The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  He’s not making me laugh. Nor is he smiling. He knows I know. Men (certain men), quite frankly, do not have the same reactions as women (certain women); can’t change that. Me, I never forget, and I don’t hide from anyone, all the less from Theo, that it was he, Theo, who made me listen to Juditha triumphans by the Red Priest of Venice. I like Vivaldi’s cruelty, or Das Augenlicht by Webern. Among others. It was he who taught me to find the Vivaldi motifs in Bach’s clavier and those of Bach in the crisscrossed cells of the atonal Viennese. Never has it occurred to me to forget, to keep quiet, or to deny that I owe him what I owe him. I write it even when, for instance in PsychMag, I celebrate the feminine genius of Judith triumphant, transported by an ecstatic tornado like my baroque Teresa.

  I have no need to hide that it was Theo who opened this world for me after having fished me out of the waters of the Fier d’Ars. Why won’t he admit that he is following in my footsteps in the kingdom of Claude-Siméon? If he has barricaded himself incognito in the archives with the inventor of 9999, isn’t it so he can better join me where I’m looking for him, in my own way, through his hypothetical and homonymous ancestor? Without making a big deal about it, discreetly, with modesty?

  Yes, let’s talk about discretion! My Astro wants to keep his Passemant to himself. After all, it’s his family name! I am unrelated—I should mind my own business. I won’t say anything. Fine. Let him take initiatives the way he wants to, all alone; to each our route.

  Unless my theft scenario, apparently absurd, is not so absurd as all that? Those ecologists who admit having staged the heist … Why does Astro tell me that Aubane could have taken him for one of them, at the archives? Couldn’t he be an accomplice of those guys from WRE.fr? Perhaps they contacted him, unless it was the other way around … Could it have been his idea? You can’t be just anybody to conjure up such a project. Could Astro be in on the thing from the start? Why not, it fits … Not very likely, however. Astro as a green militant? No. Tell me another!

  Although Nivi lacks distrust, that’s not it. No … Which doesn’t prevent him from having joined them at the next stage, or the present phase, when they’re trying to hide 9999 to make the government yield. Maybe that’s it.

  If that’s it, he won’t say a thing. Nor will Nivi.

  I look for Leibniz the swan out front, beyond my computer screen, while Theo listens to “Straight, No Chaser,” by Thelonious Monk—my Melodious Thonk, says he—royal bone structure, dissonant and melodic.

  “He’s not alone today, your friend.” Astro joins me, sees what I see; I know he thinks what I think. “A flotilla of six black Leibnizes accompany him.”

  “A sign the wind is changing. Nature is healthy around here.”

  “Let’s keep an eye on events, then.”

  50

  WHAT THE PRESS WASN’T SAYING

  The judicial police had taken their time before making the fact public, and since an overdose, in and of itself, doesn’t mobilize the investigative media, the press merely revealed, quite late, that an unexpected object was found near LSG’s inert body. Or rather that LSG’s cadaver was lying at the foot of the stolen trophy that the police were desperately seeking.

  So the investigation was going to pick up again. How could 9999 have landed there? What connection with the presumed suicide of the journalist—unless it was a murder by overdose? The announcement of this “detail,” which it wasn’t, did not fail to reignite the almost extinguished interest, on the Internet and in public opinion, for this theft of a national treasure.

  Bizarrely (or not), colleagues and friends of the King at PsychMag, though surprised, even impressed, did not seem to be particularly astonished, even less shocked. Was it because the discovery of the cadaver had already plunged them into deep sadness? And because the investigation, aiming its projectors at first on this atypical—to say the least—journalism (embodied in the “recruit to the Murdoch press,” as some newspapers called it), had provoked a scandal that besmirched the editorial board itself, and a brooding insensitivity had succeeded so many wounds? Or perhaps, for reasons that no one could express, the presence of 9999 beside Loïc Sean did not seem either extraordinary or really unexpected, in the end? The question eating at everyone was not to know why the King had hidden Passemant’s work but why this revelation came so late. Why were they only now announcing this major fact, “a case within the case”?

