The Elegance Of The Hedgehog Part 2

"And Neptune peed on Mr. Saint-Nice's leg," continues Manuela. "The poor beast must have been holding it in for hours, and when Mr. Badoise finally got out the leash the dog couldn't wait and in the entrance he went on Saint-Nice's trouser leg."

Neptune, a c.o.c.ker spaniel, belongs to the owners of the third-floor right-hand-side apartment. The second and third floors are the only ones divided into two apartments (of two thousand square feet each). On the first floor you have the de Broglies, on the fourth the Arthens, on the fifth the Josses and on the sixth the Pallieres. On the second floor are the Meurisses and the Rosens. On the third, the Saint-Nices and the Badoises. Neptune belongs to the Badoises, or more precisely, to Mademoiselle Badoise, who is studying for her law degree in a.s.sas, and who organizes soirees with other c.o.c.ker spaniel owners studying for law degrees in a.s.sas.

I am very fond of Neptune. Yes, we appreciate each other a great deal, no doubt because of that state of grace that is attained when one's feelings are immediately accessible to another creature's. Neptune can sense that I love him; his multiple desires are perfectly clear to me. What charms me about the whole business is that he stubbornly insists on remaining a dog, whereas his mistress would like to make a gentleman of him. When he goes out into the courtyard, he runs to the very very end of his leash and stares covetously at the puddles of muddy water idling before him. His mistress has only to give one jerk to his yoke for him to lower his hindquarters down onto the ground, and with no further ado he will set to licking his attributes. The sight of Athena, the Meurisses' ridiculous whippet, causes Neptune to stick his tongue out like a lubricious satyr and pant in antic.i.p.ation, his head filled with phantasms. What is particularly amusing about c.o.c.ker spaniels is their swaying gait when they are in a playful mood: it's as if they had tiny little springs screwed to their paws that cause them to bounce upward-but gently, without jolting. This also affects their paws and ears like the rolling of a s.h.i.+p, so c.o.c.ker spaniels, like jaunty little vessels plying dry land, lend a nautical touch to the urban landscape: utterly enchanting.

Ultimately, however, Neptune is a greedy glutton who'll do anything for a sc.r.a.p of turnip or a crust of stale bread. When his mistress leads him past the garbage can room, he pulls frenetically in the direction of said room, tongue lolling, tail wagging madly. Diane Badoise despairs of such behavior. To her distinguished soul it seems that one's dog should be like the young ladies of antebellum high society in Savannah in the Confederate South, who could scarcely find a husband unless they feigned to have no appet.i.te whatsoever.

But instead, Neptune carries on as if he were some famished Yankee.

Journal of the Movement of the World No. 2.

Bacon for the c.o.c.ker Spaniel.

In our building there are two dogs: the whippet belonging to the Meurisses who looks like a skeleton covered over with beige leather hide, and a ginger c.o.c.ker spaniel who belongs to Diane Badoise, an anorexic blond woman who wears Burberry raincoats and who is the daughter of a very la-di-da lawyer. The whippet is called Athena and the c.o.c.ker Neptune. Just in case you don't yet understand what sort of place I live in: you won't find any Fidos or Rovers in our place. Anyway, yesterday, in the hallway, the two dogs met and I was fortunate to witness a very interesting sort of ballet. I won't dwell on the dogs, who sniffed each other's bottoms. I don't know if Neptune smells bad but Athena took a leap backward while Neptune looked as if he were sniffing a bouquet of roses with a huge juicy steak in the middle.

No, what was interesting was the two human beings at the end of each leash. Because in town it is the dogs who have their masters on a leash, though no one seems to have caught on to the fact. If you have voluntarily saddled yourself with a dog that you'll have to walk twice a day, come rain wind or snow, that is as good as having put a leash around your own neck. Anyway, Diane Badoise and Anne-Helene Meurisse (same mold, twenty-five years apart) met in the hallway, each at the end of her leash. What a muddle when this happens! They're as clumsy as if they had webbed fingers and feet because they're incapable of doing the only truly practical thing in cases like this: acknowledge what is going on in order to prevent it. But because they act as if they believed they were walking two distinguished stuffed animals utterly devoid of any inappropriate impulses, they cannot bleat at their dogs to stop sniffing their a.s.ses or licking their little b.a.l.l.s.

