Sila's Fortune (3 page)

‘I have to say, if I'd been that waiter, I'd have smashed the guy's face in,' said Matthieu.

‘You can hardly punch a customer when you're a waiter at the finest restaurant in the world,' said Simon.

‘So that's the finest restaurant in the world?'

‘It's the only place I could take you. There was no choice.'

‘I'd still have smashed his face in!'

They emerged onto the Champs-Élysées. In the summer evening, the streetlights gave off a purple glow, forming haloes
against the sky. The trees along the avenue glimmered. Light streamed from the cars, curiously silent somehow, waiting patiently for the long river of metal which stretched back to the Place de la Concorde to begin flowing.

The two friends walked down the Champs-Élysées and, when they came to the Place de la Concorde, hailed a taxi. They rolled down the windows and, silent now, allowed themselves to be lulled by the movement of the car.

It pulled up outside a large brick building in the 11th arrondissement and they took the elevator to the top – the ninth floor. Simon slipped his key into the lock. They stepped into the apartment. A hallway with a polished parquet floor led to a living room and, beyond, a covered terrace furnished in the oriental style which overhung the void. They sat down.

‘That guy who hit …'

‘Not again!' Simon interrupted.

‘Well, it's not normal, is it? You don't deck a guy for taking your kid by the arm.'

‘It's normal if you're a dickhead.'

‘You'd have to be a very particular type of dickhead.'

‘Probably,' Simon yawned.

‘One with an obsession for power and property. He's
my
kid and nobody touches him.'

‘Couldn't have put it better myself.'

‘Do you have that obsession?' asked Matthieu.

‘No.'

‘Me neither, but we might be better off if we did. That absolute need to assert yourself. To mark your territory.'

‘Like an animal, you mean?'

‘Yeah, like an animal. To be less human and more animal. I sometimes wonder if that's not the secret to life. Allowing yourself to be guided by your instincts, your urges.'

‘So you're saying we should be predators? Nice idea. Reverse the whole history of mankind and go back to being wild animals.'

‘Well, I'll tell you one thing, that particular dickhead is at war. And I think people who are constantly waging war have an advantage over everyone else.'

Simon nodded.

‘Maybe. But it's also because they've already lost. To me a man who's always at war is a man already reconciled to loss. The loss of everything that makes us human, but also the defeat of happiness.'

Somewhat surprised to have said something so perceptive, and fearful of a better riposte, Simon headed off to bed. Matthieu stayed for a moment, lost in thought, then he too went to his room.

They had been sharing this apartment for a year. They had met at a ball, had hit it off, though on the face of it they had nothing in common, and six months later Matthieu moved in and became Simon's flatmate. It was a three-room apartment. With the curious obstinacy he sometimes had, Simon had been determined to find an apartment with terraces. Plural. ‘Which area are you looking to live in?' ‘I don't care about the area. I want two terraces.' ‘What's your budget?' ‘I don't have a budget, I have a requirement: terraces.' This, at least, was his account of the conversation. And at the time he was far from being a wealthy man. He was working as a researcher in a maths laboratory.

Simon had scurried into the apartment on the heels of the estate agent. There was a terrace off the kitchen, and a second terrace leading off from the living room. With each new terrace Simon's excitement grew and when they came to the third terrace, he signed the deal. The third terrace, a short flight of steps up from the largest bedroom, was bordered by withered shrubs. It could hardly be called luxurious, but then neither could the apartment or the building itself, located as they were in the outskirts of the 11th arrondissement in a tangle of winding charmless streets. But this was what he wanted: it overlooked all of Paris. Though there was nothing lavish about it, it was an exceptional space, perched high up, like the crow's nest on a ship, as though isolated from the humdrum routine of the city.

‘You have access to the roof if you like. It's a flat roof, it would be like a fourth terrace. You'll have the only key, you have sole access.'

Simon moved in. In winter, grey leached into the apartment from all around. The grey of the clouds, of the city. A congenially melancholy atmosphere, though sometimes a little cold. In summer, the sun illuminated the far-flung corners of every room. Simon would retreat to the roof terrace wearing only boxer shorts, and there patiently track the sun's course from morning to night, which accentuated his dark complexion. He was perfectly at home there. Alone, at peace, just how he liked it.

