An Aristocrat

On Thursday and Friday, Manuela, my only friend, comes to tea. Manuela is a simple woman and 20 years wasted dusting others houses have not been able to rob her of her natural elegance. ‘Dusting’ is a polite term for all the grunt work she does, but the rich will never call something by its name.

“I empty the rubbish bins full of sanitary napkins, clean the puke of the dogs, clean the bird cages. One would never believe that animals so small can make so much caca!” she would tell me in her soft and whispery accent. “Dusting?! That would be a lovely thing to do!”

When she comes to my place at three in the afternoon - Tuesdays from the Arthens, and Thursdays from the Broglies - she would have used Coton-Tige to clean all the bins which inspite of her regular cleaning are as dirty and as disgusting as any other toilet in the world because that is one thing the rich have in common with the poor: the human body with its repugnant intestines to empty waste matter.

One must admire Manuela. She performs tasks which others turn their noses up at but she stays as refined as ever.

“To eat a walnut, one must spread a tablecloth’ says Manuela as she extracts a smaller hamper of clear wood from her old basket. The hamper has almonds set in little spirals tissue paper. I prepare the coffee. We won’t drink it but we both enjoy the smell. What we do drink, in silence, is a glass of green tea and as we nibble our almonds.

Just as I am a traitor to the archetype of the concierge, Manuela, completely betrays her class. She is a Portugese maid living illegally in this country. Her father’s name was Faro, and she, born under a fig tree after seven siblings and before six more, was sent to work in the fields early and married off just as early to a construction worker who was working in France. She has four children of her own who are French by birth but seen as Portugese by society. Manuela though, is a true aristocrat, a real one of the grand sort who does not have to suffer any kind of competition because in her heart she bears the essence of etiquette and .Who, after all, is an aristocrat? It’s a woman untouched by vulgarity even when she is surrounded by it.

The commonness of her marital family, their Sundays, made stupid with laughter and being born feeble and without prospects, the commonness of a neighborhood marked with the same desolation as the hellish factories that its men descend into everyday, that of her employers whose money does not mask their pettiness and who address her as they would a scabby, mangy dog. You should have seen Manuela offering me her pastries as if she were a queen to understand her grace. Yes, really like a queen. With Manuela there my home is transformed into a palace and our little snacks into a feast for royalty. It’s the way a storyteller can make life look like a shimmering stream into which all the sorrows and boredom of life disappear, Manuela made our drab existence seem warm, gay and dramatic.

“Young Pallieres bid me good morning in the stairwell,” she said suddenly and broke the silence that had fallen between us.
I indulged in a little smirk and then shrugged and said ,“He reads Marx.”

“Marx?,” she asked me, pronouncing the ‘x’ as a soft ‘ch’ in her accent that reminded me of clear skies.

“The father of communism,” I replied.

Manuela snorted disdainfully. “Politics,” she said,”A game for the young rich that they don’t share with anyone else”. She thought for a second, knitting her eyebrows, “Its not like his usual reading though.”

The graphic porn that the young ones hide under their mattresses doesn’t escape Manuela and young Pallieres at one time had quite a collection of titles such as “The Naughty Noblemen”

We spent some time laughing and reminiscing in the quiet way that seasoned friendship has. These moments are precious to me and my heart feels bruised every time I think of the day that Manuela will fulfill her dream and return to her country for good, leaving me here, alone and old, without company that at least twice a week, makes me feel like a queen. I am apprehensive. What will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything and asks me for nothing, leaves

We could hear footsteps in the hallway followed distinctly by the sound of someone pressing the button for the elevator. It was an old fashioned elevator with black grilled shutters. The insides had padding and wood paneling If it had been large enough they would have had an attendant inside it. I recognized the footsteps we heard.: It was Pierre Arthen, the food critic and snob extraordinaire who lived on the fourth floor. The way he would screw up his face if he ever had occasion to stand at my threshold you would think he had been forced to enter a dirty little hovel. Well. I’ve read these famous critics and I know what they are worth.

“I don’t understand the whole thing,” said Manuela to whom a good roast is a good roast and that is the end of that.

