by Yasmina Reza
Danielle’s mother agreed to take Eduardo. We arranged to bring him to her at Sucy-en-Brie the next Sunday. Meanwhile, I had settled something that was bothering me. After careful examination of the front of our apartment building, I went up to see the sixth-floor tenant, Monsieur Aparicio, a retiree from the Postal Service, not much of a talker.
As I passed the door of the Manoscrivis, I saw the wax seals and the yellow notice form where the line “Infraction” was filled out: “Intentional Homicide.” Monsieur Aparicio is mostly bald but the remaining hair at the back of his head is caught in a little bow. A touch of modernity that gave me courage. I told him my plan, which was to hook up a hose with a pistol nozzle in his apartment so that the Manoscrivi plants could be watered from above, from his balcony. “I’m not asking you to do it, Monsieur Aparicio,” I said. “I’ll come myself to take care of it, if you allow me, twice a week, at whatever time might suit you, early morning or evening.” Several minutes later, and after hearing my long-winded plea, he let me come in. We went into the living room, he opened the window. We leaned out over the parapet, I said, “You see how pretty it is, all their plantings. The rain can’t get to even the mimosa.” On his own balcony there was a bicycle, a table, and some tools. As to greenery, a couple of vaguely soil-filled pots and an old fern. Where would the hose be hooked up? he asked. In the kitchen, I said.
“Gotta get at least a twenty-yarder.”
“Yes, of course!! Thank you, Monsieur Aparicio!”
He never offered me a coffee, and our exchanges remained limited to meteorologic matters. I am doubly grateful to him. First, for never having fussed about the drama itself (including the day when the police extended the investigation to all the neighbors), and second, for not taking over my role as irrigator. I bought an excellent expandable hose with a universal hookup and a variable nozzle that made it possible to water from a distance. Aparicio himself attaches it to his faucet and starts the flow before I arrive each time. He could do the job at any hour he chose and free himself from the servitude of our appointments. He must have sensed the fetishism that binds me to this task and has always respected it. Since his eviction to our flat, Eduardo had immured himself in a state of hostile moroseness. He would wander from one piece of furniture to another, crouching underneath them or clinging to the shadowy corners. He did agree to eat, and Pierre managed to get the last Revigot 200 pills into him, crushed in some tuna-fish mash. On my return to the apartment, the night before our excursion to Sucy, I witnessed the following scene: The fishing pole was twitching from inside the bathroom, and in the corridor Eduardo kept a dull eye on the caprices of the leopard tail.
At the sight of me he fled, while Pierre, seated naked on the toilet, focused on his magnetic chessboard and its manual, went on waving the pole with one hand. In Deuil-l’Alouette, there’s a Raminogrobis shop that does cats and dogs. To carry Eduardo to Danielle’s mother, I bought a travel container in hard plastic. I took the mid-range one at thirty-nine euros so he’d be more comfortable. In the front hall, everything stood ready: Jean-Lino’s canvas bag and all the accessories, including the T-shirt, the litter box, and the brand-new cage with its grille door open, awaiting only its occupant. The minute he saw it, Eduardo detested the travel cage. He tried to flee, but Pierre grabbed him, shouting “Close the doors!” He positioned the cat at the opening and tried to keep him there. We pushed, the cat resisted, his front paws rigid and overextended, he slipped a little on the floor, the cage slid away at the same time. We tried to persuade him by talking to him, I even think we managed a few Italian-style words. Eduardo tried every means to escape, squirming and biting Pierre’s arms as Pierre yelled at me. Once or twice he lost hold and we had to start over. We put toys into the case, the Feliway diffuser, some fish patties. The cat would have none of it. After twenty minutes of exhausting battle, Pierre thought of standing the cage on end, with the open door on top. Pouring with sweat, in a fury, he caught Eduardo and dropped him in vertically, headfirst through the opening. There was a weird moment when I saw that the head and the front paws were inside. Pierre was holding the cage, he said, “Help him in, help him!” I shoved him down as best I could with my eyes closed. We slammed the gate shut. The cage was strewn with smashed fish patties. Eduardo howled, but he was howling from inside.
