‘You’re definitely on to something … Reread Drumont,’ I told Steve, just to make him happy, and he gazed at me with the obedient, naive eyes of an opportunistic child. When I reached my classroom – today I planned to discuss Jean Lorrain – there were three guys in their twenties, two of them Arab, one of them black, standing in the doorway. They weren’t armed, not that day. They stood there calmly. Nothing about them was overtly menacing. All the same, they were blocking the entrance. I had to say something. I stopped and faced them. They had to be under orders to avoid provocation and to treat the teachers with respect. At least I hoped so.
‘I’m a professor here. My class is about to start,’ I said in a firm tone, addressing the group. It was the black guy who answered, with a broad smile: ‘No problem, monsieur, we’re just here to visit our sisters …’ and he tilted his head reassuringly towards the classroom. The only sisters he could mean were two North African girls seated together in the back left row, both in black burkas, their eyes protected by mesh. They looked pretty irreproachable to me. ‘Well, there you have them,’ I said, with bonhomie. Then I insisted: ‘Now you can go.’ ‘No problem, monsieur,’ he said, with an even broader smile, then he turned on his heel, followed by the other two, neither of whom had said a word. He took three steps, then turned again. ‘Peace be with you, monsieur,’ he said with a small bow. ‘That went well,’ I told myself, closing the classroom door. ‘This time.’ I don’t know just what I’d expected. Supposedly, teachers had been attacked in Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Aix-Marseille and Saint-Denis, but I had never met a colleague who’d been attacked, and I didn’t believe the rumours. According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighbourhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organisations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumour, but the fact was that, as of last autumn, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.
On my way out of class (what did those two virgins in burkas care about that revolting queen, that self-proclaimed
analist
, Jean Lorrain? did their fathers realise what they were reading in the name of literature?), I bumped into Marie-Françoise, who proposed lunch. Clearly, it was going to be a social day.
I liked the old bag. She was funny, she was an insatiable gossip, and she’d been at the university long enough, and spent enough time on the right committees, to have better information than anyone would ever entrust to the likes of Steve. She led us to a Moroccan restaurant in the rue Monge. Clearly, it would be a halal day, too.
She got going as soon as the waiter brought our food. Big Delouze was on the way out. The National Council of Universities had been in session since June, and it looked as though they’d choose Robert Rediger to replace her.
Glancing down into my lamb-and-artichoke tagine, I raised my eyebrows. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s huge. And it’s not just talk – I have it on good authority.’
I excused myself, and in the men’s room I slipped out my smartphone. You really can find anything on the Internet nowadays. A two-minute search revealed that Robert Rediger was famously pro-Palestinian, and that he’d helped orchestrate the boycott against the Israelis. I washed my hands carefully and went back to the table.
My heart sank: my tagine was already getting cold. ‘Won’t they wait for the elections?’ I asked, after I’d had a bite. This struck me as a sensible question.
‘The elections? The
elections
? What have the elections got to do with it?’ Not so sensible after all, I guessed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just, in three weeks we might have a new president …’
‘Please, that’s all settled. It will be just like 2017, the National Front will make it into the run-offs and the left will be voted back in. I don’t see why the council should fart around waiting for the elections.’
‘But there’s the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re an unknown quantity. If they got twenty per cent, it would be a symbolic benchmark, and could change the balance of power …’ I was talking utter bullshit, of course. Ninety-nine per cent of the Muslim Brotherhood would throw their votes to the Socialists. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the results at all, but that phrase
the balance of power
always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you’d been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I was also rather pleased with
symbolic benchmark
. In any case, Marie-Françoise nodded as if I’d just expressed an idea, and she launched into a long disquisition on the possible consequences, for the university leadership, if the Muslim Brotherhood was voted in. Her combinatory intelligence was fully engaged, but I wasn’t really listening any more. I watched the hypotheses flicker across her sharp old features. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.
My afternoon seminar was exhausting. Doctoral students tended to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on France 2.
That night the National Front candidate was on. She proclaimed her love of France (‘But which France?’ asked a centre-left pundit, lamely), and I wondered whether my love life was really and truly over. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent much of the evening trying to decide whether to call Myriam. I had a feeling she wasn’t seeing anyone new. I’d run into her a few times at the university and she had given me a look that one might describe as intense, but the truth was she always looked intense, even when she was choosing a conditioner. I couldn’t get my hopes up. Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was, inarguably withering away.
‘Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.’ So begins the article Maupassant published in
Gil Blas
on
À rebours
. In general, literary history has been hard on Naturalism. Huysmans was celebrated for having thrown off its yoke, and yet Maupassant’s article is much deeper and more sensitive than the article by Bloy that appeared at the same time in
Le chat noir
. Even Zola’s objections make sense, on rereading: it is true that, psychologically, Jean des Esseintes remains unchanged from the first page to the last; that nothing happens, or can happen, in the book; that it has, in a sense, no plot. It is also true that there was no way for Huysmans to take
À rebours
any further than he did. His masterpiece was a dead end – but isn’t that true of any masterpiece? After a book like that, Huysmans had no choice but to part ways with Naturalism. This is all that Zola notices. Maupassant, the greater artist, grasped that it was a masterpiece. I laid out these ideas in a short article for the
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies
, which, for the several days it took me to write it, was much more engaging than the electoral campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.
