The anomaly, p.7
The Anomaly, page 7
THE MIESEL AFFAIR
APRIL 22, the day that Victor Miesel falls from his balcony, is a Thursday.
Clémence Balmer’s lunch at the Rostand has been postponed, and she’s preparing to go out for a walk in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens when Miesel’s email provokes a small ding from her computer. Clémence is fond of Victor: he’s a talented author who can give the impression he’s improvising, but is in fact a thinker. His books are always constructed, they’re both fluid and beautifully written, and never quite the same; Miesel gives Balmer a rewarding reason to do her job. Glory is slow in coming, true, but maybe one day readers will…No one is safe from success. Miesel couldn’t care less about it, anyway. His last book, Failures That Missed the Mark, ended up on the longlists for the big French prizes, the Médicis, the Goncourt, and the Renaudot, only to disappear two weeks later, when the shortlists were announced: feeling irritated as much as saddened, she called him to console him, but within seconds he was the one consoling her, and he asked her if she was free the next day because he had two invitations for the Odéon Theatre. No, everything glided over him like water off a duck’s back.
Clémence downloads the attached document onto her e-reader, an editor’s reflex action. But she sees that there’s no message introducing the text, and her curiosity is piqued by the title, The anomaly—which is harder and more striking than any of his previous titles—so she opens it on the spot, and is awestruck.
Clémence Balmer is a fast reader, it’s her job, and she’s finished the book in an hour. The anomaly is unlike anything Victor has produced before. It isn’t a novel, or a confession, or even a succession of unconnected dazzling sentences or brilliant truisms. It’s a strange book, thrillingly fast-paced, unputdownable, and between the lines she could see all of Miesel’s influences: Jankélévitch, Camus, Goncharov, and so many others. A dark, very immediate text in which even the banter is painful: “God, but stupidity oozes from every corner of a religious mind. Every conviction is a thorn in the side of intelligence. Believers lose their wits in their efforts to see death as just another misadventure. Doubt has made me an autodidact of life, and I have enjoyed every moment all the more for that. I am never overcome by mystical emotions, even when gazing at the glorious glittering around a cloud. On the brink of death by drowning, I try to swim, I cannot in all decency pray to Archimedes. And as I sink today, my eyes open onto an abyss where no theorem holds sway.”
Suddenly worried, Balmer decides to call Miesel right away. His cell, then his landline. The police pick up. When she hears what Miesel has done, she’s dumbfounded, devastated. She answers the officer’s questions and is overwhelmed by genuine sadness as well as glowering anger. The last time she saw Victor, now when was that? Early March, to celebrate that translation prize, they had dinner at the Brasserie Lipp, he had his perennial andouillette, she her Parisienne salad, they drank a Pic-Saint-Loup, and she didn’t sense anything, not a thing, didn’t decipher the tiniest clue in her friend’s words. She rereads The anomaly in light of the disaster it foreshadows. She notices that it is signed Victør Miesel, with an ø that is none other than the symbol for the empty set. A tragic witticism.
Balmer contacts those she can. Miesel had lost his parents and had no brothers or sisters. There was Ilena Leskov, of course, the young Russian teacher at Languages East who left him after a stormy, one-year relationship, and by the by, was a great-great-niece of Nikolai Leskov, whom Victor translated. The young teacher keeps saying “Boje moï!” “How terrible!” “How can it be true?” with emphatic conviction, and is in a hurry to end the call. Clémence considers a sentence that she’s just read in Miesel’s manuscript: “Nobody lives long enough to know just how little interest anybody takes in anybody.”
The editor handles everything, calls friends, organizes the funeral (which is nonreligious, naturally), and she arranges for an announcement to appear in Le Monde:
ORANGE TREE EDITIONS,
CLÉMENCE BALMER, AND THE WHOLE TEAM ARE SAD TO ANNOUNCE THE DEATH OF VICTOR MIESEL, WRITER, POET, TRANSLATOR, AND FRIEND.
She writes a long press release for Agence France-Presse, reminding readers of his most prestigious translations and his books that enjoyed favorable critical receptions. She adds that an exceptional text will be published shortly, that Miesel had put the finishing touches to it before his final act. She inserts three extracts from The anomaly, and then this woman who doesn’t drink pours herself a finger of whiskey and sips it slowly. It’s a Scottish single malt, one Victor liked.
