This turn of events put to rest my fears regarding whoever had contacted Robert. They had done so to warn me, whoever they were. It could have been my own contacts for this job, letting me know I was disposable. Making sure I was aware they could blow my cover while I could not blow theirs, not knowing even who they were.
In any case, what trouble could Robert the Incapacitated make for me now?
The poor man was in a coma. It was practically like being dead.
SOME OF MY LUCK WAS MORE MEASURED. Not good or bad. My presence at Le Moulin was fairly well-accepted after the first week, although no one shared any hint to me that they were planning acts of sabotage, or suggested they had committed any, and certain people there seemed to regard me coldly. This was normal and expected. I knew to be patient.
The trust I was building was primarily with the upper-class monks, Pascal and the boys in the library. We sat around the table, debating things. I was free to disagree, since having a few contrary opinions, within limits, was the persona of authenticity by which they were coming to know me.
We broke for the Moulinards’ communal lunch at one thirty p.m., meals whose offerings hovered in the genre of the enchilada despite this being France.
I often pleaded American workaholism and skipped lunch. I either stayed in the library or lay under a walnut tree.
“Off to your daydreaming,” Pascal would say.
He was not wrong. I lay and watched patterns of light, recalling ideas of Bruno’s about the hallucinatory effects of nature.
After lunch, Florence with her pale complexion and her smudged eyeliner would bring coffee to the library. I observed her on account that she was maintaining contact with Nadia Derain, whom the rest had relegated to the status of a leper.
I knew from Nadia that Pascal assigned Florence to care for his two children when they came to visit. The mother of those kids, a former Moulinard, had gone back to Paris, and Pascal saw the children two weeks a year, in the summer. This past summer he had imposed nannyship onto Florence, who was burdened with these two little brats, whom Pascal all but ignored. But secrets and discord were, for now, to be observed and not acted upon.
After Florence delivered the coffee tray, the cups were passed around as if this coffee had miraculously appeared, or as if we were well aware that “unwaged labor” had produced it (meaning someone completed a task without being paid to do so). We accepted as a given that someone had to make coffee and wash cups and that, as Pascal had said to me, the old division of labor between men and women reasserts itself when people attempt to live on a commune.
That the labor of thinking, reading, and writing fell to men was not discussed in the library. That my status seemed to be something on the level of an honorary man was also not discussed. My connection to Pascal’s personal life, combined with my academic training, put me in a special category. And I was from the US, which to the library theorists was a mythical place of social extremes and gun violence. They asked a lot of questions, and I played a certain role, as an expert on savage life in America, pointing out their own naïveté as people from a country with a civil fabric, a social safety net, which reinforced my status as separate from the women of their commune.
When the concept of “unwaged labor” was discussed openly, it was treated as an abstraction. Housework, childcare, and “emotional labor” (which meant listening to someone’s problems or offering advice) should be considered real work, the Moulinards argued, because this work had to be done, in addition to the work that people did for an employer. Like a woman cooks meals and launders clothes for a husband before he heads to the factory or the bank, depending on his class level, and this woman does the same for their children, who are reared either to join the workforce like their father or to be conscripted themselves into unwaged labor like their mother.
Pascal talked about the radical icon Melva Blumberg and a treatise she had written on gender and housework, in which she addressed the fact that domestic chores fell to women even as women had, by the time she wrote this text, in the late 1970s, left the home and were working waged jobs, which meant that these women were forced to do double duty, to moonlight as chambermaids for themselves and their families. Melva Blumberg suggested that just as automation was reshaping the American factory, robots might be assigned to do housework, a civic task that would be like a huge public works project, sponsored by and managed at the level of the state, like nationalized health care, Pascal summarized. Nationalized home-cleaning crews would go house to house with specialized robotic machines developed to do this work, and no one would have to clean their own house.
“Come on,” I said.
Voices rose. Jérôme and Alexandre were on my side of this one—the state, they asked, we want the state in our homes?
Pascal quieted the furor, gesturing to take things down a notch.
