This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this—ridiculous journal of an aging concierge—if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.
In this way, in the full proof and texture of my self, I accede to a self-forgetfulness that borders on ecstasy, to savor the blissful calm of my watching consciousness.
Finally, climbing back into the cart, Ryabinin complains openly to his clerk about the mannerisms of these fine gentlemen.
“And with regard to the purchase, Mikhail Ignatich?” asks the lad.
“Well, well! . . . ” replies the merchant.
As we may rapidly conclude, from a human being’s appearance and position, to their intelligence . . . Ryabinin, accountant of the sand in the sea, wily actor and brilliant manipulator, has no time for whatever negative opinions his person might inspire. He was born intelligent, and a pariah, but he has no dreams of glory; the only thing that compels him to action is the promise of profit, the prospect of politely fleecing the overlords of an imbecilic system that has nothing but scorn for him but does not know how to stop him. Thus am I, poor concierge, resigned to a total lack of luxury—but I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.
Profound thought No. 8
If you forget the future
You lose
The present
Today we went to Chatou to see Mamie Josse, Papa’s mother, who moved to a retirement home two weeks ago. Papa went with her when she settled in and this time we all went together to see her. Mamie can’t live all alone anymore in her big house in Chatou: she’s almost blind, she has arthritis, and she can hardly walk or hold anything in her hands and the minute you leave her alone she gets frightened. Her children (Papa, my uncle François and my aunt Laure) tried to manage things for her with a private nurse but she couldn’t stay there 24/7; besides, all of Mamie’s friends were already in retirement homes, so it seemed like a good solution.
Mamie’s retirement home is something else. I wonder how much it costs a month, a luxury old people’s home like this? Mamie’s room is big and light, with lovely furniture and lovely curtains, a little adjoining living room and a bathroom with a marble bathtub. Maman and Colombe went into raptures over the marble bathtub, as if Mamie could care less that her tub is marble when her fingers are concrete . . . Besides, marble’s ugly. Papa didn’t say much. I know he feels guilty that his mother is in a retirement home. “Well, you don’t expect us to take her in?” said Maman when they both thought I was out of earshot (but I hear everything, especially things I’m not supposed to hear). “No, Solange, of course not . . . ” replied Papa, in a tone that implied, “Let’s pretend I really think the opposite, all the while saying ‘No, no’ with a weary and resigned air about me, like a good husband who goes along—that way I come off as the good guy.” I’m very well acquainted with that tone of Papa’s. It means: “I know I’m a coward but don’t anyone try to tell me as much.” Obviously, it couldn’t fail: “You really are a coward,” said Maman, furiously flinging a dishrag into the sink. The minute she gets angry, it’s really weird, she has to throw something. Once she even threw Constitution. “You don’t want it any more than I do,” she continued, picking up the dishrag again and waving it in front of Papa’s face. “In any event, it’s done,” said Papa—which are the words of a coward to the power of ten.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad Mamie is not coming to live with us. Although with four thousand square feet it wouldn’t really be a problem. I do, however, think that old people deserve some respect. And in a retirement home, you get no more respect, that’s for sure. When you go there, it means: “I’m done for, I’m nobody, everyone, myself included, is just waiting for one thing: death, a dreary end to all this boredom.” No, the reason I don’t want Mamie to come and live with us is that I don’t like her. She’s a nasty old woman and before that she was a nasty young woman. I think this too is profoundly unjust: take a very old man, who was once a heating engineer, a kindly man, who never showed anything but kindness to those around him, a man who knew how to create love and give it and receive it, who connected with people in a human and sensitive way. His wife is dead, his children don’t have two pennies to rub together and, moreover, they have their own kids—and lots of them—to feed and raise. And they live all the way at the other end of the country. So you put this nice old man in a retirement home near the village where he was born, where his children can only come to see him twice a year—a retirement home for poor people, where he has to share a room, where the food’s revolting and the personnel are fighting off their own certainty of ending up in the same place someday by mistreating the inmates. Is this the price you pay for love, to end your life in sordid promiscuity? Now take my grandmother, who has never contributed to anything in life beyond a long series of receptions, fixed smiles, intrigues and futile expenses, and consider the fact that she is entitled to a charming room, with a private living room, and scallops in champagne sauce for lunch. So is that the reward for emotional anorexia—a marble bathtub in a ruinously expensive bijou residence?
