Pétronille Read online

  She was right, the two went together. At the first bistro we found, opposite the station, I ordered a bottle of Taittinger. As we drank, we gave vent to all our anti-English sentiment: what better way to create an atmosphere? When it came time to go our separate ways, we had to admit that we did not believe a word of what we had said.

  When I got home I immediately wrote my article, “An Interview with Vivienne Westwood,” where I praised the woman to the skies. Nevertheless, I did not leave out any of the discourtesies she had heaped upon me, including the task of walking her poodle. When the commissioning editor received my article, she called me to offer her apologies.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “What I don’t understand is why you insisted that she was looking forward to meeting me.”

  “That’s what her agent told me. And it would have been the least she could have done. What can I do to make it up to you? The psychological trauma you suffered…”

  “You needn’t go so far as to speak of psychological trauma. Why not summon the psychological support unit while you’re at it?”

  “No, you’re right. But a few bottles of champagne, that ought to work wonders for psychological trauma.”

  This journalist obviously knew me well.

  “Oh, you were talking about that type of psychological trauma. Well, what can I say, a few bottles of Laurent-Perrier…”

  “Cuvée Grand Siècle?”

  “You’re right, we mustn’t underestimate the psychological trauma I suffered.”

  The next day, four bottles of Laurent-Perrier Cuvée Grand Siècle were delivered to my door. At that rate, I’ll gladly interview the nastiest old swine on the planet, and walk their poodles wherever they like.

  In 2002 a second novel by Pétronille Fanto, The Neon Light, was published by Éditions Stock.

  I rushed out to get it. The story was about contemporary adolescence. The hero, Léon, was a sort of fifteen-year-old Oblomov, dragging his entire family down in a nihilistic spiral. The book fascinated me even more than the first one had. In a subtle and comic way, it advocated despair.

  I wrote to Pétronille, a letter of the sort only I can write. It is very difficult to express deep admiration to the person inspiring it. In person, that is the last thing I can do. But the pen provides me with a way to overcome the obstacle. In the shelter of the page, I can extricate myself from my excessive emotion. Pessoa has said that writing diminishes the fever of feeling. His sublime words do not apply to me; on the contrary: writing increases my feverish emotions, but the good thing about this worrying rise in an already critical temperature is that it allows clarity to emerge from the confusion in which I am steeped.

  Pétronille called me. She seemed pleased with my letter, because she exclaimed, “Wow!”

  “Thank you.”

  “Given your thoughts about my book, you must be dying to invite me to drink some champagne. I have good news for you: I accept your invitation.”

  I had one bottle left from my post–Vivienne Westwood psychological compensation. At the end of the second flute I declared to Pétronille that in The Neon Light she was denouncing a current trend: the contamination of adults by adolescent values.

  “What a pity you don’t host a late-night panel show on France 2!” she said.

  “Go ahead and laugh. It’s true.”

  “We can continue this conversation at a bar, if that’s where you’re headed.”

  Pétronille liked to keep her conversation lighthearted, except when it was about politics. And there, sooner or later the daughter of the militant communist would show her face, and sooner or later she would exclaim—whether talking about salaries or unemployment or anything else: “You just don’t realize how precarious this makes everything!”

  This expression, which she still uses to this day when referring to the latest source of indignation, has always stunned me. I have never heard anyone other than Pétronille use it, not even politicians on the far left like Arlette Laguiller or Olivier Besancenot. For me, it is Pétronille’s hapax legomenon. I have heard her apply it to things I could never have imagined would have the slightest rapport with being made precarious.

  And that evening, when she informed me that she was going to be doing a signing in a prestigious Parisian bookstore, and I congratulated her, I saw her begin to fume with anger. I tried to get to the bottom of it. Out it came:

  “Those bourgeois booksellers ought to be paying the writers who come and waste two hours of their life signing books for them!”

  “Now now, Pétronille, what are you on about? Booksellers already have a hard enough time as it is making ends meet. As far as a bookseller is concerned, they’re taking a risk, inviting an author to sign at their store, but for the author, it’s a gift!”

  “You really buy all that, don’t you? You’re so naïve! I maintain that all work deserves a salary. To do a book signing without being paid puts you in a precarious situation.”

  I was speechless.

  “Hey, the tide’s gone out,” she complained, handing me her empty champagne flute.

  “We’ve drunk the entire bottle.”

  “So let’s kill another one.”

  “No, I think we’ll leave it there.”

  I had noticed that the more she drank the more she ventured into the far left of the left.

  “What, only one bottle? You, Amélie Nothomb, with your apartment bubbling over with champagne? It’s obscene! It’s disgusting. It’s…”

  “Making things precarious?” I suggested.

  “Exactly.”

  Being Pétronille’s drinking companion was not the most restful thing on earth. Not long thereafter, while she and I were sipping some Moët during God knows what literary event, she expressed an urge to go skiing. I don’t remember exactly how the topic came up. I will resort to imagination and verisimilitude to reconstruct our conversation:

  “Just look at these baboons. I swear, the more I hang around them, the greater my need for some fresh mountain air.”

