He picks a golden coffee capsule from a bowl, then sends a polite text message telling Olympe, the cleaner, not to bother coming this week—the poor thing doesn’t need to see this. Now Antoine understands why he woke up with such a hellish hangover, having barely drunk last night—the girl slipped a roofie in his drink. It’s noon, he slept like a dormouse, slept right through the alarm and missed his early morning meeting. He will have to call his assistant and get her to push back his return flight by a day. Besides, he needs to arrange to have the apartment cleaned before he leaves.
“You suck power like the bitch slut you are.” To be truly humiliating, an insult must address the victim in the feminine. He is not even surprised that a girl would do so. They have so internalized their own oppression. The only redemption lies in motherhood, and this puts them in a delicate position: in order to marry, they have to be sexually attractive, and this places them in the role of the whore. And in order to get pregnant, they have to spread their legs, which simply makes matters worse. In less than ten years, these chaste virgins will all procreate via artificial insemination, it is the only way for them to be spared what they see as the taint of sex. Which will be a relief for guys of his generation: when they want to fuck, they will have professionals, and when it comes to family, they will finally have respectable virgin mothers.
Last night, she had gatecrashed the dinner. Physical force had been required to evict her. The problem with young women who know they’re beautiful—in her case, it’s a rank overstatement—is that it never occurs to them that their persistence is simply harassment. He had no desire for her company. He had made himself clear. She had imposed. Not that he was surprised: he had assumed she was an actress. It frequently happens. It is impossible to make them understand that sleeping with a producer’s son is not going to open any doors. The younger the actress, the more stubborn she is. They know that, without contacts, they will never get anywhere and they are prepared to do anything to fill their address book. To them, sleeping with him is a matter of professional survival.
She had come on strong, done such an extravagant number that he had felt embarrassed for her. In the end, it had seemed less trouble to take her home than to shake her off. What he finds most surprising is not that she scrawled insults a meter high all over his living room, but that he does not encounter such problems more often. He is weak, shy, and awkward, he is rich as Croesus and likes to slum it. He is a perfect target for someone who wants to redecorate his apartment. It will take him all afternoon to deal with the problem. He has so many other things to do. It puts him out of commission.
She had thrown herself at him like a third-world country at a sack of rice. He does not know her first name. In bed, she proved a pleasant surprise: she was as passionate as an ex-con who has done a ten-year stretch but never adapted to girl-on-girl action. He had enjoyed the way she clung to him, tender and slutty, a debauched romantic who knows exactly what she wants, not the kind of submissive little wallflower he usually attracts, the ones who pant and pretend. It had been better than he expected, but he had quickly become bored, his mind was distracted. For a woman to truly excite him in bed, his image of her fully clothed plays a crucial role. She had thrown herself at him with too much ardor to leave room for fantasy, he had no opportunity to sublimate anything, clothes, gestures, words. In the end, he had to fantasize about the girl she had been with in order to get off. The other girl, the one in the hijab, was not as pretty, but she was more arousing, more unavailable. Who wouldn’t want to romance a princess from a harem? He had noticed her the moment she arrived. She was surly, proud, exactly the sort of girl he would like to impress. But she had not even waited for him to finish his talk before gathering her belongings and leaving. He had been terrible. As always. He has never been comfortable with public speaking, he reads from his notes and feels unable to ad-lib. Then, afterward, he had let himself be picked up by the other girl. Serves him right. He needs to buy himself a little personality.
At least the bitch had a good reason to hook up with him. One point to her. A desire to wreak havoc. She did a good job. He warms his hands against the coffee cup as he contemplates the devastation. He counts twelve slogans. He pictures himself sleeping like a baby while she was wrecking the apartment. She could have killed him. Cut his throat. He would have died snoring. Then again, the coincidence is troubling: someone vandalized his father’s apartment a few days earlier.
