“You’re just babbling clichés. You don’t hear yourself: to be what we are! But we are what we are. Find our difference! Yes! What a discovery! I’m born. Fine, so far, so good. Then one day I discover that I’m different. Fantastic! So what do I do? I go out to search for what I am. What an adventure! And what do I discover? I discover that I am what I am. Let’s hear it for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his flights of philosophy!”
“You’re a cynic. If I have a child I’ll be his nest and also the sky where he will spread his wings.”
Alice had murmured that sentence. Antoine had been careful to point out that her lyrical style contained quite a few contradictions and announced nothing good for the future of the child.
“How do you want to be his nest and his sky at the same time? Don’t you think that after a few flights he’ll realize that staying or going amounts to the same thing?”
“Antoine, I’m pregnant.”
For once, he didn’t answer back. Startled, he remained silent as he held Alice very tightly in his arms.
Antoine and Félix often meet at the school cafeteria, where they make short work of their noon meal. The place is harshly lit by rows of fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. Chords from an electric guitar, blasting from speakers hung in the four corners, join in with the racket of boisterous conversations.
“Do you still love Anaïs?”
“I vowed her my eternal love.”
“That sounds ridiculous. Eternal love! Eternity would have to exist.”
“Eternity has always existed. Time came afterwards. Time doesn’t last. Time is the child of eternity. Antoine, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and I swear to you that on the day of the Last Judgment I will be with Anaïs and my love for her will be intact in my heart.”
“Are you serious when you say things like that?”
“Do you think I’m kidding?”
“Someday I’ll prove to you that you’re totally insane. And you’ll thank me.”
If the purity and the determination of Félix’s positions bring him close to his own requirements, Antoine considers his religious convictions to be a challenge to reason in the same way as his dusty feelings for Anaïs. Loving a dead woman seems to him the height of bad faith, a willed blindness. Believing in the Last Judgment, in the eyes of this brand-new philosopher of existence, is a farcical heresy. His friend is going to make a mess of his life, that’s what he thinks. Despite the crackling of his thought, Félix sinks into obscurantism, into an outdated, dangerous, degrading belief.
“Do you have a photo of her? I’m curious to see what she looked like.”
“No.”
“I can’t believe it! How can you live a love so meteoric without that little portable piece of the beloved you can slip into your wallet?”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“How can you swear eternal devotion without that essential token?”
“My entire soul has become the sensitive plate on which her image is imprinted.”
“Your poetic tricks are unconvincing. Can you at least describe her to me?”
Félix turns his head, drawn by something.
“Did you see a ghost? You’ve gone white.”
“It’s a miracle.”
He points to a girl sitting two tables away.
“For a second I thought she was Anaïs.”
“Did she have a turned-up nose?”
“Yes.”
“And shoulder-length black hair?”
“Yes, like that girl.”
“And a mocking expression?”
“Not really. But intense, intelligent eyes.”
“Black?”
“Very black. Magnificent. Where are you going?”
“To see if that girl’s eyes are as black as Anaïs’s.”
Alice Tranchemontagne does not have black eyes. When Antoine goes over to her, he is immediately attracted by the ironic expression in her emerald-green eyes. She doesn’t believe him when he tells her that he’d confused her with a former neighbour. But she’s happy that a boy her age is using such a ploy to approach her. It’s a change from the abrupt manners she’s used to. No boys go to the trouble of making up the slightest little lie, of embroidering the slightest little compliment to approach a girl. Antoine bombards her with questions. In a short time he finds out that she’s studying social sciences, which is totally meaningless, she declares. She’s interested in politics. She adores Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She’s against the war in Vietnam, hates Nixon, objects strongly to racism, inveighs against sexism. When Antoine lets her go back to class after the lunch break, he’s convinced that he’s found his Simone. “All that,” he tells himself, “because for the length of a sigh, Félix thought that he’d seen his dead cousin come back up to the surface of the water.”
In the early days of their marriage, Alice and Antoine read the same books, listen to the same music, and share their points of view with passion in conversations that go on till daybreak. They feel as if they are taking part in a new world order by criticizing the one into which they were born. They declare themselves dissatisfied with reality and are endeavouring to change it by assimilating more or less successfully systems of thought sustained by their disparate reading. They get carried away by ideas because they’re afloat in the zeitgeist. They are particularly struck by Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. They read it when Alice is pregnant with Jonathan.
In the book, the author promotes the notion of the premature appearance of the future in the present. Exponential technological progress allows individuals to make radical changes without having time to adapt to them. Progress happens too quickly. Planned obsolescence. Consumer goods are programmed to become unusable after increasingly shorter periods of time. The future chews away at the space and