  Duly interviewed, Police Chief Rilsky took questions with his habitual discretion: waffling and professional prudence. In substance, he argued that the two-stage communication was justified by the requirements of a complex investigation involving two tracks: the one about the journalist, a demonic character who had imported into the national press morals foreign to our customs, to the point of undermining the honor of his profession as well as medical deontology itself; and the one about the theft with violence and premeditation, though without infraction or victims, of a national treasure with no direct connection to the cadaver. It had therefore seemed more prudent to investigate each of the two panels of this doubly sinister scandal carefully so as to be able to grasp precisely its connection with the presence of the stolen object in the apartment of the presumed suicide. Several elements remained to be elucidated. For the present, Rilsky was nevertheless in a position to summarize the broad outlines of the criminal scenario or, rather, scenarios.

  People listened with growing unease: don’t these “arguments” apply to all matters that are sensitive in different though necessary ways? What are they hiding from us? What don’t they want to know?

  Let’s return to the unfolding of events.

  In the beginning, the supposed brains of the seizure, Thibault Dechartre, undertakes to steal 9999 on behalf of a prince in the Gulf. Art schools prosper in the region, the taste for antiquities develops, several young women and men from wealthy families in the region and other emerging powers frequent the École du Louvre, take a passionate interest in Versailles. That’s in our interest; we encourage them. The brain’s networks manage to penetrate the Château (we are making progress in identifying the accomplices), but they do not succeed in exfiltrating the booty. What to do with this cumbersome 9999?

  That is when, at the Hypnosis Café and the Baron, with the help of controlled substances, the brain ends up confiding in friends (it’s a hypothesis), and together they conduct what will be the second phase of the operation, a scenario the police chief proposes to call the “green scenario.” These people know other people who know others, eventually including this phantom WRE.fr that floats around the net. We have identified some of them, difficult to corner; it’s a fluid milieu. Sort of a “Green Brigades,” needless to say clandestine, a “soft” version of the “Red Brigades” (apparently, I insist on apparently) in which the previous generation was compromised. Committed individuals, dreamers, evildoers as well, from their point of view quite honest—believers, basically.

  They cannot let such a coup pass, and they decide to utilize it for a good cause. Harass the government, be done with the nuclear-power stations, no less … It’s make or break … So those people attempt to put 9999 in a secure location while they mobilize public opinion, scientists, artists, that whole world of petitioners, before the expiration of their “ultimatum.” The idea sounds clever, but it doesn’t hold water. Scientists aren’t risking it. Theo isn’t either, in case Nivi needs reassurance—Rilsky confirms this, not Theo, no, never on his life! Fleeting contacts, perhaps, attempted approaches, one can imagine, but there are no experts with a reputation at this infantile phase of the operation, we are in agreement.

  However, since LSG knows all the milieus and frequents the same nightclubs as the “Green Brigades,” alias WRE.fr, the latter take advantage of his generosity. Rilsky doesn’t think he’s taking much of a risk in proposing the hypothesis that LSG is extremely flattered by their confidence in him. A nervous man, seeking recognition, eager for assimilation, or better: of an unlikely nobility. The weak link, in a nutshell.

  We are n
ow in phase three of the scenario, the most personal and, as always in those cases, the muddiest, the police chief believes. The diary of this atypical journalist (the first investigation had already completely covered that subject) apparently suggests the man was taken in. Rilsky has not read the pages of this diary; the psychology unit of the police is taking care of it, and Nivi will not necessarily share his opinion … Sticking to what appears certain at present, it seems LSG was attached to 9999 to the point of devoting a sort of cult to it. The clock had apparently become his fetish, his brother, the much desired friend. A passion, in any case, to which this delicate heart devotes pages and pages of his very personal notebook. It could not be more intimate …

  Until the moment when the deadline of the ultimatum arrives. The “Green Brigades” no longer know how to manage their prey. LSG is afraid they will take back his friend and return it to its Versailles prison. Or worse, the journalist fears that the attention paid in France and the rest of the world to the cause and to the theft having multiplied by a thousand the monetary value of the automaton, the oil barons and the International Greens will find the means to pay new accomplices. These accomplices would finally find a way to unbolt the borders and exfiltrate the masterpiece to Qatar, where the fabulous clock would only see its value in the stock market grow, with time, for the sole pleasure of its superwealthy proprietor and without any hope of its regaining the Hexagon. The King minutely details his anguish in his diary. He cracks. A state of abandon submerges him, adding to the professional error committed in the Zina affair and to the departure of his friend and protector Larson. Needless to say, the police chief is not forgetting the turbulent existence of the individual in question, his antecedents as an orphan, an expatriate, and the rest …

  “Is that enough to kill yourself?” The question remains. Rilsky tests me, but he must have his own idea.

