Yasmina Reza - Desolation

Making any such speech to Nancy would have undone me.

Why so excessive, why so ungentle and unforbearing? — Yes, Nancy, I’m so sorry. — So why? — I have to be in balance with myself. — In balance with yourself, that means really working to be sarcastic and showing that you’re inhuman? — Apparently. — What self-satisfaction! — My love, to start posing as well balanced, I’d need rather more of a future than I’ve got. I’m no longer driven by the longing to build up any particular product of my own vanity, including my own persona. I am too close to my own disintegration to get involved with nuances. Before I end up on a public bench with my friends the zombies, allow me, my generous friend, to sing the praises of intolerance, the elect, and general injustice. Grant me immoderation, the only way to save what we can of what we’re given. The hell with equity. Your friend Dacimiento wrecked the cooktop on the Aga in less than a year. Ask her what on earth she used to plane down the controls. No justice. The problem with this woman is that you could park a dead donkey on a shelf in front of her and she wouldn’t see it. I put in a kitchen for her that cost $2,700, and instead of lighting up with joy every morning when she sees it again and running around waving her arms, she puts on the kind of martyred look that explains every single summary execution in history. All of it just because on the thirtieth of November at eight in the morning, the light doesn’t come sparkling down on her in the rue Ampère the way she’d like. No justice.

The garden — all me.

I’ve done it all according to my own whims. Every which way. I didn’t start with flowers right away, I did the trees first, then the vegetables, then one day I put in the lawn, with my left hand, so to speak. The moment I left, the lawn turned into a prairie. Lawns take maintenance, they take mowing, they take watering. Who knew? Finally, what do you want, I bought some books. Too much money out the window, too many mistakes. Today you’ve seen the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the roses (four varieties). The Fortunys came two weeks ago. René and his wife Jeanne. Dazzled. I showed them my collection of clippers, if you want I’ll show them to you too. Do you? I’ve got about twenty. I keep thinking I’m going to find a better pair. An even finer blade, that will cut even more cleanly. Sometimes I go back to the old ones. I have my favorites. Even when they’re worn out, I keep them. I’m attached to every one of them. The Fortunys were interested in my tools, in the spades, in the sprayers — I’m nuts about sprayers — they were interested in my problems with amending the soil, and watering systems, and making new borders. It was cold and gray that day, and they walked around the garden, stopping in front of the flowerbeds, the trees, the walls, I watched them from the summerhouse and I thought what are you complaining about, this is what friends are.

At a certain point, René gestured — I can’t talk about it without feeling a pang — he bent down, picked up an armful of dead leaves, and threw them over Jeanne. She laughed and protested and chased him round the oak tree to give him a smack. There was one leaf that stayed stuck to her woolen cap, like a pom-pom. She was running around the tree, all awkward in her little boots, they were both running around in circles, laughing, René started clowning back around in the opposite direction, she stopped to catch her breath against the tree trunk and he caught her gloved hand and kissed it.

Arthur has never understood how I could say, René has no taste. He has never understood how I can say, Have you seen that hideous living room? I couldn’t remain friends with someone who cannot grasp that talking about the hideousness of René’s living room like that is an act of tenderness, that recognizing the hideousness of the Fortunys’ living room to be exceptional, definitive, grandiose even, is the mark of real affection.

This little race around the oak tree under a gray sky (finally I love low, gray skies most of all), this little kiss on her gloved fingers, redoubled my affection for Jeanne and René Fortuny.

For forty years from his window Lionel has been watching the metamorphoses of a tree. Every day, season by season. The bare branches, the first leaves, summer, fall. Everything that’s still green, still beautiful, normal-sized, he says, is down underneath, away from the light. Up at the ends, patches of faded ocher, brittleness, ragged remains.

I spend half my life amongst trees and greenery, I don’t see what Lionel sees. An object has to be unique, alone, to be visible. The nest has disappeared this year, he said.

Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo. A little work by Bach (little as regards length) discovered thanks to Serkin, via Lionel. The two of us sang the adagiosissimo on the phone this morning, the “Friends’ Lamento”:

Fa mi mi re’ re’ do sigh tee do tee tee La la soh fa fa mi mi sigh

Lionel told me that after he woke up and listened to this song, he felt it would be idiotic to plan any other experiences for the day. The repeated notes, the silences, the interruptions cut through him and justified his paralysis.

According to Bach specialists, it’s a pleasant little youthful composition — with a hint of irony in it. Experts flatten the world.

Marisa Botton is sixty today.

One day I stuck a Toblerone in her vagina and we ate it afterward. A Toblerone she’d bought for her son. At the beginning, she wouldn’t even drink a glass of anything with me. “In Rouen, one doesn’t drink with a stranger.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“You’re worse, you’re one of my husband’s suppliers.”

“All right, then, I have no chance of seeing you anywhere except this corridor.”

“No.”

I knew this meant yes.

At that time telephones were not in such wide use as they are today. You couldn’t reach people directly at their desks, you had to go through the switchboard. I called myself Monsieur Ostinato, an improvised name I borrowed from musical terminology. Who was Monsieur Ostinato? Even after clearing the switchboard you weren’t certain you’d get through to her and you had to tell the inquisitorial voice the purpose of your call. Monsieur Ostinato was a contractor and wanted to give her a private estimate on something. Monsieur Ostinato was only pressed into service once (Marisa thought it was the world’s worst idea, at Aunay’s everyone knew everything, and all it would take was the slightest thing and someone would start asking her husband about the improvements they were having made to their house) but seduced her with his boldness and his wild imagination. Monsieur Ostinato got his rendezvous one April evening at six o’clock in the bar of the Hotel de Dieppe.

She came a quarter of an hour late, a little disappointing in a pale raincoat.

It took me six months to have her. After Ostinato there were other names, other tricks, other lightning rendezvous at the station, at the Bar de la Poste, at the Bar du Palais, at the Dieppe, at the Scotch, the bar in the basement of the Hotel d’Angleterre, she came wearing glasses, she stayed for five minutes with her eyes fixed on the door, she said we can’t see each other anymore, you must forget me, she said in my ear I want you, whenever I think about you I can’t sleep, she just couldn’t do it, she could never do it, there was her son, her husband, her mother, the factory, Rouen, the universe, there was no place to go, there was no time, I was going mad.

One day, I had her. At lunchtime, in a room at the Hotel de la Poste, on the rue Jeanne-d’Arc.

Disturbing life.

There you are, sitting in a good restaurant, you’ve ordered a good wine, you’re trying to hustle a hundred thousand pairs of pajamas, you’re having a pro forma argument but the client isn’t even really using the conditional tense, you can sense it’s gone well, you talk golf or some such bullshit, you laugh with the client till the teeth fall out of your head, which incidentally you’ve always said I was naturally incapable of, you laugh, the buyer leans forward, you clink glasses, you show him your honest face while you calculate your margin, and instead of being no, not happy, heaven forfend, not even satisfied, but just you, pure and simple, you’re fucked, annihilated, you’re shivering in the yawning void that separates you from Marisa, aka Christine Botton, in charge of planning and contract administration at Aunay-Foulquier.