Adam Haberberg

by Yasmina Reza

  “What a strange way to talk. We're still young,” says Marie-Thérèse.

  “I don't think so.”

  “We're not even fifty.”

  It's imperative, thinks Adam, to leap out and escape into the traffic. Instead of which he extracts a little notebook from his pocket and records Marie-Thérèse's remark with the Gustav Klimt ballpoint. Then he says, where do the zoo animals go at night? Do they take them in?

  “Why should they? They stay outside in their natural state.”

  “They're not in their natural state.”

  He again pictures that solitary animal from the forests of Asia in its pathetic enclosure, feeling an affinity for this dejected creature. With a bit of luck the mist will have blanketed your pathetic enclosure, the noise of cars along the Quai Saint-Bernard will be like a distant rumble. In the mountains one can rise above the mist, he thinks, in the mountains one climbs high into the clouds and at every step the landscape changes, as do the light and the smells and the weariness and the joy that have no place in time, for they are things outside of time, he thinks, now stationary on the Boulevard Kellermann. I've never written about the mountains. When it comes to the footpaths and trails I love, I'm tongue-tied. So what's this thing about popular fiction series? says Marie-Thérèse.

  “I don't write popular fiction series. It's a friend of mine.”

  “I see.”

  “He's called Jeffrey Lord. He generally writes about ten books a year.”

  “That's a lot.”

  “Yes. That's why I sometimes give him a hand. I write one or two for him.”

  “I see.”

  Adam studies Marie-Thérèse's remark in his notebook again. We're not even fifty. He has circled the We're. He circles it again. Adam was putting his latest book behind him. In seeking to break all ties with his personal emotions, he told himself—not wanting to succumb to the abject fashion for autobiography— he'd broken all ties with himself. He'd calculated too much, planned too much, given too much thought to literature. A real writer gives no thought to literature. A real writer doesn't give a damn about literature. He'd wanted to make his mark, which is another way of flaunting one's ego in the marketplace. He'd lacked humility, he knew. The result was an account of a mother-son relationship written in the third person from the mother's point of view. Two fatal mistakes as far as he was concerned. And what a mistake, he thinks, to assume Theodore Onfray is motivated by malice. Maybe your only friend, the only one who took the trouble to read you and form his own opinions, the only one to deplore your artificiality and feebleness. Adam had not entirely lied to Marie-Thérèse Lyoc. Goncharki had developed an aversion to Richard Blade, the intergalactic traveler who provided his livelihood. Pressed and harassed, as he put it, by the publisher and unable to deliver a title on schedule, he'd jokingly invited Adam to stand in for him. After two and a half weeks, a record time for a beginner, during which he'd done nothing but remain hunched over his computer, eating dried fruit and energy bars, Adam presented Goncharki with The Black Prince of Mea-Hor. Goncharki had skimmed through the manuscript and declared it to be far and away the best of all the Blade books he'd ever written. And not only the best he'd ever written but quite probably, although he'd read only one of them at the beginning and had no memory of it, the best of all the Blades ever written in America or anywhere else. You're the real Jeffrey Lord! he'd toasted him. Who's Jeffrey Lord? Adam had asked, not knowing what nom de plume he'd just assumed. They'd wept with laughter and Goncharki had risen to his feet, thundering at the whole bistro in Churchillian tones, because he was going through a Churchillian period, We are at war! Now, we are condemned to work each other to ruin, and will TEAR your African empire to SHREDS and desert! Under Adam's pen the intergalactic hero had, of course, moved out of line a little from his usual persona and this subcontracting had at once been spotted by the editorial team. Had it not been for Goncharki's charm and the objectively excellent quality of The Black Prince of Mea-Hor, the affair might have ended in tragedy. Up to seven o'clock in the evening Goncharki was good at managing things. On the very same day he'd negotiated his own exit from the Blade series, his recruitment into the Enforcer series, which he'd had his eye on, and his replacement by Adam Haberberg, who seemed unbelievably at ease in the galactic universe. Four titles per year, three thousand euros gross per title, such was the basis of the offer made to Adam without further ado. An offer he'd not been able to respond to and one which would have shattered him had not the news of the thrombosis arrived to sweep away the existential shock of it. Thrombosis. What a horrible word, thinks Adam, raising his hand to his eye and remembering that the pain, although reduced, is still there. I've just finished a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, says Marie-Thérèse.

  “Oh yes.”

  “I really like biographies.”

  “Quite right.”

