The Man Who Risked It All Read online

  “You’re an idealist, Alan.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “That’s all well and good, but you’re living in the wrong times. We’re surrounded by cynics, and you have to be a cynic yourself to survive.”

  “I … I don’t agree. Or rather, I refuse to give in to that view. Otherwise, there’s no point to anything. I can’t accept the idea that my life amounts to working just to buy food, put a roof over my head, and go out every now and then. It would be absolutely meaningless.”

  “How are my little turkeys?” asked Arthus, looking at our plates, confident of the success of his dish.

  “Don’t be so familiar,” Alice told him, pretending to be offended.

  He walked away laughing.

  “I need a job,” I continued, “that brings something to others, even if it doesn’t change the face of the universe. I want to go to bed at night telling myself that my day has been useful, that I’ve made a contribution.”

  “You’ll have to face facts, Alan. You can’t change the world.”

  I put my fork down. Even my turkey with yellow wine didn’t tempt me anymore.

  I saw Arthus kissing a woman’s hand. He lived in a world he had created himself.

  “Yes, we can change the world,” I said emphatically. “I’m convinced each one of us can. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, don’t give up on what we think is right, don’t allow our values to be trampled on. Otherwise, we’re party to what happens.”

  “Fine words,” agreed Alice. “But in practice, they’re not much use. It’s not because you decide to maintain your integrity that you’ll stop others from behaving badly.”

  I looked at Alice. It’s strange; I had the feeling that even if she was trying to prove that my efforts were futile, deep down, she wanted me to be right. Perhaps she no longer had hope, but all she wanted was to hope again.

  I started to daydream, letting my eyes wander over the restaurant walls. They came to rest on one of the maxims that Arthus had put up. It was a quotation attributed to Gandhi: “We must be the change we want to see in the world.”

  11

  “WHAT’S CERTAIN IS that change won’t come from others!”

  Yves Dubreuil leaned back in his armchair and put his feet up on his desk.

  I like the smell of leather and old books, smells I associated with this place where, for a whole day, I had confided in him when we first met. The soft evening light filtering through the trees of his garden accentuated the English atmosphere of the room. Dubreuil was swirling the ice cubes around in his bourbon, as was his habit.

  “It’s my conviction,” he went on, “that all change must come from inside oneself, not from outside. Neither an organization nor a government nor a new boss nor a trade union nor a new partner will change your life. Besides, look at politics: Every time people have counted on someone to change their life, did it work? Think of Mitterrand in 1981, Chirac in 1995, Obama in 2008. Every time, people were disappointed. Afterward, they thought they’d been mistaken about the man, that they’d made a bad choice. In fact, that’s not the problem. The reality is that nobody but you will change your life. That’s why you’ve got to take control yourself.

  “Mind you,” he continued, “I think Gandhi’s thought went beyond individual considerations, personal expectations of change. I think he was referring to the changes that everyone would like to see in society generally, and he probably meant that it is much more powerful to embody the path oneself and be a model for others than simply to denounce and criticize.”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said. “The idea is interesting, but my becoming a model of equilibrium won’t change anything at all with regard to what my company demands of me, nor will it make my boss start to respect me.”

  “Yes it will, in a way,” Dubreuil countered. “If the fact that your boss doesn’t respect you makes you suffer, then don’t wait for him to change of his own accord. You’ve got to learn how to make him respect you. See what you can change about yourself that will make you more respected: your relative positioning, perhaps; the way you talk; the way you communicate your results. Perhaps by not letting inappropriate remarks go unchallenged. Managers who go in for moral bullying don’t attack all their employees, and their choice of victim isn’t random.”

  “You’re not going to say it’s the victim’s fault if they’re bullied!”

  “No, I’m not saying that. It’s not their fault, of course, and you can’t even say they bring it on without realizing. No, I’m just saying they have a way of behaving, a way of being that makes the bullying possible. Their torturer feels that if he attacks this person, he will succeed in having a really negative impact on them, whereas it wouldn’t necessarily work with others.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes a person end up in this category?”

  “It’s complicated. There may be several elements, but the most decisive, no doubt, is that they lack self-esteem. If they aren’t sufficiently convinced of their value deep down, they present a flaw that certain types spot at once. Then the bully only has to press where it hurts.”

  I suddenly needed air.

  “Could we open a window?”

  He got up and opened the window wide. The soft, warm air, full of moisture from the tall trees, filled the room, bringing us the calming scents of summer evenings. I could hear the gentle cheeping of birds hidden in the foliage of the tall plane trees, while the majestic branches of the century-old cedar calmly swayed.

  “I wonder if … I think that … I’m perhaps a little lacking in self-esteem. In fact, it’s not that I don’t like myself, it’s not that, and in any case I feel … normal, but it’s true that I’m easily thrown off when I’m being blamed or criticized.”

