Deputy Minister Platon might not have been a public figure, but he had managed to make of his subministerial position something of a lavish mess, by stepping on the toes of senior politicians and energy tycoons, by always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was hated by powerful string pullers, and also by regular French people, who seemed offended that they should even be made to know who he was.
I had been watching him now for months, without any explicit instructions as to what I was meant to do except report my observations.
In the event of rural protests against new state projects—the building of a nuclear-waste storage facility or a new highway, a new prison—the Minister of Rural Coherence sent in Platon, who would rush to the site and make an unpopular statement, that the rural people of department X or Y should be eager for a prison, a landfill, a nuclear-waste dump. Now he was tasked with trying to drum up support for the megabasins, and promoting this new strategy for “rural coherence.” The state plan was to squeeze out small farms and favor corporate ones, which would grow mostly corn.
After the excavators in Tayssac were burned, Platon had gone on television to declare that the construction of megabasins and the modernization of farming in the Guyenne were vital to the economic future of rural France. Whether this was true or not, this plan was vital to the economic interests of the people who had sent me here.
I had witnessed the meetings Platon had around Paris. I’d studied his habits. I had “gone along,” unbeknownst to the deputy minister and his security detail, on various domestic trips he’d taken, and twice on trips to Spain, where he held long meetings with Catholic clergy. I assumed he was not talking to these priests about spiritual matters, although one could argue that those of poor character have more to discuss with their priest than those who are unassailable and good, and yet I was certain Platon was not hunkering in a confession booth, and instead involved in some racket connected to the Spanish Church.
In Paris, he had a mistress he visited regularly, out in Vincennes. This had been my sole reason for going to that suburb, in whose large park I had gotten the inspiration for my fictional part-time job as a dog walker. Platon’s mistress, a wealthy blond divorcée with toned calves, herself had several small fluffy white dogs that I’d seen tugging her from a bouquet of leashes she gripped. Usually, her maid walked the dogs, and once, I saw her maid kick one of the dogs.
Platon made repeated visits to an aesthetic clinic in Chaillot, and one Saturday he emerged from its opaque-frosted doors with his head wrapped in bandages. Later, he had a fuller and thicker head of hair than he’d had before.
He dyed his new hair regularly at a beauty salon inside the Hotel Meurice. Perhaps the new hair was transplanted, perhaps from a dead man—I’m not up on how those transplants work, but they had to get the hair from somewhere.
The deputy minister had a static problem in winter, his pants clinging to his dress socks instead of draping as he wanted them to, and I could see that he had a temper in the way he stopped walking and jutted his leg to correct the static contact between his slacks and his socks.
You’ll injure your groin by kicking your leg like that, I thought at him as I watched him do this repeatedly.
Platon argued with his staff. He yelled at his security guard for getting in his way. This guard had been assigned after Platon received threats to his physical safety. A deputy from the Ministry of Rural Coherence would not typically be assigned security, but Platon was. It seemed as if Platon, or someone near him, understood that he had something to fear.
His security guard was a young and muscular Serbian with a thick and pronounced brow bone. The Serb’s comportment was clumsy, perhaps on account of his excessive muscles and the tight fit of his suits across his broad shoulders, his narrow slacks straining against his meaty thighs.
Platon also berated his assigned driver, an older man with a jaundiced complexion and hooded eyes that were the blue of mentholated cough drops. This chauffeur often glared at Platon with his menthol-blue eyes as if he detested his boss.
I knew why. This driver, called Georges, was the type who had worked his way up from the bottom. He played by the rules, respected hierarchies, and had spent his career in service to elites.
But Platon was not an elite, and so Georges did not respect him.
Platon had not been educated at any of the grandes écoles. His background was barely middle class, and worse, he wasn’t even French. Platon was Spanish. His given name was Pablo Platon y Platon, which he’d gallicized to Paul Platon, nasal “on.” The French tabloids called him Pablo. Georges, too, probably called him Pablo, at least secretly, to let off steam for the indignity of having to spend the final years of his professional life, just before his long-planned retirement, serving a low-class Spaniard subminister who pretended to be French.
And it wasn’t as if Platon was from some grand Spanish metropolis like Madrid. He wasn’t even from Barcelona. (Not that this would be acceptable either; one can imagine the outrage poor Georges felt about his boss’s loyalty to FC Barcelona.)
Platon was from Palafrugell, a town that was basically a place to fill up before traversing wastes of saw grass droning with insect chatter on the way to the beaches of the Costa Brava, where Spaniards like him crowded the sand and not a single one of them was reading a book.
Georges the chauffeur didn’t read books either, just racing forms, which I watched him study religiously.
EVERY CORNER OF MARSEILLE, riding from the train station to the hotel, looked like it had been recently jackhammered. Live electric wires grazed the sidewalk, setting off sparks. Graffiti covered buildings and retaining walls. Having never been there, this was exactly how I had imagined Marseille would be.
A motorcade of state dignitaries in Mercedes limousines rolled past in an uninterrupted stream as we were forced to stop, despite having the green.
