The Man Who Risked It All (6 page)

“In my opinion, the best way is to learn to do something else. Again, if pretending to be the victim is your best bet, it’s clearly because your brain doesn’t have many other possibilities. Therefore, you must develop some. You know, nature abhors a vacuum. So if you simply try to suppress the victim role and don’t know how to do anything else in its place, it won’t work. You’ll resist the change. The best thing is to discover that you
can
do something different. Then, I’m confident, your brain will quickly choose the new option of its own accord, if it brings you more advantages.”

“And what will this new option be?”

“Well, I’m going to teach you to get what you want on a daily basis. If you succeed, you won’t need to pretend to be the victim. Listen, I know it was only an anecdote, but you staggered me yesterday when you told me your lack of luck pursued you even in an insignificant act of everyday life like buying bread at the baker’s. You said you regularly get bread that’s got a hard crust but you prefer it soft!”

“That’s right.”

“You must be kidding! That means you’re not even capable of saying, ‘The crust on this one is overdone. May I have that one next to it?’”

“Of course, I’m capable of it! It’s just that I don’t want to put the baker out when there’s a shop full of customers waiting. That’s all.”

“But it would take only two seconds! You prefer eating crusty bread that you don’t like to taking two seconds of the baker’s time! No, the truth is, you don’t dare tell him. You are afraid of annoying him to get what you want. You’re afraid that he’ll think you are demanding and unpleasant, that he won’t like you. And you’re afraid that the other customers will be annoyed.”

“It’s possible.”

“On your deathbed you’ll be able to say, ‘I made nothing of my life. I got none of the things I wanted, but everybody thought I was nice.’ Brilliant.”

I was beginning to feel decidedly ill. I looked away from this man with his upsetting words and allowed my gaze to wander over the buildings, shops, and people we were passing by.

“I have some great news,” he went on.

Skeptical, I didn’t even bother to look at him.

“The great news is that all that is in the past. What’s more, you’ll never again eat crusty bread. Never,” he said, looking around. “Vladi, stop.”

The chauffeur stopped the car and turned on the hazard lights. Cars passed us, sounding their horns.

“What do you want from in there?” Dubreuil asked, pointing to a bakery.

“At this moment, nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Good. So you’re going to go in, ask for a loaf, a cake, anything, and when it’s given to you, you’ll find a reason to refuse it and ask for something else. Then you’ll invent another reason to refuse the second item, then the third and the fourth. And then you’ll say that, after all, you don’t want anything, and you’ll leave without buying a thing.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. In a few minutes, you’ll have proved it.”

“It’s beyond me.”

“Vladi!”

The chauffeur got out, opened the door for me, and waited. I looked daggers at Dubreuil and then reluctantly got out. A glance at the bakery: the crowd before closing time. I felt my heart beating at top speed.

Inside, it was a hive of activity. I stood in line as if I were waiting for my turn to mount the scaffold. It was the first time since my arrival in France that the smell of fresh bread had repelled me. The shop assistant repeated the customers’ orders to the woman at the cash register, who repeated them out loud as she took the money. Meanwhile, the assistant was already taking care of the next customer. It was like a well-rehearsed ballet performance. When it was my turn, there were already eight or ten customers behind me. I swallowed hard.

“Monsieur?” she asked me in her very high-pitched voice.

“A baguette, please.”

My voice was muffled, as though stuck in my throat.

“A baguette for monsieur!”

“One euro ten cents,” said the cashier.

The shop assistant was already talking to the next customer.

“Madame?”

“A
pain au chocolat.
”

“A
pain au chocolat
for Madame!”

“Excuse me, would you have one less well done, please?” I forced myself to say.

“One euro twenty for Madame.”

“Here you are,” said the assistant, holding out another loaf. “Mademoiselle, it’s your turn.”

“A sliced sandwich loaf, please,” Mademoiselle said.

“Hmm, excuse me. I’ll have a bran loaf, actually,” I squeaked.

The slicing machine drowned out my voice. She didn’t hear me.

