I suddenly interrupt my research as if I have stumbled across the ever absent sesame. ‘I must ring Ali Slimane,’ I say, lunging towards the phone.
‘We haven’t got time,’ Ben tells me, already busy chopping herbs essential to my recipes.
I don’t listen to him. I sit on the floor behind the bar, sheltered from noises and prying eyes on the street. Ben is panicking, pacing up and down, opening the fridge then closing it again. What could he do on his own? Does he know how to put together an exotic menu for four? Does he have any idea what you should put in a giant salad once you have wisely abandoned the idea of rice, tuna and sweet corn? He can’t stop looking at me, a questioning look in his eye, begging me to get back to work, not to scupper his fantastic plans for expansion at this early stage.
The ring tone sounds in my ear, we are connected by a cable, Ali and I.
‘Hello, it’s Myriam.’
‘Hello.’
‘Do you remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you well?’
‘Yes.’
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No.’
I feel as if I’m talking to the sphinx. His answers are concave, opening the door on enigmas rather than closing it on doubt. I’m happy to hear his voice. I can picture him at home: top of the hill, tumbledown stone wall like a Roman ruin, frosted glass windows, clods of mud on the steel boot-scraper.
‘I’ve opened a restaurant.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I need you.’
He says nothing. During his pause I silently enumerate everything I know about him: his dark mouth, his assurance that he won’t make me cry, his putty-coloured cotton trousers, the melancholy in his eyes, the spindly roll-ups in his elegant fingers.
‘I’ll come,’ he promises.
I give him the address, ask when he thinks he might be able to get here, whether he needs me to fill out an order form. Does he have a fax? He answers none of my questions. He tells me he is happy to hear from me, that he feels something about me has changed.
I hang up. I take a while to get to my feet. My legs are wobbly. I have to heave myself up by gripping the edge of the bar. I totter over to the butcher’s block. I feel like lying down, letting myself go, waiting.
Ben has his teeth firmly clenched, exasperated by the time I’m wasting. He’s worried his initiative will be threatened by my new-found laziness. I look at the green pyramid of herbs he has chopped and mixed together, creating a mattress softer than a goose-down duvet, a little mountain of subtle pleasures - I pat the top of it gently.
‘Next?’ Ben asks, knife in hand.
I can’t resist the pleasure of torturing him.
‘Next,’ I tell him, ‘we have a nice little cigarette like in the good old days.’
‘Like the good old days?’ he repeats, dismayed.
‘That’s right,’ I say, leaning on the back-rest of the banquette with my feet up on a stool. ‘The good old days when I was twenty and you weren’t even born.’
A few words too many perhaps. Now he’s been punished, sitting there under my bookshelves. He’s sulking. The young don’t like being resented for their tender years. The old don’t like being reminded of their age. No one wants to see themselves as a meaningless squashed fly on the grand scale of time. I regret my words but still manage to savour the intoxication of the forbidden cigarette. We look at each other, Ben and I, and suddenly - like an illumination - I realize that he likes men. I wouldn’t be able to say the exact effect this has on me. I feel excluded. Curious too. But we don’t have time to talk about this discovery. We’ve got work to do.
