The Map and the Territory (28 page)

The funeral had been arranged for the following Monday. On this subject the writer had left extremely precise instructions, which he had put in his will, accompanied by the necessary sum. He did not wish to be cremated, but very classically buried. “I want the worms to free my skeleton,” he added, allowing himself a personal note in an otherwise very official text. “I have always had excellent relations with my skeleton, and I am delighted that it can free itself from its straitjacket of flesh.” He wanted to be buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, and had even bought the plot in advance, which by chance was a few meters away from that of Emmanuel Bove.

Jasselin and Ferber were both
quite good
at funerals. Often dressed in somber colors, slightly emaciated, and with a naturally pale complexion, Ferber had no difficulty in putting on the sadness and gravitas required in these circumstances; as for Jasselin, his exhausted, resigned attitude of a man who knows life, and no longer has any illusions about it, was also completely appropriate. They had, in fact, already attended together quite a few funerals, sometimes of victims, more often of colleagues: some who had committed suicide, others who had died in the course of duty—and the latter was the most impressive kind: there was generally the award of a medal which was solemnly pinned to the coffin, and the presence of a high-ranking official or even the minister; in short, with all the honors of the republic.

They met at ten in the police station in the sixth arrondissement; through the windows of the reception rooms of the town hall, which had been opened to them for the occasion, there was a very good view onto the place Saint-Sulpice. It had been discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that the author of
The Elementary Particles
, who throughout his life had displayed an intransigent atheism, had very discreetly been baptized, in a church in Courtenay, six months before. This news drew the ecclesiastical authorities out of a painful uncertainty: for obvious media reasons, they did not want to be kept away from the funerals of personalities; but the regular progress of atheism, the steady fall in the rate of baptism and even baptisms of pure convenience, and the rigid perpetuation of their rules led them more and more often to this disheartening solution.

Alerted by e-mail, the cardinal archbishop of Paris enthusiastically gave his agreement to a mass, which would take place at eleven. He himself wrote the homily, which emphasized the universal human value of the novelist’s work and recalled only very discreetly, as a coda, his secret baptism in the church in Courtenay. The whole ceremony, with the communion and the other fundamentals, was to last about an hour; it was therefore at about midday that Houellebecq would be
led to his last resting place
.

There too, Ferber informed him, he had left very precise instructions, going as far as designing his gravestone: a simple black basalt tombstone, at ground level; he insisted on the fact that it was not to be raised at all, even by a few centimeters. The tombstone carried his name, without dates or any other facts, and the design of a Möbius strip. He’d had it made before his death, by a Parisian marble mason, and had personally overseen the work.

“So,” Jasselin remarked, “he didn’t think he was a piece of shit.”

“He was right,” Ferber replied softly. “He wasn’t a bad writer, you know …”

Jasselin immediately felt ashamed of his remark, formulated without any real reason. What Houellebecq had done for himself was no more, and even rather less, than what would have been done by any notable of
the nineteenth century, or any minor nobleman of previous centuries. Indeed, when he thought about it, he realized that he totally disapproved of the modest, modern trend, consisting of having yourself cremated and your ashes scattered somewhere in the heart of the countryside, as if to show more clearly that you were returning to its bosom and mixing again with the elements. And even in the case of his dog, who died five years before, he’d made a point of burying it—placing next to its little corpse, at the moment of burial, a toy he’d particularly liked—and erecting a modest monument to it, in the garden of his parents’ house, in Brittany, where his father himself had died the previous year, and which he had chosen not to sell, with the idea perhaps that they, he and Hélène, would go and spend their retirement there. Man
was not a part of
nature, he had raised himself above nature, and the dog, since its domestication, had also raised itself above it, that’s what he thought in his heart of hearts. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him
impious
, even though he didn’t believe in God, the more it seemed to him in some way
anthropologically impious
, to scatter the ashes of a human being on the fields, the rivers or the sea, or even, as he remembered had been done by that clown Alain Gillot-Pétré, who had been considered in his time as having
given a flush of youth
to weather reporting on television, in the eye of a cyclone. A human being had a conscience, a unique, individual, and irreplaceable conscience, and thus deserved a monument, a stele, or at least an inscription—well, something which asserts and bears witness to his existence for future centuries; that’s what Jasselin truly believed.

“They’re coming,” Ferber said softly, drawing him out of his meditation. Indeed, although it was only half past ten, about thirty people had already gathered in front of the entrance to the church. Who could they be? Some anonymous people, Houellebecq’s readers. It could happen, mainly in the case of murders committed for revenge, that the criminal would come and attend his victim’s funeral. He didn’t believe it was the case here, but he had nonetheless arranged for two photographers, two men from the criminal records office who had taken up position in a flat in the rue Froidevaux that offered a perfect view of the cemetery of Montparnasse, equipped with cameras and telescopic lenses.

Ten minutes later, he saw Teresa Cremisi and Frédéric Beigbeder
arrive on foot. They caught sight of each other and embraced. With her oriental physique, the publisher could have been one of those hired mourners who were until very recently employed at certain Mediterranean funerals; and Beigbeder seemed deep in particularly dark thoughts. In fact, although the author of
A French Novel
was only fifty-one at the time, and it was undoubtedly one of the first funerals he’d had the occasion to attend for someone of his generation, he had to think that it was far from being the last; that, increasingly, phone conversations with his friends would no longer start with the expression “What are you doing tonight?” but rather with “Guess who died.”

