Platform (2 page)

'My brain is a mess. . .' I said with a disappointed smile. 'But, I don't know, maybe I was at a private view.'

'A private view?' He waited patiently, his fingers hovering some inches above the keyboard.

'Yes, I work for the Ministry of Culture. I plan the financing for exhibitions, or sometimes shows.'

'Shows?'

'Shows . . . contemporary dance . . .' I felt completely desperate, overcome with shame.

'Generally speaking, then, you work on cultural events?'

'Yes, that's it. . . You could put it like that.' He looked at me with a compassion tinged with seriousness. He had an awareness of the existence of a cultural sector, a vague but definite awareness. He must have had to meet people from all walks of life in his profession; no area of society could be completely alien to him. Police work is a human science.

The rest of the interview proceeded more or less normally; I had watched a few made-for-TV movies, so I was prepared for this kind of conversation. Did I know any enemies my father might have? No, but no friends either, to be honest. In any case, my father wasn't important enough to have enemies. Who stood to gain by his death? Well, me. When did I last visit him? August, probably. There's never much to do in the office in August, and my colleagues have to go on holiday because they have children. I stay in Paris, I play solitaire on the computer and around the 15th I take a long weekend off; that was the extent of my visits to my father. On that subject, did I have a good relationship with my father? Yes and no. Mostly no, but I came to see him once or twice a year; that in itself wasn't too bad.

He nodded. I could feel my statement was coming to an end; I would have liked to say more. I felt overcome by a feeling of irrational, abnormal pity for Chaumont. He was already loading paper into his printer. 'My father was very sporty!' I said brusquely. He looked up at me enquiringly. 'I don't know . . .' I said, spreading my hands in despair, 'I just wanted to say that he was very athletic' He shrugged disappointedly and pressed 'Print'.

After I'd signed my statement, I walked Captain Chaumont to the door. I was aware that I had been a disappointing witness, I told him. 'All witnesses are disappointing . . .' he said. I considered this aphorism for a while. Before us stretched the endless monotony of the fields. Chaumont climbed into his Peugeot 305; he would keep me informed of any developments in the investigation. In the public sector, the death of a parent or grandparent entitles one to three days' leave. As a result, I could very easily have taken my time going home, bought some local camembert; but I immediately took the motorway for Paris.

I spent the last day of my compassionate leave in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares; I was particularly fond of the star-ratings system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximise his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyses the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialised purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. Back at the office I told Marie-Jeanne that I needed a holiday. Marie-Jeanne is my colleague; together we work on exhibition proposals, together we work for the benefit of the contemporary arts. She is a woman of thirty-five, with lank blond hair, her eyes are a very light blue; I know nothing about her personal life. Within the office hierarchy, she has a position slightly senior to mine; but this is something which she ignores - she likes to emphasise teamwork within the office. Every time we receive a visit from a really important person - a delegate from the Department of Plastic Arts or someone from the Ministry — she insists on this notion of teamwork. 'And this is the most important man in the office! . . .' she exclaims, walking into my office; 'He's the one who juggles the figures and the financial statements... I would be completely lost without him.' And then she laughs; the important visitors laugh in turn, or at least smile good-naturedly. I smile too, insofar as I can. I try to imagine myself as a juggler; but in reality it's quite enough to master simple arithmetic. Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing, her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends; having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist; it is an accusation from which she must defend herself and the institution. She is also in regular contact with artists, gallery owners and the editors of obscure reviews, obscure, at least, to me; these telephone calls keep her happy, because her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it: I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting; I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing; it's not up to me to invent or adopt new attitudes, new affinities with the world - I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend towards melancholy. I've attended many exhibitions, private views, many performances that remain unforgettable. My conclusion, henceforth, is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine.

I had informed Marie-Jeanne of my bereavement; she greeted me sympathetically, she even put her hand on my shoulder. My request to take some time off seemed completely natural to her. 'You need to take stock, Michel,' she reckoned, 'you need to turn inward.' I tried to visualise the movement she was suggesting and I concluded that she was probably right. 'Cecilia will put the provisional budget to bed,' she went on; 'I'll talk to her about it.' What precisely was she alluding to, and who was this Cecilia? Glancing around me, I noticed the design for a poster and I remembered. Cecilia was a fat, redhead who was always gorging herself on Cadburys and who'd been in the department for two months: a temp, work experience maybe, someone pretty insignificant at any rate. And it was true that before my father's death I had been working on a provisional budget for the exhibition, ‘Hands Up, You Rascals!', due to open in Bourg-la-Reine in January. It consisted of photographs of police brutality taken with a telephoto lens in Yvelines; but we weren't talking documentary here, more a process of the theatricalisation of space, full of nods to various cop shows featuring the Los Angeles Police Department. The artist had favoured a 'fun' approach rather than the social critique you'd expect. An interesting project, all in all, not too expensive nor too complicated; even a moron like Cecilia was capable of finalising the provisional budget.

Usually, when I left the office, I'd take in a peepshow. It set me back fifty francs, maybe seventy if I was slow to ejaculate. Watching pussy in motion cleared my head. The contradictory trends of contemporary video art, balancing the conservation of national heritage with support for living creativity ... all of that quickly evaporated before the facile magic of a moving pussy. I gently emptied my testicles. At the same moment, Cecilia was stuffing herself with chocolate cake in a patisserie near the Ministry; our motives were much the same.

