The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
Chapter 2: The Miracles of Art
My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have
been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier
with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments, all
of which are inhabited, all of which are immense. I am a widow, I am short,
ugly, and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early
mornings of self-inflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth. I did not go to
college, I have always been poor, discreet, and insignificant. I live alone with
my cat, a big lazy tom who has no distinguishing features other than the fact
that his paws smell bad when he is annoyed. Neither he nor I make any effort to
take part in the social doings of our respective kindred species. Because I am
rarely friendly — though always polite — I am not liked, but am tolerated nonetheless: I correspond so very well to what social prejudice has
collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the
multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion
according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered. And since
it has been written somewhere that concierges are old, ugly and sour, so has it
been branded in fiery letters on the pediment of that same imbecilic firmament
that the aforementioned concierges have rather large dithering cats who sleep
all day on cushions that have been covered with crocheted cases.
Similarly, it has been decreed that concierges watch television interminably
while their rather large cats doze, and that the entrance to the building must
smell of pot-au-feu, cabbage soup, or a country-style cassoulet.
I have the extraordinary good fortune to be the concierge of a very high-class
sort of building. It was so humiliating for me to have to cook such loathsome
dishes that when Monsieur de Broglie — the State Councilor on the first floor —
intervened, (an intervention he described to his wife as being "courteous but
firm," whose
only intention was to rid our communal habitat of such plebeian effluvia), it
came as an immense relief, one I concealed as best I could beneath an expression
of reluctant compliance.
That was twenty-seven years ago. Since then, I have gone every day to the
butcher's to buy a slice of ham or some calf's liver, which I slip into my net
bag between my packet of noodles and my bunch of carrots. I then obligingly
display these pauper's victuals — now much improved by the noteworthy fact that
they do not smell — because I am a pauper in a house full of rich people and
this display nourishes both the consensual cliché and my cat Leo, who has become
rather large by virtue of these meals that should have been mine, and who stuffs
himself liberally and noisily with macaroni and butter, and pork from the
delicatessen, while I am free — without any olfactory disturbances or anyone
suspecting a thing — to indulge my own culinary proclivities.
The issue of the television is trickier. In my late husband's day, I did go
along with it, for the constancy of his viewing spared me the chore of watching.
From the hallway of the building you could hear the sound of the thing, and that
sufficed to perpetuate the charade of social hierarchy, but once Lucien had
passed away I had to think hard to find a way to keep up appearances. Alive, he
freed me from this iniquitous obligation; dead, he has deprived me of his lack
of culture, the indispensable bulwark against other people's suspicions.
I found a solution thanks to a non-buzzer.
A chime linked to an infrared mechanism now alerts me to the comings and
goings in the hallway, which has eliminated the need for anyone to buzz to
notify me of their presence if I happen to be out of earshot. For on such
occasions I am actually in the back room, where I spend most of my hours of
leisure and where, sheltered from the noise and smells that my condition
imposes, I can live as I please, without being deprived of the information vital
to any sentry: who is coming in, who is going out, with whom, and at what time.
Thus, the residents going down the hall would hear the muffled sounds that
indicated a television was on, and as they tend to lack rather than abound in
imagination, they would form a mental image of the concierge sprawled in front
of her television set. As for me, cozily installed in my lair, I heard nothing
but I knew that someone was going by. So I would go to the adjacent room and
peek through the spy-hole located opposite the stairway and, well hidden behind
the white net curtains, I could inquire discreetly as to the identity of the
passerby.
With the advent of videocassettes and, subsequently, the DVD divinity, things
changed radically, much to the enrichment of my happy hours. As it is not
terribly common to come
across a concierge waxing ecstatic over Death in Venice or to hear
strains of Mahler wafting from her loge, I delved into my hard-earned conjugal
savings and bought a second television set that I could operate in my hideaway.
Thus, the television in the front room, guardian of my clandestine activities,
could bleat away and I was no longer forced to listen to inane nonsense fit for
the brain of a clam — I was in the back room, perfectly euphoric, my eyes
filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art.
