Impurity Read online

  “You’re a cynic. If I have a child I’ll be his nest and also the sky where he will spread his wings.”

  Alice had murmured that sentence. Antoine had been careful to point out that her lyrical style contained quite a few contradictions and announced nothing good for the future of the child.

  “How do you want to be his nest and his sky at the same time? Don’t you think that after a few flights he’ll realize that staying or going amounts to the same thing?”

  “Antoine, I’m pregnant.”

  For once, he didn’t answer back. Startled, he remained silent as he held Alice very tightly in his arms.

  Antoine and Félix often meet at the school cafeteria, where they make short work of their noon meal. The place is harshly lit by rows of fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. Chords from an electric guitar, blasting from speakers hung in the four corners, join in with the racket of boisterous conversations.

  “Do you still love Anaïs?”

  “I vowed her my eternal love.”

  “That sounds ridiculous. Eternal love! Eternity would have to exist.”

  “Eternity has always existed. Time came afterwards. Time doesn’t last. Time is the child of eternity. Antoine, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and I swear to you that on the day of the Last Judgment I will be with Anaïs and my love for her will be intact in my heart.”

  “Are you serious when you say things like that?”

  “Do you think I’m kidding?”

  “Someday I’ll prove to you that you’re totally insane. And you’ll thank me.”

  If the purity and the determination of Félix’s positions bring him close to his own requirements, Antoine considers his religious convictions to be a challenge to reason in the same way as his dusty feelings for Anaïs. Loving a dead woman seems to him the height of bad faith, a willed blindness. Believing in the Last Judgment, in the eyes of this brand-new philosopher of existence, is a farcical heresy. His friend is going to make a mess of his life, that’s what he thinks. Despite the crackling of his thought, Félix sinks into obscurantism, into an outdated, dangerous, degrading belief.

  “Do you have a photo of her? I’m curious to see what she looked like.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe it! How can you live a love so meteoric without that little portable piece of the beloved you can slip into your wallet?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “How can you swear eternal devotion without that essential token?”

  “My entire soul has become the sensitive plate on which her image is imprinted.”

  “Your poetic tricks are unconvincing. Can you at least describe her to me?”

  Félix turns his head, drawn by something.

  “Did you see a ghost? You’ve gone white.”

  “It’s a miracle.”

  He points to a girl sitting two tables away.

  “For a second I thought she was Anaïs.”

  “Did she have a turned-up nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “And shoulder-length black hair?”

  “Yes, like that girl.”

  “And a mocking expression?”

  “Not really. But intense, intelligent eyes.”

  “Black?”

  “Very black. Magnificent. Where are you going?”

  “To see if that girl’s eyes are as black as Anaïs’s.”

  Alice Tranchemontagne does not have black eyes. When Antoine goes over to her, he is immediately attracted by the ironic expression in her emerald-green eyes. She doesn’t believe him when he tells her that he’d confused her with a former neighbour. But she’s happy that a boy her age is using such a ploy to approach her. It’s a change from the abrupt manners she’s used to. No boys go to the trouble of making up the slightest little lie, of embroidering the slightest little compliment to approach a girl. Antoine bombards her with questions. In a short time he finds out that she’s studying social sciences, which is totally meaningless, she declares. She’s interested in politics. She adores Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She’s against the war in Vietnam, hates Nixon, objects strongly to racism, inveighs against sexism. When Antoine lets her go back to class after the lunch break, he’s convinced that he’s found his Simone. “All that,” he tells himself, “because for the length of a sigh, Félix thought that he’d seen his dead cousin come back up to the surface of the water.”

  In the early days of their marriage, Alice and Antoine read the same books, listen to the same music, and share their points of view with passion in conversations that go on till daybreak. They feel as if they are taking part in a new world order by criticizing the one into which they were born. They declare themselves dissatisfied with reality and are endeavouring to change it by assimilating more or less successfully systems of thought sustained by their disparate reading. They get carried away by ideas because they’re afloat in the zeitgeist. They are particularly struck by Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. They read it when Alice is pregnant with Jonathan.

