by Yasmina Reza
Lionel told me yesterday morning that he’d finally hit bottom. Task for the day, I had told him: fight despair. “Oh, you’re still stuck back there,” he sighs: “you plan and you fight. I, finally, thank God, have reached bottom.”
Note the peculiarity. Lionel, my friend and the most passionate of men, is on a relentless search for the absence of passion. What causes my suffering, my boy, is what I see in your look. A look that alternates between pity and boredom. And maybe also irritation. You listen to me, you force yourself to be here and nothing you hear gets inside you, nothing speaks to you, nothing touches you. Do you know that another person’s empty presence is the greatest lack of all? Have you ever felt that? Even when you think you’re being heard and being loved, the other person persists in being absent. And yours, my child, is extreme. I can take your hand, and yet you couldn’t be farther away. We are incapable of taking the smallest step together. In your eyes I read your utter incomprehension and my own old age. I read my abandonment. I read a confirmation of my solitude.
Making any such speech to Nancy would have undone me.
Why so excessive, why so ungentle and unforbearing? —Yes, Nancy, I’m so sorry. —So why? —I have to be in balance with myself. —In balance with yourself, that means really working to be sarcastic and showing that you’re inhuman? —Apparently. —What self-satisfaction! —My love, to start posing as well balanced, I’d need rather more of a future than I’ve got. I’m no longer driven by the longing to build up any particular product of my own vanity, including my own persona. I am too close to my own disintegration to get involved with nuances. Before I end up on a public bench with my friends the zombies, allow me, my generous friend, to sing the praises of intolerance, the elect, and general injustice. Grant me immoderation, the only way to save what we can of what we’re given. The hell with equity. Your friend Dacimiento wrecked the cooktop on the Aga in less than a year. Ask her what on earth she used to plane down the controls. No justice. The problem with this woman is that you could park a dead donkey on a shelf in front of her and she wouldn’t see it. I put in a kitchen for her that cost $2,700, and instead of lighting up with joy every morning when she sees it again and running around waving her arms, she puts on the kind of martyred look that explains every single summary execution in history. All of it just because on the thirtieth of November at eight in the morning, the light doesn’t come sparkling down on her in the rue Ampère the way she’d like. No justice.
The garden—all me.
I’ve done it all according to my own whims. Every which way. I didn’t start with flowers right away, I did the trees first, then the vegetables, then one day I put in the lawn, with my left hand, so to speak. The moment I left, the lawn turned into a prairie. Lawns take maintenance, they take mowing, they take watering. Who knew? Finally, what do you want, I bought some books. Too much money out the window, too many mistakes. Today you’ve seen the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the roses (four varieties). The Fortunys came two weeks ago. René and his wife Jeanne. Dazzled. I showed them my collection of clippers, if you want I’ll show them to you too. Do you? I’ve got about twenty. I keep thinking I’m going to find a better pair. An even finer blade, that will cut even more cleanly. Sometimes I go back to the old ones. I have my favorites. Even when they’re worn out, I keep them. I’m attached to every one of them. The Fortunys were interested in my tools, in the spades, in the sprayers—I’m nuts about sprayers—they were interested in my problems with amending the soil, and watering systems, and making new borders. It was cold and gray that day, and they walked around the garden, stopping in front of the flowerbeds, the trees, the walls, I watched them from the summerhouse and I thought what are you complaining about, this is what friends are.
At a certain point, René gestured—I can’t talk about it without feeling a pang—he bent down, picked up an armful of dead leaves, and threw them over Jeanne. She laughed and protested and chased him round the oak tree to give him a smack. There was one leaf that stayed stuck to her woolen cap, like a pom-pom. She was running around the tree, all awkward in her little boots, they were both running around in circles, laughing, René started clowning back around in the opposite direction, she stopped to catch her breath against the tree trunk and he caught her gloved hand and kissed it.
Arthur has never understood how I could say, René has no taste. He has never understood how I can say, Have you seen that hideous living room? I couldn’t remain friends with someone who cannot grasp that talking about the hideousness of René’s living room like that is an act of tenderness, that recognizing the hideousness of the Fortunys’ living room to be exceptional, definitive, grandiose even, is the mark of real affection.
This little race around the oak tree under a gray sky (finally I love low, gray skies most of all), this little kiss on her gloved fingers, redoubled my affection for Jeanne and René Fortuny.
