Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  “What’s that from?”

  “My scars?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Acne. I used to be covered with pimples.”

  He smoked gazing around the kitchen. What was he thinking about? Me, I was picturing Lydie stretched out dead in the other room. It was both enormous and nothing at the same time. The house was calm. The Frigidaire was sending out its hum. When we were emptying our mother’s apartment, my sister and I found a bunch of her office supplies in a drawer. The stuff was years old, from when she kept the accounts at the Sani-Chauffe company. A case holding a ruler, a four-color Bic pen, staples, a brand-new ream of paper, scissors that could cut for the next hundred years. Objects are bastards, Jeanne said. Again I asked Jean-Lino what had happened.

  When they got upstairs, Lydie accused him of humiliating her in company. That he could go back over the episode at the Carreaux Bleus restaurant with his caricature of the chicken was a betrayal in itself, plus the fact of mixing Rémi up in the story. He shouldn’t have mentioned Rémi, Lydie said, and certainly not to report that the boy had made fun of her, his grandmother, which besides wasn’t true. Jean-Lino, still in euphoric spirits, replied breezily that he hadn’t meant any harm, that he’d told that whole story carried away by the hope of making people laugh, which often happens at parties like that, and in fact everybody did laugh good-humoredly. He reminded her how even she had wound up laughing, back there in the restaurant when they’d imitated hens fluttering. Lydie flew into a rage, claiming that she had only laughed (and not much) to cover for him, JeanLino, in the boy’s eyes—to keep the child from realizing, given his ultrasensitivity, how upsetting the imitation was. She would never have imagined, she added, that on top of that she would have to relive that ridicule among strangers, and she pointed out that the performance at the party was applauded only by that belligerent drunk. She scolded him for not seeing her stiffness or her subtle signals, and generally for a lack of sensitivity toward her. Jean-Lino tried to protest, because if there was ever a man attentive to her, and even on the alert, it was he, but Lydie was immured in her complaints and would have none of it. That chicken story, told—alas yes—with the sole purpose of setting off some stupid laughter, revealed his insensitivity, not to say his mediocrity. She had always accepted that he chose not to adopt her way of life, as long as she felt respected and understood. Which was obviously not the case. Yes, some creatures do have wings instead of arms! And thus they flutter and roost. At least—she added as if aiming at Jean-Lino himself— they do as long as the cowardice and thoughtlessness of men didn’t make it impossible for them to do so. What was funny about that? She didn’t understand how people could laugh at lives that are miserable from birth to the slaughterhouse. And drag a child of six into the laughter, to make him into the torturer of tomorrow. Animals only want to live, to peck, to munch grass in the fields. Men throw them into terrible confinement, into factories of death where they can’t move, or turn around, or see daylight, she said. If he really cared out the boy’s welfare and not just winning him over with some loathsome attitudes, these are the things he should be teaching him. Animals have no voice and can’t demand anything for themselves, but by luck, she boasted, there were people in the world like Grandma Lydie to register complaints on their behalf: that’s what he could have taught Rémi, instead of making fun of her. Generally speaking, she blamed him for coming on to the boy at her expense ( Jean-Lino took offense at the term, completely wrong, a term she chose just to mortify him needlessly)—the only strategy he could find, she said, to work up a little complicity with him. She said his behavior was pathetic, that he meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to the boy and would never be his Grampa Lino. She said she was outraged that he should call him our grandchild when he was nothing to the child, who did have actual grandfathers even though one was dead and he never saw the other one. That such a usurpation, especially in front of her, and among strangers, was an act of great violence, since he knew perfectly well her position on the matter and he’d used the term so casually in a situation where she couldn’t correct him. She said further that he didn’t realize it but the child despised him, because children have no respect for people who try to please them and who do anything they want, especially that kind of child, she said, matured beyond his age by the circumstances of life and endowed with a superior intelligence. When Jean-Lino tried to cite the recent signs of affection Rémi had shown him, she was quick to say that all children, Rémi no less than any other, are little whores. And on the pretext of disabusing him, she took the occasion to remind him of his inexperience in that realm. She said that a man who went dotty like that lost all sex appeal for any normal woman and that she had seen quite enough of that behavior already over Eduardo. That she had managed despite herself to put up privately with the spectacle of his regression, but had never expected to see it play out in plain daylight. “In a couple,” she said, “each party has got to make some effort to do the other honor. How a person conducts himself affects what people will think of his or her partner. What good are the violet shirt and the Roger Tin frames if he goes off on dwarf arms and clucking? When I put on my coral earrings and my red Gigi Dool shoes, when I cancel two patients to get a hair coloring and a manicure on the very morning of a party, I do it to measure up to what I believe Your Wife should be, I do it to honor you. And that goes for every realm. And then when we come together with people who are refined and intellectual, she went on, my husband drinks like a tank, acts like a chicken, tells anyone who’ll listen that my grandchild makes fun of me, that the waiter makes fun of me—I’d forgotten that guy—and that my husband himself makes fun of me by twisting a story on a subject that shouldn’t be a laughing matter and that nobody understands is really serious.” Jean-Lino pointed out (or tried to) that several people at the party had taken her side. “No, no, no,” Lydie said, “only one person, and even her—it was that ice-cold researcher lady. You saw how she looked when I said I sing. Even your darling Elisabeth, your dear friend, didn’t say anything. All those people who’re supposed to be in science or whatever don’t give a damn. They don’t worry about a thing, their brains stop at their specialty. And they’re probably the people who developed the antibiotics they stick into the industrial pig farms. The crazy guy was right about that: The men stuff their bellies and their pockets too. They don’t give a damn about the hideous slaughterhouses, they kill off nature and that’s fine with them. And you don’t care either, all you care about is going downstairs to smoke your lousy Chesterfields.”

