The Elementary Particles (3 page)

5

It is the summer of 1968; Michel is ten years old. He has lived with his grandmother since he was three, in the village of Charny in the Yonne, near the border with the Loiret. Every morning he gets up early to make his grandmother’s breakfast. He has made a list: how long the tea should brew, how many slices of bread and butter and so on.

He often stays in his room all morning reading Jules Verne,
Pif le chien
or
The Famous Five,
but he spends most of his time poring over a magazine he collects,
The Universe Explained
. There are articles about the structure of the elements, about how clouds form and bees swarm. He reads about the Taj Mahal, a palace built by an ancient king to honor his dead queen; about the death of Socrates; about Euclid’s invention of geometry three thousand years ago.

In the afternoon, sitting in the garden with his back to the cherry tree, he can feel the springiness of the grass and the heat of the sun. The lettuces soak up the sun’s rays and water from the ground. He has to water them when it gets dark. He sits in the garden reading
The Universe Explained,
or one of the books in a series called
One Hundred Facts About
. . . He absorbs knowledge.

Sometimes he cycles cross-country, pedaling as hard as he can, filling his lungs with a taste of the infinite. He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief. The countryside streams past.

. . .

There is nothing left in Charny but a small grocer’s shop. Every Wednesday, though, the butcher’s van comes around; the fishmonger’s every Friday. His grandmother often makes creamed cod for lunch on Saturday. Michel does not know that this is his last summer in Charny. His grandmother suffered a heart attack some months ago, and her daughters are already looking for a house in the suburbs of Paris where she can be closer to them. She is not strong enough to cope on her own anymore, nor to tend the garden all year long.

Though Michel rarely plays with boys his own age, he gets along with his peers well enough. They consider him a bit of a loner. His schoolwork is excellent—he seems to understand everything effortlessly—and he is first in all his classes. Naturally, his grandmother is very proud. Yet he is neither bullied nor hated by his classmates; he is happy to let them copy his work in class, always waiting for the boy next to him to finish before turning the page. Despite his excellent academic record, he always sits at the back of the class. His is a fragile kingdom.

6

One summer while he was still living in the Yonne, Michel spent an afternoon running through the fields with his cousin Brigitte. A pretty, gentle girl of sixteen, she some years later would marry a complete bastard. It was the summer of 1967. She grabbed his hands, swinging him round and round until they collapsed in a heap on the freshly mown grass. He pressed himself into her warm breast; she was wearing a short skirt. Next morning they were covered in spots and itched all over.

Thrombidium holosericum,
also called the chigger, is plentiful in summer meadows. Two millimeters in diameter, with a fat, fleshy, bright red body, it embeds its beak in the skin of mammals, causing unbearable itching.
Linguatula rhinaria,
or tongue worm, is a parasite which lives in the frontal and maxillary sinuses of dogs and, occasionally, humans. The larva is oval and has a short tail and a sharp spike near the mouth; two pairs of limbs are armed with long claws. The body of the adult is between eighteen and eighty-five millimeters long, flat, ribbed, translucent and covered in barbed spines.

In December 1968 Michel’s grandmother moved to Seine-et-Marne to be closer to her daughters. Michel’s daily life changed little at first. Fifty kilometers from Paris, Crécy-en-Brie was a still pretty country village; its old and dignified houses had been painted by Corot. Tourist brochures referred to it, hopefully, as “Venice on the Brie,” a reference to the network of canals that brought water from the Grand Morin. Few villagers commuted to Paris, most working for local businesses or in nearby Meaux.

Two months after the move, at a time when advertising had barely begun on France’s then only channel, his grandmother bought a television. And so, on 21 July 1969, Michel was able to watch the first steps of man on the moon, live. Six hundred million people across the world watched with him. The broadcast, which lasted three or four hours, probably represents the culmination of the first stage of the great Western technological dream.