So I don’t like Mamie and she doesn’t like me very much either. She adores Colombe, however, who returns it in kind, which means she has her eye on her inheritance—with the utterly genuine detachment of the girl-who-doesn’t-have-her-eye-on-her-inheritance. So I figured the day in Chatou would be an unbelievable ordeal, and bingo: Maman and Colombe go into raptures about the bathtub, Papa looks as if he’s just swallowed his umbrella, and old dried-out bedridden invalids are being wheeled around the corridors with all their drip bags. A madwoman (“Alzheimer’s,” said Colombe with a learned air—yeah, really!) calls me “Pretty Clara” and shouts two seconds later that she wants her dog right away, practically poking my eye out with her huge diamond ring and to boot, someone even tries to escape! The residents who are still healthy have electronic bracelets around their wrists: when they try to go outside the walls of the residence it beeps at the reception desk and the personnel rush out after the fugitives who, obviously, get caught after a hundred hard-earned yards and who protest vigorously that this is not supposed to be the Gulag, and they ask to speak to the director and make all sorts of weird gestures until they are shoved into their wheelchairs. This lady who attempted her final sprint had changed her clothes after lunch-time: she had put on her escape outfit, a dress with polka dots and ruffles all over, very practical for climbing over fences. In short, at two p.m., after the bathtub, the scallops in champagne sauce and the spectacular escape of Edmond Dantès, I was ripe for despair.
Then suddenly I remembered that I had decided to build and not destroy. I looked all around me for something positive, careful not to look at Colombe. I couldn’t find anything. All these people looking for death, not knowing what to do . . . And then, oh miracle, Colombe herself provided me with a solution, yes, Colombe. When we left, after we’d kissed Mamie and promised to come back soon, my sister said, “Okay, it looks like Mamie is nicely settled in. But as for everything else . . . we have to hurry and forget about it, and quickly.” Let’s not quibble about the “hurry quickly,” because that would be petty, let’s just concentrate on the idea: to forget about it quickly.
On the contrary, we absolutely mustn’t forget it. We mustn’t forget old people with thei
r rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They’re spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty. Colombe thinks you can “hurry up and forget” because it all seems so very far away to her, the prospect of old age, as if it were never going to happen to her. But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they’re always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn’t think about tomorrow . . . But if you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?
So, we mustn’t forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
ON GRAMMAR
1. Infinitesimal
This morning Jacinthe Rosen introduced me to the new owner of the Arthens apartment.
His name is Kakuro Something. I failed to understand properly because Madame Rosen always talks as if she has a cockroach in her mouth and because the elevator door opened at that very moment to let Monsieur Pallières’s father out, all cloaked in haughtiness. He greeted us cursorily and hurried off with the jerky stride of a busy captain of industry.
The newcomer is a gentleman in his sixties, very presentable and very Japanese. He is rather small and slim, his face is wrinkled but his features are sharp. His entire person emanates kindliness, but I also sense decisiveness, joviality, and a strong will.
At the moment he is enduring Jacinthe Rosen’s pithiatic prattling. She brings to mind a hen at the foot of a mountain of grain.
“Bonjour Madame,” were his first and only words, in unaccented French.
I am wearing my semi-retarded concierge uniform. We are dealing with a new resident here, and force of habit has not yet compelled him to assume that I am inept, so I must make a special pedagogical effort. I limit myself therefore to a refrain of asthenic yeses in response to Jacinthe Rosen’s hysterical salvoes.
“You will show Monsieur Something (Shou?) the outbuildings?”
“Will you explain the mail to Monsieur Something?” (Pshoo?)
“The decorators are coming on Friday. Could you keep an eye out for Monsieur Something (Opshoo?), between ten and half past ten?”
And so on.
Monsieur Something betrays no signs of impatience, and waits politely, looking at me with a kindly smile. Everything is going very well, I feel. All we need do is wait for Madame Rosen to tire and I shall be able to repair to my den.
And then.
“The doormat that was outside the Arthens’s door hasn’t been cleaned. Can you bring it to the cleaner’s?” asks the hen.
