Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  In my paranoid fantasies, it seems to me the system has been rigged to trivialize my revolution, that giving me money, success, fame, recognition is designed to make my pseudorevolution look obtuse. I’m not yet sure whether this lavish punishment will work. Is it possible to be muzzled by luxury? Can success be the spectacular funeral cortege of revolution? That’s certainly the method Enver Hoxha opted for in making Ismail Kadaré deputy. It is based on invalidating the writer’s grievance by making him powerful. How can anyone believe in what Americans call the “limousine liberal,” what we in France refer to as the “gauche caviar”? Is it possible to be rich but sympathetic to change? Yes: you need only cultivate ingratitude. To be a “BoBo” or a “RiRe” simply means you haven’t outgrown ingratitude. Being a “Bourgeois Bohemian” is a good thing, much better than being a bourgeois period. I’m sick and tired of people saying I’m just a spoiled brat smashing his toys. I’m smashing them so I can create others.

  9:45

  My ancestor, John Adams, signed a treaty with Libya in Tripoli on June 10, 1797, indicating to the Ottoman Empire (which at the time ruled the Maghreb) that America was “in no way founded on the Christian faith.” There is no American crusade against Islam! The first war in Afghanistan was against the Russians, not the Afghanis.

  Later, an alliance grew up between “born-again Christians” and Saudi Wahhabis (disciples of Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, 1703-1792, the “Calvin of the Sands”). We often forget that Islam, like Judeo-Christian faiths, claims its descent from Abraham. The religion in power in America is a sister-enemy of fundamentalist Islam. We are witnessing a new Saint Bartholomew; Jerry and David are the victims of a Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre perpetrated by the oil-producing nations. Christian fundamentalists face down Muslim fundamentalists: I am going to die because of an incestuous quarrel between billionaire sects.

  But I never believed in it! My parents campaigned against abortion, against alcohol, against prostitution and homosexuality, but Mom was on the pill, Dad drank every night, and whores and faggots overran Texas like they did the rest of the country! I never agreed with their ideas on education; at college, I even campaigned briefly for the Communist Party USA, just to piss off my dad who supported Reagan! Why should I have to pay for them? Take my parents, they’ve had their time, them and their “compassionate conservatism”! I was a fucking Marxist, not an evangelist! Oh God, I’m losing it…

  “Dad, I’ve got a headache…”

  “Breathe through your mouth.”

  We descend into the black cloud of Windows on the World.

  9:46

  New York is a boudoir where they serve you salmon mousse with everything, or salmon en croûte, or just plain salmon. What is it with Americans and salmon? That’s all they eat. In Paris it’s “salad of young green seasonal shoots,” here it’s salmon steak, salmon tartare. Paradoxically, the hip neighborhood is the Meatpacking District.

  The clubs in the Meatpacking District are faithful to the name of the neighborhood: they really are meat markets. Models sway like hunks of meat hanging from hooks. I ask some New Yorker coked up to the eyeballs where he goes to chill out away from the city of lunatics. Ibiza, he says. Some New Yorkers are absolutely incorrigible. No one can save them from their apocalypse. The beauty of fury.

  The bouncer at Cielo doesn’t seem too open-minded.

  “Are you on the list?”

  “Um…yeah, sure…”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “My name is Osama, Osama bin fucking Laden, okay?”

  You have to be able to run fast after making a terrible joke to a bouncer.

  It a rare thing, a writer afraid of the book he’s writing.

