Submission (15 page)

All of which is to say, these two escorts were
fine
. Still, that wasn’t enough to make me want to see them or have sex with them again, or to make me go on living. Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

As it turned out, my father was the one who died, a few weeks later. I got the news over the phone from Sylvia, his partner. She said she was sorry that we hadn’t ‘had much chance to talk’. This was a euphemism: in fact, we’d never spoken at all. I had learned of her existence only two years before, the last time my father and I had talked, when he’d happened to mention her in passing.

She came to pick me up at the Briançon railway station. The trip had been very unpleasant. The high-speed train to Grenoble still ran all right, they maintained basic service on the TGV, but the TER was falling apart. The train to Briançon broke down more than once. We ended up arriving an hour and fifteen minutes late. The toilets were stopped up, a puddle of water and shit had overflowed into the corridor and threatened to spread into the compartments.

Sylvia was behind the wheel of a Mitsubishi Pajero Instyle, and to my utter stupefaction the seats were covered in fake leopard skin. The Mitsubishi Pajero (I learned from the special issue of
Auto-Journal
that I bought when I got home) is ‘one of the best recreational vehicles for handling back-country roads’. The Instyle model comes with leather upholstery, electric sunroof, backup camera, and an 860-watt, twenty-two-speaker Rockford Acoustic audio system. The whole thing left me profoundly shaken, since my father had always – at least, as long as I knew anything about him – been so rigidly, almost affectedly bourgeois in his good taste. He wore the three-piece suits (grey chalk-stripe or occasionally dark blue) and the expensive English ties of a successful CFO, which is exactly what he was. With his wavy blonde hair, sky-blue eyes and handsome face, he could have appeared in one of those movies that Hollywood makes every few years about some abstruse but supposedly important issue to do with finance, subprimes and Wall Street. I hadn’t seen him for six years, and had no idea how his life might have changed, but nothing could have prepared me for his metamorphosis into a suburban adventurer.

Sylvia was fiftyish, about twenty-five years his junior. If not for me, everything would have gone to her. My existence meant that she would be deprived of my portion of the estate – 50 per cent, since I was an only child. Under the circumstances, one could hardly expect her to feel any warmth towards me, but she behaved reasonably well and addressed me without excessive hostility. I’d called several times to let her know the train was running late, and the lawyer had pushed our appointment back to six o’clock.

The reading of my father’s will held no big surprises: he had divided his estate between us equally, with no additional bequests. Still, the lawyer had done his job. He began by itemising my father’s holdings.

My father had received a generous pension from Unilever but had very little in cash: two thousand euros in his current account, some ten thousand that he’d invested in a mutual fund a long time ago and probably forgotten. His main asset was the house where he and Sylvia lived: a broker in Briançon had appraised it at 410,000 euros. His Mitsubishi, almost new, was selling for 45,000 euros online. The one surprising thing was his collection of high-priced guns, which the lawyer listed according to their value: the most expensive were a Verney-Carron Platines and a Chapuis Oural Elite. Altogether the collection was worth 87,000 euros – a good deal more than the SUV.

‘He collected guns?’ I asked Sylvia.

‘They weren’t collector’s pieces. He did a lot of hunting. It had become his great passion.’

An ex-CFO of Unilever buying an off-road SUV and discovering his inner hunter-gatherer – it was surprising, but I could see it. The lawyer had already finished; the division would be dismayingly simple. The proceedings were swift, but I still missed my train thanks to the earlier delay. It was the last train that evening. This placed Sylvia in an awkward position, as we both realised, probably at the same moment, when we got back in the car. I was quick to let her off the hook. I said the best thing for me, by far, was to find a hotel near the station. There was a very early train I had to catch, I told her, because I had an extremely important meeting in Paris. I was lying on both counts: not only did I not have a meeting the next day, but the earliest train didn’t leave until noon. The earliest I could hope to be back in Paris was six o’clock. Reassured that I was about to vanish from her life, she was almost enthusiastic in her offer of a drink at ‘our house’, as she persisted in calling it. Not only was it no longer ‘their’ house, now that my father was dead, but soon it wouldn’t be hers either. Given the state of her finances, as I understood them, there was no way she could give me my share of the inheritance without selling the place.

