The Elegance of the Hedgehog (21 page)

S
o, do you think all of this is of any interest to our aspiring candidate for intellectual glory?

’Tis most unlikely.

Colombe Josse, who has no ongoing preoccupation with Beauty or the destiny of tables, is relentless in her exploration of Ockham’s philosophical thought, but she ventures only where her utterly uninteresting semantic simpering cares to take her. The most remarkable thing is the intention that presides over her undertaking, and that is to make Ockham’s philosophical theses into the
consequence
of his conception of God’s action, by reducing his years of philosophical labor to the rank of a secondary excrescence of his theological thought. It is sidereal, as inebriating as bad wine and above all a perfect illustration of the way the university works: if you want to make a career, take a marginal, exotic text (William Ockham’s
Sum of Logic
) that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing to it an intention that the author himself had not been aware of (because, as we all know, the unknown in conceptual matters is far more powerful than any conscious design), distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis (it is the concept of the absolute power of God that is at the basis of a logical analysis, the philosophical implications of which are ignored), burn all your icons while you’re at it (atheism, faith in Reason as opposed to the reason of faith, love of wisdom and other bagatelles dear to the hearts of socialists), devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game at the expense of a collectivity whom you drag from their beds at seven in the morning, and send a courier to your research director.

What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others? And I’m not referring to the false servitude that high-ranking state-employed flunkeys exhibit so proudly, as if it were a badge of virtue: the façade of humility they wear is nothing more than vanity and disdain. Cloaked every morning in the ostentatious modesty of the high-ranking civil servant, Etienne de Broglie convinced me long ago of the pride of his caste. Inversely, privilege brings with it
true
obligations. If you belong to the closed inner sanctum of the elite, you must serve in equal proportion to the glory and ease of material existence you derive from belonging to that inner sanctum. What would I do if I were Colombe Josse, a young student at the École Normale with all my future before me? I would dedicate myself to the progress of Humanity, with resolving issues that are crucial for the survival, well-being and elevation of mankind, with the fate of Beauty in the world, or with the just crusade for philosophical authenticity. It’s not a calling, there are choices, the field is wide. You do not take up philosophy the way you enter the seminary, with a credo as your sword and a single path as your destiny. Should you study Plato, Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite—for this turns the university into a sect.

Go to Angelina’s
To learn
Why cars are burning

S
omething really fascinating happened today! I went to see Madame Michel to ask her to bring some mail for Colombe up to the house once the courier delivers it to her loge. In fact it’s Colombe’s master’s thesis on William of Ockham, it’s a first draft that her director was supposed to read and send back with comments. What’s really funny is that Madame Michel told Colombe to take a hike because she rang at the loge at seven in the morning to ask her to bring up the package. Madame Michel must have told her off (the loge opens at eight) because Colombe came back to the house like a fury, ranting that the concierge was an old scumbag and who did she think she was, anyway, and have you ever seen such a thing? Maman seemed to recall suddenly that yes, indeed, in an advanced, civilized country, you don’t go disturbing concierges at any old hour of the day or night (and she would have done better to remember that before Colombe went down there), but that didn’t calm my sister down, and she went on bleating that just because she’d goofed up on the time didn’t mean this non-entity had the right to slam the door in her face. Maman just let it go. If Colombe were my daughter—Darwin forbid—I would have slapped her on both cheeks.

Ten minutes later Colombe came into my room with a really gooey smile on her face. Now that is one thing I really cannot stand. I’d even rather she yelled at me. “Paloma, sweetie, can you do me a really big favor?” she cooed. “No,” I answered. She took a deep breath, ruing the fact that I am not her personal slave, why she could have had me horsewhipped, which would have made her feel a lot better—what an irritating snotty-nosed kid. “Let’s make a deal,” I added. “You don’t even know what I want,” she retorted with a scornful little smirk. “You want me to go see Madame Michel,” I said. She sat there with her mouth open. She’s told herself so long that I’m a retard that she’s finally ended up believing it. “I’ll do it if you don’t play loud music in your room for a month.” “A week,” said Colombe. “Then I won’t go,” I said. “Okay,” said Colombe, “go see that old bag and tell her to bring me Marian’s package the minute it comes to her loge.” And she went out, slamming the door behind her.

So I went to see Madame Michel and she invited me in for a cup of tea.

