Happy Are the Happy Read online

  ALSO BY YASMINA REZA

  PLAYS

  “Art”

  The God of Carnage

  Life x 3

  The Unexpected Man

  Conversations after a Burial

  FICTION

  Desolation

  NONFICTION

  Dawn Dusk or Night:

  A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

  Copyright © Yasmina Reza and Flammarion, 2013

  Originally published in French as Heureux les heureux by Flammarion, Paris, in 2013

  Translation copyright © John Cullen 2014

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Reza, Yasmina.

  [Heureux les heureux. English]

  Happy are the happy / by Yasmina Reza; translated from the French by John Cullen.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-692-8 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-59051-693-5 (ebook)

  1. Man-woman relationships — Fiction. 2. Adultery—Fiction. I. Cullen, John, 1942– translator. II. Title.

  PQ2678.E955H4813 2014

  843′.914—dc23

  2014005643

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  for Moïra

  Felices los amados y los amantes

  y los que pueden prescindir del amor.

  Felices los felices.

  Happy are those who are beloved and those who love and those who can do without love.

  Happy are the happy.

  — JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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 EHRENFRIED

  DAMIEN BARNÈCHE

  LUC CONDAMINE

  HÉLÈNE BARNÈCHE

  JEANNETTE BLOT

  ROBERT TOSCANO

  ODILE TOSCANO

  JEAN EHRENFRIED

  About the Authors

  Robert Toscano

  We were at the supermarket, shopping for the weekend. At some point she said, you go stand in the cheese line while I get the rest of the groceries. When I came back, the shopping cart was half filled with boxes of cereal and bags of cookies and packets of powdered food and other desserts. I said, what’s all this for? —What do you mean, what’s all this for? I said, what’s the point of buying all this? —You have children, Robert. They like Chocolate Cruesli, they like Napolitains, they adore Kinder Bueno bars. She displayed the various packages. It’s ridiculous to gorge those kids on sugar and fat, I said. This cart is ridiculous. She said, what kind of cheese did you buy? —A Crottin de Chavignol and a Morbier. And no Gruyère? she cried out. —I forgot and I’m not going back, the line’s too long. —If there’s one kind of cheese you have to buy, you know very well it’s Gruyère, who eats Morbier in our house? Who? I do, I said. —Since when do you eat Morbier? Who wants to eat Morbier? Odile, stop it, I said. —Who likes this Morbier crap? Implicit meaning: besides your mother, my mother had recently found a nut, a metal nut, in a chunk of Morbier. I said, Odile, you’re shouting. She gave the cart a jerk and threw three Milka chocolate bars into it. I picked them up and replaced them on the shelf. She flung the bars back into the cart even faster than before. I said, I’m out of here. She answered, get out, get out, I’m out of here is all you know how to say, it’s your sole response. As soon as you run out of arguments, you say I’m out of here, you immediately resort to this grotesque threat. It’s true, I admit it, I often say I’m out of here, I’m aware I say it, but I don’t see how I can not say it when it’s the only thing I want to say, when I see no way out other than immediate withdrawal, but I also realize, yes, that I put it in the form of an ultimatum. Well, you’re finished shopping, I say to Odile, propelling the shopping cart forward. Or do we have some more stupid shit to buy? —Listen to the way you talk to me! Do you even realize how you talk to me? I say, come on. Come on! Nothing irks me more than these sudden mood shifts, where everything stops, everything freezes. Obviously, I could say I’m sorry. Not just once, I’d have to say it twice, in the right tone. If I said I’m sorry, if I said it twice in the right tone, then the day could restart and almost return to normal, except that I don’t in the least feel like saying those words, nor is there any physiological possibility of my uttering them when she stops short in front of shelves of condiments with that flabbergasted look of outrage and desolation. Come on, Odile, please, I say more gently. I’m cold and I have an article to finish. Apologize, she says. If she said Apologize in her normal voice, I might comply, but she whispers, she gives the word a colorless, atonal inflection I can’t get past. I say, please. I remain calm. Please, I say mildly, and I see myself driving down a highway at top speed, stereo turned all the way up, and I’m listening to a song called “Sodade,” a recent discovery I understand nothing of except for the solitude in the singer’s voice and the word solitude itself, repeated countless times, even though I’m told sodade doesn’t actually mean solitude, but nostalgia, absence, regret, spleen, so many intimate things that can’t be shared, and all of them names for solitude, just as the