The Map and the Territory (21 page)

On 30 December, in the middle of the afternoon, Jed telephoned Houellebecq. The writer was in top form. He’d just spent an hour chopping wood, he announced. Chopping wood? Yes, his house in the Loiret now had a fireplace. He also had a dog—a two-year-old mongrel that he’d taken in on Christmas Day from the pet shelter in Montargis.

“Are you doing anything on New Year’s Eve?” Jed inquired.

“No, nothing in particular; I’m rereading Tocqueville at the moment. You know, in the countryside we go to bed early, especially in winter.”

For an instant Jed had the idea of inviting him, but realized just in time that he could hardly invite someone to a party he wasn’t giving himself; anyway, the author would certainly have refused.

“I’m going to bring your portrait, as promised. In the first days of January.”

“My portrait, yes … Please do, please do.” He didn’t seem to care at all. They chatted pleasantly for a few more minutes. There was in the voice of the author of
The Elementary Particles
something that Jed had never noticed before, that he’d never expected to find, and that he took some time to identify, because basically he hadn’t found it in anyone, for many years: he seemed happy.

Some Vendée peasants armed with pitchforks mounted the guard at each side of the porch leading to Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s townhouse. Jed handed one of them the e-mail invitation he’d printed out and proceeded into the large cobbled courtyard, which was entirely lit by torches. A dozen guests were walking toward the broad, open doors that led into the reception rooms. With his velvet trousers and his C&A Sympatex blouson, he felt awfully
underdressed:
the women were in long dresses, and most of the men in dinner jackets. Two meters in front of him he recognized Julien Lepers, accompanied by a magnificent black girl who was easily a foot taller; she was wearing a sparkling long white dress, with gold facing and open at the back right down to her ass, the torchlight reflecting on her bare skin. The host himself—wearing an ordinary dinner jacket, the one he used for “
grandes écoles
special editions,” his working dinner jacket in a way—seemed buried in some difficult discussion with a small, hot-headed man who looked nasty and gave the impression of having corporate responsibilities. Jed moved past them and, entering the first reception room, was greeted by the insistent complaint of a dozen Breton bagpipers, who had just started a tortured and interminable Celtic tune that was almost painful to listen to. Keeping a good distance, he entered the second room and accepted an Emmental-flavored canapé and a glass of
“vendange tardive”
Gewürztraminer, offered by two Alsatian waitresses wearing headdresses and white-and-red aprons who
circulated among the guests with their trays; they were so alike that they could’ve been twins.

The reception area was made up of four conjoining rooms with ceilings at least eight meters high. Jed had never seen such a huge apartment; he’d no idea that such an apartment could exist. However, it probably wasn’t much, he thought in a flash of lucidity, compared with the residences of those who bought his paintings. There must have been two or three hundred guests, and the din of the conversations gradually drowned the wailing of the pipes. Feeling he was going to pass out, he leaned against a stand of Auvergnat products, and accepted a Jésus-Laguiole brochette and a glass of Saint-Pourçain. The powerful, earthy smell of the cheeses restored his balance a little; he emptied his glass of Saint-Pourçain, asked for another, and resumed his advance through the crowd. He was beginning to feel a bit too hot, and realized he should have left his coat at the cloakroom. His coat was truly at odds with the
dress code
, he scolded himself again. All the men were in evening dress, absolutely all of them, he repeated desperately to himself, and at just that instant he found himself in front of Pierre Bellemare, dressed in Tergal petrol-blue trousers and a white shirt with a jabot covered in grease stains—his trousers were held up by wide braces in the colors of the American flag. Jed warmly held his hand out to the French king of teleshopping, who, taken aback, shook it and started off again, slightly reassured.

It took him more than twenty minutes to find Olga. Standing in a doorway, half hidden by a curtain, she was deep in a clearly professional conversation with Jean-Pierre Pernaut. He was the main one speaking, declaiming sentences punctuated by determined movements of his right hand; she nodded from time to time, absorbed and attentive, and formulated very few objections or remarks. Jed stood there frozen, just a few yards from her. Two bands of cream-colored cloth—tied behind her neck and encrusted with small crystals—covered her breasts and joined at her navel, pinned together by a silver brooch representing the sun, before attaching to a short, figure-hugging skirt, also studded with crystals, that revealed her white garters; her tights, also white, were extremely sheer. Aging, and especially apparent aging, is in no respect a continuous process. Life could rather be characterized as a succession of levels, separated by sudden falls. When we meet someone we have lost
sight of for some years, we sometimes have the impression that he has
aged;
sometimes, on the other hand, that he hasn’t changed at all. This is a complete fallacy, since decay is still secretly making its way inside the organism before bursting out into the broad daylight. For ten years, Olga had kept herself at a radiant level of beauty—without this being enough to make her happy. Nor had he, Jed believed, changed all that much over the last ten years; he had
produced a body of work
, as they say, without ever encountering, or even contemplating, happiness.