“A sliced sandwich loaf for the lady!”

“One euro eighty.”

“Madame?” the shop assistant asked the next customer.

“No, excuse me,” I said, slightly louder. “I’ll have a bran loaf, actually.”

“And a bran loaf with the baguette for monsieur!”

“That’ll be three euros fifteen then,” said the cashier.

“Young man, it’s your turn,” the shop assistant said to the next in line.

“No,” I said. “It was
instead of
the baguette, not in addition.”

“Two loaves,” the young man called out.

“Right, that’s two euros five cents for the gentleman, and two euros ten for the young man.”

“Madame?” said the shop assistant.

I felt awful. I didn’t have the heart to carry on. A glance toward the car. The chauffeur was standing beside it, his arms folded. He wasn’t taking his eyes off me.

“Half a baguette, well done,” said an old lady.

“Excuse me,” I said to the assistant, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry, but I’d rather have a half-baguette as well.”

“Make up your mind,” she said in her very high-pitched voice, taking the other half of the baguette she had cut for the old lady.

I was very hot. I was sweating under my suit.

“Sixty cents for the old lady and the same for the gentleman.”

“Madame?” the shop assistant asked.

“I’m still thinking,” said a young woman who was looking at the cakes with an obvious feeling of guilt.

She must be counting the number of calories in each one,
I thought.

“Another problem, monsieur?” the assistant asked, suspiciously.

“Look, I’m really sorry. I know I’m out of line, but a sandwich loaf. I think I want a sandwich loaf. Yes, that’s it! A sandwich loaf!”

She stared at me with obvious annoyance. I didn’t dare turn around, but I had a feeling the customers stuck behind me were about to grab me by the collar and throw me out. She sighed, and then turned around to get the sandwich loaf.

“Hang on! Stop! No, actually …”

“Yes?” the assistant said in a choked voice, no doubt on the verge of hysterics.

“I want … nothing. Actually, I don’t want anything. Thank you … sorry … thank you.”

I turned on my heels and walked past the line of customers, head down, without looking at them. At the door, I broke into a run, feeling like a thief.

The chauffeur was waiting with the car door open, as if I were a VIP, but I felt as ashamed as a little boy who has just been caught trying to steal a sweet from a stall. I dived into the Mercedes in a sweat.

“You’re as red as an Englishman who’s just spent an hour in the sun on the Riviera,” said Dubreuil, visibly amused.

“It’s not funny. Really not funny.”

“Anyhow, you see, you did it.”

I didn’t answer. The car moved off.

“Perhaps I went a bit far for a first time,” he acknowledged. “But I promise you that in a few weeks you’ll be able to do it and treat it as a joke.”

“But it doesn’t interest me! I don’t want to become a pain in the neck! I can’t
bear
people who are a pain in the neck, who are too demanding and piss everyone off. I don’t want to be like them!”

“It’s not about you becoming a pain in the neck. I won’t make you go from one extreme to the other. I just want you to know how to get what you want, even if you have to put people out a bit. But he who can do more, can do less. I’m going to push you to do a bit more than necessary, so that later you’ll be quite at ease asking for what it’s normal for you to want.”

“So, what’s the next stage?”

“For the next few days, you will visit at least three bakeries a day, and you will ask for two changes of what you’re given. It’ll be easy.”

Compared with what I’d just done, that did indeed seem acceptable.

“For how long do I have to do this?”

“Until it becomes quite natural for you, requiring no effort. And remember, you can be demanding and still remain nice. You don’t have to be unpleasant.”

The Mercedes pulled up in front of my apartment. Vladi got out and opened the door for me.

“Good evening,” said Dubreuil.

I didn’t answer.

Étienne emerged from under the staircase and stared at the car.

“Well, someone’s doing all right for himself,” he said, coming up to me. He took off his hat and pretended to sweep the sidewalk in front of me, backing up as I advanced. “Monsieur le Président,” he said with an extra flourish.

I felt obliged to give him some money.

