Desolation (Vintage International)

by Yasmina Reza

  In the refreshment bar where we find a seat, Genevieve doesn’t talk to me about her balcony, she talks about Leo Fench. “One day I got this note from Leo, and I’ll tell you right away it’s a quote from Louis Aragon which he’d picked up from who knows where because you know, Leo really didn’t read much at all (he said he’d read the essentials long ago); on this piece of typing paper, folded in four, he’d written, Don’t read this letter: read the other one, the one I tore up. Think about the fact that I’m constantly tearing up a letter, a sort of letter. . . . Followed by the name of the poet and nothing else. This other letter, my dear, gave me my reason to live for years. And even at this age, taking my grandson to his judo classes or pruning my roses with the wrong pair of clippers, I find myself wanting to decipher words that were never written, never given expression, and never heard. Leo didn’t want any part of a romantic entanglement. Love didn’t feature anywhere in Leo’s rules of life, if I can put it that way. It took me a very, very long time to believe that he could have any genuine feeling for me. You know, one never trusts the words of a seducer. The seducer cannot summon what might be called the moral element in language. In the same way one doesn’t dare give way to desire, because yes it’s idiotic but one is afraid of not being satisfied sexually (please excuse,” she adds, “this excessively confidential conversation which has overtaken me all of a sudden, it’s so rare to meet someone with whom I can talk about Leopold and all these things). There are women who boast that they know to keep a man that way. For me, on the other hand, it always made me very vulnerable. In the arms of a man with the reputation of knowing women, one thinks one will be a disappointment or uninteresting. I never imagined I had the slightest sway of that kind over him. Even in our most audacious moments I didn’t think I measured up to a Leo Fench, and perhaps this insecurity heightened the excitement. Leo died of a stroke at the age of fiftyseven. A man who had no intention of checking out so soon, who believed even more idiotically than most men in his own longevity. I don’t want to brush against you, I told him, I don’t want to be a walker through time who brushes against you as our paths cross. But Leopold embraced you even as he vanished into the mosaic of his life. Business, appointments, obligations on the rue Las-Cases, comings and goings of children, his inevitable other women (Leo operated on the principle that a man should seize upon all available women and that all women were more or less available, Leo liked quick sex, no sentiment, no tomorrows) whom I could never think about without feeling faint, trips, vacations, the endless absences that would wound your heart forever. Leo believed, and I still bear him a grudge for this, that we were imperishable. ”

  Does it ever happen, my child, in your life of bliss, that you feel the stab of incurable loneliness? In the midst of the gardens in the park at Longchamp, under the deadly spring sun, a woman with whom you have everything in common says something and the words seem to trace a crack and you know there will be no coming together, that it’s hopeless, that the soul is solitary and there is nothing one person can do for the other.

  She says, “Make me stop. Tell me about your trees, tell me about you, and your life, what are your children doing?”

  “My daughter married a pharmacist and I’m a grandfather.”

  Incongruous phrase which slips out for no reason, but for a moment, in the company of this disarming woman, I give way to spontaneous sentimental vaporings and even produce the name Jerome without having to search my memory.

  “And your son?”

  “My son loves life and the world,” I say.

  “What luck!” she laughs. A Genevieve Abramowitz was what I needed. “And you?”

  “Me, I’ve destroyed the best part of myself. I’ve become more human, and it’s tragic, Genevieve.” Upon which, I invite her to dinner that night.

