Angelina

Profound Thought No. 14

Go to Angelina’s

To learn

Why cars are burning

The television was on in the loge. She wasn’t watching it. There was a program about kids burning cars in the banlieues. When I saw the images I wondered what it is that makes a kid want to burn a car. What is going on in their heads? And then this thought came into my mind: what about me? Why do I want to set fire to the apartment? Journalists talk about unemployment and poverty; I talk about the selfishness and duplicity of my family. But these are all hollow phrases. There have always been unemployment and poverty and pathetic families. And yet, people don’t go burning cars or apartments every day of the week. Honestly! I figured that, in the end, they were all false pretexts. Why do people burn cars? Why do I want to set fire to the apartment?

I didn’t get an answer to my question until I went shopping with my aunt Hélène, my mother’s sister, and my cousin Sophie. In fact we had to go buy a present for my mother’s birthday, which is next Sunday. The pretext was a visit to the Musée Dapper, but we went straight to the interior design boutiques in the 2nd and 8th arrondissements. The idea was to find an umbrella stand and buy my present for Maman as well.

Anyway, after the rigmarole with the umbrella stand, we went to eat some cakes and drink hot chocolate at Angelina’s, a tea room on the rue de Rivoli. You’ll tell me that nothing could be further removed from the topic of young people in the banlieues burning cars. Well, not at all! I saw something while we were at Angelina’s that offered me a lot of insight about other things. At the table next to ours there was a couple with a baby. The couple were white and their baby was Asian, a little boy they called Théo. They struck up a conversation with Hélène and chatted for a while. Obviously they had in common the fact that their children were different, that is why they noticed each other and began to converse. We learned that Théo had been adopted, he was fifteen months old when they brought him home from Thailand—his parents had died in the tsunami, along with all his brothers and sisters. I was looking around and thinking, how will he manage? Here we were at Angelina’s after all: all these well-dressed people, nibbling preciously at their exorbitantly priced patisserie, who were here only for . . . well, for the significance of the place itself—belonging to a certain world, with its beliefs, its codes, its projects, its history, and so on. It’s symbolic. When you go to have tea chez Angelina, you are in France, in a world that is wealthy, hierarchical, rational, Cartesian, policed. How will little Théo manage? He spent the first months of his life in a fishing village in Thailand, in an Eastern world dominated by its own values and emotions, where symbolic belonging might be played out at village feasts celebrating the Rain God, where children are brought up with magical beliefs, etc. And now here he is in France, at Angelina’s, suddenly immersed in a different culture without any time to adjust, with a social position that has changed in every possible way: from Asia to Europe, from poverty to wealth.

Then suddenly I said to myself, Théo might want to burn cars some day. Because it’s a gesture of frustration and anger, and maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you’ve been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don’t know where you are? What do you do if your culture will always be that of a Thai fishing village and of Parisian grands bourgeois at the same time? Or if you’re the son of immigrants but also the citizen of an old, conservative nation? So you burn cars, because when you have no culture, you’re no longer a civilized animal, you’re a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.

I know this is not a very profound thought but after that I did have a profound thought all the same: I asked myself, what about me? What is my cultural problem? In what way am I torn between two incompatible beliefs? And in what way am I a wild beast?

And then I had an enlightened thought, thinking of Maman’s incantatory care of her green plants and Colombe’s phobic manias and Papa’s stress over Mamie being in a retirement home, and a whole lot of other things like that. Maman thinks you can conjure your destiny just by going pschitt, and Colombe thinks you can push your cares to one side just by washing your hands, and Papa thinks he’s a bad son who will be punished because he’s abandoned his mother: in the end, they too have magical beliefs, the beliefs of primitive people, but unlike the Thai fishermen, they can’t accept them, because they are rich-educated-Cartesian-French people.

And I am probably the biggest victim of all of this contradiction because, for some unknown reason, I am hypersensitive to anything that is dissonant, as if I had some sort of absolute pitch for false notes or contradictions. This contradiction and all the others . . . As a result, I don’t feel I belong to any belief system, to any of these incoherent family cultures.

Maybe I’m the symptom of the family contradiction, and so I’m the one who has to disappear, if the family is to prosper.