The Elementary Particles (16 page)

Michel went back to his desk and noted on a piece of paper,
Write something about blood;
then lay down to think, but he fell asleep almost immediately. Some days later, when he turned up the piece of paper, he discovered the words “blood is thicker than water” written underneath; for ten minutes he stood there completely mystified.

14

On the morning of the first of September Bruno waited for Christiane at the Gare du Nord. She had taken a bus from Noyon to Amiens and a train from there to Paris. It was a beautiful day. Her train arrived at 11:37. She was wearing a long print dress with lace cuffs and a pattern of scattered flowers. He took her in his arms. Their hearts beat eagerly.

They had lunch in an Indian restaurant, then went back to his apartment and made love. The floor was polished, the curtains had been cleaned and smelled lovely, he’d put flowers in the vases. He managed to hold back for a long time, waiting for her to come; sunlight flickered through the gap in the curtains, glinting on her black hair, where he could see one or two gray hairs. She came, then came again immediately afterward. As she did so, her vagina contracted vigorously and he came inside her. He pressed himself against her and they fell asleep.

When they woke, it was around seven and the sun was sinking between the high-rises. Bruno opened a bottle of white wine. He had never spoken to anyone about the years that followed his return from Dijon; he wanted to now.

“At the beginning of the 1989–1990 academic year, Anne got a job at the Lycée Condorcet. We rented an apartment, a small, dark two-bedroom on the rue Rodier. Victor was going to nursery school by now, so I had my days free. It was about then that I started visiting prostitutes. There were lots of Thai massage parlors in the area—the New Bangkok, the Golden Lotus and the Mai Lin; the girls were polite, always smiling, and everything went well. At about the same time I started seeing an analyst. I don’t remember much about the experience—I think the guy had a beard, but I might be confusing him with someone in a film. I talked to him about my adolescence, and a lot about the massage parlors. I felt he had nothing but contempt for me, which made me feel better. In any case, in January I changed shrinks. The new one was good—he had an office near the Strasbourg Saint-Denis metro, so I’d tour the peep shows on the way back. His name was Dr. Azoulay. There were copies of
Paris Match
in his waiting room. Anyway, I thought he was a good doctor. My case didn’t really interest him much, but I didn’t hold that against him—after all, it was terribly banal. I was just one more frustrated, aging fucker who didn’t find his wife attractive anymore. At about the same time, he was called as an expert witness in the trial of a gang of teenage Satanists who had cut up some handicapped kid with a saw and eaten him. You have to admit that was a damn sight more exciting. Anyway, at the end of every session, he’d recommend that I take up a sport—he was obsessed with sports. Though he was getting a little paunch himself. Anyway, the sessions were okay, if a bit depressing; the only thing that seemed to bring him to life was my relationship with my parents. At the beginning of February, I had a really interesting story for him. It was in the waiting room of the Mai Lin; I’d come in and sat down next to some guy whose face seemed familiar—I didn’t recognize him, there was just something about him. Anyway, he was sent upstairs and I went up right after him. There were only two massage cabins, separated by a plastic curtain, so he had to be on the other side. When the girl started stroking my belly with her soapy tits, I had a revelation: the guy in the next cabin getting a quick “full body” was my father. He had aged terribly—he looked like a real retiree—but there was no doubt about it, it was him. Just as I realized this, I heard him come with a little noise like a bladder emptying. After I’d shot off myself, I waited a couple of minutes before getting dressed; I didn’t fancy running into him on the way out. But the day I told the story to my analyst, I phoned my father when I got home. He seemed surprised to hear from me—but pleased. I was right—he was retired, having sold his shares in the Cannes clinic. He’d lost a lot of money in the last couple of years, but he was still okay financially; there were people a lot worse off. We said we’d meet up someday soon, but we couldn’t manage it right away.

“At the beginning of March I got a call from the school superintendent. One of the teachers had taken maternity leave early, so they had a vacancy until the end of the year at the Lycée de Meaux. Well, I thought about it for three hours—after all, I had very bad memories of Meaux— and then figured out that I didn’t really give a damn. I suppose that’s old age for you. Emotional reactions are dulled; you harbor little resentment and little joy. You spend most of your time worrying about the functioning of your organs, about their precarious equilibrium.

