by Yasmina Reza
That place, the Courette du Temple, seems distant now— the woman in the polka-dot dress, the man who thought he could play “Fly Me to the Moon” on the harmonica. The four of us, drunk on the sidewalk, crowding into and then thrown out of a cab that was already occupied. A man who’d been among the first to perform asked me, “You come here often?”
“First time.”
“The first time, people don’t dare.”
The past falls apart so quickly! It turns to chalk and crumbles like the Wall of the
Forgotten. I often think of the San Michele cemetery in Venice. We visited there, Pierre and Bernard and I, nearly alone one foggy November day. San Michele, an endless maze of enclosures, cells, plots, fields. An entire island of tombs. The walkways in the columbarium: whole walls of photo portraits bristling with jutting flasks of artificial flowers. Hundreds of photos of people dressed in their best, tidily coiffed, smiling gaily. We’d got lost there, wandering vaguely about seeing nobody else. It was lunchtime, midweek. On one tombstone there was this inscription: You will be with us always, Love, your Emma. I was struck by the nerve of the phrase. As if certain people remained eternally on earth. As if the two worlds should go on separately. In the urns section there was that Wall of the Forgotten. A dingy gray surface. The names and dates on it were nearly obliterated. You could still read “1905” on one of the clearer plaques. No photo, nowhere—there was nothing, just one or two clumps of porcelain flowers jutting from a crack in the slab. These people were no longer with anyone in our world. The black-and-whitish coloring of that wall—I see it as the very color of the past. From the minute you set foot on earth you must give up any idea of permanence. Near the Rialto bridge, on that same foggy day, Pierre bought me a short cashmere cape, brown and blue. I’d spotted it on a dummy in the window of a poorly lit shop. The door was hard to open and the man who came to help us had a half-paralyzed arm. An enormous counter ate up the whole interior. On the walls, shelving held merchandise, almost all of it wrapped in bundles. With his good arm he drew from a drawer several capes of different colors in their transparent slipcases. None was the same nice match of colors. When he understood that he would have to get down the one from the shopwindow, he grumbled something toward the rear of the shop. A woman arrived, no more cheerful than he, her head sunk between her shoulders, dressed as if she were outdoors (it was chilly in the shop). She moved a stool to reach into the vitrine and set about undoing the pins that attached the cape to the figure. I tried on the cape at a mirror where you couldn’t see a thing. I turned toward the men. Pierre thought it wasn’t bad. Bernard thought it looked a bit matronly. The couple said absolutely nothing. They seemed old and uninterested. We bought the cape, very inexpensive. The woman folded it carefully and put it in a pretty slipcase, which I still have, with Cashmere Made in Italy printed on it. They evinced no pleasure from the sale, which might have been the only one all day. They must have been there for years, seen their clientele thin out little by little, the elegant inhabitants of the neighborhood leaving town or dead. When they themselves go, Chinese shopkeepers will take over the place and sell handbags. The same colored leather bags hanging on display everywhere in the city. Or else an ice cream parlor, with super-harsh neon lighting. Or else, although not very likely, some young folks will open a dress shop. But the dress shop is part of the same transitory world as the handbags. The disagreeable couple belonged to a slower human race. I say slower, not more enduring.
They were someplace in the landscape, they still go on existing a little in my memory.
At Pasteur, our department is in a building that was once the hospital. It was built early in the twentieth century and it’s landmarked. It’s made of stone and red brick, in the style of the historic building. The two wings are separated by gardens and linked by a marvelous greenhouse, no longer in use because the glass structure could collapse. Still, the plants go right on growing there like in a little jungle. The window of my own ground-floor office looks onto a hedge and trees. Beyond them is a newer building with a glass façade. On days when the sun shines the façade of our own is reflected in it. I daydream, I travel back, imagining the life there in the old days when contagious patients were kept in isolation, there were wooden beds and nurses in stiff caps or white veils. I see things I did not see before.