  Nivi thinks that Marianne is totally absorbed by Indira. Dr. Baruch perfectly assumes the obligations of mother and father within their little single-parent family. And even if LSG had helped her achieve her assisted maternity in one way or another, it had never been a question of seeking child support from him. On this Marianne has always been clear. Loïc Sean is an exceptionally gifted human being, she adores him, that’s not a mystery for anyone, she was saying it again just recently before the discovery of the cadaver. So there was no reason there to kill himself.

  “Besides, why talk of suicide?” Marianne is indignant. “The media thrive on the pathetic, we know that, but on the part of the police I was expecting more prudence. Loïc Sean may simply have overdone the dose, in a state of euphoria, or perhaps in a somewhat more pronounced state of depression, but with the sole purpose of feeling good.”

  Nivi doesn’t have any idea. An overdose is an unconscious suicide, all the same. Maybe. Maybe not. She prefers to think that basically LSG, who loved the “royal language” French, truly fell in love with 9999, in love like never before, never as much. She’d have to read the diary if it’s legally possible—and if the family of the defunct authorizes it; relatives must exist somewhere. Whatever that may be, she has her conviction: LSG had reached a degree of solitude and passion such that he could not stand the idea of living apart from 9999. Therefore, by dying at its feet, his cadaver would be found beside the stolen work. That would be the end of the green scenario. And Passemant will return to Versailles. That’s what the King wishes. Why?

  Well, because then 9999 will stay in France. Where LSG caught sight of it for the first time, in the Château that enchanted him, whose provocative installations he loved. “You understand, Nivi,” he said, “Versailles was a baroque installation, and now it’s modern. Yes it is! I love the modern when it is baroque. Not you, I know you. But me, I’m baroque, don’t you think? That useless luxury, the ‘accursed share,’ the debauchery of beauty, they have to be burned! Those people of Versailles burned the decors of their enchanted islands, can you imagine, they burned themselves to survive!”

  And he laughed like a madman.

  “One never knows why someone kills themselves.” Nivi, alluding to the rose, comments that suicide has no why. “However, in dying with the astronomical clock’s tick-tock for a lullaby, our King returns Passemant to us. Well, that’s what he wanted: that 9999 remain in France, in Versailles. I believe it; I am sure of it. Not to be visited, catalogued, studied, evaluated, sold, utilized, sequestered, calculated, stolen, and so on. For love. That’s all. The most fragile among us was the most seriously in love. He offered us his limitless love for 9999. Do you find that ridiculous? Not I. His world had become too harsh: he couldn’t take it anymore; he was happy to give us the present. That’s what I think. Not a suicide—he simply undid the theft. A gift.”

  Rilsky must think I’m delirious. “Nivi’s into literature,” he says. Though with fondness, as often in my presence, but he’s deeply skeptical. The investigation is going to progress with or without a “cause.” Whether the cause is green or red, there is criminal offense, there is premeditation, there is corruption, and there is the death of a man. A trial will therefore ensue. Can one speak of a crime? We’ll see, but a certain number of the guilty parties, and they won’t be minor ones, will be severely punished, as the law demands. At least that’s what they’re saying.

  “Could psychoanalysis have saved him?” The police chief still doesn’t understand a thing. Or is he making fun of Nivi—which amounts to the same thing?

  She thinks LSG found the “point” where one can “delight in the good without being angry at the opposite evil.” The secret of perpetual motion according to Pascal. Except that for him, it was a final point. Can one live when one has touched that point?

  51

  PARADISE IS AT THE LUX

  Did you listen to the video by the American astronauts? When you have looked at the Earth from space and you return, you realize that Earth is the Garden of Eden!”

