Desolation (Vintage International)

by Yasmina Reza

  Explain to me about voyages, my boy. Is there a life outside oneself? Is there a reality outside oneself? The only woman who ever truly obsessed me was a slut who wasn’t fit to tie my shoes. I would have torn myself to pieces for her, and in one sense she skinned me alive. It was my only existential experience. She was simply there, like an object, worthless, persisting in being worthless, but her yeses or her nos could reduce me from a conqueror to a bundle of rags, when she said yes I could challenge the universe and when she said no I crumbled.

  Life is our impatient desires. Reality is what has to give way. That’s my theory. The rest is women’s nonsense.

  Tell me about traveling. I used to go off myself, if you remember, when the two of you were children. My annual trip to the Far East. For years I said Far East when I meant Korea. Then, business expanded to include all Southeast Asia, when I got into manufacturing I went to Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, in short what’s the difference? Hotels, factories, offices, business lunches, airports, hotels, palm trees, American cars, factories, planes, evenings of entertainment laid on by the suppliers, dancing in your stocking feet with some kind of geishas who’ve fed you beforehand with little sticks like an infant, not whores but not virgins either, city tours, monuments you don’t give a shit about, you come back with a suitcase stuffed full of junk, knickknacks, and all that souvenir rubbish, and what world have you seen, where have you been, those simple words Far East contained so many more boundaries, so many dreams, so much more of a voyage!

  Her name was Christine, she called herself Marisa. Her advantage over your mother and Nancy is that she never tried the American thing, if you see what I mean. Your mother and Nancy transformed themselves into Americans over time. It was the only way they could find to distinguish themselves. Emancipation. I knew your mother had turned into an American the day I heard her at dinner casually mentioning, excuse the detail, toes and earlobes as erogenous zones. Those last words uttered in the uninhibited tones of a woman who uses them as part of her daily vocabulary.

  Unhappy—yes, I was unhappy. In some absurd way haunted, in some absurd way shattered. Shattered by Marisa Botton, alias Christine, in charge of planning and contract administration at Aunay-Foulquier.

  She lived in Rouen. All our clients at the beginning were in Rouen. The Montevalons, the Köllers, Aunay-Foulquier, Rouen.

  Marisa Botton, Rouen. The only reality, Rouen.

  Final quarrel with Arthur. Over a phrase. Talking about René Fortuny, I said, “René has no taste.”

  “He doesn’t have your taste,” Arthur retorts.

  I say, “You’ve seen that hideous living room of his.”

  “Say you don’t like his place, don’t say it’s hideous.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Will you please,” pontificates Arthur, “will you please make a distinction between your imagination and reality.”

  Subtext: you’re not the whole world. There are things in their infinite variety, and then there’s you, you episodic little piece of shit, and no one gives a fuck about you or your opinions. As a result of which, I quarreled badly, irreparably, with Arthur, whom I won’t miss for a minute you might say, except for chess, where although his game had gone off, he proved to be the only possible partner. Way off. You couldn’t play a quick match with him anymore. His neurons were all shot to hell. A guy who bases his priorities on so-called reality has lost his intellectual level anyhow. To look at it a different way, a guy who fails to take the hideousness of René Fortuny’s living room as a measure of reality is a guy who’s had it. And, final remark, will you please make a distinction between reality and your imagination. Completely absurd. Total failure to grasp the universe. What has happened to Rouen since this name stopped breaking my heart? Rouen that drove my every action, my every gesture. Rouen, my exile, my Babylon, Rouen, written endlessly, erased, written again, Rouen, surrendered to Arthur’s reality, five letters on a roadmap.

  One day when we were skiing at Chandolin, while all of you were on the slopes and I was walking along the paths, I met a family of Italians. Mother on toboggan, father on toboggan, children on toboggans. The mother was howling with joy and panic, the father was yelling, “Frena! Frena!” The children were laughing, they were all banging into one another, ricocheting off the sides of the track, tipping over in hysterics, Frena! . . .

  While we were young, we used to go to Morzine in winter, Lionel was engaged to a girl there whom I also liked. From the window we’d watch the sunset on the mountains. Suddenly the girl burst out, “Why do I have such a pessimistic view of life?”

  “Look at the mountains,” said Lionel. “Look how beautiful the ridges are, one day you’ll think, ‘I wasted my best hours.’ ”

  “You’re right, but what do I do?”

  “Be a bit of an idiot.”

