What else would a person need to know?
As it turns out, hardly anything.
THE GENE FOR ADDICTION that many of us inherited from Neanderthals, Bruno wrote to them, a gene associated with depression and artistic temperaments, might have served a quite practical purpose for the Thal. (The Moulinards had sent Bruno a question about natural selection, and why we hold on to instincts that do not serve us and might harm us, even significantly.)
Addiction, Bruno told them, could have been the distorted expression of a quite useful trait: the instinct to move toward joy, and even to gorge oneself on joy.
To gorge on substances or behaviors that induced feelings of pleasure, of well-being and a certain “rightness” with oneself and with the world, might have aided the Neanderthal’s survival in countless ways: to fall in lust, to fall in love, to bear children, to stay warm, to build reserves of fat for times of scarcity, to take intervals of rest, and to recharge and restore. Pleasure augers survival. Think of sexual pleasure, Bruno said, the very root of existence: we further our species with ingenious simplicity—by going toward what feels good, by letting things happen, by allowing our bodies to speak and to say: “This.” To say: “Yes.”
But of course, to embrace what feels good, to have a natural and quite strong instinct to do so, poses risks. Serious ones. Most notably, it leads to crippling attachments to drugs and alcohol.
I do not need to remind you, Bruno wrote to Pascal Balmy and the others, that the annals of history are filled with descriptions of gifted and charismatic people who wanted to remake the world, special souls with second sight, natural leaders who burned clean and bright, and who brought the promise of their vision to the masses, but who gorged on joy until it wrecked them.
Keep a list, Bruno wrote, of those who have been martyred to joy, lost to it.
Do not be on that list.
While many, as Bruno warned, drink because they have to, because they have become alcoholics, I myself drink simply for pleasure. Those who abstain as some kind of program are often recovering alcoholics, or acolytes to religions that ban it, but there does exist that rare breed of person with little natural interest in drinking, who doesn’t like the taste or feel the pull, people who can take it or leave it. Pascal Balmy, by all accounts (according to the dossier in my possession), was a guy who could have just a single beer, or he might leave a beer on the bar half-full, and the fact that he didn’t seem interested in drinking may have been one of the more pragmatic reasons why the old leftists like Bruno were so invested in him.
Some considered Pascal Balmy to be an heir to an earlier figure of French notoriety: the writer, filmmaker, and provocateur Guy Debord.
Bruno Lacombe had known Guy Debord well, or as well as anyone could have known him, moody and dickish as he seems to have been. In the uprisings of May 1968, Guy Debord had made quite a nuisance of himself to the French government, with his galvanizing charisma and his caustic tone. He had pointed out the ersatz value of consumer rewards and the inhumanity of wage work, which people should never do, as Debord had famously scrawled on the rue de Seine.
Debord rejected all official culture—the “spectacle”—which reduced modern people to imbeciles. He had a legendary status that seemed to endure even now. I could see why. Who wants to argue that consumer culture, whether it’s fast food or franchised movies or duty-free cosmetics, is wholesome and beneficial? If people do not start out as imbeciles, they are made imbecilic by the corporate contours of their daily life, lulled into a sleep, a sleep which, according to Debord, prevents them from wanting a more authentic life. True enough. Which isn’t to say I agree with Debord’s insistence we should never work, or some of his other proclamations.
Debord himself never worked because he never had to. He had money from his family, if not a lot, and his critique of the world, and everything good in it that was lost and wrecked, might have derived, at least to some degree, from his anger about his own family’s fortune, partly lost and mostly wrecked.
Pascal Balmy did not have to work either. He had family money, like Debord, and he was said to possess a Debordian charisma, wry and electric. It seemed that Pascal was modeling himself on Debord, but the “good” Debord—young and mysterious and magnetic—not the “bad” or “late” Debord, whose cult magnetism and talk of a better world curdled into bitterness and very heavy drinking.
Pascal was said to have Debord’s sex appeal, back when Debord had sex appeal. (Late Debord’s face had grown to resemble that of a dead goldfish clotted with scurf, and I am not being fanciful here, but forensic and precise, given the photos of Late Debord included in my dossier. At the end of his life, he looks like a dead goldfish floating in a dirty bowl.) And while Debord was considered “inimitable,” Pascal had internalized his voice, his style of critique, in the essays and missives published anonymously by Le Moulin, writings that, as I suspected and Lucien confirmed, were mostly authored by Pascal alone.
Guy Debord had once bragged that he wrote much less than those who write but drank much more than those who drink. He had not changed the world. Instead, he had merely become famous.
Pascal Balmy had no interest in fame, drank little, and played a cat-and-mouse game with French authorities. These factors were no small part of why my contacts had me watching him.
I SAID PRIEST VALLEY is on the left side of Highway 198, but of course this is only the case if you are traveling northwest, as I had been when I saw a sign for that place, decided it would make a good origin story, and stashed it for future use.
On the single occasion I passed through Priest Valley, I was coming from Coalinga, a grim town that smells like pig manure and contains not a single family from the American middle class.
I was driving with an animal liberation activist in my passenger seat, a freckled boy aged twenty-three with a fringe of fluffy red beard-hair attached to his jawline like drapery tassel. If this outré facial hair gave hints of radicalization, I had just watched this boy purchase five hundred pounds of nitrate fertilizer from a farm supplier.
I had suggested to him that proceeding with this plan would be regarded by me as evidence of his viability as a romantic partner, that “direct action,” in the form of sabotage, was a critical step in our courtship.