She must have made a ravishing little goth as a teenager, not so long ago, and she had grown into a very classy young woman, with her bobbed black hair, her very white skin and her dark eyes. Classy, but quietly sexy. And she more than lived up to her promise of discreet sexuality. For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, and no one had ever given me more pleasure than Myriam. She could contract her pussy at will (sometimes softly, with a slow, irresistible pressure; sometimes in sharp, rebellious little tugs); when she gave me her little arse, she swivelled it around with infinite grace. As for her blow jobs, I’d never encountered anything like them. She approached each one as if it were her first, and would be her last. Any single one of them would have been enough to justify a man’s existence.
I ended up calling her, once I’d spent a few more days wondering whether I should. We agreed to meet that very evening.
We continue to use
tu
with our ex-girlfriends, that’s the custom, but we kiss them on the cheeks and not the lips. Myriam wore a short black skirt and black tights. I’d invited her to my place. I didn’t really want to go to a restaurant. She had an inquisitive look around the room and sat back on the sofa. Her skirt really was extremely short and she’d put on make-up. I offered her a drink. Whisky, she said, if you have it.
‘Something’s different …’ She took a sip. ‘But I can’t tell what.’
‘The curtains.’ I had installed double curtains, orange and ochre with a vaguely ethnic motif. I’d also bought a throw.
She turned round, kneeling on the sofa to examine the curtains. ‘Pretty,’ she decided. ‘Very pretty, actually. But then, you always did have good taste – for such a macho man.’ She turned to face me. ‘You don’t mind me calling you macho, do you?’
‘I don’t know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now – but was it really a good idea?’
Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realised I had no answer, to this question or any other.
‘So you’re for a return to patriarchy?’
‘You know I’m not
for
anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.’
‘Yes, in theory you’re definitely macho. But then you have such refined tastes in writers: Mallarmé, Huysmans. They don’t exactly play to the macho base. Plus you have a weirdly feminine eye for household textiles. On the other hand, you dress like a loser. I could see you cultivating a grungy macho thing, but you don’t like ZZ Top, you’ve always preferred Nick Drake. In other words, you’re a walking enigma.’
I poured myself another whisky before responding. Aggression often masks a desire to seduce – I’d read that in Boris Cyrulnik, and Boris Cyrulnik isn’t fucking around. When it comes to psychology, no one’s got anything on him. He’s like a Konrad Lorenz of human beings. Plus, her thighs had parted slightly as she waited for me to answer. This was body language, and the body doesn’t lie.
‘There’s nothing enigmatic about it, unless you psychologise like a women’s magazine, where everyone’s reduced to some kind of consumer demographic: the eco-responsible urban professional, the brand-conscious bourgeoise, the LGBT-friendly club girl, the satanic geek, the techno-Buddhist. They invent a new one every week. I don’t match up with some preconceived consumer profile, that’s all.’
‘You know … the one night we see each other again, don’t you think we could try to be nice?’ Hearing the catch in her voice, I was abashed. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked to smooth things over. No, she wasn’t hungry, but we always ended up eating. ‘Would you like sushi?’ She said yes, of course. Everyone always says yes to sushi. From the most discerning gourmets to the strictest calorie counters, there’s a sort of universal consensus regarding this shapeless juxtaposition of raw fish and white rice. I had a delivery menu, and she was already poring over the
wasabi
and the
maki
and the
salmon rolls
– I didn’t understand a word of it, and didn’t care to. I chose the B3 combination and called in the order. I should have taken her out to a restaurant after all. When I hung up, I put on Nick Drake. We sat there not saying anything for a long time, until I broke the silence by asking, idiotically enough, how university was going. She gave me a reproachful look and answered that it was going well, she was planning to get a master’s in publishing. Relieved, I managed to steer the conversation towards a more general topic, which happened to validate her career goals: how even though the French economy was falling apart, publishing was doing all right and had increasing profit margins. It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.
‘You don’t seem to be doing too great yourself. But then you always seemed that way, really,’ she said without animosity, almost sadly. What could I say? I couldn’t exactly argue.
‘Do I really seem that depressed?’ I asked after another silence.
‘No, not depressed. In a sense it’s worse. You’ve always had this weird kind of honesty, like an inability to make the compromises that everyone has to make, in the end, just to go about their lives. Let’s say you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable solution. Where does that leave me? I’m studying, I think of myself as an individual person, endowed with the same capacity for reflection and decision-making as a man. Do you really think I’m disposable?’
The right answer was probably yes, but I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I wasn’t as honest as all that. The sushi still hadn’t arrived. I poured myself another whisky, my third. Nick Drake went on evoking pure maidens, princesses of old. And I still didn’t want to give her a child, or help out around the house, or buy a Baby Björn. I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I sort of wanted to fuck her but I also sort of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell. I felt a slight wave of nausea. Where the fuck was Rapid Sushi, anyway? I should have asked her to suck me off, right then. Then we might have stood a chance, but I let the darkness settle and thicken, second by second.
‘Maybe I should go,’ she said after a silence of at least three minutes. Nick Drake had just ended his lamentations. We were about to hear the belchings of Nirvana. I turned it off and said, ‘If you like.’