Serotonin Read online

  I woke up at exactly five o’clock and though I craved a coffee, I couldn’t risk making a noise in the kitchen. It was very likely that Yuzu had come home. She never stayed out all night, despite how her evenings might have gone: falling asleep without coating herself in her eighteen beauty creams was unimaginable. She was probably asleep already, but five o’clock was still a bit early; her sleep was at its deepest at around seven or eight, so I would have to be patient. I had chosen the early check-in option at the Mercure – my room would be available from nine o’clock – and I was bound to find a café open somewhere nearby.

  * * *

  I had prepared my suitcase the previous day and had nothing more to do before I left. It was a bit sad to realise that I had no personal memento to take away: no letter, no photograph, not even a book, it was all on my MacBook Air, a thin parallelepiped of brushed aluminium; my entire past weighed 1,100 grammes. It also dawned on me that during the two years of our relationship, Yuzu had never given me a present – absolutely nothing, not one.

  Then I realised something even more surprising: the previous evening, stunned by Yuzu’s tacit acceptance of my death, I had for a few minutes forgotten the circumstances of my parents’ death. There was of course a third solution, for romantic lovers, that was independent of hypothetical trans-human immortality or of the equally hypothetical celestial Jerusalem; an immediately practicable solution, which required neither high-level genetic research nor fervent prayers to the Lord; the very solution that my parents had adopted some twenty years ago.

  A notary from Senlis who counted all the local dignitaries among his clientele and a former student at the École du Louvre who settled for the role of housewife: there was nothing about my parents, at first sight, to suggest a passionate love affair. Appearances, I had observed, were rarely deceptive; but in this case they were.

  * * *

  On the day before his sixty-fourth birthday my father, who had been suffering from persistent headaches for several weeks, consulted our family doctor who prescribed him a CT scan. Three days later, the doctor informed him of the results: the scan revealed a large tumour, but it was impossible to tell at this stage whether it was cancerous or not and a biopsy was required.

  A week later, the results of the biopsy were perfectly clear: the tumour was in fact cancerous and aggressive, and it was developing rapidly through a mixture of glioblastomas and anaplastic astrocytomas. Brain cancer is relatively rare but very often fatal, the rate of survival for a year is below 10 per cent; its causes unknown.

  Due to the placement of the tumour a surgical operation was unthinkable; but chemotherapy and radiotherapy had sometimes produced some kind of results.

  It should be noted that neither my father nor my mother saw fit to inform me of these facts; I discovered them only by chance during a visit to Senlis, when I asked my mother about a letter from the hospital that she had forgotten to put away.

  The other thing that gave me pause for thought was that, on the day of my visit, they had probably already made their decision, and perhaps even ordered the pills on the Internet.

  * * *

  They were found a week later, lying side by side on their marital bed. Always anxious to avoid causing anyone any trouble, my father had alerted the local police by letter, even including a copy of the keys in the envelope.

  They had taken the pills in the early evening on the day of their fortieth wedding anniversary. Their death had been quick, the police officer kindly assured me; quick but not instant – it was easy to tell by their positions on the bed that they had wanted to hold hands until the end, but they had suffered from convulsions in their death throes, and their hands had parted.

  No one ever discovered how they had got hold of the pills; my mother had deleted her navigation history on the home computer (she would inevitably have been in charge, my father hated computers and anything that might have looked like technological progress more generally; he had held back for as long as possible before giving in and buying equipment for his office, and it was his secretary who dealt with everything – he had never touched a computer keyboard in his life). Obviously, the police officer told me, if I really wanted to they could easily trace the order, nothing is ever totally deleted in the cloud; it was possible, but was it necessary?

