So much of his income was in commission that the corpulent pater familias and his wife had begun to eat less, and the whole family had given up excursions, movies, and dessert. They would do without almost anything for the sake of school supplies and decent clothes for the children. This was more than a matter of pride. For the Marteau children the only exit from the gray and dirty banlieue, where one could not safely venture out at night, was education. Had Armand gone on assistance he would have been allowed several hundred Euros a month more than he was taking in by trying to sell insurance to Parisians who would disappear in August. But no one in his family had ever been on the dole, and the dole seemed to him to be a kind of death.
His father, a farmer in Epaignes, thought that anyone behind a desk in Paris had an illegitimate lock on success and could by decree dictate prices and shares, whereas he himself was always at the mercy of the sun, the soil, and wind that blew in from the sea. Which is why Armand, who had been an unusually good student with a ready talent for math, had left the farm and now was on his way to a glass building in La Défense, a high tower in which the windows did not open and he didn’t have one anyway, although he could see some sky and some daylight across the floor and over the heads of a score of brokers bobbing at their desks.
The huge, pale place at the center of La Défense was like a desert. Armand Marteau would look down from the outside windows when he was near them in hallways and the offices of his seniors, and note that because the dominant color of dress in Paris was black – the color of retreat, protection, closing in on oneself, hardness, cynicism, hiding, and anger – the people moving across the windblown, open space seemed to scurry like ants. The speed at which they moved relative to their apparent size and the distance between him and them was undeniably ant speed. And as they were office workers like him, loosed momentarily from the giant ant hills, in one of which he himself was trapped, this was not a happy reflection, as tiny at a distance as it might be, of his whale-like self.
The morning train slowly filled up with people who, because they knew that other people thought they did not belong in France, looked at blond and blue-eyed Armand as if he were the enemy. He glanced back, convinced by what he saw that they, even if born in France, might choose to be forever alien. Were they friendly and in good spirits, it was easy for him to accept them without qualification. But so often they were oppressed, sullen, tired, angry, and in despair, just like him. And so often they seemed automatically hostile to him, a giant, ruddy farmer who would stare back at them in puzzlement. Their eyes seemed to burn, whereas his, he knew, were as cool and transparent as aquamarine.
At the office were plenty of North and sub-Saharan Africans, but they were kinder and friendlier to him than most of their “French” counterparts, who said that for Armand Marteau the best part of the day was the sandwich – a double cut, because of his weight and because he couldn’t afford to go out with anyone to a restaurant or even a café, which they did every day without fail. When he first heard the epithets he had heard many times since, such as hippo, whale boy, and elephantus, he had laughed along with them; but nothing followed, no flattery, sympathy, self-deprecation, or inclusion. It was deeply hurtful, for they sat by him all day, and they said these things with neither affection nor respect.
The world is full of men and women with souls like swallows and bodies like buffaloes, and, for no good reason, in the end it is much more likely that the soul will have followed the body than the body will have followed the soul. In between is the tragedy of happiness and delicacy sinking into a sea of slights. For a woman it is far worse than for a man, and had Armand been a woman he would have suffered even more or perhaps given up long before.
But giving up would mean many things, including a retreat to the farm, which in its present state could not support six. And he had no savings with which to expand it. A neighboring farmer had already sold out, and from their house the senior Marteaux saw not only plains of wheat and hay but, less than a kilometer distant, a truck park and warehouse (the distribution center for a hypermarket), with lights that blazed from dusk to dawn. Once there had been camps of Roman soldiers on the same spot, the berms still visible, and their lights had been oil lamps that would have been lovely as they flickered in the distance like fireflies.
Although Normandy was beautiful and was what he knew, and he loved the rain sweeping in from the sea and disappearing as it was chased by sunlight through sparkling mist, he hated the milking before dawn, the lowing of cows leaving for slaughter, the ever-presence of manure, hosing off his boots many times a day, the humidity, uncertainty, cold, and strain.
But the city, which his father thought was escape and relief, had proved in its own way just as difficult. His train whisked him past streets where he could not set foot for fear of his life. Salesmen at his company were not allowed to wear the relaxed, almost universal blue blazer of Paris, but had to spend the day in suit and tie, a torture for someone of Armand’s size and weight. La Défense was not like Paris anyway, but just a bleak machine fraying with wear. He hated it. Riding up in the elevator, he prayed for a client or any new business that would take him out into the trees or along the boulevards, into a room, a house, a mansion with a garden. It was becoming more and more unlikely. None of his colleagues referred business to him as they did to each other. Although he could not prove it, even the switchboard operator seemed hardly ever to route new calls to him according to his just share.
Long before, the director had come down hard on the saying of “Moo” when Armand appeared on the floor, but when the elevator doors parted and the salesmen glanced at him, turning their heads like a school of fish, he heard it even if it did not sound.
MAROON ACOUSTIC PANELS floated like spaceships above the work floor. For a Norman whose world had been open to the winds, maroon was a color as claustrophobia-inducing as black. Perhaps lurid purple, the paralytic color of death, would have been worse, but maroon had all the charm of dried blood.