The Map and the Territory (7 page)

“I’m very happy to work on this project …” Marylin announced in a whiny voice. “Deeply happy.”

Olga, bending down to try and match her height, felt atrociously uncomfortable and ended up indicating to them a small conference room next to her office. “I’ll let you get on with your work,” she said before leaving with relief. Marylin took out an oversize diary and two packs of tissues before continuing.

“First of all, I studied geography. Then I turned toward human geography. And now I am exclusively into humans. Well, if you can call them human beings,” she added.

She initially wanted to know if he had any “pet media” as far as the written press was concerned. This certainly wasn’t the case; in fact, Jed couldn’t remember ever buying a newspaper or a magazine. He liked television, especially in the morning. You could comfortably jump from cartoons to news from the stock exchange; occasionally, when a subject particularly interested him, he connected to the Internet. But the printed press seemed a strange remnant, probably doomed in the short term, and whose interest in any case escaped him.

“Okay …” Marylin commented politely. “So, I suppose I have more or less carte blanche.”

She did indeed have carte blanche, and used it to the best of her ability. When they went into the hall in the avenue de Breteuil on the evening of the
vernissage
, Olga was shocked. “There’s a lot of people,” she finally said, impressed. “Yes, people have come along,” Marylin confirmed with a muted satisfaction that seemed bizarrely mixed with rancor. There were about a hundred people, but what she meant was that there were some important people, and how could you know that? The only person Jed knew by sight was Patrick Forestier, Olga’s immediate superior, the director of communications for Michelin France, a typical product of the École Polytechnique who had spent three hours trying to dress
artistically
, going through his entire wardrobe before opting for one of his usual gray suits—worn without a tie.

The entrance to the hall was barred by a big panel, leaving two-meters-wide passageways at either side, on which Jed had displayed a satellite photo taken around the mountain of Guebwiller next to an enlargement of a Michelin Departments map of the same zone. The contrast was striking: while the photograph showed only a soup of more or less uniform green sprinkled with vague blue spots, the map developed a fascinating maze of departmental and scenic roads,
viewpoints
, forests, lakes, and cols. Above the two enlargements, in black capital letters, was the title of the exhibition: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.

In the hall itself, on big movable walls, Jed had hung about thirty photographic enlargements—all borrowed from Michelin Departments maps, but choosing the most varied geographical zones, from the high mountains to the Breton coast, from the bocage of the Manche to the cereal-growing plains of Eure-et-Loir. Flanked by Olga and Jed, Marylin stopped on the threshold to observe the crowd of journalists, personalities, and critics like a predator surveys a herd of antelope at a watering hole.

“Pépita Bourguignon is there,” she finally said with a dry sneer.

“Bourguignon?” asked Jed.

“The art critic for
Le Monde
.”

He almost stupidly repeated “For the world?” before remembering that it was an evening newspaper, and resolved to shut up, as much as possible, for the rest of the soirée. Once separated from Marylin, he had no problem walking peacefully among his photos, without anyone recognizing him as
the artist
, and without even attempting to listen in on the conversations. It seemed to him, in relation to other
vernissages
, that the hubbub was rather less loud; the atmosphere was concentrated, almost reverential, and many people were looking at his work—this was probably a good sign. Patrick Forestier was one of the few exuberant guests; with a glass of champagne in his hand, he was turning around to widen his audience while congratulating himself loudly on the “end of the misunderstanding between Michelin and the art world.”

Three days later, Marylin burst into the conference room near Olga’s office, where Jed had taken a seat to wait for the press reviews. She took out of her shopping bag a pack of paper tissues and that day’s
Le Monde
.

“Have you not read it?” she exclaimed with what for her was overexcitement. “Well, it’s just as well I came.”

