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  Opposite him is a guy from my company who responds tirelessly to his objections - in a very clumsy way, in my opinion - by pretending to believe that the other man is deliberately exaggerating, even that the whole thing is pure pleasantry. He is one of my superiors in the hierarchy; I think his name is Norbert Lejailly. I didn't know he'd be here, and I can't say I'm overjoyed by his presence. This man has the features and the behaviour of a pig. He seizes the least opportunity to laugh long and loud. When he isn't laughing he slowly rubs his hands together. He is podgy, even obese, and his self-satisfaction, which nothing solid would seem to support, is absolutely unbearable to me. But this morning I feel really rather good, and on two occasions I will even laugh with him, in echo of his witticisms.

  During the morning a seventh person will make periodic appearances, intended to jolly along this meeting of minds. He is the head of the Ministry of Agriculture

  `Computer Studies' section, the one I missed the other day. This individual seems to have given himself the mission of embodying an exaggerated version of the young and dynamic boss. In this he's streets ahead of anything I've had occasion to observe up till now. His shirt is open, as if he hadn't quite had the time to button it up, and his tie flies off to one side as if caught in a slipstream. He doesn't walk down the corridors, he glides. If he could fly, he would. His face is shining, his hair disordered and damp as if he'd come straight from the swimming pool.

  On his first entrance he sees us, me and my boss. In a flash he's standing by us, without me figuring out how. He must have covered the ten metres in less than five seconds, in any event he was too fast for me.

  He places his hand on my shoulder and speaks to me in a gentle voice, saying how much he's sorry for making me wait for nothing the other day; I give him an angelic smile, tell him it's of no importance, that I understand and that I know that sooner or later the meeting will take place. I am being sincere. It is a very tender moment. He is leaning towards me and me alone. You'd think we were two lovers whom life had just reunited after a long separation.

  He will make two other appearances during the morning, but each time he'll remain at the door, addressing himself solely to the young guy in glasses. Each time he begins by excusing himself for disturbing us with an enchanting smile; he stays at the door, hanging on the jamb, balancing on one leg as if the inner tension that drives him prevented him from standing upright for too long.

  Of the meeting itself I retain but few memories; in any case nothing concrete was decided, except for in the last quarter of an hour, very quickly, just before going to lunch, when a training timetable for the provinces was drawn up. I am directly concerned, since it's me who will have to do the travelling around; so I hastily take note of the dates and places ... a piece of paper which I will, as it happens, mislay that same evening.

  The whole thing will be explained to me again next day in the course of a briefing with the theoretician. Thus I learn that a sophisticated three-tier system of training has been set up by the Ministry (therefore by him, if I understand things correctly). It is a question of how best to respond to the needs of the users by means of a complementary, but organically independent, package of training programmes. All this clearly bears the stamp of a subtle mind.

  In real terms I will be involved in a tour that will take me firstly to Rouen for a duration of two weeks, then to Dijon for a week, and lastly to La Roche-sur-Yon for four days. I will leave on the first of December and be home again for Christmas, so as to enable me to `spend the holidays with my family'. The human aspect has not been forgotten, then. How splendid.

  I also learn - and it's a surprise - that I will not be alone in undertaking these training programmes. In effect my company has decided to send two people. We will work in tandem. For twenty-five minutes, and in an agonizing silence, the theoretician points out the advantages and the disadvantages of the tandem training. Finally, in extremis, the advantages seem to carry the day.

  I am completely in the dark about the identity of the second person who is required to accompany me. It's probably someone I know In any event nobody has seen fit to notify me.

  Cleverly taking advantage of an unrelated remark he has just made, the theoretician makes the observation that it is a real pity this second person (whose identity will remain a mystery until the last minute) is not there, and that nobody thought it wise to invite him. Pushing on with his argument, he contrives to implicitly suggest that in these conditions my own presence is itself just as useless, or at very least of limited use. Which is precisely what I'm thinking.

  10

  The Degrees of Freedom According to J.-Y. Fréhaut

  Afterwards, I go back to company headquarters. A good reception awaits me there; I have, it seems, succeeded in re-establishing my standing in the company.

  My head of department takes me to one side; he reveals to me the importance of this contract. He knows I'm a solid young man. He devotes a few words, of a bitter realism, to the theft of my car. This is verily a conversation between men, next to the automatic hot drinks machine. In him I discern a true professional in the management of human resources; I'm putty in his hands. He seems ever more handsome to me.

