Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Yasmina Reza
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Robert Toscano
Marguerite Blot
Odile Toscano
Vincent Zawada
Pascaline Hutner
Paola Suares
Ernest Blot
Philip Chemla
Loula Moreno
Raoul Barnèche
Virginie Déruelle
Rémi Grobe
Chantal Audouin
Jean Erhenfried
Damien Barnèche
Luc Condamine
Hélène Barnèche
Jeannette Blot
Robert Toscano
Odile Toscano
Jean Ehrenfried
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Copyright
1 novel.
18 people.
18 lives.
Infinite combinations: families and friends, colleagues and patients, lovers and mourners ...
But sometimes a crowd is the loneliest place to be.
An award-winning exploration of dreams and disillusionment, love and infidelity from the creator of global theatre sensation ‘Art’ and God of Carnage.
Novels
Hammerklavier
Desolation
Adam Haberberg
Dawn, Dusk or Night
Plays
Conversations After a Burial
‘Art’
The Unexpected Man
Life x 3
God of Carnage
Screenplays
Lulu Kreutz’s Picnic
YASMINA REZA is a French playwright and novelist, based in Paris. Both her novels and plays have been translated worldwide. Her plays are multi-award-winning critical and popular international successes; Conversations After a Burial, ‘Art’, The Unexpected Man, Life x 3, A Spanish Play and God of Carnage have been translated into thirty-five languages and produced all over the world. God of Carnage was made into the film Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski, and A Spanish Play inspired the film Chicas, which was directed by Yasmina Reza herself. Her novels include Hammerklavier, Desolation, Adam Haberberg and Dawn, Dusk or Night.
SARAH ARDIZZONE was born in Brussels and lives in Brixton. She has translated some forty titles from the French, winning the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation and a New York Times Notable Book accolade. Like Yasmina Reza, Sarah originally trained in theatre with Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
To Moïra
The translator wishes to thank Yasmina Reza and Michal Shavit for their patience and encouragement; Sam Gordon for his brilliantly insightful close reading and suggestions, as well as his diligent checking; Anneesa Higgins for ‘purveyor of fine cheeses’ in the first Robert Toscano chapter; Christopher Adams for kindly making sense of the bridge terms in the Raoul Barnèche chapter; Ros Schwartz and Géraldine D’Amico, translation fairy godmothers; also, Judy and Stephen Kane, and Emma Nightingale, for their generous hospitality. And finally, Simon Ardizzone, for everything.
‘Felices los amados y los amantes y los que
pueden prescindir del amor. Felices los felices.’
‘Happy are the loved and the lovers and those
who can do without love. Happy are the happy.’
Jorge Luis Borges
WE WERE DOING the weekend shop at the supermarket. At one point she said, you go and queue for the cheese while I deal with the groceries. When I came back, the trolley was half full of cereals, biscuits, powdered food sachets and creamy desserts. I said, what’s the point in any of that? – What d’you mean, what’s the point? I said, where’s the sense in any of that? – You’ve got children, Robert, they like Cruesli, they like Napolitains, and they have a soft spot for Kinder Bueno; she was holding up the packets for me. I said, it’s ludicrous to stuff them full of fat and sugar, this trolley is ludicrous, and she said, which cheeses did you buy? – A Chavignol and some Morbier. She shrieked, and no Gruyère? – I forgot and I’m not going back, it’s too busy. – If you’re only buying one cheese, you know perfectly well it has to be Gruyère, who eats Morbier at home? Who? Me, I said. – Since when do you eat Morbier? Who wants to eat Morbier? I said, stop it, Odile. – Who likes bloody Morbier?! Meaning: ‘apart from your mother’. Recently, my mother had found a rivet in a Morbier. I said, you’re shouting, Odile. She manhandled the trolley and tossed in a three-pack of Milka bars. I fished out the bars and put them back on the shelf. In a flash, she put them back in the trolley. I said, I’m off. She replied, off you go then, off you go, all you ever say is I’m off, it’s your stock response, as soon as you’re running low on excuses you say I’m off, out comes this preposterous threat. She’s right, I often say I’m off, I admit I say it, but I don’t see how I could not say it, when it’s the only urge I have, when I can see no way out apart from instant desertion, but I also admit, yes, that I use it as an ultimatum. Right, have you finished your shopping, I say to Odile, giving the trolley a shove forward, we don’t have any other crap to buy? – Listen to how you’re talking to me! Do you have any idea how you’re talking to me? I say, keep moving. Keep moving! Nothing irritates me more than these sudden instances of piqued pride, when everything stops, when everything is transfixed. Of course I could say, I’m sorry. Not once, I’d have to say it twice, in the right tone of voice. If I said I’m sorry, twice, in the right tone of voice, we could almost carry on normally with our day, except that I