I had felt a real affection for her father, and I sensed that he liked me; every now and again he dropped by to bring a bottle – alcohol is very important for the elderly, it’s almost all they’ve got left. I had immediately taken a liking to his daughter, and she had loved her father deeply, that was obvious; her filial love was open, whole, unconditional. However, we were not destined to see each other again, and we parted with the certainty that we would never see each other again, that the estate agents would take care of the details. Those kinds of thing happen constantly in human lives.
* * *
In fact I didn’t have the slightest desire to live alone in that house where I had lived with Camille, and not the slightest desire to live anywhere else either, but I no longer had a chance – I had to act: her traineeship was really coming to an end, we had only a few weeks left, and soon only a few days. That’s obviously the reason, the chief and almost sole reason, that I decided to come back to Paris, but I don’t know what masculine modesty led me to mention other reasons when I talked to her, given that I talked about it to everybody and even to her; luckily she didn’t fall for it, and when I talked to her about my professional ambitions and she gave me a hesitant and pained look; it was, in fact, regrettable that I didn’t have the courage to just say to her: ‘I want to return to Paris because I love you, and I want to live with you’; she must have told herself that men have their limitations – I was her first man, but I think she quickly and easily understood this.
Besides, this speech about my professional ambitions wasn’t totally a lie; I had become aware of the severe constraints on my scope for action at DRAF and that the true power was in Brussels, or at least in the central administrative services in close relations with Brussels; that was where I had to go if I wanted to get my point of view across. Except jobs at that level were rare, much rarer than in DRAF, and it took me almost a year to achieve my goals – a year during which I didn’t have the courage to look for a new apartment in Caen, so the Adagio Aparthotel offered a mediocre but acceptable solution for four nights a week, and it was there that I destroyed my first smoke detector.
There were work drinks at DRAF almost every Friday evening, and it was impossible for me to get out of them, so I don’t think I ever managed to catch the 17.53 train. The 18.53 got me in to Gare Saint-Lazare at 20.46; as I have already said, I know happiness and the things which constitute it, and I know very well what it is about. All couples have their little rituals, their insignificant and even slightly ridiculous rituals, that they don’t talk to anybody about. One of ours was to start our weekends by dining, every Friday evening, at Brasserie Mollard, just opposite the station. I think that I had whelks with mayonnaise and lobster Thermidor every time, and that every time I thought it was good; I never felt the need, or even the desire, to explore the rest of the menu.
In Paris, I had found a nice two-bedroom flat with a courtyard on Rue des Écoles, and found myself less than fifty metres from the studio flat where I had lived during my student years. But I can’t say that life with Camille reminded me of my student years; it was no longer the same thing, aside from anything else I wasn’t a student any more, and more importantly Camille was different; she didn’t have that lightness, that recklessness that had been mine when I was studying at the Agro. It’s a cliché to say that girls are more serious about their studies, and it’s probably an accurate cliché, but there was something else too; I was only ten years older than Camille, but undeniably something had changed, the mood of that generation was not the same as ours; I realised that all her classmates, whatever their area of studies, were serious and hard-working, and placed a lot of importance on their scholarly success, as if they already knew that in the outside world nobody was going to be offering them anything on a plate, that the world awaiting them was inhospitable and harsh. Sometimes, they felt the need to decompress, and then they got drunk in a group, but their drinking sessions themselves were different from the ones that I had known: they got violently drunk, they gulped down huge quantities of alcohol at great speed, as if to reach a state of drunkenness as quickly as possible; they got drunk exactly as miners must have done in the time of Germinal – the resemblance was further enhanced by the return in force of absinthe, which reached startling levels of alcohol and in fact made it possible to get plastered in a minimum amount of time.
Camille manifested the same seriousness that she applied to her studies in her relationship with me. I don’t mean to say that she was austere or prim – on the contrary, she was very cheerful, laughed over nothing, and in some respects she had even remained curiously childlike and sometimes had cravings for Kinder Bueno, that kind of thing. But we were a couple; it was a serious business, the most serious business of her life, and I was overwhelmed: my breath was literally taken away every time I read in her gaze the gravity, the depth of her commitment – a gravity, a depth which I would have been incapable of at the age of nineteen. Perhaps she also shared that trait with other young people of her generation – I know that her friends thought she ‘was lucky to have found somebody’, and the somewhat settled, bourgeois nature of our relationship satisfied a deep need in her – the fact that we went to an old-fashioned 1900-style brasserie every Friday evening, rather than a tapas bar in Oberkampf, struck me as symptomatic of the dream in which we were trying to live. The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.
But why drag myself to past scenes? as the poet said; I want to dream and not weep, he added as if one had the choice. I need only say that our relationship lasted a little over five years – five years of happiness is quite considerable and I certainly didn’t deserve as much – and it came to an end in a horribly stupid way; things like that shouldn’t happen, but they do happen, they happen every day. God is a mediocre scriptwriter, that’s the conviction that almost fifty years of life have led me to form, and more generally God is mediocre: the whole of his creation bears the stamp of approximation and failure, when it isn’t meanness pure and simple; of course, there are exceptions, there are definitely exceptions, the possibility of happiness had to exist if only as bait – well, I’m digressing, let’s get back to my subject which is me, not that it’s especially interesting but it’s my subject.