  “When I've a meeting, I really have to target. It's important for the customer to say to himself, she doesn't just sell anything to anybody. Take the meeting I had at the Clos Lucée, the house Francois I gave him. I really focused on the target beforehand so as to maximize my chances of opening up an account with this customer. I'm lucky to have a professional occupation that opens me up to fresh horizons. Right, I'm going to pass, that one's getting on my nerves. Some specialists say this is the best off-road vehicle in the world, you know. The sales representative of today, if he wants to succeed, needs to look beyond the confines of his own little business.”

  “Of course,” says Adam, noting Marie-Thérèse's jeans. And her sneakers. They go with the Jeep, he tells himself. The hairstyle, too, more up-to-date than the face. The rest, the coat, the scarf, the handbag, are reminiscent of that see-through figure in Suresnes long ago.

  “The salesman, as people picture him,” she says, driving past the BaByliss building, “the guy at the end of his tether, eating alone in the restaurant with his suitcase, there are still lots of those, but I'm not like that at all. I've positively bloomed in my profession. The buyers know that.”

  The men who read me, Goncharki used to say, are the guy on the station platform, the guy alone in his room in the provinces, all loners.

  “The people who succeed in this profession,” Marie -Thérèse continues—God knows why she's charging into the breach like this, thinks Adam, but maybe she sensed his look—”are people who are open to the world and pleasant-looking. What's enabled me to succeed in my profession is being genuine, being authentic. Those girls in their suit-skirt-and-heels at trade fairs, you don't see much of them as the years go by, only the authentic people stay the course. You need to feel good about yourself when you go somewhere. I walk into a museum, it's a museum where they're not working with me, I need to make them feel the need. If I want to persuade them to create a sales outlet for my merchandise I need to go in with a presentation that's about more than the outlet. They need to get the feeling I'm not there to set up an outlet at all, even if they know very well that setting up an outlet there is the bottom line. The buyer wants more from this relationship than his little sales outlet, the purely commercial presentation is a thing of the past.”

  Low apartment blocks, gray buildings, pink apartment blocks, in brick, in tiles, and Darty and Cora and Mondiale Moquette, a nondescript road through the fog, which has left only a few trails of mist behind, little suburban villas in the dusk, and Speedy and Laho Supplies and billboards all the time and the sign for Montrouge and the sign for Bagneux through the rain on the window. And Marie-Thérèse Lyoc bursting with energy inside the warm Jeep. Marie-Thérèse heading homeward, who knows it all by heart and doesn't give a damn, who's not the type to think that life's decor should be fairyland. Marie-Thérèse repeating words he doesn't understand that run into one another and dance like the gleaming raindrops.

  “Do you remember Serge Gautheron?” she says.

  “No.”

  “Dark hair, not very tall. His father had a sports equipment store at Rueil, Serge Gautheron, can't you picture him?”
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  “More or less.”

  “We got married.”

  “You're married?”

  “I'm divorced now but we were married for eight years.”

  I can't cope, thinks Adam, I can't cope with this grotesque piece of information, I'll focus on the road, a road entirely dedicated to the car, a road of garages, gas stations, inspection and repair garages, I'll focus on new and used car sales showrooms, I'll focus on body shops, places where they sell tires and spare parts, I don't want to hear about Serge Gautheron's and Marie-Thérèse Lyoc's lives, I don't want to know anything about these ghosts from the past. He recalls wandering around in a scrapyard at Carrières-sur-Seine looking for a white fender for a Passat. He recalls the waste ground, the guy in his cabin that smelled of tobacco and the dog that surged up from nowhere, barking, at the end of a very long, endless chain.

  “I even have a picture of the two of you,” says Marie-Thérèse, “a school photo taken in the eleventh grade, I think.”

  Of course she's kept all the class photos, he tells himself. The same set of class photos his mother always kept, the way she kept his teeth, blackened with age, in a metal box. Those class photos in which he invariably appears sad and ugly, sadder and uglier he used to think, with every passing year. While each time the others looked better in those photos, there was always something dubious about me, he told himself, the phony smile, the badly parted hair, something phony about my posture. Not one of those class photos was any good, he thinks, and my mother kept them all, every year approving of my freakish appearance, uncritically approving of her boy's progress from grade to grade, keeping everything, teeth, exercise books, Mother's Day gifts, only to end up, now I'm an adult, with a total lack of interest. Adam doesn't want to see the class photo with Serge Gautheron in it. When you say Serge Gautheron, he knows, you're saying Alice Canella, you're saying Tristan Mateo. Alice Canella is dead. I don't want to see myself standing alongside Tristan Mateo and Alice Canella again.

  I don't want to contemplate such an epitaph on my youth in the company of Marie-Thérèse Lyoc. I want the Bourg-la-Reine road sign, I want Peugeot, Champion, and Volvic, I want to take my car in for an inspection, I want to buy wall-to-wall carpet and wallpaper. Alice used to go on vacation with Marie-Thérèse, Adam recalls. When they came back Marie-Thérèse gave herself airs because she knew things no one else knew. That she might have had a love life of her own never crossed anyone's mind.