So here's what happened: Diane Badoise came out of the elevator with Neptune, and Anne-Helene Meurisse was waiting right outside with Athena. They virtually threw their dogs one on top of the other and, obviously, it sent Neptune utterly crazy. Here you come nicely trotting out of the elevator only to find your nose right up against Athena's derriere, that's not something that happens every day. For ages now Colombe has been ranting on to us about kairos kairos, a Greek concept that means roughly "the right moment," something at which Napoleon apparently excelled. Naturally, my sister is an expert on military strategy. Anyway, kairos kairos is the intuition of the moment, something like that. Well I can tell you that Neptune had his is the intuition of the moment, something like that. Well I can tell you that Neptune had his kairos kairos right in front of his nose and he didn't mess around, he made like a hussar, in the old style, and climbed right on top. "Oh my G.o.d!" shrieked Anne-Helene Meurisse as if she herself were victim of this outrage. "Oh, no!" exclaimed Diane Badoise, as if all the shame were hers, whereas I'd bet you a chocolate truffle that it would never have occurred to her to climb onto Athena's rear end. And they both began pulling at their dogs' leashes but there was a problem, and that's what evolved into an interesting movement. right in front of his nose and he didn't mess around, he made like a hussar, in the old style, and climbed right on top. "Oh my G.o.d!" shrieked Anne-Helene Meurisse as if she herself were victim of this outrage. "Oh, no!" exclaimed Diane Badoise, as if all the shame were hers, whereas I'd bet you a chocolate truffle that it would never have occurred to her to climb onto Athena's rear end. And they both began pulling at their dogs' leashes but there was a problem, and that's what evolved into an interesting movement.

In fact, Diane should have pulled upward and the other lady downward, which would have released the two dogs but, instead of that, they each pulled sideways and as it's very narrow in front of the elevator cage, they very quickly ran into an obstacle: one of them the elevator grille, the other the wall on the left and as a result Neptune, who had lost his balance with the first tug, suddenly got a surge of energy and clung all the more solidly to Athena who was howling and rolling her eyes with fright. At that point the humans changed strategy by trying to drag their dogs away to a larger s.p.a.ce so that they could repeat the maneuver more comfortably. But the matter was getting urgent: everyone knows there's a point at which dogs get stuck. So they really stepped on it, shouting simultaneously, "Oh my G.o.d oh my G.o.d," pulling on their leashes as if their very virtue was at stake. But in her haste, Diane Badoise slipped and twisted her ankle. And this was the moment of the interesting movement: her ankle twisted toward the outside and at the same time her entire body swerved in the same direction, except for her ponytail which went the opposite way.

It was magnificent, I a.s.sure you: it was like something by Bacon. There's been a framed Bacon in my parents' bathroom forever, a picture of someone on the potty, in fact, and in good Bacon style, you know, sort of tortured and not very appetizing. I have always thought that it probably had an effect on the serenity of one's actions but anyway in my house we each have our own toilet so there was no point complaining. But Diane Badoise was completely thrown out of joint when she twisted her ankle, making weird angles with her knees, her arms and her head, and to top it off, her ponytail sticking out horizontally like that-and I immediately thought of the Bacon in the bathroom. For a very brief moment she looked like a disjointed rag doll, her body completely contorted and, for a few thousandths of a second (it happened very quickly, but, as I am very attentive to the movements of the body these days, I saw it as if in slow motion), Diane Badoise looked like a full-length portrait by Bacon. From that sudden impression to the consideration that the thing in the bathroom has been there all these years just so now I could fully appreciate her bizarre contortions, there is only a short step. And then Diane fell onto the dogs and that solved the problem because Athena, crushed on the ground, managed to wriggle free of Neptune. A complicated little ballet then followed, Anne-Helene trying to help Diane and all the while keep her dog at a safe distance from the lubricious monster, and Neptune, completely indifferent to the shouts and pain of his mistress, continued to pull in the direction of his steak a la rose steak a la rose. But at that very moment Madame Michel came out of her loge and I grabbed Neptune's leash and dragged him farther away.

