The Elegance of the Hedgehog (13 page)

A
few days go by.

As on every Tuesday, Manuela comes to my loge. I just have time, before she closes the door behind her, to hear Jacinthe Rosen talking with young Madame Meurisse next to the elevator, which is taking its own sweet time to arrive.

“My son says that the Chinese are very difficult to deal with.”

Madame Rosen’s resident cockroach affects her pronunciation: she does not say Chinese, but Chanese.

I’ve always dreamt of visiting Chana. ’Tis far more interesting than China, after all.

“He dismissed the baroness,” says Manuela. Her cheeks are pink and her eyes are shining. “And everyone else along with her.”

I adopt the very air of innocence.

“Who did?”

“Monsieur Ozu, of course!” Manuela looks at me reproachfully.

For over a fortnight now all the talk in the building is of Monsieur Ozu moving into the apartment of the late Pierre Arthens. In this frozen place, this glacial prison of power and idleness, the arrival of a new resident and the unbelievable things that, under his orders, a whole host of professional contractors have been getting up to—their numbers so impressive that even Neptune has given up on trying to sniff each and every one—this arrival, therefore, has brought with it a wave of excitement and panic all at the same time. For the conventional aspiration to see tradition maintained and the contingent disapproval of anything that might remotely might evoke newly-acquired wealth—ostentatious interior decoration, the installation of stereo equipment, excessive use of meals delivered from the
traiteur
—were in open competition with a deeper hunger, deep in the guts of all these benighted souls blinded by boredom: the hunger for novelty. Thus, for two weeks or more 7, rue de Grenelle throbbed to the rhythm of the comings and goings of painters, carpenters, plumbers, cabinet-makers, and delivery men, carrying furniture, carpets, and electronic equipment, until the grand finale, the actual movers; and all these people had clearly been hired to transform the fourth floor from top to bottom. So, needless to say, all the residents of the building were dying to see that transformation for themselves. The Josses and the Pallières no longer took the elevator: discovering new wellsprings of vigor, they would wander at all hours across the landing of the fourth floor, which naturally they could not avoid if they were to leave and then return to their own apartments. They now attracted the envious gazes of all the other residents: Bernadette de Broglie plotted to take tea with Solange Josse—never mind that she is a socialist; and Jacinthe Rosen volunteered to drop off the package for Sabine Pallières that had just been delivered to my loge—I was only too pleased myself to entrust her with the task, making a great hypocritical fuss over it in the process.

Because I alone, of everyone in the building, have been careful to avoid Monsieur Ozu. We met twice in the hallway but he was always accompanied and merely greeted me politely, and I did likewise. Nothing in his behavior betrayed anything other than courtesy and indifferent kindliness. But just as children can sense that beneath the skin of conventional behavior lies the true stuff of which human beings are made, my internal radar, suddenly on high alert, told me that Monsieur Ozu was watching me closely, biding his time.

It was his secretary who saw to all the tasks requiring any contact with me. I am also willing to wager that Paul Nguyen has something to do with the fascination Monsieur Ozu’s coming has been exerting on the residents. He is a strikingly handsome young man. From Asia and his Vietnamese father, he has acquired distinguished manners and a mysterious serenity. From Europe and his mother (a White Russian), he has inherited height and Slavic cheekbones, as well as the light shade of his slightly almond-shaped eyes. He is both manly and delicate, a perfect synthesis of masculine good looks and Asian gentleness.

I learned about his background one afternoon when there was a great commotion all around, and I could see he was very busy: he rang at my loge to apprise me of the arrival early the next morning of a new crew of delivery men, and I offered him a cup of tea; he accepted without ado. We conversed in an exquisitely nonchalant manner. Who would ever have imagined that such a handsome and competent young man—for he was most competent, I’d swear by all the gods, we all could tell by the way he organized the work and never seemed overwhelmed or tired, getting everything done in a calm manner—would also be so utterly devoid of any form of snobbery? When he took his leave, thanking me warmly, I realized that in his presence I had forgotten even the very notion of trying to hide who I was.

But back to the news of the day.

“He dismissed the baroness, and everyone else.”

Manuela is elated, and cannot hide it. Anna Arthens, upon leaving Paris, had solemnly promised Violette Grelier that she would commend her to the new owner. Monsieur Ozu, wishing to honor the request of the widow from whom he was buying the property (and consequently breaking her heart), had agreed to receive her former servants and talk to them. The Greliers, with Anna Arthens as their sponsor, could have found a desirable position in any good household, but Violette was nurturing the insane hope that she might be able to stay on in the same place where, in her own words, she had spent the best years of her life.

“Leaving here would be like dying,” she had said to Manuela. “Well, I’m not talking about you, my dear. You’ll just have to get used to the idea.”

