Desolation (Vintage International)

by Yasmina Reza

  Leo watches a leaf quiver, his finger calls my attention to the perfection of some shrub or another and he says, “Now what?”

  And that’s what I think about when your mother opens the paper and says Leopold Fench is dead. Cans of tuna fish from Roanne, the stool from the rue Las-Cases, his unbuttoned jacket in the sunshine on the rue de Solferino.

  A beautiful day, a man walking happily along a street in Paris at the furthest remove from death. The sky belongs to him, the river belongs to him, the houses, and the faces, belong to him, the old friend he meets where rue de Solferino and rue de l’Université cross belongs to him, as, for the last time, although he doesn’t know it, does the little chamber that is his life.

  Your mother, sounding only marginally surprised, said, “Leopold Fench is dead.” The relative unimportance of the death is measured in the offhand way she says it. Your mother has suggested, if not decreed, that the world could keep on calmly turning without Leo, that Leo Fench lived and died the way dogs live and die, nice companions but not important.

  “I’m shattered by this,” I say.

  “Shattered? Why? The two of you weren’t that close.”

  “We were close in a way that’s beyond you.”

  “Everything’s beyond me these days.”

  “Quite.”

  She began to cry. The moment a woman starts to cry, I want to deck her. I can’t stand people who go to pieces. Take some cake, my boy. Take a slice. Orange cake, Mrs. Dacimiento brought it for my breakfast. I turned over the plastic wrapping, orange cake, twenty francs. Mass-made by lesbians from Pont l’Abbé in a former pigsty turned factory. That’s what she wants to shove down my throat at breakfast, me who hates breakfast. A piece of cellulose spritzed with artificial essence of fruit.

  Leo Fench believed in life. And he opted for frivolity because he believed in life, not in people. From people, Leo expected nothing. It was he one day, when Lionel was particularly depressed and was thinking of going to a doctor, who said, “You should take something to cheer you up a little. Just a little. Just enough so that you don’t seem to be wandering loose all day in Bagneux cemetery.”

  Leo didn’t believe in anything he’d built up himself. Here was a man who had spent his whole life demonstrating how dynamic and risk-taking he was, and he didn’t believe in human enterprise or success or the reassuring effects that came with success.

  Leo believed in the reality of the chill of the tomb.

  Leo believed in the reality of the yellow corridor of Saint-Antoine hospital where his mother died under the supervision of Professor Ottorno, the reality of the time—months—he spent joking about the tubes, the probes, and so on, the whole unfortunate reality of the pathetic mechanics of life.

  A man without any illusions about the passage of time, who had the nerve to be genuinely cheerful.

  Leo and Lionel were the same age. They started to beat up on each other the moment they got on the telephone. They yelled. You know how it used to end? Joëlle would unplug the receiver for fear Lionel would have a heart attack. Each of them was convinced he looked younger than the other. Whenever the two of them were together, one of them would say, “Tell the truth, which of us looks younger?” and the other would immediately chime in, “Yes, come on, tell the truth, which of us looks younger?” . . .

  Have you noticed I’ve been dyeing my hair? I dye my hair. Formula and stylist courtesy of René Fortuny. A failure, huh? I dye my hair. Why? What do I know?

  Do you remember this essay topic? You’re taking a walk in the woods and you’re struck by how picturesque it all is. Some idiot of a schoolboy once wrote I was walking quietly along the path when all of a sudden, cunningly hidden behind a tree, the picturesque leapt out and struck me. Do you remember how we laughed? It was the cunningly hidden behind a tree that was the best. Well, that’s exactly how it’s been for me recently with depression. I’m walking along minding my own business and all of a sudden, cunningly hidden in the scenery, depression leaps out and strikes me. With a force and a weight you can’t even imagine. And what do I do to fight it? I dye my hair. When existential depression attacks without warning, your father dyes his hair.

