The Age of Reinvention

For Ariel

Love is not that sweet thing everyone talks about. Maybe people are tortured in order to make them say that? Whatever, everyone is lying.

ORHAN PAMUK, interview, April 2011

All success cloaks a surrender.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Literary success represents only a small part of what I think about. Success slips through your fingers, it escapes you whichever way you turn [. . .] and it is my own life that is, ultimately, the most important thing.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, interview with Bernard Pivot, 1979

Let's begin with his wound. Yes, let's begin there. The last of the stigmata inflicted during a brutal upbringing that Samir Tahar spent his whole life escaping, it was an inch-long gash on his neck. He'd gone to a plastic surgeon in Times Square who attempted to sand it off with a grinding wheel, but it was too late: he would keep the scar forever as a souvenir, would look at it every morning and remember where he came from, from what place/what violence.
Look at it! Touch it!
They looked, they touched. The first time was always a shock: the sight of/the contact with that whitish scar which betrayed the fury of its creator, signaled the taste for a power struggle, for contradiction—a form of social brutality that, brought to incandescence, presaged eroticism—a wound that he could hide beneath a scarf, a foulard, or a turtleneck sweater, so that nothing could be seen of it. That day, he was concealing it behind the starched collar of a $300 shirt—purchased in one of those luxury clothing stores that Samuel Baron only ever entered now with the vague hope of stealing from the cash register—and everything about him breathed opulence, complacency, consumerism, a zero-defect design. Everything about him denied what he had been: even his manners were affected, his voice tinged with an aristocratic accent, this man who, in law school, had been one of the most vocal supporters of the proletarian left! One of those radicals who had used their original mortification as a social weapon. Now, newly rich, an A-list lawyer, a big spender, a thunderous orator, a
lex machina
, everything about him spoke of identity change, vaulting ambition, social redemption—the exact counterpoint of what Samuel had become. Was he hallucinating? Maybe. This isn't
real,
thinks/prays/screams Samuel; that can't be
him
—Samir—that brand-new, famous, deified man, a personal and original creation, a prince surrounded by his camarilla, with his slick, specious rhetoric. On TV, he is primped and sexy, appealing to men and women, worshipped by all; an object of jealousy, perhaps, but also of respect; a virtuoso of the bar, fearless and shameless, smashing the prosecution's argument to pieces with the jackhammer of his wit . . . That can't be him, that artificial courtroom wolf,
there
, in New York, on CNN, his first name Americanized in capital letters—
SAM TAHAR
—and beneath it, his occupation:
lawyer
, while
he
, Samuel, was wasting away in a dingy apartment in Clichy-sous-Bois, rented for €700 per month, was slaving eight hours a day as a social worker for a charity, helping troubled youths who always seemed to ask:
Baron—is that Jewish?
, and would spend his evenings reading/posting on literary blogs (with the username Witold92)/writing pseudonymous books that were systematically rejected—
His great social novel? We're still waiting for it
—that can't be him, Samir Tahar, transformed beyond recognition, his face covered with a layer of beige foundation, eyes turned to the camera with the perfect command of an elite actor/lion tamer/marksman, his dark eyebrows waxed and shaped, his body corseted in a bespoke designer suit that was possibly even bought for the occasion, chosen specifically in order to seduce/persuade/attract attention, the holy trinity of political communication, the lessons that had been rammed down their throats at law school and which Samir was now putting into practice with the arrogant self-assurance of a campaigning politician. Samir, a guest on American television, representing the families of two U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan,
¹
intoning a paean to interventionism, glorifying moral fiber, trying his hand at sentimentalism! Samir, being questioned by the journalist
²
—who treats him with deference, as if he's the conscience of the free world!—and remaining calm and confident, apparently having muzzled the beast within him, controlled the violence that for so long contaminated his every gesture. And yet, when you first met him, that was all you saw: the surreptitious wound, the tragic echoes of the horror of his formative years, spent inside the grimy walls of a twenty-floor tower block, fifteen or twenty of them (maybe even more) crammed on a stairwell that stank of dog/human piss; all those years spent pent-up there, on the eighteenth floor, with a view of the balconies of the tower block opposite, sweat suits swaying in the wind—fake Adidas, Nike, Puma bought for nothing in Taiwan/Ventimiglia/Marrakesh/the local Goodwill store, sweat-stained grayish undershirts, frayed underpants, rough toilet paper, plastic tablecloths, panties misshapen by too many washes/pounds lost or gained, hung out to dry in front of the satellite dishes that swarmed over the roofs/façades like rats in darkened basements where nobody ever went anymore out of fear of theft/rape/violence, where nobody ever went unless threatened with a pistol/knife/box cutter/knuckle-duster/billy club/bottle of sulfuric acid/pump-action shotgun/pepper spray/rifle/nunchuks (this was before the unrest in the East and the arrival in bulk of weapons of war from the ex-Yugoslavia—what a godsend! Just take a family vacation and—bingo!—load the good stuff in the trunk among all the kids' toys: assault rifles, automatic weapons, Uzis, Kalashnikovs, explosives with electronic detonators . . . even [whatever floats your boat] rocket launchers, if you buy them cash-only. So you go off to a forest where you can practice alone, no witnesses, and then you wage war in underground parking garages sticky with puddles of engine oil and urine where nobody ever went anymore unless accompanied by a cop—and cops never went down there anymore. You wage ideological warfare in squats where twenty-five-/thirty-year-old lepers rejected/remade the world, or sexual warfare in basements stinking of damp and dope smoke where fourteen-/fifteen-year-olds roasted NONCONSENTING minors, ten or twenty of them taking it in turns, 'cause they had to prove they were men, 'cause the violence inside them had to force its way out somehow—they told the judge this in their defense—'cause they needed some kind of outlet for it. Or gang warfare carried out on wasteland turned into a battleground, night and day, by dozens of people crowding around to watch rheumy-eyed pit bulls fighting, each of them named after some fallen dictator—Hitler being the most popular—betting heavily on the biggest, the most rabid, the most deadly, yelling at the beast to tear its opponent to shreds, to bite its fucking eyeballs, turned on by the blood/the ripped flesh/the groans of pain and dying), while Samir stayed upstairs, studying like a freak, refusing to accept a life with no future, no money, having to choose between a job as a cleaner/warehouseman/delivery driver/caretaker/security guard, or dealer, if you aim really high, if you're ambitious; wanting to impress his mother, Nawel Tahar, a cleaning lady for the Brunet family.
³
Nawel, a petite, black-eyed brunette and model employee, knows all about them: she cleans their laundry, their dishes, their floors, their children, scouring, scrubbing, polishing and vacuuming, declaring only half her earnings, working Saturdays and public holidays, sometimes evenings in order to wait on them/their friends, politically committed men, feverishly scanning the papers for their name, googling themselves whenever they hear that someone has written an article on them—good or bad, who cares, as long as people are talking about them—happy to fuck women under thirty in rooms rented by the year, preoccupied by their weight, the ups and downs of the stock market, their wrinkles, obsessed by the loss of their youth, their savings, their hair; people who sleep together, work together, swap jobs, wives, mistresses, take it in turns to big each other up, lick ass, and get their cocks sucked by Albanian whores—the best in the world, apparently—whom they will attempt to liberate from detention centers where they were kept by ambitious administrators, whom they will try to save by using their connections—vainly, alas—sickened by immigration policies that tear away their objects of desire, their cleaning ladies, their kids' favorite babysitters, the construction workers paid cash-in-hand who transform industrial wastelands into luxury lofts where they continue the revolution until the Assemblée Nationale Métro station because beyond that it's not really their area anymore,
Nawel, you can have the leftovers it's a shame to waste them and we don't have a dog
, yes, the tragic shards of fate and hate that twenty years spent swallowing the choke pear have burned into their gaze—a hardened, shadowy gaze, sharp as a carbide knife that will scalp you and yet you'll like it all the same. But all that was before Samir's social success as a TV puppet, animated for your pleasure: Bravo, you've done it!
She
was conquered. Because there were two of them in front of the screen, two of them suppressing their hysterical aggression, two accomplices in failure: Nina was there too, Nina who had loved him, at twenty years old, when everything was still to play for, when everything was still possible. What ambitions does she have now? (1) Obtaining a raise of €100 per month. (2) Having a child before it's too late—but what kind of future would the kid have? (3) Moving to a two-bed apartment with a view over a soccer field/trash cans/a muddy lakeside area where two ivory-colored swans flap their wings/die—the lost territories of the French Republic. (4) Paying off their debts—but how? Short-term solution: a government debt forgiveness commission. Long-term solution: God only knows. (5) Take a vacation, one week in Tunisia maybe, at an all-inclusive beach club on Djerba . . . well, they could dream.

