Yasmina Reza - Desolation

Leo didn’t believe in anything he’d built up himself. Here was a man who had spent his whole life demonstrating how dynamic and risk-taking he was, and he didn’t believe in human enterprise or success or the reassuring effects that came with success.

Leo believed in the reality of the chill of the tomb.

Leo believed in the reality of the yellow corridor of Saint-Antoine hospital where his mother died under the supervision of Professor Ottorno, the reality of the time — months — he spent joking about the tubes, the probes, and so on, the whole unfortunate reality of the pathetic mechanics of life.

A man without any illusions about the passage of time, who had the nerve to be genuinely cheerful.

Leo and Lionel were the same age. They started to beat up on each other the moment they got on the telephone. They yelled. You know how it used to end? Joëlle would unplug the receiver for fear Lionel would have a heart attack. Each of them was convinced he looked younger than the other. Whenever the two of them were together, one of them would say, “Tell the truth, which of us looks younger?” and the other would immediately chime in, “Yes, come on, tell the truth, which of us looks younger?”. .

Have you noticed I’ve been dyeing my hair? I dye my hair. Formula and stylist courtesy of René Fortuny. A failure, huh? I dye my hair. Why? What do I know?

Do you remember this essay topic? You’re taking a walk in the woods and you’re struck by how picturesque it all is. Some idiot of a schoolboy once wrote I was walking quietly along the path when all of a sudden, cunningly hidden behind a tree, the picturesque leapt out and struck me. Do you remember how we laughed? It was the cunningly hidden behind a tree that was the best. Well, that’s exactly how it’s been for me recently with depression. I’m walking along minding my own business and all of a sudden, cunningly hidden in the scenery, depression leaps out and strikes me. With a force and a weight you can’t even imagine. And what do I do to fight it? I dye my hair. When existential depression attacks without warning, your father dyes his hair.

Leo on the other hand never dyed his hair. Leopold Fench, prince of the moment, was above that kind of primping. In one day, Leo Fench broke more hearts than René and me in a lifetime. When your mother says in that incredibly tone-deaf way, when your mother says, “Leopold Fench is dead,” I think of our last meeting at the rue de l’Université. Two souls encounter each other at random, two paths cross, there’s nothing to distinguish them from the rest of humanity, nothing to distinguish them from those who’ve already lived or those to come. And this, I tell myself, would be totally irrelevant if Leo had not been something I value a hundred times higher than a happy man — a joyful man.

Open the wall cabinet in Nancy’s bathroom and you have a perfect vision of human pathos.

Nancy pretends to be aging bravely. For a moment I even feared that her newfound spirituality was going to be the crutch that would allow her to accept wrinkles and facial hair and set off, stick in hand, to wander over hill and dale. No way. Open her cabinet. Cavernous heart of Nancy’s secret war against time. You’ll trip over my latest discovery in this fortress of lunacy— Exfoliating Force C Radiance. A novelty I’d never have noticed if it weren’t for the size of the box and its virulent orange color. You know I’ve never been good at English. Force C Radiance. The words terrify me. Exfoliating! Poor Nancy, I think. Poor little Nancy, who longs to please for an hour or two before she dies. Poor animal, wearing down her teeth in a frenzy to gnaw the last of the marrow out of life. “But why, Nancy,” I say to her, “why all these products? Are they all really necessary?” Nancy shrugs and immediately turns the conversation to the fact that I’ve dared to enter her strictly private bathroom, and open her strictly private wall cabinet to involve myself, in contravention of the most elementary rules of respect, in her strictly private things. While she’s laying down the laws that govern her intimacy for the 412th time, I look at her face, inundated by all the glop from the forbidden cabinet, a nicely sagging face, a face quivering with longing to put it all right, a face advancing peacefully toward its end.

Experience has taught me to be a diplomat, because once you get into territory like this, you know, they’re all pretty much out of their minds. One day your mother was complaining about some newly visible sag line on her cheek. Because she was confiding in me, I said, not intending to be mean, quite the opposite: “It’s nothing.”

“So you can see it too?!” she cries in horror.

“See what? No, I didn’t see a thing.”

“Don’t try and take it back. So it shows, it really shows!”. . and she’s already wailing and turning against me. Since then I’ve banished “It’s nothing” in favor of “It’s not true.” Whatever “it” is, I deny it. When a woman starts fussing over some physical defect, deny, deny, deny. Particularly if she says, “Tell me the truth.” I don’t know how things are with you and women, dear boy, but try to keep them in the plural. Don’t narrow things down to the singular for as long as you can avoid it.

At the hairdresser, I ask for the same treatment as Monsieur Fortuny’s, only not quite so strong. I didn’t dare say color because it’s a unisex hairdresser. Result: you can never tell the difference from the way anything was before, except maybe when it’s a question of boasting a head of white hair and what comes out is a lunatic blond halo. To sum up, if your hair is dyed it looks dyed, and if it doesn’t look dyed, there’s no dye in it. That’s the truth. Women don’t give a shit if they look all tarted up. Women abandoned any idea of the natural centuries ago. But we men, we don’t know how to handle all that. The proof is, while I’m at the hairdresser to be shampooed, I’m thumbing through a magazine and I land on Donald Trump and his new fiancée. Blond girl, twenty-five, fine. But as for him, and I put on my glasses to take a better look, he’s pushing sixty, hair like an upside-down conch shell, setting off from the back of his head at an angle of 110 degrees, probably to hide a bald spot and landing in a fringed swag on his forehead. The whole thing a tone poem of russet browns. There’s a guy who’s earning a good living, I say to myself as I wait to be shampooed, a guy who has his photograph taken day and night and hasn’t found a single person in his entourage who’ll tell him, “No, Mr. Trump, it’s not okay, it’s absolutely not okay.” When the girl arrives with her products, I immediately insist on the weaker form of the treatment. René made an easy transition from hair tonic to hair coloring. All his life, René has gone in for creams and scalp massages, and all my life I’ve envied the hair of René Fortuny.

It’s funny the way people set themselves certain goals. René, who from the age of twenty more or less let his body go to rack and ruin, for some reason known only to himself gave all his attention to his hair. Maybe, and I mean this quite seriously, haircare was René’s road to the meaning of life.

The world is not outside us. Alas. If the world were outside us, there wouldn’t be enough roads for me to travel until I dropped, and instead of hectoring you, I would envy you. I would hate your youth and all the time you have left, and I would envy your eyes, which will see things I shall not see. But the world is not outside us. The world lives within us. Everything you see here, that I planted, my boy, rosebushes, impatiens, boxwood, pear trees, lives only through my thoughts, man’s only knowledge of the world comes from within himself and he can never step outside his own skin. Which is why, at bottom, we no longer fear solitude. Even when we grow old and find ourselves alone again, we don’t give a shit. Little by little we find ourselves completely alone again and we don’t give a shit.