Written by Patrick Kéchichian, the article—a full page, with a very beautiful color reproduction of Jed’s photograph of the map of Dordogne and the Lot—was ecstatic in its praise. From the very first lines, he likened the point of view of the map—or of the satellite image—to that of God. “With that profound tranquility of the great revolutionaries,” he wrote, “the artist—a man of tender age—moves away, starting with the inaugural piece by which he makes us enter his world, from that
naturalist and neo-pagan vision by which our contemporaries exhaust themselves in an attempt to retrieve the image of the Absent One. Not without gallant audacity, he adopts the point of view of a God co-participating, alongside man, in the (re)construction of the world.” He then wrote, at length, about the works, displaying a surprising knowledge of photographic technique, before concluding: “Between mystical union with the world and rational theology, Jed Martin has made a choice. The first perhaps in Western art since the great figures of the Renaissance, he has, to the nocturnal seductions of Hildegard of Bingen, preferred the difficult and clear constructions of the ‘silent bull,’ as his fellow students at the University of Cologne had the habit of nicknaming the Aquinite. If this choice is of course questionable, the loftiness of vision it implies is scarcely that. Here is an artistic year that begins under the most promising of auspices.”

“It’s not stupid, what he’s saying,” Jed commented.

She looked at him indignantly. “This article is enormous!” she replied severely. “Okay, it’s quite surprising that Kéchichian did it; usually he only deals with books. After all, Pépita Bourguignon was there …” She was perplexed for a few seconds before concluding, firmly: “Well, let’s say I prefer a full page by Kéchichian to a tiny note by Bourguignon.”

“And now what’s going to happen?”

“They’re going to come. The articles are going to come, more and more of them.”

They celebrated the event that very evening at Chez Anthony et Georges. “They’re talking a lot about you,” Georges slipped to him while helping Olga to take off her coat. Restaurateurs like celebs; it’s with the utmost attention that they follow cultural and high-society news, and they know that the presence of celebs in their establishment can have a real draw on the stupidly rich segment of the population that they want above all as their clientele. And the celebs, in general, love restaurants; it’s a sort of symbiosis that is established, naturally, between restaurants and celebs. As a very young mini-celeb, Jed adopted without difficulty that attitude of modest detachment which suited his new status, for which Georges, an expert in intermediary celebrity, showed his appreciation. There weren’t many people that evening in the restaurant, just a Korean couple who left quickly. Olga opted for a
gazpacho à l’arugula
and semi-cooked lobster with a yam mash, Jed for pan-seared scallops and a
baby-turbot and caraway soufflé with its Passe-Crassane pear emulsion. Anthony came to join them for dessert, wearing his kitchen apron and brandishing a bottle of Bas-Armagnac Castarède 1905. “On the house,” he said, out of breath, before filling the glasses. According to Rothenstein and Bowles, this
millésime
enchanted by its amplitude, nobility, and panache. The finale of prune and rancio was the typical example of a mature eau de vie, long on the finish, with a note of fine old leather at the last. Anthony had put on a bit of weight since their last visit, as was no doubt inevitable; the secretion of testosterone diminishes with age, the level of fat increases; he was reaching the critical age.

Olga breathed in at length, and with delectation, the bouquet of the Armagnac, before wetting her lips: she was adapting marvelously well to France, it was difficult to believe that she had spent her childhood in a block of flats in the Moscow suburbs.

“How is it that the new chefs,” she asked after her first sip—“I mean the chefs who get talked about—are almost all homosexuals?”

“Hah!” Anthony stretched out voluptuously in his seat, casting a delighted look around the restaurant. “Well, there,
ma chérie
, lies
the
big secret, because homosexuals have always
a-dored
cooking, right from the start, but
nobody
said it, absolutely
no-body
. What helped a lot, I think, was the three stars given to Frank Pichon. That a transsexual cook could get three Michelin stars—now that, that was really a strong signal …” He took a sip, and seemed to plunge back into the past. “And then, obviously,” he continued with extraordinary excitement, “obviously what triggered everything, the atomic bomb, was the outing of Jean-Pierre Pernaut!”

“Yes, it’s sure that the outing of Jean-Pierre Pernaut was huge …” agreed Georges with bad grace. “But you know, Tony,” he continued in a hissing and querulous tone, “basically it’s not society which refused to accept homosexual chefs, it was homosexuals who refused to accept themselves as chefs. Look, we’ve never had an article in
Têtu
, nothing; it was
Le Parisien
who spoke about the restaurant first. In the traditional gay scene, they didn’t find it glamorous enough to go into cuisine. For them it was
homey
, it was too
homey
, precisely that!” Jed suddenly intuited that Georges was also addressing Anthony’s emerging rolls of fat, that he was beginning to miss an obscure, preculinary
leather-and-chains
past, that it would be best to change the subject. Jed then skilfully returned to
the outing of Jean-Pierre Pernaut, an obvious and outrageous subject: he himself as a television viewer had been overwhelmed. Pernaut’s “Yes, it’s true, I love David” live before the cameras of France 2 would remain in his view as one of the pivotal moments of television in the 2010s. A consensus was quickly reached on this subject and Anthony poured another round of Bas-Armagnac. “As for me, I define myself, above all, as a television viewer!” exclaimed Jed with a passionate exultation that earned him a surprised look from Olga.