Profound Thought No. 1
Follow the stars
In the goldfish bowl
An end
Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate
what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding, and, like
flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around,
suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this
spiral that is taking them where they don't want to go. The most intelligent
among them turn it into a religion: oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois
existence! Cynics of this kind frequently dine at Papa's table: "What has become
of the dreams of our youth?" they ask, with their smug, disillusioned air.
"Those years are long gone, and life's a bitch." I despise this false lucidity
that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: kids
who don't understand what has happened to them and who act big and tough when in
fact all they want is to burst into tears.
And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe
what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by
deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it
is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become
an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains
intact, but all the available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things.
All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you
can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself,
you deceive your own children.
All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent
trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a
lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then their entire lives
wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has
led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars and they end up like
goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children
right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good
moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as
an adult — not to mention the fact that you'd be spared at least one traumatic
experience, i.e. the goldfish bowl.
I am twelve years old, I live at 7, rue de Grenelle in an apartment for rich
people. My parents are rich, my family is rich and my sister and I are,
therefore, as good as rich. My father is a parliamentarian and before that he
was a minister: no doubt he'll end up in the top spot, emptying out the wine
cellar of the residence at the Hôtel de Lassay. As for my mother . . . Well, my
mother isn't exactly a genius but she is educated. She has a Ph.D. in
literature. She writes her dinner invitations without mistakes and spends her
time bombarding us with literary references, ("Colombe, stop trying to act like
Madame Guermantes," or "Pumpkin, you are a regular Sanseverina,").
Despite all that, despite all this good fortune and all this wealth, I have
known for a very long time that the final destination is the goldfish bowl. How
do I know? Well, the fact is I am very intelligent. Exceptionally intelligent,
in fact. Even now, if you look at children my age, there's an abyss. And since I
don't really want to stand out, and since intelligence is very highly rated in
my family — an exceptionally gifted child would never have a moment's peace — I
try to scale back my performance at school, but even so I always come first. You
might think that to pretend to be simply of average intelligence when you are
twelve years old like me and have the level of a senior in college is easy.
Well, not at all. It really takes an effort to appear stupider than you are.
But, in a way, this does keep me from dying of boredom: all the time I don't
need to spend learning and understanding I use to imitate the ordinary good
pupils — the way they do things, the answers they give, their progress, their
concerns and their minor errors. I read everything that Constance Baret writes —
she is second in the class — all her math and French and history and that way I
find out what I have to do: for French a string of words that are coherent and
spelled correctly; for math the mechanical reproduction of operations devoid of
meaning; and for history a list of events joined by logical connections. But
even if you compare me to an adult, I am much smarter than the vast majority.
That's the way it is. I'm not particularly proud of this because it's not my
doing. But one thing is sure — there's no way I'm going to end up in the
goldfish bowl. I've thought this through quite carefully. Even for someone like
me who is supersmart and gifted in her studies and different from everyone else,
in fact superior to the vast majority — even for me life is already all plotted
out and so dismal you could cry: no one seems to have thought of the fact that
if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a
failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your
success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
So I've made up my mind. I am about to leave childhood behind and, in spite
of my conviction that life is a farce, I don't think I can hold out to the end.
We are, basically, programmed to believe in something that doesn't exist,
because we are living creatures; we don't want to suffer. So we spend all our
energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that
that is why life has meaning. I may be very intelligent, but I don't know how
much longer I'm going to be able to struggle against this biological tendency.
