The Elegance of the Hedgehog Read online

  11. The Rebellion of the Mongolian Tribes

  There is a quiet knock on the door of the loge. It’s Manuela, she’s just been given the rest of the day off. “The Maître is dying,” she says; I cannot tell whether she means to add a touch of irony to this echo of Chabrot’s refrain. “You aren’t busy? We would have our tea now?”

  Manuela’s casual disregard for synchronizing verb tenses, the way she uses a conditional interrogative without the proper word order, the way she can make free with her syntax because she is only a poor Portuguese woman forced into the language of exile, all have the same air of obsolescence about them as Chabrot’s strict formulas.

  “I met Laura in the stairs,” she says as she sits down. “She was holding to the banister as if she needed to go to the toilet. When she saw me, she left.”

  Laura is the younger Arthens daughter, a nice girl who doesn’t get many visits. Clémence, her older sister, is the awkward incarnation of frustration, a devout churchgoer who spends her time boring her husband and children with endless, mind-numbing days of holy mass, parish fêtes, and cross-stitch embroidery. But Jean, the youngest, is a drug addict, a sad wreck. He was a lovely child once, with wide eyes filled with wonder, who would trot along behind his father as if his life depended on it. But when he started using drugs the change was spectacular: he ceased to move. After a childhood wasted running after God in vain, he now seems to be tripping over his own legs, moving along in fits and starts, stopping in the stairs or outside the elevator or in the courtyard for increasingly lengthy spells, to the point of occasionally falling asleep on my doormat or in the garbage can room. One day he was stationed in a studied stupor above the bed of roses and dwarf camellias, so I asked him if he needed anything, and it occurred to me that he was beginning to look more and more like Neptune, with his tearful eyes, his damp, twitching nose, and his scruffy curly hair straying across his temples.

  “Uh, uh no,” he had replied, his words as detached and halting as his gestures.

  “Wouldn’t you at least like to sit down?” I suggested.

  “Sit down?” he echoed, astonished. “Uh, uh no, what for?”

  “To rest a bit.”

  “Ah, I seeee. Well, uh, uh no.”

  I left him to the company of the camellias and kept an eye on him from the window. After a very long time he roused himself from his floral contemplation and headed at a snail’s pace for my loge. I opened before he foundered in his endeavor to ring the bell.

  “I’ll be on my way,” he said, without seeing me, his silky unkempt locks flopping down over his eyes. Then, with what seemed an enormous effort: “Those flowers . . . what are they called?”

  “The camellias?” I asked, surprised.

  “Camellias . . . ” he echoed slowly, “camellias . . . Well thank you, Madame Michel,” he said eventually, his voice astonishingly firm.

  And he turned on his heels. I did not see him again for weeks, until one morning in November when, as he was passing by outside my loge, I scarcely recognized him, so great was his fall. Yes, a fall . . . We are all headed for one. But for a young man to reach that point before his time, the point where he cannot get to his feet again . . . such a fall is so visible and so brutal that your heart is seized with pity. Jean Arthens was no more than a tortured body staggering through life on a razor’s edge. Horrified, I was wondering how he would even manage to make the simple gestures required to operate the elevator when Bernard Grelier suddenly appeared, took hold of him and lifted him up as if he were a feather, and I was spared having to intervene. I had a brief glimpse of a frail, mature man carrying a ravaged child in his arms, then they disappeared into the dark stairway.

  “But Clémence will be coming,” said Manuela who, uncannily, always picks up the thread of my unspoken thoughts.

  “Chabrot told me to ask her to leave,” I said, thoughtful. “He won’t see anyone but Paul.”

  “The baroness was so upset she was blowing her nose into a dishcloth,” added Manuela, referring to Violette Grelier.

  I am not surprised. Truth will out, when the end is near . . . Violette Grelier is to dishcloths what Pierre Arthens is to silk; we are all prisoners of our own destiny, must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and, in our epilogue, must be the person we have always been deep inside, regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime. Just because you have been around fine linen does not mean you are entitled to it—no more than a sick person is to health.

  I pour the tea and we sip in silence. We have never had our tea together in the morning, and this break with our usual protocol imbues the ritual with a strange flavor.

  Yes, this sudden transmutation in the order of things seems to enhance our pleasure, as if consecrating the unchanging nature of a ritual established over our afternoons together, a ritual that has ripened into a solid and meaningful reality. Today, because it has been transgressed, our ritual suddenly acquires all its power; we are tasting the splendid gift of this unexpected morning as if it were some precious nectar; ordinary gestures have an extraordinary resonance, as we breathe in the fragrance of the tea, savor it, lower our cups, serve more, and sip again: every gesture has the bright aura of rebirth. At moments like this the web of life is revealed by the power of ritual, and each time we renew our ceremony, the pleasure will be all the greater for our having violated one of its principles. Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time. Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn—and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

  So, let us drink a cup of tea.

