Status Updates From Life: A User's Manual

The bedroom is already a dead man’s room, and furniture, objects, and knickknacks already seem to be awaiting this coming death with polished indifference, standing in their proper places, properly clean, fixed for an all time impersonal silence.

I wanted you for my wife, and I wanted your child. I have neither the one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.

Lo abbandono, mi annoia.

Bartlebooth was sufficiently aware, if only from having experienced it himself, of the havoc that passion may wreak on the most sensible people, to know the critic’s words were no idle threat.

Mademoiselle Crespi was born in a village in the hills behind Ajaccio. She left Corsica at twelve & has never been back. Sometimes she closes her eyes & can see the landscape that lay beyond the window of the room in which everyone lived: the wall covered with bougainvillea in flower, the slope on which tufts of spurge grew, the hedge of prickly pear, the caper espalier; but she cannot remember anything else.

Finally, Bartlebooth turned to Véronique Altamont, because he had learned that she was studying watercolors & enjoyed doing puzzles. Since then, almost every day, the chit of a girl comes to spend an hour or two with the old Englishman, putting the little wooden pieces into his hand one by one, as she describes in her still, small voice the imperceptible differences of color between them.

Half-hanging in empty space, Carel listened to Ursula with tears in his eyes & when she had finished her story he swore to free her the very next day. As a token of his oath he slipped his signet ring onto her finger, an opaline corundum within an ovoid bezel. “For the Ancients,” he told her, “this stone was the symbol of memory & there is a legend that whoever sees this ring will never be able to forget.”

From as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a soft brush in a bowl of hot water, a lather so thick & white that even after 75 years it still made her mouth water.