And yet the idea of sharing the flat had been Simon's. Perhaps because the permanently empty second bedroom troubled his sense of logic. But his decision had also been the result of the bombshell that had been his meeting with Matthieu.

Simon was a shy, diffident creature. After his parents' death in a car crash, he had been raised by an aunt, his mother's older sister. At the age of six, he had suddenly found himself an orphan, the result of a twist of fate he could not understand but nonetheless accepted. Just as he had been born, so his parents had died. It was a fact of life about which there was no point speculating. He did not cry, he was not sad, but he found himself now in a world from which all colour had drained, in a goldfish bowl devoid of life. For the most part, he did nothing; he was indifferent to books, to television, cut off from his classmates, who saw him as stand-offish and sickly, and his regular illnesses further set him apart. In this reclusive existence, through some mysterious circuitry in his brain, he developed an extraordinary memory. This inexplicable phenomenon made him a sort of memory genius and, had he displayed the least intellectual curiosity, he would have been exceptionally intelligent. But goldfish in their bowls exhibit no curiosity. Simon would lie on his bed thinking, reliving the events of his day – the pointless inanities of his life. A pear he had peeled at the dinner table, a pen he had dropped in class, a dog that had crossed the street in front of him. The polo neck of a boy in class, the frill of a dress, the texture of skin.

At the provincial school he attended, Simon had been a good pupil. He hadn't needed to study, since he remembered everything down to the smallest detail. In fact it was his prodigious memory that marked him out in his first year in secondary school. Before that, he had not been much liked. His frailness was unsettling. Other boys could not get him to play games of
any kind. They could not fight with him, even a harsh word was enough to leave him distraught and tearful. Given this fact, it was surprising that he was not victimised but was left to himself, a fact that can only be explained because the school was in an affluent part of town with pupils who were not particularly cruel and who were kept on a tight leash by parents who all knew each another. The word had clearly gone out not to bother Simon but to leave him alone; this often meant him spending playtime in the classroom, extending the goldfish bowl of his bedroom, of his existence.

In his first year at secondary school, where a battery of teachers were tasked with teaching the various subjects his old schoolteacher Madame André, had taught all by herself, Simon spent his first term petrified. The different classrooms and teachers completely bewildered him and upset his routine. You had to pack up your books, leave one classroom, dash to the stairs and run to a different classroom on a different floor, careful not to get the wrong door, say ‘Good Morning' to another new teacher … It was a puzzle. But however strange he was, Simon was not without resources and managed to adapt, though he was invariably the last to leave the class, still clumsily packing his things away while the teacher waited impatiently to close the classroom.

In the second term, in French class, they studied poetry. First, the rules of versification, then individual texts. At the end of one class, the teacher asked how many of them could remember what they had been studying for the previous hour. The poem was Victor Hugo's ‘Tomorrow, At Dawn'. Everyone in the class protested. Except Simon who, as usual, did not say a word.

On a sudden whim the French teacher, a man they all found intimidating, called on Simon. Paralysed, the boy said nothing. Then, closing his eyes, he began to speak, and he recited the whole poem.

‘Did you know it already?' the teacher asked.

‘No,' Simon answered shyly.

‘Good. So you remembered it.'

Then the teacher set another poem for the class to learn. It was ‘The Sleeper in the Valley' by Rimbaud. Simon read the poem. Knew it. He leaned back in his chair.

‘Simon, learn the poem!' said the teacher. ‘Don't rest on your laurels.'

Simon blushed. He pored over the text again, but what could he do? He already knew it by heart. He stared into space.

Irritated, the teacher shouted at him: ‘Recite as much as you've learned.'

And Simon recited the whole poem, without a single mistake or hesitation.

‘Did you know that one already?'

The boy blushed again.

‘No.'

‘You're not going to tell me that you learned it by heart in the past two minutes!'

Simon shrugged helplessly.