Their chalet, which overlooked the Freissinières Valley, was enormous. The underground garage could have held ten cars. Crossing the hallway into the living room, I paused in front of a cluster of stuffed trophies, chamois or mouflons – at any fate, that kind of mammal. There was also a wild boar. That one I recognised.

‘Take off your coat, if you like,’ Sylvia said. ‘Hunting is nice, you know – I hadn’t known anything about it, either. They’d go hunting every Sunday, all day, then we’d have dinner together with the other hunters and their wives, all twenty of us. We’d have everyone over for a drink, and often, afterwards, we’d go to a little restaurant with a private room, in the next village.’

So my father’s last years had been
nice
. This, too, was a surprise. When I was growing up, I’d never met anyone he worked with, and I don’t think he ever saw anyone – outside of work, that is. Had my parents had any friends? If so, none that I remembered. We had a big house in Maisons-Lafitte – not as big as this one, certainly, but big. I didn’t remember anyone ever coming to dinner or spending the weekend, or doing any of the things people do with their
friends
. What’s worse, I don’t think my father ever had what you’d call a
mistress
, either. I couldn’t be sure, of course, I didn’t have any proof, but I just couldn’t connect the idea of a mistress with the man I remembered. In other words, he had led two entirely separate lives, one having nothing to do with the other.

The living room was vast. It must have taken up the entire floor, if you included the open-plan kitchen (on the right, as you walked in) and the farmhouse table beside it. The rest of the space was filled with coffee tables and deep white leather sofas, with more hunting trophies on the wall and a rack for my father’s guns. They were beautiful objects, and their elaborate metal inlays shone with a gentle glow. The floor was strewn with various animal skins – mainly sheep, I’d guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge. I went over to the picture window. It took up the whole back wall and looked out on the mountains. ‘Across from us,’ Sylvia said, ‘you can see the top of La Meije. And to the north there’s the Barre des Écrins. Can I offer you a drink?’

I’d never seen such a well-stocked bar. There were ten different kinds of brandy, plus certain liqueurs I had never even heard of, but I asked for a martini. Sylvia turned on a lamp. Nightfall cast a bluish tinge over the snow-covered mountains, and sadness settled over the room. Even without my inheritance, I couldn’t imagine that she would want to live alone in a house like this. She still worked, she did something in Briançon, I didn’t know what. She’d told me on our way to the lawyer’s office, but I’d forgotten. Obviously, even if she moved into a nice apartment in the centre of Briançon, her life was going to be much less pleasant than before. I sat down somewhat reluctantly on a sofa and accepted another martini, but I’d already decided that it would be my last. When I finished this one I’d ask her to drive me to the hotel. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that I would never understand women. Here was a normal – almost cartoonishly normal – woman, and yet she’d seen something in my father, something my mother and I never saw. And I don’t think it was only, or even mainly, a question of money. She made plenty herself; that much was clear from her clothes, her hair, the way she talked. In that ordinary old man she, and she alone, had found something to love.

When I got back to Paris there was the email I’d been dreading for the last few weeks. Or no, that’s not quite true, I think I was already resigned to it. What I really wanted to know was whether Myriam, too, would tell me that she had
met someone
– whether she’d use the expression.

She used the expression. In the next paragraph she said she was deeply sorry, and that she’d never think of me without a certain sadness. I believed that was true – and also true that she wouldn’t think of me very often. Then she changed the subject, pretending to be consumed with worry over the political situation in France. That was nice, her acting as if somehow we’d been torn apart by the whirlwind of history. It wasn’t entirely honest, of course, but it was nice.

I turned away from the computer screen and went over to the window. A single lenticular cloud, its edges tinted orange by the setting sun, hovered high above the Charléty stadium, as immobile and indifferent as an intergalactic spaceship. I felt a dull, numb pain, that’s all, but it was enough to keep me from thinking clearly. All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations. Quitting the university had been extremely simple, whereas dealing with my social security and health insurer turned out to be a huge bureaucratic undertaking, one that I didn’t have the courage to face. And yet I had to. Even my very comfortable pension wouldn’t be enough to see me through a serious illness. On the other hand, it did allow me to sign up for more escorts. I felt no real desire, only an obscure Kantian notion of ‘duty towards the self’, as I surfed my usual sites. In the end I settled on an ad posted by two girls: a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan named Rachida and a twenty-four-year-old Spaniard named Luisa promised ‘the enchantments of a wild and mischievous duo’. They were expensive, obviously, but I thought I was entitled to a little extravagance, all things considered. We made a date for that same evening.