  In Chandolin, the Italians were idiots. Complete idiots on their toboggans. I saw them from a distance on the slope, on their mad descent, falling off, swearing, and me, motionless, an old man that day—I was still young—an old man made of lead and bitterness. Fifty years after Morzine, I said to Lionel, “Did you and I know how to be real idiots?”

  “You did,” he said.

  Lately he confessed that he’d wept at the Place des Invalides as he watched the president of Mexico go past with his motorcycle escort. Lionel wept, undone by the French welcome and the grandeur of the Republic.

  “Having failed to be enough of an idiot,” I laughed, “you’re a genuine moron.”

  “Of course.” He nodded.

  Being an idiot, or a bit of an idiot, my boy, doesn’t apply to fans of the tropics. Don’t misinterpret me. I’m always afraid, you’ll forgive me, that you’ll try to take advantage of a vocabulary whose humor and lapidary wit escape you. It’s the exact opposite, when you think about it. Being a bit of an idiot, as per Lionel’s original advice, is only for complicated souls. Only the tormented, you see, which means unfortunately the exact opposite of who you’re trying to be, will grasp the brotherly element of choice here. No one urges an idiot to be a bit of an idiot. Nor do they urge it on anyone who’s happy-go-lucky, a related idiot, just between the two of us. Even less do they urge it on a truly happy man. If such a man exists.

  Lionel can’t get it up anymore. “One less curse to cope with,” he announces. I say, “So what else is new? You haven’t been getting it up for a long time now.”

  “No, no,” he says, “wrong. I can’t get it up with Joëlle anymore. With Joëlle it’s dead and buried, but I was still managing it elsewhere. The problem is that now I can’t get it up with anyone. From one day to the next, it stopped functioning. I didn’t have the strength to take it as a real plus. I went to see someone, a Dr. Sartaoui, who’s a specialist in this stuff. There were two of us in the waiting room,” says Lionel. “I said to myself, Hey, he’s younger than me and he can’t get it up either. That cheered me up for a moment.”

  The guy prescribes pills, to be taken two hours beforehand. “Two hours before what,” I say.

  “Before what? Before you fuck!”

  “And how do you know you’re going to fuck two hours from now?

  “Because with whores you can schedule it, my friend.”

  Which has always been the biggest difference between Lionel and me. He has a real taste for it, I’ve never really spent time with them. So—Lionel goes and tests the pill, which is a fabulous success. Second test, just as fabulous, if short-lived. He goes mad. Decides, although he doesn’t “go out” anymore and has had no working sense of what goes on out there socially in the city for some years now, to have a fling. He’s already located his quarry in a waitress at the Petit Demours where he eats lunch every day of the week. The girl’s been working there for a year, and a pathetic bond between them has progressed all the way from jokes to lingering eye contact. Doped up with Sartaoui’s pills, Lionel goes over to the direct offensive, an offensive which opens with, “Do you know that in Australia there are black widow spiders in
the towns and the yellow snake too, extremely poisonous,” this whispered between the blanquette of veal and coffee. Lionel, you understand, has never been with anyone except whores or self-destructive women whom, as far as one can see, he doesn’t view in any sexual way but subjugates with his outpourings against love, children, reproduction, in short, life. The waitress—fifty years his junior, please note—belongs to an intermediary category that’s completely unknown to him. Which is why this preamble is such a jawdropper.

  The girl laughs. The girl laughs and says, as if to show the remark was brilliant, “We’ve got dangerous animals here as well.” Lionel’s feathers are in full courtship display, as he feels automatically this means he can propose a rendezvous. The girl accepts. Lionel goes home and starts doing his calculations. They’re meeting at 4:30 at a café midway between the two of them, the girl’s due back at Demours at 7:00, that gives them two and a half hours, half an hour in the café for verbal preliminaries, 5:00 hotel . . . hotel? Or his place? Which hotel? Lionel opts for his place, which has all the advantages, despite some redundant scruples in the back of his mind which are quickly discarded, so—5:00 at his place, let’s say 5:15 to allow for hitches, that means the pill has to be swallowed at 3:15, which means right now, hop, Lionel swallows the pill. He paces around for an hour, rubs himself with perfume, does two or three stretching exercises recommended in one of Joëlle’s magazines, decides to subscribe to Wild Earth, the publication where he found his pickup line in Sartaoui’s waiting room, and which is obviously the key to the whole story.

  At 4:15 he goes downstairs. He walks up rue Langier looking much more cheerful than usual, it’s a beautiful day, the kind of day when God and the wind have decided to ruffle you gently on your good side. He’s happy. For four minutes, Lionel strides along as king of the world.

