by Mari Reiza
‘Excellent choices.’
‘That is before coming to see you for a special project that will make you Truth Leader!’
There it was, the real reason for his call. My election roster had opened for December 2012 and he knew I had no escape.
‘Done deal,’ it was the only thing I could reply.
Uncritical Satisfaction
In which Vittal tries to get elected to Truth Leader; Lucy flakes out on Peter in New York; Peter is moving to London; Vittal loses interest; Alakrita is moving to London.
We were largely unaccountable, seldom required to justify ourselves or the results of our actions. We received so much admiration that we became conceited, which made us uncritical. Conceited men only hear praise. We had vouched to advise within our competencies but thought that we were forever competent in everything.
And we covered up for each other all the time, even though there was nothing big to cover up. We had invented our own industry with no official standards, so that nothing was ever illegal. In essence, our discipline lacked rules of debate so that there would never be a malpractice judgement against an Enterpriser, because no one would have agreed on what malpractice was.
We had originally embraced a duty, a gentlemen’s obligation as part of our vocation, to object to unsavoury practices. But the Enterprise order of things had at some point changed from embracing the right to condemn, to protecting the right to survive. Duty-to-Object had been one of those unenforceable laws that gave people hope, but did nothing else.
And the thing was that, at work with patients, even when our recommendations would be followed to the letter, the final result would depend on so many other factors that a key mechanism of self-criticism was disabled. It was difficult to know if anything going wrong was ever our fault. We were left to measure our own success with a collection of soft metrics and inspiring case studies we made up ourselves.
In addition, we had to be masters of discretion, meaning that it was difficult to talk about and explain how successful we were, which suited us perfectly. Patients had to trust us. We said the best evidence came from our long-standing relationships which we wouldn’t disclose, so nobody knew how long-standing they were. And we could claim the moral upper hand because we did not measure our performance against our profits but other metrics we had coined especially, like impact, or was it influence? It invariably appeared in the third column of our patient case studies. It was a number. We would not always be sure how it had got there, but once there, we felt compelled to perpetuate it. Had it involved the misery of firings? We were not to blame, in that case we had followed orders or been caught in the macro-economic trends of the day, or were even following our own intuition, but it had been well meant. Bev was good at reminding us of these things.
And, in the rare event that none of the metrics pointed the right way and we had to admit failure, it was like what an amazing spot we had chosen to fall on and how well we had fallen. We were even experts at falling without hurting ourselves, we were amazing.
We had an amazing willpower to imagine that we were always right, that we could not do anything wrong. And we were so humble that we were content not to take credit in public for our greatness. Internal praise was good enough for us; who gave a fuck about the outside world anyway? As long as we were never to take any blame, of course, that was the Machiavellian pact. ‘Good advice depends on the shrewdness of the prince who seeks it.’ Had Enterprise been alive in the Florentine Republic of the fifteenth century, we would have said it first.
Vittal tries to get elected to Truth Leader
‘Being human is a guest room, every morning a new arrival,’ said Jelaluddin Rumi. A new poisoned chalice, that is what I would say.
Peter-Moses’s special project to make me Truth Leader turned out to be a poisoned gift. It was a plan to help a patient who, for tax reasons, had decided that his organisation should be domiciled in the UK. And it just made no fucking sense, because for the previous three years, we had charged this same company hundreds of thousands of dollars to move them from the East Coast of the US to Silicon Valley. We had designed a new talent programme for them, hired East side techies and small VC types, got everyone fired-up and aligned, and built a campaign to convince the world that this patient was to be at the centre of one of the world’s most exciting innovation hotspots. Were we seriously, only a few months later, pretending they should move to Sandwich?
‘Why does money always get the better of us?’ I asked Peter straight. ‘Did Pope Julius II at the time of the Sistine Chapel say to Michelangelo, oh yeah it looks pretty good but some new money came in from the Orient so let’s repaint Adam with a turban?’
Peter looked confused.
‘We should turn it down,’ I said, leaving no scope for interpretation. Was I getting bolder?
There was an odd silence, another one in which I thought to offer a sweet.
Then Peter said Trojan had fucked up with this client already. That was all he said.
And I knew then I should have never tried to stand up to Peter, to offer an alternative opinion. It was like debating with a Mariachi band. Now I was only a small rodent being tapped back and forth at the mercy of Peter’s paw. Weren’t we all rodents for Peter, for Enterprise? I felt like something big and strong coming towards me and that the only thing I could do was to hide somewhere too small for it to get in, and to remain trapped there. And the bigger I let Peter be, the smaller I was becoming.
‘Trojan will become Truth Leader anyway,’ Peter said, ‘he is too well connected and he has to take care of his sick wife.’
We always stood for people who had blundered their personal life because it made us feel compassionate and comparatively fortunate, or perhaps because we felt it was our fault, Enterprise’s fault. I still said nothing.
‘Tobias will make it as well,’ added Peter. ‘We owe him for his madness.’
Suddenly, Tobias was cousin Adolf who had rickets and a gait and did not need to share his toys because he would die soon.
