Let’s be clear: I do not hate death; I hate my death. If the vast majority of humankind accept that it is inexorable, that’s their problem. Personally, I can see no advantage to dying. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, Death stops with me. This tale is an account of my efforts to stop foolishly dying like everyone else. It was unthinkable that I should die without fighting back. Death is lazy, only fatalists truly believe it is inevitable. I loathe those resigned to their fate, who sigh and mutter “Oh là là, we all go that way one day or another.” Fuck off and die somewhere else, puny mortals.
Every corpse is first and foremost a has-been.
There is nothing extraordinary about my life, but even so, I would rather that it carry on as long as possible.
Vainly, I got married twice. As a reaction, ten years ago I had a child without marrying her mother. And then, in Geneva, I met Léonore, curvaceous brunette, doctor in molecular virology. I asked her to marry me straightaway. I’m not very skilled at picking up women; that’s why I marry in haste (except for Caroline, which is probably why she left me). Romy and I sent Léonore a text message: “If you come to visit us in Paris, don’t forget to bring double cream from Gruyères, we’ll supply the meringues.” I don’t think the metaphor was deliberately erotic. I can’t come up with a definition for love: personally, I feel it as a gnawing ache analogous to drug withdrawal. In marrying me Léonore was not simply marrying a father, she was agreeing to be stepmother to a pale-eyed preteen girl. After our wedding in a pink church in the Bahamas, Léonore divided her time between Paris and Geneva. We would take it in turns to catch the TGV Lyria. Sometimes we’d take it together so we could fuck on board. We talked a lot while making love between two carriages, between two countries.
“I should warn you, I’m not on the pill.”
“So much the better, I want to impregnate you.”
“Stop it, you’re making me horny!”
“My gametes want to ravage your oocytes.”
“Keep going … I love it …”
“I’m going to shoot three hundred million flagella at your fallopian tubes …”
“Oh, yessss …”
“Do I look like a guy who fucks just for the fun of it?”
“Oooh, gonad me!”
Nine months later … Lou arrived so quickly that we didn’t even have time to move in together. I’ve speeded up the story to get to my point: the subject of this book is not life, but non-death. Fathering a child at fifty is like trying to correct a film script that’s already been written. Usually, a man is born, marries, reproduces, divorces, and when he turns fifty, he rests. In choosing reproduction over retirement, I contravened the rules.
On the same evening that our baby was born, David Pujadas announced on the TV news that life expectancy in France had stagnated at seventy-eight. I had only twenty-six years left to live. But this was how old Léonore was, and we both knew how quickly twenty-six years flash past: in five minutes.
Twenty-six years, or 9,490 days left to live. Every day, from waking to sleeping, had to be slowly savoured as though I had just been released from prison. I had to live as though I was reborn every morning. To see the world through the eyes of a baby when actually I was a beat-up second-hand car. I needed an advent calendar with 9,490 windows to open. Every day that passes is one day less: 9,490 days are all that separate me from the Answer. I taught my youngest daughter a trick that my mother had taught me: turning over the shell of the boiled egg you’ve just eaten. Lou pretends she has barely started on her egg and I pretend to be annoyed. She cracks the shell with her spoon and I pretend to be surprised that the shell is empty. We’re both laughing at a prank that relies on everyone playacting: Lou forces herself to believe that she has genuinely tricked me and every day I act like I’m surprised by the same prank. Could this little Sisyphean game be a metaphor for the human condition? Your shell is empty, so turn it over and pretend it’s funny. Growing old is laughing at a joke you know by heart.
My fear of death is ridiculous, I know that. It’s time to admit it: my nihilism is a failure. I have spent my whole life making fun of life; I have made irony my stock-in-trade. I don’t believe in God: that’s why I want to keep body and soul together. (Actually, I’d be happy just to keep body together.) I’m a nihilist who ended up with two children. And here I am forced to publicly confess, sheepish yet proud, that procreating is the most important thing that ever happened to me, to me, moderator of TV squabbles and director of satirical films.
There are two kinds of nihilist: those who take their lives and those who create new ones. The former are dangerous, the latter are pathetic. Violent nihilists have succeeded in discrediting my armchair pessimism. Cioran is the sort of pessimist jihadists assassinate. I bitterly resent Islamists for making derision derisory. But that’s the way it is, it has to be admitted: every life, however worthless, is superior to nothingness, however heroic. If you don’t believe in an eternal life-after-death, you inevitably want to prolong your own life. And this is how, from being a melancholy cynic, one becomes a posthuman scientist.
The life story you are reading guarantees my immortalization; it is preserved in Human Longevity, Inc., file number X76097AA804. But we’ll come back to that later.