He was so disappointed, poor mutt. And so he flopped down and started licking his little b.a.l.l.s, making a lot of slurping noises, which only added to poor Diane's despair. Madame Michel called an ambulance because Diane's ankle was seriously beginning to look like a watermelon and then she took Neptune to her place while Anne-Helene Meurisse stayed with Diane. As for me, I went home and said to myself, Okay, a Bacon come to life before my very eyes, does that make it worth it?

I decided it didn't: because not only did Neptune not get his treat but, on top of it, he didn't even get his walk.

8. Prophet of the Modern Elite.

This morning, while listening to France Inter on the radio, I was surprised to discover that I am not who I thought I was. Until that time I had ascribed the reasons for my cultural eclecticism to my condition as a proletarian autodidact. As I have already explained, I have spent every moment of my existence that could be spared from work in reading, watching films, and listening to music. But my frenzied devouring of cultural objects seems to me to suffer from a major error of taste: brutally mixing respectable works with others that are far less so.

It is most certainly in the domain of reading that my eclecticism is least p.r.o.nounced, though even there the variety of my interests is most extreme. I have read history, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, pedagogy, psychoa.n.a.lysis and, of course-above all-literature. While all these have always interested me, literature has been my whole life. My cat Leo was baptized thus because of Tolstoy. My previous cat was called Dongo because of Stendhal's Fabrice del. The first one was called Karenina because of Anna but I called her Kare for short, for fear of being found out. With the exception of my guilty lapse where Stendhal is concerned, my taste is most definitely partial to pre-1910 Russia, but it flatters my pride to note that the amount of world literature I have devoured is nevertheless considerable, given the fact that I am a country girl who, by ending up head concierge at 7, rue de Grenelle, has witnessed her career expectations go far beyond what she antic.i.p.ated-particularly when you think that such a destiny should surely have doomed her to the eternal wors.h.i.+p of Barbara Cartland. I do confess to a guilty indulgence for detective stories-but the ones I read I consider to be true works of literature. I find it especially exasperating when, from time to time, I have to drag myself away from my Connelly or Mankell in order to go and answer the door for Bernard Grelier or Sabine Pallieres, whose concerns are hardly shared by the likes of Harry Bosch, the jazz-loving LAPD cop, and all the more so when all they have to say is: "How come the garbage smells all the way out into the courtyard?"

That Bernard Grelier and the heiress of an old Banque de France family could both speak in so colloquial a manner and yet be preoccupied by the same trivial things sheds a new light onto humanity.

Where the cinema is concerned, however, my eclecticism is in full flower. I like American blockbusters and art-house films. In fact, for a long time I preferred to watch entertaining British or American films, with the exception of a few serious works that I reserved for my esthetic sensibilities, since my pa.s.sionate or empathetic sensibilities were exclusively focused on entertainment. Greenaway fills me with admiration, interest and yawns, whereas I weep buckets of syrupy tears every time Melly and Mammy climb the stairway at the Butler mansion after Bonnie Blue dies; as for Blade Runner Blade Runner, it is a masterpiece of high-end escapism. For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving, and immensely satisfying.

Take today, for example. I quiver with impatience at the thought of the treat I have in store-the fruit of exemplary patience, the long-deferred satisfaction of my desire to see, once again, a film I saw for the first time at Christmas, in 1989.

