Someone Else

by Tonino Benacquista

  No need to reply, even less need to listen. Nicolas tried not smile at the sight of his decoy beer standing at an angle on his desk, right under Bardane’s nose. The prototype existed – it now needed a name.

  “I can spot people with ambition, I played this game long before you did.”

  A Canticle?

  That sounds nice, Canticle. It’s got the “can” in there and there’s also the tease of “tickle”. It would almost work. But what exactly is a canticle? It’s something they sing in church, isn’t it? Have to steer clear of religious connotations.

  “You have a problem with authority, Nicolas.”

  A Tubiline?

  It’s catchy, but it’s not going to work in many languages. Decoy beer has an international career ahead of it. I need a name that’s going to work well worldwide.

  “Anyone who wants out can go and try their chances somewhere else.”

  Ah, I’ve got it!

  Trickpack!

  It’s perfect! It sounds like something that’s always existed. It’s got something gadgety about it. Doesn’t everyone have a Trickpack?

  “Please don’t force me to ask for your resignation.”

  Bardane left under Nicolas’s absent gaze. The decoy beer had been christened! He needed to register its birth right away. Before leaving the building, he rang Alissa.

  “I’m calling back, as promised, about your proposal. That’s fine.”

  *

  National Institute of Patent Rights, 26b Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Nicolas went into the tall grey building with great solemnity, and wandered through the corridors for a while before going to reception, where he was handed a form for registering a patent, with information on how to proceed. He sat himself down in a large circular room like a beehive with a desk in each cell, a few tables for reading and filling in the forms, and things to read on the walls to while away the waiting. Before stepping through the Institute’s doors, he had stopped at the nearest café, just long enough to laugh at the absurdity of what he was doing and to dissolve the last of his inhibitions in a glass of brandy. This time the ethanol was no longer helping him to overcome his anxiety or giving him his own free will, it was providing him with the means to see his fanciful idea through to the end, to give it some substance, institutionalize it.

  He read through a first leaflet, Patents: Protecting Your Invention, where the very notion of invention was explained: you cannot register an idea but its application. Then he read How to Register a Request for a Patent, which listed every step he had to take, and he soon decided it was too complicated for him to tackle alone; he was told that he would be able to get some help from the offices of the Inventors’ Association.

  He was tempted to back down. Inventors’ Association! Him, a little cog in the huge machine, a worker ant in the community, a brick in the great pyramid, an insignificant part of the whole, how was he going to find the courage to step through the door of the Inventors’ Association? As he walked down the corridor he heard the jeers of all the men of science and progress who had contributed to the well-being of the human race.

  A young employee greeted him and gave him some practical advice to nudge him in the right direction.

  “Which category would your invention fall into: mechanical, chemical, electrical, electronic or information technology?”

  By elimination, Nicolas replied: the first. The young man did not ask for any more details and explained exactly how he should put together his file: fill in the patent request form, write a precise description of his invention, and have it looked over by one of the Institute’s engineers. A meeting was arranged for the following day, to give Nicolas time to struggle with a written description of his invention. He was greeted twenty-four hours later by Mme Zabel, who read his text.

  DESCRIPTION

  The present invention puts forward a sliding sheath to cover metal cans of soda, fruit juice or beer, which could be used to display texts, images or inlaid designs. It slips over any standard size can of drink, so as to hide the brand.

  The device consists principally of a cylinder with an interior diameter slightly larger than the exterior diameter of a standard can of drink, and exactly the same height as the main cylinder so that it can slide over the latter.

  Depending on the specific design, it may also include:

  – Above the standard cylinder, a chamfered section below a vertical rim a quarter of an inch deep, mimicking – with a slightly larger diameter – the chamfering and the rim of cans. In this case, the object of this invention would adhere to the can by adjusting the dimensions and the amount of give in the materials used.

  – Along the lower edge, a chamfered area mimicking – with a slightly larger diameter – the chamfering at the base of a can, as well as a flat or concave base.

  – Along the upper edge, a chamfered section below a vertical rim a quarter of an inch deep, mimicking – with a slightly larger diameter – the chamfering and the rim of cans, and along the lower edge, a system for keeping it attached to the can of drink in the chamfered lower half.

  – It will generally constitute a cylinder which corresponds to the entire height of a can, or some part of that height, with or without a base, in such a way that it can slide over the can and cover it.

  To Nicolas’s amazement, Mme Zabel asked him to make very few alterations; this was enough to make him feel almost like an inventor. On his request form, he had made a mistake, though: in the “Name of Invention” box he had put “Trickpack”.

  “That might eventually be the name of a registered trademark. What we need here is an objective name.”

  For want of anything better, he opted for “drinks can cover”, for fear of suggesting “decoy beer”. She checked through the form very seriously, which was irrefutable proof that it was acceptable. She clattered on her computer keyboard for a moment to bring up the patents that might be similar to Nicolas’s, and found only two.

  “You could stop by at the information department for more details, but it doesn’t look as if there’s much of a problem.”