Our taxi driver, an older lady with a gravelly voice, turned up the volume on Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” as she waited for the motorcade to pass.
This driver took us on an extralong loop to run the meter and show us more broken concrete, rebar, trash, a vehicle burned beyond recognition, but also villas with armed guards. In the driveway of one of the villas was a convertible Maserati blasting “Get Lucky.” I knew she was taking us for a ride, but I didn’t care. I said nothing to Lucien, who was too naïve to notice, or too in thrall to the anti-Parisian disorder of this place.
When the taxi driver deposited us in front of our hotel, she tried to sell us knockoff Patek watches from a display case in her trunk. Don’t want a watch? I’ve already bilked you anyway, her sun-wrinkled face said wordlessly, as she tucked the money Lucien gave her into the pocket of the housedress.
I thought of it as the dress and not her housedress because my suspicion, not yet disproven with evidence, was that all these French matrons who were the sort to wear a housedress were wearing a single housedress. Faded floral print, a sleeveless shift with a zipper up the front and patch pockets, for carrying a few clothespins, a key to the mailbox, a token for the grocery carts at supermarkets. They shared this housedress. Passed it around.
Just as I had suspected that the Orthodox Jewish women in South Williamsburg, upon my initial introduction to that hermetic world, might be sharing a single wig, taking shifts wearing it for their occasional public sorties. This was in the course of my first foray into the private sector, after the debacle of Nancy and the boy. I was hired freelance by a tri-state security firm. The interview took place at an old-school steakhouse next to the Williamsburg Bridge, a place whose heyday was over. The clientele was not Godfather Part III; it was Men’s Wearhouse. The job involved surveilling a politician who was trying to block the development of riverfront condominiums.
While lurking around Orthodox Williamsburg, I saw large groups of Hasidic men or Hasidic boys. I would see one woman, on the street or on a subway platform, in her shapeless long skirt and her orthopedic shoes, and I wondered if the reason I saw her at all was because she had dibs on the wig that morning.
The shared use of both the housedress by old French matrons and the wig by young Hasidic women keeps the riot potential down, making it so that these women have to emerge single file, or rather, one at a time.
If I witness an army of women in housedresses occupying town squares or breaking shopwindows with their rolling pins, I will know I was wrong, and I’ll be amused to have been wrong, but those are scenes I have yet to see.
Which is not to say I sympathize with angry women breaking shopwindows. I do what I’m hired to. And yet, who knows, maybe I, too, could smash a big window with a rolling pin, were I a housewife tasked with using such kitchen equipment.
But I’m not a housewife, or an Orthodox subordinate in industrial pantyhose and a communal wig. And if I’m going to smash something, I’ll use a sledgehammer, which, on account of its weight, does all the work for you.
IF ADDICTION WAS the unfortunate byproduct of a quite useful survival mechanism, what about depression? the Moulinards had wondered in an email to Bruno. Was it depression, to which Neanderthals were so prone, that led to their downfall?
Bruno replied that the depression suffered by Neanderthal man should be thought of as a spiritual mantle, and not all bad. Thal’s tendency to anhedonic brooding had likely been the engine of his abstract thinking, and his stupendous preternatural capacity for a dream life.
Neanderthals had hunted in teams, had lived collaboratively, but were introverts by temperament and kept their clans small. They did not hoard supplies, or engage in a growth-at-any-cost mindset. Their brooding, Bruno speculated, may have aided their resistance to such a mindset, of greed and accumulation. And Thal’s freedom from ambition for ambition’s sake may have led him to the most refined and least practical of human drives: to art for art’s sake.
Bruno said that the “standard story”—that art was the domain of the Homo sapiens—was flat-out wrong. Just because Homo sapiens was the first to leave rich evidence in pictures, most famously in Lascaux and other caves north of here, we must not deduce, he said, that Homo sapiens was the first to have a symbolic universe.
Pictures of hunting, Bruno said, show us Homo sapiens’s symbolic life, and it consists almost entirely of eating and killing.
If symbolism could be defined as the act of storing information outside of one’s own mind, early Homo sapiens had chosen to store images that were already abundant, and by rendering likenesses of the animals he hunted, the Homo sapiens was attempting to exert power, and to own.
The Neanderthal, in contrast, wanted to record what he saw in dreams, to put into the world what otherwise did not exist. The marks that Thal was believed to have left, on cave walls, on rocks, on animal bones, were abstract codes of great mystery and transcendent beauty. Lines, dots, slants, cuts. And two colors: red and black.
These colors, red and black, were of course the scheme of the classic twentieth-century anarchist flag, Bruno didn’t need to remind Pascal and the Moulinards. And while one would not want to draw a direct link between primordial contrasts of bright and obscure, of bloody and dark, with a modern symbol for rejecting statehood, nevertheless, what we find, he said, is that two essential chromatic hues were developed by Neanderthals: red and black.
This could have been retinal, and unconscious, that the eye is drawn to this opposition of hues, colors that stir us to commitment, to strength, to a longing for a better world, but Bruno counseled not to relegate such an echo to chance, because the enduring duality of red and black deserved more.
