Desolation

by Yasmina Reza

  Most of the people I meet, including my daughter, have only the most trivial grasp of time.

  Nancy has developed literary pretensions too. More precisely, since I do have to admit she’s a woman I’ve always seen with a book in her hand, pretty much, Nancy has suddenly been captivated by a writer: André Petit-Pautre (you can easily guess what temptations this name sets off in me). You don’t know him. Nobody knows him. Except for me, because she sometimes invites him to dinner with his wife. Petit-Pautre is her mentor. And our guest, from now on. I remarked that in a world where everyone writes, it’s no surprise that André Petit-Pautre writes too. The other day Lionel quoted me that wonderful thing Enesco said about Bach: the soul of my soul. I said to Lionel, who’s always loved both books and music, “Can you name a simple text that has been the soul of your soul?”

  “No. Words can’t reach that high. And the soul doesn’t read.”

  I went back to Chopin. I could almost say I took him up for the first time, because I had hated him so much for so many years. Aside from a few moments of Romantic absentmindedness in my youth, I’ve always loathed Chopin. And I went back to him thanks to Samson François, a guy I’ve never been able to listen to either before now, because of his name. Samson, okay, but François! Samson Apfelbaum, absolutely, but not Samson François. Stuck in traffic, I turn on classical radio: “Nocturne.” I leave it on. It’s beautiful. Here you are, sinking back down to Chopin in your old age, bravo, I say to myself. Who’s the pianist? Samson François. Yet another surrender. What do you want, I don’t care that much anymore.

  Your sister who is intent on my achieving cultivation asked me if I’d been to the Picasso museum. I told her that not only had I never gone to the Picasso museum but I never would go to the Picasso museum. There’s too much enthusiasm about him, I said. I hate the enthusiasm of the masses for beauty. Generally speaking, all these people who haunt exhibitions and plod around for hours on end revolt me. Your sister, who’s never had a trace of humor or detachment and hasn’t acquired them from her husband either, though I forgive him because he’s a pharmacist and at least I can discuss medicines with him, shrugs her shoulders and asks me with secret sorrow how I spend my days. I think, I tell her, about the absurdity of human effort. You educate people and when you’re finally coming down the home stretch what you have to listen to is them proselytizing for literature and the Picasso museum. That’s how I spend my days, I tell her emphatically, in these sorts of meditations. “You’re interested in politics,” says Nancy. “He’s always very interested in politics,” says poor Nancy, making nice, because my being described as dense has upset her and she’s not trying to come to my assistance but she does want to rehabilitate herself as a wife. “You’re mistaken, dear,” I’m obliged to correct her. “I’m interested in events around the planet the way Lionel watches cars and people passing from his window. Which is to say indifferent to everything except the movement.” Lumping them together, what never changes about these women is that they never believe me. They take everything I say as a series of pathetic and inappropriate poses. Which encourages me to the worst extremes. I think that by the end of the day, I’ve asserted, talking about Jerome—oh, yes, Jerome, there’s another example, yes, he’s my grandson but after all he’s only two and a half and sometimes I call him Jeremy or Thomas, which doesn’t mean a thing, I hear perfectly well but I just don’t hang on to Jerome as his name, your sister takes this as an unforgivable provocation, she doesn’t imagine for a second that I could have forgotten the child’s name—so, talking about Jerome, I’ve said what I think, following on from what had become an extended conversation, which is that I’d prefer him to become a tyrant rather than some card-carrying union faggot. Sounds of horrified clucking, and then to close off any recurrence of Dacimiento as a subject of discussion, I state that the only worthwhile system is feudalism, which had the merit of producing either midgets who kept their mouths shut—and didn’t go around driving us nuts with the Picasso museum and other cultural flab—or knights and revolutionaries, epic types who wielded the sword and the lance. These days we get placards and balloons and women like you who sing. Me personally, I said again, I prefer people screaming and out for blood, waving pikes. At least they make an impression. “Does getting old involve becoming a caricature of yourself?” your sister interjects to show off her cunning and demonstrate that she’s my equal by insulting me. A few years ago I would have slapped her for less. What do you know about aging, you poor creature, how do you even dare use the word after having the complacency to add to humanity by producing a supplementary Jerome. “Getting old,” I said with some restraint, “means to be done with compassion.”

  I finished Sunday overcome by loneliness and despair. I’ve always imagined despair to be linked to a particular view of life. Today I discover a despair that is independent of time.

  Explain to me the word happiness. I’m willing to believe there’s a part of one’s being that provides for it.

  I’ve caught a glimpse of it.

  Death is in us. It gradually gains ground. Little by little, everything dissolves and becomes the same. My child, after a certain age, everything is the same as everything else and there’s nothing that serves as a goal anymore. And if God, for which I thank Him, hadn’t given me such a horror of boredom, I could end up like those old dullards you see sitting on public benches contemplating the victory of time.