Discreetly, Jasselin and Ferber left the town hall and came to mingle with the group. About fifty people had now gathered. At five to eleven, the hearse drew up in front of the church—a simple black van from the municipal funeral directors. When the two employees took out the coffin, a murmur of consternation and horror went through the crowd. The investigators from the criminal records office had had a trying task gathering together the rags of skin scattered at the crime scene, grouping them together in hermetically sealed plastic bags which they had sent, with the intact head, to Paris. Once the examinations were finished, all of it formed only a small compact pile, of a volume far inferior to that of an ordinary human corpse, and the employees of the municipal funeral service had judged it right to use a child’s coffin, one meter twenty in length. This will to rationality was perhaps praiseworthy in principle, but the effect it had, when the two employees took the coffin out onto the church steps, was absolutely awful. Jasselin heard Ferber stifle a gulp of sorrow, and he himself, as hardened as he was, had a heavy heart; several people present had broken down in tears.

As usual, the mass itself was for Jasselin a moment of total boredom. He had lost all contact with the Catholic faith at the age of ten and, despite the great number of funerals he had attended, he had never succeeded in returning to it. Basically he understood nothing about it, he did not even see exactly what the priest wanted to talk about; there were mentions of Jerusalem which seemed to him irrelevant, but which must have had a symbolic meaning, he thought. However, he did feel that the rite seemed
appropriate
, that the promises concerning a future life were in this case obviously welcome. The intervention of the Church was basically much more legitimate in the case of a funeral than in
that of a birth, or a marriage. There it was perfectly in its element; it had
something to say
about death, whereas about love this was more doubtful.

At a funeral, the close members of the family usually stand by the coffin to receive condolences; but here there was no family. Once mass had been said, the two employees again took the little coffin—once more, a shiver of sadness ran through Jasselin—and put it back in the van. To his great surprise, about fifty people were waiting, on the steps, for them to leave the church—probably those readers of Houellebecq who were allergic to any religious ceremony.

Nothing special had been put in place, no blocking of the streets, no traffic control, so the hearse left directly for Montparnasse cemetery, and it was on the sidewalks that about a hundred people made the same journey, along the Jardin du Luxembourg, through the rue Guynemer, then taking the rue Vavin, the rue Bréa, for a moment going up the boulevard Raspail before cutting through the rue Huyghens. Jasselin and Ferber had joined them. There were people of all ages and all backgrounds, most often alone, sometimes in couples; basically people that nothing in particular seemed to unite, in whom no common trait could be discerned, and Jasselin suddenly had the certainty that they were wasting their time. They were readers of Houellebecq and that was all. It was implausible that anyone involved in the murder would be among them. Too bad, he thought; it was at least a pleasant walk; weather was keeping fine in the Paris region, the sky was a deep, almost winter blue.

Probably briefed by the priest, the gravediggers had waited for them to start shoveling. In front of the grave, Jasselin’s enthusiasm for funerals grew again, to the point where he took the firm and definitive decision to be buried himself, and to phone his solicitor the following day and have this made explicit in his will. The first shovelfuls of earth fell on the coffin. A lone woman, aged about thirty, threw a white rose—they’re good all the same, women, he said to himself. They think of things that men don’t have a clue about. In a cremation there are always noises of
machinery, the gas burners which make a terrifying din, while here the silence was almost total, troubled only by the reassuring sound of the shovelfuls of earth landing on the wood, spreading out gently on the surface of the coffin. At the center of the cemetery, the noise of the traffic was almost imperceptible. As the earth gradually filled the grave, the noise became more muffled and dull; then the tombstone was laid.

He received the photos the following day, mid-morning. The investigators from the criminal records office might well have annoyed Jasselin with their arrogance, but he had to acknowledge that they generally provided excellent work. The pictures were clear, well lit, in excellent definition despite the distance, and you could recognize perfectly the features of each of the people who had bothered to go to the writer’s funeral. The prints were accompanied by a memory stick containing the photos in digital form. He immediately sent this to the Investigation Brigade by internal mail, with a note asking them to check them against databases with photos of criminals; they were now equipped with face-recognition software which allowed them to carry out the operation in a few minutes. He didn’t have much hope, but you had to at least try.

He got the results early that evening, when he was preparing to return home; they were, as he expected, negative. At the same time, the Investigation Brigade had added a summary of about thirty pages concerning the contents of Houellebecq’s computer—whose codes they had finally succeeded in breaking. He took it with him to study at home in peace.

He was greeted by the yappings of Michou, who leapt around for about a quarter of an hour, and by the aroma of cod
à la galicienne
—Hélène tried
to vary the flavors, passing from Burgundian to Alsatian, from Provençal to Southwestern; she was also good at Italian, Turkish, and Moroccan, and had just joined a workshop initiating her to Far Eastern dishes that was organized by the municipality of the fifth arrondissement. He came over to kiss her; she had put on a pretty silk dress. “It’s ready in ten minutes, if you like,” she said. She looked relaxed, happy, as she always did when she didn’t have to go in to the university—the All Saints’ Day holidays had just begun. Hélène’s interest in economics had waned considerably over the years. More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast of the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor as chemistry, or physics. And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. The only reply, she knew in her heart of hearts, was that they wanted to make money, as much money as possible; aside from a few short-term humanitarian fads, that was the only thing that really got them going. Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins, even if she avoided formulating it to herself in terms that stark. She had planned to take early retirement as soon as Jean-Pierre left the crime squad—he was not in the same state of mind and still liked his job just as much. Evil and crime appeared to him to be subjects just as urgent and essential as when he’d started, twenty-eight years before.