Desolation Read Online Free Page B

the fifties Leo made a fortune with the introduction of nylon thread that wouldn’t ladder. Only two weeks beforehand we bumped into each other on the rue de Solferino. He was coming from the dentist’s. No hint of the shadow of death. Pleasant, the same as always. One fine day a man is walking happily along the rue de Solferino and next day he’s dead. Leopold Fench was the most cheerful man I ever knew. When we first got to know each other in the fifties, I read this cheerfulness as a form of instability, it takes time to recognize that cheerfulness is a death song. The son of a grocer from Roanne, he made a fortune in nylon and bought himself an apartment on the rue Las-Cases. Main floor and garden, plus another floor upstairs. He had a year’s worth of work done on it, maybe even more. He redid the whole thing. He ran all round Paris to find the tiles, he ordered doors from God knows where, and mantelpieces, he went through the decorators, he designed a chandelier himself and had it made in Italy. After a year and a half he moved in with his family. One afternoon just afterward, he calls me. Come by, he says. He opens the door to me himself. We go into the salon. The room opened onto the garden, and you had to go down a few steps. It must have been January, but the weather was particularly fine that day. I tell him, “My friend, it’s a triumph.” He shows me every detail, I remember we spent whole minutes on the curtain tiebacks with their special pleating, he shows me the size of the rooms, the perspectives, the genuine boiseries, the fake cornices, he shows me everything right down to the light switches. I say, “It’s a real triumph.” I say, “There isn’t another apartment like it in Paris.” He nods. We sit down, he on a stool with tapestry work he’d been praising two minutes before. We look at the garden through the glass door. Light streams into the room. There’s an occasional noise from the street but it’s almost nothing, a vague sound that seems to emanate from the provinces, a background murmur of peaceable life.
    Leo watches a leaf quiver, his finger calls my attention to the perfection of some shrub or another and he says, “Now what?”
    And that’s what I think about when your mother opens the paper and says Leopold Fench is dead. Cans of tuna fish from Roanne, the stool from the rue Las-Cases, his unbuttoned jacket in the sunshine on the rue de Solferino.
    A beautiful day, a man walking happily along a street in Paris at the furthest remove from death. The sky belongs to him, the river belongs to him, the houses, and the faces, belong to him, the old friend he meets where rue de Solferino and rue de l’Université cross belongs to him, as, for the last time, although he doesn’t know it, does the little chamber that is his life.
    Your mother, sounding only marginally surprised, said, “Leopold Fench is dead.” The relative unimportance of the death is measured in the offhand way she says it. Your mother has suggested, if not decreed, that the world could keep on calmly turning without Leo, that Leo Fench lived and died the way dogs live and die, nice companions but not important.
    “I’m shattered by this,” I say.
    “Shattered? Why? The two of you weren’t that close.”
    “We were close in a way that’s beyond you.”
    “Everything’s beyond me these days.”
    “Quite.”
    She began to cry. The moment a woman starts to cry, I want to deck her. I can’t stand people who go to pieces. Take some cake, my boy. Take a slice. Orange cake, Mrs. Dacimiento brought it for my breakfast. I turned over the plastic wrapping, orange cake, twenty francs. Mass-made by lesbians from Pont l’Abbé in a former pigsty turned factory. That’s what she wants to shove down my throat at breakfast, me who hates breakfast. A piece of cellulose spritzed with artificial essence of fruit.
    Leo Fench believed in life. And he opted for frivolity because he believed in life, not in people. From