Desolation

by Yasmina Reza

  Stand up, Genevieve, I said, in the living room in rue Ampère, where we found ourselves after walking the whole length of the Park Monceau and sitting for quite some while in the rotunda. Stand up, Genevieve, I commanded after we’d shared a third of a surviving bottle of vodka. Stand up, come on, we’ll move the armchairs, let’s push back the chairs and the table, I’ll close the curtains, Genevieve, and make rue Ampère and Paris and time all disappear, give me your hand and we’ll dance, Jewish Songs for Cello and Piano, present from my son-in-law Michel, never listened to them before, it’s just like opening a bottle of some ancient nectar with you but I think we’ve drunk enough, let’s dance instead, this evening we’ll dance to Uncertainty and the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre, I was born somewhere between Samara and Kazan on the Volga, somewhere between deserted roads and deserted villages, I’m going to die in the bed in that bedroom next door, a good bed to croak in, as I said to Nancy the other day, she was lying on the daybed for once in her life as was I, I said it’s perfect for keeping watch over someone who’s dying, you smile, Nancy, but that’s where you’ll be, in the armchair, I mean, my love, I’ll be in the bed. Frankly I don’t know which is the better spot. Let’s dance, Genevieve, the steppes are blanketed in white, there are no walls and no doors, the road we’re traveling doesn’t matter anymore. The little pre-Columbian goat has lost a leg, Rosa Dacimiento threw it out, a little leg made of clay, what does she think she’s doing? In the great tradition of Audoulia, I run the cloth over the bookcase slowly to begin with, then speed up as I get closer to the clay statue, laugh, Genevieve, laugh, I do so love your laugh, I’ll do the impossible, go anywhere, if it’ll make you laugh. Audoulia was our pre-Dacimiento, Spanish, my boy as a mere child made model fighter planes, and she broke them all dusting, she didn’t dust, she dueled with fighter squadrons, I miss her today, just as I miss everything to do with times past, whether it’s Audoulia, a leather bag, or the smell of fresh-sawn lumber, I’m immensely nostalgic, Genevieve, incurably nostalgic, it’s something that can wreck your reputation in a minute these days, if you’re nostalgic you’re one of our world’s bastards, I hate our world. Nancy is in Brest, at her parents’. My wife Nancy, Genevieve, is forging right ahead, and since she’s been forging right ahead she’s no longer pretending to jump out of the window, she no longer rolls around on the ground, she beats me periodically and that makes me feel a rediscovered tenderness for her because this madness makes me remember her old fragility, I used to love Nancy, I loved her fits, I loved her laugh, she had the laugh I love, your laugh, and Lionel’s. Arthur’s before he became the universal man. She called me at the office to say I’m off to kill myself, do you realize this is the last time you’ll hear me on the phone, I said but where are you, she started to cry, I’m stuck in traffic on the avenue de la Grande Armée, even when I need to kill myself I can’t get out of Paris. That was the Nancy I loved. I went to get her, I took her shopping, she spent a century choosing a face powder or a pair of shoes, she gave it the same sincerity, the same seriousness she had brought an hour before to the idea of killing herself, I waited for her in overheated rooms, sitting on makeshift stools, we came out clutching parcels, she hung on my neck and kissed me, half-laughing, half-crying, and I ended up crying with her and we both cried over how hard life is and the price of shoes, why our paths are diverging like this, why she’s become this socially engaged person, driven from dawn to dusk by the world as adventure, once she didn’t give a shit, now that she’s in love with illegal aliens from Mali she’s no longer in love with me, since she’s come down on the side of generosity, she’s out to kill me. Let’s dance. What we’re listening to is a Prayer. Let’s dance, Genevieve, before us there was nobody and after us there will be nobody. The world goes on, but for nothing. Let’s dance. I was born in a country that existed in a different time, on white plains, I am incurably nostalgic for empty villages, empty roads, empty sounds, how am I supposed to follow my wife in all her humanistic bustle? I’m happy to go back into winter where I came from. Maybe that’s the distant place that gave me my taste for gray light and it’s from that distant place that the sounds of strings echo in my ears, continually, like a ghostly relic. Let’s do a spin. I admire how light you are on your feet. Lionel, who watches the world from his window, loves the gray of the sky as much as I do, at least he’s sure, he says, that the weather isn’t pleasing anyone at all, and with a little luck, he says, melancholy will manage to overtake an idiot or two and you’ll feel a little less alone, a tiny little bit less alone, he says, than on those National Cultural Heritage days when you see clusters of happy people going past in shorts like fat bunches of grapes, shorts should be banned in towns, he says, even in small towns, shorts should be permitted in open country and only in open country, and then only in autumn colors, towns should have a ban on shorts and happy people, he says in conclusion. Every day, Genevieve, we talk on the phone. Every morning we call each other, we almost don’t speak to each other anymore except on the phone, we’re that close. We no longer need a face to talk to. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell Lionel that Arthur has bought himself an apartment in Jerusalem. Maybe he knows and he’s had the tact, knowing how coolly I would view it, to keep quiet. I would like to know what Lionel thinks on this matter. And Arthur too, I miss. I miss him. Not just at checkers, where despite the fact that his game had really gone down, he was the only possible partner. Despite the fact that his game had gone down alarmingly, which he did out of friendship, another discipline. I miss him because I laughed with him too. There was a time when Arthur and I could laugh about the general failure of life. Arthur, I don’t know if you know, almost separated from Vera because of a dream. He woke up one morning and said to Vera, “You’re horrible. You’re a horrible woman.” Vera, in his dream, was taking him to lunch. Contrary to their usual habits, Vera is driving the BMW. It’s supposed to be midday, but they’re driving in twilight down the sandy bed of a dried-up river, sort of like the Garonne at the end of its course. They’re driving, alone, in some sort of estuary lined with truck stops, they meet the occasional construction vehicle, pass a gravel pit that’s operating at full capacity. There are boats pulled up in pools of water against the banks, you can tell that there’s free passage only once a day, you can tell the tide’s going to come in, suddenly Arthur tries to grab the wheel and yells, Quicksand—the BMW’s going to sink! Vera replies, All you think about is your damn car, you’re such a gutless wonder, I’m never going to take you anywhere again. When he wakes up, Arthur analyzes the dream, he goes back to the sand, the mud, the rising tide, the gravel, the truck stops pretending to be port taverns, the smell of fish, he thinks about the twilight, he thinks about the horrible reaction when he tried to save the BMW, which is to say their return, which is to say the two of them, and he says to himself, aha, that’s where she was taking me to lunch. She was actually taking me to death.