I sit up abruptly, crush the cigarette in the sink and wash my hands right up to the elbows. I feel like a surgeon in the operating theatre, with his nurse by his side. The surgeon says ‘forceps’ and the nurse announces ‘forceps’ as she hands her boss the instrument. It’s very important that she repeats the word he has just uttered because he can - although it’s very rare - make mistakes. He gets the wrong word. He says ‘forceps’ but needs the scalpel. The nurse says ‘forceps’ as she hands them to him and then, instead of cutting the patient’s abdomen with pincers (which would be extremely hard work), he hears his mistake in his assistant’s words and corrects himself in time: ‘no, scalpel’. ‘Scalpel’ says the nurse, handing him the required instrument. With cooking, as with surgery, we have no right to slips of the tongue. I say ‘salt’ and Ben repeats the word as he hands it to me. I say ‘butter’, he says ‘butter’. I say ‘peppers’, he says ‘peppers’. I say ‘six eggs’, he says ‘six eggs’. He understands without my needing to explain to him. He has noticed the urgency in my voice and my every move. He anticipates, constantly wipes surfaces clean, throws the peelings away as they accumulate, turns on the gas hobs and sets the oven to pre-heat. Our arms cross, our voices overlap, he tucks a stray lock of my hair back in place, knowing how much it annoys me having hair over my eyes when I’m working. I slip on a tomato skin and he catches me. I hand him knives to rinse. He supplies me with spoons and spatulas. He replaces damp tea towels and washes the lettuce. I show him how to chop tomatoes into cubes, and courgettes into thin strips. He says ‘Oh, brilliant!’ and copies me. His talents in the kitchen are on a par with his talents as a waiter. He is deft, patient, meticulous, focused and quick. He understands the lemon/salt balance, senses the sweet/spicy equilibrium. He has good instincts and, as I pass onto him everything I know, I can feel my heart growing lighter. The weight of knowledge is leaving me, my mind going blank. I work even faster. It makes me smile. It’s almost a circus act. My hands are in the flour before I’ve had time to think ‘pour into a bowl, chop the butter, mix, knead’. I move about carrying my head in my hand like Saint Denis, not suffering the effects of this decapitation but rejoicing in it.
Our tapas look exquisite: little squares of spiced honey-cake decorated with goat’s cheese and roast pears, chicken livers in port on slices of potato with onion marmalade, rolled up radicchio with honey and haddock. Ben has been to buy some boxes from the patisserie to stow our treasures. The exotic menu is made up of taramasalata, roulade of tuna and capers, salad of peppers sautéed in garlic, and aubergine caviar. It isn’t very exotic for an inhabitant of the Balkans but it probably would be for someone from Vietnam or Brittany. The giant salad really is a giant: there’s a whole meal in it, from the first course to the dessert and all that with no rice and no tinned sweet corn. Slivers, slivers of all sorts of different things - vegetables, cheeses, fruit - all blended without crushing each other, side by side without working against each other.
At seven o’clock we are ready, our orders are waiting (keeping warm or staying chilled) and our evening menu - built around wild mushrooms, smoked fish and blueberries - is arranged. We have flushed cheeks, tired hands and idiotically happy smiles on our faces. To celebrate our first night of combined activities, I open a bottle of champagne, which we cheerfully empty during the course of the evening. Our net-surfing customers are delightful and peculiarly talkative. They feel they have to chat while I pack their order. They are clearly trying to dazzle, wanting to be seen in a good light. I wonder what Ben said about me on our site. As he sees them to the door, he tells them feedback is very welcome, that we are going to set up a tasters’ forum, that their comments will be published on our home page. The restaurant customers get involved, wanting to know who these invaders leaving with armfuls of cardboard boxes are. Ben works through the room handing out the leaflets he put together goodness knows when or how. They are elegant bookmarks in violet-coloured card giving the name of the restaurant and the web address. A sub-title in smaller print reads ‘Chosen Caterers’ and I think it’s the most cryptic and the most explicit phrase I’ve ever read.
I cash up while Ben finishes clearing the tables. It’s quarter to midnight. We’re getting to bed later and later. I wonder how long we can continue at this pace. Ben pours me a cognac. I’m a bit tipsy. So is he. We clink glasses, looking into each
other’s eyes, hooking our arms round each other’s elbows and drinking to our health, prosperity, success and future millions. I ask him how we’re going to cope with his absurd idea. The internet is too big for us and we will never meet the demand. It wasn’t what I was planning: I envisaged a sort of recycling, getting some value out of leftovers, struggling to avoid waste. I tell him he’s a capitalist. He tells me I’m an old hippy. I tell him he reeks of business school. He tells me I reek of skipping school. Then he defends himself more seriously, patiently explaining that you can’t give if you don’t have the means, that you have to expand before you can spread, that Eden is synonymous with abundance, not with just getting by. I don’t understand how I, who was brought up in a middle-class family, I, who grew up wanting my own middle-class family in turn, can be given a lesson in management and etiquette by some child off the streets. Who is Ben? I suddenly can’t bear how little I know about him. There are a hundred things I want to ask him about his childhood and his parents, but the question that pops out is not one I had planned on submitting.
