The Map and the Territory (19 page)

There then followed two to three minutes of mute frenzy, as they took the profiteroles one by one from the decorated box provided by the
pâtissier
and promptly ate them. Then things calmed down, and Jed proposed coffee. His father accepted immediately.

“I feel like smoking a cigarette,” he said. “Do you have any?”

“I don’t smoke,” Jed said, and leapt up. “But I can go out for them. I know a tobacconist on the place d’Italie that’s open late in the evening. And then …” He consulted his watch in disbelief. “It’s only eight.”

“Even on Christmas Eve, you think they’re open?”

“I can try.”

He put on his coat. Outside, he was struck by a violent blast of wind; snowflakes were swirling around in the freezing air. It must have been
several degrees below zero. On the place d’Italie, the
bar-tabac
was closing. The owner returned to his counter, grumbling.

“What will it be?”

“Cigarettes.”

“What brand?”

“I don’t know. Some good cigarettes.”

The man looked at him furiously.

“Dunhill! Some Dunhill and some Gitanes! And a lighter!”

His father hadn’t moved, still shrunk in his chair, and didn’t even react on hearing the door open. Nevertheless, he took a Gitane from the pack and looked at it with curiosity before lighting up. “It’s twenty years since I last smoked,” he remarked. “But what’s the importance of all that now?” He drew a puff, then another. “It’s strong,” he said. “It’s good. When I was young, everybody smoked. In meetings, discussions in the cafés, we smoked all the time. It’s funny how things change …”

He sipped the cognac his son had placed in front of him, then again fell silent. In the silence, Jed could make out the increasingly violent whistling of the wind. He looked through the window: the snowflakes were swirling, very dense; it was turning into a real storm.

“I always wanted to be an architect, I think,” his father continued. “When I was small I was interested in animals, like all children probably; when asked I would say I wanted to become a vet later in life, but deep down I think I was already attracted by architecture. At the age of ten, I remember, I tried to build a nest for the swallows who spent the summer in the shed. In an encyclopedia I’d found some indications on how swallows built their nests, with earth and saliva. I spent weeks on it …” His voice quavered slightly and he stopped again. Jed looked at him worriedly, but then he took a big sip of cognac before continuing.

“But they never wanted to use my nest. Never. They even stopped nesting in the shed …” The old man suddenly began to cry. Tears were pouring down his face and it was awful.

“Dad,” Jed said, completely distraught. “Dad.” It seemed he could no longer stop crying. “Swallows never use nests built by human hand,” Jed said very quickly, “it’s impossible. If a man so much as touches their nest, they leave it to build a new one.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it a few years ago in a book on animal behavior—I’d done some research for a painting.”

This was untrue, he’d read nothing of the sort, but his father seemed instantly relieved and calmed down immediately. And to think, Jed thought, that he had been carrying this weight on his heart for more than sixty years … that it had probably plagued him throughout his career as an architect …

“After the baccalaureate, I matriculated at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. That worried my mother a little, she would’ve preferred that I’d gone to an engineering school; but I received a lot of support from my grandfather. I think he had an artistic ambition, as a photographer, but he never had the chance to photograph anything other than marriages and communions.”

Jed had never seen his father busy with anything other than technical problems, and at the end more and more with financial problems; the idea that his father had also gone to Beaux-Arts, that architecture belonged to the artistic disciplines, was surprising, and it made Jed uncomfortable.

“Yes, I too wanted to be an
artist
,” his father said acrimoniously, almost nastily. “But I didn’t succeed. The dominant current when I was young was functionalism, and in truth it had already been dominating everything for several decades. Nothing had happened in architecture since Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. All the new towns, all the housing estates that were built in the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s were marked by their influence. With a few others, at the Beaux-Arts, we had the ambition to do something different. We didn’t really reject the primacy of function, nor the notion of a ‘machine for living,’ but what we were challenging was what was meant by the fact of living somewhere. Like the Marxists, like the liberals, Le Corbusier was a productivist. What he imagined for man were square, utilitarian blocks of offices, with no decoration whatsoever, and residential buildings that were almost identical, with a few supplementary functions—nursery, gymnasium, swimming pool. Between the two were fast lanes. In his cell for living, man was to benefit from pure air and light; this was very important in his view. And between the structures of work and habitation, free space was reserved for wild nature: forests, rivers. I imagine that, in his
mind, human families would be able to walk there on Sundays, but he nonetheless wanted to conserve this space, he was a sort of
proto-ecologist
. For him mankind had to confine itself to circumscribed modules of habitation, which were in the midst of nature, but which in no case should modify it. It’s terrifyingly primitive when you think about it, a terrifying regression from any true rural landscape, which is a subtle, complex, and evolving mixture of meadows, fields, forests, and villages. It’s the vision of a brutal, totalitarian mind. Le Corbusier seemed to us both totalitarian and brutal, motivated by an intense taste for ugliness; but it’s his vision that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. As for us, on the other hand, we were influenced by Charles Fourier …” He smiled on seeing the surprise on his son’s face. “We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite comical. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army. It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a
thinker
, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a
guru
, the first of his kind; and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organization of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work? What makes him occupy a determined place in the social structure and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple; we thought this was an inadequate reply. As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the ancien régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard,
without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of a modern man, much vaguer: the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honor of the function.”

