At Twenty-Six, Hélène lives in a nice one-bedroom apartment in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. She earns two thousand euros a month gross, not bad for her age although it could be better. But to earn more, she would have to pass more competitive exams.
Because at WKC, the firm that hired her, what they sell is gray matter, rankings, awe. This means that a consultant fresh out of HEC can charge up to six hundred euros a day. His salary is calculated proportionally. Same for someone from the Polytechnique, or Paris Tech. Or for those rare few who managed to get an MBA at Wharton, Harvard, or the London School of Economics. Beyond those select schools, the drop is pretty steep. There are people who went to Parisian business schools or Supelec or Sciences Po. One notch below this are those who went to provincial business schools. And, finally, there are the “atypical profiles”: occasionally, WKC will hire a graduate in organizational sociology or anthropology who has written a thesis on the business world or the spirit of capitalism or some crap like that. This is not as good as hiring someone from the École Normale Supérieure, of course, but these intellectual types are supposed to bring some left-field thinking to this monolithic corporation with its four thousand nine hundred six employees and its annual turnover of almost three billion euros on French territory alone.
Since joining WKC, Hélène sometimes feels as if the entire planet is in the hands of these little men in blue suits who visit every business, every corporate group and government body, to demonstrate the indisputable inadequacy of each firm’s workforce and figures, to explain to the employees what their job consists of, how they should do it better, to support the constantly overwhelmed HR departments, and to offer their insights to decision-makers invariably doomed to efficiency gains, slaves to productivity, the damned souls of operating profit.
Hélène went to ESC Lyon. Not a bad school. She could have done worse—by going to Nancy or Strasbourg, for example—and at least this way she was still in the top ten. But if she hadn’t given up German at the preparatory school, she would probably have done better at her exams and made it to a more prestigious institution, which would have completely altered the trajectory of her career.
Except that, up to that point, she had always rested on her laurels. She’d been the best student at her high school, had found prep school relatively easy because she was good at math, and then done plenty of partying after her baccalaureate. While they looked for an efficiency apartment, prior to Hélène’s joining the Lycée Poincaré prep school, her mother had warned her: “You’re a big girl, so you can do what you want now. But if you fail your exams, you come home right away, and we never talk about it again.”
And Hélène had done what she wanted, relieved as she was to be free of Cornécourt, her parents, and Charlotte, with whom there was nothing much left to talk about. In their senior year, Charlotte had finally been transferred to the Bac ES stream, which did not require such a high level of math, and the two girls had hardly seen each other. Hélène knew that her ex-BFF had been through difficulties at school and through several men too, that she had passed her driving test and now had a little blue Clio. Hélène, on the other hand, had mostly just stayed home, pinned there by boredom, lack of money, and a vague sense of disgust. In her small bedroom, she had dreamed of other places and read lots of books, notably Edith Wharton, who had become one of her favorite authors. One day, she had thought, she too would discover the beau monde, travel widely, be a free woman. The expression “international career” lit up her head like fireworks. During this period, her mother often criticized her for staying in her room, not getting any exercise, being gloomy and spiteful. But almost everything beyond the confines of her room caused her pain. No cash, no space, no openings. People who all knew one another and who interfered in your life. She nurtured a hatred for the provinces, for subprefectures and local roads, that would never leave her.
Hélène had passed her baccalaureate easily, while Charlotte had just scraped by. They saw each other one last time, the night the results were released, at Papagayo, a tawdry nightclub in the city center that changed its name every year after a brawl or after a customer disappeared, often taking the contents of the cash register with them. But the two girls barely spoke. Their friendship was practically dead: it was like a zombie, a half-extinguished fire. Hélène had stood on a balcony, chain-smoking cigarettes, and watched her ex-friend preening on the dance floor. I am so done with all this shit, she’d thought.
Anyway, prep school had not been difficult, and when she graduated from her business school, Hélène had immediately found a job, starting with an internship at Olympus. Soon after being hired, she was chosen by a program seeking out high-potential employees. It was only then that she found out what competition really meant.
For four months, she took part in an expensive and extremely selective training program in Levallois-Perret with a dozen other lucky candidates. The program was a sort of hothouse, designed by Olympus to find out which of the seeds they had planted would grow most spectacularly. Talent recruitment was clearly a major strategic initiative for the Japanese multinational.