  She gave him a few contacts to put him in touch with manufacturers who might be interested in the patent. At the information department, Nicolas consulted two registers, both of which described inventions intended to help with opening and using cans, no comparison with his “drinks can cover”. He stopped at the Registration office, paid his 250-franc fee and left the Institute. He felt, at last, like an inventor.

  *

  “Apparently, the network went down over half of the fifth floor of the central tower.”

  “Didn’t hear about it,” said José. “Did it affect you, Monsieur Marcheschi?”

  “Did it affect me! Do you really want to know?”

  No one saw fit to say they did not. Nicolas could see he was ready to launch into an illustration of his incomparable merits.

  “The power cut happened between ten past and half past three precisely. You must know there’s a law you can do nothing about, you can call it Murphy’s law or Sod’s law, the law of butter-side down. Anyway, everyone knows this law, which means the worst possible outcome has an inevitability we can do nothing about. If you can believe it, since February I’ve been poised on the brink of finalizing negotiations with a company in Milan called Cartamaggiore. The man I’ve been dealing with is the formidable Franco Morelli, who I knew at Harvard Business School. He favours me because we studied together – esprit de corps, at least there are some good things in life! – but if there’s the tiniest hitch, he could always turn to Ragendorf in Frankfurt and they would make him an offer at least equivalent to mine. Franco won’t give up on any part of the negotiations. He’s like me, only worse.”

  Polite laughter, just to give him time to draw breath.

  “We need an initial document to settle the principal terms, I invite him to the Plaza so that I can put together this letter of intent, he submits it to his board of directors and gets their backing. Over a period of two months I have a lot of troub
le getting the complementary technical information out of the Italians, but things are coming along, until today . . . when I need to go back over a few points in this famous document. It’s ten past three, I switch on my computer, open the file and underline the points I’m interested in. I want to make this text as easy as possible to read, so God knows what gets into me but I change the font. All I have to do now is click on Enter. I have no idea why but I click on . . . Delete.”

  “No!”

  “You didn’t?”

  Nicolas could not believe his ears. Was Marcheschi’s story actually about failure?

  “It seems absurd, but it’s the truth: the whole text disappeared! Some of you will think, quite rightly, that this wasn’t just a slip of the finger but the perfect deliberate mistake, I wanted to frighten myself, to see these negotiations somehow threatened, I don’t know. I won’t deny the subconscious element in what I did, but I won’t go any further with psychological analysis: the damage was done.”

  “You could always have used Undo and the text would have reappeared,” said Arnaud. “You must have known that.”

  “Of course I knew, but that was when Murphy’s law came into play. When I was about to click on Undo, it was ten past three and the whole network went off in my sector. In case you weren’t aware of this, my dear Arnaud, when the computer comes back on, it’s too late to click on Undo.”

  “Didn’t you have any copies?”

  “Yes, that’s just it, now this really illustrates Murphy’s law: I had a copy. Dripping with sweat, I go through all my drawers and find it, I rush to the first computer I can find, put the diskette in and I see the words: Illegible disk. Do you want to initialize?”

  “That’s really tough,” said Régine.

  “Like you say.”

  “So?”

  “So, I couldn’t see myself calling Morelli back to say, ‘By the way, if we should suppress the preferential subscription rights, what did we agree on the maximum number of shares reserved?’ He’d think I was completely incompetent and be on to Ragendorf within the hour.”

  “Is there more?”

  Nicolas would have given anything for there not to have been. He would have seen Marcheschi as a human being, human and fallible enough to recover a bit of respect for him. Instead of this, Marcheschi pronounced a long drawn out yes to reignite their interest.

  “If I had the teeniest chance of getting out of this, I had to try it. I open a new file and go back over all the points of the negotiation one by one. In an emergency like that the thing we call our memory suddenly becomes a fierce precision tool whose strength has never before been appreciated. Today, for the first time in my life, I really had a conversation with my memory. I spoke to it, out loud, asked it questions, gently, like a child, trying to earn its trust. If the sector is valued at 10 per cent of the Group’s market capitalization, with less than 2 per cent after complementary audit evaluations, the capital increase is 32 per cent and for outside investors: X is at 13 per cent, Y at 12 per cent and Z at 7.5 per cent. My subconscious may have initiated this catastrophe, but it was that same subconscious that went to dig out the information from where it was hiding. Franco had asked for . . . 22 per cent, when in this country the legal maximum is 15 per cent. Taking paragraph 5 as a condition to the contract, we have a two-thirds majority and an extra seat. I experienced this peculiar phenomenon which felt like wandering round an old hangar filled with millions of files and trying to find the right ones with a pocket torch. I had to do it, otherwise the world would fall apart; or mine would, anyway. I don’t know whether I should thank God, Freud or the fact that I’ve always eaten a lot of fish, but the end product of this whole saga went off to Milan by e-mail just over two hours ago now. Franco rang me back to tell me his boss agreed on every point. And here I am, loyal as ever, just about to have my second pastis with all of you.”