The aunt didn’t recognize me. She was seated beside her walker, with a bib around her neck, in a windowless annex cafeteria, alone before a plate of fish and mashed potatoes. I hadn’t expected her to be at dinner at six o’clock. It’s a great effort for me to adjust to that terrifying schedule. I see it as a means of disposing of people. The only people you can cause to eat dinner at that hour are the vulnerable ones you want to unload into bed (at hostels people are already there). I introduced myself, said I had come once before with Jean-Lino. She looked me over carefully. There’s sometimes a certain icy authority in the gaze of the old. Her name was Benilde. I learned that at the front desk—Benilde Poggio—but I didn’t dare pronounce it. The receptionist had said, “Oh the lady from the Dolomites!” I know the Dolomites from Dino Buzzati books. Denner was reading “Mountains of Glass”: portraits of alpinists, laments for the destruction of nature, for the slopes the writer would never walk again. It was so to speak Denner’s bedside book. He used to read me chapters aloud. Some of them were masterpieces. I remembered one piece on the conquest of Everest: “In the old fortress, atop the highest tower, there was still one small room where no one had ever gone. The door was finally opened. Man entered in, and he saw. There is no mystery left.” The woman from the Dolomites has long hands that are thick and a little callused. The fingers all move together as if they were glued. With her fork she deboned the fish, which was already deboned. I asked if I was disturbing her; I said, You may want to dine quietly? She made a kind of carpet of the potatoes which she then brought to her mouth. I thought her head shook less than the last time. She watched me as she chewed. Occasionally she lifted the bib to her lips. I thought the hairdresser had overdone the mauve tinting. And the curl too. They must have a coiffeur in the home. I no longer understood what I was doing there. What is the point of this fantasy of benevolence that consists of visiting a woman who’s a stranger to you and who doesn’t even know who you are? She was wearing a long sweater with pockets. She felt around in one of them and pulled out a little plastic packet tied with a string and held it out to me. In an unknown language, she told me to smell it. It smelled of cumin. Is that cumin? I asked. Sì, cumino. She wanted me to sniff again. I said I liked cumin a lot. And coriander, too. She gestured that I should open the packet. The knot was fairly tight and she couldn’t manage with her swollen fingers. When I opened it she signaled me to pour a bit of cumin into the hollow of her hand. By means of trembling movements she indicated that it need be only a pinch. She had me smell the grains again in her hand and, laughing, she scattered them onto the fish. I laughed too. She said something I didn’t understand completely but in passing I caught Lydie’s name. And I thought I understood that it was Lydie who had given her the packet. I’d never made the connection between the aunt and Lydie. How stupid of me. She was Jean-Lino’s wife, how could she not have known the aunt? She set before me, with the spoon, the lemon yogurt from her tray. We could hear sounds of voices in the corridor, sounds of doors, of things rolling. Without knowing how, one knew these were the sounds of evening—contained sounds, that would not be heard anywhere else. I thought of the visit I’d made with Jean-Lino, when she had talked about her chickens coming into the house and settling everywhere. This time the aunt spoke neither of chickens nor of cowbells. She had taken on other habits far from mountain life, a thousand leagues from the great shadows that swell and shrink. She had got used to the smooth walls and the wooden railings, she had agreed to watch time melt away no matter where.
Buzzati saw the immobility of mountains as their prime attribute. “The reason, I believe, is that man seeks a state of absolute tranquility,” he wrote. Etienne Dienesmann hiked with his ch
ildren on the trails he’d walked in the past with his father. They picnicked at the foot of the same cliffs. They raised their eyes to the same array of peaks. With the father gone, everything was still in place in the limpid chill. Every summer, surrounded by laughter, he felt his own unimportance. Eventually he came to experience it without bitterness.
Dear Jean-Lino,
Before I ask you to listen to my elucubrations on the fate of objects, you should know that in Sucy-en-Brie at Danielle’s mother’s house (you met Danielle, the documentation manager who’d just come from her stepfather’s burial) Eduardo seems to have become nice. That’s the word that was used. Do animals change their nature? I would sooner attribute it to the helpful adjustment of two creatures in mourning. I know you were worried about him and we’ve kept you informed of his transfer. According to the latest reports, he spends his days on the sill of a groundfloor window, like the old folks in the villages of the South who watch life go by from their doorstep. He oversees the dirt plot where real birds and real mice frolic in full safety for, contrary to the fears of his new owner, he never leaves his post. If not exactly proud of him, at least be easy about him. My mother died last month. In a shoebox in her house I found the nutcracker I made in eighth grade. For one experimental year, girls were given access to the ironand woodworking shops in the boys’ school. None of us chose metalworking, but a few of us plunged into woodworking to avoid sewing class. The teacher was a Chinese man with a wig, a madman. We would finish up fifteen minutes early to leave time for putting the tools back. If the hand plane protruded so much as two millimeters beyond its compartment in the rack, he would scream and slap the kids. Almost the whole year was spent making a nutcracker. The boys built a model with two levels, a kind of press; the girls a mushroom-shaped model. Mine was two colors with a hat that looked like an acorn painted dark brown. When I gave it to my father, I put some walnuts in the package. At first, seeing the object, he exclaimed, “It’s a cock, your thing here!” And then he was impressed when he saw that it worked. My father loved tools and respected the worker. He showed the nutcracker to everyone—that is, to his sister Micheline and friends, to one or two colleagues who came by for a drink at the