Anne-Marie the Beauty Read online

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  Anne-Marie the Beauty

  YASMINA REZA

  Translated by Alison L. Strayer

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland

  Copyright

  © 2019 by Yasmina Reza, Flammarion

  English translation

  © 2021 by Alison L. Strayer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, writing or recording, or through any other system for the storage or retrieval of information without the written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watt Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Reza, Yasmina, author. | Strayer, Alison L., translator.

  Title: Anne-Marie the Beauty / Yasmina Reza ; translated by Alison L. Strayer.

  Other titles: Anne-Marie la Beauté. English

  Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020058082 (print) | LCCN 2020058083 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781644210512 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644210529 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ2678.E955 A6713 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2678.E955

  (ebook) | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058082

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058083

  to André Marcon

  ANNE-MARIE THE BEAUTY

  ***

  I COME FROM Saint-Sourd-en-Ger, madame, a place where no one lies about

  In Saint-Sourd, when I was a child, there were the coal pits and the Prosper Ginot theater company

  You’d see the actors from the Comédie de Saint-Sourd go by in the town square. They walked alone or in pairs

  Especially on Sundays, on account of the market

  I could always say their names

  I murmured them to myself, Armand Cheval, Prosper Ginot, Madeleine Puglierin, Désiré Guelde, Georgia Glazer, Odette Ordonneau

  I recognized them all

  . . .

  Here I am, cavorting. Almost

  Yes . . .

  Will they put my titanium knee joint in the urn after I’m cremated?

  I’ve been wondering

  People in the know, madame, say the soul leaves the body right away and you see yourself

  You see yourself lowered into the ground

  That’s why I say cremation

  I‘ve had a happy life, you know

  My whole knee is titanium, they only left the kneecap

  The doctor said, you’re almost good as new, you can give the cane a rest

  Get that thing out of my sight!

  For me a cane means polio

  Deformed kids with gimpy legs creeping around Saint-Sourd, hugging the walls

  I lived in terror of polio my whole childhood

  The slightest twinge and I had polio

  Or sometimes it was cancer, or meningitis

  But mostly I had polio

  I’d never have received you with the cane. You don’t mind the slippers?

  They’re Furlanes

  Gondolier slippers from Venice. I have yellow ones too

  When my husband was alive, they lay moldering in the closet

  He said they made me look stumpy

  With the cane, I’d worked out a quiet little circuit with places to sit down on the way to Picard and the Monoprix

  And the beauty parlor for my tint

  I sat down at the bakeshop with the little tearoom. I sat at the pharmacy, where they like me. Then at Picard, where they adore me. There was the 84 bus stop with a shelter. And an empty cashier’s seat at the Monoprix

  There are three cashiers for five cash desks. They know me there

  At the Monoprix, there’s a little evangelical from Madagascar who loves me. Victor. He stacks boxes. He finds whatever I’m looking for

  The security guard too—none too swift but nice. He grabs the things I can’t reach. I haven’t got my range of motion back. They keep the compound for polishing the brass under the shelves for lack of space

  That Monoprix’s not big enough

  They know me there

  The new doctor said, you’re pretty much good as new, you can ditch the cane

  No sooner said than done!

  He says my blood pressure’s a little high

  I said, how’s that, doctor, my pressure’s high when it never was before? He said, that’s how it goes. One day we don’t have a thing and the next day we do

  I said, oh là, I don’t care for that way of thinking! Dr. Olbrecht never thought that way

  I miss Olbrecht. We knew each other for thirty years

  He used to come see me on stage

  He took care of my husband and my son too

  At a certain age, it’s as if word gets round and people slip away on you. The ones who were supposed to be there holding your hand till the end. The doctor, the agent, the husband, my neighbors the Storms

  The first time, I saw her through a doorway. Lying on a sofa with all that hair

  I’d just arrived in the capital from the North to audition at the Théâtre de Clichy

  I saw the bent head at the end of the room with the hair tumbling down. She was smoking

  Someone said, that’s Giselle Fayolle

  I thought she was a big deal, but she was nothing then. Nothing at all

  Still, to me a girl with a dressing room in Paris was a big deal

  We got to know each other doing Bérénice

  I played her confidante

  In real life too, I sympathized with her lovers

  She lived on rue Émile-Augier, and I had a room on rue des Rondeaux which she never visited

  When we met again, forty years later, it was still me going to see her

  In the end, Giselle had bowel trouble, and I had the buggered knee

  We went out to eat from time to time. Or I went to her place on rue de Courcelles

