The Map and the Territory (11 page)

He did, however, reply. “I’m with my daughter,” he said angrily. “But I’m taking her back to her mother in a minute,” he added, toning down the reproach.

“I’ve a favor to ask.”

“Ha ha ha!” scoffed Beigbeder with contrived gaiety. “You know, you’re a wonderful guy. You haven’t called me for ten years. And then you call me, on Christmas Day, to ask a favor. You’re probably a genius. Only a genius could be so egocentric, autistic even … Okay, we’ll see each other in the Flore at seven,” the author of
A French Novel
concluded, unexpectedly.

Jed arrived five minutes late and immediately spotted the writer at a table at the back. The neighboring tables were unoccupied, forming a sort of security perimeter with two meters’ radius. Some provincials entering the café, and even a few tourists, were nudging one another and pointing at him in wonderment. An acquaintance, penetrating the perimeter, kissed him before disappearing. There was certainly a bit of a financial shortfall for the establishment to make up (similarly, the illustrious Philippe Sollers had, it seems, a table reserved at the Closerie des Lilas that could be taken by no one else, whether or not he came to have lunch). This minimal loss of revenue was largely compensated for by the tourist attraction that the regular, attestable presence of the author of
99 Francs
represented—a presence, what’s more, completely
in keeping with the establishment’s historical vocation. By his courageous stands in favor of legalizing of drugs and granting legal status to prostitutes of both sexes, as well as the more consensual ones on illegal immigrants and the living conditions of prisoners, Frédéric Beigbeder had progressively become a sort of Sartre of the 2010s, and this to general surprise and even slightly to his own, the past predisposing him to play instead the role of a Jean-Edern Hallier, or even a Gonzague Saint-Bris. A demanding fellow traveler of Olivier Besancenot’s New Anticapitalist Party, which, he pointed out to
Der Spiegel
, risked drifting toward anti-Semitism, he had succeeded in making people forget the half-bourgeois, half-aristocratic origins of his family, and even the presence of his brother in the top echelons of French business. Sartre himself, it’s true, was hardly born destitute.

Sitting in front of a Mauresque cocktail, the author stared melancholically at an almost empty metal pill case that now contained only a few specks of cocaine. Catching sight of Jed, he beckoned him to sit down at his table. A waiter quickly approached to take the order.

“Uh, I don’t know. A Viandox? Does that still exist?”

“A Viandox,” repeated Beigbeder pensively. “You really are a strange guy.”

“I was surprised you remembered me.”

“Oh, yes,” the author replied in a peculiarly sad voice. “Oh, yes, I remember you …”

Jed explained what it was about. At the name of Houellebecq, he noticed, Beigbeder suddenly became tense. “I’m not asking you for his phone number,” Jed quickly added. “I’m just asking if you can phone him to talk about my request.”

The waiter brought the Viandox. Beigbeder sat silently, deep in thought.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay, I’m going to call him. With him, you never quite know how he’ll react; but in the circumstances it might be useful for him as well.”

“You think he’ll accept?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Is there anything that could persuade him?”

“Well … This may surprise you, because he doesn’t have this reputation at all: money. In principle he doesn’t care about money, he lives
on sweet fuck all; but his divorce has left him high and dry. What’s more, he’d bought flats in Spain at the seaside that are going to be repossessed without compensation, because of a law protecting the coastline with retroactive effect—a crazy story. In reality, I think he’s a bit hard up at the moment—it’s unbelievable, no, with all that he could have earned? So, there you go: if you offer him a lot of money, I think you’ve got a good chance.”

He turned silent, finished his Mauresque in one go, ordered another, and looked at Jed with a mixture of reproach and melancholy. “You know,” he finally said, “Olga. She loved you.”

Jed shrunk slightly in his chair. “I mean,” Beigbeder continued, “she
truly
loved you.” He went silent and looked at him, nodding incredulously. “And you let her go back to Russia … And you never gave her any news … Love … Love is
rare
. Didn’t you know that? Have you never been told that?

“I’m speaking to you about this, although obviously it’s none of my business,” he went on, “because she’s coming back to France soon. I still have a few friends in television, and I know that Michelin is going to create a new channel on TNT, Michelin TV, centered on gastronomy, the
terroir
, heritage, the French landscape, et cetera. It’s Olga who’ll run it. Okay, on paper, the director general will be Jean-Pierre Pernaut; but in practice, it’s she who’ll have all the say on the programming. So there you are,” he concluded in a tone that clearly indicated the conversation was over; “you came to ask me a small favor, and I’ve done you a big one.”

He gave Jed a sharp look as he got up to leave. “Unless you think that the most important thing is your exhibition.” He nodded again and, mumbling in an almost inaudible voice, added with disgust: “Fucking artists …”

The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters. Jed opted for the Husqvarna, a water from the center of Norway, which sparkled discreetly. It was extremely pure—although, in reality, no more than the others. All these mineral waters distinguished themselves only by the sparkling, a slightly different texture in the mouth; none of them were salty or ferruginous; the basic point of Norwegian mineral waters seemed to be moderation. Subtle hedonists, these Norwegians, thought Jed as he bought his Husqvarna; it was pleasant, he thought again, that so many different forms of purity could exist.

The cloud ceiling arrived very quickly, and with it that nothingness that characterizes a plane journey above the clouds. Briefly, around halfway, he saw the gigantic and wrinkled surface of the sea, like the skin of a terminally ill old man.