Jean-Pierre Pernaut stopped talking and drank some Beaumes-de-Venise; Olga looked a few degrees away and suddenly saw Jed, standing there in the crowd. A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction. She put her hand lightly on the host’s forearm, giving him a word of apology, and in a few bounds she was in front of Jed and kissing him on the mouth. Then she stepped back, taking him by the hands. For a few seconds they remained silent.

Avuncular in his Arthur van Aschendonk tails, Jean-Pierre Pernaut saw them turn toward him. His unguarded expression in that moment suggested that he understood life and even felt at ease with it. Olga made the introductions.

“I know you!” the host exclaimed, his smile widening even more. “Come with me!”

Quickly crossing the last room, accidentally brushing the arm of Patrick Le Lay (who had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy shares in the channel), he led them down a wide corridor with high, vaulted walls made of thick limestone. More than a townhouse, Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s residence reminded you of a Romanesque abbey, with its corridors and crypts. They stopped in front of a thick door padded with brown leather. “My office,” said the host.

He stopped at the doorway, letting them enter the room. A line of acajou bookcases mainly contained tourist guides, of all kinds—the
Guide du Routard
next to the
Guide Bleu
, the
Petit Futé
next to the
Lonely Planet
. The books by Jean-Pierre Pernaut himself, from
The Magnificent Crafts of the Artisans
to
A Taste of France
, were exhibited on display shelves. A windowsill contained the five Sept d’Or awards he had won in the course of his career, as well as sports trophies of uncertain origin.
Deep leather armchairs spread themselves around a mahogany executive desk. Behind the desk, and discreetly lit by halogen lamps, was one of the photos from Jed’s Michelin period. Curiously, the host had not chosen a spectacular, immediately picturesque image, like those he had made of the Var corniche or of the gorges of Verdon. The photo, centered on Gournay-en-Bray, was treated with solid colors, without any lighting or perspective. Jed remembered that he had taken it directly from above. The white, green, and brown spots were distributed equally, traversed by the symmetrical network of the departmental roads. No agglomeration stood out clearly, each seeming to have the same importance, which gave the overall impression of calm, balance, and almost abstraction. This landscape, he realized, was probably the one he had flown over at low altitude, immediately after departing from Beauvais, when he went to visit Houellebecq in Ireland. In the presence of the concrete reality, of that discreet juxtaposition of meadows, fields, and villages, he had felt the same thing: balance, a peaceful harmony.

“I know that you’ve now turned to painting,” Jean-Pierre Pernaut went on, “and that you’ve made a painting of me. To tell you the truth, I tried to buy it; but François Pinault bid higher, and I couldn’t follow.”

“François Pinault?” Jed was surprised.
The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting
was a quiet painting, classical in technique, which didn’t correspond at all to the the Breton businessman’s usual, much
wilder
choices. No doubt he’d decided to diversify.

“Perhaps I should have …” He paused. “I’m sorry … Perhaps I should have introduced a sort of preference clause for the subjects portrayed.”

“It’s the market,” Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancorless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.

The host led them back down the vaulted corridor, the basques of his tails slowly floating behind him. Jed glanced at his watch: it was almost midnight. They again passed through the double doors leading to the reception rooms: the din was now at its peak; new guests had arrived, swelling the gathering to four or five hundred people. In the middle of a small group, a very inebriated Patrick Le Lay was perorating noisily; he had swiped a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and was guzzling long
swigs of it. The host Claire Chazal, visibly tense, put her hand on his arm, trying to interrupt him; but the president of the channel had manifestly crossed certain red lines. “TF1 are the biggest!” he was shouting. “I don’t give Jean-Pierre’s channel six months! M6 are the same, they thought they could screw us with
Loft Story
, but we doubled the price with
Koh-Lanta
and we fucked them up the ass! Up the ass!” he repeated, and threw the bottle over his shoulder. It grazed the skull of Julien Lepers and smashed at the feet of three middle-aged men, in gray three-piece suits, who stared at him sternly.