  Pure Astro, transmitting his euphoria to me from the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in the Abruzzi—or maybe he is at the Fermilab near Chicago?

  Voltaire had no need to be an American astronaut to know that Paradise is here: here where he was, in person. More precise, the Sage of Ferney, and more original than my A’s colleagues. I understand him. Eden stretches out beneath my windows: it’s the Luxembourg Gardens. With Stan, Astro, Marianne, and her new hypercomposed microfamily. With Rilsky and the cadaver of the King, Claude-Siméon and his 9,999 years, the Beloved then abhorred king, Émilie on fire and la Pompadour as rival to the Clock, Cassini and Saint-Eustache, La Salpêtrière and the Louvre, my veranda facing the Fier d’Ars …

  The anticyclone has a lock on Europe, the tropical summer repulses autumn into Siberia, and the bees that have survived the pesticides continue to make honey around the queens of France turned into statues along the paths that lead to the basins with their model sailboats.

  In contrast to what I had imagined in the past, I did not commit murder to take over the Vogels’ apartment. I look with their eyes—they who taught me to embrace the memory of France in this most logical, most childlike of gardens, most French of all. I am at home at my window on the sixth floor above the Lux. I have not forgotten. GlobalPsyNet, PsyNetOne, and PsychMag, my home ports, resist austerity. Suicides and business are still making the front pages. Indira has escaped Ulf and the King. The stars continue to reveal their secrets to Theo Passemant, my Astro. He follows me by e-mail; I accompany him by iPhone, the Latitude application complemented by Starwalk. The laughable cosmology of the ignorant: fine by me, I adore it.

  With each beat of my heart I know what star is above the park, what other star is in my A’s thoughts. Here, now. Pluto pulses in the heel of Serpentarius, blinding brilliance that eclipses the Moon. Tactile, surreal, more than cosmic and perfectly vegetal, I rejoin Astro through this miniature app Latitude. My Theo is not afraid of being located, at least not by me; he lets me follow him in his interstellar displacement, from lab to lab, whatever the continent. He knows I know where he i
s when he makes love to me in thought in the Abruzzi or in the very heart of the Andes, at five billion years after the Big Bang or at the other end of the expansion accelerating toward the glacial void. Astro over there is with me here and now, above the linden trees. In the compact time of the encounter that has no need to speak of itself, written ILY.

  Yes, Paradise is at the Lux. If there are humans only on our planet, if France is more rural even than the rice paddies of China, if Claude-Siméon Passemant’s clock and my Theo’s neutrons inhabit my senses, then … Separations are appeased in voyages, crimes are illuminated by analysis, sorrow suspends the hours. But desire extends memory, and time escapes—both above and below, mobile condensation, continuous present, incommensurable.

  I am not awake; simply I’m not sleeping—it’s not the same thing. At dusk, the fabric of this limbo envelops my internal coups d’état and transports me toward Émilie translating Leibniz in the fire of the pregnancy that will cause her death; summons up Passemant’s workshop in the Louvre; caresses Louis XV’s legs enclosing his astronomical clock; protects Stan, who is teaching Indira to read; slips between Astro’s fingers writing to me from the neighborhood of a supernova; slicks his penis possessing me all night long. This limbo is a nameless novel, color of black silk, taste of coffee and cherries, with the speed of lightning and the repose of a dream above the Lux.

  I slip into a spray of water and into a ray of light shining in the distance on the Sacré-Coeur, on the horizon of my garden. I tremble under the chestnut tree pruned in a straight line, and I am extinguished in the feathers of the dead pigeon on the gravel that my steps trample. I follow the scarlet geraniums and the swings. The bronze of the lion, the horse, the tortoise bathed by the fountain, and Astro’s eye screwed onto his telescope. The owl-headed guide who leads tourists at Versailles, the foreign students at the Marly, the King, the Parc-aux-Cerfs, and Rilsky. Ugo the toxic and Stan who speaks in haikus. I? Who? Dust of stars. Programmed by neurons that I reprogram in reverse by means of words, of vagabond meanings, of abolished and reemergent time.