Whatever Read online

  Poor Bernard, in a way. What can he really do with his life? Buy CDs at the FNAC? A guy like him ought to have kids; if he had kids you'd hope he might end up getting something out of the wriggling of little Bernards. But no, he isn't even married.

  A dead loss. At bottom he isn't so much to be pitied, this good Bernard, this dear Bernard. I even think he's happy - inasmuch as he can be, of course; inasmuch as he's Bernard.

  5

  Making Contact

  Later I made an appointment at the Ministry of Agriculture with a girl called Catherine Lechardoy. The specialized software program itself was called `Maple'. Aside from exuding a sugary sap the actual maple is a tree prized in cabinet-making; it grows in certain regions of the colder temperate zones, being particularly widespread in Canada. The Maple program is written in Pascal, with certain routines in C+ +. Pascal is a seventeenth-century French writer, author of some celebrated

  `Pensées'. It is also a highly structured programming language particularly suited to the processing of statistics, the mastery of which I'd managed to acquire in the past. The Maple program was to be used for paying government subsidies to the farmers, an area Catherine Lechardoy was responsible for, at the data processing level that is. Up till now we'd never met, Catherine Lechardoy and I. In fine, this was a `first making of contact'.

  In our field of computer engineering the most interesting aspect is, without a doubt, contact with the clients; at least this is what the company bigwigs love to spout over a fig liqueur (I eavesdropped on their pool-side chats a few times during the recent seminar at the Kusadasi club village).

  For my part, it's always with a certain apprehension that I envisage the first contact with a new client; there are different human beings involved, organized within a certain structure, the frequentation of whom one will have to get used to; a worrying prospect. Of course experience has quickly taught me that I'm only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes, their general way of approaching life. Theoretically, then, there is nothing to fear inasmuch as the professional nature of the meeting guarantees, in principle, its innocuousness. Despite that I've also had occasion to remark that human beings are often bent on making themselves conspicuous by subtle and disagreeable variations, defects, character traits and the like - doubtless with the goal of obliging their interlocutors to treat them as total individuals. Thus one person will like tennis, another will be mad on horse riding, a third will profess to playing golf. Certain higher management types are crazy about filleted herrings; others detest them. So many varied destinies, so many potential ways of doing things. Though the general framework of a `first customer contact' is clearly circumscribed there nevertheless remains, alas, a margin of uncertainty.

  As it happened Catherine Lechardoy wasn't there when ... I was told, `held up by a check at the central site'. I was invited to take a seat and wait for her, which I did. The conversation revolved around a bombing that had occurred the evening before on the Champs-Élysées. A bomb had been planted under a seat in a café. Two people were dead. A third had had her legs and half her face blown off, she'd be maimed and blind for life. I learned that this wasn't the first such outrage; a few days earlier a bomb had exploded in a post office near the Hôtel de Ville, blasting a fifty-year-old woman to bits. I also learned these bombs were planted by Arab terrorists who were demanding the release of other Arab terrorists, held in France for various killings.

  Around five I had to leave for the police station to make a statement about the theft of my car. Catherine Lechardoy hadn't returned, and I'd barely taken part in the conversation. The making contact would take place some other day, I assumed.

  The inspector who typed out my statement was around my age. Obviously of Provençal origin, he was the marrying kind. I wondered if his wife, his hypothetical kids, he himself, were happy in Paris. Wife a post office employee, kids going to nursery school? Impossible to say.

  He was somewhat bitter and twisted, as you might expect. `Thefts . . . happen every minute of the day . . . no chance . . . in any case they dump 'em straightaway . . .' I nodded sympathetically as he proceeded to utter these simple truths, drawn from his everyday experience; but I could do nothing to lighten his burden.

  By the end, however, his rancour took on a slightly more positive ring, or so it seemed to me: Right then, be seeing you! Maybe your car'll turn up. It does happen!' He was hoping, I think, to say more on the matter; but there was nothing more to say.

  6

  A Second Chance

  The following morning I'm told I've committed a faux pas. I should have insisted on seeing Catherine Lechardoy ; my unexplained departure has been taken amiss by the Ministry of Agriculture.

  I also learn - and this is a complete surprise - that since my last contract my work has not given complete satisfaction. They'd said nothing up to now, but I had been found wanting. With this Ministry of Agriculture contract I am, to some extent, being offered a second chance. My head of department assumes a tense air, pure soap opera, when telling me, `We're at the service of the client, you know. In our line of business, alas, it's rare to get a second chance.

  I regret making this man unhappy. He is very handsome . A face at once sensual and manly, with close-cropped grey hair. White shirt of an impeccable fine weave, allowing some powerful and bronzed pees to show through. Club tie. Natural and decisive movements , indicative of a perfect physical condition. The only excuse I can come up with - and it seems extremely feeble to me - is that my car has just been stolen. I'm saying, then, that I'm currently grappling with a nascent psychological problem. This is when my head of department flips; the theft of my car visibly angers him. He didn't know; couldn't have guessed; now he understands. And when the moment of leavetaking arrives, standing by the door of his office, feet planted in the thick pearl-grey carpet, it's with emotion that he'll urge me `to hang in there'.

