Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  The Hyena is exactly what Elisabeth has been expecting: a brazen invertebrate, the worst kind of person this age has produced. Abject beings, flaunting their lack of grace, and proud to live like animals. One doesn’t even think of Satan on seeing her approach: he would choose a more impressive shape. Not this long, slim, flexible body, stupidly pleased with itself.

  ‘Are you looking for anyone? I’m Sister Elisabeth.’

  The Hyena shows neither surprise nor fear. Her encephalogram is too steady for her to demonstrate amazement.

  ‘Sister Elisabeth? Did someone warn you I was coming?’

  ‘Oh, you know… people come to see me.’

  ‘Your headquarters isn’t that easy to get to, is it? But it’s worth the trip. Lovely place.’

  ‘Very inspirational. Yes.’

  ‘I’m looking for a French teenager, Valentine Galtan. I believe you’ve had some contact with her?’

  ‘Valentine? Valentine … what was the name?’

  She deliberately uses the intonations of a little old lady, a bit deaf, but with her wits about her. People like that style. She’s acquired more charisma with every line on her face. She’s feared and respected, it’s instinctive. She doesn’t feel old in herself. In fact, she feels less old than she did ten years ago. She’s had a new lease of life, she forgets to feel her body declining.

  ‘Ah yes, yes. Valentine. A very young girl? Yes, I do remember her. A lively child, intelligent, but very lonely. Would you like to come with me, we could have a few quiet words.’

  She points to a side path. Above it, the stone mountains rise vertically, hieratically. If you look up, their mass hides the sky. The Hyena follows her slowly. Something seems to be oppressing her.

  ‘This is steep, are we going far up?’

  ‘No, no, here we are. Do you suffer from vertigo?’

  ‘Let’s say I wouldn’t like someone to give me a push.’

  ‘What a strange idea! Do you feel guilty about something?’

  ‘No, but you know how it is… A young girl, the Church, you immediately get ideas about satanic rituals, orgies, St Andrew’s crosses, dirty photos, with some violent climax as a bonus. You might have a good reason to want me out of the way, mightn’t you?’

  Sister Elisabeth turns round and gives her a look heavy with reproach, but also laden with benevolence. Since she’s taken the veil, this has always worked a treat. She can short-circuit aggression. The Hyena remains hermetic, too shameless to let herself be intimidated.

  ‘Dear me, you must have a very dark idea of our evangelical mission. But let me reassure you. I am not at all familiar with the group practices you refer to…’

  The lesbian seems to listen in silence. Her profile is classic, and when she stops showing off, you can see that she would have been a beautiful woman.

  There aren’t many tourists at this time of year. The two women sit down side by side on a small stone bench. Opposite are the clouds, almost within arm’s reach. A bird swoops down into the void, hundreds of metres, then lands, with careless accuracy, on a little branch protruding from the rock.

  Elisabeth could do with a cigarette. She gave it up, without difficulty, for the first years after taking the veil – sisters aren’t permitted to smoke. But she’s been feeling like it again, these last months. The worst thing is her dreams. She smokes in them every night. Next morning, she feels pierced with blind stabs, a terrible craving for nicotine. She gives in to temptation when she can manage it. That’s not often. She’s rarely alone. She shares her bedroom with an African woman just back from Boston. The sisters get moved around, to protect them from getting like the lesbian for instance. Relationships can quickly become too intense, the young ones aren’t always hard-wired to resist. Turning her face up to the sun, the Hyena looks like a satisfied lizard. She speaks without turning her head, her eyes closed against the blinding light. ‘Are you not allowed to smoke, among the sisters?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  It’s a nasty coincidence, as if the other woman could read her thoughts. The lesbian offers her a cigarette. She accepts it. Nobody can see them here. A slight dizziness, then immediate relief at the first draw.

  Sister Elisabeth pats the lesbian’s hand reassuringly. She’s surprised at the warm smoothness of her skin.

  ‘But tell me, why are you looking for Valentine Galtan?’

  ‘She’s run away from home. Her father and her grandmother have called in a detective agency. So you have met her?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve come across her. You know, these youngsters, they come to me hungry, I don’t ask questions. She’s a brave little thing.’

  ‘Do you know where she is now?’

  ‘No, I haven’t the slightest idea. Valentine’s path crossed mine. I told her not to be afraid, I could see she’d recover. And she went off, just as she’d come, without any explanation.’

  ‘So why drag me all the way out here?’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to come, my child. You came here of your own accord.’

  Elisabeth remembers the Hyena perfectly well. And the extremely unpleasant impression she had already made on her, long ago, in Oxford, in the early 1990s. Elisabeth was running a course in rapid reading and memory improvement. It was the first time she had been teaching for the US National Education Agency. The purpose was to spot the most interesting pupils and report them to her hierarchy. They could be recruited and trained. It would be her speciality for some years. She had always had a good eye. She was never a good teacher, because mediocre pupils soon bored her. But she homed in quickly on elite individuals. They are rare. Good brains have been that way since childhood, so one can’t expect miracles.