This was after many months of conversations between him and me, talk that was meant to lead him to speak freely of his plans to commit illegal acts in the name of his beliefs. The government agency who was my employer at that time had been convinced that this boy and his cohort of “green” anarchists were capable of violence. But the hundreds of hours I spent with him had not uncovered any evidence of such violence. This time together was mistaken by him for a deep personal bond between us. Pressure from my supervisor in those months was constant, to unearth plans for sabotage on the part of the boy and his cohort. Looking back, I can only guess that pressure from my supervisor’s own higher-up was also constant. This drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists was so strong and so relentless that I began to feel I had no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.
I don’t blame myself. I blame the Feds and their obsession with scruffy kids, which laddered down the chain of command and all but forced me to act. It was easy enough. I made it seem that an ardent commitment to defending the rights of animals, and a possible romantic future with me, were one and the same thing, a future this boy and I might consecrate by planting a bomb at a research laboratory.
When the boy came to understand this, and to agree to it, he cried. He looked afraid, but he said he was very happy, and that he was so glad he’d met me. He was ready for the future, come what may.
I liked this boy. He was timid and earnest. He had the ascetic air of a devout person from a different century. We were never intimate. We touched each other only once, after he made the fertilizer purchase. He reached over and placed his hand on mine as we sat in the car, and his hand was ice-cold. It trembled.
The boy’s role was to implicate someone else, a woman named Nancy who was the central focus of a federal investigation as a suspected militant in the animal rights movement.
Later that day, I observed the boy deliver the fertilizer to Nancy, who lived in a warehouse in West Oakland. I had never met Nancy. She wore Coke-bottle glasses and answered the door of her Oakland warehouse in a too-short kimono, flaunting bare legs that were stubby and blunt as sawed-off shotguns.
I try to be respectful of other women’s shortcomings. The dumb luck of good looks is akin to the fact that it may very well rain on the sea in times of drought, and will not rain where it is needed, on a farmer’s crops: grace is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent, in giving to the one who already has rather a lot, and taking from the one who has been denied, who doesn’t have a pot to piss in.
And so it’s nothing more than God’s reckless scattering of grace that I am tall and have long legs, that I’m pretty, even if my face is bland.
I’m aware that iconic beauty involves some deviation from universal standards, and I don’t have that kind of beauty. I wouldn’t want it. My banal and conventional looks have served me well. People think I look familiar. Have I met you? they ask. But I’m merely what white women are meant to look like. Symmetrical face, small straight nose, regular features, brown eyes, brown hair, clear skin: these are not identifying descriptors.
BACK IN ’68, Guy Debord and Bruno Lacombe had both believed, as many had believed, that an uprising, when it came, would happen first in cities, whose labor conditions, a density of factories and people who had little option but to work in them, were the necessary ingredients for change. Some event, such as the killing of an unarmed young man by police, would spark a revolt, and people would rise up, torch automobiles, occupy public buildings, and set up barricades to fight the state.
This sort of thing had taken place all over Europe in the half century since the 1960s. Part of my job is to be something of an expert on such events and the social movements that precipitate them (and how those movements can be destroyed, either from outside or from inside). But none of these eruptions had resulted in the overthrow of capitalism in any of the advanced industrial nations of the entire European continent—not a single one.
In the wake of the colossal failure of leftist revolt, many radicals went to the countryside. Guy Debord moved to a crumbling cottage in the Auvergne. His retreat marked the end of his revolutionary passion, at a point when Debord had convinced himself it was an insurrection to drink, over the course of a single weekend, an entire case of grand cru Burgundy, gifted by his wealthy banker brother-in-law.
It is not an insurrection to drink a case of grand cru Burgundy. And so Debord did the state a favor by nullifying himself in this manner. Eventually, he shot himself in the heart, but on account that he’d already destroyed himself with alcohol (he’d singed his peripheral nerves, the ones that control the hands, arms, legs, and feet).
Bruno Lacombe was part of this drift, the exodus from cities. He came to the Guyenne in the early 1970s, along with other ’68-ers. Most of those who came grew disillusioned by the challenges of farming, the isolation of the region, the closed-off community of locals.
Of the ’68-ers who had attempted to settle in the Guyenne, only one besides Bruno had stayed, a man named Jean Violaine, who had befriended many of the dairy farmers around Vantôme, and latched onto the notion that peasants, and not factory workers, were the real revolutionaries.
There seemed to have been some rift between Jean and Bruno, a falling-out, though my dossier did not specify what caused it. Rifts are good. Sectarianism among radicals—perhaps not unlike heavy drinking—can nullify threats to the status quo without the need for outside intervention. The state was keeping an eye on Bruno, and on Jean Violaine, but for the past forty-odd years, since those two had arrived in the Guyenne, the region had been quiet.
The Guyenne was no Larzac, for instance. That remote plateau in the Massif Central had become a territory of lawlessness in the 1970s. The state had tried to expropriate land in the Larzac for a military base. One hundred thousand people showed up to prevent it. There were hunger strikes and sheep let loose in courtrooms. Peasants, Occitan nationalists, cheese farmers in debt to the Crédit Agricole, and even a Catholic bishop had joined forces. The Larzac became a showcase for international troublemakers and an embarrassment to the French government, which was forced to abandon its plan to build the military base.
In the Guyenne there had been no such troubles. Not until the arrival—as my dossier suggested—of Pascal Balmy.
