The Elegance of the Hedgehog Read online

  So I watched the game attentively, constantly on the lookout for the same thing: compact moments where a player became his own movement without having to fragment himself by heading toward. And I saw them! I saw them in every phase of the game: in the scrums, with one clear point of equilibrium, a player who found his roots, who became a solid little anchor giving his strength to the group; then in the phases of deployment, with a player who’d find the right speed without thinking any more about the goal, by concentrating on his own movement and running as if in a state of grace, with the ball stuck firm to his body; and in the trance of the place-kicker, cut off from the rest of the world in order to find the perfect foot movement. But none of them came near the perfection of the great Maori player. When he scored the first try for New Zealand, Papa sat there dumbfounded, his mouth wide open, his beer quite forgotten. He should have been completely pissed because he was rooting for the French team but instead, wiping his hand across his brow, he said, “What a player!” The commentators were sort of hungover but they couldn’t hide the fact that they’d seen something really beautiful: a player who was running without moving, leaving everyone else behind him. And the others, who seemed by comparison to move with frenzied and awkward gestures, were incapable of catching up with him.

  So I said to myself: There, I have managed to witness motionless movement in the world: is that something worth carrying on for? And at that very moment a French player lost his shorts in a maul and suddenly I felt totally depressed because it made everyone else laugh so hard they cried, including Papa who had himself another beer to celebrate, despite two centuries of Protestantism in the family. I felt as if something had been profaned.

  No, then, that won’t be enough. Further movements will be necessary to convince me. But at least this one has given me an idea.

  2. On Wars and Colonies

  I have had no formal education, as I said in the preamble to these musings. Well, that is not exactly true. But my studious youth came to a halt at the certificate of studies, and before that time I was careful not to draw attention to myself—I was terribly frightened by the suspicions aroused in Mr. Servant, my teacher, when he discovered that I had been avidly devouring his newspaper, which was filled with nothing but wars and colonies—and I was not yet ten years old.

  Why? I do not know. Do you suppose I might really have continued? That is a question for the soothsayers of old. Let us just say that the idea of struggling to make my way in a world of privileged, affluent people exhausted me before I even tried: I was the child of nothing, I had neither beauty nor charm, neither past nor ambition; I had not the slightest savoir-faire or sparkle. There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demands upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.

  For those who have no appetite, the first pangs of hunger are a source of both suffering and illumination. As a child I was apathetic, a virtual invalid, my posture so poor you would have taken me for a hunchback, and I only managed to get through my everyday life thanks to my ignorance of any alternatives. My lack of interest verged on the void: nothing spoke to me, nothing aroused me and, like a helpless wisp borne this way and that upon some mysterious wind, I was not even aware of any desire to put an end to my existence.

  There was very little conversation in my family. The children shrieked and the adults went about their business just as they would have had they been alone. We ate our fill, somewhat frugally, we were not mistreated and our paupers’ rags were clean and sturdily mended so that even if we were ashamed, at least we did not suffer from the cold. But we did not speak.

  The revelation occurred when, at the age of five, going to school for the first time, I was both astonished and frightened to hear a voice speaking to me and saying my name.

  “Renée?” asked the voice, and I felt a friendly hand on mine.

  This happened in the hallway where, for the first day of school, they had gathered the children, as it was raining outside.

  “Renée?” I heard again the inflections of the voice above me, and felt the touch of the friendly hand—an incomprehensible language—still pressing lightly and tenderly on my arm.

  I raised my head, an unusual, almost dizzying movement, and met a pair of eyes.

  Renée. That meant me. For the first time, someone was talking to me, saying my name. Where my parents habitually merely gestured or grunted, here was a woman with clear eyes and a smiling mouth standing before me, and she was finding her way to my heart, saying my name, entering with me into a closeness I had not previously known existed. I looked around me and saw a world that was suddenly filled with colors. In one painful flash I became aware of the rain falling outside, the windows streaked with water, the smell of damp clothing, the confinement of the hallway, the narrow passageway vibrating with the press of pupils, the shine of the coatracks with their copper hooks where capes made of cheap cloth were hung close together, and the height of the ceiling which, to the eyes of a small child, was like that of the sky.

  So, with my doleful eyes glued to hers, I clung to the woman who had just brought me into the world.

  “Renée,” said the voice again, “don’t you want to take off your raincoat?”

