Zenith Hotel (9 page)

The day is over. They call a truce to the
negotiations
. Mother has the upper hand. Jean-Paul thinks that actually the Perspex isn’t so bad. They put away the glossy catalogue. Jean-Paul would like to empty his mind once and for all. We’ll see tomorrow.

I don’t know why I’m thinking of this. When I was a kid, at my grandparents’, we always ate the bread from the day before. We had to finish it up, even though there was fresh bread. We never got to eat that.

I don’t feel too bad this evening. I’ve seen worse, believe me. No, this evening, things are OK. I did the same things, said the same words as usual. I’m an old hand, like a factory worker on a production line. The same action, relentlessly, for years. No hope. A little factory worker of the flesh. My factory is the city, my production line, cocks.

Time passes. One more and then I’m going home. Before I go to bed, I’ll have something to eat.
Something
sweet.

Then, like every evening, I’ll go and fill up my plastic bottle on the landing. I’ll have a lick and a promise at the sink. Have to wait till tomorrow for a shower.

I’ll be tired, but I won’t sleep. I’ll have to numb my mind with television. Something really smutty that makes me feel alive again.

Robert is a sponge. He soaks up events and people, retaining everything in his thick yellow foam. But at some point, if someone grabs him, if he’s crushed in the métro or in a cinema queue, he spews out everything in a stream of insults and platitudes, an uncontrolled performance that splatters the toes of your shoes. But he’s discreet, people don’t notice him. Only don’t wring him like a dirty sock, don’t squeeze him too hard.

He scrubs away the days and the years, and at the same time he mops up sorrows and regrets. He quite enjoys his condition, it’s just that he doesn’t like being left in the sink. He deserves better, he has a teaching qualification. Robert’s thing had been philosophy. And then he stopped, he can’t remember why. Robert’s a bit floppy, he has
difficulty
moving. Sometimes he wants to. He sits down and thinks about it, and finally he stays put. He used to have a lovely armchair in cracked leather. He realized there was a danger that he’d never get up again. He threw it out and has sat on
a wooden chair ever since. It’s not as comfortable but even so he can sit in it for hours. People have to understand that he’s not playing games, that if he does nothing it is principally an ambition, like his own personal regurgitated philosophy, a version of Lettrism. Robert doesn’t work. He’ll never work. The only problem is that he doesn’t create anything either. He’s never been any good with his hands or his mind. Robert is a sponge, he absorbs everything that flows around him. And that’s all.

Being a sponge rather suits him. Or rather, it appears to suit him because he never questions whether it does or not. Sometimes he loses his temper, on one occasion he threw out his aunt’s ancient Chesterfield. In short, his life is running smoothly. He feels that nothing should be changed.

Robert fancies himself as a leading
Surrealist
figure or something similar. He could happily have been a burglar too, or a pirate. That’s classy, not like all those office jobs, four-colour ballpoints and double-sided adhesive tape.

Robert likes Bryan Ferry and nettle soup. He likes nibbling the bits of cuticle that grow on his nails, falling asleep listening to the radio and flicking through mail order catalogues. Robert likes all that, he’s almost a complete wimp. There’s
something
singular about him, something touching. He has dark circles under his eyes, as if his tears had gradually encrusted themselves around his eye sockets. Yes, that’s it, the tears furrowed his flesh and turned it purple as they dried. A trace of dried sadness around his eyes. Something that won’t pass, always ready to spurt out for some unknown reason. That’s Robert’s little mystery. He has a secret, a scar he can’t show, even though it’s raw and always will be. That gaping wound will remain inside him as long as he lives. ‘Don’t shake me, I’m full of tears’, he might have said had he been a genius and a famous writer called Henri Calet.

What am I without other people? asks Robert. I mean, if there weren’t any other people, would I wash my hands after going to the toilet? No,
definitely
not, he wouldn’t wash his hands, he wouldn’t change his socks. He’d crawl on the ground like a little rat full of slime. As Sartre said, the other is
the indispensable mediator between myself and me. But Robert is no Calet, and he’s no Sartre either. No, I definitely wouldn’t wash my hands, I’d eat my bogies and fart in the street.

That’s pretty much how Robert suddenly came to realize that he needed others, all those other people around him. He decided to face the world, meet people, sign up for yoga classes. Suddenly, he aspired to a social life, to negotiations, to the hustle and bustle of the crowd. He pounded the pavement, he carried heavy banners with
enthusiasm
, he went shopping on Saturday afternoons on Boulevard Haussmann. He tried to chat up girls and find friends to play darts with. He bought a TV and burned his books. He became a
blinkered
activist and chased girls. He found a job and joined a trade union. He wore his jeans like
everyone
else, he played online poker.