“Get used to the idea, fiddle-dee-dee,” says Manuela who, since she followed my advice and watched
Gone with the Wind
, has been taking herself for the Scarlett of Argenteuil. “She’s leaving, and I’m staying!”

“Monsieur Ozu is hiring you?”

“You’ll never guess, he’s taken me on for twelve hours, and I’ll be paid like a princess!”

“Twelve hours! How will you manage?”

“I’m going to drop Madame Pallières,” she replies, on the verge of ecstasy, “I’m going to drop Madame Pallières.”

And because one really should over-indulge in things that are this good:

“Yes,” she says again, “I’m going to drop Madame Pallières.”

We savor a moment of silence to honor this profusion of blessings.

“I’ll make the tea,” I say, interrupting our state of bliss. “White tea, to celebrate.”

“Oh, I forgot, I brought something.”

She removes a little pouch in ivory tissue paper from her shopping bag.

I set about untying the blue velvet ribbon. Inside, dark chocolate florentines glisten like black diamonds.

“He’s going to pay me twenty-two euros an hour,” says Manuela, putting the cups on the table then sitting down again, after courteously enjoining Leo to set off and discover the world. “Twenty-two euros! Can you believe it? The others pay me eight, ten, eleven! That
pretensiosa
Pallières woman, she pays me eight euros and leaves her filthy underpants under the bed.”

“Perhaps Monsieur Ozu will leave his filthy underpants under the bed,” I say, smiling.

“Oh, he’s not the type!” She grows thoughtful. “I hope I’ll know what to do, in any case. Because he has a lot of strange stuff up there, you know. And he’s got all these
bonzes
to water and spray.”

Manuela means Monsieur Ozu’s bonsaï. These are tall and slender ones, and do not have the typical tortured shape that can often leave a forbidding impression; to me, on their way through the hall to their new home, they evoked another era, and the faint whisper of their foliage suggested the fugitive vision of a distant forest.

“Who would have thought the decorators would do all this,” continues Manuela. “Knock everything down and redo it!”

For Manuela, a decorator is an ethereal being who places cushions on expensive sofas and takes a step back to admire the effect.

“They’re knocking the walls down with sledgehammers,” she had told me a week earlier, breathless after trying to climb the stairs four at a time with a huge broom in her hand. Now she continued, “You know . . . it’s really lovely now. I wish you could see it.”

“What are his cats called?” I ask, to distract her and remove this dangerous, hare-brained idea from her mind.

“Oh, they’re gorgeous!” she says, looking at Leo with consternation. “They’re ever so thin and move around without a sound, like this.”

With her hand she draws strange undulations in the air.

“Do you know their names?” I ask again.

“The female is Kitty, but I didn’t catch the male’s name.”

A bead of cold sweat races down my spine.

“Levin?” I venture.

“Yes, that’s it. Levin. How did you know?” She frowns. “Not that revolutionary guy is it?”

“No, the revolutionary was Lenin. Levin is the hero of a great Russian novel. Kitty is the woman he is in love with.”

“He has had all the doors changed.” Manuela is only moderately interested in Russian novels. “They slide now. And would you believe it, it’s much more practical. I wonder why we don’t do the same. You save a lot of room, and it’s not as noisy.”

How true. Once again, Manuela brilliantly sums up the situation, and earns my admiration. But her innocent remark also brings on a delicious sensation for other reasons.

T
wo reasons, to be exact, both related to Ozu’s films.

The first has to do with the sliding doors themselves. From the very first film I saw,
Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
, I was fascinated by the way the Japanese use space in their lives, and by these doors that slide and move quietly along invisible rails, refusing to offend space. For when we push open a door, we transform a place in a very insidious way. We offend its full extension, and introduce a disruptive and poorly proportioned obstacle. If you think about it carefully, there is nothing uglier than an open door. An open door introduces a break in the room, a sort of provincial interference, destroying the unity of space. In the adjoining room it creates a depression, an absolutely pointless gaping hole adrift in a section of wall that would have preferred to remain whole. In either case a door disrupts continuity, without offering anything in exchange other than freedom of movement, which could easily be ensured by another means. Sliding doors avoid such pitfalls and enhance space. Without affecting the balance of the room, they allow it to be transformed. When a sliding door is open, two areas communicate without offending each other. When it is closed, each regains its integrity. Sharing and reunion can occur without intrusion. Life becomes a quiet stroll—whereas our life, in the homes we have, seems like nothing so much as a long series of intrusions.

“How true,” I say to Manuela, “it’s more practical and less abrupt.”

