The Elementary Particles (4 page)

8

THE OMEGA MALE

Bruno leans against the sink. He has taken off his pajama top, and the folds of his pale stomach press against the cold porcelain. He is eleven years old. About to brush his teeth, as he does every night, he hopes to get out of the bathroom without anything happening. When Wilmart comes up from behind and pushes him, Bruno backs away, trembling; he knows what will happen next. “Leave me alone,” he says feebly.

Now Pelé also comes over. He is short, stocky and very strong. He slaps Bruno hard and the boy starts to cry. They push him to the ground, grab his feet and drag him across the floor to the toilets. They rip off his pajama bottoms. His penis is hairless, still that of a child. The two hold him by the hair and force his mouth open. Pelé takes a toilet brush and scrubs Bruno’s face. He can taste shit. He screams.

Brasseur joins the others; at fourteen, he is the oldest boy in the
sixième
. He takes out his prick, which to Bruno seems huge, then stands over the boy and pisses on his face. The night before he’d forced Bruno to suck him off and lick his ass, but he doesn’t feel like it tonight. “This’ll put hair on your chest,” he jokes, “and your balls.” He nods and the others spread shaving cream on his genitals. Brasseur opens a straight razor and brings the blade close. Terrified, Bruno shits himself.

. . .

One night in March 1968, a prefect found him curled up on the floor of the toilets in the courtyard, naked and covered in shit. He found a pair of pajamas for the boy and took him to see Cohen, the housemaster. Bruno was terrified of being forced to squeal on Brasseur, but Cohen was calm, though he’d been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. Unlike the prefects who reported to him, he treated the boys with the same respect he extended to his colleagues. This was his third boarding school and certainly not the toughest. He knew that victims almost always refused to inform on their tormentors. The only thing he could do was penalize the prefect in charge of the
sixième
dormitory. Most of the boys were ignored by their parents, making Cohen the sole authority figure in their lives. He tried to keep a close eye on his pupils and preempt trouble, but with only five prefects for two hundred boys, this was impossible. After Bruno left he made himself a cup of coffee and leafed through his files. Though he could prove nothing, he knew the culprits were Pelé and Brasseur. If he caught them, he would have them expelled. One or two cruel elements were enough to reduce the others to a state of savagery. In early adolescence, boys can be particularly savage; they gang up and are only too eager to torture and humiliate the weak. Cohen had no illusions about the depths to which the human animal could sink when not constrained by law. He had built a fearsome reputation since his arrival at the school in Meaux. He knew he represented the ultimate sanction, without which the treatment meted out to boys like Bruno would know no bounds.

Bruno was happy to repeat a year, since Pelé, Brasseur and Wilmart had graduated to the
cinquième
and would be in a different dormitory. Unfortunately, a ministerial directive taken after the riots of 1968 introduced an autodisciplinary system in boarding schools and a reduction in staffing. The decision was very much of its time, and resulted in considerable savings in salaries. It became easier for pupils to move about at night, and soon the bullies took to staging raids on the younger boys’ dormitories at least once a week. They would bring one or two victims back to the
cirquième
dormitory, where the ceremonies would begin. Toward the end of December, Jean-Michel Kempf, a nervous, skinny boy who had arrived earlier that year, threw himself out the window to escape his tormentors. The boy was lucky to escape with multiple fractures; the fall easily could’ve been fatal. His ankle was badly broken, and though surgeons worked hard to reassemble the bone fragments, he would be crippled for the rest of his life.

Cohen organized an inquiry, which confirmed his suspicions; and despite the boy’s protestations of innocence, he suspended Pelé for three days.

For the most part, animal societies are structured according to a hierarchy in which rank relates directly to the physical strength of each member. The most dominant male in the group is known as the
alpha male,
his nearest rival the
beta male,
and so on down to the weakest of the group, the
omega male
. Combat rituals generally determine status within the group; weaker animals try to better their position by challenging those above them. A dominant position confers certain privileges: first to feed and to couple with females in the group. The weakest animal, however, can generally avoid combat by adopting such submissive postures as crouching or presenting the rump.

Bruno, however, found himself in a less auspicious position. While dominance and brutality are commonplace in the animal kingdom, among higher primates, notably the chimpanzee (
Pan troglodytes
), weaker animals suffer acts of gratuitous cruelty. This tendency is at its greatest in primitive human societies and among children and adolescents in developed societies.
Compassion,
the capacity to identify with the suffering of others, develops later; this is quickly systematized into a
moral order.
At the boarding school in Meaux, Jean Cohen personified that moral order and did not intend to deviate from it. He did not believe that the Nazis had perverted Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Cohen’s opinion, the ideas manifest in Nietzsche’s philosophy—the rejection of compassion, the elevation of individuals above the moral order and the triumph of the will—led directly to Nazism. Given his qualifications and his time at the school, Cohen could have been headmaster; he remained a housemaster by choice. He wrote repeatedly to the Ministry of Education to complain about the cutback in boarding school staff, but received no reply.

