The Map and the Territory (4 page)

It was within these walls, and under the extremely dark canopies of pine trees in the park during long walks, that Jed spent his studious and sad teenage years. He didn’t complain about his lot, and couldn’t imagine any other. The fights between pupils were sometimes violent, the humiliations brutal and cruel, and Jed, being delicate and slight, would have been incapable of defending himself; but word spread that he was motherless, and such suffering, which none of them could claim to know, intimidated his schoolmates; thus there was around him a sort of halo of fearful respect. He didn’t have a single close friend, and didn’t seek the friendship of others. Instead, he spent afternoons in the library, and at the age of eighteen, having passed the baccalaureate, he had an extensive knowledge, unusual among the young people of his generation, of the literary heritage of mankind. He had read Plato, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; he had read Racine, Molière, and Hugo; he knew Balzac,
Dickens, Flaubert, the German romantics and the Russian novelists. Even more surprisingly, he was familiar with the main dogmas of the Catholic faith, whose mark on Western culture had been so profound—while his contemporaries generally knew more about the life of Spider-Man than that of Jesus.

This sense of a slightly old-fashioned seriousness was going to make a favorable impression on the teachers who had to examine his application for admission to the Beaux-Arts; they were obviously dealing with a candidate who was original, cultivated, serious, and probably hard-working. The application itself, entitled “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” displayed a surprising aesthetic maturity. Avoiding emphasis on the shininess of the metals and the menacing nature of the forms, Jed had used a neutral lighting, with few contrasts, and photographed articles of hardware against a background of mid-gray velvet. Nuts, bolts, and adjusting knobs appeared like so many jewels, gleaming discreetly.

He had, however, great trouble (and this difficulty would stay with him all his life) in writing the introduction to his photos. After various attempts at justifying his subject he took refuge in the purely factual, restricting himself to emphasizing that the most rudimentary pieces of hardware, made of steel, already had a machine precision within one-tenth of a millimeter. Closer to precision engineering in the strictest sense, the pieces used in quality photographic cameras, or Formula 1 engines, were generally made of aluminum or a light alloy and machined to within a hundredth of a millimeter. Finally, high-precision engineering, for example in watchmaking or dental surgery, made use of titanium; the tolerance was then within microns. In short, as Jed concluded in an abrupt and approximate way, the history of mankind could in large part be linked to the history of the use of metals—the still recent age of polymers and plastics not having had the time, in his view, to produce any real mental transformation.

Some art historians, more versed in the manipulation of language, noted later that this first real creation of Jed’s already presented itself, just as in a way did all his subsequent creations, despite their variety, as a
homage to human labor
.

Thus, Jed launched himself into an artistic career whose sole project was to give an objective description of the world—a goal whose illusory nature he rarely sensed. Despite his classical background, he was in no way—contrary to what has often been written since—filled with a religious respect for the old masters; to Rembrandt and Velázquez he much preferred, from that time onwards, Mondrian and Klee.

During the first months following his move to the thirteenth arrondissement he did almost nothing, except fulfilling the numerous orders he received for photographs of objects. And then one day, while unwrapping a Western Digital multimedia hard disk that had just been delivered by courier, and which he had to shoot from different angles by the following day, he understood that he had finished with the photography of objects—at least on the artistic level. As if the fact that he had come to photograph these objects in a purely professional and commercial aim invalidated any possibility of using them in a creative project.

This realization, as brutal as it was unexpected, plunged him into a period of low-intensity depression, during which his main daily distraction became watching
Questions for a Champion
, a program hosted by Julien Lepers. By dint of his sheer determination and a terrifying capacity for work, this initially ungifted host—he was a bit stupid, with the face and the appetites of a ram, and had first imagined a career as a variety singer, for which he no doubt nursed a secret nostalgia—had gradually become a central figure in the French media landscape. People saw themselves in him: students in their first year at the École Polytechnique as well as retired primary-school teachers in the Pas-de-Calais, bikers from Limousin as well as restaurant owners in the Var. Neither impressive nor distant, he exuded an average, and even sympathetic, image of France in the 2010s. A fan of Jean-Pierre Foucault’s, of his humanity and sly straightforwardness, Jed nevertheless had to admit that increasingly he was seduced by Julien Lepers.

At the beginning of October he received a phone call from his father, informing him that his grandmother had just died; Jean-Pierre’s voice was slow, a bit downcast, but scarcely more than usual. Jed’s grandmother had, he knew, never got over the death of her husband, whom she had loved passionately, which was surprising in a poor, rural milieu
that normally didn’t lend itself to romantic outpourings. After his death nothing, not even her grandson, had managed to rescue her from a spiraling sadness that gradually made her give up all activity, from breeding rabbits to making jam, and finally abandon even the garden.

Jed’s father had to go to the Creuse the following day for the funeral, then for the house and inheritance issues. He wanted his son to accompany him. In fact, he would like him to stay a little longer to take care of all the formalities; he had a lot of work at the firm. Jed accepted immediately.

The following day, his father fetched him in his Mercedes. Around eleven they got onto the A20, one of the most beautiful motorways in France, one of those that cross the most harmonious rural landscapes; the air was clear and mild, with a little mist on the horizon. At three, they stopped at a service station just before La Souterraine; at his father’s request, while he filled the tank, Jed bought a Michelin Departments road map of the Creuse and the Haute-Vienne. It was then, unfolding the map, while standing by the cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, that he had his second great aesthetic revelation. This map was sublime. Overcome, he began to tremble in front of the food display. Never had he contemplated an object as magnificent, as rich in emotion and meaning, as this 1/150,000-scale Michelin map of the Creuse and the Haute-Vienne. The essence of modernity, of scientific and technical apprehension of the world, was here combined with the essence of animal life. The drawing was complex and beautiful, absolutely clear, using only a small palette of colors. But in each of the hamlets and villages, represented according to their importance, you felt the thrill, the appeal, of human lives, of dozens and hundreds of souls—some destined for damnation, others for eternal life.