  And, holding me firmly so I would not fall, she removed my clothes with the agility of long experience.

  We are mistaken to believe that our consciousness is awakened at the moment of our first birth—perhaps because we do not know how to imagine any other living state. It may seem to us that we have always seen and felt and, armed with this belief, we identify our entry into the world as the decisive instant where consciousness is born. The fact that for five years a little girl called Renée, a perfectly operational machine of perception blessed with sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, could have lived in a state of utter unawareness both of herself and of the universe, is proof if any were needed that such a hasty theory is wrong. For in order for consciousness to be aroused, it must have a name.

  However, a combination of unfortunate circumstances would seem to confirm that no one had ever thought of giving me my name.

  “You have such pretty eyes,” added the teacher, and I knew intuitively that she was not lying, that at that moment my eyes were shining with all their beauty and, to reflect the miracle of my birth, were sparkling with a thousand small fires.

  I began to tremble and searched her eyes for the complicity that shared joy can bring.

  In her gentle, kindly gaze I saw nothing but compassion.

  In the moment where I had at last come to life, I was merely pitied.

  I was possessed.

  As my hunger could not be assuaged by playing the game of social interaction—an inconceivable aim, given my social condition (and it was at a later point in time that I would grasp the meaning of the compassion I saw in the eyes of my savior—for has one ever seen a girl raised in poverty penetrate the headiness of language deeply enough to share it with others?)—then it would be appeased by books. I touched one for the first time. I’d seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.

  Unbeknownst to all, I learned to read. When the teacher was still droning away with the letters of the alphabet to my classmates, I had already been long acquainted with the solidarity that weaves written signs together, the infinite combinations and marvelous sounds that had dubbed me a dame in this place, on that first day, when she had said my name. No one knew. I read as if deranged, at first in hiding and then, once it seemed to me that the normal amount of time to learn one’s letters had elapsed, out in the open for all to see, but I was careful to conceal the pleasure and interest that reading afforded me.

  The feeble child had become a hungry soul.

  At the age of twelve I left school and worked at home and in the fields alongside my parents and my brothers and sisters. At
seventeen I married.

  3. The Poodle as Totem

  In the collective imagination, the couple formed by married concierges—a close-knit pair consisting of two entities so insignificant that only their union can make them apparent—will in all likelihood be the owners of a poodle. As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection upon their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy loges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all.

  Thus the concierge couple, as served by the metaphor of their totemic poodle, seems to be utterly devoid of such passions as love and desire and, like their totem, destined to remain ugly, stupid, submissive and boastful. If, in certain novels, princes fall in love with working-class lasses, and princesses with galley slaves, between two concierges, even of the opposite sex, there is never any romance of the type that others experience and that might someday make a worthy story.

  Not only were we never the owners of a poodle, but I believe I can fairly assert that our marriage was a success. With my husband, I was myself. I think back on our little Sunday mornings with nostalgia, mornings blessed with restfulness where, in the silent kitchen, he would drink his coffee while I read.

  I married him at the age of seventeen following a swift but proper courtship. He worked at the factory, as did my older brothers, and stopped in many an evening on his way home to drink a coffee and a drop of something stronger. Alas, I was ugly. And yet that would not have played the slightest role had I been ugly the way others are ugly. But I bore the cruelty of my affliction alone: this ugliness that deprived me of any freshness, although I was not yet a woman, and caused me at the age of fifteen to resemble the woman I would be at the age of fifty. My stooped back, thick waist, short legs, widespread feet, abundant hair, and lumpy features—well, features lacking any shapeliness or grace—might have been overlooked for the sake of the youthful charm granted to even the most unprepossessing amongst us—but no, at the age of twenty I already qualified as an old biddy.

  Thus, when the intentions of my future husband became clear and it was no longer possible for me to ignore them, I opened my heart to him, speaking frankly for the first time to someone other than my own self, and I confessed to him how astonished I was that he might conceive of wanting to marry me.

  I was sincere. I had for many years accustomed myself to the prospect of a solitary life. To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent, condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things—some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favored among her children—no, it is a superfluous plaything that exists only to enhance the value of the jewel. As for ugliness, it is guilty from the start, and I was doomed by my tragic destiny to suffer all the more, for I was hardly stupid.