He wishes she had stayed. Right now, he would give a lot to know more about her. Standing motionless in the middle of the ravaged room, Antoine finds himself unable to move. It works, this thing they’re doing. It is brutal. He sets his cell phone to charge. Before the cleanup, he wants to take some photographs. It’s a piece of performative art, he could exhibit it as is. He does not know whether he would have the balls to suggest it. Poor vandal, if she thinks he is going to call his father to share the overwhelming feeling of shame … She would have done better to interrogate him last night, before offering up her body as a sacrifice. When his father discovered the door to his apartment daubed with obscene graffiti, he had told his children he was the victim of an ugly conspiracy, probably the work of jealous colleagues, then he had told them to say nothing to anyone, and the subject was closed.
Antoine is staggered by the extent of the damage. He does not wait until his phone is fully charged before starting to take photographs. He knows artistic activism when he sees it. When his father told him about the hurtful graffiti on his door, Antoine immediately knew the apposite term. Less than a year ago, he attended a lecture by an Argentinian curator on the subject of escrache, about how the mothers of those “disappeared” during the dictatorship attacked the torturers who had gone unpunished, publicly shaming them by daubing slogans on their homes.
What he should do is not bother to repaint. Leave it as it is. It would be interesting. Take the insult on board. He is bitterly aware of the irony of the situation: he had found the lecture on escrache fascinating, he had written page after page in his notebook about the alternative political strategies emerging in countries where justice was not dispensed through the judiciary. He does not know what his father did to bring these problems on himself. But it comes as no surprise that he too is paying the price. He is not the son of a choirboy.
Antoine would like to track down the girl who did this. He would like to warn her. They will be caught. They have no idea of the means his father has at his disposal. He will find them. They have no idea of the lengths he will go to if someone confronts him. They will pay dearly.
The little vandal could not possibly hate his father as much as Antoine has learned to do. She does not know him well enough. Maybe he raped her in his office after a drinking binge one night … but she did not have to endure his presence through her childhood. He hopes she has no illusions that a man like his father might feel remorse. Whatever his father has done, he is convinced he was within his rights—his desires trump all else.
* * *
Antoine grew up the son that all great families find themselves encumbered with—the embarrassing idiot. He collected endless diagnoses in the course of countless therapies: dyslexia, ADHD, learning difficulties, memory deficiency, deafness, Asperger syndrome, intellectual giftedness, and oversensitivity. Eventually he was sent to school in Switzerland. Whether the teachers arranged desks in a circle, left him to run around the playground, or brutally punished him … the results were the same: he had no idea what they were talking about. When explained in a pedagogic context, the simplest notions eluded him, they became abstract, impossible to grasp. In order for him to pass the baccalauréat, his family had shelled out the cost of a duplex apartment in the sixth arrondissement.
Antoine never came to terms with his environment. Feeling second-rate among his peers, from early adolescence he sought out misfits—the shady characters of the neighborhood. Perhaps he hoped that contact with the less fortunate would rid him of his own complexes. He knows that this is how this generally works: gu
ys like him tend to gravitate toward people they feel are innately inferior, because they prefer to dazzle the destitute rather than deal with their sense of inferiority among their peers. He does not think that he is like that. But you never know. He felt genuinely drawn to the intelligence of people from the housing projects in the suburbs, the swiftness of their reactions, the sureness of their instincts, their firsthand knowledge of life, and above all the inflammatory humor they used to mock their hardship and transform it into a badge of honor. He loved their use of language, the way they smashed their way through every aspect of life and misappropriated all the things that were denied them. It was a different era, back then. Being able to rock the mic earned you respect. The culture of the suburbs was everywhere in the late nineties, and the guys he hung with weren’t likely to be impressed because he has been taught a solid command of Latin. Antoine had had to fight hard, to push through several panic attacks, to get himself accepted by the guys he wanted to hang with.
Before that, in the schools he had gone to, he had always had the impression that the other pupils from his social class were privy to some secret that he had not been told. They seemed naturally confident. They were good at sports, effortlessly learned languages, they knew what clothes to wear … He had been twenty years old when Booba released Temps Mort. All the kids were listening to Snoop Dogg, Dre, Tupac, and the Notorious B.I.G. He had found a home in this music, like a surrogate womb. Hip-hop was suddenly mainstream and he set himself up as an agent for tag artists.
