Yasmina Reza - Desolation

In seven years, she has not once figured out how to fit the garbage bag properly over the rim of the garbage can. Sometimes I long to say, “Have you never put a rubber on a guy?” Have you seen how bloated I am these days? I disgust myself. Eat too much for lunch, not enough in the mornings. Always hated breakfast, hated the ritual. That endless show of vitality. Nancy is always in a good mood in the mornings. She smiles as she pours your tea. As she crunches her little piece of buttered toast with honey her eyes are marking out the hidden boundaries of her day. She’s wonderful, you know. She loves people, she wants the best for all humanity. Starting at dawn. The woman is so upbeat, it’s a nightmare, from the moment she gets out of bed. Granted it’s new, but that’s how it is from here on out. Nancy’s on the side of generosity. At any given moment she’s doing her utmost to talk people into submission, and at the first opportunity she hurls herself into the nearest crowd waving slogans and all the rest of it. She wasn’t like that when I got to know her, as you can imagine. The idea of democracy gave Nancy the raw material to elevate her soul. Maybe what she lost in sex appeal she made up in paradise? Nancy overflows with energy. She accuses me of constant complaining, she doesn’t understand that a man who has no place to whine cannot be a normal man. She accuses me of never helping her, she accuses me, whenever we go somewhere, of collapsing on the bed while she does the unpacking, she doesn’t understand that I’m always more tired than she is. Even when she’s tired, she lacks any taste for the horizontal, whereas me, I’m from a long line of the spread-eagled, distinguished by our renunciation of our stomach muscles. Nancy knows nothing about the aging of the body, just as she refutes any element of the tragic in life. Which two things are identical, come to that. Since she’s started getting passionately involved in social upheavals, and since she’s turned her dacimientesque inclinations into a way of life, Nancy is thrilled to be a member of the human race. I am surrounded on all sides by an army of the happy, as you can see! When I got to know her, she was exciting, and at least she didn’t fling herself gaily into the thick of existence. You could detect a little trace of melancholy in her manner. A little existential pallor. Very exciting. A lack of will is a tangible quality in a woman. When I got to know her, I can even say that from a certain standpoint Nancy was superior to me. What has dulled itself into indifference in me — worn down by tiredness, old age, and, if I boast a little, by defeats that I myself sought out — she already had by sheer stupidity. The essence of stupidity. That is how desirable women are, my boy: a little superficial, a little absentminded, inclined to nebulous ideas. You cannot imagine how terrifying the change is. A heart that you thought was languishing, a body that you thought was tender and reserved for your own debaucheries, are seized in the brutal grip of optimism and transformed into the heart and body of a squadron leader. A brain that you thought was bound to apathy starts to manufacture thoughts, and of course the thoughts are always contrary to your own, and uttered pigheadedly, just to finish you off.

Explain traveling to me. My child. I understand the longing to move. I understand about restlessness. I understand the curiosity, the desire to be something other, that last in particular. Before I became the old man you see, I found all that with women. I’d be someone else for two or three days. Boring. Are you someone else on your odysseys? Tell me, teach me, what goes on way away out there. Way away from what?

The garden — all me. If I dropped dead in it right now, in two months it would be a wilderness. Lionel’s wife changed the curtains in their apartment. I have Lionel on the phone every morning, and every morning since the catastrophe Lionel tells me about the catastrophe of the curtains. Imagine a man who has spent forty years yanking the same curtains closed and who suddenly in the last stages of his life finds himself forced not only into change but also into gentle arm movements because his wife has decided to spruce up the place and has installed a sliding track for the new curtains he loathes. Take Lionel as an example; Lionel has always been a sort of contemplative creature. Nobody could say, could they, that Lionel had thrown himself into life’s great adventure? And equally you could say to me, Why do you forgive Lionel for having spent the best of his days staring out of his window at Place Laugier-Farraday when you blame me for observing all the magic of our planet? To which I would respond, dear boy, that Lionel has never, ever aspired to the least hint of fullness, a ridiculous word by the way, to the least hint of prosperity, to even an atom of bodily satiety. Lionel, who was always nailed to the spot by pessimism and inner torments, has only one aspiration, which is peace of mind. A terrible ambition, my child, and one that has no need of the Antipodes. But I have to tell you that if Lionel has become the friend he is, it’s because at any moment when I might be assailed unexpectedly by dark fantasies, I will find in him some echo, even a contradictory one, of my dejection. You cannot be friends with someone who’s a happy man or who wants to be, which is even worse. For starters, you see, you don’t laugh with a happy man. You can’t laugh with a happy man. For starters, I don’t even know if a happy man laughs at all. Do you laugh? Do you still laugh? Perhaps, contrary to all allegations by your cow of a sister, you’re not definitively happy?

With Lionel, I laugh. And I laugh uninhibitedly. And I sympathize with him. And I understand the tragedy of the curtains. And because we understand the tragedy of the curtains, we can also laugh about it. But there’s nobody else Lionel could laugh with over the curtain catastrophe. If we can laugh about it, it’s because the two of us have weighed the disturbance. A weight, you’ll admit, that a happy man has no means to assess. Besides, a happy man is happy to change the curtains because he craves transformations. A happy man consciously chooses a woman who changes the curtains. Where Lionel and I see a criminal, normal people who aspire to happiness salute a balanced woman and a sane one. A domestic Nancy. Mrs. Dacimiento leaves for eight days in Portugal at the beginning of November. The beginning of November: a date she concocted herself. Supposedly her central-heating guy is marrying off his sister. It’s nonstop in these big families: if it isn’t a marriage, it’s a funeral. And Nancy applauds. That Dacimiento decides, a cappella, to take a week’s holiday right in the middle of the year and without giving us more than a month’s warning or asking our opinion, God forbid she should ask for our authorization, all this strikes her as perfectly legitimate and congenial. Fine. But that I could dare to express a slight reservation about the appropriateness of defining November as a normal month when Dacimiento has already taken her vacation and her paid days off and she’ll get her Christmas bonus and the central-heating guy will get most of my pants and my shirts, sooner or later, is a manifestation of meanmindedness and psychological inadequacy that stuns her. The new charter of her existential positivism has an obligatory clause in it mandating the dropping of your pants in front of the maid.

Your sister, whose choice of words is always calculated to annoy me, says that you taste things. To me, tasting things means Denise Chazeau-Combert sucking on a caramelized cherry. She tells me you taste things, which naturally implies “as opposed to you, Papa.” Besides, the “as opposed to you, Papa,” is part and parcel of 90 percent of whatever the two of you say. What are you tasting, my child? What are these faraway things that are worth a dalliance?

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