Whatever: a novel (2 page)

What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.

Such a life has not been granted me. ..."

I've just turned thirty. After a chaotic start I did very well in my studies; today I'm in middle management. Analyst-programmer in a computer software company, my salary is two and a half times the minimum wage; a tidy purchasing power, by any standards. I can expect significant advancement within my firm; unless I decide, as many do, to sign on with a client. All in all I may consider myself satisfied with my social status. On the sexual plane, on the other hand, the success is less resounding. I have had many women, but for limited periods. Lacking in looks as well as personal charm, subject to frequent bouts of depression, I don't in the least correspond to what women are usually looking for in a man. And then I've always felt a kind of slight reticence with those women who were opening their organs to me. Basically all I represented for them was a
last resort
. Which is not, you will agree, the ideal point of departure for a lasting relationship.

In fact, since my breakup with Véronique two years ago I haven't been acquainted with any women; the feeble and inconsistent attempts I've made in that direction have only resulted in predictable failure. Two years is a long time. But in reality, above all when one is working, it's no time at all.

It may be, dear reader and friend, that you are a woman yourself. Don't be alarmed, these things happen. Anyway, it changes nothing of what I have to say to you. I take the rough with the smooth.

My idea is not to try and charm you with subtle psychological observations. I have no desire to draw applause from you with my finesse and my humour. There are some authors who employ their talent in the delicate description of varying states of soul, character traits, etc. I shall not be counted among these. All that accumulation of realistic detail, with clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight, has always seemed pure bullshit to me, I'm sorry to say. Daniel who is Hervé's friend, but who feels a certain reticence about Gérard. Paul's fantasy as embodied in Virginie, my cousin's trip to Venice . . . One could spend hours on this. Might as well watch lobsters marching up the side of an aquarium (it suffices, for that, to go to a fish restaurant). Added to which, I associate very little with other human beings.

To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself I will need, on the contrary, to prune. To simplify. To demolish, one by one, a host of details. In this I will be aided, moreover, by the simple play of historical forces. The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death's countenance appears in all its glory. The third millennium augurs well.

4.

Bernard, Oh Bernard

On getting back to work the following Monday, I learned that my company had just sold a specialized software program to the Ministry of Agriculture and that I'd been chosen to train them how to use it. This was announced to me by Henry La Brette (he's very proud of the `y' of 'Henri', and his surname separated as two words). Aged thirty, like me, Henry La Brette is my immediate superior in the hierarchy. In general our relationship is marked by a veiled hostility. Hence, and as if he took personal delight in putting my nose out of joint, he immediately announced that this contract would call for a lot of travelling around: to Rouen, to La Roche-sur-Yon; I don't know where else. These trips have always been a nightmare for me and Henry La Brette knows it. I could have retorted, `Right then, I quit.' But I didn't.

Long before the phrase became fashionable, my company developed an authentic
enterprise culture
(the creation of a logo, distribution of sweatshirts to the salaried staff, motivation seminars in Turkey). It's a topnotch enterprise, enjoying an enviable reputation in its field; a
good firm
, whichever way you look at it. I can't walk out just like that, you understand.

It's ten in the morning. I'm sitting in a cool white office, opposite a guy slightly younger than me who's just joined the firm. I think he's called Bernard. His mediocrity is distressing. He can't stop talking about money and investment: share packages, portfolios, high interest saving schemes . . . the full set. He's banking on a level of wage increase slightly higher than inflation. He bores me somewhat. I don't really manage to reply to him. His moustache twitches.

It goes quiet again once he leaves the office. We work in a totally devastated neighbourhood which looks a bit like the surface of the moon. It's somewhere in the 13th arrondissement. When you arrive by bus you'd really think World War III had happened. But no, it's only urban planning.

Our windows look out on wasteland which stretches practically as far as you can see, muddy, bristling with hoardings. A few shells of buildings. Immobile cranes. The ambience is calm and cold.

Bernard comes back. To brighten the atmosphere I tell him that it stinks in my building. People generally go for these stories of vile smells, I've observed. And it's true that coming down the stairs this morning I really did notice a pestilential odour. What's the usually so busy cleaning woman up to, then? He says, Ìt must be a dead rat somewhere. For some reason the idea of it seems to amuse him. His moustache twitches slightly.

Poor Bernard, in a way. What can he really do with his life? Buy CDs at the FNAC? A guy like him ought to have kids; if he had kids you'd hope he might end up getting something out of the wriggling of little Bernards. But no, he isn't even married.

A dead loss. At bottom he isn't so much to be pitied, this good Bernard, this dear Bernard. I even think he's happy - inasmuch as he can be, of course; inasmuch as he's Bernard.

5

Making Contact

Later I made an appointment at the Ministry of Agriculture with a girl called Catherine Lechardoy. The specialized software program itself was called `Maple'. Aside from exuding a sugary sap the actual maple is a tree prized in cabinet-making; it grows in certain regions of the colder temperate zones, being particularly widespread in Canada. The Maple program is written in Pascal, with certain routines in C+ +. Pascal is a seventeenth-century French writer, author of some celebrated

`Pensées'. It is also a highly structured programming language particularly suited to the processing of statistics, the mastery of which I'd managed to acquire in the past. The Maple program was to be used for paying government subsidies to the farmers, an area Catherine Lechardoy was responsible for, at the data processing level that is. Up till now we'd never met, Catherine Lechardoy and I. In fine, this was a `first making of contact'.

