Things and A Man Asleep (3 page)

But the mere prospect of the work involved scared them. They would have had to borrow, to save, to invest. They could not bring themselves to do it. Their hearts weren't in it: they thought only in terms of all or nothing. The bookcase would be light oak or it would not be. It was not. Books piled up on two dirty wooden shelving stacks, and, in double rows, in cupboards which should never have been used that way. For three years an electric point remained unrepaired, without their making up their minds to call in an electrician, whilst along almost every wall ran crudely spliced and shoddily extended leads. It took them six months to replace a curtain pulley-rope. And the slightest hold-up in regular maintenance resulted within twenty- four hours in a mess which the beneficent presence of trees and gardens so close at hand made even more unbearable.

The temporary, the provisional held absolute sway. They were in wait only of a miracle. They would have summoned architects, contractors, builders, plumbers, decorators and painters. They would have gone on a cruise and on their return would have found a flat transformed, converted, refurbished, a model apartment, miraculously enlarged, full of custom-built details, removable partitions, sliding doors, an efficient and unobtrusive heating system, invisible electrical wiring, good quality furniture.

But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.

Such a lack of directness, of clear-headedness, almost, was typical. What was probably the most serious thing was that they were cruelly lacking in ease - not material, objective ease, but easiness, or a certain kind of relaxedness. They tended to be on edge, tense, avid, almost jealous. Their love of well-being, of higher living standards, came out most often as an idiotic kind of sermonising, when they would hold forth, they and their friends, on the sheer genius of a pipe or a low table; they would turn them into
objets d'art
, into museum pieces. They would become passionate about a suitcase-one of those tiny, astonishingly flat cases in slightly grainy black leather you could see on display in shop windows around Madeleine and which seem the quintessence of the alleged pleasures of lightning visits to New York or to London. They would cross all of Paris to see an armchair they'd been told was just perfect. And since they knew their classics they would sometimes even hesitate to put on some new garment, as it seemed so important to them, for it to look its best, that it should first have been worn three times. But the slightly ritualised gestures they would make to show their approval at a tailor's, or a milliner's, or a bootmaker's shop window display only managed, most often, to make them look slightly silly.

Perhaps they were too marked by their past (not they alone, moreover, but their friends, their colleagues, people of their age, the circles they mixed in). Perhaps they were too greedy from the outset: they wanted to go too fast. The world and its things would have had to have always belonged to them, and then they could have imprinted on them myriad signs of their ownership. But they were condemned to conquest; they could become richer and richer, but there was no way they could have always been rich. They would have liked to live in comfort, amidst beauty. But they shrieked, they admired, and that was the surest proof that they were not in it, not amidst it. They lacked tradition - in perhaps the most despicable sense of the word - as well as true enjoyment, implicit and immanent, like a self-evident truth, the enjoyment which involves bodily happiness; their pleasure was cerebral. Too often, what they liked in the things they called luxury was only the money behind them; they loved wealth before they loved life.

In this respect their first sallies outside the student world, their first forays into the universe of high-class shops which was soon to become their Promised Land, were particularly revealing. Their still-wavering taste, their over-hesitant meticulousness, their lack of experience, their rather blinkered respect for what they believed to be the standards of true good taste, brought them some jarring moments, some humiliations. For a time it might have appeared that the sartorial ideal to which Jérôme and his friends aspired was not that of the English gentleman, but the utterly continental caricature of it presented by a recent emigrant on a modest salary. And on the day Jérôme bought his first pair of British shoes, he took great care, after polishing them at length with a woollen rag dipped in a little beeswax of superior quality, rubbing very gently in small concentric circles, he took great care to put them in the sun where they were supposed to acquire an outstanding shine in the least time. Alas, alongside a pair of crepe-soled moccasin ankle-boots which he obstinately refused to wear, they were his only shoes; he misused them, dragged them through rutted tracks, and finished them off in just under seven months.

Then, as time passed, with the help of accumulating experience, it seemed that they were learning how to stand back a little from their most fervent passions. They had learned how to wait, and how to grow accustomed. Their taste matured slowly, became firmer, more balanced. Their desires had time to ripen; their greed became less sour. When on outings around Paris they stopped in villages to look at antiques, they no longer rushed straight towards the china plates, towards the church pews, towards the blown-glass demijohns and the brass candlesticks. To be sure, the somewhat static image they had of the ideal home, of perfect amenity, of the happy life was still imbued with a lot of naivety, a lot of self-indulgence: there was something forced in their liking for objects which only the taste of the day decreed to be beautiful: imitation Epinal pseudo-naive cartoons, English-style etchings, agates, spun-glass tumblers, neo-primitive paste jewellery, para- scientific apparatus, which in no time at all they would come across in all the window displays in Rue Jacob, in Rue Visconti. They still dreamt of possessing such things; they would have assuaged that obvious, instant need to be up-to-date, to be seen to be connoisseurs. But this extreme imitativeness was becoming less and less important, and it was pleasant for them to reflect that the picture they had of life had slowly been stripped of all its more aggressive, showy and occasionally juvenile trappings. They had burnt what they had previously worshipped: the witches' mirrors, the chopping-blocks, those stupid little mobiles, the radiometers, the multi-coloured pebbles, the hessian panels adorned with expressive squiggles as if by Mathieu. It seemed to them that they were progressively mastering their desires: they knew what they wanted; they had clear ideas. They knew what their happiness, their freedom would be.

But they were wrong all the same. They were beginning to lose their way. Already they were starting to feel they were being propelled along a path of which they knew neither the turns nor the terminus. They did on occasions feel frightened. Most often, however, all they felt was impatience: they felt ready; they were available; they were waiting to live, they were waiting for money.

