The Elegance of the Hedgehog (17 page)

A
t seven o’clock, more dead than alive, I head for the fourth floor, praying fit to burst that I shall not run into anyone.

The hallway is deserted.

The stairway is deserted.

The landing outside Monsieur Ozu’s apartment is deserted.

This silent desert, which should have filled me with joy, weighs upon my heart with a dark foreboding and I am overcome with an irrepressible desire to flee. My gloomy loge suddenly seems a cozy, shining refuge, and I feel a wave of nostalgia thinking of Leo sprawled in front of a television, which no longer seems so iniquitous. After all, what is there to lose? All I have to do is turn my heels and go back down the stairs and into my loge. Nothing could be simpler. It is an entirely reasonable proposition, unlike this dinner, which borders on absurdity.

A sound from the fifth floor, just above my head, interrupts my thoughts. I begin instantly to sweat with fear—how very elegant—and, not fully understanding my own gesture, press frantically on the doorbell.

Not even time for my heart to start pounding: the door opens.

Monsieur Ozu greets me with a big smile.

“Good evening, Madame Michel!” he trumpets with what seems like genuine good humor.

Saints alive, the sound on the fifth floor is becoming more distinct: someone closing a door.

“Yes, good evening,” I say, and very nearly shove past my host to get in the door.

“Let me take your things,” says Monsieur Ozu, still smiling profusely.

I hand him my purse and take in the immense hallway before me.

Something draws my gaze.

D
irectly opposite the entrance, in a ray of light, hangs a painting.

This is the situation: here am I, Renée, fifty-four years of age, with bunions on my feet, born in a bog and bound to remain there; here am I going to dinner at the home of a wealthy Japanese man—whose concierge I happen to be—solely because I was startled by a quotation from
Anna Karenina
; here am I, Renée, intimidated and frightened to my innermost core, and so acutely aware of the inappropriateness and blasphemous nature of my presence here that I could faint—here, in this place which, although it may be physically accessible to the likes of me, is nevertheless representative of a world to which I do not belong, a world that wants nothing to do with concierges; as I was saying, here am I, Renée, somewhat carelessly allowing my gaze to wander beyond Monsieur Ozu and into a ray of light that is striking a little painting in a dark frame.

Only the splendors of Art can explain why the awareness of my unworthiness has suddenly been eclipsed by an esthetic blackout. I no longer know who I am. I walk around Monsieur Ozu, captured by the vision.

It is a still life, representing a table laid for a light meal of bread and oysters. In the foreground, on a silver plate, are a half-bared lemon and a knife with a chiseled handle. In the background are two closed oysters, a shard of shell, gleaming mother-of-pearl, and a pewter saucer which probably contains pepper. In between the two are a goblet lying on its side, a roll showing its doughy white interior and, on the left, half-filled with a pale golden liquid, is a large goblet, balloon-shaped like an upside-down dome, with a large cylindrical stem decorated with glass lozenges. The colors range from yellow to ebony. The background is dull gold, slightly dusty.

I am a fervent admirer of still lifes. I have borrowed all the books on painting from the library and pored over them in search of still life paintings. I have been to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée d’Art Moderne, and I saw—a dazzling revelation—the Chardin exhibition at the Petit Palais in 1979. But Chardin’s entire oeuvre does not equal one single master work of Dutch painting from the seventeenth century. The still lifes of Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz Heda, Willem Kalf and Osias Beert are masterpieces of the genre—masterpieces full stop, for which, without a moment’s hesitation, I would trade the entire Italian Quattrocento.

And this picture, without a moment’s hesitation either, is unquestionably a Pieter Claesz.

“It’s a copy,” says Monsieur Ozu behind me; I had totally forgotten about him.

Must this man forever startle me?

I am startled.

Taking hold of myself, I am about to say something like:

“It’s very pretty,” a statement that is to art as using “bring” when you mean “take” is to the beauty of language.

Having regained my self-control, I am about to resume my role as obtuse caretaker by uttering something like:

“Amazing the things they can do nowadays!” (In response to: it’s a copy.)