For forty years from his window Lionel has been watching the metamorphoses of a tree. Every day, season by season. The bare branches, the first leaves, summer, fall. Everything that’s still green, still beautiful, normal-sized, he says, is down underneath, away from the light. Up at the ends, patches of faded ocher, brittleness, ragged remains.
I spend half my life amongst trees and greenery, I don’t see what Lionel sees. An object has to be unique, alone, to be visible. The nest has disappeared this year, he said.
Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo. A little work by Bach (little as regards length) discovered thanks to Serkin, via Lionel. The two of us sang the adagiosissimo on the phone this morning, the “Friends’ Lamento”:
Fa mi mi re’ re’ do sigh tee do tee tee La la soh fa fa mi mi sigh
Lionel told me that after he woke up and listened to this song, he felt it would be idiotic to plan any other experiences for the day. The repeated notes, the silences, the interruptions cut through him and justified his paralysis.
According to Bach specialists, it’s a pleasant little youthful composition—with a hint of irony in it. Experts flatten the world.
Marisa Botton is sixty today.
One day I stuck a Toblerone in her vagina and we ate it afterward. A Toblerone she’d bought for her son. At the beginning, she wouldn’t even drink a glass of anything with me. “In Rouen, one doesn’t drink with a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger.”
“You’re worse, you’re one of my husband’s suppliers.”
“All right, then, I have no chance of seeing you anywhere except this corridor.”
“No.”
I knew this meant yes.
At that time telephones were not in such wide use as they are today. You couldn’t reach people directly at their desks, you had to go through the switchboard. I called myself Monsieur Ostinato, an improvised name I borrowed from musical terminology. Who was Monsieur Ostinato? Even after clearing the switchboard you weren’t certain you’d get through to her and you had to tell the inquisitorial voice the purpose of your call. Monsieur Ostinato was a contractor and wanted to give her a private estimate on something. Monsieur Ostinato was only pressed into service once (Marisa thought it was the world’s worst idea, at Aunay’s everyone knew everything, and all it would take was the slightest thing and someone would start asking her husband about the improvements they were having made to their house) but seduced her with his boldness and his wild imagination. Monsieur Ostinato got his rendezvous one April evening at six o’clock in the bar of the Hotel de Dieppe.
She came a quarter of an hour late, a little disappointing in a pale raincoat.
It took me six months to have her. After Ostinato there were other names, other tricks, other lightning rendezvous at the station, at the Bar de la Poste, at the Bar du Palais, at the Dieppe, at the Scotch, the bar in the basement of the Hotel d’Angleterre, she came wearing glasses, she stayed for five minutes with her eyes fixed on the door, she said we can’t see each other anymore, you must forget me, she said in my ear I want you, whenever I t
hink about you I can’t sleep, she just couldn’t do it, she could never do it, there was her son, her husband, her mother, the factory, Rouen, the universe, there was no place to go, there was no time, I was going mad.
One day, I had her. At lunchtime, in a room at the Hotel de la Poste, on the rue Jeanne-d’Arc.
Disturbing life.
There you are, sitting in a good restaurant, you’ve ordered a good wine, you’re trying to hustle a hundred thousand pairs of pajamas, you’re having a pro forma argument but the client isn’t even really using the conditional tense, you can sense it’s gone well, you talk golf or some such bullshit, you laugh with the client till the teeth fall out of your head, which incidentally you’ve always said I was naturally incapable of, you laugh, the buyer leans forward, you clink glasses, you show him your honest face while you calculate your margin, and instead of being no, not happy, heaven forfend, not even satisfied, but just you, pure and simple, you’re fucked, annihilated, you’re shivering in the yawning void that separates you from Marisa, aka Christine Botton, in charge of planning and contract administration at Aunay-Foulquier.
Why didn’t things stay as they were at that point? Two little hours in the rue Jeanne-d’Arc. Two sort-of-mongrel -hours of no particular rapture or even the sweetness of beginnings. But how can we give up our own imaginations, and if we did, where would we be headed? She suited me because she was so out of whack, she said yes, she said no, and yes and no at the same time, she suited me because I didn’t understand her . . . you see, my boy, even today I’m inventing her all over again . . . she suited me because I never wearied of desiring her, because she was an illusion that kept receding, and I would rise to that like a fish to the ultimate bait.
