Anne-Marie the Beauty Read online

  Next, standing before a big Warhol-esque portrait of Giselle, a woman sang Thérèse de Lisieux’s To Live on Love, and I started to cry. You can’t help yourself, it’s the organ, it really gets you down. I pictured the dressing room and the fag in her mouth, and the hair, and the letters from her lovers, and little Kikine on the flowery daybed, Kikine who turned into that other person, stiff as a ramrod, in a culotte skirt

  A thousand years that flashed by in a second

  We bumped into each other on rue de Courcelles, almost right in front of her door. It was years after Break of Noon. Both of us were dazzled to be living in the same neighborhood. Come in, come up!

  She lived alone in her big flat with decorative moldings

  It was a cozy impersonal flat. There was one just like it on every floor of the building. No trace of the mess she used to make wherever she went, back when I knew her

  She showed me her sideways view of Parc Monceau. A faint odor of camphor clung to the place

  Giselle still appeared in films and TV series. She’d even returned to stage not long before

  But the lights had gone cold, madame

  We pretended not to notice. She served me a cup of tea. We went into raptures over the teacups she had bought for a euro at Hema. She brought out a picture of us that she had kept, taken at the entrance of the Théâtre de Clichy. I realized how beautiful she had been. I had a leering smile that I’d meant to be penetrating. Everyone knows how to make a photo-face but me. I told her I was widowed. My husband had died six months before. She asked me if his ghost ever visited. Gigi believed in ghosts. She told me that Ingmar Bergman’s ghost came to her flat on a regular basis. They had long talks. About fate, pendulums, night, and tranquilizers, Gigi said, but also home decorating. —For example it was he who convinced me to change the kitchen tiles

  Giselle thought it was a shame that he’d had his teeth redone and no longer had his pointy little incisor. I said, but when would he have had his teeth done? She did not know

  I was happy to see her again, mademoiselle

  As she spoke, she leaned her head back on the sofa, her feet up on the coffee table. I had forgotten this capacity for languor

  On the street she’d seemed smaller than before. And she continued to seem smaller, right until her death

  The Congolese priest made a gesture. Gigi’s six grandchildren, necktied and squeezed into dark-colored suits, climbed onto the tiny podium. The eldest, a boy of about fifteen, whose voice was changing, read a text he’d written himself, which began, Mamita, you’ve left us . . . That was Giselle’s grandma-name

  Just what we needed, a remembrance of Giselle as Mamita, next to her psychedelic turquoise portrait!

  Giselle had just wanted to be called Giselle, she had told me, but no one else agreed

  Giselle equated “Mamita” with underarm flab, deafness, an uncooperative back, unruly bowels, quick fixes for the skin, muscles, and hair color, the whole torrent of ruin that hurls you into the arms of death before you know it

  Gigi did not like old age

  Who does?

  In the end, she complained about everything, monsieur

  About her entourage, her decrepitude, and especially her daughters, the youngest of whom showed her no affection. Gigi said, she kisses me through gritted teeth, as though my mouth were smeared with manure

  When Raymond Lice started rambling, we worked out a system, we’d say “ding-dong!” each time he repeated himself

  It worked like a charm

  When he heard “ding-dong” he’d say, oh pardon me!

  One day I dared to say, Gigi, remember Raymond and ding-dong? —Yes of course. —Well, each time you complain I’m going to say “ding-dong”

  Do as you please

  Corinna, in a surge of family feeling, had taken Gigi on holiday to Roquebrune. Holidays with the husband and the passel of brats. She called me every day

  I hate ruins

  I hate people who visit ruins

  I hate the seaside

  I hate children and their squealing joy. The Vietnamese kid is the worst. A cretin. Just because he’s an adopted Vietnamese kid doesn’t mean he’s not a cretin

  The priestling is a pain in the ass. The priestling is her son-in-law

  The car is a pain in the ass

  The Super U Mart is a pain in the ass

  Ding-dong!

  You’re lucky to have a son, Anne-Marie, girls are nothing but hatred and resentment. I told the gastroenterologist that it’s my morning orange juice that blocks my pylorus, but he couldn’t care less, he wants me to take a double dose of Colopeg before the next colonoscopy, he says the last one must not have been done in the right conditions. I said, doc, you need your head examined. I’ll go on a bulk-free diet for two weeks and it’ll be spick and span in there, the way you want it. Ding-dong! I won’t let you tear my innards to shreds because you take me for a half-wit! Ding-dong! You know, Anne-Marie, my left arm has been half-dead for months, I can’t button a blouse anymore. The physio says that only the head should rest on the pillow, not the neck, I said we do the best we can to sleep, Monsieur Grenier, it’s a miracle if we sleep at all, and then he said, well, don’t be surprised if you end up with ankylosis. Oh, they’re such a pain in the ass! Ding-dong ding-dong!