“These proposals of Melva Blumberg’s were for a different world than this one,” he said. “She’s a brilliant thinker. And you embarrass yourselves, frankly, by looking for the dumb argument inside her bold one. She’s talking about a realm in which property won’t be privately owned.
“The state entering is not the same specter you imagine now, in terms of a violation of so-called privacy. This is not about being raided by the gendarmerie! It’s not a social worker coming to inspect your home and consider taking your children away. You don’t know what a shared world will feel like. Everything will be different. Including your own emotions and biases and judgments.”
Pascal was so determined to convince us that he seemed to vibrate with belief in his own rhetoric, practically trembled under his own powers, self-seduced.
These people were always repeating a maxim about the end of the world, that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than it was to imagine the end of capitalism.”
The point of this maxim was that bringing down capitalism would require a more robust imagination. But just because something is harder to imagine does not mean it’s correct.
In terms of which of these two will end first, capitalism might be more insidious and durable than the blue-green miracle of planet earth and its swaddling of life-giving ether.
Bruno had declared in his letters that capitalism wasn’t coming to an end. The only option was to leave the world. An abstruse idea, as he didn’t mean leave the blue-green earth. He meant leave our world on it, cast off an entire manner of inhabiting reality.
At first this idea struck me as lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.
BRUNO WAS “LACOMBE” TO THEM, and not a man you’d ever sit down with or see. Their other mentor, Jean Violaine, I met my second week at Le Moulin.
Jean hugged everyone upon greetings, even me, a stranger to him, and as he did, I smelled the volatile fumes of liquor wafting from him. He was in his seventies and alarmingly thin, his arms roped in veins. More veins crept up over his temples and head, as if there were no spare flesh to mask the essential wiring that kept this man alive. He wore a ratty sleeveless T-shirt. His trousers were belted way up high.
In one of the letters, Bruno had written about Allen’s rule, which postulates that people and animals from colder climates will have shorter limbs than their equivalents from warmer climates (accounting for the sturdy legs of the Thal, and the breadstick limbs of H. sapiens, who began to flourish as temperatures thawed).
My rule is that the older the Frenchman, and the more rural his location, the higher his pants will be belted. Jean Violaine’s were up at his sternum. This style is typically complimented with five-euro supermarket espadrilles. Jean’s disintegrating pair, their soles as thin as matchbook covers, looked to have been walked in all the way from Boulière.
In fact, Jean had just come from Boulière, where he had attended a meeting of the Federation of Milk Producers of greater Guyenne. We were at the table in the library, listening to him talk.
“Morale is low,” he said. “The wholesale price for milk is less than what it costs to produce. Dairy farmers are desperate. Up in the Dordogne, a breeder just committed suicide. In Normandy, it’s happening regularly.”
He had gone to this meeting to discuss with the dairy farmers the movement against megabasins in the Guyenne. Some union members said they were ready to give up farming and sell their land to one of the big companies coming in to grow seed corn. Let them do what they want, these farmers had argued. It was time to give up on the old ways. Others shouted them down. A vote was taken. By just a hair, the union members took an official group position: they were against the megabasins.
This was treated as a victory by those in the library, but after Jean left that afternoon, an argument began. Alexandre and Jérôme objected to some of the politics of the people Jean aligned himself with.
“He drinks with these guys who are yelling about Arabs and foreign workers,” Alexandre said.
I kept my face blank, to suppress my amusement. Refined and Parisian Alexandre had never been forced to associate with the sort of lower-class white people who might feel threatened, if misguidedly, by immigrants and nonwhites.
This was more or less what Pascal said to him.
“Perhaps that’s true,” Alexandre conceded. “But when you sit down with some of these people to find out what they want, it’s ‘We want more supermarkets. We want cheap gasoline. We want Catholic neighbors.’ And when they say Catholic they mean French, and by French they mean white.”
(Everyone at Le Moulin was white, or at least they looked white to me, but they were white people with the burnish of good language, who knew not to be coarse and racist.)
“They want to use pesticides,” Jérôme chimed in. “They want to be able to shoot wolves with impunity. They don’t want environmental regulations.”