Though he joined the local school in Crécy in midterm, Michel adapted quickly and had no difficulty passing his end-of-year exams. Every Thursday he bought
Pif,
newly relaunched, with its free “gadget” every week. Unlike most children his age, he did not buy it for the gadget but for the adventure stories. Through a dazzling sweep of history and costume these tales played out some simple moral values. Michel slowly realized that this moral system ran through all the stories: “Ragnar the Viking”; “Teddy Ted and the Apache”; “Rahan, Son of a Savage Age”; and “Nasdine Hodja,” who duped viziers and caliphs. It was a realization that would profoundly affect him. Later, reading Nietzsche provoked only a brief irritation, and Kant served only to confirm what he already knew: that perfect morality is unique and universal. Nothing is added to it and nothing changes over the course of time. It is not dependent on history, economics, sociology or culture; it is not dependent on anything. Not determined, it determines; not conditioned, it conditions. It is, in other words, absolute.

Everyday morality is always a blend, variously proportioned, of perfect morality and other more ambiguous ideas, for the most part religious. The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.

Michel liked all of the heroes in
Pif,
but his favorite was Black Wolf, the Lone Indian. He was a synthesis of the noblest qualities of the Apache, the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Black Wolf roamed the prairies ceaselessly with his horse Chinook and his wolf Toopee, instinctively coming to the aid of the weak. Black Wolf continually commented on the transcendent ethic which underpinned his actions. Often, he referred to poetic proverbs from the Lakota and the Cree; sometimes, more prosaically, to the “law of the prairie.” Years later, Michel still considered him Kant’s ideal hero: always acting “as if he were by his maxims a legitimating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” Some episodes—like “The Leather Bracelet,” in which the extraordinary character of the old Cheyenne chief searches for the stars—broke free of the straitjacket of the “adventure story” for a world that was more poetic, more moral.

He was less interested in television. Every week, however, his heart in his mouth, he watched
The Animal Kingdom
. Graceful animals like gazelles and antelopes spent their days in abject terror while lions and panthers lived out their lives in listless imbecility punctuated by explosive bursts of cruelty. They slaughtered weaker animals, dismembered and devoured the sick and the old before falling back into a brutish sleep where the only activity was that of the parasites feeding on them from within. Some of these parasites were hosts to smaller parasites, which in turn were a breeding ground for viruses. Snakes moved among the trees, their fangs bared, ready to strike at bird or mammal, only to be ripped apart by hawks. The pompous, half-witted voice of Claude Darget, filled with awe and unjustifiable admiration, narrated these atrocities. Michel trembled with indignation. But as he watched, the unshakable conviction grew that nature, taken as a whole, was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.

In April 1970
Pif
gave away a free gift which was to become famous: Sea Monkeys. Each copy came with a sachet of
poudre de vie
—the eggs of a tiny marine crustacean,
Artemia salina,
which had spent thousands of years in suspended animation. The process of bringing them back to life was complicated: water had to be allowed to settle for three days, then warmed. Only then was the powder added and the water stirred gently. In the days that followed, the bowl had to be kept near a source of light; warm water had to be added regularly to compensate for evaporation and the water stirred to keep it oxygenated. Some weeks later, the bowl was swarming with a multitude of translucent crustaceans, indisputably alive if faintly revolting. Not knowing what to do with them, Michel ended up tipping them into the river Morin.

The complete adventure story in the same issue concerned the boyhood of Rahan, and told how he had come to his vocation as a lone hero in Palaeolithic Europe. When still a child, he had seen his tribe wiped out by an erupting volcano. As he knelt by his dying father, Crâo the Wise, the old man gave him a necklace of three hawk’s talons. Each talon symbolized one of the qualities of “those who walked upright”—the first loyalty, the second courage and the third, and most important, kindness. Rahan had worn the necklace ever since, always trying to prove himself worthy of it.

In the long narrow garden of the house in Crécy was a cherry tree only slightly smaller than the one in Michel’s garden in the Yonne. There he would sit and read
The Universe Explained
and
A Hundred Facts About . . .
For his twelfth birthday, his grandmother gave him “My First Chemistry Set.” Chemistry was mysterious and strange; it was much more exciting than mechanics or electricity. Each substance came in a separate tube. Each had its own color and texture, elements forever distinct from each other, but simply juxtaposing them could produce violent reactions, which in a flash could create some new substance.

