Fouad Laroui - The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

He finished the Volkskrant article and the Thalys still hadn’t arrived. He consulted his watch then began an imaginary course for the ectoplasms: “What does that mean, ‘to read the thoughts of Mr. Tartempion’? All I had to do was think of Brussels and the phrase ‘funny place to meet up’ formed mechanically in my head. Where does this idiocy come from? We don’t know! From physicochemical connections in the spongy mass we call the brain, from an electric shock…It all happened automatically, as if I had inadvertently pushed a button programmed, unbeknownst to me, to open a hidden door. (A sweeping glance around the lecture hall to check that his students had understood the image.) To what extent am I, me , responsible for that chain of events?”

The Thalys pulled in noiselessly along the platform. John steered himself toward car 11, in front of which stood an affable employee who took a glance at his ticket.

“Seat 74, on your right,” said the employee in Dutch and then French.

John contented himself with nodding his head and giving a faint smile. He had stopped making remarks along the lines of “Yes, I know, I take this train two times a month” a long time ago, for they accomplished nothing, except, perhaps, an irate reaction from the employee (“Excuse me for trying to be of service…”). He had decided, once and for all, to consider each civil functionary as a machine with which it was necessary to maintain relations that our descendants will maintain with their South Korean robots: informative, brief, concrete — never any affect or emotion. (“But, m’sieur, you’re dehumanizing the world.” “That happened long before I came along, mademoiselle Guusje.”) Placing his suitcase above seat 74, John resumed his course: “Even if we get to that point one day, by implanting the most advanced electrodes in Mr. Tartempion’s brain, to ‘read’ his thoughts, how would we separate those that belong to him of his own right, those that engage him and genuinely express his ‘ego,’ from those that appear all of a sudden, that do nothing, so to speak, but pass through?”

He plopped onto his seat, adjusted it to the reclined position, closed his eyes and continued. Addressing Stephan, one of his favorite students, he said: “Suppose I watch our Great Leader on the television — assuming we are in a totalitarian country — and this incongruous phrase forms in my head: ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ because at school, that’s what we shouted at one of our classmates who was a little chubby and the Great Leader had put on some weight in the past few months…So, Stephan, you are a functionary of the Ministry of Control of the People’s Thoughts and the electrodes are informing on me. The brain of citizen John Van Duursen, at 8:56pm, was crossed by the words ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ at the moment when our glorious Guide appeared on the little screen — so, Stephan, the question is: Am I responsible for this concatenation of words that formed without my being able to do anything about it?”

The Thalys had just set off and was now gliding out of the station, with the city on the left and the port on the right. “ Il y a des marins qui naissent / dans la chaleur épaisse …”, the song popped into John’s head; he very much admired the great Jacques Brel. Look who was adding grist to his mill now (“So to speak,” thought John, vexed at not having anyone to whom he could remark that to add grist to the mill of a Batavian was certainly as pointless as supplying coal to Newcastle or sand to the Sahara).

“Looks like I got a little derailed there,” he said — and he heard the phrase: “You mean, a little detailed?” Ha, ha. Here we have the clear proof of his theory: our thoughts don’t belong to us, for the most part. They fall under the jurisdiction of…what’s the phrase? Ah yes: spontaneous generation. They are little electric currents that…Anyway. He dove back into his magazine. The phrase “funny place to meet up” was all the more incongruous because he knew perfectly well why he was going to Brussels: to put an end to his relationship. Funny place to break up.

Annie hasn’t smoked for a long time. She renounced her vice for John, her Hollandais (“ No, Annie, Holland is only a province of the Netherlands. I am né-er-lan-dais .” ) …her capricious Néerlandais , a bit stubborn, terribly intelligent. She doesn’t smoke anything and so much the better, for there is no longer anywhere to “light up”—she learned that expression from John — in the Gare du Nord, where she is waiting for the Thalys that will take her to Brussels. For the first time in months, her fingers are itching for it, she bites her lips, this would be the moment to exhale her anxiety in the cigarette’s smoke. She raises her eyes toward the board that she’s consulted a thousand times since the start, two years ago, of her long-distance relationship with the great Batavian she is about to meet in the land of Tintin.

The train leaves in fifteen minutes. I have time to go buy a newspaper. A bit more than an hour and I’ll be in Brussels. It’s curious, he didn’t seem surprised when I proposed we spend the weekend there, instead of meeting up, per usual, in Paris or Amsterdam. He didn’t ask any questions…What would I have replied? We began this adventure in Brussels, it’s logical (she hesitates, perhaps that’s not the appropriate word), it’s right (suitable? appropriate?) that we separate there, like a loop closing itself, at once finished and infinite. How will John react to the decision she had made? To break up.

Car 17. After leaving her suitcase at the entrance, Annie goes to sit in the seat indicated on her ticket, discreetly stuffs Quies earplugs in her ears — no interest in hearing the multilingual jabbering of her neighbors — and takes out her newspaper. “The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair” continues. It’s a godsend for the press, whose sales are exploding. Everyone has an opinion on the topic. As it happens, it was the cause of her latest fight with John. Fight? Let’s say snag, a cultural misunderstanding… “This type of scandal wouldn’t happen in my country,” John had decreed with that little air of moral superiority that frustrated Annie so much.

“That’s right, treat us like degenerates while you’re at it.”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate. You know I adore France. But come on, you let everything slide with your male politicians.”

“Yours don’t interest anybody, that’s why we don’t go digging through their private lives. Who ever heard talk of Balkenende or Rutte?”

It wasn’t the first time they had quarreled, but that time had left a sour taste in her mouth. Was it possible to spend one’s life with someone who always assumed the role of moral authority? A man she believed she loved but who irritated her with his obsessive reduction of everything to the following certitude: he knew what was right and she had no choice but to come around to his opinion. The Thalys was trundling now through the Parisian suburbs before reaching its tremendous speed in the plains of the north. “It’s hard enough with each of us living in our own country, to always have these three hours of train between us,” she thought. “If on top of that I have to live in a sort of permanent guilt because I don’t have the Calvinist principles of Monsieur…” She remembered that John Calvin was French but didn’t know how to turn the phrase to her advantage. Oh, whatever…Her eyes lingered again on the headline of her daily. Look at that, Johnny Hallyday is playing the actor, on the stage. In a play by Tennessee Williams, no less. She dreamed for an instant about going to see it with John but collided with another one of his principles: a play is done in the language in which it was written. Easy to say, when you’re a polyglot like him. I’m a professor of history, not letters. I prattle through a bit of English. Thankfully he speaks my language. Ah, another theme of our squabbles. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would partake in long conversations in Dutch, in Amsterdam, in a café or at the home of friends, unconcerned that she didn’t understand a word.