‘What’s it like making love with a man?’ I ask.
Ben stares at me, wide-eyed.
‘Sorry?’ he manages.
I repeat my question - if I’m going to be blunt and indiscreet I might as well see it through. ‘What’s it like making love with a man?’
‘You’re the one who should be asked that,’ he retorts.
I pour myself some more cognac. I feel as if I’m losing control, I would willingly lose control. I’m playing a part, the I-KNOW-who-you-are part. But, it turns out, my hypothesis is wrong. I look at him: his smooth cheeks, his perfectly outlined mouth, his nostrils so intelligent (not mean, dark or repulsive), his long eyelashes closing slowly over eyes which are set quite wide apart and are slightly down-turned. To me he seems absolutely made for love: his body slim and a little stiff, cautious but quick; his hands, with their long palms and short fingers, their surprising strength. Without my asking any more questions, without making me take responsibility for the enquiry, Ben explains very simply that he has no love life.
‘But you do have a sex life?’ I ask, with a stupid note of hope in my voice.
‘No,’ he replies without sadness or joy.
‘Like a priest, then? Like a nun?’
‘Not really,’ he says after a while. ‘For me it’s not a constraint, or an obligation. It’s not a sacrifice.’
He hesitates for a moment. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to either,’ he adds. ‘It’s just the way it is.’
‘Like a malformation, then?’
I’ve had far too much to drink. I’m talking nonsense. Being crude and aggressive. But he bursts out laughing. He’s hysterical, bent double. Ben’s tact is quite magical, I think to myself. He calms down and goes back to his pedagogic explanation.
‘I’m normal but there’s no sex in my life, like some people might have no books or music. Those people are just as alive as us but they like different things, they have other pleasures. They don’t feel anything’s missing because, as far as they’re concerned, that thing doesn’t exist.’
A violent sense of relief - as after a sustained superhuman effort - washes over me: not feeling any desire, now that would be true freedom in this combative hostile world. No more waiting, no more betrayal, or sullied hearts, or guilty bodies. An end to the torture and the hours wasted in constructing pitiful strategies. A colourless, painless internal landscape. Being transparent as glass, and never again reflecting like a mirror.
‘But,’ Ben goes on, interrupting my musing, ‘that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to love, to love with a different kind of love.’
He gets up and comes over towards me. I get up too. He takes me in his arms and holds me to his tall body, which reaches beyond me in every direction, flat, spread out like a military map. He talks into the crook of my neck: ‘You, for example, I really like you. Really. Really.’
His body remains mute, while mine is screaming. A poster unfurls between my legs, the words EAT ME spelled out on it in giant trembling letters.
‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ I say apologetically, pushing him away. ‘Much too much.’
He strokes my head kindly. And I think of the love animals feel: the way animals love their masters, and masters their animals. How can I stall my body? I must think of Ben as my cat, Ben as an antelope. Why can I never stem the flow of this source within me? I ought to know how to stroke Ben’s head as if he were a Labrador. We’re not the same species. There, that’s it. I would so love to be one of his kind. All that energy channelled into work and imagination. I understand why great mystics live in a state of abstinence. Except that Ben goes one further: with him it’s not a case of forbidding desire, he simply doesn’t experience it. That’s how he finds time to carry on with his studies, work as a waiter, create an internet site and look after a madwoman like me. There’s nothing holding him back. Not one gram of ballast, he’s free to go. No deviations, nothing to slow him down, straight for the goal. But what is the goal? How can anyone live without the prospect of love? I would be so afraid of death if I had to launch straight towards the end like that, with no distractions and without the vast obstacle of passion! What would you cling to? I think of the suspension bridge spanning the abyss, the immeasurable work of art that only love can build and which leads us to eternity. How does Ben manage to cross the tiny dizzying chasms that open up in our everyday lives?