  Jean-Lino doesn’t know what to do. Leave her stewing and go have his smoke, or stay and try to smooth things over. She was sitting at her desk, a little antique writing table in the living room, she’d put on her glasses and was reading her emails on the laptop with the look of a woman getting back to things worth her interest. He’d never seen her do her mail at night. Making up looks like a long haul. He decides to go out and have his smoke. He puts on his biker jacket and leaves. He takes the stairs down. Reaching our floor, he hears the sound of voices. People are leaving our apartment and standing around on the landing to wait for the elevator. He thinks my sister and Serge are probably in the group. He hears laughter, hears my charming voice (the word he used). Even though the door separating the stairwell from the landing is closed, he moves back up a few steps to avoid being seen. He has lost all confidence. He’s ashamed. An hour earlier he’d been part of that merry band, he’d felt included, maybe even appreciated at certain points. Now he doesn’t even want to risk running into any of them downstairs. Even when these people have left, others might still come along. When he hears the elevator set off and our apartment door close, he climbs back up to the fifth floor. He sits down on the highest step, on the worn carpeting, and lights his cigarette. It’s the first time he’s smoked in the stairwell. He’d never thought of it before. He thinks back over the evening. He smiles as he reviews the good moments, he didn’t feel the mockery when he was making people laugh, but maybe
he’s naïve. He and Lydie—they aren’t used to going out, at least not to this sort of gathering. At the beginning, they’d been a little shy, but they’d soon felt comfortable. He’s no longer sure of anything. All he knows is that he was happy and now he isn’t. And that somebody did something that deprived him of his high spirits. I understood him better than anyone, he’d found somebody to talk to. My father didn’t know how to lose his temper without hitting. At dinner once when I was feeling cheerful, I spiked up a potato from the platter with a knife and stuck the thing whole into my mouth. I got a smack instantly and I still feel the scorch of it today. Not because he’d hit me—I was used to that—but because he had shot down my high spirits. Jean-Lino has a sense of some injustice. He sees himself, doubled over on the top step in his leather jacket, in the horrid light of the stairwell. Lydie’s words about Rémi come back to him. He had managed to avoid hearing them too well; he’d had a few drinks and that helped. But everything was gone, vanished—the pleasure, the euphoria. Did the boy despise him? Jean-Lino didn’t believe a child that age could feel such a sentiment, but she’d also said he knew nothing about children. He’d given up on Grampa Lino, was hoping for something else, something more substantial and deeper. The last time he saw Rémi, he’d taken him to the zoo with its amusement park. It was a weekday, during the school winter break. On the Metro he’d bought the boy a laser pen from a hawker. The ride was long, with changes. After tracing zigzags on the floor and the walls, Rémi had begun attacking the passengers with his ray pen. Jean-Lino told him to aim just at the feet but he raised the beam surreptitiously to people’s