  7

  Catherine, Little Catherine

  The receptionist at the Ministry of Agriculture always wears a leather miniskirt; but this time I don't need her to find room 6017.

  From the start Catherine Lechardoy confirms my worst fears. She's twenty-five, with a higher technical certificate in data processing, and prominent teeth; her aggressiveness is astonishing. `Let's hope it's going to work, your software! If it's like the last one we bought from you ... a real bastard. In the end, of course, it's ... I'm just the bimbo, I'm here to clean up the shit the others leave behind. . .', etc.

  I explain to her that it's not me, either, who decides what is sold. Nor what is produced. In fact I decide nothing. Neither of us decides anything. I'm just here to help her, give her some copies of the instruction manual, try and set up a teaching programme with her ... But none of this satisfies her. Her anger is intense, her anger is deep. Now she's talking about methodology. According to her everyone in the business should conform to a rigorous methodology based on structured programming; and instead of that there is anarchy, programmes are written any old way, each person does as he likes in his little corner without considering the others, there's no agreement, there's no general project, there's no harmony. Paris is a horrible city, people don't meet, they're not even interested in their work, it's all so superficial, they all go home at six, work done or not, nobody gives a damn.

  She suggests going for a coffee. I accept, obviously. An automatic machine. I haven't any change, she gives me two francs. The coffee is foul, but that doesn't stop her rant. In Paris you can drop dead right on the street, nobody gives a damn. Where she is, in the Warn, it's different. Every weekend she goes back to her place in the Warn. And in the evenings she takes courses at the CNAM to improve her prospects. In three years she'll maybe have her engineering diploma.

  Engineer. I'm an engineer. It's vital I say something. I enquire, in a slightly strangled voice,

  -Courses in what?

  -Courses in management control, factor analysis, algorithmi
c, financial accounting.

  -That must be hard work, I remark in a rather vague tone.

  Yes, it's hard work, but work doesn't frighten her. In the evenings she often works in her studio flat till midnight getting her studies done. Anyway you have to fight to get anything in life, that's what she's always believed. We go back up the stairs towards her office. `0.K. fight, little Catherine . . .' I mournfully say to myself. She's not all that pretty. As well as prominent teeth she has lifeless hair, little eyes that burn with anger. No breasts or buttocks to speak of. God has not, in truth, been too kind to her.

  I think we're going to get along very well. She has the decided air of organizing everything, running the show, all I'll have to do is come down here and give my courses. Which suits me fine; I have no wish to contradict her. I don't reckon she'll fall in love with me; I get the impression she's beyond trying it on with a man.

  Around eleven a new person bursts into the office. His name is Patrick Leroy and apparently he shares the same office as Catherine. Hawaiian shirt, buttock-hugging jeans and a bunch of keys hanging from the belt, which jangle when he walks. He's a bit knackered, he informs us. He's spent the night in a jazz club with a mate, they managed to `make it with a couple of chicks'. All in all, he's happy.

  He will spend the rest of the morning on the phone. He talks in a loud voice. During the course of the third phone call he will touch on a subject which is, in itself, extremely sad: one of their common women friends, his and the girl he's calling, has been killed in a car crash. An aggravating circumstance is that the car was driven by a third mate, whom he calls Òld Fred'. And Old Fred himself is unscathed. It's all, in theory, somewhat distressing, but he'll succeed in gliding over this aspect of the issue with a sort of cynical vulgarity feet on the table and hip language. `She was super-cool, Nathalie . . . A real goer, too. It's the pits, an absolute downer . . . You've been to the funeral? Funerals, they get to me a bit. And what's the use of

  'em? Mind you, I was saying to myself, maybe for the old folk, fair does. Old Fred was there? You got to admit he's got balls, the asshole.'

  I greeted lunch hour with tremendous relief.

  In the afternoon I was due to see the head of the 'Computer Studies' department. I don't really know why. As far as I was concerned I had nothing to say to him.

  I waited for an hour and a half in an empty, slightly gloomy office. I didn't really want to turn the light on, partly for fear of signalling my presence.

  Before installing myself in this office I'd been handed a voluminous report called Directive on the Ministry of Agriculture Data Processing Plan. There again, I couldn't see why. The document had nothing at all to do with me. It was devoted, if the introduction was to be believed, to an attempt at the predefinition of various archetypal scenarii, understood within a targeted objective. The objectives, which themselves warranted a more detailed analysis in terms of desirability, were for instance the orientation of a politics of aid to farmers, the development of a more competitive para-agricultural sector at the European level, the redressing of the commercial balance in the realm of fresh products ... I quickly leafed through the opus, underlining the more amusing phrases in pencil: The strategic level consists in the realization of a system of global information promulgated by the integration of diversified heterogeneous sub-systems. Or indeed: It appears urgent to validate a canonic relational model within an organizational dynamic leading in the medium term to a database -oriented object. A secretary finally appeared to advise me that the meeting was taking longer than expected and that it would unfortunately be impossible for her boss to receive me today.

