Whatever: a novel (9 page)

'Her hormonal mechanisms must have functioned normally, there's no reason to suppose otherwise. And then? Does that suffice for having erotic fantasies? Did she imagine masculine hands lingering between the folds of her obese belly? Descending as far as her sexual parts? I turn to medicine and medicine can afford me no answer. There are many things concerning Bardot I have not managed to elucidate. I have tried.

'I didn't go as far as sleeping with her. I merely took the first steps along the path which normally leads to this. To be exact, I began at the beginning of November to speak to her, a few words at the end of class, nothing more than this for a whole fortnight. And then, on two or three occasions I asked her for explanations on such and such a point of mathematics; all this with great prudence, and without drawing attention to myself. Around mid-December I began to touch her hand, in a seemingly accidental way. Each time she reacted as if to an electric shock. It was rather impressive.

'The culminating point of our relations was attained just before Christmas, when I again accompanied her to her train (in reality a rail-car). As the station was more than eight hundred metres away this was no mean feat; I was even spotted on this occasion. In class I was generally taken to be a rather weird person, so this in fact only did limited harm to my social image.

'That evening, in the middle of the platform, I kissed her on the cheek. I did not kiss her on the mouth. What is more I think that paradoxically she would not have permitted this, since even if her lips and her tongue had never ever known the experience of contact with a masculine tongue she nonetheless had a very precise idea of the time and place when this operation ought to take place within the archetypal unfolding of adolescent flirting, I would even say that a more precise idea than the latter had never had occasion to be rectified and assuaged by the fluid vapour of the lived instant.

'Immediately after the Christmas holidays I stopped speaking to her. The guy who had spotted me near the station seemed to have forgotten the incident, but I had been afraid even so. In any case, dating Bardot would have demanded a moral strength far superior to the one I could, even at the time, pride myself on. Because not only was she ugly but she was plain nasty. Goaded on by sexual liberation (it was right at the beginning of the 80s, AIDS still did not exist), she couldn't make appeal to some ethical notion of virginity, obviously. On top of that she was too intelligent and too lucid to account for her state as being a product of "JudeoChristian influence" - in any case her parents were agnostics. All means of evasion were thus closed to her. She could only assist, in silent hatred, at the liberation of others; witness the boys pressing themselves like crabs against others' bodies; sense the relationships being formed, the experiments being undertaken, the orgasms surging forth; live to the full a silent self-destruction when faced with the flaunted pleasure of others. Thus was her adolescence to unfold, and thus it unfolded: jealousy and frustration fermented slowly to become a swelling of paroxystic hatred.

'In the end I am not terribly proud of this story. The whole thing was too manifestly ludicrous to be devoid of cruelty. For example I recall myself greeting her one morning with these words, "Oh, you have a new dress, Brigitte." It was really repulsive, even if true; because the fact is amazing but nonetheless real:
she'd
changed her dress
, I even remember one time when she'd put
a ribbon in her hair
: Oh my God! a calf's head decorated with chopped parsley, more like. I implore her pardon in the name of all humanity.

'The desire for love is deep in man, it plunges its roots to astonishing depths, and the multiplicity of its radicles is intercalated in the very substance of the heart. Despite the avalanche of humiliations which made up her daily life, Brigitte Bardot waited and hoped. She is probably waiting and hoping still. In her situation a viper would already have committed suicide. Mankind is supremely self-confident.'

'After having taken a long and hard look at the echelonment of the various appendices of the sexual function, the moment appears to have arrived to expound the central theorem of my apocritique. Unless you were to put a halt to the implacable unfolding of my reasoning with the objection that, good prince, I will permit you to formulate: "You take all your examples from adolescence, which is indeed an important period in life, but when all is said and done it only occupies an exceedingly brief fraction of this. Are you not afraid, then, that your conclusions, the finesse and rigour of which we admire, may ultimately turn out to be both partial and limited?" To this amiable adversary I will reply that adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word. The attractile drives are unleashed around the age of thirteen, after which they gradually diminish, or rather they are resolved in models of behaviour which are, after all, only constrained forces. The violence of the initial explosion means that the outcome of the conflict may remain uncertain for years; this is what is called a transitory regime in electrodynamics. But little by little the oscillations become slower, to the point of resolving themselves in mild and melancholic long waves; from this moment on all is decided, and life is nothing more than a preparation for death. This can be expressed in a more brutal and less exact way by saying that man is a diminished adolescent.

'After having taken a long and hard look at the echelonment of the various appendices of the sexual function, the moment seems to me to have come to expound the central theorem of my apocritique. For this I will utilize the lever of a condensed but adequate formulation, to wit:

Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy

'At this stage it will more than ever behove me to swathe my formulation in the austere garb of rigour. The ideological enemy is often crouching close to the target, and with a long cry of hatred he throws himself, at the entry to the last bend, on the imprudent thinker who, intoxicated from feeling the first rays of truth already alighting on his anaemic brow, had stupidly neglected to guard his rear. I will not imitate this error, and, letting the candelabra of stupefaction light themselves in your brains, I will continue to unwind the coils of my reasoning with the silent moderation of the rattlesnake. Thus I will take care to ignore the objection any attentive reader would not fail to confront me with: in the second example I surreptitiously introduced the concept of love, whereas until now my argument was based on pure sexuality. Contradiction? Incoherence? Ha ha ha!

