Yasmina Reza - Desolation

Bach will save me from you all, from your revolting versions of paradise, Bach will save my life.

“My current wife, Nancy,” I say to Genevieve, “is capable of standing motionless — you could time her — in a discount drugstore for an hour at a stretch choosing loose face powder (I still don’t know what that is).”

“Doesn’t seem abnormal to me,” says Genevieve.

“No, not at all abnormal, on the contrary I was expressing regret.”

“She doesn’t do it anymore?”

“These days Nancy, although she’s beautiful to me, spends her money on rejuvenating creams and potions, but, how can I put it, her bent is now scientific. No more of that charming tendency to err toward the magical. Sooner or later women abandon futility.”

“That’s what you think. No more than two weeks ago — and Samuel, I’m no longer in the bloom of youth — I threw a tantrum because I couldn’t get my usual lipstick. I said Arancil is no longer making Bamboo? I said, they’ve discontinued Bamboo?! I’m talking too loud, aren’t I? Samuel, I’m pissed, you’ve got me completely drunk, my friend, you know I basically don’t drink. Our friend the false Hauvette is leaving. He’s not so terrible. The real Hauvette is probably not that well preserved. He may even be dead. At our age, there’s a good chance we’re dead, no? It’s our only rendezvous these days. Which is why I’m capable of going all the way across Paris for a lipstick or a lightning facefirming gel, the hell with the gravity of our final moments, I want pure fantasy, because waiting at the end of the road, my dear, what’s waiting is Bagneux where I’ll be stuck with Abramowitz and his parents, who were already dead as doornails while they were alive, when I would have been so happy to be in Montparnasse in the Jewish part of the cemetery next to Leopold, finally sleeping next to him, even as dust, even in oblivion, even as nothing. Finally no more having to get up and pretend to take everything so lightly, no more standing forever on the threshold of my own life, a little mocking, a little unreliable, a little treacherous, no more wasting my physical strength and my time fighting against the love I felt for him, you’re pouring me another glass, you must take total responsibility for the state I’m in, Montparnasse is still part of the city, you go walking there without thinking twice, you take the children and hunt for entertaining figures among the dead, Leo would have hated being at Bagneux, last time I laid a pebble on his grave, almost a year ago, it was already dark, and I forbid you to laugh, we talked to each other: where were you all our lives? I murmured, when my life intersected with yours, where were you, now I’m too old to attract you, love passes me by and doesn’t even see me. — This is what I wanted, Genevieve. — What did you want? — That your face would be soft. That time would have left its marks, that I can stroke it the way you stroke a dog. — Why? He doesn’t answer. I ask why, but he doesn’t answer. There’s nothing more than the brown gravestone and the pebble in one corner, just as I too, during his life, stayed in a corner, and, absurdly, I tell them all the things I would never ever have said out loud while he was alive, I tell the marble and the incised letters things I left unsaid while my life and his intersected, and that will still remain unsaid tonight, even though I’m lightheaded, because I will never worry again about upsetting him or contradicting him or losing him, death has given him to me. Help, Samuel, right away, we have to get some fresh air.”