And I also very nearly deliver the fatal blow, from which Monsieur Ozu’s suspicions would never recover and which would establish the proof of my unworthiness forever:

“Those glasses are weird.”

I turn around.

The words, “A copy of what?” which I abruptly decide are the most appropriate, remain stuck in my throat.

And instead, I say, “It’s so beautiful.”

W
hence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply in flushing out the causes thereof, that all this beauty is the fruit of a virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them—the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of the shells, the clear velvet of the lemon—this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one’s initial dazzled gaze.

The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance. The confirmation that certain forms, in the particular aspect that their creators have given them, return again and again throughout the history of art and, in the filigree of individual genius, constitute nonetheless facets of a universal genius, is something deeply unsettling. What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? Despite the diversity of subject matter, supports and techniques, despite the insignificance and ephemeral nature of lives always doomed to belong to one era and one culture alone, and despite the singular nature of a gaze that can only ever see what its constitution will allow and that is tainted by the poverty of its individuality, the genius of great artists penetrates to the heart of the mystery and exhumes, under various guises, the same sublime form that we seek in all artistic production. What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. In the still life with a lemon, for example, this essence cannot merely be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that
this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged
. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a
force
, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both the tension and the balance of the configuration—this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.

W
hat is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, carving from time an emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind’s ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It
gives shape
to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.

The seal of eternity . . . What absent world does our heart intuit when we see these dishes and cups, these carpets and glasses? Beyond the frame of the painting there is, no doubt, the tumult and boredom of everyday life—itself an unceasing and futile pursuit, consumed by projects; but within the frame lies the plenitude of a suspended moment, stolen from time, rescued from human longing. Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where—even though tomorrow we will die—we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring . . . We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art. This table—did I have to set it? Must I have covet this repast in order to see it? Somewhere,
elsewhere
, someone wanted that meal, someone aspired to that mineral transparency and sought the pleasure offered by the salt, silky caress of a lemony oyster on his tongue. This was but one project of a hundred yet unhatched, leading to a thousand more, the intention to prepare and savor a banquet of shellfish—someone else’s project, in fact, that existed in order for the painting to come to life.

But when we gaze at a still life, when—even though we did not pursue it—we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else’s desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: this still life incarnates the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes—silent, without life or motion—a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed—pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

For art is emotion without desire.

Will he move, or won’t he

T
oday Maman took me to see her shrink. Reason: I hide. Here’s what Maman said to me: “Sweetheart, you know very well that it is driving us crazy the way you go off hiding. I think it would be a good idea for you to come and talk about it with Dr. Theid, especially after what you said the other time.” In the first place, Dr. Theid is only a doctor in my mother’s perturbed little mind. He’s no more a doctor or author of a doctoral dissertation than I am, but obviously it gives Maman great satisfaction to be able to say “Doctor,” something to do with his apparent ambition to treat her, and take his time (ten years) about it. He is after all an old leftie who’s converted to psychoanalysis after a few years of not terribly violent studies in Nanterre and a lucky encounter with a big wheel in the Freudian Cause. And in the second place, I don’t see what the problem is. That I “hide” is not true, anyway; I go off to be alone in a place where no one can find me. I just want to be able to write my
Profound Thoughts
and my
Journal of the Movement of the World
in peace and, before that, I just wanted to be able to think quietly in my head without being disturbed by the inanities my sister says or listens to on the radio or her stereo, or without Maman coming to bother me, whispering, “Mamie’s here, sweetheart, come give her a kiss,” which is one of the least enticing injunctions I know.

