The Affront of Doubt (Part 1)
"Think on the storm that gathers o'er your head / And threatens ev'ry hour to burst upon it" — Cato, a Tragedy, Joseph Addison, 1712
If we survive the next heaven-heaved rock, even if it creates a crater the size of Kansas and blots out the sun for a year or two or even three, we won’t remember what day it struck the Earth. Because disasters don’t lodge in memory as precise moments. This is why we give storms names—Sandy, Cindy, Harvey, Irma, Usagi, Jose, Katia—and why, once they blow over, unless we were in their path, unless they flattened our homes and annihilated our loved ones, we don’t give them another thought.
And then, when the next storms threaten, bigger, meaner, costlier, deadlier, we give them the same names.
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
American elections because they’re slow clocks, one tick every four years, provide a mnemonic grid. MLK on a motel balcony, RFK in a hotel kitchen, both in 1968, just before Nixon. Brexit, just before Trump.
Was it different for our parents? They had the war. D-Day. The Battle of the Bulge. We had sports. We had assassinations. The seventh game. Paul Henderson’s goal. Rope-a-dope. The grassy knoll, sixty years ago this Wednesday. John Lennon outside the Dakota, the year, the day? OJ in the Bronco. Lady Di in the tunnel. The day Michael Jackson died I was driving my sister’s beat-up old white van across a bridge in a blinding rainstorm. The Lion’s Gate Bridge, driving to North Van, the kids in the back seat, it must have been summertime. The van was held together with duct tape and filled with desiccant gel packets to fight off the black mould. My son’s best friend called just as the announcement was made on the car radio. Same news, same time, nine hours apart. I remember the look on the kids’ faces.
Chornobyl, however. 29 April 1986. But only because of something else that happened. I was in Toronto, living in a house filled with jazz musicians, smoking too much dope and studying philosophy—a terrible combination—and working the closing shift in a bar on Bloor. Chornobyl was all anyone talked about that night; we were drinking; we were stoned; our heads were in the clouds; and the clouds were radioactive. Can you see radioactivity, does it have a smell? That’s what I remember thinking as I locked up the bar, put the key in the hole and turned it, twice, and then put the key in the pocket of my jeans and walked home, looking up and seeing the stars, thinking about the clouds, thinking about Hegel, opening the front door without letting the lock click or the hinges creak, stepping out of my shoes, tiptoeing upstairs to where my girlfriend would be fast asleep on a futon on the floor. Asleep for hours—early classes, actual ambitions, serious about Art—but walking down the hall I could see that the door to our room was open, wide open, and its light was on, and it was bright, brighter than usual, and inside there was a lightbulb dangling from a wire where her Chinese paper lantern had been, and a few hooks sticking out of the barren walls. Everything else—the paintings and drawings on the hooks, her clothes, shoes, books, plants, lamps, candles, the table, the chairs, the fabrics she hung from the ceiling to make the room look like the inside of a Bedouin tent—gone.
I didn’t see her again for five years.
And that’s why I remember Chornobyl.
But the dates of most killings and attacks and the like, they stick out, and in our brains, in our memories, because we name them after their dates. The nines and the elevens, the thirteenths, the ides of March, the October sevenths, the July fourths, the quatorzes juillets, and the first of May, this last one, for me at least, 1993, forever stuck inside my head because of Pierre Bérégovoy, the just-ousted French prime minister, and the irreparable consequences of something he did that day, an impulsive and in most people’s opinion excessive gesture—un geste désespéré, son dernier geste politique, un geste d'une grande violence, égoïste pour certains, courageux pour d’autres1—that was what they said about it in the press.
It happened just a few hours after he gave the traditional International Workers’ Day speech to his Socialist Party supporters and staff in Nevers, the capital of the Nièvre, where he was the regional député and mayor. I wasn’t there but I read about it, how after the speech, “Béré”—people liked to call him by this nickname because it sounded like “beret”, the working man’s hat, a symbol, along with the baguette, of la France profonde—handed out glasses of local wine and sprigs of lilies of the valley, which the French sell and buy on May Day, to a roomful of trade unionists. He was in his element, he was no énarque, he didn’t go to some elite school. When he was 16 and his factory worker father got sick, he quit the lycée and got a job sweeping the floor in the same factory where his father lost his lungs. Then he rose through the ranks of the unions and put all his love and passion into Socialism and was himself proof of its power and truth — even when he was Minister of Finance, beloved by international bankers for the “rigueur” of his new-found faith in the free market.
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls— Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers— Up many and many a marvellous shrine Whose wreathed friezes intertwine The viol, the violet, and the vine.
The day before, 30 April 1993, he signed the deal for the new Nevers hospital. The director explained the taxonomy of calamities, the insufficient resources, the patient surges, the staff shortages, the large-scale disruptors, the burden of need. A doctor described triage. Who can be helped? Who must wait? Who is beyond help? The greatest good for the greatest number. But what place for any of this in a world containing evil? Ordinary morals and virtues are inadequate. And he the last man, surviving the collapse of the world? A grievous day and night had befallen him, and the earth had swallowed him, and Lo! Death had reared himself a throne in a strange city lying alone, and come May Day, the following morn, something was definitely off. What had happened in the night, in the dark? Everything was off. A slow erosion of his dignity and citizenship, for a disaster need not be sudden. Resignedly beneath the sky, the melancholy waters lie. Those present could sense this. At least, that is what they would say later. How his speech was funereal. How he looked stressed. How he had gulped down a glass of wine, and then another. And then another.
