Whatever: a novel Read Free

Hence, and as if he took personal delight in putting my nose out of joint, he immediately announced that this contract would call for a lot of travelling around: to Rouen, to La Roche-sur-Yon; I don't know where else. These trips have always been a nightmare for me and Henry La Brette knows it. I could have retorted, `Right then, I quit.' But I didn't.

    Long before the phrase became fashionable, my company developed an authentic enterprise culture (the creation of a logo, distribution of sweatshirts to the salaried staff, motivation seminars in Turkey). It's a topnotch enterprise, enjoying an enviable reputation in its field; a good firm , whichever way you look at it. I can't walk out just like that, you understand.

    It's ten in the morning. I'm sitting in a cool white office, opposite a guy slightly younger than me who's just joined the firm. I think he's called Bernard. His mediocrity is distressing. He can't stop talking about money and investment: share packages, portfolios, high interest saving schemes . . . the full set. He's banking on a level of wage increase slightly higher than inflation. He bores me somewhat. I don't really manage to reply to him. His moustache twitches.

    It goes quiet again once he leaves the office. We work in a totally devastated neighbourhood which looks a bit like the surface of the moon. It's somewhere in the 13th arrondissement. When you arrive by bus you'd really think World War III had happened. But no, it's only urban planning.

    Our windows look out on wasteland which stretches practically as far as you can see, muddy, bristling with hoardings. A few shells of buildings. Immobile cranes. The ambience is calm and cold.

    Bernard comes back. To brighten the atmosphere I tell him that it stinks in my building. People generally go for these stories of vile smells, I've observed. And it's true that coming down the stairs this morning I really did notice a pestilential odour. What's the usually so busy cleaning woman up to, then? He says, Ìt must be a dead rat somewhere. For some reason the idea of it seems to amuse him. His moustache twitches slightly.

    Poor Bernard, in a way. What can he really do with his life? Buy CDs at the FNAC? A guy like him ought to have kids; if he had kids you'd hope he might end up getting something out of the wriggling of little Bernards. But no, he isn't even married.

    A dead loss. At bottom he isn't so much to be pitied, this good Bernard, this dear Bernard. I even think he's happy - inasmuch as he can be, of course; inasmuch as he's Bernard.

    5

    Making Contact

    Later I made an appointment at the Ministry of Agriculture with a girl called Catherine Lechardoy. The specialized software program itself was called `Maple'. Aside from exuding a sugary sap the actual maple is a tree prized in cabinet-making; it grows in certain regions of the colder temperate zones, being particularly widespread in Canada. The Maple program is written in Pascal, with certain routines in C+ +. Pascal is a seventeenth-century French writer, author of some celebrated
    `Pensées'. It is also a highly structured programming language particularly suited to the processing of statistics, the mastery of which I'd managed to acquire in the past. The Maple program was to be used for paying government subsidies to the farmers, an area Catherine Lechardoy was responsible for, at the data processing level that is. Up till now we'd never met, Catherine Lechardoy and I. In fine, this was a `first making of contact'.

    In our field of computer engineering the most interesting aspect is, without a doubt, contact with the clients; at least this is what the company bigwigs love to spout over a fig liqueur (I eavesdropped on their pool-side chats a few times during the recent seminar at the Kusadasi club village).

    For my part, it's always with a certain apprehension that I envisage the first contact with a new client; there are different human beings involved, organized within a certain