by Mari Reiza
Besides, I strongly disagreed from the start with our choice of the word Father. I thought that it was too much responsibility to be part of the social history of such an important word. What if we did to the meaning of Father what the Mafia did to padrino? Mandy had expressed this concern in a long letter to our CEO, and for once I had agreed with her. We carried so much weight on our shoulders giving our own interpretation to the word Father.
Some days I felt deeply sad that words like shit and fuck and bastard and prick, that I would have expected to use on Goldman’s trading floor, were unthinkable at Enterprise. There was no jerking off and no drugs. And what happened to passion, blood, pornography, tears, totty, hero and love? It seemed that by taking away our own words, Enterprise was taking away our old world.
And of course they would not stop at words but went for our looks too.
We were to be grey Savile Row suits, long socks, unicolour ties, white shirts, strictly loafers, navy blue. Fedora hats. Just kidding on the hat. The professional, bland, selfless, I-do-not-have-a-personality BUT you-can-trust-me-with-your-life look. For the women, outnumbered ten to one at the highest ranks and seven to three at the lowest, and over-numbered ten to one at support level according to Mandy’s other famous email to our CEO, go-to-hell skirts and plunging necklines, push-up bras and spiky heels. Just kidding again. That was what we would have loved. We could surely have had that, had we been allowed to vote democratically before they numbed our brains. But our few female peers would not have felt comfortable with that, other than Alakrita, who could have stood wearing bondage gear in the middle of our presidential laboratory on the tenth floor and not given a fuck. But female Enterprisers were generally the type to seldom feel comfortable with themselves full stop.
OEF (One Enterprise Fiction) had crept in and taken over us.
Did anyone care that we had stopped being ourselves? That we didn’t sound like ourselves? That we didn’t look like ourselves?
It was because we were not ourselves anymore. But it was impressed with diligence upon our brains that our forced behaviours were part of the basic habits of success. It was not about us as individuals anymore. We were just parts of an exceptional body, and, in any one day, hundreds of our Squads would be out there, risking their lives to save the world. And mine was one of them, with the same highly trained uniformed marines as any other, holding the same weapons that could turn them into something deadly.
We should have never given into fear. We should have never given into this.
Early Days with Miriam
Three years in at Enterprise, I already knew that money was the only thing that kept Miriam with me. Enterprise was killing our marriage.
Miriam did not see much of me, she could only count the dollars coming in. And we spent any time we had together burning cash. Luxury wedding weekends were great for that. We had been the first of our friends to marry but others were catching up.
‘Madness spreads fast!’ I said but she didn’t find it funny.
I remember travelling from London to a marriage in Gujarat for a couple of days (yes, you heard well, we were jetsetters now!), where the groom arrived on horseback only because they had not found an elephant. I was sure, had our friends thought it was good entertainment, they would have had the bride arrive on stage on a giraffe, Naomi Campbell-style. The Europeans from the bride’s side had sat embarrassed in their saris all for custom’s sake, whilst the locals wore Armani.
Not much later the same year, we had gone to Namibia where another wedding couple showed stern commitment by marrying outside a jeep in the middle of a private reserve, whilst a watcher kept a lookout for nearby lions. The bride had been wearing a can-can dress, idyllic against the background of the savanna.
Yet another marriage we attended, weeks apart in Rome, had the groom hiring Pavarotti and the Circo Massimo: ‘One does not need to be the Rolling Stones for the Circo Massimo!’ It was hard to make sense of it all.
Who were these people?
They were suddenly our best friends.
When had this happened? Had I not been there?
Probably not.
They were our neighbours, colleagues from Enterprise’s Wives Programme, Miriam’s bunch from her early UBS internship and acquaintances through her countless courses undoubtedly populated with bored wives of lawyers, bankers, consultants and whatever other form of useless worm lived in our part of London.
