Ясмина Реза - Babylon

The Americans gave me back some images of being young. We daydreamed and did nothing. We’d watch people go by, we’d make up lives for them, decide what objects they looked like—a mallet, a bandage . . . We’d laugh. Underneath the laughter there was a slightly bitter boredom. I’d really like to see them again, those pictures we took around the Cardinet Bridge. They probably got thrown out here one day with old papers. After that birthday at Auteuil, I developed some affection for Jean-Lino Manoscrivi. If we left the building at the same time we’d walk a little ways together and sometimes we’d have a coffee at the corner. Outdoors he could smoke, at home not. I saw him as a very gentle man, and I still see him that way. There was never any familiarity between us and we always used the formal vous . But we did talk, we sometimes told each other things we didn’t tell other people. He especially, but it could happen that I did too. We discovered we had the same dislike for our childhoods, the same desire to just cross them out. One day, speaking of the course of his life journey, he said, “Well anyhow, the worst is over with.” I agreed. Jean-Lino was the grandson of Italian Jewish immigrants on his father’s side. His father had started out doing odd jobs in a trimmings workshop. He went on to specialize in ribbons, to the point of opening a notions shop during the sixties. A little alleyway storefront on Avenue Parmentier. His mother tended the register. They lived in a courtyard flat a few steps from the shop. The parents worked hard and were not affectionate; Jean-Lino didn’t expand on the topic. He had a brother, much older, who did well in the garment industry. He himself got into trouble, his mother threw him out of the house. He went into the food line after getting a certificate in pastry making. At the most hopeful period in his life, he set up a restaurant. It was hard—no vacations, too little business. In the end, the government employment center paid for his training in mass marketing and a placement agency got him into the Guli stores where he handled after-sales support on home appliances. He’d never had a child. That was the one reproach he dared to level at the fates that ruled his existence. His first wife had left him after the restaurant failed. When he met Lydie, she was already a grandmother by a daughter from an earlier marriage. For the past two years the child had been coming regularly to their apartment. The parents had separated on such bad terms that Social Services got involved, and they would unload the kid at grandma’s place on the slightest excuse. With a tenderness that had never found an outlet (except with his cat), Jean-Lino had welcomed little Rémi with open arms, and tried to get the boy to love him. Is it right to want to make someone love you? Isn’t that the kind of project that’s always doomed to disaster?

The beginnings were chaotic. Five years old when he arrived—the family had been living in the South—the child made a point of ignoring Jean-Lino completely, and would cry the moment Lydie moved out of sight. He was an ordinary little boy, rather plump, with a nice smile and dimples. The difficulties of taming were made worse by Jean-Lino’s cat Eduardo, an unpleasant animal picked up on the streets of Vicenza who could only be spoken to in Italian. Lydie had worked things out with Eduardo. She’d dangle her pendant before him and the cat would follow the swinging rose quartz, mesmerized (the stone had been “a gift” to Lydie somewhere in Brazil). On the other hand, Eduardo had taken against Rémi. He would swell to twice his size whenever the child appeared, and would hiss in a disturbing way. Jean-Lino tried to bring his cat into line with no help from anyone. Lydie had solved the situation by keeping Eduardo in the bathroom. Rémi would go and torment him by imitating his miauling through the door. Jean-Lino tried to stop the boy but he lacked authority. When there was no one near, he would go quietly to soothe the animal through the door by murmuring a few Italian endearments. Rémi refused to call Jean-Lino “Grampa Jean-Lino.” Actually, it’s wrong to say the boy refused; he simply never did call him Grampa Jean-Lino, despite the man’s constant chant of Grampa Jean-Lino’s going to read you a story now , or If you eat all your fish, Grampa Jean-Lino will buy you this or that . Grampa Jean-Lino was simply disdained by Rémi, who did not give a damn about him. When the boy had any reason to use his name at all he called him Jean-Lino, who felt foolishly touched by just the use of his first name uttered with no familial qualifier. As time went on, changing strategy, he got it into his head to win the boy’s heart through fun and games. He taught him to say silly things like Howdydoody, which the boy loved and instantly converted to Whodiddoodydoody, then just Youdodoody, chanting it over and over, putting on crazy voices or yelling it right at Jean-Lino, in public if possible and very loud. I was a spectator at this little performance myself in the apartment-house lobby.