have no urge, no physiological possibility of saying such words when she stops in the middle of a row of condiments, as if stunned by insult and calamity. Keep moving please, Odile, I say in a controlled voice, I’m hot and I have an article to finish. Apologise, she says. If she’d said apologise in a normal tone, I might have backed down, but she murmurs, she makes her voice deliberately flat, atonal, and there’s no way round that. I say, please, and I keep calm, please, in a controlled voice, I picture myself speeding round a ring road, listening at full blast to ‘Sodade’, a song I’ve recently discovered, and which I don’t understand at all, apart from the loneliness of the voice, and the word solitude repeated over and over again, even if people tell me the word doesn’t mean solitude but nostalgia, loss, regret, melancholy, a host of intimate things that cannot be shared but which are known as solitude, just as the domestic trolley, the aisle of oils and vinegars, and the man begging his wife under the fluorescent lighting are known as solitude. I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Odile. Odile is an unnecessary addition. Of course it is. Odile isn’t nice. I say Odile as a sign of my impatience, but I’m not expecting her to turn, arms dangling, towards the refrigerated-goods section, at the back of the shop, without a word, leaving her handbag in the trolley. What are you doing, Odile? I shout, I’ve got two hours left to write a major piece on the new gold rush! I sound completely ridiculous. She’s disappeared from sight. People are staring at me. I grab the trolley and make a dash for the back of the shop, I can’t see her (she’s always had a talent for disappearing, even in happier circumstances). I shout, Odile! I head towards the drinks: nobody. Odile! Odile! I sense I’m alarming the people around me, not that I care, I plough up and down the aisles with the trolley, God I hate supermarkets, and all of a sudden I spot her, in the cheese queue, a queue that’s even longer than it was a moment ago, she’s gone back to join the cheese queue! Odile, I say, once I’m level with her, I’m speaking in a measured voice, Odile, you’ll have to wait twenty minutes to be served, let’s go and we’ll buy the Gruyère somewhere else. No reply. What does she do? She rummages in the trolley and picks up the Morbier. I say, you’re not going to return the Morbier? – Yes. We’ll give it to Mum, I say to lighten the mood. Recently, my mother found a screw in some Morbier. Odile doesn’t smile. She stands there, the upright injured party in the line of penitents. My mother told the cheesemonger, I don’t like to make a fuss but, given your reputation as a purveyor of fine cheeses, I should point out that I found a metal rivet in your Morbier. The guy didn’t give a damn, he didn’t even offer her the three Rocamadours she was buying that day as a goodwill gesture. My mother prides herself on having paid without batting an eyelid and of being bigger than the cheesemonger. I walk up to Odile and I say, quietly, I’m going to count to three, Odile. I’m going to count to three. Do you hear me? Now why, just as I say that, do I think of the Hutners, a couple we’re friends with, who have withdrawn into a show of smug-marriedness, they’ve started addressing each other, of late, as ‘my heart’, and they say things like ‘let’s cook something special this evening, my heart’. I don’t know why the Hutners spring to mind when I’m possessed by the opposite kind of lunacy, but perhaps there isn’t such a big divide between let’s cook something special this evening, my heart and I’m going to count to three, Odile, in both cases there’s a sort of constraining of the self in order to become two, by which I mean there’s no more natural harmony in let’s cook something special, my heart, oh no, and no less of a gulf either, except that I’m going to count to three has prompted a twitch in Odile’s face, a puckering of her mouth, the tiny beginnings of a laugh, to which of course I simply mustn’t succumb for as long as I don’t have a clear green light, however strong the urge, no I’ve got to pretend I haven’t seen a thing. I decide to count, I say one; I whisper it clearly, the woman just behind Odile has a ringside seat, with the toe of her shoe Odile pushes away some wrapping that’s trailing on the floor, the queue is getting longer and it’s not moving at all, I need to say two, I say two, it’s an open two, magnanimous, the woman behind glues herself to us, she’s wearing a hat, a sort of upturned floppy felt bucket, I can’t bear women who wear hats like that, the hat is a very bad sign, my glare is intended to make her back off by a metre but nothing happens, she stares at me curiously, she looks me up and down, does she smell atrociously bad? There’s often an odour that emanates from women who wear outfits that are stacked, unless it’s the proximity of fermented dairy products. Inside my jacket, my mobile vibrates. I squint to read the caller’s name because I don’t have time to find my glasses. It’s a contributor who might be able to tip me off about the