. . .
Things were very different for Annabelle. Last thing at night, before she went to sleep, she thought about Michel and every morning she was overjoyed to see him again. If something funny or interesting happened at school, her first thought was of the moment she could tell Michel about it. On days when they could not see each other for some reason, she was worried and upset. During the summer holidays (her family had a house in the Gironde), she wrote to him every day. The letters were more sisterly than passionate, and her feelings more a glow than a consuming fire, but even if she were reluctant to admit it to herself, the truth slowly dawned on her: on the first try, without looking, without really wanting to, she had found true love. Her first love was the real thing; there would not be another, and such a question did not even arise. It was a plausible scenario, according to Mademoiselle ge Tendre, but one did well to be cautious as it almost never happened. There were, however, rare, almost miraculous cases that demonstrated it was possible. And if it happened to you it was the most wonderful thing in the whole world.
11
Michel still had a photograph taken in the garden of Annabelle’s house during the Easter holidays of 1971. Her father had hidden Easter eggs in the bushes and flower beds. In the photo, Annabelle was standing in the middle of a bed of forsythias, parting the tall stems, intent on her search with all the gravity of childhood. She had just begun to mature; her face was delicate, and it was obvious even then that she would be exceptionally beautiful. The gentle swell of her sweater hinted at her breasts. This would be the last time there was an egg hunt at Easter; the following year they would be too old to play these games.
At about the age of thirteen, progesterone and estrogen secreted by the ovaries in a girl’s body produce pads of fatty tissue around the breasts and buttocks. When perfectly formed, these organs have a round, full, pleasing aspect and produce violent arousal in the male. Like her mother at that age, Annabelle had a beautiful body. Her mother’s face was charming but plain, and nothing could have prepared her for the painful shock of Annabelle’s beauty; she was quite frightened by it. Annabelle owed her big blue eyes and the dazzling shock of blonde hair to her father’s side of the family, yet only the most extraordinary fluke of morphogenetics could account for the devastating purity of her face.
Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible—no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.
At fifteen, Annabelle was one of those rare beauties who can turn every man’s head—regardless of age or physical fitness. She was one of the few who could send pulses racing in young and middle-aged alike and cause old men to groan with regret simply by walking down the street. She quickly noticed the silence that followed her appearance in a café or a classroom, but it would be years before she completely understood it. At the school in Crécy-en-Brie, it was common knowledge that she and Michel were “together,” but even if they hadn’t been, no boy would have dared to try. The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.
In September 1972 Michel entered the seconde at the Lycée de Meaux, leaving Annabelle, who was in the troisième, in Crécy for another year. Every evening Michel took the train home, changed at Esbly and usually arrived in Crécy on the 6:33 p.m. train, where Annabelle would be waiting at the station. They would walk through the small town and along the banks of the canals. Sometimes—though not often—they would go to the café. Annabelle knew that one day Michel would want to take her in his arms, kiss her and caress her body, which she could feel was changing. She waited patiently for that day, and wasn’t unduly worried; she was confident it would happen.
Many fundamental aspects of sexual behavior are innate, though experiences during the formative years of life play an important role in birds and mammals. Early physical contact with members of the same species seems to play a vital role in the development of dogs, cats, rats, guinea pigs and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulata). Male rats deprived of maternal contact during infancy exhibit serious disturbances in sexual behavior, especially in mating rituals. If his life had depended on it (and, in a very real sense, it did), Michel could not have kissed Annabelle. Often, when he arrived at Crécy station Annabelle would be so overjoyed to see him that she threw her arms around him. For a moment they were held in a state of happy paralysis; only afterward would they begin to talk.
Bruno was also in the seconde at Meaux, though not in Michel’s class. He knew that his mother had a son by a different father, but no more than that. He saw little of his mother. He twice had spent his holidays in the villa in Cassis where she now lived. She regularly entertained hitchhikers and sundry young men passing through. The popular press would have characterized them as hippies. It was true that they were unemployed, and that Janine—who by now had changed her name to Jane—provided for them during their stay. They lived off the profits of the plastic surgery clinic her ex-husband had set up—in other words, off the desire of well-to-do women to fight the ravages of time, or correct certain natural imperfections. They would swim naked in the creeks. Bruno always refused to take off his trunks; he felt small, pale, fat and repulsive. Sometimes his mother would take one of the boys to her bed. She was forty-five years old and her vulva was scrawny and sagged slightly, but she was still a very beautiful woman. Bruno jerked off at least three times a day. Here he was surrounded by the vulvas of young women, sometimes less than a meter away, but Bruno understood that they were closed to him: other boys were bigger, stronger, more tanned. Much later, Bruno would come to realize that the petit-bourgeois world of employees and middle managers was more accepting, more tolerant, than the alternative scene—represented at that time by hippies. “If I dress up as a middle manager, they’ll accept me as one,” Bruno liked to say. “All I need is a suit, a shirt and tie—all for eight hundred francs on sale at C&A. In fact, all I really have to do is learn to tie a necktie. Not having a car is a bit of a problem—the only real problem middle managers face in life. But it can be done: take out a loan, work for a couple of years to pay it off and there you go. But there’s no point in trying to pass myself off as a dropout. I’m not young or good-looking enough and I’m certainly not cool enough. My hair’s falling out, I’m getting fat. Worse than that, the older I get, the more terrified I am of rejection. I’m just not natural enough, not enough of an animal. It’s a permanent handicap because no matter what I say or do, no matter what I buy, I can never overcome it, because it’s a natural handicap.”