The following morning she reads the opening of the book with some conviction to a “select committee,” a ridiculous turn of phrase given that the entire publishing company is there, even the two interns. Both commissioning editors approve, the sales director insists on getting the book out as quickly as possible without actually daring to articulate the self-evident necrophilic point: the critics and the general public are going to love this story of a book delivered moments before the big leap. He has an example in mind, it must have been twelve or thirteen years ago, what was the author’s name again? Couldn’t we at least change the title so that it references the author’s tragic end? suggests the bookshop liaison officer. No, we couldn’t, Clémence Balmer retorts tartly. A sticker then, or a band? No again. And at least put Victor instead of Victør; it would be a better spelling for data referencing services, right? Wrong.
The book is edited over the weekend, typeset on Monday, and photocopies of the first proofs are sent straight to the press; by the end of the week the final page proofs are with the printer, which starts running the presses the very day that Miesel is incinerated at the Père-Lachaise crematorium. His ashes have not been scattered before the book is sent out to distributors. It’s a record, publishing has rarely been this quick to respond since Princess Di’s biography. The first Wednesday in May The anomaly is piled up in every bookshop. Balmer opted for a print run of ten thousand, to give it a chance, with a simple blue sticker: MIESEL.
It’s an instant success. The cultural pages of Libération give it the promised double-page spread; Le Monde des Livres—conspicuously silent on all his other books—redeems itself with a long, adulatory obit that includes the words “congratulations are due to Orange Tree Editions for publishing Miesel’s work”; La Grande Librairie exhumes what footage there is of Victor to produce a televised portrait of him; and the radio station France Culture devotes three programs to him. The Miesel affair is underway. Clémence arranges for an urgent reprint of Failures That Missed the Mark, and even that novel from five years back, The Mountains Will Come to Find Us, whose last remaining copies were in danger of being pulped.
Discussions are organized, and Balmer agrees to take part in some of them. Actors read extracts in bookshops, there’s a “Miesel Night” at the Paris literary center, the Maison de la Poésie, where a famous actor who has a fine, deep voice and was “blown away” by The anomaly regales a packed house with a complete reading of the book that lasts four hours. Ilena is in the audience, in tears. A May launch isn’t ideal for competing in the big literary prizes in the fall, but rumor has it among the juries that Miesel is “a dead cert.” There’s already talk that he’s secured the Médicis.
This same month of May sees the founding of the Society of Friends of Victør Miesel, an eclectic collection of friends and admirers who clearly didn’t all know him or even read his books. Victør Miesel now has a plethora of “best friends,” from a Mr. T., a dandy with a high-pitched voice and a penchant for overtight jackets, to one Salerno—Silvio was it, or Livio?—his “very old friend,” whom Clémence has never heard mentioned. This society soon renames itself Frevimi, then “the Anomalists.” Ilena is a member, and in an exquisite rewriting of their not very glorious relationship, Ms. Leskov gradually raises herself to the tragic yet dignified status of official widow.
Clémence Balmer watches all this fall into place with detachment and an obscure feeling of distaste. Achieving success at the age of fifty is a little like finally being served the mustard when you’re on to dessert, and that’s bad enough, but Miesel’s posthumous fame upsets Clémence the friend more than his unwarranted invisibility ever did Clémence the publisher. What was it Victor wrote? “Glory is only ever imposture, except perhaps in running races. But I suspect all those who profess to scorn it of secretly fulminating because they have simply had to relinquish any claim to it.”
SLIMBOY
FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021
EKO ATLANTIC, LAGOS, NIGERIA
THE ITALIAN CONSUL in Lagos stumbles with every step he takes toward the petits fours. Neither Nigeria nor alcohol agrees with him. Ugo Darchini sways and staggers, and when some champagne sloshes from his glass, spattering the exotic wooden floor of this outsize function room at the Eko Atlantic Hotel, he apologizes in a croaky, slurred voice.
