Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Michel Houellebecq
Title Page
Prologue
Part One: The Lost Kingdom
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8. The Omega Male
Chapter 9
Chapter 10. Caroline Yessayan is to blame for everything
Chapter 11
Chapter 12. A Balanced Diet
Chapter 13
Chapter 14. Summer of ’75
Chapter 15
Part Two: Strange Moments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2. A Thirteen-Hour Flight
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7. Conversation in a Caravan
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10. Julian and Aldous
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15. The Macmillan Hypothesis
Chapter 16. Towards an Aesthetic of Goodwill
Chapter 17
Chapter 18. Second Meetings
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22. Saorge – Terminus
Part Three: Infinite Emotional
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue
Copyright
Whatever
THE FIRST OF July fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organised his leaving drinks for Tuesday evening. Bottles of champagne nestled among containers of frozen embryos in the large Brandt refrigerator usually filled with chemicals.
Four bottles for fifteen people was a little miserly, but the whole party was a sham. One careless word would break it up and send his colleagues scurrying for their cars. They stood around drinking in the white-tiled basement decorated only by a poster of the Lakes of Germany. Nobody had offered to take photos. A research student who had arrived earlier that year – a young man with a beard and a vapid expression – left after a few minutes explaining that he had to pick up his car from the garage. A palpable sense of unease spread through the group. Term would be over soon. Some of them were going home to visit family, others were going on holiday. The sound of their voices snapped like twigs in the air. Shortly afterwards, the party broke up.
By seven-thirty it was all over. Djerzinski walked across the car park with one of his colleagues. She had long black hair, very white skin and large breasts. She was older than he, and would inevitably take his position as head of the department. Most of her published papers were on the DAF3 gene in the fruit fly. She was unmarried.
When they reached his Toyota he offered his hand, smiling (he had been preparing himself mentally for this for several seconds, remembering to smile). Their palms brushed and they shook hands gently. Later, he decided a handshake lacked warmth; under the circumstances, they could have kissed each other on both cheeks like visiting dignitaries or people in show business.
After they had said their goodbyes, he sat in his car for what seemed to him an unusually long five minutes. Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms? Perhaps she was thinking about her career, her new responsibilities: if so, was she happy? At last, her Golf pulled out of the car park, leaving him alone. The weather had been magnificent all day; it was still warm now. In the early weeks of summer everything seemed fixed, motionless, radiant, though already the days were getting shorter.
He felt privileged to have worked here, he thought as he pulled out into the street. When asked ‘Do you feel privileged to live in an area like Palaiseau?’, 63 per cent of respondents answered ‘Yes’. It was hardly surprising: the buildings were on a human scale, surrounded by lush green lawns. There were several supermarkets conveniently nearby for shopping. The phrase ‘quality of life’ seemed to have been coined for such a place.
The motorway back into Paris was deserted and Djerzinski felt like a character in a science-fiction film he had seen at university: the last man on earth after every other living thing had been wiped out. A post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Djerzinski had lived on the rue Frémicourt for ten years, during which he had grown accustomed to the quiet. In 1993 he felt the need for a companion, something to welcome him home in the evening. He settled on a white canary. It was a fearful animal, which sang in the mornings though it never seemed happy. Could a canary be happy? Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of joyous fulfilment akin to inebriation, rapture or ecstasy. The first time he took the canary out of its cage, the frightened creature shat on the sofa before flying back to the bars, desperate to find the way back in. He tried again a month later. This time, the poor bird managed to fall from an open window. Barely remembering to flutter its wings, it landed on a balcony five floors down on the building opposite. All that Michel could do was wait for the woman who lived there to come home, and hope that she didn’t have a cat. She was an editor at Vingt Ans and worked late. She didn’t have a cat.
Michel recovered the bird after dark; it was trembling with cold and fear, huddled against the concrete windowsill. He sometimes saw the woman again as he was taking the rubbish out. She would nod in greeting and he would nod back. Something good had come of the accident – he had met one of his neighbours.
From his window he could see a dozen buildings – some three hundred apartments. When he came home in the evening, the canary would whistle and chirp for five or ten minutes. Michel would feed the bird and change the gravel in its cage. Tonight, however, silence greeted him. He crossed the room to the cage. The canary was dead, its cold white body lying on the gravel.
He ate a Monoprix ready-meal – monkfish in parsley sauce, from their Gourmet range – washed down with a mediocre Valdepeñas. After some thought, he put the bird’s body into a plastic bag and dumped it in the rubbish chute. What was he supposed to do? Say mass?
He didn’t know what was at the end of the chute. The opening was narrow (though large enough to take the canary). He dreamed that the chute opened onto vast rubbish bins filled with old coffee filters, ravioli in tomato sauce and mangled genitalia. Huge worms, as big as the canary, armed with terrible beaks, would attack the body. Tear off its feet, rip out its intestines, burst its eyeballs. He woke up, trembling; it was only one o’clock. He swallowed three Xanax. So ended his first night of freedom.