One evening, the last (the last evening of a folly that lasted almost three years and incidentally caused me to split up with your mother), I was waiting for her in a room at the Dieppe (waiting would be my definition of it). Botton was at Interstoff, the annual textiles fair in Frankfurt. Her son was supposedly at her sister’s. I waited, swallowing packages of potato crisps I’d stolen from the deserted bar, washed down with tap water (back then there were no minibars and no televisions in the rooms), reread the Paris-Normandy newspaper for the forty-sixth time, paced around like a deranged person banging into the furniture, at two in the morning I called her house. She picked up sounding fast asleep, her voice just killed me. I said, I’m leaving the hotel and I’m coming over. She said, No, no, don’t do that, you know you can’t. I yelled, Here’s what I know, I’ve been waiting for you for four hours in this nightmare of a room. She whispered, My son has a fever, I kept him at home. I knew she was lying, I said, Me too, me too, I’ve got a fever, she laughed and hung up. I called back, I yelled, You’ll never see me again, you’re nothing but a little provincial slut, you’re not even beautiful, you’re NOTHING. I went back to Paris that same night in a state of genuine collapse.
Next morning, I was on my way to the office and this guy on the boulevard des Capucines handed me a tract for Aid to the Sahara or something. There’s no greater suffering, it said on the piece of paper, than that of a mother who has to watch helplessly as her child dies. I thought, what do you know, asshole, and I crumpled the flyer. Because what was in danger of being extinguished that day wasn’t love or any form of earthly attachment but the very illusion of life. It doesn’t matter, my boy, that this illusion was limited to the corridors at Aunay’s, hotel-room walls, car seats, and the occasional miserable gateway in Rouen, i.e., nothing that could possibly bear a close or a distant resemblance to the ordinary run of life’s illusions. There was never the faintest atmosphere of romance between us, not a single place we visited together, no wood where we walked, not a single landscape, no unfamiliar street, no place in the world we ever took the time to just be. We never did more than pause on thresholds, halt in ephemeral stairwells, and if I had the faintest talent at analyzing things, I’d conclude that with Marisa the illusion of life was all the more violent because it was unadorned by any external element whatever, and never, never confused with happiness.
With your brother-in-law Michel I can have conversations about constipation. I mean to say I can have scientific conversations with him. With Arthur, back then, I could also have such conversations, but they were man-to-man, or rather, one damned man to another. With Michel there’s some hope mixed in. I have to say to his credit that the boy does seem to know his digestive tract. For starters, he calls it the “transit,” which is a nice touch. Last Sunday, he switched me from Duphalac to Transipeg, which is supposed to be less bloating. Duphalac worked for me, but made me bloated. He forbids me to use glycerine suppositories. Obviously I’m not going to pay any attention. If I listened to him, I’d use those Eductyl suppositories of his, you shit water every ten minutes four times in a row. Michel never comes to see me without a whole little suitcase of medicines. He knows all my illnesses, he’s interested, and he enjoys fine-tuning my treatments. Your sister, who has developed something of an ecological bent, disapproves, of course. Michel is a good pharmacist, maybe even an excellent pharmacist, and I’d be glad to see him often if our exchanges were confined to the riveting sphere of illnesses and their cures. But how are you supposed to put out the welcome mat for someone who’s just spent the morning jogging from Montfort to Coignières and working his way back by train on the B line with his friends the Jewish Ramblers, without ever mentioning the subject, without asking him for example what secret branch of the tradition produced these lunatics. He takes it badly. A nice boy all the same, happy to help with the weeding, always interested in my health. Threaten his Jewish integrity (his exact words), and within three minutes flat—it never fails—he’ll be invoking genocide as a way of calling me to order. And reminding me that solidarity is not a metaphor. That it’s not necessary to go all the way back to the Garden of Eden to hold out a hand to someone, that if you want to remake the world you have to cut through the everyday games. To remind me that we are still these poor little birds stripped of our feathers, and our urgent task, if we are ever to recover our cohesion and our dignity, is to fly toward one another until we meet, be it in Jerusalem or Coignières, because Michel Cukiermann’s tribe is no longer the People of the Book, but the People of the Shoah. So, because he patiently explained Transipeg to me in all its technical detail, I do not say to him that my people, be they the People of the Book, the People of Pride, or the People of Solitude, are bitter and untrained in a different way, that to my knowledge they have never compared themselves to a shivering brood of baby birds, and I do not say that my own suffering is one it is much harder to admit to, namely, that I am forced to confront him in all his pathetic gravity, his righteousness and brotherhood, without disemboweling him.
