Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  We went in. He did not turn on the vestibule light. Eduardo slithered among our legs with his back arched in a dromedary hump. At the end of the corridor, the bathroom and the bedroom were lighted. Jean-Lino took up the same waiting posture again—shoulders hunched high, arms hanging loose—as in our house at the same location.

  “Where is she?” Pierre whispered. I found the whispering bizarre and at the same time I understood that there was no way we could talk at normal volume. JeanLino tilted his head toward the bedroom. Pierre moved into the hallway. With me behind him. From the hall we could already see her. Feet up by the head of the bed, skirt rumpled, dressed still as she had been at our house. Pierre pushed the door wider. She was lying with her jaw hanging open, her eyes wide and bulging beneath the poster of Nina Simone in her white string dress and her endless pendants. We saw right away that it was very serious. In a surge of professionalism (from TV serials? police thrillers?) Pierre gripped her wrist to check the pulse. Jean-Lino appeared in the doorway, nodding his head like a witness gloomily gratified at seeing his first impression confirmed. He had his sand-colored glasses on again. Pierre looked at Jean-Lino in alarm. He said, “You really did . . . She is dead.” Jean-Lino agreed. No one moved. Then Pierre said, “Maybe we should . . . maybe close her eyes.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’ll let you do it . . .”

  Jean-Lino came over to Lydie and swiped his hand over her eyelids, a gesture from a religious drawing. But the jaw still hung open. I said, “Can’t we put it a little better . . . ?” Jean-Lino opened a drawer where there were all sorts of scarves. I picked up the first I saw, a sheer veil with a pattern of pale flowers. Jean-Lino pressed the mouth closed, I wrapped the head and tied the knot hard beneath the chin. She was much more pleasant to look at now. She looked as if she were taking a little nap outdoors under a tree. And then, I don’t know why, JeanLino also put shoes on her feet, red pumps with straps and a flat bow. I looked at those extremities on top of the trapunto bedcover, it was unthinkable that those feet and the ankle bracelet with the dangling charms should no longer belong to a person. I was startled to find myself framing the image in my head: from the hem of the dress to the edge of the bed, showing a few inches of wall, the slim legs, the satin-clad feet splayed on the puckered fabric as if after some brutal lovemaking. The alreadypast image of Lydie Gumbiner. One of the charms was longer than the others, I didn’t have my glasses on but I thought I could make out some kind of owl. What had that bird meant, dangling against her skin? On the dresser there was another owl, in pewter. To bear life on earth we gather magical objects. This is what enchants me when I look at the stop-time world of photographs, those details like elegies. Clothes, knickknacks, talismans, all the bits of chic or shabby paraphernalia provide silent sustenance to mankind. Pierre said, “Now we’ve got to call the police, Jean-Lino.”

  “The police—ah no—no no.”

  Pierre glanced at me. I asked, “But what do you mean to do? . . .”

  “No, not the police.”

  “Jean-Lino, you’ve . . . This thing did happen to you . . .

  You came to get us . . . What can we do for you?”

  Pierre was standing next to a chest, the gravity of his tone and the prayer-position of his hands a little undercut by his pink skirt-like underwear. Jean-Lino, his head lowered, was watching the cat’s movements around the bed.

  “You want us to phone someone? A lawyer? I know a lawyer.”

  Eduardo climbed onto the chamber pot. A porcelain chamber pot with a round wooden lid on top (a cheese platter?) and I thought how that wasn’t a bad idea, a chamber-pot at the foot of the bed, what with me getting up three times a night to pee. Jean-Lino said Non sul vaso da notte micino with a little caress meant to make the cat get down. Eduardo ignored him, busy as he was with scrutinizing Lydie’s body from precisely the same level as the view, “Ti ha fatto male, eh, piccolino mio . . .”

  “Jean-Lino, you’re going to have to cooperate a little,”

  Pierre began again.

  “Let’s go into the living room, maybe?” I said.

  “Povero patatino . . .”

  Pierre went to glance out the window. He closed the drapes. In his duckskin loafers and sheer underpants, he declared: “OK, I’ll tell you what, Jean-Lino, if you don’t call the police, at some point we’re going to do it.”

  “It’s not for us to do it!” I protested.

  “It’s not for us to do. But someone has to do it.”

  “Let’s not stay in this room, let’s go think it over calmly.”

  “Think about what, Elisabeth? That woman’s been strangled by her husband, a fit of passion, no one’s asking for details, the police have to be called. And you, Jean-Lino, come on back to earth. And say something, in a language a person can understand, because this lovetalk with that fucking Italian cat is beginning to get on my nerves.”

