Whatever: a novel (3 page)

She suggests going for a coffee. I accept, obviously. An automatic machine. I haven't any change, she gives me two francs. The coffee is foul, but that doesn't stop her rant. In Paris you can drop dead right on the street, nobody gives a damn. Where she is, in the Warn, it's different. Every weekend she goes back to her place in the Warn. And in the evenings she takes courses at the CNAM to improve her prospects. In three years she'll maybe have her engineering diploma.

Engineer. I'm an engineer. It's vital I say something. I enquire, in a slightly strangled voice,

-Courses in what?

-Courses in management control, factor analysis, algorithmic, financial accounting.

-That must be hard work, I remark in a rather vague tone.

Yes, it's hard work, but work doesn't frighten her. In the evenings she often works in her studio flat till midnight getting her studies done. Anyway you have to fight to get anything in life, that's what she's always believed. We go back up the stairs towards her office. `0.K. fight, little Catherine . . .' I mournfully say to myself. She's not all that pretty. As well as prominent teeth she has lifeless hair, little eyes that burn with anger. No breasts or buttocks to speak of. God has not, in truth, been too kind to her.

I think we're going to get along very well. She has the decided air of organizing everything, running the show, all I'll have to do is come down here and give my courses. Which suits me fine; I have no wish to contradict her. I don't reckon she'll fall in love with me; I get the impression she's beyond trying it on with a man.

Around eleven a new person bursts into the office. His name is Patrick Leroy and apparently he shares the same office as Catherine. Hawaiian shirt, buttock-hugging jeans and a bunch of keys hanging from the belt, which jangle when he walks. He's a bit knackered, he informs us. He's spent the night in a jazz club with a mate, they managed to `make it with a couple of chicks'. All in all, he's happy.

He will spend the rest of the morning on the phone. He talks in a loud voice. During the course of the third phone call he will touch on a subject which is, in itself, extremely sad: one of their common women friends, his and the girl he's calling, has been killed in a car crash. An aggravating circumstance is that the car was driven by a third mate, whom he calls Òld Fred'. And Old Fred himself is unscathed. It's all, in theory, somewhat distressing, but he'll succeed in gliding over this aspect of the issue with a sort of cynical vulgarity feet on the table and hip language. `She was super-cool, Nathalie . . . A real goer, too. It's the pits, an absolute downer . . . You've been to the funeral? Funerals, they get to me a bit. And what's the use of

'em? Mind you, I was saying to myself, maybe for the old folk, fair does. Old Fred was there? You got to admit he's got balls, the asshole.'

I greeted lunch hour with tremendous relief.

In the afternoon I was due to see the head of the 'Computer Studies' department. I don't really know why. As far as I was concerned I had nothing to say to him.

I waited for an hour and a half in an empty, slightly gloomy office. I didn't really want to turn the light on, partly for fear of signalling my presence.

Before installing myself in this office I'd been handed a voluminous report called
Directive on the Ministry of Agriculture Data Processing Plan
. There again, I couldn't see why. The document had nothing at all to do with me. It was devoted, if the introduction was to be believed, to an
attempt at the predefinition of various
archetypal scenarii, understood within a targeted objective
. The objectives, which themselves warranted a more detailed analysis in terms of desirability, were for instance the orientation of a politics of aid to farmers, the development of a more competitive para-agricultural sector at the European level, the redressing of the commercial balance in the realm of fresh products ... I quickly leafed through the opus, underlining the more amusing phrases in pencil:
The strategic level consists in
the realization of a system of global information promulgated by the integration of
diversified heterogeneous sub-systems
. Or indeed:
It appears urgent to validate a
canonic relational model within an organizational dynamic leading in the medium
term to a database -oriented object.
A secretary finally appeared to advise me that the meeting was taking longer than expected and that it would unfortunately be impossible for her boss to receive me today.

So I took myself off home. As long as they're paying me, ha ha!

I spotted a strange graffito in the Sèvres-Babylon métro station: `God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice', the inscription said. I mused on who the person so well informed about God's designs might be.

8

In general I see nobody at the weekends. I stay home, do a bit of tidying. I get gently depressed.

This Saturday however, between eight and eleven, a social moment is in the offing. I am to eat with a priest friend in a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant is good; on that front, no problem. But is my friend still my friend?

We did our studies together: we were twenty, just kids really. Now we're thirty. Once he'd got his engineer's diploma he went off to the seminary, he changed course. Today he's a parish priest in Vitry. It isn't an easy parish.

I eat a red bean taco and Jean-Pierre Buvet talks to me about sexuality. According to him the interest our society pretends to show in eroticism (through advertising magazines, the media in general) is completely artificial. Most people, in fact, are quickly bored by the subject, but they pretend the opposite out of a bizarre inverted hypocrisy.

He gets to his main thesis. Our civilization, he says, suffers from vital exhaustion. In the century of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently that mundane life can offer only imperfect joys, that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse, he asserts, would no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it's abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.

I get the impression he considers me a fitting symbol of this vital exhaustion. No sex drive, no ambition; no real interests, either. I don't know what to say to him: I get the impression everybody's a bit like that. I consider myself a normal kind of guy. Well, perhaps not completely , but who is completely, huh? Eighty per cent normal, let's say. For something to say in the meantime I casually observe that these days everybody is bound, at one moment or another in his life, to have the feeling of being a failure. We are agreed on that.