ON 14 DECEMBER 1900, in a paper to the Berlin Academy entitled ‘Zur Theorie des Geseztes der Energieverteilung in Normalspektrum’, Max Planck introduced the idea of quantum energy. It was a concept that would play a decisive role in the evolution of physics. Between 1900 and 1920, Einstein, Bohr and their contemporaries developed a number of ingenious models which attempted to reconcile this idea with previous theories. It was not until the 1920s that it became apparent that such attempts were futile.
Niels Bohr’s claim to be the founder of quantum mechanics rests less on his own discoveries than on the extraordinary atmosphere of creativity and intellectual openness he fostered around him. The Institute of Physics, which Bohr founded in Copenhagen in 1919, welcomed the cream of young European physicists. Heisenberg, Pauli and Born served their apprenticeships there. Though some years their senior, Bohr would spend hours talking through their hypotheses in detail. He was perceptive and good humoured but extremely rigorous. However, if Bohr tolerated no laxity in his students’ experiments, he did not think any new idea foolish a priori; no concept was so established that it could not be challenged. He liked to invite his students to his country house in Tisvilde, where he also welcomed politicians, artists and scientists from other fields. Their conversations ranged easily from philosophy to physics, history to art, from religion to everyday life. Nothing comparable had happened since the days of the Greek philosophers. It was in this extraordinary environment, between 1925 and 1927, that the basic premises of the Copenhagen Interpretation – which called into question established concepts of space, time and causality – were developed.
Djerzinski had singularly failed to foster such an environment around him. The atmosphere in his research facility was like an office, no better, no worse. Far from the popular image of molecular biologists as Rimbauds with microscopes, research scientists were not great thinkers, but simple technicians who read Le Nouvel Observateur and dreamed of going on holiday to Greenland. Molecular biology was routine. It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic secondrate intellect. Researchers wrote theses and studied for PhDs when a baccalauréat and a couple of years in college would have been more than enough for them to handle the equipment. ‘There’s no mystery to decoding the genome,’ Desplechin, the director of the biology department, liked to say, ‘. . . synthesising proteins, now that takes real talent. It’s hardly surprising that Gamow, the first person to discover how to, was a physicist. But decoding DNA, pfff . . . you decode one gene, then another and another, feed the results into a computer and let it work out the sub-sequences. You send a fax to Colorado – they’re working on gene B27, we’re working on C33. It’s like following a recipe. From time to time someone comes up with better equipment and they give him the Nobel prize. It’s a joke.’
The first of July was oppressively hot. In the afternoon a storm threatened which would send the sunbathers scattering. Desplechin’s office on the Quai Anatole France looked out onto the river. Opposite, on the Quai des Tuileries, homosexuals, many of them wearing thongs, walked around in the sunshine. They chatted in pairs and groups, and shared towels. Suntan lotion glistened on their biceps, their buttocks were glabrous and sleek. While they talked, some massaged their genitals through nylon briefs, or slipped a finger under their waistbands, revealing pubic hair or the root of the penis. Desplechin had set up a telescope beside the bay window. Rumour had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a common or garden alcoholic.
On one such afternoon he had twice tried to masturbate, his eye glued to the eyepiece, staring at an adolescent who had taken off his thong and whose cock had begun to rise. Desplechin’s penis fell, wrinkled and flaccid; he abandoned the attempt.
Djerzinski arrived punctually at four o’clock. Desplechin had asked to see him. The case was intriguing. Certainly, it was common for a researcher to take a year’s sabbatical to work in Norway or Japan, or another of those sinister countries where middle-aged people commit suicide en masse. Others – especially in the Mitterrand years, when greed reached its dizziest heights – went to venture capitalists to set up companies to exploit some molecule or another commercially. Many of them had succeeded in using the knowledge they had acquired during their years of pure research to amass considerable fortunes. But for Djerzinski to take a sabbatical with no plan, no pretext nor the merest hint of an excuse, was intolerable. At forty, he was already head of department, with fifteen researchers working under him. He reported directly to Desplechin – in theory at least. His team was widely considered to be one of the best in Europe, and their results excellent. What was wrong with the man? Desplechin forced himself to be upbeat: ‘So, any idea what you’re going to do with yourself?’ There was a minute’s silence before Djerzinski answered soberly, ‘Think.’ This was hardly a promising start, but Desplechin kept up his cheerful façade. ‘Any personal projects?’ He stared into the thin face, the sad, serious eyes of the man, and suddenly he felt intensely embarrassed. What personal life? He had plucked Djerzinski from the University of Orsay fifteen years ago. It had proved to be an excellent choice: Djerzinski was a disciplined and rigorous researcher who had built up a considerable body of work in the intervening years. The reputation of the CNRS as a leader in molecular biology was in no small part due to his work. He had kept his side of the bargain.
