Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  She met him at a dinner party with some French friends, he was spending a few days in Barcelona because he wanted to work with flamenco musicians. He shadowed her all evening, and because she wasn’t keen to talk to anyone else in particular, she allowed him to. Then he got her email address out of their hostess, claiming he wanted to invite her to the premiere of an Almodóvar film, followed by dinner with Javier Bardem. If it hadn’t been for what turned out to be a lie about the dinner, she’d have sent him packing directly. As it was, she’d had the evening from hell, sitting on a hard seat. When she found out that the dinner was nonexistent, she walked out on him as soon as the credits rolled, saying she had a plane to catch next morning.

  But he hadn’t given up. When had she given in to some morbid urge and allowed herself to be drawn back in? At first she’d found it rather touching to see his naive way of strolling into town, like a cowboy. People who’ve recently acquired celebrity status go mad with joy, dazzled by their good luck, and they think they’ve made it now, everything’s going to be OK. They’re as happy as baby turtles, waddling clumsily over the sand, convinced they’ll reach the sea, while up in the sky the cunning raptors are circling. The pathetic pride with which he boasted to her about his thirty-square-metre apartment he’s just bought near the Gare de l’Est in Paris. He calls it his bachelor pad.

  Why hadn’t she just made a break for it? Her failure to do so bothers her. Only women who are ugly or fat or old allow themselves to be lulled into acquiescence by someone else’s intensity of desire. Never sleep with anyone beneath you, that’s the first rule of respect for your femininity.

  He talks a lot about the money he’s making, while repeating that it’s no big deal. He’s against consumer society, lives very modestly himself. He’s a dropout with a rich daddy, she worked that one out in three questions. Brought up in big houses in exclusive districts, went to top schools before realizing he didn’t have the strength of character to keep up the family tradition of success. So he decided to be an artist and a rebel, and to live off the monthly allowance from his papa, he thinks himself amazing for managing on it, and he likes living in downmarket districts, because he will always be superior to them, and knows he can get out any time he likes. When he’s fed up with his children seeing the prostitutes hanging around downstairs in his block of flats, he’ll change his tune and pick up the keys to one of the apartments his family owns. But for now, he’s pretending his weakness of resolve is a subversive choice.

  She can do without artists’ company. Sportsmen or politicians, yes, they can impress her. But artists – invariably pseuds. And top of the list without hesitation, she’d put writers. Been there, done that. What they offer with one generous hand is grabbed back a hundredfold with the other, the rapacious, mean, and unscrupulous hand. The hand that writes, betrays, crucifies, pins down. The one that sacrifices you. She was married for three years to a novelist. He’s put her in every novel he’s written since then. And he’d be mighty indignant if she dared complain of the treatment he inflicts on her.

  She is really so bored right now… if only this little man had managed to display one or two qualities, she might have convinced herself that he was worth a try. He has a nice name, Alexandre, quite trendy, she would like to whisper it. And he’s taken care over dressing. He’s a bit weedy and awkward with his premature paunch and narrow shoulders, but his suit is handmade, otherwise it wouldn’t hang so well on him. He has a nice voice, but no idea how to turn a compliment. He’s gobbling up his paella, with greasy lips and the grin of a little boy who thinks he’s found out something all by himself. ‘You’re incredibly beautiful!’ Oh really. Nobody else had ever noticed such a thing before he came along, of course. He orders coffee. Shifts on his chair, he must already be thinking about the hotel room and how to go about it. His sausage-like fingers grip his liqueur glass, and he goes on boasting, without noticing that the woman he’s talking to is ill at ease. She’s considered lying, thinking up some excuse, so as to let him down gently. But she opts for brutality: the sun’s beating down, the parasol no longer protects them from the heat. She feels dozy. He deserves to be dropped right now, no kid gloves, because he hasn’t inspired any dream in her and isn’t even aware of it, because he’s been excited since yesterday at the thought of sleeping with her, when he doesn’t even know how to make her laugh. She feels him panting with impatience. She picks up her jacket and her bag. He looks up with a start, a little apprehensive because he thinks now he’s going to leave with her, the screwing point has arrived, here we go.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

  Already on her feet, she doesn’t look at him.

