Pierre brought the Volvo to a bucking and coughing stop in the center of the Place of Tardets and clawed his way out. After bruising his toe against the battered door, he set about his commissions, the first of which was to share a hospitable glass with old friends.
No one thought it odd that Pierre always delivered a kick to the car upon entering or leaving, as Volvo-bashing was a general practice in southwestern France, and could even be encountered as far away as Paris. Indeed, carried to cosmopolitan centers around the world by tourists, Volvo-bashing was slowly becoming a cult activity throughout the world, and this pleased Nicholai Hel, since he had begun it all.
Some years before, seeking a car-of-all-work for the château, Hel had followed the advice of a friend and purchased a Volvo on the assumption that a car so expensive, lacking in beauty, comfort, speed, and fuel economy must have something else to recommend it. And he was assured that this something else was durability and service. His battle with rust began on the third day; and little errors of construction and design and set-up (misaligned wheels that wore out his tires within five thousand kilometers, a windshield wiper that daintily avoided contact with the glass, a rear hatch catch so designed as to require two hands to close it, so that loading and unloading was a burlesque of inefficient motion) required that he return the automobile frequently to the dealer some 150 kilometers away. It was the dealer’s view that these problems were the manufacturer’s and the manufacturer’s view that the responsibility lay with the dealer; and after months of receiving polite but vague letters of disinterested condolence from the company, Hel decided to bite the bullet and set the car to the brutish tasks of transporting sheep and bringing equipment up rough mountain roads, hoping that it would soon fall apart and justify his purchase of a vehicle with a more reliable service infrastructure. Sadly, while he had found no truth in the company’s reputation for service, there was some basis for the car’s claim to durability and, while it always ran poorly, it always ran. Under other circumstances, Hel would have viewed durability as a virtue in a machine, but he could find little consolation in the threat that his problems would go on for years.
Having observed Pierre’s skills as a chauffeur, Hel thought to shorten his torment by allowing Pierre to drive the car whenever he chose. But this plot was foiled because ironic fate shielded Pierre from accidents. So Hel came to accept his Volvo as one of the comic burdens of life, but he allowed himself to vent his frustration by kicking or bashing the car each time he got in or out.
It was not long before his caving associates fell into the practice of bashing his Volvo whenever they passed it, at first as a joke and later by habit. Soon they and the young men they traveled with began to bash any Volvo they passed. And in the illogical way of fads, Volvo-bashing began to spread, here taking on an anti-Establishment tone, there a quality of youthful exuberance; here as an expression of antimaterialism, there as a manifestation of in-cult with-itness.
Even owners of Volvos began to accept the bashing craze, for it proved that they traveled in circles of the internationally aware. And there were cases of owners secretly bashing their own Volvos, to gain unearned reputations as cosmopolites. There were persistent, though probably apocryphal, rumors that Volvo was planning to introduce a prebashed model in its efforts to attract the smart set to an automobile that had sacrificed everything to passenger safety (despite their use of Firestone 500 tires on many models) and primarily appealed to affluent egotists who assumed that the continuance of their lives was important to the destiny of Man.
After his shower, Hel found laid out in the dressing room his black broadcloth Edwardian suit, which had been designed to protect either guests in simple business suits or those in evening wear from feeling under– or overdressed. When he met Hana at the top of the principal staircase, she was in a long dress of Cantonese style that had the same social ambiguity as his suit.
“Where’s Le Cagot?” he asked as they went down to a small salon to await their guests. “I’ve felt his presence several times today, but I haven’t heard or seen him.”
“I assume he is dressing in his room.” Hana laughed lightly. “He told me that I would be so taken by his new clothes that I would swoon amorously into his arms.”
“Oh, God.” Le Cagot’s taste in clothes, as in most things, ran to operatic overstatement. “And Miss Stern?”
“She has been in her room most of the afternoon. You evidently gave her rather a bad time during your chat.”
“Hm-m-m.”
“She’ll be down shortly after Pierre returns with clothes for her. Do you want to hear the menu?”
“No, I’m sure it’s perfect.”
“Not that, but adequate. These guests give us a chance to be rid of the roebuck old M. Ibar gave us. It’s been hanging just over a week, so it should be ready. Is there something special I should know about our guests?”
“They are strangers to me. Enemies, I believe.”
“How should I treat them?”
“Like any guest in our house. With that particular charm of yours that makes all men feel interesting and important. I want these people to be off balance and unsure of themselves. They are Americans. Just as you or I would be uncomfortable at a barbecue, they suffer from social vertigo at a proper dinner. Even their gratin, the jetset, are culturally as bogus as airlines cuisine.”
“What on earth is a ‘barbecue’?”
“A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer.”
“I daren’t ask what a ‘hush puppy’ is.”
“Don’t.”
They sat together in the darkening salon, their fingers touching. The sun was down behind the mountains, and through the open porte fenêtres they could see a silver gloaming that seemed to rise from the ground of the park, its dim light filling the space beneath the black-green pines, the effect rendered mutable and dear by the threat of an incoming storm.
“How long did you live in America, Nikko?”
“About three years, just after I left Japan. In fact, I still have an apartment in New York.”
“I’ve always wanted to visit New York.”
“You’d be disappointed. It’s a frightened city in which everyone is in hot and narrow pursuit of money: the bankers, the muggers, the businessmen, the whores. If you walk the streets and watch their eyes, you see two things: fear and fury. They are diminished people hovering behind triple-locked doors. They fight with men they don’t hate, and make love to women they don’t like. Asea in a mongrel society, they borrow orts and leavings from the world’s cultures. Kir is a popular drink among those desperate to be ‘with it,’ and they affect Perrier, although they have one of the world’s great waters in the local village of Saratoga. Their best French restaurants offer what we would think of as thirty-franc meals for ten times that much, and the service is characterized by insufferable snottiness on the part of the waiter, usually an incompetent peasant who happens to be able to read the menu. But then, Americans enjoy being abused by waiters. It’s their only way of judging the quality of the food. On the other hand, if one must live in urban America—a cruel and unusual punishment at best—one might as well live in the real New York, rather than in the artificial ones farther inland. And there are some good things. Harlem has real tone. The municipal library is adequate. There is a man named Jimmy Fox who is the best barman in North America. And twice I even found myself in conversation about the nature of shibui —not shibumi, of course. It’s more within the range of the mercantile mind to talk of the characteristics of the beautiful than to discuss the nature of Beauty.”