  So I took myself off home. As long as they're paying me, ha ha!

  I spotted a strange graffito in the Sèvres-Babylon métro station: `God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice', the inscription said. I mused on who the person so well informed about God's designs might be.

  8

  In general I see nobody at the weekends. I stay home, do a bit of tidying. I get gently depressed.

  This Saturday however, between eight and eleven, a social moment is in the offing. I am to eat with a priest friend in a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant is good; on that front, no problem. But is my friend still my friend?

  We did our studies together: we were twenty, just kids really. Now we're thirty. Once he'd got his engineer's diploma he went off to the seminary, he changed course. Today he's a parish priest in Vitry. It isn't an easy parish.

  I eat a red bean taco and Jean-Pierre Buvet talks to me about sexuality. According to him the interest our society pretends to show in eroticism (through advertising magazines, the media in general) is completely artificial. Most people, in fact, are quickly bored by the subject, but they pretend the opposite out of a bizarre inverted hypocrisy.

  He gets to his main thesis. Our civilization, he says, suffers from vital exhaustion. In the century of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently that mundane life can offer only imperfect joys, that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse, he asserts, would no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it's abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.

  I get the impression he considers me a fitting symbol of this vital exhaustion. No sex drive, no ambition; no real interests, either. I don't know what to say to him: I get the impression everybody's a bit like that. I consider myself a normal kind of guy. Well, perhaps not completely , but who is completely, huh? Eighty per cent normal, let's say. For something to say in the meantime I casually observe that these days everybody is bound, at one moment or another in his life, to have the feeling of being a failure. We are agreed on that.

  The conversation stalls. I nibble my caramelized vermicelli . He advises me to find God again, or go into psychoanalysis; I give a start at the comparison. He's interested in my case, he explains; he seems to think I'm in a bad way. I'm alone, much too alone; it isn't natural, according to him.

  We have a brandy. He lays his cards on the table. As far as he's concerned is the answer; the wellspring of life. Of a rich and active life. `You must accept your divine nature!' he exclaims; the next table turns round. I feel a little tired; I get the impression we're reaching an impasse. I smile, just in case. I haven't got too many friends, I don't want to lose this one. `You must accept your divine nature,' he repeats more softly; I promise I'll make an effort. I add a few words, I force myself to reestablish a consensus.

  Next, a coffee, and each to his home. In the end it was a pleasant evening.

  9

  Six persons are presently gathered around a rather nice oval table, probably in fake mahogany. The curtains, of a sombre green, are drawn; you’d think you were in a small drawing room. I suddenly have the feeling that the meeting is going to last all morning.

  The first Ministry of Agriculture representative has blue eyes. He is young, has little round glasses, he must have still been a student up till a short time ago. Despite his youth he gives a remarkable impression of seriousness . He will take notes all morning, sometimes at the most unexpected moments. Here is a leader of men, or at least a future leader.

  The second Ministry representative is a middle-aged man with a fringe of beard, like the fearsome tutors in The Famous Five. He seems to exert a great influence on Catherine Lechardoy, who is seated at his side. He is a theoretician. His interventions will be so many calls to order concerning the importance of methodology and, more generally, of reflection prior to action. At this juncture I don't see why: the software is already paid for, there's no more need to reflect, but I refrain from saying so. I immediately get the feeling he doesn't like me. How can I gain his love? I decide that on several occasions in the morning I will support his interventions with a slightly stupid expression of admiration, as if he'd suddenly opened up astonishing perspectives for me, f
ull of wisdom and breadth. He must, in the normal course of things, conclude from this that I am a young man of goodwill, ready to engage myself under his orders in the proper direction.

  The third Ministry representative is Catherine Lechardoy . The poor thing has a slightly sad air this morning; all her recent combativeness seems to have left her. Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn't been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone.

  The fourth Ministry representative is a kind of caricature of the rural socialist. He wears boots and a parka, as if he was just back from a field trip; he has a thick beard and smokes a pipe; I wouldn't like to be his son. In front of him on the table he has ostentatiously placed a book called Cheesemaking and the Challenge of New Technologies. I can't work out what he's doing there, he obviously knows nothing about the subject under discussion; perhaps he's a trade union representative. Whatever the truth of it, he seems to have set himself the goal of making the atmosphere more tense and of provoking conflict by means of repetitive remarks about `the uselessness of these meetings which never get anywhere', or else `these software packages chosen in a Ministry office which never correspond to the real needs of the chaps on the ground'.