The Festival of Insignificance Read online

  A small van stopped in front of the building and two drivers brought up all the provisions Charles had ordered—bottles of wine and whiskey, ham, sausages, pastries—and set them down in the kitchen. With the maid’s help, Charles and Caliban covered a long table set up in the salon with an enormous cloth and set out plates, platters, glasses, and bottles. Then, as the cocktail hour drew near, they retired to a small room Madame D’Ardelo had assigned them. From a valise, they lifted out two white jackets and slipped them on. They needed no mirror, they simply looked each other over and could not suppress a little laugh. This always gave them a brief instant of pleasure. They almost forgot that they were working out of necessity, to earn a living; seeing themselves in their white costumes, they had the sense they were doing it for fun.

  Then Charles went off to the salon, leaving Caliban to arrange the remaining platters. A very young girl, self-assured, stepped into the kitchen and turned to the maid: “You are not to show yourself out front in the salon for even a second! If our guests saw you they’d run right out!” Then, examining the Portuguese girl’s lips, she exploded with laughter: “Where did you dig up that lipstick? You look like some African bird! A parrot from Bourenbouboubou!” and she left the kitchen, laughing.

  Her eyes moist, the Portuguese girl told Caliban (in Portuguese): “Madame is nice! But her daughter! She’s just so mean! She said that because she likes you! When there are men around she’s always mean to me! She loves humiliating me in front of men!”

  Unable to respond, Caliban stroked her hair. She raised her eyes and said (in French): “Look at me, is my lipstick so ugly?” She turned her head right and left so he could inspect the full span of her lips.

  “No,” he said (in Pakistani), “your lipstick color is a very good choice.”

  In his white jacket, the maid found Caliban even more sublime, even more unbelievable, and she told him (in Portuguese): “I’m so glad you are here.”

  And he, carried away by his own eloquence, said (still in Pakistani): “And not just your lips, but your face, your body, all of you—just as I see you here before me; you’re lovely, very lovely—”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” the maid responded (in Portuguese).

  The Photo on the Wall

  Not only for Caliban, who no longer finds anything amusing in his masquerade, but for all my characters, that evening is clouded with sadness: for Charles, who had confessed to Alain his fears for his ailing mother; for Alain, moved by that filial love that he himself had never experienced, and moved as well by the image of an old countrywoman who belonged to a world unknown to him but for which he felt nostalgia all the more. Unfortunately, when he’d hoped to prolong the phone conversation, Charles was already late and had had to hang up. Alain then picked up his cell phone to call Madeleine again. But hers rang and rang; in vain. As he often did in similar instances, he turned his attention to a photo hanging on his wall. There was no other photo in his studio but that one—the face of a young woman: his mother.

  A few months after Alain’s birth, she had left her husband, who, given his discreet ways, had never spoken ill of her. He was a subtle, gentle man. The child did not understand how a woman could abandon a man so subtle and gentle, and understood even less how she could have abandoned her son, who was also (as he was aware) since childhood (if not since his conception) a subtle, gentle person.

  “Where does she live?” he had asked his father.

  “Probably in America.”

  “What do you mean, ‘probably’?”

  “I don’t know her address.”

  “But it’s her duty to give it to you.”

  “She has no duty to me.”

  “But to me? She doesn’t want to hear news of me? She doesn’t want to know what I’m doing? She doesn’t want to know that I think about her?”

  One day the father lost control:

  “Since you insist, I’ll tell you: Your mother never wanted you to be born. She never wanted you to be around here, to be burying yourself in that easy chair where you’re so comfortable. She wanted nothing to do with you. So now you understand?”

  The father was not an aggressive man. But despite his great reserve, he had not managed to hide his profound disagreement with a woman who had tried to keep a human being from coming into the world.

