Desolation Read Online Free

she arrives. She finds a dazed old man who holds out a trembling hand. She orders tea and immediately announces that she’ll have to leave by six. Sartaoui’s pill, in defiance of its apparently shaky user, is sending out its first hidden signals. Disastrous timing. The girl is calm, smiles. Listens. Like a nurse in a palliative care unit. While she’s blowing on her herbal tea, Lionel clutches his chest, the only part of him that’s in synch at this moment, his last wisp of horizon.
    He’s going to play his last card.
    “I don’t feel well,” he says. “Something’s the matter, could you take me home?”
    “You don’t feel well?”
    “No,” he says, struggling pitiably to his feet, “I feel dizzy.”
    “Dizzy?”
    “Yes, dizzy.”
    She takes his arm. They leave. The rue Pierre-Demours is crowded, noisy. The weather is gray. She supports him in a friendly fashion. Friendly girl, he says to himself, what a farce!
    They arrive at the entrance to his building. “Would you like me to come up with you?” she offers sympathetically.
    “I’d like that,” Lionel answers in a high-pitched quaver, wondering how on earth, once they get upstairs, he will manage to change gears and become Casanova. The elevator comes down. Stops. Picture one of those open elevators with a grille. Lionel sees feet, a corner of skirt . . . Joëlle! Joëlle, general secretary of a pension savings bank at the Porte de Picpus, Joëlle who’s been supporting the family for forty years, never in forty years home before seven in the evening, is home today, in the rue Langier, at 5:15.
    “Madame Gagnion died,” she says.
    Slut, thinks Lionel, that slut of a Gagnion who finds a way to croak while I’m having a hard-on. Filthy slut. Gagnion is their upstairs neighbor. An old woman who’s got nobody left but them. In a word, Lionel thanks the girl, tells Joëlle he too had some kind of attack in the street. What kind of an attack? Joëlle fusses, already in shock because of Gagnion. Nothing, nothing whatever, darling, a little dizzy spell. Joëlle gives some instructions to the concierge, they go back upstairs, Joëlle insists that Lionel lie down. She helps him undress. “But what’s going on,” she cries, “you’ve got a hard-on.” And immediately, instead of profiting from the situation, starts yelling and hitting him. The bitch from downstairs is nothing but a whore and she’ll gut her, he didn’t have any kind of attack, he’s pathetic, a parasite, a piece of shit. Whereupon farewell Sartaoui, farewell waitress from the Demours, farewell erection.
    A finale like any other, you’ll say.
    Well, yes. One finale leads to another, my boy. First one finale, then the next. Things extinguish themselves one after another. From the glory of day to the shadows. Like Lionel heading up the rue Pierre-Demours.
    You know that Nancy has also become a psychologist. You’ll say that’s all part of her arsenal. She’s become a psychologist and when you come up as the subject, which happens, this is her theory. I’m supposed to have traumatized you—a theory your mother naturally shares—I’m supposed to have traumatized you when you were a child by my severity, my demands, my readiness to strike you, and so on. I’m supposed to have traumatized you and somehow suffocated you. Suffocated you by the force of my personality which was disproportionate to your sensibility, your fragility, your all those so-called positive words which are in vogue these days.
    So, traumatized and suffocated, you embarked on life in the worst possible circumstances. To hear tell, you were on your way to being a drug addict or a delinquent. At this stage in the experiment, Nancy thinks she can arouse my sympathy, which only goes to show her poor grasp of psychology, by the way. Accordingly I’m supposed to take pleasure in the fact that you’re laid back. That you have absolutely no ambition, that you’ll end up a social disaster—so what. You’re a boy