  ‘Thanks very much for the lunch. But I have to go home now.’

  ‘Right now?’

  She’s already turned her back on him, he has to wave his short arms to attract the waiter, fumbling in his pockets, cursing away, he can’t believe this is happening to him, she was on the end of his line, hooked, he’d practically landed her.

  What a pain.

  She walks along one of the little alleyways running up from a corner of the plaza. Narrow, high-walled, cool, smelling of dishwater, echoing with building works, past scaffolding and the iron shutters of closed shops. Past a dark bar with a brightly painted façade. She turns into a cobbled street, narrow and shady. She’s hurrying to get away, she doesn’t want him to catch her up, he’s capable of making a scene. She’d like to stay downtown for a while, but she wouldn’t feel easy. She reaches La Laietana, and stops the first available taxi. She has to repeat her address three times before the driver understands.

  She lives high up, in the northern part of the city. Old elegant houses, more or less well-kept. A few white modern buildings give the streets a phoney Californian atmosphere. You don’t meet anyone except domestic staff, Cuban or South American, wearing black dresses and white aprons, emptying the dustbins, doing the shopping, taking or fetching children. There are a lot of private schools round here, bilingual in English or French. Just before five o’clock, the traffic’s blocked by the school run, huge shiny vehicles, parents picking up their kids.

  Vanessa asks the driver to drop her off a few streets before hers, and he agrees with relief. At this time of day, to take her to the end of the cul-de-sac where she lives could take a good thirty minutes. Walking up the steep slope, she keeps her head back, watching out for birds in the trees. Green parakeets have invaded the territory, they seem to get on with the local pigeons. She likes to see them just as much as before, but having only birds to look at, she’s spotted other smaller ones: there are little black birds with bright blue fronts, and brown ones with orange necks. Bel-Ami probably spends all day lurking, hoping to catch one of them.

  She greets the parking valet of the restaurant in Contessa Street. She doesn’t say hello to many people, she only rarely sees any of the neighbours, and the ones she meets don’t seem very friendly. If she were still in France, she’d think they’d got her down as ethnic. But here, and that was one of the reasons she was so keen to come, she looks just like the natives. She just dresses better, that’s all. Here she’s a Parisienne. Nobody looks knowing when she says her name is Vanessa.

  There was a long list of reasons why she’d been glad to come and live in Barcelona with Camille. After two years, she’s changed her mind, but Camille says they must wait another year for the crisis to blow over and then they’ll leave Europe. He wants them to relocate to Shanghai, he’s trying to land a long-term contract there. He says it’s like going to New York in the 1960s, that’s where it’s all happening now, she’ll love the French quarter, the food, the city. When he first mentioned it she was keen, and ready for any amount of travel. Now she’s not so sure. She’d like them to go back to Paris. In those early months in Barcelona, she’d been enchanted, she’d combed the design shops to furnish their vast house, found a cleaner who could teach her Spanish – she never stops talking and asking questions, Vanessa has had to make rapid progress to keep on good terms wi
th her. She had taken the metro every day, got off at random, with her camera, insatiable for the special light of the city. Barcelona is a town full of little corners, hidden squares, tucked-away streets. She spent hours every evening on her computer, sorting her photographs, framing or altering them. For those first months, it had been enough.

  Camille’s always away, he does his best to be home at weekends but it isn’t always possible and he’s rarely as much as ten days running in his office, down by the sea. The scheme he’s working on hasn’t been cancelled, but half of the architectural practice has been let go, and those who are still there have to adjust. That means abandoning large-scale projects and spending more time on eco-friendly log cabins heated with solar panels. So she’s often alone, and her circumstances mean she spends a lot of time thinking how her life was in France.

