by Yasmina Reza
We clink glasses in silence. And in silence she and I contemplate, I by dint of twisting around so that I can see him reflected in the glass, the remains of Jean-Louis Hauvette, murderer of Leopold Fench.
The remains don’t amount to much, if truth be told, but then what would remain of an old man sitting alone at a table on Place des Ternes, watching the shadows of passing traffic behind a window?
“Were you angry at him?”
“Terribly.”
“Until this evening?”
“No, not anymore, this evening,” she murmurs, stricken.
We agree that pity has a catastrophic effect on all forms of vitality.
By hating him unflinchingly (and Hauvette was all the more to be hated because unjustly accused), Genevieve had kept Hauvette in focus. She had saved him from old age and oblivion. For as long as anger and resentment lasted, their pitiful story endured too. A slightly hunched back, a general air of solitude, and Genevieve was undone. Everything was undone. Because the only reality is subjective. Enter pity, and Genevieve, Hauvette, and even Leo had all reverted to insignificance. Enter pity and the eroding effects of time (are they the same thing? yes) and the episode in the rue Charlot and the death that followed, and the life that followed, are no more than minute, infinitesimally minute dislocations.
Disturb God.
Take a little step back so that He can enter the world, every day, and several times a day, and your whole life long.
I cannot boast of having taken it. That little step. Not even for a single day. Not even once, I’m ashamed to say, my boy, without expecting a response, without hoping for a hearing. The Jew, the real Jew, says to God, I have obeyed You, come, I’ve made room for you in our world, and I ask nothing, absolutely nothing, from you.
Disturb God. This, yes, this I have done. But you see there are no laws that govern this enterprise. And life, my boy, doesn’t like being disturbed. Mankind aspires to comfort. To disturb life is to take the road of genuine desperation.
“Genevieve, everything beyond the immediate moment is unreal. Soon all three of us will be dead and buried. Let’s invite Jean-Louis Hauvette to join us.”
“How do I look?”
“Beautiful.”
“Old?”
“No.”
“So go.”
Jean-Louis Hauvette is finishing a sole. I say, excuse me, and I tell him that a woman he hasn’t seen for a long time would like to speak to him. He listens to me and turns round toward Genevieve. Then something happens that is totally unforeseen. Genevieve looks up in my direction, makes a gesture I don’t understand, and starts to laugh, laugh uncontrollably, into her napkin. Jean-Louis Hauvette looks at her for a moment and turns back to me. “Who is it?” he asks.
“Genevieve Abramowitz,” I say.
“I’m glad I amuse this person. I have no idea who she is,” he says, sticking a fork into his last potato.
“But you are Jean-Louis Hauvette, aren’t you?” I try stupidly.
“Not at all,” he says, dismissing me.
My son—what should I have said?
Are you going to go on and on fucking around like this? A little thrill in Malaysia, a little dose of culture in Jordan, then three months off with more people who like to fuck around in the Luberon. The world is within reach of absolutely anybody these days. And everything is familiar, everything is overrun. Not one place left untouched. I finally have a certain sympathy for the Afghans and all religious fanatics in general. You’re not going to go visiting them, at least. Whole herds of you aren’t going to go trash the slopes of Pamir.
My son.
Did you open the fridge? Have you taken in the sad sight of the fridge? Here or in the rue Ampère, same fridge, same sad sight. Nancy doesn’t give a damn, she’s above these trivialities, and Dacimiento never buys what I like. When I open the fridge now, what do I see? Caramel puddings, cream cheese with fruit, and yogurt drinks. For Jerome, obviously. Jerome, who’s here three times a month, sets the rules in my fridge. Jerome is apparently a particularly precocious child. At the age of two and a half, he can make rhymes. The other day your sister said “bread and butter, see,” . . . “pretty face on me” was Jerome’s immediate response. General bedazzlement. In which I joined. I’m not an expert, maybe it is extraordinary, age two and a half, to say pretty face on me when someone says bread and butter, see. In any case, he’s a coddled, loved, and praised little creature, and he’s off to a good start, as far as I can make out. You, my poor boy, you never had any Pop Tarts or Dannon yogurts (the brand names stick in my brain the moment I close the fridge), I don’t remember your very first efforts at poetry and if I loved you, I certainly didn’t build an altar to your status as a child. Nancy’s and your mother’s version: I traumatized you. The examples they quote me are ridiculous. One day—one episode among others— your mother and I went to see your teacher, you were beginning to read and write. The teacher was satisfied: I’m pleased, she said, he’s become socialized this year; last year he didn’t join in the other children’s games, he stayed in his own world and asked questions that are not appropriate at that age. Your mother and the teacher congratulated themselves on this happy development, and instead of joining in, I gave you the cold shoulder (a child of five!) because I was incapable of being pleased that you were mixing with other children and becoming part of the herd. Another story about school, from later on, you came home from high school with the results of a math test. You had come fifth and you were over the moon at coming fifth (you were usually second from the bottom). Instead of promising you a model Spitfire, I apparently said to you in a disappointed voice, “And why not first?” Upon which you burst into tears, ran into your room, and slammed the door howling, “You’re never satisfied, you’re so mean!” Jerome will certainly be able to tell his father he’s so mean without causing the least upset. In my day, nobody talked to his father like that. I went straight into your room and gave you a hiding.