Darchini comes over to the French consul by the buffet as a castaway might approach a buoy. Her lemon-yellow dress has a hypnotic effect on him, with its golden spirals that remind him of Gidouille in that film of Ubu Roi. Since multicolored dashikis and traditional Yoruban agbadas have replaced Versace suits and Armani tuxedos at these Nigerian receptions, people have had to work hard if they don’t want to be invisible. The three Nigerians who were talking to the French consul abandon her as soon as they spot the Italian, as if he were contaminated with the plague. Darchini’s eyes are reeled in by those swirls on the lemon dress, and he feels a wave of nausea.
“Buona sera, Hélène. Your outfit is magnificent, it’s tapaphysic…pataphysical. Forgive me, I actually only had two glasses.”
“Good evening, Ugo, I’ve been meaning to get in touch to hear your news. I thought you’d have gone home to Italy, after what happened. I know your daughter went back to Siena with her mother.”
Ugo Darchini gives a grimace of a smile, but it’s no good, Hélène Charrier can’t possibly understand, she can’t imagine the days spent negotiating with abductors high on meth for the return of his fourteen-year-old daughter, not daring to guess what Renata was going through, terrified one of those nuts would slice off a finger or an ear to get him to hurry up and hand over the seventy thousand dollars. He entrusted the money to Taiwo, a “security consultant,” a seriously shady character, but one who was recommended by one of the deputy directors of Eni’s oil-prospecting arm. Taiwo had already acted as a go-between two years earlier, when that guy’s son was kidnapped. Both sides wore Kalashnikovs slung across one shoulder for the handover with the “area boys” in a side street near the docks in Apapa, opposite an evangelist church with a sign that was flashing “Pray as you go.” It was only fifty thousand dollars back then. The price of everything goes up.
And yet everyone from the ambassador in Abuja to the switchboard operator at the consulate had warned him, you be very careful of your daughter when she goes to the international high school, people here survive on a dollar a day, so kidnapping is a business like any other, better than most others in fact. But he just had to do this Lagos job if he wanted to land the Athens posting in a couple of years. Maria insisted on coming with him so that Renata could experience Africa. One time, just one time he hadn’t had the heart to forbid his daughter from venturing beyond their guarded, gated community without an armed escort. Just one time.
“They were right to go home to Italy,” the French consul sighs, “because I can guarantee it’s getting worse and worse in Lagos. Take electricity, you get it for thirty minutes, then it suddenly shuts down, and for hours. I don’t know how people keep food in their fridges. Without the generator we wouldn’t be able to work at the consulate, and without the tank we wouldn’t have any water. And everything’s like that, Ugo. Tutto.”
Yes, everything’s like that. Ugo knows. His first sight of Lagos, from the window on the plane, through the brown haze of pollution, was sprawling square kilometers of slums, millions of rusty corrugated-iron roofs, a gridwork of anarchy, and also that vast traffic jam of thousands of black-and-yellow potato-beetle-like minibuses, vehicles so dangerous that there are efforts—albeit failed efforts—to outlaw them. And every summer, when the torrential rains come and the roads turn into a pestilential swamp, Lagos reminds everyone that its name means “lakes” in Portuguese. For decades the city’s been left to its own devices, now so corrupt that foreign roadworks companies refuse all contracts with the city council. Even the country has abandoned the place, and no Nigerian president has set foot in Lagos for five years.
Ugo hears tragic stories every day. The story of the teenage girl who had to cross the expressway to reach the only faucet with drinking water, who was knocked down. Ten trucks ran over her without stopping. The story of the man who had an epileptic fit and collapsed—it was yesterday, his cook Naruma saw him with her own eyes—and passersby left him on the ground, spasming and foaming at the mouth, he might even have died. The story of the old man from the Oshidi slum who threw himself under the tracks of a bulldozer to save three items of clothing, and the vehicle didn’t even pause.
If you think you’re strong, come to Lagos, and then you’ll see.
The French consul puts down her glass and waves to a tall, generously proportioned young black woman in a purple dashiki, who comes over and kisses her enthusiastically.
“Ah, Hélène! I’m looking for the director of Lagos Fashion Week, but I’m not sure where she can…”
“Swahila, allow me to introduce Ugo Darchini, my Italian counterpart. Swahila Odiaka has been our cultural attaché in Lagos for a year.”
