The Elegance of the Hedgehog (6 page)

Bacon for the Cocker Spaniel

I
n our building there are two dogs: the whippet belonging to the Meurisses who looks like a skeleton covered over with beige leather hide, and a ginger cocker spaniel who belongs to Diane Badoise, an anorexic blond woman who wears Burberry raincoats and who is the daughter of a very la-di-da lawyer. The whippet is called Athena and the cocker Neptune. Just in case you don’t yet understand what sort of place I live in: you won’t find any Fidos or Rovers in our place. Anyway, yesterday, in the hallway, the two dogs met and I was fortunate to witness a very interesting sort of ballet. I won’t dwell on the dogs, who sniffed each other’s bottoms. I don’t know if Neptune smells bad but Athena took a leap backward while Neptune looked as if he were sniffing a bouquet of roses with a huge juicy steak in the middle.

No, what was interesting was the two human beings at the end of each leash. Because in town it is the dogs who have their masters on a leash, though no one seems to have caught on to the fact. If you have voluntarily saddled yourself with a dog that you’ll have to walk twice a day, come rain wind or snow, that is as good as having put a leash around your own neck. Anyway, Diane Badoise and Anne-Hélène Meurisse (same mold, twenty-five years apart) met in the hallway, each at the end of her leash. What a muddle when this happens! They’re as clumsy as if they had webbed fingers and feet because they’re incapable of doing the only truly practical thing in cases like this: acknowledge what is going on in order to prevent it. But because they act as if they believed they were walking two distinguished stuffed animals utterly devoid of any inappropriate impulses, they cannot bleat at their dogs to stop sniffing their asses or licking their little balls.

So here’s what happened: Diane Badoise came out of the elevator with Neptune, and Anne-Hélène Meurisse was waiting right outside with Athena. They virtually threw their dogs one on top of the other and, obviously, it sent Neptune utterly crazy. Here you come nicely trotting out of the elevator only to find your nose right up against Athena’s derrière, that’s not something that happens every day. For ages now Colombe has been ranting on to us about
kairos
, a Greek concept that means roughly “the right moment,” something at which Napoleon apparently excelled. Naturally, my sister is an expert on military strategy. Anyway,
kairos
is the intuition of the moment, something like that. Well I can tell you that Neptune had his
kairos
right in front of his nose and he didn’t mess around, he made like a hussar, in the old style, and climbed right on top. “Oh my God!” shrieked Anne-Hélène Meurisse as if she herself were victim of this outrage. “Oh, no!” exclaimed Diane Badoise, as if all the shame were hers, whereas I’d bet you a chocolate truffle that it would never have occurred to her to climb onto Athena’s rear end. And they both began pulling at their dogs’ leashes but there was a problem, and that’s what evolved into an interesting movement.

In fact, Diane should have pulled upward and the other lady downward, which would have released the two dogs but, instead of that, they each pulled sideways and as it’s very narrow in front of the elevator cage, they very quickly ran into an obstacle: one of them the elevator grille, the other the wall on the left and as a result Neptune, who had lost his balance with the first tug, suddenly got a surge of energy and clung all the more solidly to Athena who was howling and rolling her eyes with fright. At that point the humans changed strategy by trying to drag their dogs away to a larger space so that they could repeat the maneuver more comfortably. But the matter was getting urgent: everyone knows there’s a point at which dogs get stuck. So they really stepped on it, shouting simultaneously, “Oh my God oh my God,” pulling on their leashes as if their very virtue was at stake. But in her haste, Diane Badoise slipped and twisted her ankle. And this was the moment of the interesting movement: her ankle twisted toward the outside and at the same time her entire body swerved in the same direction, except for her ponytail which went the opposite way.

It was magnificent, I assure you: it was like something by Bacon. There’s been a framed Bacon in my parents’ bathroom forever, a picture of someone on the potty, in fact, and in good Bacon style, you know, sort of tortured and not very appetizing. I have always thought that it probably had an effect on the serenity of one’s actions but anyway in my house we each have our own toilet so there was no point complaining. But Diane Badoise was completely thrown out of joint when she twisted her ankle, making weird angles with her knees, her arms and her head, and to top it off, her ponytail sticking out horizontally like that—and I immediately thought of the Bacon in the bathroom. For a very brief moment she looked like a disjointed rag doll, her body completely contorted and, for a few thousandths of a second (it happened very quickly, but, as I am very attentive to the movements of the body these days, I saw it as if in slow motion), Diane Badoise looked like a full-length portrait by Bacon. From that sudden impression to the consideration that the thing in the bathroom has been there all these years just so now I could fully appreciate her bizarre contortions, there is only a short step. And then Diane fell onto the dogs and that solved the problem because Athena, crushed on the ground, managed to wriggle free of Neptune. A complicated little ballet then followed, Anne-Hélène trying to help Diane and all the while keep her dog at a safe distance from the lubricious monster, and Neptune, completely indifferent to the shouts and pain of his mistress, continued to pull in the direction of his
steak à la rose
. But at that very moment Madame Michel came out of her loge and I grabbed Neptune’s leash and dragged him farther away.