  We meet up at eight o’clock in the Ballon des Ternes. She’s wearing a green suit that matches her eyes, she’s discreet, she’s pretty, and I’m all dressed up as well. The table I reserved isn’t ready, so we have a drink at the bar. I order a whisky, an unusual order for me as you know since I only drink wine, Genevieve orders a gin and tonic. We’re both of us, for whatever reason, tongue-tied. I compliment her on the way she looks. She says I’ve remained a very attractive man. I say I didn’t know I ever had been. She tells me to stop flirting. I’ve honestly never thought of myself as well endowed by nature in that way, and certainly not these days when I’m going to pieces in all directions, but finally all it takes is the littlest thing and you’re in the sack. She wets her lips with the gin, I shake my glass to make the ice cubes clink. We smile at each other. The content of this evening is not yet clear. A waiter sets a saucer of shelled pistachios on the counter. “Do you still see Lionel?” she asks. Shelled pistachios, wonderful, I think to myself. “Still. And you?” I take a handful and pop them in my mouth. I’ll never know what Genevieve’s answer was because my teeth, all set to encounter something with the gentle bite of almonds, have just met an unexpected resistance that is completely and instantaneously disorientating. Simultaneously a glance at the saucer confirms the ghastly truth. I’m in the process of crunching spat-out olive pits.

  It’s not true, I think, it can’t be true. I make a face and spit everything back into the saucer, I take a gulp of whisky—there was foresight in that order—and gargle it noisily, then another gulp, and another, seized with the uncontrollable need to disinfect myself. Genevieve, who hasn’t been following all this, stares at me dumbstruck. Between two doses of mouthwash and grimaces of disgust, I point to the saucer and the pits. “My poor friend,” she cries, helpless with laughter. “That’s horrible.” As I glance out of the corner of my eye at the scary clientele of this place, fat sauerkraut-eaters and beer guzzlers, provincial wrecks with grease-smeared mouths, i.e., the assembled pitspitters, it’s her laugh once again that delivers both me and our dinner from everyday wretchedness and its ordinary slot in time.

  “I would never have thought,” she says once we’ve been seated at our table, “I would never have thought you’d be the kind of man who’d shut himself off in a house. Let alone the kind of man who’d take up gardening.”

  “Nancy, my second wife, inherited a house in the Marne from her father. We used to go there from time to time. There are a lot of woods in the area. I like woods. On my side of the family we never had a particular place, I didn’t know what it was to become attached to a landscape by habit, walking through familiar trees, walking the same ground, the only variation being a little more to the right or to the left, or taking the longer way round or the shorter. I liked going back there. One day I bought a weeping willow at a tree nursery, then some privet that I planted in the garden every which way. I didn’t want to learn, I wanted to create. I dug little holes when what was needed was a hole ten times the size of the root ball, I went mad for manure, things to amend the soil, peat, I spread three bags of manure where one was required, telling myself it was better, I bungled around, I burned everything, but life had substance.”

  “And rue Ampère?”

  “I’m still there. A few days a week.”

  I tell her I’m still there a few days a week and for the second time that day I feel the black wing of desolation unfurl and settle over me. Is it alcohol that makes the phrase so painful? A few days a week, and for how long? Am I shut off from the future forever? How did it happen? I hate the days. Where are the days, the real days? Stagnation is killing me.

  “This is my life. A few days in rue Ampère, a few days in the Marne, rue Ampère, Marne, the stock exchange, the garden. The ancients used to go off on wars of conquest to ward off tedium. Conquest versus tedium, the bloodied saber versus unendurable peace. Me, I take the train to Châlons and plunge into GardenEarth to buy a manure pitchfork or my umpteenth sprayer. Genevieve, my friend, Genevieve, let’s use this evening to fight the grayness of existence. This morning I was thumbing through a magazine article about the correspondence of a Nobel Prize–winning Japanese writer and Oz, the Israeli writer
(my daughter wants to cultivate me, Amos Oz has a good place on the lists, she thinks she can lure me with secular-progressive Jewish literature; two pages and I was sound asleep). The title of the article: ‘The Battle for Tolerance.’ Tagline: the sentence from the Japanese guy, I hear the note of hope that echoes in your words. Hope of what, Genevieve? What is it these people hope? The great minds of the century. So absolutely convinced they’re on the road to somewhere. So thrilled, poor guys, to be predicting some ultimate achievement (the very idea is grotesque). What is it they hope? What sort of progress? Peace? A horizon with no hidden chasms, no contradictions. No people.