  For Nicolas the worst bit was probably that last little touch. Every time Marcheschi treated them to one of his pompous and elaborate descriptions of his own exploits, why did he feel the need to end it with: And here I am, loyal as ever, just about to have my second pastis with all of you. Having saved the world, he honoured them with his presence, simple mortals that they were, dazzled by his combination of brilliance and modesty.

  Nicolas could not let him get away with it.

  “For many years Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote thousands of pages when he was living in fear of being arrested. To save on paper and to hide his texts from the KGB, he wrote in little green notebooks – he wasn’t allowed white paper – and managed to fit about sixty lines of minute writing on every page. He was forty-two years old and suffering from lung cancer when he was sent to the Gulag. During his eight years of detention he no longer had any paper but he carried on writing . . . without actually writing. ‘No man knows his own abilities nor those of his memory,’ he would say later. To teach himself how to memorize things, he wrote poems in series of twenty verses, which he learned by heart, day after day. He used rosary beads (which the guards let him keep) to help himself do it, making each bead represent a certain number of verses. He remembered 12,000 verses like that, and spent ten days a month running through all of them to turn his memory into an absolutely unique tool. It was with that tool and his courage, his talent and his powers of resistance that he finally managed to ‘write’ prose, to hold it in his head for the duration of his detention and to reproduce it word for word years later. Alexander Solzhenitsyn experienced the three greatest scourges of the twentieth century: war, labour camps and cancer. When he was over eighty, his impenetrable handwriting still hadn’t changed.”

  Instead of shaking his hand, Marcheschi gave him a little nod as he left the table. The day was far from over and Nicolas still felt like drinking till his insides burned, but not here, not now. He knew exactly where and with whom.

  Why should he be deprived of seeing Loraine and her blue eyes? Because of a headache in the morning? Or because of feeling a bit tired round about 11 o’clock? He was forty years old, he was young, he was old, he had experience and had a lot still to learn, everything was starting for real, it was still too soon to deprive himself of anything. What was the point of this sensible attitude, which made him want to fall into line from the moment he got up? What was the point of living if the moments of pure pleasure did not take priority over everything else? On Judgment Day, God would forgive him everything except for failing to make the most of this strange gift He had given mankind. Before dawn, Nicolas would make love with Loraine, and never mind if life seemed terrifying when he woke up. I mean, who could guarantee that tomorrow the sun would rise anyway?

  “Hello, Loraine? Am I disturbing you?”

  “Not at all, I really want to have a drink with a certain gentleman who’ll do everything I ask of him.”

  “The Lynn in twenty minutes?”

  “What about going back to that hotel? If we feel like touching each other at all, we’ll have to be ultra precise in describing what it is we want.”

  Her request did not need any reply. How could he not agree with the proposed programme? He tried to guess what she was doing at that precise moment; his imagination made him hear various different things in succession: a child crying, the public address system in a station, another woman whispering, a man sighing. Nicolas had become the victim of strange symptoms, unconsciously imitating his lover so that he too now had a taste for secrecy; a naive way of trying to prove to himself that they were made to get along. The previous evening, as he lay with his cheek on the pillow in a state of utter abandon, he had enjoyed speculating about Loraine’s identity. The game had popped up of its own accord as he held her in his arms.

  “You don’t have hands like a surgeon.”

  “You don’t wear the right perfume to be a housewife and mother.”

  “You haven’t got the shoulders of a swimming instructor.”

  “You don’t dress like a teacher.”

  “You’re not as hairy as the Mediterraneans.”


  “You don’t make love like a northener.”

  “You’re not Sherlock Holmes!”

  “You’re not Mata Hari.”

  For want of anything better, he settled for creating a character which he could alter to suit his mood. Sometimes he would see her as a housewife, leading a string of children whom she would abandon at about six in the evening, leaving them with an obliging husband so that she could go and quench her thirst for solitude and wine. Sometimes she would be a man-eater, Paris crammed with her lovers, and occasionally people walking along the Seine would see the body of one of these unfortunates floating by. Sometimes she would be his own neighbour from his apartment block, who had been endlessly imaginative to hide the fact from him. With a girl like her, anything was possible.

  Less than an hour later, as they sprawled on the bed in front of CNN news, she had snuggled into the crook of his shoulder riveted by the deployment of troops in some far-off country. Before nightfall Nicolas had been able to see Loraine’s body in natural light. A little more rounded than the one he had made out the day before, which was not a bad thing. Her buttocks and legs only slightly filled out, her hips nicely curved, breasts which swayed the moment she moved. Shapes which had the raw appeal of African idols and which excited instinctive desires. All things he had not been able to appreciate the night before, overrun by drink and in the clutches of the inevitable turmoil of the first time. Fully clothed, Loraine was a city type who knew how to behave and what to do. Naked, she was robust as a woman of the land. When Nicolas held her to him, he dicovered earthly powers he had always been missing.

  She switched the television off and drew the curtains. It was time for their bodies really to get to know each other, to become more familiar. Later in the night, they ordered lots of tramezzinis and a bottle of wine.