Desolation (Vintage International) by Reza Yasmina

Author:Reza, Yasmina [Reza, Yasmina]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Lionel told me that after he woke up and listened to this song, he felt it would be idiotic to plan any other experiences for the day. The repeated notes, the silences, the interruptions cut through him and justified his paralysis.

According to Bach specialists, it’s a pleasant little youthful composition—with a hint of irony in it. Experts flatten the world.

Marisa Botton is sixty today.

One day I stuck a Toblerone in her vagina and we ate it afterward. A Toblerone she’d bought for her son. At the beginning, she wouldn’t even drink a glass of anything with me. “In Rouen, one doesn’t drink with a stranger.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“You’re worse, you’re one of my husband’s suppliers.”

“All right, then, I have no chance of seeing you anywhere except this corridor.”

“No.”

I knew this meant yes.

At that time telephones were not in such wide use as they are today. You couldn’t reach people directly at their desks, you had to go through the switchboard. I called myself Monsieur Ostinato, an improvised name I borrowed from musical terminology. Who was Monsieur Ostinato? Even after clearing the switchboard you weren’t certain you’d get through to her and you had to tell the inquisitorial voice the purpose of your call. Monsieur Ostinato was a contractor and wanted to give her a private estimate on something. Monsieur Ostinato was only pressed into service once (Marisa thought it was the world’s worst idea, at Aunay’s everyone knew everything, and all it would take was the slightest thing and someone would start asking her husband about the improvements they were having made to their house) but seduced her with his boldness and his wild imagination. Monsieur Ostinato got his rendezvous one April evening at six o’clock in the bar of the Hotel de Dieppe.

She came a quarter of an hour late, a little disappointing in a pale raincoat.

It took me six months to have her. After Ostinato there were other names, other tricks, other lightning rendezvous at the station, at the Bar de la Poste, at the Bar du Palais, at the Dieppe, at the Scotch, the bar in the basement of the Hotel d’Angleterre, she came wearing glasses, she stayed for five minutes with her eyes fixed on the door, she said we can’t see each other anymore, you must forget me, she said in my ear I want you, whenever I think about you I can’t sleep, she just couldn’t do it, she could never do it, there was her son, her husband, her mother, the factory, Rouen, the universe, there was no place to go, there was no time, I was going mad.

One day, I had her. At lunchtime, in a room at the Hotel de la Poste, on the rue Jeanne-d’Arc.

Disturbing life.

There you are, sitting in a good restaurant, you’ve ordered a good wine, you’re trying to hustle a hundred thousand pairs of pajamas, you’re having a pro forma argument but the client isn’t even really using the conditional tense, you can sense it’s gone well,

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