faces while pretending to be looking elsewhere. People yelled and Jean-Lino had to confiscate the toy until the zoo stop. Rémi sulked. Even when they reached the park he lagged behind. He brightened at the trick mirrors, breaking up over the distorted shapes they made of his body and especially of Jean-Lino’s. They went on the Enchanted River trip, the bumper cars, the Russian Mountains, the place wasn’t crowded and they could do it all with no waiting. Rémi flew the airplanes, at the game booths they won a plush monkey, a water pistol, a bubble blower, a boomerang ball, Rémi ate a chocolate crêpe and they shared a cone of cotton candy. Rémi wanted to ride a dromedary—he’d seen that in a picture at the entry gate—and they looked for the animals but there were none; they’d be back in the springtime, like the ponies, they were told. Again Rémi sulked. They went to the playground. Jean-Lino sat down on a bench. Rémi too. Jean-Lino asked if he’d like to climb the giant spiderweb. Rémi said no. He burrowed his head into his parka hood, leaving his new toys scattered about him as if he’d stopped caring about them. Jean-Lino said he’d finish his cigarette and then they’d leave. A boy Rémi’s age walked past them, playing railroad train and marking a track in the sand ahead of him with a branch. Rémi gazed after him. The kid came past again and stopped. He pointed to their bench and said, That there is the Maleficia Station. Rémi asked where he’d gotten the branch, they went off together to a little clump of bushes. Two minutes later they tore past Jean-Lino; Rémi had become a train. After several circuits they abandoned their branches and climbed into the toboggan slide from the bottom. They emerged giggling from the top, knocking over the little kids who’d just come up the ladder. They did all sorts of things around the playground, they dug through the sand down to the concrete, they conferred awhile leaning against the doorpost of a wooden hut, they climbed around the giant spiderweb and played at hanging dangerously from it. Rémi was livelier than Jean-Lino had ever seen him. Even from a distance, he could feel the boy’s overexcitement, the urgent complicity with the new friend. He also saw Rémi’s desire to conform, his submission. Jean-Lino felt cold. He made occasional signals to the boy, who didn’t see them. He was tired of waiting there on the hard bench. Dusk was coming on. And he was feeling something he couldn’t admit to—a sense of abandonment. As he thought back on that afternoon in the park now, alone in the service stairwell, melancholy gripped him again. He remembered the toys he’d had to go around picking up and stuffing into a cotton sack he bought at a kiosk. Rémi had refused to carry it, and Jean-Lino had slung it across his own back and lugged it home himself. Aside from the bubble blower, the other toys had never come out of the bag since. In the Metro, Rémi had fallen asleep against his shoulder, and had put a hand into his as they crossed streets on the way home. Lydie’s words darken those pictures. He doesn’t know what to think anymore. The words have seeped into his body and are bleeding him uncontrollably. Jean-Lino crushes out his cigarette on the concrete step, he slips the stub beneath the carpet. His feet look skinny in his dress loafers. He feels small—in size, in everything.