  She’s not really cut out for Catalonia. It’s impossible to find a good manicurist here. When she arrived, she liked the hairdressers, who knew all about straightening. But in the end she’d like to find a hairdresser who can actually give her a decent cut. The fitness classes are all organized for the third age. What they call Pilates consists of a sort of gymnastics using a stretch band, the kind of thing they did in France in the eighties. At the sports club she’s joined, which people told her was one of the smartest in Spain, the women are all practically a hundred years old. They must have been eating the wrong things for years and never used any beauty creams. They don’t mind going in for plastic surgery. But at their stage of decomposition, the burqa is the only solution. She thought she was coming to the most Californian city in Europe, and instead she finds herself surrounded by badly made-over peasants, strangers to elegance, who shout into their mobile phones, and have no idea about makeup. Even the young Russian women at her club are not drop-dead beauties. But the worst thing about the whole region is the men. OK, she can make allowances for their being short. She’s known men who were seductive even if they weren’t tall, all the more seductive in fact because they tried to make up for it. And OK, they have this weird taste for glasses with fancy frames. She could have lived with that. Plus, after twenty years, they start losing their hair. All right. But it begins to pile up. And when you consider that they’re not seductive, or good talkers, or skilled at flirting, that by forty they’ve got pot bellies… well, in the end it adds up to a lot. Luckily there are the South Americans, Basques and Andalusians, without whom she’d have died of boredom.

  When she arrived here, the sensation of being a Parisienne who can look down in amusement on the locals had enchanted her. Never before in her life had she had the happiness of being racist. Of being born somewhere else, in a country less touched by misfortune, where you get a better education. The joys of condescension. As racist as a real Frenchwoman. Legitimately. The most fortunate of the Catalans, from the oldest family, would always be a hick in the eyes of a girl born in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. How good it had made her feel, observing wealthy people here and picking up, point by point, everything that betrayed their lack of sophistication, culture, luxury or taste. But in the end, she’d rather be in France. It was always the same old story, you had to choose between loving or being loved. Better to be afraid of making a mistake in your French or a lapse of taste in Paris, than to feel at ease here.

  Camille says she exaggerates, she’s prejudiced. Of course he finds Catalonia fantastic; he’s never here. He laughs like anything at home, when she tells him her conclusions of the week. ‘When I think about it, all this stuff about Catalan autonomy, it’s a bit like if me and my friends from our council estate in Sarcelles had decided that France has been oppressing us since our grandparents arrived there, so we absolutely need subsidies to teach us how to talk our native dialect. It would be great, we could write a whole grammar book, the four of us, and we’d decide we were going to talk Sarcellish, a mixture of North African and bad French, we could put in thirty or so backslang words, and then we’d ask for all the road signs to be translated into Sarcellish. Then we could live off the grants for “linguistic normalization”. But of course we’d send our kids to private school, to make sure they learnt a real language.’ Camille advises her to keep her opinions to herself, he says anti-Catalanism is something only the extreme right goes in for, and outside their living room it wouldn’t amuse anyone. He tries to make her understand that it’s because of forty years of Francoist oppression. But come on, Franco executed communists, and that didn’t give the people round here a burning desire to join the reds. Franco had this vision of a Spain living off tourism and real estate, and since his death nobody has shown any sign of changing that. The Americans were allies of the dictatorship, weren’t they? And Vanessa doesn’t get the impression anyone minds learning their language. She’s had enough of this backwater, she’d like to move.

