Desolation (4 page)

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.

In the mornings, when I’m sitting at table faced with Dacimiento’s pound cake and condemned to listen to Nancy crunching her little bits of buttered toast, having already gorged herself on France Inter and
Le
Figaro
—fueled by her incomprehensible appetite to be part of the world, she’s been ready to cross swords since dawn—I have an actual physical sensation of the solitariness of man’s existence. And when your sister thinks to give me pleasure (how am I supposed to forgive her for such utter ignorance of who I am) by telling me “He’s
happy,
” I calculate how rare the bridges are from one solitude to another.

Every day the world shrivels me a little and today it’s the world that’s shriveling inside me. That’s the way things are. Little by little death gains the upper hand. One gets used to it. One gets used to death. It’s not such a bad thing to maintain the rhythms of the universe.

In the Kabbalah, which never interested you, doubtless my fault, it says that
one has to shake God to make
him show Himself
. Shake God.

You, my boy, you don’t shake much, do you?

Shake God.

God
doesn’t exist,
but we make space for Him, we take a little step back so that He will come down to our world, not just every day but several times a day and for our whole lifetime. The only reality is His will, for the world, the world, my boy, is made up of our impatient desires.

And what is it you want? What does my son want?

My son wants neither to build, nor to create, nor to invent. Above all, my son doesn’t want to change the order of things. My son wants everything to be cool.

At a moment when anything is possible, at a moment when I would have risked my skin to keep my place among the living, my son wants calm and creature comforts, my son wants peace to bandage up the pitiful wounds in his soul. I whose only terror has always been daily monotony, I who pushed open the gates of Hell to escape this mortal enemy, I have given life to a windsurfer.

If you were to tell me to pursue a woman to the ends of the earth, I’d bow. Everything to do with desire is desperate and boundless. The need to be someone else, someone whose dream of being swept to his fate would at last be fulfilled, this I understand. And without setting myself up as an authority on disintegration, I understand one could literally be swallowed up in pursuit of it. In your whole life, my boy, has there ever been a Marisa Botton? If so, you couldn’t be happy and nobody would talk about you in such degrading terms, because even if one recovers from a Marisa or someone like her with time, one doesn’t come back from it as the same person one was, one is inconsolable, my child, for that part of oneself one has lost, inconsolable.

Marisa Botton from Rouen, in that way, was my true existential experience.

To begin with, she was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And she would have gone on being nothing if I hadn’t had the idea one day when I was bored, to invent her.

Her name was Christine, and she called herself Marisa. This
Marisa
gave you the whole woman. She was married, with a child. Married to a buyer from Aunay’s with whom I did business. That’s how I got to know her. At the beginning, completely insignificant. The kind of woman whose dress fits so tightly that she’s still pulling on the material to make the skirt or the sleeve sit better. I passed her from time to time in the corridors at Aunay’s. One day she says, “It’s really irritating,” and I say, “Irritating? Are you talking to me?”

“Yes. You never say hello to me. You could at least say hello.”

“Do we know each other?”

“My husband is Roland Botton. We had dinner together last winter.”

I said hello to her for a year. Because I hadn’t recognized her again, I forced myself to recognize her. See what things depend on. Hello for a year. Nothing more. Translate that into twenty hellos if you reckon that I went to Rouen once or twice a month, because due to a phenomenon I put down as sheer chance, I ran into her each time I was there. Twenty hellos, which evolved from hello madame to hello dear Madame Botton and finally, after passing through several variations, ending with Marisa hello! Never an extra word, never a how are you, nothing. The day I said Marisa hello! she stops: “Such familiarity all of a sudden.” Why did I throw out Marisa hello!? You know me, nice day, unexpected memory of her first name, probably heard it mentioned five minutes before, in short, a momentary whim and suddenly this woman who didn’t exist a second ago, becomes a bodily reality because she decides to take these chance words seriously. “Is that a reproach?”

“Quite the opposite.”