At first everything went the way it usually did, which is to say, fine. They had a nice studio near Place Monge. They’d lit incense and put on soft music, whale songs or something. I penetrated them and fucked them in the arse, one after the other, without fatigue or pleasure. It was only after half an hour, when I was taking Luisa from behind, that I felt the stirrings of something new. Rachida kissed me on the cheek, then with a little smile she slipped behind me. She rested one hand on my arse, then leaned in and started licking my balls. Little by little, with growing amazement, I felt shivers of forgotten pleasure. Maybe Myriam’s email, and the fact that she’d, as it were, officially left me, freed me up in some way. I don’t know. Wild with gratitude, I turned round, tore off the condom, and offered myself up to Rachida’s mouth. Two minutes later, I came between her lips. She meticulously licked up the last drops as I stroked her hair.

Before I left, I insisted on tipping them a hundred euros each. Maybe it was too soon to give up after all – witness these two girls, and my father’s surprising late-life transformation. And maybe, if I kept seeing Rachida on a regular basis, we’d end up having feelings for each other. At least, there was no reason to absolutely rule it out.

This brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes’s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a ‘state of grace’. I thought often of what Tanneur had told me about the new president’s international ambitions, and although it went practically unnoticed, I was intrigued to see that Morocco had re-entered negotiations to join the EU. There was already a timetable in place for Turkey. The rebuilding of the Roman Empire was well under way, and in his domestic policies Ben Abbes had gone from strength to strength. His first achievement was a dramatic drop in crime: in the most troubled neighbourhoods it was down 90 per cent. He’d had another instant success with unemployment, which had plummeted. This was clearly due to women leaving the workforce en masse – due, in turn, to the highly symbolic first measure passed by the new government: a large new subsidy for families. At first there had been some squirming on the left, since the subsidy was reserved for women who gave up working. The new unemployment figures put an end to that. The subsidy hadn’t even added to the deficit, since it was completely offset by drastic cuts in education – until now, far and away the largest item in the national budget. Under the new system, mandatory education ended with junior school, around the age of twelve. For most children, the school certificate would be their last degree. From then on, vocational training was encouraged. Secondary and higher education had been completely privatised. All of these reforms were meant to ‘restore the centrality, the dignity, of the family as the building block of society’: so the new president and his prime minister declared in a strange joint speech during which Ben Abbes reached nearly mystical heights, while François Bayrou, his face wreathed in a beatific smile, more or less played the role of John Sausage, the Hanswurst of old German folk plays, who repeated – in an exaggerated, slightly grotesque way – everything the main character said. Muslim schools were doing fine, obviously. When it came to education, the Gulf States still had plenty to spend. More surprisingly, some Catholic and Jewish schools seemed to have made the best of a bad situation by appealing to various CEOs. In any case, they announced that they had covered their costs and would open as usual in the autumn.

At first the brutal implosion of the two-party system, which had ruled French politics since time immemorial, plunged the media into a stupor bordering on aphasia. You could see poor Christophe Barbier trailing from one news set to the next, his scarf at half-mast, seemingly unable to comment on a historic change that he hadn’t seen coming. The truth was nobody had. And yet, as the weeks went by, nodes of opposition began to form – first, on the anti-religious left. Protests were organised by the rather unlikely team of Jean-Luc Melenchon and Michel Onfray. The Left Front still existed, at least on paper, and it was clear that Ben Abbes would face a challenge in 2027, and not just from the National Front. On the other side, groups like the Union of Salafist Students rose up to denounce the persistence of immorality and demand sharia law. So, little by little, the stage was set for a political debate. This would be a new kind of debate, unlike anything in recent French history, more like what existed in the Middle East. But still it would be debate, of a sort. And the existence of political debate, however factitious, is necessary to the smooth functioning of the media – and, perhaps also, to keep people feeling that they live, at least technically, in a democracy.