‘That’s it?’
‘That’s not nothing. Do you have a place in the country where you can go to ground?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Even so, I’d urge you to take off, sooner rather than later. Find a little hotel somewhere. Didn’t you say you lived in Chinatown? I doubt we’ll see any looting or rioting near you, but all the same, I’d have a holiday and wait for things to settle down.’
‘I’d feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship.’
‘Rats are intelligent mammals,’ he answered calmly, almost with amusement. ‘They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours.’
‘The academic year isn’t over. I still have two weeks of teaching.’
‘The academic year!’ Now he was grinning, almost laughing. ‘It’s true that all sorts of things could happen, and nobody knows just what, but I do doubt we’ll make it to the end of the academic year!’
Now he fell silent and sipped his champagne, and I knew I’d get nothing more out of him. A slightly contemptuous smile played over his lips, which was odd, since I’d have said he was almost starting to be nice to me. I ordered another beer, this time raspberry-flavoured. I had no desire to go home. There was nothing and no one waiting for me there. I wondered whether Lempereur had a partner, or at least a girlfriend. Probably. He was a kind of éminence grise, a political leader, in a clandestine movement. Everyone knows there are girls who go for that kind of thing. There are girls who go for Huysmanists, for that matter. I once met a girl — a pretty, attractive girl — who told me she fantasised about Jean-François Copé. It took me several days to get over it. Really, with girls today, all bets are off.
Friday, 20 May
The next day I opened an account at the Barclays bank in the avenue des Gobelins. The funds would be transferred in just one working day, the bank clerk informed me. A few minutes later I had a Visa, very much to my surprise.
I decided to walk home. I had filled out the paperwork mechanically, on autopilot, and now I needed to think. Crossing Place d’Italie, I was overcome by the feeling that everything could disappear. That petite black woman with the curly hair and the tight jeans, waiting for the 21 bus, could disappear; she would disappear, or at least she’d be in for some serious re-education. There were the usual fund-raisers in front of the Italie 2 shopping centre — today they were Greenpeace — and they would disappear, too. I blinked as a bearded young man with long brown hair came up to me holding his clipboard, and it was as if he were already gone. I passed by without seeing him and went through the glass doors that led to the ground floor of the mall.
Inside, the results were more mixed. The Bricorama would stay, but the Jennyfer’s days were numbered. It had nothing to offer the good Muslim tween. Secret Stories, which advertised name-brand lingerie at discount prices, had nothing to worry about: the same kind of shops were doing fine in the malls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Neither, for that matter, did Chantal Thomass or La Perla. Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicoloured lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favour of clothes that were loose and shapeless. All of a sudden, as I stood in front of the Rapid’Jus (whose concoctions kept getting more and more complicated: they had coconut — passion fruit — guava, mango — lychee — guarana, and a dozen other flavors, all with bewildering vitamin ingredients), I thought of Bruno Deslandes. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. I hadn’t thought of him, either. We’d been doctoral students together, we’d even been what you might call friendly. He worked on Laforgue. His dissertation had received a pass without distinction, and soon afterwards he’d got a job as a tax inspector, then married a girl named Annelise, whom he’d probably met at some student function. She worked in the marketing department of a mobile network, she made much more than he did, but he had job security, as they say. They’d bought a house on a plot of land in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, and they already had two kids, a boy and a girl. He was the only one on our course who’d ended up with a normal family life. The others drifted around, with a little online dating here, a little speed dating there, and a lot of solitude in between. I’d bumped into Bruno on the commuter train, and he’d invited me over the following Friday for a barbecue. It was late June, he had a garden, he could have people over for barbecues. There would be a few neighbours but, he cautioned me, ‘nobody from university’.
Their mistake, I realised as soon as I set foot in his garden and said hello to his wife, was choosing a Friday night. She’d been working all day and was exhausted, plus she’d been watching too many reruns of Come Dine with Me on Channel M6 and had planned a menu that was much too ambitious. The morel soufflé was a lost cause, but just when it became clear that even the guacamole was ruined and I thought she was going to break down in sobs, her three-year-old son started screaming at Bruno, who’d got shit-faced as soon as the first guests arrived and couldn’t manage to turn the sausages on the grill, so I helped him out. From the depths of her despair she gave me a look of profound gratitude. It was more complicated than I’d thought, barbecuing: before I knew it, the lamb chops were covered in a film of charred fat, blackish and probably carcinogenic, the flames were leaping higher and higher but I didn’t have any idea what to do, if I fiddled with the thing the bottle of butane could explode, we were alone before the mound of charred meat, and the other guests were emptying the bottles of rosé, oblivious. I was relieved to see the storm clouds gathering overhead. When we felt the first drops, wind-driven and icy, we beat a hasty retreat to the living room, where the barbecue turned into a cold buffet. As she sank down into her sofa, glaring at the tabbouleh, I thought about Annelise’s life — and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether ‘stylish’ or ‘sexy’, most likely ‘stylish’ in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner — he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known — had to have known — that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
I was one of the last to leave. I even helped Annelise clear up. I had no intention of trying anything with her — which would have been possible. In her situation, anything was possible. I just wanted her to feel a sense of solidarity: solidarity in vain.