personal shopping cart is a name for solitude, and so is the oil and vinegar aisle, and so is the man pleading with his wife under the fluorescent lights. I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Odile. Odile’s not necessary in that sentence. Of course not. Odile isn’t nice, I say Odile at the end to indicate my impatience, but I don’t expect her to make an about-face, arms dangling, and head for the frozen foods, that is, for the back of the store, without saying a word, leaving her handbag in the shopping cart. I shout, what are you doing, Odile? I shout, I’ve got only two hours left to write a very important article on the new gold rush! A completely ridiculous declaration. She’s disappeared from sight. People are looking at me. I grab the handle of the cart and make a beeline for the back of the store. I don’t see her (she’s always had a talent for vanishing, even from pleasant situations). I call out, Odile! I go to the beverage section: nobody. Odile! Odile! I’m clearly upsetting the people around me, but I couldn’t care less, I wheel the cart up and down the aisles – I loathe these supermarkets – and suddenly I spot her in the cheese line, which is even longer than it was a little while ago, she’s got herself back in the cheese line! I go up to her and say, Odile, I express myself in a measured tone, Odile, I say, it’s going to be twenty minutes before you get served, let’s leave and buy the Gruyère somewhere else. No response. What’s she doing? She digs around in the shopping cart and pulls out the Morbier. You’re not going to return the Morbier? I ask. —Yes I am. We’ll give it to Maman,
I say, trying to lighten things up. My mother recently found a metal nut in a chunk of Morbier. Odile doesn’t smile. She remains stiff and offended, standing there in the penance line. My mother said to the cheesemonger, I’m not the type of woman who makes a fuss, but for the sake of your longevity as a respected dealer in cheese, I must inform you that I found a bolt in a piece of your Morbier. The guy didn’t give a damn, he didn’t even offer to comp the three Rocamadours she was buying. My mother boasts that she paid without flinching, thus proving herself a bigger person than the cheesemonger. I stand close to Odile and say in a low voice, I’m counting to three, Odile. I’m counting to three. You understand? And for some reason, at the moment when I say that, I think about the Hutners, a couple of friends of ours who are curled up together inside a willed state of conjugal well-being. Lately they’ve taken to calling each other “my own” and saying things like “Let’s eat well this evening, my own.” I don’t know why the Hutners cross my mind at the moment when an opposite madness has come over me, but maybe there isn’t really a whole lot of difference between Let’s eat well tonight, my own, and I’m counting to three, Odile, in both cases the effort to be a couple causes a kind of constriction of the being, I mean there’s no more natural harmony in Let’s eat well, my own, no, not at all, and no less disaster either, except that my I’m counting to three causes a shiver to pass over Odile’s face, a wrinkling of the mouth, the infinitesimal beginnings of a smile, while I must absolutely refrain from beginning to smile myself, of course, as long as I don’t receive an unequivocal green light, even though I really feel like smiling, but instead I’ve got to act as if I haven’t noticed a thing, and so I decide to count, I say one, I whisper the word distinctly, the woman right behind Odile has a ringside view, Odile pushes a bit of discarded packaging with the tip of her shoe, the line’s getting longer and not moving at all, it’s time for me to say two, I say two, openly, generously, the woman behind Odile practically glues herself to us, she’s wearing a hat, a kind of overturned bucket made of soft felt, I can’t stand women who wear that sort of hat, a hat like that’s a very bad sign, I put something in my look intended to make the woman back off a yard or so, but nothing happens, she considers me curiously, she sizes me up, does she smell disgustingly bad? Women who dress in layers often give off a bad odor, or could it be the proximity of spoiled dairy products? My cell phone vibrates in my inside jacket pocket. I screw up my eyes to read the caller’s name because I don’t have time to find my glasses. It’s a colleague with a tip about the Bundesbank’s gold reserves. To cut the conversation short, I tell him I’m in a meeting and ask him to send me an e-mail. That little phone call may prove to be a stroke of luck. I lean down and murmur into Odile’s ear, in the tone of a man returning to his responsibilities: my editor in chief wants a sidebar on German gold reserve stockpiling, it’s something of a state secret, and that call may point me to information I don’t have at the moment. German gold reserves, she says, who cares about that? And she pulls in her neck