  That was my Arthur. Hypersensitive, irrational. Why, at the moment when there’s nothing more to lose, should he have to give up all claim to his own capriciousness? Embark on a quest for some sort of sorry coherence, at the moment when he should be shedding all inessentials and constructing a last-minute self, however pathetic. What’s the point? One day, Genevieve, it was a few years ago, I was driving along the quays at the Cours Albert I, on the opposite sidewalk, a man was skirting the wall, an old man with an astrakhan hat and a beige loden coat. He was walking at the pace old people walk, hands in his pockets, alone with his shadow in the sun. It was my father. I often think about that look, and how he never felt it on him. And I see this image again. An image stripped of its truth. He’s in Bagneux too. We won’t be lost when we get there, Genevieve. My father was what Dacimiento accuses me of being, a sort of cleanliness freak. His grave at Bagneux is of Euville stone. A white stone, plain, perfect for eternity but gets dirty easily. When I go to visit him, I take a plastic bag with an extra-hard-bristled brush, a sponge, and a bottle of water. And we two talk to each other as well, he says here you
are at last, my boy, Colette Waintraub, who has no sense of timing, has left this ridiculous pot of flowers on me, it blew over in the first gust of wind, result, everything’s a mess, it’s raining, there’s soil everywhere, patches under the pebbles, can you still read my name? I tell him you’re going to be pleased, Papa, I get out all my stuff, I kneel down, clear everything away, and I start scrubbing, rubbing away with the extra-hard brush, he says that’s good, you at least understand me, you’re the only one who understands me, I scrub away as hard as I can and he starts giving me orders just the way he used to tell me how to scrub his back or how to clean a bathtub, scrub, little one, there, there, right there, you dirty child, do that bit again, scrub the star, you can see it’s clogged up with earth, harder, that’s better. I stand up, I wheeze, after all I’m seventy-three years old, I’ve been bent over in my coat for ten minutes already, I put back the various pebbles on the grave, everything looks wonderful, and then I catch a glimpse of the sides and I see that the sides could do with a cleaning too. I’m saying to myself maybe it’s unnecessary—who pays attention to the sides?—when I feel a voice that’s getting impatient, oh, no, my friend, you’re going to finish it, don’t be sloppy, clean the whole thing, and I admit he’s right, and I kneel down again and I scrub the whole surround like a madman, the lichen, the mold, the gummed-on leaves, the encrusted earth, and when I finish, exhausted, his grave is like new and I say to him you’re happy, and he’s happy.

