We had made a pact, Pietro. A secret pact. Because Thierry, like me, was opposed to the merger, right from the start, from the moment Boesson started to talk about it. Thierry also realized immediately what was at stake: our past, our passion, our freedom, everything. It was one year ago, believe it or not. We went out to dinner together, to da Toni, in Venice, on the island of Le Vignole—I was there for the film festival. We went to dinner, he and I, secretly, without saying a word to anybody. It was my wedding anniversary, and Elegance was with me, and she and I were supposed to go out to dinner to celebrate; but Thierry phoned from Paris and said in two hours I’m going to be at da Toni, come by yourself, don’t tell anyone, we have to talk, it’s important…And I realized that something major had happened, because that day the board had met in Paris, although I hadn’t been there. I told Ely that we’d have to postpone our dinner until the next day and I left, without telling her about Thierry. Because that’s how things were between us: he always came first for me, and I always came first for him. And while I was waiting for him at the table at da Toni, beneath the trees, and I was drinking that sparkling white wine they serve and looking at the Venice skyline standing out against the reddest sunset I have ever seen anywhere, I swear, including Africa, I was overcome with emotion, Pietro: overcome and happy. I thought of all the things that we’d done together, Thierry and I, of all the impossible victories we had won, against all odds, against all logic, since the days when they derided us as les outsiders; and I thought of how nice my life must be if my best friend was about to come to talk to me about something very important. Don’t get me wrong, very important not only for the two of us, but truly very important, for the national economy, for the stock market, for politics; something that would end up on the front page of newspapers. What was that special thing, I wondered, that made my life so nice? The world is full of top executives that go out to dinner together to decide on important things. What was so unique about my case? It was friendship, Pietro. None of those executives is friends with the person sitting in front of him. In fact, he often hates him. And so he doesn’t drink during dinner, doesn’t look at the panorama, doesn’t even eat, only pretends. He listens, questions, calculates, speaks. He’s a machine. He can’t trust anyone, can’t let down his guard, can’t feel anything: he can only fight, even there, all the time. And this makes his life ugly. But I was about to have dinner with my friend, and I could enjoy the evening breeze and look at the panorama and drink the wine while I was waiting for him and his big news, and my life was beautiful.
Then he arrived and he was a wreck, and he was high, I think, because every now and then he still snorted, and, in short, he immediately, you see, immediately said that we had to stop the merger. He said this even before telling me that Boesson had spoken about a merger with the Americans that afternoon; he said, “Jean-Claude, la fusion jamais,” and I had to ask him, “What merger?” because till that day no one had ever imagined that Boesson could be such a megalomaniac. He was sincere that night, Thierry; he was high, hotheaded, and sincere…
He had no problem convincing me: I hate Boesson, I hate all the énarques, and I also hate the Americans to boot. And we made a pact. Either we would stop it, or both of us would have to chop wood in front of our houses in Aspen. Either of us could have blocked it, for that matter: he had Paris, I had the International and Italy, we were the number one and the number two. With the merger, the only companies in the group that Boesson was fucking over were ours. Not the others, because the others had no soul, like almost every company in the world: simple machines to make money, to put the squeeze on the investors, to generate value. But our corporations had soul, and it was our soul, which of course couldn’t be merged with something else. Boesson might compensate us, of course he would, and after the merger he might give us, say, the presidency of some cosmetics or alcohol multinational, or he might send us to Hollywood, what a laugh, to teach cinema to the Americans…But our soul would be fucked for all time. And so we made a pact. No to the merger, we said, and since both of us were a little buzzed, me on the wine and him on his Colombian cocaine, we made a blood pact. Think about it: two French baby boomers sitting at a table at da Toni, who cut their palms with Toni’s knife and then mix their blood together by shaking hands and toasting each other with Toni’s wine. No to the merger! But it wasn’t prudent for the two of us to fight it right away, and we decided that we would play good cop, bad cop: he would be the good cop—with Boesson, I mean—and I would be the bad cop. So I was supposed to say no to the merger from the beginning, and I did, I told everyone to their face, every time I could, in interviews, at board meetings, everywhere, while he, instead, was supposed to be more positive and play the part of the peacemaker. From that night on we started arguing with each other in front of Boesson, and even publicly: never a quarrel but contradicting each other, dissenting, arguing. To give that piece of shit the impression that we were divided, that les temps des outsiders c’étaient finis. But it was an act, don’t you see, Pietro? It was all fake. In reality we were both working to fuck over Boesson. We knew, Pietro, that a merger of such proportions creates a very weak god, namely Boesson, and an army of frustrated, humiliated, repressed, transferred, and fired men; we knew that it creates value in the stock market when it’s announced, but then it depreciates and cancels out the quality of the work produced by the companies involved, and that in the long term it turns into a failure for everyone. We knew it because we had seen it happen before, and we had also often taken advantage of it.