and draws down the corners of her mouth so that I can gauge the insignificance of the subject, but even more seriously, the insignificance of my work, of my efforts in general, as if there was no hope of expecting anything more from me, not even the consciousness of my own derelictions. Women will seize any opportunity to deflate you, they love reminding you how much of a disappointment you are. Odile has just moved up in the cheese line. She’s got her bag back, and she’s still clutching the Morbier. I’m hot. I’m suffocating. I want to be far away, I no longer remember what we’re doing here or why we’re doing it. I’d like to be sliding on snowshoes in western Canada, planting stakes and marking trees with my ax in frozen valleys, like the gold prospector Graham Boer, the subject of my article. Does this Boer person have a wife and children? A guy who confronts grizzly bears and temperatures of twenty-five below zero isn’t likely to put up with being bored to death in a goddamn supermarket at grocery rush hour. Is this any place for a man? Who can wander up and down these fluorescent rows, past this plethora of packaging, without yielding to discouragement? And to know that you’ll be back here, in all seasons of the year, whether you want to or not, hauling the same shopping cart, under the command of a woman who grows more rigid every day. Not long ago, my father-in-law, Ernest Blot, told our nine-year-old son, I’m going to buy you a new pen, you’re staining your fingers with that one. Antoine replied, that’s all right, I don’t need a pen to be happy anymore. There’s the secret, Ernest said, the child understood it: reduce your requirements for happiness to a minimum. My father-in-law is a champion of over-the-top adages totally out of keeping with his actual temperament. Ernest has never given in to the smallest reduction in his vital potential (forget the word happiness). When he was compelled to live like a convalescent after his coronary bypass operations, faced with relearning modest everyday routines and performing domestic chores he’d always avoided, he felt as though he’d been singled out and struck down by God himself. Odile, I say, if I say three, if I speak the number three, I’ll take the car and leave you here on your own, shopping cart and all. Seems unlikely, she says. —It may seem unlikely, but it’s what I’m going to do in two seconds. —You can’t take the car, Robert, the keys are in my bag. I rummage in my pockets, a gesture made all the more stupid by the fact that I remember handing her the keys. —Give them back, please. Odile smiles. She slings her bag across her shoulders and wedges it between her body and the Plexiglas front of the cheese display case. I move closer, grab the bag, and pull on it. Odile resists. I yank the shoulder strap. She clutches it and pulls the other way. She’s having fun! I seize the bag by the bottom, I wouldn’t have any trouble snatching it away from her if circumstances were different. She laughs. She clings. She says, aren’t you going to say three? Why don’t you say three? She’s getting on my nerves. And those keys in her bag, they’re getting on my nerves too. But I really like Odile when she’s like this. I really like to see her laugh. I’m on the verge of relaxing and letting our struggle turn into a kind of teasing game when I hear a chuckle, and then I see the woman in the felt hat, giddy with feminine complicity, burst out laughing without the slightest embarrassment. All at once, I have no choice. I become brutal. I flatten Odile against the Plexiglas and try to get my hand inside her bag. She struggles, complains that I’m hurting her, I say, give me those fucking keys, she says, you’re crazy, I tear the Morbier out of her hands and heave it into the aisle, at last I feel the keys amid the general disorder of her bag, I take them out, I wave them in front of her eyes without letting her go, I say, let’s get the hell out of here this minute. Now the woman with the hat is looking scared. I say to her, what’s the matter, honey, you’re not laughing anymore? Why not? I pull both Odile and the cart, I haul them along past the shelves and the racks toward the checkout counters. I keep a tight grip on her wrist even though she’s not putting up any resistance, there’s nothing innocent about her submission, I’d rather she forced me to drag her. Whenever she dons her martyr’s costume, I always wind up paying the price. Of course, the checkout lines are long too. We take our place in one deadly queue without exchanging a word. I release Odile’s arm. She pretends to be a normal customer. I even watch her organize the shopping cart, arranging things a little to make them easier to bag. Our mutual silence continues in the parking lot. Also in the car. Night has fallen. The streetlights make us drowsy, and I put on the CD with the Portuguese song, the one with the woman’s voice repeating the same word over and over.