  My own son, Genevieve, trots around the globe. He’s thirty-eight years old and goes from one point on the map to the other and I don’t understand a thing. In the course of these wanderings my son frees himself from his wounds, abandons his storm-tossed soul and his inner lacerations, abandons me, and everything we were is thrown into the pit of oblivion. The road to happiness, Genevieve, is perhaps the road to oblivion. In October he’ll be back, we’ll see each other, and he will be amiable and patient and gentle. And to begin with I’ll be amiable and patient and gentle and I’ll say to him where’s the sense in all this? And I’ll wait for him to take my hand and reply where was the sense of all the rest of it? And then I’d say yes, when you come right down to it, where was the sense in all the rest of it? And we wouldn’t say another word and we’d take a walk through the bracken and everything would be in order.

  At the beginning, Genevieve, I’ll be amiable and patient and gentle, I’ll say explain the word happiness. You have put down roots in this world, my boy. Tell me, how did you do it? Nancy, dear little saint that she is, however, will already have put me on my guard: Stop provoking him, he doesn’t want to be happy (and listen to the disdain in that word) he wants to be in his proper place. —I’ll ask what does that mean, his proper place? —Being in his proper place, Nancy will retort, now that she’s so seriously well informed, is more than being happy. It means freeing yourself up, it means accepting that the most important thing is balance. It means calibrating your weight and your rhythm, like a planet revolving around the sun. You don’t wage battles with the outside world anymore, you no longer feel choked by the things you lack, you can even allow yourself to be sad. Your son, she will say by way of conclusion, is finding his proper place. At the beginning, Genevieve, I’ll be amiable and patient and gentle. But how do you remain amiable and patient and gentle when you’re being told your only son aspires to be floating in the ether. And how do you behave toward someone whose ideal, whose final goal is to be in his proper place? Who in the course of this quest (I’m borrowing the vocabulary from the Crusades) has freed himself of his wounds and his torments. What stuff is a man made of, who has freed himself of his wounds? And how does one behave toward someone who claims that from now on he is going to take a more serene view of things? It isn’t the serene view of things that wounds you, it’s the sheer voluptuous pretentiousness of letting you know. Everything in him is proclaiming his serene view of things, the way he sits on a chair, the way he walks, the way he does everything slowly, the way even his eyes are smooth. His eyes, in which, alas, what I see is not the serene view of things but indifference.

  I’ll say, Where’s the sense in all this? But he won’t take my hand and he won’t say the words I want to hear. There will be no words exchanged almost in silence, no unspoken understanding, no walk through the bracken. What there will be, unfortunately, on the one side is silence, and on the other, evidence of bitterness, evidence of injustice, lack of gentleness, lack of pity. An anatomy of melancholy.

  I’ll say, Explain the word happy.

  I don’t want their paraphrases, I don’t want their circumlocutions, I want the unadulterated word in all its terror, I want the word happy. I like dancing with you, Genevieve, I like your lightness, your hesitant grace. I would like to make you laugh again. Be patient, I can switch moods as I move from one foot to the other.

