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end revolt me. Your sister, who’s never had a trace of humor or detachment and hasn’t acquired them from her husband either, though I forgive him because he’s a pharmacist and at least I can discuss medicines with him, shrugs her shoulders and asks me with secret sorrow how I spend my days. I think, I tell her, about the absurdity of human effort. You educate people and when you’re finally coming down the home stretch what you have to listen to is them proselytizing for literature and the Picasso museum. That’s how I spend my days, I tell her emphatically, in these sorts of meditations. “You’re interested in politics,” says Nancy. “He’s always very interested in politics,” says poor Nancy, making nice, because my being described as
dense
has upset her and she’s not trying to come to my assistance but she does want to rehabilitate herself as a wife. “You’re mistaken, dear,” I’m obliged to correct her. “I’m interested in events around the planet the way Lionel watches cars and people passing from his window. Which is to say indifferent to everything except the movement.” Lumping them together, what never changes about these women is that they never believe me. They take everything I say as a series of pathetic and inappropriate poses. Which encourages me to the worst extremes. I think that by the end of the day, I’ve asserted, talking about Jerome—oh, yes, Jerome, there’s another example, yes, he’s my grandson but after all he’s only two and a half and sometimes I call him Jeremy or Thomas, which doesn’t mean a thing, I hear perfectly well but I just don’t hang on to Jerome as his name, your sister takes this as an unforgivable provocation, she doesn’t imagine for a second that I could have forgotten the child’s name—so, talking about Jerome, I’ve said what I think, following on from what had become an extended conversation, which is that I’d prefer him to become a tyrant rather than some card-carrying union faggot. Sounds of horrified clucking, and then to close off any recurrence of Dacimiento as a subject of discussion, I state that the only worthwhile system is feudalism, which had the merit of producing either midgets who kept their mouths shut—and didn’t go around driving us nuts with the Picasso museum and other cultural flab—or knights and revolutionaries, epic types who wielded the sword and the lance. These days we get placards and balloons and women like you who sing. Me personally, I said again, I prefer people screaming and out for blood, waving pikes. At least they make an impression. “Does getting old involve becoming a caricature of yourself?” your sister interjects to show off her cunning and demonstrate that she’s my equal by insulting me. A few years ago I would have slapped her for less. What do you know about aging, you poor creature, how do you even dare use the word after having the complacency to add to humanity by producing a supplementary Jerome. “Getting old,” I said with some restraint, “means to be done with compassion.”
    I finished Sunday overcome by loneliness and despair. I’ve always imagined despair to be linked to a particular view of life. Today I discover a despair that is independent of time.
    Explain to me the word
happiness.
I’m willing to believe there’s a part of one’s being that provides for it.
    I’ve caught a glimpse of it.
    Death is in us. It gradually gains ground. Little by little, everything dissolves and becomes the same. My child, after a certain age, everything is the same as everything else and there’s nothing that serves as a goal anymore. And if God, for which I thank Him, hadn’t given me such a horror of boredom, I could end up like those old dullards you see sitting on public benches contemplating the victory of time.
    At the garden show at Longchamp I hear someone say my name. Some unknown woman is smiling at me. Genevieve, she says. Genevieve Abramowitz. She looks like a little