After a while I no longer heard a sound from our bedroom. I went to look. Pierre was burrowed in on his side. He’d fallen asleep. Asleep. While just above, on the other side of the ceiling . . . I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his graying hair. I really like his hair. It’s thick and wavy. I stroked it. He was sleeping. That disturbed me. He himself said, later, that he was knocked out by the series of shots we’d drunk in our panic and disarray all evening long. No matter. He’d gone to bed, he’d pulled up the covers, he’d settled into the position of a man consenting to sleep. He had left me all alone. Unsupervised. He had come to take me back with his steel fingers for nothing. I was willing to obey the paternal voice as long as it stayed firm. The stern voice had scolded for a couple of brief minutes and then let the matter go. A sleeping guy is a guy who’s dropped you. He’s no longer worrying about you. I had thought him a little ridiculous as the stern taskmaster ready to phone the cops, but I did think, Well, he’s afraid for me, he’s protecting me. Actually, he had herded me back into the fold and then washed his hands of me. No worry, no concern for another person. One more unkept promise. And what should I make of—I thought, there on the edge of the bed in the dark— what should I make of his lack of curiosity? Pierre had never been interested in crime stories in the news, in the troubles of common folk. He sees no shadowy dimension there. For him it all smells of piss or these people are garbage. In a way I’m closer to Ginette Anicé than I am to my husband. I went into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet seat and examined the samples I’d been given along with the Gwyneth Paltrow anti-aging product. There was a nutrient mask from the Dead Sea that you leave on to work through the night. I put it on, thoughtfully. No clear ideas. The other day on TV I heard some not-old fellow say, “The Lord guides me, each day I ask his advice, even before coming here on the program.” God does a lot of advising these days. I remember a time when such a remark would have provoked wild laughter. Today everyone considers it normal, including on the intellectual TV talk shows. I would like someone to help me out, or enlighten me. Here in the bathroom I had nobody, not even a double like Danielle’s who would call me “hey girl.” I went to the front door and looked through the peephole. Total darkness. I went back into the living room, I turned off the lamp and opened the window. I stood at an angle to the balcony. No one in the parking lot. The Manoscrivis’ Laguna, parked just below. I listened to the silence of the damp night, a touch of wind, a car engine. I closed the window again. No sound came from upstairs. Nothing. I started prowling the living room, tracing pointless rounds in my fake-fur slippers. I caught myself doing a few little skips among the furniture. Despite it all, something in me was dancing. I had known that effect before, that irrepressible lightness at a moment when the full force of misfortune has just missed you. Is it a kind of drunkenness at reprieve? At the sense of keeping your footing on a pitching deck? or just stupidly, as for Ginette Anicé (her again), at escaping boredom? In the program for the night there was suddenly the chance to go off-piste. My husband having abandoned me, I could just as easily go back into the stairwell. It’s not a bad thing that an expectation is disappointed—the space of disappointment is where our Faustian gene gets expressed. According to Svante Pääbo, one of my biology professors, we diverge from the Neanderthals by only an infinitely small modification in a particular chromosome. An odd mutation in the genome that might enable a thrust into the unknown, the crossing of the oceans with no certainty of finding land beyond the horizon, the whole human fever of exploration, of creativity and of destruction. In other words: a gene for madness. I went back into our bedroom. Pierre was sleeping deeply. I grabbed a cardigan lying there, took the keys from the v
estibule, and quietly left the flat. Upstairs, I knocked as I whispered Jean-Lino’s name. He opened the door, unsurprised, a syringe in his hand. The place smelled of smoke. I’m in the middle of doing the medications, he said. For a moment I thought he was talking about Lydie and that he’d lost his mind. Following him into the kitchen, I understood that he meant Eduardo. “He has kidney stones. He has to take six pills a day and a new diet of fish patties that’s not helping him at all,” said Jean-Lino, bustling about. “Please sit down, Elisabeth.”
“The poor baby.”
“The first day, I spent an hour and a half getting him to swallow one antibiotic tablet. The vet told me You just stick the pill in his mouth and you hold his jaws closed. Oh sure. The minute I let go of his jaw he’d spit it out. I understood that to swallow, a cat has to open and close his jaws, as if he’s chewing. But the worst part,” Jean-Lino said, “is the yeast.”
As he spoke, he was pouring a mixture he had previously spoon-stirred from the bowl into a baby’s nursing syringe.
“Those fish patties give him diarrhea. The vet says it’s not them, but I say it is. A urinary-stress formula. He gobbles them up in half a second, he adores them, and they give him diarrhea. The antibiotics and the anti-kidney-stone things, I’ve figured out a system. They’re real tiny, about the size of a lentil, but the Ultradiar capsule, I have to dissolve that in water and feed it to him with the baby syringe. OK, where’d he go, the little diablo? I’ll go look for him.”
I stayed on for a moment alone in the kitchen. On the table was a circular with Lydie’s picture. lydie gumbiner Musicotherapy, Sonotherapy, Massage with Tibetan bowls. In the foldover section there was the photo of a gong, and below it, the line The voice and the rhythm matter more than the words and the meaning. I looked at the straw basket on the countertop with its cotton Provençal neckerchief, I put a name to all the herbs in the collection—garlic, thyme, onion, oregano, sage, bay laurel. Charmingly arranged by a caring hand, I said to myself. With some dish in mind? or just to make theater of daily life? Jean-Lino returned with Eduardo in his arms. He sat down and began to feed him the solution the way you’d give a bottle to a newborn. I’m never comfortable in the presence of that cat, a savage little thug, but now he looked beaten down, accepting the treatment and the humiliating position with fatalism.
