Articles in English

On horses

• The first step
• Sheik

Stories

• The Christmas before the first
• Where stories come from
• Alienation
• Just my imagination

On translation

• Sounding the elephant's trumpet,  part 1
• Sounding the elephant's trumpet,  part 2

Articles en français

Chevaux

• Sheik
• Programme du spectacle Le Premier Pas (pdf, 533ko)
• Marina Dewit, ma chuchoteuse préférée
• Contre le "sport" équestre

Histoires pour enfants

• Samoht, le cheval qui ne voulait pas sauter

Divers

• Le cheval qui dit "Je t'aime"

Regain (journal de la Confédération Paysanne)

• Le terrorisme du mauvais goût
• La vraie guerre des religions

Madagascar impressed me so much that I determined to write about my experiences there. I got as far as sketching out a handful of touching scenes: the extraordinarily beautiful singing of a lady in the kitchen at a café in Fort Dauphin; an Italian woman on a plane endlessly flicking through a stack of postcards, thoughtfully matching pictures to people; a stallkeeper trying to refuse money for the table of spices I had carelessly knocked over; an eight-year-old kid playing meticulously arranged Beatles songs on the guitar (saw his face years later on a CD sleeve); families carrying rudimentary musical instruments over the barren Horombe to celebrate the regular airing of an ancestor’s bones. As usual, my enthusiasm for the project proved much bigger than my ability or availability.

Though my enthusiasm for travel itself never really faded, I did end up travelling less and less when I started raising horses, an adventure that is just as thrilling with none of the irksome preliminaries like spending half a day in an airport and all day on a plane. For a few years I hardly went any further than Montpellier, three hours’ drive away. So when the need arose for me to go to Paris, to beg for work, I joked about the two-day trip seeming as exotic as a month in Malaysia. To save me from boredom I even tried to keep the parallel up while I was there. And true to my habit of pushing improbable analogies well beyond any legitimacy they might originally have had, here I am actually writing about it. I’ve got two paragraphs done so it should be all right.

The bulk of any business trip to Paris is spent underground, and I’m reminded of Julio Cortázar’s stories, like the one where he plays games looking at the girl in front through the reflection in the window. From Orly into town I’m seated opposite a startlingly beautiful black woman who I try not to look at all. I’ve often tried to imagine what it must be like being a beautiful woman, so beautiful that men hardly dare look at her. I can’t get very far. In one of A.S. Byatt’s stories, a teenaged girl senses her body becoming as powerful, and dangerous to men, as a sharp two-edged sword. Must be frightening. The beauty in front of me is perfectly and absolutely still. No fidgeting at all. Does it go with the beauty? Tight control over the two-edged sword? Inner peace? Model: practice for lengthy poses?

Somewhere in the crush of standing passengers behind me there’s a guy on a cellphone trying to coax a number from directory enquiries. He wants to get hold of l’Équipe, a sports newspaper “No I haven’t got the address, but it’s got to be somewhere in Paris… Hang on, this is like a major national newspaper… What d’ya mean, ‘can’t find it’?” After much haggling, he finally gets through to the paper, then smoothly on to the martial arts correspondent, with whom he holds a long and enthusiastic conversation, angling for editorial coverage of a little-known Brazilian fighting speciality, that was originally imported from Asia. The carriage empties and fills, empties and fills, and the guy ends up sitting next to me, trying not to look at the gorgeous statue in front. Instead, he gets into a conversation with the guy seated next to her, a really young kid who’s been in the army and knows a thing or two about combat, which is as much in the head as the body. After all, that’s what martial arts are all about. Sure, a Thai boxer’s pretty strong, but one of these Brazilian fighters could get the better of him, with his fancy throws and locks. Very technical.

Back on the surface, my first meeting sets the tone for the others to come. Market forces are hard at work, ceaselessly shifting wealth from one pair of hands into another, smoothly and crisply across the whole surface of the globe. There are dips and sags, with a few peaks, but none of those peaks is climbable by a person with my profile. In fact my profile right now shows a pretty good match to a sort of economic salt lake as it were. Where the opportunity happens to be right now is in a very narrow speciality. There’s a lot of money being spent there. It’s weird because nothing’s actually going to come out of all that spending. Everyone knows that, but it’s sort of a compulsory transitional stage they’ve got to go through. Legal reasons and all that. The conversation’s perfectly amiable. All very matter of fact. I’m lulled into something that passes for a sense of security. Trying my hardest to mould into the nonchalant conversational model before me, I find myself talking about a very serious biologist who compares this sort of economic phenomenon with a tumour. System strangled by uncontrolled growth of non-productive cells. All automotive engineering talents diverted into producing immensely complex and utterly useless fuel delivery system, while engine, steering and brakes stagnate. Fuel pipes circumnavigate the vehicle several times round, interspersed with many pumps, each more brilliantly sophisticated than the last. Each pump communicates electronically with all the others, so all automotive IT personnel are redeployed to the sole task of writing fuel delivery software. Pipes multiply off into successive constellations of interconnected subsystems. Within a decade fuel delivery systems have become so heavy and so cumbersome that the cars they were originally designed to serve can no longer actually move at all. Biologically speaking, this is cancer. Laughter. A little tense? How refreshing to talk philosophy over lunch. We’ll be in touch.

