Desolation Read Online Free PDF

in a frenzy to gnaw the last of the marrow out of life. “But why, Nancy,” I say to her, “why all these products? Are they all really necessary?” Nancy shrugs and immediately turns the conversation to the fact that I’ve dared to enter her strictly private bathroom, and open her strictly private wall cabinet to involve myself, in contravention of the most elementary rules of respect, in her strictly private things. While she’s laying down the laws that govern her intimacy for the 412th time, I look at her face, inundated by all the glop from the forbidden cabinet, a nicely sagging face, a face quivering with longing to put it all right, a face advancing peacefully toward its end.
    Experience has taught me to be a diplomat, because once you get into territory like this, you know, they’re all pretty much out of their minds. One day your mother was complaining about some newly visible sag line on her cheek. Because she was confiding in me, I said, not intending to be mean, quite the opposite: “It’s nothing.”
    “So you can see it too?!” she cries in horror.
    “See what? No, I didn’t see a thing.”
    “Don’t try and take it back. So it shows, it really shows!” . . . and she’s already wailing and turning against me. Since then I’ve banished “It’s nothing” in favor of “It’s not true.” Whatever “it” is, I deny it. When a woman starts fussing over some physical defect, deny, deny, deny. Particularly if she says, “Tell me the truth.” I don’t know how things are with you and women, dear boy, but try to keep them in the plural. Don’t narrow things down to the singular for as long as you can avoid it.
    At the hairdresser, I ask for the same
treatment
as Monsieur Fortuny’s, only not quite so strong. I didn’t dare say
color
because it’s a unisex hairdresser. Result: you can never tell the difference from the way anything was before, except maybe when it’s a question of boasting a head of white hair and what comes out is a lunatic blond halo. To sum up, if your hair is dyed it looks dyed, and if it doesn’t look dyed, there’s no dye in it. That’s the truth. Women don’t give a shit if they look all tarted up. Women abandoned any idea of the natural centuries ago. But we men, we don’t know how to handle all that. The proof is, while I’m at the hairdresser to be shampooed, I’m thumbing through a magazine and I land on Donald Trump and his new fiancée. Blond girl, twenty-five, fine. But as for him, and I put on my glasses to take a better look, he’s pushing sixty, hair like an upside-down conch shell, setting off from the back of his head at an angle of 110 degrees, probably to hide a bald spot and landing in a fringed swag on his forehead. The whole thing a tone poem of russet browns. There’s a guy who’s earning a good living, I say to myself as I wait to be shampooed, a guy who has his photograph taken day and night and hasn’t found a single person in his entourage who’ll tell him, “No, Mr. Trump, it’s not okay, it’s
absolutely
not okay.” When the girl arrives with her products, I immediately insist on the weaker form of the treatment. René made an easy transition from hair tonic to hair coloring. All his life, René has gone in for creams and scalp massages, and all my life I’ve envied the hair of René Fortuny.
    It’s funny the way people set themselves certain goals. René, who from the age of twenty more or less let his body go to rack and ruin, for some reason known only to himself gave all his attention to his hair. Maybe, and I mean this quite seriously, haircare was René’s road to the meaning of life.
    The world is not outside us. Alas. If the world were outside us, there wouldn’t be enough roads for me to travel until I dropped, and instead of hectoring you, I would envy you. I would hate your youth and all the time you have left, and I would envy your eyes, which will see things I shall not see. But the world is not outside us.