At the prep school and in Lyon, the atmosphere had not been especially competitive—not that different, in fact, from her old high school—but this was something else. From the moment each candidate introduced themselves, it was easy to deduce from the exams they had passed and the degrees they had taken each person’s market value. Hélène realized she was at the bottom of this particular ladder, and from that moment on she noticed that people didn’t really listen to her, that even the instructors seemed to pity her. On dress-down Fridays, some of the students would wear a sweatshirt boasting the name of their American university or the famous letters HEC. On several different occasions, she felt like shit. But she didn’t cry. She didn’t crack. That was not her style.
As for the training program, it was pretty simple. The company’s main aim was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these elite students, and then to improve them. They were also taught to behave like real managers, not to move their hands too much when they talked, to speak calmly, avoid negative expressions…all that pop psychology made up of platitudes and cursory manipulation that passes for science in the upper echelons of management.
But most of the work was based on practical scenarios: human resources, crisis management, communication, team management, profitability. This last domain was, of course, the most important. The exercises consisted of managing a wide range of data in a minimal amount of time to produce the best decisions. Hélène was a natural at this game, and the only person who could better her was a tall and already bald guy who’d graduated from Paris X. Six-two, with an eagle’s face and a tendency to spit when he spoke, this man could calculate an EBITDA rounded up to the second decimal after half an hour spent studying thirty pages of data. It was breathtaking to witness. After all those years thinking she was some kind of prodigy, Hélène now discovered, in that white-walled classroom, among that small group of over-qualified posh people, that she had simply never been exposed to any adversaries worthy of the name.
After that, she worked at Olympus’s European headquarters in Hamburg, an incredibly wealthy and populist city rooted, with all its tonnage of ships and containers, at the mouth of the Elbe, full of fat pink busy men, a pervading spirit of greed, and crowds of tourists swarming the port amid a maritime folklore scented with beer and fries. There, she had earned her stripes, using her very basic German and a bit of Globish to command her team specialized in medical systems—and more particularly in endoscopes, of which Olympus was the world leader.
After two years of this, wearying of the grind and tired of giving orders, she had decided to interview for positions at various major consulting firms. An old college friend who worked at Ernst & Young had strongly recommended it.
“You’ll see, it’s really interesting. It changes all the time. Although, if I’m honest, it’s not quite what it appears.”
“What do you mean?”
And her friend had explained how it worked. While what they claimed to sell was efficiency and performance, consulting firms were actually promising to cut costs. And cost-cutting did not come cheap.
She had interviews at Deloitte, at KPMG, and at a small law firm that was seeking to diversify, but in the end it was WKC who hired her. Each time, the recruitment process was the same: practical scenarios, followed by the personality test. The scenarios were easy, and generally all the same. Some kind of businessman selling windows, waffle irons, or scrub brushes. Depending on the situation for the given territory, the cost of raw materials and manpower, the competition, and other similar considerations, she had to make a rapid mental calculation to help and quantify her market. Hélène knew this routine and the responses by heart. The most important thing was not to say anything too original. At this stage in the process, having thoughts of your own was not considered an asset. For the personality test, the candidate ought to appear lively, lucid, pleasant but rigorous, to have values without coming on too strong, to give the impression that they were dependable, honest, competitive, hardworking, capable of being outspoken without crossing any lines. In broad terms, pragmatism was the key quality they were seeking; there was no place for ideology, unless you counted pragmatism as your ideology, but it was a risk to frame things in that way. Faced with the small committee of examiners, like a reflection of her own future, Hélène put on an assured performance. She was an old hand at this now, and—unlike when she started in the business—could afford to wear Zadig & Voltaire jeans, a Vanessa Bruno top, and Sergio Rossi shoes. A far cry from the Zara suit she wore to her first interviews.
Two weeks later, she moved to Paris and began working with her first client.
It Is Difficult to start with. Her job consists of traveling by train to visit universities that are attempting to improve their organization. In the upper echelons of French government, populated by the same small blue men who proliferate in the big consulting firms of New York, Oslo, or Puteaux, the key words have become “rationalization,” “performance,” “assessment.” Everyone is sick of waste. The country’s taxpayers are owed a return on investment; electors deserve consolidated results. That money, granted to local authorities, must now be spent with quantifiable wisdom, in a scientific way, must be assigned to areas where it will produce the largest and most measurable effects. Anglo-Saxon lessons have been learned. They are gradually gaining ground in schools, in the corridors of power, they are flowing through boardrooms, overwhelming departments, informing decisions, reaching every office, soaking into schedules, and at the end of it all they are running through arteries, filling minds, until you can hear your heart beating in time with their efficient, satisfying rhythm: rapid, repetitive, reproducible. You are now part of the process.