In captivity, a male kangaroo—
Macropus—
will often interpret the zookeeper’s upright posture as a threat. If the keeper hunches his shoulders, adopting the nonaggressive stance of a peaceful kangaroo, the animal’s violent impulse is defused. Jean Cohen did not intend to become a peaceful kangaroo. The savagery of Michel Brasseur, a normal stage in the development of the ego even in lesser animals, had crippled one of his classmates; boys like Bruno would probably be psychologically scarred for life. When he summoned Brasseur to his office, he fully intended to make his contempt obvious, to let the boy know he was about to be expelled.

On Sunday evenings, when his father drove him back in the Mercedes, Bruno would start to tremble as they reached the outskirts of Nanteuil-les-Meaux. The school hall was decorated with bas-reliefs of illustrious former pupils: Courteline and Moissan. Georges Courteline was a French writer whose stories parodied the absurdities of the bourgeoisie. Henri Moissan, a chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906, had isolated silicon and fluorine, and pioneered the use of the electric oven. Bruno’s father always arrived just in time for dinner at seven o’clock. Bruno usually only managed to eat at lunchtime, when they ate with the day pupils. At dinner only the boarders were present; they sat in groups of eight, with a senior at the head of each table. The seniors served themselves and then spat into the bowl so the younger boys wouldn’t touch it.

Every Sunday, Bruno tried to talk to his father, and each time he decided it was hopeless. His father believed it was good for a boy to learn to defend himself; and it was true that other boys—some no older than Bruno—fought back. They kicked and punched until, eventually, they earned the respect of their elders.

At forty-two, Serge Clément was a success. While his parents ran a small grocer’s shop in Petit-Clamart, Serge already owned three clinics specializing in plastic surgery—one in Neuilly, another in Vésinet and a third near Lausanne in Switzerland. When his ex-wife left to live in California, he had taken over the management of the clinic in Cannes, sending her half of the profits. He had not done any surgical work for some time but was, as they say, “a good manager.” He didn’t really know how to behave with his son, though. He wanted to do his best for the boy, as long as it did not require too much of his time; and he felt a certain guilt. He usually would arrange not to see his girlfriends when Bruno came for the weekend. He bought prepared meals from the delicatessen and they ate together, then watched television. Serge had no idea how to play games. Sometimes Bruno would get up in the middle of the night and go to the fridge. He would pour cornflakes into a bowl, add milk and cream and a thick layer of sugar. Then he would eat. He would eat bowl after bowl of cornflakes until he felt sick. His stomach felt heavy. He felt almost happy.

9

From a moral standpoint, 1970 was marked by a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic, despite the intervention of vigilant censors. The musical
Hair,
which was to bring the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s to the general public, was a huge success. Bare breasts spread quickly across the beaches of the Riviera. In a few short months, the number of sex shops in Paris leapt from three to forty-five.

In September, Michel started the
quatrième
and took German as his second language. It was in German class that he met Annabelle.

At the time, Michel had only the most modest idea of what happiness might be. In fact, he had never thought about it. His views were those of his grandmother, who had instilled them in her children. His grandmother was Catholic and voted for de Gaulle; both her daughters had married communists, but this had not changed her view of the world. She was of the generation who as children had suffered the hardships of war and then, at twenty, celebrated the Liberation. These are the ideas they wished to bequeath to their children: a woman stays at home and does the housework (her work made easier by a variety of electrical appliances, allowing her plenty of time to spend with her children). A man goes off to his job but, thanks to automation, works shorter hours, and his work is less arduous. Couples are happy and faithful; they live in a nice house in the suburbs
.
In their spare time, they may enjoy gardening and crafts and appreciate the arts, or they may prefer to travel and discover other countries, other cultures, other lifestyles.

Jacob Wilkening was born in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands. He arrived in France at the age of four, and had only a vague recollection of his Dutch childhood. In 1946 he married the sister of one of his best friends. She was seventeen years old, and had never been with a man. He worked for a time in a factory making microscopes before setting up his own business crafting precision lenses, principally subcontracting for Angénieux and Pathé. The business flourished. There was no competition from Japan in those days, and France produced lenses that were the equal of Schneider and Zeiss. The couple had two sons, born in 1948 and 1951, and, much later, in 1958, a daughter, Annabelle.