Bundesbank’s gold reserves. I ask him to send me an email because I’m in a meeting, which is what I say as shorthand. This could be a lucky phone call: I lean over and whisper into Odile’s ear, in a voice that has resumed its responsibilities, my editor wants a focus piece on the state secret of Germany’s stockpiling, and I haven’t got anything on it yet. She says, who’s interested in that? And she puckers her face, curling down the corners of her mouth so that I can see how inane the topic is, but more seriously still how inane my work is, and my efforts in general, as if there was no more hope for me, not even a recognition of my own sacrifices. Women take every opportunity to dump you in it, they love to remind you how disappointing you are. Odile has just moved up a place in the cheese queue. She has picked up her handbag and is still gripping the Morbier. I’m hot. I’m suffocating. I’d like to be far away, I don’t know what we’re doing here any more or what any of this is about. I’d like to slide on snowshoes in Western Canada, like Graham Boer, the gold digger and hero of my article, to plant stakes and mark the trees with an axe in frozen valleys. Does he have a wife and children, this Boer? A guy who braves grizzly bears and temperatures of minus thirty wouldn’t have any truck with supermarket shopping at peak time. Is this a man’s place? Who can walk down these aisles of fluorescent lighting, past never-ending packs, without feeling demoralised? And to think I’ll be back, come rain or shine, whether I want to or not, dragging the same trolley under the orders of a woman who’s becoming increasingly set in her ways. Not long ago, my father-in-law, Ernest Blot, said to our nine-year-old son, I’m going to buy you a new pen, you’re staining your fingers with that one. Antoine replied, it’s not worth it, I don’t need to be happy with a pen any more. That’s the secret, said Ernest, the child has understood: reduce the demand for happiness to a minimum. My father-in-law is the champion of fanciful maxims, which are worlds apart from his own temperament. Ernest has never made the slightest concession to anything that might reduce his vital potential (forget about the word happiness). Forced to observe the rhythm of the convalescent after his coronary bypass operations, and faced with a modest re-apprenticeship to life and the domestic servitude he’d always dodged, he felt singled out and struck down by God himself. Odile, if I say three, if the number three escapes my lips, you won’t see me any more, I’ll take the car and I’ll leave you stranded here with the trolley. She says, I’d be surprised. – Surprised you may be, but that’s what I’m going to do in two seconds time. – You can’t take the car, Robert, the keys are in my bag. I rummage in my pockets like a fool because I can remember handing over the keys. Give them back, please. Odile smiles. She wedges her bag, which is slung across her shoulder, between her body and the front of the cheese counter. I step forward to tug at the bag. I tug. Odile resists. I tug at the strap. She hangs on to it and pulls in the other direction. She thinks it’s funny! I grab hold of the bottom of the bag, I’d have no difficulty wrenching it off her in any other situation. She laughs. She tightens her grip. She says, aren’t you going to say three? Why don’t you say three? She’s getting on my nerves. And the keys in the bag, they’re getting on my nerves too. But I love it when Odile is like this. And I love seeing her laugh. I’m just about to relax into a mischievous game when I hear a snigger right up close to us, and I see the woman with the felt hat, drunk on female complicity, burst out laughing, brazenly. So I have no choice. I turn savage. I pin Odile against the Plexiglas and try to find a way into the opening of the bag, she struggles, complains that I’m hurting her, I say, give me those fucking keys, she says, you’re crazy. I grab the Morbier out of her hands, I chuck it into the aisle, at last I can feel the keys in the jumble of her bag, I dig them out, I jangle them before her eyes without relaxing my hold on her, I say, we’re getting the hell out of here right now. The woman with the hat is looking terror-stricken, I say to her, you’re not laughing any more, how come? I tug on Odile and the trolley, I lead them past the shelves, towards the exit tills, I grip her wrist tightly even though she’s not putting up a fight, it’s far from innocent, this kind of submissiveness, I’d rather be forced to drag her, I always pay for it in the end when she slips on her martyr costume. There’s a queue at the tills of course. We take our place in this deadly wait-in-line, without exchanging a word. I’ve let go of Odile’s arm and she poses as a normal customer, I can even see her sorting the items in the trolley and establishing a little order to help with the bagging-up. In the car park, we don’t say anything. The same in the car. It’s dark. The lights from the road make us drowsy and I put on the CD of the Portuguese song with the woman’s voice repeating the same word over and over again.
