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  The apartment was in an old thread factory that had closed its doors in the early 1970s, and had remained unoccupied for a few years before Claire’s father bought it – an enterprising architect who was quick to spot a juicy deal, and who had turned it into a set of lofts. The entrance was a big porch secured by a metal gate with enormous bars, the digicode had just been replaced by a biometrical system of iris recognition; there was an intercom connected to a video camera for visitors.

  Once you passed through the gate, you entered a vast paved courtyard surrounded by old industrial buildings – there were about twenty co-owners. The loft that Claire’s mother owned, one of the largest, consisted of a large open space of 100 square metres – with a six-metre-high ceiling – leading to an open-plan kitchen with a central island, a big bathroom with an Italian-style shower and a jacuzzi, two bedrooms including one on a mezzanine and the other one complemented by a dressing room, and an office opening on to a small bit of garden. The whole thing was a little over 200 square metres.

  Even if the term was not very widespread at the time, the other co-owners were exactly what would come to be known as bobos – bourgeois bohemians – and they could only have been delighted to have a theatre actress as a neighbour; what would the theatre be without bobos? At the time the newspaper Libération was not yet read only by casual theatre workers but also by a part (albeit a decreasing one) of their audience, and Le Monde was still more or less keeping up its sales and its prestige; in short, Claire was given an enthusiastic welcome in the building. My own situation, as I was well aware, was more delicate; Monsanto must have seemed to them like a company that was about as honourable as the CIA. A good lie always borrows certain elements from reality, so I immediately told them that I worked in genetic research for rare diseases – rare diseases are unimpeachable, you immediately think of autism or one of those poor little child victims of progeria who already looks like an old person at the age of twelve – and though I would have been incapable of working in that field, I knew enough about genetics to hold my own against any bobo, even an educated one.

  To tell the truth, I felt increasingly uneasy in my job. There was no clear proof of the dangers of GMOs, and most radical ecologists were ignorant idiots anyway, but there was no proof of their harmlessness either, and my superiors within the company were quite simply pathological liars. The truth is that we knew nothing, or practically nothing, about the long-term consequences of genetic plant manipulations, but in my eyes the problem didn’t even lie there; it was that seed-producers and manufacturers of fertilisers and pesticides, on an agricultural level, were destructive and lethal; it was that this intensive agriculture, based on massive exploitation and the maximisation of yields per hectare, this agricultural industry based entirely on export and on the separation of agriculture and animal-rearing, was in my eyes the precise opposite of what needed to be done if we were to achieve acceptable development; we had to prioritise quality, we had to consume and produce locally, protect the soil and the water tables, by going back to complex crop rotations and the use of animal fertilisers. I must have surprised the odd person, at one of the neighbourly drinks that followed our first few months of moving in, with the vehemence and the extremely well-documented nature of my interventions on these subjects; of course they thought the same as I did but without knowing anything about it, simply out of pure left-wing conformity to tell the truth, and the fact remained that I had had ideas, perhaps I had even had ideals – it was no coincidence that I had gone to Agro rather than attending a general school like the Polytechnique or the HEC – in short, I had ideals and I was busy betraying them.

  But resigning was out of the question; my salary was indispensable to our survival because Claire’s career, in spite of the critical success of that play adapted from Georges Bataille, remained stubbornly stalled. Her past trapped her in the cultural field, which was a misunderstanding because her dream was to work in commercial cinema; she only ever went to see films immediately accessible to everybody; she had loved The Big Blue, and even more than that The Visitors, while she found Bataille’s play ‘completely idiotic’, and it was the same with a play by Leiris that she got involved with a little later, but the worst was probably a one-hour reading of Blanchot for France Culture – she would never have suspected, she told me, that such crap existed, it was baffling she said for them to offer such nonsense up to the public. For my part, I had no opinion about Blanchot, I just remembered an amusing phrase by Cioran in which he explained that Blanchot is the ideal author for learning to type, because one is not ‘troubled by meaning’.

  Unfortunately for Claire her physique went in the same direction as her CV: her beauty, blonde, elegant and cold, seemed to predispose her towards texts read out in a blank voice in a subsidised theatre; at the time, the entertainment industry was keen on Latina or hot mixed-race girls – in short Claire absolutely wasn’t on trend, and over the next year she didn’t manage to land a single part except in the off-off productions I’ve mentioned, despite regularly reading Film français, despite a determination, which she never denied, to turn up to pretty much every casting. Even in deodorant ads there was clearly no room for Norwegian omelettes. She might, paradoxically, have had more of a chance in porn: obviously not to undermine the hot black or Latina babies, this sector tried to maintain a great diversity of physiques and ethnicities among its actresses. She might have bitten the bullet in my absence, even though she knew very well that a career in porn would never lead to a career as an actress in mainstream cinema, but I think that had they been more or less identical salary levels, she would still have preferred porn to reading Blanchot on France Culture. In any case it wouldn’t have lasted very long, professional porn was going through its last few months before amateur porn on the Internet destroyed it. YouPorn would destroy the porn industry even faster than YouTube had destroyed the music industry – porn has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, as numerous essayists have observed, even though none of them is alert to the paradoxical nature of this observation, where pornography remains the sector of human activity in which there is least room for innovation, and absolutely nothing new happens; everything imaginable, broadly speaking, existed in the pornography of Greek or Roman antiquity.