  At the garden show at Longchamp I hear someone say my name. Some unknown woman is smiling at me. Genevieve, she says. Genevieve Abramowitz. She looks like a little tortoise in her summer dress, short hair, eyes still pretty behind her glasses. Genevieve Abramowitz who was once the grand passion of Leo Fench. “I wouldn’t have expected to meet you here,” she says, “after all these years.”

  We look at each other for a moment, unable to find the right words. “I didn’t know you were interested in gardening.”

  “I’ve always had a thing for flowers. I have a house now.”

  I look at this little lady with her helmet of white hair pulling a little plant wagon full of gardenias and I think of Leo under the earth in Montparnasse cemetery. “And you?” I say.

  “I have a pretense at a balcony that I keep spruced up. It gives me something to do.”

  She says it gives me something to do and smiles apologetically. Immediately I think, me too, it gives me something to do, what else is going on here but me giving myself something to do, the two of us are giving ourselves something to do, citizens henceforth of a world in which desire no longer exists. A world in which compost and gardenias have replaced our possibilities of becoming something more. Compost, gardenias, guaranteed exchange rates, little deals here and there, playing the stock market, and getting sick become a substitute for living. A world without a Promised Land, without burns, without victories and defeats, a world where impatience has become terminally beside the point.

  O God, grant me the power to relive one day, one hour of the era of obsessions!

  Make me a lunatic, a fanatic, a criminal if you want. Give me back a horror of peace and quiet in any form. In the deadly light of the sun at Longchamp stands a man who disgusts me, a worm-eaten creature, a shadow, a man from the suburbs of manhood.

  “Every year,” she goes on, “I go and leave a stone on Leopold’s grave along with a little bunch of violets. His wife wrote me a letter after he died. She knew.”

  I nod. What is there to say to that? The body can do what it likes, the soul will tell itself any story it chooses. We are only kissing the masks that hide the face of abandonment. The ending of Leo Fench and Genevieve Abramowitz, whom we watched feverish and sleepless: three withered flower stalks and a pebble on a slab.

  She knew, she said. I nod with appropriate gravity. Two words which are supposed to re-conjure the illusion, two words to restore some apparent significance to the affair. What did she know, poor thing? What do any of us know, I thought, standing there among the flowers in these hopelessly unsuitable surrounding
s, since everything effaces itself with the passage of time.

  Genevieve Abramowitz gives me news of Arthur, whom, with his wife, she sees regularly. “And you,” she asks, “do you still see him?”

  “Less than I used to,” I say.

  “He’s just bought an apartment in Israel.”

  “Arthur? Where?”

  “Jerusalem.”

  “What on earth for?” I yell.

  “To spend part of the year there,” she answers, astonished.

  “I’m appalled.”

  I immediately think of your brother-in-law Michel, and his discovery of the Jewish Ramblers of Île-de-France, which gives him a system for declaring he’s a little bit Jewish. Between genocide and his Sunday exertions he’s found a way to weave together his roots and his observances. Michel Cukiermann, my son-in-law: heir of suffering, pillar of the community, contemporary stand-in for the sons of Abraham, disciple of Moses. Which he’s turned to account by becoming pro-Palestinian and talking incessantly about peace. Someone you should get on with really well. Listen, I told him, let’s settle this once and for all. You want peace in Israel. Okay. Why, one wonders. You want peace over there so as not to mess up relations between Montreuil and Roissy. Ireland, where things have been going on for centuries, doesn’t enter your mind, Yugoslavia bores you, you’ve had it with Kosovo up to here, Rwanda and Cambodia zilch, but you want peace in Israel the same way Arthur has just invested in real estate in Jerusalem. A flag planted for humanism and a little patch of ground for progressive souls in the new territories. That’s your way of rebuilding the temple of Solomon.

  Genevieve Abramowitz was a very fine woman. A woman with whom you could laugh, which is rare. “I’m appalled,” I said to her, “all these Jews without duties, without religious imperatives, buying their own redemption,” I go on, suddenly fired up.

  She laughs. “You haven’t changed.”

  “Nor you. I always liked your laugh and you still have it. To tell you the truth, I had a row with Arthur. Arthur recently told me to make a distinction between reality and my imagination. Arthur thinks the world can be considered from an objective point of view and that he’s the man to do it. The only cause of my unease, according to him, is my incurably partial view of things. He’s right. And I’m sure it was a totally objective decision, springing from his absolutely unarbitrary take on reality, when our friend Arthur Sadi, of whom no one could say that he’d breathed the air of synagogues to excess, bought himself a passport to his Jewish identity in the Holy Land.”

  “But his son just married an Israeli girl!”

  “So? If my son marries a girl from Tahiti, which is far from impossible in the circumstances, I’m going to go bury myself in Tahiti?”

