Free Adam Haberberg by Yasmina Reza Page A

cook?”
    “Yes.”
    “What do you do that's good?” she says from a long way off, peeling the onion under the tap at the sink.
    “Pasta.”
    “What kind of pasta?”
    “All kinds.”
    “Italian style?”
    “Yes. I do risotto as well.”
    “I adore risotto. You must make me a risotto one
    day.”
    “Yes.”
    She slices the potatoes, tosses the onion into a frying pan, and returns to sit down facing him. And your wife, does she cook? she says. “Not a lot. She doesn't have time.” “What does she do?” “She's an engineer.”
    “In what specialty?”
    “Telecommunications.”
    Marie-Thérèse falls silent. She lowers her eyes and seems to be meditating on this reply. She polishes her spectacles with the cloth and puts them back in their case. The onion sizzles in the frying pan. She gets up to turn down the heat. She adds the potatoes, turns up the power in the exhaust fan, and leaves the kitchen, closing the door.
    Marie-Thérèse and Adam sit facing each other. Without the background light from the kitchen the room has taken on the semblance of an empty space. On the low table, apart from the tray she's just brought in, there's a flower in a pot. When the daylight fades, Goncharki had said one day at his house, I don't get up to light the room. I don't switch on anything, I let things take on the semblance of shadows and if I'm doing something I continue doing what I was doing in the dark. Is it quiet in Viry? says Adam, after a long silence.
    “Oh yes it's quiet,” she says.
    “What's it like?”
    “Nothing much. Viry's neutral, it's not much of a place.”
    Help me, my God, he thinks, to transmute life into literature! To transmute Marie-Thérèse, the linoleumfloor, the Tucs, the gloomy light, to transmute Viry and all the years into literature. I have no greater wish. I offer up this prayer as I swallow a mouthful of cherry liqueur: grant me the power to exist in spite of and beyond reality. Until now I've not been sincere, as you well know, I always wanted to be loved and praised, I wanted to be
somebody
, my God. I've played at being arrogant, a naysayer. What I wanted, and I laugh at the phrase, was to occupy a place in our time. Of all that I've written, the only thing I have any affection for is
The Black Prince of Mea-Hor
, my one book devoid of vanity. You see me tonight, seated in this living room in Viry-Châtillon, observing the configuration of the furniture, waiting with Marie-Thérèse Lyoc for time to pass. A switched-off television on a television table: a combination you could find in a hotel room. A set of shelves with CDs, a few books and some photos on them, a sideboard adapted to house hi-fi equipment, a Moroccan cushioned footstool. A Bonnard picture on the wall, a reproduction on paper in a red frame. A woman pouring a cup of tea for a dog that sits upright and obedient at the table, waiting to be served. Here, where nothing is happening, in the absence of any physical body, I feel more disoriented than in the real world, which is, as I heard a commentator on the radio put it,
in chemical
precipitation.
I think about my age and the seconds slip away into the void. Help me, God, to capture all this for the simple comfort of feeling I'm alive. Do you smoke? says Marie-Thérèse.
    “No.”
    “Do you mind if I smoke? I hardly smoke at all during the day but in the evening I enjoy it.”
    “Go ahead.”
    The smoke spirals upward, shrouding the woman and her dog in a haze. In the past, he thinks, he's seen other works by Bonnard with a similar feel to them, or with animals in them, at any rate. The fading coil leaves a blurred impression. Adam suddenly sees coarse brushstrokes, a coarse palette, he tells himself, an excessive covering of the canvas, and he tells himself that he could suddenly no longer like Bonnard, he who'd always liked Bonnard, and that Bonnard, exhibited here on this ocher wall, by the light of this Oriental lamp, was turning out to be glutinous and messy,