A month later Marylin came into the office, her bag even more stuffed than usual. After having blown her nose three times, she set in front of Jed a fat dossier, held together with elastic bands.

“It’s the press,” she added, as if he weren’t reacting.

He looked blankly at the cardboard cover. “How is it?” he asked.

“Excellent. We’ve got everyone.” She didn’t seem particularly pleased. Behind her sniveling façade, this little woman was a warrior, a specialist in
commando operations
. What got her juices flowing was unleashing the movement, getting the first big article; then, when things started going by themselves, she would fall back into her nauseous apathy. She spoke more and more softly, and Jed hardly heard her add: “There’s just Pépita Bourguignon who’s done nothing.

“Oh, well,” she concluded sadly, “it was nice working with you.”

“We’ll never meet again?”

“If you need me, yes, of course. You have my cell-phone number.”

Then she took her leave, going off to an uncertain fate—you had the impression, in fact, that she would go back to bed immediately and make herself a tisane. While passing through the doorway, she turned around one last time and added, in a lifeless voice, “I think it was the biggest success of my life.”

The critics were, Jed realized on browsing through the dossier, exceptionally unanimous in their praise. It happens in contemporary
societies, despite the determination with which journalists hunt and identify fashions in formation, and if possible create them, that some develop in a wild, anarchic fashion and prosper before being named—in fact, this happens more and more often, since the massive spread of the Internet and the accompanying collapse of printed media. The growing popularity, across all of France, of cookery classes, the recent appearance of local competitions rewarding new creations in charcuterie or cheese making, the massive and inexorable spread of hiking, and even the outing of Jean-Pierre Pernaut combined to bring about this new sociological fact: for the first time in France since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the countryside had become
trendy
again. French society seemed to suddenly become aware of this, through its major dailies and magazines, in the few weeks which followed Jed’s
vernissage
. And the Michelin map, an utterly unnoticed utilitarian object, became in the space of those very weeks the privileged vehicle for initiation into what
Libération
was to shamelessly call the “magic of the
terroir
.”

Patrick Forestier’s office, whose windows offered a view of the Arc de Triomphe, was ingeniously modular: by moving certain elements you could organize a conference, project images, or have a brunch, all confined in a space of seventy square meters; a microwave enabled you to heat up food; you could also sleep there. To receive Jed, Forestier had chosen the “working breakfast” option: fruit juice, pastries, and coffee waited on the table.

He opened his arms wide to greet him; it was an understatement to say he was beaming. “I was confident … I’ve always been confident!” he exclaimed, something which, according to Olga, who had briefed Jed before the meeting, was at the very least exaggerated. “Now we must convert the try!” (His arms made rapid horizontal movements that were, Jed understood immediately, an imitation of rugby passes.) “Please sit down.” They took their places on the sofas surrounding the table; Jed poured himself coffee.
“We are a team,”
added Forestier in English, rather unnecessarily.

“Our map sales have grown by seventeen percent in the past month,” he continued. “We could, and others would do it, raise the prices; we won’t.”

He left Jed the time to appreciate the lofty considerations behind this commercial decision before adding: “What is most unexpected is
that there are even buyers for the old Michelin maps, which we have seen auctioned on the Internet. And until a few weeks ago, we were happy to pulp these old maps,” he said funereally. “We squandered a heritage whose value no one in-house suspected … until your magnificent photos.” He seemed to sink into a depressed meditation on this money lost so stupidly, or perhaps more generally on the destruction of value, but then pulled himself together. “Concerning your—” he sought the appropriate word—“concerning your
works
, we must strike very hard!” Suddenly he sat up on his sofa. Fleetingly, Jed had the impression that he was going to jump straight onto the table and beat his chest in a Tarzan impersonation; he creased his eyes to get rid of the vision.