Babylon Read online

  They’d gone off for a week together, father and son, to winter sports in the Alps. They were sharing a room in a hotel that had a sauna in the basement. Coming back up into the room one evening, all relaxed in his robe, Pierre found Emmanuel in tears in front of the TV. “What’s wrong?” “It’s snowing in Paris!” “Here too, darling, look how pretty it is outside,” Pierre said. “The sunset on the mountaintops!” “I want to go back to Deuil-l’Alouette!” the boy wailed. He was rolling around on the bed, howling, throwing off whatever his hand fell on, inconsolable at missing the snow in Deuil-l’Alouette. In the end, Pierre threw the remote at him. The thing exploded against the wall, Emmanuel claiming he’d ducked just in time, Pierre always insisting he’d aimed to the side. “Snow, which is to say, my childhood, which is to say, happiness”—even though it’s not true for me, I always think of that line of Cioran’s. Rushing into the kitchen with her cake, Jeanne said, “I nearly broke my neck on your sidewalk!” as if we were responsible for the change in weather. She was wearing some unusual sandals, lashed to her feet with thongs, whose purchase I understood a moment later on seeing her photos of the S&M equipment. Thanks to the snow, the party took off.

  People arrived damp and effervescent, in quick sequence. Jeanne’s ex-husband Serge (they separated eight years ago, on good terms, and we’ve all stayed close) appointed himself to door duty, answering the intercom, helping with the coats, improvising introductions. My pal Danielle, who handles documentation at the Pasteur, arrived very upset as well. She had just buried her stepfather that day. At the hospital, when her mother saw the body in its coffin, she had cried, “But Jean-Pierre didn’t have a mustache!” The attendant who’d prepared the body had shaved him badly and the shadow beneath the nostrils gave him a Hitler look. When Danielle told that story I remembered the flat tight hairdo, with a harsh part, they’d given my aunt at her funeral—a woman who her whole life had kept up a constant succession of permanent waves and big bouffants. When she was rotting in a retirement home her husband, who to use my mother’s expression had never quit “chasing skirts,” gave away all her clothes to the Little Sisters of the Poor, except for the outfit she would need to be buried in. “Jean-Pierre didn’t have a mustache!” Danielle’s mother kept repeating in a frantic tone (Danielle reproduced it perfectly). She apparently went rushing around the room, flinging herself against the walls time and again. In a firmly sane voice Danielle said, “Mama, calm down, we’re going to fix it.” A man came in, she pointed out the shaving problem, her mother kept saying, “My husband didn’t have a mustache!” The man tiptoed back in with a shaving kit. The hairless and powdered Jean-Pierre who emerged bore no greater resemblance to the familiar Jean-Pierre, but her mother leaned into the coffin over the recumbent figure and said, “Oh you are so handsome my darling Pilou!” Later, emerging into the corridor, unsteady and near collapse, she said “You’ve got to take serious care of me now, Danielle darling, what are you doing tonight? I could cook us a little veal roast, with mushrooms?” Well, girl, Danielle said to herself, so long to partying with your pals, you can’t leave your mother all alone tonight. I remarked that I myself had never had a double who called me “girl” and kept me from doing dumb things. “Well, my double does call me ‘girl,’” Danielle said, “but I don’t listen to her.”

  “So you did leave her all alone?”

  “I handed her over to one of her neighbors, but I’ve got to have a stiff drink right this minute!”

  “You should have brought her along.”

  “You’re insane! Give me a break!” Danielle cried, tossing back a glassful.

  From that moment on, Mathieu Crosse, a colleague of Pierre’s, started prowling around her. I was in the kitchen slicing a quiche when Emmanuel turned up by surprise, all expansive and beaming like a boy with three parties ahead of him. He seemed astonishingly young among us. He was. The Lallemants arrived with a chicken spice loaf and a book for Pierre from Lambert wrapped in gift paper. Pierre accepted the package gracefully and set it down on a table without unwrapping it. I said, “No, open it! He never opens anything anymore!” It was a first edition of Tartakower’s Breviary of Chess. A very thoughtful present, because Pierre had been mourning the loss of his boyhood copy. I said, “He never unwraps packages lately, it’s a new thing with him.”“Am I heading the same way as my father?” Emmanuel said. “I buy clothes and then I don’t take them out of the bag and it’s a good two weeks before I put them on.” “Because you’re too young,” Pierre said. “You’ll see, one day you won’t put them on at all.” Marie-Jo Lallemant fluffed her wet hair with a kind of sensuous pleasure. “So what are you up to these days, Manu?” I heard her accost Emmanuel, in the tone of someone his own age. She’s an orthoptist, and sees herself as a chum to young folks. “Digital marketing,” said Emmanuel. “Oh, great!” While I looked for a tray to serve the chicken loaf, I heard phrases like “We set up content sites for B2B companies” and saw Marie-Jo giving complicit nods. “Digital is way more fun than, like, financial planning!” Marie-Jo was totally with him on that.