In those years I enjoyed certain professional satisfactions; I even had during some brief moments – particularly when I was travelling to Brussels – the illusion of being an important man. And I probably was more important than when I had been involved in clownish promotional operations concerning Livarot; I played a certain part in the development of the French government’s position on the European agricultural budget – but I soon came to realise that while that budget might have been the first European one, and France the first beneficiary country, the number of farmers was simply too high to reverse the trend towards decline; I gradually concluded that French farmers were condemned, so I detached myself from that job, as others did: I understood that the world wasn’t one of the things I could change, and others were more ambitious, more motivated, probably more intelligent.
It was during one of my trips to Brussels that I had the wretched idea of sleeping with Tam. Pretty much anybody would have had that idea, I think, she was a ravishing little black girl, particularly her little arse, well, she had a pretty little black girl’s arse and that says it all, and my method of seduction was directly inspired by it. It was a Thursday evening and we, a group of relatively young Eurocrats, were drinking beers at the Grand Central; maybe I made her laugh at some point – I was capable of doing that kind of thing in those days – although it was just as we were going out to continue the evening in a club on Place du Luxembourg that I put my hand on her arse; in principle simple methods don’t work well, but it worked that time.
Tam belonged to the British delegation (Britain was still part of Europe at the time, or pretending to be) but she was originally from Jamaica
I think, or maybe from Barbados – well, one of those islands that seem to be able to produce a limitless quantity of ganja, rum and pretty black girls with little arses; all things that help you to live but don’t turn life into a destiny. I should add that she sucked dick ‘like a queen’, as they say strangely at least in certain circles, and certainly better than the Queen of England; well, I can’t deny that I spent a pleasant night, a very pleasant one, but was it a good idea to start again?
Because I did start again during one of her stays in Paris; she came there from time to time – I have absolutely no idea why, certainly not to go shopping, Parisian women go shopping in London and never the other way around; well, tourists must have their reasons – in short I joined her at her hotel in the neighbourhood of Saint-Germain, and then I went out with her on Rue de Buci, holding her by the hand, probably with that slightly idiotic expression of a man who has just come, and I found myself face to face with Camille – I have no idea what she was doing in that part of town either; I said it was just a stupid affair. There was nothing but fear in the look she gave me, a look of pure terror; then she turned around and fled, literally fled. It took me a few minutes to catch up with the girl, but I’m pretty sure that I reached the apartment five minutes after her, not more. She didn’t rebuke me, she showed no anger – it was more dreadful than that: she started to cry. She cried for hours, gently, tears flowed down her face and she didn’t even think of wiping them away; it was the worst episode of my life, there is no doubt about that. My brain worked slowly, foggily, as I tried to find a phrase along the lines of: ‘We’re not going to throw everything away over some meaningless sex…’ or: ‘I don’t feel anything for that girl, I’d been drinking…’ (the former true, the latter obviously false). But nothing seemed adequate or appropriate. The next day she went on crying as she got her things together, while I racked my brain to find an appropriate phrase; to be honest, I spent the next two or three years searching for an appropriate phrase, and it’s likely that I’ve never stopped searching.
* * *
My life carried on without any notable events – apart from Yuzu, who I’ve mentioned – and I found myself on my own again, more alone than I had ever been; well, I had hummus, which is suited to solitary pleasures, but as the Christmas period is more delicate I would have needed a seafood platter, but that is something that should be shared; having a seafood platter on your own is scraping the barrel – even Françoise Sagan couldn’t have described that, it’s too dreadful for words.
Which left me with Thailand, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t get there; a few colleagues had talked about it: they were adorable girls but they did have a certain professional pride, and they weren’t too keen on a client who couldn’t get it up – they felt they were being called into question – and, well, I didn’t want to cause a scene.
* * *
In December 2001, immediately after my meeting with Camille, I had found myself, for the first time in my life, facing a recurrent and inevitable drama: the Christmas period – my parents had died in June, what was there to celebrate? Camille had remained close to her parents, and often went for lunch with them on Sunday afternoon; they lived in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, about fifty kilometres away. I had sensed since the start that my silence on the matter of my parents intrigued Camille, but she refrained from talking to me about it and waited for me to broach the subject myself. I did so, at last, a week before Christmas, and told her the story of their suicide. It was a shock to her, I realised straight away, a deep shock; there are things you haven’t really had the opportunity to think about at the age of nineteen, things that you really don’t think about before life forces you to. It was then that she suggested spending New Year’s Eve with her.
It’s always a delicate and uncomfortable moment, being introduced to the parents, but I read something obvious in the look she gave me: under no circumstances would her parents call her choice into question, it wouldn’t even occur to them; she had chosen me and I was part of the family, it was as simple as that.