Stand up, Genevieve, I said, in the living room in rue Ampère, where we found ourselves after walking the whole length of the Park Monceau and sitting for quite some while in the rotunda. Stand up, Genevieve, I commanded after we’d shared a third of a surviving bottle of vodka. Stand up, come on, we’ll move the armchairs, let’s push back the chairs and the table, I’ll close the curtains, Genevieve, and make rue Ampère and Paris and time all disappear, give me your hand and we’ll dance, Jewish Songs for Cello and Piano, present from my son-in-law Michel, never listened to them before, it’s just like opening a bottle of some ancient nectar with you but I think we’ve drunk enough, let’s dance instead, this evening we’ll dance to Uncertainty and the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre, I was born somewhere between Samara and Kazan on the Volga, somewhere between deserted roads and deserted villages, I’m going to die in the bed in that bedroom next door, a good bed to croak in, as I said to Nancy the other day, she was lying on the daybed for once in her life as was I, I said it’s perfect for keeping watch over someone who’s dying, you smile, Nancy, but that’s where you’ll be, in the armchair, I mean, my love, I’ll be in the bed. Frankly I don’t know which is the better spot. Let’s dance, Genevieve, the steppes are blanketed in white, there are no walls and no doors, the road we’re traveling doesn’t matter anymore. The little pre-Columbian goat has lost a leg, Rosa Dacimiento threw it out, a little leg made of clay, what does she think she’s doing? In the great tradition of Audoulia, I run the cloth over the bookcase slowly to begin with, then speed up as I get closer to the clay statue, laugh, Genevieve, laugh, I do so love your laugh, I’ll do the impossible, go anywhere, if it’ll make you laugh. Audoulia was our pre-Dacimiento, Spanish, my boy as a mere child made model fighter planes, and she broke them all dusting, she didn’t dust, she dueled with fighter squadrons, I miss her today, just as I miss everything to do with times past, whether it’s Audoulia, a leather bag, or the smell of fresh-sawn lumber, I’m immensely nostalgic, Genevieve, incurably nostalgic, it’s something that can wreck your reputation in a minute these days, if you’re nostalgic you’re one of our world’s bastards, I hate our world. Nancy is in Brest, at her parents’. My wife Nancy, Genevieve, is forging right ahead, and since she’s been forging right ahead she’s no longer pretending to jump out of the window, she no longer rolls around on the ground, she beats me periodically and that makes me feel a rediscovered tenderness for her because this madness makes me remember her old fragility, I used to love Nancy, I loved her fits, I loved her laugh, she had the laugh I love, your laugh, and Lionel’s. Arthur’s before he became the universal man. She called me at the office to say I’m off to kill myself, do you realize this is the last time you’ll hear me on the phone, I said but where are you, she started to cry, I’m stuck in traffic on the avenue de la Grande Armée, even when I need to kill myself I can’t get out of Paris. That was the Nancy I loved. I went to get her, I took her shopping, she spent a century choosing a face powder or a pair of shoes, she gave it the same sincerity, the same seriousness she had brought an hour before to the idea of killing herself, I waited for her in overheated rooms, sitting on makeshift stools, we came out clutching parcels, she hung on my neck and kissed me, half-laughing, half-crying, and I ended up crying with her and we both cried over how hard life is and the price of shoes, why our paths are diverging like this, why she’s become this socially engaged person, driven from dawn to dusk by the world as adventure, once she didn’t give a shit, now that she’s in love with illegal aliens from Mali she’s no longer in love with me, since she’s come down on the side of generosity, she’s out to kill me. Let’s dance. What we’re listening to is a Prayer. Let’s dance, Genevieve, before us there was nobody and after us there will be nobody. The world goes on, but for nothing. Let’s dance. I was born in a country that existed in a different time, on white plains, I am incurably nostalgic for empty villages, empty roads, empty sounds, how am I supposed to follow my wife in all her humanistic bustle? I’m happy to go back into winter where I came from. Maybe that’s the distant place that gave me my taste for gray light and it’s from that distant place that the sounds of strings echo in my ears, continually, like a ghostly relic. Let’s do a spin. I admire how light you are on your feet. Lionel, who watches the world from his window, loves the gray of the sky as much as I do, at least he’s sure, he says, that the weather isn’t pleasing anyone at all, and with a little luck, he says, melancholy will manage to overtake an idiot or two and you’ll feel a little less alone, a tiny little bit less alone, he says, than on those National Cultural Heritage days when you see clusters of happy people going past in shorts like fat bunches of grapes, shorts should be banned in towns, he says, even in small towns, shorts should be permitted in open country and only in open country, and then only in autumn colors, towns should have a ban on shorts and happy people, he says in conclusion. Every day, Genevieve, we talk on the phone. Every morning we call each other, we almost don’t speak to each other anymore except on the phone, we’re that close. We no longer need a face to talk to. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell Lionel that Arthur has bought himself an apartment in Jerusalem. Maybe he knows and he’s had the tact, knowing how coolly I would view it, to keep quiet. I would like to know what Lionel thinks on this matter. And Arthur too, I miss. I miss him. Not just at checkers, where despite the fact that his game had really gone down, he was the only possible partner. Despite the fact that his game had gone down alarmingly, which he did out of friendship, another discipline. I miss him because I laughed with him too. There was a time when Arthur and I could laugh about the general failure of life. Arthur, I don’t know if you know, almost separated from Vera because of a dream. He woke up one morning and said to Vera, “You’re horrible. You’re a horrible woman.” Vera, in his dream, was taking him to lunch. Contrary to their usual habits, Vera is driving the BMW. It’s supposed to be midday, but they’re driving in twilight down the sandy bed of a dried-up river, sort of like the Garonne at the end of its course. They’re driving, alone, in some sort of estuary lined with truck stops, they meet the occasional construction vehicle, pass a gravel pit that’s operating at full capacity. There are boats pulled up in pools of water against the banks, you can tell that there’s free passage only once a day, you can tell the tide’s going to come in, suddenly Arthur tries to grab the wheel and yells, Quicksand — the BMW’s going to sink! Vera replies, All you think about is your damn car, you’re such a gutless wonder, I’m never going to take you anywhere again. When he wakes up, Arthur analyzes the dream, he goes back to the sand, the mud, the rising tide, the gravel, the truck stops pretending to be port taverns, the smell of fish, he thinks about the twilight, he thinks about the horrible reaction when he tried to save the BMW, which is to say their return, which is to say the two of them, and he says to himself, aha, that’s where she was taking me to lunch. She was actually taking me to death.