  Kakuzo Okakura, the author of the Book of Tea, laments the rebellion of the Mongolian tribes in the thirteenth century not because it brought death and desolation but because it destroyed one of the creations of the Song dynasty, the most precious among them, the art of tea. Like Okakura, I know that tea is no minor beverage. When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

  The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accesion to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.

  Profound Thought No. 6

  What do you drink

  What do you read

  At breakfast

  And I know who

  You are

  Every morning at breakfast Papa drinks a coffee and reads the newspaper. Several newspapers, in fact: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération and, once a week, L’Express, Les Échos, Time and Courrier International. But I can tell that the most satisfying thing for him is his first cup of coffee with Le Monde. He is absorbed by his reading for at least half an hour. In order to enjoy this half-hour, he has to get up very early, because his days are full. But every morning, even if there’s been a nighttime session and he has only slept two hours, he gets up at six and reads his paper while he drinks a strong cup of coffee. In this way Papa constructs himself, every day. I say “constructs himself” because I think that each time it’s a new construction,
as if everything has been reduced to ashes during the night, and he has to start from scratch. In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it’s been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe. For Papa, the newspaper and the coffee are magic wands that transform him into an important man. Like a pumpkin into a coach. Of course he finds this very satisfying: I never see him as calm and relaxed as when he’s sitting drinking his six o’clock coffee. But at such a price! You pay such a price when you lead a false life! When the mask is taken away, when there’s a crisis—and there’s always a crisis at some point among mortals—the truth is terrible! Look at Monsieur Arthens, the food critic on the sixth floor, who is dying. At noon, Maman whirled in from her shopping like a tornado and the moment she was in the hallway she shouted for everybody to hear: “Pierre Arthens is dying!” By everybody, of course I mean Constitution and me. Needless to say, her effort at drama was a flop. Maman, who was a bit disheveled, looked disappointed. When Papa came home this evening she jumped on him to tell him the news. Papa seemed surprised: “His heart? What, already?” he asked.

  I have to admit that Monsieur Arthens is a truly nasty man. Papa is just a kid who’s playing the dead serious grown-up. But Monsieur Arthens . . . a first class truly nasty man. When I say nasty, I don’t mean unkind or cruel or tyrannical, though there is a bit of that too. No, when I say, “he’s a truly nasty man,” I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he’s already like a corpse even though he’s still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can’t you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so that he won’t feel nauseated by who he is.

  Pierre Arthens for sure was truly nasty. They say he was the pope of food critics and a worldwide champion of French cuisine. Well, that doesn’t surprise me. If you want my opinion, French cuisine is pitiful. So much genius and wherewithal and so many resources for such a heavy end result . . . And so many sauces and stuffings and pastries, enough to make you burst! It’s in such bad taste . . . And when it isn’t heavy, it’s as fussy as can be: you’re dying of hunger and before you are three stylized radishes and two scallops in a seaweed gelée served on pseudo-Zen plates by waiters who look as joyful as undertakers. On Saturday we went to a very fancy restaurant that was just like that: Napoléon’s Bar. This was a family outing, to celebrate Colombe’s birthday. And she chose her dishes with all her usual grace: pretentious thingummies with chestnuts, lamb prepared with some herbs with unpronounceable names, and a Grand Marnier sabayon (how horrible can you get). Sabayon is the emblem of French cuisine: it pretends to be light but would asphyxiate any common Christian. I didn’t have a starter (and I’ll spare you Colombe’s remarks about my “irritating-little-sister anorexia”) and then, for the price of sixty-three euros, I had some filets of mullet in curry (with diced al dente zucchini and carrot tucked under the fish) and then, for thirty-four euros, the least evil thing I could find on the menu: a bitter chocolate fondant. Let me tell you: at that price, I would have preferred a year’s subscription to McDonald’s. At least it’s in bad taste without being pretentious. And I won’t even get started on the décor in the dining room and on the table. When the French want to get away from the traditional “Empire” style with burgundy drapes and gilt galore, they go for the hospital style. You sit on these Le Corbusier chairs (“By Corbu,” says Maman) and you eat out of these white plates with very Soviet-bureaucracy geometrical shapes, and you dry your hands in the restrooms on towels so thin that they don’t absorb a thing.