house from time to time. He wanted to know how I’d made the thread of the screw section, if I’d used a special gouge. He’d say “Pass me Elisabeth’s cock” and do a demonstration with everything that had a shell. He’d say “smooth turn, quiet cracking, impeccable walnut.” It didn’t bother me that he’d say cock, it even made me laugh. That all went on for a while, until everyone forgot about the nutcracker. It must have stayed in the kitchen on a fruit plate and then it disappeared. I never would have thought it went on existing somewhere. I didn’t even remember it. Now it’s lying right in front of me, alongside a newer pepper grinder. It looks astoundingly comfortable. Why do certain objects fall apart and others not? When we emptied my mother’s apartment, if it had been my sister who opened the shoebox she would have tossed it out without a thought along with the other old stuff. Lydie believed in the destiny of things. Would it be so impossible, after all, that the rose quartz in her pendant really had been a gift to her? (I should tell you by the way that I’m not so far myself from asking in restaurants, and also at the butcher’s—where I go less and less—if the chickens were free to fly around, the pigs to wallow, just as I can no longer stand to see an animal on display as an attraction since I started getting the bulletins from her organization.) Jean-Lino, even with the judge’s green light, you and I have only exchanged notes that are short, and from my side hideously stiff, despite my intentions to the contrary. None of my letters, though they’re spurred by an authentic impulse to write, has ever left my house, and none ever really took off. So far it’s been impossible for me to find the right tone. This one too I began by thinking I wouldn’t send either. So I’m speaking to you freely, as we always did, without worrying about the imbalance of condition between us, or about your state of mind. I can just as easily go on about a nutcracker as confess to you for instance that in the early days of my return (my return!) I had to battle a sense of abandonment and the depression that comes when a period of time draws to an end and closes over. No more Manoscrivis above our heads. The Manoscrivis on the fifth floor were the familiar order of things. I know how laughable that can seem compared to the news of the world, but what disappeared with you is an invisible good, the kind we never think about, it’s life we take for granted.
We went out on the balcony to watch the arrival of the police van and the squad cars.
Truth to tell, half the building was at their windows. I leaned out and looked up. Aparicio was there too. He pulled back instantly, uncomfortable at being seen. The reenactment was scheduled for eleven at night. The nighttime hour was meant to replicate the original conditions. We were also told that we should wear the same clothing we had on at the time of the events. I laid out the undershorts and the Kitty pajamas on the bed, like costumes for a play. A dozen people came into the building, one of them a woman carrying a case and a small folding table. Jean-Lino stepped out of the van between two uniformed cops, his hands cuffed. Seeing him, from up there in the Zara biker jacket and the hat from the racetrack, threw me for a loop. I felt as if there’d been some gigantic mistake. From the standpoint of death and the universe, as I suddenly seemed to see things from my parapet, all this insane activity around an inoffensive man—bound and redisguised as himself—struck my eyes as a grotesque farce.
The examining magistrate wanted to start with what he termed “the exit from the party.” For that first segment, he thought it unnecessary to dress up as we were three months ago. The stenographer was seated on the landing, at her folding table, before a little portable computer. Photo number one, said the judge: Policewoman playing the role of Madame Gumbiner. A tiny woman with curly hair posed, with her arms glued to her sides, in an oversized basque vest. Jean-Lino, looking just as much a stuffed figure, stood by the elevator in a violet shirt and shorter hair. He was uncuffed. He looked younger, I thought. New variable-lens glasses in metal frames freshened him up. The door to the service stairs stood open. One group of officers was stationed in the stairwell. On the landing I recognized the chief investigator from the Paris criminal police, and one of the cops from the lobby during the arrest. The judge wanted to know in what order people had left our apartment. None of the three of us could recall. After a slight muddle, it was vaguely settled that Lydie was the first to cross the threshold, after the El Ouardis, who were not deemed worth representing. The judge posed the new Manoscrivi couple together with Pierre and me in our doorway for the photo: Madame Gumbiner and Monsieur Manoscrivi leave the Jauze apartment—with Monsieur and Madame El Ouardi who take the elevator. The judge stressed the importance of the narration in talking to me: The photo file will be distributed at the time of the trial, he said, it is an instructional tool for the president of the court. Later, when he orders a photo of Monsieur Jauze returning to his bedroom to go to sleep, he will tell me, “It is important for the jury members to understand that you were left alone.” After this preamble, they all walked up to the next floor. Pierre and I went into our living room. Pierre asked me in a hateful tone if I wanted to watch a little of the news while we waited. I had no desire to see the news. He took his chessboard and sat down to study a problem. He hated it all, and particularly his recruitment into each new episode of the business. When we received the summons for the reenactment, he’d sworn to high heaven that he would not be part of it. Sitting now with nothing to do on the couch next to my husband, I observed the apartment as it had never been in normal times. The cushions equidistant and plumped up, the random mounds of things moved into tidy bookish piles. The gleaming floor, with nothing lying about. My mother would have arranged it all this way. The finger on the trouser seam before the authority of the law. We could hear footsteps and the sound of voices upstairs. I said, “Is he going to strangle the policewoman?”
“Let’s hope not.”
I stretched
out, laying my head on his legs. That put him in a very uncomfortable position. I said, “Will he put her into the suitcase?”