‘You won’t always be like that,’ I tell him. ‘It’ll change.’
I would like him to listen to ‘Norwegian Wood’.
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not going to change. And I don’t want to change. I’m not the only one, there are others like me. Lots of young people. There always have been, but it wasn’t so obvious before. People used not to talk about it because they didn’t talk about anything then. The proportion of virgins in the adult population is constant. Why do you think that is? Because they’re shy? Well, it’s true that in among them there are the disabled, the mad, the ill, and then there’s us.’
How I hate that ‘us’. Army of nihilists.
‘And how would the world work if everyone was like you?’ I ask.
‘We’re not asking anyone else to be like us. Not at all,’ he says. ‘If everyone was like you, the planet would be even more over-populated than it is. We’d all have five babies on our hands.’
‘Love and babies aren’t the same thing,’ I tell him.
‘They are the same thing,’ Ben asserts. ‘I don’t intend to reproduce.’
Night is marching on and the shadows, exaggerated by the alcohol, start to look threatening. I can picture them, all these youngsters, bearing down on us in serried ranks, elbow to elbow. I find this union terrifying because there is no shred of jealousy or desire to break it up. They devote all their time to studying, all their energy to conquering power while we poor old things struggle on, worn down by our lustful urges.
‘Naff off,’ I tell Ben.
‘I’ll naff off tomorrow,’ he says with a smile. ‘I’ve missed the last Métro, it’s cold and I haven’t got enough money for a taxi.’
I take a note from the till and hand it to him. ‘Here, here’s some money. You’ll take everything I’ve got anyway.’
‘Yeah, right,’ he says, still smiling. ‘Go to bed, Myriam. I’m going to stay. It’s been quite an evening and I don’t want to leave you on your own.’
He takes the sleeping-bag from under the banquette - he knows all my secrets. He lies me down, tucks me in, gently strokes my hand and tells me everything is fine. Just before I go to sleep I see him lit by a tiny torch which casts a gorilla-shaped shadow on the wall: he’s taking a laptop from his scruffy bag, plugging it in and setting up goodness-knows-what as he fiddles away with the wires and keys. I dream that I’m dreaming I’m going into the gardens of a palace. It’s a closed circuit: as soon as I pass the rose garden I wake from the dream within the dream and it starts again.
In the middle of the night I wake up, completely lucid. There are fish swimming backwards and forwards on Ben’s computer screen, wafting indifferently through black water. He has rested his head on the table and gone to sleep with his arms crossed in front of his forehead. I study the angles and broken outlines that shape him, fitting him around the wooden platform, his legs jumbled in with the chair legs. Only the repeated to-ing and fro-ing of the paler-coloured fish allows me to pick out his silhouette. The rest of the time - when it’s a grey shark, an indigo barracuda or a brown moray eel drifting past - all I can see is a dark bulk not far from me. I’m worried, remembering our conversation. Unlike Ben himself, I don’t think there always have been members of his tribe. In fact, these young people strike me as being the most fully realized by-product of our civilization. A whole generation of disillusionment and disgust. How can they be persuaded they are on the wrong tracks? It’s a tempting emancipation: you needn’t be trapped any more, no ties, no worrying about faithfulness, loyalty or territory. I don’t know how to make him see the even more dangerous trap he is falling into. We are never more vulnerable than when we believe we are making a stand for revolt. Refusing the system has only ever served the system. How can I tell him that? I can barely even think it. What I do know is that desire is still the only truly subversive force. When the oppressor puts on the austere mask of economic logic it’s more important than ever to nurture a reserve tank of complete nonsense, that wonderful reservoir of fickleness. While Ben sleeps I intone the merits of physical insurrection.
Chez Moi Page 13