In our field of computer engineering the most interesting aspect is, without a doubt, contact with the clients; at least this is what the company bigwigs love to spout over a fig liqueur (I eavesdropped on their pool-side chats a few times during the recent seminar at the Kusadasi club village).

For my part, it's always with a certain apprehension that I envisage the first contact with a new client; there are different human beings involved, organized within a certain structure, the frequentation of whom one will have to get used to; a worrying prospect. Of course experience has quickly taught me that I'm only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes, their general way of approaching life. Theoretically, then, there is nothing to fear inasmuch as the professional nature of the meeting guarantees, in principle, its innocuousness. Despite that I've also had occasion to remark that human beings are often bent on making themselves conspicuous by subtle and disagreeable variations, defects, character traits and the like - doubtless with the goal of obliging their interlocutors to treat them as total individuals. Thus one person will like tennis, another will be mad on horse riding, a third will profess to playing golf. Certain higher management types are crazy about filleted herrings; others detest them. So many varied destinies, so many potential ways of doing things. Though the general framework of a `first customer contact' is clearly circumscribed there nevertheless remains, alas, a margin of uncertainty.

As it happened Catherine Lechardoy wasn't there when ... I was told, `held up by a check at the central site'. I was invited to take a seat and wait for her, which I did. The conversation revolved around a bombing that had occurred the evening before on the Champs-Élysées. A bomb had been planted under a seat in a café. Two people were dead. A third had had her legs and half her face blown off, she'd be maimed and blind for life. I learned that this wasn't the first such outrage; a few days earlier a bomb had exploded in a post office near the Hôtel de Ville, blasting a fifty-year-old woman to bits. I also learned these bombs were planted by Arab terrorists who were demanding the release of other Arab terrorists, held in France for various killings.

Around five I had to leave for the police station to make a statement about the theft of my car. Catherine Lechardoy hadn't returned, and I'd barely taken part in the conversation. The making contact would take place some other day, I assumed.

The inspector who typed out my statement was around my age. Obviously of Provençal origin, he was the marrying kind. I wondered if his wife, his hypothetical kids, he himself, were happy in Paris. Wife a post office employee, kids going to nursery school? Impossible to say.

He was somewhat bitter and twisted, as you might expect. `Thefts . . . happen every minute of the day . . . no chance . . . in any case they dump 'em straightaway . . .' I nodded sympathetically as he proceeded to utter these simple truths, drawn from his everyday experience; but I could do nothing to lighten his burden.

By the end, however, his rancour took on a slightly more positive ring, or so it seemed to me: Right then, be seeing you! Maybe your car'll turn up. It does happen!' He was hoping, I think, to say more on the matter; but there was nothing more to say.

6

A Second Chance

The following morning I'm told I've committed a faux pas. I should have insisted on seeing Catherine Lechardoy ; my unexplained departure has been taken amiss by the Ministry of Agriculture.

I also learn - and this is a complete surprise - that since my last contract my work has not given complete satisfaction. They'd said nothing up to now, but I had been found wanting. With this Ministry of Agriculture contract I am, to some extent, being offered a second chance. My head of department assumes a tense air, pure soap opera, when telling me, `We're at the service of the client, you know. In our line of business, alas, it's rare to get a second chance.

I regret making this man unhappy. He is very handsome . A face at once sensual and manly, with close-cropped grey hair. White shirt of an impeccable fine weave, allowing some powerful and bronzed pees to show through. Club tie. Natural and decisive movements , indicative of a perfect physical condition. The only excuse I can come up with - and it seems extremely feeble to me - is that my car has just been stolen. I'm saying, then, that I'm currently grappling with a nascent psychological problem. This is when my head of department flips; the theft of my car visibly angers him. He didn't know; couldn't have guessed; now he understands. And when the moment of leavetaking arrives, standing by the door of his office, feet planted in the thick pearl-grey carpet, it's with emotion that he'll urge me `to hang in there'.

7

Catherine, Little Catherine

The receptionist at the Ministry of Agriculture always wears a leather miniskirt; but this time I don't need her to find room 6017.

From the start Catherine Lechardoy confirms my worst fears. She's twenty-five, with a higher technical certificate in data processing, and prominent teeth; her aggressiveness is astonishing. `Let's hope it's going to work, your software! If it's like the last one we bought from you ... a real bastard. In the end, of course, it's ... I'm just the bimbo, I'm here to clean up the shit the others leave behind. . .', etc.

I explain to her that it's not me, either, who decides what is sold. Nor what is produced. In fact I decide nothing. Neither of us decides anything. I'm just here to help her, give her some copies of the instruction manual, try and set up a teaching programme with her ... But none of this satisfies her. Her anger is intense, her anger is deep. Now she's talking about methodology. According to her everyone in the business should conform to a rigorous methodology based on structured programming; and instead of that there is anarchy, programmes are written any old way, each person does as he likes in his little corner without considering the others, there's no agreement, there's no general project, there's no harmony. Paris is a horrible city, people don't meet, they're not even interested in their work, it's all so superficial, they all go home at six, work done or not, nobody gives a damn.