It is quite something, when you think about it, to see the path taken by these rules before they establish themselves inside people. Each time, they are met with resistance, because bad habits die hard. But, little by little, they impose themselves, become categorical, unquestionable. And no weapons are required to effect this monumental transformation. All you need are numbers, because nothing is as imperative as a target, nobody can twist your arm quite like a performance indicator. The bottom line is a master that cannot be contradicted, unless you wish to seem like a madman. Or worse: behind the times.
Even so, to lead this revolution and direct efforts in the right way, the organizers of this great enterprise of rationalization require an entire army of consultants and experts who earn their living by bringing down costs, who monetize the science of operational efficiency, who make a fortune from their knowledge of measurement, interpretation, and change. With the aid of certain important-sounding verbs—“identify,” “categorize,” “prioritize,” “evaluate”—they impose this new scientific order, a perfect reign of performance designed to last forever, because it is no longer relative or political or historical, but nothing less than reality itself, transformed into infinitely calculable matter.
Hélène works for the public service business unit at WKC, the function of which is to facilitate—in Bordeaux, Toulouse, or Picardie—the necessary changes taking place at a global level. This is what her dreams of international travel have brought her. She takes regional trains, sleeps at the Ibis hotel near the station, and when she arrives at the office in question is always met by an identical-looking man in a suit and tie. This man looks at her in two different ways simultaneously: on the one hand, she is a woman, which would tend to make him treat her as his inferior; on the other, she comes from Paris and earns more money than he does, which makes her intimidating.
This man, generally a sly old fox in his fifties who enjoys long lunches and wears loafers because that means he doesn’t have to bend over to tie his laces, does his best to accommodate these contradictory indicators by being moderately charming and relatively bossy.
“What I want is for us to increase our performance levels while maintaining the same number of employees,” he explains, smoothing down his tie.
They all say this. Hélène is used to it. Nobody ever uses the term “wage bill”—it’s obscene.
When he introduces her to other, less important men in a pleasant conference room where assistants have set out trays of pastries, and pots of tea and coffee, he will sometimes dare to say: “Gentlemen, I have a pretty young woman for you.”
And a union leader will shout out: “How much will that cost us?”
In such circles, women are rarer but just as tough, particularly this one, the head of the applied languages department, with her orange Bakelite necklace and matching clip-on earrings, who announces in a rough smoker’s voice: “I have nothing against you personally, but I want you to know that we do not agree at all with this new fashion for private firms.”
“I understand,” says Hélène.
Sometimes she rents a car and drives halfway across the country to spend three weeks in a town with a river running through it, a town with streets named after Raymond Poincaré, Georges Clemenceau, and Charles de Gaulle. There, she rediscovers the landscape of her childhood: three large high schools and a tax office all built in the same seventies style, cafés called Le Marigny or Le Bar des Sports, flower beds, green benches, a reasonably ugly industrial zone on the outskirts, a boules club, a chamber of commerce, young people sitting on café terraces, old people everywhere.
Here, she does her job.
Confronted by defiant anger everywhere she turns, she responds with smiling calmness, excellent work, and an infallible instinct for sniffing out—amid the mass of information she is given—the weak points in the organizations she inspects: the redundant departments, the places where money is lost, where the mechanism jams. Hélène has never been a grind, but now she gets caught up in the game and becomes one of those people who say things like I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Soon, nothing thrills her more than solving a problem connected to a point of law, an administrative rule, or a budget line.
Until that day in Orléans when it all goes wrong.
Two months later, at her assessment interview, she reviews the incident with her manager, Marc Hammoudi.
“Listen, as far as the actual audit is concerned—data gathering and all that stuff—I have no complaints at all. You did a good job. But you failed when it came to the client.”
“What? I don’t understand. I gave everything for that client.”
“You need to learn to manage people. I had to go there twice to whip him into shape. You still think what we’re selling is the organization, the process. You need to keep two things in mind. First, time tracking. That’s what we’re selling: brain hours. If you start giving away your ideas for free, we’re screwed. So forget his demands—you only give what we’ve sold. That’s it. Second, the show.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Yes, you do. We all do. Listen, we have a billion-dollar market and no product. What exactly do you think we’re selling?”
“What do you mean?”
“The client shells out, but he has nothing tangible to show for it. He doesn’t get a new Ferrari in his garage. What we’re selling is neurons. That’s our business. The problem is that you can’t touch gray matter. You’re not selling him your pie charts or your graphs, your recommendations or strategies. You’re selling him your intelligence. He’s paying you because you’re smarter than he is. You have to justify your added value. You have to put on a show. At the same time, every client has his own little obsessions. If you don’t listen to him, you’re screwed.”
