The Enchanted Clock Read online

  During my night’s sleep, these labyrinthine spaces fashion the brain of a man in 3-D. The king of France, said to be hypocritical, is an office man here. Notes, documents, files. He takes Passemant by the shoulder, leads him to a separate cabinet. “I like papers, study, reading. And even writing, a lot—at Coigny, Noailles, Toulouse … I write as I will, but I warn them all: there will be no rattling on about my letters!”

  His papers are arranged in order on shelves, labeled in his handwriting: descriptions of products, scales, expedients, means, plans. Inventories and catalogues of all states, grades, and charges.

  “An impenetrable secret nook,” says the king.

  “A clockmaker’s work, Sire.”

  “As it were.” Louis does not seem to disapprove of his subject’s audacity. “You understand, my friend, this comes to me from my ancestor: ‘Have neither favorites nor Prime Minister, ever. Listen, consult your council, but decide.’ ”

  How can this be possible? My dream is wondering …

  “Chauvelon’s taste inspires me in spite of his disgrace, what can I say. ‘Everything too well known is scorned, thus it is a rule for royal authority not to let it be seen what the king can do; soon one would know what he cannot do.’ ”

  They join a little group of intimates, before whom Passemant will describe the clock conceived for the king of Golconda, which was ordered by Dupleix, the governor of Pondicherry. Ordinarily taciturn and frivolous, the undecipherable Louis XV speaks freely. His Majesty looks to his astronomical engineer for confirmation: “You have an idea, Passemant? Tell me. Yes, yes, I’m interested! I listen and I decide. What else would I do? A great and noble monarchy like ours, which holds the attention of all Europe, should be governed by orders with full and ideal knowledge of the laws that constitute it. Such laws are just only on the condition of being in harmony with the laws of the universe. A good king, in short, would be ill-advised to ignore those laws. And if Apollo is his patron, the sovereign owes it to himself to regulate the time of his subjects with his eyes fixed on the time of Apollo … The time you call cosmic, is that the scientific word?”

  Louis recites as if he is reading a book … The one I may have read the day before, found among Stan’s documents or those of the little Albane Dechartre …?

  Whereupon my dream branches off into flames, a brazier, the smell of burnt wood (memory of the stampede Stan and I lived through at Versailles?). His Majesty kneels down as if nothing were more natural, among his royal functions, than to maintain the fireplace. He relights the fire for his stupefied guests. Claude-Siméon tries to take hold of the poker, but, brushing his shoulder, the king stops him and stirs the embers himself. “It’s my pleasure, Passemant. I prefer to listen to you describe your new clock than to see you lend a hand for the fire. And we have to let the poor folks sleep, too often I prevent them from sleeping. Come, tell me everything, I want you to.”

  Intimidated, dumbfounded, finally emboldened, Passemant stands before the fireplace as if transported and describes in a loud voice his project for a new clock, “The Creation of the World”: “Since such is your desire, Your Majesty, it will be a singular clock. Approximately five feet tall, encased in gilded bronze, it represents the different moments of Creation brought together and seen from a single point of view. The Earth is a bronze globe of fourteen inches in diameter on which all the countries are engraved, with the principal cities. This globe is situated among rocks and waterfalls that serve as a universal horizon. Behind it rise clouds that end in a gilded bronze sun of three feet in diameter. In the middle we place the clock; its communications give the terrestrial globe its various movements. Its first movement is turning on its axis; and as the sun, which seems to light it, can light only the top part, the bottom part is plunged into darkness. Thus all the cities that begin to appear at the edge of this universal horizon made of water and rocks enter daylight. Those that pass under the solar rays are at noon, and those that reach the other edge of the horizon enter night, and the sun sets for them. Days lengthen and shorten during the year. The seasons follow each other, and one sees the countries that have six months of day and six months of night and the time at every instant for all the peoples of the world. A moon placed among the clouds waxes and wanes regularly. So that this machine, whose revolutions are of the greatest exactness, unites the useful with the magnificent.”

  I thought my dream ended there, but now the Owl appears. “The scene is taking place at the Trianon Palace,” she says, feeling it is her duty to instruct Stan. I awaken.