  * * *

  I didn’t know that two people could be buried in the same coffin, there are so many health and safety regulations about everything that you imagine almost anything is forbidden, but not that, apparently it was possible, unless my father made use of his contacts post-mortem by writing some letters – as I have said he knew all the dignitaries in the town, and even most of those in the département – but whatever happened, that was how it was done, and they were laid to rest in the same coffin, in the northernmost corner of Senlis cemetery. At the time of her death, my mother was fifty-nine and in perfect health. The priest had irritated me a little during his sermon, glibly talking about the magnificence of human love as a prelude to the even greater magnificence of divine love; I found it a bit indecent of the Catholic Church to try to recover them. When he is faced with genuine love a priest keeps his trap shut, that was what I wanted to say to him; what could he have known, the idiot, about my parents’ love? I wasn’t sure I really understood it myself – I had always sensed in their gestures, in their smiles, something I would never entirely have access to. I don’t mean that they didn’t love me, they probably did, and from every point of view they were excellent parents: attentive, present but not too much so, generous when they had to be; but it wasn’t the same type of love, and I always remained outside the magical, supernatural circle that they formed together (their level of communication was truly astonishing, I’m sure I witnessed at least two clearly demonstrable cases of telepathy). They had no other child, and I remember that the year I went back to the Lycée Henri IV after my baccalauréat for the preparatory course in Agriculture, and explained that, given the poor public transport in Senlis, it would be far more practical for me to rent a room in Paris, I clearly remember spotting, fleetingly but indisputably, an expression of relief in my mother; the first thought that had come to her was that she and my father would finally be able to rediscover one another. My father barely tried to conceal his joy; he immediately took charge of things and a week later I moved to an unnecessarily luxurious studio – bigger, I realised straight away, than the attic rooms which my classmates settled for – on Rue des Écoles, five minutes’ walk from the lycée.

  I got up at precisely seven o’clock in the morning and crossed the sitting room without a sound. The front door to the apartment, massive and reinforced, was as silent as that of a safe.

  On that first day of August, the traffic in Paris was flowing, and I was even able to park on Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie, a few metres from the hotel. Unlike the other major roads (Avenue d’Italie, Avenue des Gobelins, Boulevards Auguste-Blanqui and Vincent-Auriol…) which begin at the Place d’Italie and drain most of the traffic from the south-eastern arrondissements of Paris, Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie turned into Rue Abel-Hovelacque after fifty metres, which was a street of only modest importance. Its status as an avenue might have seemed undeserved had it not been for its surprising and pointless width, and for the central strip planted with trees that separated the two thoroughfares, currently deserted; in one direction, Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie looked more like a pri- vate drive – it called to mind those pseudo-avenues (Vélasquez, Van Dyck, Ruysdael) on the edge of Parc Monceau; in short there was something luxurious about it, and that impression was further reinforced at the entrance to the Hôtel Mercure, which curiously consisted of a large porch that opened on to an inner courtyard decorated with statues: a setting more easily imagined as part of a mid-ranking château. It was half-past seven, and three cafés in Place d’Italie were already open: the Café de France, the Café Margeride (serving specialities from the Cantal, but it was a bit early for that) and the Café O’Jules, at the corner of Rue Bobillot. I opted for
the last of these, in spite of the stupid name, because the managers had had the original idea of translating ‘happy hours’ into French, here rendered as ‘les heures heureuses ’; I was sure that Alain Finkielkraut would have approved of my choice.

  Overall, the menu of the establishment excited me, and even made me reconsider the negative judgement that I had initially formed about its name: the use of the name ‘Jules’ had in fact allowed them to develop a deeply innovative menu system, in which the creativity of the names of dishes was combined with meaningful contextualisation; for example, the chapter devoted to salads juxtaposed ‘Jules in the South’ (lettuce, tomatoes, egg, prawns, rice, olives, anchovies, peppers) with ‘Jules in Norway’ (lettuce, tomatoes, smoked salmon, prawns, poached egg, toast). For my part, I felt that I would soon (perhaps even this lunchtime) be succumbing to the delights of ‘Jules on the farm’ (lettuce, ham, Cantal cheese, fried potatoes, walnut halves, boiled egg), unless I fell prey to those of ‘Jules the shepherd’ (lettuce, tomatoes, warm goat’s cheese, honey, lardons).