  Marguerite Blot

  In the distant era of my marriage, in the hotel where we used to go as a family in the summer, there was a woman we would see every year. A cheerful, elegant woman with a sporty cut to her gray hair. She appeared everywhere, moving from group to group and dining at a different table every evening. Often, late in the afternoon, she could be found sitting with a book. She’d settle herself into a corner of the lounge so she could keep an eye on the comings and goings. Whenever she saw anyone who looked the least bit familiar, h
er face would light up and she’d wave her book like a handkerchief. One day she arrived with a tall brunette woman wearing an airy pleated skirt. Afterward, they were never seen apart. They had lunch on the lakeshore, played tennis, played cards. I asked who the tall woman was. Une dame de compagnie, I was told: a lady companion. I accepted the designation as one accepts an ordinary word, a word without a specific connotation. The two women appeared every year at the same time, and I’d say to myself, there’s Madame Compain and her lady companion. In due course, a dog was added to their party. They’d take turns holding its leash, but the animal clearly belonged to Madame Compain. We’d see all three of them stepping out every morning, the dog pulling the ladies forward as they strove to hold it back by modulating its name through all the keys, but without any success. In February this past winter, and therefore a great many years later, I went on a mountain holiday with my son, who’s a grown man now. He skis, of course, with his friends, and I walk. I love to go on walks, I love the forest and the silence. The staff at the hotel suggested some trails I could take, but they were all too far away and I didn’t dare. One shouldn’t walk too far alone in the mountains and the snow. I laughed, thinking that I ought to put up an ad at the reception desk: Single woman seeks someone pleasant to walk with. Anyway, I immediately thought about Madame Compain and her lady companion, and I understood what it meant to be une dame de compagnie. My understanding frightened me, because Madame Compain had always struck me as a woman who was a bit lost. Even when she was laughing with other people. And maybe, now that I think about it, especially when she was laughing, and also when she was dressing for the evening. I turned to my father – that is, I raised my eyes to heaven – and murmured, Papa, I can’t become a Madame Compain! It had been a long time since I’d last spoken to my father. Since he died, I’ve been asking him to intervene in my life. I look up at the sky and talk to him in a secret, vehement voice. He’s the only person I can speak to when I feel powerless. Besides him, I don’t know anyone in the next world who would pay me any attention. It never occurs to me to address God. I’ve always thought you can’t disturb God. You can’t speak to him directly. He doesn’t have the time to get involved with individual cases. Or if he does, they have to be exceptionally serious. On the scale of entreaties, mine are, in a manner of speaking, absurd. I feel the way my friend Pauline did when she lost a necklace she’d inherited from her mother and then found it in some tall grass. As they were passing through a village later, her husband stopped the car and rushed over to the church. It was locked, and so he started frantically rattling the door handle. What are you doing? Pauline asked. I want to thank God, he replied. —God doesn’t give a shit! —I want to thank the Blessed Virgin. —Listen, Hervé, think about the size of the universe, think about the countless evils on earth, think about all the things that happen down here. If there’s a God, if there’s a Blessed Virgin, do you really believe my necklace matters to them?… And so I address my father, who seems more accessible. I ask him for specific favors. Maybe because circumstances make me desire specific things, but also because – below the surface – I want to gauge his abilities. It’s always the same call for help. A petition for movement. But my father’s hopeless. Either he doesn’t hear me or he has no power. I find it appalling that the dead have no power. I disapprove of this radical division of our worlds. From time to time I attribute prophetic knowledge to my father. I think: he’s not granting your wishes because he knows they won’t be conducive to your welfare. That upsets me, I feel like saying, mind your own business, but at least I can consider his nonintervention a deliberate act. That was what he did with Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, the last man I fell in love with. Jean-Gabriel Vigarello is one of my colleagues, a professor of mathematics at the Lycée Camille-Saint-Saëns, where I myself teach Spanish. In retrospect, I tell myself my father wasn’t wrong. But what’s retrospect? It’s old age. My father’s heavenly values exasperate me. They’re quite bourgeois, if you think about them. When he was alive, he believed in the stars, haunted houses, and all sorts of esoteric baubles. My brother Ernest, despite the way he makes his unbelief a cause for vanity, resembles