In comparison Claire was almost well – after all, she could still join Alcoholics Anonymous, apparently they sometimes have surprising results – and also, I realised when I got back to the Hôtel Mercure, Claire was bound to die alone, and unhappy, but at least she wouldn’t die poor. After selling her loft, and taking into account the market price, she would end up with three times as much money as me. A single property purchase enabled her father to earn so much more than mine had in forty years of struggle, writing authenticated deeds and recording mortgages, where the money had never been an adequate recompense for the work, strictly speaking there was no connection between the two, no human society had ever been based on the fair remuneration of work, and even a future communist society was not supposed to be based on it; for Marx, the principle of wealth distribution was reduced to this entirely hollow formula: ‘To each according to his needs’, an endless source of carping and quibbling if by some misfortune someone tried to put it into practice, but luckily that had never happened, no more in the communist countries than anywhere else; money went to money and kept company with power, that was the final word in social organisation.
* * *
By the time I separated from Claire, my fate had been notably sweetened by my acquaintance with Normande cows; they were a consolation to me, a revelation almost. I was, however, no stranger to cows; as a child I had spent a summer month every year in Méribel, where my father had a time-share in a chalet. While my parents spent their days hiking like a pair of lovers along the mountain paths, I watched television, especially the Tour de France, to which I would develop a lasting addiction. From time to time, though, I used to go out; adult interests were a mystery to me, and there must certainly have been something interesting, I said to myself, in climbing those high mountains, because so many adults did so, starting with my own parents.
I failed to develop any real aesthetic emotion at the sight of the Alpine landscapes; but I did feel affection for the cows, often coming across a herd of them walking from one summer pasture to another. They were Tarentaises, lively little cows with tawny coats, excellent walkers with an impulsive nature; they often gambolled along the mountain paths, and the bells around their necks produced a pretty sound even before one had seen them.
On the other hand nobody imagined a Normande cow beginning to gambol, there was something so irreverent about the very idea that in my opinion a simple acceleration of their gait could only have occurred under extreme threat to life. Normande cows were ample and majestic, and broadly speaking that seemed to be enough for them; it was only by discovering Normande cows that I understood why the Hindus held the animal to be sacred. During the solitary weekends that I spent in Clécy, ten minutes contemplating a herd of cows grazing in the surrounding fields was enough to make me forget Rue de Ménilmontant, the castings, Vincent Cassel, Claire’s desperate efforts to be accepted by a circle that wanted nothing of her, and finally to forget Claire herself.
* * *
I wasn’t yet thirty, but I was gradually entering a wintry zone unlit by any memory of my loved one or any hope of repeating the miracle, and weakness of the senses was reinforced by a growing professional disinvestment; the task force was slowly falling apart; there were still a few sparks, a few principled declarations notably during work drinks (there was at least one of these a week at DRAF), but we had to agree that the Normans didn’t know how to sell their products; calvados for instance had all the qualities of a great spirit – a good calvados was comparable to a bas-Armagnac or even a cognac – but it was a hundred times less visible in airport duty-free shops, pretty much everywhere in the world; and its place was generally symbolic even in French supermarkets. As for cider, let’s not even mention it; cider was virtually absent from large-scale distribution and was barely even served in bars. Positions were still vehemently adopted during those work drinks, promises were made to act without delay, and then everything subsided gently over the subsequent identical, and not entirely disagreeable, weeks, and the idea that there isn’t much that you can do about anything anyway gradually imposed itself; even the director, so aggressive and dashing when I had started, gradually lost his edge, he had just got married and talked mostly about planning for the farmhouse that he had just bought as a home for his future family. There had been a bit more excitement for several months during the brief tenancy of an exuberant Lebanese intern, who notably took down a photograph of George W. Bush paying homage to a hearty plate of cheeses, a photograph that prompted a mini-scandal in some American media – apparently that idiot Bush had been unaware that the importation of unpasteurised cheeses had just been forbidden in his country – so there was a slight media impact, but sales still didn’t take off, and repeated dispatches of Livarot and Pont-l’Évêque to Vladimir Putin proved no more effective.
* * *
I wasn’t very useful but I wasn’t harmful either, and there had in fact been some progress with Monsanto, and in the morning when I went to work, passing through the banks of fog that floated over the countryside at the wheel of my G 350, I was still able to tell myself that my life wasn’t a definitive failure. Each time I passed through the village of Thury-Harcourt I wondered if there was a connection there with Aymeric, and in the end I looked for the answer on the Internet – which was much more laborious in those days and the network less fully developed – but in the end I found the answer on the still embryonic website of Patrimoine Normand, ‘the magazine of Norman history and the Norman way of life’. Yes, there was a connection, and a direct one at that. The village had originally been called Thury, then Harcourt, with reference to the family; it had become Thury again during the Revolution before assuming its present name of Thury-Harcourt in an attempted reconciliation between les deux France. In the days of Louis XIII an enormous château had gone up, sometimes referred to as a ‘Norman Versailles’, which had been first the residence of the Dukes of Harcourt, then of the governors of the province. Left almost entirely intact by the Revolution, it had been burned down in August 1944 during the retreat of the ‘das Reich’ division which the 59th Staffordshire Regiment caught in a pincer movement.