  At the Taj, I admire a tall, sad, long-haired blonde dressed in black, surrounded by brothers. I don’t remember how I get talking to her. Maybe I spill my drink over her, jostled by some stoned French kid. I apologize and wipe my apple martini over her pale breasts. That’s when she says her bodyguards are going to break my face. I ask her to reason with them. She laughs, introduces me to her two giant brothers. I comment that her nail polish is the same color as her bubblegum. I ask her where she’s going later. When you’re anonymous in a distant city, you might as well exploit the situation and be direct. She says they’re going to the Lotus. Then she disappears into the crowd. I take a taxi to go wait for her at the Lotus. An hour later, I’m wasted by the time she arrives accompanied by her henchmen. She smiles when she recognizes me. To keep an American woman happy, you have to give her tokens of persistence. Her every gesture is beautiful. She looks touched by my presence, embarrassed by her overpro-tective brothers. She comes over to talk to me, touches my arm. I tell her I’ve always dreamed of having kids with a model. She asks if I’m French. I put on my Spanish accent. Her laugh is like crystal. I pour her a drink which she downs in one. New York women are crystalline but tough. It is she who leans toward my mouth. She kisses me, her tongue is cold and wet from the ice. Her neck smells of soap. I was wondering whether my pecker was up to functioning tonight, but it’s fine—I get a hard-on straight off. I ask her name. Candace, she says. I ask her what she does for a living. Victoria’s Secret catalogs, she tells me. She asks what I do for a living. New York women often ask this question, then mentally calculate your salary. I tell her I’m writing a novel about Windows on the World. Her face becomes blank. It’s as though I’d hit her with a baseball bat. She tells me she has to get back to her little group, that she’ll be right back. She never returns.

  9:47

  “A hundred times I have thought:

  New York is a catastrophe.

  And fifty times:

  It is a beautiful catastrophe.”

  Le Corbusier

  Did you know that there were two Towers of Babel? Archaeologists are categorical. The ruins of a ziggurat still stand today in Borsippa, on the banks of the Euphrates, a few miles south of Babylon—an edifice that local tradition, both Christian and Muslim, claims is the Tower of Babel (the House of the Seven Guides of Heaven and Earth). The ruins rise up to 155 feet with a section of wall at the summit. Local legend has it that a comet, sent by God to punish the blasphemers, smashed into the tip causing a fire, evidence for which is still borne by the blackened bricks (you can check on site).

  But here was a second tower, a little to the north. Rebuilt in Babylon, the second Tower of Babel had been gradually destroyed by centuries of invasions. Today, all that remains are sections of the foundations, but according to Herodotus (fifth century BC), who claimed to have climbed the steps, it was 299 feet high and was made up of seven levels.

  There were once Twin Towers of Babel…in Iraq.

  9:48

  Art Spiegelman said it best: he said New Yorkers turned toward the World Trade Center as though toward Mecca. Did the towers fulfill some spiritual emptiness? They were the legs which supported the American dream. It’s difficult to imagine what the World Trade Center looked like at dusk: two columns of light, and—seen close up—thousands of tiny yellow squares, the lighted windows of little offices, a giant chessboard of polished glass in which thousands of marionettes answered their phones, typed into their word processors, came and went, a cup of decaf always in hand, flourished important pieces of paper, sent urgent emails to the whole world, these thousands of flames in the twilight, this luminous anthill, this atomic reactor from which everything departed, to which everything arrived, the indomitable lighthouse of the world, this sword piercing the clouds of the dying day, which served as a sign to New Yorkers when the sky veered to red and they felt their souls fade.

  9:49

  In the Windows, the few remaining survivors intone Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (1939).

  9:50

  Something else has changed since the eighties: back then, New Yorkers said “Hi”; now, they say, “Hey, what’s up?” The way they say hello is less subtle, more surprised. I remember “Hi” as a greeting that was smiling, polite, happy to see you. “Hey” sounds di
fferent since the tragedy. I hear it as a “Hey, what are you doing here? Good for you, you’re still alive.” But it’s probably just my paranoia again. I circle the building like a vulture in search of corpses. I wander the vertical streets breathing in fresh calamity. A writer is a jackal, a coyote, a hyena. Give me my dose of desolation, I’m looking for a tragedy, don’t suppose you’ve got some little atrocity to hand? I chew on Bubble Yum and the heartache of orphans.

  Some critics claim cinema is a “window on the world.” Others say the novel is. Art is a window on the world. Like the tinted windows of the glass towers in which I can see my reflection, a tall, stooped silhouette in a black coat, a heron with glasses walking with enormous strides. Fleeing the image I walk faster, but it follows me like a bird of prey. Writing an autobiographical novel not to reveal oneself, but to melt away. A novel is a two-way mirror behind which I hide so I can see and not be seen. The mirror in which I see myself, in the end, I give to others.

