Mother, behold your sons so lost to themselves.
Judge them not on a base intrigue
But welcome them back like the Prodigal Son.
Let them return to outstretched arms.
Or maybe I was just hungry. I’d forgotten to eat the day before, and possibly what I should do was go back to my hotel and sit down to a few ducks’ legs instead of falling down between the pews in an attack of mystical hypoglycaemia. I thought again of Huysmans, of the sufferings and doubts of his conversion, and of his desperate desire to be part of a religion.
I stayed until the reading ended, but once it was over I realised that, despite the great beauty of the text, I’d have preferred to spend my last visit alone. What this severe statue expressed was not attachment to a homeland, to a country; not some celebration of the soldier’s manly courage; not even a child’s desire for his mother. It was something mysterious, priestly and royal that surpassed Péguy’s understanding, to say nothing of Huysmans’. The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shrivelled and puny. After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the car park.
IV
~ ~ ~
As I returned to Paris, as I crossed the toll gate at Saint-Arnoult, as I passed Savigny-sur-Orge, Antony, then Montrouge, as I turned off for the exit at Porte d’Italie, I knew that what lay before me was a joyless but not an empty life. It would be filled with minor assaults. As I’d expected, someone had taken advantage of my absence to steal the parking space that came with my apartment, and there was a trickle of water underneath the fridge. These were the only domestic incidents. My mailbox was full of various kinds of bureaucratic mail, some of which would require an immediate response. To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you’re always likely to run foul of some agency or other. I knew it would take several days to get back up to speed. I performed some summary triage, throwing away the least interesting ads, keeping the targeted offers (the ‘three-day madness’ at Office Depot, the private sale at Cobrason), then I gazed out at the uniformly grey sky. I stood that way for several hours, now and then refilling my glass of rum, before I attacked the letters. The first two, from my insurance company, informed me that it was impossible to fulfil certain requests for reimbursement and invited me to send a new request with photocopies of the appropriate documents attached. This was the kind of mail I was used to, and generally left unanswered. The third letter, by contrast, held a surprise. Sent from the city hall in Nevers, it expressed its deepest condolences on the death of my mother and informed me that the body had been transported to the city coroner’s office, which I should contact in order to make the necessary arrangements. The letter was dated Tuesday, 31 May. I quickly flipped through the pile. There was one follow-up letter postmarked 14 June and another from 28 June. Finally, on 11 July the city informed me that, pursuant to article L 2223–27 of the General Local Authorities Code, the city had deposited my mother’s body in the common division of the municipal cemetery. I had five years to order the exhumation of her body and its reburial in a private plot, at the end of which time it would be cremated and the ashes scattered in a ‘garden of memory’. If I were to request this exhumation, I would be liable for the expense incurred by the municipality — one coffin, four bearers, the cost of the plot itself.
I certainly hadn’t imagined my mother leading a vibrant social life, attending conferences on pre-Columbian civilisation or making the rounds of the local Romanesque churches with other women her age. Even so, I had no idea she was so completely alone. They’d probably tried to get in touch with my father, too, and he must have left the letters unanswered. In spite of everything, it bothered me to think of her being buried in a potter’s field (this, the Internet informed me, was the former name for the common division of the municipal cemetery), and I wondered what had become of her French bulldog (humane society? euthanasia by injection?).
Next I set aside the payment-due notices and the other bills. Those were easy. All I had to do was put each one in the appropriate file in order to isolate the correspondence with my two essential interlocutors, those pillars of a man’s life: my insurer and the tax bureau. I didn’t have the courage to face that right away, and I decided to have a look around Paris — well, maybe not Paris, that would be too much on my first day back. I’d start off with a stroll around the neighbourhood.
As I pushed the lift button, it occurred to me that I hadn’t received any post from the university. I went back and checked my bank statements: my pay cheque had been direct-deposited, as usual, at the end of June. My job status was just as uncertain as ever.
The change in the political regime had left no visible mark on the neighbourhood. Tight knots of Chinese men still gathered in front of the OTB, racing forms in hand. Others hurried along pushing handcarts full of rice noodles, soy sauce, mangos. Nothing, not even a Muslim government, could curb their incessant activity — Muslim proselytising would dissolve without a trace, like the Christian message before it, in the vast ocean of their civilisation.
I wandered through Chinatown for an hour or more. The parish of Saint-Hippolyte was still offering its introductory courses in Mandarin, and there were the flyers for the ‘Asian Fever’ club nights in Maisons-Alfort. I couldn’t find any visible signs of change other than the disappearance of the kosher section from the Géant Casino. Mass retail was nothing if not opportunistic.
Things were different in Italie 2. As I’d predicted, the Jennyfer store had disappeared, replaced by a kind of organic Provençal boutique offering essential oils, olive oil and honey harvested from the garrigue. Less explicably, no doubt for strictly economic reasons, the L’Homme Moderne franchise, located in a more or less dead zone of the second floor, had also closed its doors. It had yet to be replaced. The biggest change, a subtle one, was in the shoppers themselves. Like all shopping centres — though naturally, in a much less spectacular way than those in La Défense or Les Halles — Italie 2 had always attracted a fair amount of riff-raff. They’d completely disappeared. Also, women’s clothing had been transformed. I felt the change at once, but I couldn’t put it into words. The number of Muslim veils had increased only slightly — it wasn’t that. I spent almost an hour walking around before it hit me: all the women were wearing trousers. To visualise a woman’s thighs and to mentally reconstruct her pussy where the thighs intersect — a process whose power of excitation is directly proportional to the length of bare leg — was so involuntary and mechanical with me, so genetic you might say, that it took me a while to notice what was missing: no more dresses or skirts. Women were wearing a new garment, a kind of long cotton smock, ending at mid-thigh, which eliminated any objective interest in the tight trousers that some women might potentially wear; as for shorts, these were obviously out of the question. The contemplation of women’s arses, that small, dreamy consolation, had also become impossible. A transformation was indeed under way. There’d been a fundamental shift. Several hours of channel surfing revealed no further changes, but then, soft-core porn had gone out of fashion years before.