The Elegance of the Hedgehog (10 page)

C
ivilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education. What does education imply? One must offer camellias on moss, tirelessly, in order to escape the natural impulses of our species, because those impulses do not change, and continually threaten the fragile equilibrium of survival.

I am a very camellia-on-moss sort of person. If I really think about it, there is nothing else that can quite explain my withdrawal into this bleak loge of mine. As I was convinced very early on of the pointlessness of my existence, I could have chosen to rebel, and taking God as my witness that I had been cruelly used by fate, I could have resorted to the violence inherent in our condition. But school made of me a soul whose unpromising destiny led only to abnegation and confinement. The wonder of my second birth had shown me the way to master my impulses: since it was school that had given birth to me, I had to show my allegiance, and thus I complied with my instructors’ intentions by tamely becoming a most civilized human being. In fact, when the struggle to dominate our primate aggressiveness takes up arms as powerful as books and words, the undertaking is an easy one, and that is how I became an educated person, finding in written symbols the strength to resist my own nature.

Thus I was utterly astonished by my own reaction when Antoine Pallières rang imperiously at the loge three times, and without a greeting began reproachfully haranguing me for the disappearance of his chrome scooter: I slammed the door in his face, and at the same time very nearly amputated my cat’s tail as he was slipping out the door.

Not so very camellia-on-moss after all, I thought.

And as I had to allow Leo re-entry into his quarters, I immediately opened the door again after I had slammed it.

“Excuse me,” I said, “a draft.”

Antoine Pallières looked at me with the expression of someone who wonders if he has really seen what he thinks he has seen. But as he has been conditioned to imagine that only what must happen does happen, in the way that rich people convince themselves that their lives run along a heavenly track that the power of money has quite naturally laid for them, Antoine decided to believe me. I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.

“Yes, well, anyway I was mainly coming to give you this from my mother,” he said.

And he handed me a white envelope.

“Thank you,” I said, and shut the door in his face for the second time.

And here I am in my kitchen with the envelope in my hand.

“What is wrong with me this morning?” I say to Leo.

The death of Pierre Arthens has been wilting my camellias.

I open the envelope and read this little note written on a business card whose surface is so glossy that the ink, to the dismay of the defeated blotter, has bled slightly underneath each letter.

Madame Michel,
Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages
from the dry cleaner’s this afternoon?
I’ll pick them up at your loge this evening.
Scribbled signature

I was not prepared for such an underhanded attack. I collapse in shock on the nearest chair. I even begin to wonder if I am not going mad. Does this have the same effect on you, when this sort of thing happens?

Let me explain:

The cat is sleeping.

You’ve just read a harmless little sentence, and it has not caused you any pain or sudden fits of suffering, has it? Fair enough.

Now read again:

The cat, is sleeping.

Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity:

The cat comma is sleeping.

The cat, is sleeping.

Would you be so kind as, to sign for.

On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect:

I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace . . .

And on the other hand, we have this dribbling scribbling on vellum, courtesy of Sabine Pallières, this comma slicing the sentence in half with all the trenchancy of a knife blade:

Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s?

If Sabine Pallières had been a good Portuguese woman born under a fig tree in Faro, or a concierge who’d just arrived from the high-rise banlieues of Paris, or if she were the mentally challenged member of a tolerant family who had taken her in out of the goodness of their hearts, I might have whole-heartedly forgiven such guilty nonchalance. But Sabine Pallières is wealthy. Sabine Pallières is the wife of a bigwig in the arms industry, Sabine Pallières is the mother of a cretin in a conifer green duffle coat who, once he has his requisite diplomas and has obtained his Political Science degree, will in all likelihood go on to disseminate the mediocrity of his paltry ideas in a right-wing ministerial cabinet, and Sabine Pallières is, moreover, the daughter of a nasty woman in a fur coat who sits on the selection committee of a very prestigious publishing house and who is always so overloaded with jewels that there are days when I fear she will collapse from the sheer weight of them.

For all of these reasons, Sabine Pallières has no excuse. The gifts of fate come with a price. For those who have been favored by life’s indulgence, rigorous respect in matters of beauty is a non-negotiable requirement. Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are forgotten or reborn, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to be entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misusage when using language, one must first and foremost have sworn one’s total allegiance. Society’s elect, those whom fate has spared from the servitude that is the lot of the poor, must, consequently, shoulder the double burden of worshipping and respecting the splendors of language. Finally, Sabine Pallières’s misuse of punctuation constitutes an instance of blasphemy that is all the more insidious when one considers that there are marvelous poets born in stinking caravans or high-rise slums who
do
have for beauty the sacred respect that it is so rightfully owed.

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.

At this critical moment in my indignant ruminations someone rings at my loge.

