This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Régis Jauffret, a French writer working since the 1980s. “Basketball, Tennis, and Swimming” is a micro-fiction that takes a look into the lived experience of depression—specifically a depression borne under a lack of inspiration and connection. Deep colors, sweeping juxtapositions, and a certain simplicity of thought feed into a narrative that questions schedules, labor, and purpose. An anti-capitalist vision of work opposed to melancholic states gives purpose to the purposeless. Uplifting narratives do not always have to be grand, this story shows, and the structures of neoliberal life worlds and traditional values can be tweaked with the help of a proper and poetic angle (and some odd desires!).
The staff have access to basketball hoops, three tennis courts, and a big pool with a sunroof, allowing them to enjoy some fresh air over the summer. It matters to me that everyone’s happy. I didn’t create this company to earn money, but to let the hopeless reacquire a taste for life.
I myself have known periods when I’ve risen at five in the afternoon, only to immediately lie back down after drinking some orange juice and eating a slice of bread. Those were the only times I saw my children, when they weren’t with their soccer team or at school. I came in contact with my wife’s body whenever she’d happen to be in bed, but I spent whole weeks without seeing her face in broad daylight. Medications in every color were piled up on the bedside table. I swallowed them without counting, and recognized them by their shape or their taste. I had gray dreams, without peaks or valleys, without sea, snow, night, or sun. Dreams like landscapes so flat, so desolate, that to my eyes nothing like them exists on our planet. I didn’t even think about death, it was too desirable for me to think possible. I slowly sank into the mattress, which cradled me like a cockle shell cast around my imprint.
— My family tolerated my presence.
But everybody knew that no one could do anything for me, and that I couldn’t do anything for me either. Time had become boundless, infinite, eternal. I felt like I’d been in this darkened room ever since darkness first appeared in the universe, whose sole, motionless, unchanging element was me. Memories of my former life would come to me furtively, but it looked foreign, and I thought it had to be someone else leading it, elsewhere, in another city, in a distant or future epoch I would never know.
— One morning, I opened the curtains.
The weather was as gray as my dreams, but the foliage in the trees was luminous. There were red and green vegetables at the grocer’s stall, and cars in all colors filed down the street, sparkling from the rain beginning to fall in showers. I woke up my wife to show her this unreal spectacle, which might never be witnessed again. She must have thought I was telling her about an eclipse, or the Eiffel Tower inexplicably morphing into a dinosaur.
— Look.
— There’s nothing to see.
As it was Sunday, she plunged back under the covers.
Since then, everything has filled me with wonder. I dumped my entire fortune into this company, which doesn’t produce any more than it sells. Yet it does have a hierarchy, and everyone is subject to schedules that are mostly well-respected. People get the impression they’re useful, they even imagine they’re working. While they spend their days waiting for orders that never come, and play like kids at camp.
Translated from the French by Jonathan Woolen
Régis Jauffret is a French fiction writer and dramatist with over twenty published works released since 1985, largely written in the form of dramatic monologues. He has received the prix Goncourt de la nouvelle for 2018’s Microfictions 2018, the prix France Culture-Télérama and the prix de l’Humour noir for 2007’s Microfictions, the prix Femina for 2005’s Asiles de fous, and the prix Décembre for 2005’s Univers, univers. He has also been the subject of court battles around his fictional depictions of the Édouard Stern and Dominique Strauss-Kahn affairs, in the novels Sévère (subsequently adapted to film in 2013 under the title Une histoire d’amour) and La Ballade de Rikers Island respectively.
Jonathan Woollen serves as Deputy Director of Events at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, and as leader of the store’s International Literature Book Group.
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