“This is the hard part,” Jean-Lino said, “you’ve got to be very careful he doesn’t swallow the wrong way.” Was it that line? The almost pedagogic posture of his body? I had the sneaking sense that he was preparing Eduardo’s immediate future. In short, that he was hoping to entrust the cat to us. That threw me into a panic. I said, “What do you mean to do, Jean-Lino?”
“The day before yesterday, he drank too fast and he started coughing, coughing, choking.”
“What do you mean to do about Lydie?”
“I’m going to call the police.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Where’s Pierre?”
“He went to sleep.”
The cat was calmly drinking its yeast. The box of fish patties sat on the table. Given the label, I thought there must be some sort of anti-anxiety drug in the formula. Jean-Lino was still leaning his head against the animal’s muzzle. His voice had grown stronger since he appeared at our door. The look of his face and his mouth, too. I had known the champion of The Mouth in Search of a Form: Michel Chemama, my English teacher at the Lycée Auguste Renoir, a Jew from Algeria, forever linked to the words “Haaarvestiiing meuchiiiine,” pronounced with the lower lip thrust forward (for years, and still today, I have puzzled over the urgency of teaching the term “har-vesting machine” to French city kids just beginning to learn English). Jean-Lino set the syringe down on the table. Eduardo slipped to the floor and left the kitchen. We did not speak. I really liked Michel Chemama, always in his gray flannel trousers, his double-breasted navy blazer with its metal buttons. He may still be alive. As a child you can’t judge a teacher’s age, they all seem old. It was nice of you to come back, Jean-Lino said. What happened, Jean-Lino? I wouldn’t have chosen to be so direct, but nothing else came to mind. Language transmits only the obstacles to expression. You’re aware of that in normal circumstances and you work around it. Jean-Lino shook his head. He leaned forward to pick up a mandarin orange from the counter. He offered me one. I refused. He began to peel his. I said, “The two of you looked happy at home.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Well, yeah—I was.”
“Don’t feel you have to—”
He set the mandarin down on a bit of the peel, pulled apart a segment and took off the threads of white pith.
“I don’t feel anything now. Am I a monster, Elisabeth?”
“You’re anesthetized.”
“I cried when it happened. But I don’t know if it was from sadness.”
“Not yet.”
“Ah—yes . . . Yes, that’s it. Not yet.”
He took up, one after the other, the orange sections and cleaned them without eating them. I was dying to ask him, What do you plan to do with Eduardo, but I was afraid of immediately easing his way by my question. I also wanted to ask him about his new glasses. A person doesn’t change unthinkingly from dark rectangle to sand-colored half-round. The thick frames still hinted at his baby face. Among the unknowable elements that cause you to move toward a person and love him, there’s the face. But no facial description is possible. I looked at the long nose that lifted and spread at the tip, the long part underneath, a straight line down from nostrils to mouth. I thought about his teeth, going every which-way, the complete opposite of today’s dental style. While he fiddled with the orange peel, I registered forever the three things Jean-Lino’s face expressed all at the same time: goodness, suffering, gaiety. I said, “I never saw those glasses before.”
“They’re new.”
“They’re nice.”
“They’re from Roger Tin. Acetate.”
We smiled. For sure, it was Lydie who’d chosen the glasses. He would never have reached for that fashion color on his own. There was a racket from the bedroom. I leapt to my feet and pressed my body absurdly against the fridge. Jean-Lino went to see. I was ashamed of my reaction. I mean, if Lydie had actually waked up that would be good news, why be frightened? No, no, the dead awak-ening has always been terrifying, all of literature says so. I stood in the kitchen doorway and listened. Unalarming sounds, Jean-Lino’s Italian voice. I heard him close the door to the bedroom, the corridor plunged into darkness, and he reappeared. Eduardo had tried to jump from the chamber pot to the night table but the lid had slid off, he missed the jump and knocked over the bed lamp. JeanLino sat down at the table again. So did I. He took out a Chesterfield. “May I?”
“Of course.”
“He’s got no experience there—normally he’s not allowed in the bedroom.”
I did something I hadn’t done in thirty years. I took a cigarette and lit up. I drew the smoke right into my lungs. It snagged at my throat and I found the taste disgusting. Sometimes during school vacation, Joelle and I would go to stay near her family’s place in the Indre. They would lend us a little farmhouse outside Le Blanc. We’d say, “We’re off to see the yokels.” One night at supper my right arm started to twitch in a kind of Saint Vitus’ dance, I couldn’t pick up a fork, I’d smoked two packs of Camels in the course of the day, I was thirteen. Later I smoked again a little with Denner. Jean-Lino took the cigarette out of my hand and stubbed it out in the promotional ashtray. I dared to do another thing I would never have done any other time: I stroked his pitted cheek. I said,