  In the book, the author promotes the notion of the premature appearance of the future in the present. Exponential technological progress allows individuals to make radical changes without having time to adapt to them. Progress happens too quickly. Planned obsolescence. Consumer goods are programmed to become unusable after increasingly shorter periods of time. The future chews away at the space and time of the everyday, experienced henceforth as a source of anxiety, whence the shock. Toffler denounces this disturbance and offers solutions to slow its progress but, once his book is finished, the reader retains only a feeling of helplessness in the face of what awaits humanity. Once past the threshold of the year 2000, societal changes attributable to technological prowess will have reached a critical point of no return: the individual, prisoner of a tentacular world, will lose all freedom, all personal initiative.

  Overwhelmed by her reading, Alice wonders why bring a child into the world if the world as she has always known it is disappearing? Like everyone of her generation, she lived through the torments of the Cold War when she was just a child. Her parents, her teachers worried her with their talk of the eventuality of nuclear war. But the seventies, with the spin-off effects of the hippie movement, erased her apocalyptic anxieties. Now they’re back, as Alice is preparing to become a mommy, not in the form of a nuclear explosion that will destroy the whole planet but in that of a relentless future sending humans racing around in all directions, like headless hens. Life will lose its meaning, and death will be greeted with indifference.

  It is at this point of her life that Alice distances herself from her husband’s positions on anything and everything. She no longer shares his taste in music and films. Oh, she still appreciates his critical discourse that denounces the pervading stupidity and intellectual sloth. But, she thinks, you can’t always be on the defensive and see life as a trial. She has a duty to be positive for the unborn child. She doesn’t want to reflect on the world and its death foretold. She rejects pessimism and nightmare scenarios. Enjoy the present moment, appreciate the beauty of a sunbathed landscape, savour a good meal: such a world view also merits her attention. One must have confidence in life and concentrate on the bright side. She likes the expression “the bright side of things.” Stroking her rounded belly, she gives her unborn son a rendezvous with the year 2000. He’ll be twenty years old then. She promises him that the world will still look like a world made for men, women, and children despite the prophets of doom. She will be there to enter the twenty-first century with him in spite of the future.

  She hasn’t been able to keep her promise. Jonathan has just turned nineteen. A few days earlier, she finished writing A Pure Heart, which had worn her out. Into that novel she had inserted some painful events from her past with Antoine. She knows that its publication is liable to turn their lives upside down. She needs to get away for a while. It’s the Christmas holiday season. She persuades Antoine to take an all-inclusive trip to Huatulco, in Mexico. Two weeks of total idleness. Drink, eat,
sunbathe, read on the beach, swim. Everything that Antoine hates and has always refused to do, despite the pleas of his wife. He finds the very idea of an all-inclusive trip demeaning. Take a bunch of people fleeing the winter, close them up inside an artificial décor, surrounded by pools bordering the sea, served by underpaid people, eat twice as much as usual – there’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, after all – drink four times as much as the bloodstream can carry – there’s an open bar, after all – strut around in fake luxury boutiques, watch shows designed to entertain sun-stunned tourists with bloated bellies and broken-down brains, no, no, no!

  “Think about it: under its heavenly appearance, the all-inclusive trip hides the structure of a concentration camp.”

  “Exaggeration expresses first of all the weakness of one’s argument. As you yourself are always saying.”

  Usually, they would spend vacations in Prague or Berlin. But this time, Antoine succumbed to Alice’s arguments. Basically, he wanted quite often to lose himself in that artificial world, sink into that deceptive nonchalance where life regresses and happiness is defined according to criteria clearly identifiable: golden beach, blue sky, turquoise sea, a man, a woman.

  They are to land at Huatulco on Christmas Eve. Before they leave, Alice wants to give herself one last little treat. She’s been thinking about it for weeks now: the brand-new iMac.

