Badoise came out of the lift with Neptune, and Anne-Hélène Meurisse was waiting right outside with Athena. They virtually threw their dogs one on top of the other and, obviously, it drove Neptune utterly crazy. Here you come nicely trotting out of the lift only to find your nose right up against Athena’s derrière, that’s not something that happens every day. For ages now Colombe has been ranting on to us about kairos, a Greek concept that means roughly ‘the right moment’, something at which Napoleon apparently excelled. Naturally, my sister is an expert on military strategy. Anyway, kairos is the intuition of the moment, something like that. Well, I can tell you that Neptune had his kairos right in front of his nose and he didn’t mess around, he made like a hussar, in the old style, and climbed right on top. ‘Oh my God!’ shrieked Anne-Hélène Meurisse as if she herself were victim of this outrage. ‘Oh, no!’ exclaimed Diane Badoise, as if all the shame were hers, though I’d bet you a chocolate truffle that it would never have occurred to her to climb onto Athena’s rear end. And they both began pulling at their dogs’ leashes but there was a problem, and that’s what evolved into an interesting movement.
In fact, Diane should have pulled upwards and the other lady downwards, which would have released the two dogs but, instead of that, they each pulled sideways and as it’s very narrow in front of the lift cage, they very quickly ran into an obstacle: one of them the lift grille, the other the wall on the left and as a result Neptune, who had lost his balance with the first tug, suddenly had a surge of energy and clung all the more solidly to Athena who was howling and rolling her eyes with fright. At that point the humans changed strategy by trying to drag their dogs away to a larger space so that they could repeat the manoeuvre more comfortably. But the matter was getting urgent: everyone knows there’s a point at which dogs get stuck. So they really stepped on it, shouting simultaneously, ‘Oh my God oh my God,’ pulling on their leashes as if their very virtue was at stake. But in her haste, Diane Badoise slipped and twisted her ankle. And this was the moment of the interesting movement: her ankle twisted outwards and at the same time her entire body swerved in the same direction, except for her ponytail which went the opposite way.
It was magnificent, I assure you: it was like something by Bacon. There’s been a framed Bacon in my parents’ bathroom forever, a picture of someone on the potty, in fact, and in good Bacon style, you know, sort of tortured and not very appetising. I have always thought that it probably had an effect on the serenity of one’s actions but anyway in my house we each have our own toilet so there was no point complaining. But Diane Badoise was completely thrown out of joint when she twisted her ankle, making weird angles with her knees, her arms and her head, and to top it off, her ponytail sticking out horizontally like that – and I immediately thought of the Bacon in the bathroom. For a very brief moment she looked like a disjointed rag doll, her body completely contorted and, for a few thousandths of a second (it happened very quickly, but, as I am very attentive to the movements of the body these days, I saw it as if in slow motion), Diane Badoise looked like a full-length portrait by Bacon. From that sudden impression to the consideration that the thing in the bathroom has been there all these years just so now I could fully appreciate her bizarre contortions, there is only a short step. And then Diane fell onto the dogs and that solved the problem because Athena, crushed on the ground, managed to wriggle free of Neptune. A complicated little ballet then followed, Anne-Hélène trying to help Diane and all the while keep her dog at a safe distance from the lubricious monster, and Neptune, completely indifferent to the shouts and pain of his mistress, continued to pull in the direction of his steak à la rose. But at that very moment Madame Michel came out of her lodge and I grabbed Neptune’s leash and dragged him farther away.
He was so disappointed, poor mutt. And so he flopped down and started licking his little balls, making a lot of slurping noises, which only added to poor Diane’s despair. Madame Michel called an ambulance because Diane’s ankle was seriously beginning to look like a watermelon and then she took Neptune to her place while Anne-Hélène Meurisse stayed with Diane. As for me, I went home and said to myself, OK, a Bacon come to life before my very eyes, does that make it worth it?
I decided it didn’t: because not only did Neptune not get his treat but, on top of that, he didn’t even get his walk.
8. Prophet of the Modern Elite
This morning, while listening to France Inter on the radio, I was surprised to discover that I am not who I thought I was. Up until then I had ascribed the reasons for my cultural eclecticism to my condition as a proletarian autodidact. As I have already explained, I have spent every moment of my existence that could be spared from work in reading, watching films and listening to music. But my frenzied devouring of cultural objects seems to me to suffer from a major error of taste: brutally mixing respectable works with others that are far less so.
It is most certainly in the domain of reading that my eclecticism is least pronounced, though even there the variety of my interests is the most extreme. I have read history, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, pedagogy, psychoanalysis and, of course – above all – literature. While all these topics have always interested me, literature has been my whole life. My cat Leo was baptised thus because of Tolstoy. My previous cat was called Dongo because of Stendhal’s Fabrice del. The first one was called Karenina because of Anna but I called her Karé for short, for fear of being found out. With the exception of my guilty lapse where Stendhal is concerned, my taste is most definitely partial to pre-1910 Russia, but it flatters my pride to note that the amount of world literature I have devoured is nevertheless considerable, given the fact that I am a country girl who, by ending up head concierge at 7, Rue de Grenelle, has witnessed her career expectations go far beyond what she anticipated – particularly when you think that such a destiny should surely have doomed her to the eternal worship of Barbara Cartland. I do confess to a guilty indulgence for detective stories – but the ones I read I consider to be true works of literature. I find it especially exasperating when, from time to time, I have to drag myself away from my Connelly or Mankell in order to go and answer the door for Bernard Grelier or Sabine Pallières, whose concerns are hardly shared by the likes of Harry Bosch, the jazz-loving LAPD cop, and all the more so when all they have to say is:
‘How come the rubbish smells all the way out into the courtyard?’
That both Bernard Grelier and the heiress of an old Banque de France family could speak in so colloquial a manner and be preoccupied by the same trivial things sheds a new light on humanity.
Where the cinema is concerned, however, my eclecticism is in full flower. I like American blockbusters and art-house films. In fact, for a long time I preferred to watch entertaining British or American films, with the exception of a few serious works that I reserved for my aesthetic sensibilities, since my passionate or empathetic sensibilities were exclusively focused on entertainment. Greenaway fills me with admiration, interest and yawns, whereas I weep buckets of syrupy tears every time Melly and Mammy climb the staircase at the Butler mansion after Bonnie Blue dies; as for Blade Runner, it is a masterpiece of high-end escapism. For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving and immensely satisfying.
Take today, for example. I quiver with impatience at the thought of the treat I have in store – the fruit of exemplary patience, the long-deferred satisfaction of my desire to see, once again, a film I saw for the first time at Christmas, in 1989.
By Christmas 1989 Lucien was very sick. We did not yet know when his death would come, but we were bound by the certainty of its imminence, bound to the dread inside, bound to each other by these invisible ties. When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body; it also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped. Like