‘Nal has Detroit and Alakrita has her dad, so she will get along unless she does something truly stupid like burning the whole New York office building down with a cigarette butt.’ He was definitely right.
‘She will probably get along even if she did that.’
‘Do you want to be the only one left out?’
Had a despotic dictator imposed a Duty-to-Object to doing stupid things on all its subjects, under pain of death, maybe I would have done the right thing.
But Peter said that if we stopped to think for a minute that we were irresponsible, unprepared and uninformed, then fear would settle in and it would be the end.
‘Is it even legal?’ I asked.
‘What is legal? Was Iraq legal?’ came Peter’s reply.
My head was spinning, ‘Harari! Harari! Harari!’ like those trumpets in football stadiums.
Peter was right. Nothing to fear but fear itself.
Lucy flakes out on Peter in New York
It was a hot summer day by British standards; you would still have lit a fire in the evening. I had been travelling a fair bit with my poisoned chalice project and it was my first day back in the office in two weeks, when Lucy stormed in.
‘What an arrogant, pampered palace prat,’ it was about Peter again and it rang like music to my ears. I was hating the man more than ever.
Lucy’s ankles convulsed with indignation. I told her to take a seat at my desk and enjoyed the symbolism of her invading my private space, a symbolism I had puffed-up myself as I knew that it meant nothing to her.
‘I stood Peter up at his meeting in New York. Just got back.’
‘Really?’ I knew she had balls but was surprised nevertheless. She had left him there with no explanation.
She told me she had been writing the deck for one of his speeches for months. He had ignored her throughout, then opened it for the first time three minutes before the event, as he had rushed in for a coffee at the little bar on the side
of the auditorium.
‘Typical Peter,’ I mumbled.
‘He made me sit in front of him, quietly, whilst he reviewed it at speed. Then he asked me to order him some fruit and munched it in a rush.’
‘Berries is his latest. From the Yucatan jungle?’ I smiled at her.
‘He next made two insignificant changes to the presentation – a font and a full-stop – making a fuss of it, and asked me to pay the breakfast bill. Vittal, did I travel all the way to New York to order him some fucking fruit?’ she sounded furious again.
‘It’s a well-regarded job, plenty of opportunities for diversification, so many different fruits…’ She was too maddened to laugh at my comments and I was loving it.
‘He rushed to the podium and presented, with his usual charisma, and everyone adored it. I told him that he had looked great. He did not even thank me for my interest or my work during all those months. He only gave me a new list of incomprehensible to-dos with no specific timeline and rushed to have a coffee with some people he pretended to be key clients.’
I knew that Peter could be bored quickly when at the periphery of any situation and his vanity required constant stimulation and proof that his self-styling was something he was completely in control of. I had that vision again, of Peter the cat, tapping the rodent back and forth with the flat side of his paw, repeating to himself that he was in control. Except this time he had got more than he could chew, I felt.
‘He next disappeared from the conference without telling me, and sent me an email hours later asking whether the calibre of attendees left for the afternoon were worth him popping back for a drink?’ She made a funny face, ‘And to confirm that everything was ready for the event at his house the next day, one of my other chores. The ungrateful jerk!’
Lucy had gone up to her hotel room, packed and taken the first plane back.
‘Does he enjoy making people feel like shit?’
I didn’t want to think that Peter was treating Lucy in a special way but knew that his behaviour wasn’t accidental either, and that he did it because he could.
‘Fuck it, Vittal,’ Lucy banged my desk with her knuckles. ‘He can have his job back, I don’t want to be one of his personal arse-lickers.’
Like me, she meant.
‘Look at the message I got this morning from him,’ she was going to read me that message on her BlackBerry (PEN-ers didn’t have iPhones) word by word: ‘I am worried about you. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you or your family.’
It seemed to me too personal a message and I resented Peter for that. Who did he think he was to Lucy?
‘He thinks it’s my health again,’ she was explaining. ‘It cannot even enter his little head that I am not going to stand there and be treated like a jerk by a knob like him, or by anybody else for that matter, unless they are holding my baby dangling from a fifth floor terrace.’ ‘And I do not even have a baby,’ she was quick to add.
I knew Lucy had for years been working with the machos on the City’s trading floors before Enterprise. You would have thought that she was thick-skinned, but she was still not permissive in the slightest. People thought she stood against men in particular as a woman, that she was a feminist, but she was not really. She probably did not care if anyone offended the whole of the female gender, as long as they did not offend her personally. She was only a feminist out of personal pride, because she happened to be a woman herself and had zero tolerance for shit. She would never accept that Peter was charisma and blind hunger, one of those men who could make you feel a million dollars one day and cause pain and not think the next.
‘Peter can be quite complicated,’ I said.
‘Fuck off, Vittal. You have to be smart to be complicated.’ Lucy the flippant bombardier, the blazing fire that can’t but say the truth, always with that smiley curve that set everything straight for me. I wanted her so badly.
I thought I was starting to understand her more and more, how she resented a man who needed a constant staff of hundreds of leeches, to mentor her on life, so that at best she shunned Peter and at worse she ridiculed him. Peter couldn’t take it.