  * * *

  As for me, Monsanto was really starting to get on my nerves, and I was beginning to look at other job listings, more or less via all the means offered to an Agro graduate and particularly through the alumni association, but it wasn’t until early November that I happened upon a truly interesting offer from the Regional Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry for Lower Normandy. It involved setting up a new structure dedicated to the export of French cheeses. I sent off my CV and quickly got an interview, and went to and from Caen in a day. The director of DRAF was another Agro old boy, a young old boy: I knew him by sight, he had been in his second year when I was in my first. I don’t know where he did his final-year training course, but he had retained the habit (not widespread in French administrative circles at the time) of using Anglo-Saxon terms to no good effect. His initial observation was that French cheese was still exported almost exclusively within Europe, that its position remained insignificant in the United States and above all that, unlike wine (at this point he launched into a long and sustained tribute to inter-branch organisations with regard to the wines of Bordeaux), the cheese sector had not been able to anticipate the arrival of emerging markets: essentially Russia, but soon China, probably followed by India a little later. That applied to all French cheeses; but we were in Normandy, he pertinently stressed, and the first aim of the task force he planned to put in place would be to promote the ‘lords of the Normandy trilogy’: Camembert, Pont-l’Évêque, Livarot. Only Camembert, until now, had really enjoyed international fame, for historical reasons that were exciting but which he didn’t have time to expand upon; Livarot and even Pont-l’Évêque remained completely unknown in Russia and China; he didn’t have limitless funds, but he had
still managed to assemble the budget required to recruit five people, and what he was looking for first and foremost was the head of this task force, and was I interested in the job?

  I was, and confirmed as much with an appropriate combination of professionalism and enthusiasm. One initial idea had come to me, and I thought it might be a good idea to share it with him: many Americans – well, maybe not many, let’s just say Americans – came every year to visit the Landing Beaches where members of their families, and sometimes even their own parents, had made the supreme sacrifice. Of course, they all needed time for contemplation, we weren’t thinking of organising cheese tastings by the gates of military cemeteries; but everybody ultimately has to eat, and were we sure that Normandy cheeses were taking sufficient advantage of this memorial tourism? He reacted enthusiastically: that was precisely the kind of thing, in fact, that needed to be set in motion, and imagination more generally needed to be part of the mix; the synergies that champagne-makers had developed with the French luxury goods industry were unlikely to be reproduced straight away: was it possible to imagine Gisele Bündchen tasting a piece of Livarot (whereas her sipping from a coupe of champagne was indeed possible)? In short, I would more or less have carte blanche and he would not attempt to rein in my creativity, and besides, my work at Monsanto couldn’t have been easy either (in truth I hadn’t had to make much of an effort as the arguments put forward by the seed manufacturer were brutally simple: without GMOs we wouldn’t be able to feed a constantly growing human population, by and large it was Monsanto or famine). In short, when I left his office I already knew, particularly from the way he had talked about my work at Monsanto in the past tense, that my application had been successful.

  * * *

  My contract started on 1 January 2001. After a few weeks in the hotel I found a pretty house to rent, isolated in the middle of a rolling landscape of groves and pastures, two kilometres from the village of Clécy, which prided itself on holding the slightly overstated title of ‘capital of Suisse normande ’. It really was a ravishing house, with dovecotes; there was a large sitting room on the ground floor covered in terracotta tiles, three bedrooms with parquet floors, and a study. In the annexe, there was an old converted wine press that could be used as a spare room; central heating had been installed.

  It was a ravishing house, and while being shown around I felt that its owner had loved it immensely and had maintained it with meticulous care; he was a little withered old man somewhere between the ages of seventy-five and eighty and he had lived well here, he told me straight away, but it had become impossible now as he needed frequent medical assistance, a nurse at home at least three times a week and every day in times of crisis, so an apartment in Caen was more sensible; he was lucky that his children looked after him well, his daughter had chosen to train as a nurse herself, he was lucky considering what you saw these days, and I agreed with him, he was lucky; only it hadn’t been the same since his wife died, and it would never be the same again. He was clearly a believer and suicide was something that he would never have imagined, but sometimes he thought that it was taking God a long time to remember him, at his age it might have been useful; I had tears in my eyes almost throughout the whole visit.

  * * *

  It was a ravishing house, but I would be living alone there. Claire had clearly and frankly rejected the idea of moving to a village in Lower Normandy. For a moment I imagined suggesting to her that she could ‘come back to Paris for castings’ before realising the absurdity of the idea: she went to about ten castings a week and it made no sense, moving to the country would be career suicide; though is it really a serious matter for something to commit suicide when it is already dead? That was what I thought deep down, but obviously I couldn’t say that to her, not as directly as that, and how could you say it indirectly? No solution came to mind.

  So we agreed, apparently reasonably, that I was the one who would come to Paris for the weekend; we probably shared the illusion that this separation and weekly reunions would give our relationship energy and the chance to breathe, that each weekend would become a celebration of our love, etc.