From the first time he went to stay with his mother, Bruno knew he would never be accepted by the hippies; he was not and never would be a noble savage. At night, he dreamed of gaping vaginas. It was about then that he began reading Kafka. The first time, he felt a cold shudder, a treacherous feeling, as though his body were turning to ice; some hours after reading The Trial he still felt numb and unsteady. He knew at once that this slow-motion world—riddled with shame, where people passed one another in an unearthly void in which no human contact seemed possible—precisely mirrored his mental world. The universe was cold and sluggish. There was, however, one source of warmth—between a woman’s thighs; but there seemed no way for him to reach it.
It was becoming increasingly clear that something was wrong with Bruno. He had no friends, he was terrified of girls, his entire adolescence was a disaster. His father realized this with a growing sense of guilt. He insisted that his ex-wife join them for Christmas 1972 so they could discuss th
e problem. As they talked, it became clear that Bruno’s half brother was at the same school (in a different class) and that the boys had never met. This single fact hit Bruno’s father hard, for it epitomized the utter breakdown of their family, a breakdown for which they were both to blame. Asserting his authority for the first time, he insisted that Janine contact her other son and try to salvage what she could.
Janine had no illusions as to Michel’s grandmother’s opinion of her, but it was to prove even worse than she expected. Just as she was parking the Porsche outside the house in Crécy-en-Brie, the old woman came out carrying a shopping bag. “I can’t stop you from seeing him,” she said curtly, “he’s your son. Now I’m off to do some shopping. I’ll only be a couple of hours, and I don’t want to find you here when I get back.” Then she turned on her heel.
Michel was in his room. Janine pushed open the door and went in. She had intended to kiss him, but when she moved toward him he jumped back nearly a meter. He had grown to look strikingly like his father: the same fine blond hair, the same sharp features and high cheekbones. She had brought him a present: a record player and some Rolling Stones albums. He took them without a word. He kept the record player, but smashed the records some days later. His room was austere, without a single poster on the wall. A math book lay open on his desk. “What are you working on?” she asked. “Differential equations,” he answered reluctantly. She had wanted to talk to him about his life, invite him on vacation; obviously that was out of the question. She simply told him that his brother would be coming to visit him, and he nodded. She had been there almost an hour, and the silences were becoming more drawn out, when they heard Annabelle’s voice from the garden. Michel ran to the window and shouted for her to come in. Janine watched the girl as she opened the gate. “She’s pretty, your girlfriend,” she said, her mouth twisting slightly. The word lashed Michel like a whip, and his whole expression changed. Annabelle passed as Janine was climbing into the Porsche; the woman stared at her, her eyes filled with loathing.
Michel’s grandmother felt no antipathy toward Bruno. In her blunt but essentially accurate opinion, he was another victim of Janine’s parenting skills. Every Thursday afternoon Bruno would go to see Michel, taking the train from Crécy-la-Chapelle. If it was possible—and it almost always was—he would find a girl on her own and sit facing her. Most of them wore see-through blouses or something similar and crossed their legs. He would not sit directly opposite but at an angle, sometimes sharing the same seat a couple of feet away. He would get a hard-on the moment he saw the sweep of long blonde or dark hair. By the time he sat down, the throb in his underpants would be unbearable. He would take a handkerchief out of his pocket as he sat down and open a folder across his lap. In one or two tugs it was over. Sometimes, if the girl uncrossed her legs just as he was taking his cock out, he didn’t even need to touch himself—he came the moment he saw her panties. The handkerchief was a backup; he didn’t really need it. Usually he ejaculated across the folder, over pages of second-order equations, diagrams of insects or a graph of coal production in the USSR. The girl would keep reading her magazine.
Years later, Bruno could never see himself in that boy. He knew these things had happened and that they were directly connected to the fat, timid boy in the photographs of his childhood. The little boy was clearly related to the sexually obsessed adult he had become. His childhood had been difficult and his adolescence ghastly. He was forty-two now; objectively, death was still a long way off. What was left? Oh, there would be other blow-jobs and he would come to accept having to pay for them. A life lived in pursuit of a goal leaves little time for reminiscence. As his erections became shorter and more infrequent, Bruno felt himself succumb to a sad decline. His only goal in life had been sexual, and he realized it was too late to change that now. In this, Bruno was characteristic of his generation. While he was a teenager, the fierce economic competition French society had known for two hundred years abated. The prevailing opinion was that economic conditions tended toward a certain equality. The Swedish model of democratic socialism was referred to by politicians and businessmen alike. In such a society, Bruno was not motivated to distinguish himself through financial success. His sole professional objective was—quite reasonably—to fade into the “vast, amorphous mass of the middle classes,” as President Giscard d’Estaing would later refer to it. But human beings are quick to establish hierarchies and keen to feel superior to their peers. Denmark and Sweden, which then provided the socioeconomic models for European democracies, also obliged with a model of sexual liberation. Unexpectedly, this great middle class of laborers and office workers—or, rather, their sons and daughters—were to discover a new sport in which to compete. At a language course which Bruno attended in 1972 in Traunstein, a small Bavarian village near the Austrian border, Patrick Castelli, a young French boy in his class, succeeded in fucking thirty-seven girls in the space of three weeks. Over the same period, Bruno managed to score zero. In the end he flashed his prick at a shop assistant in a supermarket; luckily, the girl broke out laughing and did not press charges. Like Bruno, Patrick Castelli was a good student from a respectable family, and their career prospects were almost identical. Bruno’s memories of his adolescence were all of this kind.
Later, the rise of the global economy would create much fiercer competition, which swept away all the dreams of integrating the populace into a vast middle class with ever-rising incomes. Whole social classes fell through the net and joined the ranks of the unemployed. But the savage sexual competition did not abate as a result—quite the reverse.
Bruno had known Michel for twenty-five years now. Over the course of this terrifyingly long period, he felt he had hardly changed at all: he firmly believed in the concept of a kernel of personal identity, some immutable core which defined him. It was true, however, that vast tracts of his intimate history had sunk without trace from his memory. There were months—years, in fact—that seemed as though he had never lived them. This was not true of his adolescence, which was a rich seam of memories and formative experiences. The human memory, his brother explained to him much later, resembles Griffiths’s Consistent Histories. It was in May and they were drinking Campari in Michel’s apartment. They usually talked about social and political issues, and rarely discussed the past; that evening was an exception. “Each person has a set of memories of different points in their lives,” Michel explained. “The memories come in different forms; thoughts, feelings, faces. Sometimes you only remember a name—like that girl Patricia Hohweiller you were talking about earlier, you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize her today. Sometimes you remember a face without knowing why. Everything you remember about Caroline Yessayan is compacted into the precise seconds when your hand was resting on her thigh.
“Griffiths’s consistent-history approach was introduced in 1984 to create coherent narratives from quantum information. A Griffiths’s history is constructed from a succession of more or less random quantum measurements taken at different moments. Each measurement defines a specific physical mass at a precise moment with reference to a specific set of values. As an example, in a time t1 an electron moves at a certain speed approximately determined depending on the method of measurement. At a time t2 it is situated at a certain point in space. At a time t3, it has a certain spin value. From this collection of measurements it is possible to construct a history which is logically consistent. It cannot be said to be true; simply that it can be sustained without contradiction. Under a given set of experimental conditions, a finite number of possible histories can be recreated using Griffiths’s method; these are called Griffiths’s Consistent Histories. In these, the world behaves as though composed of separate objects, each having fixed, intrinsic properties. However, the number of consistent histories that can be created from a single set of data is generally greater than one. As a being you are self-aware, and this consciousness allows you to hypothesize that the story you’ve created from a given set of memories is a consis
tent history, justified by a single narrative voice. As a unique individual, having existed for a particular period and been subjected to an ontology of objects and properties, you can assert this with absolute certainty, and so automatically assume that it is a Griffiths’s history. You make this hypothesis about real life, rather than about the domain of dreams.”
“I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion,” said Bruno quietly, “but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one.” Michel, who knew nothing about Buddhism, couldn’t answer. It was not an easy conversation; they saw each other twice a year at most. In September 1973 they had both started in the première C, and for two years they took the same math and physics classes. Michel was far ahead of the rest of his class. Human reality, he was beginning to realize, was a series of disappointments, bitterness and pain. He found in mathematics a happiness both serene and intense. Moving through the half-light, he would suddenly find a way through—with some formula, some audacious factorization—and be transported to a plane of luminous serenity. The first equation in any proof was the most poignant, because the truth fluttering in the distance was still precarious; the last was the most thrilling, the most joyful.