Whatever: a novel (12 page)

After the second rock number the disc jockey put on a slow song. It was Nino Ferrer's
Le Sud
; a magnificent record, it has to be said. The half-caste touched the pseudo-Véronique's shoulder lightly; they got up of common accord. At this instant Tisserand turned to face him. He spread his hands, opened his mouth, but I don't think he can have had the time to speak. The half-caste eased him aside calmly, with gentleness, and in a few seconds they were on the dance floor.

They made a magnificent couple. The pseudo-Véronique was quite tall, maybe five seven, but he was a good head taller. She confidently pressed her body against the guy's. Tisserand sat down again at my side; he was trembling in every limb. He watched the couple, hypnotized. I waited a minute or more; this slow dance, I recalled, went on forever. Then I shook him gently by the shoulder, repeating

`Raphaël' over and again.

-What can I do? he asked.

-Go and have a wank.

-You reckon it's hopeless?

-Sure. It's been hopeless for a long time, from the very beginning. You will never represent, Raphaël, a young girl's erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It's already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you've known since your adolescence, Raphaël, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future - which in all frankness I doubt - this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get deeper and deeper. An atrocious, unremitting bitterness will end up gripping your heart. For you there will be neither redemption nor deliverance. That's how it is. Yet that doesn't mean, however, that all possibility of revenge is closed to you. These women you desire so much, you too can possess them. You can even possess what is most precious about them. What is it, Raphaël, that is most precious about them?

-Their beauty? he suggested.

-It's not their beauty, I can tell you that much; it isn't their vagina either, nor even their love; because all these disappear with life itself. And from now on you can possess their life. Launch yourself on a career of murder this very evening; believe me, my friend, it's the only way still open to you. When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then will you truly be the master; then will you possess them body and soul. Perhaps you will even manage, prior to their sacrifice, to obtain various succulent favours from them; a knife, Raphaël, is a powerful ally.

He was staring long and hard at the couple who were intertwined as they slowly turned around the dance floor; one of the pseudo-Wromque's hands encircled the half-caste's waist, the other was resting on his shoulder. Softly, almost timidly, he said to me, Ì'd rather kill the guy.' I knew then that I'd won; I suddenly relaxed and refilled our glasses.

-Well then, I exclaimed, what's stopping you? Why yes! Get the hang of it on a young nigger! In any case they're going to leave together, the thing looks cut and dried. You'll have, of course, to kill the guy before getting a piece of the woman. As it happens I've a knife in the front of the car.

They did in fact leave together ten minutes later. I got up, grabbing the bottle as I did; Tisserand followed me docilely.

Outside, the night was oddly pleasant, warm almost. There was a brief conflab in the parking lot between the girl and the black guy; they made off towards a scooter. I got into the front of the car, took the knife out of its bag; its serrations gleamed prettily in the moonlight. Before getting on the scooter they embraced for some time; it was beautiful and very tender. By my side Tisserand was trembling incessantly; I had the feeling I could smell the putrid sperm rising in his prick. Playing nervously with the controls, he dipped the headlights; the girl blinked. They decided then to leave; our car moved off gently behind them. Tisserand asked me:

-Where are they going to sleep?

-Probably at the girl's parents; it's the done thing. But we'll have to stop them before then. As soon as we're on a back road we'll run into the scooter. They'll probably be a bit banged up; you won't have any problem finishing off the guy.

The car was bowling smoothly along the coast road; ahead, in the beam of the headlights, the girl could be seen clutching the waist of her companion. After a few minutes' silence I started in again:

-We could always drive over them, just to be on the safe side.

-They don't look to be concerned about anything, he remarked in a dreamy voice.

Suddenly the scooter veered off to the right along a track going down to the sea. This wasn't in the plan; I told Tisserand to slow down. A bit further on the couple pulled up; I noticed that the guy was taking the trouble to set his anti-theft device before leading the girl off towards the dunes.

Once over the first lot of dunes I understood more. Almost at high tide, and forming an immense curve, the sea extended to our feet; the light of the full moon was playing gently on its surface. The couple were making off towards the south, skirting the edge of the water. The air temperature was increasingly pleasant, abnormally pleasant; you'd have thought it was the month of June. In these conditions, well sure, I understood: to make love beside the ocean, under the splendour of the stars; I understood only too well; it's exactly what I'd have done in their place. I proffered the knife to Tisserand; he left without a word.

I went back towards the car; supporting myself on the hood, I slid down on to the sand. I gulped down a few mouthfuls of bourbon, then got behind the wheel and steered the car in the direction of the sea. It was a bit risky, but the sound of the engine itself seemed muffled, imperceptible; the night was all-embracing, tender. I had a terrible yearning to drive straight into the ocean. Tisserand's absence was becoming prolonged.

When he returned he didn't say a word. He was holding the long knife in his hand; the blade was glinting softly; I detected no bloodstains on its surface. All of a sudden I felt a wave of sadness. Finally, he spoke.

-When I got there they were lying between two dunes. He'd already taken her dress and her bra off. Her breasts were so beautiful, so round in the moonlight. Then she turned, she lay on top of him. She unbuttoned his trousers. When she began sucking him off I couldn't stand it.

He fell silent. I waited. The sea was as smooth as a lake.

-I turned back, I walked between the dunes. I could have killed them; they were oblivious to everything, they didn't even know I was there. I masturbated. I had no wish to kill them; blood changes nothing.

-Blood is everywhere.