9. Red October.

By Christmas, 1989, Lucien was very sick. We did not yet know when his death would come, but we were bound by the certainty of its imminence, bound to the dread inside, bound to each other by these invisible ties. When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body; it also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped. Like a spider's thread drawn ever tighter around our projects, making it impossible to breathe, with each pa.s.sing day the illness was overwhelming our life. When I came in from running ch.o.r.es outside, it was like entering a dark cellar where I was constantly cold, with a chill that nothing could remedy, so much so toward the end that when I slept alongside Lucien, it seemed as if his body were sucking up all the heat my body might have managed to purloin elsewhere.

His illness was first diagnosed in the spring of 1988; it ate away at him for seventeen months and carried him off just before Christmas, 1990. The elder Madame Meurisse raised money among the inhabitants of the building, and a fine wreath of flowers was delivered to my loge, bound with a ribbon that bore no text. She alone came to the funeral. She was a cold, stiff, pious woman, but there was something sincere about her austere and rather abrupt manners, and when she died, a year after Lucien, I said to myself that she had been a good woman and that I would miss her, although we had scarcely exchanged two words in fifteen years.

"She made her daughter-in-law miserable right up to the end. May she rest in peace, she was a saintly woman," said Manuela-who professes a truly epic hatred for the younger Madame Meurisse-by way of a funeral oration.

Thus with the exception of Cornelia Meurisse, with her little veils and rosaries, Lucien's illness did not strike anyone as being worthy of interest. To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people-perhaps because their lives are more rarified, deprived of the oxygen of money and savoir-faire-experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference. Since we were concierges, it was a given that death, for us, must be a matter of course, whereas for our privileged neighbors it carried all the weight of injustice and drama. The death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day in the stairs or at the door to our loge, Lucien was a non-ent.i.ty who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury nor artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt. The fact that we might be going through h.e.l.l like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien's suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises.

One morning three weeks before that Christmas, I had just come in from shopping with a bag filled with turnips and lung for the cat, and there was Lucien dressed and ready to go out. He had even knotted his scarf and stood there waiting for me. After weeks of witnessing my husband's agony as, drained of all strength and enveloped in a terrifying pallor, he would hobble from the bedroom to the kitchen; after weeks of seeing him wear nothing other than a pair of pajamas that looked the very uniform of demise, and now to find him with his eyes s.h.i.+ning and a mischievous expression on his face, the collar of his winter coat turned right up to his peculiarly pink cheeks: I very nearly collapsed.

"Lucien!" I exclaimed, and I was about to go to hold him up, sit him down, undress him and I don't know what else, everything that the illness had taught to me in the way of unfamiliar gestures, which had become of late the only ones I knew how to make. I was about to put my bag down and embrace him, hold him close to me, carry him, all those things once more, when, breathless and feeling a strange flutter of expansion in my heart, I stopped in my tracks.

"We'll just make it," said Lucien, "the next show is at one."

In the heat of the theater, on the verge of tears, happier than I had ever been, I was holding the faint warmth of his hand for the first time in months. I knew that an unexpected surge of energy had roused him from his bed, given him the strength to get dressed and the urge to go out, the desire for us to share a conjugal pleasure one more time-and I knew, too, that this was the sign that there was not much time left, a state of grace before the end. But that did not matter to me, I just wanted to make the most of it, of these moments stolen from the burden of illness, moments with his warm hand in mine and a shudder of pleasure going through both of us because, thank heavens, it was a film we could share and delight in equally.

I think he died right after that. His body held on for three more weeks, but his mind departed at the end of the film, because he knew it was better that way, because he had said farewell to me in the dark theater. There were no poignant regrets, because he had found peace this way; he had placed his trust in what we had said to each other without any need for words, while we watched, together, the bright screen where a story was being told.

And I accepted it.

The Hunt for Red October is the film of our last embrace. For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punis.h.i.+ng curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers. is the film of our last embrace. For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punis.h.i.+ng curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers.