  The Lallemants had just got back from Egypt. Lambert laid out photographs of pyramids with always one or two Asians in the frame, shots of Cairo, storefronts with dummies in them, and then one unusual image. I said, “Oh let’s see, let’s see that!” It was nothing: a woman viewed from the back walking with a little child. The shot was almost random, not very sharp. I can pull it up today on my computer because Lambert sent it to me online right then (which is why in my album it comes just before the picture of the Manoscrivis laughing). In a street in Cairo, a woman is walking holding the hand of a tiny girl in a long white dress. The street surface there is tiled, probably an esplanade or a broad sidewalk. It’s nighttime. All around are men, signs, overlighted shopwindows. The woman is voluminous, her hair concealed by a scarf. It’s hard to work out exactly how she’s dressed, over a black sweater and dark trousers she’s got a kneelength orange tunic. The child comes up to just above her knees, she’s all in white except for her bare arms. A kind of priest-like dress with panels, very long, that grazes the ground and must hinder her walking, under that a loose shirt up to the neck. The dress flares out from the waist, the way it would for an adult style, with a notable sweep of fabric. Up top, there’s the child’s very small head. The nape of the neck is naked except for a tail of braid down the middle, her hair is thin and black, the ears protrude. How old is she? That dress doesn’t suit her at all. She’s been dolled up and marched out into the night. I immediately identified with that figure in white being launched into years of shame. When I was a child they were always making me pretty. I understood that I wasn’t naturally pretty. But people shouldn’t dress up an unlovely child. She’ll feel abnormal. I saw the other children as harmonious. I felt ridiculous in old-lady clothes that kept me from fidgeting, my hair always cut short (throughout my entire childhood my mother forbade me long hair) and pinned back with a barrette to control the curl and bare my forehead. I remember a period when I would do my homework with fake-hair pieces clipped onto my own; I would shake my head regularly to feel them swing and bounce. My mother wanted me to make a good appearance. By which she meant tidy, slickedback, constrained, and ugly. This woman in the headscarf wasn’t thinking of the little girl’s well-being. She felt nothing like that in her own body. But mostly, there is no concern for well-being. No one thought of such a thing in our house. I cannot forgive that bitch Anicé for scorning my mother’s doily. I can’t sleep thinking of it. She was really nice, your momma! meaning to please me. Or to reproach me. My mother was anything but nice. It was impossible to describe her in those terms. On the pretext of death, people strip a person of their essential character. What would have pleased me, instead, would have been for that bitch to take the placemat tenderly, lay it carefully into her bag, treat it at least for the few seconds of farewell as a cherished object. She probably tossed it into the nearest trashcan. I would have done the same, but no one would suspect it. When I wasn’t par
t of a social display, my mother would drag me around like that Cairo mother, preoccupied with other life concerns. When her hands were taken up by the shopping cart, I was supposed to hold onto its side rail. I could trot along for miles with snot running from my nose and my hood askew on my head and she’d never notice. Jeanne and I were always overdressed. Until we were quite old we had to wear hoods for six months of the year. What detail was it that caught my eye when Lambert laid out his inert photographs before us? That pair walking the greenish tile pavement caught me up short. Despite the disproportion between the two figures, the overwhelming mother and the child with the pin-like head, you could grasp the whole force of their tiny life. No matter that the photo was taken only a few days before my party, in a different country, a different climate; still it grabbed me and thrust me way back in time. We were ugly, and ill-dressed, my mother and I. We used to go all alone through the streets in that same way, and even though my mother was not large, I felt very small alongside her. Emptying her apartment with Jeanne, I understood how alone she had been throughout her life. When my father had his bouts of madness and hit me, she would turn up in my room to ask me to stop crying. She’d appear on the threshold and say, “All right now, that’s enough theater.” Then she would go cook dinner and make some dish I liked—a noodle soup, say. In the last months of her life, when we came to visit her, she was possessed by some inexplicable liveliness. Neck straining forward, face at the ready, on the watch for any movement, she was determined not to miss a word exchanged in her presence, and this was despite her deafness. She who all her life had made a specialty of indifference, who had taken a negative counterposition on everything, when it came time to throw in the sponge she was devoured by curiosity.