Cash-burning weekends still fared better than full-week holidays, than that fatidic Sicily retreat in 2004 when Miriam and I had had fierce daily rows with backdrop views of the most beautiful places in the Mediterranean. It had cost me a fortune, all to leave the room morning after morning with exhaustion, after night-long hysteric tantrums which needed to be soothed by intense swims at sea. Miriam had thrown my BlackBerry into the pool during one of her fits, at the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea in Palermo, a masterpiece of Sicilian Art Nouveau. And to top it off, my email account had got hacked, so I reset the password to Sicily_2004 in a hurry, which saddened me with sour memories for the next two months until I got round to changing it again.
After the Sicily trip, given the continued lack of success in our relationship, we gave up holidaying for a bit and changed tack: we tried to build a home, our little apartment in hip Elgin Crescent. We had rented one of those up-and-down flats with direct access to communal gardens because we planned to have kids. It had knocked me back an extortionate amount, again, and I never sat in the garden once. I had seen Hammi’s bachelor pad in Milan near San Babila, the one he had in addition to the Paris flat and the holiday home somewhere else in the Italian countryside where his wife and kids resided in peace as well-heeled rural bohos. He had great furniture pieces in Milan, from a funky dealer nearby, Dilmos. But when I had suggested a few of them to Miriam she had turned her head in disgust.
Odd silence. ‘Anyone a sweet?’ I had humoured her.
But she had insisted that Artemide’s Callimaco looked like Schwarzenegger’s bazooka, or a blown-up toilet brush, that she was a Fendi Home-type of girl herself. And that is where the few things that we bought for our apartment ended up coming from, including an uncomfortable but hypoallergenic mattress.
Her clean surfaces policy started to drive me mad too. My books were hidden in boxes underneath the bed as clutter. Only coffee table bricks were allowed; like The Life of Botero, The Haunted Whale, Beautiful World, Healthy Foods, 101 Things to Do Before You Die... She also approved of the Departures magazine, which we apparently got for free with my American Express (‘Nothing comes for free, darling!’) and the FT’s ‘How to Spend It’, which she left open at selected ‘hinting’ pages.
I found our nest bland and plasticky and white. I would even have preferred some colonial furniture and a painting of pilgrims plucking a turkey.
Why have I married this person? I started thinking bad thoughts. She does not even fuck me anymore (or maybe I do not fuck her?).
Was it a good enough reason for divorce that she had refused to buy me a golden Flap (that was a sofa) with my own dollars? It was my Confrère election bonus that she had been anticipating. I had given her a choice. The golden Flap or the red Boa? Instead we got a Fendi sofa and a bloody Boffi kitchen.
‘You can’t cook, Miriam!’ I said to her, and prayed that God could perform miracles and sort us out.
No Chain of Command
In which Vittal nearly doesn’t get elected; Miriam goes AWOL; she wants a luxury holiday; and he wants to move to New York.
We were strictly No Chain of Command (NCC) at Enterprise.
‘We self-govern and persuade by multitude of committees, following our own curiosity, imagination and entrepreneurial spirit.’ Those were the words in our Bible. ‘Men need to be masters of themselves to succeed serving others,’ our values read, ‘there is no King, but every man does that which is right in his own eyes.’
The theory went like this.
We claimed to live in a non-hierarchical environment (didn’t ev
erything I’ve told you so far sound like that, dear Reader?) where one could self-manage, as long as he followed the ethical code. We were the masters of our own capacity, ruling over our individual deployment, because we were well-meaning people who could be trusted to decide how best to spend our time (though not how to speak or what to wear), especially when we had no choice anyway.
Do I sound bitter now?
In essence, we were pretty much free but we weren’t.
This freedom was still seen as a source of enormous energy for Enterprise. We believed that letting individuals follow their own initiative would give them dignity and eventually benefit all of us. And I soon realised that, contrary to my initial expectations, even for those at the top of Enterprise, handing decisions to the lower layers was a liberation; it freed up time for golf.