My son, I cannot, absolutely cannot, speak one more word to anyone who lacks the capacity for doubt, who has cocooned himself in everyday simplifications, who sets up against me his own edifying vision of the world. You have certainly avoided such rigidities and you don’t act out such passions, but you have dismissed any form of ambition, opting instead for the complete pointlessness of doing anything. My friend Lionel also represents a vote for humanity as inertia, but you’re not in the same camp. Lionel doesn’t expect anything. Lionel looks at the sheer pointlessness of the day-to-day and he takes evasive action. You, my dear, are still nursing your own little pet project, because what you want is to blossom. Since I’ve been taking a close interest in plants and flowers, this expression has taken on real meaning. You lift your arms in a corolla, you offer your head to the passing breeze, and you beam at anyone who walks by.
Certain pieces in The Art of the Fugue have the where-withal to make my soul dance. First Fugue, Counterpoint 1, slow, fast, never wearied of listening to it, stated, restated, never wearying, slow, fast, slow, listening for hours, my boy, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, all of life playing itself out uninterruptedly in one’s ear, never wearying, Counterpoint 10, Counterpoint 12, Counterpoint 13, the thirteenth fugue! danced,
sung at the hardest of moments, ineffable dance, ineffable song, bearer of ineffable joy, Counterpoint 14, unfinished as per the record sleeve, I liked the word unfinished, mi, re’, do, tee, lah, tee, re’—STOP— interruption caused by death, long radical silence, the work isn’t uncompleted, it’s infinite, it’s not incomplete but unfinished, arrested, rendered infinite by the grave.
Bach will save me from you all, from your revolting versions of paradise, Bach will save my life.
“My current wife, Nancy,” I say to Genevieve, “is capable of standing motionless—you could time her—in a discount drugstore for an hour at a stretch choosing loose face powder (I still don’t know what that is).”
“Doesn’t seem abnormal to me,” says Genevieve.
“No, not at all abnormal, on the contrary I was expressing regret.”
“She doesn’t do it anymore?”
“These days Nancy, although she’s beautiful to me, spends her money on rejuvenating creams and potions, but, how can I put it, her bent is now scientific. No more of that charming tendency to err toward the magical. Sooner or later women abandon futility.”
“That’s what you think. No more than two weeks ago—and Samuel, I’m no longer in the bloom of youth—I threw a tantrum because I couldn’t get my usual lipstick. I said Arancil is no longer making Bamboo? I said, they’ve discontinued Bamboo?! I’m talking too loud, aren’t I? Samuel, I’m pissed, you’ve got me completely drunk, my friend, you know I basically don’t drink. Our friend the false Hauvette is leaving. He’s not so terrible. The real Hauvette is probably not that well preserved. He may even be dead. At our age, there’s a good chance we’re dead, no? It’s our only rendezvous these days. Which is why I’m capable of going all the way across Paris for a lipstick or a lightning facefirming gel, the hell with the gravity of our final moments, I want pure fantasy, because waiting at the end of the road, my dear, what’s waiting is Bagneux where I’ll be stuck with Abramowitz and his parents, who were already dead as doornails while they were alive, when I would have been so happy to be in Montparnasse in the Jewish part of the cemetery next to Leopold, finally sleeping next to him, even as dust, even in oblivion, even as nothing. Finally no more having to get up and pretend to take everything so lightly, no more standing forever on the threshold of my own life, a little mocking, a little unreliable, a little treacherous, no more wasting my physical strength and my time fighting against the love I felt for him, you’re pouring me another glass, you must take total responsibility for the state I’m in, Montparnasse is still part of the city, you go walking there without thinking twice, you take the children and hunt for entertaining figures among the dead, Leo would have hated being at Bagneux, last time I laid a pebble on his grave, almost a year ago, it was already dark, and I forbid you to laugh, we talked to each other: where were you all our lives? I murmured, when my life intersected with yours, where were you, now I’m too old to attract you, love passes me by and doesn’t even see me. —This is what I wanted, Genevieve. —What did you want? —That your face would be soft. That time would have left its marks, that I can stroke it the way you stroke a dog. —Why? He doesn’t answer. I ask why, but he doesn’t answer. There’s nothing more than the brown gravestone and the pebble in one corner, just as I too, during his life, stayed in a corner, and, absurdly, I tell them all the things I would never ever have said out loud while he was alive, I tell the marble and the incised letters things I left unsaid while my life and his intersected, and that will still remain unsaid tonight, even though I’m lightheaded, because I will never worry again about upsetting him or contradicting him or losing him, death has given him to me. Help, Samuel, right away, we have to get some fresh air.”