  He should take me in his arms, he should say come, Papa, I’m taking you with me, your friend Genevieve is right, the end of the road is Bagneux, so come to Mombasa and laugh with your son who’s as much of an idiot as the Italians in Chandolin forty years, ago, Papa, I’ll scrub your grave the way you scrubbed your father’s, I’ll take the brush and go several times a year, the stone will sparkle and shine, and you will give me your orders and we’ll laugh, and meantime while we wait, come with me, let’s play horses, the map will be our board, the place doesn’t matter, the only reality is inside us, and stop feeling alone, I’ll carry you if you want, I can laugh too, whatever you think, what’s the point of it all if you’re going to find yourself somewhere between Châlons and the rue Ampère waiting for death to snatch you away, you could just as well have been selling pasta in the South, you love sugo, the oil, the olives, the tomatoes and garlic, I don’t go chasing happiness but I don’t avoid it either, it would be such a great surprise if it popped out from behind a tree and hit us in the eye, like the picturesque, I’ll be glad to explain the word happy to you, Papa, it’s nothing like what you think, happy is laughing the way the two of you used to laugh, the way you laughed at the deathbed of your brother Benjamin when you stroked him and you said how beautiful you are, you’re at peace now, and I said you can’t actually say he’s beautiful, Papa, maybe it would be a good idea to close his mouth before his children get here, and we started to try to close his mouth with a dishcloth, you pushing on his jaw, me tying a knot and then tightening it as hard as I could at the top of his skull, and God how we laughed as we looked at him and you said hey, you didn’t blow it, and we were weeping with laughter when his children arrived and his son looked at his father all done up like an Easter egg and looked at us hooting with laughter and said what’s going on here? and we had to leave the room, do you remember, Papa, because otherwise we’d totally fall apart, and that’s what truth is, that’s the only truth, and all the rest is fakery masquerading as seriousness.

  He should take me in his arms and say all that to me, Genevieve, and everything would be in order. So please, my son, keep going with the inventory of laughter.

  He should say I remember you, Papa, when you prided yourself on being a king when it came to fast talking, you were getting your first orders of shirts from Korea, your specialty was late delivery, you used to be screaming down the telephone in English, even on Sundays, nobody was allowed into the living room, and next morning you said to your clients the boat will be here in a week and after a fortnight you said the boat has had engine trouble, and then you asked yourself okay what can I think up next and we said say there’s been a storm, Papa, and you said yes, good idea, children, there’s been a terrible storm, bring me the atlas and let’s see where it hit. And when the boat docked you got forty thousand shirts with three-quarter-length sleeves because the sleeve measurements you gave them were taken from the shoulder but the Koreans understood them as being taken from the neck. He should say I remember you, Papa, when you were the king of imprecision, he should say, Genevieve, our childhood home is not deserted, I can still hear a voice yelling, “The first person who complains about anything whatev
er is going to get his throat cut, I’ll do it with my bare hands. Not one of you, you band of parasites, has a stock of forty thousand shirts as unsalable in summer as they are in winter.” And later, when we were teenagers, Papa, and you started doing business with Rumania, importing blue jeans, denim jackets, youth apparel, as you called it, for mass distribution, and we asked, “Don’t you have a sample of straight-leg jeans with buttons, not a zipper?” you said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got those,” and we said, “But you’re sure they’re really tight at the ankle and the fly’s the same as you get on Levi’s?” and you said, “I’ve got them,” “And are they faded like Wranglers, Papa,” and you said, “I’ve got them, I’ve got them,” “And my size, Papa, are you sure there are samples in my size?” “I’ve got them in every size,” and then you added, “And every color,” and we got worried. “What do you mean every color, Papa, real jeans only come in blue,” and you cut the discussion off by screaming, “Mine are better!” and right away we knew they were shit, the moment you said mine were better we knew they were shit and we were going to find ourselves with orange bell-bottomed jeans with a zippered fly. What you did at home in the seventies was to create a sort of ultimate antichic, les BETTER de Perlman and Company, just like les MUST de Cartier.