  “Renée,” he replied, with as much gravity as he could muster, showing himself to be more loquacious during the long disquisition to come than he would ever be again, “Renée, I don’t want my wife to be one of those giddy young things who run wild and have no more brain than a sparrow beneath their pretty face. I want a woman who’s loyal, a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper. I want a calm and steady companion who’ll stay by my side and support me. In exchange, you can expect me to be a serious worker, a calm man at home and a tender husband at the right moment. I’m not a bad sort, and I’ll do my best.”

  And he did.

  Small and dry like the stump of an elm tree, he had nevertheless a pleasant face and usually wore a smile. He did not drink, smoke, chew tobacco, or gamble. At home, when work was done, he’d watch television, browse through fishing magazines or play cards with his friends from the factory. He was very sociable and often invited people over. On Sundays he went fishing. As for me, I looked after the housekeeping, because he didn’t like the idea of me doing it for other people.

  He was not lacking in intelligence, although his particular intelligence was not of the sort that an industrious society values. While his skills were confined to manual work, he displayed a talent that did not stem solely from mere mechanical aptitude and, however uneducated he might be, he approached everything with a spirit of ingeniousness, something which, where small tasks are concerned, distinguishes the artists from the mere laborers and, in conversation, shows that knowledge is not everything. Having been resigned from an early age to the prospect of the life of a nun, I felt therefore that it was benign indeed of the heavens to have placed between my young bride’s hands a companion with such agreeable manners and who, while not an intellectual, was no less clever for it.

  I might have ended up with the likes of Grelier.

  Bernard Grelier is one of the rare souls at 7, rue de Grenelle in whose presence I have no fear of betraying myself. Whether I say to him: “War and Peace is the staging of a determinist vision of history” or “You’d do well to oil the hinges in the garbage room,” he will not find that one is any more significant than the other. It even seems miraculous that the latter phrase manages to fire him into action. How can one do something one does not understand? No doubt this type of proposition does not require any rational processing and, like those stimuli that move in a loop through our bone marrow and set off a reflex without calling on the brain, perhaps the summons to apply oil is merely of a mechanical nature and sets in motion a reaction in one’s limbs without inviting the mind to participate.

  Bernard Grelier is the husband of Violette Grelier, who is the “housekeeper” for the Arthens. She began working for them thirty years ago as a simple maid, and she rose through the ranks as they in turn became wealthier, and once she was a housekeeper she found herself reigning over a laughable kingdom whose subjects were the cleaning lady (Manuela), the part-time butler (an Englishman), and the factotum (her husband); she is as scornful of the lower classes as are her high and mighty upper-class employers. All day long she jabbers like a magpie, busily rushing here and there, acting important, reprimanding her menial subalterns as if this were Versailles in better days, and exhausting Manuela with pontificating speeches about the love of a job well done and the decline of good manners.

  “She hasn’t read Marx,” said Manuela to me one day.

  The pertinence of this remark uttered by a Portuguese woman who is in no way well versed in the study of philosophy is striking. No, Violette Grelier has certainly not read any Marx, for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of cleaning products for rich people’s silverware. She has paid the price for this oversight by inheriting a daily routine punctuated with endless catalogues vaunting the qualities of starch and linen dust cloths.

  I, therefore, had been well married.

  To my husband, moreover, I had very quickly confessed my great sin.

  Profound Thought No. 2

  The cat here on earth

  Modern totem

  And intermittently decorative

  In any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next and leave their fur everywhere, and no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately
our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.

  My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She’s vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue. It would seem that children believe for a fairly long time that anything that moves has a soul and is endowed with intention. My mother is no longer a child but she apparently has not managed to conceive that Constitution and Parliament possess no more understanding than the vacuum cleaner. I concede that the difference between the vacuum cleaner and the cats is that a cat can experience pain and pleasure. But does that mean it has a greater ability to communicate with humans? Not at all. That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects. When I hear my mother say “Constitution is both a very proud and very sensitive little cat” when in fact said cat is sprawled on the sofa because she’s eaten too much, it really makes me want to laugh. But if you think about the hypothesis that a cat’s purpose is to act as a modern totem, a sort of emblematic incarnation, protector of the home, reflecting well upon its owners, then everything becomes clear. My mother makes the cats into what she wishes we were, and which we absolutely are not. You won’t find anyone less proud and sensitive than the three aforementioned members of the Josse family: Papa, Maman, and Colombe. They are utterly spineless and anesthetized, emptied of all emotion.