  Generally speaking, the proposed meals did not address an obsolete controversy, tracing the outlines of a peaceful cohabitation between traditional cuisine (onion soup gratinée, fillets of herring with warm potatoes) and innovative fooding (panko prawns with salsa verde, bagel aveyronnais). A similar desire for synthesis was apparent from the cocktail list which, apart from all the classics, contained some orig-inal creations such as ‘green inferno’ (Malibu, vodka, milk, pineapple juice, crème de menthe), the ‘zombie’ (amber rum, crème d’abricot, lemon juice, pineapple juice, grenadine) and the surprising but extremely simple ‘Bobillot beach’ (vodka, pineapple juice, strawberry juice). In short, I felt that I wasn’t going to be spending just happy hours in this establishment, but also happy days, weeks and even years.

  At about nine o’clock, having finished my regional breakfast, and having left enough of a tip to ensure the goodwill of the waiters, I made for the reception desk of the Hôtel Mercure, where the welcome I received broadly confirmed my initial hopes. The receptionist confirmed before even asking for my Visa card, exceeding my expectations: a smoking room had been reserved for me, as I had requested. ‘You are our guest for a week?’ she continued, with an exquisite interrogatory hint; I confirmed as much.

  * * *

  I had said a week as I might have said anything else, my only plan had been to free myself from a toxic relationship that was killing me: my planned deliberate disappearance had been a complete success, and now there I was, a middle-aged Western man, sheltered from need for several years, with no relatives or friends, stripped of personal plans and of genuine interests, deeply disappointed by his previous professional life, whose emotional experiences had been variable but had had the common feature of coming to an end, essentially deprived of reasons to live and of reasons to die. I could take advantage of the possibility to make a new start, to ‘rebound’, as they say comically on television programmes and in articles about human psychology in specialist magazines; I could also allow myself to slip into lethargic inactivity. My hotel room, I was immediately aware, would guide me in that second direction: it was genuinely tiny, ten square metres in total, I guessed, the double bed occupied almost the whole space, you could move around it but only just; facing it, on a narrow table, were the indispensable television and a courtesy tray (which is to say a kettle, some paper cups and sachets of instant coffee). They had also managed, in that constrained space, to place a minibar and a chair opposite a mirror thirty centimetres square; and that was it. This was my new home.

  Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so. Was I capable of being happy in general? That’s the kind of question, I think, that is best not asked.

  The only difficulty with living in a hotel is that you have to leave your room – and therefore your bed – every day so that the housekeeper can do her job. The time when you need to leave is in principle indeterminate, since the chambermaids’ timetable is never communicated to the customer. For my part I would have preferred, knowing that the cleaning never took very long, to have been assigned a time to go out; but that was not how things were organised, and in a sense I understood that: it would not have been in line with the values of the hotel trade, it would have been more like how a prison functions, say. So I had to trust in the spirit of initiative and the responsiveness of the cleaning woman, or rather women.

  But I could help them, give them a clue by turning over the little information card hooked on the door handle, moving it from the position, ‘Shhhh I’m sleeping – Please do not disturb’ (symbolised by the picture of an English bulldog asleep on a mat) to the position, ‘I’m awake – Please make up the room’ (two chickens, photographed against a theatre curtain, in a state of vigorous and almost aggressive wakefulness).