While delving into the darker regions of the human psyche, Spanish writer Juan José Millas found out that you could go into one wardrobe and come out of any other. Anywhere. Generations earlier, Cortázar had made a similar discovery: all fires were one fire. In his Buenos Aires one day, I stumbled across the deep and unsuspected parallel between the grid layouts of that city’s streets and those of Carcassonne. When living in Carcassonne years earlier I had recurrent dreams of a steep, dangerous and suffocatingly claustrophobic passageway out of Carcassonne castle. That passageway, I now knew, led right to the embankment in Divertimento, and right to Luis Sepúlveda’s green-doored house in Santiago. Walking with my two English nieces in Carcassonne a couple of summers ago I was dumbstruck to see a narrow passageway out of the castle, cordoned off with tape. There were warning notices not to go in. I told my nieces about the dream, and about my quest for a shortcut to Argentina. One of them looked at me as if I’d gone mad, and the other said “come on then”. We went on down through the rubble and ended up in a neighbourhood of the city I was unfamiliar with. Things might have been different if we’d turned left then, but I steered right, and we ate ice-cream in the main square and drove home. Everyone except me went to sleep in the car on the way back, so they didn’t even realize I’d taken the old road. Otherwise we’d have all been killed skidding on the ice, pursued by the black car with the Irish registration plates that I’d spotted earlier on in town. In Carcassonne I’d worked as a labourer at a manor house with a tall tower topped with green-glazed roof tiles. The recurrent dream told me there was a twin manor with the same green roof off the road to Arzens. Back to back they stood across the Malepère heath. Life there would have been less carefree. Driving down that road you would sometimes see it and sometimes not, depending on a lot of things, like the mist, and what you happened to be thinking about. Every time it appeared it sent shivers down my spine. That day the green glaze glistened in the evening sunlight and I thought I saw belfries.

Fitful sleep that night. The air is so different, the noises so strange. It was good when morning came. I like big cities best in the very early morning, when they’re just waking up. The contrast is just so startling. Everything fresh and new, ready for the frantic cycle to start all over again. Springtime every day, for early risers only. Madrid in summer was the best, because they’d actually hose the streets down every morning. The whole city taking a shower, its delicate yet oh-so-rugged pores being flossed through ready for another day’s heavy duty. You’d meet teams of three along the street, one with a coil of thick red pipe, one with a heavy steel hydrant wrench, and one with an impressively industrial sweeping implement. I always wanted to paint them, as a rock group with their improbable instruments.

On the outskirts of the city, the corporate barons have built impenetrable fortresses, cities within cities, hives within hives. I’m reminded of the popular quip about why communism was supposedly predestined to failure: “great idea, wrong species”, goes the sneer. Evolutionary anthropologists tell us we can no sooner change human nature than fly to the moon. (Well, grow wings then.) Yet humans are clearly malleable enough to perform as social insects in this kind of organization, which bears not the slightest resemblance to the environment in which the species evolved. The tribe size is wrong. Everything is wrong. It shouldn’t work at all. Whereas the medieval castle was designed to deter outsiders, the architecture of the new corporate fortresses intimidates those within. What can the individual weigh against the power that built this? People become cogs in the great machine within the machine, every bit ants. In this perfectly organized structure there is a tiny cell containing my name and phone number, along with precise instructions governing the circumstances in which this number should be called by the hive residents. I would like to extend these circumstances, but this would mean rewriting the instructions, a complex task that is itself governed by higher instructions. The procedure for rewriting many sets of embedded instructions naturally has a considerable degree of inertia about it; and that inertia can only be overcome by a particularly weighty ant, which I am not. I have my cell, and should be thankful for it. Undoubtedly, judging on ability alone, I should indeed be granted a larger cell, easier to access by many more workers. But this would be to disregard the complex and delicate structure of the hive itself. A higher logic reigns: for one cell to expand, others would contract. Membranes would tauten. Tensions would arise. Since the individual cannot comprehend these delicate balances, he must accept his allotted function as making an optimum contribution to the common good. Communism might have met its destiny, yet distorted derivative dialectics thrive among its most virulent detractors.