  “You know that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s worse. He’s taking advantage of a marriage which is a surprise in itself, excuse me, Genevieve, to assuage some concocted nationalism that’s even more repellent than its genuine twin. Arthur will have a grandson called Ariel or Boaz, which is, I have to admit, certainly better than Jerome, and he’ll get into fights with everyone who fails to make the journey to be there for the circumcision. It all makes me sick. Tahiti doesn’t lead you that far astray. Tahiti is not an act. You have to tell me about this marriage, Genevieve. Because here’s a boy I saw being born, whose development I’ve followed with interest, with whom I always wished that my own son would have made friends, but he refused—you were horribly standoffish, my dear— a boy, all in all, who was infinitely superior to his father and whom, as you can see, I would never have suspected of needing to have his own Jewish girl, let alone an Israeli.”

  “What’s the point, my friend,” she replies smack in the middle of the flowerbeds in the park at Longchamp. “What’s the point of using all these definitions with me? I’m an old lady now, I’m no longer susceptible to the charms of contrarians like you. You think you’re being provocative and you’re just being predictable” (your sister used the word dense, remember?). “Unlike Arthur I don’t think there’s any reason to reproach you for the blinkered way you see the world, but why do you feel obliged to belittle it at every given moment? Your standpoint on this story is the standpoint of someone who’s fallen out of love. As a standpoint it’s devoid of affection, it doesn’t carry much authority, if you want to know what I think, and it certainly doesn’t merit being broadcast. People we no longer love no longer carry any credit with us and everything they do seems artificial. When we’re in love, obviously,” she went on after a hesitation, “we blindly cultivate every magic pull of enchantment . . . while you were drawn to Arthur, you would have accepted the apartment in Jerusalem and you would have been happy about the marriage because, please forgive me,” she adds by way of a final thrust, “you shouldn’t make yourself out to be less of a Jew than you are. You’re striking a bit of an attitude.”

  “My dear Genevieve, last night I was killing time in front of the TV by watching some variety show that was raising money for charity. At a certain moment a singer delivered himself of the pronouncement that ‘As long as people love one another, the world will be saved.’ I hear this, Genevieve, the words love and hope being thrown out into empty air and all I want is to declare war on the planet. From a biological perspective, my dear Genevieve, I cannot tolerate any speeches about virtue—I don’t mean yours, which is charming and comes from someone who is authentically good and fine (and besides it’s not a speech about virtue, it’s a reproach)—I told you this anecdote to show you just how incapable I am, alas, of moderation. At the very least I know I should moderate my words. Either keeping quiet or cooling down whatever is boiling inside us should be within the grasp of any civilized human being, but I’ve ceased to want to play that role, you know, which means I’ve also ceased doing damage to my health, because always trying to be elegant and balanced was proving fatal for my nerves. No less fatal, to be honest, than the unbridled expansiveness of my moods. So, you see, I’m delivered twice over. Delivered from the paradise of temperance and delivered from the obligation of being in harmony with one’s body. No, Genevieve, I would not at some other time have accepted the apartment in Jerusalem. At some other time there would not have been an apartment in Jerusalem, at some other time Arthur would never have given in to the farce of reinventing himself as an exile. At the time you’re referring to, Arthur couldn’t endure the heat, he hated old stones and bigots, and had no thought of contributing his quota to Jewish history. At that particular time, Arthur wasn’t yet considering the world from an objective standpoint, a crowning piece of nonsense, born of who knows what, which is just tolerance by another name. Because that’s the word, the defining word at the heart of his speech, tolerance. Like a number of people who resemble him, over time Arthur concocted himself a persona of the modern man with his panoply of noble attitudes, his frenzied openmindedness, and his pact with mediocrity. No one is more contemporary than our friend Arthur. That said, Genevieve, you’re not wrong to insist that the same act doesn’t have the same value when performed by different people. If you yourself were to buy an apartment in Jerusalem, it wouldn’t be of any importance to me, any more than a pied-àterre in Cagnes-sur-Mer, who knows why that came to my mind, I’ve never said Cagnes-sur-Mer in my life before. In Arthur’s case, alas, the proceeding is not a trivial one. Arthur buys in Jerusalem to become a member of a club. The twentieth century has invented the Jew without constraints, without obligations, and without a purpose in life. Here’s someone who has lived unwittingly as the hero of his own existence and suddenly, without much of an investment, in his old age wants to become a citizen of all humanity. Member of the club of liberated Jews. What could be more select than that? Zionism and tolerance. Residency and free will. What could be more irreproachable? As for me, who have no desire to belong to any community, I don’t want to have a measured step and I don’t want to have a measured spirit, my dear, that’s the wrong pair of clippers you put in your wagon, let me show you something better and
then we’ll talk about your balcony.”

  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. ”