  “I think so, too,” Dubreuil said. “Next time, I’ll give you a task to develop your self-esteem, your self-confidence, so you’ll be stronger deep down.”

  I wondered if I wouldn’t have done better to keep quiet.

  “To get back to the point, I believe that you can change your manager’s opinion and attitude by changing yourself, but that’s not going to change the course of events in the company. That would require you to know how to communicate well. But I’m convinced that you could convince your managers, who you complain about all the time, to change their opinion on certain points. You should be able to influence them and gain progress on certain fronts.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “You say that because you don’t as yet know how to go about it. And don’t forget that when a situation really doesn’t suit you, you can always move to a different company. If you knew the number of people dissatisfied with their job, who complain about it and stay put. Human beings are afraid of change, of novelty, and they very often prefer to remain where it’s familiar, even if that’s very unpleasant, than to leave it for a new situation that they don’t know.

  “It’s Plato’s cave,” Dubreuil said. “Plato described people who had lived all their lives in a very dark cave that they had never left. The cave was their universe, and despite it being murky, it was familiar and therefore reassuring. They obstinately refused to set foot outside because not knowing the exterior world, they imagined it to be hostile, dangerous. Consequently, it was impossible for them to discover that this unknown space was, in fact, filled with sun, beauty, freedom.

  “Lots of people today live in Plato’s cave without realizing it. They are scared stiff of the unknown and refuse any change that affects them personally. They have ideas, plans, dreams but never carry them out, paralyzed by a thousand unfounded fears, bound hand and foot by shackles they alone have the key to. The key is hanging around their neck, but they’ll never grab hold of it.

  “I believe life itself is made up of change, of movement. There’s no sense in clinging to the status quo. Only the dead are immobile. It’s in our interest not just to accept change but to initiate it, so that we can evolve in a way that suits us.”


  Dubreuil poured himself a splash of bourbon and added some ice cubes that clinked in his glass.

  I had a sudden inspiration. “Speaking of change, there is one I would really like, but I can’t make happen, even though I’m the only one concerned: I want to stop smoking. Could you do something?”

  “It depends. Tell me a bit more. Why do you want to stop?”

  “For the same reasons as everyone: It’s filthy, and it slowly kills you.”

  “Right. So what’s stopping you from giving it up?”

  “To be honest, I like it. It’s difficult to give up something you enjoy. I would miss it, especially in times of stress, when it helps me unwind.”

  “Okay, then imagine there exists something else that’s really good, that’s nice to take and relieves stress into the bargain. You can use it whenever you like. Imagine. In those circumstances, you’d easily stop smoking?”

  “Perhaps… .”

  “That’s not a very convincing reply. Imagine: You’ve got this magic substance that brings you pleasure and helps you unwind whenever you need it. Do cigarettes give you anything else?”

  “No.”

  “So, what’s to stop you giving up in those circumstances?”

  As hard as I imagined a miracle substance that would give me pleasure and relaxation on demand, something upset me about giving up cigarettes. What? What could it be? It was as if I could vaguely feel the answer without being able to express it. It took me a long time before it came out, and then it seemed self-evident.

  “Freedom.”

  “Freedom?”

  “Yes, freedom. Even if I want to give up tobacco, there is such social pressure to give it up that I feel as if it wouldn’t really be my choice anymore, so I’d be losing my freedom if I stopped smoking.”

  “You’d lose your freedom?”

  “Everyone’s rabbiting on about smoking, saying ‘You should stop,’ so that if I did, I would feel like I’d given in to pressure, submitted to the will of others.”

  A smile crossed his face.

  “Okay. I’ll send you my instructions. You must follow them to the letter. As usual.”

  I felt a draft behind me and turned around. Catherine had opened the door partway and slipped into the room. She sat down in a corner silently and gave me a little smile.

  That’s when it caught my eye—a gray notebook, quite big, laid on the desk. On the cover, I could read my name upside down, written in block letters in black ink and underlined with a rapid but firm stroke. Did Dubreuil have a whole notebook on me? I had a burning desire to read it. What did it contain? The list of the trials he was going to impose on me? Notes about me, about our encounters?

  “Right,” Dubreuil resumed. “Let’s take stock of where you are overall. You’ve learned to show disagreement, to express your wishes and desires, and to assert yourself in your relations with others.”

  “In sum, yes.”

  “Now—and this goes back to what we were just saying—you must learn to communicate better with others. It’s fundamental. We’re not alone on earth. We inevitably relate to others and interact with them, and we don’t always set about it very well. There are useful things to know in order to be appreciated and respected by others, and have good relations.”