  She remembers the Hyena, from that winter in Oxford, because the lesbian had taken a keen interest in the seminar on offer. Not because of her job as a hybrid detective, partly working in the private sector and partly for state secret services, but because a girl she was attached to had signed up to it. Elisabeth remembers this perverted presence, prowling round her new protegée. A brilliant pupil with exceptional potential. She, Elisabeth, had had the last word, and the girl had resisted the morbid temptation implicit in any relation with the degenerate element. But it had been a close-run thing. The Hyena – she already had the nickname in those days – had that haughty arrogance that disturbs young minds.

  The daughter, wife and mother of military men, Elisabeth knows all about willpower. Having a backbone. Nothing makes it easier to convince other people than to be convinced yourself, and she had won that battle in a fierce struggle.

  Her son had died, shortly beforehand. Not yet thirty, he liked driving fast cars. A fatal crash.

  His death hadn’t driven her into depression. She isn’t that kind of woman. She has never known the intoxication of great sorrow. Death simply robbed her of everything that had any value for her. But the past will always be there. Nothing can change it. She doesn’t believe in God, but she feels there is a journey to be made, and that you have to do it with your head held high. And not soften on the way. Right, left, atheists, believers, in the end they all speak the same language, they all end up in tears. She doesn’t have any faith. At first she had thought it might come. She wasn’t asking for a spectacular revelation. She wasn’t one of those crazy erotomaniacs who need to brandish their devotion to God and their intimate relation with the deity as if they were boasting of masturbation. She isn’t vain, she has no need to be distinguished by some extraordinary vision of a saint or the Virgin Mary. But she had expected that devotion would take possession of her in the same way that love and respect for her fatherland had. She was prepared for fervour. The loss of the son around whom she had organized her life had carved out a sublime emptiness inside her. She could have filled it with faith. Like a marriage of reason, when love grows out of the habit of sharing the life of your partner.

  The first year she had been with the sisters, the silence inside her had been total. Invaluable calm. Then her critical faculties had returned. That
was her character. In India, one day, she had been observing, along the room, a volunteer leaning over a patient who had just died, and had reflected how disagreeable was that way of exhibiting your delight at being a witness to other people’s suffering without being able to do anything to relieve it. The young volunteer had an ecstatic smile on her lips, her hands were trembling with unhealthy excitement, as she pronounced the last prayer. You could see she was happy to be there, that she was feeling superior to anyone else, because she was sacrificing two months of her holiday to watch other people die. Everything in her demeanour pointed to the most shameless, the most inappropriate self-satisfaction. A charity based on pride and the will to do more and better than other people. Elisabeth had thought that the young ninny in tears would have been incapable of retaining her dignity if it had been her own child lying there, with maggots eating the wounds on its legs.

  Their outfit hadn’t been a hospital: they gave no medical care, because they had no resources. The number of beds was insufficient for all the sick people, and most of the bodies were groaning on mats on the floor. Until that particular day, Elisabeth had made no judgements, she had simply done as she was asked. Change dressings, clean infected wounds, bring the dying a bowl of rice, help them to eat. She was also there to send back accounts of everything she saw around her, and any information she could pick up, to certain superiors. They had not suggested that she take the veil out of vocation, but because they wanted information about Mother Teresa’s succession. Although this service had been unofficially requested by a member of Opus Dei, Elisabeth had good reason to think that her information was also relayed at once to the secret services of her country. Considering the colossal sums of money transferred by the Missionaries of Charity, it was logical that someone wanted to make sure the exchanges could be traced. She had been carrying out her mission for some months without passing judgement on the people around her. Even the idiotic volunteer. But it had woken her critical antennae. The harsh relentless intelligence that let nothing escape it. And which made it hard to tolerate the presence of other human beings. Her eyes had opened again, her words had organized themselves into sentences: the placid stupidity of this sister, the excessive ego of that one, the tedious machinations of a third… and her own loneliness.

  She scorned the prohibitions she had imposed on herself, the sickening but ecstatic poverty which encouraged only the develoment of crass stupidity, the constant proximity of the other missionary nuns, sometimes good women who had taken the chance to flee the poverty of their homeland, but more often simpletons whose brains, already not too impressive, had literally melted under the effect of the spiritual, material and emotional privations forced on them.

  For a long time, she’d been forgotten. The people at the top had changed, the leaders of her country were only interested in undermining their own allies. No one came to ask her for information any more. She had not been too distressed. She had arranged to return to Europe, and there she had taken on new responsibilities and distinctions. Last year in London, a man had arrived, declaring he wanted to make a donation and asking to speak with her in private. He’d claimed to be high up in the secret services. She’d taken him for a crackpot. He was obsessed with the restoration of the Christian faith in Europe, and was convinced that wars needed to be waged on several fronts: against sects, against Islam, against Judaism, against capitalism. The more he went on, the harder it got to see who he thought his allies would be in this war, in which he seemed to be the only person involved. He was a young man, one of those saps who hadn’t even been snatched from his mother to do his military service, but who was quite sure of his virility. Still, from the amount of information he conveyed, she had had to admit in the end that he really did have the contacts he was boasting about. He arranged for regular, discreet payments into an account in Sister Elisabeth’s name. So that was the point they’d reached, in the country for which she had always considered she should be ready to die: they were using extroverted and unstable eccentrics for the top responsible jobs, they were letting the show be run by halfwits. When he had asked her to keep her eyes open, on the ground, to find a young man prepared to make the greatest of sacrifices, she had only half-listened. Then he had sent her off to Barcelona, officially to study the possibility – at a time of collapsing house prices and the influx of impoverished Christians from all over the world – of opening a convent; unofficially because he encouraged her to re-establish contact with old friends from Opus Dei. Because they weren’t in her good books either.

