Ясмина Реза - Babylon

The next day, I went to the Pasteur as if everything were normal. I had lunch in the canteen with Danielle. On the telephone all we’d said was that we had things to tell. We found a table near a window, set down our trays, I said, “Who goes first?”

“Go ahead, you go.”

“You won’t be disappointed.”

She was all ears. “You remember that couple who were there Saturday night, a woman with an orange-dyed mane and her husband?”

“Yes, your neighbors.”

“Our neighbors. He strangled her that night.”

“She’s dead?”

“Well, yes.”

Anyone else would have put on a horrified look. Not my Danielle—she lit up. “No?!”

She had no idea of my relation with Jean-Lino. I gave her an account of the night (the official one, need I specify). A very lively report. Urged on by her beneficent frivolity, I took care with all the effects: the doorbell, the cat, the suitcase, the lobby, the cops, the jail cell . . . From time to time, Danielle would say “It’s insane!!” or some such remark. She was enchanted.

“And what will you do with the cat?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t an atom of feeling for him.”

“We could give him to my mother.”

“Your mother? . . .”

“She lives in a ground-floor in Sucy. There’s a little square of lawn in front, he’d be very happy.”

“But what about her?”

“That will pull her out of her funk over Jean-Pierre. She adores cats, she’s had them before.”

“Ask her about it.”

“I’ll call her tonight.”

“And what about you? . . . While this was going on . . . Mathieu Crosse?”

I had no sooner finished saying Mathieu Crosse than a yoke of depression fell onto my shoulders. Here we were trading story for story as we started on the lemon tart, the insane neighbor stacked against the potential lover: Jean-Lino, do excuse me. But Danielle is subtle. Rather than describe her Saturday night, with that faculty we women have for thickening the slimmest amorous anecdote, conferring weight on no matter what word or insignificant detail, she set about understating the significance of her encounter. Something that might have given us joy and the thread of an unending tale became a small tale verging on sad. She had driven Mathieu Crosse home in her car. Double-parked in front of his house. He had the delicacy (in view, she assumed, of her newly bereaved situation) not to suggest that she come upstairs. Touched by this thoughtfulness, and after a few awkward clinches in the front seat, she parked properly.

He’d had to confess that he was boarding his sixteen-year-old son for the weekend. The boy was out but could be back at any moment. Ultimately, they did slip into the apartment like a couple of thieves afraid of getting caught. Toward four o’clock in the morning, ejected upon the son’s arrival, she went home in something of a whirl. “You like him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“I kinda do.”

I told her that she would be interrogated as a witness, as would Mathieu and all my guests, by the crime squad. She was far from unhappy at the prospect.

Only Georges Verbot showed no surprise when we told people. The woman was asking to get hit with a pickax, he said. Claudette El Ouardi emerged from her reserve to say that she had noticed something wasn’t quite right with that Manoscrivi fellow.

She had noticed it when they met at the front door and he’d introduced himself by way of some incomprehensible sally. Later on she’d felt embarrassed at the sight of his euphoria over Gil Teyo-Diaz needling Mimi. His imitation of the chicken beating its wings had upset her, as much for the vulgarity of the act as for his views. While never imagining such an abominable development, she had sensed madness around his antics. All her comments, proffered over the phone in her even tones, showed me how much closer I was to a Jean-Lino than to a Claudette, whose stiffness I’d hitherto attributed to a form of scientist’s introversion but now suddenly saw as revealing a shameful conformism. Before she grew into a great stringbean and lost her vocation, my sister Jeanne used to dance. Our parents and I went to see her perform in a year-end gala. She did a little solo at stage-front that everyone applauded. There were drinks afterward in the cafeteria of the Maison des Jeunes. Our parents were mingling with the others, who complimented them on Jeanne. My father wasn’t accustomed to that sort of thing. He thought he’d get through it by joking. People smiled politely. It was clear to me that the jokes were going a little off the mark but he got excited without realizing anything. At a certain point he chuckled, his nostrils reddened and dilated, and said, “Yeah she’s great, pretty soon we could send her out into the street to dance and pass the hat.” People turned away and the four of us were left alone. Another time, my high-school music teacher organized a trip to the Olympia music hall to see Michel Polnareff. My father drove us in from Puteaux with two classmates and their mother. In the Sani-Chauffe company van, which was actually our usual car, he said, “Somebody’s gotta explain to me why the national school system would send you kids to see that faggot!” When my classmates reached adolescence and he’d run into one of them at the house, he would pat her behind or grip a breast and exclaim, “Oh it’s coming along nice now, you’re turning into a big girl, Caroline honey!” The girl would laugh convulsively and I’d say “Papa please!!” He’d laugh, “What, I’m just checking out the goods, no harm in that!” These days he’d go straight to jail. My father made me ashamed, often, but I was never able to cross to the other side. No character on a plain background ever interested me. Except to Danielle, then Emmanuel and Bernard, we gave no details on the business here. I told nobody about my involvement, nor about my session at the police station. Not even Jeanne, who anyhow was all tied up in her erotic passion. Catherine Mussin was the only one who said the poor thing about Lydie. The others considered the event abstractly horrible and were curious about the details and the why. I must confess to feeling a certain delectation in announcing the thing. It’s not unpleasant to be the bearer of sensational news. But I should have stopped there. Managed to hang up right away, and not be drawn into any chatter. There’s no purity in the human relationship. The poor thing. I ask myself whether the term applies. We can’t judge only living persons by the criteria of our situation. It’s absurd to pity a dead person. But you can complain of destiny. The mixture of suffering and a probable inanity. Yes. In that sense the poor thing does apply. I can say the poor things about my father, about my mother, Joseph Denner, the Savannah couple, the Jehovah’s Witness in front of the enormous wall, some dead people from my black-and-white photography books, those folks in the tomb portraits in San Michele, dressed up like kings among their fake flowers but whose lives we sense were not always rosy, the numberless obscurities from before, all the people whose deaths the newspapers bundle together into utter meaninglessness. I think of that line of Jankélévitch’s about his father: “What was the point of that little stroll [he had to take] through the firmament of destiny? . . .” Ought we to say “poor thing” about Lydie Gumbiner? In her highly colored world, Lydie Gumbiner had wafted above any vicissitudes. I can only think of her in movement, I see her crossing the parking lot, her skirts fluttering, like a lively little woman in a George Grosz drawing, or patting the cleavage of her bosom beneath a tumble of hair. On her leaflet she had written, “The voice and the rhythm matter more than the words and the meaning.” Lydie Gumbiner had sung, militated, spun her crystal pendant: in her way she had dodged Nothingness.