Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  Lydie asked whether the chicken in the Lallemants’ loaf came from an organic farm source. Sounding a little put out, Marie-Jo replied, “I honestly have no idea. We got it at Truffon.”

  “Don’t know the place,” Lydie said.

  “It’s luscious,” said Catherine Mussin.

  “Delicious,” Danielle confirmed as she sliced a piece, with seductive care, for Mathieu Crosse.

  “Have you tried it, Lydie?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t eat chicken unless I’m sure of its source.”

  “Well, that’s certainly true!” cried Jean-Lino. The Jean-Lino from the racetrack.

  “Yes of course it’s true,” Lydie said tightly. “Besides which, I’ve just about quit eating meat altogether.”

  “But she keeps an eye on what other people eat!” Jean-Lino chortled.

  “She’s right,” said Claudette El Ouardi, in one of her few utterances of the evening.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” began Jean-Lino—the racetrack Jean-Lino. “The other night we went out for dinner at the Blue Cartreaux with our grandson Rémi. I was thinking I’d order Basque chicken, and Rémi wanted chicken with fries. Lydie asked the waiter first off if the chickens had been raised on organic feed.”

  Lydie nodded to confirm the tale.

  “When she was told that they were raised on organic feed,” Jean-Lino went on, pleased at managing the language, “she asked if the chicken was free-range at the farm, if it had been fluttering around and roosting in the trees. The waiter turns to me, he repeats Fluttering? In the trees? with the look of a person dealing with some crank. I gave a little shrug of sympathy, the kind of automatic move us men make sometimes,” he joked, “and Lydie repeated, very seriously, that yes, hens do roost.”

  “Yes, a chicken roosts,” Lydie affirmed.

  “There, see?” Jean Lino laughed, calling us to witness. “When the waiter left I told Rémi, “If we want Grandma Lydie to let us order chicken, the chicken has to roost in the trees!” The little guy asked why the chicken had to roost? She says, because it’s important for the chicken to have a normal chicken life.”

  “Exactly,” said Lydie.

  “We said, ‘Yes, yes, that we know, but we didn’t know that meant the chicken had to roost in trees!’”

  “And it’s got to take dust baths, too,” Lydie added now, with a stiffened neck and tone of voice that should have chilled Jean-Lino if he’d been more sober.

  “Ha ha ha!”

  “To groom its feathers. Personally I don’t think it’s enough to announce, like your friend that stupid waiter who doesn’t even know what he’s serving, that the chicken ate bio grains, I want to know if the bird has lived a free-range life, in the open air and suited to her species.”

  “She’s right,” Claudine El Ouardi said again.

  “And I wasn’t too pleased, you know, to see you ganging up with the waiter and the boy.”

  “Oh please, a person’s got a right to laugh, the whole business isn’t that serious, honeybun! Rémi and I have a new game we play now. Whenever we see the word ‘chicken’ or hear it, we start fluttering!” he said again, and with his eyes half-shut and his elbows crooked, he flapped his hands at shoulder level, so weirdly that Georges Verbot guffawed—a hoarse, drunken laugh that made everyone uneasy except Jean-Lino, who, in his excitement, improved on his act by stretching out his neck, even emitting (believe it!) a few deep clucks, and rotating his shoulders and back. It was like a kind of incarnation. Georges declared that he was going to work up a new cartoon character—an organic chicken, a next-generation terrorist who’d spread germ war-fare—maybe call it “The Devil’s Doing”? He could see it already—he would sling a merino wool scarf around its neck . . . Then, leaning into Catherine Mussin who stared back in a panic, he murmured, “You know, merinos? The sheep they shear to hell and mutilate in Australia?”