After this brief interview, which gets her a B and a mediocre bonus, Hélène feels an admiration for her boss that is vaguely reminiscent of someone with Stockholm syndrome. Yet Marc Hammoudi is no guru; he doesn’t even care particularly about being persuasive. His desires lie elsewhere. He is nakedly ambitious. He makes no attempt to conceal his lust for ladder-climbing. He lacks the bourgeois concern for appearances that makes some people transform their greed for money into a taste for art, horses, or haute cuisine. What excites him is power. His desire is raw and always frustrated, but those frustrations only serve to further kindle his ambition.
When she compares him with the other employees at WKC, Hélène realizes he is a completely different beast. She has come to identify three different categories of consultants: the good little soldiers, the zealots, and the tourists. She herself belongs to the first category, those who have always worked hard at school, who wanted a well-paid job with benefits and an aura of prestige, regular promotions, an enviable career, a fulfilling family life. Such employees appreciate high-quality work, like consolidating files, prefer to have a full knowledge of the facts before beginning a conversation, find it interesting to experience different environments, and are proud of their ability to adapt to various contexts, giving the best of themselves each time. They believe that their work is headed in the right direction, that they are part of a general progress: adaptation to a world in perpetual evolution. The zealots, on the other hand, are marked by their categorical conviction, their unrelenting urges. They speak the language of management all day long, impacting and prioritizing even when they are at home with their family, even on Sundays, treating their kids to the same half-baked wisdom that they dispense to their clients: “My job is to help you ask the right questions” and “Information is power.” These employees can no longer distinguish between the world of work and the real world. Their vocabularies have been jargonized. Performance is in their souls. You can recognize them from that dreamy look in their eyes, the absolute conviction that gives them the appearance of men who know things must be treated seriously, but without fear. Hélène thought at first that they were just showing off, but they actually believe all this crap. The most surprising thing about the zealots is that they are not defined by their intelligence: they can be halfwits or they can be geniuses, it makes no difference. You see them striding from open-plan offices to meeting rooms, from conference calls to kickoffs, faith shining from their eyes, not a single wrinkle in their suit. They will end up millionaires and on weekends they will wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts, maybe even tasseled loafers. There is nothing to be done with them but to watch them succeed. Lastly, there are the tourists. The beginnings of their careers are usually marked by uncertainty, a moment of hesitation when deciding which direction they want to take, parents who push them the wrong way, a business school chosen out of weakness, conformism, or weariness, an aimless indecisiveness that ends with an improbable and essentially useless PhD. Whatever their background, the tourists seem to have ended up in their current position by chance, and their prevalence largely explains the high turnover in the profession. They never fully grasp the trade vocabulary. They don’t really care about client satisfaction; they don’t hunger for big bonuses. They do not feel that they have any special authority to give advice to people who have been doing their jobs efficiently for decades. They are like lost souls drifting through the vast transparent offices of WKC, incapable of taking any pleasure from the concierge service or the Japanese garden. They have no aspirations to ascend to the upper floors, where the company’s top brass sit at enormous desks and occasionally make fools of themselves after drinking too much at a team-building weekend in the Verdon Gorge.
Marc Hammoudi does not fit into any of these categories. He is, in his own way, a barbarian. He rakes in cash the way others once razed villages. And while he abides by all the rules with his clients, and sometimes even acts quite servile, it is all a strategy, a form of camouflage. Other than that, he has no illusions and a razor-sharp intelligence that makes Hélène question her belief in the company’s values.
The president of WKC sends an email every week to all the company’s employees, usually on a Thursday. This message is midway between an activity report and a newspaper editorial. Everyone reads it religiously, and while a few may occasionally express reservations about its contents, they do so only in small groups and orally. Anyway, these emails are generally well thought out, featuring not only passages about business news and future prospects, but some thought-provoking ideas and inspirational quotations, with a particular insistence upon values. Because the president is convinced that WKC is an ethical enterprise. The company’s values, he believes, are what distinguish it from its rivals, what give it such strength and attractiveness. This philosophy was especially prominent in an email from June 2001 that included four points—“excellence,” “courage,” “together,” “for better” (the latter two in English)—and ended with these lines, which, though written by the president himself, were nonetheless presented in quotation marks: “ ‘Our probity is practiced in our work, our relationships with our colleagues and our clients, internally and externally, but also in the framework of our friendships and our family. The WKC spirit must accompany us wherever we go, in a free and intentional way.’ ”
Marc, however, does not read this corporate literature.