  Later that afternoon I will attend the farewell drink for Jean-Yves Fréhaut. A muchvalued asset is leaving the firm, the head of department affirms; a technician of the highest calibre. In his future career he will doubtless know successes at least as great as those which have marked this one; this is the very least he wishes him. And may he drop by whenever he likes, to drain the cup of friendship! Like a first love, a first job, he concludes in a ribald tone, is something that's hard to forget. I wonder right then if he hasn't drunk too much.

  Brief applause. Some movement is registered around J.-Y Fréhaut; he turns on his heel with a satisfied air. I know this young man slightly; we arrived at the firm at the same time, three years ago; we used to share the same office. We'd talked about civilization one time. He claimed - and in a sense he truly believed it - that the increase in the flow of information within society was in itself a good thing. That freedom was nothing other than the possibility of establishing various interconnections between individuals, projects, organizations, services. According to him the maximum amount of freedom coincided with the maximum amount of potential choice. In a metaphor borrowed from the mechanics of solids, he called these choices degrees of freedom.

  We were, I remember, sitting near the central processing unit. The air conditioning was emitting a slight hum. He was comparing society to a brain, as it were, and its individuals to so many cerebral cells for which it is, in effect, desirable to establish the maximum number of interconnections. But the analogy stopped there. For this was a liberal, and he was scarcely a partisan of what is so necessary to the brain: a unifying project.

  His own life, I would subsequently learn, was functional in the extreme. He was living in a studio flat in the 15th arrondissement. The heating was included in the rent. He barely did more than sleep there, since he was in fact working a lot - and often, outside of working time, he was reading Micro-Systemes. The famous degrees of freedom consisted, as far as he was concerned , in choosing his dinner by Minitel (he was a subscriber to this service, new at the time, which guaranteed the delivery of hot food at a given hour and with relatively little delay).

  I liked to think of him of an evening composing his menu, using the Minitel which sat on the left corner of his desk. I used to tease him about the telephone hotlines; but in reality I'm sure he was a virgin.

  He was happy in a sense. He took himself to be, and rightly so, a participant in the telecommunications revolution. He actually did live each increase in computer power, each step towards the globalization of the network, as a personal victory. He voted socialist. And, funnily enough, he adored Gauguin.

  11

  I was never to see Jean-Yves Fréhaut again. And anyway, why would I have?

  Basically we'd never really clicked. In any event people rarely see each other ag
ain these days, even in cases where the relationship begins in an atmosphere of enthusiasm. Sometimes breathless conversations take place, touching on the general aspects of life; sometimes, too, a carnal embrace comes about. Sure, you exchange telephone numbers but, generally speaking, you rarely call again. And even when you do call and meet up, disillusionment and disenchantment rapidly take over from the initial enthusiasm. Believe me, I know life; it's all perfectly cut and dried.

  This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We're a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

  If human relations become progressively impossible this is due, precisely, to the multiplying of those degrees of freedom of which Jean-Yves Fréhaut declared himself the enthusiastic prophet. He himself had never known any intimate relationship, of that I'm sure; his state of freedom was extreme. There is no acrimony in what I say. Here was, as I've mentioned, a happy man; that said, I don't envy him his happiness.

  The species of information technology thinker to which Jean-Yves Fréhaut belonged is less rare than you'd think. In every average-sized company you can find one, occasionally two. Besides, most people vaguely admit that every relationship, in particular every human relationship, is reduced to an exchange of information (if of course you include in the notion of information messages of a non-neutral, that is, gratifying or punitive, nature). Under these conditions it doesn't take long for a thinker on information technology to be transformed into a thinker on social evolution. His discourse will often be brilliant, and hence convincing; the affective dimension may even be built into it.

  The next day - again on the occasion of a farewell drink, but this time at the Ministry of Agriculture - I had occasion to discuss things with the theoretician, flanked as usual by Catherine Lechardoy. He himself had never met Jean-Yves Fréhaut, and would have no occasion to do so. I imagine that in a hypothetical meeting the intellectual exchange would have been courteous, yet of a high level. Doubtless they'd have arrived at a consensus on certain values such as freedom, transparency and the necessity of establishing a system of generalized transactions subsuming the totality of social activities.

  The object of this moment of conviviality was to fête the retirement of a small man of some sixty years with grey hair and thick glasses. The staff had clubbed together to buy him a fishing rod - a high-performance Japanese model, with three-speed reel and range modifiable by simple finger pressure - but he didn't know that yet. He was staying well in sight beside the bottles of champagne. People were coming up and giving him a friendly pat on the back, even evoking a shared memory.

  Next, the head of the `Computer Studies' department began to speak. It was an impossible task, he announced right away, to summarize in a few words thirty years of a career devoted entirely to agricultural computing. Louis Lindon, he recalled, had known the heroic days of computerization: punched cards! power cuts! magnetic drums! With each exclamation he spread his arms wide, as if bidding those present to cast their minds back to that far-distant time.