  When one cannot answer the question “Why?” one must at least attempt to answer the question “How?”

  Grief does not prevent wealthy old women from walking their dogs on Madison Avenue nor street hawkers from displaying their fake Gucci bags on the sidewalk a block from the real Gucci store. There are gallery openings still where everyone dresses in black; there are clubs still where you have to be on the guest list; there are hotels still where everything—from the guests to the decor—is beautiful. At 9:50, in a further attempt to go back in time, I step into 95 Wall Street, the building where I worked during the eighties, to see whether it will trigger some Proustian memory within me. There is still a CRéDIT LYONNAIS logo on the lobby wall but the receptionist explains that the French bank moved up to midtown some time ago. From Proust to Modiano in ten seconds. The deserted lobby. The doorman’s suspicious look. The tight-lipped security guards. The mysterious businessmen. The hazy memory. Did I really spend every day here? There’s no point hanging around, nothing is coming back to me.

  “Sir, you can’t stay here.”

  The stocky uniformed guy comes over to me slowly.

  “But I worked here a long time ago…”

  I put on my Spanish accent, but there’s nothing doing. I’m evicted by my past. My past wants nothing to do with me. My past accompanies me through the revolving door. I’m forced to turn my back on it once again.

  9:51

  WILD TRADE CENTER.

  Cat Stevens sang, “Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world.” I used to have all his records. Cat Stevens was one of my idols along with Neil Young and James Taylor. So many moving songs, so many extraordinary miniatures, delicate, crystalline. The music of Harold and Maude. Uncompromising lyrics over heartbreaking melodies, lyrical but simple. As if this singer/songwriter had been touched by something greater than him, as though he had access to some higher power. “When I’m alone,” he said, “the songs just come.”

  Time leaves you nothing

  Nothing at all

  (“Time,” 1970)

  Oh mama, mama see me, I’m a pop star

  Oh mama, mama see me on the TV

  (“Pop Star,” 1970)

  Trouble, oh, trouble set me free

  (“Trouble,” 1970)

  Cat Stevens’ great theme is the loss of innocence. The beginning of “Where Do the Children Play?” resonates oddly at 9:15:

  Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes […]

  Will you tell us when to live,

  Will you tell us when to die?

  I could play the game of terrible omens by quoting “Morning Has Broken,” “Home in the Sky,” and also an earlier song: “The view from the top can be oh so very lonely” (1967).

  Cat Stevens had the simplicity of the true poet, but to me he was more than that. He was my brother in loneliness, my friend, my fellow traveler. I would hang out in my bedroom in Texas for hours, barefoot on my bed, looking at the album covers. His acoustic guitar gave me a feeling of peace. Back then, album covers were twelve inches. When records were replaced by CDs, music became “the record industry.” It sent out a message: music in its plastic packaging is no longer a thing of contemplation but consumption. I could talk to you for hours about the crying trash can. On the album cover of Mona Bone Jakon, there’s a gray trash can crying a single tear. Can you think of a better metaphor for our times? We’ve created a world of crying garbage cans. I love the strange titles, too: Tea for the Tillerman. Teaser and the Firecat, and the overblown Elton John-style covers. And the lavish arrangements (Rolling Stone called them “lush”). The violins on “Lilywhite” (1970): the finest bridge in pop music since Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.”

  Cat Stevens tried to say something, then he disappeared.

  You will still be here tomorrow

  But your dreams may not

  (“Father and Son,” 1970)

  He wrote all these masterpieces in the same year—between January and July 1970—at the age of twenty-two, while in hospital recovering from an almost fatal bout of tuberculosis. The romantics’ disease: a bad cough left untreated made worse through an excess of drugs, alcohol, women, and sleepless nights. It is in hospital that Cat Stevens lets his beard grow.

