Amélie Nothomb - Fear and Trembling

I never saw him there again. Mister Tenshi had found a way of manifesting his disapproval of my fate—by boycotting the rest rooms on the forty-fourth floor. He went to the forty-third floor. Angelic though he might be, he was still made of flesh and blood.

I soon realized that he had spread the good word to those around him; no one from Dairy Products used my men’s room anymore. And I gradually noticed an increasing disaffection for it on the part of the other departments.

Bless Mister Tenshi. This boycott constituted a veritable revenge on Yumimoto. The employees who chose to relieve themselves on the forty-third floor wasted precious company time waiting for the elevator or taking the emergency stairs. In Japan, this is known as sabotage, and it is one of the most serious crimes one can commit, a crime so despicable that they use the French word for it. Only a foreigner could dream up a word for such base behavior.

This solidarity moved me. The word “boycott”—which originates from the name of an Irish landowner—suggests masculinity. And the blockade on my kingdom was exclusively masculine. There was no “girlcott.” In fact, Fubuki seemed more fanatical than usual about using the rest rooms. She started to brush her teeth there twice a day; her hatred for me was having a beneficial effect on her oral and dental hygiene. She so resented me for not resigning that she would use any pretext she could to sneer.

Fubuki may have thought she was torturing me but in fact I was delighted to be given so many opportunities to admire her tempestuous beauty in this our own personal gynaeceum. No boudoir was ever more intimate than the women’s room on the forty-fourth floor. When the door opened, I knew it had to be her, given, as I’ve said, that the other three female import-export employees worked on the forty-third floor. Our little space was like the stage for a play, a place for two tragic actors to meet several times a day to enact the next episode of their fight to the death.

GRADUALLY, THE DISAFFECTION for the men’s bathroom on the forty-fourth floor became a little too flagrant. I hardly saw anyone there anymore—just one or two twits who didn’t know better, plus of course the vice-president. I imagine that it was the latter who took offense at the situation and alerted the authorities.

My position must have posed a real tactical problem for the higher-ups: interventionist though they were, they could not actually force their employees to relieve themselves on their own floor rather than on the floor below. On the other hand, they could not tolerate this act of sabotage. They had to do something. But what?

Naturally, I was deemed responsible for their infamous behavior.

“This can’t go on. You’ve disrupted everything around you once again,” Fubuki told me one day in a fearsome voice.

“What have I done now?

“You know very well.”

“I swear that I don’t.”

“Haven’t you noticed that the men no longer dare to use the bathroom on the forty-fourth floor? They’re wasting time by using the one on the forty-third floor. Your presence here embarrasses them.”

“I understand. But I didn’t choose to be here. You know that.”

“The insolence! If only you were capable of behaving in a dignified way, these things wouldn’t happen.”

I frowned.

“I can’t see how my dignity fits in to all this.”

“If you looked at the men who come to use the bathroom the same way you look at me, their attitude would be easily explained.”

I burst out laughing.

“I don’t look at them at all!”

“In that case, why are they so embarrassed?”

“It’s quite normal. Just having a member of the opposite sex there is enough to intimidate them.”

“And why do you not draw the obvious lesson from that observation?”

“What lesson would you have me draw?”

“Not to be there anymore!”

My face lit up.

“Are you relieving me of my men’s room duties? Oh, thank you!”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“As soon as a man comes in, you go out. You wait until he’s left before you go back in.”

“Fine. But if I’m in the ladies’ rest room, I won’t be able to tell whether anyone’s in the men’s bathroom. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

I put on my most stupid, wide-eyed expression.

“I’ve got an idea! All we have to do is put a surveillance camera in the men’s bathroom, and a monitor in the ladies’ room. That way, I’ll always know when I can go in there!”

Fubuki looked at me in consternation.

“A camera in the men’s bathroom? Do you ever think before you speak?”

“Of course the men can’t know they’re being watched,” I went on ingenuously.

“Be quiet! You’re an idiot!”

“Let’s hope so. Imagine if you’d given this job to an intelligent person!”

“What right do you have to answer me back like that?”

“What have I got to lose? It would be impossible to give me a more lowly position.”

I’d gone too far. I thought Fubuki was having a coronary. She looked at me with daggers in her eyes.

“Be careful. You don’t know what might happen.”

“Tell me.”

“I repeat: be careful. And find a way of not being in the men’s bathroom when someone comes to use it.”

She left. I wondered whether she was bluffing.

JUST IN CASE, I obeyed my new orders. Actually, I was relieved not to have to spend so much time in a place in which, during the space of two months, I had been given the distinct privilege of discovering that there was absolutely nothing refined about the bathroom habits of the Japanese male. Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.

Even though I was spending less time in the men’s room, I noted that employees from the Dairy Products Department had not resumed their use of the forty-fourth floor bathroom. Spurred on by their leader, their boycott continued.

Relieving oneself had become a political act.

Any man who still used the facilities on the forty-fourth floor was in effect saying: “My submission to authority is total and absolute, and I don’t care if foreigners are humiliated. They don’t belong at Yumimoto anyway.”

Any man who refused might have expressed this opinion: “Respecting my superiors does not prevent me from being critical of some of their decisions. Furthermore, I think that we would benefit from putting foreigners in positions of responsibility in which they might be useful to us.”

An ideological debate was raging at the Yumimoto Corporation.

EVERY EXISTENCE CONTAINS its primal trauma, an event dividing life into a before and an after, a trauma so great that even the most furtive memory of it is enough to make an individual freeze in irrational, incurable, animal terror.

The ladies’ room had a lovely bay window. I spent hours standing before it, pressing my forehead against the glass, imagining again and again throwing myself into the view, letting the feeling of falling permeate my body until I was giddy. That is why I was never bored for one minute in my job.

I was right in the middle of a mental defenestration when a new drama erupted. The door opened behind me. It could only be Fubuki; and yet here was not the quick clean sound my torturer made when she opened the door. It was as if the door had been pushed in. The footsteps were not those made by her delicate pumps but heavy and thunderous, those of a yeti in rut.

Everything happened very quickly. I barely had time to turn around to see the great bulk of the vice-president bearing down on me.

Microseconds of astonishment were followed by an eternity of panic.