One day, when Hélène asked him what he thought of the evolutionary model that WKC wished to adopt, with its twin pillars of modification and continuation that defined the path toward transformation, he replied simply:
“I could not give a flying fuck.”
Which does not prevent him from producing that kind of bombastic rhetoric himself, nor from backing it up with endless graphs and charts.
Hélène admires his drive, and she tries to follow in his slipstream, to imitate him, to reassure herself by staying close to him. Hammoudi, for his part, does not seem to notice her. He just plows his furrow, blinkers on, carrot dangling, formidable in his power, neckless, huge shoulders, his skin almost gray, his eyes yellow, and his curly hair receding. Hélène knows nothing about his private life. He dresses like everyone else, in blue and gray, plain tie over a plain semi-tailored shirt, soft loafers, no cuff links, an unremarkable Omega on his wrist. He is simple and straightforward. Sometimes he so little resembles a person that he becomes as comforting as a computer.
And one night, Hélène is rehearsing a presentation for some big shots from the Department of Higher Education with Marc and a guy she doesn’t really know, Pierre-Antoine, who is noticeable for occasionally wearing a bow tie and being almost surreally kind. The two men fire questions at her in an empty office. She responds without missing a beat, a little dry and academic, but she knows her stuff. The interrogation lasts just under an hour, then her manager looks at his watch.
“All right, that’s enough. Very good. On Tuesday, I’ll go with you to visit the client.”
“In Pau?”
Marc is already packing away his laptop. Pierre-Antoine slips away, shyly wishing them a good evening. The two of them are left together, Hélène sitting and Marc standing.
“Yeah, we’ll take the TGV, then rent a car down there. My assistant will send you an email with all the details.”
Hélène Spends The whole weekend worrying about this, wondering what he wants from her, whether it’s a favor or a punishment. The following Tuesday, on the high-speed train, Marc does not enlighten her further. He just goes through his emails, slips off his shoes, works on various files, underlining in a two-color red-and-blue ballpoint, and goes onto the platform to make a few phone calls, leaving behind a faint smell of feet and vetiver. They’re in first class, naturally—all WKC employees are entitled to this perk—but despite this setting so ideal for nomadic working, Hélène is almost completely incapable of concentrating. The journey lasts practically the whole day, and her boss barely speaks a word to her.
When they arrive at the University of Pau, Marc begins by reassuring the client. At WKC, this is what we do; you’re in safe hands; everything will be fine. It’s expensive, obviously, but that’s the market price. The dean of the university passes them on to an underling who leads them to the office they will occupy—a clean, perfectly suitable room with a window overlooking a river. They are even provided with a Thermos.
“This won’t do,” Marc says.
“What do you mean?”
“Too small, not enough light. Too far away from the people working here. Find us something else.”
“But this is all we have.”
“Find something else.”
It takes more than two hours, and assistance from a porter, two secretaries, and—curiously—an electrician, before they finally come up with an office that Marc finds acceptable. There, they are brought the promised documents and they immediately start leafing through them, even though they received almost everything beforehand by email. After three hours of work, Hélène leaves the room for a moment to smoke a cigarette, but her boss stays where he is, his socks on the carpet, his forehead resting on one hand, and his eyes glued to the computer screen.
That night, Marc and Hélène eat dinner together in a small restaurant near their hotel. She orders a steak tartare while he goes for a calzone with a green salad. He stuffs a big leaf of lettuce into each slice of pizza, which he cuts as though he’s sawing a piece of wood. They also order a bottle of sparkling water and a carafe of Madiran. Since Marc only ever drinks water when he’s working, Hélène takes care of the wine and soon feels the tensions of the past few days easing under the drink’s soft caress. She even dares to ask a few questions, to which Marc responds with good grace, reeling off the words rapidly, his voice muffled by food. Then there comes a moment when, fooled by his unusual cheerfulness, she ventures a personal remark:
“I’m glad I get to work with people like you.”
Marc turns his yellow eyes toward her, eyelids lowered, and stares at her for a moment, as if to check that she isn’t making fun of him.
Hélène feels herself blush.
“I just mean, this is a special company. I’m not one of those corporate people, you know, but WKC is pretty great.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We’re generally considered the dunces of the profession. Go to Deloitte, or one of those small private firms that deal with high-level mergers. Even at Mercer, they think we’re a bunch of idiots.”