‘Well,’ Desplechin concluded, ‘we’ll keep your log-in to the faculty server active indefinitely, of course. You’ll have access to the results and the intranet and so forth. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.’
After Djerzinski left, Desplechin went back to the bay window. He was sweating slightly. On the bank opposite, a young, dark-haired Arab boy was taking off his shorts. Fundamental questions remained to be answered in biology. Biologists acted as though molecules were separate and distinct entities defined solely by electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. Not one of them had even heard of the EPR paradox or the Aspect experiments, nor taken the trouble to study developments in physics since the beginning of the century. Their view of the atom had evolved little since that of Democritus. They accumulated reams of repetitive statistics in the hope of finding some immediate industrial application, never realising that the very methods they were using were threatened. He and Djerzinski were probably the only members of the CNRS who had studied physics and who realised that once biologists were forced to confront the reality of the atom, the very basis of modern biology would be blown away.
Desplechin thought about this as night fell over the Seine. He could not begin to imagine where Djerzinski’s thinking might lead; he did not even feel able to discuss it with him. He was almost sixty years old and, intellectually, he felt that he was past it. The homosexuals had left now, and the bank opposite was deserted. Desplechin tried to remember when he had last had an erection. He waited for the storm.
THE STORM BROKE at about nine o’clock that evening. Djerzinski listened to the rain and sipped cheap Armagnac. He had just turned forty – perhaps he was having a mid-life crisis. Improved living standards meant that a forty-year-old nowadays was in excellent physical shape. The first signs that one had crossed a threshold – whether in physical appearance or in the slowing of the body’s responses – and begun the long decline towards death, tended to appear at forty-five, perhaps fifty. In any case, the typical mid-life crisis was sexual – a sudden frantic pursuit of young girls. This was hardly the case for Djerzinski – he used his cock to piss, no more.
The following morning he got up at seven, took his copy of Werner Heisenberg’s autobiography, Physics and Beyond, and headed for the Champs de Mars. The dawn was limpid and cool. He had had the book since he was seventeen. He sat under a chestnut tree on the Allée Victor-Cousin and re-read the chapter where Heisenberg, recounting his years as a student, tells of his first encounter with atomic theory:
It must have been in the Spring of 1920. The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into a great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star by which they could guide their steps in the prevailing darkness. And so, one bright spring morning, some ten or twenty of us, most of them younger than myself, set out on a ramble which, if I remember correctly, took us through the hills above the western shore of Lake Starnberg. Through gaps in the dense emerald screen of beech we caught occasional glimpses of the lake beneath, and of the tall mountains in the far distance. It was here that I had my first conversation about the world of atoms which was to play such an important part in my subsequent life.
At around eleven the heat began to become oppressive and Michel went back to his apartment. He undressed completely and lay down. In the three weeks that followed he barely moved. It is easy to imagine that a fish, bobbing to the surface to gulp the air, sees a beautiful, insubstantial new world. Then it retreats to its world of algae where fish feed on one other. But for a moment, it has had a glimpse of a different world, a perfect world – ours.
On the evening of 15 July he phoned Bruno. His half-brother’s voice on his answerphone was coolly ironic over a jazz riff. Bruno had a leather jacket and a goatee beard. To enhance his streetwise image he smoked cigars, worked out regularly and talked like a character from a second-rate cop show. Bruno was definitely in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Was Michel? A man in a mid-life crisis is asking only to live, to live a little more, a little longer. Michel, on the other hand, had had enough; he could see no reason to go on.
That evening he stumbled on a photo taken at his primary school in Charny and he cried. The child in the photograph sat at his desk holding a textbook open in front of him. The boy smiled straight at the camera happily, confidently; it seemed unthinkable to Djerzinski that he was that boy. The child did his homework, worked hard in class with an assured seriousness. He was just beginning to discover the world, and what he saw did not frighten him; he was ready to take his place in society. All of this was written on the boy’s face. He was wearing a jacket with a narrow collar.
For several days Michel kept the photograph beside him on his bedside table. The mysteries of time were banal, he told himself, this was the way of the world: youthful optimism fades and happiness and confidence evaporate. He lay on his Bultex mattress, struggling to come to terms with the transience of life. There was a small round dimple on the boy’s forehead – a scar he had from chickenpox; that scar had accompanied him down the years. Where was truth? The heat of midday filled the room.
BORN TO ILLITERATE peasants in central Corsica in 1882, Martin Ceccaldi seemed destined for the undistinguished life of a farmer, which had been the lot of his ancestors for countless generations. It is a way of life long since vanished, and is fondly remembered only by a handful of radical environmentalists. A detailed description of this pastoral ‘idyll’ is unnecessary, but for the sake of argument, I will outline it broadly. You are at one with nature, have plenty of fresh air and a couple of fields to plough (the number and size of which are strictly fixed by hereditary principle). Now and then you kill a boar; you fuck occasionally, mostly with your wife, whose role is to give birth to children; said children grow up to take their place in the same ecosystem. Eventually, you catch something serious and you’re history.