During my three years of study at Agro, Aymeric d’Harcourt-Olonde had been my only true friend, and I had spent most of my evenings in his room – first at Grignon, then in the Agro building in the Cité Internationale – downing cans of strong lager and smoking weed (well, he did most of the smoking, I preferred beer, but he must have been on about thirty joints a day, he must have been high pretty much all the time during his first two years as a student), and most importantly listening to records. With his long blond curly hair and his Canadian lumberjack shirt, Aymeric had quite a typical grunge look, but he took it much further than Nirvana and Pearl Jam, he had really gone back to the sources, and in his room all the shelves were occupied by hundreds of vinyl records from the sixties and seventies: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who, he even had the Doors, Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix, Van der Graaf Generator … YouTube didn’t exist yet and hardly anybody at the time remembered those groups, but anyway for me it had been a total discovery, an absolute wonder.
We often spent the evening together, sometimes with one or two other guys from the course – not very remarkable, I can hardly remember their faces and I’ve completely forgotten their names – but on the other hand there were never any girls, which is a strange thing when I think about it: I don’t remember knowing Aymeric ever having a sexual relationship. He wasn’t a virgin, or at least I don’t think so, and he didn’t give the impression of being afraid of girls, but rather he seemed to be thinking about something else, perhaps his career; he had a seriousness that probably escaped me at the time because I didn’t give a damn about my career – I don’t think I thought about it for more than thirty seconds, it seemed so unlikely that anyone could seriously be interested in anything but girls – and the worst thing is that now, at forty-six, I realise that I was right at the time: girls are whores if you want to see them that wa
y, but a career is a more considerable whore and one that doesn’t give you any pleasure.
At the end of my second year I expected Aymeric to choose, like me, a fake specialisation like rural sociology or ecology, but instead he signed up for animal husbandry, a field for hard workers. At the end of the holidays in September, he turned up with short hair and a completely new wardrobe, and when he went off for his end-of-year internship at Danone he was even wearing a suit and tie. We saw each other a bit less that year, which I remember as a year of holidays: I had chosen to specialise in ecology and we spent our time travelling all over France to study a particular plant formation in its habitat. By the end of the year I had learned how to recognise the different plant formations that existed in France and I could predict their occurrence using a geological map and local meteorological data, and that was more or less it, and it would later help me shut up Green activists when the conversation turned to the real consequences of climate change. Aymeric, on the other hand, spent most of his internship in the marketing department of Danone, and one might reasonably have expected him to devote his career to the creation of new drinking yoghurts or smoothies. He surprised me once again on the evening of our graduation ceremony, when he told me that he planned to take over a farming business in Manche. Agronomic engineers were present in almost every area of agribusiness, sometimes in technical posts and most often directorial, but hardly ever became farmers themselves; consulting the directory of Agro alumni in search of his address, I noticed that Aymeric was the only one from our year who had made that choice.
He lived in Canville-la-Rocque, and told me on the phone that I would have trouble finding it, and that I would have to ask the locals for the Château d’Olonde. Yes, that belonged to his family too, but it was from before the days of Thury-Harcourt: the château had been destroyed for a first time in 1204, then rebuilt in the middle of the thirteenth century. Apart from that he had got married the previous year, and had a herd of three hundred dairy cows on his farm; he hadn’t invested badly and, well, he would talk to me about it. No, he hadn’t seen anyone from the Agro since moving there.
I arrived outside the Château d’Olonde at dusk. It was less of a castle than an incoherent collection of buildings in various states of conservation, but it was hard to reconstruct the initial plan; in the centre, a main residential building, massive and rectangular, seemed to be standing more or less, and although grass and moss had begun to nibble at the stones, they were thick blocks of granite, probably Flamanville granite, and it would take another few centuries to erode them seriously. Further towards the rear, a tall, thin cylindrical keep seemed to be almost fully intact; but closer to the entrance of the main keep – which must have been square originally and have constituted the military core of the fortress, but had now lost its windows and roof – erosion had softened and rounded the remaining scraps of walls; they were gently approaching their geological fate. About a hundred metres away, the metal gleam of a big shed and a silo clashed with the landscape; I think this was the first modern building that I had seen for about fifty kilometres.
Aymeric had grown his hair again, and had started wearing big checked shirts like before, but now they had returned to their original purpose as work clothes. ‘This place was the setting for the last novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, A Nameless Story,’ he informed me. ‘In 1882, Barey called it an “old and almost dilapidated” castle; as you can see, it hasn’t got much better since then.’
‘Didn’t you get any help from Historical Monuments?’
‘Vaguely … We signed up for listed status anyway, but you hardly ever get any help. Cécile, my wife, would like to do some large-scale renovation work and turn it into a hotel, a hôtel de charme, that kind of thing. Basically there are about fourteen unoccupied buildings, and we heat five rooms in all. What can I get you to drink?’