  I have already described Alain’s last encounter with his mother, beside the swimming pool of a rented vacation house. He was ten at the time. He was sixteen when his father died. A few days after the funeral, he had torn his mother’s photograph out of a family album, got it framed, and hung it on his wall. Why was there no picture of his father in his apartment? I don’t know. Is that illogical? Certainly. Unfair? Without a doubt. But that’s how it is: On the walls of his studio there hung only a single photograph: the one of his mother. With which, from time to time, he would talk:

  How to Give Birth to an Apologizer

  “Why didn’t you have an abortion? Did he stop you?”

  A voice came to him from the photograph:

  “You’ll never know that. Everything you imagine about me is just fairy tales. But I love your fairy tales. Even when you made me out to be a murderer who drowned a young man in the river. I liked it all. Keep it up, Alain. Tell me a story! Go on, imagine! I’m listening.”

  And Alain imagined. He imagined the father on his mother’s body. Before their coitus, she warned him: “I didn’t take the Pill, be careful!” He reassured her. So she makes love without mistrust; then, when she sees the signs of climax appear on the man’s face, and grow, she starts to cry out: “Watch out!” then “No! No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” but the man’s face is redder and redder, red and repugnant; she pushes at the heavier weight of this body clamping her against him, she fights, but he wraps her still tighter, and she suddenly understands that for him this is not the blindness of passion but will—cold, premeditated will—while for her it is more than will, it is hatred, a hatred all the more ferocious because the battle is lost.

  This was not the first time Alain imagined their coitus; this coitus hypnotized him and caused him to suppose that every human being was the exact replica of the instant during which it was conceived. He stood at his mirror and examined his face for traces of the double, simultaneous hatreds that had led to his birth: the man’s hatred and the woman’s hatred at the moment of the man’s orgasm; the hatred of the gentle and physically strong coupled with the hatred of the courageous and physically weak.

  And he thinks how the fruit of that double hatred could only be an apologizer. He was gentle and intelligent like his father; and he would always remain an intruder, as his mother had viewed him. A person who is both an intruder and gentle is condemned, by an implacable logic, to apologize throughout his whole life.

  He looked at the face hung on the wall and once again he saw the woman who, defeated, in her dripping dress, climbs into the car, slips unnoticed past the concierge’s window, climbs the staircase, and, barefoot, returns to the apartment where she will stay until the intruder leaves her body. And where, a few months later, she will abandon the two of them.

  Ramon Arrives at the Cocktail Party in a Foul Mood

  Despite the compassion he had felt at the end of their encounter in the Luxembourg Gardens, Ramon could not change the fact that D’Ardelo belonged to the sort of people he did not like. Even though they had a trait in common—the passion for dazzling others; for startling them by an amusing remark; for conquering a woman before their very eyes. Except that Ramon was not a Narcissus. He enjoyed success but feared to rouse envy; he liked being admired but fled the admirers. His diffidence had turned into a love of solitude after he sustained a few wounds in his private life, but especially since the previous year, when he had been obliged to join the dismal army of the retired: His nonconformist remarks, which had used to keep him young, now despite his misleading appearance made him an uncontemporary character, a person not of our time, and thus old.

  So he decided to boycott the cocktail party he’d been invited to by his former colleague (a man not yet retired), and he did not change his mind until the last minute, when Charles and Caliban swore that only his presence would make bearable their ever more boring task as waiters. Still, he arrived very late, long after a guest had delivered a speech in the host’s honor. The apartment was jammed. Knowing no one, Ramon headed for the long table behind which his two friends were serving drinks. To lighten his foul mood, he greeted them with a few words in rough imitation of their Pakistani babble. Caliban replied in his authentic version of the same babble.

  Then, with a wineglass in hand, still in a foul mood, wandering among the strangers, Ramon was drawn to the excitement of a few people turned toward the vestibule door. A woman appeared there, slender and beautiful, in her fifties. Her head tilted back, she slid a hand several times beneath her hair, lifting it, then letting it fall back gracefully, and she turned to offer everyone the voluptuously tragic expression of her face; no one among the guests had ever met her, but all knew her from photos: the famous Madame Franck. She stopped at the long table, bent over, and with grave concentration indicated to Caliban various canapés she liked.

