It started—it starts—in 1960 at Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, where I was in philosophy class, which, seeing that I was born in December 1942, shows that I am not such a retard as all that.
It was early days in the school year. We had gotten into the habit of doing fuck all in tenth grade, and that wasn’t about to change. For one thing we were totally contemptuous of physics and math. The physics teacher had been caught urinating into the lab sink between classes, and we knew it, and he knew we knew it. The math guy was an old Corsican whose doglike face sported hard, wild hairs: you could see these white strands, stiff and prickly as fish bones, poking out from the soft crannies of a face otherwise as dried up as on old rubber band. These men could not care less whether we studied or not. Math scores were very low in the philosophy baccalaureate stream.
Literature presented no problems for me. I’d always read voraciously. I could’ve been brilliant had I cared to be, but I didn’t. I used to sit slumped at my table between Leroy, who played rugby and frequented working girls (he’d just had a dose of the clap; he would finger his foreskin via a hole in his pocket and each time discover with dismay that a drop of serous fluid had beaded there), and Babulique, of modest background, who was very fat and reeked of sweat.
One day the philosophy teacher was talking about psychology, about the reactions of a chicken placed behind a semicircular wire fence with grain on the other side; the chicken never had the sense to go around the side of this barrier. The weather was mild, a late-season sun was shining, it was Indian summer (the title of a Stan Getz piece with Al Haig on piano—pathetic music). Leroy liked West Coast jazz, especially Gerry Mulligan. Me, I didn’t care for it; I liked hard bop, the Jazz Messengers, Charlie Mingus, that sort of thing.
The bell rang. A great rustling of papers and folders, and the class was over. The next class was math. I left through the main entrance and took off down to the Seine to a truck drivers’ joint near the Bourse de Commerce for a café-calvados and a game of pinball. I had just five thousand francs to see me through the week and it was only Wednesday. Old Butron was putting the squeeze on me. I should ask for extra funds from my mother, the stupid cow, as a donation, say, to my class’s collection of philosophical works; philosophy is a wide field, and books are expensive. A good idea.
I walked up Rue Jeanne d’Arc toward the train station. I eyed a floozy walking ahead of me with wild hair and an ass that rippled like oil. She must have thought she was somehow beautiful with her sand nigger’s nose. She was definitely a Sephardic Jew. I was pretty familiar with Jews; I had laid quite a few Jewesses.
I stopped in front of the record shop window. A Les McCann had come in that couldn’t be bad, but it was an LP, and I was wearing my tight-fitting blue jacket—hardly practical. I looked at my reflection in the window. I had a date in a few minutes. My hair was fairly long; I let it hang down each side of my forehead. My forehead was broad and smooth and my eyes were very expressive. My nose was ordinary. Which had never bothered me much. I had on my light-gray pants, drainpipes, my buckle loafers, and a light-blue shirt with a knitted Bordeaux necktie that matched the loafers, and black socks. So described, this all might seem uncoordinated, but actually the combination was not bad. I was almost six foot tall, long-legged and loose-limbed. I consulted my watch and saw I was five minutes late, so I had to get a move on.
Walking on to the parking area in front of the cathedral, I checked out any rather fancy cars without the departmental suffix 76 on their plates, trying their doors as I passed. I ended up scoring a Fiat 1100 with a half-open vent window—child’s play to get in. I settled behind the wheel in a laid-back way. Getting out a thermometer and a dropper filched from my father, the old bastard, I injected mercury into the keyhole of the ignition, started it up, and put on my shades.
I drove up Rue Jeanne d’Arc, looking to see as I went past whether Lyse was on the terrace of the café on the far side of the street. I went around the triangle at the top, passed the station, and cruised back down, pulling up smoothly by the sidewalk. Lyse got to her feet and gestured simultaneously to the waiter and me. As she was settling up, I noticed her girlfriend, a petite short-haired brunette in brick-red pants and a black sweater. She had a well-built ass—such a rarity these days. She turned and met my look. She telegraphed hostility. I climbed out of the Fiat. I was getting a hard-on. My prick, whose size gives me no concern, hindered my step, because my light-gray pants were also close-fitting. Lyse was about to get into the car.
“We can’t leave you behind, can we?” I said to the girlfriend.
“You look like a first-class moron,” she retorted.
Lyse was suddenly stone-faced. She realized instinctively that these opening sallies had something sexual about them, although she didn’t grasp this consciously, as I did.
I suggested to the girlfriend that we end the day at the seaside, and she accepted in a contemptuous way, saying how curious she would be to hear me make idiotic remarks.
To cut her down to size, I had her sit in the back, and all the way to Dieppe I didn’t say a single word to her while French-kissing Lyse at every bend and frequently finding myself over on the left side of the road coming out of the turn.
The beach we were headed for, not far from Dieppe, has been lauded by poets, but that was before the war. After the Germans set up their V-1 launch ramps nearby, the place was leveled by bombs, as they say. The local cob houses were swiftly blown away, as were the fine hotels in brick and mortar where rich young Englishmen in white flannels used to vacation back in the day, a tennis racket under one arm and a banjo under the other, or at least so I’ve heard. When the time for reconstruction came, the yokels were treated to faceless concrete, and the town became ugly. Meanwhile social progress and the proliferation of automobiles made the region accessible to masses of industrial workers, so in the season it was no longer elegant young Englishmen who haunted the place but rowdy proles with their brats shitting all over the place. I hate all this vulgarity. I’m sure I would have measured up if only I’d been born into truly high-class circumstances instead of being just a doctor’s son.