Hélène sits there open-mouthed for a second or two, before asking:
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you here? You could work anywhere.”
Just recently, Hélène was told how Marc dazzled everyone during a meeting about the reorganization of a company by skimming through the documents the way a chef might sniff a bisque and putting his finger on the problem in five seconds flat: that’s it, that spot in the purchasing department. There’s someone in that office who isn’t doing their job properly. The client was dumbstruck. It seemed simultaneously absurd and magical. But Marc was proved right.
“The good thing about WKC is that they’re not trying to be chic. They don’t care about your name or your family. Even your education isn’t that important. I mean, you went to ESC Lyon, so you should know that better than anyone.”
Hélène sits there, stunned, and Marc, looking pleased with himself, uses his tongue to dislodge a piece of lettuce from between his teeth.
“I’m kidding. All I care about is that they leave me in peace, and they don’t turn me down for a partnership just because I’ve got curly hair.”
In The Days that follow, Hélène has the opportunity to observe his methods up close: the way he manages the client, always listening, satisfying his whims, but mistreating him too, which oddly seems to come as a great relief to the dean of the university.
“You have to understand: a client is always worried, because he has a need, and he doesn’t know if it will be met. He’s afraid of making the wrong choices. He’s afraid of being taken for a ride. A client lives in fear, and he wants a father figure to reassure him.”
Hélène could never learn things like this at school or from books. She discovers them in Pau, in their office flooded with beautiful autumn light, in an aura of slight amazement, accompanied by the subliminal aroma of socks and Marc’s expensive eau de toilette. What most surprises her is the mixture of insight and cunning, even cynicism. Marc is perfectly capable of saying things like: “Our job basically consists in tidying empty rooms.” Or: “A consultant is a guy who borrows your watch to tell you the time and then runs off with your watch.” But behind these mercenary haikus, she also observes his sharp-eyed talent for data-crunching, snuffling like a truffle pig, his large and sensitive snout foraging dexterously among the columns and tables, the organizational charts and operating accounts, cutting through the crap like a plowshare, slurping up the swill to expose the underlying numbers, making himself comfortable, his body squelching delightedly in the muck of this sanctuary where dirty laundry is unpacked, where the institution dumps its secrets, where the innermost intimacy of its organs is laid bare.
In this mathematical pigsty, Marc Hammoudi sifts gold from the mud and, with a quiver of pleasure, miraculously unearths unsuspected diamonds. He is not keen on interviews. The men are all smug liars; the women, panicky and vain. In his opinion, this is all just diplomacy, making people believe they’ve been heard, that their views have been taken on board—delay tactics, in other words. Verbatim records disgust him; surveys leave him cold. As far as he’s concerned, all that stuff is just for salving your conscience, and his work, he knows, has nothing to do with morality. He leaves all that crap to others. He’s too old to bother with the work of commiseration. His science of mechanisms has no need of actors. Psychology is for bullshitters; he puts his faith in the solidity of facts.
After two days of this, Hélène is forced to admit that he has done a good job, and even if she does not feel even remotely capable of copying his style, she also no longer sees her work in the same light. On Thursday evening, they eat dinner as usual, tête-à-tête in the same little restaurant. He seems satisfied, smiling and expressive in his seat, but he does not say whether it is the prospect of returning to Paris that thrills him, or his disciple’s progress.
“Let’s order aperitifs. And some wine.”
He checks his BlackBerry.
“The train doesn’t leave until ten. We can take it easy.” They order Tournedos Rossini and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which he imagines won’t be as heavy as the local wines. Their conversation is mostly about work and their colleagues. Marc is paternalistic and petty. He has an acid tongue. Almost nobody is spared. Slackers, ass-lickers, incompetents, rich kids, no-hopers, morons, sociologists…the insults rain down. Hélène laughs along, adding her own contributions. Out of nowhere, in this interlude of wine and complicity, she finds him very handsome. They have coffee and then, standing up and putting on his raincoat, Marc decides it would be silly to go to bed so early. Hélène is less sure. She instinctively mistrusts this kind of man, the tough guys who sweep you up and impress you, sickeningly sexy, the successful ones who know it all, their bellies swelled with self-importance. The word “executive” pops back into her mind.
“I’d rather get some sleep,” she says.
“Don’t be a killjoy. One last drink won’t hurt.”
