Slowness (6 page)

As he speaks these last words, he feels tears welling in his eyes. That bothers him a little, he

sees again the image of his father, who as an old man was continually in an emotional state and wept at every turn, but then he says to himself, why not let go for once: these people should feel honored by his emotion, which he proffers them like a little gift from Prague.

He is not mistaken. The audience too is moved. Hardly has he pronounced the final word than Berck rises and applauds. The camera is there in an instant, it films Berck’s face, his hands applauding, and it films the Czech scientist as well. The entire room rises, slowly or swiftly, faces smiling or serious, everyone is clapping, and they enjoy it so much that they do not know when to stop; the Czech scientist stands before them, tall, very tall, awkwardly tall, and the more awkwardness radiates from his figure, the more he is touching and feels touched, so that his tears no longer hide beneath his eyelids but roll solemnly down around his nose, toward his mouth, toward his chin, in full sight of all his colleagues, who start applauding still harder, if possible.

Finally, the ovation thins, people sit back down, and the Czech scientist says in a trembling voice: “I thank you, my friends, I thank you with all my

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heart.” He bows and moves toward his place. And he knows that right now he is living the greatest moment of his life, the moment of glory, yes, of glory, why not say the word, he feels grand and beautiful, he feels famous, and he wants his walk to his seat to be long and never-ending.

chairman coughs and says: “I thank Monsieur Tchecochipi … [he waits a good moment to give the guest a last chance to remember on his own] … and I call on the next speaker.” At this point, the silence is briefly broken by a muffled laugh at the far end of the room.

Immersed in his thoughts, the Czech scientist hears neither the laugh nor his colleague’s paper. Other speakers follow, until a Belgian scientist, who like him works on flies, awakens him from his meditation: good Lord, he forgot to give his paper! He puts his hand in his pocket, the five sheets are there as proof that he is not dreaming.

His cheeks are burning. He feels ridiculous. Can he still retrieve something of the situation? No, he knows he cannot retrieve anything at all.

After a few moments of shame, a strange idea comes to console him: it’s true he is ridiculous; but there is nothing negative, nothing shameful or disagreeable, in that; the ridiculousness that has befallen him intensifies still more the inherent melancholy of his life, renders his destiny still sadder, and hence still grander and more beautiful.

No, pride will never desert the melancholy of the Czech scientist.

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As he went to his seat, silence reigned in the room. Perhaps it would be more precise to say several silences reigned. The scientist discerned only one: the emotional silence. He did not realize that, gradually, like an imperceptible modulation that moves a sonata from one key to another, the emotional silence had changed into an uneasy silence. Everyone had understood that this gentleman with an unpronounceable name was so moved by himself that he had forgotten to read the paper that was supposed to inform them of his discoveries of new flies. And everyone knew it would have been impolite to remind him of it. After a lengthy hesitation, the conference

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telling you that my girlfriend keeps wanting me to get rough with her.” This time around, everyone is listening to him, and Vincent does not make the mistake of pausing; he talks faster and faster, as if to keep ahead of someone chasing after him to interrupt him: “But I can’t do it, I’m too nice, you know?” and in response to these words he himself starts laughing. Seeing that his laughter is unechoed, he hurries to go on and speeds up his delivery still more: “A young typist often comes to my house, I dictate to her. …”

“Does she use a computer?” asks a man, suddenly taking an interest.

“Yes,” Vincent answers.

“What make?”

Vincent names a make. The man owns a different one, and he starts telling stories about what he has gone through with his computer, which has picked up the habit of playing dirty tricks on him. Everyone is chuckling, and now and then they guffaw.

And Vincent sadly recalls an old idea of his: people always think that a man’s fortunes are more or less determined by his appearance, by the beauty or ugliness of his face, by his size, by

Every meeting has its deserters who gather in an adjoining room to drink. Vincent, who is weary of listening to the entomologists and was not sufficiently entertained by the Czech scientist’s odd performance, turns up in the lobby with the other deserters, around a long table near the bar.

After sitting silent for quite a while, he manages to start a conversation with some strangers: “I have a girlfriend who wants me to get rough.”

