By this point a huge number of things had already been said, determined and, as my father would have put it in his lawyerly jargon, ‘placed on file’. She had soft brown eyes, and she followed me along platform C then down the Rue d’Augue – I was parked about a hundred metres away – and when I had put her luggage in the boot she calmly sat down in the front seat as if she was going to do it dozens, hundreds, thousands of times again; there was absolutely nothing at stake and I felt so calm, a kind of calm that I had never known before, so much so that it took me, I think, a good half-hour before turning on the ignition. I may have moved my head back and forth like a happy idiot, but she showed no impatience, not even the slightest sign of surprise at my stillness; the weather was glorious, the sky a turquoise blue, almost unreal.
Driving along the Northern ring road, then past the UHC, I became aware that we were in a grim UDZ, consisting mostly of low grey corrugated-iron buildings; the environment wasn’t even hostile, it was just frighteningly neutral; I’d driven through this setting every morning for a year without even noticing that it existed. Camille’s hotel stood between a prosthetic limb factory and the offices of an accountancy firm. ‘I couldn’t decide between Appart’City and the Adagio Aparthotel,’ I stammered. ‘Obviously Appart’City isn’t central at all but it’s a quarter of an hour’s walk from DRAF, and if you want to go out at night you’re right next to the Claude-Bloch tram stop. It takes ten minutes to get to the centre of town and runs till midnight, and bear in mind that it’s the same in the other direction too. You could get to work by tram, and from the Adagio you’ve got a view of the banks of the Orne, but on the other hand at Appart’City the premium studios have a terrace, and I thought that might be nice too; well, we can swap if you like, obviously DRAF’s in charge of that…’ She gave me a weird look, difficult to interpret, a mixture of incomprehension and compassion; later she explained that she’d been wondering why I was engaging in these laborious justifications, when it was obvious that we were going to live together.
In this hardcore peri-urban environment, the DRAF buildings created a strange impression of disuse, of neglect and abandonment, and it wasn’t just an impression, I said to Camille, as soon as it rained most of the offices leaked, and it rained here most of the time. It looked less like a set of administrative buildings than a village of private houses scattered at random in what might have been a park but really looked more like a patch of waste ground, invaded by ineradicable vegetation, and the asphalt avenues between the buildings were starting to crack under pressure from the vegetation. Now, I went on, I would have to introduce her to her official traineeship supervisor, the director of veterinary services, who could only be described, I continued with resignation, as an old fool. Mean and belligerent by nature, he ruthlessly harassed all staff members who had the misfortune to be under his orders, especially the younger ones – he had a particular aversion to youth, and so it very much seemed as if he took personal offence at the obligation imposed on him of welcoming a young trainee. Not only did he hate young people, he didn’t like animals that much either, apart from horses – for him, horses were the only animals that mattered and the other quadrupeds were merely a large animal sub-proletariat, destined in any case for slaughter very soon. He had spent most of his career at the National Stud in Le Pin-au-Haras, and even though his appointment to DRAF was a promotion – and, to tell the truth, the crowning glory of his career – he had taken it as an affront. Having said that, however, this encounter was just something she had to get through, I told her, and the director’s aversion towards young people was such that he would do everything within his power to avoid all contact, so she could be more or less certain of never seeing him again in the three months of her traineeship.
Once that moment had passed (‘He is actually an old fool…’ she confirmed soberly), I entrusted her to one of the duty veterinarians – a nice woman of about thirty with whom I had always got on well. And for a week nothing happened. I had jotted Camille’s number down in my diary, I knew it was up to me to call her, that was something that hadn’t changed very much in relations between men and women – and besides, I was ten years older than her, that was a point to consider. I have a strange memory of that period; I can only compare it to those rare moments that come when one is extremely calm and happy, or about to topple into sleep, but holding back at the last minute, while at the same time being aware that the sleep about to come will be deep, delicious and restorative. I don’t think I’m making a mistake comparing sleep to love; I don’t think I’m mistaken comparing love to a kind of dream à deux, admittedly with some little moments of individual dreaming, little games of connection and encounter, but which enable us to transform our earthly existence into an endurable moment – the only way to do so, to tell the truth.
* * *
In fact, things didn’t go as I had predicted; the outside world imposed itself, and did so brutally: Camille called me almost exactly a week later, early in the afternoon. She was in a panic, having taken refuge in a McDonald’s in the industrial zone of Elbeuf; she had just spent the morning on a battery chicken farm, she had taken advantage of the lunch break to escape and I had to come, I needed to come and get her straight away and rescue her.