So we pretended to be at odds with each other—locking horns in a quarrel that was supposed to always create the impression it could be mended—and in the meanwhile we continued to meet secretly, in Milan, in London, and especially in Venice, to brief each other on the situation. And things were going well, because, as predicted, after the euphoria and the big stock market gains following the announcement, when the Americans started laying down tough conditions in the negotiation, the problems began for Boesson. He had Steiner in his sights, you see? A real shark, an owner in the sense that Boesson doesn’t own any of the things he controls, while Steiner does, he controls and owns. And however much Boesson might have had the impression that he was getting favorable conditions—to win the merger, as he says, and become God—the fact remained that he could be thrown out from one moment to the next while the shark couldn’t. At those secret dinners, when everyone thought we had parted ways and were no longer the united force that we had been for twenty years, Thierry and I had victory right there, seated at the table beside us: our victory was not wanting to become any bigger, not wanting to become any richer, not wanting to go any higher, wanting to stay the way we were, friends, powerful, and still relatively small. We were on the side of right, Pietro, I don’t know if you get my drift. Which never happens in this world: you fight, you win or you lose, but you never feel like you’re on the side of right, in the sense that there’s almost never right or wrong, there’s only someone who wins and someone who loses. But Thierry and I, this time, were in the right. And we laughed at the thought of Boesson, who, one fine day, when things would turn out badly for him and a simple political snag or an antitrust suit would kill the merger, would feel surrounded, surrounded and defeated. We laughed, Pietro, thinking of the day when the board of directors would take away Boesson’s aero with a decision signed by Thierry, and he would realize…
It went on like this until last spring. Then Thierry and I started seeing less of each other. Once he couldn’t make it, another time it was me. Our secret dinners came to an end. It didn’t seem serious, even though now I feel like an idiot for not realizing right away what was happening. Unlike me, living here in Milan, peacefully, and saying what I really thought, Thierry was in touch every day with Boesson, whose megalomania must have infected him. Having spent so much time with a man who thought he was God, Thierry ended up thinking he was God, too: well, not exactly God, perhaps, but a god; someone who turns everything they do into right. And he betrayed me. And he let me know it only when he was sure there was no turning back; and he didn’t tell me to my face, in private or at a board meeting: he took away my aero.
Now the merger is definitely going through. I’m out, since I was always opposed to the merger. A paranoid, Shakespearean time is about to begin for everyone. Heads will fly all over the place, others will explode by themselves, everyone will have their chance to betray, and those who don’t betray will be betrayed. After having torn him away from me, Boesson will get rid of Thierry pretty easily, and when Boesson’s the only one left, Steiner will eat him alive, the way he’s always treated those who dared to swim too close to him. And so the Americans will land in Europe thanks to the Frenchman who wanted to land in America and the former outsider who sold his soul. That’s how it’ll go, according to script. It’ll take months, maybe even years; how long depends on many unknown factors, but it will happen. It’s like when you take a cup of boiling-hot coffee and leave it on the kitchen table: you can’t say how long it will take, but you do know that the moment will definitely come when the temperature of the coffee becomes the same as the temperature of the cup, the table, and the whole kitchen…
From now on, I won’t do anything anymore, because in reality anything I do will make things easier for them. I’ll stay still, I’ll wait, I’ll show my face, but I’ll be like those stars that are dead but continue to emit light because they are so far away. My style of working, from now on, will be to not work. My way of communicating will be to not communicate. Do the same thing, Pietro. Stay here. Stay for as long as you can.