3
I saw a lot of Valérie over the two months that followed. In fact, with the exception of a weekend she spent at her parents', I think I probably saw her every clay. Jean-Yves had decided to accept the Aurore group's offer, and she had decided to follow him. The first thing she said to me, I remember, was "I'm about to move into the 6o percent tax bracket." She was right: her salary was going from forty thousand francs a month to seventy-five thousand, and after taxes, the increase was less spectacular. She knew that she would have to put a lot of work in from the moment she took up her job at the group early in March. For the time being, at Nouvelles Frontières, everything was fine: they had both tendered their resignations, they were gradually handing over the reins to their successors. I advised Valérie to save, to open a savings account or something, though in fact we didn't think about it much. Spring was late, but that was of no importance. Later, thinking about this happy time with Valérie, a time of which, paradoxically, I have so few memories, I would say that man is clearly not intended to be happy. To truly arrive at the practical possibility of happiness, man would have to transform himself—transform himself physically. What does God compare to? In the first place, obviously, a woman's pussy; but also perhaps the vapors of a Turkish bath. Something, at any rate, in which spiritual bliss becomes possible, because the body is sated with contentment, with pleasure, and all anxiety is abolished. I now know for certain that the spirit is not born, that it needs to be brought forth, and that this birth is difficult, something of which we now have only a dangerously vague idea. When I brought Valérie to orgasm, when I felt her body quiver under mine, I sometimes had the impression —fleeting but irresistible — of attaining a new level of consciousness, where every evil had been abolished. In those moments of suspension, almost of motionlessness, when the pleasure in her body mounted, I felt like a god on whom depended tranquillity and storms. It was the first, most perfect, most indisputable sort of joy. The second joy that Valérie brought me was the extraordinary gentleness, the natural generosity of her nature. Sometimes, when she had been working long hours —and over the months they would become longer and longer— I felt that she was tense, emotionally drained. Never once did she turn on me, never once did she get angry, never once did she lapse into the unpredictable hysterics that sometimes make the company of women so oppressive, so pathetic. "I'm not ambitious, Michel," she would tell me sometimes. "I feel happy with you, I think you're the love of my life, and I don't ask for anything more than that. But that shouldn't be possible: I ought to ask for more. I'm trapped in a system from which I get so little, and which I know is pointless, but I don't know how to get out. At some point, everyone should take the time to think about it, but I don't know where we are supposed to find that time." For my part, I was doing less and less work, eventually to the point that I was "working" only in the strictest possible sense of the word. I was home in plenty of time to watch Questions pour un champion and shop for dinner, and I spent every night at Valerie's place. Curiously, MarieJeanne didn't seem to hold my flagging professional attention against me. True, she enjoyed her work and was more than happy to take on her share of overtime. What she wanted more than anything, I think, was for me to be nice to her—and I was nice through all those weeks, I was gentle and peaceful. She liked the coral necklace I had brought her from Thailand and now wore it every day. As she worked on the files for the exhibitions, she would sometimes look at me in a way that was strange and difficult to decipher. One morning in February—I remember it very well, it was my birthday—she said to me straight out: "You've changed, Michel. I don't know, you seem happy." She was right: I was happy, I remember that. Of course there are lots of things, a whole series of inevitable troubles, decline and death, of course. But remembering those months, I can bear witness: I know that happiness exists.