  On December 23, 1977, having sold 40 million copies of his albums—seven of which were Top Ten albums throughout the seventies—Cat Stevens disappears. The star of the swinging sixties, the shy guy who had groupies screaming his name the moment he stepped out of his Rolls-Royce, who was permanently recording or touring, lived the rock-star life, drugs and sex in luxury hotels, the only Englishman since the Beatles and the Stones to have become a star in America, the man who sold out Madison Square Garden two nights running (the audience gave standing ovations in the middle of the songs), Cat Stevens turns toward Islam in 1977. It is his brother who offers him the Koran. He visits a mosque in Jerusalem. On July 4, 1978, he changes his name to Yusuf Islam. He is thirty-one. No star of his magnitude had ever given up everything so abruptly. He auctions his white piano, his gold discs, and distributes the money among various charities. He announces that he will never again write except to communicate the word of Mahomet. When Salman Rushdie is condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yusuf Islam declared on British television that “the punishment for blasphemy is death.” This is the same man who wrote “Peace Train.” He wears a turban, a long beard, babouches, and traditional Arab dress. He funds a Koranic school which he set up on the outskirts of London. He considers himself to have been “saved by Islam.”

  I should have converted to Islam, like Cat Stevens and Cassius Clay. I would have left Carthew Yorston behind. I would have adopted an Arabic name: Shafeeq Abdullah. I would have renamed Jerry and David: Mohammed and Ali. I would have stopped eating bacon.

  Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world.

  I make this solemn oath:

  If we make it out of here, I’ll convert us to Islam.

  9:52

  I remember fragments of America. When I was ten years old, I filmed the World Trade Center. My father had given me a Super-8 camera. We’d taken a taxi to the two towers. The buildings were like a corridor; it was like shooting rapids at the bottom of a canyon. I wasn’t in a city, I was at the bottom of a chasm. Buildings reflected the buildings opposite. I was minuscule but multiplied like in the Maze of Mirrors at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. When we arrived on the forecourt, my first action as a director was to take a low-angle shot of one of the towers. Seen from below, the tower looked like a highway to heaven. The grooves were the white lines that cars would get fined for crossing. I couldn’t film for very long; Super-8 films lasted only three minutes, and it was important not to make mistakes since you couldn’t record over them: the mistake was indelible. I probably did a sequence shot of One World Trade Center, then Two, then back to One. My dumb, low-angle shot made me dizzy, I was leaning back so far, I nearly broke my neck. It was the first time I realized that being on the ground looking up was as frightening as being high up looking down. The crushing size of t
hese colossuses was my first contact with the metaphysical—catechism lessons at the École Bossuet were less exotic. I not only felt stunned, I felt physically dominated by these concrete monsters. Something existed that was more powerful than us. The energy that had inspired these buildings was not human. Even so, the space between the pillars had been calculated by the architect to precisely equal the span of my father’s shoulders. Despite the immensity of the towers, there was something organic about them. This something which was more powerful than us, was us all the same. The warm summer wind whirled about on the plaza, carrying the greasy smell of hot-dogs with sweet mustard. I whirled too, I filmed the tourists walking across the granite flagstones, my brother Charles, a couple of kids roller-skating, a dancer moving like a robot. But I kept coming back to the two towers, my camera was literally drawn toward these two pillars of the firmament. Above our heads, the two towers seemed to merge, welded together like a triumphal arch, an upturned V. Only a timid band of sky regretfully separated them. To build such a monstrosity you had to be mad or have the soul of a child, or both. I was astonished at the passersby who went about their business without realizing that they were weaving beneath a giant’s legs. Above their heads, they had balanced a dangerous whim.

  9:53

  It would have been better all round to leave Manhattan to the Indians. The mistake dates from 1626, when Peter Minuit threw his twenty-four dollars down the drain. Should have been suspicious of someone with a name like Peter Midnight: midnight is the witching hour. Peter Minuit was proud as punch to have swindled the Algonquins, palming them off with a few glass beads in exchange for their island. But it was the Indians who swindled the Pale Faces. The glass beads were seeds which, planted in the earth, grew into a city of glass less substantial than a teepee.