There isn’t much to understand. Its sad to see a talent like that go to waste from sheer blindness. Pages and pages of dazzling prose on a tomato. Can one be so talented and yet so blind to the reality of things? I have frequently asked myself this, when I see him pass by me with his nose turned up high. The answer to this seems to be ‘YES’. Certain people are incapable of understanding or contemplating ‘life force’ and spend their entire existence on holding forth on people and things as if they had no soul. Mere delivery of observations made over the course of subjective experience.

As if in response to my unkind thoughts, the footsteps turned quite suddenly and Arthens rang the bell.

I got up, taking care to insert my feet into the sort of slippers that my role demanded. The only thing more clichéd than a caretakers slippers would be a combination of French bread and berets. I knew I would exasperate the Master, a living ode to the impatience of predators, when I did this. What came next was worse. I opened the door slowly, just a crack and thrust my nose out suspiciously. Hopefully my nose was red enough and shiny enough.

“I’m expecting a package through the courier,” he told me, with narrowed eyes and pinched nostrils. “When it arrives, can you bring it to me without delay?”

That afternoon, M. Arthens sported a huge polka-dotted floppy necktie which floated about his patrician neck and didn’t suit him at all. The leonine mane of hair on his head and the ethereal silk about his neck formed between them a sort of airy tutu in which any signs of manly virility were lost. And what the devil, that neck-tie reminded me of something. I lost my smile as I recalled. It reminded me of Legrandin, the caretaker in Marcel (Proust)’s “The Search for Times Past”. This tie looked like the one he sported – the one that expressed all his dilemmas, caught as he was between the world he belonged to and the world to which he wanted to belong. It was just such a scarf that he would have used at Place de Combray, when he met the narrators parents. He didn’t want to greet them but just before it was too late, just before he had passed them completely, he let his scarf fly in the wind - a extraordinary, melancholy greeting.

Pierre Arthens, who knows his Proust, and doesn’t, I’m sure, imagine any place in it for caretaker’s without sufficient meekness, impatiently scratched his neck waiting for my answer and said “Can you bring it to me immediately?” (The courier – the packages of the rich don’t use the usual ways of the post)

I came back to myself.

“Yes,” I said, setting new records in brevity, encouraged by his own abruptness and the absence of a ‘please’. His use of just the interrogative and the conditionnel, excused me, I thought.

“Its very fragile,” he added, “And I would request you to be careful.”

His adding an ‘I request you’ to his command didn’t really please me. Perhaps be thought I was incapable of being sensitive to subtleties of syntax and used them only out of habit. You know you are at the lower end of the pole when the person speaking to you is polite only in his words and doesn’t think you can understand his tone.

“How fragile,” I asked him in a tone that wasn’t polite at all.

He sighed and I could smell a hint of ginger in his breath.

“It’s an ‘incunable’ (an old edition).” he told me, and I just looked blankly back at him while he puffed up even more with his pride of ownership.

“Yeah. Okay. Much good it will do you,’ I said with some disgust. “I’ll bring it up as soon as the courier gets here.”

And I shut the door in his face.

I’m sure Pierre had a story to tell that evening about his caretaker who got indignant because he used the word ‘incunable’ in her presence and she thought it was something scandalous. Each time I thought of him telling such a tale, I got happy.

God knows which of us has given the worse accounting in this incident.

Profound Thought No. 1

Following the stars
Finishing in the fishbowl
A red end.

(Poursuivre les etoiles
Dans le bocal a poisons
Rouges finir)

Apparently, from time to time, adults do sit down and contemplate the disaster that their life is. They feel sorry for themselves and like mosquitoes that bang themselves all the time against the same glass pane, they get agitated, suffer, get depressed, feel hopeless and rail against an unkind fate that has brought them exactly where they don’t want to be. The more intelligent of them even make a religion out of it: “ Oh, this contemptible, comfortable and vacant middle-class existence!” Several cynics of this type dine at Papa’s table: “What happened to the dreams of our youth?” they ask with an air realization and self-satisfaction. “They have been stolen and life is a bitch”. I hate this false lucidity and maturity. The truth - they are like others, kids who don’t understand what has happened to them and who play at being older and strong even though they want to cry.