Martin Ceccaldi’s singular destiny was entirely symptomatic of the role played by secularism, throughout the Third Republic, in integrating citizens into French society and promoting technological progress. His teacher quickly realised that he was an exceptional pupil, a child of considerable intelligence with a gift for abstract thought – qualities which would have little opportunity to develop in peasant society. Martin’s teacher was keenly aware that there was more to his job than spoonfeeding elementary facts and figures to every untrained citizen. His task was to seek out the qualities that fitted a child to join the elite of the Third Republic. He managed to persuade Martin’s parents that their son could fulfil his destiny only if he were to leave Corsica.
In 1894, funded by a bursary, the boy started school at Thiers de Marseille (an institution faithfully described in the autobiography of Marcel Pagnol; the author’s well-written, realistic account of a poor-boy-made-good would remain a favourite of Martin’s). In 1902 his teacher’s faith was rewarded when he was admitted to the École Polytechnique.
In 1911 he accepted a position which was to change the course of his life for ever. He was to design and plan an efficient system of waterways throughout French Algeria. For more than 25 years he calculated the curve of aqueducts and the ideal diameter of pipes. In 1923 he married Geneviève July, a secretary whose family had come from the Languedoc to settle in Algeria two generations before. In 1928 their daughter, Janine, was born.
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription, marking simply the dates of birth and death, has, in its brevity, much to recommend it. However, in the case of Martin Ceccaldi, it seems appropriate to set his life in a socioeconomic context; to say less about the individual than about the society of which he is symptomatic. Carried forward by the sweep of history and their determination to be a part of it, symptomatic individuals lead lives which are, in the main, happy and uncomplicated. A page or two are sufficient to summarise such a life. Janine Ceccaldi, on the other hand, belongs to a different and dispiriting class of individuals we can call precursors. Ideally adapted to their time and social status on the one hand, they are anxious that their tendency to adopt new customs, or proselytise ideas still regarded as marginal might make them appear ‘above themselves’. Precursors, therefore, require a more detailed study – especially as their lives are often tortuous or confused. They are, however, merely catalysts – generally of some form of social breakdown – without the power to stamp their authority on change; which role is the preserve of revolutionaries and prophets.
From an early age, it was clear to Martin and Geneviève Ceccaldi that their daughter was extraordinarily intelligent – at least as brilliant as her father. She was an independent girl. She lost her virginity at the age of 13 – a remarkable achievement given the time and place. She spent the war years (uneventful, for the most part) in Algeria going to dances and balls in Constantine and, later, Algiers, while somehow managing to sustain flawless grades term after term. So it was that, with a first-class baccalauréat and considerable sexual experience, Janine left Algiers for Paris in 1945, to study medicine.
Post-war France was a difficult and troubled society: industrial production was at an all-time low and rationing would continue until 1948. Even so, a privileged few on the margins of society already showed symptoms of the compulsive, almost fetishistic desire for prepackaged pleasures that would sweep through the populace in the decades that followed. As a student in Paris, Janine had a ringside seat during the existential years. She danced to bebop at the Tabou with Jean-Paul Sartre. Though unimpressed by the philosopher’s work, she was struck by his ugliness which, she maintained, amounted to a handicap; they did not meet again. She herself was a stunning Mediterranean beauty, and had many lovers before she met Serge Clément in 1952, while he was completing his surgical internship.
‘You want to know what my dad was like?’ Bruno liked to say, years later, ‘Give a gorilla a mobile phone and you’ve got the general idea.’ Obviously, Serge Clément could not possibly have had a mobile phone at the time, but he was, it has to be admitted, somewhat hirsute. Though certainly not handsome, he had a simple, uncomplicated virility which seduced Janine. Moreover, he had plans. While travelling in the United States, he had become convinced that plastic surgery offered excellent career prospects for an ambitious young surgeon. The use of sex in marketing and the resulting breakdown of the traditional couple, together with the economic boom he sensed was coming to post-war Europe, suggested a vast untapped market which Serge Clément was among the first in Europe – certainly the first in France – to identify. His only problem was money: he needed funds to start up in business. Martin Ceccaldi, impressed by his future son-in-law’s entrepreneurial spirit, agreed to lend him money. Clément’s first clinic opened in Neuilly in 1953. Promoted in a series of positive articles in women’s magazines, it proved an outstanding success and Serge opened a second clinic in 1955, in the hills above Cannes.