Shannon Airport, however, enchanted Jed with its rectangular and clear forms, the height of its ceilings, the astonishing dimensions of its corridors. It was barely making it, and now served mostly low-cost airlines and troop transports of the American army, but it had visibly been planned for five times more traffic. With its structure of metal pillars and its short-pile carpet, it probably dated from the early 1960s or the
end of the 1950s. Even more than Orly, it recalled that period of technological enthusiasm of which air travel was one of the most innovative and prestigious achievements. Yet from the early 1970s, with the first Palestinian terrorist attacks—later continued, in a more spectacular and professional manner, by those of Al-Qaeda—air travel had become an infantilizing and concentration-camp-like experience you prayed would be over as soon as possible. But at the time, thought Jed as he waited for his suitcase in the immense arrivals hall—the metal baggage trolleys, square and massive, were probably also from that time—during that surprising period of the “Thirty Glorious Years,” air travel, a symbol of the modern technological adventure, was certainly something else. Still reserved for engineers and managers, for the builders of tomorrow’s world, it was destined, and no one doubted this in the context of triumphant social democracy, to become more and more accessible to the lower classes as their purchasing power and free time developed (which, besides, finally happened, but after a detour via the ultraliberalism appropriately symbolized by the low-cost airlines, and at the price of a total loss of the prestige previously associated with this method of travel).

A few minutes later, Jed found confirmation of his hypothesis about the age of the airport. The long exit corridor was decorated with photographs of eminent personalities who’d honored the airport with a visit—essentially presidents of the United States of America and popes. John Paul II, Jimmy Carter, John XXIII, George Bush I and II, Paul VI, Ronald Reagan … none of them were missing. On arriving at the end of the corridor, Jed was surprised to notice that the first of these illustrious visitors had been immortalized by not a photo, but a
painting
.

Standing on the tarmac, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had left behind the small group of officials—among whom were two ecclesiastics; in the background, some men in gabardines probably belonged to the American security services. His arm stretched forward and upward—toward the crowd massed behind the barriers, you imagined—and he smiled with that cretinous enthusiasm and optimism which is difficult for non-Americans to counterfeit. That said, his face seemed Botoxed. Turning back, Jed closely examined all the portraits of eminent personalities. Bill Clinton was as chubby and smooth as his more illustrious predecessor;
you had to agree that, on the whole, American Democratic presidents resembled Botoxed leches.

Returning to the portrait of Kennedy, however, Jed was led to a conclusion of a different order. Botox did not exist at the time, and the control of puffiness and wrinkles, today achieved by transcutaneous injections, was then done by the indulgent brush of the artist. Thus, right at the end of the 1950s, and even at the very beginning of the 1960s, it was conceivable to entrust the task of illustrating and exalting the memorable moments of a reign to painters—or at least to the most mediocre among them. This was undoubtedly a daub—you only had to compare the treatment of the sky with what Turner or Constable would have done; even second-class English watercolorists could do better. All the same, there was in this painting a sort of human and symbolic truth about John Fitzgerald Kennedy that was achieved by none of the photos in the gallery—even that of John Paul II, although in good shape, taken on the steps of the plane as he opened his arms wide to salute one of the last Catholic populations in Europe.

The Oakwood Arms Hotel, too, borrowed its decor from those pioneering days of commercial aviation: period advertisements for Air France and Lufthansa, black-and-white photographs of Douglas DC-8s and Caravelles piercing the limpid atmosphere, of captains in full dress uniforms posing proudly in their cockpits. The town of Shannon, Jed had learned on the Internet, owed its birth to the airport. It had been built in the 1960s on a site where no human settlement, not even a village, had ever existed. Irish architecture, as far as he could see, had no specific character; it was a mixture of maisonettes in redbrick, similar to those you might encounter in English suburbs, and vast white bungalows fronted by tarmacked parking spaces and bordered with lawns, American-style.

He more or less expected to have to leave a message on Houellebecq’s voice mail: until then they had communicated only by e-mail and, most recently, by texting; however, after a few rings, he answered.

“You’ll easily recognize the house, it’s the worst-kept lawn in the area,” Houellebecq had told him. At the time Jed had thought he was exaggerating, but the vegetation indeed was reaching phenomenal heights. He followed a flagstoned path that snaked for a dozen yards among clumps of nettles and thorns, up to the tarmacked pad on which a Lexus RX 350 SUV was parked. As you might expect, Houellebecq had taken the bungalow option: it was big and brand-new, with a tiled roof—a completely banal house, in fact, apart from the disgusting state of the lawn.

He rang the doorbell and waited for about thirty seconds, and the author of
The Elementary Particles
came to open the door, wearing slippers, corduroy trousers, and a comfortable fleece of undyed wool. He looked long and pensively at Jed before turning his eyes to the lawn in a morose meditation that seemed habitual.

“I don’t know how to use a lawnmower,” he concluded. “I’m afraid of the blades cutting my fingers off; it seems to happen quite often. I could buy a sheep, but I don’t like them. There’s nothing more stupid than a sheep.”

Jed followed him through rooms that had tiled floors and were empty of furniture, with moving boxes here and there. The walls were covered with a uniform off-white paper; a light layer of dust covered the floor. The house was vast, and there must’ve been at least five bedrooms; it wasn’t very warm, no more than sixty degrees; Jed guessed that all the bedrooms, with the exception of the one where Houellebecq slept, had to be empty.

“Have you just moved in?”

“Yes. I mean, three years ago.”

They finally arrived in a room that was a little warmer, a sort of small square greenhouse, with glass walls on three sides, what the English call a
conservatory
. It was furnished with a sofa, a coffee table, and an armchair; a cheap oriental carpet decorated the floor. Jed had brought two A3 portfolios; the first contained about forty photos retracing his previous career—essentially taken from his Hardware series and his Road Maps period. The second portfolio contained sixty-four photos of paintings, which represented the entirety of his pictorial production, from
Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher
to
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology
.