Yasmina Reza - Desolation

In Place Laugier-Farraday, there’s a tree. A chestnut, I think, but I’m not sure. In short, a single tree that Lionel’s been looking at from his window for forty years. Every day, in every season. Buds, leaves, fall, and so on. Every day, in every season, Lionel has observed time’s shattering indifference.

In a single generation you have swept away the only credo that has ever motivated me. I whose only terror is daily monotony, I who would push open the gates of Hell to escape such a mortal enemy, I have a son who’s rotting in leisure. Maybe you knew from the beginning — what a piece of wisdom, if that’s the case! — that we’re all condemned to be inferior to ourselves. The world shrivels me day by day. And though I have struggled relentlessly but in vain against this desiccation, it was a battle lost before it began. So, you’ll say, secure in the wretched mishmash of commonplace mediocrity that seems to be your substance, was there any point in joining battle at all? Because any war, no matter how pointless or how deadly, is better than mere comfort. In the course of my life I have been literally killed, first imprisoned then executed, by the inertia of people whose only goal is comfort. Your pals. The horde of people just like you. What amazes me about you is that you haven’t embarked on a little family. Like your sister. The first woman, parenthetically, ever to give birth to a child. And, while we’re at it, how are you doing with women, dear boy? You screw a little on your voyages? You do screw, don’t you?

Explain to me about voyages, my boy. Is there a life outside oneself? Is there a reality outside oneself? The only woman who ever truly obsessed me was a slut who wasn’t fit to tie my shoes. I would have torn myself to pieces for her, and in one sense she skinned me alive. It was my only existential experience. She was simply there, like an object, worthless, persisting in being worthless, but her yeses or her nos could reduce me from a conqueror to a bundle of rags, when she said yes I could challenge the universe and when she said no I crumbled.

Life is our impatient desires. Reality is what has to give way. That’s my theory. The rest is women’s nonsense.

Tell me about traveling. I used to go off myself, if you remember, when the two of you were children. My annual trip to the Far East. For years I said Far East when I meant Korea. Then, business expanded to include all Southeast Asia, when I got into manufacturing I went to Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, in short what’s the difference? Hotels, factories, offices, business lunches, airports, hotels, palm trees, American cars, factories, planes, evenings of entertainment laid on by the suppliers, dancing in your stocking feet with some kind of geishas who’ve fed you beforehand with little sticks like an infant, not whores but not virgins either, city tours, monuments you don’t give a shit about, you come back with a suitcase stuffed full of junk, knickknacks, and all that souvenir rubbish, and what world have you seen, where have you been, those simple words Far East contained so many more boundaries, so many dreams, so much more of a voyage!

Her name was Christine, she called herself Marisa. Her advantage over your mother and Nancy is that she never tried the American thing, if you see what I mean. Your mother and Nancy transformed themselves into Americans over time. It was the only way they could find to distinguish themselves. Emancipation. I knew your mother had turned into an American the day I heard her at dinner casually mentioning, excuse the detail, toes and earlobes as erogenous zones. Those last words uttered in the uninhibited tones of a woman who uses them as part of her daily vocabulary.

Unhappy — yes, I was unhappy. In some absurd way haunted, in some absurd way shattered. Shattered by Marisa Botton, alias Christine, in charge of planning and contract administration at Aunay-Foulquier.

She lived in Rouen. All our clients at the beginning were in Rouen. The Montevalons, the Köllers, Aunay-Foulquier, Rouen.

Marisa Botton, Rouen. The only reality, Rouen.

Final quarrel with Arthur. Over a phrase. Talking about René Fortuny, I said, “René has no taste.”

“He doesn’t have your taste,” Arthur retorts.

I say, “You’ve seen that hideous living room of his.”

“Say you don’t like his place, don’t say it’s hideous.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Will you please,” pontificates Arthur, “will you please make a distinction between your imagination and reality.”

Subtext: you’re not the whole world. There are things in their infinite variety, and then there’s you, you episodic little piece of shit, and no one gives a fuck about you or your opinions. As a result of which, I quarreled badly, irreparably, with Arthur, whom I won’t miss for a minute you might say, except for chess, where although his game had gone off, he proved to be the only possible partner. Way off. You couldn’t play a quick match with him anymore. His neurons were all shot to hell. A guy who bases his priorities on so-called reality has lost his intellectual level anyhow. To look at it a different way, a guy who fails to take the hideousness of René Fortuny’s living room as a measure of reality is a guy who’s had it. And, final remark, will you please make a distinction between reality and your imagination. Completely absurd. Total failure to grasp the universe. What has happened to Rouen since this name stopped breaking my heart? Rouen that drove my every action, my every gesture. Rouen, my exile, my Babylon, Rouen, written endlessly, erased, written again, Rouen, surrendered to Arthur’s reality, five letters on a roadmap.

One day when we were skiing at Chandolin, while all of you were on the slopes and I was walking along the paths, I met a family of Italians. Mother on toboggan, father on toboggan, children on toboggans. The mother was howling with joy and panic, the father was yelling, “Frena! Frena!” The children were laughing, they were all banging into one another, ricocheting off the sides of the track, tipping over in hysterics, Frena! . .

While we were young, we used to go to Morzine in winter, Lionel was engaged to a girl there whom I also liked. From the window we’d watch the sunset on the mountains. Suddenly the girl burst out, “Why do I have such a pessimistic view of life?”

“Look at the mountains,” said Lionel. “Look how beautiful the ridges are, one day you’ll think, ‘I wasted my best hours.’ ”

“You’re right, but what do I do?”

“Be a bit of an idiot.”

In Chandolin, the Italians were idiots. Complete idiots on their toboggans. I saw them from a distance on the slope, on their mad descent, falling off, swearing, and me, motionless, an old man that day — I was still young — an old man made of lead and bitterness. Fifty years after Morzine, I said to Lionel, “Did you and I know how to be real idiots?”

“You did,” he said.

Lately he confessed that he’d wept at the Place des Invalides as he watched the president of Mexico go past with his motorcycle escort. Lionel wept, undone by the French welcome and the grandeur of the Republic.

“Having failed to be enough of an idiot,” I laughed, “you’re a genuine moron.”

“Of course.” He nodded.

Being an idiot, or a bit of an idiot, my boy, doesn’t apply to fans of the tropics. Don’t misinterpret me. I’m always afraid, you’ll forgive me, that you’ll try to take advantage of a vocabulary whose humor and lapidary wit escape you. It’s the exact opposite, when you think about it. Being a bit of an idiot, as per Lionel’s original advice, is only for complicated souls. Only the tormented, you see, which means unfortunately the exact opposite of who you’re trying to be, will grasp the brotherly element of choice here. No one urges an idiot to be a bit of an idiot. Nor do they urge it on anyone who’s happy-go-lucky, a related idiot, just between the two of us. Even less do they urge it on a truly happy man. If such a man exists.