The meeting times out, leaving me with more time than I’d planned, so I decide to phone a colleague I haven’t seen for a while. We’d only actually met once before, but had corresponded quite a lot, on work, and spoke lengthily on the phone, on things like her wayward son and my nephew’s reading difficulties. No I couldn’t come over. She was very busy. Anyway, had I bothered to answer her last e-mail, months or even years ago? “And you know, the time we met, I got the impression I’d failed a sort of test.” Mystified, mortified, I stuttered apologies, and we struggled to get the conversation on the rails. The hour had passed when the batteries in my phone ran out.

In the underground back to the city, the tiredness starts to turn into desperation. I can’t handle lack of sleep. Even in my youth I could never keep up with friends partying all night. I half doze, to be woken by a gentle prod from a fellow in front. My hand is bleeding copiously. I have a farmer’s hands, rough, scarred and useful. They take care of themselves with admirable toughness, effortlessly deflecting aggression from grease, manure, thorns and the occasional glance of the sawblade. The blood is dripping into an unsightly pool on the floor of the train from a tiny, most insignificant thorn prick, days old and healed. Absurd! I nod an embarrassed gratitude and fumble for a handkerchief. The next stop is mine.

I wander the streets round Montparnasse aimlessly. I visit the bookshop. Night is falling and it’s half raining, half snowing. They say a prey animal will struggle with all its strength while there is the slightest chance of escape, then just switch off when all hope is lost. When that happens, it is claimed (to smooth mother nature’s ragged image as “red in tooth and claw”) there is no more pain. Once, when very bad news was announced, I felt as if a bubble had been cast around me, separating me physically from passers-by on the street. Sounds reached me as through water, and sights as through misted glass. Was this the entrance into the hopelessness trance?

Most incongruous among the concrete, down a cul de sac there’s a fine old building with a tiled roof that’s low enough to see, set in grounds that seem ridiculously large for central Paris. It must be a college of some sort, because a bell rings out and the street fills with students. In a café out of the bitter cold I have to be careful lifting the cup up to my lips. The fingers are too numb to keep the brain properly informed on their angles, so I have to watch the level of the coffee to make sure it stays horizontal. The place is cosy and joyful, full of students with their scarves. For the first time in my life it hits me that generations have passed. The people I play music with are half my age, and there are people even younger in my little equestrian theatre troupe. But I had hardly even realized. Everyone here is very well dressed, whereas in my day scruffiness, or least colourfulness, would have been a point of honour. Dissent was for the educated and conformism for the ignorant. It’s the opposite today. In a smart restaurant in Andalucía a couple of years ago, we found ourselves seated next to a honeymooning couple of Americans, him Asian and her Mexican. He was educating her, talking about what he’d learned at business school. Yes, greed was good because self-interest was what made the world go round. Without the driving force of greed, humanity would just stagnate. Jesus Christ was the best communicator the world had ever seen: no other brand name has ever proved so successful. Snappy little nibbles of the new folk wisdom.

The crowded airport drew the last remnants of energy from me and I boarded the plane in a state of collapse. Far more exhausted than after a day spent felling timber. The thoughts in my mind raced out of control. What kind of human being was I? When France had won the World Cup I’d being driving through Toulouse. The whole place had exploded in a riot of glee, and I had found that terrifying. The terror of a prey facing a pack. Or the disquiet of suspecting that I did not belong to the same species at all. What if I went into town one day and met only with giant rodents? To a receptive audience I’d almost boast about misfitting. But that was during the golden years. While the strong young quarry could easily outrun its predators. But how dare I feel superior to my fellows? How despicable to claim my failings as virtues! If I were human at all, I must be autistic. Can you catch autism, or had I been autistic all along? Can you opt for it? She’d been seriously ill and I didn’t even know. I’d let friendships lapse out of pure laziness. Here was I the great campaigner, ever eager to save the human race from moral disintegration, and yet I was incapable of caring properly about an actual human being. How could I be so callous as to use a friend as a mere time-filler on a business trip? How could I not realize that someone might actually like to hear from me from time to time? As a kid I never dared to believe the girl I had a crush on might have liked me too, however obvious she made it. I go to a meeting with an economist and I insinuate that the very foundations of his whole world are rotten. Oh the arrogance of it! And when people have the kindness to invite me to dinner I don’t even know how to thank them. How do you say ordinary everyday things without sounding as if you’re reciting a formula, which is surely worse than saying nothing at all? Isn’t it? I really don’t know! In any case, I know I won’t be able to hit the proper intonation. It won’t match my facial expression. I write (or wrote) for a living, but it’s communication at a distance. Close-up, in person, I am just useless and clumsy. Autistic. On a good day, outrunning again, I can sometimes turn it to my advantage, to come across as quite the cute reclusive oddity. Dostoyevsky’s idiot. How singularly rural, up there in the mountains with his horses! But it’s just a pretence, an artifice to disguise that in business circles (tell the truth: in all circles) I move as awkwardly as India, my favourite mare, let loose in the Paris metro.

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