Yasmina Reza - Desolation

Lionel can’t get it up anymore. “One less curse to cope with,” he announces. I say, “So what else is new? You haven’t been getting it up for a long time now.”

“No, no,” he says, “wrong. I can’t get it up with Joëlle anymore. With Joëlle it’s dead and buried, but I was still managing it elsewhere. The problem is that now I can’t get it up with anyone. From one day to the next, it stopped functioning. I didn’t have the strength to take it as a real plus. I went to see someone, a Dr. Sartaoui, who’s a specialist in this stuff. There were two of us in the waiting room,” says Lionel. “I said to myself, Hey, he’s younger than me and he can’t get it up either. That cheered me up for a moment.”

The guy prescribes pills, to be taken two hours beforehand. “Two hours before what,” I say.

“Before what? Before you fuck!”

“And how do you know you’re going to fuck two hours from now?

“Because with whores you can schedule it, my friend.”

Which has always been the biggest difference between Lionel and me. He has a real taste for it, I’ve never really spent time with them. So — Lionel goes and tests the pill, which is a fabulous success. Second test, just as fabulous, if short-lived. He goes mad. Decides, although he doesn’t “go out” anymore and has had no working sense of what goes on out there socially in the city for some years now, to have a fling. He’s already located his quarry in a waitress at the Petit Demours where he eats lunch every day of the week. The girl’s been working there for a year, and a pathetic bond between them has progressed all the way from jokes to lingering eye contact. Doped up with Sartaoui’s pills, Lionel goes over to the direct offensive, an offensive which opens with, “Do you know that in Australia there are black widow spiders in the towns and the yellow snake too, extremely poisonous,” this whispered between the blanquette of veal and coffee. Lionel, you understand, has never been with anyone except whores or self-destructive women whom, as far as one can see, he doesn’t view in any sexual way but subjugates with his outpourings against love, children, reproduction, in short, life. The waitress — fifty years his junior, please note — belongs to an intermediary category that’s completely unknown to him. Which is why this preamble is such a jawdropper.

The girl laughs. The girl laughs and says, as if to show the remark was brilliant, “We’ve got dangerous animals here as well.” Lionel’s feathers are in full courtship display, as he feels automatically this means he can propose a rendezvous. The girl accepts. Lionel goes home and starts doing his calculations. They’re meeting at 4:30 at a café midway between the two of them, the girl’s due back at Demours at 7:00, that gives them two and a half hours, half an hour in the café for verbal preliminaries, 5:00 hotel. . hotel? Or his place? Which hotel? Lionel opts for his place, which has all the advantages, despite some redundant scruples in the back of his mind which are quickly discarded, so—5:00 at his place, let’s say 5:15 to allow for hitches, that means the pill has to be swallowed at 3:15, which means right now, hop, Lionel swallows the pill. He paces around for an hour, rubs himself with perfume, does two or three stretching exercises recommended in one of Joëlle’s magazines, decides to subscribe to Wild Earth, the publication where he found his pickup line in Sartaoui’s waiting room, and which is obviously the key to the whole story.

At 4:15 he goes downstairs. He walks up rue Langier looking much more cheerful than usual, it’s a beautiful day, the kind of day when God and the wind have decided to ruffle you gently on your good side. He’s happy. For four minutes, Lionel strides along as king of the world.

4:20 p.m. and he’s at the café where he orders a lemon Schweppes, which he loathes, so as to be sure his breath is fresh. At 4:35 the girl still isn’t there, at 4:45 ditto. At 4:55, she arrives. She finds a dazed old man who holds out a trembling hand. She orders tea and immediately announces that she’ll have to leave by six. Sartaoui’s pill, in defiance of its apparently shaky user, is sending out its first hidden signals. Disastrous timing. The girl is calm, smiles. Listens. Like a nurse in a palliative care unit. While she’s blowing on her herbal tea, Lionel clutches his chest, the only part of him that’s in synch at this moment, his last wisp of horizon.

He’s going to play his last card.

“I don’t feel well,” he says. “Something’s the matter, could you take me home?”

“You don’t feel well?”

“No,” he says, struggling pitiably to his feet, “I feel dizzy.”

“Dizzy?”

“Yes, dizzy.”

She takes his arm. They leave. The rue Pierre-Demours is crowded, noisy. The weather is gray. She supports him in a friendly fashion. Friendly girl, he says to himself, what a farce!

They arrive at the entrance to his building. “Would you like me to come up with you?” she offers sympathetically.

“I’d like that,” Lionel answers in a high-pitched quaver, wondering how on earth, once they get upstairs, he will manage to change gears and become Casanova. The elevator comes down. Stops. Picture one of those open elevators with a grille. Lionel sees feet, a corner of skirt. . Joëlle! Joëlle, general secretary of a pension savings bank at the Porte de Picpus, Joëlle who’s been supporting the family for forty years, never in forty years home before seven in the evening, is home today, in the rue Langier, at 5:15.

“Madame Gagnion died,” she says.

Slut, thinks Lionel, that slut of a Gagnion who finds a way to croak while I’m having a hard-on. Filthy slut. Gagnion is their upstairs neighbor. An old woman who’s got nobody left but them. In a word, Lionel thanks the girl, tells Joëlle he too had some kind of attack in the street. What kind of an attack? Joëlle fusses, already in shock because of Gagnion. Nothing, nothing whatever, darling, a little dizzy spell. Joëlle gives some instructions to the concierge, they go back upstairs, Joëlle insists that Lionel lie down. She helps him undress. “But what’s going on,” she cries, “you’ve got a hard-on.” And immediately, instead of profiting from the situation, starts yelling and hitting him. The bitch from downstairs is nothing but a whore and she’ll gut her, he didn’t have any kind of attack, he’s pathetic, a parasite, a piece of shit. Whereupon farewell Sartaoui, farewell waitress from the Demours, farewell erection.

A finale like any other, you’ll say.

Well, yes. One finale leads to another, my boy. First one finale, then the next. Things extinguish themselves one after another. From the glory of day to the shadows. Like Lionel heading up the rue Pierre-Demours.

You know that Nancy has also become a psychologist. You’ll say that’s all part of her arsenal. She’s become a psychologist and when you come up as the subject, which happens, this is her theory. I’m supposed to have traumatized you — a theory your mother naturally shares — I’m supposed to have traumatized you when you were a child by my severity, my demands, my readiness to strike you, and so on. I’m supposed to have traumatized you and somehow suffocated you. Suffocated you by the force of my personality which was disproportionate to your sensibility, your fragility, your all those so-called positive words which are in vogue these days.

So, traumatized and suffocated, you embarked on life in the worst possible circumstances. To hear tell, you were on your way to being a drug addict or a delinquent. At this stage in the experiment, Nancy thinks she can arouse my sympathy, which only goes to show her poor grasp of psychology, by the way. Accordingly I’m supposed to take pleasure in the fact that you’re laid back. That you have absolutely no ambition, that you’ll end up a social disaster — so what. You’re a boy who’s raising the bar on misery. Hats off. With Stalin for a father, hats off, my boy.