Happy Are the Happy by Yasmina Reza Page B

firing a parting shot, she says, good thing your father didn’t choose to have himself chopped up in pieces, otherwise you’d want to be chopped up in pieces too. I think she turns off the ceiling light while she’s speaking. There’s hardly any light coming in from outside, and so I remain in darkness, good riddance to me. I take the pack of Gauloises out of my pocket. I promised Doctor Ayoun I’d stop smoking. Just as I promised him I’d eat salads and broiled steaks. A nice guy, that Ayoun. A single cigarette won’t kill me. My eyes fall on the shrimp net with the wooden frame that’s been hanging on the wall for decades. Fifty years ago, somebody used to plunge it under layers of seaweed and thrust it into rifts. In the old days, Jeannette would put bouquets of thyme, laurel, all sorts of herbs in that net. Objects pile up, items no longer of any use. And neither are we. I listen to the rain, which has dropped down a tone. The wind too. I lower thelid and close the laptop. All that our eyes can see is already in the past. I’m not sad. Things are made to disappear. I’ll vanish without a fuss. There will be no coffin and no bones. Everything will go on as it has always done. Everything will float blithely away on the water.

Philip Chemla
    I’d like to suffer for love. The other evening, in the theater, I heard these words: “Sadness after intimate sexual intercourse one is familiar with of course … Yes, that one knows and is prepared to face.” The lines are from Beckett’s play
Happy Days
. Oh, the happy days of sadness I’ve never known. I don’t dream about a union or an idyll, I don’t dream about any more or less durable romantic felicity, no, I’d just like to know a certain kind of sadness. I can guess what it’s like. I may have already felt it. An impression halfway between a sense of something missing and a child’s heavy heart. Among the hundreds of bodies I desire, I’d like to come across one with a talent for wounding me. Even from a distance, even absent, even lying on a bed beside me and turning away. I’d like to come across a lover armed with an indiscernible, flaying blade. That’s the signature of love, I know it from the books I read long ago, before medicine stole all my time. Between me and my brother, there was never a word. When I was ten, he got into my bed. He was five years older than me. The door was ajar. I didn’t understand very well what was going on, but I knew it was forbidden. I don’t precisely remember the things we did. For years. Strokes and rubs. I remember the day he first came to me, and I remember my first orgasm. That’s all. I’m not sure whether we kissed, but the place that sort of thing would eventually occupy in my life leads me to believe he musthave kissed me. As time went on, and until his marriage, more and more it was I who approached him. No word passed between us. Except for his
No
when I presented myself. He’d say no, but he’d always give in. I remember only silences between us. No exchanges, no language meant to sustain an imaginary life. No coincidence of emotions and sex. We had a shed in the back of our yard. I’d go there and gaze out through a broken windowpane at the life in the street. One night a garbage truck driver spotted me and winked. The night was dark and the man inaccessible in his high cabin. Later, when I wasn’t so young anymore, I’d go chasing after garbage men. My father, whose brother was in Guinea, had a subscription to the magazine
Vivante Afrique
. It was my first porn magazine. Matte bodies on matte paper. Stalwart, protective farmers, nearly naked, sparkling on the page. I hung a picture of Nefertiti on the wall above my bed. She kept watch like an icon, untouchable and somber. Before I went away to boarding school, I used to go to various public gardens and offer myself to Arabs there. I’d say, use me. One day when some guy and I were taking off our clothes in a stairwell, I sensed that he was