When Papa, putting on his angry look, asks me, “Well, why on earth are you hiding?” in general, I don’t reply. What could I say? “Because you all get on my nerves and I have a work of great significance to produce before I die?” Obviously, I can’t. So, last time I tried to be funny, just so they’d stop over-dramatizing things. I put on a sort of lost look, I stared at Papa and, with the voice of someone on their deathbed, said, “It’s because of all these voices in my head.” Egads! Red alert throughout the house! Papa’s eyes were popping out of his head, Maman and Colombe came running full tilt when he called out for them and everybody was talking to me at the same time: “Sweetheart, it’s not serious, we’ll get you out of there” (Papa), “I’ll call Dr. Theid right away” (Maman), “How many voices have you heard?” (Colombe), and so on. Maman put on the expression she keeps for special occasions, somewhere between worry and excitement: and what if my daughter were a Case for Science? How awful, but how glorious! So, seeing them get all carried away like this I said, “No I’m not, just kidding!” but I had to say it several times over before they heard me and then another few times before they believed me. And even then I’m not sure I convinced them. In short, Maman made an appointment for me to see Doc T., and we went there this morning.

First we sat in a very elegant waiting room with magazines dating from various periods: a few National Geographics from ten years ago and the latest Elle clearly displayed on top of the pile. And then Dr. Theid came in. Looking just like his photograph (in a magazine that Maman had shown to everyone), but in the flesh, in living color and odor: that is, brown and pipe tobacco. A dashing fifty-something, carefully groomed; but, above all, everything was brown: his hair, neatly trimmed beard, complexion (newly minted Seychelles), sweater, pants, shoes, and watch band—all in the same tones of chestnut brown. Or, like dead leaves. With, moreover, a high-class pipe aroma (light tobacco: honey and dried fruit). Anyway, I said to myself, let’s go have a nice autumnal chat by the fireplace among people from good families—a refined conversation, constructive and perhaps even a bit silken (I love that adjective).

Maman came in with me, we sat down on the two chairs facing his desk and he sat behind the desk, in a big swiveling armchair with strange wings,
Star Trek
style. He crossed his hands in front of his belly, looked at us, and said, “How are you two ladies doing today?”

Well, that was getting off to a very bad start. It instantly got my hackles up. The kind of sentence that a supermarket flunkey uses to sell two-sided toothbrushes to Madame and her daughter hiding behind their shopping cart is not exactly what you expect from a shrink now, is it? But my anger stopped short when I became aware of something that would be fascinating for my
Journal of the Movement of the World
. I looked carefully, concentrating as hard as I could and I thought, No, it’s not possible. Yes, yes it is! It is possible! Incredible! I was enthralled, to such a degree that I hardly heard Maman telling him all her little woes (my daughter hides, my daughter frightens us, tells us she hears voices, my daughter doesn’t speak to us, we are worried about my daughter), saying “my daughter” two hundred times while I was sitting there five inches away and, as a result, when he spoke to me, I almost jumped.

Let me explain. I knew that Dr. T. was alive because he had walked ahead of me, sat down, and talked. But for all the rest, he may as well have been dead: he did not move. Once he was wedged into his spaceship armchair, not another movement; just his lips trembling, but with great restraint. And the rest of him: immobile, perfectly immobile. Usually when you speak you don’t just move your lips, you naturally bring other things into play: face muscles, tiny little gestures of the hands, neck, shoulders; and when you’re speaking, it’s still very difficult to stay absolutely motionless, there’s always a little trembling somewhere, an eyelid blinking, an imperceptible wiggling of the foot, etc.

But here: nothing! Nada! Wallou! A living statue! Can you imagine! “So, young lady,” he said, making me jump, “what do you have to say about all this?” I had trouble getting my thoughts together because I was completely absorbed by his immobility and so it took me a while to come up with an answer. Maman was writhing on her chair as if she had hemorrhoids but the Doc was staring at me without blinking. I said to myself: “I have to make him move, there must be something that will get him to move.” So I said, “I will only speak in the presence of my lawyer,” hoping that that would do it. Total flop: he didn’t budge. Maman sighed like a martyred Madonna but our man stayed perfectly immobile. “Your lawyer . . . hmm . . . ” he said, without moving. By now I was completely absorbed by the challenge. Will he move, or won’t he? I decided to muster all my forces into battle. “You’re not on trial here,” he added, “you know that, hmm.” And I was thinking, if I manage to make him move, it will all be worth it, really, I won’t have wasted my day! “Well,” said the statue, “my dear Solange, I’d like to have a little tête-à-tête with this young lady.” My dear Solange got up, flashed him the look of a tearful cocker spaniel, and left the room, making a lot of useless movements (to compensate, no doubt).