  There’s always some millstone character at these things. That evening the millstone was Georges Verbot. He eats, he drinks, he never helps out, and he doesn’t talk to anybody. The snow had turned to a soft rain. Plate and glass in hand, Georges Verbot wandered aimlessly among the groups, then went to stare out the window as if to say the scene was at least slightly more interesting outdoors. I was furious that Pierre had invited him again. There’s this tendency among many men, I’d noticed, to drag along through their whole lives these annoying millstones whom they find entertaining while nobody else understands why. Way back, Georges was a historian, then he drew comic strips, now he scribbles and just gets by, drinking all the way. He still has a vaguely handsome face that attracts women who have nothing much going on. Catherine Mussin, who still works for Font-Pouvreau, edged over to the window and tried a little opener about the changeable weather. Georges said he liked lousy weather, rain, especially this kind of dismal rain that pisses everyone off. Catherine gave a nervous laugh, charmed by the picturesque. He asked what she did, she said she was a patent engineer, he replied, “Same bullshit as Elisabeth!” She laughed again and explained that the point was protecting a researcher’s inventions.

  “Oh yah. And what invention are you protecting these days?”

  “I’m working on Di-opiomorphine. An application for a patent for a new analgesic, that is.”

  “And what’s your application going to do? Help those guys make a fortune?”

  She tried to introduce some nuance. By this point she must already have gotten a good whiff of liquor breath. Georges said, “A real researcher doesn’t give a damn about the bucks, my girl, he doesn’t need his work to be protected!”

  Catherine tried to put in the term “public interest” but to absolutely no avail.

  “You folks are the worker bees of the industrial world,” Georges went on. “The guys who discovered the AIDS virus didn’t give a damn for the money, what interested them was basic research, basic research doesn’t need you my darlings, your patent fuss is just commerce plain and simple, you’re not protecting anybody, you’re protecting the bucks.”

  He’d cornered her between the window frame and the chest, he was talking into her face from two inches away. She was suffocating and started shouting, “Don’t be so aggressive!” People turned around and Pierre stepped in to control his friend. The Manoscrivis took Catherine in hand, making her a plate of salad and bread with the Lallemants’ chicken loaf. She kept saying, “Who is that guy? He’s crazy!” As I passed by Lydie I said, “There’s a fellow you ought to do your readjustment thing on!” “Can’t adjust an alky,” she informed me. I wondered who she did adjust if you couldn’t do it to lunatics.

  At one point Lambert was heard to say, “All the leftwing ideas are deserting me little by little.” To which Jeanne replied, with a boldness that would have been suicidal a few years back among this same bunch, “Me they never did get to!” “Me neither,” Lydie chuckled, utterly comfortable among the company. “Lambert neither!” Pierre said. “What are you talking about, my whole life I voted left, through hell and high water!” said Lambert defensively. “People even accuse me of being a hard-core old lefty.” Serge claimed the title for himself alone in the room, and someone asked if “lefty” could be translated into other languages. Everyone threw out words, by common consent ruling out the possibility of any real English-language equivalent. Gil Teyo-Diaz, our expert in things Hispanic, offered “progré,” citing as he did so the bearded hero of the strip Quico, el progré. I said, “And what about in Italian, Jean-Lino—how would you say it?” I saw him redden, embarrassed at being thrust forward suddenly; he looked for a little help from his wife, who shrugged impatiently, he stammered something or other and wound up offering “sinistroide.”

  Sinistroide! The word brought laughter and someone asked if you could say un vecchio sinistroide. He said he didn’t see why not, but that since he wasn’t an Italian from Italy, he wasn’t certain of the term, anyhow he couldn’t say anything for sure on the matter, the only Italian he spoke was with his cat, and they never discussed politics. This charmed the crowd and he inadvertently became a pet of the evening.

  “Youth is departing!” Serge cried when Emmanuel tried to sneak out. The poor kid had to come back into the living room to make the farewell rounds. I had seen him standing before Lydie for a long while, curiously bent over, and then I realized she had taken his hand and was talking to him without releasing it, as do people who are confident of their personal magnetism and whose age allows them some physical familiarity. Catherine asked Jean-Lino if he had any children. His face brightened, he spoke of a joy that had come to him from heaven and Rémi’s name reached his lips. Perhaps people invent their joy. Perhaps nothing is real, neither joy nor sorrow. Jean-Lino called “joy” the surprise, the unexpected thing: the presence of a child in his life. He called “joy” the surprise of tending to another being, of being responsible for someone. That’s the way Jean-Lino was made. The infernal Rémi was joy fallen from heaven.