  4:20 p.m. and he’s at the café where he orders a lemon Schweppes, which he loathes, so as to be sure his breath is fresh. At 4:35 the girl still isn’t there, at 4:45 ditto. At 4:55, she arrives. She finds a dazed old man who holds out a trembling hand. She orders tea and immediately announces that she’ll have to leave by six. Sartaoui’s pill, in defiance of its apparently shaky user, is sending out its first hidden signals. Disastrous timing. The girl is calm, smiles. Listens. Like a nurse in a palliative care unit. While she’s blowing on her herbal tea, Lionel clutches his chest, the only part of him that’s in synch at this moment, his last wisp of horizon.

  He’s going to play his last card.

  “I don’t feel well,” he says. “Something’s the matter, could you take me home?”

  “You don’t feel well?”

  “No,” he says, struggling pitiably to his feet, “I feel dizzy.”

  “Dizzy?”

  “Yes, dizzy.”

  She takes his arm. They leave. The rue Pierre-Demours is crowded, noisy. The weather is gray. She supports him in a friendly fashion. Friendly girl, he says to himself, what a farce!

  They arrive at the entrance to his building. “Would you like me to come up with you?” she offers sympathetically.

  “I’d like that,” Lionel answers in a high-pitched quaver, wondering how on earth, once they get upstairs, he will manage to change gears and become Casanova. The elevator comes down. Stops. Picture one of those open elevators with a grille. Lionel sees feet, a corner of skirt . . . Joëlle! Joëlle, general secretary of a pension savings bank at the Porte de Picpus, Joëlle who’s been supporting the family for forty years, never in forty years home before seven in the evening, is home today, in the rue Langier, at 5:15.

  “Madame Gagnion died,” she says.

  Slut, thinks Lionel, that slut of a Gagnion who finds a way to croak while I’m having a hard-on. Filthy slut. Gagnion is their upstairs neighbor. An old woman who’s got nobody left but them. In a word, Lionel thanks the girl, tells Joëlle he too had some kind of attack in the street. What kind of an attack? Joëlle fusses, already in shock because of Gagnion. Nothing, nothing whatever, darling, a little dizzy spell. Joëlle gives some instructions to the concierge, they go back upstairs, Joëlle insists that Lionel lie down. She helps him undress. “But what’s going on,” she cries, “you’ve got a hard-on.” And immediately, instead of profiting from the situation, starts yelling and hitting him. The bitch from downstairs is nothing but a whore and she’ll gut her, he didn’t have any kind of attack, he’s pathetic, a parasite, a piece of shit. Whereupon farewell Sartaoui, farewell waitress from the Demours, farewell erection.

  A finale like any other, you’ll say.

  Well, yes. One finale leads to another, my boy. First one finale, then the next. Things extinguish themselves one after another. From the glory of day to the shadows. Like Lionel heading up the rue Pierre-Demours.

  You know that Nancy has also become a psychologist. You’ll say that’s all part of her arsenal. She’s become a psychologist and when you come up as the subject, which happens, this is her theory. I’m supposed to have traumatized you—a theory your mother naturally shares—I’m supposed to have traumatized you when you were a child by my severity, my demands, my readiness to strike you, and so on. I’m supposed to have traumatized you and somehow suffocated you. Suffocated you by the force of my personality which was disproportionate to your sensibility, your fragility, your all those so-called positive words which are in vogue these days.

  So, traumatized and suffocated, you embarked on life in the worst possible circumstances. To hear tell, you were on your way to being a drug addict or a delinquent. At this stage in the experiment, Nancy thinks she can arouse my sympathy, which only goes to show her poor grasp of psychology, by the way. Accordingly I’m supposed to take pleasure in the fact that you’re laid back. That you have absolutely no ambition, that you’ll end up a social disaster—so what. You’re a boy who’s raising the bar on misery. Hats off. With Stalin for a father, hats off, my boy.

  If I weren’t moved by some degree of pity and affection for you, I’d find you repellent. Nancy has no idea how much you disgust me when she talks about how crushed you are. Those are her words. I’m supposed to have crushed you.

  “How?” I ask.

  “You were too strong, you didn’t let him blossom.”

  “Ah, but he’s blossoming now?”

  “Yes, he’s beginning to, it’s wonderful.”

