Exactly. It seemed to him that his immense fatigue — though his fury was no less considerable, Fanta would say with a snicker, adding that it was just like him to claim to be consumed, even as the perpetual muted rage he inflicted on his nearest and dearest was far more wearing on them: isn’t that right, Rudy? — that his great fatigue resulted from his efforts to steer their poor tumbrel, that load of painful, degrading dreams, in the right direction.
Had his desire to do the right thing ever been rewarded?
No, not even — no — not even acknowledged, let alone praised or honored.
In defense of Fanta, who always seemed to be blaming him silently for all their setbacks and misfortunes, he had to acknowledge that he was quick to preempt any such judgment by cultivating the feeling that he himself was vaguely accountable for all the bad luck that came their way.
As for the rare strokes of good fortune, he’d gotten into the habit of greeting them with considerable skepticism, and his mistrustful face eloquently expressed his expectation that no one would think of showing him any gratitude for the brief moment of happiness in their house since he’d had nothing to do with it.
Oh yes, Rudy was well aware of that.
He felt this look of almost nauseous suspicion starting to show on his face the moment he suggested to Fanta, for example, or to Djibril, that they go to a restaurant, or out to the canoe club for a spin, then only to see in return (as the child, unable to fathom his father’s secret intentions, turned to catch his mother’s eye) a look of anxiety or slight dismay sweep across those two beautiful faces, so similar, his wife’s and his son’s, at which sight, unable to suppress his resentment, he’d get very cross, saying to them, “What? Aren’t you ever pleased?” whereupon the two beautiful faces of the only creatures he loved on this earth became expressionless, now revealing nothing more than a dismal indifference toward him and all his suggestions for making them happy, and a will to banish silently from their lives, their thoughts, and their feelings this surly and erratic man whom malevolent fate had obliged them to suffer for the time being, like the aftereffects of a bad, shameful dream. Everything that was going to happen to me has happened.
He pulled up sharply on the verge of the little road that every day led him straight to Manille’s headquarters as soon as he’d passed the big rotary at the center of which there now stood a curious statue of white stone, a naked man whose bent back, lowered head, and outstretched arms seemed, with terrified resignation, to be waiting for the fountain to drench him with its water when summer came around again.
Rudy had followed every stage of the fountain’s construction as he drove slowly past the rotary every morning in his old Renault Nevada before turning off toward the Manille offices, and without his noticing it, his mild curiosity had changed into embarrassment, then into a deeper unease when he thought he discerned a close resemblance between the statue’s face and his own (the same flat, square forehead, the straight but rather short nose, prominent jaw, big mouth, and angular chin so typical of proud men who know precisely where each one of their resolute steps is leading, something more comic than pathetic when one was still happy to slave away at Manille’s, huh, Rudy?), and his distress only grew at the sight of the monstrous genitalia that the artist, a certain R. Gauquelan, who lived nearby, had carved on his hero’s crotch, causing Rudy to feel himself the subject of a cruel mockery, so pitiful was the contrast between the statue’s weak, spineless posture and its enormous scrotum.
He tried now to avoid looking at the statue as he drove past the rotary in his worn-out Nevada.
But a malevolent reflex sometimes caused him to glance at the stone face that was his own, at that large, pale figure stooping with fear, and at the testicles out of all proportion with the rest, until he’d come to resent and almost hate Gauquelan, who’d managed, Rudy read in the local paper, to sell his sculpture to the municipality for around a hundred thousand euros.
That bit of news had caused him considerable anguish.
It was, he said to himself, as if while he was still an innocent or just asleep, Gauquelan had taken advantage of him and gotten him to pose for some ridiculous pornographic photo that had made Gauquelan richer as it made Descas poorer and more grotesque — as if Gauquelan had yanked him from a tiresome dream and plunged him into a degrading one.
“A hundred thousand euros, I can’t believe it,” he’d said to Fanta, snickering to mask his distress. “No, I really can’t believe it.”
“What’s it matter?” Fanta must have replied. “How does the fact that others are doing well diminish you?” she asked, with that irritating habit, recently adopted, of appearing to look at every situation with a lofty, magnanimous detachment, abandoning Rudy to his petty envies, which, no more than the rest of it, did she care any longer to share with him.
But she couldn’t stop him from recalling the good years not so long ago — nor reminding her of them, beseechingly — when it was one of their fondest pleasures to sit cross-legged, side by side, like two old chums in their darkened bedroom, sharing the same cigarette, and dissecting with brutal frankness the habits and personalities of their acquaintances and neighbors, and deriving from the very harshness they shared, along with a quite conscious bad faith, laughs they could never — would have never dared — share with others, but that were appropriate enough to two old friends, which, in addition to being man and wife, they genuinely were.
He wanted her to remember this, she who now affected to think that she’d never enjoyed a moment’s fun with him; but (given the groveling manner he’d been reduced to in spite of himself) it was hardly the best move he could have come up with: begging her to notice that, however it had come about, what had been was no more, that the amusing companion he might have been, once, was now probably dead and gone for good, and that it was all his fault, and his alone.
And he always came back to this intolerable aspect, the unspoken accusation grabbing him by the throat — that it was, eternally, his fault — and the more he struggled to free himself from what was strangling him, killing him, the more he shook his heavy head, the angrier he got, and the worse his crimes became.
Indeed, they’d not had any friends for a long while, and the neighbors avoided him.
Rudy Descas couldn’t care less, thinking he had enough to worry about without troubling himself to wonder how his attitude might be putting people off, but he could no longer make fun of them with Fanta, even if she’d been inclined to want him to.
They lived isolated lives, very isolated, that’s what he had to accept.
It seemed that their friends (who were they exactly? what were their names? where had they all gone?) had drifted away as Fanta started to turn her back on him; it was as if the love she’d felt for him had, like some dazzling outsider in their midst, been the only thing they both liked and took interest in, and that once this beautiful witness had vanished into thin air, Fanta and he — but he most of all — had finally come to be seen, by all those friends, in the starkness of their banality, their poverty.
But Rudy couldn’t care less.
He had need only of his wife and of his son — and, as he had already admitted to himself with some embarrassment, he had a lot less need of his son than of his wife, and less need still of his son per se than as some mysterious and seductive extension of his wife, as a fascinating, miraculous development of the personality and beauty of Fanta.
As for these formless shadows, those who’d acted the part of friends, all he missed were their warm, kindly looks assuring him that Rudy Descas was a nice guy, a pleasant man to be with, whose wife from a far-off place loved him unreservedly — in that gaze he was then truly himself, Rudy Descas, just as he saw himself, present in this world, and not the unlikely, discordant figure emerging from some tiresome, shameful dream that no dawn would manage to chase away. What has become of my friends whom I loved so much and was so close to?