* * *
What had led the Da Silvas to settle in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne would remain a mystery to me until the end, as would what had allowed Joaquim Da Silva – a simple construction worker at first – to become manager of the main, and only, newsagent’s and tobacconist’s in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, which was in a remarkable location beside the lake. The stories of the lives of humans who belong to the generations immediately preceding our own often provide this kind of configuration in which we may observe the working of an arrangement that has become almost mythical, formerly known by the name of ‘social climbing’. The fact remains that Joaquim Da Silva had lived there, with his wife who was also Portuguese, without ever looking back; he never dreamt of returning to the Portugal of his birth, and he fathered two children: Camille and then, much later, Kevin. Being as French as one can be, I had nothing to say about these subjects, but the conversation was easy and pleasant; my work interested Joaquim Da Silva, who came from farming origins like everybody – his parents had tried to grow I can’t remember what in the Alentejo – and so he was not insensitive to the increasingly grievous distress of the farmers of his region; in fact, as the manager of a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s, he was sometimes not a long way from seeing himself as someone privileged. In fact, although he worked hard, he still worked less than the average farmer; in fact, although he didn’t earn much he still earned more than they did. Conversations about the economy are a bit like conversations about cyclones or earthquakes; quite soon you end up not really understanding what you’re talking about and feel as if you’re discussing some dark divinity, so you top up the champagne, well, champagne particularly in the Christmas period; I ate remarkably well during that stay with Camille’s parents, and I was made very welcome; more generally, they were adorable, but I think my parents would have come well out of that meeting too, in a slightly more bourgeois way but not that much; they knew how to put people at ease and I had had the opportunity to see them at work many times; the day before we left, I dreamt that Camille had been welcomed at my parents’ house in Senlis and I nearly talked to her about it when I woke up, but then I remembered that they were dead – I’ve always had difficulties with death, it’s a characteristic trait of mine.
* * *
I would still like to try, if only for an unusually attentive reader, to cast some light, however faint, on these subjects: why did I want to see Camille again? Why had I felt a need to see Claire again? And even to see the third girl – the anorexic one with the flax seeds whose name escapes me right now, but if the reader is as attentive as I imagine, he will be able to supply it – why had I wanted to see her again?
Most dying people (that is, apart from the ones who have themselves swiftly euthanised in a car park or a dedicated room) organise a kind of ceremony around their passing on; they want to see, one last time, the people who have played a part in the lives, and they want to talk to them, one last time, for a variable amount of time. This is very important to them, and I’ve seen it on many occasions: they’re worried when you can’t get the person on the telephone, and want to organise meetings as soon as possible, and of course that’s understandable – they only have a few days at their disposal, but the exact number has not been communicated to them, though they are in any case not many, just a few. The palliative care units (at least the ones I’ve had the opportunity to see in operation, and there are inevitably quite a lot of those, at my age) address these requests with competence and humanity: they are admirable people, they belong to the small and courageous contingent of ‘admirable little people’ who allow society to carry on in an otherwise generally inhuman and shitty age.
Similarly, I probably tried – on a more limited scale but one that might be useful for training purposes – to organise a mini farewell ceremony for my libido or, in more concrete terms, for my cock at a time when it was announcing to me that it was preparing to bring its service to an end; I wanted to see, once again, all
the women who had honoured it, who had loved it in their way. The two ceremonies in my case, the small and the large, were as it happens almost identical, since male friendship had counted for little in my life, basically there had only been Aymeric. It’s strange, that wish to draw up a balance, to convince oneself at the last moment that one has lived; or perhaps it isn’t strange at all, it’s the opposite that is terrible and strange, it is terrible and strange to think about all the men and all the women who have nothing to tell, and who imagine no future fate other than to dissolve into a vague biological and technical continuum (because ashes are technical; even when they are only destined to become fertiliser you have to assess their potassium and nitrogen levels); all those people, in short, whose lives have played out without external incident, and who leave life without thinking about it, as one leaves a holiday home that was just fine, without, however, having an idea of a final destination, with just that vague intuition that it would have been preferable not to have been born – well, now I’m talking about the majority of men and women.
So it was with a clear sense of things being irremediable that I booked a room at the Hôtel Spa Béryl on the shores of the lake in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne for the night from the 24th to the 25th; then I set off on the morning of the 24th; the 24th was a Sunday and most people must have left on Friday evening, or first thing Saturday at the latest, as the motorway was deserted apart from the inevitable Latvian and Bulgarian HGVs. I devoted most of my journey to perfecting a mini narrative intended for the receptionist or the cleaning staff if there were any: the planned family party was so big that my uncle (it was happening at my uncle’s house but all branches of the family would be there – I would be seeing cousins I hadn’t seen for years, even decades) was unable to put them all up, so I had made the sacrifice of spending the night in a hotel. It was an excellent story, I think, and I gradually started to believe it; obviously I would be unable to call room service to make it really authentic, and so I bought regional products (Livarot, cider, apple juice, andouille) shortly before reaching my destination: the Pays d’Argentan service station.
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