I thought Lucy had that rare certainty in her. She knew what she wanted. ‘Because roots are always the start of things,’ she had said once.
She had told me on different occasions about her own roots, her grandmother, and how she had had it all. I knew that Lucy’s grandmother had had her bath run for her at precisely 10.30 every morning, in her marble bathroom with the prescribed amount of Rochas salts disassociating in water cooled down to the exact right temperature, fresh flowers on the windowsill across from the old sunburst make-up mirror. Her bedroom had had two ante-rooms, one for clothes, smelling of Calèche, and another for relaxation and expression of her thoughts, and a separate bathroom from her husband’s, of course. Her household had received the best fashion scoops from Paris, although she had herself never worn labels but had visited her own tailor twice a season. There had been weekly manicures and pedicures and tinted blonde hair like Marilyn Monroe, and a selection of crests she had planned to offer Lucy after her eighteenth birthday. The lady’s three south-facing reception rooms had been kept constantly well-aired and cleaned by neat maids in tailored skirts, navy blue, with matching hats. She had never carried keys because there was always someone on duty to welcome her at home. Her house had been decorated with Venetian glass, Persian silk rugs, unique silver objects and family portraits by in-vogue painters, as well as Gobelin tapestries. The main rooms had been panelled with oak and there had been a library with twenty-thousand volumes and a grand piano by Steinway. Her father had been gifted the first ever television set to reach Spain and was always driving the latest car models. Breakfast had been served on a silver tray in the first reception room at 9.30 every morning, and at lunch she had used a bell to call the butler to the dining-room as required. She had enjoyed big family Easter lunches on Castiglioni tables, arranged with the best embroidered linens, porcelain and silverware. Wine cases had arrived from her father’s vineyards and the freshest vegetables from his estate. Chocolates had been sent for from El Goya in Vitoria, as her sister had owned the premises and struck a close friendship with the famous chocolatier. Her gardens had been cured after the latest French fashions and garden furniture had come from Unopiù. She had had the latest golf clubs and sports fashion and golf and tennis club memberships, though she had rarely played. Her trips around Europe and as far as New York had been in flights where a handful of gentlemen in Il Borsalino fedoras had travelled with their wives in ample dazzling furs. And Every Christmas, at the entrance hall by her house’s staircase, there had stood a five-metre-tall tree sent to her family for the past two-hundred years by the king of Sweden.
Then, in a very sudden sort of way, I could envisage, the wealth had evaporated and in a few years Lucy’s father would be forced to go without weekend newspapers so that his baby could have banana for lunch. ‘Two generations of only daughters was no way to sustain a fortune,’ her grandmother had said, especially when they had been educated to sit beautifully, to sew and play the piano, and married the wrong men.
Change of destiny, quick, dirty, BRUTAL. Was this why Lucy felt permanently enraged?
And the problem with Lucy was that she hated the way we measured things at Enterprise, because it made her feel that down was the only way she had gone in this world. But at the same time, she found pleasure in constantly reminding herself of where she came from, and her ambivalence made her stand for opposite things at the same time. Pride and modesty, respect and shame. But the truth was that she needed to look at things in a different way, and she herself knew that she may well have been the happiest in the freedom of the small joys and hopes of the bonnes du sixième étage (maids of the sixth floor).
And she was right about Peter. What had he exactly achieved in his life to justify him telling her what to aspire to?
Lucy had once told me how her grandmother’s father had spent his whole life building a co
operative that people still talked of today. He had stood for his workers during the Spanish civil war and had been shot in the back for that. ‘What is a salaried, new-monied, ignorant motherfucker on a power-high fuelled by testosterone, who has never dared to risk his life, not even his own reputation, family or fortune, going to teach me about being successful?’
Lucy was extremely arrogant, even more than Peter, and I could see her point, that she could outdo him at anything, even arrogance.
As I was thinking all these things, I could still hear Lucy moaning.
‘Somehow I have allowed myself to grow a soft spot for this uncivilised moron.’ She said she felt like a fool. ‘At some point I believed in him, that he was a good man! But why do we create our own myths?’ she was asking.
And her words hurt like red ants down my trousers, that jealousy thing again.
‘I resent his apparent indifference because I know that it is not real, that it was Peter’s spark that started everything because I loved feeling wanted, and I am yearning against my will for Peter to surprise me, and to say all the things that I had imagined him saying, and to be that great person that I had unconsciously made him into. Perhaps it’s time to admit that that person was never real but I can’t stop myself!’
What was she saying?
I thought how it was true that love was as bad as a trip to the dentist; I knew Lucy had never been mine but I couldn't stand losing her. Why was this ugly man unable to cherish the essence of life, able to arouse such emotions in her? Was he worthy of Lucy? Did he deserve her love? What was Lucy’s fixation with Peter? Was it love? Why did she have to keep going back to this man when she found nothing there that she wanted?
Perhaps it was like me. Me and Peter. Me and Enterprise. The pain we cannot live without.