  Thinking about it again now, it seems to me Lydie never opened her mouth for the rest of the evening. Pierre, though he’s less given to observing people, has the same impression. At the time, of course, no one paid any attention. It was actually a good party, that Spring Celebration of mine. I said so to myself as I looked around at our friends in the little living room, lounging casually, all of them talking fairly loud, smoking, guzzling food, mixing together. Danielle and Mathieu Crosse cooing out in the hallway, Jeanne and Mimi half-gone, sprawled like teenagers on the hassock giggling quietly. The expression creating a bond came to mind again, and I broached the theme of hollow concepts. We came up with a bunch of them, including, oddly, the idea of tolerance. It was Nasser El Ouardi who suggested it, declaring that it was a stupid concept to begin with, as tolerance can only be exercised on condition of indifference; once it’s no longer tied to indifference, he said, the concept falls apart. Lambert and a few others undertook to defend the term but Nasser, sitting tall above us on the Moroccan chair, held to his viewpoint by taking the notion back to the simple verb “love,” arguing with a panache that stumped us. Around eleven o’clock, Pierre’s brother Bernard arrived with a Black Forest sausage that could not be sliced. Anyhow, we had long since started on the desserts. He is an engineer for a German company involved in developing an elevator that works without cables and horizontally. My brother-in-law is a great seducer, a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy every woman ought to flee instantly. Catherine Mussin, who has no alert system, instantly signed up for the magnetic levitation. The first guests to arrive were also the first to leave. Hardly had the El Ouardis stood up than Lydie tugged Jean-Lino by the sleeve. I realize now that Jean-Lino was reluctant to go. The El Ouardis and the Manoscrivis parted with an embrace on the doormat where they’d met. There was even some talk of going together, one day soon, to hear Lydie at a jam session.

  At the end the only people left were the Dienesmanns, Bernard, and us. Bernard started ranting about Catherine Mussin, bawling us out for not coming to his rescue. She apparently told him that she was “in her third season.” A woman tells you I’m in my third season, that’s a sure cock-strangler, he said. We described her scene with Georges, who got Bernard’s full sympathy. And then we talked about the snow again. And about cycles, about the absurdity of believing in linear time, about the past that no longer exists, the present that doesn’t exist either. Etienne talked about how, long ago, he used to hike with his father in the mountains; when Merle came along, he and she would pull far ahead of the older man, cutting cross-country, tearing up the slopes—they were the young folks. Then later, with their own children, for a long time the two of them still used to walk on ahead of the others. Etienne said, “We’d look back and say, What a drag waiting for you guys to catch up! Today, after a few steps all of us together, the kids are already way out of sight. Uncatchable without even realizing it, the way we must have been. We’d wait for my father at the foot of the hills. When he appeared at the bend of the trail, he would act as if he’d been dawdling on purpose, taking in the beauty. He’d say, Did you see that big field of gentians? And those forget-me-nots? . . . Now it’s us who hold up the group,” Etienne said. “The details of nature slow us down too. The whole damn thing goes so fast. Anyway, I’ll soon have a good excuse with my eyes! . . .” We were content there, the five of us in the nighttime, feet up on the coffee table, at peace and a little old, in the messy apartment. We were content in our world of nostalgias and slow banter, sipping at our pear brandy. I thought how Etienne had been lucky, walking in the mountains with his father. My father wasn’t really the sort of guy you could go walking in the mountains with. Or walk anywhere else with, either. And forget about forget-menots!

  As he left, Bernard asked who were the woman with the red hair and the guy with the Giscard hairdo? Our upstairs neighbors, we said. They’re funny, Bernard said, I like him. We walked out on the balcony to watch the three of them leave the building, Bernard with his motorcycle and his big helmet, the Dienesmanns rounding the corner holding each other by the waist. No trace of snow left, the sky was starry and the air
almost gentle.

  I said to Pierre, “Did you think I looked pretty?”

  “Very.”

  “You didn’t think Jeanne looked glorious?”

  “She looked good.”

  “Better than me?”

  “No, you both looked very good.”

  “Does she look younger?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Don’t I look younger, though?”

  “You look the same.”

  “If you didn’t know me, and you were seeing the two of us, which one would you think was better-looking?”

  “What do you say we clean up tomorrow?”

  “You’d go spontaneously toward which one of us?”

  “You.”

  “Serge must have told her the same thing in the elevator.”

  “Mathematics.”

  “You have no credibility. Did you like her shoes? Aren’t those thongs hideous? You don’t think it’s crazy to dress like that at her age?”

  “There’s one quiche left . . . Three-quarters of that disgusting chicken loaf.”