  In 1998, Apple’s publicity is so strident that no one can escape it: a high-performance machine that looks like a design object, a blue-green computer that makes you want to create, to launch a motley collection of ideas, to move around in infinite networks thanks to its simplified internet connection, a computer inside a translucent plastic shell!

  Nothing like the Macintosh, sluggish, slow, a dull beige block that Alice had bought in 1993. Yes, why should a computer be ugly and far removed from any aesthetic concern? The colour of the iMac, Bondi blue, had been chosen as a reference to that of the sea off Bondi Beach in southern Australia. Alice is impressed by that kind of detail, which makes her relate to Apple’s advertising. “I think, therefore iMac,” she says to herself as she stows the box with her brand-new computer in the trunk of her car. She can’t wait to show it to Antoine, who’ll be green with envy. He will deny it in any case. She’ll pass on her old Macintosh to him. She hurries out of the mall. Before going home she wants to stop at her publisher’s to submit the final version of her manuscript. Louis-Martin is waiting impatiently for her Pure Heart before closing his office for Christmas. Alice insists on handing it to him directly. After that’s done she leaves at once, anxious to get home and finish preparing for the trip. Lost in thought, she runs a red light and collides with a snowplough. Her cervical vertebrae broken, Alice dies in the ambulance.

  A second before the impact, she was imagining Antoine’s reaction at the moment when he turned the last page of A Pure Heart.

  A PURE HEART

  Intrigued, Philippe watches Vincent cut minuscule slices of hash with a razor blade. Then he mixes them with some tobacco and rolls it all into a cigarette. Lights it, slowly inhales.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “You can feel it already?”

  “Your turn now, try it.”

  Philippe chokes on the first drag.

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. Try.”

  He makes a second attempt, chokes more violently. His eyes fill with tears.

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Let me have it. We’ll do a shotgun.”

  “A what?”

  “A shotgun.”

  Vincent turns the joint around and places the lit end in his mouth. Then he puts his lips on his friend’s. Never has anyone approached Philippe so intimately. If he’s stoned he doesn’t know if it’s because of the hash or this new proximity between them.

  “What’s that called in French?”

  “What?”

  “Shotgun.”

  “I don’t think it exists in other languages.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “The war in Vietnam. Apparently American soldiers invented the shotgun to increase the effect of cannabis. Or to save on dope. One puff for two people. Why’re you smiling?”

  “Imagining the soldiers. It balances things.”

  “What?”

  “War, peace. Because it’s like a kiss.”

  “Yeah, a kiss with fire in the middle. Actually, Philippe, what do you do about sex?”

  “Nothing. Why, should I do something?”

  “So no …”

  “No, I don’t satisfy myself with my own hand.”

  “What about your erections? Because when you wake up they’re already standing there in front of you.”

  “I don’t do anything. They come, they go.”

  “Liar, you’re a dirty little hypocrite.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Vincent.”

  “If I understand right, I’ve just introduced a saint to the world of drugs.”

  “I’m not a saint, I’m just me. I don’t need to behave like everybody else just to exist. Most young people would rather follow fashions than act according to their own convictions.”

  “You only spout banalities.”

  “And you think you’re original with your hashish and your long hair. Basically, you follow the foreseeable course of any young man who’s rebelling against his parents’ ideas. Later on you’ll settle down and rejoin society.”

  “While you, you aren’t going to change?”

  “I’ll stay faithful to my convictions.”

  “You know, Philippe, you’re incredibly pretentious.”

  “I’m pulling your leg.”

  “No, no, you’ve just revealed who you really are. Another toke?”

  “Once is once too many.”

  Vincent gives him a look, a mocking smile, then rolls another joint. The atmosphere in the room is getting heavier as he inhales, deeply and noisily. Philippe would like to know what’s hiding behind the little look of complacency that has just appeared on the face of his friend.

  “I love someone.”

  “You love Christ, Philippe, not very original.”

  “Yes, I love Christ. But I also love Laure.”

