We needed answers at the end of the programme, but all we got were generalisations. “The State must play its part,” boomed a bald guy, pulling his last two remaining hairs up from his neck and down over his jutting forehead. “Urgent times call for drastic measures”, said a badly shaven guest, who had probably been using his wife’s hair-removal cream. “We need a Marshall Plan hic et nunc” proffered a man who, to camera and in profile, looked like a sole. “We need to tighten our belts”, added a woman wearing glasses with lenses thick as bicycle wheels from the early years of the Occupation. “We need … we need, we need to look at … to look at … the behaviour of … of those on so … so … social … benefits, git … git … get … them to change their habits and useless … get them to use less medishit … shit … medicine. And we also … we also … need to organise a crackdown on fraud”, was the response of a man who stammered from the off and had trouble finishing his sentences. The theme music started up, the debaters smiled and congratulated themselves, pleased at putting in a good performance.
I knew my neighbour had been watching the same programme. I could hear his telly from my studio. What I didn’t know was how much of a pain in the neck he was going to be about this story …
* * *
The next day, when I was still red-eyed from watching that spat on the telly, my neighbour from across the hallway ran into me down by the bins and accosted me in a sarcastic tone of voice:
“You hardly need me to tell you, this situation is serious! Very serious! They’re saying the hole in the social security is getting deeper and deeper because there’s riff-raff out there, with no sense of republican values, threatening our democracy. Now, I’m naming no names here, but something has got to be done!”
Why was he saying this to me? We don’t get on, the two of us. We barely speak, and there’s never been a good feeling since the day I set foot in this building with my suitcases of clothes to live with the woman who would later become the mother of my daughter.
I took my time before answering, I didn’t want to lose my temper. I told him that I understood what he was talking about, that I had watched the programme too. And that yes, the hole in the social certainly was deep and there were already plenty of victims who had fallen into it. That I’d been asking myself a thousand and one questions since that debate. And that I wanted to get a clearer picture of what was going on.
“Yes, but something needs doing right now! Enough is enough, I’ve had it with people like you who are always waiting to get a clearer picture, and all the time that hole just keeps growing. Tell me, while we’re on the subject, is it your new vocation to stay at home and type every day on a goddam typewriter that makes the whole building shake? Does that really put bread on the table or is it because you don’t want to admit to people that you’re unemployed?”
Having failed to get a rise out of me he paused, before leaving the basement, to examine my shoes and my Cerutti 1884 suit. I was convinced I must have trodden in something or that there were dirty marks on my clothes.
“When you’re taking your rubbish down to the bins, is it really necessary to dress up like a dandy going to a wedding, eh?” he rattled off, sounding vexed. “Those clothes must have cost a king’s ransom!”
I don’t know what makes him think I buy my clothes using state benefits, in other words his money. He’s the one who is popping pills all day long, stocking up again when the fancy takes him, getting various doctors to make home visits. The fact of the matter is he’s become more and more insufferable since his accident on the fifth floor. If he’d been happy to cultivate his own garden, nothing would have happened to him. But his problem is that he spends all his time going up and down the stairwell, spying on the residents’ every move, finding out what people get up to in their own homes, keeping tabs on their comings and goings in the corridors.
It’s two months ago now since he fell and hit his head, and I can still remember how everybody in the building was scared that day because a nice fellow from the second floor who watches a lot of detective films explained to us how an inspector would lead a lengthy police investigation, that we would be on the evening news on the telly, and that people would see us in flesh and blood across all of France, including in Corsica and Monaco …
And I remember how, when the neighbour slipped on the stairs, I stopped writing and opened my door because from the screeching up there you’d have thought a wild boar was having its throat slit with a chainsaw like something straight out of Scarface. We could hear him going thud on each step like a sack of potatoes, from the fifth floor all the way down to the ground floor where I was. He blacked out in front of my door, arms splayed. The tenants came rushing down, some of them barefoot, others with towels wrapped round their waists. We could see he was dead for good, so we decided we’d better call the emergency services. But someone from the sixth floor, who knew what to do in situations like that, announced it wasn’t an ambulance we needed but an undertaker or a pathologist. He warned us that the emergency services these days wouldn’t stand for being messed around, they’d had enough of being called out for nursery school bumps and bruises every thirty seconds, and now their union was threatening to make people pay for crazy call-outs.
“The person who rings pays the call-out fee, not me!” he emphasised.
So we dropped the idea, but the corpse was still there, in front of us. The nice fellow from the second floor who watches too many detective films warned us that we would soon get a visit from someone cantankerous, a German cousin of Inspector Colombo, that he would wear a raincoat and drive an old banger which he’d park in front of our building, that he’d smoke a smelly cigar, that he’d talk to us about his wife and his dog, that he’d pretend not to notice anything, that he’d lay traps for us, that he’d tire us out with his questions about this, that and the other, that he’d look for clues on the soles of our shoes, on our cigarette stubs, our beer glasses, our dusty doormats, in our condoms and our jacket pockets, in lipsticks, on badly knotted ties, on our grubby front door knobs, down by the bins, that he’d have a word with the Arab on the corner, then with the Chinese, then with the Pakistanis, then with the Indians, then with the Greeks, then with the Polish plumbers, that he’d take fingerprint samples from every landing, that he’d want to know what we’d been up to before the drama took place, what we ate two days before, what we drank a month before, that he’d look into what relations were like between the residents, that he’d spend time down in the basements, that he’d pay close attention to all the numbers we had dialled — even Freefone numbers — that he’d also take his time over the calls we had received, even if it was just someone trying to sell us a second-hand vacuum cleaner or to make us switch telephone suppliers. Not only that, but Colombo’s cousin would summon everyone who had paid us a visit over the last twenty and a half years minimum. And after all that, some of us would still have to spend hours in custody, in a police station with a stuttering lawyer appointed by the court, and officers who would treat the suspects like guinea pigs for new torture methods from the United States that are used to worm information fast out of people who try it on during the interrogation sessions.