He stopped there. I got the distinct feeling that he’d used up his first round of arguments. He tasted the Meursault, I poured myself a second glass. It occurred to me that I had never felt so desirable. Glory had been a long time coming. Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remembered almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get into bed at four in the afternoon with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up — I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.
I finished my wine and poured myself a third glass. Through the bay window, I watched the sun setting over the arena. The silence became a little bit embarrassing. Well, if he wanted to put his cards on the table, two could play at that game.
‘There’s a condition, though …’ I said, cautiously. ‘And it isn’t trivial …’
He gave a slow nod of the head.
‘You think … You think I’m someone who could actually convert to Islam?’
He gazed at the floor, as if lost in intense personal reflections, then he looked me in the eye. ‘I do.’
The smile he gave me was luminous, innocent. It was the second time he’d graced me with it, so it came as slightly less of a shock. But still, his smile was awfully effective. At least now it was his turn to talk. I swallowed two lukewarm canapés in quick succession. The sun vanished behind the terraced steps; night washed over the arena. It was amazing to think that fights between gladiators and wild beasts had actually taken place here, two thousand years before.
‘You aren’t Catholic, are you? That could be a problem.’
No, in fact; I couldn’t say that I was.
‘And I don’t think you’re really an atheist, either. True atheists are rare.’
‘Really? On the contrary, I’d have said that most people in the Western world are atheists.’
‘Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God — they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognise yourself in this description.’
No, in fact, I didn’t; even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés. I’d overdone it on the canapés. I took another glass of the Meursault to settle my stomach.
‘The fact is, most people live their lives without worrying too much about these supposedly philosophical questions. They think about them only when they’re facing some kind of tragedy — a serious illness, the death of a loved one. At least, that’s how it is in the West; in the rest of the world people die and kill in the name of these very questions, they wage bloody wars over them, and they have since the dawn of time. These metaphysical questions are exactly what men fight over, not market shares or who gets to hunt where. Even in the West, atheism has no solid basis. When I talk to people about God, I always start by lending them a book on astronomy …’
‘Your photos really are very beautiful.’
‘Yes, the beauty of the universe is striking, but the sheer size of it is what staggers the mind. You have hundreds of billions of galaxies, each made up of hundreds of billions of stars, some of them billions of light years — hundreds of billions of billions of kilometres — apart. And if you pull back far enough, to a scale of a billion light years, an order begins to emerge. The galaxy clusters are distributed according to a vast cosmic graph. If you go up to a hundred people in the street and lay out these scientific facts, how many will have the nerve to argue that the whole thing was created by chance? Besides, the universe is relatively young — fifteen billion years old at the most. It’s like the famous monkey and the typewriter: How long would it take a chimpanzee, typing at random, to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays? Well, how long would it take blind chance to reconstruct the universe? A lot more than fifteen billion years … And I’m not just speaking for the man in the street. The greatest scientists have thought so, too. In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton’s — just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God. He was such a firm believer that he spent the last years of his life writing an exegesis of the Bible — the one sacred text that was really available to him. Einstein wasn’t an atheist, either. The exact nature of his belief is harder to define, but when he told Bohr, “God does not play dice with the universe,” he didn’t mean it as a joke. To him it was inconceivable that the universe should be ruled by chance. The argument of the “watchmaker God”, which Voltaire considered irrefutable, is just as strong today as it was in the eighteenth century. If anything, it’s become even more pertinent as science has drawn closer and closer connections between astrophysics and the motion of particles. At the end of the day, isn’t there something ridiculous about some puny creature, living on an anonymous planet, in a remote spur of an ordinary galaxy, standing up on his hind legs and announcing, “God does not exist”? But forgive me, I’m rambling on …’
‘No, don’t apologise, I’m really interested,’ I said, sincerely. It’s true that I was starting to feel a little bit fucked up. When I glanced over at the table, I saw that the bottle of Meursault was empty.
‘You’re right,’ I went on, ‘that I don’t have any very solid grounds for my atheism. It would be presumptous to claim that I did.’
‘Presumptous — that’s the word. At the end of the day, there’s something incredibly proud and arrogant about atheist humanism. Even the Christian idea of incarnation is laughably pretentious. God turned Himself into a man … Why man and not an inhabitant of Sirius, or the Andromeda galaxy? Wouldn’t that be more likely?’
‘You believe in extraterrestrial life?’ I interrupted. I was surprised.
‘I don’t know, I haven’t given it much thought, but as a question of arithmetic, if you take all the myriad stars in the universe, each with its multiple planets, it would be shocking if life occurred only on earth. But that’s not important. All I’m saying is that the universe obviously bears the hallmarks of intelligent design, that it’s clearly the manifestation of some gigantic mind. Sooner or later, that simple idea is going to come back round. I’ve always known this, ever since I was young. All intellectual debate of the twentieth century can be summed up as a battle between communism — that is, “hard” humanism — and liberal democracy, the soft version. But what a reductive debate. Since I was fifteen, I’ve known that what they now call the return of religion was unavoidable. My family was Catholic — or rather, they were lapsed; really it was my grandparents who were Catholic — so naturally I started off turning towards the Church. Then, in my first year at university, I joined the nativist movement.’
My surprise must have shown, because he stopped and looked at me, a smile playing on his lips. Just then there was a knock at the door and Malika reappeared carrying a new tray with a cafetière, two cups, and a plate of pistachio baklava and briouats. She also brought in a bottle of boukha, with two small glasses.