  I even slept there once when she was feeling blue

  Always me going to see her

  After my surgery, I stopped. No more excursions

  Of course it was a shock, madame, seeing her there in black and white

  Black and white in magazines means six feet under

  We were used to seeing that photo in color

  Blue sparkles, all the way to her temples

  Back then, rumor had it she was Alain Delon’s mistress

  Maybe Ingmar Bergman’s, too

  Anyway, tongues wagged

  You’re at the pedicure salon and turn a page, expecting something frivolous, and there is Gigi Fayolle in black and white

  The obituaries below have no photos

  I was fresh off the train from Saint-Sourd, in Paris to audition

  No one was playing the confidantes in tragedy. I came recommended

  When they gave me Phénice, I was so happy, mademoiselle, incredibly, immeasurably happy because of the feeling of luck

  Giselle reclined on a flowery sofa with her hair

  I was mesmerized by her hair

  She was twenty-one. I was nineteen

  She was one of those girls who stay in bed till noon and do everything in bed, eat, talk on the phone, read, receive visitors, and in their dressing room they have a sofa, and they lie down again with their feet up

  That was
Giselle when I knew her. Lying with a cup of tea and a biscuit within reach

  She had a room on Rue Emile Augier, near La Muette. Mine was on rue des Rondeaux in the 20th

  The street faces the wall of Père Lachaise cemetery. What a view. Like a bullet in the head. I’ve never understood people who can eat just one biscuit. One biscuit, where’s the joy?

  She snapped up all the big roles. By lying on her back like a sleeping statue on a tomb, and looking as if there was nothing in the world that she wanted. She got all the queen roles, the madwomen, the whores, and even the colonial floozies. It’s good for your career to look as if you don’t want anything

  I gave languor a try, too

  But not everyone is cut out for languor

  Dr. Olbrecht threw parties at his home, with themes. One year it was the desert and the Bédouins. He called a special events planner. He ordered a lorry-load of sand and a multicolored tent. They sat around the living room, Bédouin-style, the doctor’s wife eating dates with their friends on ten inches of sand

  I was a little sweet on Olbrecht

  His wife up and left him, just like that. What is good for a woman?

  I had a nice husband. Uncomplicated

  His pet activity was repainting the apartment

  He always wanted to repaint, repaint, repaint. He was wild about making things fresh again

  I was bored with my husband, but you know, boredom is part of love

  He talked to me about his expert appraisals in termite control. We played Scrabble

  He was a hundred percent organized, he could not bear the unforeseen

  My husband could not survive without structure. Even a penal structure would have suited him. Electroshock at five, torture at half past six. Those are the rules, so we know what we’re doing. I’d have been content to play la Bédouine with Olbrecht

  You play la Bédouine and when you’re a widow, you end up in a hole in the wall with a hot plate and your heap of trinkets

  My husband left me two pension and retirement protection plans, plus two life insurance policies in my name. Not to mention a nice three-room flat, a stone’s throw from Place Pereire

  But the specter of the wheel that turns is never far

  You start out as little people, and you’re little people in the end

  Gigi received her lovers slathered in beauty masks and while shaving her legs. She made her own masks from vegetables, aubergines, carrots

  She had no intellectual life whatsoever

  If you ask me, she never read a whole play, not even the ones she acted in

  For Bérénice, she only read her own scenes

  The playbill was posted at the entrance to the theater. My name was at the bottom. I passed it sixty times a day. I walked up and down rue du Calvaire to test the effect of the name Anne-Marie Mille on people passing by. It was in small letters at the bottom, next to last, but you could see it clearly because of the double space just below. The name caught your eye. Especially on the downhill walk

  Anne-Marie Mille had the ring of stardom

  Who’s playing in Three Sisters? . . . Anne-Marie Mille. Anne-Marie Mille!

  Who’s playing Angélique? . . . Anne-Marie Mille. Anne-Marie Mille, magnifique!

  My life was a near miss, madame. In some of the photos from Saint-Sourd, I have the hands of a girl in a coma. Arms dangling, wrists curled, fingers pointing upward. I saw on TV that when a person in a coma curls his wrists, he’s a goner

  We gave poetry recitations at the youth club hall of the church, and people said, Anne-Marie’s diction is excellent, Anne-Marie has perfect enunciation

  I did enunciate well

  I enunciated well because I loved to say the words, mademoiselle

  Words expanded me

  On weekends and holidays, they made me wear white gloves like American women

  I did not know how to hold myself in the bulky old-lady dress and the hairstyle they’d given me

  Parted down the middle

  The natural wave flattened on top, with kisscurls at the sides. I already had breasts

  She cut my hair all the time, all the time

  My mother was a laundress at the Hôtel du Quai. She’d started as a worker in the lace mills. In the blank where you wrote your parents’ occupations, I had to write pattern maker

  She killed herself two or three times a year

  At thirteen, I made myself hairpieces from synthetic yarn to have the feel of bouncy locks on my cheeks

  They were supposed to make me look pretty, mademoiselle

  My mother said, we need to see her face, but my face was not right

  They worked on straightening and styling the hair, but my face never followed

  The stiff white dress with puffy shoulders

  Diamond-patterned tights

  I felt hideous, hideous

  I can spot an unhappy girl in her Sunday best from ten miles away

  When an actor from Saint-Sourd passed, we stopped to look. Afterward the street seemed empty

  They were tall and pale. They walked above the ground with graceful strides We couldn’t hold a candle to them

  The new generations will never witness this procession. Never, monsieur

  It snowed last night. Real snow. The bus shelter is completely covered

  My son told me, a woman your age took a migrant into her home and he knifed her

  Right . . .

