NOW I KNOW our lives evolve sometimes like the great spring tides of the Brittany coast. One morning, on the first day of a new phase of life, the Bay of Paimpol is empty, as dry as if the sea had never been there. Alone, in the middle, a thin trickle of water reminds us it was once a bay and that the sea knew it. Then the water, like a painter working in successive layers of colour, covers the sand and the beach with a blue tinted by the sand it barely laps at. The progress continues for days, which for a bay emptied of its water must be the equivalent of years for a man. Water takes its place. At the beginning of the spring tide, the oysters lined up in rows on their trellis suffer from the sun and lack of water. Their thirst grows ever more powerful and, as the water becomes more generous, they gorge themselves eagerly. People say, though no one believes it, that spring tide oysters are the fleshiest, that their salt taste is more refined, and their iodine content higher than the oysters born of ordinary tides. As for the bay, after two weeks, it awakens so full of water it sometimes grazes rocks never touched by the sea. Now that I was allowed to discover the world, I resembled a pebble or an oyster raised and nourished by the great spring tides.
My eleventh summer was a studious one, to the dismay of my parents who wanted me to be different from them—active and athletic. I loved sports, especially tennis and hockey, and I was good at both. Paradoxically, my parents, even as they encouraged me to play those sports, denigrated professional athletes and the amorphous cohort of their fans. Once my father said, “Sports is the new opium of the people.” He was talking about professional sports, which were very far from my mind, but it was obvious he couldn’t reconcile his desire to see me strong and agile with his fear that I would really get interested in sports and want to pursue them seriously. Without realizing it, my parents oriented me in a different direction.
After the right to watch the TV news, I was given the right to read my father’s paper. For my birthday, I received books that weren’t adventure novels for once: atlases with commentary, a work on Native American culture, and the 1985 Yearbook.
I never knew there were so many countries. I’d been told how many continents there were, and that was deemed sufficient. The writing was much too complicated. The articles discussed GNPs and growth rates, types of government and education status. I decided to begin at the beginning: I’d learn the names of the countries, continent by continent, and the capital cities, and then the population of each country. I wondered which ones were rich and which poor. I read that the growth rate for Ethiopia was 8% in 1984. If that was true, why had I watched a boy my age starving to death? Father must know. “One day I’ll explain, Claude.” I didn’t push any further, but his refusal to answer intrigued me, especially because he read the newspaper voraciously, along with books on political subjects, and sometimes I caught him telling Mother that the world was essentially rotten.
We lived in a comfortable, well-off neighbourhood. Every house had its backyard. Our Greek, Italian, and Portuguese neighbours generally covered theirs in asphalt. The French-speaking ones grew gardens decorated with typical flowers, geraniums and pansies, sometimes a few fuchsias. Our neighbours grew tomatoes and cucumbers on the bit of land that separated the houses from the sidewalk. We planted ferns and wide-leaved plants. My mother drew inspiration from traditional Japanese gardens, she said. The neighbours, no matter their relation to cucumbers or fuchsias, got along wonderfully. They stood together on the sidewalk and talked, they invited each other in for a drink, and the Italian lady always made sure we tasted her first tomatoes. When summer came, the dynamic of the encounters changed, as did the smoke that each yard breathed out. Barbecues were trotted out and invitations flowed. A primitive scent filled the air, the smell of grilling meat, sputtering fat, and vegetables that blackened over flames that were too high, a wild odour of the country, the savannah, foreign essences. Father considered that the barbecue ritual was bourgeois, but he never hesitated when an invitation was involved. With the Greeks, he talked for hours about the Colonels, with the Portuguese, the month of April, with the Italians, the Red Brigades. He seemed to know everything about the world, or at least about these countries, though he never smiled during these long conversations. Chewing on a sausage, he looked sombre and preoccupied, then he would set down his uneaten plate of shish kebabs and launch into an endless tirade. He seemed to have codes and keys and tools to explain the world he kept from me.
When Mother announced that she had bought a barbecue, “an ordinary one,” and that it was time to invite our neighbours, my father sighed. “Have we really gotten that bourgeois? A barbecue party!” It wasn’t one of those gas models that were taking over the backyards of the neighbourhood, but a kind of black pit in which you piled real charcoal or wood briquettes and laboured to light.
“How come you don’t like barbecues, and what does ‘bourgeois’ mean?”
“Let me explain. Your mother and I haven’t always lived this way. A bourgeois…that’s someone who’s satisfied with himself and wants to defend his place in society. Someone who obeys society’s codes.”
I was reassured, at least partly. I wasn’t satisfied with myself and I had no place in society. But we always scrupulously respected its codes.
I had a methodical mind that took nothing for granted, and that included what my father said. When I opened the dictionary to look for “bourgeois,” I realized I was becoming myself by not being satisfied with his evasive answers. The demand to watch television was the first step in my rebellion, and searching the dictionary was the beginning of my independence.
Such things might seem banal. A child methodically taking control of his life, with neither anger nor rejection, setting down his foundations. Those are my nostalgic thoughts as I watch an insipid French series on TV, in a Swiss hotel in a dismal suburb of a monotonous city. I hear the 11:59 pulling into the station. My window is always open and the trains help me tell time. I know the schedules of every train going to Rotterdam and Gouda, even the ones that don’t stop in Voorburg. The 11:59 comes from Utrecht.
Sometimes, even for those of us who have chosen it, solitude can become intolerable. We fill it imperfectly by sending messages in a bottle. These days, the man who has lost his way can use e-mail to express his dismay in rapid fashion. He types out, Hi, how are you, haven’t heard from you for a while, how’s my nephew doing? The people who receive these bottles that are all but empty are surprised by the sudden return of a man who had been totally absent. Sometimes they answer. I sent a few messages and I’m awaiting a response, any kind will do, as long as I can feel I’m not totally alone. There is one new message.
“The Bunia mission is cancelled for security reasons. More tomorrow.”
All those vaccinations for nothing. Still stuck in Voorburg.
Then another message, an answer to one of my bottles from Nathalie, my ex-wife. “If you’re writing, you must really be alone. I’m doing fine, I’m happy in love and, you couldn’t know it, but I’m pregnant. We moved into a nice apartment in the same part of town as your parents. A little garden, a parasol, lounge chairs, friendly neighbours. Do you still think we can change the world? I hope you’re not too unhappy.”
No, I’m not too unhappy. I chose this life and, in part thanks to my work, Thomas Kabanga, the criminal of Bunia, will soon be tried and found guilty. Thousands of anonymous, voiceless victims, with no means of defending themselves, will finally be granted justice. And that’s no mean feat. I liked Nathalie well enough, but I travelled the world through books, and she liked her cafés and her friends who chattered about everything and nothing. I preferred to talk about everything, and never about nothing.