To build
You live
You die
These are
Consequences

T
he more time goes by, the more determined I become to set this place on fire. Not to mention committing suicide. The need becomes painfully obvious: I got told off by Papa because I corrected one of his guests who’d said something untrue. In fact it was Tibère’s father. Tibère is my sister’s boyfriend. He’s in the École Normale Supérieure with her, but he studies mathematics. When I think they call these people the elite . . . The only difference I can see between Colombe, Tibère, their friends and a gang of “working-class” kids is that my sister and her chums are stupider. They drink and smoke and talk as if they were from the projects and toss phrases around like, “Hollande really did for Fabius with his referendum, get a load of that, the dude’s a real killer” (I swear to you), or: “All the RDs (research directors) who’ve been appointed over the last two years are right-wing pigs, yes, the far right has got us locked up, better not mess with your dissertation director” (heard only yesterday). At a lower level, you get: “Right, the blonde that J.B. is chasing, she’s an English major, a blonde, right” (idem) and slightly above: “Marian’s lecture, that was like, excellent, when he said that existence isn’t the first attribute of God” (idem, just after closing the file on the blond English major). What am I supposed to think? And here’s the jackpot (give or take a word): “Being an atheist doesn’t mean you can’t see the power of metaphysical ontology. Yeah, what matters is the conceptual power, not truth. And Marian, filthy priest, he’s fly, yo? Calms ya down.

The white pearls
Fallen on my sleeves with heart still full
We parted
I take them with me
As a memory of you

(Kokinshu)

I put some of Maman’s yellow foam earplugs in my ears and read haikus from Papa’s
Anthology of Classical Japanese Poetry
so that I couldn’t hear their degenerate conversation. Afterwards, Colombe and Tibère stayed by themselves and started making unspeakable sounds, knowing perfectly well that I could hear them. The worst of it was that Tibère was staying for dinner because Maman had invited his parents. Tibère’s father is a film producer, and his mother has an art gallery on the quai de Seine. Colombe absolutely adores Tibère’s parents, she’s going with them to Venice next weekend, good riddance, for three days I’ll have some peace.

So, at dinner, Tibère’s father said: “What, you don’t know go, that fantastic Japanese game? I’m in the middle of producing a film version of Shan Sa’s novel,
The Girl Who Played Go
, it’s a fa-bu-lous game, the Japanese equivalent of chess. Yet another invention we owe to the Japanese, it is fa-bu-lous, I assure you!” And he began to explain the rules of go. He had it all wrong. To start with, it’s the Chinese who invented go. I know because I read a cult manga on go. It’s called
Hikaru No Go
. Secondly, it is not an equivalent to chess. Other than the fact that it’s a board game and that two adversaries face off over black and white pieces, it’s as different from chess as cats are from dogs. In chess, you have to kill to win. In go, you have to build to live. And thirdly, some of the rules that Mister I’m-the-father-of-an-idiot described were wrong. The aim of the game is not to eat the other, but to build the biggest territory. The rule regarding taking stones says that you can “commit suicide” if it is to take your adversary’s stones and not that you’re strictly forbidden to go anywhere you might be automatically taken. And so on.

So when Mister I-have-engendered-a-pustule said, “The ranking system of players starts at one
kyu
and then it goes up to thirty
kyu
and after that you go to
dan
: first
dan
, then second, and so on,” I couldn’t restrain myself, I said, “No, it’s in the opposite order: you begin with thirty
kyu
and go up to one.”

But Mister Forgive-me-I-knew-not-what-I-was-doing was obstinate and said grumpily, “No, dear child, I do believe I am right.” I shook my head; Papa was frowning and looking at me. The worst of it is that it was Tibère who saved me. “Yes, Dad, she’s right, first
kyu
is strongest.” Tibère is a math student, he plays chess and go. I hate the idea. Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls. But in any event it’s Tibère’s father who was wrong and Papa, after dinner, told me off: “If you’re going to open your mouth to make my guests look ridiculous, then don’t.” What should I have done? Open my mouth like Colombe to say, “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what to think of this season’s line-up at the Théâtre des Amandiers,” when she’s utterly incapable of reciting a single line from Racine, never mind appreciating the beauty of it. Open my mouth like Maman to say, “Apparently the Biennale last year was very disappointing,” when she would kill for her house plants and let all of Vermeer go up in flames? Open my mouth like Papa to say, “The French cultural exception is a subtle paradox,” which is virtually word for word exactly what he has said at the last sixteen dinner parties? Open my mouth like Tibère’s mother to say, “These days you can scarcely find a single decent cheese maker in all of Paris.” At least she’s not in contradiction with her Auvergne shopkeeper roots.

When I think of go . . . Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only the means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi’s characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It’s a proverb for playing go, and for life.

Live, or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are, I’ve assigned myself a new obligation. I’m going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I’m going to start building. Even with Colombe I’ll try to do something positive. What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building.

T
he someone ringing at my door turns out to be the charming Olympe Saint-Nice, the daughter of the diplomat on the second floor. I like Olympe Saint-Nice. I think that one must have considerable strength of character to survive such a ridiculous first name, especially when one knows it must have destined the unfortunate girl to peals of laughter and “Hey, Olympe, can I climb on your mount?” all through what must have seemed an interminable adolescence. Moreover, Olympe Saint-Nice apparently does not wish to claim her birthright: she aspires neither to a rich marriage, nor to the corridors of power, nor to diplomacy, and least of all to any sort of celebrity. Olympe Saint-Nice wants to become a veterinarian.