  My son bought me a blood pressure monitor

  I made the mistake of telling him the new doctor thinks my blood pressure’s high

  Who wants that kind of thing around? I chucked it in the cupboard with the cane

  He’s a worrier. A worrier like his father

  Advice, advice, advice

  He has a new tic. He clears his throat on the phone. He clears it every two sentences. I say, if you’re phoning just to clear your throat, don’t bother

  When he comes to the house, I bring out the blood pressure cuff. I leave it lying around as if I used it. The sight of those medical gewgaws makes my skin crawl. They spell the end

  He’s barely in the door when he says, it’s an oven in here! I say, I like it this way. —It’s eighty degrees! I can’t stay in this kind of heat. —Well, go, then! It’s my home and I’m fine. I have to grab him before he fiddles with the dials on the boiler. Why must you take control of everything against my will? —Someone has to keep an eye on you. You exhibit disturbing behavior. Wanting to be warm is a disturbing behavior?

  That’s how it is with us, the world shrunk down to the strictest run-of-the-mill

  If I ask about his life, he gets all worked up. We only talk about my woes, never anything of interest. He goes to the kitchen and lines up my boxes of prescriptions in a row so I don’t mix them up

  I say, what’s the point? Your grandmother—my mother—had a plastic bag full of pills she nibbled at like Haribos.* She just dug in, not knowing what she was taking

  And look how she ended up

  Dead, same as everyone else. Who has it any better in the end?

  I almost forgot an important detail, madame: I started with cut-out pictures of Brigitte Bardot

  My mother brought home old magazines from the hotel. She flipped through them at night, sipping a Gypsy Rose. She powdered herself like a corpse and went full tilt on the rouge. I never knew if it was due to bad lighting over the sink, or because she was a nutter

  In the magazines, I always looked for photos of Brigitte Bardot. I clipped them out and pasted them in an album that I showed to invisible visitors

  I narrated episodes from my life, turning the pages with modesty because of course this beauty was me. Anne-Marie the Beauty

  I posed with thigh-high boots like Nancy Sinatra, and pulled funny faces on a boat in Norway

  Sometimes I tol
d my visitors, yes you’re right, I do look pensive sitting on that bench. It was a dark time of my life

  But I didn’t talk about my beauty or my hair

  Or I just said, yes, a French twist is the height of chic! I like to do my hair that way once in a while

  Giselle never had hair like Brigitte Bardot’s. No!

  I spoke loudly in a voice that was not mine. I was always afraid someone would hear or see me. Our room was a hallway. You could enter through two diagonal doors. We had a trundle bed. My sister slept on the lower shelf, which was never properly raised off the floor. For her entire childhood, she slept low to the ground. In the daytime, her bed disappeared. It ticked me off when she sat on mine. Sometimes I gave her a push. People would yell at me. They said, where do you expect the poor thing to sit? Poor thing! Always the poor thing

  Anne-Marie the beauty did not have a bedroom with daisy-patterned walls. Anne-Marie the beauty was beautiful, her hair wasn’t parted down the middle, or set in an ugly perm, or flat as a pancake at the top of her head and puffed-out around the ears

  She was an unknown, you know

  She lived in the North too

  You can’t exactly say Giselle’s death made waves. Anyway, that’s how it seems to me

  What did I read? . . . Paris Match, the tabloids . . .

  On TV? . . . They showed a repeat of The False Lovers, it was the least they could do . . . Other than that?

  I don’t follow all those social networks. Maybe people talked more about her there

  I appreciate your coming to interview me

  One thing you must never forget, madame. In our world, we fall from on high

  In theaters, back in the old days, artists took up a collection for comrades in need

  A woman in a crinkly red dress gave a half-pious, half-

  menacing speech, then went around with her money-box

  She exhaled bad luck. A lopsided hairdo, kind of ratty

  A hairdo where you twist the strands and pin them up for volume, and it all collapses on one side. That’s the bad-luck hairdo

  Other times, to cheer things up, there was a man with a D’Artagnan hat

  They called out names you’d seen on playbills, once upon a time, poor folk who believed their star had risen