Janine and Serge were what would later be called a ‘modern’ couple; her pregnancy was something of an accident. She decided, however, to have the child, believing that maternity was something every woman should experience. It was an uneventful pregnancy, and Bruno was born in March 1956. The couple quickly realised that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their personal freedom and, in 1958, they agreed to send Bruno to Algeria to live with his maternal grandmother. By then, Janine was pregnant again, this time by Marc Djerzinski.
Lucien Djerzinski had left Katowice in 1919 hoping to find work in France – or, more exactly, fled the misery and famine of the small mining community into which he had been born twenty years earlier. In France, he found work on the railways as a labourer before being promoted to track maintenance. He met and married Marie le Roux, the daughter of a newspaperman from Burgundy, and fathered four children before dying in an Allied bombing raid in 1944.
Marc, their third child, was 14 when his father died. He was an intelligent boy, serious, perhaps a little sad. In 1946, with the help of a neighbour, he got a job at the Pathé studios in Joinville, where it was immediately apparent that he had a talent for film. Given the most rudimentary instructions, he could set up and light a set before the lighting cameraman had even arrived. Henri Alekan was impressed by the boy’s work and when he joined the ORTF, shortly after broadcasting began in 1951, he invited Marc to be his assistant.
When he met Janine, in 1957, Marc was shooting a documentary on the ‘Tropezians’. Focusing principally on Brigitte Bardot (Et Dieu créa la Femme, released in 1956, marked the beginning of the Bardot legend), it covered the artistic and literary scene around Saint-Tropez with particular emphasis on what would later be called ‘la bande à Sagan’. Janine was fascinated by this milieu which, despite her wealth, was closed to her. She seemed to be genuinely in love with Marc. She convinced herself that he had the makings of a great director – which was probably true. Marc made cinéma vérité documentaries. Using minimal lighting and the careful placement of objects, he could conjure scenes reminiscent of Edward Hopper: calm, prosaic but quietly desperate. Though he was surrounded by celebrities, his gaze never seemed more than indifferent. He filmed Sagan and Bardot with the same attention to detail as he might a lobster. He spoke to no one, befriended no one; he was genuinely fascinating.
Janine divorced Serge in 1958, shortly after they had packed Bruno off to her parents. It was an amicable separation, with both parties admitting fault. Serge was generous, giving Janine his share of the Cannes clinic, which guaranteed her a comfortable income. Marc proved no less a loner after he and Janine had moved into a villa in Sainte-Maxime together. She nagged him constantly, telling him he should work on his career as a director. He agreed but did nothing, simply waiting for the next documentary opportunity to come his way. If she arranged a dinner party, he would eat in the kitchen before the guests arrived and then go walking on the sea front. He would return just as the guests were leaving and explain that he was editing a film.
The birth of their son in 1958 clearly disturbed him. He would stand for minutes at a time staring at the child, who bore an uncanny resemblance to him: the same angular face, high cheekbones and piercing green eyes. Shortly after, Janine began to be unfaithful. He was probably hurt by her infidelity, but it was impossible to tell as he spoke less and less. He spent his time making small altars of pebbles, driftwood and seashells and photographing them under the blazing sky.
His documentary about Saint-Tropez was well received in the industry, but he turned down an interview request from Les Cahiers du Cinéma. His reputation reached new heights in 1959 with the broadcast of a short, bilious documentary about the film Salut les Copains and the yéyé phenomenon. He had no interest in drama and twice refused an invitation to work with Jean-Luc Godard. Janine had by now taken up with a group of Americans staying on the Riviera. Something radical was happening in California. At Esalen, near Big Sur, people were living together in communes which practised sexual liberation and the use of mind-expanding drugs. Janine and Francesco di Meola became lovers. He was an Italian-American, had met Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley and was one of the founding members of the Esalen commune.
In January 1961 Marc travelled to China to shoot a documentary about the new communist society emerging in the People’s Republic. He arrived back in Sainte-Maxime on the afternoon of 23 June. The house seemed deserted. A girl of about 15 sat naked and cross-legged on the floor of the living room. ‘Gone to the beach’, she finally said, listlessly, before sinking back into torpor. In Janine’s bedroom he found a large, bearded man, naked and visibly drunk, lying snoring across the bed. Listening, Marc thought he could hear cries or screams.
Pushing open the door of one of the upstairs bedrooms, he smelled a retch-inducing stench. The sun flared violently through the huge bay window onto the black and white tiles where his son crawled around awkwardly, slipping occasionally in pools of urine or excrement. He blinked against the light and whimpered continuously. Sensing a human presence, the boy tried to escape; Marc picked him up and the child trembled in his arms.
Marc left the house and bought a child’s car-seat from a nearby shop. He wrote a short note to Janine, strapped his son into his car, climbed in, and headed north. When he reached Valence, he turned into the Massif Central. It was getting dark. From time to time, between the hairpin bends, he glanced back at his sleeping son and felt overcome by a strange emotion.