“When I got off the train and walked through the town, I was surprised at how small and ugly it was—there seemed to be nothing of interest in it at all. As a kid, when I got back to Meaux every Sunday night, I felt like I was entering some vast hellish place. Well, I was wrong—it was a pretty small hell, without a single distinguishing feature. The streets and the houses didn’t conjure up any memories—even the school had been renovated. I took a tour of the building where the boarders had lived; it had long since been closed and turned into a local history museum. In these rooms, other boys had hit me and humiliated me. They’d spit on me, pissed on me, pushed my head into the toilet and enjoyed it, but I didn’t feel anything. Oh, maybe I felt a little sad—but in a very general sort of way. ‘God Himself cannot undo that which has been done,’ as some Catholic writer said somewhere. When I looked back at what was left of my childhood in Meaux, it didn’t look too bad to me.

“I walked around town for several hours, and even went back to the Café de la Plage. I thought about Caroline Yessayan and Patricia Hohweiller, but nothing there particularly reminded me of them. I suppose I’d never really forgotten them. I noticed a lot of young immigrants—blacks, mostly, a lot more than when I was a teenager; that was the only thing that had really changed. Then I went back to the school and introduced myself. The housemaster was delighted to hear I was a former pupil; he said he might go and dig out my file but I changed the subject, so at least I didn’t have to go through that. I took three classes:
seconde, première A
and
première S
. I realized straightaway that the
première A
would be the worst: there were three boys and about thirty girls. Thirty sixteen-year-old girls—blondes, brunettes, redheads, white girls, Arabs, Asians . . . every one of them lovely and every one of them desirable. And they weren’t virgins, either—you could tell. They slept around, swapped boyfriends—enjoying their youth to the full. I used to walk past the condom machine every day and they weren’t the slightest bit embarrassed to use it right in front of me.

“The problems started when I decided I might have a chance. A lot of their parents were probably divorced, so I was convinced I could find one who was looking for a father figure. It could work—I was sure of it. But I’d have to be a big, broad-shouldered father figure, so I grew a beard and joined a gym. The beard was a qualified success—it grew in thinly, which made me look like a dirty old man, a little like Salman Rushdie—but the gym was a great idea. Within a couple of months I had well-defined pecs and deltoids. The problem—and it was a new one for me—was my dick. It probably sounds strange now, but in the seventies nobody really cared how big their dick was. When I was a teenager I had every conceivable hang-up about my body except that. I don’t know who started it—queers, probably, though you find it a lot in American detective novels, but there’s no mention of it in Sartre. Whatever, in the showers at the gym I realized I had a really small dick. I measured it when I got home—it was twelve centimeters, maybe thirteen or fourteen if you measured right to the base. I’d found something new to worry about, something I couldn’t do anything about; it was a basic and permanent handicap. It was around then that I started hating blacks. There weren’t many of them in the school—most of them went to the technical high school, Lycée Pierre-de-Coubertin, where the eminent Defrance did his philosophical striptease and propounded his pro-youth ass-kissing. I only had one, in my
première A
class, a big, stocky guy who called himself Ben. He always wore a baseball cap and Nikes; I was convinced he had a huge dick. All the girls threw themselves at this big baboon and here I was trying to teach them about Mallarmé—what the fuck was the point? This is the way Western civilization would end, I thought bitterly, people worshiping in front of big dicks, like hamadryas baboons. I got into the habit of coming to class without any underwear on. This black guy was going out with exactly the girl I would have chosen myself: blonde, very pretty, with a childlike face and small firm tits. They would come to class holding hands. I always kept the windows closed while they were working; the girls would get hot and take off their sweaters, their T-shirts sticking to their breasts. Hidden behind my desk, I’d jerk off. I still remember the day I gave them a passage from
Le Côté de Guermantes
to comment on.

. . . the purity of a bloodline into which for many generations there had flowed only what was greatest in the history of France had rid her manner of everything that the lower orders call “airs” and had endowed her with perfect simplicity . . .