What reassures her is his detachment: he seems distant, self-absorbed, like a hermit crab with an American Express card. He pays the check and leaves a big tip that immediately wins him the approval of the young waiter. At last, Hélène agrees to go with him, because he’s not really giving her a choice anyway, and so they set off through the practically empty Thursday-night streets of that small southwestern town. It’s cold and dry, and Hélène follows her boss. He doesn’t say a word, but she can tell from his heavy breathing and his wavering gait that he’s already three sheets to the wind. Soon they arrive at Le Wilson, a nightclub where entrance is barred by one of those classic heavy wooden doors with a spyhole that slides open. The bouncer points them through a long corridor filled with muffled echoes of the music, then they enter an enormous room with a bar that runs all the way across one wall and a split-level dance floor where a few people are dancing. More than a few, in fact, unless it’s just a false impression caused by the mirrors and the strobe lights.
While Marc heads toward the bar, Hélène squints, as if that might help her to bear the earsplitting volume. It’s been a long time since she went clubbing. As the bass notes vibrate inside her chest and up to her temples, she finds a guilty pleasure in that feeling of power, of being a girl in this stock market where desires are selling cheap. Not to mention the fact that she’s a Parisian in a provincial club, a young woman with money, good references, and an intuitive grasp of the latest fashions that are born by the Seine before spreading slowly through the rest of France. Or at least this is what she tells herself.
But this patronizing perspective is also designed to comfort her, because she already feels unsettled by the sight of those twenty-year-old girls on the dance floor in their bright little tops and the boys with their rugby players’ shoulders and their polo shirts. She and Marc exchange a few inaudible words, and she nods, feeling sweat trickle down her back in the heat. As she lights a cigarette, she notices a strange little man, mustache and sweat suit, doing a repulsive dance while watching himself in a mirror. Marc spots him too, and they share a knowing, Jacobin look. Then they sit down on a couch vacated by two couples.
“I can’t believe how crowded it is.”
“What?”
“I said it’s crowded.”
“Oh, yeah.”
A waitress in a skintight Johnnie Walker T-shirt brings them a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice, two glasses, and a bottle of Coke.
“What the hell?” yells Hélène, a little shocked.
“No big deal. It’s for me.”
She isn’t sure if he means that he’s paying for it, or if he wants the whole bottle to himself. But he pours her a glass of whiskey and hands it to her.
“Coke?”
Hélène lip-reads this and shakes her head, then uses a pair of metal tongs to drop two ice cubes into her glass. How many times has she found herself in this situation, her head starting to spin, enthusiasm looming like a threat, her body full of urges that are no longer entirely her own. When she was younger, she used to go out all the time; she was a blackout queen, addicted to those moments of pure joy that end in amnesia and suicidal hangovers. She would often wake, early morning, in some strange man’s apartment, feeling broken and dirty, and would have to try to reconstruct the story of how she’d gotten there with the aid of a few strobe-like memories. Later, she would send messages to her friends, attempting to fill the gaps in the narrative. I hope I didn’t do anything too embarrassing? What time did we get home? The replies would come, bringing sighs of relief or gasps of horror followed by the promise not to go through it all again. Hélène had quite a few skeletons of that sort in her closet: boys taking advantage, a line of coke on a toilet seat, dried vomit in her hair, grim Sundays spent under the duvet, ashamed and wanting to die, because she could not believe there was a sponge big enough to wipe all of that away. Because, above all, she did not understand who that other Hélène was, the one who took over her body after she’d had too much to drink. What if that was the real Hélène?
Her boss leans back in his seat, legs crossed, one arm stretched across the top of the couch, blissfully ogling the movement of the nearby bodies. He’s taken off his jacket, and the position of his legs allows her to see—between the top of one black sock and the hem of his pants—a wide strip of pale flesh. Hélène shudders. She puts her glass down. Looks at her watch: one in the morning, tomorrow already. The smoke stings her eyes. The bass throbs in her head. Marc leans toward her. She sees his lips, the clamminess of his forehead, the whiteness of his teeth exaggerated by the black light. She points at her ear to make him understand she can’t hear. He shuffles closer to her. His arm is behind her back now and despite the cigarette smoke, she can recognize his scent—vetiver and something else behind it, something sweet, almost sugary. He speaks into her ear.
“Want to dance?”
She recoils slightly. And smiles at him.
“No, I think I’m too tired.”
Marc’s face moves away. She contemplates his impassive expression, the terrible whiteness of his teeth. He stands up and straightens his pants.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Hélène.
So he goes over to the dance floor and starts to dance on his own, the soles of his loafers sliding around within a small radius, his arms raised and his eyes closed. His skin gleams under the colored spotlights. Hélène takes another swig of whiskey and watches her boss moving with perfect seriousness, taking pleasure in his profound, solitary commitment.