When it was Pontevin saying that, he paused there for a moment, during which his entire audience fell into an attentive silence. Vincent tries to effect the same pause, and, indeed, he hears laughter, great laughter, rising up: that encourages him, his eyes gleam, he signals with his hand to calm his audience, but just then he registers that they are all looking toward the other end of the table, entertained by the altercation between two gentlemen calling each other names.

After a minute or two, he manages again to make himself heard: “I was in the middle of

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his hair or lack of it. Wrong. It is the voice that decides it all. And Vincent’s is feeble and too piercing; when he starts to talk no one notices, so that he has to force it, and then everyone has the impression he is shouting. Pontevin, by contrast, speaks with utter softness, and his deep voice resounds, pleasing, beautiful, powerful, so that everyone listens only to him.

Ah, that damned Pontevin. He had promised to come with Vincent to the conference and bring the whole gang and then he lost interest, true to his nature, with its tendency toward talk over actions. From one standpoint, Vincent was disappointed, from the other he felt more than ever obliged not to fail the command of his teacher, who on the eve of Vincent’s departure had said: “You’ll have to represent all of us. I give you full power to act in our name, for our common cause.” Of course, it was a joke command, but the gang of cronies at the Cafe Gascon is convinced that in the senseless world we live in, only joke commands deserve obedience. In his mind’s eye, alongside the head of the subtle Pontevin, Vincent could see Machu’s enormous mug grinning approval. Fortified by that message and that grin, he decides to take

action; he looks around him, and in the group clustered at the bar, he sees a girl he likes.

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The entomologists are strange boors: they are neglecting the girl even though she is listening to them with the best will in the world, prepared to laugh when she should and to look serious when they indicate. Clearly, she knows none of the men here, and her diligent reactions, which go unnoticed, are cover for a soul struck shy. Vincent gets up from the table, approaches the group the girl is in, and speaks to her. Soon they move apart from the others and grow absorbed in a conversation that proves easy and limitless from the start. Her name is Julie, she is a typist, she did a little job for the chairman of the entomologists; free since the afternoon, she took the opportunity to spend the evening in this famous chateau among people who intimidate her but who also excite her curiosity, since until yesterday she had never seen an entomologist. Vincent feels comfortable with her, he

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doesn’t need to raise his voice, indeed he lowers it to keep the others from hearing them. Then he draws her over to a little table where they can sit side by side, and he lays his hand over hers.

“You know,” he says, “everything depends on the power of the voice. It’s more important than having a good-looking face.”

“Your voice is lovely.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But weak.”

“That’s what’s nice about it. My voice is awful, grating, croaking, like an old crow, don’t you think?”

“No,” says Vincent with a certain tenderness, “I love your voice, it’s provocative, irreverent.”

“You think?”

“Your voice is like you!” Vincent says fondly. “You’re irreverent and provocative yourself!”

Julie, who loves hearing what Vincent is telling her: “Yes, I think that’s so.”

“These people are jerks,” says Vincent.

She so agrees: “Absolutely.”

“Show-offs. Bourgeois. Did you see Berck? What a moron!”

She agrees absolutely. These people behaved to her as if she were invisible, and anything she can hear against them gives her pleasure, she feels avenged. Vincent seems more and more appealing, he’s a good-looking fellow, cheerful and unaffected, and he is not a show-off at all.

“I feel,” says Vincent, “like raising some real hell here____”

That sounds good: like a promise of mutiny. Julie smiles, she feels like applauding.

“I’m going to get you a whisky!” he tells her, and he sets off to the other end of the lobby, toward the bar.

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Meanwhile, the chairman closes the conference, the participants noisily leave the room, and the lobby immediately fills up. Berck approaches the Czech scientist. “I was most moved by your …” he hesitates purposely, to make clear how hard it is to find a term delicate enough to describe the genre of speech the Czech had made, “… by

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your … testimony. We tend to forget too quickly. Fd like to assure you that I have been extremely sensitive to what was happening in your country. You people were the pride of Europe, which hasn’t many reasons of its own to be proud.”

The Czech scientist makes a vague gesture of protest to indicate his modesty.