  “I love the mountains,” I said, innocently enough.

  “Perfect. It’s December. Before the month is out you and I will go skiing. Let’s find someone.”

  I don’t remember whom we contacted, but by the following morning we had a reservation for two people in an Alpine resort which for the sake of the story we shall call Dustin-les-Mites.

  I called Pétronille to ask her how she had found it. Her inebriation was even more amnesiac than my own:

  “Look, I don’t remember a thing. But it will be fun, we’re going skiing. Can you take care of the train tickets?”

  She was right, after all. You have to force the hand of fate. If everything were left to my own initiative, nothing would ever happen in life.

  On December 26 after two trains and a taxi we arrived in Dustin-les-Mites, at an altitude of 1200 meters. We dropped our things off at the chalet apartment. Pétronille was fidgeting with impatience. We had to put on our ski things at once and head for the front.

  While we were waiting in line for tickets for the chairlifts, she said, “When was the last time you went skiing?”

  “In Japan.”

  “With that famous fiancé of yours, then?”

  “No. When I was little.”

  Silence.

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Four.”

  “Are you telling me that you haven’t been skiing since you were four years old?”

  “I am.”

  “And now, how old are you?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  Pétronille sighed with dismay.

  “Don’t count on me to give you lessons. I came here to have fun.”

  “I don’t need your lessons.”

  “You haven’t been skiing in over thirty years, Amélie!”

  “I was a very go
od skier when I was four.”

  “Of course. You got your honorary snowflake at kindergarten. I’m impressed.”

  “It’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “I believe in the genius of childhood.”

  Pétronille put her face in her hands and said, “We are headed for disaster.”

  “I promise you I can feel in my legs what I have to do.”

  At 2:30 we were on the slopes. The sun was shining, the snow conditions were perfect. My enthusiasm was at a peak.

  Pétronille set off like a shot. In less time than it takes me to write this, she made her way down the vast slope, flowing with flawless elegance.

  Cheerful as can be, I set off after her. Six feet farther along I fell flat on my face. I immediately got back on my feet and pushed myself forward, and a second later I was back on the ground. Fifteen times in a row I repeated the same rigmarole. Pétronille had time to take the T-bar and was now standing there next to me.

  “The genius of childhood doesn’t seem to be working. Do you want me to show you?”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Not even ten minutes later, she’d had time to go down and come back up, and was by my side as every five seconds I fell over.

  “We have a problem,” she said. “You’re going to need a very patient instructor.”

  I burst into tears.

  “And a psychiatrist,” she added.

  “Leave me alone! I’m sure I can do it! It’s your presence that’s stopping me. Can’t you find some other slope—far, far away from this one?”

  “All right.”

  She vanished.

  So I was on my own, with two foreign bodies on my feet that were supposed to be a prolongation of my legs, but which so far had only made me feel like I had replaced my shoes with Ottoman sabers. I closed my eyes and went deep inside to look for my four-year-old self.

  In the early 1970s, the Tyrol was all the rage where Japanese fantasies were concerned. My parents had rented a cuckoo clock of a chalet for a week, nestled in a resort in the Japanese Alps. The instructors wore lederhosen and the hostesses were in dirndls with bodices embroidered with edelweiss. It was Christmastime. Whenever we went to drink hot chocolate, there was always a Japanese choir singing in German, hymns to the glory of fir trees. To me it was a world of sublime strangeness.

  On the slopes, the rudimentary instruction my mother gave me bore fruit. By the end of the week, I was like a flash of lightning on my tiny skis. I even knew how to turn.

  “If I keep my eyes closed, I can do it,” I decided now. And that is what I did: I thrust myself forward in total obscurity and, indeed, the feeling came back to me. By pivoting regularly, I made it to the bottom of the slope without falling over. I let out a cry of triumph.

  As I was heading toward the T-bar, a string bean of a man skied up to me.

  “What the hell are you doing? I was teaching my kids how to ski and you almost ran them down!”

  “I’m sorry. It was because I had my eyes closed.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  Perhaps I ought to change my method. Fortunately, once I got to the top of the slope, I discovered that even with my eyes open I could ski very well. What a delight to slalom through the powdery snow, and to use the bumps as ski jumps! What a marvelous sport! I tried some other slopes, and everything went my way. Pétronille caught up with me, flabbergasted.

  “What happened?”

  “I believe in the genius of childhood,” I said again.

  We skied in convoy until evening. How many times since that day have I heard Pétronille tell the story? “There I was on the ski slope with a beginner who was so useless she was in tears, and one hour later I found her zipping around like a pro! I swear, no way is this woman normal.”

  The next morning, Pétronille told me she’d had a very bad night’s sleep. “This place is full of dust mites! I’m allergic.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Open the windows.”

  We tried in vain to open the windows in the apartment. Clearly, we were not meant to open any of them. All our efforts were futile.

  “This is crazy!” fumed Pétronille. “A closed-in space, with wall-to-wall carpeting, and we can’t even air it out!”