But he made the rounds anyway, as he always did, and he shook everyone’s hands, and he is smiling in the photographs.
And then he left with Lesport, his bodyguard, a former cop; and Ragouneau, his long-time driver—and not a word was exchanged in the Renault as they drove to lunch at Béré’s little sister’s house in Pougues-les-Eaux. And as always, Ragouneau and Lesport ate with the family. Roasted chicken. Did Béré drink more wine than usual? He made two jokes about Lesport’s service revolver, which Lesport had left at home that morning and Bérégovoy had made him go back and get. It was in the glove compartment.
“Shouldn’t it be in a shoulder holster, or strapped to your ankle? What if somebody at this table tries to kill me? What if the chicken tries to kill me? What if its wishbone gets lodged in my windpipe?” Everyone laughed uncomfortably. The waves by then had a redder glow, the hours were breathing faint and low—after lunch, he asked to be driven to the Nevers train station, without saying why. He got out of his car, entered the station and studied the train timetable for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch, returned to the car and asked to be taken home.
He spent a half hour in the apartment, then returned to the car and asked to be taken to the ducal palace, where the mayor’s office is located.
The concierge unlocked the door. He was surprised to see the mayor. Not because the building was closed for the holiday, but because Bérégovoy rarely used his offices there.
“I need a phone,” whispered Bérégovoy. The concierge led him to an empty room, where he locked himself in for ten minutes.
There is no record of what happened in the next half-hour.
At 4:30 pm Ragouneau drove them to a bicycle race in Parc Roger Salengro, where Bérégovoy handed out medals to the first, second, and third place finishers, all boys between the ages of 11 and 13. He shook the winners’ hands. He shook the hands of their parents. Then they drove to a pleasure boat marina on the Loire. There, Bérégovoy shot the starting pistol for a kayak race and a canoe race and each time made a joke about Lesport’s service revolver. He shook the winners’ hands, shook the hand of the new manager of the municipal camping grounds upriver, posed for photographs, and made two more telephone calls.
Who he called, then or before, or after, has never been disclosed.
Then, having left Lesport at the marina, he asked Ragouneau, just as they exited the campsite, to turn left towards the swimming pool, which he had officially opened years before, it’s next to the river, which was still high from the spring rains, and to stop at “Le Peuplier isolé” a spot on the riverbank named after a giant dead poplar felled a few months before.
The car drove slowly along the Loire, slowed more, stopped. Bérégovoy, now in the front seat, told Ragouneau he needed to make a telephone call. “It’s a private matter,” he said.
Ragouneau nodded, opened the door, lit a cigarette, and walked down the path until he was out of earshot. From where he stood, he could hear the hum of the drinking-water plant and the back-and-forth smacks of a tennis ball. A few minutes later, Bérégovoy, who built both the water plant and the tennis court, called him back.
“I need to go back to Nevers,” he said.
They set off again. A few moments later, however, Bérégovoy said, “No, sorry, take me to Sermoise.”
But lo, a stir is in the air! The wave—there is a movement there!
Sermoise was the next town. Where a new bridge for the autoroute was being built. Bérégovoy had pushed the project through, just as he had pushed through the autoroute itself, the A77, which put Nevers on the map, directly linked it to Paris.
The car rolled slowly past the just-built pylons—Béré had the window down, this would be his legacy, he thought, not the scandals—then turned down rue de la Jonction and onto the tree-lined towpath on the right bank, two colonnades of poplars on both sides of a clean road, well-landscaped, leading to a fresh hell.
There open fanes and gaping graves Yawn level with the luminous waves; But not the riches there that lie In each idol’s diamond eye— Not the gaily-jewelled dead Tempt the waters from their bed; For no ripples curl, alas! Along that wilderness of glass—
They stopped near the footbridge. This was his wife’s favourite weekend walking spot. This was where he shot his last election campaign video. He requested a few minutes alone to make another telephone call. Ragouneau exited the car and walked away.
Then, Pierre Bérégovoy, Prime Minister of the French Republic under François Mitterrand from April 2, 1992 to March 29, 1993, preceded by Édith Cresson and succeeded by Édouard Balladur, took his bodyguard’s service weapon—either a .357 Magnum or a five-shot Smith & Wesson .38 Special—out of the glove compartment and slipped it under his coat.
He stepped out of the car into the rain.
“Go back and pick up Lesport,” he told Ragouneau, who was smoking a cigarette under a poplar. “We need to go back to Paris.”
As the car pulled away, Bérégovoy walked off into the trees. He waited for the car to disappear entirely. Then he aimed the gun at the ground and pulled the trigger.
Translation: “a desperate gesture, his last political gesture, a gesture of great violence, selfish for some, courageous for others”.
Argh! A cliff-hanger!