The conversation stalls. I nibble my caramelized vermicelli . He advises me to find God again, or go into psychoanalysis; I give a start at the comparison. He's interested in my case, he explains; he seems to think I'm in a bad way. I'm alone, much too alone; it isn't natural, according to him.

We have a brandy. He lays his cards on the table. As far as he's concerned is the answer; the wellspring of life. Of a rich and active life. `You must accept your divine nature!' he exclaims; the next table turns round. I feel a little tired; I get the impression we're reaching an impasse. I smile, just in case. I haven't got too many friends, I don't want to lose this one. `You must accept your divine nature,' he repeats more softly; I promise I'll make an effort. I add a few words, I force myself to reestablish a consensus.

Next, a coffee, and each to his home. In the end it was a pleasant evening.

9

Six persons are presently gathered around a rather nice oval table, probably in fake mahogany. The curtains, of a sombre green, are drawn; you’d think you were in a small drawing room. I suddenly have the feeling that the meeting is going to last all morning.

The first Ministry of Agriculture representative has blue eyes. He is young, has little round glasses, he must have still been a student up till a short time ago. Despite his youth he gives a remarkable impression of seriousness . He will take notes all morning, sometimes at the most unexpected moments. Here is a leader of men, or at least a future leader.

The second Ministry representative is a middle-aged man with a fringe of beard, like the fearsome tutors in The Famous Five. He seems to exert a great influence on Catherine Lechardoy, who is seated at his side. He is a theoretician. His interventions will be so many calls to order concerning the importance of methodology and, more generally, of reflection prior to action. At this juncture I don't see why: the software is already paid for, there's no more need to reflect, but I refrain from saying so. I immediately get the feeling he doesn't like me. How can I gain his love? I decide that on several occasions in the morning I will support his interventions with a slightly stupid expression of admiration, as if he'd suddenly opened up astonishing perspectives for me, full of wisdom and breadth. He must, in the normal course of things, conclude from this that I am a young man of goodwill, ready to engage myself under his orders in the proper direction.

The third Ministry representative is Catherine Lechardoy . The poor thing has a slightly sad air this morning; all her recent combativeness seems to have left her. Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn't been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone.

The fourth Ministry representative is a kind of caricature of the rural socialist. He wears boots and a parka, as if he was just back from a field trip; he has a thick beard and smokes a pipe; I wouldn't like to be his son. In front of him on the table he has ostentatiously placed a book called
Cheesemaking and the Challenge of New
Technologies.
I can't work out what he's doing there, he obviously knows nothing about the subject under discussion; perhaps he's a trade union representative. Whatever the truth of it, he seems to have set himself the goal of making the atmosphere more tense and of provoking conflict by means of repetitive remarks about `the uselessness of these meetings which never get anywhere', or else `these software packages chosen in a Ministry office which never correspond to the real needs of the chaps on the ground'.

Opposite him is a guy from my company who responds tirelessly to his objections - in a very clumsy way, in my opinion - by pretending to believe that the other man is deliberately exaggerating, even that the whole thing is pure pleasantry. He is one of my superiors in the hierarchy; I think his name is Norbert Lejailly. I didn't know he'd be here, and I can't say I'm overjoyed by his presence. This man has the features and the behaviour of a pig. He seizes the least opportunity to laugh long and loud. When he isn't laughing he slowly rubs his hands together. He is podgy, even obese, and his self-satisfaction, which nothing solid would seem to support, is absolutely unbearable to me. But this morning I feel really rather good, and on two occasions I will even laugh with him, in echo of his witticisms.

During the morning a seventh person will make periodic appearances, intended to jolly along this meeting of minds. He is the head of the Ministry of Agriculture

`Computer Studies' section, the one I missed the other day. This individual seems to have given himself the mission of embodying an exaggerated version of the young and dynamic boss. In this he's streets ahead of anything I've had occasion to observe up till now. His shirt is open, as if he hadn't quite had the time to button it up, and his tie flies off to one side as if caught in a slipstream. He doesn't walk down the corridors, he glides. If he could fly, he would. His face is shining, his hair disordered and damp as if he'd come straight from the swimming pool.

On his first entrance he sees us, me and my boss. In a flash he's standing by us, without me figuring out how. He must have covered the ten metres in less than five seconds, in any event he was too fast for me.

He places his hand on my shoulder and speaks to me in a gentle voice, saying how much he's sorry for making me wait for nothing the other day; I give him an angelic smile, tell him it's of no importance, that I understand and that I know that sooner or later the meeting will take place. I am being sincere. It is a very tender moment. He is leaning towards me and me alone. You'd think we were two lovers whom life had just reunited after a long separation.

He will make two other appearances during the morning, but each time he'll remain at the door, addressing himself solely to the young guy in glasses. Each time he begins by excusing himself for disturbing us with an enchanting smile; he stays at the door, hanging on the jamb, balancing on one leg as if the inner tension that drives him prevented him from standing upright for too long.

Of the meeting itself I retain but few memories; in any case nothing concrete was decided, except for in the last quarter of an hour, very quickly, just before going to lunch, when a training timetable for the provinces was drawn up. I am directly concerned, since it's me who will have to do the travelling around; so I hastily take note of the dates and places ... a piece of paper which I will, as it happens, mislay that same evening.