  “He’s in shock.”

  “He’s in shock, yes. We’re all in shock.”

  “Let’s try not to get upset, Pierre . . . Jean-Lino, what do you propose? . . . Jean-Lino? . . .”

  Pierre sat down in the yellow velvet armchair. Jean-Lino pulled the pack of Chesterfields out of his pocket and lit one. The smoke spread over Lydie. He imme-diately tried to wave it away with his hand. And then, looking at his wife with what I thought was sorrow, he said, “Could I speak to you alone for two seconds, Elisabeth?”

  “What do you want to say to her?”

  “Just two seconds, Pierre.”

  I made a little sign like, the situation is under control, and I took Jean-Lino’s arm to draw him out of the bedroom. Jean-Lino plunged into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. In a very muffled voice and without turning on any light, he said:

  “Could you help me put her into the elevator? . . .”

  “But . . . what do you mean?”

  “In a suitcase . . .”

  “In a suitcase? . . .”

  “She’s tiny, she doesn’t weigh much . . . Someone has to go down with her . . . I can’t go in the elevator.”

  “Why go with her?”

  “To handle the arrival downstairs. In case someone had rung for it from there.” That made sense to me.

  “You’ll do what with her? . . .”

  “I know where to take her . . .”

  “You’re going to drive her somewhere in the car?”

  “The car’s right out front. Just help me get her down, Elisabeth, I’ll take care of the rest . . .”

  There was a familiar smell of laundry soap. We were standing in utter darkness. I couldn’t see him. I could hear the urgency and distress in his voice. I thought how we’d have to be sure the parking lot was empty too . . . The door was wrenched open.

  “You’re thinking of helping this nut to stick his wife in the elevator, Elisabeth?” Pierre gripped my arm with steel fingers (he has beautiful hands, and strong). “We’re going downstairs and I’m calling the police.”

  He was pulling me, I resisted by clutching some bathrobes hanging from a hook—this lasted maybe three seconds. We must have set off some switch because a neon wall fixture went on. Everything turned yellow, that old-time yellow like we used to have in Puteaux.

  “Go, Elisabeth, go on back to your place my dear Elisabeth, I’m crazy, you should leave here,” Jean-Lino implored with his arms stretched before him.

  “But what will you do, Jean-Lino?” I said.

  He put his head in his arms and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Rocking slightly and without looking at us, he groaned, “I’ll get hold of myself, I’ll get hold of myself.” I felt insanely sad for him, huddled like that, his hair a mess, beneath a laundry wall rack in the crowded bathroom.

  Pierre started to pull at me again. I said, “Stop pulling me!”

  “You want to go to jail? You want to get us all thrown in jail?”

  Without looking at us, and with great effort like a child being scolded, Jean-Lino said, “She kicked Eduardo.”
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  “Lydie kicked Eduardo?!?” I repeated.

  “She kicked the cat and he strangled her. And we’re out of here,” Pierre said.

  “But she adores animals!” I said.

  Jean-Lino shrugged.

  “She had me sign a petition this very afternoon!”

  “What petition did you sign?” Pierre demanded to know.

  “A petition against grinding up baby chicks.”

  “OK, OK, that’s enough,” Pierre said, furious and pushing me toward the hall door.

  Fur bristling and teeth bared, Eduardo slipped out of the bathroom.

  “Non aver paura, tesoro . . . He’s got kidney stones, the poor thing.”

  “Are you going to call the police, Jean-Lino?” I asked. “It’s got to be you who does it.”

  “There’s no other solution,” Pierre said.

  “Yes . . .”

  “None, Jean-Lino.”

  “Yes.”

  Pierre opened the front door and shoved me out onto the landing. Before he closed it, I called in, “Do you want someone to stay with you?”

  “Wake up the whole building!” Pierre whispered, carefully closing the door. Then he pulled me into the stairwell, gripping me with his steel hand. Back in our apartment he kept me moving on into the living room as if to avoid our being heard. He tried to draw the drapes, which are purely decorative, and tore off a corner of one.

  “What the hell are you doing, Pierre?”

  “Those stupid panels!” He tossed down a glassful of cognac. “You were ready to help him get rid of the body, Elisabeth?”

  “It’s offensive, you coming to eavesdrop at the door.”

  “You were ready to take the elevator with a corpse . . . Can you see yourself going down alone, four floors with a stiff ? . . . Answer me please.”