Until the age of fifty, you run with the crowd. After that, you’re a little less eager to hurry. Around you, you see fewer people, and in front of you, a yawning abyss. My life has dwindled. I can clearly feel that my brain is younger than my body. I get beaten 6–2 at tennis by my twelve-year-old nephew. Romy knows how to change the cartridges in my printer; I’m completely incapable. It takes me three days to recover from a night drinking tequila. I’ve reached the age where you’re afraid to take drugs: you snort “bumps” rather than the “fat rails” of yesteryear. You constantly look like a prude because you’re afraid of having a stroke. You drink apple juice on the rocks so people think it’s whisky. When you pass a girl in the street, you don’t turn around for fear of getting a crick in your neck. The minute you decide to go surfing, you end up with an ear infection. Every night, you wake up once or twice because you need to pee. These are the joys of being a fiftysomething: if someone had told me that one day I’d fasten my seat belt in the back of a taxi …!
Old people constantly have an ache somewhere or other. The body is worn out; few are the days without a pain in the foot, a cramp in the leg, a shooting pain in the chest. To say nothing of the neurological and psychological problems. The worst of which is constant kvetching. Old age broadly consists of pissing off those around you. Old men moan and grumble, and put young people to flight.
The one thing all fiftysomethings have in common is that we’re scared shitless. You can see it in certain gestures: we’re terribly careful about what we eat. We give up smoking and drinking. We stay out of the sun. We avoid oxidation of every kind. We’re permanently freaked out. Former party animals turn into chickenshit wimps desperate to save their skin. Even the word “wimp” is an indication of the author’s advanced age. We safeguard our last moments. We take out personal pension plans, life insurance policies, real estate investments. In the blink of an eye, my generation has gone from heedlessness to paranoia. I feel as though it happened overnight: suddenly all my wild and wasted friends from the ’80s are obsessed with organic food, quinoa, veganism, and biking tours. As though we’re all tripping on GHB (Generational Hangover Bug). The more time my friends spent holed up in the toilets of Le Baron twenty years ago, the more they now spend lecturing me on superfoods and healthy living. It’s all the more surreal since I never saw it coming. Maybe I’d been sucked into the black hole of my divorces and my TV shows, I thought it was still cool to do drugs with call girls, I never saw the world around me changing. Guys whose idea of a night out was ending up in a gutter at 8:00 a.m. are now ayatollahs of the paleo diet and my former drug dealers are now devotees of mountain trekking in North Face clodhoppers. Now, you spark up a cigarette and y
ou’re a suicide bomber; order a caipirovska and you’re the scum of the earth. You haven’t read Sylvain Tesson? Poor bastard. It’s their own past they’re railing against. Even Sylvain Tesson once nearly snuffed it while drunkenly climbing across rooftops. Stop making Tesson out to be some eco-friendly monk! He’s just like me: an alcoholic Russophile who’s scared to die.
I started watching every single cookery programme: Masterchef, Top Chef, Les Escapades de Petitrenaud. I’m an ex-clubber who’s moved into Lo-Cal cuisine. And something that was bound to happen has happened: I signed up for a gym. Even in my worst nightmares, I’d never predicted such a cataclysm: me on a Cross-Trainer, me vibrating on a Power Plate, me propped on my elbows doing Core Strength Exercises, me squatting against the wall imitating an Air Chair, me pulling on Bungee Cords, me pumping iron to turn my moobs into pecs. Down the centuries, man has fought in many heroic wars; in the twenty-first century, the struggle against death has taken on a new form: a guy in shorts with a skipping rope.
I’m afraid, because Romy and Lou don’t deserve to be orphaned. I’m trying to postpone my end. Life is ending, and I refuse to accept that. Death doesn’t fit with my Reverse Schedule. This morning, I walked barefoot over strawberries my baby girl had thrown on the floor.
Could this great joy, won at such great cost,
In the next five minutes somehow all be lost?
I’m going deaf: I’m forever asking people to repeat things. But maybe there’s no problem with my hearing, maybe I’m simply not interested in other people. I’m at the age where men start to drink Coke Zero because they’re getting a paunch and they’re afraid they’ll never see their prick again. Every night, in the bath, I count the hairs I’ve shed floating on the surface of the water. If there are more than ten, I get depressed. With a pair of tweezers, I hunt down the grey hairs sprouting from my nose, my ears, and I trim my eyebrows, which look like they’ve been borrowed from Groucho Marx. I keep a close eye on moles and beauty spots as though waiting for milk to boil. I wear “razor-thin” suits by Hedi Slimane in the hope that if Death encounters a bearded guy squeezed into a slim fitting jacket, it’ll assume it’s got the wrong man. The knuckles on my hand are numb, my back aches after fifteen minutes’ physical exercise. At fifty, there’s no time left for lounging around. Life works on a tight schedule. My smartwatch constantly displays my heartbeat and the number of calories I burn when I walk. My Hexoskin Smart Shirt transmits my sweat rate to my iPhone 7. I find knowing these futile statistics reassuring. At any moment, I can tell you the number of steps I’ve taken since this morning. The World Health Organization recommends taking 10,000 steps a day; I’m only at 6,136 and already I’m shattered.