I hung up furiously: what idiot at DRAF sent her there? I knew that farm very well; it was a huge one, over three hundred thousand chickens, that exported eggs to Canada and Saudi Arabia, but most importantly had an appalling reputation, one of the worst in France, and the result of every inspection had been negative: thousands of chickens tried to survive in sheds lit from above by powerful halogens, crammed together so tightly that they touched; there were no cages which meant they were ‘barn reared’; they were featherless and scrawny, their skin irritated and infested with red mites; they lived among the decomposing corpses of their fellows, and spent every second of their brief existence – a year at most – squawking with terror. That was true even in the best-kept poultry farms, and it was the first thing that struck you, that incessant squawking, and the permanent look of panic that the chickens gave you, that look of panic and incomprehension; they didn’t ask for pity, they wouldn’t have been capable of it, but they didn’t understand, they didn’t understand the conditions in which they had been called upon to live. Not to mention the male chicks, useless for egg-laying, who were thrown alive, by the handful, into crushers; I knew all of that, I had had the opportunity to visit several poultry farms of which Elbeuf was probably the worst, but the low moral standards which, like everyone else, I was capable of displaying had allowed me to forget it.
She ran towards me as soon as she saw me coming across the car park and she hugged me, she hugged me for a long time, unable to stop crying. How could men do that? How could they allow that to happen? I had nothing to say on the subject, only uninteresting generalisations about human nature.
Once we were in the car driving towards Caen, she addressed more embarrassing questions: how could vets, public health inspectors, let that happen? How could they visit places where animal torture was an everyday matter, and let them go on working, indeed collaborate with them when they were, in fact, vets? I confess that at that point I wondered: were they overpaid to keep silent? I don’t think so. After all, I’m sure there were doctors with medical degrees in the Nazi camps. There too it was ultimately a source of banal and far from encouraging contemplations on humanity; I preferred to say nothing.
Still, when she told me that she was thinking of abandoning her veterinary studies, I intervened. It was a liberal profession, I reminded her; nothing forced her to work in an industrial animal-breeding facility, nothing could even force her to see one again, and I had to add that she had seen the worst, the worst of possible situations (well, the worst in France at least, there were chickens in worse conditions in other countries, but I refrained from saying so). Now she knew, that was all – it was a lot, but it was all. I also refrained from pointing out that it was no better for pigs, nor more and more frequentl
y even for cows – she had already had enough for one day, it seemed to me.
Having reached her Appart’City, she told me she couldn’t just go back to hers like that and absolutely needed a drink. There wasn’t much in the area that lent itself to such a thing; in fact, there was only the Hôtel Mercure Côte de Nacre, whose clientele consisted exclusively of middle managers working for one or other of the companies in the industrial complex.
The bar proved to be strangely pleasant, scattered with sofas and deep armchairs covered with ochre fabric, and with the moderately discreet presence of a barman. Camille had really taken a moral knock; she was a very young girl and, after visiting an industrial chicken-breeding facility, it took her five Martinis to really be able to relax. I felt exhausted myself, extremely exhausted, as if a very long journey was coming to an end; I didn’t even feel capable of taking to the road again to get back to Clécy, I didn’t feel vigorous at all – in fact I was benign and happy. So we took a room for the night at the Hôtel Mercure Côte de Nacre and it was what you’d expect from a Hôtel Mercure; well, that’s where we spent our first night, and in all likelihood I will remember it until my final days: images of that ludicrous decor will come back to haunt me until the very end, they already come back every evening and I know that isn’t going to stop, that in fact it will only become more accentuated, more and more searing, until death delivers me.
I obviously expected that Camille would like the house in Clécy; I had a rudimentary aesthetic sense and, well, I could tell that it was a pretty house; on the other hand I hadn’t anticipated that she would also make it her house, that from her first days there she would have ideas about how to decorate it and fit it out, that she would want to buy fabrics, move furniture, that in the end she would quite quickly come to act like a wife – in a decidedly un-feminist sense – even though she was only nineteen. Until now I had been living here as if I were in a hotel, a good hotel, a successful hôtel de charme, but it wasn’t until Camille arrived that I had a sense that it was, truly, my house – and that was only because it was hers.
My daily life underwent other modifications; until now, quite prosaically, I had done my shopping at the Super U in Thury-Harcourt, which had the extra advantage of allowing me to fill up with diesel when I left the supermarket, and to check my tyre pressure every now and again: I hadn’t even visited the little town of Clécy, although it no doubt had its charms, attested to by tourist guides of varying degrees of reliability, but being the capital of the Suisse Normande wasn’t something to be scoffed at.
That all changed with Camille, and we became regular customers at the boucherie–charcuterie and the boulangerie–patisserie, both on Place du Tripot, with the town hall and the tourist office. Well, to be more precise, it was Camille who became a regular customer – in general, I just waited for her while drinking pints at the brasserie Le Vincennes, which also sold cigarettes and Loto-PMU tickets, on Place Charles-de-Gaulle, just opposite the church. Once we even went for dinner at Au Site Normand, the village restaurant, which prided itself on having hosted the Charlots for the shooting of a scene for the film Rookies Run Amok – there hadn’t just been Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, the 1970s had had their shady side – but either way the restaurant was good, and had a sumptuous cheese board.
It was a new way of life for me, one I had never imagined as being possible with Claire, and which proved to be full of unsuspected charms; well, what I mean is that Camille had ideas about how to live; you put her in a pretty village in the middle of the Normandy countryside, and she immediately saw how to get to the best of that pretty Normandy village. Men in general don’t know how to live: they have no true familiarity with life, and never feel entirely at ease in it, so they pursue different projects, more or less ambitious and more or less grandiose – generally speaking, of course, they fail and reach the conclusion that they would have been better off just living, but as a rule by that point it’s too late.