  “In a suitcase.”

  “Oh, all right then—excuse me!”

  “You would have known that if you’d been a little patient.”

  “You realize what we’re discussing? This is really serious, Elisabeth.”

  I was suddenly cold, and my head hurt. I put on a shawl and went to heat some water in the kitchen. I came back with my tea and huddled in a corner of the couch, at the opposite end from where the Manoscrivis had sat. Pierre strode around the room. I said, “I think it’s awful we’ve abandoned him.” He sat beside me and rubbed my shoulder, a gesture that could have been intended either to warm me up or to calm a crazed mind.

  On the other side of the parking lot the building was entirely dark. We must have been the only people who had not surrendered to the night. We and the upstairs neighbors.

  Lydie, watched over by the black cat, stretched out in her party dress, and Jean-Lino abandoned beneath the hanging laundry. In a storybook I used to have, the princess pricked herself with a spindle and fell into a deep sleep. They had her laid out on a bed embroidered with gold and silver, she had those same coral-colored tresses and her lips were like a red red rose. A text came up on my phone.

  Pierre said, “You’re not answering him!”

  “But it’s your son!”

  Emmanuel had written “Great spring celebration, Mom!” with a smiley face and a snowman. That sent me into tears, without understanding why. That message in the middle of the night. The snowman. The little figure of happiness that sends you right back to everything that ends, to loss. The children are way out ahead, like the children of Etienne and Merle on the mountain trail. As I had hurled myself far away, so far, from my parents. It’s not the big betrayals but the repeated tiny losses that make for the melancholy. When Emmanuel was small, he ran a shop. A little low table, in a corner of his bedroom, where the merchandise was laid out and where he sat behind it. He would sell things he made himself, all kinds of cardboard items painted in decorative patterns, rollers from Sapolin paint and toilet paper, finds picked up outdoors, acorns and twigs he also painted, little figures in modeling clay. He had made his own currency—the “pestos”—just bills, bits of paper torn any whichway. Every day he would call out from his room, “The store is open!” Neither Pierre nor I would react; we’d got used to the call. He never repeated it, so a long silence would follow. Then there’d come a moment when I remembered that I’d heard him, and I’d picture him all alone there, the little businessman behind his counter, waiting for the customer. I’d go in, carrying the purse with pestos bills in it. He was pleased to see me arrive but quite professional nonetheless—we said the formal vous to each other. I would make my selection, pay for it, and leave with my bag of river pebbles and painted chestnuts, faces on the white discs smiling or scowling. On that list of hollow concepts we had put the duty to remember. What an inept expression! Time past, good or bad, is nothing but an armful of dead leaves we should just burn up. We’d also listed the work of mourning.Two expressions utterly empty of meaning, and contradictory besides. I asked Pierre, “What shall I say?”

  “You can tell him the neighbor bumped off his wife an hour later.”

  “Anyhow, he thinks we’re asleep.”

  We pulled the shawl over us both as if we were expecting to spend the night on the sofa. Suddenly he got up, I heard him bustling in the entryway. He came back with the toolbox and the stepladder, which he unfolded at the window. I watched him climb the rungs in his pantyskirt and his loafers. Driven by some feverish energy, he tried to repair the curtain rod. The rollers were caught in the rod and the fabric hem was torn. He tried to patch it together. Scrabbling in the toolbox, he asked me whether we had any extra hooks. I said I had no idea. He got irritated, tugged at the cord, pulled on the linen panel and sprang all the hooks, and wound up tearing the whole thing down in a fury. I had no reaction. Pierre sat on the top of the stepladder, hunched over, belly hanging forward, hands crossed, elbows on his thighs. We stayed like that for a strange moment, without speaking. I was suddenly overcome by a crazy giggle, a thing at the back of the throat that I more or less stifled in a cushion. He stepped down, folded the ladder, and put it back in the entry closet with the toolkit. Coming back to the living room he said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Yes . . .”

  Jean-Lino’s little bouquet of mauve roses was jammed into a glass of water on the edge of a bookshelf. I hadn’t even bothered to take off their string. I looked for another vase and in the end I put them into a perfume flask. When he and I visited the aunt in her rest home, Jean-Lino had bought a bouquet of anemones. He told me, “You give them to her.” I held the bouquet as I stood in a corridor waiting for the aunt. There were wooden railings along either side, a woman was walking backward with a cane and thick pressure stockings. The aunt had appeared with her walker and charged right toward the cafeteria. I presented the flowers awkwardly, the aunt had no interest in cut flowers from Paris; they stayed behind in the commons room. Now I set the perfume flask on the coffee table. The roses seemed fake. The whole arrangement in that stained crystal vase had the look of an ornament on a gravestone. Or maybe it was just a sense of anomaly because of the hour and the situation. What was JeanLino doing all alone up there? Pierre called to me from the bedroom. I said, “I’m coming” . . . How could we have left him there?

