Lucien’s idea of connecting me to Pascal (he believed it was his own idea to connect me to Pascal) was that I could translate into English the book that Pascal and his comrades at Le Moulin had written anonymously, since I had a facility with languages and a lot of free time.
—i mean, i will be meeting pascal if he shows up, I texted.
—He’ll show up, Lucien texted back. For you, he’ll show. He’s curious about you. He’s keen to work together. I talked to him about it. But I should warn you… he’s charismatic.
Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.
Without having met him, I was certain that Pascal Balmy’s charisma, like anyone’s—Joan of Arc’s, let’s say—resided only in the will of other people to believe. Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.
—are you jealous? I asked in reply.
Pascal was Lucien’s old friend, and I’d be meeting him without Lucien there to mediate.
—It’s not that. He gets the upper hand. Look at all these people who followed him down there from Paris. It’s pretty weird. But that’s how he is. I mean, I have known him forever and I still try to impress him. It’s pathetic.
(I was already attuned to what, in Lucien, was pathetic.)
—he won’t get the upper hand with me, I texted back, and for once I was being completely and totally honest.
BRUNO LACOMBE RECEIVED EMAILS from only one account, from an address that was used, I knew, by multiple people at Le Moulin, among them Pascal Balmy, certainly the main correspondent, although the queries sent to Bruno were never signed. They were always just a short question, open-ended, which Bruno answered in depth.
Such as the one they sent as a follow-up to Bruno’s discussion of Neanderthals’ depression and their smoking habits. Their question was about plant origins and tobacco: Was tobacco not a New World plant? they asked.
“Given how stringent we’ve been with our own farming techniques,” they wrote, “and our approach to rewilding what might be native to this part of France, we are confused at the idea that tobacco, which we regard as invasive, could have always been here.”
Bruno said, in reply, that without making direct accusations of anyone asking such a question, he could attack that person’s conditioning and the external forces that had shaped their attitudes, leading to a profound misunderstanding of migration patterns and an abuse of the concepts “native” and “new.”
No, he said, tobacco is not a New World plant.
And in any case, people have been in the Americas for tens of thousands of years.
The spread of people over the face of the planet was not a simple three-act play structure, of up and out of Africa (I), into Europe (II), and across a land bridge (III). Bruno said it was far more diffuse and mysterious how people had settled various corners of the earth. The idea that they flowed in a single direction, for instance, had to be false. Do you walk in only one direction? he asked rhetorically. Of course you don’t, he answered. Over the parts of a day, a season, a year, a life, people move in many directions, as locus points with their own free will, though he put “free” here into scare quotes.
The more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use, and Bruno was no exception (and neither am I, even as I deplore this habit in others). The less education, the more accidental quotes, whose purpose is the opposite of scaring, and simply to declare that a thing has a name but is being named by someone without a high level of literacy: “Corn Muffins,” handwritten by a minimum-wage employee on a sign in a bakery case. “Sale,” also handwritten. The not-so-literate and the hyper-literate both love quotation marks, while most people use them only to indicate, in written form, when someone is speaking. In my life before this life, as a graduate student, there were know-it-all women in my department who held their hands up and curved their pointer and middle fingers to frame a word or phrase they were voicing with irony, as a critique. They were fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. They were getting PhDs in rhetoric at Berkeley, as I had planned to, before I abandoned that plan (and spared myself their fate, which was to subject themselves to academic job interviews in DoubleTree hotel rooms at a Modern Language Association conference). Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare-quoting women.
IT HAD BEEN a long and tedious journey from Marseille to the Dubois place. Eight hours. I had made a lot of stops to try to keep things interesting. Then again, the trip might have been eight hours because I was doing that.
I was on toll roads, pulling over to drink regional wines in highway travel centers, franchised and generic, with food steaming under orange heat lamps, each of these travel centers offering local products. Lavender oils, for instance, always made at monasteries, as if the monks worshipped lavender instead of God. Or dried truffles, mustards, and glass jars of jellied meats that look like cat food, and which French people call a “terrine” and eat as if it were not cat food.
It all gets mixed up in your stomach anyhow, I heard no one say as people lined up to buy this stuff.
I sampled these wines from the vantage of plastic seating overlooking fuel pump and highway. I sipped rosé from the Luberon at a clammily air-conditioned Monop’ off the A55, a chaotic place where children screeched and a haggard woman dragged a dirty mop over the floor. The rosé was delicate and fruity, crisp as ironed linen.
I found a Pécharmant from the oldest vintner in Bergerac at the L’Arche Cafeteria on the autoroute A7, a wine that was woody with notes of ambergris and laurel and maybe dried apricot.