  “Isn’t there anything else you can do about dust mites?”

  “Vacuum cleaner.”

  In a closet I found a vacuum cleaner of the sort a slovenly bachelor might use: Pétronille eyed it scornfully. I went over the entire apartment. She shrugged.

  “We should also shake out the comforters, and since we can’t open the window…”

  “That’s no problem. I’ll go shake them outside.”

  I seized each of the comforters bodily and went to shake them out in the street, mindless of people staring. Every time I went back in, Pétronille handed me something else to take down and shake out: pillows, sheets, bedspreads. I did my duty without flinching.

  After my umpteenth trip, she informed me she would help me with the mattress.

  “You won’t be able to lift it by yourself.”

  “Wait a minute. We’re going to shake the mattress out in the street?”

  “Dust mites love to hide in mattresses. This mattress is a four-star hotel as far as they’re concerned.”

  I didn’t dare protest. Lifting the mattress, taking it down on our shoulders and getting it out into the fresh air was a veritable way of the cross. But that was nothing compared to the torture of shaking it out in the street and carrying it back up the narrow stairs.

  Once we had managed to get it back into the apartment, Pétronille came out with, “Right. Your mattress, now.”

  “Why? I’m not allergic to dust mites!”

  “Just think about it. There’s one meter between our beds. For a dust mite, that is hardly what you’d call an insurmountable distance.”

  Resigned, I picked up my mattress and lugged it out into the street, thinking that Christ had been only a bit player, since he’d only had to walk his way of the cross once. Unless I’m Simon of Cyrene, I thought. And I laughed up my sleeve, imagining Christ turning to Simon the way Pétronille had turned to me: “Hey, are you gonna help me with this thing or not?”

  We had not yet touched bottom. There in the street, while we were strenuously shaking the mattress, two policeman came up at a trot, alerted by some stalwart law-abiding neighbor.

  “So, it’s burglary in broad daylight now, is it?” said one of the officers.

  “No, we’re just cleaning house,” I replied, breathlessly.

  “Yeah, yeah. Your ID papers.”

  We had a great deal of difficulty in proving our innocence. The hardest thing was to keep Pétronille from speaking, which I only managed to do by intervening with the humble and conciliatory tone the situation required. The policemen went away, saying, “Don’t let us catch you at it again!”

  Fortunately, they did not hear Pétronille’s reply: “We’ll be doing precisely that, first thing tomorrow morning!”

  But I heard.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course! Dust mites die hard.”

  I was overcome by such deep discouragement that even when I was back on the slopes I did not enjoy myself at all: was it the prospect of having to move two mattresses every single day? All I felt was weariness and despondency.

  At noon, Pétronille sighed: “I’m sick of skiing!”

  “Already?”

  “It’s because of my bad night. Don’t you have any ideas for how we can have more fun?”

  I did have an idea. I left Pétronille to eat her croque-monsieur, and I hurried over to the minimarket. The only champagne they sold was Piper-Heidsieck. I came back with my rucksack weighed down with two bottles. When we reached the top of the slope on
the T-bar, I informed my friend that I would stay there and she should come back to meet me there half an hour later. No sooner had she left than I buried the two bottles in the snow.

  “What a marvelous region!” I thought. “No need for an ice bucket!” While I waited I spent my time imagining the number of grands crus I could chill in such a panorama. Japanese poetry got it right: it is the contemplation of landscapes that reveals us best.

  Pétronille came back and declared that she was dead beat.

  “I hope your surprise is a nice one.”

  I disinterred one of the champagne bottles. After opening her eyes wide, she made one of her typical comments: “I suppose you didn’t think to bring any flutes.”

  Which is when I cleared the snow from the second bottle.

  “That’s why I bought two bottles. That way we each have our own.”

  “How elegant can you get!”

  “The point is to drink while you’re skiing. Skiing with a flute in your hand, that’s James Bond stuff.”

  “Drink while skiing? You’re crazy.”

  “No, just practical,” I said. “Let’s start down, what I mean is, let’s start drinking here.”

  We uncorked the two bottles. When she had drunk half of hers, Pétronille decreed that it was worth trying to drink while skiing.

  “The problem is we don’t have three hands,” she said.

  “I’ve thought of that,” I answered. “One pole in the right hand, and the bottle in the left.”

  “But we need the other pole!”

  “I’ve seen one-armed skiers on disabled sports programs on television, and they manage fine.”

  I had done a damn good job preparing my argument. It was tailor-made to convince a lush who was hoping for nothing better.

  The spare poles were fastened to my backpack and flatteringly replaced by a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck.

  “Is this legal?” asked Pétronille.

  “Something that has never been done is neither legal nor illegal,” I said, decisively and firmly.

  She set off first. I had never seen her ski so boldly. I slid onto the slope to follow her. The impression was extraordinary: it was as if the air and the snow were offering less resistance. Time had changed, too, and everything went by in a flash of ecstasy that seemed to last a thousand years.