Desolation (3 page)

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.

If I weren’t moved by some degree of pity and affection for you, I’d find you repellent. Nancy has no idea how much you disgust me when she talks about how
crushed
you are. Those are her words. I’m supposed to have crushed you.

“How?” I ask.

“You were too strong, you didn’t let him blossom.”

“Ah, but he’s blossoming now?”

“Yes, he’s beginning to, it’s wonderful.”

Nancy can talk about you blossoming for minutes at a time. Your crushing and your blossoming are the two major lines on your medical chart. Not once have you ever inquired after my health. To what should I attribute this silence? Shame? Indifference, ennui? You should know I’m not well. And if you’ve always known I’ve been prone to illness, you should take on board that they now dictate the way I spend my time. But you don’t give a fuck, you don’t think it’s worth talking about. Your brother-in-law Michel who was here on Sunday with your sister and the baby—that’s when she used the word
happy
about you—is blossoming too, go figure. He’s joined the Jewish Ramblers at the Île-de-France. The only way he’s found to be a Jew at last. Last weekend they did Montfort-L’Amaury-Coignières. They came in the afternoon, in the morning he’d done Montfort to Coignières. Eleven miles. Over the moon. Through colonies of weekend cottages, forests sliced up by highways, the odd hill, what do I know. He’s laid back too. No vestige of existential angst. You’ll say he’s managed to weed-whack his entire psyche at one go. Explain to me how anyone, let alone in a group, can plow all the way from Montfort via Cergy to Coignières, between manure heaps and beetroot fields, ride back on the B line and remain an optimist. Here’s a boy who gets up on Sunday after a grueling walk, hops out of bed at dawn’s early light, and says to himself, Hey, great, today I’m going to walk to Coignières with my friends the Jewish Ramblers. To Coignières. Apparently one blossoms where one can. You, you need the Caribbean. Because to crown it all, in my despotism and mistreatment of you, I’ve made you a high-class whore. If you remain immune to the poetry of Cergy-to-Pontoise, it’s undoubtedly my fault and I know better than anyone, kindly note, that’s it impossible to raise the bar of unhappiness inside the Beltway.

You’ve decided to take a year’s sabbatical. You’ll be surprised to know I was curious enough to look up the word in the dictionary, and the definition makes it completely inapplicable to you because it refers to university professors going off once every seven years to do their own research. But so what, if everyone had to avoid abusing or stretching language, nobody’d ever open their mouth. So you decided to take a sabbatical year, a verbal fig leaf to disguise an entire sabbatical life, if what your friends say is to be believed. In short, you’ve decided to opt out. Fine. If there’s anything that interests me, despite myself, in this plan of yours, it’s its absolute vacuity. No irony intended, for once. When you decide to opt out of everything except touring the planet, you free yourself of all scruples and parasitic virtues, and clearly you’re miles away from any idea, thank God, of devoting your time to some form of good works, like protecting orphaned children or virgin forests. Radically egotistical, radically consistent. That’s not so common these days, particularly as someone as weak-natured as you are could be in danger of being dragged into some sort of philanthropic orgy.

One day your mother opened the newspaper and said, “Leopold Fench is dead.”

It was the worst sentence I’ve ever heard in my life.

Leo Fench was Lionel’s cousin by marriage. He had been one of the frontline troops in the heroic epic of mass manufacture in the clothing industry. I don’t know if you knew him. At the end of the fifties Leo made a fortune with the introduction of nylon thread that wouldn’t ladder. Only two weeks beforehand we bumped into each other on the rue de Solferino. He was coming from the dentist’s. No hint of the shadow of death. Pleasant, the same as always. One fine day a man is walking happily along the rue de Solferino and next day he’s dead. Leopold Fench was the most cheerful man I ever knew. When we first got to know each other in the fifties, I read this cheerfulness as a form of instability, it takes time to recognize that cheerfulness is a death song. The son of a grocer from Roanne, he made a fortune in nylon and bought himself an apartment on the rue Las-Cases. Main floor and garden, plus another floor upstairs. He had a year’s worth of work done on it, maybe even more. He redid the whole thing. He ran all round Paris to find the tiles, he ordered doors from God knows where, and mantelpieces, he went through the decorators, he designed a chandelier himself and had it made in Italy. After a year and a half he moved in with his family. One afternoon just afterward, he calls me. Come by, he says. He opens the door to me himself. We go into the salon. The room opened onto the garden, and you had to go down a few steps. It must have been January, but the weather was particularly fine that day. I tell him, “My friend, it’s a triumph.” He shows me every detail, I remember we spent whole minutes on the curtain tiebacks with their special pleating, he shows me the size of the rooms, the perspectives, the genuine boiseries, the fake cornices, he shows me everything right down to the light switches. I say, “It’s a real triumph.” I say, “There isn’t another apartment like it in Paris.” He nods. We sit down, he on a stool with tapestry work he’d been praising two minutes before. We look at the garden through the glass door. Light streams into the room. There’s an occasional noise from the street but it’s almost nothing, a vague sound that seems to emanate from the provinces, a background murmur of peaceable life.

Leo watches a leaf quiver, his finger calls my attention to the perfection of some shrub or another and he says, “Now what?”

And that’s what I think about when your mother opens the paper and says Leopold Fench is dead. Cans of tuna fish from Roanne, the stool from the rue Las-Cases, his unbuttoned jacket in the sunshine on the rue de Solferino.

A beautiful day, a man walking happily along a street in Paris at the furthest remove from death. The sky belongs to him, the river belongs to him, the houses, and the faces, belong to him, the old friend he meets where rue de Solferino and rue de l’Université cross belongs to him, as, for the last time, although he doesn’t know it, does the little chamber that is his life.

Your mother, sounding only marginally surprised, said, “Leopold Fench is dead.” The relative unimportance of the death is measured in the offhand way she says it. Your mother has suggested, if not decreed, that the world could keep on calmly turning without Leo, that Leo Fench lived and died the way dogs live and die, nice companions but not important.

“I’m shattered by this,” I say.

“Shattered? Why? The two of you weren’t that close.”

“We were close in a way that’s beyond you.”

“Everything’s beyond me these days.”

“Quite.”

She began to cry. The moment a woman starts to cry, I want to deck her. I can’t stand people who go to pieces. Take some cake, my boy. Take a slice. Orange cake, Mrs. Dacimiento brought it for my breakfast. I turned over the plastic wrapping, orange cake, twenty francs. Mass-made by lesbians from Pont l’Abbé in a former pigsty turned factory. That’s what she wants to shove down my throat at breakfast, me who hates breakfast. A piece of cellulose spritzed with artificial essence of fruit.

Leo Fench believed in life. And he opted for frivolity because he believed in life, not in people. From people, Leo expected nothing. It was he one day, when Lionel was particularly depressed and was thinking of going to a doctor, who said, “You should take something to cheer you up a little. Just
a little.
Just enough so that you don’t seem to be wandering loose all day in Bagneux cemetery.”

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.