Subsequently, Michel’s grandmother, who had retired to live in the Yonne, brought him up. His mother moved to America shortly afterward to join di Meola’s commune. He would not see her again until he was 15. He saw little of his father, either. In 1964 Marc went to Tibet to film a documentary about the Chinese occupation. He wrote to his mother to say he was well, and to tell her how much he admired Tibetan Buddhism – which the Chinese were brutally eradicating; after that, silence. The French government made approaches to the Chinese authorities, but there was no response. Though no body was ever found, he was officially presumed dead a year later.
IT IS THE summer of 1968; Michel is ten years old. He has lived with his grandmother since he was two, in the village of Charny in the Yonne, near the border with the Loiret. Every morning he gets up early to make his grandmother’s breakfast; he has made a list: how long the tea should brew, how many slices of bread-and-butter and so on.
He often stays in his room all morning reading Jules Verne, Pif le Chien, or the Famous Five, but he spends most of his time poring over a magazine he collects, The Universe Explained. There are articles about the structure of the elements, about how clouds form and bees swarm. He reads about the Taj Mahal, a palace built by an ancient king to honour his dead queen; about the death of Socrates; about Euclid’s invention of geometry three thousand years ago.
In the afternoon, sitting in the garden with his back to the cherry tree, he can feel the springiness of the grass and the heat of the sun. The lettuces soak up the sun’s rays and water from the ground. He has to water them when it gets dark. He sits in the garden reading The Universe Explained, or one of the books in a series called One Hundred Facts About . . . He feeds on knowledge.
Sometimes he cycles cross-country, pedalling as hard as he can, filling his lungs with a taste of the infinite. He does not know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is a brief one. The countryside flashes past.
There is nothing in Charny but a small grocer’s shop. Every Wednesday, though, the butcher’s van calls round; the fishmonger’s every Friday. His grandmother often makes creamed cod for lunch on Saturday. Michel does not know that this is his last summer in Charny. His grandmother suffered a heart attack some months ago, her daughters are already looking for a house in the suburbs of Paris so that she can be closer to them. She is not strong enough to cope on her own any more, nor to tend the garden all year round.
Though Michel rarely plays with boys his own age, he gets along with his peers well enough. They think of him as a bit of a loner. His schoolwork is excellent – he seems to understand everything effortlessly – and his grandmother is very proud. Yet he is not bullied by his classmates; he is happy to let them copy his work in class, always waiting for the boy next to him to finish before turning the page. Despite his excellent academic record, he always sits at the back of the class. His is a fragile kingdom.
ONE SUMMER WHILE he was still living in the Yonne, Michel spent an afternoon running through the fields with his cousin Brigitte. A pretty, gentle girl of 16, who some years later would marry a complete bastard. It was the summer of 1967. She grabbed his hands, swinging him round and round until they collapsed in a heap on the freshly mown grass. He pressed himself into her warm breast; she was wearing a short skirt. Next morning they were covered in spots and itched all over.
Thrombidium holosericum is plentiful in summer meadows. Two millimetres in diameter, with a fat, fleshy, bright red body, it embeds itself into the bodies of mammals causing painful itching. Linguatulia rhinaria is a parasite which lives in the frontal and maxilliary sinuses of dogs and, occasionally, humans. The larva is oval and has a short tail and a sharp spike near the mouth; two pairs of limbs are armed with long claws. The body of the adult is between 18 and 85 centimetres long, flat, ribbed, translucent and covered in barbed spines.
In December 1968 Michel’s grandmother moved to Seine-et-Marne to be closer to her daughters. Michel’s day-to-day life changed little at first. Fifty kilometres from Paris, Crécy-en-Brie was a pretty country village at the time; its old and dignified houses had been painted by Corot in his day. Tourist brochures referred to it, hopefully, as ‘Venice on the Brie’, a reference to the network of canals that brought water from the Grand Morin. Few villagers commuted to Paris, most working for local businesses, or in nearby Meaux.
Two months after the move, at a time when advertising had barely begun on France’s then only channel, his grandmother bought a television. And so, on 21 July 1969, Michel was able to stay up and watch the first steps of man on the moon, live. Six hundred million people across the world watched with him. The broadcast, which lasted three or four hours, probably represents the culmination of the first great Western technological dream.
Though he joined the local school in Crécy in midterm, Michel adapted quickly and had no difficulty passing his end of year exams. Every Thursday he bought Pif, newly relaunched, with its free ‘gadget’ every week. Unlike most children of his age, he did not buy it for the gadget, but for the adventure stories. The dazzling sweep of history and costume of these tales did little to mask the simple moral values they exemplified. Michel slowly realised that this moral system ran through all the stories: Ragnar the Viking; Teddy Ted and the Apache; Rahan ‘Son of a Savage Age’; and Nasdine Hodja in the world of viziers and caliphs. It was a realisation that would have a profound effect on him. Later, when he read Nietzsche, he was only briefly provoked, and Kant only served to confirm what he already knew: that perfect morality is unique and universal. Nothing is added to it and nothing changes in the course of time. It is not dependent on history, economics, sociology or culture; it is not dependent on anything. Not determined, it determines. Not conditioned, it conditions. It is, in other words, absolute.