I was happy, I’d never been so happy, and never would be again; but at no point did I forget that the situation was transient. Camille was only an intern at DRAF and would inevitably leave in late January to resume her studies in Maisons-Alfort. Inevitably? I could have suggested that she give up her studies and become a housewife, my wife in fact, and in retrospect, when I think about it (and I think about it almost all the time), I think she would have said yes – particularly after the industrial chicken-rearing facility. But I didn’t, and I probably couldn’t have done; I hadn’t been formatted for such a proposition, it wasn’t part of my software; I was a modern man, and for me, like for all of my contemporaries, a woman’s professional career was something that had to be respected above all else – it was the absolute criterion, it meant overtaking barbarism and leaving the Middle Ages. At the same time, I wasn’t entirely a modern man because I had, even just for a few seconds, been able to imagine the imperative of her leaving it; but once again I didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything, and let events run their course, while I essentially placed no trust in this return to Paris: like all cities, Paris was made to generate loneliness, and we hadn’t had enough time together, in that house, a man and a woman alone and facing one another; for a few months we had been the rest of each other’s world, but would we be able to sustain such a thing? I don’t know; I’m old now and can’t really remember, but I think I was already afraid, and I’d understood, even then, that society was a machine for destroying love.
* * *
I only have two photographs from that time in Clécy; we had too much living to do to waste our time on selfies, I imagine, but perhaps that practice was less widespread at the time, social media was still in its infancy if it existed at all; yes, people lived more back then without a doubt. These photographs were probably taken on the same day, in a forest near Clécy; they’re surprising, because they were probably taken in November, but everything in the picture – the fresh, vibrant light, the brilliance of the foliage – suggests early spring. Camille is wearing a short skirt and a matching denim jacket. Under the jacket is a white shirt knotted at the waist, decorated with printed red fruits. In the first photograph, her face is lit up by a radiant smile, really bursting with happiness – and it seems crazy today to tell myself that I was the source of her happiness. The second photograph is pornographic – it’s the only pornographic picture of her that I’ve kept. Her handbag, bright pink, is set down on the grass beside her. Kneeling in front of me, she has taken my penis in her mouth, her lips are closed halfway down my glans. Her eyes are closed, and she is concentrating so hard on the act of fellatio that her face is blank, her features perfectly pure; I have never again had a chance to see such a representation of the gift.
* * *
I had been living with Camille for two months and had been based in Clécy for just over a year when my landlord died. It rained on the day of his funeral, as is often the case in Normandy in January, and just about the whole village was there, almost all of them old; his time had come, I heard as I followed the cortège, he had had a good life; I remember the priest came from Falaise, about thirty kilometres away, and with desertification, de-Christianisation and all those things beginning with ‘de’, the poor priest had his work cut out for him and was constantly on the road; but, well, this funeral was an easy one: the mortal being who had just passed on had never neglected the sacraments and his faith had remained intact; a genuine Christian had just yielded his soul to God and, the priest could assert with certainty, his place was now reserved by the side of the Father. His children, who were present, could certainly weep – the gift of tears had been granted to man and it was necessary – but they were to feel no fear as they would soon find themselves in a better world where death, suffering and tears would be abolished.
The two children in question were easy to recognise, they were thirty years younger than the population of Clécy, and I immediately sensed that the girl had something to say to me, something difficult, so I waited for her to come towards me, under
a steady, cold rain, while the spadefuls of earth were slowly scattered into the grave, but she could only express herself in the café where the attendees had gathered at the end of the ceremony. So, she felt truly awkward having to tell me this, but I would have to move: her father’s house was up for sale and the Dutch buyers wanted to get hold of it quickly; it’s rare for life-annuity properties to be rented out, which happens in the case of an occupied life-annuity property sale where the seller has retained the usufruct. In that moment I worked out that they were really in the shit financially: renting out an occupied life-annuity property is a phrase that is hardly ever used, particularly because the tenant risks causing difficulties when returning the property. So I immediately tried to reassure her that I wouldn’t cause any difficulties, that I was fine and had a salary, but had they really come to this? Well, yes, they really had come to this: her husband had just lost his job at Graindorge, which was going through some real difficulties, and there they got to the heart of my work, the shameful heart of my incompetence. The Graindorge company, founded in 1910 in Livarot, had diversified into Camembert and Pont-l’Évêque, and had known an hour of glory (the uncontested leader in Livarot had hauled itself up to second place in the production of the two other cheeses in the Norman trilogy) before, in the early 2000s, entering a spiral of financial crisis that would become more and more acute, finally concluding in 2016 with its purchase by Lactalis, the global number one in milk production.
I was very well aware of the situation but I said nothing about it to the daughter of my former landlord because there are times when it’s better to keep your trap shut – after all, there was nothing to boast about; I had failed to help her husband’s company and in the end save his job, but I assured her in any case that she had nothing to fear, that I would free the house as soon as possible.
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