Loses all the time
Bizarrely, back then, his Francisque medal, received directly from General Pétain, and his functions in the Vichy regime, however modest, are never mentioned, neither by the media (amnesiac, as usual) nor by his political enemies (who perhaps don’t want to upset their own constituency with unpleasant memories). Only the very small group on the extreme right are spreading what the new generation considers a calumny.
The meeting begins. Fabius has served hot drinks, cookies, and fruit juice on a large varnished wooden table. To indicate the size of their task, Moati takes out an old editorial on Mitterrand by Jean Daniel, which he cut out of a Nouvel Obs from 1966: “Not only does this man give the impression that he believes in nothing: when you are with him, he makes you feel guilty for believing in something. Almost involuntarily, he insinuates that nothing is pure, all is sordid, and that no illusions are allowed.”
All the men gathered around the table agree that they have a job on their hands.
Moati eats Palmitos.
Badinter pleads Mitterrand’s cause: in politics, cynicism is only a relative handicap; it can also suggest shrewdness and pragmatism. After all, compromise doesn’t have to be unprincipled. The very nature of democracy necessitates flexibility and calculation. Diogenes the Cynic was a particularly enlightened philosopher.
“Okay. So what about the Observatoire?” asks Fabius.
Lang protests: this murky affair about a faked attack was never cleared up, and it was all based on the dubious testimony of an ex-Gaullist turned right-wing extremist who changed his story several times. And Mitterrand’s car had been found riddled with bullets! Lang seems genuinely indignant.
“Agreed,” says Fabius. So that’s his shady past dealt with. But there remains the fact that, up to now, he has not come across as especially likable or especially socialist.
Jack Lang reminds them that Jean Cau said Mitterrand was a priest and his socialism was “the flip side of his Christianity.”
Debray sighs. “What a load of crap.”
Badinter lights a cigarette.
Moati eats Chokinis.
Attali: “He decided to move to the left. He thinks it’s necessary to contain the Communist Party. But it puts off moderate left-wing voters.”
Debray: “No, what you call a moderate left-wing voter, I would call a centrist. Or a radical Valoisian, at a push. Those people will vote for the Right, no matter what. They’re Giscardians.”
Fabius: “Including left-wing radicals?”
Debray: “Naturally.”
Lang: “All right, and the canines?”
Moati: “We’ve booked him an appointment with a dentist in the Marais. He’s going to give him a smile like Paul Newman’s.”
Fabius: “Age?”
Attali: “Experience.”
Debray: “Madagascar?”
Fabius: “Who cares? Everyone’s forgotten it.”
Attali: “He was minister of the colonies in ’51, and the massacres took place in ’47. Sure, he said some unfortunate things, but he doesn’t have blood on his hands.”
Badinter says nothing. Neither does Debray. Moati drinks his hot chocolate.
Lang: “But there’s that film where you see him in a colonial helmet in front of Africans in loincloths…”
Moati: “The TV stations won’t show those images again.”
Fabius: “Colonialism is a bad subject for the Right. They won’t want to get into this.”
Attali: “That’s true for the Algerian War too. First and foremost, Algeria is de Gaulle’s betrayal. It’s sensitive. Giscard won’t take any risks with the pied-noir vote.”
Debray: “And the Communists?”
Fabius: “If Marchais plays the Algerian card, we’ll play Messerschmitt. In politics, as in every other aspect of life, it’s not in anyone’s interests to dig up the past.”
Attali: “And if he insists, we’ll hit him with the Nazi-Soviet Pact!”
Fabius: “Okay, fine. And the positives?”
Silence.
They pour themselves more coffee.
Fabius lights a cigarette.
Jack Lang: “Well, his image is of a man of letters.”
Attali: “Who cares? The French vote for Badinguet, not for Victor Hugo.”
Lang: “He’s a great orator.”
Debray: “Yeah.”
Moati: “No.”
Fabius: “Robert?”
Badinter: “Yes and no.”
Debray: “He’s a crowd-pleaser.”
Badinter: “He’s good when he has the time to develop his line of thought, and when he’s feeling confident.”
Moati: “But he’s no good on TV.”
Lang: “He’s good when he goes head-to-head.”
Attali: “But not face-to-face.”
Badinter: “He’s uncomfortable when anyone resists or contradicts him. He knows how to construct an argument, but he doesn’t like being interrupted. As powerful as he can be at a rally, with the crowd behind him, he can be equally abstruse and boring with journalists.”
Fabius: “That’s because on TV he usually despises whoever’s interviewing him.”
Lang: “He likes to take his time, to warm up slowly. Onstage, he can do that, feel his way forward, test out his rhetoric, adapt to his audience. On TV, that’s impossible.”
Moati: “But TV’s not going to change for him.”
Attali: “Well, not in the next year anyway. Once we’re in power…”
All: “… we fire Elkabbach!” (laughter)
Lang: “He has to think about TV like a giant rally. He has to tell himself that the crowd is right behind the camera.”
Moati: “He needs to watch out for waxing lyrical, though. It’s okay at a rally, but it doesn’t work in a studio.”
Attali: “He has to learn to be more concise and direct.”
Moati: “He has to improve. He has to train for it. We’ll make him rehearse.”
Fabius: “Hmm, he’s going to love that.”
28
After four or five days, Hamed finally decides to go home, at least to check whether he might have a clean T-shirt lying around somewhere, so he drags himself up the six or seven flights of stairs that lead to his attic room, where he can’t take a shower because there’s no bathroom but he can at least collapse on his bed for a few hours to purge himself of physical and nervous fatigue and the vanity of the world and existence. But when he turns the key in the lock, he feels something odd and notices that the door has been forced, so he gently pushes it open—it creaks discreetly—and finds his room in a state of chaos: the bed turned over, the drawers pulled out, the baseboard torn off, his clothes spread all over the floor, his fridge open with a bottle of Banga left intact in the door, the mirror over the sink broken into several pieces, his cans of Gini and 7 Up scattered to the far corners of the room, his collection of Yacht Magazine torn out page by page as well as his comic-book history of France (the volume on the French Revolution and the one on Napoleon seem to have disappeared), his dictionary and his books thrown haphazardly around, the tape from his music cassettes unraveled and his stereo partially dismantled.
Hamed respools a Supertramp tape, puts it in the cassette player, and presses PLAY to see if it still works. Then he collapses onto his upside-down mattress and falls asleep, fully clothed, door wide open, to the opening chords of “The Logical Song,” thinking that when he was young he, too, thought that life was a miracle, beautiful and magical, but that, while things have certainly changed, he doesn’t yet feel very responsible nor very radical.
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