A lot of tag artists were happy to work in fashion, galleries, and institutions. At the time, he didn’t think of it as anything other than a strategy for making friends. A few of the artists had talent, charisma, he was in awe of them. Antoine had a surname that opened doors and a predisposition to split personality: he already spoke the language of art galleries, and he learned the language of the streets. Like certain bilingual children, he was never completely comfortable in either. He was convinced—though the history of street art proved otherwise—that he had only to open the doors and the two worlds would be able to communicate. He chose his protégés with care. They made him a little money, but mostly they made him an international reputation. He quickly became a go-to curator. His artists pocketed some serious skrilla. But very few of them really took off. Most of the artists he worked with ended up back at square one, bitterly disappointed. Once you’ve had a taste of a world where you can breathe freely, had access to those privileged spheres where money flows continuously, it’s difficult to deal with the suffocation of going back to the block. Some guy would get a contract, pocket a couple of grand, get to know what it felt like to breathe, then a younger guy would come along, Contemporary Art was obsessed with innovation, and yesterday’s star would go back to collecting welfare. This was the rule, Antoine and his artists discovered it at the same time, the difference was that he was here for the long haul.
Antoine can brag about exhibiting some of the biggest names in street art in New York galleries and at glittering private views on the West Coast only to have to drop them one after another. Rich kids are enthusiastic and have the means to subsidize their gullibility: the invoice life presents them for their mistakes is not excessive. Antoine worked on the—specious—principle that, if given the opportunity, the destitute would eagerly conform to the diktats of the system. But fucking things up remains their preferred option. They are sensitive souls: at the mention of the first compromise, they get bent out of shape and threaten to kill people. They lack something that only an education at a prestigious private school can provide: an imperviousness to criticism and an unshakeable conviction that you are important.
In his early years as a curator, he had seen his apartment burgled, his papers stolen, his galleries torched, his lawyer fleeced, his sister harassed, witnessed a diplomat’s nose being broken and the Institut français in London being tagged … But his career was made. Though it was not a conscious decision, he gradually gravitated toward more conventional artists. Now that his reputation was established, he could frequent people like himself without feeling inferior. The current trend—the investor profile—is for emerging artists from the Middle East and eastern Europe, so Antoine slakes his thirst for radicalism by working with other rich kids whose culture seemed exotic yesterday but today has become the new Universal. He rarely listens to hip-hop anymore; he worships Leonard Cohen.
* * *
He can’t leave the apartment in this state. He is leaving Paris tomorrow and Francesca might come back while he is away. She wouldn’t appreciate the new décor, even if he sells it to her as art. It would be difficult to explain that he brought some girl he didn’t know back to spend the night. Four coffees. He makes the same mistake every morning. He has dry heaves and his stomach is in knots. It is his way of getting himself in gear. Since he is stranded in Paris, he makes a list of things he might do. He needs to add a ream of stuff to his Twitter feed—there is never a clause in his contract, but it is taken for granted that he has a certain presence on social media. People see him crisscrossing the world, spending half his life in departure lounges, a rolling suitcase permanently attached to one hand. The jet lag nation are a people apart, they immediately recognize their own and have a faint contempt for airport amateurs. This mania for organizing meetings in far-flung countries for things that could be dealt with over Skype. Nothing turns the brain to mush quite like prolonged sojourns in first-class lounges. From one hotel room to the next, with his suitcase and his perfectly folded shirts, he racks up air miles and gradually loses any ability to think.
* * *
He leaves a message on his father’s voicemail: “I’m in Paris till tomorrow, if you’ve got a minute I could swing by the office for a coffee—and pick up a couple of DVDs.” Usually, he avoids seeing his father. It took him many years to formulate a simple thought: the man’s an asshole. For a long time, Antoine saw him through his mother’s eyes: a loving, upstanding man with a formidable intellect. A good father disappointed by wayward children. Then he had an epiphany: his father did not love him. He had spent so longing hearing about how his father was devoted to him that he had never thought to wonder: Precisely when and in what manner was this devotion expressed? His father was neither loving nor upstanding. He was narcissistic, mendacious, quick-tempered, obsessed with money, and incapable of controlling his libido … To him, Antoine was a burden who cost him an arm and a leg. The father took an interest in his son only to lavish him with his contempt.