III

Jérôme was twenty-four and Sylvie twenty-two. They were both market researchers. Their work, which was not exactly a trade nor quite a profession, consisted of interviewing people by various different techniques, on a range of subjects. It was difficult work, requiring at the very least a high degree of nervous concentration, but it was not uninteresting, not at all badly paid, and it left them an appreciable amount of free time.

Like almost all their colleagues, Jérôme and Sylvie had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice. No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again, history had chosen for them. Of course, like everyone else, they would have liked to give themselves to something, to feel in themselves some powerful need that they would have called a vocation, an ambition that would have raised them up, a passion that would have fulfilled them. But they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them. When they were students the prospect of a mediocre degree and then a teaching post with a tiny salary at Nogent-sur-Seine, Château-Thierry or Etampes terrified them so much that virtually on meeting each other - Jérôme was then twenty-one, Sylvie nineteen - and without needing to talk it over, they dropped out of courses they had never really begun. The thirst for knowledge did not torture them. Far more prosaically, and without hiding from the fact that they were probably making a mistake and that sooner or later they would come to regret it, they thirsted for a slightly bigger room, for running hot and cold water, for a shower, for meals more varied, or just more copious, than those they ate in student canteens, maybe for a car, for records, holidays, clothes.

Motivation research had emerged in France several years earlier. That year it was still expanding fast. New agencies were springing up by the month, out of nothing, or almost. You could get work in them easily. Most often it involved going into parks or standing at school gates or knocking on doors in suburban housing estates to ask housewives if they had noticed some recent advertisement and what they thought of it. These instant surveys, called minitests or quickies, earned a hundred francs each. It wasn't much, but it was better than baby-sitting, working as a night watchman or as a dishwasher, better than any of the other menial jobs - distributing leaflets, book-keeping, timing radio advertisements, hawking, cramming - which were traditionally the preserve of students. And then the very youth of the agencies themselves, their almost informal state of development, the still total absence of trained staff, held out the prospect, at least potentially, of rapid promotion and a dizzying rise in status.

It was not a bad guess. They spent a few months handing out survey questionnaires. Then came an agency director who, for lack of time, took a chance on them: and so they set off for the provinces with tape-recorders under their arms. Some of their fellow travellers, scarcely older than they were, introduced them to the techniques of the open and the closed interview, which were actually less difficult than is commonly supposed. They learned how to make other people do the talking and to weigh their own words carefully; they learned how to unearth from people's muddled hesitations, perplexed silences and shy hints the lines that needed pursuing; they pierced the secret of that universal "aha . . .", a truly magical intonation with which the interviewer punctuates the interviewee's words, to bolster his confidence, to show that he understands, to egg him on, to query and even sometimes to threaten him.

They obtained respectable results. They built on their success. They picked up, from here and from there, snippets of sociology, psychology, statistics; they acquired the vocabulary and the signs, the mannerisms that make the right impression: for Sylvie, a particular way of putting on and taking off her glasses, a particular way of taking notes, of thumbing through a report, a particular way of speaking, of inserting in her conversations with employers and in a barely interrogative tone of voice turns of phrase like "indeed . . "I guess maybe . . "up to a point . . "what I'm wondering is . . .", a particular way of quoting at appropriate points the names of C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, or - even better — Lazarsfeld, Cantril or Herbert Hyman, of whose works they had read not three pages.

They proved very adept at acquiring these indispensable basic items of professional equipment, and, scarcely one year after their first involvement in motivation research, they were entrusted with the highly responsible task of a "content analysis": it was one rung only below the role of project supervisor, which was always performed by an office-based executive, the highest, thus the best-paid and consequently the most prestigious position in the whole hierarchy. Over the following years they almost never slipped from these heights.

And so for four years and maybe more they explored and interviewed and analysed. Why are pure-suction vacuum cleaners selling so poorly? What do people of modest Origin think of chicory? Do you like ready-made mashed potato, and if so, why? Because it's light? Because it's creamy? Because it's easy to make - just open it up and there you are? Do people really reckon baby carriages are expensive? Aren't you always prepared to fork out a bit extra for the good of the kids? Which way will French women vote? Do people like cheese in squeezy tubes? Are you for or against public transport? What do you notice first when you eat yoghurt? - the colour? the texture? the taste? natural odour? Do you read a lot, a little, not at all? Do you eat out? Would you, Madam, like to rent your room to a Black? What do people think, honestly, of old age pensions? What does the younger generation think? What do executives think? What does the woman of thirty think? What do you think of holidays? Where do you spend your holidays? Do you like frozen food? How much do you think a lighter like this one costs, eh? What do you look for in a mattress? Describe a man who likes pasta. What do you think of your washing machine? Are you satisfied with it? Doesn't it make too many suds? Does it wash properly? Does it tear the clothes? Does it dry? Would you rather have a washing machine that dries as * well? And safety in coal mines, is it alright or not good enough, in your view, sir? (Make the target speak; ask him to give personal examples: things he has seen; has he been injured himself? How did it happen? And your son, sir, will he be a miner like his father? So what will he be, then?)

There was washing, drying, ironing. Gas, electricity and the telephone. Children. Clothes and underclothes. Mustard. Packet soups, tinned soups. Hair: how to wash it, how to dry it, how to make it hold a wave, how to make it shine. Students, fingernails, cough syrup, typewriters, fertilisers, tractors, leisure pursuits, presents, stationery, linen, politics, motorways, alcoholic drinks, mineral water, cheeses, jams, lamps and curtains, insurance and gardening.
Nil humani alienum
. . . Nothing that was human was outside their scope.