Dawn Dusk or Night

Man alone is a dream. Man alone is an illusion. One likes to think of them in an emblematic solitude, but men only pretend to be alone. This is deceiving. Predators, they are called, but predators are solitary. Without doubt, within their territory, men can be predatory. Elsewhere, they are tame. In the office at Place Beauvau, where we meet for the first time, he listens graciously, and then I very quickly perceive, in little ways, something with which I am all too familiar, impatience. He has understood. He is "honored" that I would like to do his portrait. He says, So, you want to be there. I say, Yes. Later, I am talking with my friend Marc in a cafe. Anyway, you'll reinvent him. Writers, like tyrants, are capable of bending the world to their will. No landscape. No city. For a long time, I will not see a thing. Not a place, not even him. Thus, this day, a highway through nowhere. Road signs, exit. Warehouses. Venue. Headlong rush into the dressing room. Constant stream of things to nibble. In the prefabricated makeup room, some prunes, some chocolate, candied fruit squares. Him nibbling constantly. Nibbling, gobbling, rushing. I had noticed that he ate fast, just as I had noticed that he limped. Getting dressed, after the meeting in Agen, he keeps repeating, They want to cut down on the working hours, when we want to boost the purchasing power. He has said it during the speech, in front of six thousand peoplehad said it solemnly the night before, during the dinner, in his apartment at the Ministere (with a slightly ridiculous solemnity, as if seriously testing). He repeats the sentence over and over to these people he has no need to convince, he is happy, he repeats the words as he changes his shirt, still in disbelief, still waiting, like a child, for the umpteenth approval. In front of Andre Glucksmann asking questions (twenty-five minutes each, in a slow and didactic voice) on Europe's future, EU energy policy, or the fate of Africa, he slouches in his chair, upper body projecting patience, legs restless, opening and closing in perpetual motion. As the Bastille Day garden party winds down, he is hugging Christian Clavier. They are hugging the way actors do. Wild with joy, with love, with You, I mean you, my pal, shouted at the whole world. The kind of hug I have seen a thousand times, other places, other faces, actors hell-bent on hugging publicly, drunk with their own performance, with their demonstrative laughter, their superhuman zeal. A little bit later, as he is burying his tie in the black bag he is taking to Rome, he says to me, Did you see who was there? Did you see? . . . No . . . Mathias's parents. (Mathias? . . .) Math-ias, if I remember correctly, was the little boy who was raped and murdered. The day before, during a conver-sation on foreign policy with Glucksmann and Bruckner,* he had managed to slip in the Mathias storyhe had mentioned it to me at some point, I don't know when. Mathias's parents. Mathias's parents were there. I nod in sympathy. What else do you do? Flipping through Le Point the day his book, Testimony, comes out. Alongside the excerpts, some photos captioned and perhaps chosen by him. As is usually the case, and well before I met him, I am struck by the childhood. Childhood, intelligence, men's clothing. The tie and the suit never fit his age. The man's suit accentuating a kind of fragility. The laugh is not the laugh of someone his age. He seems more elegant these days. I say so to Pierre Charon. He is elegant, yes, he's gone back to Dior. Before, he wore Lan- vin, Lanvin is normally the thing, but it has to be tailored, the sleeves cut, all kinds of alterations, Dior suits him better. . . . Observing him at the town hall in Palavas-les-FloReza, Yasmina is the author of 'Dawn Dusk or Night' with ISBN 9780307269218 and ISBN 0307269213.