Born into a happy family—in the twenty-five years they had been married, her parents had never had a serious argument—Annabelle knew that she was destined for the same. She began to think about such things the summer before she met Michel, when she was going on thirteen. Somewhere in the world was a boy she had never met, a boy who knew nothing about her, but with whom she would spend the rest of her life. She would try to make him happy, and he would try to make her happy as well. But she was disturbed that she didn’t have the slightest idea what he would look like. A girl her age had expressed the same concern in a letter to the Disney comic
Le Journal de Mickey
. The answer was meant to be reassuring, and ended with these words: “Don’t worry, little Coralie; when you see him, you’ll know.”

They began to spend time together doing their German homework. Michel lived just across the street, barely fifty meters away. More and more often, they spent Thursdays and Sundays together. Michel would arrive at Annabelle’s house just after lunch, when her little brother would look out the window and announce, “Annabelle, it’s your fiancé . . . ,” she would blush; but her parents did not make fun of her. She realized that she really liked Michel.

An odd boy, he knew nothing about soccer or rock music. He was not unpopular at school, but although he talked to a number of people, he kept his distance. Before Annabelle, he had never invited anyone to his house. He was a solitary child, used to his own thoughts and dreams. Little by little, he grew accustomed to her presence. They often set out on their bicycles up the hill at Voulangis, then walked through the woods and fields until they came to the cliff that towered above the valley of the Grand Morin. They walked back through the meadows, slowly getting to know each other.

10

CAROLINE YESSAYAN IS TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING

That same year, things improved a little for Bruno when he went back to school. Now in the
quatrième,
he was one of the big boys. From the
quatrième
to the final year, the boys slept in a different wing in dormitories divided into four-bed cubicles. To the bullies, he had already been destroyed, humiliated; they moved on to new victims. This was also the year Bruno discovered girls. Sometimes—not often—there was a joint outing for the local boarding schools. On Thursday afternoons, if the weather was good, they would go to a sort of man-made beach on the banks of the Marne outside Meaux. There was a café nearby with pinball machines and table soccer, though its real attraction was a python. The boys liked to torment the animal, tapping their fingers on the sides of the vivarium. The vibrations drove the snake wild and it would throw itself against the glass until it knocked itself unconscious.

One afternoon in October, Bruno found himself talking to Patricia Hohweiller. She was an orphan and had to stay in school year-round, except for the holidays, when she went to stay with her uncle in Alsace. She was blonde and thin and talked very quickly, her animated face occasionally slipping into an odd smile. The following week he was shocked to see her sitting, legs spread, on Brasseur’s knee. His arm was around her waist and he was kissing her. Bruno drew no particular conclusions from this. If the thugs who had terrorized him for years were popular with the girls, it was because they were the only ones who dared to hit on them. He had noticed that Pelé, Wilmart and even Brasseur himself never bullied the younger boys if there were girls around.

Pupils in the
quatrième
were allowed to join the film society, which held screenings every Thursday evening in the boys’ assembly hall, though girls were allowed to attend. One night in December, just before
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
started, Bruno took the seat next to Caroline Yessayan. Toward the end of the film—having thought about it for more than an hour—he very gently placed his left hand on her thigh. For a few wonderful seconds (five? seven? surely no more than ten) nothing happened. She didn’t move. Bruno felt a warm glow flood his body and thought he might faint. Then, without saying a word, she brushed his hand away. Years later—fairly often, actually—when some little whore was sucking him off, Bruno would remember those few seconds of terrifying joy; he also remembered the moment when Caroline Yessayan moved his hand away. What the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

If Bruno had touched Caroline Yessayan’s arm that evening, she almost certainly would have let him, and it probably would have been the beginning of something. While they were waiting in line, she had deliberately struck up a conversation and had kept a seat free to give him an opportunity to sit beside her. During the film, she had put her arm on the armrest between them. She had noticed Bruno before and she fancied him; that evening, she was hoping against hope that he would hold her hand. Why did Bruno touch her thigh? Probably because Caroline Yessayan’s thigh was bare, and in his innocence he could not imagine it was bare for no reason. As he grew older and remembered his boyhood with disgust, he came to see this as the defining moment of his life. It all appeared to him in the light of cold and unchangeable fact. On that December evening in 1970, Caroline Yessayan had it in her power to undo all the humiliation and the sadness of his childhood. After this first failure (for after she gently removed his hand, he never spoke to her again), everything became much more difficult. Of course, it was not really Caroline Yessayan’s fault. Rather the reverse: Caroline Yessayan—a little Armenian girl with doe eyes and long, curly black hair who had found herself, after endless family wranglings, among the dark and gloomy buildings of the boarding school in Meaux—Caroline Yessayan alone gave Bruno a reason to believe in humanity. If it all had ended in a terrible emptiness, it was because of something so trivial that it was grotesque. Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Caroline Yessayan’s miniskirt was to blame for everything.