It followed that we had no bosses but only peers, and being more peer-like was a suggestion that you often got on Enterprise feedback forms. Seniors wanted to be treated as peers, seemingly. Although not invariably.
Did NCC make sense? We were humble peas, great servants. Should we have anticipated that perhaps we would be bad masters (of ourselves), which when left to themselves would burn faster and faster?
In practice, NCC meant that we let a thousand flowers bloom, involving as many colleagues as possible in every decision. We loved co-heads and interdisciplinary boards and multi-ethnic committees that changed every three years, so that no one ever had to make a resolution on their own or stick to it. There was no individual accountability, no pressure for independent greatness.
May NCC have led to paralysis?
Even the brightest debaters at Enterprise could not argue with the fact that it may have taken longer to do anything.
But we knew that we would get to the right decision only collectively, it was what Bev endlessly repeated in her speeches.
We could admit that, a few times, like with democracy, NCC ate at the capacity to exert authority. We may have drifted to ungovernability, where Enterprise alliances and collective bickering weighed more than administrative competence. Maybe we should have anticipated that if we wanted a less controlling Enterprise, we needed a strong control to achieve it. Our OEF (One Enterprise Fiction) was not controlling enough, perhaps, on occasion.
And we still had the old problem of being captured by the elites, despite how much we tried to be non-hierarchical. Most internal leadership meetings were to be attended exclusively by Confrères upwards; CEO interviews and conference speeches were Truth Leader territory, unless a last-minute round of golf had come up. Anyone below Father was forbidden access to economic insights on Enterprise profitability. Juniors invariably got the blame if things went wrong and their project hours were erased. And, the worst injustice of all, pointed out in a third famous note from Mandy to our beloved CEO, was that PEN-ers were not part of NCC at all. They weren’t peers. They could not give feedback on Enterprisers.
The assistant to Enterprise’s CEO had snapped at Mandy, ‘It is the PEN-ers’ own fault to be sidelined for not aspiring to perfection.’ She had hurled at Mandy that PEN-ers were all beneficiaries of a university education and they could at least try hard like the rest of them to belong.
The CEO’s assistant had not seen the irony of her own comment, coming from a mere secretary, with a degree from Oxford though. Was she pushing herself hard enough?
Gert, the office manager, had further intervened to calm the waters, explaining that there would always be enough good Enterprisers with a vote to weed out any bad apples, to do the right thing. It was still a democracy. The Enterprise system would work as well without PEN-ers’ feedback on our higher ranks. We didn’t need their thoughts.
‘And women do not need to vote because there are always enough men to make the right decision,’ Mandy had pointed out.
And Gert had astonishingly almost agreed, maintaining that women should have faith that the prevailing system designed by men would reward them, not try to change it.
The message for me was loud and clear. In order to achieve maximum benefit, it was paramount to be a male at Enterprise, and not a PEN-er, and I needed to officially get the title of Confrère, then of Father, URGENTLY, or I would die trying to survive the NCC pandemonium.
There was only one small problem…
After four solid years with Hammi, I was staffed on my last project with a dipshit. And at Enterprise, as in life, you were only ever as good as your last project.
Vittal nearly doesn’t get elected and Miriam goes AWOL
It was January 2005 and I was working at a client based in an ugly suburb outside Milan.
In addition to that curse, I had recently learnt that my mum had been diagnosed with early breast cancer.
In addition to that second curse, Miriam had gone absolutely AWOL.
But there was no scope in an Enterpriser’s life for such things. There was a website and an office counsellor no one dared using, and an up-or-out-or-somewhere-else policy where you could use the somewhere-else card in an emergency, at your own risk, being certain to never come back to anywhere which was somewhere you wanted to be.
‘The elect and the damned.’ I had always thought of it that way. Divine providence had no grace at Enterprise.
Then there was the snow.
I woke up at 5.30 am on the Monday morning.