Its really quite simple to understand. Unfortunately, children believe what adults say and then they become adults and take revenge on their kids by telling them “Life has a meaning – meaning as determined by adults” and that universal lie everyone is obliged to believe. By the time one is old enough to understand that its all wrong, it is too late. The mystery remains and all the energy of a lifetime is wasted on stupid activities. There isn’t much left to do other than anaesthetizing oneself to it all, hiding the fact that one doesn’t really find any meaning in life (perhaps even from oneself) and then fool ones kids into thinking there is a meaning to it all.

The folks who hang out with my family have all followed the same path – a youth spent in trying to stabilize their intelligence, squeezing like a lemon their education and assuring for themselves a position amongst the comfortably off and then spend the rest of life asking themselves with bewilderment why such hopes are wasted on such an empty existence. Folks believe that they are following their stars but instead of climbing into the sky they end up like gold fish in a tank. I ask, would it not be simpler to teach children from the start that life is quite absurd. That would kill some happy moments in childhood but would make for considerable savings to an adult even without accounting for being spared of the trauma of being a gold fish.

Me, I’m 12 years old and I live at No. 7 Grenelle road in a luxurious apartment. My parents are rich, my family is rich and my sister and I are consequently, well, RICH. My dad is a deputy after having been a minister. My mom… well, mom is not exactly the brightest of bulbs but she is educated. She has her doctorate in lit. She writes perfect dinner invitations and spends her time boring us to death with literary references.

Despite this. Despite all this luck and all the money for a long time now, I know the final destination is going to be the fish-bowl. How do I know this? I am smart. Even exceptionally smart. Already if one sees kids my age, it’s the pits. I have no special wish to be marked out and in my family, which places such a premium on intelligence, a talented kid would never get peace. So I try at school to under perform but despite my efforts I’m always first. One would think that acting dumb, especially when one has a high IQ is easy. Let me tell you – its not. It takes a lot of hard work to appear dumber. In a way though the deception keeps me from dying of boredom: the time that does not go towards studying, I spend in imitating the style, the responses, the preoccupations and little faults of ordinary students. I read all the Constance Baret, the second in class does in maths , in French and in history and I learn what I need to do: in French it needs to be a set of words which are spelt accurately, in maths a mechanical reproduction of meaningless operations and in history a series of facts linked by conjunctions. Even in comparison with adults I’m a lot smarter than the majority of them. That is just the way it is. I am not especially proud of it because I’m not here for any special purpose. And this I know for sure – I will not go into the fishbowl. It’s a well thought out decision. For someone like me – intelligent, good at studies, different from others and superior for the most part, life is already traced out and the fate charted out is sad enough to make one cry. No one has thought that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has as much value as being a failure. Its just more comfortable.

I have therefore taken my decision. I will end adulthood and despite my certainty that life is a farce, I do not believe that I can live it till the logical end. Deep inside, we are programmed to believe in that which does not exist because we are living beings and we don’t want to suffer. So we spend all our energy in convincing ourselves that there is something out there that is worth the pain and that is what will give life more meaning. And smart as I am I don’t know how long I will be able to resist this biological urge. Once my life takes the adult path will I still be able to see the ridiculousness of it all? I don’t think so. And that is why I have taken my decision: at the end of this school year, the day I turn 13, the 16th of June to be precise, I will kill myself. I am not going to do this with much fanfare. In fact, it would be preferable if they did not suspect it to be suicide. Adults have a morbid, hysterical approach to death and give it a disproportionate importance when it is one of the most banal events in the world. My Japanese side is obviously attracted to seppuku. (When I say my Japanese side I refer to my love for Japan.) I’m now in the fourth form and have Japanese for a second language. The prof is not too bad. He swallows half his French words and spends considerable amounts of time in ­scratching his head with an air of perplexity, but the text book is decent and I am making great progress I would prefer to read my mangas in the original, you see. Mom doesn’t understand that and goes on “how can a girl as smart as you read manga?”. I haven’t explained to her that “manga” in Japanese simply means comic strip. She believes that I am abasing myself with a lesser culture and I don’t disabuse her such notions. I could read Taniguchi in Japanese. But let me get back to the point: It needs to be done before the 16th of June because on that day I will kill myself. But no sepukku. It would be beautiful and meaningful…but… I really don’t want to suffer any pain. In fact, I hate pain. I had to consider this when I took my decision. Death ought to be a delicate passage, a graceful glide towards the final resting place. There are folks who jump from windows on the 4th floor or by swallow Javel or hang themselves. Its stupid. I find it obscene. Why would you want to kill yourself that way if you are doing it to stop the suffering?!