The song ends abruptly and, from the excited whispers that rise from the dance floor, Hélène realizes that the locals are about to have their moment. The youngest ones smile at each other and get ready. A few grab others’ shoulders. The singer’s voice erupts solemnly and is echoed by the full-throated warblings of these kids with their tragic faces:
Burned earth in the wind
Of the rocky land.
Hélène knows this song, of course, as does the whole country. In every village, in every town, at weddings and parties, on Radio Nostalgie and at New Year’s Eve, “Les Lacs du Connemara” is played, with its stabbing strings, its Gitane-roughened voice, its effortless crescendo, and suddenly that rhythm: tam tatam tatatatatam. In front of her, twenty dancers start to jump, reinforcing the drumbeat with their hammering feet, chins raised high, like a parody of soldiers, and Marc disappears, caught up in that crowd of pistons. All that remain are those unbreakable, twenty-year-old bodies, the same ones Hélène used to see in college at those parties that the student associations would organize every week, and which invariably ended like this, with “Les Lacs du Connemara,” because that was how they did it at HEC.
It all floods back. Her studio apartment in Écully, the open-bar evenings and the initiation weekend at a campsite near Montpellier, the new kids being forced to drink and Blanche Goetz in her underwear crying in a tent, no one ever worked out why. A hotel complex grooming its future clients by inviting these students to a skiing weekend in Val-Thorens. Thankfully, having grown up in the Vosges, Hélène did not look too clumsy on a red run.
The song being played again when, just after arriving in Paris, she would see Julien, Léandre, and Clémence almost every night. They were all starting out in life, Léandre and Julien renting an apartment together, Clémence living with her aunt. For a while they lived like overgrown students, going out a lot, and sleeping with one another without any real consequences. Well, they had other fish to fry, didn’t they? Because, while they did have fun, the discovery of what could only be called “the world of work” was not without its disillusions. At school they had dreamed of being entrepreneurs, managers, had seen the economy as a land to be conquered. But their real lives consisted of filling out forms, attending meetings, sucking up to bosses and clients, selling hot air, and putting up with their colleagues. When they saw each other, they barely even talked about their jobs, preferring to believe that this rut was just another sort of hazing ceremony, one that would soon be over. At Léandre and Julien’s place they would drink cheap, strong Cahors wine that turned their tongues purple. Then they would dance to Jamiroquai and Britney, Daft Punk and Sardou, until the neighbor came around to complain. They would invite him to party with them, and sometimes he would call the police on them. But the cops were generally pretty understanding: they knew there was nothing to fear from young people like these.
Hélène continued to hang out with her college friends, chatting in ad hoc discussion threads on Messenger where they would pass on work opportunities and mess around. They still organized weekends together, barbecues in the countryside or pool parties. The good old days were still going strong. They even went on a cruise together around the Cyclades, saw the sun rise over the Aegean after an all-nighter, stretched out on the deck, suntanned and blissed out, with Sardou’s song playing quietly in the background.
In the summer of 2001, Clémence and Léandre got married in the Drôme, at an old, renovated farm that belonged to the bride’s parents. Bride and groom rolled up to the church in a Rolls-Royce and some of the men wore morning coats or even military uniform. Hélène’s date was a guy from the ESSEC business school who worked with Léandre in the retail sector of the BNP bank. It was at that wedding that she met a cute, well-built man in a pale suit with a silk knit tie, a brazenly British sense of style that appealed to her. His name was Philippe Chevalier and the two of them danced under a pale canvas canopy, to rock songs and to ballads. Late that night, some joker played the famous Sardou song and everyone piled onto the dance floor, jumping around and yelling like they always did. They were still so young, so cut out for success, so in tune with the Zeitgeist. Hélène and Philippe promised to call each other, but neither of them bothered to take that first step. The current of time took them in separate directions then, until bringing them back together much more recently, by chance, at a Japanese restaurant in the seventeenth arrondissement, where he gave her that strange look, at once mocking and eager. Since then, they have gone on a few dates, fucked a few times. To Hélène, that guy is a source both of relief and of anguish. She does not want to let him go.
On the dance floor at the Wilson, the music finally ends. After the usual complaints, the customers reluctantly shuffle off the floor. It is then that Hélène sees Marc, another glass in hand, continuing to shimmy, poignant in his solitude. And in that smoky, cellar-like atmosphere, in the awful, deepening silence after the deafening music has been turned off, she thinks that he looks like a drowning man.