The Elegance of the Hedgehog (7 page)

Care
For plants
For children

T
here’s a cleaning woman who comes to our house three hours a day, but it’s Maman who looks after the plants. And it’s an unbelievable rigmarole. She has two watering cans, one for water with fertilizer, one for special soft water, and a spray gun with several settings for “targeted” squirts, either “shower” or “mist.” Every morning she inspects the twenty houseplants in the apartment and administers the appropriate treatment to each one. She murmurs all sorts of stuff to them, oblivious of the outside world. You can say whatever you want to Maman while she’s looking after her plants, she’ll completely ignore it. For example: “I’m going to buy some drugs today and maybe go for an overdose,” will get you the following answer: “The kentia’s going yellow at the tips of the leaves, too much water, not good at all.”

With this we grasp the opening tenets of the paradigm: if you want to ruin your life by not listening to what other people are saying to you, look after houseplants. But that’s not all. When Maman is squirting water onto the plants, I can plainly see the hope that fills her. She thinks it’s a kind of balm that is going to penetrate the plant and bring it what it needs to prosper. It’s the same thing with the fertilizer, which she gives them by means of little sticks in the soil (in the mixture of potting soil, compost, sand, and turf that she has made up specially for each individual plant at the nursery over at the Porte d’Auteuil). So, Maman feeds her plants the way she feeds her children: water and fertilizer for the kentia, green beans and vitamin C for us. That’s the heart of the paradigm: concentrate on the object, convey all the nutritional elements from the outside to the inside and, as they make their way inside, they will cause the object to grow and prosper. A little “pschtt” on its leaves and there’s the plant ready to go out into the world. You look at it with a mixture of anxiety and hope, you know how fragile life can be, you worry about accidents but, at the same time, you are satisfied with the knowledge that you’ve done what you were supposed to do, you’ve played your nurturing role: you feel reassured and, for a time, things feel safe. That’s how Maman views life: a succession of conjuring acts, as useless as a “pschtt” with the spray gun, which provide a fleeting illusion of security.

It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, nor sustain our souls.

C
habrot is ringing at my loge.

Chabrot is Pierre Arthens’s personal physician. He is one of those aging-beau types who are always tanned, and he squirms in the presence of the Maître like the worm he really is. In twenty years, he has never greeted me or even given the least sign that he was aware of my presence. An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptune’s skull and bounce off that of Chabrot altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

But this morning Chabrot seems to have lost all his tan. His cheeks are drooping, his hand is trembling and as for his nose . . . wet. Yes, wet. Chabrot, physician to the mighty, has a runny nose. And on top of it he is uttering my name.

“Madame Michel.”

Perhaps it isn’t Chabrot at all but some sort of extraterrestrial mutant assisted by intelligence services that leave something to desire, because the real Chabrot doesn’t clutter his mind with information regarding subordinates who are, by definition, anonymous.

“Madame Michel,” says Chabrot’s flawed imitation, “Madame Michel.”

Well, we’ll find out. My name is Madame Michel.

“A terrible misfortune . . . ” continues Runny Nose who, gadzooks, is sniffling instead of blowing his nose.

Well I never. He’s sniffling noisily, expediting his nasal runoff to a place it never came from, and I am obliged, by the speed of his gesture, to witness the feverish contractions of his Adam’s apple working to assist the passage of said nasal secretion. It is repulsive but above all disconcerting.

I look to the right, to the left. The hallway is deserted. If my ET has any hostile intentions, I am doomed.

He takes himself in hand, repeats himself.

“A terrible misfortune, yes, a terrible misfortune. Monsieur Arthens is dying.”

“Dying? Actually dying?”

“Actually dying, Madame Michel, actually dying. He has forty-eight hours left to live.”

“But I saw him yesterday morning, he was fit as a fiddle!” I am stunned.

“Alas, Madame, alas. When the heart gives way, it’s like a bolt from the blue. In the morning you’re hopping around like a mountain goat and in the evening you’re in your tomb.”