I’ve thought through my exit: for the past one year, every month, I steal one of mom’s sleeping pills. She takes so many of them she might not have noticed if I had taken one a day, but I’m a cautious person. Take no chances, that is my policy when it comes to projects where the smallest possibility of being fond out exists.

So here I am proceeding tranquilly towards the 16th of June and I have no fear. Just some regrets, perhaps. But the world is not made for princesses. That said, its not necessary to vegetate just because one has decided to die. In fact, its quite the contrary. Its not important how one dies or at what age, what is important is what one was doing at the moment of death. In Taniguchi, the heroes die while climbing Mt. Everest. Since I have no chance of attempting K2 or Grandes Jorasses before the 16th, my Everest is going to be an intellectual pursuit. I have set myself the goal of having only the most profound thoughts and I will note them down in this diary: if nothing has meaning, one must atleast have the spirit to confront it, no? But since my Japanese side is particularly strong, I have added a condition: this profound thought has to be formulated as a small Japanese poem : a haiku or a tanka. My favorite Haiku is one of Basho’s:

A Fisherman’s Hut
Full of Shrimp
The Crickets!


Now that is not like the fish bowl, that is poetry,

But the world I live in has less poetry than the huts of Jap fishermen. Do you find it normal that four people have 400 square meters when there are several others, and some may even be poor poets, don’t have decent housing and are shut up in a 15X20 room? This summer I heard on the news that some Africans had died because a fire in the stairwell had spread throughout their building and that gave me an idea. The gold fish spent all day talking about how the poor Africans could not escape. My parents and Colombe think they swim in an ocean and nothing will happen to them because of their 400 square meters filled with furniture and art.

So on 16th June I plan to refresh their memory of sardines: I shall set fire to the apartment (with the barbecue lighter). I’m not a criminal: I shall do this when there is no one in. (16th is a Saturday and Saturday afternoon, Colombe is off at Tibere’s, mom is at yoga and dad is at his club and me – I shall stay home). I’ll get the cats out through the window, call the firefighters well in time and then shall head off peacefully to sleep in moms bedroom with my sleeping pills.

Without an apartment and without a daughter they will perhaps think of those poor dead Africans.

The Miracles of Art

My name is Renee. I am 54 years old and for the past 27 years I have been the caretaker of No. 7 Grenelle Road. It’s a lovely exclusive apartment complex with an inner court and gardens, divided now into eight apartments but each of them is still grand and luxurious.

I’m a widow – short, ugly, plump, with corns on my feet and on some mornings, bad breath that would knock out an elephant. I haven’t had much by way of a formal education and have always been poor, quiet and insignificant. I live alone with my cat –a huge lazy tom, notable mostly for the way he can scratch a person when he is irritated. He, like me, makes scant effort to integrate with larger society. I’m not what one would call nice, even if I am always polite. I am tolerated because I fit so perfectly into the social conception of what the caretaker of an apartment block should be like, because I am one of the cogs in the wheel, my presence and conformity to every prejudice my employers have gives them a sense of rightess – I make sense in a world gone mad. And that preconception says that caretakers are old, ugly and harsh. It also says that said caretaker will possess a cat that will sleep through the day on cushions covered with crochet slips.

The selfsame chapter on the ‘rules for caretakers’ also says that they must watch television interminably while the fat cat snoozes and the corridors must smell of casserole, cabbage soup and other such olfactory malfeasances. I have had the unheard of good luck to be a caretaker in a house of grand standing. It was humiliating for me to have to cook these infamous dishes. But I still do it to keep up appearances.

For the past 27 years, each day, I go to the butchers and buy a tranche of ham or foie de veau, which I then wedge into my kitchen cabinet between the packets of noodles and the box of carrots. I exhibit happily these victuals of the poor before I give them over to Leon, my cat, so that he stays fat and helps me keep up that illusion and at the same time I avoid having to stuff myself silly with pig meat and can satiate all the cravings I have for macaroni with butter without anyone suspecting where my real culinary inclinations lie.

