The Map and the Territory (17 page)

Two convinced supporters of the market economy; two resolute supporters also of the Democratic Party, and yet two opposing facets of capitalism, as different as a banker in Balzac could be from Verne’s engineer.
The Conversation at Palo Alto
, Houellebecq stressed in his conclusion, was far too modest a subtitle; instead, Jed Martin could have entitled his painting
A Brief History of Capitalism
, for that, indeed, is what it was.

After much equivocation, the
vernissage
was fixed for 11 December, a Wednesday—the ideal day, according to Marylin. Urgently produced by an Italian printer, the catalogues arrived just in time. They were elegant, luxurious objects—you don’t skimp on that, Marylin had decided, and Franz was more and more beholden to her. It was becoming curious; he followed her around everywhere, like a bichon, while she made her phone calls.

After stacking a pile of catalogues by the entrance and checking that all the canvases were hung correctly, they had nothing to do until the opening, scheduled for seven, and the gallerist began to show palpable signs of nervousness; he was wearing a curious embroidered Slovakian peasant shirt over his black Diesel jeans. Marylin, still composed, was checking a few details on her cell phone and wandering from one painting to another, with Franz at her heels.
It’s a game, it’s a million-dollar game
.

By six-thirty, Jed began to tire of his sidekicks’ antics, and announced he was going out for a walk. “Just a walk around the neighborhood, I’m taking a little walk. Don’t worry, walking does you good.”

The remark showed exaggerated optimism, as he realized once he set foot on the boulevard Vincent-Auriol. Some cars raced by, splashing him; it was cold and rainy, that’s all you could say, that evening, for the boulevard Vincent-Auriol. A Casino supermarket and a Shell service station
were the only perceptible centers of energy, the only social propositions likely to provoke desire, happiness, or joy. Jed already knew these lively places: he had been a regular customer of the Casino supermarket for years, before switching to the Franprix in the boulevard de l’Hôpital. As for the Shell station, he also knew it well: on many a Sunday, he had appreciated being able to go there for Pringles and bottles of Hépar. But there was no point this evening. A cocktail party had obviously been scheduled, and they’d called on the services of a caterer.

However, along with dozens of other customers, he went into the supermarket and immediately noticed various improvements. Near the book section, a shelf of newspapers now offered a large choice of dailies and magazines. The range of fresh Italian pasta had expanded yet again (undoubtedly, nothing seemed able to stop the advance of fresh Italian pasta), and above all the food court had been enriched with a magnificent, brand-new self-service salad bar, which lined up about fifty varieties, some of which looked delicious. That’s what gave him the desire to come back, what gave him the
stupefyingly strong
desire to come back, as Houellebecq would’ve said. Jed suddenly missed him a lot, standing in front of the salad bar, where a few middle-aged women calculated, skeptically, the caloric content of the ingredients on offer. He knew the writer shared his taste for big food retailers
—real
retail, as he would say—and like him he wished, in a more or less utopian and distant future, for the fusion of the various chain stores into one total supermarket, which would cover all the needs of mankind. How nice it would have been to visit this refurbished Casino supermarket together, to nudge each other and point out the sections of completely new products, or particularly clear and exhaustive nutritional labeling!

Was he experiencing a
feeling of friendship
for Houellebecq? That would be an exaggeration. Jed didn’t think he was capable of such a feeling: he had gone through childhood and the start of adolescence without falling prey to strong friendships, while these periods of life are considered particularly propitious for their birth. It was scarcely probable that friendship would come to him now,
late in life
. But still, he had appreciated their encounter, and above all he liked his text. He found in it a surprising quality of intuition, given the author’s obvious lack of artistic education. Of course he had invited him to the
vernissage;
Houellebecq had replied that he would “try to pop in,” which meant that the chances
of seeing him were almost nil. When they’d spoken on the phone, he was very excited by the renovation of his new home. When he’d returned, two months ago, in a sort of sentimental pilgrimage, to the village where he’d spent his childhood, his family home was up for sale. He’d considered this “absolutely miraculous.” It was fate, and he had bought it immediately, without even discussing the price, and moved in his things—most of which, it’s true, had never left their boxes—and now was busy furnishing it. That’s all he’d talked about, and Jed’s painting seemed the least of his concerns. Jed had, however, promised to bring it to him after the
vernissage
and the first days of the exhibition, when occasionally a few latecomer journalists would show up.