The second reason has to do with an association of ideas which led me from sliding doors to women’s feet. In Ozu’s films, I don’t know how many shots I have seen where the actors slide open the front door, come into the hall and remove their shoes. The women, above all, are particularly gifted at this sequence of gestures. They come in, slide the door along the wall, and take two quick steps that lead them to the foot of the raised area where the family rooms are located; without bending over they remove their laceless shoes from their feet and with a supple, gracious motion of their legs pivot upon themselves as they climb, back first, onto the platform. Their skirts puff out slightly; the way they bend their knees in order to climb up is energetic and precise, and their bodies easily follow the slight pirouette of their feet, which leads to a curiously broken and casual series of steps, as if their ankles were hobbled. But while such hindrance in one’s gestures generally evokes some sort of constraint, the lively little steps with their incomprehensible fits and starts confer onto the feet of these walking women the seal of a work of art.

When we Westerners walk, our culture dictates that we must, through the continuity of a movement we envision as smooth and seamless, try to restore what we take to be the very essence of life: efficiency without obstacles, a fluid performance that, being free of interruption, will represent the vital élan thanks to which all will be realized. For us the standard is the cheetah in action: all his movements fuse together harmoniously, one cannot be distinguished from the next, and the swift passage of the great wild animal seems like one long continuous movement symbolizing the deep perfection of life. When a Japanese woman disrupts the powerful sequence of natural movement with her jerky little steps, we ought to experience the disquiet that troubles our soul whenever nature is violated in this way, but in fact we are filled with a unfamiliar blissfulness, as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty. What we discover in this affront to the sacred rhythm of life, this defiant movement of little feet, this excellence born of constraint, is a paradigm of Art.

When movement has been banished from a nature that seeks its continuity, when it becomes renegade and remarkable by virtue of its very discontinuity, it attains the level of esthetic creation.

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.

Grammar
A stratum of consciousness
Leading to beauty

I
n the morning, as a rule, I always take a moment to listen to music in my room. Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure . . . well . . . everything there is to endure: my sister, my mother, school, Achille Grand-Fernet, and so on. Music is not merely a pleasure to the ears the way that gastronomy is to the palate or painting to the eyes. There’s nothing terribly original about the fact that I put music on in the morning, just that it sets the tone for the rest of the day. It’s very simple but also sort of complicated to explain: I believe that we can choose our moods: because we are aware that there are several mood-strata and we have the means to gain access to them. For example, to write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don’t come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it’s not a question of “the will,” it’s a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll. And to activate the mechanism there’s nothing better than a little music. For example, to relax, I put on something that takes me into a sort of faraway mood, where things can’t really reach me, where I can look at them as if I were watching a film: a “detached” stratum of consciousness. In general, for that particular stratum, I resort to jazz or, more effective overall but longer to take effect: Dire Straits (long live my mp3 player).

So, this morning I listened to Glenn Miller before leaving for school. I guess it didn’t last long enough. When the incident occurred, I lost all my detachment. It was during French class with Madame Fine (who is a living antonym because she has a repository of spare tires around her midriff). What’s more, she wears pink. I love pink, I think it’s a color that’s had a bad rap, it’s made out to be a thing for babies or women who wear too much makeup, but pink is really a subtle and delicate color, and it figures a lot in Japanese poetry. But pink and Madame Fine are a bit like jam and pigs. Anyway, this morning I had French class with her. That in itself is already a chore. French with Madame Fine is reduced to a long series of technical exercises, whether we’re doing grammar or reading texts. With her it’s as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don’t think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: “Did you like this text/this book?” And yet that is the only question that could give meaning to the narrative points of view or the construction of the story . . . Never mind the fact that the minds of younger kids are, I think, more open to literature than say the minds of high school or college students. Let me explain: at my age, all you need is to talk to us about something with some passion, pluck the right strings (love, rebellion, thirst for novelty, etc.) and you have every chance of succeeding. Our history teacher, Monsieur Lermit, had us hooked by the end of the second class by showing us photos of these guys who’d had their hand or their lips cut off under Sharia law, because they’d been stealing or smoking. But he didn’t do it as if he were showing us a gory film or something. It was enthralling, and we listened attentively throughout the class, the point of which was to warn us against the foolishness of mankind, and not Islam specifically. So if Madame Fine had taken the trouble to read a few verses of Racine to us, with a tremor in her voice, (
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse / Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice
) she would have discovered that the average adolescent is fully ripe for the tragedy of love. By high school it’s harder: adulthood is around the corner, kids already have an intuitive idea of how grown-ups behave, and they begin to wonder what role and what place they are going to inherit on stage, and anyway by then something has been spoiled, and the goldfish bowl is no longer very far away.