  “It’s well known, Mama, the Gazette de France recounts this event on March 2, 1754: ‘His Majesty was so pleased that he expressed his desire to see this mechanical construction again.’ ”

  Of course. I did not know. Who would know that today?

  15

  “YOU ARE MY DEPTH”

  There you are.”

  My Astro doesn’t open his arms; he takes my hands, squeezes them as hard as he can. His eyes converse with mine. Wordlessly. There remains the imprint of our blended skins. And soon that of our genitals. “Your depth.” That’s all he’ll say. Digging, fathoming, turning, licking, sucking, palpating, palpitating, kissing, spurting, sparkling, enveloping. Tasty, toxic, exorbitant. Outside of me, in me, indefatigable, timid, resolved, incisive, decisive, concentrated, impulsive, explosive.

  Now, holding his hand, I smile at the only adventure that seems possible today: solitude with him, the leisure to let myself go to the point of craziness, to explore madness. A sort of prayer. Stendhal thought of the novel as the comedy of the nineteenth century. I consider it the prayer of the twenty-first. Is it still possible to speak of the novel? Concepts one thought of as solid take bodily form, become apprehensible. And among them is Time. Let’s go with prayer.

  My A is a tormented soul. He is mistrustful about everything, everyone, Passemant in particular.

  “Your ancestor? A relative? A homonym?”

  No answer, never any answer. Vague smile. “You’re interested in that? What’s its importance?” says Theo, icily.

  He thinks it’s meaningless to connect oneself to a family name—it’s just a pastime at best.

  “Not for me!” Now the cold is turning to anger.

  Could my A be one of those new soulless terrestrials who manipulate cognitive strategies to adapt to digital language elements? No. Not he. Had he been, he would of course have saved me from drowning, but without taking the trouble to cover me with a blanket and hold my hand.

  This tormented one is a fugitive uncoupled from his roots who has chosen the sky as his refuge. His great dark eyes leave you at the very moment when you hope to gaze into them; they flee toward the light that bathes the façade of the Palais Royal.

  “Do you see that illumination giving depth to the décor?” He’s changing focus, changing theme.

  Never speak of yourself—it’s too vulgar—at the risk of losing your privacy. Or very rarely, by allusion. And especially do not burden yourself, the better to burn body and soul between the infinitely great and the infinitely little.

  All that’s left is for me to gather up the precious pebbles my Astro scatters inadvertently or on purpose and follow him in this adventure, which is less extraterrestrial than he imagines, since it is ours, here and now. I, Nivi, need it to compose the puzzle that takes the place of my interior being, my survival equipment.

  For Theo, the exodus probably began at the death of his father, the jeweler and clockmaker Jean Passemant. You know of Passemant & Nicolet, master clockmakers for ten generations, rue Vieille-du-Temple. Ruptured aneurism at thirty-eight. My Theo is only five then, an orphan clinging to his mother, Irene, who sheds no tears and says nothing. Too much pain. No fuss, no fuss at all, nothing. Only that mortal dilation of an artery making holes in the past, annihilating it. And indifference for a bandage: coldness made woman. Tied to her little Theo, single child encapsulated in the maternal embrace, as in the arms of a Virgin confusing Nativity with Dormition.

&nb
sp; My Astro’s mother, whose maiden name was Irene Rilsky, is none other than the older sister of Police Chief Northrop Rilsky. Yes, the same Rilsky I met during my investigation of the decapitation of my friend Gloria Harrison, the incorrigible translator of this planetary village where no one reads, even though each year, for example in France, eight hundred novels are published, of which four hundred are translations from English.

  Rilsky, the dear man, later investigated a murder in Byzantium that occurred in the cathedral at Puy-en-Velay and was intended to lead to an explosion at the Louvre pyramid. Several times I went to be with him in New York, his Interpol functions having led to his living for many years on the other side of the Atlantic. A very close friend, a provisional lover.

  At the death of Theo’s father, Uncle Rilsky couldn’t let Irene wall herself up in her frigid mourning. He had read Freud a bit and knew what melancholy implies, also thanks to me. Irene’s brother—there was only a difference of five years—took it upon himself to take little Theo under his wing. This odd recomposed family formed a trio that was not really incestuous but was clearly incestual, as it is said among shrinks. Irene, Nor, and Theo. Nor never talked to me about it, and I had decided to put this story aside as insignificant. The hinterland of Nor: how did that concern me? Until Theo fell from the sky with his savior’s voice, in the waters of the Ile de Ré, his eyes fixed on the microwaves from the cosmic background, which penetrate me and save me.