Jed’s father stopped speaking and noticed that his son was now listening to him with rapt attention. “Yes,” he commented, “there’s doubtless a rapport with what you’ve tried to do in your paintings. There’s a lot of rubbish in Fourier’s work, and overall it’s almost unreadable; there is, however, still something to be drawn from it. Well, at least that’s what we thought at the time …”

He fell quiet, and seemed to plunge back into his memories. The gusts of wind had calmed down, making way for a starry, silent sky; a thick layer of snow covered the rooftops.

“I was young,” he finally said with a sort of serene incredulity. “Maybe you can’t completely understand this, because you were born into a family that was already rich. But I was young, I was preparing to become an architect, and I was in Paris—everything seemed possible. And I wasn’t the only one. Paris was gay at the time, and you had the impression you could remake the world. It’s there that I met your mother—she was studying at the Conservatoire, she played violin. We were like a band of artists, really. Well, that was limited to writing four or five articles in an architecture review, which several of us signed. They were political texts, mainly. We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organization, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe—who made empty, multipurpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses—and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces, divided into identical cells that were suited, we wrote, only for model prisons. These articles had a certain impact—I think Deleuze spoke about them—but we all had to work, and we entered the big architectural practices, and life immediately became much less fun. Quite quickly my financial situation improved, as there was a lot of work at the time with France rebuilding herself at high speed. I bought the house in Raincy; I thought it was a good idea, and back then it was a pleasant town. I also got it for a very good price—it was a client who put me onto it, a property developer. The owner was an old guy, visibly an intellectual, still in a gray
three-piece suit with a flower in the buttonhole—every day I saw him it was a different flower. He looked like he’d stepped out of the Belle Époque, or the 1930s at the latest. I couldn’t fit him with his environment. You could’ve imagined coming across him, I don’t know, on the quai Voltaire … well, certainly not in Raincy. He was a former university professor, specializing in esoterism and the history of religions—I remember he was very clued in on the Kabbalah and gnosis, but he was interested in this in a very particular way. For example, he had nothing but contempt for René Guénon. ‘That imbecile Guénon,’ that’s how he spoke about him. I think he’d written several virulent critiques of his books. He’d never been married, he’d
lived for his work
, as we say. I read a long article he’d written in a social-science journal, in which he developed some quite curious considerations on fate, on the possibility of developing a new religion based on the principle of synchronicity. His library alone would have been worth the price of the house, I think—there were more than five thousand volumes, in French, English, and German. It’s there that I discovered the works of William Morris.”

He stopped on seeing a change in Jed’s expression.

“You know William Morris?”

“No, Dad. But I also lived in that house, and I remember the library …” He hesitated and sighed. “I don’t understand why you’ve waited so many years to tell me about all this.”

“It’s because I’m going to die soon, I think,” his father said simply. “Well, not straightaway, not the day after tomorrow, but it’s obvious I don’t have very long left.” He looked around him and smiled almost cheerily. “Can I have some more cognac?” Jed served him immediately. He lit a Gitane, inhaling the smoke with delight.

“And then your mother became pregnant with you. The end of her pregnancy went badly, she had to have a cesarean. The doctor informed her that she would no longer be able to have children; what’s more, she had some quite terrible scars. That was hard for her; she was a beautiful woman, you know … We weren’t unhappy together, and never had any serious arguments, but it’s true I didn’t speak to her enough. There’s the violin as well. I think she should never have stopped playing. I remember one evening at the porte de Bagnolet, I was coming back from work in my Mercedes, it was already nine o’clock but there were still traffic jams. I don’t know what triggered it, maybe the Mercuriale towers, because
I was working on a very similar project, which I found ugly and uninteresting, but I saw myself in my car in the middle of these fast-entry slip roads, in front of those appalling buildings, and all of a sudden I told myself I couldn’t go on. I was nearly forty, my professional life was a success, but I couldn’t go on. In a few minutes I decided to start my own business, to try and practice architecture as I understood it. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t want to die without at least trying. I called on the ex-students I knew at the Beaux-Arts, but all of them had settled down—they’d succeeded too, and no longer wanted to take risks. So, I launched into it on my own. I made contact again with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, we’d met a few years before and got on rather well, and he introduced me to people interested in free figuration: Combas, Di Rosa … I don’t know if I’ve already spoken to you about William Morris?”

“Yes, you just mentioned him five minutes ago.”

“Ah?” He stopped, and a lost expression crossed his face. “I’m going to try a Dunhill.” He took a few puffs. “It’s good as well; different from the Gitanes, but it’s good. I don’t understand why everyone has given up smoking all of a sudden.”

He savored the rest of his cigarette without speaking. Jed was waiting. Very far away outside, a solitary klaxon was trying to play “Il est né, le divin enfant” but got the notes wrong and started again; then silence returned—there was no concert of klaxons. On the roofs across Paris, the snow was now thick, stabilized; there was something definitive in this stillness, Jed thought.