I’ve lost something along the way, and that something is called my youth. In our unshockable era, death alone is shocking. Since the beginning of this chapter, 10,000 people have died across the world. I prefer not to enumerate those who will die between here and the end of the book; the carnage would be too terrible to contemplate.
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THERE’S SOMETHING I don’t understand: you need a licence to drive a car, but to father a child, nothing. They’ll let any asshole be a father. All he has to do is plant his seed and, nine months later, he is lumbered with the most colossal, the most crushing responsibility. What man is prepared for such an undertaking? I recommend a “paternity permit,” requiring something like a driving test, that would assess a man’s generosity, capacity for love, exemplary nature, human warmth, tenderness, politeness, education and, obviously, absence of incestuous or paedophiliac tendencies. Only perfect men should be authorized to procreate. The problem with such a “paternity permit” is that no one I know would qualify, certainly not your humble servant. The generation that introduces the “paternity permit” will probably be the last. Thereafter, no man will be authorized to father children. Humanity would die out as men were disqualified from fathering children.
Fatherhood, even when planned, is a profession that involves thinking on your feet. Unsurprisingly, nature has programmed for a surge of paternal affection, a joy that overwhelms you from the moment of birth. The father takes the squalling infant in his arms: he instantly falls in love with this sticky, wriggling, bluish creature. Nature sets great store by this moment when the witless youth becomes a senile old man. This is the paternal trip-switch: suddenly, the man forgets all thoughts of his car, his apartment, his job, or even cheating on the mother of his child. The man is no longer a man, he is a father, what Péguy calls the “great adventurer of modern times”: in fact, a happy fool. Does he know what awaits him? No: here, too, nature has been cunning. If men knew what awaited them, they would think twice before embarking on such an insane venture. They would choose easier adventures: swimming across the Pacific, climbing the Himalayas barefoot. A piece of cake by comparison. Fatherhood alights on the incompetent without warning. It is a catastrophe known as happiness.
I have two daughters: child number one is ten years old, the younger child has just learned to say her name. You’ll note I say “the younger child” rather than “child number two”: this is superstition. I’m hoping to disprove the old maxim “never two without three,” but the very fact that I’ve written the words means I’m already prepared for the worst. Have I been a good father? How can I know? Sometimes I was absent or thoughtless, clumsy or simply stupid; I did my best. I gave hugs and kisses, I worked so that my daughters had a nice house and healthy food, so they could holiday in the sun; the things they take for granted have required considerable effort on my part. For me, fatherhood means two things: 1) it has given my life meaning; 2) it has prevented me from dying. We need to stop thinking that a father is someone who looks after others. That’s not true. I am being completely sincere in writing this. Mine is a generation in which children look after their parents. When I became a father, I thought I was Kurt Cobain; he also had a daughter. But, unlike him, I didn’t commit suicide. I often think about Frances Bean Cobain, who is twenty-five now. When I think about her, I like Nirvana a little less. Fatherhood is a job you have no right to chuck in.
This doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty all the time. I’m not proud that I wasn’t able to stay with the mother of my elder daughter. How can you bring up a child when you’ve done everything in your power to be infantile? I think I’ve tried to be equal to the task. To be worthy of my children, even if my father had less to do with looking after me than my mother. It wasn’t his fault; it’s long since been forgiven. I know so many fathers who think they take good care of their children, but never spend a moment with them, they spend their days at the office and their nights in front of a laptop, they never ask questions and never listen to the answers, they allow TV news, urgent phone calls, and irrational fears about illegal immigration to come between them and their children. It’s so easy to avoid the little excrescences who live with you. You make sure you don’t step on them, when in fact you should use them as the missing rung on your ladder. Our society is one of absent fathers and deadbeat dads, apparently: though that’s not how I’ve experienced it. When I separated from Caroline, I made sure I looked after Romy every other weekend and later every other week. I probably did more to raise her than I would have if I’d lived with her full-time … And now, with Lou, I’ve experienced custody that isn’t shared. It’s not so terrible to watch someone grow every day. I’ve experimented at being various kinds of father: absent, part-time, full-time. Someday, I should ask my daughters which father they would have preferred: the one who leaves, the one who stays, or the one who comes and goes. Show business isn’t the only profession where you can have a walk-on part.
