I think that if you have decided to die, it is precisely because your decision is in the nature of things, so you must do it in a gentle way. Dying must be a delicate passage, a sweet slipping away to rest. There are people who commit suicide by jumping out of the window of the fourth floor or swallowing bleach or even hanging themselves! That’s senseless! Obscene, even. What is the point of dying if not to not suffer? I’ve devoted great care to planning how I’ll exit the scene: every month for the last year I’ve been pilfering a sleeping pill from Maman’s box on the bedside table. She takes so many that she wouldn’t even notice if I took one every day, but I’ve decided to be particularly careful. You can’t leave anything to chance when you’ve made a decision that most people won’t understand. You can’t imagine how quickly people will get in the way of your most heartfelt plans, in the name of such trifles as ‘the meaning of life’ or ‘love of mankind’. Oh and then there is ‘the sacred nature of childhood’.
Therefore, I am heading slowly towards the date of the sixteenth of June and I’m not afraid. A few regrets, maybe. But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses. Having said that, simply because you’ve made plans to die doesn’t mean you have to vegetate like some rotting piece of cabbage. Quite the contrary. The main thing isn’t about dying or how old you are when you die, it’s what you are doing the moment you die. In Taniguchi the heroes die while climbing Mount Everest. Since I haven’t the slightest chance of taking a stab at K2 or the Grandes Jorasses before the sixteenth of June, my own personal Everest will be an intellectual endeavour. I have set as my goal to have the greatest number possible of profound thoughts, and to write them down in this notebook: even if nothing has any meaning, the mind, at least, can give it a shot, don’t you think? But since I have this big thing about Japan, I’ve added one requirement: these profound thoughts have to be formulated like a little Japanese poem: either a haiku (three lines) or a tanka (five lines).
My favourite haiku is by Basho.
The fisherman’s hut
Mixed with little shrimp
Some crickets!
Now that’s no goldfish bowl, is it, that’s what I call poetry!
But in the world I live in there is less poetry than in a Japanese fisherman’s hut. And do you think it is normal for four people to live in four thousand square feet when tons of other people, perhaps some poètes maudits among them, don’t even have a decent place to live and are crammed together fifteen at a time in two hundred square feet? When, this summer, I heard on the news that some Africans had died because a fire had started in the stairway of their run-down tenement, I had an idea. Those Africans have the goldfish bowl right there in front of them, all day long – they can’t escape through storytelling. But my parents and Colombe are convinced they’re swimming in the ocean just because they live in their four thousand square feet with their piles of furniture and paintings.
So, on the sixteenth of June I intend to refresh their peasized memories: I’m going to set fire to the apartment (with the barbecue lighter). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a criminal: I’ll do it when there’s no one around (the sixteenth of June is a Saturday and on Saturdays Colombe goes to see Tibère, Maman is at yoga, Papa is at his club and as for me, I stay home), I’ll evacuate the cats through the window and I’ll call the fire brigade early enough so that there won’t be any victims. And then I’ll go off quietly to Grandma’s with my pills, to sleep.
With no more apartment and no more daughter, maybe they’ll give some thought to all those dead Africans, don’t you think?
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Manuela, my only friend, comes for tea with me in my lodge. Manuela is a simple woman and twenty years wasted stalking dust in other people’s homes has in no way robbed her of her elegance. Besides, stalking dust is a very euphemistic way to put it. But where the rich are concerned, things are rarely called by their true name.
‘I empty bins full of sanitary towels,’ she says, with her gentle, slightly hissing accent. ‘I wipe up dog vomit, clean the bird cage – you’d never believe the amount of poo such tiny animals can make – and I scrub the toilets. You talk about dust? Big deal!’
You must understand that when she comes down to see me at two in the afternoon, on Tuesdays after the Arthens, and on Thursdays after the de Broglies, Manuela has been polishing the toilets with a cotton bud, and though they may be gilded with gold leaf, they are just as filthy and reeking as any toilets on the planet, because if there is one thing the rich do share with the poor, however unwillingly, it is their nauseating intestines that always manage to find a place to free themselves of that which makes them stink.
So Manuela deserves our praise. Although she’s been sacrificed at the altar of a world where the most thankless tasks have been allotted to some women while others merely hold their nose without raising a finger, she nevertheless strives relentlessly to maintain a degree of refinement that goes far beyond any gold-leaf gilding, a fortiori of the sanitary variety.
‘When you eat a walnut, you must use a tablecloth,’ says Manuela, removing from her old shopping bag a little hamper made of light wood where some almond tuiles are nestled among curls of carmine tissue paper. I make coffee that we shall not drink, but its wafting aroma delights us both, and in silence we sip a cup of green tea as we nibble on our tuiles.
Just as I am a permanent traitor to my archetype, so is Manuela: to the Portuguese cleaning woman she is a criminal oblivious of her condition. This girl from Faro, born under a fig tree after seven siblings and before six more, forced in childhood to work the fields and scarcely out of it to marry a mason and take the road of exile, mother of four children who are French by birthright but whom society looks upon as thoroughly Portuguese – this girl from Faro, as I was saying, who wears the requisite black support stockings and a kerchief on her head, is an aristocrat. An authentic one, of the kind whose entitlement you cannot contest: it is etched onto her very heart, it mocks titles and people with handles to their names. What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.
On Sundays, the vulgarity of her in-laws, who with their loud laughter muffle the pain of being born weak and without prospects; the vulgarity of an environment as bleakly desolate as the neon lights of the factory where the men go each morning, like sinners returning to hell; then, the vulgarity of her employers who, for all their money, cannot hide their own baseness and who speak to her the way they would a mangy dog covered with oozing bald patches. But you should have witnessed Manuela offering me, as if I were a queen, the fruit of her prowess in haute pâtisserie to fully appreciate the grace that inhabits this woman. Yes, as if I were a queen. When Manuela arrives, my lodge is transformed into a palace, and a picnic between two pariahs becomes the feast of two monarchs. Like a storyteller transforming life into a shimmering river where trouble and boredom vanish far below the water, Manuela metamorphoses our existence into a warm and joyful epic.
‘That little Pallières boy said hello to me on the stairs,’ she says suddenly, interrupting the silence.
I snort with disdain.
‘He’s reading Marx,’ I add, with a shrug of my shoulders.
‘Marx?’ she asks, pronouncing the x as if it were a sh, a somewhat slurping sh, as charming as a clear sky.
‘The father of communism,’ I reply.
Manuela