Everyday morality is always a blend, variously proportioned, of perfect morality and other, more ambiguous ideas – for the most part religious. The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.
Michel liked all of the heroes in Pif, but his favourite was Black Wolf, the Lone Indian. He was a synthesis of the noblest qualities of the Apache, the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Black Wolf roamed the prairies ceaselessly with his horse Shinook and his wolf Toopee, instinctively coming to the aid of the weak. Black Wolf continually commented on the transcendent ethic which underpinned his actions. Often, he referred to poetic proverbs from the Dakota and the Cree; sometimes more prosaically to the ‘law of the prairie’. Years later, Michel still thought of him as Kant’s ideal: always acting ‘as if he were by his maxims in every case a legitimating member in the universal kingdom of ends’. Some episodes, like ‘The Leather Bracelet’ in which the extraordinary character of the old Cheyenne chief searches for the stars, broke free of the straitjacket of the ‘adventure story’ for a world that was more poetic, more moral.
He was less interested in television. Every week, however, his heart in his mouth, he watched The Animal Kingdom. Graceful animals like gazelles and the antelopes spent their days in abject terror while lions and panthers lived out their lives in listless imbecility punctuated by explosive bursts of cruelty. They slaughtered weaker animals; dismembered and devoured the sick and the old, before falling back into brutish sleep where the only activity was that of the parasites feeding on them from within. Some of the parasites were hosts to smaller parasites, which in turn were a breeding ground for viruses. Snakes moved among the trees, their fangs bared, ready to strike at bird or mammal, only to be ripped apart by hawks. The pompous, half-witted voice of Claude Darget narrated these atrocities, his voice filled with awe and unjustifiable admiration. Michel trembled with indignation. But, as he watched, the unshakeable conviction grew that, taken as a whole, nature was not only savage, it was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust – and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.
In April 1970 Pif gave away a free gift which was to become famous: ‘Sea Monkeys’. Each copy came with a sachet of poudre de vie – the eggs of a tiny marine crustacean, Artemia salina. They had spent thousands of years in suspended animation. The process for bringing them back to life was complicated: water had to be decanted from one container into another for three days, then warmed. Only then was the powder added and the water stirred gently. In the days that followed, the bowl had to be kept near a source of light; warm water had to be added regularly to compensate for evaporation and the water stirred to keep it oxygenated. Some weeks later, the bowl was swarming with a multitude of translucent crustaceans, which were indisputably alive, if faintly revolting. Not knowing what to do with them, Michel ended up tipping them into the river Morin.
The complete adventure story in the same issue concerned the boyhood of Rahan, and told how he had come to his vocation as a lone hero in Palaeolithic Europe. When still a child, he had seen his tribe wiped out by an erupting volcano. As he knelt by his dying father, Crâo the Wise, the old man gave him a necklace of three hawk’s talons. Each of the talons symbolised one of the qualities of ‘those who walked upright’. The first symbolised loyalty, the second courage, and the third and most important was the talon of kindness. Rahan had worn the necklace ever since, trying always to prove himself worthy of it.
In the long narrow garden of the house in Crécy was a cherry tree only slightly smaller than the one in Michel’s garden in the Yonne. There he would sit and read The Universe Explained and A Hundred Facts About . . . For his twelfth birthday, his grandmother gave him ‘My First Chemistry Set’. Chemistry was mysterious and strange; it was much more exciting than physics or biology. Each substance came in a separate tube. Each had its own colour and texture, elements forever distinct from each other, but simply putting them close to each other could produce violent reactions, which, in a flash, could create some new substance.
It was as he was reading in the garden one afternoon in July that Michel realised that the elements could have been completely different. Atoms with identical valency but higher atomic weight could have taken the place of the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen which made up all living things. On another planet, where temperature and atmospheric pressure were different, the stuff of life could be silicon, sulphur and phosphorus; or germanium, selenium and arsenic; or even tin, tellurium and antimony. He had no one he could really talk to about these things. At his insistence, his grandmother bought him several books on biochemistry.
BRUNO’S EARLIEST MEMORY was one of humiliation. He was four years old, and attending the Pare Laperlier nursery school in Algiers. It was an autumn afternoon and the teacher had shown the boys how to make necklaces out of leaves. The girls, most of them in white dresses, sat on a small bank watching, their faces already betraying a hint of the dumb resignation of women. The ground was strewn with golden leaves, mostly chestnut and poplar. One after another, his friends finished their necklaces and went to place them around the necks of their little girlfriends. He could not seem to finish his. The leaves broke and crumbled in his hands. How could he tell them that he too needed love? How could he let them know without a necklace? He started to cry with rage but the teacher did not come to help. Class had finished and the children stood up and began to file out of the park. The nursery school closed shortly afterwards.
