Читать книгу A French Novel - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 8

I had just found out my brother had been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur when I was arrested. The police did not handcuff me straight away; they only did that later, when I was being transferred to the Hôtel-Dieu, and again when I was transferred to prison on the Île de la Cité the following night. The President of the Republic had just written a charming letter to my elder brother, congratulating him on his contribution to the economic dynamism of France: ‘You are a perfect example of the sort of capitalism we want: a capitalism of entrepreneurs rather than one of speculators.’ On 28 January 2008, at the police station in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, officers in blue uniform, guns and truncheons dangling from their belts, stripped me completely naked in order to search me, confiscated my phone, my watch, my credit card, my money, my keys, my passport, my driving licence, my belt and my scarf, took samples of my saliva and my fingerprints, lifted up my testicles to see whether I had anything stuffed up my arsehole, took front, side and three-quarter photographs of me holding a mugshot placard, before returning me to a cage two metres square, its walls covered with graffiti, dried blood and snot. At the time I did not realise that, a few days later, I would be watching my brother receiving the Légion d’honneur in the Salle des Fêtes of the Élysée Palace, which is not quite so cramped, and that through the picture windows I would watch the leaves of the oak trees in the grounds moving in the wind, as though waving to me, beckoning me to come into the presidential gardens. Lying on a concrete bench at about four o’clock in the morning that dark night, the situation seemed simple to me: God had faith in my brother, and He had abandoned me. How could two people who had been so close as children have had such different fates? I had just been arrested for using class-A drugs on the public highway with a friend. A pickpocket in the next cell hammered on the glass half-heartedly, but regularly enough to keep the rest of the prisoners from getting any sleep. Sleep, in any case, would have been impossible, a utopian dream, since even when the convicts stopped bawling, the police shouted to each other along the gangways at the top of their lungs, as though the prisoners were deaf. The air was pervaded by the smell of sweat, vomit and undercooked microwaved stewed beef with carrots. Time passes very slowly when you don’t have a watch and when no one thinks to switch off the flickering strip light on the ceiling. Lying on the filthy concrete floor at my feet, a schizophrenic in an alcoholic coma groaned, snored and farted. It was freezing, but I was burning up. I tried to think of nothing, but it was impossible: when you bang people up in a tiny little cell, their brains work overtime trying in vain to ward off panic; some fall to their knees and beg to be let out, others have a nervous breakdown, try to top themselves, or confess to crimes they didn’t commit. I would have given anything for a book or a sleeping pill. But since I had neither, I started writing this book in my head, with no pen, my eyes closed. I hope that this book lets you escape from it all, as it did me that night.