-I know Sperm is everywhere too. Right now I've had enough. I'm going back to Paris. He didn't suggest that I accompany him. I got up, walked towards the sea. The bottle of bourbon was almost empty; I swallowed the last mouthful. When I got back the beach was deserted; I hadn't even heard the car drive off.

I was never to see Tisserand again; he was killed in his car that night, on his return trip to Paris. There was a lot of fog on the outskirts of Angers; he was driving like the clappers, as usual. His 205 GTI collided head-on with a lorry that had pulled out into the middle of the carriageway . He died instantly, just before dawn. The next day was a holiday, to celebrate the birth of Christ; it was only three days later that his family heard about the business. The burial had already taken place, according to ritual; which cut short any idea of wreaths or mourners. A few words were pronounced on the sadness of such a death and on the difficulty of driving in fog, people went back to work, and that was that.

At least, I said to myself on learning of his death, he'll have battled to the end. The Under-25s club, the winter sports vacations . . . At least he won't have abdicated, won't have thrown in the towel. Right to the end, and despite repeated failure, he'll have looked for love. Squashed flat in the bodywork of his 205 GTI on the almost deserted highway, all bloody in his black suit and gold tie, I know that in his heart there was still the struggle, the desire and the will to struggle.

Part Three

1

Ah yes, that was
unconscious irony
! One breathes freely ...

After Tisserand's departure I slept fitfully; doubtless I masturbated. On awakening my tackle was sticky, the sand damp and cold; frankly I'd had enough. I was sorry Tisserand hadn't killed the black guy; day was breaking. I was miles away from any village. I got up and set off down the road.

What else was there for it? My cigarettes were sodden but still smokable. On returning to Paris I found a letter emanating from the ex-pupils' association of my engineering school; it suggested I buy fine wines and foie gras for the holidays, all at unbeatable prices. I remarked to myself that the mailout had been done with intolerable lateness.

The next day I didn’t go to work. For no precise reason; I simply didn't fancy it. Squatting on the moquette I leafed through some mail order catalogues. In a brochure put out by the Galeries Lafayette I found an interesting description of human beings, under the title
Today's People
:
After a really full day they snuggle
down into a deep sofa with sober lines
(Steiner, Roset, Cinna).
To a jazz tune they
admire the style of their Dhurries carpets, the gaiety of their wall coverings
(Patrick Frey).
Ready to set off for a frenzied set of tennis, towels await them in the
bathroom
(Yves Saint-Laurent, Ted Lapidus).
And it's before a dinner with intimate
friends in their kitchens created by
Daniel Hechter
or
Primrose Bordier
that they'll
remake the world.

Friday and Saturday I didn't do much; let's just say I meditated, if you can call it that. I remember having thought of suicide, of its paradoxical usefulness. Let's put a chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk, throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%

of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged.

My meditation on chimpanzees was prolonged late into the night of Saturday and Sunday, and I finished up laying the foundations for an animal story called
Dialogues
Between a Chimpanzee and a Stork
, which in fact constituted a political pamphlet of rare violence. Taken prisoner by a tribe of storks, the chimpanzee was at first selfpreoccupied, his thoughts far away. One morning, summoning up his courage, he demanded to see the eldest of the storks. Immediately brought before the bird, he raised his arms dramatically to the sky before pronouncing this despairing discourse:

Òf all economic and social systems, capitalism is unquestionably the most natural. This already suffices to show that it is bound to be the worst. Once this conclusion is drawn it only remains to develop a workable and consistent set of concepts, that is, one whose mechanical functioning will permit, proceeding from facts introduced by chance, the generation of multiple proofs which reinforce the predetermined judgment, the way that bars of graphite can reinforce the structure of a nuclear reactor. That is a simple task, worthy of a very young monkey; however I would like to disregard it.

`During the migration of the spermatic flood towards the neck of the uterus, an imposing phenomenon, completely respectable and absolutely essential for the reproduction of species, one sometimes observes the aberrant comportment of certain spermatozoa. They look ahead, they look behind, they sometimes even swim against the current for a few brief seconds, and the accelerated wriggling of their tail now seems to translate as the revising of an ontological decision. If they do not compensate for this surprising indecision by a given velocity they generally arrive too late, and consequently rarely participate at the grand festival of genetic recombination. And so it was in August 1793 that Maximilien Robespierre was carried along by the movement of history like a crystal of chalcedony caught in a distant avalanche, or better still like a young stork with still too-feeble wings, born by unhappy chance just before the approach of winter, and which suffers considerable difficulty - the thing is understandable - in maintaining a correct course during the crossing of jet-streams. Now jet-streams are, as we know, particularly violent on the approaches of Africa. But I shall refine my thinking once more.

Òn the day of his execution Maximilien Robespierre had a broken jaw. It was held together by a bandage. Just before placing his head under the blade the executioner wrenched off his bandage; Robespierre let out a scream of pain, torrents of blood spurted from his wound, his broken teeth spilled forth on the ground. Then the executioner brandished the bandage at the end of his arm like a trophy, showing it to the crowd massed around the scaffold. People were laughing, jeering.

Àt this point the chroniclers generally add: "The Revolution was over." This is rigorously exact.

Àt the very moment the executioner brandished his disgusting blood-soaked bandage to the acclaim of the crowd, I like to think that in the mind of Robespierre there was something other than suffering. Something apart from the feeling of failure. A hope? Or doubtless the feeling that he'd done what he had to do. Maximilien Robespierre, I love you.'