IN THE DISTANT era of my marriage, in the hotel where we used to spend our summers en famille, there was a woman we would see every year. Cheerful, elegant, grey hair in a sporty cut. Always present, she moved from group to group and dined each night at a different table. Often, in the late afternoons, she was to be seen sitting with a book. She chose a corner of the lounge from where she could keep an eye on the comings and goings. The moment she saw somebody she recognised, her face would light up and she would flutter her book like a handkerchief. One day she arrived with a tall brunette in a diaphanous pleated skirt. They were inseparable. They lunched in front of the lake, played tennis, played cards. I enquired who the brunette was and I was told a lady’s companion. I accepted the term as you do an ordinary term, a term without any particular meaning. Every year at the same time, they appeared and I would think to myself, there goes Madame Compain and her lady’s companion. Next came a dog, held on a lead by one or the other, although it clearly belonged to Madame Compain. All three of them could be seen setting out in the morning, the dog dragging them along, as they tried to keep it in check by calling out its name in every tone imaginable, but to no avail. In February, this winter, and therefore many years later, I headed for the mountains with my son, who is all grown up now. He goes skiing of course, with his friends, and I walk. I enjoy walking, I enjoy the forest and the silence. At our hotel, some walks were pointed out to me, but I didn’t undertake any of them because of the distance. One can’t be alone and too far away in the mountains and the snow. I chuckled at the thought of putting up a notice at reception: single woman seeks pleasant person to go walking with. Madame Compain and her lady’s companion immediately sprang to mind, and I realised what lady’s companion meant. I was frightened that I misunderstood, because Madame Compain had always struck me as a woman who was somewhat lost. Even when she was laughing with people. Perhaps especially, now I come to think about it, when she was laughing and dressed up for the evening. I turned towards my father, by which I mean I raised my eyes to the sky and whispered, Daddy, I can’t become a Madame Compain! It had been a long time since I had addressed my father. Since his death, I ask him to intervene in my life. I stare at the sky and speak to him secretly but vehemently. He’s the only being I can turn to when I feel powerless. Other than him, I don’t know anybody who would take any notice of me in the beyond. It never occurs to me to talk to God. I’ve always maintained you can’t bother God. You can’t talk to him directly. He hasn’t got time to take an interest in individual cases. Or at least only in exceptionally serious cases. In the scale of entreaties, mine are, so to speak, ridiculous. I feel much the same as my friend Pauline did when she found her necklace, inherited from her mother, lost in the long grass. As they were passing through a village, her husband stopped the car to rush into the church. The door was locked, he started rattling the latch frantically. – What on earth are you doing? I want to give thanks to God, he replied. – God doesn’t give a hoot! – I want to give thanks to the Holy Virgin. – Listen, Hervé, if there is a God, if there is a Holy Virgin, do you really think that in the light of the universe, and all the misfortunes on earth, and everything else that’s going on here, my necklace matters to them?! . . . So I call upon my father who seems more within reach. The favours I ask of him are clearly defined. Perhaps because circumstances are such that I require something specific, but also, in a subterranean kind of way, to gauge what he’s capable of. It’s always the same call for help. A petition for something to shift. But my father is useless. He can’t hear me or else he has no power. It’s pathetic that the dead should be powerless. I disapprove of this radical division of worlds. From time to time, I credit him with prophetic knowledge. I think: he’s not granting your requests because he knows they’re not in your best interests. You’re getting on my nerves, I feel like saying, what are you meddling for, but at least that way I can consider his non-intervention as deliberate. That’s what he did with Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, the last man I fell for. Jean-Gabriel Vigarello is a colleague, a mathematics teacher at the Lycée Camille-Saint-Saëns, where I teach Spanish. With hindsight, I tell myself that my father wasn’t wrong. But what is hindsight? It’s old age. My father’s celestial values exasperate me, they’re terribly bourgeois when you think about it. In his lifetime, he believed in the stars, in haunted houses and in all sorts of esoteric knick-knackery. My brother Ernest, who has turned his lack of belief into a justification for vanity, resembles him a little more each day. Recently, I heard Ernest repeating of his own volition: ‘the stars influence but don’t dictate’. My father was crazy about that maxim, which I’d forgotten, and he would add the name of Ptolemy in a half-threatening manner. If the stars don’t dictate, I thought, what would you know about the immanentYa no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejadoleft,