His father left just afterwards: he had a business meeting the following morning in Paris. Jed went out into the garden. The sun was setting as the rear lights of the Mercedes disappeared in the direction of the motorway, and he thought again of Geneviève. They had been lovers for a few years, while he was studying at the Beaux-Arts; it was with her, in fact, that he had lost his virginity. Geneviève was Malagasy, and had explained to him the curious exhumation customs practiced in her country. One week after the death, the corpse was dug up, the shroud was undone, and a meal was eaten in its presence, in the family’s dining room; then it was buried again. This was repeated after a month, then after three; he no longer could remember the details very well, but it seemed there were no fewer than seven exhumations in all, the last one taking place a year after the death, before the deceased was definitively considered dead, and capable of achieving eternal rest. This system of accepting death, and the physical reality of the corpse, went precisely against the modern Western sensibility, Jed thought, and fleetingly he regretted having let Geneviève leave his life. She was sweet and gentle; at the time he suffered from terrible ophthalmic migraines, and she would happily spend hours at his bedside, cooking him food, bringing him water and medication. Temperamentally, she was also rather hot, and on the sexual level she had taught him everything. Jed liked her drawings, which borrowed a little from graffiti, but distinguished themselves by the childlike and joyful character of the figures, by something rounded about the writing, and the palette she used—lots of cadmium red, Indian yellow, and raw or burnt sienna.
To finance her studies, Geneviève cashed in on her charms, as it was once described; Jed found this outmoded expression suited her better than the Anglo-Saxon term escort. She charged two hundred and fifty euros an hour, with a supplement of one hundred euros for anal sex. He had no objection to this activity, and even offered to take erotic photos to improve the presentation of her Web site. As much as men are often jealous, and sometimes horribly jealous, of their girlfriends’ former lovers, and as much as they ask themselves anxiously for years, and sometimes until death, if it hadn’t been better with the other one, if the other hadn’t given them more pleasure, they easily accept, without the slightest effort, everything their women might have done in the past as a prostitute. As soon as it is concluded by a financial transaction, any sexual activity is excused, rendered inoffensive, and in some way sanctified by the ancient curse of work. Depending on the month, Geneviève earned between five and ten thousand euros without devoting more than a few hours to it per week. She made him take advantage by inciting him not to “make a thing of it,” and several times they took winter holidays together on Mauritius or in the Maldives, which she paid for entirely. She was so natural, so cheerful, that he never felt the slightest unease at being akin to a pimp.
That said, he felt real sadness when she informed him that she was going to move in with one of her regular clients—a thirty-five-year-old lawyer, whose life exactly resembled, according to what she had told Jed, those of the corporate lawyers described in business thrillers—generally written by Americans. He knew that she would keep her word and that she would remain faithful to her husband, and, in short, when he went through the door of her studio flat for the last time, he knew that he undoubtedly would never see her again. Fifteen years had passed since then; her husband was presumably fulfilled, and she a happy mother; her children were, he was sure without knowing them, polite and well educated, and received excellent marks at school. Was the income of her husband, the corporate lawyer, now higher than that of Jed as an artist? It was a difficult question to answer, but perhaps the only one worth posing. “You have the vocation of an artist, you truly want it …” she had told him during their last encounter. “You’re small, cute, and slender, but you have the will to do something, you have enormous ambition. I saw it straightaway in your eyes. Me, I do that just”—she vaguely pointed around at the charcoal drawings on the wall—“for fun.”
Jed had kept some of Geneviève’s drawings, and he continued to find real value in them. Art should perhaps be like that, he occasionally told himself, an innocent and joyful, almost animalistic pastime; there had been opinions like that, “stupid like a painter” or “he paints like the bird sings,” and so on; perhaps that’s how art would be once man had got beyond the question of death, or maybe it had already been that way, in certain periods—for example, in the work of Fra Angelico, so close to paradise, so full of the idea that one’s time on earth was just a temporary and obscure preparation for eternal life by the side of Jesus the Lord. And now I am with you, every day, until the end of the world.
On the day after the funeral, he was visited by the lawyer. He hadn’t talked about this with his father—he realized they hadn’t even broached the subject, yet it was the principal motive for his being there—but it appeared immediately obvious to him that there was no question of selling the house, and he didn’t even feel the need to phone his father to discuss the matter. He felt good in this house, and from the start. It was a place where you could live. He liked the clumsy juxtaposition of the renovated wing, whose walls were covered with white insulation, and the old part, with walls made of unevenly joined stones. He liked the swing door, which was impossible to shut fully, that opened onto the road to Guéret, and the enormous stove in the kitchen, which you could feed with wood, coal, and no doubt any sort of fuel. He was tempted in this house to believe in things like love, the reciprocal love of the couple that irradiates the walls with a certain warmth, a gentle warmth that passes on to future occupants, bringing peace to their souls. At this rate, he could well have believed in ghosts, or indeed in anything.
Anyway, the lawyer was in no mood to encourage him to sell; he would have reacted differently, he confessed, only two or three years ago. At that time English bankers, retired young-old English bankers, having already taken over the Dordogne, were fanning out toward Bordelais and the Massif Central, progressing rapidly by using captured positions as bases, and were now taking over central Limousin; very soon you could expect their arrival in the Creuse and a concomitant increase in property prices. But the crash on the London Stock Exchange, the sub-prime crisis, and the collapse of speculative values had greatly changed the situation: far from dreaming of doing up charming rural residences, the young-old English bankers suddenly had difficulty paying the mortgages on their houses in Kensington; they dreamed instead, more and more often, of selling out, and, truth be told, prices had collapsed completely. You would now have to wait, at least according to the lawyer’s forecast, for the arrival of a new generation of rich people, whose wealth was more solid, based on some form of industrial production; they could be Chinese or Vietnamese, who knows, but anyway it seemed to him at the moment that the best course was to wait, to keep the house in good condition, and possibly make a few improvements that respected the traditions of local artisans. On the other hand, it was useless to invest in such luxuries as a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, or a high-speed Internet connection; the nouveaux riches, once they had bought the house, always preferred to deal with that themselves. He was completely categorical on this point; it was experience talking, and he had forty years as a lawyer behind him.
When his father came back to fetch him the following weekend, everything had been settled, the business sorted and tied up, the small legacies in the will distributed to the neighbors. They had the feeling that their mother and grandmother could rest in peace, as they say. Jed relaxed in the Napa-leather seat as the Class S joined the motorway with a purr of mechanical satisfaction. For two hours, they crossed a landscape of autumn colors at moderate speed; they spoke little, but Jed had the impression that a sort of entente had been established between them, an agreement on the general way of going about life. When they approached the Melun Centre interchange, he understood that he had, during that week, experienced a peaceful interlude.
3
Jed Martin’s work has often been presented as the product of a cold, d
etached reflection on the state of the world, and he has been made into a sort of descendant of the great conceptual artists of the previous century. It was, however, in a state of nervous frenzy that on his return to Paris, he bought all the Michelin maps he could find—just over a hundred and fifty of them. He soon realized that the most interesting ones belonged to the Michelin Regions series, which covered most of Europe, and Michelin Departments, limited to France. Turning away from purely moneymaking photography, he acquired a Better Light 6000-HS digital back, which enabled the capture of 48-bit RGB files in a 6000-by-8000-pixel format.
For almost six months he seldom went out, except for a daily walk that took him to the Casino supermarket on the boulevard Vincent-Auriol. His contact with the other students from the Beaux-Arts, already rare while he was there, became rarer, until they disappeared completely, and it was with surprise that he received, at the beginning of March, an e-mail inviting him to take part in a collective exhibition, Let’s Remain Courteous, which was to be organized in May by the Ricard Foundation. He accepted immediately, without understanding that it was precisely his almost ostentatious detachment that had created around him an aura of mystery, and that many of his former classmates wanted to know what he was up to.
On the morning of the vernissage, he realized that he hadn’t said a word for almost a month, except the “No” he repeated every day to the cashier (rarely the same one, it has to be said) who asked him if he had the Club Casino loyalty card; nevertheless he made his way, at the agreed hour, to the rue Boissy d’Anglas. There were perhaps a hundred people (well, he had never known how to calculate that sort of thing; but in any case, there were scores of guests), and he was worried at first when he noticed that he didn’t recognize any of them. For a moment he feared that he’d got the wrong day or exhibition, but his photo prints were there, hung on a wall at the back and lit correctly. After serving himself a glass of whisky, he went round the hall several times, following an ellipsoidal trajectory, more or less pretending to be absorbed in his thoughts while his brain managed to formulate no thoughts whatsoever except the surprise that his former classmates had completely disappeared from his memory, were effaced, and radically so, which made him wonder if he belonged to the human race. He would have recognized Geneviève, at least. Yes, it was certain that he would have recognized his former lover. That was a certainty he could cling to.
At the end of his third walk around, Jed saw a young woman staring intently at his photographs. It would have been difficult not to notice her: she was not only by far the most beautiful woman at the gathering but also without doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. With a very pale, almost translucent complexion, platinum-blond hair, and prominent cheekbones, she corresponded perfectly to the image of Slavic beauty as popularized by modeling agencies since the fall of the USSR.
When he walked around again, she was no longer there; but he caught sight of her halfway through his sixth circuit, smiling with a glass of champagne in her hand, in the middle of a small group. The men were staring at her with a lust that they didn’t even try to hide; the jaw on one of them was half-dislocated.
When he passed by his photos once more, she was standing there, alone. He had a second’s hesitation, then sidled over and stood in front of the image, looked at it, and nodded.
She turned to study him pensively for a few seconds, then asked: “Are you the artist?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him again, more intently, for at least five seconds, before saying: “I find it very beautiful.”
She had said that simply, calmly, but with real conviction. Incapable of finding an appropriate reply, Jed turned back toward the image. He had to agree that he was, in fact, quite happy with it himself. For the exhibition he had chosen a part of the Michelin map of the Creuse that contained his grandmother’s village. He had used a very low camera angle, at thirty degrees from the horizontal, while setting the tilt to the maximum in order to obtain a very high depth of field. It was then, by using Photoshop layers, that he had introduced the background blurring and the bluish effect on the horizon. In the foreground were the pond at Breuil and the village of Châtelus-le-Marcheix. Farther away, the roads winding through the forest between the villages of Saint-Goussaud, Laurière, and Jabreilles-les-Bordes appeared like a dream territory, fairylike and inviolable. In the back-left corner of the image, as if emerging from a bank of mist, the white-and-red ribbon of the A20 motorway could still be made out clearly.
“Do you often take photos of road maps?”
“Yes … Yes, quite often.”
“Always Michelin?”
“Yes.”
She pondered this before asking him: “Have you made many photos like this?”
“Just over eight hundred.”
This time she stared at him, frankly taken aback, for at least twenty seconds, before continuing: “We must talk about it. We must meet to talk about it. This may surprise you, but … I work for Michelin.”
Out of her tiny Prada bag she took a business card, which he looked at stupidly before putting it in his pocket: Olga Sheremoyova, Public Relations, Michelin France.
He called the following morning, and Olga proposed they dine together that very evening.
“I don’t eat out much …” he objected. “Well, I mean, not really in restaurants. I probably don’t even know any restaurants in Paris.”
“I know lots of them,” she replied firmly. “I could even say that … in some way it’s my job.”
They met at Chez Anthony et Georges, a tiny restaurant with a dozen tables situated on the rue d’Arras. Everything in the room, the crockery as well as the furniture, had been bargain-hunted in antique shops and formed a pretty but disparate mixture of tables and chairs copied from the eighteenth century, art nouveau knickknacks, and English china and porcelain. The place was filled with tourists, especially Americans and Chinese; there was also a table of Russians. Olga was welcomed as a regular by Georges, a thin, bald, and vaguely worrying man who looked a bit like a former leather queen. Anthony, in the kitchen, was an understated bear who probably had to pay attention to his weight, since his menu betrayed a veritable obsession with foie gras. Jed catalogued them as semimodern gays who were careful to avoid the excesses and errors in taste classically associated with their community, but who all the same let themselves go a bit from time to time. The moment Olga arrived, Georges asked her: “Can I take your coat, ma chérie?,” emphasizing the ma chérie in a very camp tone of voice. She was wearing a fur coat, a curious choice for the season, but underneath had on a very short miniskirt and a white-satin bandeau top adorned with Swarovski crystals; she was truly magnificent.
“How are you, sweetie?” said Anthony, mincing in his apron in front of them. “Do you like chicken with crayfish? We’ve received some crayfish from Limousin that’re sublime, absolutely sublime. Hello, monsieur,” he added, glancing at Jed.
“Does that tempt you?” Olga asked Jed once he left.
“I … yes. It’s typical. I mean, you have the impression it’s typical, but you’re not very sure of what. Is it in the guide?” He had the impression this was the question to ask.
“Not yet. We’re going to add it in next year’s edition. There’s been an article in Condé Nast Traveller, and the Chinese edition of Elle.”
Though currently she was working in Michelin’s Paris office, Olga was in fact on temporary reassignment with the holding company Michelin Finance, based in Switzerland. In a quite logical attempt at diversification, the firm had recently bought bulk shares in the chain Relais & Châteaux and even more in French Touch, which had been rapidly growing in importance for a few years—all the while honoring, for deontological reasons, the strict editorial independence in relation of the various guides. Michelin had soon become aware that the French, on the whole, could no longer afford holidays in France, and in any case certainly not in the hotels proposed by the chains. A questionnaire distributed in the French Touch hotels th
e year before had shown that seventy-five percent of the clientele came from China, India, and Russia—the percentage rising to ninety for the résidences d’exception, the most prestigious establishments. Olga had been taken on to overhaul the marketing strategy and adapt it to the expectations of this new customer base.
Patronage in the domain of contemporary art was not really part of Michelin’s traditional culture, she went on. A multinational, based in Clermont-Ferrand since the beginning, and whose board of directors always included a descendant of the founders, it had the reputation of being a rather conservative, if not paternalistic, business. The notion of opening a Michelin space in Paris dedicated to contemporary art had a difficult time getting past the ruling authorities, when in fact it would translate, she was sure, into a big upmarket rise of the company’s image in Russia and China.
“Am I boring you?” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, I only talk about business, while you’re an artist …”
“Not at all,” replied Jed sincerely. “Not at all, I’m fascinated. Look, I haven’t even touched my foie gras.”
He was, in fact, fascinated, but rather by her eyes, by the movement of her lips when she spoke—her light-pink, slightly pearly lipstick went very well with her eyes.
They then looked at each other, for a few seconds, speechless, and Jed had no doubt: the look she plunged into his own was well and truly one of desire. And from his expression, she could tell immediately that he knew this.
“In short,” Olga continued, slightly flustered, “in short, for me it’s unhoped-for to find an artist who takes Michelin maps as the subject of his work.”