Desolation Read Online Free Page A

who’s raising the bar on misery. Hats off. With Stalin for a father, hats off, my boy.
    If I weren’t moved by some degree of pity and affection for you, I’d find you repellent. Nancy has no idea how much you disgust me when she talks about how
crushed
you are. Those are her words. I’m supposed to have crushed you.
    “How?” I ask.
    “You were too strong, you didn’t let him blossom.”
    “Ah, but he’s blossoming now?”
    “Yes, he’s beginning to, it’s wonderful.”
    Nancy can talk about you blossoming for minutes at a time. Your crushing and your blossoming are the two major lines on your medical chart. Not once have you ever inquired after my health. To what should I attribute this silence? Shame? Indifference, ennui? You should know I’m not well. And if you’ve always known I’ve been prone to illness, you should take on board that they now dictate the way I spend my time. But you don’t give a fuck, you don’t think it’s worth talking about. Your brother-in-law Michel who was here on Sunday with your sister and the baby—that’s when she used the word
happy
about you—is blossoming too, go figure. He’s joined the Jewish Ramblers at the Île-de-France. The only way he’s found to be a Jew at last. Last weekend they did Montfort-L’Amaury-Coignières. They came in the afternoon, in the morning he’d done Montfort to Coignières. Eleven miles. Over the moon. Through colonies of weekend cottages, forests sliced up by highways, the odd hill, what do I know. He’s laid back too. No vestige of existential angst. You’ll say he’s managed to weed-whack his entire psyche at one go. Explain to me how anyone, let alone in a group, can plow all the way from Montfort via Cergy to Coignières, between manure heaps and beetroot fields, ride back on the B line and remain an optimist. Here’s a boy who gets up on Sunday after a grueling walk, hops out of bed at dawn’s early light, and says to himself, Hey, great, today I’m going to walk to Coignières with my friends the Jewish Ramblers. To Coignières. Apparently one blossoms where one can. You, you need the Caribbean. Because to crown it all, in my despotism and mistreatment of you, I’ve made you a high-class whore. If you remain immune to the poetry of Cergy-to-Pontoise, it’s undoubtedly my fault and I know better than anyone, kindly note, that’s it impossible to raise the bar of unhappiness inside the Beltway.
    You’ve decided to take a year’s sabbatical. You’ll be surprised to know I was curious enough to look up the word in the dictionary, and the definition makes it completely inapplicable to you because it refers to university professors going off once every seven years to do their own research. But so what, if everyone had to avoid abusing or stretching language, nobody’d ever open their mouth. So you decided to take a sabbatical year, a verbal fig leaf to disguise an entire sabbatical life, if what your friends say is to be believed. In short, you’ve decided to opt out. Fine. If there’s anything that interests me, despite myself, in this plan of yours, it’s its absolute vacuity. No irony intended, for once. When you decide to opt out of everything except touring the planet, you free yourself of all scruples and parasitic virtues, and clearly you’re miles away from any idea, thank God, of devoting your time to some form of good works, like protecting orphaned children or virgin forests. Radically egotistical, radically consistent. That’s not so common these days, particularly as someone as weak-natured as you are could be in danger of being dragged into some sort of philanthropic orgy.
    One day your mother opened the newspaper and said, “Leopold Fench is dead.”
    It was the worst sentence I’ve ever heard in my life.
    Leo Fench was Lionel’s cousin by marriage. He had been one of the frontline troops in the heroic epic of mass manufacture in the clothing industry. I don’t know if you knew him. At the end of