“A country vet,” she confided to me one day when we were talking cats on my doormat. “In Paris all you get are house pets. I want cows and pigs, too.”

Olympe is not one for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge. Olympe talks to me because I have a cat, and that brings us into a community of interests; I greatly admire her ability to circumvent all the barriers that society puts up along our laughable way through life.

“I have to tell you what happened to Constitution,” she says when I open the door.

“Please come in then, do you have five minutes?”

Not only does she have five minutes, she is so delighted to find someone with whom she can talk cats and little cat woes that she stays for an hour and drinks five cups of tea one after the other.

Yes, I really do like Olympe Saint-Nice.

Constitution is a lovely little female with caramel colored fur, a rosebud pink nose, white whiskers and lilac pads: she belongs to the Josses, and like all the pets in the building, she is taken to see Olympe the moment she even farts in the wrong direction. This useless but enchanting creature, three years of age, recently meowed all night long, depriving her owners of their sleep.

“Why, then?” I ask at the right moment, because we are absorbed by the complicity of acting out a tale and each of us wishes to play her role to perfection.

“A urinary tract infection!” says Olympe. “A urinary tract infection!”

Olympe is only nineteen and is waiting with frenzied impatience to start veterinary college. In the meantime she works relentlessly and both bewails and enjoys the afflictions that befall the fauna of our building, the only beasts upon which she can practice.

That is why she has announced Constitution’s urinary tract infection to me as if she had found a seam rich with diamonds.

“Urinary tract infection!” I chime enthusiastically.

“Yes,” she sighs, her eyes shining. “Poor sweetie, she was peeing all over the place and—” Olympe takes a breath before reaching the best part of the story—“she displayed mildly hemorrhagic urine!”

Dear God this is good. If she had said, There was blood in her pee, the story would have been over in no time. But Olympe, cloaking her cat doctor’s uniform with emotion, has also adopted the terminology. I have always found great delight in hearing people speak like this. “Mildly hemorrhagic urine” is, to me, a form of light entertainment: it has a nice ring to it and evokes a singular world, a brief refreshing change from literature. For the very same reason, I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which convey the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatiotemporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.

“There are two possible etiologies for urinary tract infections,” continues Olympe. “Either an infectious germ, or renal dysfunction. I felt her bladder to start with, to be sure she didn’t have distension.”

“Distension?!”

“In cases of renal dysfunction where the cat cannot urinate, the bladder fills up and gets terribly distended, to the point where you can feel it if you palpate the abdomen,” explains Olympe. “But this wasn’t the case. And she didn’t seem to be in pain when I was examining her. But she was still peeing everywhere.”

I spare a thought for Solange Josse’s living room, transformed into a giant litter box with trendy ketchup-colored accents. But for Olympe that is mere collateral damage.

“So did Solange have urine tests done?”

Yes, but there was nothing wrong with Constitution. No kidney stones, no insidious germs lurking in her peanut-sized bladder, no infiltrations of enemy bacteriological agents. And yet, for all the anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic and antibiotic medication administered, Constitution remains obdurate.

“So what is wrong with her?” I ask.

“You won’t believe this,” says Olympe. “She has interstitial idiopathic cystitis.”

“Good Lord, what’s that?” I ask, eager for the next development.

“It’s like, well, Constitution is a nervous wreck,” replies Olympe with a peal of laughter. “Interstitial is whatever has to do with an inflammation of the walls of the bladder and idiopathic means no identified medical cause. In short, when she’s stressed, she gets inflammatory cystitis. Just like women.”

“But why on earth would she be stressed?” I am thinking out loud, for if Constitution, whose daily life as a fat, decorative lazybones is disturbed by nothing worse than kindly veterinary examinations consisting of having one’s bladder rubbed, has reason to be stressed out, the rest of the animal kingdom is bound to succumb to serious panic attacks.

“The veterinarian has spoken: only the cat knows why.”

And Olympe pouts with frustration.

“Not long ago Paul (Josse) told her she was fat. There’s no way to know. It could be anything.”

“And how do you treat it?”

“As you do with humans,” laughs Olympe. “You prescribe Prozac.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

What did I tell you. Animals we are, animals we shall remain. The fact that a rich person’s cat suffers from the same afflictions as a civilized woman is hardly a reason to call this cruel and inhuman treatment of felines or the contamination by mankind of an innocent domestic animal; rather, to the contrary, one should point to the deep-rooted solidarity underlying the fate of all animal species. We share the same appetites, we endure the same afflictions.

“In any event,” says Olympe, “this will give me pause when I treat animals I don’t know.”

She gets up and bids a friendly goodbye.

“Thank you, Madame Michel, you’re the only one I can talk to about things like this.”

“Oh you’re most welcome, Olympe, it was my pleasure.”

And I am about to close the door when she says,

“Oh, by the way, Anna Arthens is going to sell the apartment. I hope the new owners will have cats, too.”