My appearance is an inspissated imp clung upon a whited soul.
A white man of a certain age who, certainly, shares an ancestry with Colonel Blimp and Kaiser Wilhelm, my doughy visage transforms even the sublest utterance into what seems overfed bluster. So, unlike for some, no one ever mistakes my purport when I’m just plain blustering.
Also, since infancy, I have been incapable both of a straight face or a sacred feeling; my prayers have ever been blasphemies.
Also, for many years, typically, I’ve made a point of reading Le Monde in August.
Featuring hyper-critical, well-informed, in-depth articles on quite abstract matters, Monde editors seem instinctively to understand the summer relaxation needs of your bourgeois-bohème, or “bobo”. Appropriately, the paper is dated for the next day, emphasizing both the naturally unthreatening nature of somebody else’s tempest in somebody else’s safely-distant teapot and underlining the thrill of anticipating it.
Reading Monde in the summer helps, I think, along with not too-infrequent sips of Ricard and Campari, and the sea air, of course, effectively mute the hubbub of the hucksters and grabbers wading through their lakes of crocodile tears who clutter my otherwise perfectly satisfactory life.
Also, there’s the squinty-typed monthly Le Monde Diplomatique for the train rides back and forth from the lieu de vacances, like fat quote marks around “August”.
So it is that laying me down wiped out after a session of yoga on the beach led by the remarkable yogini Katja Thomsen, my mind turns instantly away from the spiritual to the enthusiastic, sensual, vulgar.
Subtle political schemes, not vigorous exercise, nor tickling Atlantic sun, nor brisk breeze, nor flavorful wines, turn my face red.
“Karine,” I say after five minutes of visualizing a brave new world, or two. She stirs on her mat, “Mmmmm?”
One of the very many good things about Karine is that she’s always ready for a little chitchat, whether she’s in some sort of spiritual mode, as she often protests too much to be. Or not.
“There're a couple of guys,” I continue, “that say we could tax Facebook & Google and all the others – spammers, too. We could go after them for tax evasion, like Al Capone. Tax ‘em just like we tax the use of other public resources, like land or oil. These fellas say we could use the money to fund a universal minimum income.”1
“Mmmm. Good. They deserve it.”
- Deserve it?
“Yes. Merit it. They are robbers, these internet people. Bandits. Your Facebook and such, I mean.”
- Taxation is punishment for robbery?”
“Mais, oui. Or…”
Karine turns on her side, props her head onto her hand and looks past me, along the stretching beach.
“… A little bit,” she continues.” It’s part of why we tax rich people, isn’t it? To punish them?” She pauses.
“It’s like we arrest only some people, not everybody. Or, you can’t arrest everybody for every crime they commit. But you can be sure that everybody is, at bottom, un vicieux, deserving punishment for undetected crime. Everybody has some crime on her conscience. Non? Taxes are to rich people what arrest is to ordinary people, punishment, because is very difficult to arrest rich people in the usual way. Such persons can pay lawyers and legal fees are deductible. So, taxes remind them they are vicieux and not above the law and mostly scare them enough to keep them just honest enough to keep the ball rolling. Vois-tu?”
What I see is that Karine’s rolling the goddamn ball I got rolling and is sweetly, innocently, firmly, deflating it along the way.
This is one of the many things I can’t bear in this other human being that I nevertheless passionately adore. Yes, adore, from the bottom of the soles of her feet to her sixth chakra and to the farthest echo of a persnickety female voice that sounds of my mother but is not, cannot, must not, be.
In an instant, I feel tingly, warm, when she comes around me. And I have felt this, this, this love from the very first moment I laid eyes on her, on her frizzy head, her pert, boyish bottom.
Worse, as she goes along, I know, she will get me interested in her, her words, her other sense of things. Get me liking it, get me thinking about something else entirely. I don’t know what.
I turn on my side, prop my head in my hand and stare at her scrunched-up face as she sums up.
“So. Punishment is only to make an example. That is why we don’t any longer have a death penalty here in France, mon Tracy. That would take the game too far, like in America. An American like you still wishes to prove that her neighbor is really the vicieux. C’est quoi, l’expression? ‘Oliest than t’ou?’ Oui… Mieux que son prochain. It is a privilege of conviction pour assasinat, mon Tracy; we French have been made too wise to believe that anyone but Americans are worse than the others. Even Germans. Most especially Germans.”
A merry smile broadens her face.
- Do you think so? Really?
“O! Yes. Is the wine in the cooler?”
- Yes, it is. But where’s Katja?”
“Katja? What about Katja?”
- We’re being pure, Chou, for yoga week. Remember? We don’t want Katja to see us boozing.
Karine twists around like a snake, both hands free, and, bending from the hips, snaps the cooler open, grabs the wine bottle by the neck. I seem to see the popping eyes of a plucked chicken just above her grasp.
“Where did you put the glasses?”
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1 « Se réapproprier une ressource d’utilité publique : Données personnelles, une affaire politique , » Pierre Rimbert, Le Monde Diplomatique, septembre 2016. Citing, in particular : Nicolas Colin & Pierre Collin , « Mission d'expertise Sur la fiscalité de l'économie numérique , » La Documentation française, Paris 2013 ; Dominique Cardon & Antonio A. Castillo, « Qu'est-ce que le Digital Labor ? » INA Éditions , Paris 2015 ; Mona Chollet , « Le Revenu garanti et ses faux amis, » Le Monde Diplomatique, juillet 2016.