In putting his hand on Caroline Yessayan’s thigh, Bruno might as well have been asking her to marry him. The beginning of his adolescence coincided with a period of social change. Aside from a handful of
precursors—
of whom his parents, of course, were a depressing example—the previous generation had made a fierce and unwavering connection between marriage, sex and love. The rise of the bourgeoisie and the rapid economic changes of the 1950s had led to a decline in
arranged marriages
—except in the rapidly dwindling aristocracy, where lineage was still of real significance. The Catholic Church, which had always frowned upon sex outside of marriage, welcomed this shift toward the
love match
. It was closer to Catholic doctrine (“Male and female created He them”), and brought its ideal world of peace, fidelity and love a step closer. The Communist party, which was the only spiritual power that could rival the church at the time, was fighting for almost identical objectives. Consequently, young people in the 1950s, without exception, waited impatiently to
fall in love,
as the desertion of the countryside and the concurrent disappearance of village communities allowed the choice of a future spouse to be made from an almost infinite selection, just as the choice itself became of the utmost importance. (At Sarcelles, in September 1955, a new political movement dedicated to the preservation of the “extended family” was launched; proof in itself that society had now been reduced to the nuclear family.) It would be fair to say that the late 1950s and early 1960s were
the golden age of romantic love
—a time we remember today through the songs of Jean Ferrat and early Françoise Hardy.

But it was at precisely this time that the consumption of prurient mass-market entertainment from North America (the songs of Elvis Presley, the films of Marilyn Monroe) was spreading all over Western Europe. Along with the refrigerators and washing machines designed to make for a happy couple came the transistor radio and the record player, which would teach the adolescent how to
flirt
. The distinction between true love and flirtation, latent during the sixties, exploded in the early seventies in magazines like
Mademoiselle Âge Tendre
and
Vingt Ans
, and crystallized around the central question of the era: “How far can you go before you get married?” The libidinal, hedonistic American option received great support from the liberal press (the first issue of
Actuel
appeared in October 1970, and
Charlie-Hebdo
in November). Although their politics were notionally left-wing, these magazines embraced the ideals of the entertainment industry: the destruction of Judeo-Christian values, the supremacy of youth and individual freedom. Torn between these conflicting pressures, teen magazines hastily cobbled together a compromise that can be summed up in the following life history.

In the first stage (say, from twelve to eighteen), a girl would
go out with
several boys (the semantic ambivalence of the term reflected a very real behavioral ambiguity: what did
going out with
a boy actually mean? Did it mean kissing, or did it include the more profound joys of
petting
or of
heavy petting,
or even of full sexual intercourse? Should you allow a boy to touch your breasts? Should you take off your panties? And what should you do with his
thing
?) For Patricia Hohweiller and Caroline Yessayan the problem was far from simple; their favorite magazines gave vague, often contradictory answers. In the second stage (once she left high school), the same girl needed a
serious relationship
(referred to in German magazines as “big love”). Now the defining question was: “Should I move in with Jeremy?” This was the second and final stage. The flaw in the solution offered by girls’ magazines—arbitrarily recommending contradictory forms of behavior in consecutive periods of a girl’s life—only became apparent some years later with the inexorable rise in the divorce rate. Nevertheless, for many years girls, naïve and already disoriented by the speed of social change, accepted these improbable rules and tried their best to stick to them.

. . .

Things were very different for Annabelle. Last thing at night, before she went to sleep, she thought about Michel and every morning she was overjoyed to see him again. If something funny or interesting happened at school, her first thought was of the moment she could tell Michel about it. On days when they could not see each other for some reason, she was worried and upset. During the summer holidays (her family had a house in the Gironde), she wrote to him every day. The letters were more sisterly than passionate, and her feelings more a glow than a consuming fire, but even if she were reluctant to admit it to herself, the truth slowly dawned on her: on the first try, without looking, without really wanting to, she had found
true love
. Her first love was the real thing; there would not be another, and such a question did not even arise. It was a plausible scenario, according to
Mademoiselle Âge Tendre,
but one did well to be cautious as it almost never happened. There were, however, rare, almost miraculous cases that demonstrated it was possible. And if it happened to you it was the most wonderful thing in the whole world.