  Theo disengaged from the instant glue of Irene and abandoned the tortuous investigations of the police chief. Obstinately turning his back on the darkness—enough with the lamentations! Farewell, “night where no conceiving is done” and “horrible unfeasible love”! Not to ask too many questions, to observe the world and oneself at a great, great distance, to keep to the right, to keep to the left, protect the right, protect the left, remain vigilant, impermeable. “Theo? In search of his dead father, needless to say, pressurized and airtight in his space suit,” the uncle diagnoses, having become an apprentice therapist.

  An invisible target, this loss of the paternal history, imaginary Planck Wall and Big Bang. It makes your heart ache, dilates your pupils. Nothing terrestrial is viable with such a heritage. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend?” The Passemant-Nicolet family doesn’t mince words. Irene blushes, still glacial in her incandescent black body. “You’re gay, my man!” Nor prods his nephew, trying to provoke him from time to time. But the guilty party doesn’t hear. He’s content to get up from the table without a noise, his mind on other matters. “Maybe a monk?” Irene hopes. In vain. And a joyless laughter cascades from her, the matrix of Theo’s laugh.

  I don’t like this vibrating laugh of Irene’s. Her triumphant depression, the protestant denial of deep-seated feelings, the compressed anguish of the American-style feminist she claims to be: I hate them all when they pierce through Theo the bird-catcher’s little bells. He cohabited with this spasmodic hilarity of the mourning female, then shredded it into a thousand stars and refashioned it into nonsense, a child’s game. Into a pure delirium that relegates you to the margins of humanity or just before the birth of visible matter. Yes, Theo chose this last flight, the most absolute possible at the present time. It is not enough to explore time, which amounts to suffering from it; time machines are machines for suffering, it’s well known since Proust or even H. G. Wells, and women know it better than anyone; no, it’s out of the question to start over. Theo prefers to decompose time; he claims it can be forgotten, he frees himself of it. His laughter is the radiance of this absence, the wave of a sigh.

  I think I loved my Astro definitively from the moment I understood that his laughter was his second birth, wresting his Papageno score from the swells of maternal dissatisfaction, from the poison of his feminine lining.

  As nothing human is truly desirable for him, young Theo drops everything. Goes and surfs the waters of La Rochelle, wins the MIT competition, gets married to the zero-point where energy no longer exists and the Instanton contains all the information of the Great Universe. I dwell in a time that is not real, he thinks.

  Without telling me, as usual, my A is transfused into this time-without-time, trapped in immense gravitation, a terrifying density that contains nothing solid. Since he thinks about them and calculates them, he lives them, he is of them, and I participate too. As best I can, in my own way. For all that, Theo does not succumb, and he pursues his investigation. What lies beyond? A preuniverse? Not really. And before? He envisions an eternal existence, “origin” of origins, with plural potentialities, well before the Beginning that will lead to particles, to bodies, and to our Word. Ending with it in a new initial Singularity that will dilate in turn, engendering bubbles of white universes sustained by multiple existences—billions of further universes. A hypothesis, as required in the sciences. Theo made it his thesis, his doctorate, his profession, his cosmology, his theology. To be discussed. To be innovated. To be abandoned, perhaps.

  At this point in the adventure where physical energy links to sensorial and mental information, Theo wants us to think that he himself behaves like a Big Bounce. Then Rilsky attempts to bring his nephew back down to earth. He has no notion of the singular equilibrium that ties me to Astro. Unless he has detected it? He only tells me I am far away—me, Nivi, far from him, the police chief of my metaphysical detective novels. Without flinching, no reproach whatsoever, nothing but a nostalgic and resigned smile. I smile also, without comment.

  As for Theo, he is categorical: “You and I are at the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. So far there is nothing but light, but it is invisible.”