His grandparents lived in a beautiful apartment on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. The apartment, like many in the centre of Algiers, was designed in the bourgeois style of the great Haussmann buildings in Paris. A central hall, thirty metres long, ran the length of the apartment, ending in a drawing-room. From the balcony of the drawing-room, the whole of the ‘White City’ was at one’s feet. Many years later, when Bruno was already an embittered middle-aged cynic, he could still remember himself, aged four, pedalling furiously down the dark hallway towards the shimmering portal of the balcony. It was at moments like this that he had come closest to true happiness.
His grandfather died in 1967. In temperate climates, the body of a bird or mammal first attracts specific species of flies (Musca, Curtoneura), but once decomposition has begun to set in, these are joined by others, particularly Calliphora and Lucilia. Under the combined action of bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by the larvae, the corpse begins to liquefy and becomes a ferment of butyric and ammoniac reactions. In three short months, the flies will have completed their work. They are succeeded by hordes of coleopterans, specifically Dermestes, and lepidoptera like Aglossa pinguinalis which feed on fatty tissue. Larvae of the Piophila petasionis feed on the fermenting proteins with other coleopterans called Corynetes.
The cadaver, now decomposed, becomes a host to Acaridae which absorb the last traces of residual moisture. Desiccated now and mummified, the corpse still harbours parasites, the larvae of beetles, Aglossa cuprealis and Tineola bisellelia maggots, which complete the cycle.
Bruno could still see the beautiful deep black coffin with a silver cross. It was a peaceful image, a happy one: he knew his grandfather would be at peace in such a magnificent coffin. He did not learn about Acaridae and the host of parasites with names like Italian film stars until later. But even now the image of his grandfather’s coffin was still a happy one.
He remembered his grandmother, sitting on a suitcase in the middle of the kitchen on the day they arrived in Marseilles. Cockroaches scuttled between the cracks in the tiles. It was then that she began to lose her mind. The litany of troubles in those few short weeks had overwhelmed her: the slow agony of her husband’s death, the hurried departure from Algiers and the arduous search for an apartment, finding one at last on a housing estate in the north-east of Marseilles. She had never set foot in France before. Her daughter had deserted her; she had not even attended her father’s funeral. Deep down, Bruno’s grandmother felt certain that there had been a mistake. Someone, somewhere had made a dreadful mistake.
She picked herself up and carried on for another five years. She bought new furniture, set up a bed in the dining room for Bruno and enrolled him in a local primary school. Every afternoon she came to collect him. He was ashamed of the small, frail, shrivelled woman who took his hand to lead him home. All the other children had parents; divorce was still rare in those days.
At night she would go over and over her life trying to discover how it had come to this. She rarely managed to find sleep before dawn. The apartment had low ceilings and the rooms were stuffy and unbearably hot. During the day she pottered around in slippers, talking to herself. Sometimes she would repeat a phrase fifty times without realising. Her daughter’s memory haunted her: ‘Her own father’s funeral and she didn’t come.’ She went from one room to another carrying a bucket or a saucepan whose purpose she had already forgotten. ‘Her own father’s funeral . . . Her own father’s funeral.’ Her slippers squeaked on the tiled floors. Terrified, Bruno curled himself into a ball in his bed. He knew things could only get worse. Sometimes she would get up early, still in dressing-gown and curlers, and whisper to herself’Algeria is French . . . ’ and then her slippers would squeak across the floor. She walked back and forth in the tiny two-room apartment staring at some fixed, far-off point. ‘France . . . France . . . ’ she repeated slowly, her voice dying away.
She had always been a good cook; here it became her only pleasure. She would cook lavish meals for Bruno as though she were entertaining a party of ten. Peppers marinated in olive oil, anchovies, potato salad: sometimes there would be five hors d’oeuvres before a main course of stuffed aubergine or saddle of hare with olives, sometimes couscous. The one thing she had never succeeded in mastering was baking, but every week when she collected her pension she would bring home pastries, boxes of nougat and marrons glacés. As time went by, Bruno became a fat, fearful child. She herself ate little or nothing.
On Sunday mornings she would sleep late and Bruno would climb into her bed and press himself against her emaciated body. Sometimes he dreamed of getting up in the night, taking a knife and stabbing her through the heart; he could see himself break down in tears beside the body; in his imagination, he always died soon after her.
Late in 1966 she received a letter from her daughter. Bruno’s father – with whom she still exchanged cards at Christmas – had given her their address in Marseilles. In the letter, Janine expressed no real regret, as evidenced by her opening sentence ‘I heard Daddy died and you moved to France’. She explained that she was leaving California and coming back to live in the south of France. She gave no forwarding address.