“Is he going to die at home, he’s not going to the hospital?”

“Oh, Madame Michel!” exclaims Chabrot, looking at me with the same expression as Neptune when he’s on his leash, “Who wants to die in the hospital?”

For the first time in twenty years I feel a vague flutter of sympathy for Chabrot. He is, after all, a human being too, I say to myself, and in the end, we are all alike.

“Madame Michel,” he says again, and I am astounded by this profusion of Madame Michels after twenty years of nothing, “a great many people will no doubt want to see the Maître before . . . before. But he does not want to see anyone. With the exception of his nephew Paul. Would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?”

I am torn. I realize that, as usual, my presence has only been acknowledged for the purpose of giving me a task to do. But then again, I concede, that is why I am here. I have also noticed that Chabrot speaks in a manner that I find absolutely enthralling—would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?—and this troubles me. I do like this archaic, polite usage. I am a complete slave to vocabulary, I ought to have named my cat Roget. This fellow may be a nuisance but his language is delectable. And, finally, who wants to die in the hospital? asked the aging beau. No one. Not Pierre Arthens, nor Chabrot, nor Lucien, nor I. Chabrot, with his harmless question, has made us all human.

“I shall do what I can,” I say. “But I cannot pursue them into the stairway either.”

“No,” he says, “but you can discourage them. Tell them the Maître has locked his door.”

And he gives me a strange look.

I must be careful, I must be very careful. I have been getting sloppy lately. There was the incident with the Pallières boy, my preposterous mention of
The German Ideology
, which, if the youngster had had half the intelligence of an oyster, could easily have betrayed some very awkward things. And now we have a geriatric sun addict the color of toast who indulges in antiquated expressions and I am at his feet losing all my discipline.

I immediately wipe from my eyes the spark that had momentarily shone there, and adopt the glassy expression of the obedient concierge who is prepared to do her best even if she cannot pursue people into the stairway.

Chabrot’s odd expression vanishes.

To further eradicate any trace of my lexical misdeeds, I allow myself a little heresy.

“Some sorta heart attack, huh?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Chabrot, “a heart attack.”

A moment of silence.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Don’t mention it,” I reply, and close the door.

Life
Everyone’s
Military service

I
am very proud of this profound thought. It came to me through Colombe. So at least once she will have been of some use in my life. I never thought I’d be able to say that before I die.

From the very start Colombe and I have been at war because as far as Colombe is concerned, life is a permanent battle where you can only win by destroying the other guy. She cannot feel safe if she hasn’t crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. A world where there’s room for other people is a dangerous world, according to her pathetic warmongering criteria. At the same time she still needs them just a bit, for a small but essential chore: someone, after all, has to recognize her power. So not only does she spend her time trying to crush me by every available means, but on top of it she would like me to tell her, while her sword is under my chin, that she is the greatest and that I love her. So there are days when she drives me absolutely crazy. And as for the frosting on the cake, for some obscure reason Colombe, who most of the time is totally insensitive to what’s going on with other people, has figured out that what I dread more than anything else in life is noise. I think she discovered this by chance. It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go
inward
, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not something Colombe is capable of understanding, because her inner space is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside. But in any case she figured out that I need silence and, unfortunately, my room is next to hers. So all day long she makes noise. She shouts into the phone, she puts her music on really loud (and that really gets to me), she slams doors, gives a running commentary on everything she does, including the most fascinating things like brushing her hair and looking for pencils in the drawer. In short, since she can’t invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level, she invades my personal auditory space, and ruins my life from morning to night. You really have to have a pretty impoverished concept of territory to stoop this low; I don’t give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind. But Colombe won’t stop at just ignoring the facts; she converts them into philosophy: “My pest of a little sister is an intolerant and depressive little runt who hates other people and would rather live in a cemetery where everyone is dead—whereas
I
am outgoing, joyful, and full of life.” If there is one thing I detest, it’s when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed. With Colombe, I’ve really lucked out.