The woman smiles and shakes the limp hand proffered by the consul. Over by the door there’s a flurry of flashbulbs and shouting.
“Oh, it’s Slimboy!” exclaims the cultural attaché. “He’s giving a concert on Victoria Island in a couple of hours. You’ve heard of Slimboy, of course, Hélène.”
No, Hélène hasn’t heard of him.
“Money not worth it, worth it, worth it…” Swahila sings, laughing. “Really, Hélène, don’t you ever watch YouTube? He had a local following three or four months ago, but it’s just gone into hyperspace with his song ‘Yaba Girls’—he’s had over a billion views in a few weeks. A media explosion, like that Korean guy ten years ago, you know? Surely…Slimboy? And you, Mr. Darchini?”
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Odiaka,” Ugo declines politely, “I’ve never heard of him either. Verdi and Puccini are more my thing, Paolo Conte in a pinch.”
This time—a hint of revenge is sweet—it’s Swahila who feigns ignorance.
“ ‘Yaba Girls’ has a very hip-hop, R and B rhythm, well, more Afropop actually. It’s an homage to his mother, who had a shop in the fashion district in Yaba.”
“Come on, follow me,” she says, gesturing to them. “Let’s go and watch, he’s giving a press conference. The minister helped arrange one of his concerts in Paris back in March.”
The two consuls follow the cultural attaché, who feverishly weaves through the increasingly compact crowd, all the way to the musician and his girlfriend, all the way to the high-pitched squeals of his fans and the clamoring of the paparazzi.
“Slimboy! Slimboy! A photo please! Give Suomi a kiss!”
The emperor of African pop obeys the photographers, and amid the flashes he kisses the young actress, going down on his knees because he is as tall as his very new fiancée is petite. They pose like this for a long time, docile and cooperative. Maybe that’s what happiness is.
Femi Ahmed Kaduna, alias Slimboy, still can’t get over it. Three months ago his fame was limited to the Little Lagos that is Peckham in south London, at a stretch to Westchase in the suburbs of Houston, but however many cult Fela Kuti numbers he covered, adding his own special flavor, neither the concert in Paris nor the one in New York right afterward was a great success.
It was during the last hour of the Paris–New York flight, after thinking he wouldn’t come out of it alive and making extensive use of the sick bags, that Slimboy got the idea for “Yaba Girls.” A song that would use simple words to express his love for the neighborhood where he grew up, for the “needles and scissors” girls, a song of the young Femi’s gratitude to his mother, who sold necklaces in the market, his mother who’d prayed for him every day and had just died; it would be an amazing, gentle, melodious song.
And on the flight back to Lagos he decided that for once the music video wouldn’t be a parade of powerful motorbikes and outboard motors, it wouldn’t feature fabulous seminaked girls dancing on a beach, writhing on a bed with him in a lavish villa; he wouldn’t wear gold chains and wouldn’t leer as he counted his dollars. No, everyone did that, he wanted something different, so it would show the dignity of ordinary people, work-weary women, shopkeepers, seamstresses, and ironers laughing and dancing while they worked when it was over 110 degrees in the shade, and the only splashes of color would be strips of wax print cotton. And he, Slimboy, would be dressed in white in those dirty streets, singing in English and Yoruba, saying hi to one person, then another, respectfully, humbly even, showing the deference of the kid he’d been during his happy childhood. He, Slimboy, would break the mold of the Afro-rap vibe, he would steer clear of auto-tune, reverb, delay, and other overused effects, and—hovering over the melody—there would be a softly lilting counterpoint provided by a saxophonist. Slimboy had even found the musician, a skeletal old white guy with very little hair left, a Quebecois virtuoso who sometimes played with Drake: he would symbolize the old world handing over the baton to the new.
They filmed the video in two days in the streets of Yaba, uploaded it right away, and the song went global. There are already four remixes of “Yaba Girls,” including one by Franks; Slimboy was the surprise guest at the Coachella Festival; he’s sung alongside Beyoncé; dueted with Eminem, and been interviewed by Oprah. Yes, maybe that’s happiness.