Fortunately we were in the last days of October now and there were no more summer people. The beach was deserted, with a lukewarm wind blowing across it.
“I’m throwing myself in,” announced Lyse, in a mobilizing way.
She did not add “and whoever loves me will come too,” but she might as well have. I merely made an avuncular gesture of encouragement. She looked stupid, not knowing now if she was going in or not. She went in anyway, to save face, and started swimming straight out, toward England. She probably wanted me to be worried about her. Tough. I leant on an elbow to check out her girlfriend.
She was called Anne Gouin. As I said, she had a well-built ass, firm, high-riding—very fine, one of the hardest things to find. Small breasts, but bold, by which I mean pointy. Round face, little nose, wide mouth, big blue eyes with lashes that were not bad at all. The scornful pout was perfectly fake. I took off my jacket and tie and unbuttoned my shirt to the sternum. My chest was hairless but tawny.
“Why did you insult me before?”
She shrugged. She was pleased with herself.
“What’s special about me?” I asked. “I’m not particularly special.”
“That’s just it,” she replied, ever more pleased with herself.
“I don’t make problems for myself,” I lied. “Maybe that’s why I annoy people. Life is absurd. We only have a laughable scrap of time in the eyes of eternity, so why sacrifice ourselves for anything? Let’s just love the good things. Food. Or Beaujolais.”
I paused briefly to lend force to my words.
“You have to play the game,” I declared.
“Beaujolais is not an ideal.”
“There is no ideal,” I stated coldly. “God does not exist and Marxism is a con.”
She smiled sardonically. “You’ll see.”
“What will I see?”
“Lots of people are like you in thinking that History is over. But it isn’t. Look at Algeria. Pretty soon the whole third world will overthrow its masters. Then capitalism, deprived of raw materials, will experience an overproduction of contradictions and an economic crisis, and you will feel the pain.”
“Après moi le déluge,” I answered, not very elegantly.
“Not after you!” she cried. “No! No! Even in your own lifetime France will go fascist. In a few years the return of a defeated army will confront everyone with a decisive choice.”
“I choose not to choose.”
And wham! We were off to the races!
“Poor unconscious fool,” she whispered in my ear.
The heat of our exchange had made her breathing more rapid. I cupped her face in my palm. We gazed intently at each other. She put her tongue in my mouth. I pushed her down on the pebbles. We rubbed against one another. We were both flushed. Lyse showed up, out of the water, got the picture right away and remained mute for the rest of the day. In any case Lyse and I were now history.
On the return ride Anne sat up front. Her mood all the way back was reserved; she kept crossing her thighs every time I tried to get a response by elbowing her snatch. I paid no attention. Lyse was sobbing in the back. I dropped them both off where I picked them up. I asked Anne no questions, not her phone number, not where she went to school, so as to disconcert her, and quite aware that I could easily find her again if I wanted; Rouen is not such a big place.
I went and parked the Fiat down by the Seine, and before leaving it I popped the trunk, which was unlocked, just to see if it contained anything worth ripping off. A rather paunchy guy ran at me then. As I found out later, he owned this shithole of a car.
“Filthy little thief!” he went.
He tried to grab me by the collar. I struggled. He slapped me. I grabbed the hand crank from the trunk and brought it down with all my might on the guy’s head. His hat was crushed. He staggered. Blood spurted over his ruddy forehead. I landed another blow with the hand crank across his face. His jaw was dislocated. He toppled onto the curb and fractured his skull. Two dockworkers raced across the road and tackled me, twisting my arms and immobilizing me.
•
Extract from Jacquie Gouin’s notes.
Henri Butron was born on December 8, 1942, in Orléans. His father, a thirty-eight-year-old physician, scion of a respected Touraine family, worked mornings in a clinic and afternoons in an office shared with another, older doctor. Butron’s mother was a self-effacing individual, rather ugly and indolent, an animal lover. The family had a very orderly life. Nothing appears to have predisposed Henri Butron to degeneracy. He was the only son and admittedly rather spoilt, but the Butrons were a close family, and their standard of living was high though not extravagant.
The young Henri Butron was rather puny but healthy enough. He was a great reader of adventure novels. His teachers considered him intelligent and assiduous, if somewhat dull.
At age ten Butron entered a Jesuit school as a day boy; there he completed the major part of his secondary education.
In late 1958 Dr. Butron bought a practice in Rouen, where the family soon settled. Henri Butron entered the tenth grade at Lycée Corneille in the middle of the school year. The teaching staff judged him extremely lazy. Some mentioned his intelligence, and all his passivity. Perhaps the more relaxed discipline affected him negatively. But even in Orléans, apparently, he had “borrowed” cars at night in order to escort the wife of a junior officer quartered in town on romantic excursions.
Butron passed the first part of his baccalaureate early in the summer of 1960. He was interested in jazz and tried to play the drums but gave them up before long. It seems that at this time he got into the habit of stealing cars regularly, always taking them for a spin and then promptly leaving them not far from the place where he had purloined them.
On October 3, 1960, he stole an automobile belonging to a Monsieur Albert Ventrée, a merchant from Châlons-sur-Marne, for a trip to the Dieppe area. On his return, by chance, he was surprised by Ventrée just as he was parking the man’s car. Blows were exchanged. Henri Butron struck the owner, who was trying to grapple with him. The businessman suffered a fractured skull and a broken jaw and Butron was jailed. His father and Ventrée reached a settlement. The authorities, out of respect for Butron Senior, made no objection when Ventrée dropped all charges. Henri Butron then enlisted in the army. After his training he was assigned to Signals in Oran. Wounded in the right eye during an exercise, he was soon invalided out.