  Some days, when I wake up, my age hits me smack in the face. Our youth is dead. We’ll never be young again. It’s that “never again” that’s dizzying. Yesterday I reproached Pierre for being soft, easily satisfied with little. I finally said, “You let life just go by.” He cited a colleague, an econ professor who’d died of a heart attack a month earlier, he said Max gobbled up life, one project after another, look what it got him. That makes me a little blue, it’s hard to keep projecting forward. But maybe the very idea of the future is destructive. There are languages that don’t even have a future tense.

  The Americans has become my bedside book. Ever since I opened it again, I leaf through it a little every day. In Savannah an afternoon in 1955, which is the year all the photos in the book were taken, a couple is crossing a street. He is a soldier in uniform, shirt and peaked cap. He might be about fifty, pipe in his jaw, relaxed in that American way, despite his pudgy body and the potbelly sliced at the middle by his waistband. The woman is much shorter even in heels and she’s holding onto his arm in the old-fashioned way, by the crook at his elbow. Robert Frank has caught them full front, both looking into the lens. She is well turned out, molded into a dark pretty dress trimmed at the pockets and neck, with patent-leather pumps. She’s smiling at the photographer. She looks older than the man, a face lined with difficulties, anyhow that’s what I see. You think right off that it’s not every day she goes strolling on a man’s arm, that she’s having a day of splendor with her new handbag, her girlish hairdo, her strapping fella in his officer’s cap. It was a Sunday of life like you get sometimes, when good luck befalls you. The first time I saw Lydie, she was crossing the lobby and leaving the building on Jean-Lino’s arm. In mid-afternoon, she too dressed to the nines, all done up and head high, proud of herself, of her life, of her little pockmarked man. They had just moved in. Maybe she never walked out that door again with the same radiant satisfaction. We all do that at some point, man or woman—strut out on somebody’s arm as if we were the only one in the world to have hit the jackpot. We ought to hold onto such flashes of glory. We can’t hope for anything in life to last. I talked to Jeanne on the phone: her adventure is losing steam. The picture-framer is less and less eager and more and more dissolute. When our mother died Jeanne tried to use the sad event to bring a touch of sentiment into the relationship. The boyfriend made clear he didn’t much care and sent her a lot of hard-core messages as the days passed—he wants to drag her to orgies and offer her to other men, etc. When she resists, he turns aggressive. Jeanne calls me almost every day, half-crying. She tells me, “He puts these pictures in my head, now I feel like I want to go and see. But I’m not up to it. I’m vulnerable. I’m alone. I have no railing to hold onto, to take a slide into hell you need a railing, I slide down and I stay at the bottom.”

  Jean-Lino opens the door back into the apartment. He takes off his biker jacket and hangs it up in the vestibule. Lydie is still at her desk and the computer. Jean-Lino walks into the living room. She’s wearing her tortoiseshell butterfly glasses low on her nose and she doesn’t turn her head. He’d like to make her understand that a radical change has occurred, and to say something definitive. But he’s frail, his mind is muddled.

  Nothing comes to him. On the glass-topped bar, alongside the bottles, he sees the Spider-Man bubble blower from the zoo. Rémi loved t
o blow bubbles on the balcony. When there was a wind, he would rush to see whether they’d floated around the building and past his little corner room. Before dinner the day they’d come back from the park, he had crouched down between the plants at the base of the balustrade, with his nose stuck between the rails. He’s a real professional, he can make giant bubbles, tiny ones in clusters, some that look pregnant one inside another, weird shapes he calls “Bizarroids.” After a while there was no more fluid in the jar. Jean-Lino refilled it with a mixture of dishwashing liquid and water. He put in too much soap. The bubbles came out heavy, and they stung the skin. Rémi poured the whole jar down onto the heads of passersby. The people shouted up. Rémi hid, giggling. Jean-Lino laughed too. Lydie rushed over to close the window to the balcony, asking him why he was doing such a thing at his age. Rémi said he’d emptied the jar because the stuff Jean-Lino made hurt his skin and his eyes. Lydie yelled at Jean-Lino. The boy waited for that to be over with no expression. Jean-Lino remembers that impassive look. At the time he’d taken it for discomfort, the embarrassment children feel when grownups squabble. But maybe it was something worse—indifference, disdain? Lydie’s words eat at him. Her hair is the same color as the lampshade. He thinks she looks like a fortune-teller. She’s holding herself super-erect, he can feel her hostility from the small of her back to her shoulder blades. Jean-Lino pours himself a glass of Fernet-Branca and drinks it standing stolidly in the center of the living room. For a second, the idea crosses his mind to pick up the lamp and slam it down on her head. Lydie is busy with the screen. She takes notes on a pad alongside. Jean-Lino goes over to see. She’s on some farm-animal protection site, he can make out a text on the agony of turkeys. He slams down the lid of the computer and says, “You drive us nuts with your barnyard, I’m sick of all that.” She tries to raise the lid but he’s pressing his hand down on it. She says, with a scornful snigger, “I know you don’t give a damn about it.”