“No, don’t protest,” continues Berck. “I’m determined to say it. You, you especially, the intellectuals of your country, by your determined resistance to Communist oppression, you’ve shown the courage we often lack, you’ve shown such a thirst for freedom, I would even say such daring for freedom, that you’ve become an example to us. Besides,” he adds, to give his words a touch of the informal, a sign of partnership, “Budapest is a magnificent, vital city and, allow me to emphasize the point, utterly European.”

“You mean Prague?” the Czech scientist asks timidly.

Ah, damn geography! Berck realizes that geography has led him to commit a small error, and mastering his irritation in the face of his colleague’s tactlessness, he says: “Of course I mean Prague, but I also mean Cracow, I mean Sofia, I

mean Saint Petersburg, I have in mind all those cities of the East that have just emerged from an enormous concentration camp.”

“Don’t say ‘concentration camp.’ We often lost our jobs, but we weren’t in camps.”

“All the countries of the East were covered with camps, my good fellow! Real or symbolic camps, it doesn’t matter!”

“And don’t say ‘the East,’” the Czech scientist goes on with his objections: “Prague, as you know, is as Western a city as Paris. Charles University, which was founded in the fourteenth century, was the first university in the Holy Roman Empire. It was there, as of course you know, that Jan Hus taught, Luther’s precursor, the great reformer of the Church and of orthography.”

What kind of fly has bitten the Czech scientist? He just doesn’t stop correcting his interlocutor, who is enraged by it, although he manages to preserve some warmth in his voice: “My dear colleague, don’t be ashamed of coming from the East. France has the warmest feelings for the East. Look at your nineteenth-century emigration!”

“We had no nineteenth-century emigration.”

“What about Mickiewicz? I am proud that he should have found his second homeland in France!”

“But Mickiewicz wasn’t…” the Czech scientist keeps objecting.

Just then Immaculata arrives on the scene; she makes some vigorous signals to her cameraman and then, with a wave of her hand, moves the Czech to one side, installs herself in front of Berck, and addresses him: “Jacques-Alain Berck…”

The cameraman sets the camera back on his shoulder: “Just a minute!”

Immaculata breaks off, looks at the cameraman, and then again at Berck: “Jacques-Alain Berck…”’

to her for ridding him of the exotic pedant, he even gives her a vague smile.

Heartened, she takes a cheerful and conspicuously familiar tone: “Jacques-Alain Berck, here in this gathering of entomologists, a family you belong to through the coincidences in your destiny, you’ve just lived through some emotional moments … ,” and she thrusts the microphone at his mouth.

Berck answers like a schoolboy: “Yes, we are privileged to welcome here among us a great Czech entomologist who instead of devoting himself to his profession has had to spend his whole life in prison. We were all moved by his presence.”

Being a dancer is not only a passion, it is also a road one can never again turn off from; when Duberques humiliated him after the lunch with the AIDS people, Berck went to Somalia not through a surge of vanity but because he felt obliged to make up for a botched dance step. Right now he senses the insipid quality of his remarks, he knows they lack something, a touch of salt, some unexpected idea, a surprise. So, instead of stopping, he goes on talking until he sees, coming toward him from afar, a better

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When, an hour earlier, Berck saw Immaculata and her cameraman in the conference room, he thought he would howl with fury. But now the irritation caused by the Czech scientist has outstripped the one caused by Immaculata; grateful

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inspiration: “And I take this opportunity to announce my proposal to establish a Franco-Czech Entomological Association. [Himself surprised by this idea, he immediately feels much better.] I’ve just discussed this with my colleague from Prague [he gestures vaguely toward the Czech scientist], who has declared himself delighted with the idea of ornamenting this association with the name of a great exiled poet of the last century who will forever symbolize the friendship between our two peoples. Mickiewicz. Adam Mickiewicz. The life of this poet stands as a lesson that will remind us that everything we do, be it poetry or science, is a revolt. [The word “revolt” puts him definitively back in fine form.] For man is always in revolt [now he’s really splendid and he knows it], isn’t that so, my friend? [He turns to the Czech scientist, who immediately appears within the camera frame and tilts his head as if to say “yes.”] You have proved this by your life, by your sacrifices, by your sufferings, yes, you confirm my belief that any man worthy of the name is always in revolt, in revolt against oppression, and if there is oppression no more … [a long pause, Pontevin