He was so disappointed, poor mutt. And so he flopped down and started licking his little balls, making a lot of slurping noises, which only added to poor Diane’s despair. Madame Michel called an ambulance because Diane’s ankle was seriously beginning to look like a watermelon and then she took Neptune to her place while Anne-Hélène Meurisse stayed with Diane. As for me, I went home and said to myself, Okay, a Bacon come to life before my very eyes, does that make it worth it?

I decided it didn’t: because not only did Neptune not get his treat but, on top of it, he didn’t even get his walk.

T
his morning, while listening to France Inter on the radio, I was surprised to discover that I am not who I thought I was. Until that time I had ascribed the reasons for my cultural eclecticism to my condition as a proletarian autodidact. As I have already explained, I have spent every moment of my existence that could be spared from work in reading, watching films, and listening to music. But my frenzied devouring of cultural objects seems to me to suffer from a major error of taste: brutally mixing respectable works with others that are far less so.

It is most certainly in the domain of reading that my eclecticism is least pronounced, though even there the variety of my interests is most extreme. I have read history, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, pedagogy, psychoanalysis and, of course—above all—literature. While all these have always interested me, literature has been my whole life. My cat Leo was baptized thus because of Tolstoy. My previous cat was called Dongo because of Stendhal’s Fabrice del. The first one was called Karenina because of Anna but I called her Karé for short, for fear of being found out. With the exception of my guilty lapse where Stendhal is concerned, my taste is most definitely partial to pre-1910 Russia, but it flatters my pride to note that the amount of world literature I have devoured is nevertheless considerable, given the fact that I am a country girl who, by ending up head concierge at 7, rue de Grenelle, has witnessed her career expectations go far beyond what she anticipated—particularly when you think that such a destiny should surely have doomed her to the eternal worship of Barbara Cartland. I do confess to a guilty indulgence for detective stories—but the ones I read I consider to be true works of literature. I find it especially exasperating when, from time to time, I have to drag myself away from my Connelly or Mankell in order to go and answer the door for Bernard Grelier or Sabine Pallières, whose concerns are hardly shared by the likes of Harry Bosch, the jazz-loving LAPD cop, and all the more so when all they have to say is:

“How come the garbage smells all the way out into the courtyard?”

That Bernard Grelier and the heiress of an old Banque de France family could both speak in so colloquial a manner and yet be preoccupied by the same trivial things sheds a new light onto humanity.

Where the cinema is concerned, however, my eclecticism is in full flower. I like American blockbusters and art-house films. In fact, for a long time I preferred to watch entertaining British or American films, with the exception of a few serious works that I reserved for my esthetic sensibilities, since my passionate or empathetic sensibilities were exclusively focused on entertainment. Greenaway fills me with admiration, interest and yawns, whereas I weep buckets of syrupy tears every time Melly and Mammy climb the stairway at the Butler mansion after Bonnie Blue dies; as for
Blade Runner
, it is a masterpiece of high-end escapism. For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving, and immensely satisfying.

Take today, for example. I quiver with impatience at the thought of the treat I have in store—the fruit of exemplary patience, the long-deferred satisfaction of my desire to see, once again, a film I saw for the first time at Christmas, in 1989.

B
y Christmas, 1989, Lucien was very sick. We did not yet know when his death would come, but we were bound by the certainty of its imminence, bound to the dread inside, bound to each other by these invisible ties. When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body; it also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped. Like a spider’s thread drawn ever tighter around our projects, making it impossible to breathe, with each passing day the illness was overwhelming our life. When I came in from running chores outside, it was like entering a dark cellar where I was constantly cold, with a chill that nothing could remedy, so much so toward the end that when I slept alongside Lucien, it seemed as if his body were sucking up all the heat my body might have managed to purloin elsewhere.

His illness was first diagnosed in the spring of 1988; it ate away at him for seventeen months and carried him off just before Christmas, 1990. The elder Madame Meurisse raised money among the inhabitants of the building, and a fine wreath of flowers was delivered to my loge, bound with a ribbon that bore no text. She alone came to the funeral. She was a cold, stiff, pious woman, but there was something sincere about her austere and rather abrupt manners, and when she died, a year after Lucien, I said to myself that she had been a good woman and that I would miss her, although we had scarcely exchanged two words in fifteen years.