Antoine would like to be able to say that, professionally, he is utterly unlike his father, that he has convictions, that he is a man of the left. But he is too perceptive not to have noticed that, objectively, he has had fewer opportunities than his father did to be corrupt. If he is honest and upstanding, it is for want of temptation.
He had sworn to himself that, when his turn came, he would not be a distant, demanding father, a ball-breaking bastard who only comes home to complain that his kids are badly brought up. But heredity is a patient spider. It spins in the shadows, unbeknownst to its host. Now that his turn has come, he can barely conceal the contempt he feels for his own son. While Pablo was still a child, everything was perfectly fine. But he does not like the boy he has grown into. Family has nothing to do with it. He is a part of his generation. He had not even turned ten when he became obsessed with reality TV. Emotional saccharine. His child would sit blissfully watching Les Anges de la téléréalité. A pile of steaming horseshit nothing could tear him from. And Antoine had watched, devastated, as his child’s intelligence melted away like snow on a sunny day. If forced to do something else, Pablo did not actively resist. He would passively wait until he could go back and stare at the screen. The rest of the time, the little brat whines about wanting a new jacket, a new phone, a pair of thousand-euro headphones, expensive vacations. Antoine is aware that he looks at his son the way his father used to look at him. Francesca does the best she can to try to ensure that her son has skills beyond being able to name
every contestant from every season of The Bachelor. She and Antoine have stayed married, but, by tacit agreement, they do their best to avoid being in the same country at the same time. Their relationship reminds him a little of his parents’. Except for the fact that she does not admire him, and does not suffer his infidelities in silence: she quickly lost interest in him, and it is she who stubbornly avoids him. He can see her point. He gets it.
Being the daughter of a high-ranking Cuban family and armed with a Venezuelan passport, Francesca was working on the South American contemporary art circuit when they met, through mutual friends, in San Francisco. Their initial harmony slowly crumbled. He does not know how to make her happy. She cannot stand the fact that he works, she cannot stand the fact that he has no ambition. She can’t stand having him around all the time, she can’t stand it when he travels. If they go away for the weekend, she starts crying as soon as the plane takes off, if they stay in a hotel, she can’t stand the noise from the neighbors in the next room, if they stay at home, she complains that she doesn’t get along with any of his friends. There is no way of predicting what she will complain about, she is mercurial. All he can know for certain is that she is never happy when she is with him.
When she is not around, Antoine cherishes the idea he has of her, her frankness, her irreverent intelligence, her radicalism, her exuberance. But whenever she is near, he is terrified of her outbursts, the constant criticism—she makes him feel small. It is one more thing that recalls the nightmare of his father: Francesca reminds him of his stepmother.
Antoine had been seventeen when Marilyn first came into their lives. Until then, theirs had been a family in the classic tradition: the husband, the wife, the children, the regular mistress, the occasional prostitute or discreet orgy. But the wife had now turned forty and the husband decided to perpetuate a different tradition: he left her for a younger model. Marilyn wore large hats and was passionate about interior design and alternative medicine. Twenty years on, the smell of lavender oil still makes Antoine physically sick. His stepmother was impossible. She imposed a reign of terror at home. His father was often absent. Unable to deal with the separation, and reduced to living in a studio apartment in Porte Dorée, his mother had tried to end her life in the months after the divorce, and in the years that followed, his visits to her were in one hospital room or another. Then Marilyn got pregnant. And the horror truly began. She got it into her head that her son would get a raw deal when it came time to inherit, that the children of the first marriage would get more. Antoine learned to hide under the bed when she flew into a rage. She had a diabolical intelligence: she could always find the weakest point, the most humiliating punishment, the most hurtful word. She crushed brother and sister with the zeal of a torturer. The father could see what was happening. He made no attempt to protect them from the situation he had imposed on them. Marilyn was the military wing of their relationship.
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