It was more difficult to resolve the problem of the television. When my late husband was still alive I was able to completely avoid it thanks to the dedication with which he watched it. I was spared me of any duties in that direction. His TV could be heard in the corridor and that was enough to keep up our score in the class hierarchy game. After his death though, I had to rack my brains for a solution

And it was thanks to a non-button that I found it.

A chime linked to an infrared mechanism was installed so I would know if anyone entered the building even if I wasn’t in the sitting room making the old calling bell redundant. I continued with my routine of staying in the basement where I was protected from all the sounds and smells that my condition would otherwise have imposed on me and I still got to know what I wanted to – who entered, who left, with whom and when.

The folks that traversed the hallways still here the muffled sounds of the TV and even those of the most limited imagination I’m sure, form the image of the caretaker shut up in front of the idiot box. But I’m cozy in my den and when I hear someone passing by, I go to the next room which faces the stairs, and hidden behind my muslin curtains I look out through the dormer window to see who it is.

The introduction of video cassettes and later, of the the godly DVD, made me even happier in my felicity. Although not too many of my kind would have a soul roused by Death in Venice or who enjoy Mahler, I did and I dipped into the marital savings, bought myself the equipment and while the television continued to blare out into the corridor I would sit there, with tears in my eyes sometime, before the miracles of art.

Whosever Sows Desire...

Marx (Prologue)

“Marx has completely changed my vision of the world,” declared the younger Pallieres who normally never speaks to me. Antoine Pallieres was the sole heir of an old industrial family and son of one of my eight employers. The final belch of a grand merchant family, the sort that is produced only from the most discreet hiccups, he went on with his narrative automatically. A doorpost would have done as well for audience. He didn’t think I heard (let alone understood) anything of what he was saying. What, after all, could the masses, the labour class, understand of the oeuvre of Marx? Its arduous work reading it, the language is high-flown; the prose, very subtle; and his hypotheses are of the greatest complexity.

And then I almost betrayed myself.

“You shoud read The German Ideology”, I told that cretin in a fur duffle coat.

To understand Marx and to understand why he is wrong , one must read The German Ideology. It’s anthropology is the pedestal that Marx used to make all his exhortations of a new world and the foundation on which his masterful certainty is built: men, who no longer desire, shall be better able to live fulfilled lives. In a world where the hubris of desire is muzzled, a new social order can be born - washed of selfish individual goals, oppression and noxious hierarchies.

“He that sows desire, reaps oppression,” I said sotto-voce, thinking only my cat would hear.

But Antoine Pallieres, whose repugnant and embroyonic moustache has nothing on the elegant whiskers of my feline companion, looked at me strangely, uncertain of what he had heard. As always, it was the inability of human beings to step outside their normal mental habits that saved me. A caretaker does not read The German Ideology and therefore is incapable of citing the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. In addition, a caretaker who reads Marx teeters dangerously at the edge of subversion, has already sold herself to the devil named CGT. That she can read for amusement or elevation of the spirit seems too bizarre and never strikes one of the members of the upper classes.

While closing the door quickly in his face I murmered in the same tone “Wish your mother a good day,” hoping that one normal statement would be sufficient to glue his preconceptions back in place.

The Blurb

The Elegance of a Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery

Translated by Gayathri

“My name is Renee. I’m 54 years old and I’m the caretaker of No. 7 Grenelle Road, an upper middle class building. I’m a widow – short, ugly, plump, with corns on my feet and on some mornings, bad breath that would knock out an elephant. Outwardly I conform so perfectly to the image the general public has of a caretaker that they never think that I could be a woman of letters. Better read perhaps, than all my bourgeois employers.”

“My name is Paloma. I’m 12 years old. I live at No. 7 Grenelle Road in an apartment that could be the last word in luxury. But for a long time now, I know that the final destination is to be life in a fishbowl - the vacuous and inept existence of all adults. How do I know this? Because I’m intelligent. Exceptionally integlligent. So, I’ve made my decision : at the end of this school year, the day I turn 13, I’m going to kill myself”.