As he was reading in the garden one afternoon in July, Michel realized that the chemical bases of life could’ve been completely different. Atoms with identical valency but higher atomic weight could have taken the place of the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen which made up all living things. On another planet, with different temperature and atmospheric pressure, the stuff of life could be silicon, sulfur and phosphorus; or germanium, selenium and arsenic; or even tin, tellurium and antimony. He had no one he could really talk to about these things. At his request, his grandmother bought him several books on biochemistry.

7

Bruno’s earliest memory was one of humiliation. He was four years old and attending the Parc Laperlier nursery school in Algiers. It was an autumn afternoon and the teacher had shown the boys how to make necklaces out of leaves. The girls, most of them in white dresses, sat on a small bank watching, their faces already betraying a hint of dumb female resignation. The ground was strewn with golden leaves, mostly chestnut and plane. One after another, his friends finished their necklaces and went to place them around the necks of their little girlfriends, but he could not seem to finish his. The leaves broke and crumbled in his hands. How could he tell them that he, too, needed love? How could he let them know without a necklace? He started to cry with rage, yet the teacher did not come to help. Class had finished, and the children stood up and began to file out of the park. The nursery school closed shortly afterward.

His grandparents lived in a beautiful apartment on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet. Like many in the center of Algiers, it was designed in the bourgeois style of the great Haussmann buildings in Paris. A central hall, twenty meters long, ran the length of the apartment, ending in a drawing room from whose balcony the whole of the “White City” was at one’s feet. Many years later, when Bruno was already an embittered middle-aged cynic, he could still remember himself, aged four, pedaling furiously down the dark hallway toward the shimmering portal of the balcony. It was at moments like this that he had come closest to true happiness.

His grandfather died in 1962. In temperate climates, the body of a bird or mammal first attracts specific species of flies (
Musca, Curtoneura
), but once decomposition sets in, these are joined by others, particularly
Calliphora
and
Lucilia
. Under the combined action of bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by the larvae, the corpse begins to liquefy and becomes a ferment of butyric and ammoniac reactions. In three short months, the flies will have completed their work. They are succeeded by hordes of coleoptera, specifically
Dermestes,
and lepidoptera like
Aglossa pinguinalis,
which feed on fatty tissue. Larvae of the
Piophila petasionis
feed on the fermenting proteins with other coleoptera called
Corynetes
.

The now-decomposed cadaver becomes a host to
Acaridae,
which absorb the last traces of residual moisture. Desiccated and mummified, the corpse still harbors parasites, the larvae of beetles,
Aglossa cuprealis
and
Tineola biselliella
maggots, which complete the cycle.

Bruno could still see the beautiful deep black coffin with a silver cross. It was a soothing, even happy image: he knew his grandfather would be at peace in such a magnificent coffin. He did not learn about
Acaridae
and the host of parasites with names like Italian film stars until later. But even now the image of his grandfather’s coffin remained a happy one.

He remembered his grandmother, sitting on a suitcase in the middle of the kitchen on the day they arrived in Marseilles. Cockroaches scuttled between the cracks in the tiles. It was probably then that she began to lose her mind. The litany of troubles in those few short weeks had overwhelmed her: the slow agony of her husband’s death, the hurried departure from Algiers and the arduous search for an apartment, finding one at last in a filthy housing project in the northeast of Marseilles. She had never set foot in France before. Her daughter had deserted her, and hadn’t even attended her father’s funeral. Deep down, Bruno’s grandmother felt certain there had been a mistake. Someone, somewhere, had made a dreadful mistake.

She picked herself up and carried on for another five years. She bought new furniture, set up a bed in the dining room for Bruno and enrolled him in a local primary school. Every afternoon she came to collect him. He was ashamed of the small, frail, shriveled woman who took his hand to lead him home. All the other children had parents; divorce was still rare in those days.

