For a while I believed that something like the Nation could exist—something as real as a material object—but I was mistaken. I had not scrutinized the stinking little anthill that is the earth. There were frontiers, granted, but their only purpose was to make money for leaders, who merely pretended to oppose one another; they set up an opposition between internal and external, the external being evil; in this way they persuaded everyone within their borders to unite against that evil. That was the way they hung on to power, the bastards.
The only thing I had yet to understand in order to be a free man was that ideas are not real, and it was at this time that I understood it. Only sex and money were real. And for that matter if you had money you had sex, so long as you were young. And I was young, so only money was real.
Thus freed from my earlier beliefs, I felt no scruples about accepting when Jacquie called me on the phone and asked me to collaborate with her on a proposed article for The New Informer, a left-wing weekly for which she worked as a journalist. She wanted us to produce a piece on my youth, which she thought would epitomize a particular time. I was pretty much in agreement. We would split the fee fifty-fifty. I would talk and she would knock it into shape. She already had the title: “Return of the Little Soldier.” She was all excited. We would need to bulk things up a bit when it came to my record with respect to Algeria, to my earlier misdeeds, and to my subsequent terrorist activity. I did not say no. I said all right, so long as it paid. I cannot now say in all honesty that a long-term plan to forge an image for myself had already formed in my mind, but I am sure that one was guiding me unconsciously. I believe in the unconscious.
We began work sessions. I liked Jacquie’s apartment. It had modern furniture and old provincial pieces jumbled up. But harmonious. Not like my place with all its Henri II and company, complete with casters. She had exotic stuff, but everything blended together. A stuffed sand lizard, a gift from a fellag, seemed perfectly at home lying on the lid of a Norman grain mill which, when opened, revealed calf-bound books by Leon Trotsky. And there was plenty of good coffee.
The books too were unfamiliar. My whole childhood was spent among manuals of anatomy, Balzac, and Henri Troyat. The Balzacs, moreover, were never read.
Here there were modern novels, Robbe-Grillet, things like that. Fairly toxic, what’s more. But mainly real writings on real subjects, sociology, statistics, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Paul Ricoeur, René Dumont, Castro, etc. Facts, in other words, about real life. Take Lévi-Strauss, for example: he explains how Indian tribes were so undernourished that the guys could no longer get it up, so that when an explorer turned up, little Indian girls would shower him with all sorts of favors and blandishments, so frustrated were they and so eager to get laid. You can’t make this stuff up—it’s life in the raw, it’s real. I would have loved to be an explorer.
To begin with Jacquie adopted a snooty air. It was her way of believing in herself. She tried to get me to agree with her, and be respectful. She tried to dictate almost everything I said, to give me the impression that she understood me better than I understood myself. At times she ceased taking notes, although I was talking and obviously saying important things. Otherwise I wouldn’t be saying them, for shit’s sake!
In such cases I didn’t hesitate: I stopped speaking and looked at her as though waiting for her cue. She was then obliged to carry on noting. In this way I made her write down the very things she did not want to write.
I understood perfectly what she was up to. She wanted to convince me that she was the boss. Well, two could play that game. And I had more staying power than she did.
What was more, the fact of her taking notes on whatever I was on about tended to subordinate her to me. Without forcing things, I gradually bent her to my will.
The first time we worked together I remained quite neutral.
As a result, on the second occasion she was rather disconcerted when I began alluding to her body and her person.
I hardly wore kid gloves. Experience has taught me that with intellectual women all the preliminaries occur on the level of the noodle, the level of talk. When dealing with such an intellectual never, ever feel her up. She will have a fit. What you need to do is stay silent for a moment, not touching her or anything, keeping your distance, three meters being about right, then ask her, absolutely without moving or anything, a question that is rather explicit, sexually speaking, but quite cerebral.
My own particular trick is to inquire suddenly whether I inspire repulsion or desire. For in either case, I would argue, the question is liable to rattle the relationship.
“Nothing of that sort” was Jacquie’s reply, and she lit a cigarette to save face.
I gazed at her for a long time. Know how to play on silence.
“It comes to the same thing anyway,” I said. “Behind repulsion lies desire. Behind desire, repulsion.”
I could tell I’d struck pay dirt, but I made no sign. She drew on her cigarette and gave a short laugh that sounded fake.
“Let’s get back to work,” she said.
I wasn’t going to let her wriggle out of it like that.
“The work has to be good,” I said. “And it won’t be if it’s hamstrung by unconscious mental urges.”
Mental urges my foot! The fact was I had a major boner.
She shook her head every which way, patted her perm into place and emitted a tiny fluting laugh that rang utterly false. I had her.
I have always been excited by the idea of debauching a woman by way of the intellect. This is quite different from ordinary sex. Of course, being just out of the slammer, I needed to get my rocks off in short order. I had a regular lay in a quayside truckers’ bar, a barmaid who was plump and dirty-minded. She would jostle and pinch me, that was her way; and empty my wallet. Needless to say, I furnished it only with the minimal funds required to satisfy her without ruining me. I was not afraid of becoming her cash cow, or of her rifling through my pockets. It aroused me, truth to tell. She was nothing to me but a floozy, a quick fix.
Quick fixes leave you where you were. What I wanted to do was to advance, make conquests. Especially, be it said, considering what she thought she was, the conquest of Jacquie. An intellectual and all that. I hated her. Which was why, rolling my cigarillo between my teeth, I said, “Get real. You know what I’m saying.”
The bitch did not so much as pretend ignorance. Instead she gave me a pitying look. My blood, or rather my precious bodily fluids, boiled.
“I have never tolerated that kind of look,” I thundered, “from a slut, especially one who votes for the Republic.”
“I don’t vote for the Republic,” she ventured.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that matters is power. Power relationships. Between us too. Get it?”
She yawned. I could have killed her on the spot. But I had better ways.
“Not a shred of an article will be done,” I said rather coldly, “until we have fucked on this carpet that I am pointing to.”
(And, while saying I was pointing, I pointed.)
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” she went, in a forced way.
And I could see she was gearing up to deliver some withering response, but I did not leave her the time, getting to my feet, tightening my belt and making for the door, which fazed her.
“On this carpet here,” I reiterated, stamping on it with my heel. “But next time. Right now I am tired. I’m out of here. Going for a walk. Think it over a bit in that little head of yours so full of mush.”
Then I left, cigarillo still clenched between my choppers. I went down to the port. There were high schoolers in the bars on Rue Jeanne d’Arc. They reminded me of times not so long before. But far off all the same.
Maybe it is only today that all those things seem to me so close to each other in time, because I’ve come so far since, and because I’m in danger. I really should have taken the weapon Eddy offered me.