Overwhelmed by her reading, Alice wonders why bring a child into the world if the world as she has always known it is disappearing? Like everyone of her generation, she lived through the torments of the Cold War when she was just a child. Her parents, her teachers worried her with their talk of the eventuality of nuclear war. But the seventies, with the spin-off effects of the hippie movement, erased her apocalyptic anxieties. Now they’re back, as Alice is preparing to become a mommy, not in the form of a nuclear explosion that will destroy the whole planet but in that of a relentless future sending humans racing around in all directions, like headless hens. Life will lose its meaning, and death will be greeted with indifference.
It is at this point of her life that Alice distances herself from her husband’s positions on anything and everything. She no longer shares his taste in music and films. Oh, she still appreciates his critical discourse that denounces the pervading stupidity and intellectual sloth. But, she thinks, you can’t always be on the defensive and see life as a trial. She has a duty to be positive for the unborn child. She doesn’t want to reflect on the world and its death foretold. She rejects pessimism and nightmare scenarios. Enjoy the present moment, appreciate the beauty of a sunbathed landscape, savour a good meal: such a world view also merits her attention. One must have confidence in life and concentrate on the bright side. She likes the expression “the bright side of things.” Stroking her rounded belly, she gives her unborn son a rendezvous with the year 2000. He’ll be twenty years old then. She promises him that the world will still look like a world made for men, women, and children despite the prophets of doom. She will be there to enter the twenty-first century with him in spite of the future.
She hasn’t been able to keep her promise. Jonathan has just turned nineteen. A few days earlier, she finished writing A Pure Heart, which had worn her out. Into that novel she had inserted some painful events from her past with Antoine. She knows that its publication is liable to turn their lives upside down. She needs to get away for a while. It’s the Christmas holiday season. She persuades Antoine to take an all-inclusive trip to Huatulco, in Mexico. Two weeks of total idleness. Drink, eat, sunbathe, read on the beach, swim. Everything that Antoine hates and has always refused to do, despite the pleas of his wife. He finds the very idea of an all-inclusive trip demeaning. Take a bunch of people fleeing the winter, close them up inside an artificial décor, surrounded by pools bordering the sea, served by underpaid people, eat twice as much as usual – there’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, after all – drink four times as much as the bloodstream can carry – there’s an open bar, after all – strut around in fake luxury boutiques, watch shows designed to entertain sun-stunned tourists with bloated bellies and broken-down brains, no, no, no!
“Think about it: under its heavenly appearance, the all-inclusive trip hides the structure of a concentration camp.”
“Exaggeration expresses first of all the weakness of one’s argument. As you yourself are always saying.”
Usually, they would spend vacations in Prague or Berlin. But this time, Antoine succumbed to Alice’s arguments. Basically, he wanted quite often to lose himself in that artificial world, sink into that deceptive nonchalance where life regresses and happiness is defined according to criteria clearly identifiable: golden beach, blue sky, turquoise sea, a man, a woman.
They are to land at Huatulco on Christmas Eve. Before they leave, Alice wants to give herself one last little treat. She’s been thinking about it for weeks now: the brand-new iMac.
In 1998, Apple’s publicity is so strident that no one can escape it: a high-performance machine that looks like a design object, a blue-green computer that makes you want to create, to launch a motley collection of ideas, to move around in infinite networks thanks to its simplified internet connection, a computer inside a translucent plastic shell!
Nothing like the Macintosh, sluggish, slow, a dull beige block that Alice had bought in 1993. Yes, why should a computer be ugly and far removed from any aesthetic concern? The colour of the iMac, Bondi blue, had been chosen as a reference to that of the sea off Bondi Beach in southern Australia. Alice is impressed by that kind of detail, which makes her relate to Apple’s advertising. “I think, therefore iMac,” she says to herself as she stows the box with her brand-new computer in the trunk of her car. She can’t wait to show it to Antoine, who’ll be green with envy. He will deny it in any case. She’ll pass on her old Macintosh to him. She hurries out of the mall. Before going home she wants to stop at her publisher’s to submit the final version of her manuscript. Louis-Martin is waiting impatiently for her Pure Heart before closing his office for Christmas. Alice insists on handing it to him directly. After that’s done she leaves at once, anxious to get home and finish preparing for the trip. Lost in thought, she runs a red light and collides with a snowplough. Her cervical vertebrae broken, Alice dies in the ambulance.
A second before the impact, she was imagining Antoine’s reaction at the moment when he turned the last page of A Pure Heart.