“Your mother is very worried about you,” he attacked, managing this time not to move even his lower lip. I thought for a moment, and decided that provocation was not the best tactic if I were to succeed. If you want to reinforce your psychoanalyst’s belief in his own mastery, provoke him the way kids provoke their parents. So I decided to say something with a lot of gravitas: “Do you think it has something to do with the foreclosure of the Name of the Father?” Do you think that made him move? Not a fraction. He remained immobile and impassive. But I seemed to detect something in his eyes, like a flicker. I decided to exploit the lead further. “Hmm?” he went, “I don’t think you understand what you are saying.” “Oh yes, yes I do,” I went, “but there is one thing I don’t understand in Lacan, it is the exact nature of his relation to structuralism.” He opened his mouth slightly to say something but I was quicker. “Oh, yeah, and the mathemes, too. All those knots, it’s a bit muddled. Do you understand any of it, this topology stuff? Everybody has known for quite a while that it’s a scam, no?” Here I detected some progress. He hadn’t had time to close his mouth and, in the end, it stayed open. Then he took hold of himself and on his motionless face came a motionless expression of the sort, “You want to play games with me, little girl?” Well yes, I do want to play games with you, you big fat
marron glacé
. So I waited. “You are a very intelligent young lady, that I know,” he said (price of this information conveyed by My dear Solange: sixty euros the half-hour). “But a person can be very intelligent and at the same time quite destitute, you know, very lucid and very unhappy.” No kidding. Did you find that in
Pif Gadget
? I almost asked. And then suddenly I felt like upping the ante. I was, after all, sitting across from the guy who has been costing my family close to six hundred euros a month for nearly a decade, the results of which we are already familiar with: three hours a day of squirting house plants and an impressive consumption of state-subsidized substances. I felt my anger flaring up, nice and nasty. I leaned toward the desk and said in a very deep voice: “Listen carefully, Mr. Permafrost Psychologist, you and I are going to strike a little bargain. You’re going to leave me alone and in exchange I won’t wreck your little trade in human suffering by spreading nasty rumors about you among the Parisian political and business elite. And believe me—at least if you say you can tell just how intelligent I am—I am fully capable of doing this.” I didn’t really think this would work. I couldn’t believe it. You really have to be out to lunch to believe such a load of nonsense. And yet, however incredible, victory: a shadow of disquiet passed over the face of the good doctor Theid. I think he believed me. It’s extraordinary: if there is one thing I’ll never do, it’s spread untrue rumors to harm someone. My father with his republican soul has inoculated me with the virus of deontology, and I may find that as absurd as all the rest but I stick to it, strictly. But the good doctor, who has only had my mother on whom to base his opinions of our family, has apparently decided that the threat is real. And there, oh miracle! He moved! He clicked his tongue, uncrossed his arms, stretched one hand out toward the desk and slapped his palm against the kid leather blotter. A gesture of exasperation but also intimidation. Then he stood up, all gentle kindness vanished, and went to the door, and called Maman to come back in, and gave her some patter about my good mental health and that everything would be fine and sent us expeditiously away from his autumnal fireside.

At first I was really pleased with myself. I had managed to make him move. But as the day went on I started to feel more and more depressed. Because what happened when he moved was something not very nice, not very decent. So what if I know there are adults who wear masks that are all sweetness and light but who are very hard and ugly underneath, and so what if I know that all you have to do is see right through them for their masks to fall: when it happens with this sort of violence, it hurts. When he slapped the blotter, what it meant was, “Fine, you see me as I am, no point carrying on with this useless farce, it’s a done deal, your pathetic little bargain, now get the hell out of here, and fast.” Well, that hurt, yes, it hurt. I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don’t want to see it.

Yes, it’s time to leave a world where something that moves can reveal something so ugly.