  She’d have preferred to live in San Sebastian. Camille says that with her gift for getting up people’s noses, their house would have been bombed already. But respect, eh, the Basques are different. When she says that, Camille raises his eyebrows. He pretends to be shocked, but really he admires her toughness: ‘You’re not French for nothing, are you, you want to see bloodshed before you think any cause is worth it.’ She likes the way he treats her as a Frenchwoman, and he’s intelligent enough to know that. But if you’re looking for a one hundred per cent Frenchman, well, that’s him: a family tree that goes back to the Merovingians or something. His family is so important that they can trace ancestors from times you didn’t know existed – his family owns actual chateaux, and here he is married to her, without listening to his mother or his colleagues at work. He married her, he doesn’t want children, he loves her, he treats her like a princess. He’s as brilliant as she’s beautiful. With the same straightforward self-confidence. They don’t tell each other stories, they know that there was some luck on both sides at first, for him being born where he was, in a place where getting a good education was automatic, and for her being born with the right face and body. And they both know, too, how much effort it’s cost each of them to make the most of what they’d been given. There were other pretty girls where she grew up. But she’s the only one who’s managed to have a decent standard of living, ever since she was of an age to work things out for herself. The only one who gets to celebrate family occasions in a chateau. And probably the only one heading for forty with a body more perfect than when she was twenty, and a face that no syringe or scalpel has yet come near, unmarked, faultless, unlined. Camille, for his part, has left no stone unturned to get on, to improve, not one sleepless night did he spare himself, no language was he too lazy to learn, no risk did he refuse to take because he was scared. He’s thrown himself into his work, and never sat back on his laurels. Vanessa meanwhile has never missed a chance to learn something, to learn what kind of clothes to wear in the circles she wants to move in, how to hold yourself as if you’ve done classical ballet all your childhood, how to sit down when you really are a princess, what make of handbag to carry if you want people to think you’re rich. Learning to look like something different from what she is. Swallowing all kinds of humiliation and never complaining.

  Her mother always told her that love doesn’t exist, it’s just an invention to get girls into bed. In her other affairs, she has always been well aware who was doing the loving and who was being loved. She usually managed to be in the second category. Less exciting, but more profitable. With Camille it’s more complicated. Who’s loving and who’s loved? They’ve been married three years. She has hardly ever cheated on him. Not that that means anything, but still. And every time he comes back, he seems just as much in love as ever. The lover and the loved in their relationship seem to be more evenly balanced than usual. But for some time now, she’s been feeling so sad, things don’t have the same taste any more. Before, she was sure she was giving him the best present in the world just by being his wife. Now that her self-examination has revealed some cracks, she doesn’t have such confidence. A doubt has crept in: what if his mother was
right? What if she is just a pretty little girl from a North African family, a well-packaged bundle of losing cards? But always an imitation, never the real thing. Lacking authenticity, the real luxury of never having been poor, the luxury of being what you seem, someone who never cares, ever, what things cost, someone that life would never dare lay a finger on, for fear of making a scratch on the beautiful bodywork of happiness. To be rich is to have confidence. Even if it’s misplaced. To feel protected. One’s body. Never in danger. Protected by the house, by the name, by history, by the police even. The accessories can be bought and worn, you can make believe with them. But memories can’t be changed. What Vanessa knows about herself she can’t tear out of her mind.

  Camille, after experiencing the problems in his practice, has become more fragile. He won’t tell her exactly how much money he’s lost since the crisis started, he avoids the subject. In the papers they say it’s over, that the worst is behind them, but Camille isn’t the same these days. Both of them have lost a little of their gloss. There are plenty of things they haven’t dared say to each other in recent months.

  A year ago, building works had started in the house next door. An indescribable din, all day long, never an hour’s peace and quiet. They’re knocking everything down with sledgehammers. It’s as if it’s never-ending. Life was telling her something, very loudly. Before that, everything about the new house had made her feel physically happy. The size of the rooms, the furniture she’d chosen, the parquet floors, the big terrace. That was until the works began next door. Demolition, going on endlessly. Camille had given her a sound-proofing helmet. It made things better but she could only stand it for five minutes, after that she felt she was living inside a goldfish bowl. It was because of her reaction to the building works that she had realized she wasn’t feeling the same as usual. She was reflecting too much about her past. Vanessa has always had some aim in mind, her attention has been entirely concentrated on what’s going to happen next. But for some time now, by contrast, the wounds she thought were buried deep under her skin have started to make noises under the smooth surface, and terrible rages have started to trouble her. A jumble of past events is tormenting her, and she’d like to get rid of it, but she’s caught fast by it.