  As Emmanuel left, Etienne and Merle Dienesmann arrived. Merle had just performed (she’s a violinist) in the Dvořák Requiem at Sainte-Barberino church. Etienne is Pierre’s closest friend. For the past few months, his life has been changing. In his garage he is stockpiling light fixtures that he buys because of his late-stage macular degeneration. He categorically refuses to talk about the condition in company and acts as if nothing is wrong (which is becoming less and less possible lately). Their garage has no electricity, so when he enters that enclosure to deposit or to pick up the item that’s supposed to help him see, he sees nothing unless he goes in with a thousand-watt flashlight. Etienne was a math professor like Pierre, now he teaches chess to kids for various organizations. I’ve never heard him complain of his condition. His eyes are losing their brilliance bit by bit, but something else, I don’t know how to define it, has come to his face—endurance, nobility. Merle too acts as though nothing is happening, but I see her imperceptibly bring her glass a bit closer to the bottle when Etienne is pouring, or make some other infinitely small gesture that bowls me over.

  Jeanne spent half the party, cellphone and spectacles in hand, absorbed in some feverish conversation. Serge acted like he noticed nothing.
Playful, teasing (adorably heavy-handed), bellhop and headwaiter, talking to everyone, even trying to amuse Claudette El Ouardi, he made things light and easy for me. Even if he has got over being jealous of Jeanne’s present life, I couldn’t understand such crass behavior from her. I found my sister monstrous. A pathetic woman in her gamine spike-heel sandals, indelicate and vulgar. Passing close by her, I said, Stop, be with us a little. She looked at me as if I was embittered and irritating, and she just moved a few steps away. It nearly ruined the evening for me, but then, seeing her from behind—leaning into her phone, her dyed hair tumbling down over her bison-hump back, engulfed for so many years in the banality of life—I thought she was absolutely right to grab at this coxswain-cocksman guy, and the whip and the dirty talk, right to not worry about the jovial ex-husband, about proper behavior, while there was still time.

  Gil Teyo-Diaz and Mimi Benetrof were just back from southern Africa (everyone travels but us). Gil told about how he had found himself nose to nose with not one, not two, but three reclining lions. Man and beasts sized each other up, he said, and none of them budged! “No one budged because the lions were five kilometers away and you were observing them through binoculars from the jeep,” Mimi said. We laughed. Danielle laughed, her body stuck to Mathieu Crosse. Then in the far south of Angola, Gil went on, we were in a boat on the Kunene River where it was infested with crocodiles. According to Mimi, they had seen one baby croc on a rock—it might also have been a branch—and it was in northern Namibia. Gil declared that he had taken photos of terrifying crocodiles from less than six feet away. Sure, Mimi said, he took them at the Johannesburg zoo. She’s talking nonsense, said Gil, and “anyhow we’re not about to go on a trip like that again, now that Mimi isn’t earning a cent anymore. My wife works in the reinsurance business, in the department handling Acts of God, the term for natural disasters, which in our times, given the climate craziness, means: Goodbye bonus!” Everyone laughed. The Manoscrivis laughed. That’s the picture of them that we’ve still got: Jean-Lino, in his violet shirt and his new yellow half-round glasses, standing behind the couch, flushed from the champagne or the excitement of being out in society, all his teeth showing. Lydie, seated below him, skirt spread to either side, her face tilted left and laughing hard. Laughing probably the last laugh of her life. A laugh that I ponder endlessly. A laugh without malice, without coquetry, that I still hear resonating with its playful notes—a laugh unthreatened, suspecting nothing, knowing nothing. We get no advance warning of the irremediable. No furtive shadow slipping about with his scythe. When I was little, I used to be fascinated by the hooded skeleton whose dark contours I could see in a lunar halo. I still harbor that idea of premonition, in some form or another—a chill, a light suddenly dimming, a chime—who knows? Lydie Gumbiner did not sense anything coming, any more than the rest of us. When the other guests learned what happened hardly three hours later that night, they were stunned, and frightened. Nor did Jean-Lino feel the faintest grim brush when a few minutes later he started talking mindlessly—infected without realizing it by that conjugal behavior that involves taking center stage and teasing the partner to entertain the group. How could he have sensed anything? The situation felt familiar and inconsequential. Just some Saturday-night silliness—men reshaping the world, kidding around—turning edgy.