As I was saying, this morning on France Inter Radio I learned that this contamination of my aspiration to high culture by my penchant for lower forms of culture does not necessarily represent the indelible mark of my lowly origins or of my solitary striving for enlightenment but is, rather, a contemporary characteristic of the dominant intellectual cla.s.s. How did I come to know this? From the mouth of a sociologist, and I would have loved to have known if he himself would have loved to have known that a concierge in Scholl clogs had just made him into a holy icon. As part of a study on the evolution of the cultural practices of intellectuals who had once been immersed in highbrow culture from dawn to dusk but who were now mainstays of syncretism in whom the borders between high and low culture were irreversibly blurred, my sociologist described a cla.s.sics professor who, once upon a time, would have listened to Bach, read Mauriac, and watched art-house films, but nowadays listened to Handel and MC Solaar, read Flaubert and John Le Carre, went to see Visconti and the latest Die Hard Die Hard, and ate hamburgers at lunch and sas.h.i.+mi in the evening.

How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one's own uniqueness in the matter! Distressing, and perhaps even a bit annoying. The fact that, in spite of my confinement in a loge that conforms in every way to what is expected, in spite of an isolation that should have protected me from the imperfections of the ma.s.ses, in spite of those shameful years in my forties when I was utterly ignorant of the changes in the vast world to which I am confined; the fact that I, Renee, fifty-four years old, concierge and autodidact, am witness to the same changes that are animating the present-day elite-little Pallieres in their exclusive schools who read Marx then go off in gangs to watch Terminator Terminator, or little Badoises who study law in a.s.sas and sob into their Kleenex at Notting Hill Notting Hill-is a shock from which I can scarcely recover. And it is patently clear, for those who pay attention to chronology, that I am not the one who is aping these youngsters but, rather, in my eclectic practices, I am well ahead of them.

Renee, prophet of the contemporary elite.

"And well why not," I thought, removing the cat's slice of calf's liver from my shopping bag, and from beneath that, carefully wrapped in an unmarked sheet of plastic, two little filets of red mullet which I intend to marinate then cook in lemon juice and coriander.

And that is when it all started.

Profound Thought No. 4.

Care For plants For children.

There's a cleaning woman who comes to our house three hours a day, but it's Maman who looks after the plants. And it's an unbelievable rigmarole. She has two watering cans, one for water with fertilizer, one for special soft water, and a spray gun with several settings for "targeted" squirts, either "shower" or "mist." Every morning she inspects the twenty houseplants in the apartment and administers the appropriate treatment to each one. She murmurs all sorts of stuff to them, oblivious of the outside world. You can say whatever you want to Maman while she's looking after her plants, she'll completely ignore it. For example: "I'm going to buy some drugs today and maybe go for an overdose," will get you the following answer: "The kentia's going yellow at the tips of the leaves, too much water, not good at all."

With this we grasp the opening tenets of the paradigm: if you want to ruin your life by not listening to what other people are saying to you, look after houseplants. But that's not all. When Maman is squirting water onto the plants, I can plainly see the hope that fills her. She thinks it's a kind of balm that is going to penetrate the plant and bring it what it needs to prosper. It's the same thing with the fertilizer, which she gives them by means of little sticks in the soil (in the mixture of potting soil, compost, sand, and turf that she has made up specially for each individual plant at the nursery over at the Porte d'Auteuil). So, Maman feeds her plants the way she feeds her children: water and fertilizer for the kentia, green beans and vitamin C for us. That's the heart of the paradigm: concentrate on the object, convey all the nutritional elements from the outside to the inside and, as they make their way inside, they will cause the object to grow and prosper. A little "pschtt" on its leaves and there's the plant ready to go out into the world. You look at it with a mixture of anxiety and hope, you know how fragile life can be, you worry about accidents but, at the same time, you are satisfied with the knowledge that you've done what you were supposed to do, you've played your nurturing role: you feel rea.s.sured and, for a time, things feel safe. That's how Maman views life: a succession of conjuring acts, as useless as a "pschtt" with the spray gun, which provide a fleeting illusion of security.

It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, nor sustain our souls.

10. A Cat Called Roget.

Chabrot is ringing at my loge.

Chabrot is Pierre Arthens's personal physician. He is one of those aging-beau types who are always tanned, and he squirms in the presence of the Maitre like the worm he really is. In twenty years, he has never greeted me or even given the least sign that he was aware of my presence. An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptune's skull and bounce off that of Chabrot altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

But this morning Chabrot seems to have lost all his tan. His cheeks are drooping, his hand is trembling and as for his nose ... wet. Yes, wet. Chabrot, physician to the mighty, has a runny nose. And on top of it he is uttering my name.

"Madame Michel."

Perhaps it isn't Chabrot at all but some sort of extraterrestrial mutant a.s.sisted by intelligence services that leave something to desire, because the real Chabrot doesn't clutter his mind with information regarding subordinates who are, by definition, anonymous.

"Madame Michel," says Chabrot's flawed imitation, "Madame Michel."

Well, we'll find out. My name is Madame Michel.

"A terrible misfortune ... " continues Runny Nose who, gadzooks, is sniffling instead of blowing his nose.

Well I never. He's sniffling noisily, expediting his nasal runoff to a place it never came from, and I am obliged, by the speed of his gesture, to witness the feverish contractions of his Adam's apple working to a.s.sist the pa.s.sage of said nasal secretion. It is repulsive but above all disconcerting.

I look to the right, to the left. The hallway is deserted. If my ET has any hostile intentions, I am doomed.

He takes himself in hand, repeats himself.

"A terrible misfortune, yes, a terrible misfortune. Monsieur Arthens is dying."

"Dying? Actually dying?"

"Actually dying, Madame Michel, actually dying. He has forty-eight hours left to live."

"But I saw him yesterday morning, he was fit as a fiddle!" I am stunned.

"Alas, Madame, alas. When the heart gives way, it's like a bolt from the blue. In the morning you're hopping around like a mountain goat and in the evening you're in your tomb."

"Is he going to die at home, he's not going to the hospital?"

"Oh, Madame Michel!" exclaims Chabrot, looking at me with the same expression as Neptune when he's on his leash, "Who wants to die in the hospital?"

For the first time in twenty years I feel a vague flutter of sympathy for Chabrot. He is, after all, a human being too, I say to myself, and in the end, we are all alike.

"Madame Michel," he says again, and I am astounded by this profusion of Madame Michels after twenty years of nothing, "a great many people will no doubt want to see the Maitre before ... before. But he does not want to see anyone. With the exception of his nephew Paul. Would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?"

I am torn. I realize that, as usual, my presence has only been acknowledged for the purpose of giving me a task to do. But then again, I concede, that is why I am here. I have also noticed that Chabrot speaks in a manner that I find absolutely enthralling-would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?-and this troubles me. I do like this archaic, polite usage. I am a complete slave to vocabulary, I ought to have named my cat Roget. This fellow may be a nuisance but his language is delectable. And, finally, who wants to die in the hospital? asked the aging beau. No one. Not Pierre Arthens, nor Chabrot, nor Lucien, nor I. Chabrot, with his harmless question, has made us all human.

"I shall do what I can," I say. "But I cannot pursue them into the stairway either."

"No," he says, "but you can discourage them. Tell them the Maitre has locked his door."

And he gives me a strange look.

I must be careful, I must be very careful. I have been getting sloppy lately. There was the incident with the Pallieres boy, my preposterous mention of The German Ideology The German Ideology, which, if the youngster had had half the intelligence of an oyster, could easily have betrayed some very awkward things. And now we have a geriatric sun addict the color of toast who indulges in antiquated expressions and I am at his feet losing all my discipline.

I immediately wipe from my eyes the spark that had momentarily shone there, and adopt the gla.s.sy expression of the obedient concierge who is prepared to do her best even if she cannot pursue people into the stairway.

Chabrot's odd expression vanishes.

