NEIGHBOURS

I’ve always been depressed by noise. For me, depression is noise. Depression is a fly that enters your ear, reaches your ear drum, and you have a tough time getting it out. I never know whether it’s noise that gives me depression or depression that makes me constantly hear noise, but it’s as if a fly had entered my ear and injected its infernal buzzing there. I can’t stand noises, they put me in a bad mood, so when that dull, loud thud came through the wall for the umpteenth time that day, I had to accept there was no way you could live without noises in these deafening times. And I wondered whether there was a damn apartment in the whole universe that didn’t have noisy neighbours or, better still, didn’t have any neighbours. Everything seemed to indicate there wasn’t. Perhaps I just end up always sharing walls with the same kind of noise apologists. Two weeks ago, when I had rented the apartment and moved in, it had struck me as a quiet place. In fact, I had chosen it because of the calmness and serenity I discerned there. Now I had realized I had made a mistake. What with the dull, loud thuds coming from the other side of the living-room wall, the shouts of the woman upstairs, the drills and hammers of DIY fanatics, the eternal arguments of a couple that echoed unmistakably around the light well at lunchtime, the guffaws of the boss in the office downstairs and his ugly great voice whenever he talked on the speakerphone, the ill-defined voices of television sets, which would attack from all flanks, the panting of the couples fucking noisily at night and the car horns coming from outside, all this, more than a friendly neighbourhood, sounded like the subtle bombardment of a psychological war.

In only two weeks, given the profusion and frequency of the sonorous filtrations, I had learned to distinguish the noises and voices and could pinpoint their provenance with increasing accuracy, what neighbours they came from, what their lives were like (not at all different, by the way), without ever having set eyes on them. And since my apartment was a B – that is to say, it was situated halfway between A and C – I was caught in the crossfire of the neighbours’ sonorous emissions from both sides.