Then he realized that he wasn’t made for that life, that he wasn’t made for them. He went back to his chair and his solitude. He had never felt so free as at that moment.

He has ten or so bonsais. He calls them dwarf trees. The sales assistant always corrects him, but
it’s useless, for Robert they’ll always be dwarf trees. He’s not exactly wrong, it’s a good image.

He loves his dwarf trees. He’s put some in the bathroom, in his bedroom, and in the living room. He tends them, pruning the branches and
watering
them every day with a mineral-water spray. He bought them Japanese-style ceramic pots. The dwarf trees deserve them, they’re well behaved, they have leaves, they don’t grow. He’s given them names, but nobody knows that. Dwarfbus, L’il Dwarf, Branched Dwarf, Titch, Lilliput, Mimimati … they seem to like it.

In winter, he turns on the central heating to protect them. He plays them music. When the weather’s nice, in summer, he puts them out in the sun on his little balcony, but not for too long, it’s bad for the bark. He talks to them sometimes but he’s a bit embarrassed about it. So he goes out and tries to forget his dwarf trees, he mills around in the crowd for an afternoon.

When he goes home, he’s happy to see them. They’re so small! Their leaves so tiny!

At night, when he sleeps, he can hear them breathe. Surrounded by his miniature trees, he feels reassured. You could call it his little secret garden but that would be too corny. It’s his little secret garden and he’s proud of it. Ridiculous but sincere.

So he loves his little secret garden. He devotes his mornings to tending the tiny leaves and the tiny roots, naked under his dressing gown, a
cigarette
dangling from his lips.

At one point, Robert had wanted to start a novel. Set in the nineteenth century would be nice. Something along the lines of
Lady Chatterley
, a love story against a backdrop of social issues. In the mornings, he sat at the little kitchen table and thought about it. It kept him busy for hours. He had found his calling. He would be a writer. Cursed, of course, it wasn’t worth it otherwise. He’d drink black coffee and smoke his lungs away. Yes, that would be good, he’d have tousled hair and sport a cravat and cufflinks. He’d speak with a slightly upper-class accent, he’d be a man of letters. The novel was not progressing, but in the meantime, he cultivated his personal style. A real man of letters, slightly dirty, slightly pedantic. He wanted to suffer outrageously, take drugs, find inspiration, write all night long by candlelight. So much more stylish than a neon lamp. Brown ink, yellowing pages, notebooks in his pockets and stained fingers. He fancied the idea of himself as
sad, tormented, hunched over a piece of paper. He bought a pair of owl spectacles and looked for a muse. While waiting for his true muse, the lady of the night who would make him bleed, he made do with Kim Carnes. Sitting on the sleeve of her LP, a gun-toting man beside her. Oh! Kim Carnes! The perfect woman, sitting cross-legged on her velvet sofa. And he listened to ‘Bette Davis Eyes’,
dreaming
of her, inhaling her anguished voice deep inside his soul.

The novel began something like this:

It was a good idea to start with a real-life incident. But after that he was stuck. That was the end of his career as a scribbler.

He gave up on the idea. He sat on his wooden chair and waited for it to blow over.

Robert looks at himself from a distance. He smiles when he pictures himself a few months earlier, obsessed with the idea of being a man of letters,
allowing his hair to grow, donning a cravat every morning. Yes, he has a good laugh when he thinks back on that phase. But he’s not ashamed, it feels as if it happened to someone else. That man can’t be him, that clownish scribbler with cufflinks and a rusty inkwell. No way can that be him. So let’s laugh at him because he really is ridiculous.

Robert is able to see himself from a great
distance
. That is a strength, but it’s also a trap. He doesn’t recognize himself at all. He sees himself rather in the way that people insist that the
curly-headed
little boy perched proudly on his tricycle, that little boy in the photograph you’re holding, is you, at Grandma’s, the summer you were five. You can’t be ashamed of him. Of the snot dripping from his nose, it doesn’t matter, it’s not really you. No memories of that tricycle ride in Grandma’s garden. All right, if you’re sure it’s me, I believe you. But that little boy doesn’t affect you. He’s cute, there’s snot dribbling from his nose. And then what? He’s only you because people say so.

That’s what Robert feels; he has no need of a photo or of a childhood. His own memories are alien to him.