Very occasionally, I would take a private room at five hundred francs; that was if my dick wasn't feeling too good, when it seemed to me to resemble a useless, demanding little appendage that smelled like cheese. Then I needed a girl to take it in her hands, to go into raptures, however faked, oyer its vigour, the richness of its semen. Be that as it may, I was always home before seven-thirty. I'd start with Questions pour un champion which I had set my video to record; then I would continue with the national news. The mad cow disease crisis was of little interest to me, mostly I survived on Mousline instant mash with cheese. Then the evening would continue. I wasn't unhappy, I had 128 channels. At about two in the morning, I'd finish with Turkish musicals.

A number of days went by like this, relatively peacefully, before I received another phone call from Chaumont. Things had progressed significantly, they had found the alleged killer; actually, it was more than a allegation, for in fact the man had confessed. They were going to stage a re-enactment in a couple of days. Did I want to be present? Oh yes, I said, yes.

Marie-Jeanne congratulated me on this courageous decision. She talked about the grieving process, the mysteries of the father-son relationship. She used socially acceptable terms from a limited catalogue, what was more important, even surprising, was that I realized that she was fond of me, and it felt good. Women really do have a handle on affection, I thought as I boarded the Cherbourg train; even at work, they have a tendency to establish emotional ties, finding it difficult to orient themselves, let alone thrive, in a universe completely stripped of such emotional ties, they find it difficult to thrive in such an atmosphere. This was a weakness of theirs, as the 'psychology' column of Marie-Claire continually reminded them: it would be better if they could clearly separate the professional from the emotional, but they simply could not do it, and the 'true stories' column of Marie-Claire confirmed with equal regularity. Somewhere near Rouen, I reviewed the essential facts of the case. Chaumont's breakthrough was the discovery that Aicha had been having 'intimate relations' with my father. How often, and how intimate? He didn't know, and it had no significance to his continuing inquiry. One of Aicha's brothers had quickly confessed that he had come 'to demand an explanation' of the old man, things had got out of hand, and he had left him for dead on the concrete floor of the boiler room.

In principle, the re-enactment was to be presided over by the examining magistrate, a brusque, austere little man, dressed in flannel trousers and a dark polo-neck, his face permanently clenched in a rictus of irritation; but Chaumont quickly established himself as the real master of ceremonies. Briskly and cheerfully he greeted the participants, gave each a little word of welcome, and led them to their places: he seemed remarkably happy. This was his first murder case and he'd solved it in less than a week; in this whole banal, sordid story, he was the only true hero. Clearly overcome, a black band covering her face, Aicha sat on a chair trying to look small. She barely looked up when I arrived, pointedly looking away from where her brother was standing. Her brother, flanked by two policemen, stared at the floor with an obstinate air. He looked just like a common little thug; I didn't feel the slightest sympathy for him. Looking up, his eyes met mine; no doubt he knew who I was, He knew my role, he had undoubtedly been told: according to his brutal view of the world, I had a right to vengeance, I deserved an accounting for the blood of my father. Aware of the rapport establishing itself between us, I stared at him, not turning away; I allowed hatred to overwhelm me slowly, my breathing became easier, it was a powerful, pleasurable sensation. If I had had a gun, I would have shot him without a second thought. Killing that little shit not only seemed to me a morally neutral act, but something positive, beneficial. A policeman made some marks on the floor with a piece of chalk, and the re-enactment began. According to the accused, it was very simple: during the conversation, he had become angry and pushed my father roughly; the latter had fallen backwards, his skull had shattered on the floor; he panicked, he fled.

Of course he was lying, and Chaumont had no trouble establishing this. An examination of the victim's skull clearly indicated a furious attack; there were multiple contusions, probably the result of a series of kicks. Furthermore, my father's face had been scraped along the ground, almost sufficient to force the eye from its socket. 'I don't remember . . .' said the accused man; 'I lost it.' Watching his nervous arms, his thin, horrible face, it wasn't difficult to believe him: he hadn't planned this, he was probably excited by the impact of the skull on the ground and the sight of first blood. His defence was lucid and credible, he would probably come across well in front of a jury: a two-or three-year suspended sentence, no more. Chaumont, pleased with the way the afternoon had gone, began to bring things to a conclusion. I got up from my chair and walked over to one of the picture windows. It was getting dark: a flock of sheep were bringing their day to a close. They too were stupid; possibly even more stupid than Aicha's brother; but violence had not been programmed into their genes. On the last night of their lives they would bleat in terror, their hoofs would scrabble desperately; there would be a gunshot, their lives would seep away and their flesh would be transformed into meat. We parted with a round of handshakes; Chaumont thanked me for coming.

I saw Aicha the following day; on the advice of the estate agent, I had decided to have the house thoroughly cleaned before it was viewed. I gave her the keys, then she dropped me off at Cherbourg station. Winter was taking hold of the farmlands, clouds of mist hung over the hedges. We were uncomfortable being together. She had been familiar with my father's genitals, which tended to create a certain misplaced intimacy. It was all rather surprising: she seemed like a serious girl, and my father was hardly a ladies' man. He must have had certain traits, certain characteristics that I had failed to notice; in fact I was finding it difficult to remember his face. Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze.

Aicha's Volkswagen stopped in front of the station; I was aware that it would be best to say a few words before we parted. 'Well:. .' I said. After a few seconds, she spoke to me in a subdued voice: 'I'm going to leave the area. I've got a friend who can get me a job as a waitress in Paris; I can continue my studies there. In any case, my family think I'm a whore.' I made a murmur of comprehension. 'There are a lot more people in Paris. . .' I finally ventured with difficulty; I'd racked my brains, but that was all I could think of to say about Paris. The acute poverty of my response did not seem to discourage her. 'There's no point expecting anything from my family,' she went on with suppressed fury. 'They're not only poor, they're bloody stupid. Two years ago, my father went on the pilgrimage to Mecca; since then, you can't get a word out of him. My brothers are worse: they encourage each other's stupidity. They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.'