Desolation Read Online Free PDF Page B

The world lives within us. Everything you see here, that I planted, my boy, rosebushes, impatiens, boxwood, pear trees, lives only through my thoughts, man’s only knowledge of the world comes from within himself and he can never step outside his own skin. Which is why, at bottom, we no longer fear solitude. Even when we grow old and find ourselves alone again, we don’t give a shit. Little by little we find ourselves completely alone again and we don’t give a shit.
    In the mornings, when I’m sitting at table faced with Dacimiento’s pound cake and condemned to listen to Nancy crunching her little bits of buttered toast, having already gorged herself on France Inter and
Le
Figaro
—fueled by her incomprehensible appetite to be part of the world, she’s been ready to cross swords since dawn—I have an actual physical sensation of the solitariness of man’s existence. And when your sister thinks to give me pleasure (how am I supposed to forgive her for such utter ignorance of who I am) by telling me “He’s
happy,
” I calculate how rare the bridges are from one solitude to another.
    Every day the world shrivels me a little and today it’s the world that’s shriveling inside me. That’s the way things are. Little by little death gains the upper hand. One gets used to it. One gets used to death. It’s not such a bad thing to maintain the rhythms of the universe.
    In the Kabbalah, which never interested you, doubtless my fault, it says that
one has to shake God to make
him show Himself
. Shake God.
    You, my boy, you don’t shake much, do you?
    Shake God.
    God
doesn’t exist,
but we make space for Him, we take a little step back so that He will come down to our world, not just every day but several times a day and for our whole lifetime. The only reality is His will, for the world, the world, my boy, is made up of our impatient desires.
    And what is it you want? What does my son want?
    My son wants neither to build, nor to create, nor to invent. Above all, my son doesn’t want to change the order of things. My son wants everything to be cool.
    At a moment when anything is possible, at a moment when I would have risked my skin to keep my place among the living, my son wants calm and creature comforts, my son wants peace to bandage up the pitiful wounds in his soul. I whose only terror has always been daily monotony, I who pushed open the gates of Hell to escape this mortal enemy, I have given life to a windsurfer.
    If you were to tell me to pursue a woman to the ends of the earth, I’d bow. Everything to do with desire is desperate and boundless. The need to be someone else, someone whose dream of being swept to his fate would at last be fulfilled, this I understand. And without setting myself up as an authority on disintegration, I understand one could literally be swallowed up in pursuit of it. In your whole life, my boy, has there ever been a Marisa Botton? If so, you couldn’t be happy and nobody would talk about you in such degrading terms, because even if one recovers from a Marisa or someone like her with time, one doesn’t come back from it as the same person one was, one is inconsolable, my child, for that part of oneself one has lost, inconsolable.
    Marisa Botton from Rouen, in that way, was my true existential experience.
    To begin with, she was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And she would have gone on being nothing if I hadn’t had the idea one day when I was bored, to invent her.
    Her name was Christine, and she called herself Marisa. This
Marisa
gave you the whole woman. She was married, with a child. Married to a buyer from Aunay’s with whom I did business. That’s how I got to know her. At the beginning, completely insignificant. The kind of woman whose dress fits so tightly that she’s still pulling on the material to make the skirt or the sleeve sit better. I passed her from time to time in the corridors at Aunay’s. One day she says, “It’s really irritating,” and I say,