To further eradicate any trace of my lexical misdeeds, I allow myself a little heresy.

"Some sorta heart attack, huh?" I ask.

"Yes," says Chabrot, "a heart attack."

A moment of silence.

"Thank you," he says.

"Don't mention it," I reply, and close the door.

Profound Thought No. 5.

Life Everyone's Military service.

I am very proud of this profound thought. It came to me through Colombe. So at least once she will have been of some use in my life. I never thought I'd be able to say that before I die. am very proud of this profound thought. It came to me through Colombe. So at least once she will have been of some use in my life. I never thought I'd be able to say that before I die.

From the very start Colombe and I have been at war because as far as Colombe is concerned, life is a permanent battle where you can only win by destroying the other guy. She cannot feel safe if she hasn't crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. A world where there's room for other people is a dangerous world, according to her pathetic warmongering criteria. At the same time she still needs them just a bit, for a small but essential ch.o.r.e: someone, after all, has to recognize her power. So not only does she spend her time trying to crush me by every available means, but on top of it she would like me to tell her, while her sword is under my chin, that she is the greatest and that I love her. So there are days when she drives me absolutely crazy. And as for the frosting on the cake, for some obscure reason Colombe, who most of the time is totally insensitive to what's going on with other people, has figured out that what I dread more than anything else in life is noise. I think she discovered this by chance. It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not something Colombe is capable of understanding, because her inner s.p.a.ce is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside. But in any case she figured out that I need silence and, unfortunately, my room is next to hers. So all day long she makes noise. She shouts into the phone, she puts her music on really loud (and that really gets to me), she slams doors, gives a running commentary on everything she does, including the most fascinating things like brus.h.i.+ng her hair and looking for pencils in the drawer. In short, since she can't invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level, she invades my personal auditory s.p.a.ce, and ruins my life from morning to night. You really have to have a pretty impoverished concept of territory to stoop this low; I don't give a d.a.m.n about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind. But Colombe won't stop at just ignoring the facts; she converts them into philosophy: "My pest of a little sister is an intolerant and depressive little runt who hates other people and would rather live in a cemetery where everyone is dead-whereas I I am outgoing, joyful, and full of life." If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed. With Colombe, I've really lucked out. am outgoing, joyful, and full of life." If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed. With Colombe, I've really lucked out.

But for the last few months Colombe has not merely been content with being the most dreadful sister in the universe. She has also had the poor taste to behave in a way that worries everyone. I really don't need this: a hostile lesion of a sister and the spectacle of all her little woes. For the last few months Colombe has been obsessed with two things: order and cleanliness. The infinitely pleasant consequence? From the zombie that I used to be, I have become a dirty swine; she spends her time shouting at me because I left crumbs in the kitchen or because there was a hair in the shower this morning. Having said that, it's not just me she's after. Everybody is hara.s.sed from morning to night because there's mess or crumbs. Her room, which used to be the most incredible shambles, has become clinical: everything s.h.i.+pshape, not a speck of dust, every object has its allotted s.p.a.ce and woe befall Madame Gremond if once she's done the cleaning she doesn't put things back exactly where they were. It looks like a hospital. In a way it wouldn't bother me that Colombe has become such a neat freak. But what I cannot stand is that she goes on acting as if she's really laid back. There's a problem here somewhere but everyone pretends they haven't noticed and Colombe goes on claiming to be the only one of the two of us to take life "as an Epicurean." I a.s.sure you however that there is nothing the least bit Epicurean about taking three showers a day and shouting like a lunatic because the lamp on your night table has moved two inches.