For the time being, I’m testing her. I didn’t say much. She gave me a strange look, as if she were seeing me for the first time. She didn’t say anything about Colombe. If she were a real concierge, she would have said something like, “Yes, well, your sister there shouldn’t go thinking she can get away with whatever she likes.” Instead, she gave me a cup of tea and talked to me very politely, as if I were a real person.

The television was on in the loge. She wasn’t watching it. There was a program about kids burning cars in the banlieues. When I saw the images I wondered what it is that makes a kid want to burn a car. What is going on in their heads? And then this thought came into my mind: what about me? Why do I want to set fire to the apartment? Journalists talk about unemployment and poverty; I talk about the selfishness and duplicity of my family. But these are all hollow phrases. There have always been unemployment and poverty and pathetic families. And yet, people don’t go burning cars or apartments every day of the week. Honestly! I figured that, in the end, they were all false pretexts. Why do people burn cars? Why do I want to set fire to the apartment?

I didn’t get an answer to my question until I went shopping with my aunt Hélène, my mother’s sister, and my cousin Sophie. In fact we had to go buy a present for my mother’s birthday, which is next Sunday. The pretext was a visit to the Musée Dapper, but we went straight to the interior design boutiques in the 2nd and 8th arrondissements. The idea was to find an umbrella stand and buy my present for Maman as well.

As for the search for an umbrella stand, it was endless. It took three hours but if you ask me all the stands we saw were absolutely identical: either really basic cylinders, or things with ironwork like you’d find in an antique store. And all of them ridiculously expensive. Don’t you find it disturbing, on some level, to think that an umbrella stand can cost two hundred and eighty-nine euros? And yet that is what Hélène paid for this pretentious object in “fatigued leather” (my foot: rubbed with an iron brush, maybe) with saddlemaker’s stitching, as if we lived on a stud farm. And I bought Maman a little black lacquer box for her sleeping tablets, from an Asian boutique. Thirty euros. I already thought that was really expensive but Hélène asked me if I wanted to get something else to go with it, since it wasn’t a lot. Hélène’s husband is a gastroenterologist, and I can guarantee that, in the realm of medical doctors, gastroenterologists are not among the poorest . . . All the same, I like Hélène and Claude, because they are . . . well, I don’t know quite how to put it . . . they have integrity. They are satisfied with their life, I think, at least they don’t play at being something they’re not. And they have Sophie. Sophie has Down syndrome. I’m not the sort who gets all sentimental around people with Down syndrome the way some people in my family do—they think it’s good manners, even Colombe joins in. The consensual script reads: they are handicapped but they are so endearing, so affectionate, so touching! Personally, I find Sophie’s presence somewhat hard to take: she drools, she cries out, gets moody, has her whims and doesn’t understand anything. But that doesn’t mean I don’t admire Hélène and Claude. They themselves admit that she is difficult and that it is a real ordeal to have a daughter with Down syndrome, but they love her and do a great job looking after her, I think. This, along with their integrity—well, the result is that I really like them a lot. When you see Maman playing at being the hip, well-adjusted modern woman, or Jacinthe Rosen playing at having been born with a silver spoon stuck in her mouth, it makes Hélène, who is playing at nobody at all, and who is content with what she has, seem really likeable.

Anyway, after the rigmarole with the umbrella stand, we went to eat some cakes and drink hot chocolate at Angelina’s, a tea room on the rue de Rivoli. You’ll tell me that nothing could be further removed from the topic of young people in the banlieues burning cars. Well, not at all! I saw something while we were at Angelina’s that offered me a lot of insight about other things. At the table next to ours there was a couple with a baby. The couple were white and their baby was Asian, a little boy they called Théo. They struck up a conversation with Hélène and chatted for a while. Obviously they had in common the fact that their children were different, that is why they noticed each other and began to converse. We learned that Théo had been adopted, he was fifteen months old when they brought him home from Thailand—his parents had died in the tsunami, along with all his brothers and sisters. I was looking around and thinking, how will he manage? Here we were at Angelina’s after all: all these well-dressed people, nibbling preciously at their exorbitantly priced
patisserie
, who were here only for . . . well, for the significance of the place itself—belonging to a certain world, with its beliefs, its codes, its projects, its history, and so on. It’s symbolic. When you go to have tea
chez Angelina
, you are in France, in a world that is wealthy, hierarchical, rational, Cartesian, policed. How will little Théo manage? He spent the first months of his life in a fishing village in Thailand, in an Eastern world dominated by its own values and emotions, where symbolic belonging might be played out at village feasts celebrating the Rain God, where children are brought up with magical beliefs, etc. And now here he is in France, at Angelina’s, suddenly immersed in a different culture without any time to adjust, with a social position that has changed in every possible way: from Asia to Europe, from poverty to wealth.