  Nancy can talk about you blossoming for minutes at a time. Your crushing and your blossoming are the two major lines on your medical chart. Not once have you ever inquired after my health. To what should I attribute this silence? Shame? Indifference, ennui? You should know I’m not well. And if you’ve always known I’ve been prone to illness, you should take on board that they now dictate the way I spend my time. But you don’t give a fuck, you don’t think it’s worth talking about. Your brother-in-law Michel who was here on Sunday with your sister and the baby—that’s when she used the word happy about you—is blossoming too, go figure. He’s joined the Jewish Ramblers at the Île-de-France. The only way he’s found to be a Jew at last. Last weekend they did Montfort-L’Amaury-Coignières. They came in the afternoon, in the morning he’d done Montfort to Coignières. Eleven miles. Over the moon. Through colonies of weekend cottages, forests sliced up by highways, the odd hill, what do I know. He’s laid back too. No vestige of existential angst. You’ll say he’s managed to weed-whack his entire psyche at one go. Explain to me how anyone, let alone in a group, can plow all the way from Montfort via Cergy to Coignières, between manure heaps and beetroot fields, ride back on the B line and remain an optimist. Here’s a boy who gets up on Sunday after a grueling walk, hops out of bed at dawn’s early light, and says to himself, Hey, great, today I’m going to walk to Coignières with my friends the Jewish Ramblers. To Coignières. Apparently one blossoms where one can. You, you need the Caribbean. Because to crown it all, in my despotism and mistreatment of you, I’ve made you a high-class whore. If you remain immune to the poetry of Cergy-to-Pontoise, it’s undoubtedly my fault and I know better than anyone, kindly note, that’s i
t impossible to raise the bar of unhappiness inside the Beltway.

  You’ve decided to take a year’s sabbatical. You’ll be surprised to know I was curious enough to look up the word in the dictionary, and the definition makes it completely inapplicable to you because it refers to university professors going off once every seven years to do their own research. But so what, if everyone had to avoid abusing or stretching language, nobody’d ever open their mouth. So you decided to take a sabbatical year, a verbal fig leaf to disguise an entire sabbatical life, if what your friends say is to be believed. In short, you’ve decided to opt out. Fine. If there’s anything that interests me, despite myself, in this plan of yours, it’s its absolute vacuity. No irony intended, for once. When you decide to opt out of everything except touring the planet, you free yourself of all scruples and parasitic virtues, and clearly you’re miles away from any idea, thank God, of devoting your time to some form of good works, like protecting orphaned children or virgin forests. Radically egotistical, radically consistent. That’s not so common these days, particularly as someone as weak-natured as you are could be in danger of being dragged into some sort of philanthropic orgy.

  One day your mother opened the newspaper and said, “Leopold Fench is dead.”

  It was the worst sentence I’ve ever heard in my life.

  Leo Fench was Lionel’s cousin by marriage. He had been one of the frontline troops in the heroic epic of mass manufacture in the clothing industry. I don’t know if you knew him. At the end of the fifties Leo made a fortune with the introduction of nylon thread that wouldn’t ladder. Only two weeks beforehand we bumped into each other on the rue de Solferino. He was coming from the dentist’s. No hint of the shadow of death. Pleasant, the same as always. One fine day a man is walking happily along the rue de Solferino and next day he’s dead. Leopold Fench was the most cheerful man I ever knew. When we first got to know each other in the fifties, I read this cheerfulness as a form of instability, it takes time to recognize that cheerfulness is a death song. The son of a grocer from Roanne, he made a fortune in nylon and bought himself an apartment on the rue Las-Cases. Main floor and garden, plus another floor upstairs. He had a year’s worth of work done on it, maybe even more. He redid the whole thing. He ran all round Paris to find the tiles, he ordered doors from God knows where, and mantelpieces, he went through the decorators, he designed a chandelier himself and had it made in Italy. After a year and a half he moved in with his family. One afternoon just afterward, he calls me. Come by, he says. He opens the door to me himself. We go into the salon. The room opened onto the garden, and you had to go down a few steps. It must have been January, but the weather was particularly fine that day. I tell him, “My friend, it’s a triumph.” He shows me every detail, I remember we spent whole minutes on the curtain tiebacks with their special pleating, he shows me the size of the rooms, the perspectives, the genuine boiseries, the fake cornices, he shows me everything right down to the light switches. I say, “It’s a real triumph.” I say, “There isn’t another apartment like it in Paris.” He nods. We sit down, he on a stool with tapestry work he’d been praising two minutes before. We look at the garden through the glass door. Light streams into the room. There’s an occasional noise from the street but it’s almost nothing, a vague sound that seems to emanate from the provinces, a background murmur of peaceable life.