  In times past, that was called a coup de foudre, love at first sight. I squeeze his right hand, which keeps hold of my left. I know my Astro ignores nothing of the politico-police matters that the police chief is passionate about, nor of the anger of his uncle-father toward him, the extraterrestrial acrobat. He has judged them with his Astro’s anger, savage and cold, fed by that black energy that causes or accelerates the expansion of the world. Of all the worlds, and ours.

  “You are my depth,” he says—from time to time my Astro becomes human. He touches me, he embraces me, our bodies come together, the collision pulverizes our singularities, they simply don’t take place.

  Only afterward will we go discuss the news of the day with Rilsky.

  Have you noticed the absolute silence that resonates on earth just before nightfall? Only an ear attuned to the deep radiance of beings captures it, escaping parasite noises. What one calls a “couple,” in the inaccessible meaning of this term, is formed when two people hear this radiance in each of themselves, reciprocally, and in the world around them. No one else can mix in. We have indeed become a sort of couple, my A and I.

  16

  MAMA, ARE YOU FRENCH?

  France lost eighty-eight soldiers in Afghanistan, six in Mali. Should our armies continue to parade on the day of the storming of the Bastille, or is it sufficient to have the people sing, women and children included? Such is the question raised by a representative of the Green Party while the funeral service at the Invalides is being prepared. The national banks appear to have withstood the stress tests for the time being, but both the voters in the upcoming presidential election and the abstentionists know that no man or woman invested with universal suffrage will keep us from the fate of the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, and others. None of our current leaders, here and across the Atlantic, will receive my Astro or one of his colleagues the way Passemant was received at Versailles. Customs change … Unless there’s an awards ceremony, and even then … Overbooked, wrung out by the media. Science goes overboard; the banking system turns out to be untouchable; Taliban, jihadists, and company are out of our grasp. World summits are overloaded, and they don’t even have the time to put space shuttles and stem cells on the agenda, while those at the levers of globalized power like to relax by collecting Rolexes and listening to evangelical preachers—except when they prefer to amuse themselves with call girls,
all instead of sharpening their minds with cosmological research.

  I am aware that Louis XV ended up provoking the people’s indignation. That while dreaming of inscribing the longevity of his country into universal time, and in spite of his military successes in Europe, he was satisfied with little: the Hexagon. So much so that his “home turf,” his pré-carré, as they said and still say—namely, France—shrank rapidly, already degraded. The misery of the poor and the cacophony of power. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle brought harm, and the magnanimous pacifier of Europe that this hunter wished to be lost a large part of the French empire—New France and much of India—to the profit of the British.1

  His principal glory remains the conquest of the weaker sex. After the queen, Marie Leszczynska, it is public knowledge that His Majesty honors favorites and obscure mistresses, among whom the four daughters of the Marquis de Nesle et de Mailly: Julia, Pauline, Adelaide, and Hortense; the Marquise de Pompadour, his preferred mistress for twenty years; Marie-Louise O’Murphy, followed by nine “little mistresses” whose names are forgotten; and finally Mme du Barry. Those times know nothing of feminists or of violence perpetrated on women. At Versailles, the legend glorifies sex as a ballet of pure pleasure, the Parc-aux-Cerfs has not yet been replaced by some Sofitel, and no plaintiff has been found who would dare to testify. Our royal Apollo, a fan of astrophysics, finishes his reign among general discontent. Death and poison are spoken of, and toward the end broadsides threatening the monarch appear even in the Hall of Mirrors.

  For Nivi to exhume him along with 9999 and Passemant, this monarch, premature orphan under a regent and eternal libidinal young man, had to discover in himself and cultivate a taste for numbers, for celestial fires, and for mathematics. Within the folds of those comical rituals and his sensual extravagances, the man manages to shelter an ardent desire for knowledge that sometimes pushes him to ignore the rigid constraints of the absolute monarchy. He opens his court and his heart (secretly, in passing) to a few of his subjects from the new class of renowned scientists and sometimes even to modest technicians. For the pleasure of being informed and taking enjoyment by thinking with them. For the pleasure of knowing. A pleasure as voluptuous, as intimate, as his lovemaking with his favorites and other mistresses. More, indeed. Precious to hold forth with at the fireside, under the stuffed heads of stags and boars, not far from famous astronomical clocks. Memorable trophies to abstract speculation and sensual hunting.