The funny part of it is that instead of hardening you up, I produced a weakling. And I didn’t even make an enemy of you. If only you were my enemy, at least! In the spineless perversity of your inertia, I detect indifference, even a whiff of condescension. If I was wrong, I’ve certainly been punished for it. I’ve created a perfect stranger.
Nancy, who likes to sing your praises—if you go in for generosity, the conciliating stepmother is a favorite tune to play—had this curious thing to say: “One accepts things from one’s children one wouldn’t accept from anyone else.” “How do you mean, my love” (I’m as gentle as a lamb with Nancy from now on), “is that a victory or a surrender?” “Neither one nor the other,” she said, exasperated, “it’s just a fact.” I have never argued with Nancy. During the blessed time when she was depressed, I used to take her indifference for agreement and since she started priding herself on being able to cross swords with me intellectually, I keep my mouth shut. So you are going to be the first to savor the answer I didn’t give her. Children, Nancy, I could have said to her if time’s abrading passage hadn’t separated us as much as it has, children, my dear little Nancy, are the lowest rung on the ladder of human desires. If we conceive them, we do so at least in the hope of having someone to talk to at the end of our lives. I am already in the process, Nancy, of accepting my old age and the defeat of my body. I accept that I’ve lost the game of life in the same way that one loses at solitaire, I accept that, just as I accept these days that things are slowing down, I can even accept that there’s nothing going on, provided my body holds out a little longer, I accept that my light is slowly going out and I accept the ordinary death that will step into my place. I am in the process, Nancy, of accepting how modest a chapter in time mine has been.
So on top of all this, my love, must I also adapt myself to the inanity of my descendants? Under the pretext that these are my genes, must I forgive someone whose views of the world make me sick to my stomach? In a word, must I accept—the very thought makes me shiver—that the final perso
n in my life is a worm whose ideal is not to get in a fight with anyone? In my philosophy, Nancy, I would have said to her, a father wants his son not to be like the rest of humanity. In my philosophy, what is good for everyone else is not good for my son. I couldn’t give a fuck, I would have said to Nancy, though she wouldn’t have allowed me to go that far, I don’t give a fuck, please understand, that this boy spends his time flocking from Java to Bermuda and back again, and if I keep coming back to this more than is necessary, it’s because every mention of this ludicrous geography feeds my sense of mockery. But I don’t give a fuck how he lives his life, I don’t give a fuck if he’s in this place or that, whether he’s doing this or that is a matter of total indifference to me, I don’t give a fuck if his mediocrity is, in society’s view, more or less acceptable. Whatever he does and wherever he goes, whether he elbowed his way in or trumpeted his lack of ambition, my son has adapted to the modern world. I have sired a well-adapted man (read: adapted to everyone except his father). I have given life to someone who, like a mutating fly—I read in Science and the Future that a breed of flies that got trapped in the London Underground while it was being built mutated a hundred times faster than normal in order to survive—ends up bowing to the exigencies of the world, sees what’s reasonable and makes himself at home there, finds a comfortable little niche or two and settles in to wait for his own extinction. When you were a teenager, my boy, you had a sort of attack of nerves, an obsession with revenge, something set fire to you. I approved of that son. He was hostile to me, but I recognized him. You defied me with that ridiculous thirst for the absolute that everyone has at that age and I said to myself, The boy is as obstreperous as one could hope for, he’s going to manage to break out. But you didn’t break out of anything. Once the upheavals of youth were over, you went back to your place in the ranks of the average. No more trace of rebellion. No more trace of revenge. No more trace of passion. Everything that nourishes a man and fortifies him and lifts him out of the conditions of his existence, you consigned to oblivion. You traded fever for restraint. And you did it before you’d even set foot in inhospitable territory, before even daring to take a few steps into the kingdoms of uncertainty. You were so quick to fear for your own skin, my poor child. Like the rest of the troop of your wormlike friends, you know that every act has its price, and so from the beginning you chose never to stand out again. Avoiding suffering, that’s your whole horizon. Avoiding suffering is your substitute for the heroic epic. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present my son, a cut flower from the gang of cut flowers. I would have liked you better as a criminal or a terrorist than as a militant in the cause of happiness.