“She made her daughter-in-law miserable right up to the end. May she rest in peace, she was a saintly woman,” said Manuela—who professes a truly epic hatred for the younger Madame Meurisse—by way of a funeral oration.

Thus with the exception of Cornélia Meurisse, with her little veils and rosaries, Lucien’s illness did not strike anyone as being worthy of interest. To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people—perhaps because their lives are more rarified, deprived of the oxygen of money and savoir-faire—experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference. Since we were concierges, it was a given that death, for us, must be a matter of course, whereas for our privileged neighbors it carried all the weight of injustice and drama. The death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day in the stairs or at the door to our loge, Lucien was a non-entity who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury nor artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt. The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien’s suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises.

One morning three weeks before that Christmas, I had just come in from shopping with a bag filled with turnips and lung for the cat, and there was Lucien dressed and ready to go out. He had even knotted his scarf and stood there waiting for me. After weeks of witnessing my husband’s agony as, drained of all strength and enveloped in a terrifying pallor, he would hobble from the bedroom to the kitchen; after weeks of seeing him wear nothing other than a pair of pajamas that looked the very uniform of demise, and now to find him with his eyes shining and a mischievous expression on his face, the collar of his winter coat turned right up to his peculiarly pink cheeks: I very nearly collapsed.

“Lucien!” I exclaimed, and I was about to go to hold him up, sit him down, undress him and I don’t know what else, everything that the illness had taught to me in the way of unfamiliar gestures, which had become of late the only ones I knew how to make. I was about to put my bag down and embrace him, hold him close to me, carry him, all those things once more, when, breathless and feeling a strange flutter of expansion in my heart, I stopped in my tracks.

“We’ll just make it,” said Lucien, “the next show is at one.”

In the heat of the theater, on the verge of tears, happier than I had ever been, I was holding the faint warmth of his hand for the first time in months. I knew that an unexpected surge of energy had roused him from his bed, given him the strength to get dressed and the urge to go out, the desire for us to share a conjugal pleasure one more time—and I knew, too, that this was the sign that there was not much time left, a state of grace before the end. But that did not matter to me, I just wanted to make the most of it, of these moments stolen from the burden of illness, moments with his warm hand in mine and a shudder of pleasure going through both of us because, thank heavens, it was a film we could share and delight in equally.

I think he died right after that. His body held on for three more weeks, but his mind departed at the end of the film, because he knew it was better that way, because he had said farewell to me in the dark theater. There were no poignant regrets, because he had found peace this way; he had placed his trust in what we had said to each other without any need for words, while we watched, together, the bright screen where a story was being told.

And I accepted it.

The Hunt for Red October
is the film of our last embrace. For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers.

As I was saying, this morning on France Inter Radio I learned that this contamination of my aspiration to high culture by my penchant for lower forms of culture does not necessarily represent the indelible mark of my lowly origins or of my solitary striving for enlightenment but is, rather, a contemporary characteristic of the dominant intellectual class. How did I come to know this? From the mouth of a sociologist, and I would have loved to have known if he himself would have loved to have known that a concierge in Scholl clogs had just made him into a holy icon. As part of a study on the evolution of the cultural practices of intellectuals who had once been immersed in highbrow culture from dawn to dusk but who were now mainstays of syncretism in whom the borders between high and low culture were irreversibly blurred, my sociologist described a classics professor who, once upon a time, would have listened to Bach, read Mauriac, and watched art-house films, but nowadays listened to Handel and MC Solaar, read Flaubert and John Le Carré, went to see Visconti and the latest
Die Hard
, and ate hamburgers at lunch and sashimi in the evening.

How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one’s own uniqueness in the matter! Distressing, and perhaps even a bit annoying. The fact that, in spite of my confinement in a loge that conforms in every way to what is expected, in spite of an isolation that should have protected me from the imperfections of the masses, in spite of those shameful years in my forties when I was utterly ignorant of the changes in the vast world to which I am confined; the fact that I, Renée, fifty-four years old, concierge and autodidact, am witness to the same changes that are animating the present-day elite—little Pallières in their exclusive schools who read Marx then go off in gangs to watch
Terminator
, or little Badoises who study law in Assas and sob into their Kleenex at
Notting Hill
—is a shock from which I can scarcely recover. And it is patently clear, for those who pay attention to chronology, that I am not the one who is aping these youngsters but, rather, in my eclectic practices, I am well ahead of them.

Renée, prophet of the contemporary elite.

“And well why not,” I thought, removing the cat’s slice of calf’s liver from my shopping bag, and from beneath that, carefully wrapped in an unmarked sheet of plastic, two little filets of red mullet which I intend to marinate then cook in lemon juice and coriander.

And that is when it all started.