At night she would replay her life over and over, trying to discover how it had ended like this. She rarely managed to find sleep before dawn. The apartment had low ceilings and, in the summer, the rooms were stuffy and unbearably hot. During the day she puttered around in old slippers, talking to herself without realizing it. Sometimes she would repeat a sentence fifty times. Her daughter’s memory haunted her: “Her own father’s funeral and she didn’t come.” She went from one room to another carrying a washrag or a saucepan whose purpose she had already forgotten. “Her own father’s funeral . . . Her own father’s funeral.” Her slippers scuffled on the tiled floors. Terrified, Bruno curled himself into a ball in his bed. He knew things could only get worse. Sometimes she would get up early, still in dressing gown and curlers, and whisper to herself, “Algeria is French,” and then the scuffling would begin. She walked back and forth in the tiny two-room apartment staring at some fixed, faraway point. “France . . . France . . .” she repeated slowly, her voice dying away.

She had always been a good cook; here it became her only pleasure. She would cook lavish meals for Bruno, as though entertaining a party of ten: peppers marinated in olive oil, anchovies, potato salad; sometimes there would be five hors d’oeuvres before a main course of stuffed zucchini or rabbit with olives, from time to time a couscous. The one thing she had never succeeded in mastering was baking, but every week when she collected her pension she would bring home pastries, boxes of nougat, candied chestnuts and almond cakes. As time went by, Bruno became a fat, fearful child. She herself ate little or nothing.

On Sunday mornings she would sleep in, and Bruno would climb into her bed and press himself against her emaciated body. Sometimes he dreamed of getting up in the night, taking a knife and stabbing her through the heart; he could see himself break down in tears beside the body. In his imagination, he always died soon after her.

Late in 1966 she received a letter from her daughter. Bruno’s father—with whom she still exchanged cards at Christmas—had given her their address in Marseilles. In the letter, Janine expressed no real regret about the past, which she mentioned in the following sentence: “I heard Daddy died and you moved to France.” She explained that she was leaving California and returning to the south of France. She gave no forwarding address.

One morning in March 1967, while making deep-fried zucchini, the old woman knocked over the pan of boiling oil. She managed to drag herself into the hallway, where her screams alerted the neighbors. When Bruno came home from school, Madame Haouzi, who lived upstairs, met him at the door. She took him to the hospital, where for a few minutes he was allowed to see his grandmother. Her burns were hidden beneath the sheets. She had been given a great deal of morphine, but she recognized Bruno and took his hand in hers. Some minutes later the child was led away. Her heart gave out later that night.

For the second time, Bruno found himself face to face with death, and for a second time he almost completely failed to grasp its significance. Years later, when he was praised for a composition or a history essay, his first thought was to tell his grandmother. He would remember, then, that she was dead, but only rarely did he face this fact; it did not interrupt the dialogue between them. When offered a place at the university to study modern literature, he discussed this with her, though by now he was losing faith. He had bought two boxes of candied chestnuts for the occasion, which proved to be their last major conversation. Once he’d completed his studies and taken his first teaching job, he realized something had changed: he could not reach her anymore. The image of his grandmother dissolved and disappeared.

On the morning after her funeral he witnessed something strange. His father and mother—neither of whom he had seen before—were discussing what should be done with him. They were in the main room of the Marseilles apartment; Bruno sat on his bed and listened. To hear other people talk about him was disconcerting, especially as they seemed completely oblivious to his presence. He could almost forget that he was there—not an unpleasant feeling. Though the conversation was to have a profound impact on his life, at the time what they were saying did not seem to concern him directly. Later, when he thought about the conversation, as he often did, he felt nothing. As he sat listening to them that day, he could feel no link, no physical connection between himself and these two impossibly tall and youthful people.

It was decided that he should be enrolled at boarding school in September. He would spend weekends with his father in Paris. His mother would try to take him on vacation from time to time. Bruno did not object: these people did not seem hostile. In any case, his real life was the one he had shared with his grandmother.