  Clean lines, simplicity; no, that’s not it. “But what would you rather have?” asked Colombe, exasperated, because I didn’t manage to finish my first mullet. I didn’t answer. Because I don’t know. I’m still only a little girl, after all. But in my mangas, people seem to eat differently. It looks simple, refined, moderate, delicious. You eat the way you look at a beautiful picture or sing in a beautiful choir. Neither too much nor too little: moderate, in the good sense of the word. Maybe I’m completely mistaken; but French cuisine seems old and pretentious to me, whereas Japanese cuisine seems . . . well, neither young nor old. Eternal, divine.

  Anyway, Monsieur Arthens is dying. I wonder what he used to do in the morning to prepare for his role as a truly nasty man. Maybe a strong little coffee while he read the competition, or an American breakfast with sausages and home fries. What do we do in the morning? Papa reads his paper while he drinks his coffee, Maman drinks her coffee while she leafs through catalogues, Colombe drinks her coffee while she listens to France Inter and I drink hot chocolate while reading mangas. Just now I’m reading Taniguchi mangas; he’s a genius, and he’s teaching me a lot about people.

  But yesterday I asked Maman if I could drink some tea. My grandmother drinks black tea at breakfast, flavored with bergamot. Even though I don’t find it particularly good, it seems less aggressive than coffee, which is a nasty person’s drink. But at the restaurant last night Maman ordered some jasmine tea and she let me taste it. I thought it was so good, so “me,” that this morning I said that from now on I want to have tea at breakfast. Maman shot me a strange look (her “poorly-purged-sleeping-tablet” look) then she said yes yes sweetheart you’re old enough now.

  Tea and mangas instead of coffee and newspapers: something elegant and enchanting, instead of adult power struggles and their sad aggressiveness.

  12. Phantom Comedy

  After Manuela has left, I attend to all manner of captivating activities: I do the housework, use the mop in the hallway, take the garbage cans out into the street, pick up the leaflets, water the flowers, prepare the cat’s repast (including a slice of ham with a fat edge of rind), make my own meal—cold Chinese noodles with tomato, basil and parmesan—read the newspaper, take a moment’s retreat in my den to read a very fine Danish novel, and handle the crisis in the foyer where Lotte, the Arthens’s granddaughter, Clémence’s eldest, is crying outside my loge because Granpy doesn’t want to see her.

  At nine in the evening at last I have finished with everything and I suddenly feel old and very depressed. Death does not frighten me, least of all that of Pierre Arthens, but it is the waiting that is unbearable, this suspension of time when something has not yet happened and where we feel how very useless it is to struggle. I sit on in the kitchen, in silence, in the half-light, a bitter taste of absurdity in my mouth. My mind drifts slowly. Pierre Arthens . . . A brutal despot, hungry for glory and accolades and yet, torn to the very end between an aspiration for art and a thirst for power, he endeavored to use language in pursuit of an illusion. Which way lies truth, in the end? In power, or in Art? Is it not the power of well-crafted discourse which enables us not only to sing the praises of mankind’s creations but also to denounce as a crime of illusory vanity the urge to dominate, which moves us all—yes, all, even a wretched concierge in her cramped loge who, although she may have renounced any visible power, nevertheless pursues those dreams of power in her mind?

  Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy. We are good primates, so we spend most of our time maintaining and defending our territory, so that it will protect and gratify us; climbing—or trying not to slide down—the tribe’s hierarchical ladder, and fornicating in every manner imaginable—even mere phantasms—as much for the pleasure of it as for the promised offspring. Thus we use up a considerable amount of our energy in intimidation and seduction, and these two strategies alone ensure the quest for territory, hierarchy and sex that gives life to our conatus. But none of this touches our consciousness. We talk about love, about good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to its nice big warm dog.

&nb
sp; There are times, however, when life becomes a phantom comedy. As if aroused from a dream, we watch ourselves in action and, shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in. All our frenzied nudging and posturing suddenly becomes utterly insignificant; our cozy little nest is reduced to some futile barbarian custom, and our position in society, hard-won and eternally precarious, is but a crude vanity. As for our progeny, we view them now with new eyes, and we are horrified, because without the cloak of altruism, the reproductive act seems extraordinarily out of place. All that is left is sexual pleasure, but if it is relegated to a mere manifestation of primal abjection, it will fail in proportion, because a loveless session of gymnastics is not what we have struggled so hard to master.

  Eternity eludes us.

  At times like this, all the romantic, political, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs that years of instruction and education have tried to inculcate in us seem to be foundering on the altar of our true nature, and society, a territorial field mined with the powerful charges of hierarchy, is sinking into the nothingness of Meaning. Exeunt rich and poor, thinkers, researchers, decision-makers, slaves, the good and the evil, the creative and the conscientious, trade unionists and individualists, progressives and conservatives; all have become primitive hominoids whose nudging and posturing, mannerisms and finery, language and codes are all located on the genetic map of an average primate, and all add up to no more than this: hold your rank, or die.

  At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world.