  He had taken Pierre and me to the Courette du Temple, one of those cafés that become jazz clubs three times a week. He had organized everything—that is, arriving a half hour ahead of the show, in a room nearly empty except for the musicians at the bar. Wall speakers played standards over an array of small round tables. Jean-Lino, dressed all “casual,” had seated us practically on the edge of a tiny stage holding a piano, a bass, and drums. We said “So close?” But he wanted us to see Lydie without the obstruction of a pillar or other spectators. I think, rather, that he needed to assert his place each time, his inaugural location. He immediately greeted the owner, made the introductions as an insider, ordered three drinks without asking our choice. People gradually arrived, people of all ages, in unfashionable outfits. I remem
ber one fellow with silver-dyed hair tied into a tall do, coming and going in a jacket with a sheepskin collar over a red shirt. Some people wrote their names on a slate that hung from a mike stand; they were signing up (to perform) for the jam session, Jean-Lino explained. Lydie arrived glowing and effervescent, rushing to sign the schedule slate even before she came to join us. At first the musicians played on their own, then the trumpeter sang “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” I mused that it had been a long time since I fell in love easily, and it was also a long time since I had sat with a bunch of strangers in that seedy heat. After that, the singers came onstage carrying their sheet music. We clapped nicely no matter the performance. Jean-Lino was the biggest applauder. A woman in a polka-dot dress completely wrecked “Mack the Knife” in German; the man with the sheepskin collar (my favorite, I still think about him), introduced by the trumpeter as “Greg,” launched into a song he’d written himself. Gestures of rejection, caressing the mike, nods of quiet approval for the trumpet’s occasional contributions—he was meeting the world head-on and alone, the shiny silver helmet just a foot or two from us. Jean-Lino clapped hard, Lydie quivered with empathy. She knew him, a regular, in real life he was a ticket collector on the SNCF. She was applying fresh lip gloss when the trumpeter announced, “And now, we’ll hear . . . Lydie!!” Jean-Lino turned toward Pierre, with whom he’d never made any particular connection, and gripped his shoulder. He was red, maybe from the liquor, or stage fright, or a swell of pride that also had him scanning the audience to assess the level of concentration. Lydie began “Les Moulins de mon coeur” in an intimate tone, her voice nearly a murmur, before filling her lungs for the “anneau de Saturne” and the “ballon de carnaval.” In the full-front spotlight, the wild cap of curls and the sparkling earloops glittered. She had a delicate voice whose timbre sounded young to me, its inflections slightly naïve against her physical figure and the sense of harsh energy she gave off. She sang “Les Moulins de mon coeur” without drawing out the words, like a simple country song heard along the road, not meant to go anywhere, just to pass the time. This was an odd girl, someone you might have run across in a very different place and time. You had to see Jean-Lino. In the grip of joy, nearly risen off his chair. She didn’t look at him. Maybe didn’t care about him. She sang the words of abandonment with a child’s lightness—the bird tumbling from the nest, footprints fading—as she rocked from foot to foot, setting her bracelet’s charms swaying, living the moment to its depth with a regal imperturbability. JeanLino, leaning forward, watched over his idol with his body straining, expecting nothing in return. At one point he sensed me observing him and he straightened up as if caught in some misstep, smiling happy and embarrassed. To save face he snapped a photo of Lydie from the telephone set on the table, a quick one, not bothering with framing, his enchantment so pure he never supposed any need for it. We clapped noisily, the three of us. I knew Pierre was bored but he joined in politely. It seemed to me that the other customers appreciated Lydie too. She stayed at the mike awhile, lingering, taking her time before giving over her place, unlike the other performers, who had fled timidly the minute they were done. Before he went out for a smoke, Jean-Lino ordered four glasses of Saint James rum. Pierre had sent me a few desperate signals that made me giggle. Lydie came back to her seat in full bloom, fanning her low neckline. The trumpeter was saying, “And now we’ll hear . . . Jean-Jacques!!” It was a good-hearted evening fated for forgetting, just one in the flow of life’s numberless evenings.