  * * *

  There was no break between us, no clean and definitive break. It isn’t difficult to take the Caen–Paris train, it’s direct and it takes just over two hours; it just happened that I started taking it less and less often, at first using the excuse of having too much work, then not using any excuse at all, and after a few months it was all over. Deep down, I had never given up on the idea that Claire would come and join me in this house, that she would give up on her improbable career as an actress, and she would agree to be just my wife. Several times I had even sent her pictures of the house taken in fine weather, with the windows wide open on to the groves and pastures; I am a little ashamed to think about it now.

  * * *

  In retrospect the most remarkable thing is that, as with Yuzu twenty years later, all of my earthly possessions could be contained in a suitcase. I had decidedly little appetite for material things; which, in the eyes of certain Greek philosophers (Epicurians? Stoics? Cynics? More or less all of them?) is a very favourable mental disposition; the opposite stance, it seemed to me, had rarely been taken; so there was, on this precise point, a consensus among philosophers – which is rare enough to be stressed.

  * * *

  It was just after five o’clock when I hooked up with Claire again, and I had three hours to kill before dinner. Quite quickly, within just a few minutes, I began to wonder if this meeting was really a good idea. It clearly wasn’t going to lead to anything positive; its only result would be to awaken feelings of disappointment and bitterness that we had, after about twenty years, more or less managed to escape. We were both well aware that life is bitter and disappointing, so was there any point in getting a taxi or paying a restaurant bill to receive additional confirmation? And did I really want to know what had become of Claire? Probably nothing very brilliant, nothing in line with her hopes at any rate, but I might have realised that just by looking at film posters in the street. My own professional aspirations were less clearly defined, and that meant failure was less visible, but I still had a quite distinct feeling that I was a failure by now. The meeting of two forty-year-old losers and former lovers could have been a magnificent scene in a French film, with the appropriate actors – let’s suggest Benoît Poelvoorde and Isabelle Hup- pert for the sake of argument; in real life, was that what I wanted?

  * * *

  In certain critical moments of my life, I resorted to a form of telemancy, which to my knowledge I had invented. When they had a difficult decision to make, the knights of the Middle Ages, and later the Puritans of New England, opened their Bibles at random, rested their fingers also at random on the page and gave an interpretation of the verse they were pointing to, then took the direction indicated to them by God. Similarly, I sometimes turned on the television at random (without choosing the channel, just by pressing the On button) and tried to interpret the pictures transmitted to me.

  At precisely 6.30 p.m., I pressed the On button of the television in my room in the Hôtel Mercure. The result seemed disconcerting at first, and difficult to decode (but that sometimes happened to the medieval knights too, and even to the Puritans of New England): I happened upon a tribute to Laurent Baffie, which in itself was surprising (was he dead? he was still young, but some television presenters are struck down at the peak of their glory and violently torn from the love of their fans, that’s life). At any rate the tone of the programme was one of tribute, and all the participants stressed Laurent’s ‘deep humanity’; for some he was a ‘terrific pal, a master prankster, a total loon’, others who hadn’t known him as closely stressed his ‘impeccable professionalism’; that polyphony, well orchestrated by the way the programme had been edited, led to an actual rereading of Laurent Baffie’s work, and finished symphonically with the almost choral repetition of an expression which all of the participants agreed on: Laurent was, however you looked at
it, a ‘beautiful person’. At twenty past seven I called a taxi.

  I arrived at the Bistrot du Parisien on rue Pelleport at precisely 8.00 p.m. Claire had in fact booked a table, that was one positive thing, but from the first few seconds, as I crossed the restaurant that wasn’t busy – but it was a Sunday evening after all – I could tell it would be the only one that evening.

  After ten minutes, a waiter came to ask me if I wanted an aperitif while I was waiting. He seemed benevolent and devoted by nature, and I sensed that he anticipated a problematic encounter (how could a waiter in the twentieth arrondissement not be a bit of a shaman, or indeed a bit of a psychopomp?), and I also noticed that he would tend to side with me that evening (had he already spotted my mounting anxiety? It’s true that I had already eaten a large number of breadsticks), so much so that I ordered a triple Jack Daniel’s.

  Claire arrived at about 8.30 p.m., walking carefully, supporting herself on two tables before reaching ours, and already visibly quite drunk; was the idea of seeing me again so distressing, the reminder of the promise of happiness that life had dashed for her so painful? I hoped so for a few seconds, no more than two or three, and then a more realistic thought occurred to me: Claire was probably in this same state at the same time every day, plastered more or less to the same degree.

  * * *

  I spread my arms enthusiastically to exclaim that she looked fantastic and she hadn’t changed at all; I don’t know where I got this aptitude for lying, not from my parents in any case, perhaps from my first years at lycée, but the truth is that she had swollen up horribly, there was fat poking out more or less everywhere and her face was frankly covered with blotches; her expression was a little doubtful at first, her initial thought was probably that I was making fun of her, but that didn’t last more than ten seconds and she quickly lowered her head then raised it again straight away with a changed expression: the girl in her reappeared, and she gave me an almost flirtatious wink.