I accepted a glass of Chablis. I didn’t know if there was any point to the planned hôtel de charme, but in any case the dining room was warm and pleasant, with a big fireplace, deep bottle-green leather armchairs, and that arrangement couldn’t have had anything to do with Aymeric: he was entirely indifferent to decoration, his bedroom in the Agro was one of the most anonymous I’ve ever seen and had looked like a soldier’s bivouac – apart from the records.
Here they occupied a whole chunk of wall, it was impressive. ‘I counted them last winter, I’ve got just over five thousand…’ Aymeric said. He still had the same player, a Technics MK2, but I’d never seen the speakers – two enormous parallelepipeds of raw walnut, over a metre tall. ‘They’re Klipschorns,’ Aymeric said, ‘the first speakers manufactured by Klipsch, and perhaps the best; my grandfather bought them in 1949, he was crazy about opera. When he died, my father gave them to me – he’s never been interested in music.’
I had a sense that this equipment wasn’t used very often, and a light layer of dust had settled on the lid of the MK2. ‘Yes, it’s true…’ Aymeric confirmed my suspicion; he must have caught something in my expression, ‘I’m never really in the right state of mind to listen to music. It’s hard, you know, I’ve never managed to achieve financial equilibrium, and then in the evening I ruminate and do the accounts again, but hey, since you’re here let’s put something on – top yourself up while we’re waiting.’
After rummaging through his shelves for a minute or two he took out Ummagumma. ‘The one with the cow seems appropriate…’ he observed before setting the needle down at the beginning of ‘Grantchester Meadows’. It was extraordinary; I’d never heard, or even suspected, the existence of such a sound; every birdsong, every splash of the river was perfectly defined, the bass notes were tense and powerful, the high notes incredibly pure.
‘Cécile will be back shortly,’ he went on, ‘she had a meeting at the bank for her hotel project.’
‘I get the sense you don’t really believe in it.’
‘I don’t know, do you get the sense of lots of tourists in the region?’
‘Hardly any.’
‘Well, there you are … However, I do agree with her on one point: we have to do something. We can’t just go on losing money like that every year. If we can manage financially it’s only thanks to leasing and selling land.’
‘Do you have lots of land?’
‘Thousands of hectares; we used to own almost the whole region between Carentan and Carteret. Well, I say “we”, it still belongs to my father, but since I set up the farm he decided to leave me the product of the land leases, and even with that I’m often forced to put up a plot for sale. The worst thing is that I’m not even selling to local farmers, but to foreign investors.’
‘From which countries?’
‘Mostly Belgians and Dutch, and more and more often Chinese. Last year I sold fifty hectares to a Chinese conglomerate. They were willing to buy ten times more and pay twice the market rate. The local farmers can’t match that: they already have trouble paying back their loans and paying their leases, you always have the ones who give up and put the key under the door, and when they’re in difficulty I have trouble putting too much pressure on them, I understand them all too well, I’m now in the same situation as they are. It was easier for my father, he lived in Paris for a long time before coming back to Bayeux, and after all he was the lord of the manor … So you’re right, I’m not sure about this hotel, but there may be a way…’
On the journey there I’d been trying to think about what I was going to tell Aymeric about my precise role at DRAF. I couldn’t see myself admitting to him that I was directly implicated in this project promoting the export of Normandy cheeses. I stressed the more administrative tasks, connected with the transformation of the French AOCs into European AOPs; and that wasn’t untrue, those questions of exasperating legal formalism occupied a growing part of my working time, you constantly had to be ‘on top of things’ – on top of what I never really knew – and there can’t be an area of human activity as utterly boring as the law. But in the end I had enjoyed a certain amount
of success in my new tasks; for example it was one of my recommendations, formulated in a briefing note, which would lead – a few years later and with the adoption of the decree that defined AOP Livarot – to the decision that this cheese must be made of milk from Normande cows. At that moment I was involved in a procedural conflict that I was about to win with the Lactalis group and the cooperative of Isigny Sainte-Mère, who wanted to free themselves from the obligation to use unpasteurised milk in the manufacturing of Camembert.
I was in the middle of my explanations when Cécile arrived. She was a pretty brunette, thin and elegant, but her face was marked by tension that was almost like suffering; she had plainly had a hard day. She was nice to me, and did her best to prepare a meal, but I had the sense that she had taken on a huge amount, that her first reaction on her return, if I hadn’t been there, would have been to go to bed with some painkillers. She was happy, she told me, that Aymeric had received a visit; they were working too hard and they didn’t see anyone any more, they buried themselves away even though they weren’t yet thirty. To tell the truth I was in the same situation, apart from the fact that my workload wasn’t excessive, and basically everyone was in the same situation; our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That’s probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never survive into adulthood: we avoid seeing them so as not to be confronted by witnesses to our crushed hopes, the evidence of our defeat.
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