In fact, there was no need to wake up as I had hardly slept, being busy fighting with Miriam all night who had come from London to spend the weekend with me. I put on the TV and heard in the morning news that we were in the middle of a snow storm, that the city’s suburbs were cut off and traffic police were advising to avoid non-urgent travel.
I left a message on my Confrère’s BlackBerry. I guessed our meetings for the day at the client site would be postponed and I relished the opportunity to work from home (Enterprise had got me a neat little apartment by Corso Como given that I was staying in Milan for three months) and sort things out with Miriam.
But Niccolò-the-dipshit, my Confrère, called back in no time, ‘We are Enterprise boys and do not give up for a few inches of snow!’
Useless tosser from Rome, he probably didn’t even know what snow looked like. (Nor did I, but at least I wasn’t so arrogant as to dismiss expert advice!) Within seconds, I had Miriam on one side of the bed crying whilst Niccolò lectured me on my mobile, and my mother, probably it was her, was ringing on the house line, perhaps with her latest test results. It was a complex situation to handle and I have to admit that I froze. Then, after a few seconds, I mechanically sprung back to the role of the fucking coward that I was becoming, stood up, shaved, showered, dressed and went out to the car.
But I hadn’t completely lost all my senses yet, and inside the car I was quick to question myself at least.
‘How low am I on the scale of living creatures?’
I did not reach the dignity of a slug.
‘Obviously, I am a pea so I am not even a slug, there is a hierarchy even for small things.’
Could I imagine any longer what it was to really love someone, to come through for someone? I should have understood it at that precise moment. I should have known that that moment was pivotal and my life was changing because my perception about myself was shifting. I was truly starting to hate who I had become.
Instead, all I focused on was the snow.
I barely managed to get to pick up Niccolò at his flat near Castello without an accident. But that didn’t stop us.
With Niccolò on board, we headed out of Milan, the snow storm in plain view. I timidly ventured once more that none of our patients would be getting to the office that day. ‘They would never know that we were there.’
There was an odd silence.
‘Anyone a sweet?’ I asked but Niccolò did not get my joke. Silences seemed to be increasingly plaguing my life.
Just before reaching our client site, we arrived at a hill.
We made it up the hill but there was too much snow and the car kept sliding. A police vehicl
e passed by, stopped us and told us to abandon the car and go home or to the nearest bar for refuge and a coffee. But Niccolò, being a supreme dick of the highest quality, wouldn’t have it. ‘We will soldier on,’ he insisted.
I was not born to soldier, I knew it.
He had seen a petrol station in the distance and ordered me to go fetch chains, like a dog.
‘In my new Church shoes?’ I had moved up from Clarks.
He didn’t care.
I grumbled, but Niccolò had no time for gentle persuasion the Enterprise way. He was emphatic. He sent me on my way, ‘Go, now!’
Have you, Reader, ever put chains on a car at the side of a road, down a hill, under the snow, surrounded by moving vehicles barely able to break without sliding?
It was far from what I envisaged to be Enterprise work nor my destiny. I was certain it should have been carried out by lowly minions whilst I made money from the comfort of my office, perhaps at Goldman Sachs. I was very certain of that as I was putting the chains on under Niccolò’s supervision. And once the chains were on, he shouted from his cosy seat inside the car, asking me to push him out from the side of the road. As the vehicle caught speed, I jumped into the moving car cowboy-style and we slid down the hill to our destination.
AN EMPTY OFFICE.
How much I cursed the man that day for being a muppet, and his Roman office, and the fucking Pope, all in silence because I was a coward.
We ended up working a normal day, alone inside the eerie building except for an Ecuadorian security guard who had been trapped overnight by the snow. Niccolò must have reflected on his idiocy and tried to offer a sweetened pill, shortening our stay to leave at 5 pm. Perhaps he was only scared of the way back. It was already dark when we headed to Milan, but at least the snow had eased and the salt tracks had been out all day. I was glad this hellish day was over.