  The peace of dead souls. Every day the world shrivels me. A world of word-twisters. Of optimists done up in tutus. Genevieve, I’m crazy about your laugh. Genevieve, what could we scheme up tonight, the two of us? I’m going to order another bottle. Let’s drink. Time marches on, nothing is real except this moment. Let’s drink and let’s laugh. And scheme up some piece of madness. I’m your man tonight.”

  “Yes,” she says sadly, “nothing is real except this moment. Why do the people we love not understand this? I remember there was this song by Léo Ferré, the beautiful years race by, use them my poor love. . . . It’s impossible to put words to your feelings because every phrase already belongs to another time and everything you find to say is empty and out of date and a lie. My friend, I’ll be glad to drink with you this evening as much as you want, but since you love my laugh, look at this for a catastrophe, my eyes are full of tears.”

  I long to stand up, take her in my arms and kiss her eyelids. I don’t, inhibited by some petty sense of shame.

  Then, my dear, I set out to help her regain her good humor. To get us out of our gloom, I deploy all my gifts as a clown. Naturally you are summoned up as part of this festival, along with your sister and her pharmacist, but I keep you in reserve for the finale.

  I begin with Monsieur Tambourini. Tambourini is Lionel’s manager. I tell Genevieve about the catastrophe of the curtains, which she grasps immediately, wonderful woman, and segue into the drama of the shutters, which you don’t know about. I told you about the catastrophe of the curtains. In addition to the catastrophe of the curtains or I should say as companion piece to the catastrophe of the curtains, Lionel went through the drama of the shutters, refusing categorically that they be taken down to be repainted. To know the importance of the window in Lionel’s life is to measure just how testing any instability in the life of objects can be to him. Lionel refuses to have his shutters taken down and sends for Tambourini. He immediately starts yelling, Monsieur TAMBOURINI, Monsieur TAMBOURINI, you want me to die! The literary critic in him rejects the violence of this introduction, You’ve killed my crescendo, he says to himself, but so what and he keeps going at the same pitch, you want to rob me of my shutters for a fortnight, my wife has just robbed me of my curtains to put up others which aren’t yet lined which means they’re not even there yet, which means that between you and my wife, Monsieur Tambourini, I have been reduced to a state in which I can no longer create in my own home the consolations of darkness, the CONSOLATIONS OF DARKNESS! Monsieur Tambourini, Monsieur Tambourini, I handed him his Tambourini, said Lionel, as I tell Genevieve to make her laugh, you understand a name like that, you can’t make it up, Monsieur Tambourini, it’s out of the question and stop trying to gargle with that expression Co-op Board, a Co-op Board is a collection of assholes and I don’t belong to it and if they’re assholes enough to pay 4,900 francs per window for a lick of white paint I’m glad for you all but don’t count on me, Monsieur Tambourini, don’t count on me to goosestep through the building! I’m yelling in the restaurant and Genevieve has found her smile again, I’m off to a good start. I move on to my vacation in Norway, to Serge Goulandri, our osteopath, whose gradually eroding positivism is a joy to us both, Lionel and me, as we finally watch the first glints of despair dawn over his view of life. During one of his sessions, Goulandri complains that he loses his sense of humor when he’s depressed. That’s because you haven’t hit bottom, Lionel explains. Oh, okay, Goulandri says, nodding profoundly. Genevieve laughs. I move on to my illness, always an entertaining topic, I complain about my stomach, I’ve ballooned right up, Genevieve, I disgust myself, I complain about my stomach and Michel my son-in-law (pharmacists think they’re doctors) says you eat too fast, that’s why you’ve got a poor digestion. In the Tao-te-Ching, interjects my daughter, who’s going further and further afield in search of material to shore up the weightiness of her pronouncements, the Taoists say you have to chew each mouthful sixty times before you swallow. To which I reply they’ve never been in Drancy, these guys.1