Without hesitation, Jean-Pierre Pernaut walked over to his former boss and stood straight in front of him. “You’ve drunk too much, Patrick,” he said calmly; his muscles were tense under the fabric of the tails, his face hardened as if he was preparing for a fight. “Okay, okay …” said Le Lay, obsequiously indicating that he’d calmed down. “Okay, okay …” At that moment, a resonant tenor voice, of incredible power, rose up from the second room. Other voices, baritone and then bass, took up the same theme, without words, in a round. Many guests turned in this direction, recognizing a famous Corsican polyphony group. Twelve men of all ages, wearing black trousers, smocks, and berets, gave a vocal performance that lasted a little more than two minutes: it was at the limit of what one could call music, more a war cry, of surprising savagery. Then they suddenly stopped. Spreading his arms slightly, Jean-Pierre Pernaut went to meet the crowd, waited for silence to fall, then said in a loud voice: “Happy New Year to you all!” A volley of champagne corks popped. The host then went over to the three men in gray suits and shook hands with each of them. “They belong to the Michelin board of directors …” Olga whispered to Jed before approaching the group. “Financially, TF1, next to Michelin, counts for nothing. And it seems that Bouygues is sick of mopping up their losses,” she had the time to add before Jean-Pierre Pernaut introduced her to the three men. “I was slightly expecting Patrick to make a scene,” he was saying to the directors. “He took my departure very badly.”

“At least that proves our project doesn’t leave him cold,” the oldest one said. At that very moment, Jed saw a man of about forty approach, wearing track-suit bottoms and a hooded sweater, with a rapper’s cap stuck backwards on his head, whom he recognized incredulously as Patrick Forestier, the communications director of Michelin France. “Yo!”
he shouted to the three directors before slapping their hands. “Yo,” they each replied in turn, and it was at that moment that things started spiraling out of control. The conversational din intensified all of a sudden, while the Basque and Savoyard orchestras began to play at the same time. Jed was sweating; for a few minutes he tried to follow Olga, who was going from one guest to another to wish each a happy New Year, all smiling and warm. From the friendly but serious expressions worn by the people she approached he understood that she was addressing her staff.

Feeling the nausea rising, he ran out into the courtyard and vomited on a dwarf palm tree. The night was curiously mild. A few guests were already departing, including the three directors. (Where did they come from? Had they checked into the same hotel?) They were advancing smoothly, in triangular formation, and silently passed the Vendée peasants, conscious of representing power and the real world. They would have made a good subject for a painting, thought Jed, discreetly leaving the reception while behind them the stars of French television laughed and yelled. A dirty song competition was being orchestrated by Julien Lepers. Enigmatic in his midnight-blue costume, Jean-Pierre Pernaut surveyed everything impassively, while Patrick Le Lay, inebriated and browbeaten, stumbled on the cobblestones, hailing the departing Michelin directors, who didn’t turn round to look at him.
A Mutation in the History of West European Television:
that could have been the title of this painting Jed would never make. He vomited again, still having a little bile left in his stomach; it had probably been a mistake to mix Creole punch and absinthe.

Patrick Le Lay, his forehead bloody, crawled across the ground, having now lost all hope of rejoining the directors, who were turning the corner of the avenue Charles-de-Gaulle. The music had calmed down. From the reception rooms came the slow beat of a Savoyard groove. Jed looked to the heavens, to the indifferent constellations. Spiritual configurations of a new type were appearing; something in any case was shifting durably in the structure of the French television scene. That’s what Jed could deduce from the conversations of the guests who, having recovered their coats, were slowly moving toward the carriage entrances. He caught in passing the words “new blood” and “test run” and realized that many of the conversations had to do with Olga, who was a novelty
in the French television scene. She “came from the corporation”: this was one of the most frequent comments, along with those concerning her beauty. The outside temperature was difficult to gauge, as it alternated between cold and warm. He was seized again by a spasm, and belched with difficulty on the palm tree. On getting up again, he saw Olga, dressed in a white leopard-skin coat, who gave him a worried look.