  “So were you together already at the lycée,” he says, suddenly finding the idea piquant.

  “Ha, ha,” Marie-Thérèse laughs. A completely asexual laugh, he thinks, an incongruous little throaty laugh, there she goes again, he says to himself, giving herself airs again. I need to make a detour to the Chateau de Sceaux, just to drop off a package, she continues, turning right down a tree-lined avenue.

  Marie-Thérèse walks through the darkness toward the chateau. Adam has stayed in the Jeep in the paved parking lot. The cell phone rings. “It's me,” says Irene. “Maria tells me you're not going home.” “No.” “What are you doing?” “I'm with an old school friend.” “Marvelous.” “It's true, I swear.” “Where are you?” “At Sceaux.” “At Sceaux?” “And then I'm going to Viry-Châtillon.” “You can do what you like, I don't give a damn. Did you talk to the children?” “No.” “Well at least call them.”

  “OK.” Adam calls his sons. The rain has stopped. The park looks beautiful and the chateau too. I must come here one day with the children, he thinks, as he talks to the little one, wondering how many times in his life he's had the thought that one day he must do this or that with the children, knowing he never would. “And how do they live?” he asks the older boy. “By hunting …” “Yes. By hunting and … ? Something in the water?” “Fishing.” “Fishing and …” “I don't know, Daddy, I'm fed up with it. I can't do homework on the phone!” “And gathering. And what's the difference between history and prehistory?” “Oh gee, Daddy. Writing.” “Writing. Well done. Prehistory charts the progress of mankind before writing appears.” “My serial's just starting.” “The earliest forms of writing are very old, you get the first rudiments of writing in three thousand BC. It's very important for you to understand evolution and know your way around. I don't want you to do what I did, which was to go directly from Neanderthal man to the Mesopotamians, I jumped straight from the hairy guys in caves to the Assyrian princes in their gilded chariots, what's that noise, why's he yelling?” “He fell over with the floor lamp.” “What's Maria doing? Why did she let him play with it?” “Stop yelling, you jerk, I can't hear a thing.” “Is he hurt?” “Of course not, Daddy, you know he cries about nothing. My serial's starting.” “Sweet dreams. Do a bit more on the harpoon and the assegai.” “Bye, Daddy, I love you.”

  Here in the paved parking lot at the Chateau de Sceaux, in other words utterly remote from everywhere, in other words to hell and gone, in other words where no obligation or logic has brought us, we feel almost at peace, he thinks, and as if enjoying a respite from life. By taking art into the marketplace, Goncharki had often reiterated, that most contemptible of crimes, people have convinced every Tom, Dick, and Harry that he can be an artist. Tom, Dick, and Harry have no cause to be suspicious, they live in a world that says to them every day, express yourself, give full rein to your ego. Tom, Dick, and Harry, Goncharki had said, suffer the same torments as the authentic artist, vulnerability, anxiety, the difficulty of creation, since all this derives from the man and not from the artist. They're quickly admitted to the community of their peers, unaware that there can be no such thing as a community of artists, for the artist and above all the writer, Goncharki had said, although you and I both know we're talking about a minor branch of the genre, is a loner who has no desire to mingle and recognizes neither peers nor colleagues. In our society Tom, Dick, and Harry are given no guidelines. You can't blame them for believing they're the real thing. When you write pulp fiction you have no horizon beyond death. You're a mercenary, you no longer have a name, you go on endlessly repeating a gesture that leaves no trace. Adam draws a circle in the mist on the window and looks out to where there's nothing to see. Bye, Daddy, I love you. How much longer these sunlit words? On the street, when he's going off to school in the early morning, the older boy calls out I love you to his father who's watching him from the window as he crosses. At the corner round which he'll vanish he calls out I love you over the heads of the passersby, over the cars, and his father up there leaning out blows him a kiss and repeats the words in a low, embarrassed voice. A father who could have been one of a different kind, a father who, he too, in a sort of way, is a Tom-Dick-or-Harry father, knowing very well that this I love you is not addressed to him, Adam Haberberg, the man standing at the window, unshaven and feeling old, but to his figure throughout the ages, due throughout the ages sometimes to be the best daddy in the world and sometimes the most wicked. One day, he thinks, this child who knows nothing about you and prefers TV serials, will no longer be heard calling out I love you in the street. One day the boy staggering along the sidewalk with his bulky schoolbag and the man giving him a friendly wave, wrapped in his cloak of uncertainty, will be erased by time.