His grandmother’s body was already resting in an oak coffin. She wore a dark dress, her eyes closed and her hands joined; the employees of the funeral parlor were simply waiting for Jed and his father to close the lid. They left them alone, for about ten minutes, in the bedroom. “It’s better for her,” his father said after some silence. Yes, probably, thought Jed. “She believed in God, you know,” his father added timidly.

The following day, during the funeral mass, which the whole village attended, and then again in front of the church, as they received condolences, Jed told himself that he and his father were remarkably adapted to this sort of circumstance. Pale and weary, both dressed in somber suits, they had no difficulty in expressing the required seriousness and resigned sadness; they even appreciated, without being able to believe in it, the note of discreet hope struck by the priest—a priest who himself was old, an
old hand
at funerals, which had to be, given the average age of the population, far and away his main activity.

After returning to the house, where they were served the
vin d’honneur
, Jed realized that this was the first time that he had attended a serious funeral,
à l’ancienne
, a funeral which didn’t attempt to dodge the reality of death. Several times in Paris, he had attended cremations. The last one was of a fellow student at the Beaux-Arts who had been killed in a plane crash during his holidays in Lombok; he had been shocked that some of those present hadn’t bothered to switch off their cell phones before the moment of the cremation.

His father left just afterwards: he had a business meeting the following morning in Paris. Jed went out into the garden. The sun was setting as the rear lights of the Mercedes disappeared in the direction of the motorway, and he thought again of Geneviève. They had been lovers for a few years, while he was studying at the Beaux-Arts; it was with her, in fact, that he had lost his virginity. Geneviève was Malagasy, and had explained to him the curious exhumation customs practiced in her country. One week after the death, the corpse was dug up, the shroud was undone, and a meal was eaten in its presence, in the family’s dining room; then it was buried again. This was repeated after a month, then after three; he no longer could remember the details very well, but it seemed there were no fewer than seven exhumations in all, the last one taking place a year after the death, before the deceased was definitively considered dead, and capable of achieving eternal rest. This system of accepting death, and the physical reality of the corpse, went precisely against the modern Western sensibility, Jed thought, and fleetingly he regretted having let Geneviève leave his life. She was sweet and gentle; at the time he suffered from terrible ophthalmic migraines, and she would happily spend
hours at his bedside, cooking him food, bringing him water and medication. Temperamentally, she was also rather
hot
, and on the sexual level she had taught him everything. Jed liked her drawings, which borrowed a little from graffiti, but distinguished themselves by the childlike and joyful character of the figures, by something rounded about the writing, and the palette she used—lots of cadmium red, Indian yellow, and raw or burnt sienna.

To finance her studies, Geneviève
cashed in on her charms
, as it was once described; Jed found this outmoded expression suited her better than the Anglo-Saxon term
escort
. She charged two hundred and fifty euros an hour, with a supplement of one hundred euros for anal sex. He had no objection to this activity, and even offered to take erotic photos to improve the presentation of her Web site. As much as men are often jealous, and sometimes horribly jealous, of their girlfriends’ former lovers, and as much as they ask themselves anxiously for years, and sometimes until death, if it hadn’t been
better
with the other one, if the other hadn’t given them
more pleasure
, they easily accept, without the slightest effort, everything their women might have done in the past as a prostitute. As soon as it is concluded by a financial transaction, any sexual activity is excused, rendered inoffensive, and in some way sanctified by the ancient curse of work. Depending on the month, Geneviève earned between five and ten thousand euros without devoting more than a few hours to it per week. She made him take advantage by inciting him not to “make a thing of it,” and several times they took winter holidays together on Mauritius or in the Maldives, which she paid for entirely. She was so natural, so cheerful, that he never felt the slightest unease at being akin to a
pimp
.

That said, he felt real sadness when she informed him that she was going to move in with one of her regular clients—a thirty-five-year-old lawyer, whose life exactly resembled, according to what she had told Jed, those of the corporate lawyers described in business thrillers—generally written by Americans. He knew that she would keep her word and that she would remain faithful to her husband, and, in short, when he went through the door of her studio flat for the last time, he knew that he undoubtedly would never see her again. Fifteen years had passed since then; her husband was presumably fulfilled, and she a happy mother; her children were, he was sure without knowing them, polite and well
educated, and received excellent marks at school. Was the income of her husband, the corporate lawyer, now higher than that of Jed as an artist? It was a difficult question to answer, but perhaps the only one worth posing. “You have the vocation of an artist, you truly want it …” she had told him during their last encounter. “You’re small, cute, and slender, but you have the will to do something, you have enormous ambition. I saw it straightaway in your eyes. Me, I do that just”—she vaguely pointed around at the charcoal drawings on the wall—“for fun.”

Jed had kept some of Geneviève’s drawings, and he continued to find real value in them. Art should perhaps be like that, he occasionally told himself, an innocent and joyful, almost animalistic pastime; there had been opinions like that, “stupid like a painter” or “he paints like the bird sings,” and so on; perhaps that’s how art would be once man had got beyond the question of death, or maybe it had already been that way, in certain periods—for example, in the work of Fra Angelico, so close to paradise, so full of the idea that one’s time on earth was just a temporary and obscure preparation for eternal life by the side of Jesus the Lord.
And now I am with you, every day, until the end of the world
.