Ясмина Реза - Babylon

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 to 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.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Jean-Lino says, “I don’t give a damn in hell about the chicken, the turkey, the pigs, about all those animal-rights people, I don’t give a shit about the life the chicken leads, I’m glad to eat your organic chicken because it tastes better but apart from that I don’t give a damn, I don’t care if it had a miserable life, what do we know about it, I don’t care if it never saw daylight, never hopped around in the trees like a damn blackbird or if it rolled in the dirt, I don’t believe chickens have consciousness, chickens are made to be raised and killed and eaten. Now come to bed.”

She tries to resist but he stands in front of her across the table. He’s neither sturdy nor large but he’s still stronger than she is. She finally drops the struggle. Pushing back her chair to head for the bedroom, she says, “That’s the real you.”

“That’s the real me, yes! Yes, yes, that’s me! I’m glad you’re finally seeing it! And you think you were honoring me when you had the nerve to ask in that sweet-sour voice of yours where that lady got the chicken for her pâté, when you said you ‘don’t eat chicken unless you know where it came from’ as if we were in some cheap Chinese and it might be rat meat! You could have just not eaten it yourself, but no, you had to raise the subject, had to get on your high horse and teach people a moral lesson, so everyone should know about your virtuous behavior.”

He follows her to the bedroom. She tries to keep him out. Not possible. She sits on the bed and starts to take the barrettes out of her hair. She does it with meticulous attention, setting them one by one into a pouch, the activity pointedly barring any other concern.

“I’m sick of these constant rules,” Jean-Lino goes on, exasperated by this maniacal concentration, “sick of living in terror, if I feel like eating chicken every day I’ll eat it every day, there are people like you who won’t eat anything but grains and greens, there are more and more people like you, so eat your damn greens all of you and quit pissing us off.”

“Leave my room.”

“It’s my room too.”

“You’re dead drunk.”

“What I don’t understand is a person having the time to feel pity for all that stuff. OK, pity, but at least pity people. The world is horrible. Folks are dying on our doorstep and you guys are pitying chickens. There’s a limit to pitying. You can’t do it about everything or you’re like Abbé Pierre, incidentally he was a bastard, he’d be pitying street bums and spit on the Jews. Even him, he didn’t have a big enough heart.”

“You know what separates us from animals?” Lydie shouts. “You know how much distance there is between us and animals? This much!” She snaps her fingers. “And it gets smaller every day! Ask your scientist friends!”

“We know all about your theories.”

“They’re not mine!”

“Yeah, make that disgusted look, purse your lips, go ahead, do all your harpy faces, go ahead.”

“Leave the room, Jean-Lino.”

“I belong here.”

“I want to be alone.”

“Go in the other room.”

“Tell that cat to get out of the room.”

“No, he belongs here too.”

“He doesn’t belong in my bedroom!”

“Be nice to him a little, he’s sad all alone.”

“We’ve already had this discussion.”

“The poor thing. How come you don’t feel pity for him, since you care so much about animal welfare?”

“ Fuori Eduardo! ”

“You shouldn’t yell at him.”

“Out, asshole!”

The cat looks at Lydie haughtily and doesn’t budge. Lydie sticks out a leg and shoves him hard. The sharp heel of the Gigi Dool pump hits Eduardo in the side. He yelps in pain. By Jean-Lino’s own account, the howl shocks them both, but it’s too late. At the instant Lydie leans toward the cat, Jean-Lino grabs her by the hank of hair loosed from the barrettes and twists her neck back. She tries to turn to free herself but he no longer knows what he’s doing, he clutches the tufts of hair in both hands and wrenches them in opposite directions. She’s frightened. She looks ugly to him. From her distorted mouth comes no intelligible word, only shrill sounds that irritate him. Jean-Lino wants silence. He wants that throat to stop producing sounds. He squeezes the neck. Lydie struggles, rears up. He’s had too much to drink. He is insane. No knowing.

He presses the neck, pressing with his thumbs, he wants her to give in, to lie still, he squeezes until nothing moves.

It takes him some time to understand what just happened. At first he thinks that, considering Lydie’s personality, she’s pretending to be dead. She’s faked a faint or a seizure in the past. He shakes her gently. He says her name. He tells her to quit playing games. He lets a moment go by in total silence so Lydie will think he’s left the room. Eduardo plays along, sitting completely motionless the way feral cats can do.

Lydie persists in her stillness. It’s her eyes that alert him. They are open. He doesn’t think it’s possible for a person to sustain that stare of unvarying stupor. The idea of death crosses his mind. Lydie might be dead. He puts a finger beneath her nostrils. He feels nothing. Neither warmth nor breath. But really, he didn’t press hard. He leans close to her face. He hears nothing. He pinches a cheek, he lifts a hand. He carries out these gestures with terror and timidity. The tears come. He collapses.