'The marriage of Marthe and Martin goes back forty-three years. As they were married at twenty-one this makes them sixty-four. They are already retired or close to being so, in accordance with the social regulations which apply in their case. They will, as they say, end their lives together. In these circumstances it is patently obvious that the entity "couple" is formed, pertinent outside of any social contract, and which even manages on certain minor levels to equal or exceed in importance the old ape that is man. In my opinion it is within this framework that the possibility of giving a meaning to the word "love" can be reconsidered.

'After having girded my thought with the sharpened stakes of restriction I can now add that, despite its ontological fragility, the concept of love possesses or used to possess until recently all the attributes of a prodigious operative energy. Forged in haste, it quickly met with a large audience, and rare are those who clearly and deliberately renounce loving, even in our own times. This transparent success would tend to demonstrate a mysterious correspondence with some unknown constituent need of human nature. However, and it is precisely on this point that the aware analyst parts company with the spinner of idle tales, I shall be careful not to formulate the most succinct hypothesis on the nature of the aforesaid need.
Be that
as it may, love exists, since one can observe its effects
. Here is a phrase worthy of Claude Bernard, and I want to dedicate it to him. O unassailable savant! it is no mere accident that the observations most distant in appearance from the object that you initially considered come to be lined up one after the other, like so many plump partridges, beneath the radiant majesty of your protective halo. It must indeed possess a very great power, the experimental protocol you set out in 1865 with such rare penetration, for the most extravagant facts to only manage to cross the tenebrous frontier of scientificity after having been situated within the rigidity of your inflexible laws. I salute you, unforgettable physiologist, and I loudly declare that I shall do nothing which might, however minimally, curtail the length of your reign.

'Clearly setting down the columns of an indubitable axiomatic, I will thirdly cause it to be observed that, contrary to appearances, the vagina is much more than a hole in a lump of meat. (Yes, I know that butcher boys masturbate using escalopes . . . Long may they do so! It is not this which will hold back the prosecution of my thought!) In reality the vagina serves or used to serve until quite recently for the reproduction of the species. Yes, the species.

'Certain writers of the past have thought fit, in evoking the vagina and its attendant parts, to sport the stupidly dumb expression and blank look of a milestone. On the contrary, various others, akin to saprophytes, have wallowed in baseness and cynicism. Like the experienced pilot I shall navigate at equal distance from these symmetrical reefs; better still, I shall rely upon the trajectory of their midperpendicular to open my ample and intransigent passage towards the idyllic regions of precise reasoning. The three noble truths that have just lit up your eyes must therefore be considered as the generating trihedron of a pyramid of wisdom which, unprecedented marvel, will fly light-winged over the weathered oceans of doubt. It is sufficient to underline their importance. Notwithstanding that at the present time they somewhat suggest, in their size and their abrupt character, three columns of granite erected in the middle of the desert (such as can be observed, for example, in the plain of Thebes). It would, on the whole, be inimical and hardly consistent with the spirit of this treatise if I were to abandon my reader facing their overbearing verticality. It is for this that the joyous spirals of diverse adventitious propositions will seek to entwine themselves about these first axioms, propositions that I am now going to outline . . .'

Naturally, the work was unfinished. Furthermore, the dachshund dropped off to sleep before the end of the poodle's speech; yet certain indices would lead one to assume that it was in possession of the truth, and that the latter could be expressed in a few sober phrases. In the end I was young, I was having fun. It was before Véronique, all that; they were the good times. I remember at the age of seventeen, when I was once expressing contradictory and confused thoughts on the world, a fifty-year-old woman encountered in a buffet car had said to me, `You'll see, as you get older things get much simpler.' How right she was!

8

Back to the Cows

At 5.52 on a bitterly cold morning the train made its way into La Roche-sur-Yon. The town was silent, peaceful; absolutely peaceful. 'Right, then!' I say to myself. 'Now's the time for a little walk in the countryside . . .'

I passed through the deserted, or practically deserted, streets of the suburbs. At first I tried comparing the characteristics of the semis but it was really difficult, the sun not having come up yet; I quickly gave it up.

A few of the inhabitants were already up and about, despite the early hour; they watched me go by from their garages. They seemed to be asking themselves what I was doing there. If they'd have questioned me I'd have been hard pressed to give them an answer. In fact nothing justified my presence here. Neither here nor anywhere else, to tell the truth.

Then I arrived in the countryside proper. There were fences, and behind the fences cows. A slight blueness announced the approach of dawn.

I looked at the cows. Most of them weren’t asleep, they'd already started grazing. I remarked to myself that they were right; they must have been cold, may as well take a little exercise. I observed them benevolently, without in the least intending to disturb their early-morning peace and quiet. Some of them came over to the fence, without mooing, and looked at me. They were leaving me in peace too. That was fine.

Later I took myself off to the departmental headquarters for Agriculture. Tisserand was already there; he shook my hand with surprising warmth.

The director was waiting for us in his office. He turned out, right away, to be a rather likeable guy; obviously a kind and simple soul. On the other hand he was totally impervious to the technological message we were supposed to bring him. Computers, he tells us bluntly, he wants nothing to do with them. He has no wish to change his work habits just for the sake of being modern. Things are going nicely the way they are, and they'll go on doing so at least as long as he's here. If he's agreed to our coming it's only for not having hassles with the Ministry, but the moment we've gone he'll put the software in a cupboard and not touch it again.