“His Highness is too kind,” he said in his hoarse voice, executing an exaggeratedly reverential bow.

He had the crafty look of someone who always gets what he wants.

Yves Dubreuil took out his cell phone and pushed two keys.

“Good evening, Catherine, it’s me.”

“Well?”

“For the time being, he’s obeying. Everything’s as planned.”

“I don’t think it’ll last very long. I have considerable doubts.”

“You always have doubts, Catherine.”

“He’ll rebel in the end.”

“You say that because if you were in his place, you’d rebel.”

“Perhaps.”

“At any rate, I’ve never seen anyone so frightened of his own shadow.”

“That’s what worries me so much. That’s why I think he will never have the courage to do all you’re going to demand of him.”

“On the contrary. His fear can help us.”

“How come?”

“If he doesn’t want to go on, we’ll make sure he does … out of fear.”

Silence.

“You’re formidable, Igor.”

“Yes.”

4

A
FTER A WEEK
, I knew all the bakeries in my district, the 18th arrondissement. In the end, I observed that the best bread was to be had in the bakery I usually patronized, next to my apartment. Now I was buying three baguettes a day and off-loading my surplus stock on Étienne. Delighted at first, he had the cheek to tell me after five days that he was fed up with eating bread.

Human beings are made in such a way that we get used to almost anything. I have to admit that what had demanded a superhuman effort to begin with needed mere resolve by the end of a week. All the same, I had to consciously prepare myself for the bakery routine. One evening, I met my neighbor at the baker’s, and we talked as we stood in line. When my turn came and I was served an overcooked baguette, I didn’t have the reflex to refuse it. Being distracted by my conversation was enough to make me revert to my old habit of automatically accepting what was given to me. In short, I was being well looked after, but I was still not cured.

My office life carried on, more dismal than ever. Was it to try and make up for the deterioration in the atmosphere that Luc Fausteri suggested that the consultants on his team join him every morning at 8
A.M.
for a run? I was sure this ludicrous idea wasn’t his. He must have found it in a team-building book under a heading like
How to change your employees into winners.
The plan had obviously been approved by those higher up, however, since his boss, Grégoire Larcher, had okayed the installation of communal showers in the building.

So it was that most of the consultants found themselves every morning inhaling exhaust from the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue de Rivoli, or the scarcely less polluted air of the Tuileries Gardens. They ran without saying a word, my boss being about as talkative as a funeral director. In any case, the purpose of the exercise was no doubt to stimulate everyone’s ardor, not to develop camaraderie. Fausteri kept his distance from us as always. I had managed the feat of declining his offer, and no doubt the shop assistants in the bakeries of the 18th arrondissement had a share in this achievement. My painful experience at baseball had turned me off sports, and mixing with a group of out-of-breath men feeling virile because they’re exercising was more than I was capable of.

I arrived at the office each day at 8:55
A.M.
so that I would already be hard at work when the team returned from its morning exploits. That way, the message was clear: While you’re prancing about, some of us are slaving away. That way, I was beyond reproach. Even so, the level of reproach had risen perceptibly. Having had an original idea for once, Fausteri was no doubt vexed that I wasn’t falling in line. He began to pick on me, to make remarks incessantly about anything or nothing, from the color of my shirts to the amount of time I spent on each interview.

But the crucial point was the number of recruitment contracts signed. Since our role as salesmen had taken on more importance than searching for candidates, we had been allocated individual business targets, with commissions tied to our sales. Now our department had a business meeting every Monday morning. The decision probably hadn’t come from Fausteri. Very introverted, he hated mixing with us. Larcher must have forced him to do it. But Luc Fausteri was very clever and had succeeded in evading the thankless task of leading the weekly meeting. Larcher managed it himself, which suited him; he liked to be involved in everything. Fausteri made do with remaining silently at his side, playing the role of the aloof expert who only opened his mouth when absolutely necessary. He would regard us with a mildly condescending gaze, wondering no doubt why the simple-minded always repeat the same idiotic remarks.