What is Colombe's problem? I really don't know. Perhaps all this wanting to crush everyone has turned her into a soldier, quite literally. She wants everything just so, she scrubs and cleans as though she is in the army. Soldiers are obsessive about order and cleanliness, that's a well-known fact. For Colombe, cleanliness is a necessity, a way of combatting chaos, of holding at bay the filth of war and all those little shreds of human being it leaves behind. But in fact I wonder if Colombe is not the extreme case that reveals the norm. Don't we all deal with life the way we do our military service? Doing what we can, while we wait either to be demobbed or do battle? Some will clean up the barrack-room, others will s.h.i.+rk, or spend their time playing cards, or trafficking, or plotting something. Officers command, soldiers obey, but no one's fooled by this comedy behind closed doors: one day, you'll have to go out and die, officers and soldiers alike, the morons along with the wise guys who smuggle toilet paper or deal in cigarettes on the black market.

While I'm at it, let me give you the basic shrink's hypothesis: Colombe is so full of chaos inside, so empty and cluttered at the same time, that she is trying to create some order in herself by tidying up and cleaning her inner s.p.a.ce. Very funny, right? I figured out a long time ago that shrinks are comedians who believe that metaphors are something for great wise men. In fact, any sixth-grader can come up with one. But you should hear the scornful way Maman's friends who are shrinks laugh at the least little pun, and you should hear the absolutely idiotic things Maman tells us, too, because she tells everyone everything about her own sessions at the shrink's, as if she'd been to Disneyland: the "family life" show, the "my life with my mother" hall of mirrors, the "my life without my mother" roller coaster, the "my s.e.xual life" chamber of horrors (here she lowers her voice so I won't hear) and, in the end, for the tunnel of death, "my life as a pre-menopausal woman."

But what freaks me out about Colombe is that I often get the impression that she doesn't feel anything. Whenever she has to display some emotion it is such an act, so fake, that I wonder if she is feeling anything at all. Yes, sometimes that scares me. Maybe she's completely sick, maybe she's trying at any cost to feel something authentic, maybe she's going to commit some totally insane act. I can see the headlines from here: "Nero of the Rue de Grenelle: Young Woman Sets Fire to Family Apartment. Questioned on the Motive for Her Act, She Replied: I Wanted to Feel an Emotion."

Right, I know, I'm exaggerating a little. And I'm hardly the one to be denouncing pyromania. But still, when I heard her shouting her head off this morning because there was a cat hair on her green coat, I thought to myself, poor fool, the battle's lost before it's begun. You'd feel better if only you knew that.

11. The Rebellion of the Mongolian Tribes.

There is a quiet knock on the door of the loge. It's Manuela, she's just been given the rest of the day off. "The Maitre is dying," she says; I cannot tell whether she means to add a touch of irony to this echo of Chabrot's refrain. "You aren't busy? We would have our tea now?"

Manuela's casual disregard for synchronizing verb tenses, the way she uses a conditional interrogative without the proper word order, the way she can make free with her syntax because she is only a poor Portuguese woman forced into the language of exile, all have the same air of obsolescence about them as Chabrot's strict formulas.

"I met Laura in the stairs," she says as she sits down. "She was holding to the banister as if she needed to go to the toilet. When she saw me, she left."

Laura is the younger Arthens daughter, a nice girl who doesn't get many visits. Clemence, her older sister, is the awkward incarnation of frustration, a devout churchgoer who spends her time boring her husband and children with endless, mind-numbing days of holy ma.s.s, parish fetes, and cross-st.i.tch embroidery. But Jean, the youngest, is a drug addict, a sad wreck. He was a lovely child once, with wide eyes filled with wonder, who would trot along behind his father as if his life depended on it. But when he started using drugs the change was spectacular: he ceased to move. After a childhood wasted running after G.o.d in vain, he now seems to be tripping over his own legs, moving along in fits and starts, stopping in the stairs or outside the elevator or in the courtyard for increasingly lengthy spells, to the point of occasionally falling asleep on my doormat or in the garbage can room. One day he was stationed in a studied stupor above the bed of roses and dwarf camellias, so I asked him if he needed anything, and it occurred to me that he was beginning to look more and more like Neptune, with his tearful eyes, his damp, twitching nose, and his scruffy curly hair straying across his temples.

"Uh, uh no," he had replied, his words as detached and halting as his gestures.