She looks me straight in the eye. Incredible cheek. Smiles and goes off somewhere or other. From that day on, I think about Marisa Botton. That’s it. But it’s enough. It takes a mere nothing, you see, for someone to start making his bed in paradise. Don’t clear the table, leave the crumbs, Dacimiento will sweep up. You can’t not make crumbs eating this cake. You like the cake, that’s good. At least I don’t ruin your appetite anymore. You see how I’ve swelled up? I’m going to croak from intestinal cancer, nobody gives a shit. And I’ve also probably got Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease, since this morning there’s this tremor in my hand. Did you see the stuff she makes me eat? Last night she cooked white beans and ox tongue. Didn’t say a word. Ignoring unbelievably filthy looks from Nancy, I told her I was surprised that she’d take a week’s paid holiday smack in the middle of the year without giving us more than a bare month’s notice. And she starts defending herself, she’s been here for seven years, seven years of pure slavery of course, for seven years and she’s never once asked for however much it is a month she’s supposed to get, she wasn’t hired to do the shopping and since she’s been doing the shopping her lower back is all shot to hell, she’s not even adding in the number of hours she’s had to spend because we sat down late to dinner and the central-heating repairman was waiting outside in the car and of course that meant they had to eat dinner even later but they’re human beings too, just like we are, and so on. Because they’ve got nothing better to do but drive to Auchon now and then and sit glued to the TV, cracking peppercorns in their teeth, and suddenly they’re talking unions, you know. I’m tempted to tell her they’re not even humans, they don’t even qualify for the lowest rung on the pretty damn low ladder of human evolution, and if I manage to restrain myself it’s only due to Nancy’s vindictiveness because for some time, it’s good you should know this, she’s been beating me. Up till now she’s always beaten me in private and I have to say these moments always make me feel tender toward her again, as if this temporary madness is taking me back to the fragile person she was and this unstoppable uncontrollable meltdown is making me desire her again, but I’m afraid one day she’ll lose it and start to hit me in front of Dacimiento, all the more because she’s been developing some kind of weird complicity with Dacimiento recently and isn’t far from turning her into her everyday bosom buddy. (What’s more, Nancy sent her to her own hairdresser, I didn’t dare say a thing but when she came back she looked like Richard Widmark off to the Korean War.) Beating me up in front of Rosa Dacimiento, a scene I can’t rule out, would by the way have the advantage of giving me the chance to rally myself and I could throw her out right then and there. Do they suffer as much as we do? Dacimiento and her central-heating repairman? Without an imagination, you can’t suffer. What kind of suffering can someone experience if they only see the world at their own height, if they can’t look up or look down, if top shelves of bookcases and cornices and curtain rods and tops of wardrobes might as well be in the next world, because they’re not part of this one? Just as much as
we
do, is what I said. You’ve taken that in. I refuse to see you as suffering’s exile. Even if children don’t remain as warm as you think they will, they’re still your children and I refuse to lose you completely.

Your sister wants to cultivate me. Odd the way women these days create missions for themselves. She maintains the only thing that interests me is music. True. What’s more, to be frank, I can’t see the point of the rest. When music takes possession of you, when music fills your life, will you please tell me what’s the point of words, even nice ones, what’s the point of stories, what’s the use of all that imitating life on paper that people are so wild about, and that shows the effort that went into it and the dexterity, and gives you so little sense of inevitability. Your sister told me I’d be less dense if I read. Word for word. I didn’t get angry. I’m not upset about being dense. Read what, my sweet? Get to know a little literature, you don’t know a thing, you’ve got the time for it now. Instead of saying the exact opposite, which would have been the only possible way to get me interested in the subject, but her ignorance of who I am is bottomless, you have the time now, she says, instead of saying now, Papa, now that you’ve no time anymore.

Most of the people I meet, including my daughter, have only the most trivial grasp of time.