At about seven-twenty, when Jed returned to the gallery, through the bay windows he noticed people circulating in the rows between the paintings. They had come on time, which was probably a good sign. Marylin saw him from afar and shook her fist at him in a victory sign.

“There are heavyweights here,” she said when he rejoined her. “Some real heavyweights.”

In fact, a few meters away, he saw Franz in conversation with François Pinault, flanked by a ravishing young woman, probably of Iranian origin, who was assisting him as director of his artistic foundation. His gallerist seemed to be struggling, waving his arms around distractedly, and for an instant Jed wanted to come to his aid, before remembering what he’d always known, and what Marylin had categorically told him a few days before: he was never better than when silent.

“It’s not over yet,” the press officer went on. “You see that guy in gray, over there?” She pointed to a young man aged about thirty, with an intelligent face and extremely well dressed, his suit, tie, and shirt forming a delicate color-chart of gray. He had stopped in front of
The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting
, a relatively old painting, the first in which Jed had portrayed his subject in the company of work colleagues. That had been, he remembered, a particularly difficult one to paint: the expressions of Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s staff, listening to the directives of their charismatic leader with a curious mixture of veneration and disgust, had not been easy to render; he’d spent almost six months on it. But this painting had liberated him, and he immediately launched into
The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management
of His Business
, and in fact all his big compositions that took the world of work as their setting.

“That guy’s Roman Abramovich’s buyer for Europe,” Marylin told him. “I’ve already seen him in London and Berlin, but never in Paris; never in a contemporary art gallery, in any case.

“It’s good if you’ve got a competitive situation right from the evening of the
vernissage
,” she went on. “It’s a small world and they all know each other, so they’re going to start calculating, imagining the prices. Obviously, you need at least two bidders. And there …” She made a charming, cheeky smile, which made her look like a little girl, and which surprised Jed. “Look, there’s three of them … You see the guy over there, in front of the Bugatti painting?” She pointed at an old man with an exhausted and slightly puffy face and a small gray mustache, dressed in a badly cut black suit. “That’s Carlos Slim Helu. A Mexican of Lebanese origin. He doesn’t look like much, I know, but he made an enormous amount of money in telecommunications; according to estimates, he’s the third or fourth richest man in the world. And he’s a collector …”

What Marylin meant by
the Bugatti painting
was in fact
The Engineer Ferdinand Piëch Visiting the Production Workshops at Molsheim
, where the Bugatti Veyron 16.4—the fastest, and most expensive, car in the world—was produced. Fitted with a 16-cylinder W engine with 1,001 horsepower, complete with four turbochargers, it could go from 0 to 110 km per hour in 2.5 seconds and had a top speed of 407 km per hour. No tires available on the market could withstand such accelerations, and for this car Michelin had developed a special rubber.

Carlos Slim Helu stayed in front of the painting for at least five minutes, moving very little, stepping back and then forward a few centimeters. He had chosen, Jed noted, the ideal distance from which to view a canvas of this size; obviously, he was a real collector.

Then the Mexican billionaire turned around and made for the exit; he’d neither greeted nor spoken to anyone. As he passed, François Pinault gave him a cutting look; in the face of such a competitor, the Breton businessman wouldn’t have counted for much. Without making eye contact, Slim Helu got into the back of a black Mercedes limousine parked in front of the gallery.