  Well, it worked with Raymond Lice

  Raymond ended his days in a state nursing home in Évry. I went to visit him once. He sat in a big yellow armchair next to his bed. The bed was in the middle of the room with the headboard pushed against the wall, like in the hospital

  He did not remember my name. The in-house hairdresser had given him a side part and crimped forelock like a little boy’s

  Raymond Lice, Canella Poupi, Mirelle Camp, Giselle Fayolle

  My friends from Clichy

  We had the time of our lives, you know

  When I was little, for the holidays I was sent to stay with cousins on my mother’s side. They put me on the train, I got off at Bluzet. I waited on the platform with my suitcase until my uncle finished work. He was the stationmaster. In the summer, I poked around the shrubs behind the station and in the waiting room, which was empty, because usually only freight trains stopped there. I pined away from loneliness and boredom. My suitcase was packed with toiletries and easy-wash clothes. My mother folded everything very carefully to make a good impression

  When I came to Paris, I wanted to bring things that mattered. Boxes of trinkets, notebooks, my album, pictures to hang, my papier-mâché animals

  It was sad, monsieur, that trousseau for the unknown

  Before rue des Rondeaux, I drifted right and left with a huge suitcase that I never unpacked

  At rue des Rondeaux, I ditched almost everything

  When Giselle died, you see, it’s as if I unpacked my bag for the last time

  When we came out of the church, it was raining. The men who had lowered the coffin were soaked

  It rained at my father’s funeral also

  My parents were buried in the Mille family plot at the Colugne communal cemetery, which is smaller than Saint-Sourd’s and gives onto a field

  My father was first. We were all there in the pouring rain, my husband, my sister, my brother-in-law, more distant family, local residents, and old workers from the foundry. My mother was dressed like a Spanish lady with a black lace mantilla

  She refused to carry an umbrella. She stood there stiff and chilled to the bone. The veil stuck to her streaming cheeks with an effect of embarrassing excess

  There weren’t as many people at hers. A few relatives, the cousins from Bluzet, minus the stationmaster, who had died long ago. My mother kept up her antics right until the end. A neighbor said she’d seen her cavorting down rue Carmelin not long before

  As we left, we passed a grave heaped with fresh flowers. I looked at the name, and who do you t
hink was buried there?

  Who, mademoiselle? Prosper Ginot!

  Prosper Ginot. One thousand nine hundred and eighteen – One thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine

  Actor

  Prosper Ginot, lying in the dark in Colugne next to my parents, facing a meadow full of cows and poppies

  Where I come from, lying down is not allowed

  The recumbent position is bad for the soul

  In Saint-Sourd, there were the coal pits which no longer exist and the Prosper Ginot theater company

  We saw the actors around town, especially on Sundays, on account of the market

  I recognized them from afar

  I whispered their names

  Prosper Ginot, Armand Cheval . . .

  They were tall and pale. Much larger than life

  We told ourselves that our lives were very small

  No artist has ever been as grand as the actors of Saint-Sourd-en-Ger

  Prosper Ginot, Madeleine Puglierin, Roger Stru, Madeleine Tison, Armand Cheval, Désiré Guelde, Odette Ordonneau, Aimé Morteron, Jean Leleu, Georgia Glazer

  Haribos : sweets made by the German confectionary company Haribo, whose numerous varieties are widely distributed—and very popular—in France.

  Vichy pastilles : Produced since 1825, these octogonal pastilles are made from mineral salts from the Vichy waters, mint-flavored and traditionally thought to aid digestion.

  Break of Noon (Partage du midi), a play by Paul Claudel (1905).

  A French tragedian, comic actor, and stage director (1900–1985). During the Occupation, she was one of the nine Résistance directors. From 1962 onward she directed the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris, which now bears her name.

  About the Author

  Yasmina Reza is a novelist and playwright. Her plays Conversations After a Burial, The Unexpected Man, Art, Life x 3, and God of Carnage have all been multi-award-winning critical and popular international successes, translated into more than thirty-five languages. Art was the first non-English language play to win the American Tony Award. God of Carnage, which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film in 2012 by Roman Polanski. Her novels include Babylon (Seven Stories, 2018), which won the Prix Renaudot and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt; Desolation; and Adam Haberberg. Anne-Marie the Beauty is her most recent novel. She lives in Paris.

  About the Translator

  Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Paris.

  About Seven Stories Press

  Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Peter Plate, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.