‘It's not my fault.'

The teacher leafed through his book and gave it to Simon open at Rimbaud's long poem ‘The Drunken Boat'.

‘Try and learn that while the rest of the class works on the other poem.'

Simon read the text. In his humdrum universe, the dazzling images amazed and astonished him.

Some minutes later, the teacher began asking for volunteers to recite ‘The Sleeper in the Valley'. No one could recite the whole poem.

‘What about you, Simon? How much of “The Drunken Boat” have you managed to learn?'

In that moment, the images swelled in the confusion of words. With impeccable, inspired delivery, Simon the goldfish recited the entire poem under the astonished eyes of the rest of the class, as though another Simon, transfigured, had just stepped into the light.

Nor did this other Simon ever completely return to the darkness. For that whole year, he was ‘The Drunken Boat' kid, something that later led Simon to believe Rimbaud had saved his adolescence. Not only did his teachers no longer look on him as some pathetic creature unable to pack his school-bag who blushed or paled the moment he was spoken to, but even his classmates saw him in a different light. They would not have elected him class president, but he was the-kid-with-the-incredible-memory, the-boy-who-never-forgets, that-guy-who-doesn't-even-have-to-study, and for this they felt a certain innocuous envy. This did not mean they were jealous of him, since in every other way – his blushing, his awkwardness, the unfashionable clothes his aunt bought for him – he was utterly ridiculous.

The result of this event was that no one ever recognised Simon's true gift, which was for maths. He was never really very good at French. Since the death of his parents, silence had
welled in him like a mute, infinite fountain, forever leaving him at a loss for words. He drew strength from that silence: words would never open the world to him. Truncated phrases slipped out, phrases like amputated limbs, too short, too curt, subject-verb-object constructions that never connected him to others, since nothing in his life connected.

The silent world of mathematics, on the other hand, suited him perfectly. This was his real poetry and even if his teachers did not yet fully realise it, because the problems were still too simple, they were beginning to suspect that Simon understood maths in the way that some musicians have perfect pitch, a gift, like all of nature's gifts of pure and uncertain beauty.

It was around this gift that Simon constructed his sense of self. In the reassuring world of mathematics, a field impervious to the emotions he so feared, Simon forged the personality he was to have as an adult, and would have had still if events had not conspired to destroy him. Now he moved among his peers without cowering, invisible and silent perhaps, ignored perhaps by girls (for which he was grateful since they terrified him), but at least protected from misfortune. He lived in his little bedroom surrounded by his formulae in a little apartment where meals were served at precise times, where at eleven o'clock an elderly shadowy figure in her soft, gentle voice told him to go to bed and woke him again at seven for a breakfast of hot chocolate, already steaming on the table, and two slices of bread.

Simon's schooldays unfolded as they should. He learnt formulae and mathematical problems till they were coming out of his ears. He successfully won a place at the École Polytechnique, leading him to move out of his little room and into one hardly
bigger on the outskirts of Paris on a barren plain where arrogant fellow students informed him that having secured a place at the finest university in the world, it was time for him to ‘make a career for himself', a concept that troubled him. If ‘making a career' meant becoming an entrepreneur, he was clearly unqualified. On the other hand, he could easily imagine making a non-career for himself in a mathematics laboratory. It was a path even the least astute career guidance counsellor could not but recommend to this raw-boned young man, pockmarked with adolescent acne who could barely bring himself to look you in the eye as he shook hands. Sadly, there came a time when even guidance counsellors – fatuous fatheads who never moved from their chairs – hadn't a clue. Especially when the guidance counsellor in question took the fearsome form of Matthieu Brunel.

The university was organising its annual fancy dress ball. Simon ‘the Jude', a nickname given him by his good-natured colleagues, went wearing a military uniform, and the epaulettes for once gave a certain power and form to his anaemic physique. By this point in his life, some years after graduating from the École Polytechnique, he found it easier to deal with social occasions, and the prospect of being in a ballroom in Paris with hundreds of others was no longer quite as terrifying. The uniform granted him a place, and after all, finding his place in the world had always been his greatest problem.