  There was something I didn’t like about the way he put it.

  “I don’t want to apply techniques to communicate better. I want to stay myself and not have to say or do special things to have good relations.”

  He looked at me, taken aback.

  “In that case, why did you agree to learn language?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yes, you speak French, even English. Why did you agree to learn those languages?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How? You weren’t born speaking them. You learned them. You learned the rules, and now you apply them in order to express yourself. Do you have the feeling of not being yourself when you speak?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Are you sure? To remain really natural, perhaps you’d prefer expressing yourself in onomatopoeia, in sounds that stand for words—plop, splash, bang—or by making bellowing noises.”

  “But I learned language when I was a child. It makes a big difference.”

  “So does that mean that what we learn before a certain age is part of us and what is learned after that age is artificial and we’re not ourselves when we use it?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t feel natural when I don’t do things as they come to me spontaneously.”

  “Shall I tell you what I think?”

  “What?”

  “It’s still resistance to change! That’s the main difference between the child and the adult: The child wants to evolve. The adult does all he can not to change.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’ll tell you my opinion.”

  He leaned slightly forward and spoke in a confidential tone.

  “When you don’t want to change anymore, it’s because you’re slowly beginning to die.”

  I swallowed hard. Catherine started to cough. Outside, a bird gave a cry that sounded like mocking laughter.

  “I have realized a disturbing fact,” he went on. “In most people, the will not to change their behavior appears somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. Do you know what that age corresponds to biologically?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the age at which the brain finishes developing.”

  “So perhaps it’s not by chance,” I said, “that that’s the age when we don’t want to change anymore. Perhaps it’s natural.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the end of it. For a long time we thought that the number of brain cells diminished from then on, until the end of our life. But it has recently been demonstrated that we can continue to grow them as adults.”

  “You’ve cheered me up. I was beginning to feel old.”

  “Specifically, the process of regeneration can happen as a result of many factors, including apprenticeship. In short, if you decide to carry on learning and developing, you stay young. Body and mind are closely linked. Do you want proof?”

  “Yes.”

  “Official statistics from the Department of Health show that the moment most people retire, their health declines sharply. Why do you think that is? As long as they’re working, they’re more or less forced to adapt, to develop at least a bit in order not to be thought of as has-beens. As soon as they retire, they stop making an effort. They are fixed in their ways and decline sets in.”

  “That’s cheerful.”

  “To stay alive, you have to stay in life—in other words, to follow the movement of life, to develop. I know a woman who started playing the piano at eighty-one. That’s wonderful! Everyone knows it takes years of study to play piano properly. That means that at eighty-one, she thinks it’s still worth investing a few years to learn to play a musical instrument! I’ll bet you any amount that she’ll live a lot longer.

  “If you want to stay young all your life, continue developing, learning, discovering, and don’t imprison yourself in habits that cause sclerosis of the mind, or in the numbing comfort of what you already know how to do.”

  “Right. So what did you want to tell me about relationships?”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you a secret. A secret that will allow you to relate to anyone, even someone from a different culture than yours. It will immediately make that person want to engage with you, listen to what you have to say, respect your point of view, even if it’s different from theirs, and talk to you sincerely.”

  He took a sheet of ivory-colored paper and a black-laquered pen and started writing with a sweeping movement, the gold nib noisily scratching the paper. When he finished he held the paper out to me. The wet ink shone as if the paper refused to soak up a secret that was not meant for it.

  Embrace your neighbor’s world, and he will open himself up to you.

  I read it, reread it, and remained lost in thought
. I liked the formula; it was like a magical inscription whose meaning still eluded me.

  “Do you have the operating instructions that go with that?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “If we were remaining on a purely mental level, I would express the secret differently. I would say something along the lines of ‘Try to understand the other person before trying to be understood.’ But it goes way beyond that. You can’t sum up the communication between two people as a simple intellectual exchange. It takes place on other levels as well, at the same time.”

  “On other levels?”

  “Yes, in particular on the emotional level. The emotions you feel in the presence of the other are perceived, often unconsciously, by him. If you don’t like him, for example, even if you succeed in hiding it perfectly, he will feel it one way or another. Your intention is also something that the other feels.”

  “You mean what we’re thinking about during the conversation?”

  “Yes, but not necessarily consciously. An example: office meetings. Most of the time in those meetings, when someone asks a question, he doesn’t really have any intention of getting an answer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His intention can be just to show that he can ask intelligent questions. Or to make the person he’s talking with uncomfortable in front of the others, or to prove that he’s interested in the subject, or to claim a leadership role in the group. And quite often, it’s the intention behind the question more than the question itself that we pick up. When someone’s trying to trap us, we know it, don’t we, even if there’s nothing in their words we could objectively reproach them for?”