When I join the adults in the rat race, will I still be able to resist this
feeling of absurdity? I don't think so. That is why I've made up my mind: at the
end of the school year, on the day I turn thirteen, June sixteenth, I will
commit suicide. Careful now, I have no intention of making a big deal out of it,
as if it were an act of bravery or defiance. Besides, it's in my best interests
that no one suspect a thing. Adults have this neurotic relationship with death,
it gets blown out of all proportion, they make a huge deal out of it when in
fact it's really the most banal thing there is. What I care about, actually, is
not the thing in itself, but the way it's done. My Japanese side, obviously, is
inclined toward seppuku. When I say my Japanese side, what I mean is my love for
Japan. I'm in the eighth grade so, naturally, I chose Japanese as my second
foreign language. The teacher isn't great, he swallows his words in French and
spends his time scratching his head as if he were puzzled, but the textbook
isn't bad and since the start of the year I've made huge progress. I hope in a
few months to be able to read my favorite mangas in the original. Maman doesn't
understand that a little-girl-as-gifted-as-you-are wants to read mangas. I
haven't even bothered to explain to her that "manga" in Japanese doesn't mean
anything more than "comic book." She thinks I'm high on subculture and I haven't
set her straight on that. In short, in a few months I might be able to read
Taniguchi in Japanese. But back to what we were talking about: I'll have to do
it before June sixteenth because on June sixteenth I'm committing suicide. But I
won't do seppuku. It would be full of significance and beauty but . . . well . .
. I really have no desire to suffer. In fact, I would hate to suffer; I think
that if you have decided to die, it is precisely because your decision is in the
nature of things, so you must do it in a gentle way. Dying must be a delicate
passage, a sweet slipping away to rest. There are people who commit suicide by
jumping out of the window of the fourth floor or swallowing bleach or even
hanging themselves! That's senseless! Obscene, even. What is the point of dying
if not to not suffer? I've devoted great care to planning how I'll exit the
scene: every month for the last year I've been pilfering a sleeping pill from
Maman's box on the night-table. She takes so many that she wouldn't even notice
if I took one every day, but I've decided to be particularly careful. You can't
leave anything to chance when you've made a decision that most people won't
understand. You can't imagine how quickly people will get in the way of your
most heartfelt plans, in the name of such trifles as "the meaning of life" or
"love of mankind." Oh and then there is "the sacred nature of childhood."
Therefore, I am headed slowly toward the date of June sixteenth and I'm not
afraid. A few regrets, maybe. But the world, in its present state, is no place
for princesses. Having said that, simply because you've made plans to die
doesn't mean you have to vegetate like some rotting piece of cabbage. Quite the
contrary. The main thing isn't about dying or how old you are when you die, it's
what you are doing the moment you die. In Taniguchi the heroes die while
climbing Mount Everest. Since I haven't the slightest chance of taking a stab at
K2 or the Grandes Jorasses before June sixteenth, my own personal Everest will
be an intellectual endeavor. I have set as my goal to have the greatest number
possible of profound thoughts, and to write them down in this notebook: even if
nothing has any meaning, the mind, at least, can give it a shot, don't you
think? But since I have this big Japanese thing, I've added one requirement:
these profound thoughts have to be formulated like a little Japanese poem:
either a haiku (three verses) or a tanka (five verses).
My favorite haiku is by Basho.
Mixed with little shrimp
Some crickets!
Now that's no goldfish bowl, is it, that's what I call poetry!
But in the world I live in there is less poetry than in a Japanese
fisherman's hut. And do you think it is normal for four people to live in
fifteen hundred square feet when tons of other people, perhaps some poètes
maudits among them, don't even have a decent place to live and are crammed
together fifteen or twenty in seventy square feet? When, this summer, I heard on
the news that some Africans had died because a fire had started in the stairway
of their rundown tenement, I had an idea. Those Africans have the goldfish bowl
right there in front of them, all day long — they can't escape through
storytelling. But my parents and Colombe are convinced they're swimming in the
ocean just because they live in their fifteen hundred square feet with their
piles of furniture and paintings.
So, on June sixteenth I intend to refresh their pea-brain memories: I'm going
to set fire to the apartment (with the barbecue lighter). Don't get me wrong,
I'm not a criminal: I'll do it when there's no one around (the sixteenth of June
is a Saturday and on Saturday Colombe goes to see Tibère, Maman is at yoga, Papa
is at his club and as for me, I stay home), I'll evacuate the cats through the
window and I'll call the fire department early enough so that there won't be any
victims. And then I'll go off quietly to Grandma's with my pills, to sleep. With
no more apartment and no more daughter, maybe they'll give some thought to all
those dead Africans, don't you suppose?
Excerpted from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions. All rights reserved.
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