  Her plate was soon full, and Ramon thought of what D’Ardelo had told him in the Luxembourg Gardens: She had just lost her partner whom she had loved so passionately that, through some magical decree from the heavens, her sadness at the moment of his death had been transubstantiated into euphoria, and that her lust for life had grown a hundredfold. He watched her: She put canapés into her mouth, and her face displayed the vigorous motions of mastication.

  When D’Ardelo’s daughter (Ramon knew her by sight) noticed the tall, famous woman, the girl’s mouth stopped moving (she, too, was masticating something) and her legs star
ted running: “Darling!” She tried to embrace La Franck, but the woman was holding a plate at stomach level that thwarted her.

  “Darling!” the girl repeated as La Franck’s mouth worked over a great mass of bread and salami. Unable to swallow the whole thing, she deployed her tongue to push the mouthful into the space between molars and cheek; then, with some effort, she tried to say a few words to the girl, who could not make them out.

  Ramon took a couple of steps forward to observe them from close up. The D’Ardelo girl swallowed what she had in her own mouth, and declared in ringing tones: “I know everything, oh, I know everything! But we will never allow you to be alone! Never!”

  La Franck, her gaze set emptily ahead (Ramon could see that she had no idea who this person was), moved a segment of the mass into the middle of her mouth, chewed it, swallowed half of it, and said: “Human existence is nothing but solitude.”

  “Oh, how true that is!” cried the D’Ardelo girl.

  “A solitude surrounded by other solitudes,” La Franck added, then she swallowed down the rest, turned, and moved away.

  Ramon was unaware that a light smile of amusement was forming on his face.

  Alain Sets a Bottle of Armagnac on Top of His Armoire

  At about the same moment as that unexpected little smile was brightening Ramon’s face, a telephone ring interrupted Alain’s musings on the genesis of an apologizer. He knew instantly that it was Madeleine. Difficult to understand how these two could always talk for so long and with such pleasure, when they had so few interests in common. When Ramon had described his theory about observation posts standing each on a different point in history, from which people talk together unable to understand one another, Alain had immediately thought of his girlfriend, because, thanks to her, he knew that even the dialogue between true lovers, if their birth dates are too far apart, is only the intertwining of two monologues, each holding for the other much that is not understood. That was why, for instance, he never knew if the reason Madeleine twisted the names of famous men of the past was that she had never heard of them or that she was parodying them on purpose, to make clear to everyone that she was not the least bit interested in anything that had happened before her own lifetime. Alain was not troubled by this. It amused him to be with her just as she was, and he could be all the more content afterward when he was back in the solitude of his own studio, where he had hung poster reproductions of paintings by Bosch, Gauguin (and who knows who else) that marked out his own private world for him.

  He always had a vague idea that if he had been born some sixty years earlier he would have been an artist. A truly vague idea, since he did not know what the word “artist” meant nowadays. A painter turned window dresser? A poet? Is there still such a thing as a poet? What gave him most pleasure, these past few weeks, was sharing in Charles’s fantasy, his marionette play, in this nonsense that delighted him precisely because it made no sense.

  Knowing full well that he could not earn a living doing what he would have liked to do (but did he know what he would like to do?), he had chosen, after university, a job in which he was forced to make use not of his originality, his ideas, his talents, but only of his intelligence—that is to say, of that mathematically measurable ability that distinguishes among individuals only quantitatively—one person having more, the other less of it, Alain rather more, such that he had been well paid and could occasionally buy himself a bottle of Armagnac. A few days earlier he had bought a bottle when he noticed on its label a vintage year that matched the date of his own birth. He had thus promised himself he would open it on his birthday to celebrate his greatness with his friends, the greatness of this very great poet who, out of his humble veneration of poetry, had vowed never to write a single line.