“I looked at Ben: he scratched his head, he scratched his balls, he chewed his gum. What the hell would it mean to him, the big ape? What would it mean to any of them? I was beginning to wonder whether
I
understood what Proust meant, exactly. These dozens of pages about the purity of the bloodline, the nobility of genius compared to the nobility of race, the rarefied atmosphere of great doctors . . . it all seemed bullshit to me. We clearly live in a simpler world. The Duchesse de Guermantes has a lot less dough than Snoop Doggy Dogg; Snoop has less than Bill Gates, but he gets the girls wet. There are two possible criteria, that’s it. Of course you could write a Proustian novel about the jet set, about money and fame—a major star brought face to face with a literary legend. It would entrance the literati, but in the end, who cares? Literary fame is a poor substitute for real stardom, media stardom, which is linked to show biz; after all, show biz rakes in more than any other industry in the world. What’s a banker or a senator or a CEO next to an actor or a rock star? Financially, sexually, any way you look at it, they’re nonentities. The strategies of distinction so subtly described by Proust are completely meaningless nowadays. From the point of view of man as a hierarchical animal, as a builder of hierarchies, the twentieth century had about as much in common with the eighteenth as the GAN insurance tower with the Petit Trianon. Proust was fundamentally European—he and Thomas Mann were the last Europeans—but what he wrote no longer bears any relationship to the world as we know it. The passage about the Duchesse de Guermantes is magnificent, of course, but I found it all rather depressing. I found myself increasingly drawn to Baudelaire. Here were real themes: death, anguish, shame, dissipation, lost childhood and nostalgia—transcendent subjects. It was pretty strange really; it was spring, the weather was beautiful, there were stunning girls everywhere and there I was reading:

Be calm, my pain, and venture to be still.

You clamored for the Night; it falls; is here:

The city shrouds itself in blackest chill,

Brings peace to some, to others fear.

’Neath Pleasure’s lash, the grim high executioner,

Mortal souls, that vile and worthless throng,

Reap grim remorse amidst the abject ceremony,

Pain, take my hand; let us now along . . .

“I stopped for a minute. I could tell the poem had moved them; there was total silence. It was my last class of the day, and in half an hour I would be on the train heading home to my wife. Suddenly I heard Ben’s voice from the back of the classroom: ‘You’ve got death on the brain, old man . . .’ His voice was loud, but he didn’t seem to be trying to insult me; in fact, he sounded rather admiring. I don’t really know if he was referring to me or to Baudelaire, but as a response to the text it was pretty appropriate. But I had to deal with it somehow. I just said: ‘Get out.’ He didn’t move. I waited thirty seconds, so scared that I was sweating. I knew that if I waited much longer I wouldn’t be able to say anything, but I managed to croak ‘Get out’ again. He stood up, got his things together very slowly and walked toward me. In any conflict, there is a moment of grace when the opposing forces are equally matched. When he got to me, he stopped—he was a good head taller than I was—and for a moment, I thought he was going to deck me, but he didn’t, he just walked past me to the door. I had won. It was a small victory, of course; he was in class again the next day. I think he had understood what was going on—maybe he caught me looking at her—but he started feeling his girlfriend up right there in class. He’d push her skirt up, put his hand as high as possible, very high on her thigh, then he’d look right at me and smile, really cool. I wanted the bitch so badly. I spent the weekend writing a racist pamphlet—I had a hard-on all the time I was writing it. Monday, I called
L’Infini.
This time Sollers asked me to come to his office. He was sharp and mischievous, just like he is on television—better, even. ‘It’s obvious you’re a real racist. That’s good, it really carries the piece. Well done!’ He pointed to one of the pages with a graceful gesture. He had underlined a section:
We envy and admire the Negro because we long to regress, like him, to our animal selves; to be animals with big cocks and small reptilian brains which are no more than appendices to their pricks.
He tapped the page: ‘It’s strong, spirited, very aristocratic. You’ve got talent. A gift for words. I’m not keen on the subtitle: “We Become Racist, We Are Not Born That Way.” I always think irony is a bit, um . . .’ His face darkened, but then he twirled his cigarette holder and smiled again. He was a real clown, but a nice guy. ‘It’s very original, too, and not too heavy. You’re not even anti-Semitic!’ He pointed to another passage:
Only Jews are spared the regret of not being Negroes, because they have long since chosen the path of intelligence, shame and guilt. Nothing in Western civilization can equal or even approach what the Jews have made of guilt and shame; this is why Negroes hate the Jews most of all.
He sat back in his chair, seeming really pleased. He folded his arms behind his head; for a second I thought he was going to put his feet up on the desk, but he didn’t. He leaned forward again—he just couldn’t stay still.