She drew out the syllables of “Alexandre” in mockery, as if that name demanded to be pronounced in a stuffy lilt.
“Boys who have never worked a day in their lives. Have never prayed, never needed to. Never been humble. Up in the ZAD, we were on the front lines defending the land with country people who can as easily face off against the state as they can slaughter and dress an animal, and no one up there is talking at them in some bullshit theory-speak. I come down here and it’s, pfff, Nadia, she’s too loud, too boastful. She’s coarse. Nadia, she’s got a lot of opinions no one cares about. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Once again, I wasn’t meant to respond.
“ ‘You’re always talking about your status, your role, the part you played,’ they tell me. ‘Victories aren’t about credit,’ they say. By Pascal’s rules, everything must be an invisible ‘we.’ Well, you know what, Pascal, some of us were born an invisible ‘we.’ Some of us are from a nameless nothing, and we want a name. When you’re one of six mouths to feed and your parents can no longer work because their bodies are broken from labor and stress, you want a name and a place and respect, as part of a movement. Pff. Renouncing individuality, that’s for rich kids. Pascal can go ahead and get rid of himself. But me, thanks, I’ll stay me!
“Did you know he thinks he’s Guy Debord, reincarnated? Why would you emulate someone like that? A megalomaniac who was fucking his own sister! That’s the truth of things. Everyone knows it, but they hide that part, the part where Guy Debord was having a sexual relationship with his sister, and she wasn’t a half sister either—not that it would excuse things—but she was a full-blood sister!
“The day I brought this up, that was the beginning of the end for me and Le Moulin. Pascal looked at me with hatred. This is in the dining hall, at lunch. Burdmoore is telling some story, and no one can understand him, even the ones who are good in English. Pascal signals him to quiet. Everyone is supposed to stop what they’re doing and listen, and Pascal says:
“ ‘I realize, Nadia, that it’s difficult for you to leave anything unspoken. So be it. Let’s address this. If we concede that Guy Debord was a sadist and sexual deviant, which, yes, sure, let’s concede these might be true. But then we must also concede, Nadia, that the world is chock-full of sadists and sexual deviants, numbering no doubt in the low billions. If we take Freud half-seriously—I know this is a stretch, Nadia, especially for those who haven’t read Freud—we might suggest that sadism and deviance are part of the human psyche, as archaic and ever-present pressures that enter into contradiction with other psychic pressures and forces.’ ”
This sounded about right to me, but my thoughts on the subject were private, and irrelevant.
“And he continues like that, lecturing me in front of everyone. Well! Nadia’s read some Freud. I read the part where Sigmund says cavemen urinated on the first fire because they thought the flames were penises, excuse me, ‘phalluses,’ challenging them about their own dick size! They pissed on the flames and put them out in order to win the dick-measuring contest. That’s Sigmund’s full account of human history.”
Freud’s arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents were a little more involved than Nadia’s summary, but the point was that she was hurt. She was angry. Her salt was bitter, and I might want to see about mining it.
WE WERE BACK AT THE TOWN SQUARE. The sun had gone behind the hills. The air was cooler. Dusk was coming on. I thought about the Dubois house, locked up and waiting for me. It would be dark when I got there.
Nadia pulled over next to my rental car and shifted into what she thought was neutral. The car shuddered and the engine died. We were next to the church, its garden of nettles and thistles deep in shadow. But for Nadia, we were still in the dining hall, where Pascal had just upbraided her.
“And then he says, ‘So here is my question for you, Nadia: Why is it, that among legions of sadists, exactly one wrote The Society of the Spectacle? Could it be the case that Debord’s sadism might have had something to do with his greatness, Nadia? That the very success of his organization depended on his sadism? Could it be that vice becomes, in the historical and political space of the “sect,” a virtue?’
“He goes on and on, and his entire point is: billions are sadists but there’s only one Guy Debord!
“Le Moulin will fail if they continue this way. Up in Nantes, we stopped the government from their plans to build the airport. We defended the land. The reason for our success is that we had no leaders. Pascal doesn’t want a movement; he wants a fiefdom. Some of them at Le Moulin should have defended me. René, for instance. He’s not from their world, you know. Only Florence still talks to me. The quietest among them, and yet with the most integrity.”
We were standing next to her car.
I asked where she was staying.
“Up at this ruin. It’s an empty castle on the hill behind the lake. I broke in to one of the buildings.”
“The Château de Gaume?”
“I don’t know if it has a name. It’s a ruin. If Pascal finds out you were talking to me,” she said, “he’ll cut you off.”
“I’ll keep our conversations between us,” I said.
“You’re married to his friend?”
“Lucien Dubois. He and Pascal went to school together.”
“And before that?”
“I was in California. I had to leave. I had some trouble with the law.”
She nodded.
I was not on stable ground exactly but I took a step.
“Why don’t we talk in a few days. I’ll come up to the château.”
“Okay.” Her expression was guarded, but I felt her inner conflict. Part of her was distrustful of me, but she was too lonely to listen to that part.
She started telling me how to find the place.
I let her explain, even as Bruno had debriefed me on the coordinates of that property, and what was under it—who was buried there, and why. Not intentionally, of course. Bruno didn’t know he was debriefing me on the long and bloody history of the Château de Gaume. He didn’t know I was his student, or what a good student I was, that I could recite the year of the Cagot Rebellion (1594), the incident that sparked it (the execution of Loli the horse, burned alive in the square of Vantôme), the historic compromise between Cagot and peasant that fueled this rebellion. The pétanque they played with nobles’ heads. The defeat, the dead, the potter’s field, the castle later used as a prison for undesirables. Some of those undesirables added to its potter’s field.
“The castle gate looks locked,” she said. “But the gate is held with only looped chain. Take the road up to the top. You’re on the promenade, in front of the main building. Opposite is a chapel and an orangery, and beyond the orangery is a little one-story building with a black door. That’s where I’m staying. When you come up, can you bring some food? Things have been tough for us.”
“Us?”
“Me and Bernadette.”
“Bernadette?”
“You can meet her.”
She went around and opened her trunk.
There was a live pig in there, pinkish, coated in white bristles. It began to scrabble at the sight of Nadia, grunting and sniffing with its sheered-flat pig nose.
She clapped her hands one time and pointed.
The pig hurled itself up and over the lip of the trunk and landed on the ground, not on its feet like animals are supposed to, but it righted itself from its inelegant side-flop and stood watching her as if for further commands, sniffing with that nose that looked molded into the shape of a cup.