Nancy has developed literary pretensions too. More precisely, since I do have to admit she’s a woman I’ve always seen with a book in her hand, pretty much, Nancy has suddenly been captivated by a writer: André Petit-Pautre (you can easily guess what temptations this name sets off in me). You don’t know him. Nobody knows him. Except for me, because she sometimes invites him to dinner with his wife. Petit-Pautre is her mentor. And our guest, from now on. I remarked that in a world where everyone writes, it’s no surprise that André Petit-Pautre writes too. The other day Lionel quoted me that wonderful thing Enesco said about Bach:
the soul of my soul.
I said to Lionel, who’s always loved both books and music, “Can you name a simple text that has been the soul of your soul?”

“No. Words can’t reach that high. And the soul doesn’t read.”

I went back to Chopin. I could almost say I took him up for the first time, because I had hated him so much for so many years. Aside from a few moments of Romantic absentmindedness in my youth, I’ve always loathed Chopin. And I went back to him thanks to Samson François, a guy I’ve never been able to listen to either before now, because of his name. Samson, okay, but François! Samson Apfelbaum, absolutely, but not Samson François. Stuck in traffic, I turn on classical radio: “Nocturne.” I leave it on. It’s beautiful. Here you are, sinking back down to Chopin in your old age, bravo, I say to myself. Who’s the pianist? Samson François. Yet another surrender. What do you want, I don’t care that much anymore.

Your sister who is intent on my achieving cultivation asked me if I’d been to the Picasso museum. I told her that not only had I never gone to the Picasso museum but I never would go to the Picasso museum. There’s too much enthusiasm about him, I said. I hate the enthusiasm of the masses for
beauty.
Generally speaking, all these people who haunt exhibitions and plod around for hours on end revolt me. Your sister, who’s never had a trace of humor or detachment and hasn’t acquired them from her husband either, though I forgive him because he’s a pharmacist and at least I can discuss medicines with him, shrugs her shoulders and asks me with secret sorrow how I spend my days. I think, I tell her, about the absurdity of human effort. You educate people and when you’re finally coming down the home stretch what you have to listen to is them proselytizing for literature and the Picasso museum. That’s how I spend my days, I tell her emphatically, in these sorts of meditations. “You’re interested in politics,” says Nancy. “He’s always very interested in politics,” says poor Nancy, making nice, because my being described as
dense
has upset her and she’s not trying to come to my assistance but she does want to rehabilitate herself as a wife. “You’re mistaken, dear,” I’m obliged to correct her. “I’m interested in events around the planet the way Lionel watches cars and people passing from his window. Which is to say indifferent to everything except the movement.” Lumping them together, what never changes about these women is that they never believe me. They take everything I say as a series of pathetic and inappropriate poses. Which encourages me to the worst extremes. I think that by the end of the day, I’ve asserted, talking about Jerome—oh, yes, Jerome, there’s another example, yes, he’s my grandson but after all he’s only two and a half and sometimes I call him Jeremy or Thomas, which doesn’t mean a thing, I hear perfectly well but I just don’t hang on to Jerome as his name, your sister takes this as an unforgivable provocation, she doesn’t imagine for a second that I could have forgotten the child’s name—so, talking about Jerome, I’ve said what I think, following on from what had become an extended conversation, which is that I’d prefer him to become a tyrant rather than some card-carrying union faggot. Sounds of horrified clucking, and then to close off any recurrence of Dacimiento as a subject of discussion, I state that the only worthwhile system is feudalism, which had the merit of producing either midgets who kept their mouths shut—and didn’t go around driving us nuts with the Picasso museum and other cultural flab—or knights and revolutionaries, epic types who wielded the sword and the lance. These days we get placards and balloons and women like you who sing. Me personally, I said again, I prefer people screaming and out for blood, waving pikes. At least they make an impression. “Does getting old involve becoming a caricature of yourself?” your sister interjects to show off her cunning and demonstrate that she’s my equal by insulting me. A few years ago I would have slapped her for less. What do you know about aging, you poor creature, how do you even dare use the word after having the complacency to add to humanity by producing a supplementary Jerome. “Getting old,” I said with some restraint, “means to be done with compassion.”