Why must the comedy always turn to tragedy? To be sure, I also misuse language on occasion, although I tend to use such abuses as weapons.
“Some sorta heart attack, huh” is what I had said to Chabrot, to put him off the scent that my outlandish manners have laid.
I am therefore not so sensitive that a minor misuse will cause me to lose my reason. One must concede to others what one tolerates in oneself; besides, Jacinthe Rosen and the cockroach in her mouth were born in the dreary banlieue of Bondy in a row of buildings with grimy stairwells: consequently, I am more indulgent in her case than I would be for Madame Would-you-be-so-kind-as-comma-to.
And yet, there is an element of tragedy: I flinched when she said bring and at that very moment Monsieur Something also flinched, and our eyes met. And since that infinitesimal nanosecond when—of this I am sure—we were joined in linguistic solidarity by the shared pain that made our bodies shudder, Monsieur Something has been observing me with a very different gaze.
A watchful gaze.
And now he is speaking to me.
“Were you acquainted with the Arthens? I have heard they were quite an extraordinary family,” he says.
“No,” I reply, on my guard, “I didn’t really know them, they were just another family, here.”
“Yes, a happy family,” says Madame Rosen, who, visibly, is getting impatient.
“You know, all happy families are alike,” I mutter, to have done with this business, “there’s nothing more to it.”
“‘Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’” he says, giving me an odd look and all of a sudden, even if it’s not for the first time, I shudder.
Yes, I assure you. I shudder—but quite involuntarily. It just happened, there was nothing I could do, I was overwhelmed.
As misfortunes never travel alone, Leo decides it is time to slip between our legs, rubbing against Monsieur Something on his way.
“I have two cats,” he says. “May I ask your cat’s name?”
“Leo,” replies Jacinthe Rosen in my stead then, breaking off our conversation, she hooks her arm under Monsieur Something’s and, saying thank you without looking at me, begins to steer him toward the elevator. With infinite tact, he places his hand on her forearm and gently brings her to a halt.
“Thank you, Madame,” he says to me, then allows himself to be led away by his possessive fowl.
2. In a Moment of Grace
Do you know what an involuntary act signifies? Psychoanalysts say that it reflects the insidious maneuvering of one’s hidden unconscious. What a pointless theory, in fact. When we do something involuntarily, this is the most visible sign of the power of our conscious will; for our will, when opposed by emotion, makes use all of its wiles to attain its ends.
“I suppose this means I want to be found out,” I say to Leo, who has just re-entered his quarters and—I could swear upon it—has been conspiring with the universe to fulfill my desire.
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is the first line in Anna Karenina and, like any self-respecting concierge, I am not supposed to have read it; nor ought I to have jumped at the second part of the sentence when M. Something, in that moment of grace, pronounced it as if I had not known that Tolstoy was its author—for although common people may be sensitive to great works though they do not read them, literature, in their presence, cannot aspire to the lofty peaks where the educated elite place it.
I spend the day trying to convince myself that I am getting into a panic over nothing, and that Monsieur Something, who has at his disposal a wallet so well-stuffed that he was able to buy the entire fourth floor, has other more pressing concerns than the Parkinsonian shudderings of a feebleminded concierge.
And then, at around seven in the evening, a young man rings at my loge.
“Good evening, Madame,” he says, articulating to perfection, “my name is Paul Nguyen, I am Monsieur Ozu’s private secretary.”
He hands me his business card.
“Here is the number of my cell phone. Contractors will be coming to work for Monsieur Ozu and we would not like this to cause you any additional work. So if there is the slightest problem, please call me, I will come right away.”
You will note at this junctur
e in our little mystery that the current vignette is barren of dialogue, an element that one ordinarily notices by virtue of a succession of quotation marks running vertically down the page as the speakers each take their turn.
By rights, there should have been something like:
“Delighted to meet you.”
And then:
“Very well, I shall call you if need be.”
But there appears to be nothing of the sort.
The fact of the matter is that with absolutely no effort on my part I am mute. I am fully conscious that my mouth is open but not a sound comes out, and I greatly pity this handsome young man who is obliged to contemplate a one-hundred-and-fifty pound toad named Renée.