I enjoyed a white Bordeaux of Médoc provenance en plein air at a roadside fuel stop where a trucker farted loudly while paying for his diesel at the automatic pump, the loose valves of his truck, like his own loose valves, clattering away. This white Bordeaux was smooth as a silk garment in a virgin’s trousseau. I could have been a little buzzed by this point, five hours into my drive. This cold, dry white wine sent me dreaming about a world where all my clothes were white and I slept on white sheets and would never be traded for a dowry or violated by rough and unworthy men or forced to drink anything less than the finest French wines of the smallest and oldest and most esteemed appellations, and in a way I could say that I was living that life, right here at this gas station. At least in spirit I was.
I care about fine wine but not about food, and because the terrine is efficient—comes in its own container and can be consumed unheated—I stole two jars of it from one of these travel centers, the weight of the jars giving a new tug to the leather straps of my handbag as I purchased my wine.
It wasn’t that I believed the wine I bought was payment enough for my jars of human cat food. Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.
You’re in a highway travel center, people in a great flux and flow, coming and going and milling and choosing, the cashiers in a fugue state of next and next and next. And in order to locate the precise moment when you can take unseen, you slow it all down. You make time stop. You insert into reality what composers call a “fermata,” and while time is stopped, you put something in your bag.
In this way, I test my fitness. I test my ability to see. I gauge what other people see, and also, what they fail to see.
TREKKING AND HOBO WANDERING, Bruno continued, in parsing their question of Old World and New, was not how human beings had settled the earth. To leave Africa, to leave anyplace, and to go someplace else, in this false three-act structure, gave the impression of people walking arduous and long distances, like refugees or religious pilgrims, looking for a meal and a place to bed down. Taking off their heavy backpack with a “Phew.”
In fact, he said, migration patterns were slow, and formed incrementally: not by trekking. Simply by living. People might stay in an area for a length of time, and when the seasons change, or the hunting stock is depleted, or the waters return to a flood plain or bog that had offered bounteous foraging, or when they stumble upon a place whose features seem desirable or track a herd of animals over a season, they might resettle in the new area where they find themselves, and it could be a short walk, a day’s walk, or several weeks’ walk, from their old area. Multiply these movements by tens upon tens of thousands of years, and that is the history of the settlement of the earth.
But how people had gotten from one landmass to another over the last half million years was not yet understood, Bruno said. Polynesians had crossed the ocean long before European navigators ever dreamed of leaving shore. On another occasion he would take up this subject but for now, he implored them to understand that nothing was how they might have thought it to be, and Neanderthals in Europe and Asia—without question—smoked tobacco.
They weren’t even the first to do so, he added. That accomplishment goes to Thal’s earlier ancestor Homo erectus (Rectus, in Bruno’s parlance), nominally recognized for the rather low achievement of standing—it is in the name, Bruno said, Person Upright, but in fact, the true accomplishment of Homo erectus was that he was the first man to play with fire. And we must infer, Bruno told them, that the first man to play with fire was also the first man to smoke.
But where did Rectus get fire? We have all been taught the myth of Prometheus, Bruno said, in which is birthed this concept that man is an individual who was given, instead of a special trait, the ability to generate heat.
As the story went, Prometheus and his famously dumb brother Epimetheus were assigned the important job of distributing a positive trait to each of the animals in the kingdom on earth. Epimetheus plunged into this work, handing out traits—to bees, the ability to make honey, to deer, a talent for leaping and scampering, to owls, a head that could swivel 270 degrees, and so forth. But by the time Epimetheus got to people, he had run out of qualities in his quality sack.
It was at this point, when the sack was empty and Epimetheus had nothing to bestow, that his brother Prometheus stepped in, stole fire from the gods, and gave that to man as his positive quality.
But here is the catch, Bruno said. The catch is that fire is not always positive. And more crucially, fire is not a quality. It is not a trait that a life-form can possess.
It isn’t night vision or silent wing feathers or a hinged jaw, a spring-loaded capacity to pounce. Man, bland and featureless in this myth, lacking in his own special trait, was condemned, instead, to ingenuity, to being a devious little bastard.
In his ontological featurelessness, different from the rest of the animals in the kingdom, man had to figure out how to work with fire to compensate for lack. Man would come to rely on fire as a crutch. His use of fire would stand in for what man was denied, the possession of a positive trait, as all the other living creatures were given.
This myth of the brothers, one dumb and the other crafty, Bruno told them, and the substitution of technology for traits, was, let’s face it, not entirely mythical. In fact, it was accurate, he said, in explaining the miseries and devastations of the world, in accounting for the use of fire to do bad instead of good, to hoard, steal, ravage, pillage, and oppress.
The use of fire for harm instead of good seems to have taken hold, suspiciously, and damningly, just as the Neanderthals began to disappear and Homo sapiens rose up, an interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with.