I would have liked him better as a criminal than as a militant for happiness, I’d have said to Nancy if the solitude of marriage hadn’t rendered any exchange pointless. “What dramatics!” she would have said and smiled as she stroked my face, if the collapse of our marriage hadn’t rendered any caress impossible. My ideal man—let us admit right away he’s not exactly common—my ideal man, Nancy, I would have gone on in the flush of tenderness, is the man who has chosen ferocity. He doesn’t adapt, he doesn’t deny the hatred that sustains and shapes him, he’s not concerned with survival if it means he has to renounce himself like the English fly. He doesn’t say yes to the world. He doesn’t cower in his pathetic little hole like your mentor André Petit-Pautre, my love. Petit-Pautre comes home with an article about his book, his wife swallows his cock, and he believes that humanity is a great success. That’s how people live. My son also believes that humanity is a great success. You only have to witness his little air of superiority when he comes home from visiting one of his small tribes. My ideal man doesn’t give a fuck about being accepted by the Bambaras or the Talking Heads either. He doesn’t want to be loved, he wants to conquer. He doesn’t want to heal himself, he wants to win. My ideal man has the power to summon the dawn, would have been the climax of my peroration as I watched for the tears to spring to Nancy’s eyes. But Nancy, who cries ten times a day over nothing, is immune to this flight of ideas.
All this reminds me of a recent conversation I had with Lionel. Lionel phones up, scandalized, because he’s just discovered that in Jewish tradition life is accorded supreme value. “You must choose life,” he intones disgustedly, “Deuteronomy, last Book of Moses. What’s all this stuff about you must choose life? Explain this humiliation!” As I’m stumbling my way through a commentary on the nonliteralness of the commandment (I’m always equipped with some driveling half-assed positive explanation for every Jewish saying), Lionel bellows down the receiver, “Long live the Greeks!”
Making any such speech to Nancy would have undone me. He who reviles his fellowmen is soon undone, because what he wishes to make understood is quite simply beyond words.
We are alone. My child. Our solitude is immense. Total. And there is virtually no link between one solitude and another. Solitude is long. The joys that connect us leave almost no trace.
Every day the world shrivels me and today, it is the world inside me that has shriveled. That is how things are. In the end, I will have been vanquished by life. As it vanquished Leopold Fench. As it vanquishes all who desire it intensely. Nothing can reach the peak of our desires, my child. Except solitude. My entire life has slipped past between these two words. These words draw the arc of my little interval in time. God has withdrawn, it seems, in order to create a space that was not His before. God, who was All, to whom lack was foreign, had the catastrophic idea of withdrawing so that others (another concept that was foreign to Him) could experiment with this curse. On the question of life’s inadequacy, Arthur (astonishing how everything about him is coming back to me all of a sudden) once accused me of lacking humility. Look, he argued, look at the Einsteins, the Lubitsches, the Bruno Walters, etc. And on went the list of names, some familiar, some not, of people who were more or less exiles, more or less storm-tossed by history or life, whose joie de vivre, optimism, and lack of self-pity were supposed to teach me a lesson. To which I would have liked to present my own opposing list, forged in the same adversity but a little less frisky, but my unfamiliarity with the cultural world meant that no names leapt to mind (nowadays I have a list that gets added to every day, and would floor him).
Lack of humility. It’s possible. But why should I be humble? Humble before what, before whom?
Accept whatever life offers us that is good, said the idiot. And what has it offered me, you cretin, that I didn’t seize for myself? The only reality, Arthur, lies wrapped in my desires. The world doesn’t make offerings.