It is bad enough to have to put up with the usual grind of a class in literature without literature and a class in language without cognizance of language, so this morning when I felt something snap inside me, I just couldn’t contain myself. Madame Fine was making a point about the use of qualifying adjectives as epithets, on the pretext that our compositions were completely barren of said grammatical grace notes, “whereas really, it’s the sort of thing you learn in third grade.” She went on: “Am I to honestly believe there are students who are this incompetent in grammar,” and she looked right at Achille Grand-Fernet. I don’t like Achille Grand-Fernet but in this case I agreed with him when he asked his question. I feel it was long overdue. Moreover, when a lit teacher uses a split infinitive like that, I’m really shocked. It’s like someone sweeping the floor and forgetting the dust bunnies. “What’s the point of grammar?” asked Achille Grand-Fernet. “You ought to know by now,” replied Madame Never-mind-that-I-am-paid-to-teach-you. “Well I don’t,” replied Achille, sincerely for once, “no one ever bothered to explain it to us.” Madame Fine let out a long sigh, of the “do I really have to put up with such stupid questions” variety, and said, “The point is to make us speak and write well.”

I thought I would have a heart attack there and then. I have never heard anything so grossly inept. And by that, I don’t mean it’s
wrong
, just that it is
grossly inept
. To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop. It is utterly devoid of meaning! If she had shown us some concrete examples of things we need to know about language in order to use it properly, well, okay, why not, that would be a start. She could tell us, for example, that knowing how to conjugate a verb in all its tenses helps you avoid making the kind of major mistakes that would put you to shame at a dinner party (“I would of came to the party earlier but I tooked the wrong road”). Or, for example, that to write a proper invitation in English to a little
divertissement
at the château of Versailles, knowing the rules governing spelling and the use of apostrophes in
la langue de Shakespeare
can come in very useful: it would save you from embarrassment such as: “Deer freind, may we have the plesure of you’re company at Versaille’s this evening? The Marquise de Grand-Fernet.” But if Madame Fine thinks that’s all grammar is for . . . We already knew how to use and conjugate a verb long before we knew it was a verb. And even if knowing can help, I still don’t think it’s something decisive.

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, “Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is! How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!” I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility. I find there is nothing more beautiful, for example, than the very basic components of language, nouns and verbs. When you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the core of any statement. It’s magnificent, don’t you think? Nouns, verbs . . .

Perhaps, to gain access to all the beauty of the language that grammar unveils, you have to place yourself in a special state of awareness. I have the impression that I do that anyway without any special effort. I think that it was at the age of two, when I first heard grown-ups speak, that I understood once and for all how language is made. Grammar lessons have always seemed to me a sort of synthesis after the fact and, perhaps, a source of supplemental details concerning terminology. Can you teach children to speak and write correctly through grammar if they haven’t had the illumination that I had? Who knows. In the meanwhile, all the Madame Fines on the planet ought rather to ask themselves what would be the right piece of music to play to make their pupils go into a grammatical trance.

So I said to Madame Fine: “Not at all! That is simplistic!” There was great silence in the classroom both because as a rule I never open my mouth and because I had contradicted the teacher. She looked at me with surprise, then she put on one of those stern looks that all teachers use when they feel that the wind is veering to the north and their cozy little class on punctuation might turn into a tribunal of their pedagogical methods. “And what do you know about it, Mademoiselle Josse?” she asked acidly. Everyone was holding their breath. When the star pupil is displeased, it’s bad for the teaching body, particularly when that body is well-fed, so this morning it was like a thriller and a circus act all rolled into one: everyone was waiting to see what the outcome of the battle would be, and they were hoping it would be a bloody one.

“Well,” I said, “when you’ve read Jakobson, it becomes obvious that grammar is an end in itself and not simply a means: it provides access to the structure and beauty of language, it’s not just some trick to help people get by in society.”

“Some trick! Some trick!” she scoffed, her eyes popping out of her head. “For Mademoiselle Josse grammar is a trick!”

If she had listened carefully to what I said, she would have understood that, for me, grammar is not a trick. But I think the reference to Jakobson caused her to lose it completely, never mind that everyone was giggling, including Cannelle Martin, even though they didn’t get what I had said at all, but they could tell a little cloud from Siberia was hovering over the head of our fat French teacher. In reality, I’ve never read a thing by Jakobson, obviously not. Though I may be supersmart, I’d still rather read mangas or literature. But Maman has a friend (who’s a university professor) who was talking about Jakobson yesterday (while they were indulging in a hunk of camembert and a bottle of red wine at five in the afternoon). So, in class this morning I remembered what she had said.

At that moment, when I could sense that the rabble were growling and showing their teeth, I felt pity. I felt sorry for Madame Fine. And I don’t like lynching. It never puts anyone in a good light. Never mind that I don’t want anyone to go digging into my knowledge of Jakobson and begin to doubt the reality of my IQ.

So I backed off and didn’t say anything. I got two hours of detention and Madame Fine saved her professorial skin. But when I left the classroom, I could feel her worried little gaze following me out the door.

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.