The List of My Desires Read Online Free PDF Page B

good luck and a great misfortune. I’m rich. I’ll be able to buy anything I want. But I must tread carefully. I mustn’t be too trusting. Because when you have money, she explains, all of a sudden people love you. Total strangers love you. They’ll ask you to marry them. They’ll send you poems. Love letters. Hate letters. They’ll ask you for money to nurse a little girl whose name is Jocelyne, like yours, and who has leukaemia. They’ll send you pictures of an ill-treated dog and ask you to be its godmother, its saviour; they’ll promise you a kennel in your name, dog biscuits, dog food, a dog show. The mother of a child with a muscle-wasting disease will send you an upsetting video of her little boy falling in a stairwell and hitting his head on the wall, and ask you for money to install a lift in their apartment block. Another woman will send you photos of her own mother dribbling and incontinent, and ask you with grief-stricken tears to help pay for her to have a nurse at home. She’ll even send you a form so that you can deduct tax from your donation. A woman called Guerbette living in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe will discover that she’s your cousin, and ask you for the money for an air fare so that she can come and see you, and then money for a studio flat, and then more money so that she can bring over a friend who’s a healer and will help you to lose those extra kilos. And I haven’t even mentioned the bankers. Sugary-sweet, all of a sudden. Madame Guerbette here, bowing and scraping there. I have tax-exempt investments for you, they’ll say, invest overseas, invest in the tax-deductible restoration of old buildings as specified in the Malraux Law, invest in fine wines. In gold, in property, in precious stones. They won’t mention the wealth taxes. Fiscal controls. Or their own fees.
    I know the illness the psychologist is talking about. It’s the illness that afflicts people who don’t win, they’re trying to inoculate me with their own fears like a vaccine against evil. I protest. Some people have survived, after all. And I’ve only won eighteen million. What about people who have won a hundred, fifty, even thirty million? Exactly, replies the psychologist, looking mysterious, exactly.
    Now, and only now, do I accept a coffee. I think the blend is Livato, or Livatino maybe, a well-rounded flavour, in any case. With one sugar, thank you. There have been many suicides, she tells me. Many, many cases of depression, many divorces, much hatred and tragedy. We’ve heard of knife wounds. Injuries from shower-heads. Burns inflicted with butane gas cylinders. Families torn apart, destroyed. Deceitful daughters-in-law, alcoholic sons-in-law. Contract killers, just like in bad films. I knew of one stepfather who promised one thousand five hundred euros to anyone who would eliminate his wife, she said. She’d won a little less than seventy thousand euros. A son-in-law who cut off two fingers to get a credit-card code. Forged signatures, forged documents. Money drives people mad, Madame Guerbette, it’s behind four out of five crimes. One out of two cases of depression. I have no advice to give you, she concludes, only this information. We have a psychological support service if you would like to make use of it. She puts down her coffee cup; she hasn’t so much as moistened her Daisy Duck lips with the drink. Have you told your close family? No, I say. Excellent, she says. We can help you to break the news to them, find words to minimise the shock, because believe me, it will be a shock. Do you have children? I nod. Well, they won’t just see you as a mother now, they’ll see you as a rich mother and they’ll want their share. And then there’s your husband; let’s suppose he has an ordinary kind of job. He’ll want to give it up and devote himself to managing your fortune, I say yours because from now on it will be his as well since he loves you, oh yes, he’ll tell you how much he loves you in