It’s difficult to pretend you’re working for eight hours every day when there isn’t any work to be done, you’re in full view of forty or fifty hyperactive drones who don’t like you or who are at least made uncomfortable by your presence, and you are both very tall and fat, so that although your desk might conceivably hide behind you, you cannot conceivably hide behind it. The best part of Armand’s day was the forty-five minutes when he could bolt from the building and walk to the Seine to be near trees and water. There he would sit, his back to the massif of glass and steel behind him, and eat his lunch alone.
Lunch itself, his chief ally, was in the right-side bottom drawer of the desk, sending messages of friendliness, loyalty, and support. How often he would glance down at that drawer for comfort. He wished he had a puppy to hold. A stuffed animal might do, but he would never hear the end of it. Bathroom breaks were wonderful, although he couldn’t take too many or he would never have heard the end of it. Out of the presence of others, he could breathe. And before he went up to the office he would stand in the enormous train station beneath La Défense and stare at a fruit store. Inhaling deeply, he would imagine he was in the tropics, where no one hated him, and he was safe. When he tried to convey to his wife, a much more social person, the extent of his suffering in the office, she could not comprehend it.
“You exaggerate,” she had said over dinner in the little box within the horrid box of concrete warrens in which they lived, entombed in gray, smelling the smells of a hundred kitchens cooking, and hearing screams at night. “They can’t be thinking of you all the time.”
“Only when I move. They forget me when I stay still, I think. It’s like hunting. Anything in the forest that stays still almost certainly will be unnoticed.”
“Unless,” his wife said, “it’s shocking pink or international orange.”
“Quite so.”
“They have their troubles, too,” she said. “Why would they be thinking of you?”
“Because I’m an irritation, a recreation, a work in progress, a source of constant entertainment. My desk is directly under a spotlight and in the center of the floor, so I loom above them like a fountain in Las Vegas, or a giant butter sculpture. I’m telling you, there are eyes upon me, and twitters. There’s hardly anyone I can talk to. True, not all are hostile, but except for a few no one is kind. They’re like the men in the trading pits, who make jokes about the handicapped, the Holocaust, and plane crashes. We all compete with each other like gladiators. If you don’t meet the quota you’re out, and if everyone meets the quota they raise it. With the economy as it is they’re shrinking the department. Everyone is afraid of losing his job. It’s a bunch of snakes.”
“We can go back to the farm.”
“It won’t support six.”
“Still,” Madame Marteau said, “clients will come. You’ll see. You’ll have clients.”
“YOU HAVE NO clients,” said Edgar Auban, Armand Marteau’s chief and the director of the division. Auban was polite. Everyone was polite, with an edge. They mocked him, but not for nothing had they named him hippopotamus and elephantus. Everyone knows that when the poor, ungainly, pathetic hippopotamus finally becomes enraged, as he runs at you, fat shaking, steam-shovel mouth open, log-stump teeth arrayed, there isn’t much you can do. So, although you cannot dismiss from your mind his muddy ugliness, and your very expression as you behold him is a taunt, you are always made anxious by his powers, and you keep your distance. In Armand’s case, it was a resentful politesse.
“Well,” said Armand, staring over Auban’s head the way boys called into a headmaster’s office stare at something – their feet, the floor, a pencil sharpener – as they are reprimanded, “I have some clients.” He was staring not at a pencil sharpener but out the window at the rising terrain of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the distance.
“One.” Auban held up his right index finger like a cop stopping traffic. “In August. The next-worst associate had five. How can you have one? You know, there’s no law against selling insurance in August.” Auban shuffled some papers on his desk and looked up. “Or in the summer. In June and July you had three, total. Three? Gilbert went to Nice in August. He had a very nice time. He told me. He went out on yachts, slept with three beautiful women ….”
“At the same time?”
“I don’t know. That’s irrelevant. He swam, he ate glorious seafood, got a tan, and sold twenty-three contracts!”
“Well, he’s our best performer.”
“Do you understand that he doesn’t sell so many contracts because he’s our best performer, he’s our best performer because he sells so many contracts? Do you comprehend the difference?”
“It’s subtle.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Maybe not.”
“Look,” said Auban, “I’m forced to this.”
Armand knew a blow was coming, and felt very sad. All he could think about was his children. He mustn’t fail them, and yet ….
“Your August performance was the absolute minimum. A five-hundred-thousand-Euro contract, with an unusually small premium.”
“He was young and ridiculously healthy, like a saber-tooth tiger.”
“You’re a contract employee. If in September you don’t meet the minimum, you’ll go off salary in October. You can stay through the end of the year – commissions only – but if you don’t sell enough to go back on salary by the thirty-first of December, I’m afraid we’ll have to give your desk to someone else.”
“Oh,” said Armand, lips trembling.
“Marteau, they want me to reduce the size of our shop. They specifically identified you. What I got you was four months of probation. There’s a lot of pressure on us. You know, they got killed in trading derivatives. The government bailed them out in America. There’s so much blood on the floor there, you can’t even imagine.”
“Who are ‘they’? Who identified me?”
“London, New York.”
“But we’re one of so many subsidiaries. They concern themselves with an individual salesman? With me?”
“They have long reports and people who go blind going over them. Probably there were many lists, and probably someone took twenty seconds to look at one and flicked with his pencil a line or check next to your name, without either looking at your name or knowing your name, but just taking in, for a fraction of a second, the numbers to the right.”
“Just like that? Someone flicks his pencil and I, my wife, my son, my daughter … are cast to the waves – with the flick of a pencil?”
“Monsieur Marteau, all life is like that. Someone checks his watch, his car veers across the line, and a family is wiped out. A mechanic applies the wrong torque to a nut, which insufficiently tightens the seal, which allows fuel to leak, which starts a fire that crashes a plane and kills three hundred people. God flicks his pencil, a cell goes wrong, and the story of your life ends. This is just a job. Granted, other jobs are hard to find these days, but they exist, and, who knows, you might just get lucky.”
“You mean while I’m still here?”
“Yes. There are sixty-six million people in France, each and every one subject to the flick of many a pencil, each and every one potentially in need of life and disability insurance. Sell it to them! That’s what we do.”
Fran?ois Ehrenshtamm, Philosophe