“Look at him!” Nina shouted, eyes riveted to the screen, hypnotized by the image, drawn to it like a moth to a halogen lamp—a moth that will burn alive—and, watching him too, Samuel felt certain that Sam Tahar had long ago put behind him what had happened in 1987 at the University of L.—the incident that had destroyed Samuel forever. Twenty years spent trying to forget the tragedy of which he himself had been the unconscious orchestrator and the expiatory victim, and all for what? For it to be broadcast on CNN, at prime time.

They had met in the mid-eighties, at law school in Paris. Nina and Samuel had been together for a year when, on their first day back at school, they made the acquaintance of Samir Tahar. Like them, he was nineteen years old, but he seemed slightly older: a muscular man of medium height, with a nervous walk, whose beauty was not instantly obvious but who had you spellbound as soon as he opened his mouth. You saw him and you thought:
Yes, that manly authority, that animal magnetism—fuel for sex
. Everything about him promised pleasure; everything about him betrayed his desire—an aggressive, corrupting desire. That was the most disturbing thing about him, this guy they knew nothing about: his sincerity in conquest. It was the first thing you noticed: his taste for women—for sex, his weakness even then—perceptible in his ability to seduce them instantly, almost automatically, his sexual voracity, which he didn't even try to control, which he was able to express in a single gaze (a fixed, piercing, pornographic gaze that unveiled his thoughts and was constantly on the lookout for the slightest hint of reciprocation) and which he had to sate—quickly, urgently; his self-proclaimed and unabashed hedonism, his absolute coolness in conversation, as if every friendly or social relationship with a woman or a girl could only be justified by the possibility of its being transformed into a different kind of relationship.