Then suddenly I said to myself, Théo might want to burn cars some day. Because it’s a gesture of frustration and anger, and maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you’ve been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don’t know where you are? What do you do if your culture will always be that of a Thai fishing village and of Parisian
grands bourgeois
at the same time? Or if you’re the son of immigrants but also the citizen of an old, conservative nation? So you burn cars, because when you have no culture, you’re no longer a civilized animal, you’re a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.

I know this is not a very profound thought but after that I did have a profound thought all the same: I asked myself, what about me? What is my cultural problem? In what way am I torn between two incompatible beliefs? And in what way am I a wild beast?

And then I had an enlightened thought, thinking of Maman’s incantatory care of her green plants and Colombe’s phobic manias and Papa’s stress over Mamie being in a retirement home, and a whole lot of other things like that. Maman thinks you can conjure your destiny just by going
pschitt
, and Colombe thinks you can push your cares to one side just by washing your hands, and Papa thinks he’s a bad son who will be punished because he’s abandoned his mother: in the end, they too have magical beliefs, the beliefs of primitive people, but unlike the Thai fishermen, they can’t accept them, because they are rich-educated-Cartesian-French people.

And I am probably the biggest victim of all of this contradiction because, for some unknown reason, I am hypersensitive to anything that is dissonant, as if I had some sort of absolute pitch for false notes or contradictions. This contradiction and all the others . . . As a result, I don’t feel I belong to any belief system, to any of these incoherent family cultures.

Maybe I’m the symptom of the family contradiction, and so I’m the one who has to disappear, if the family is to prosper.

B
y the time Manuela comes down from the de Broglies’ at two o’clock, I have put the thesis back into its envelope and dropped it off at the Josses’.

This gave me the opportunity for an interesting conversation with Solange Josse.

You will recall that as far as the residents are concerned I am a stubborn concierge who lurks somewhere at the blurry edges of their ethereal vision. Solange Josse is no exception to this rule, but because she is the wife of a Socialist member of parliament she nevertheless makes an effort.

“Good morning,” she says as she opens the door and takes the envelope I hand to her.

An effort, as I said.

“You know,” she continues, “Paloma is a very eccentric little girl.”

She observes me, checking to see if I am familiar with this word. I assume a neutral expression—one of my favorites, for its wide latitude of interpretation.

Solange Josse may be a socialist but she does not believe in mankind.

“What I mean is that she is a bit strange.” She articulates carefully, as if talking to someone who is hard of hearing.

“She is a very sweet child,” I say, taking it upon myself to inject a bit of philanthropy into the conversation.

“Yes, yes,” replies Solange Josse in the tone of someone who would like to get to the point but must first overcome a number of obstacles stemming from the other person’s lack of culture. “She’s a sweet little girl but she often behaves rather strangely. She loves to hide, for example; she disappears for hours.”

“Yes, she told me.”

A slightly risky reply, compared with the strategy that advocates saying nothing, doing nothing, understanding nothing. But I think I can play the part without betraying my nature.

“Oh, she told you?”

Suddenly Solange Josse sounds rather vague. How can she find out what the concierge has inferred from what Paloma might have said? The question mobilizes her cognitive resources, causing her to lose her concentration and making her look quite absent-minded.

“Yes, she told me,” I reply. You have to admit I have a certain gift for laconicism.

I catch a glimpse of Constitution behind Solange Josse, sneaking slowly up to the door with a blasé look on her face.

“Oh, watch out, the cat,” she says.

And she comes out onto the landing and closes the door behind her. Don’t let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.

“Anyway,” she continues, “Paloma told me she would like to come to your loge from time to time. She daydreams a lot and likes to settle somewhere and do nothing. To be honest, I really would prefer she did that at home.”

“Ah.”

“But from time to time, if it’s not a bother . . . That way at least I’ll know where she is. She drives us all mad, making us look all over for her. Colombe is up to here in work and she’s not too keen on having to spend hours moving heaven and earth to find her sister.”

She opens the door a crack, ascertains that Constitution has moved on elsewhere.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she asks, her thoughts already elswhere.

“No,” I reply, “she won’t disturb me.”

“Oh, good, good,” says Solange Josse, whose attention is now most definitely being solicited by a far more urgent and interesting matter. “Thank you
so
much, it’s very kind of you.”

And she closes the door.