  Content and almost jolly after his long chat with Madeleine, he climbed onto a chair with the bottle of Armagnac and set it on top of a high, very high, armoire. Then he sat on the floor and, leaning against the wall, fixed on it a gaze that slowly transfigured it into a queen.

  Quaquelique’s Call to a Good Mood

  While Alain was gazing at the bottle atop the armoire, Ramon went on scolding himself for being somewhere he did not want to be; all these people displeased him, and he was especially intent on avoiding D’Ardelo; suddenly he saw the man just a few yards away, standing before La Franck, whom he was trying to captivate with his eloquence; to get away from them, Ramon took refuge once again at the long table where Caliban was busy pouring Bordeaux into the glasses of three guests; through his gestures and grimaces, he was giving them to understand that the wine was of rare quality. Knowing the proper behavior, the gentlemen picked up their glasses, warmed them for a long moment between their palms, took a sip and held it in their mouths, displayed to one another their faces, expressing first intense concentration, then amazed admiration, and finished by loud proclamations of delight. The whole thing lasted barely a minute, until this festival of tasting was harshly interrupted by their conversation, and Ramon, watching them, had the sense that he was attending a funeral where three gravediggers were burying the sublime taste of the wine by tossing onto its coffin the earth and the dust of their chatter; again a smile of amusement formed on his face, while just then a very frail voice, barely audible, more whistle than speech, sounded behind his back: “Ramon! What are you doing here?”

  He turned. “Quaquelique! What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for a new girlfriend,” he answered, and his deeply uninteresting little face beamed.

  “My dear fellow,” said Ramon, “you’re the same as always.”

  “You know, boredom—there’s nothing worse. That’s why I keep changing girlfriends. Without that, no good mood for me!”

  “Ah, good moods!” exclaimed Ramon, as if enlightened by those two words. “Yes, you said it! A good mood—that’s what it’s all about, exactly! Ah, what a pleasure to see you! A few days ago, I was talking about you to my friends. Oh, Quaqui, my Quaqui, I’ve got a lot to tell you—”

  Just then he spotted, a few steps away, the pretty face of a young woman he knew; this fascinated him; it was as if these two chance encounters, magically bound by the same moment in time, shot him through with energy; in his head the echo of the words “good mood” resonated like a call to arms.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Quaquelique, “we’ll talk later—you understand—”

  Quaquelique smiled. “Of course I understand. Go on, go!”

  “I’m very happy to see you again, Julie,” Ramon told the young woman. “It’s ages since I’ve run into you.”

  “That’s your fault,” the young woman replied, looking him impudently in the eyes.

  “Until this minute I had no idea what unreasonable reason brought me to this dreadful party. Now I know.”

  “And suddenly the dreadful party is no longer dreadful.” Julie laughed.

  “You’ve de-dreaded it,” Ramon said, laughing too. “But why are you here?”

  She nodded toward a group gathered around an old (very old) university celebrity. “He’s always got something to say.” Then with a promising smile: “I’m eager to see you later this evening …”

  In an excellent mood, Ramon glimpsed Charles behind the long table, looking oddly absent, his gaze set high above him. The strange stance intrigued Ramon; then he said to himself: “What a pleasure not to worry about something happening up there, what a pleasure to be right down here,” and he watched Julie walking away: The motion of her behind was both a greeting and an invitation.

  PART FIVE

  A Little Feather Floats Beneath the Ceiling

  A Little Feather Floats Beneath the Ceiling

  “… Charles … oddly absent, his gaze set high above him….” These are the words I wrote in the last paragraph of the previous chapter. But what was he looking at up there?

  A tiny thing fluttering beneath the ceiling; a very small white feather that slowly hovered, floated downward, then upward. Behind the long table covered with platters, bottles, and glasses, Charles stood motionless, his head slightly tilted back, while one after another the guests, intrigued by his stance, began to follow his gaze.