  Leo on the other hand never dyed his hair. Leopold Fench, prince of the moment, was above that kind of primping. In one day, Leo Fench broke more hearts than René and me in a lifetime. When your mother says in that incredibly tone-deaf way, when your mother says, “Leopold Fench is dead,” I think of our last meeting at the rue de l’Université. Two souls encounter each other at random, two paths cross, there’s nothing to distinguish them from the rest of humanity, nothing to distinguish them from those who’ve already lived or those to come. And this, I tell myself, would be totally irrelevant if Leo had not been something I value a hundred times higher than a happy man—a joyful man.

  Open the wall cabinet in Nancy’s bathroom and you have a perfect vision of human pathos.

  Nancy pretends to be aging bravely. For a moment I even feared that her newfound spirituality was going to be the crutch that would allow her to accept wrinkles and facial hair and set off, stick in hand, to wander over hill and dale. No way. Open her cabinet. Cavernous heart of Nancy’s secret war against time. You’ll trip over my latest discovery in this fortress of lunacy— Exfoliating Force C Radiance. A novelty I’d never have noticed if it weren’t for the size of the box and its virulent orange color. You know I’ve never been good at English. Force C Radiance. The words terrify me. Exfoliating! Poor Nancy, I think. Poor little Nancy, who longs to please for an hour or two before she dies. Poor animal, wearing down her teeth in a frenzy to gnaw the last of the marrow out of life. “But why, Nancy,” I say to her, “why all these products? Are they all really necessary?” Nancy shrugs and immediately turns the conversation to the fact that I’ve dared to enter her strictly private bathroom, and open her strictly private wall cabinet to involve myself, in contravention of the most elementary rules of respect, in her strictly private things. While she’s laying down the laws that govern her intimacy for the 412th time, I look at her face, inundated by all the glop from the forbidden cabinet, a nicely sagging face, a face quivering with longing to put it all right, a face advancing peacefully toward its end.

  Experience has taught me to be a diplomat, because once you get into territory like this, you know, they’re all pretty much out of their minds. One day your mother was complaining about some newly visible sag line on her cheek. Because she was confiding in me, I said, not intending to be mean, quite the opposite: “It’s nothing.”

  “So you can see it too?!” she cries in horror.

  “See what? No, I didn’t see a thing.”

  “Don’t try and take it back. So it shows, it really shows!” . . . and she’s already wailing and turning against me. Since then I’ve banished “It’s nothing” in favor of “It’s not true.” Whatever “it” is, I deny it. When a woman starts fussing over some physical defect, deny, deny, deny. Particularly if she says, “Tell me the truth.” I don’t know how things are with you and women, dear boy, but try to keep them in the plural. Don’t narrow things down to the singular for as long as you can avoid it.

  At the hairdresser, I ask for the same treatment as Monsieur Fortuny’s, only not quite so strong. I didn’t dare say color because it’s a unisex hairdresser. Result: you can never tell the difference from the way anything was before, except maybe when it’s a question of boasting a head of white hair and what comes out is a lunatic blond halo. To sum up, if your hair is dyed it looks dyed, and if it doesn’t look dyed, there’s no dye in it. That’s the truth. Women don’t give a shit if they look all tarted up. Women abandoned any idea of the natural centuries ago. But we men, we don’t know how to handle all that. The proof is, while I’m at the hairdresser to be shampooed, I’m thumbing through a magazine and I land on Donald Trump and his new fiancée. Blond girl, twenty-five, fine. But as for him, and I put on my glasses to take a better look, he’s pushing sixty, hair like an upside-down conch shell, setting off
from the back of his head at an angle of 110 degrees, probably to hide a bald spot and landing in a fringed swag on his forehead. The whole thing a tone poem of russet browns. There’s a guy who’s earning a good living, I say to myself as I wait to be shampooed, a guy who has his photograph taken day and night and hasn’t found a single person in his entourage who’ll tell him, “No, Mr. Trump, it’s not okay, it’s absolutely not okay.” When the girl arrives with her products, I immediately insist on the weaker form of the treatment. René made an easy transition from hair tonic to hair coloring. All his life, René has gone in for creams and scalp massages, and all my life I’ve envied the hair of René Fortuny.

  It’s funny the way people set themselves certain goals. René, who from the age of twenty more or less let his body go to rack and ruin, for some reason known only to himself gave all his attention to his hair. Maybe, and I mean this quite seriously, haircare was René’s road to the meaning of life.

  The world is not outside us. Alas. If the world were outside us, there wouldn’t be enough roads for me to travel until I dropped, and instead of hectoring you, I would envy you. I would hate your youth and all the time you have left, and I would envy your eyes, which will see things I shall not see. But the world is not outside us. The world lives within us. Everything you see here, that I planted, my boy, rosebushes, impatiens, boxwood, pear trees, lives only through my thoughts, man’s only knowledge of the world comes from within himself and he can never step outside his own skin. Which is why, at bottom, we no longer fear solitude. Even when we grow old and find ourselves alone again, we don’t give a shit. Little by little we find ourselves completely alone again and we don’t give a shit.

  In the mornings, when I’m sitting at table faced with Dacimiento’s pound cake and condemned to listen to Nancy crunching her little bits of buttered toast, having already gorged herself on France Inter and Le Figaro —fueled by her incomprehensible appetite to be part of the world, she’s been ready to cross swords since dawn—I have an actual physical sensation of the solitariness of man’s existence. And when your sister thinks to give me pleasure (how am I supposed to forgive her for such utter ignorance of who I am) by telling me “He’s happy,” I calculate how rare the bridges are from one solitude to another.

  Every day the world shrivels me a little and today it’s the world that’s shriveling inside me. That’s the way things are. Little by little death gains the upper hand. One gets used to it. One gets used to death. It’s not such a bad thing to maintain the rhythms of the universe.

  In the Kabbalah, which never interested you, doubtless my fault, it says that one has to shake God to make him show Himself. Shake God.

  You, my boy, you don’t shake much, do you?

  Shake God.

  God doesn’t exist, but we make space for Him, we take a little step back so that He will come down to our world, not just every day but several times a day and for our whole lifetime. The only reality is His will, for the world, the world, my boy, is made up of our impatient desires.

  And what is it you want? What does my son want?

  My son wants neither to build, nor to create, nor to invent. Above all, my son doesn’t want to change the order of things. My son wants everything to be cool.

  At a moment when anything is possible, at a moment when I would have risked my skin to keep my place among the living, my son wants calm and creature comforts, my son wants peace to bandage up the pitiful wounds in his soul. I whose only terror has always been daily monotony, I who pushed open the gates of Hell to escape this mortal enemy, I have given life to a windsurfer.

  If you were to tell me to pursue a woman to the ends of the earth, I’d bow. Everything to do with desire is desperate and boundless. The need to be someone else, someone whose dream of being swept to his fate would at last be fulfilled, this I understand. And without setting myself up as an authority on disintegration, I understand one could literally be swallowed up in pursuit of it. In your whole life, my boy, has there ever been a Marisa Botton? If so, you couldn’t be happy and nobody would talk about you in such degrading terms, because even if one recovers from a Marisa or someone like her with time, one doesn’t come back from it as the same person one was, one is inconsolable, my child, for that part of oneself one has lost, inconsolable.

  Marisa Botton from Rouen, in that way, was my true existential experience.

  To begin with, she was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And she would have gone on being nothing if I hadn’t had the idea one day when I was bored, to invent her.

  Her name was Christine, and she called herself Marisa. This Marisa gave you the whole woman. She was married, with a child. Married to a buyer from Aunay’s with whom I did business. That’s how I got to know her. At the beginning, completely insignificant. The kind of woman whose dress fits so tightly that she’s still pulling on the material to make the skirt or the sleeve sit better. I passed her from time to time in the corridors at Aunay’s. One day she says, “It’s really irritating,” and I say, “Irritating? Are you talking to me?”

  “Yes. You never say hello to me. You could at least say hello.”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “My husband is Roland Botton. We had dinner together last winter.”

  I said hello to her for a year. Because I hadn’t recognized her again, I forced myself to recognize her. See what things depend on. Hello for a year. Nothing more. Translate that into twenty hellos if you reckon that I went to Rouen once or twice a month, because due to a phenomenon I put down as sheer chance, I ran into her each time I was there. Twenty hellos, which evolved from hello madame to hello dear Madame Botton and finally, after passing through several variations, ending with Marisa hello! Never an extra word, never a how are you, nothing. The day I said Marisa hello! she stops: “Such familiarity all of a sudden.” Why did I throw out Marisa hello!? You know me, nice day, unexpected memory of her first name, probably heard it mentioned five minutes before, in short, a momentary whim and suddenly this woman who didn’t exist a second ago, becomes a bodily reality because she decides to take these chance words seriously. “Is that a reproach?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  She looks me straight in the eye. Incredible cheek. Smiles and goes off somewhere or other. From that day on, I think about Marisa Botton. That’s it. But it’s enough. It takes a mere nothing, you see, for someone to start making his bed in paradise. Don’t clear the table, leave the crumbs, Dacimiento will sweep up. You can’t not make crumbs eating this cake. You like the cake, that’s good. At least I don’t ruin your appetite anymore. You see how I’ve swelled up? I’m going to croak from intestinal cancer, nobody gives a shit. And I’ve also probably got Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease, since this morning there’s this tremor in my hand. Did you see the stuff she makes me eat? Last night she cooked white beans and ox tongue. Didn’t say a word. Ignoring unbelievably filthy looks from Nancy, I told her I was surprised that she’d take a week’s paid holiday smack in the middle of the year without giving us more than a bare month’s notice. And she starts defending herself, she’s been here for seven years, seven years of pure slavery of course, for seven years and she’s never once asked for however much it is a month she’s supposed to get, she wasn’t hired to do the shopping and since she’s been doing the shopping her lower back is all shot to hell, she’s not even adding in the number of hours she’s had to spend because we sat down late to dinner and the central-heating repairman was waiting outside in the car and of course that meant they had to eat dinner even later but they’re human beings too, just like we are, and so on. Because they’ve got nothing better to do but drive to Auchon now and then and sit glued to the TV, cracking peppercorns in their teeth, and suddenly they’re talking unions, you know. I’m tempted to tell her they’re not even humans, they don’t even qualify for the lowest rung on the pretty damn low ladder of human evolution, and if I manage to restrain myself it’s only due to Nancy’s vindictiveness because for some time, it’s good you shoul
d know this, she’s been beating me. Up till now she’s always beaten me in private and I have to say these moments always make me feel tender toward her again, as if this temporary madness is taking me back to the fragile person she was and this unstoppable uncontrollable meltdown is making me desire her again, but I’m afraid one day she’ll lose it and start to hit me in front of Dacimiento, all the more because she’s been developing some kind of weird complicity with Dacimiento recently and isn’t far from turning her into her everyday bosom buddy. (What’s more, Nancy sent her to her own hairdresser, I didn’t dare say a thing but when she came back she looked like Richard Widmark off to the Korean War.) Beating me up in front of Rosa Dacimiento, a scene I can’t rule out, would by the way have the advantage of giving me the chance to rally myself and I could throw her out right then and there. Do they suffer as much as we do? Dacimiento and her central-heating repairman? Without an imagination, you can’t suffer. What kind of suffering can someone experience if they only see the world at their own height, if they can’t look up or look down, if top shelves of bookcases and cornices and curtain rods and tops of wardrobes might as well be in the next world, because they’re not part of this one? Just as much as we do, is what I said. You’ve taken that in. I refuse to see you as suffering’s exile. Even if children don’t remain as warm as you think they will, they’re still your children and I refuse to lose you completely.