Pretending to laugh along, Jean-Lino told the boy, “You know, if you repeat a joke too often it stops being funny.” He could no longer cut off the routine. The more he tried to reason with him the more the boy repeated the line. Lydie offered no help, holding with the theory that you reap what you sow. When she sensed a kind of disheartenment in Jean-Lino she would just say, in a sorrowful tone, Look, leave the poor kid alone, you can’t go blaming someone who’s a victim of their parents’ bad behavior. In hindsight, I suppose she sensed the dangers in her husband’s one-sided attachment.

I should say something about the building lobby. It’s a long space, lit in the daytime by the half-window in the entry door. The elevator is in the center facing the door. You get to the stairwell through a side door in a recess on the left. The right-hand corridor leads back to the trashbin area. When the three of them were together, Lydie would take the elevator up with her grandson while Jean-Lino climbed the stairs on foot. When Jean-Lino was alone with Rémi, the boy insisted on the elevator. Getting him into the stairwell meant dragging him there howling. Jean-Lino couldn’t take the elevator. Over his lifetime it had grown impossible for him to take airplanes, elevators, the subway and the new trains with their sealed windows. One day, the boy clung to the stairwell gate like a monkey to keep from going in, and Jean-Lino finally sat down on the bottom steps with tears in his eyes. Rémi sat beside him and asked, “Why don’t you ever want to take the elevator?”

“Because I’m afraid.”

“I’m not afraid, I can do it.”

“You’re too young to go alone.”

After a while, Rémi did climb the stairs, hoisting him-self along the banister. Jean-Lino followed along behind.

If I had to pick a single image from among all those that persist in my head, it would be the one of Jean-Lino seated in the half-darkness on the Moroccan chair in our living room, his hands locked onto the armrests in the midst of a jumble of chairs that no longer had any reason to be there. Jean-Lino Manoscrivi petrified on that uncomfortable chair, in the room where the glasses I’d frantically bought for the occasion still lined the buffet, the platters of celery and chips, all the leavings of the party arranged in an optimistic moment. Who can determine the starting point of events? Who knows what murky, and perhaps long-ago, confluence of circumstances governed the business? Jean-Lino had met Lydie Gumbiner in a bar where she was singing. Put that way, we’d imagine a swaying party girl sending a sultry voice through a mike. In fact she was a little creature without much of a bosom, dressed gypsy-style and draped in pendants and charms, who made much of her hairdo, a big orange frizz tamed by decorative barrettes (she wore a charm anklet as well . . .). She was studying jazz with a singing coach, and would occasionally perform in bars (we went to hear her once). She had sung Henri Salvador’s “Syracuse” gazing at Jean-Lino who by chance was seated that night at the edge of the stage, mouthing the lyrics along with her: “Before my youth is worn away and my springtimes are over . . .” Jean-Lino was a Salvador fan. They liked each other. He liked her voice. He liked her long gauzy skirts, that taste for the gaudy. He found it appealing that a woman her age had no use for Paris convention. In fact, this was a person who in many regards could not be classified, and who lived her life as if she had certain supernatural abilities. Why did those two beings come together? I had a friend when I was getting my Intellectual Property degree in Strasbourg, a girl who was fairly withdrawn. One day she up and married a gruff, taciturn man. She told me, “He’s alone, I’m alone.”Thirty years later I ran into her on the train to Brussels, her company was building hot-air balloons for amusement parks, she was still with him and they had three grown children. The end of the story is not so cheerful for the Gumbiner-Manoscrivi couple—but among the infinitely varied arrangements in the world, isn’t it often the same pattern? I took some snapshots at our little gathering (I’d called it a “Spring Celebration”). In one picture, JeanLino is standing behind Lydie, who’s seated on the couch dressed in one of her getups, they’re both laughing, faces turned to the left. They’re in good form. Jean-Lino looks happy and flushed. He’s leaning on the back of the sofa, bent a little over the reddish pouf hairdo. I remember exactly what it was that had made them laugh. The photo was used in the dossier. It caught what any photo catches, a frozen moment never to come again, and which maybe didn’t even happen that way at the time. But given that there will never be any later images of Lydie Gumbiner, this one seems to hold some secret meaning, it’s suffused with a venomous aura. In some magazine I recently saw a picture of Josef Mengele during the 1970s in Argentina. He is sitting outdoors somewhere, in a polo shirt, in a crowd of notably younger boys and girls. One of the girls is clinging to his arm. She’s laughing. The Nazi doctor is laughing. They’re both merry and relaxed, a testament to the sunshine and the lightness of life. The photo would hold no interest without the date and the name of the central figure. The caption upends the interpretation. Is that true for all photographs?

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