I was lucky to have daughters. I don’t know whether I could have loved a son as much: for me, fatherhood is marvelling at a fringe of blond hair, gap teeth, little pink ears, dimples, peach-like skin, an impish profile, a snub nose, braces on teeth, a pointed chin above a swan’s neck. Fatherhood is also lazily allowing your child to play their video game or wat
ch Harry Potter so you don’t have to deal with them between meals. Divorce forced me to play endless cheesy games, like UNO (a sort of modern variant of Mille Bornes, a card game I played as a child). These days, my elder daughter is better than I am at many things. She can trounce me 21–08 at ping pong. She speaks Spanish fluently. She wants to make films like Sofia Coppola (which would make me Francis Ford!).
People sometimes say a director’s films are his children. I’ve rarely heard such utter bullshit. I have produced only two masterpieces, and no pixels were involved.
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I WAS LIKE everyone else: I wanted a mansion with a swimming pool in Los Angeles, and if the basement was fitted with a private cinema, a bar, and a strip club, so much the better. It was the first time in history that all of humanity wanted to live in the same place.
I didn’t introduce myself because most of you already know me. It’s pointless to recount a life that no longer belongs to me since it appears in the pages of Voici every Friday. I’d rather talk to you about something that does belong to me: my death.
I’m allergic to autumn, because it is followed by winter and I have no need of winter: I’m already cold enough inside. I am the first man who will be immortal. This is my story: I hope it will last longer than my notoriety. I wear midnight-blue shirts, midnight-blue jeans, and midnight-blue moccasins. Midnight blue is the colour that allows me to wear mourning without looking like Thierry Ardisson. I present the first chemistry show in the world. I’m sure you’ve seen my Chemistry Show on YouTube, where French law doesn’t apply and television has the right to do anything and everything without censorship. It is a talk show where I organize arguments on topical issues. The USP is that all the guests have to pop a pill an hour before we go live: Ritalin, Methadone, Captagon, Xanax, Synapsyl, Rohypnol, LSD, MDMA, Modafinil, Cialis, Solupred, Ketamine, or Stolnox, at random. They pick the gel capsule from a jar wrapped in black silk, not knowing what they will be taking. Amphetamines, opiates, steroids, tranquillizers, anxiolytics, aphrodisiacs, or hallucinogens: they have no idea what state they will be in as they engage in the most mediatized debate of their lives. The shows get millions of views on every conceivable platform. In terms of presentation style, I pitch myself somewhere between Yann Moix and Monsieur Poulpe—highbrow but wacky (the press release describes me as “pertinent and impertinent”). I have a veneer of culture, but don’t flaunt it so as not to scare off the uncouth: the sort of smartarse capable of easily navigating between theology and scatology. Last week, a priest fell asleep on my shoulder sucking his thumb while trying to defend a parliamentary bill, a comedian slipped her tongue into my mouth and flashed her breasts (I had to call security to stop her fingering herself in front of Camera 3), and a singer burst into tears and then pissed his pants while talking about his mother. As for me, it depends: on one show it took me ten minutes to say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” while on another, I interviewed the sofa for half an hour (I provided the questions and the answers); last month I threw up over my “blue suede shoes.” The most famous episode was the one where I whipped the guests with my Gucci belt before spraying champagne all over the studio and announcing that my mother had had a heart attack. I have absolutely no memory of the long, paranoid monologue that racked up four million views on YouTube: I refuse to watch it. Apparently, I was drooling. If the argument isn’t heated enough, I look down at my prompt cards—my researcher always prepares a list of embarrassing questions designed to unsettle my guests. They all leave furious. Some ask me to “sort things out” in the edit. It is at this point that I tell them the programme is livestreamed. (It’s called a “live hangout” but it’s like a good old-fashioned episode of Right to Reply.) Personally, I don’t understand why artists come and make fools of themselves in my studio, given that I’m the only one who gets paid (not much, €10,000 a week, it’s not the 1990s anymore). Recently, the audience figures have stagnated; that’s why I’ve got into directing movies. On the set of my first feature, when the technicians found me too impatient, I’d say, “Why are we only shooting two minutes a day? On YouTube, it takes an hour and a half to film ninety minutes!” Films should be shot live; it would take much less time—a single take and it’s in the can, like the movies of Iñárritu or Chazelle. The current fashion for extended takes comes from their films: the public don’t want cinema anymore, they want to observe life on the screen, and that’s not the same thing. Movie actors would be a lot less like divas if they felt the same fear as stage actors. I released a rom-com called Do You Love Me or Are You Faking It?—financed by an old pay-per-view channel—that had audience figures of 800,000: the channel covered its costs, despite “mixed” reviews. My second film, All the Supermodels in the World, didn’t fare so well, there was no TV funding and the audience figures fell by 75%. I don’t know whether I’ll direct a third film, now that I’ve found another way to become immortal.
A Life Without End Page 4