  The interested party was smiling with a knowing air, chewing his moustache in a most unpleasant manner. But on the whole he behaved correctly.

  Louis Lindon, the head of department concluded warmly, had put his stamp on agricultural computing. Without him the Ministry of Agriculture computer system would not be what it was today. And that was something none of his present and even future colleagues (his voice became slightly more tremulous) could ever forget.

  There were thirty seconds or so of warm applause. A young girl chosen from among the fairest handed the future pensioner his fishing rod. He brandished it timidly at the end of his arm. This was the signal for heading for the buffet. The head of department went up to Louis Lindon and, putting an arm around his shoulders, slowmarched him away to exchange a few extra tender and heartfelt words.

  This was the moment the theoretician chose to confide to me that, even so, Lindon belonged to another generation of computing. He programmed without real method, partly by intuition; he'd had persistent difficulty adapting to the principles of functional analysis; the concepts of the Merise method had largely passed him by. All the programmes of which he was the author had had to be rewritten, in fact; for the last two years he'd not been given very much to do, he was more or less put out to grass. Lindon's personal qualities, he added warmly, were not at all in question. Things simply change, it's normal.

  Having dispatched Louis Lindon to the mists of time the theoretician could move on to his favourite theme: according to him the production and circulation of information ought to undergo the same mutation that the production and circulation of commodities had known: the transition from the artisanal stage to the industrial stage. In matters of the production of information , he stated acrimoniously, we were still far from zero default: redundancy and imprecision were more often than not the rule. Since they were insufficiently developed, the information distribution networks remained marked by approximation and anachronism (because of this, he angrily pointed out, Telecom was still distributing phone directories on paper!). Thank God the young were clamouring for more and better information; thank God they were showing themselves to be increasingly exigent about response time; but the road that would lead to a perfectly informed, perfectly transparent and communicating society was still long.

  He developed still other ideas; Catherine Lechardoy was at his side. From time to time she acquiesced with a `Yes, that's very important: She had red on her mouth and blue on her eyes. Her skirt reached halfway down her thighs and her tights were black. I suddenly realized that she must buy panties, maybe even g-strings; the hubbub in the room became slightly more animated. I imagined her in Galeries Lafayette choosing a Brazilian tanga in scarlet lace; I felt invaded by an aching sense of compassion.

  At that moment a colleague came up to the theoretician. Turning away from us slightly, each man offered the other a panatella. Catherine Lechardoy and I remained facing each other. A distinct silence fell. Then, seeking a way out, she proceeded to talk about the bringing into line of work procedures between the servicing company and the Ministry - that's to say, between the two of us. She was still standing right beside me - our bodies were separated by a gap of thirty centimetres at most. At a certain moment, and with a clearly involuntary gesture, she lightly rubbed the lapel of my jacket between her fingers.

  I felt no desire for Catherine Lechardoy; I hadn't the slightest wish to shaft her. She was looking at me and smiling, drinking Crémant, trying her hardest to be brave; nevertheless I knew she really needed to be shafted. That hole she had at the base of her belly must appear so useless to her; a prick can always be cut off, but how do you forget the emptiness of a vagina? Her situation appeared desperate, and my tie was beginning to choke me slightly. After my third glass I came close to suggesting we leave together, go and fuck in some office; on the desk or on the carpet, it didn't matter; I was feeling up to making the necessary gestures. But I kept my mouth shut; and anyway I don't think she'd have accepted; or else I'd have first had to put my arm around her waist, say she was beautiful, brush her lips in a tender kiss. There was no way out, for sure. I briefly excused myself and went to throw up in the toilets.

  On my return the theoretician was at her side and she was listening to him docilely. She'd managed, in short, to regain control; perhaps it was all to the good, for her.

  12

  This retirement drink was to constitute the derisory apogee of my relations with the Ministry of Agriculture. I had gathered together all the necessary material for preparing my courses; we'd barely be seeing each other again; I still had a week before leaving for Rouen.

  A gloomy week. We were at the end o
f November, a time which is commonly taken to be gloom itself. For me it seemed normal that, for want of more tangible events, changes in the weather would assume a certain place in my life; besides, old people can talk about nothing else, they say.

  I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

  At times, too, I've had the impression that I'd manage to feel quite at home in a life of vacuity. That the relatively painless boredom would enable me to go on making the usual gestures of life. Another big mistake. Prolonged boredom is not tenable as a position: sooner or later it is transformed into feelings that are acutely more painful, of true pain; this is precisely what's happening to me.