our father a little more every day. Recently I heard him repeat in his turn, “The stars incline us, they do not bind us.” I’d forgotten how much our father adored that slogan, to which he’d add, almost threateningly, the name of Ptolemy. I thought, if the stars don’t bind us, Papa, then what could you possibly know about the immanent future? I became interested in Jean-Gabriel Vigarello on the day I noticed his eyes. It wasn’t easy to spot them, given that he wore his hair very long and it totally concealed his forehead – a hairstyle at once ugly and impossible for someone of his age. I thought at once, this man has a wife who doesn’t take care of him (he’s married, naturally). You don’t let a man who’s pushing sixty wear his hair like that. And most importantly, you tell him not to hide his eyes. Color-changing eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, and shimmering like a mountain lake. One evening I found myself alone with him in a café in Madrid (we’d organized a school trip to Madrid with three of our classes). I got my nerve up and said, you have very gentle eyes, Jean-Gabriel, it’s pure madness to keep them hidden. After that statement and a bottle of Carta d’Oro, one thing led to another and we wound up in my room, which overlooked a courtyard with howling cats. Once we were back in Rouen, he immediately replunged into his normal life. We’d cross paths in the halls of the lycée as if nothing had happened. He always seemed to be in a hurry, carrying his schoolbag in his left hand, his whole body leaning to that side and his graying bangs covering up more of his face than ever. I find it pathetic, the silent way men have of sending you back in time. As if it was necessary to remind us, for future reference, that human existence is fragmented. I thought, I’ll write a note and put it in his mailbox. An inconsequential, witty note, containing a reference to an incident in Madrid. I stuck the note in his box one morning when I knew he was there. No response. Not on that day, and not during any of the following days. We greeted each other exactly as before. I was assailed by a kind of sadness, I can’t say heartache, but rather the sorrow of abandonment. There’s a poem by Borges that begins, Ya no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejado. The world’s not magical anymore. You’ve been left. He says left, an everyday word, a word that makes no noise. Anybody can leave you, even a Jean-Gabriel Vigarello, who wears his hair like the Beatles fifty years after. I asked my father to intervene. In the meantime, I’d written another note, a single phrase: “Don’t forget me completely. Marguerite.” That completely struck me as ideal for dissipating his fears, if he had any. A little reminder in a jesting tone. I told my father, I still look good, but as you can see, nothing’s up, and soon I’m going to be old. I told my father, I leave the lycée at five in the afternoon, right now it’s nine in the morning, you’ve got eight hours to inspire Jean-Gabriel Vigarello with a charming reply that I’ll find in my mailbox or on my cell phone. My father didn’t lift a finger. In retrospect, I see that he was right. He’s never approved of my absurd infatuations. He’s right. You choose some faces from among others, you set out markers in time. Everybody wants to have some tale to tell. In former days, I launched myself into the future without thinking about it. Madame Compain was surely the type to have absurd infatuations. When she used to come to the hotel alone, she’d bring a great deal of luggage. Every evening she put on a different dress, a different necklace. She wore her lipstick even on her teeth, which was part of her elegance. She’d go from one table to the next, drinking a glass with one group and then another with another, always animated, always making conversation, especially with men. At the time, I was with my husband and children. In a little warm cell, from which one looks out at the world. Madame Compain fluttered around like a moth. In whatever corners the light reached, however feebly, Madame Compain would appear with her lacy wings. Ever since my childhood, I’ve made mental images for time. I see the year as an isosceles trapezoid. Winter’s on top, a confident straight line. Fall and spring are a
ttached to it like a skirt. And the summer has always been a long flat plain. These days I have the impression that the angles have softened and the figure’s not stable anymore. What’s that a sign of? I can’t become a Madame Compain. I’m going to have a serious talk with my father. I’m going to tell him he has a unique opportunity to manifest himself for my welfare. I’m going to ask him to reestablish the geometry of my life. It’s a matter of something very simple, very easy to arrange. Could you – this is what I’m preparing to say to him – could you put some lighthearted person in my way, someone I can laugh with and who likes to go on walks? Surely you know someone who’d keep the ends of his scarf crossed and smoothed flat under an old-fashioned coat, who’d hold me with a solid arm and lead me through the snowy forest and never get us lost.