  Genevieve is beaming beatifically and we crack open a bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges. After a quick detour to Dacimiento, I get to you. My son, Genevieve, I start, my son . . . the my son comes out really well, the tone is interrogative, which road should I take, where should I begin? But my boy I don’t go anywhere, I halt at the boundary of a subject I launched into, admittedly, in a mischievous tone, I’ve barely said my son and a feeling of defeat sinks the jester in me, my son I say and I see, far away at the end of a corridor, a child bathed in yellow light, in a Zorro costume, sitting in front of an aquarium. You’re not playing Zorro? I say to him. Papa, play the invincible one, you cry as you run toward me. No, I don’t have time. Oh, please! I do two or three lunges as the invincible one. You wave your sword and try to get me. I dodge around the furniture in our apartment back then, thinking one day I won’t be up to being the invincible one anymore, he’ll catch me every time. Genevieve takes my arm: “Jean-Louis Hauvette!” she hisses in a whisper.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Behind you, there on the right, don’t turn around, it’s Jean-Louis Hauvette.”

  “Who’s Jean-Louis Hauvette?”

  “The man who killed Leo.”

  “Leo was assassinated?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “By this man?”

  “Yes.”

  I turn around furtively and see the back of a man, sitting alone at a table by the window.

  “Can you see his face in the glass?” says Genevieve in a whisper. “Samuel, be nice, stand up, walk past him, and get a discreet look at him.”

  “This man killed Leo?”

  “He’s responsible for his death.”

  “I’m going.”

  I go. I pretend to be going to the men’s room and make a little detour to come back past the window. “I saw him.”

  “Old?”

  “My age.”

  “Good-looking?”

  “Ricardo Montalban after eighteen hours on the bus.”

  “That’s him. Eyes?”

  “Pale, from what I could see.”

  “It’s him. Would someone recognize me, do you think? Have I changed a lot? We haven’t seen each other for twenty years.”

  “Who was he?”

  “My lover.”

  “Genevieve, I’m not following you at all, Genevieve.”

  “Jean-Louis Hauvette was the lover I took to save myself from Leopold,” she says in a low voice, finishing what’s in her glass. “I told you, Leo had no understanding of the speed of life.”

  “And your husband?”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “You’re making me dizzy, Genevieve.”

  “Abramowitz had nothing to do with any of this. My God, he can see me reflected in the glass. He doesn’t recognize me. Women change more than men do.”

  “How did he kill Leo?”

  “The two of us killed him together.”

  Genevieve falls silent. I wait. We sit for a moment without saying a word. “You amaze me,” she says finally. “I would have thought you had more emancipated ideas.”

  “How horrible!” Again that exquisite laughter. “I admit,” I say, “that I’m more inclined to accept your criminal behavior than your lovers.”

  “Same thing. I was quick to set aside my sentimental tendencies. And I ha
ve never confused love and happiness. If I was unoccupied in my own home, I was unoccupied not the way a bored woman is unoccupied, but as a man waiting for a war to start that he’s been preparing for. I don’t know which Leo you knew, but the one I knew was a gambler and ravenous. Leopold Fench was war. I would, I think, have been an adversary on his own level if he’d shown himself more present on the battlefield. Don’t look so lugubrious, my dear, I was trying on a style just to amuse you! There’s only one truly sad thing in all this, and it’s that I can talk about it all with such indifference. I would have preferred to be inconsolable. I trust people who are inconsolable, they’re the only ones who reassure me about eternity.”

  “You’re inconsolable, Genevieve.”

  “Ah? . . . maybe. Hauvette,” she says, after another silence, taking a quick glance at the window, “Hauvette was nothing. The important thing in my liaison with this man was that Leo should hear about it. Hauvette in and of himself was nonexistent. The daughter of a mutual friend was getting married. Leo was supposed to come with his wife. Paul Abramowitz was chasing wild salmon in Canada (I had settled the Hauvette question with Abramowitz, made all the easier by the fact that he knew him and thought he was homosexual). I knew that the Fenches would be arriving late because Leo was coming back from the country. My plan was simple and good. To show myself with Hauvette during the first part of the evening and then disappear under some pretext or other before they arrived. You’re interested in these women’s stories,” she says suddenly. “Frankly Samuel, you disappoint me.”