  “Laure?”

  “My cousin.”

  “You’re very family-minded. That’s dangerous.”

  “She’s not my real cousin. Laure was adopted by my mother’s sister.”

  “When?”

  “Very young. Laure and I have loved each other since we first met.”

  “What kind of love? You’ve sworn a pact of eternal virginity, is that it? You look one another square in the eye and that’s enough?”

  “Not really, because we don’t see each other. She was living in Chicoutimi and me in Québec City. We started corresponding two years ago.”

  “But now you live in the same city.”

  “That’s true, since September. I could see her every day.”

  “And so?”

  “That changes nothing. We still write to each other.”

  “Do you talk on the phone with her?”

  “Not even. We prefer letters.”

  “You and your fake cousin tell each other stories. Now think, what use is a love that goes nowhere, that only exists in your head?”

  “It seems to me that we don’t share the same notion of love.”

  “You live on illusions. Watch out, the awakening will be brutal.”

  “Have you ever loved someone? I mean, not just made love to. I mean loved someone with all your heart.”

  “Not with all your body?”

  “Love purely.”

  “Purely? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about purity of the heart. A force that can’t be explained, that exists in each of us but that very few of us call on. A love detached from any desire: that, for me, is purity of the heart.”

  “You’re naive. Love like that doesn’t exist.”

  Philippe opens a drawer and takes
out a small metal box.

  “Here, proof that it does so exist.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Laure’s letters.”

  “And?”

  “If you read one of these letters you’d change your opinion.”

  “About what?”

  “The purity of the heart.”

  “Those words are hollow, empty. What century are you living in?”

  “Same one as you.”

  “If you want to know love, you first have to make it.”

  “That’s a very simplistic vision, Vincent. It’s surprising, coming from you.”

  “It’s a practical approach, I’d say. You’re the one full of illusions.”

  Silence settles between the two young men. The furniture, the walls also seem to fall silent, losing all at once the surplus of existence that is the effect of the hash.

  “So you’re giving them to me?”

  “What?”

  “The letters.”

  “Never.”

  “You see?”

  “What?”

  “You’re scared.”

  Looking up from his paper, Antoine spots Claire Langlois, wearing dark glasses. She crosses avenue Bernard with a determined step. Her bearing expresses a stylish mix of efficiency and joie de vivre. He stands up and waves to her, but she ignores him and disappears. He thinks briefly that he’ll run into her along the way. He saw her yesterday, he sees her again today, what will happen tomorrow? Maybe there are bridges between the world of underground desires and that of sunbathed apparitions, he hopes. He doesn’t pursue his thought any further, sips some coffee, and dives back into his reading.

  He reads several articles on the tragedy of John F. Kennedy Junior. The respectful or formal tone of the first days is wearing off. John-John’s aura is losing its brilliance. Now they write about his failures, his sometimes-difficult relationship with his mother. He had wanted to work in theatre. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was opposed, forcing him to study law. He took the bar exams three times before he passed them. People magazine voted him “the sexiest man alive.” He was rumoured to have had affairs with Madonna, Brooke Shields, and numerous other celebrities. There was speculation about his sexual orientation. A shadow was also cast on his marriage to Carolyn Bessette, who had died at his side in the accident. They were about to divorce. She did drugs. An American journalist launched a controversy by writing that she was afraid to fly when he was the pilot. Some reported that he hadn’t mastered night flight, others suggested the contrary. And conspiracy theorists, without the slightest proof, promoted the idea of a plot. An inhabitant of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of which the crash had occurred, declares that he’d seen an explosion in the sky. It was claimed that John F. Kennedy Junior was about to take the leap into politics and that he’d been assassinated because he would have had a chance of one day becoming president of the United States. But why? By whom? One journalist claims that unlike his father, John-John didn’t have the makings of a president. He was an empty shell, a simple image that America was wallowing in. Without the Kennedy name’s power of attraction, no one would have paid him any attention.