Roman Abramovich’s envoy took his turn to go up to
the Bugatti
painting
. It was indeed a curious work. A few weeks before starting it, at the flea market of Montreuil, Jed had bought for a tiny price—no more than the price of the paper—some old issues of
Peking-Information
and
China in Construction
, and the treatment had something ample and airy about it that resembled Chinese socialist realism. The wide V-shaped formation of the small group of engineers and mechanics following Ferdinand Piëch on his visit to the workshops recalled very precisely, as a particularly pugnacious and well-informed art historian noted later, that of the group of agronomists and middle-poor peasants accompanying President Mao Zedong in a watercolor reproduced in issue 122 of
China in Construction
, entitled
Forward to Irrigated Rice Growing in the Province of Hunan!
Besides, it was the only time, as other art historians have long pointed out, that Jed had tried watercolor. The engineer Ferdinand Piëch, two meters in front of the group, seemed to float rather than walk, as if levitating a few centimeters above the light epoxy floor. Three aluminum workstations accommodated the Bugatti Veyron chassis at various stages in its manufacture; in the background, the walls, made entirely of glass, opened out onto a panorama of the Vosges. By a curious coincidence, as Houellebecq observed in his text for the catalogue, this village of Molsheim, and the Vosges landscapes surrounding it, were already at the center of the Michelin map and satellite photographs with which Jed had chosen, ten years before, to open his first solo exhibition.

This simple remark, in which Houellebecq, a man of rational if narrow mind, certainly didn’t see anything more than an interesting but anecdotal fact, would inspire Patrick Kéchichian to write a passionate article, more mystical than ever: having shown us a God co-participating, with man, in the creation of the world, he wrote, the artist, completing his move toward incarnation, now showed us God descended among men. Far from the harmony of celestial spheres, God had now come “to plunge his hands in the dirty grease” so as to pay homage, with his full presence, to the sacerdotal dignity of human labor. Being himself both a true man and a true God, he had come to offer working mankind the sacrificial gift of his burning love. In the posture of the mechanic on the left leaving his workstation to follow the engineer Ferdinand Piëch, how could you not recognize, he stressed, that of Peter as he put down his nets at the invitation of Christ? “Come, I will make you a fisher of
men.” And in the absence of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 at the final stage of manufacture, he spotted a reference to the new Jerusalem.

The article was rejected by
Le Monde
, whose art editor, Pépita Bourguignon, threatened to resign if they published this “Jesus-freak shit”; but it would appear in
Art Press
the following month.

“Anyway, at this stage, we don’t give a damn about the reviews. It’s no longer there that the real decisions are made,” Marylin summed up at the end of the soirée, while Jed worried about the continual absence of Pépita Bourguignon.

At around ten, after the last guests had left, and while the catering staff was folding up the tablecloths, Franz collapsed in a soft plastic chair near the gallery entrance. “Fuck, I’m exhausted,” he said. “Absolutely exhausted.” He’d given his all, tirelessly retracing, for anyone interested, Jed’s artistic career or the history of his gallery, speaking nonstop all evening. Jed, for his part, had just nodded his head from time to time.

“Can you go get me a beer, please? From the fridge in the stockroom.”

Jed came back with a six-pack of Stella Artois. Franz gulped one down before speaking again.

“Okay, now all we have to do is wait for the offers,” he said. “We’ll assess the situation in a week’s time.”

When Jed came out onto the square of Notre-Dame de la Gare, a light and icy rain suddenly began to fall, like a warning, then stopped just as suddenly after a few seconds. He climbed the few steps leading to the entrance. The double doors of the church were wide open; it looked deserted inside. He hesitated, then turned around. The rue Jeanne-d’Arc descended as far as the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, which the Métro passed over; in the distance you could see the dome of the Panthéon. The sky was a dark and dull gray. Basically, he didn’t have much to tell God; not at that moment.

The place Nationale was deserted, and trees stripped of their leaves revealed the rectangular and perfectly fitting structures of the campus at Tolbiac. Jed turned into the rue du Château-des-Rentiers. He was early, but Franz was already there, sitting in front of a glass of cheap red wine, and it was visibly not his first. Bloodshot-eyed and hirsute, he looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks.

“Okay,” he summed up as soon as Jed had sat down. “I’ve had offers for almost all the paintings now. I’ve pushed up the bidding, maybe I can push it up a bit more; let’s say that for the moment the average price has stabilized at around five hundred thousand euros.”