  After experimenting for the first few days, I concluded that going out for two hours would be sufficient time. I soon perfected a mini-circuit that began with the O’Jules, which was quiet between ten o’clock and midday. Then I went back to Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie, which ended with a kind of little roundabout covered by trees; in fine weather I positioned myself on one of the benches arranged under the trees, I was generally alone but every now and again a pensioner sat on one of the other benches, sometimes accompanied by a small dog. Then I turned right into Rue Abel-Hovelacque; on the corner of Avenue des Gobelins I always paused at Carrefour City. I had had an inkling since my first visit that this shop would play an important part in my new life. The oriental food shelf, while not quite reaching the level of variety of the G20 near the Totem Tower where habit had taken me some days before, still displayed eight different varieties of hummus, including abugosh premium, misadot, zaatar and the extremely rare mesabecha; as to the sandwich section, I wonder if it wasn’t even superior. Until then I had believed that the minimarket sector was entirely dominated, in Paris and the ‘petite couronne ’, by Daily Monop’; I should have been suspicious when a brand like Carrefour ‘only joined it’, as its CEO had pointed out recently in an interview with Challenges, ‘to make up the numbers’.

  The opening hours, which were exceptionally generous, revealed the same desire for conquest: 7.00 to 11.00 on weekdays, 8.00 to 1.00 on Sunday; even the Arabs had never done as well as that. The reduced Sunday hours were the result of a bitter conflict initiated by a process launched by the labour inspectorate of the thirteenth arrondissement a small poster hanging in the shop informed me, which, in breathtakingly virulent terms, stigmatised the ‘aberrant decision’ taken by the district court that had finally led them to give in, under threat of a penalty ‘so exorbitant it would endanger your local trade’. Freedom of trade, and beyond it freedom of the consumer, had therefore lost a battle; but the war, one could tell from the martial tone of the poster, was far from over.

  I seldom stopped at Bar La Manufacture, directly opposite Carrefour City; some of the micro-brewery beers seemed enticing, but I wasn’t keen on the laboriously constructed atmosphere of a ‘workers’ pub’, in an area where the last worker had probably disappeared in around 1920. I would soon discover much worse, in the grim zone of Buttes-aux-Cailles; but I didn’t know it yet.

  Then I went about fifty metres back down Avenue des Gobelins before turning into Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie, and that was the only truly urban part of my circuit, the one that would allow me, through the increase in pedestrian and motorised traffic, to feel that we had crossed the barrier of 15 August, the first stage in the resumption of social life, followed by the other, more crucial, stage of 1 September.

  * * *

  Was I, in the end, as unhappy as all that? If, unusually, one of the humans with whom I came into contact (the receptionist at the Hôtel Mercure, the waiters at the café O’Jules, the girl on the till at Carrefour City) had asked about my mood, I would have been inclined to call it ‘sad’, but it was a peaceful, stable sadness, not susceptible to increase or decrease; a sadness, in short, that to all intents and purposes appeared definitive. Bu
t I wasn’t falling into that trap; I knew that life might still have plenty of surprises, either atrocious or delightful, in store for me.

  That said, for now I felt no desire, something which many philosophers had judged to be an enviable state, or at least that was my impression; the Buddhists, by and large, were on the same wavelength. But other philosophers, as well as all psychologists, considered an absence of desire to be pathological and unhealthy. After a month’s stay at the Hôtel Mercure, I still felt unable to engage in that classic debate. I renewed my stay weekly, so that I could remain in a state of freedom (a state which is looked upon favourably by all existing philosophies). In my view I wasn’t doing too badly. In fact, my mental state caused me considerable concern on one point only, and that was bodily care, even simple hygiene. I could just about manage to brush my teeth, that was still possible, but I was frankly repelled by the prospect of taking a shower or a bath; in fact, I would have liked to no longer have a body; I was finding the prospect of having a body, of having to devote care and attention to it, more and more intolerable, and although the impressive increase in homelessness had gradually made Western society relax its criteria in this field, I knew that too pronounced a stench would eventually make me stand out in an inappropriate fashion.

  I had never consulted a psychiatrist, and basically I didn’t much believe in the effectiveness of that profession, so I looked on Doctolib for a GP in the thirteenth arrondissement, to minimise travelling time.