  “It really was disgusting.”

  “Inedible. I’m tossing it . . . huge rice salad . . . Cheese enough for ten years . . . Nobody touched the liver pâté . . .”

  “I forgot to put it out!”

  “The Black Forest sausage—you could kill a person with it . . .”

  “Toss it. Nice of Lambert to bring you—”

  “My edition was earlier.”

  “Still, nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Georges was already smashed when he came in.”

  “He’s smashed at eight in the morning.”

  “Why do you invite him?”

  “He’s all alone.”

  “He creates a terrible atmosphere.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  We kept up the debriefing in the bathroom.

  “Danielle and Mathieu Crosse, you think that could work?” I began again.

  “He seems pretty interested, her I don’t know.”

  “I would’ve said the opposite. I’ll call her tomorrow morning.”

  “Your pal from upstairs, though, la belle Lydie, she’s way out there in intergalactic space.”

  “Oh, you think so!” I laughed. “On a desert island:

  Claudette El Ouardi or Lydie Gumbiner?”

  “Lydie! A hundred times Lydie!”

  “Claudette El Ouardi or Catherine Mussin?”

  “Claudette. At least you could have a conversation.”

  “Catherine Mussin or Marie-Jo?”

  “That’s tough . . . Mussin, with a gag on her mouth.

  Now you: Georges Verbot or Lambert?”

  “No. Impossible.”

  “You have to.”

  “Well then—if I wash him and scale his teeth: Georges Verbot.”

  “Slut.”

  Once we got to bed, I asked Pierre why we’d never used a whip, or handcuffs and all that. He had a terrible reaction: he laughed. It’s true it would make no sense between us. He said, “Georges or Bernard?” I said, Bernard in a blink. He said, “You like him, that jerk!” And that was enough to turn us on.

  I was nearly asleep when I heard a noise that sounded like a doorbell. Pierre had put on his miner’s headlamp to read an old SAS spy novel (since Gérard de Villiers died, it hurts him not to have new ones to read). I felt him stiffen, but then there was silence. A few minutes later we heard the same sound again. Pierre sat up to listen more closely, he tapped me and whispered, “Somebody’s at the door.” It was five after two. We both waited, leaning slightly forward, he with his reading lamp still on. Someone was ringing. Pierre got out of bed, he pulled on a T-shirt and undershorts and went to see. Through the peephole he recognized Jean-Lino. He right away imagined a water-pipe break or that sort of thing. He opened the door. Jean-Lino stared at Pierre, he made a strange move with his mouth and then, keeping his lower lip scooped like a bucket, he said, “I killed Lydie.” Pierre didn’t immediately take in the sentence. He stepped aside to let Jean-Lino in. Jean-Lino entered and stopped still by the door, his arms hanging loose. Pierre too. They both stood waiting in the vestibule. I came in wearing pajamas—a Hello Kitty nightshirt and bottoms in checkered flannel. I said, “What’s up, Jean-Lino?” He said nothing, he stared at Pierre. “What’s going on, Pierre?” “I don’t know. Let’s go in the living room.” Pierre turned on a lamp and said, “Sit down, Jean-Lino.” He offered him the couch where he’d already spent a large part of the evening, but Jean-Lino chose the uncomfortable Moroccan chair. Pierre sat down on the couch and motioned me to come beside him. I was ashamed of the room. We’d been too lazy to clean up. We’d said we’d do it all in the morning. We’d emptied the ashtrays but the place still smelled of cigarettes. There were rumpled napkins, scattered plates, bowls of chips . . . On the chest there was still a row of untouched glasses. I wanted to straighten up a little but I sensed that I ought to sit down. Jean-Lino was higher than us on the Moroccan chair. His combover hair hung halfway down on the right side, the other part flapped to the back, it was the first time I’d seen his scalp naked. There was a kind of silence and then I said gently, “What’s going on, Jean-Lino?” We watched his mouth. A mouth trying out different shapes. “Bring us a little cognac, Elisabeth,” Pierre said.

  “For you too?”

  “Yes.”