  Then Valentine had stumbled into her – literally– in the street. Having drunk too much, the teenager had tripped over the nun, as she knelt over an unconscious wretch lying in the gutter. The teenager had immediately clung on to her, a child with alcohol on her breath, a waif, staggering round, too young to be repulsive. A little bird intoxicated with wine. She had stammered out a few words about her grandfather and his faith. In spiritual terms, Valentine was about as aware as a pumpkin. But she was emotionally attached to memories of prayers in the family. And very quickly, before she had been asked anything, she had come out with ‘I don’t know how you manage it, loving your neighbour and going on your knees to try and clean people’s wounds… because when I see the crap we live in, all I can think is I want to blow it sky-high.’

  Recruit and train. Sister Elisabeth had her doubts though. This little girl was suspiciously docile, too easily led for new impressions to remain fixed firmly on her. There was some duplicity there, which made her hard to manoeuvre. She had quite a lively intelligence, but superficial and disorganized. Still, she had all the right attributes: poor relationship with her family, unstable personality, massively attention-seeking. From that point, things had got moving. Until she had been warned of the two private detectives arriving in Barcelona. Who have turned up a bit soon, before the teenager has been fully trained.

  Consequently, Sister Elisabeth has been informed that it would be good if she could wrap up her report on Barcelona as soon as possible, so as to follow Valentine back to Paris. And the moment has arrived.

  You never know exactly who you are working for. And you don’t know for whose sake you die. Not a problem. Sister Elisabeth does what she has always done, what those humans she admires have always done, she obeys orders.

  ‘No, really, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m so sorry. The last time I saw Valentine, she mentioned some friends… squatters somewhere, I think? I tried to persuade her to go home, but…’

  She doesn’t have time to finish her sentence. A harsh animal cry escapes from the Hyena, who has closed her eyes in a grimace. She turns to face the nun, rage darkening her gaze. Her state of alarm is grotesque. The old woman shows neither surprise nor fear. She knows all about the brutality of the weak. Degenerates mistake this for strength: an emotional outburst. The lesbian snarls: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’

  Without replying, Sister Elisabeth looks her straight in the eye, simulating sincere astonishment, while thinking to herself, What right have you got to talk about shame, you poor pervert?

  The Hyena replies out loud, as if she had read her thoughts. ‘I can’t lecture anyone about morality, but I don’t ponce about in a little white sari and a holier-than-thou expression. I don’t do deals on the backs of children.’

  Sister Elisabeth feels the bite of cold sweat on her back. She has nothing but scorn for the kind of pathetic sentimentality behind that kind of remark – there’s no way nations can be governed simply with good intentions – but she can’t suppress a moment of panic at the thought that this lesbian really can read her mind. The Hyena hammers home her advantage: ‘Yes, of course I can! What did you think? And you won’t get away with it. I’m picking you up on my radar, like I’ve never picked anyone up before!’

  ‘But what on earth has come over you, my child?’

  Never admit anything. Block your thoughts. Matters mustn’t be compromised by this stupid incident. A little bird perches a few feet from them and p
ecks at crumbs from a tourist’s sandwiches. Sister Elisabeth spreads her hands as a sign of impotence. ‘My child, what can you be imagining? What is there so terrible that could concern this little girl? Lord in heaven, perhaps I should have taken more care of her than I did. Do you want me to try and help you find her? I could ask around if you like, and let you know if I get any news?’

  ‘Why her? Didn’t you have anyone else from your own people? Couldn’t you send your own children?’

  ‘But I’m offering you my help, to get her home safe and sound… And I think I really want to help you. As I said, I’m sure it would be worth trying to find out something from these squatters…’

  ‘Because she was all alone, wasn’t she? Alone and easy to influence?’

  WE AVOIDED THE SUBJECT BUT ZOSKA KNEW that what we were doing didn’t make sense. After lunch, waving Valentine’s photo, we checked the bars, the tobacconists, the record shops, the stores selling T-shirts and trainers. Then we had a coffee on a terrace, and after that we just strolled aimlessly, without asking ourselves whether it wasn’t a bit odd to spend a day doing nothing in the middle of an investigation that was already more or less stalled.

  Sticking close to Zoska, I’m electrified whenever her elbow brushes against mine. We eat ice creams on a bench in the sun, and I wonder whether I have ever lived such a sweet and perfect moment, as round as a bubble. Zoska says she doesn’t want to stay in Barcelona, that the city has been ruined by tourism, that she’s doing drugs too much here, and that everything’s expensive. But for someone who wants to get away, she seems to me to be pretty pleased with the life here.