But for the last few months Colombe has not merely been content with being the most dreadful sister in the universe. She has also had the poor taste to behave in a way that worries everyone. I really don’t need this: a hostile lesion of a sister and the spectacle of all her little woes. For the last few months Colombe has been obsessed with two things: order and cleanliness. The infinitely pleasant consequence? From the zombie that I used to be, I have become a dirty swine; she spends her time shouting at me because I left crumbs in the kitchen or because there was a hair in the shower this morning. Having said that, it’s not just me she’s after. Everybody is harassed from morning to night because there’s mess or crumbs. Her room, which used to be the most incredible shambles, has become clinical: everything shipshape, not a speck of dust, every object has its allotted space and woe befall Madame Grémond if once she’s done the cleaning she doesn’t put things back exactly where they were. It looks like a hospital. In a way it wouldn’t bother me that Colombe has become such a neat freak. But what I cannot stand is that she goes on acting as if she’s really laid back. There’s a problem here somewhere but everyone pretends they haven’t noticed and Colombe goes on claiming to be the only one of the two of us to take life “as an Epicurean.” I assure you however that there is nothing the least bit Epicurean about taking three showers a day and shouting like a lunatic because the lamp on your night table has moved two inches.

What is Colombe’s problem? I really don’t know. Perhaps all this wanting to crush everyone has turned her into a soldier, quite literally. She wants everything just so, she scrubs and cleans as though she is in the army. Soldiers are obsessive about order and cleanliness, that’s a well-known fact. For Colombe, cleanliness is a necessity, a way of combatting chaos, of holding at bay the filth of war and all those little shreds of human being it leaves behind. But in fact I wonder if Colombe is not the extreme case that reveals the norm. Don’t we all deal with life the way we do our military service? Doing what we can, while we wait either to be demobbed or do battle? Some will clean up the barrack-room, others will shirk, or spend their time playing cards, or trafficking, or plotting something. Officers command, soldiers obey, but no one’s fooled by this comedy behind closed doors: one day, you’ll have to go out and die, officers and soldiers alike, the morons along with the wise guys who smuggle toilet paper or deal in cigarettes on the black market.

While I’m at it, let me give you the basic shrink’s hypothesis: Colombe is so full of chaos inside, so empty and cluttered at the same time, that she is trying to create some order in herself by tidying up and cleaning her inner space. Very funny, right? I figured out a long time ago that shrinks are comedians who believe that metaphors are something for great wise men. In fact, any sixth-grader can come up with one. But you should hear the scornful way Maman’s friends who are shrinks laugh at the least little pun, and you should hear the absolutely idiotic things Maman tells us, too, because she tells everyone everything about her own sessions at the shrink’s, as if she’d been to Disneyland: the “family life” show, the “my life with my mother” hall of mirrors, the “my life without my mother” roller coaster, the “my sexual life” chamber of horrors (here she lowers her voice so I won’t hear) and, in the end, for the tunnel of death, “my life as a pre-menopausal woman.”

But what freaks me out about Colombe is that I often get the impression that she doesn’t feel anything. Whenever she has to display some emotion it is such an act, so fake, that I wonder if she is feeling anything at all. Yes, sometimes that scares me. Maybe she’s completely sick, maybe she’s trying at any cost to feel something authentic, maybe she’s going to commit some totally insane act. I can see the headlines from here: “Nero of the Rue de Grenelle: Young Woman Sets Fire to Family Apartment. Questioned on the Motive for Her Act, She Replied: I Wanted to Feel an Emotion.”

Right, I know, I’m exaggerating a little. And I’m hardly the one to be denouncing pyromania. But still, when I heard her shouting her head off this morning because there was a cat hair on her green coat, I thought to myself, poor fool, the battle’s lost before it’s begun. You’d feel better if only you knew that.