  I got three vodka glasses and filled them with cognac. Jean-Lino drank his down in one gulp. Something else was strange about his face. Pierre poured him another and we sipped too. I did not understand what the three of us were doing in the middle of the night drinking again in the messy dim living room. After a moment Pierre said, in an ordinary voice as if he were asking a friendly question, “You killed Lydie?” I looked at him, I looked at Jean-Lino, and with a laugh I said, “You killed Lydie!” Jean-Lino set his forearms on the chair frame, but that chair is not made for that, and for a second he looked strapped into an electric chair. I realized he wasn’t wearing glasses. I’d never seen him without glasses. “Where is Lydie?” I said.

  “I strangled her.”

  “You strangled Lydie?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “What don’t you understand? He strangled Lydie,” said Pierre.

  “Where is she?”

  Jean-Lino waved a hand toward the upstairs.

  “Is she dead?” Pierre asked.

  He nodded and closed his eyes.

  “Maybe not,” said Pierre. “Let’s go check.”

  Pierre and I stood. I ran into the bedroom to get a sweater and put on slippers. When I got back to the living room Jean-Lino hadn’t moved an inch. “Let’s go see, Jean-Lino,” Pierre encouraged him, “in case she’s alive. You know, it’s not that easy to strangle someone.”

  “She’s dead,” Jean-Lino said in a cavernous voice.

  “Not sure, not sure, let’s go up!” Pierre was starting to get annoyed. He signaled me to step in. I took Jean-Li-no’s arm. It was unbelievably stiff and stayed clamped to the Moroccan chair. I tried to reassure him, murmuring kind words. I said, “Jean-Lino, you can’t stay in that chair all night.”

  “Especially since you’re the only one who’d ever even want to,” Pierre said, trying to tone down the drama.

  “That’s certainly true,” I confirmed.

  “Every second counts! We’re wasting time!”

  “He’s right . . .”

  “Get hold of yourself, Jean-Lino!”

  “I’m telling you, she’s dead.”

  Pierre collapsed back onto the couch, his foot caught in the cord of the table lamp, which fell to the floor and plunged us into near darkness. “Shit, I really need all this!”

  I turned on the ceiling light, which we never use. “Not the ceiling light, not the ceiling light, for god’s sake!” Pierre moaned. I lit a floor lamp. Jean-Lino faced these successive lighting arrangements without changing his marmoreal posture. I no longer knew what to do, b
etween a husband slumped in the position of a fellow determined to let everything go to hell and a Jean-Lino fossilized and unrecognizable. We’d all had too much to drink. I started tidying the room. I took away the glasses, the bottles, whatever was lying around. I shook out the cloth from the buffet over the balcony edge. I stacked the chairs Lydie had lent us by the door. I brought in the hand vacuum, my beloved Rowenta, to pick up the crumbs. I started to vacuum the coffee table, the carpet beneath it, Pierre emerged from his slack state and snatched it from my hands. “Perfect moment for that! You find this the right time for housekeeping?” He stood up, holding the Rowenta like a machine gun, and said to Jean-Lino, “OK my friend, now we’re going upstairs, come on, up we go!” Jean-Lino shifted a little but he seemed nailed to his Moroccan seat, incapable of pulling himself out of it. Pierre set the vacuum going again and aimed it at Jean-Lino’s chest, sucking up a patch of shirt with a startling noise. I cried, “What are you doing?” Jean-Lino was terrified by the suction and leapt up into a defense stance. At that moment I knew we were actually going to go upstairs. Jean-Lino set his hair back in place and smoothed it compulsively several times, I gently led him toward the door. Pierre put on street shoes and we left the apartment. We went up on foot, by the yellowish light of the stairwell, Pierre ahead in pale pink flared undershorts, naked legs and loafers, then Jean-Lino in his rumpled party clothes, and me at the rear in pajamas and fake-fur slippers. At their door, Jean-Lino fumbled in his pockets before pulling out the right key, we could hear Eduardo meowing and scratching behind the door, Jean-Lino murmured little words to him, sono io gioia mia, sta’ tranquillo cucciolino. I took Pierre’s hand, I felt a little anxiety and at the same time a terrific desire to move forward into the thickness of the night.