Nothing to Be Frightened Of (38 page)

Authors: Julian Barnes

BOOK: Nothing to Be Frightened Of

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Chitry-les-Mines lies some twenty miles south of Vézelay. A faded blue tin sign proposes a right turn off the main road to
Maison de Jules Renard
, where the boy grew up amid that silent parental war and, years later, the man broke down the bedroom door to find his suicided father. A second tin sign, and a second right turn, leads you to
Monument de Jules Renard
, whose erection he teasingly entrusted to his sister a few months before he died: “We were wondering this morning who would see to setting up my bust on the little square in Chitry. We thought straight away that we could count on you . . .” The “little square,” a lime-planted triangle in front of the church, has inevitably become the Place Jules Renard. The writer’s bronze bust is supported by a stone column, at the base of which sits a brooding Poil de Carotte, looking melancholy and mature for his age. A stone tree climbs up the other side of the column, bursting into leaf around the writer’s shoulders: nature enclosing and protecting him, in death as in life. It is a handsome piece of work, and when unveiled in October 1913 by André Renard—pharmacist, former socialist deputy, and distant cousin—it must have seemed the only monument this obscure village would ever require. Its size fits the square, and so renders the First World War memorial, only a few yards away, almost apologetic of its presence, its listed names somehow less important, and less of a loss to Chitry, than its arteriosclerotic chronicler.

There is not a shop, a café, or even a grimy petrol pump in this straggly village; the only reason for an outsider to stop here is Jules Renard. Somewhere nearby must be the well, doubtless long since filled in, which claimed Mme. Renard nearly a century ago. A tricolore on the building opposite the church identifies the
mairie
where both François Renard and his son performed their civic functions, where Jules was kissed on the lips by a bride he had just joined in matrimony (“It cost me 20 francs”). The tarmacked lane between
mairie
and
église
leads out of the village a few hundred yards to the cemetery, which still lies in open countryside.

It is a July day of canicular heat, and the square, sloping graveyard is as bleak and dusty as a parade ground. A list of names and plot numbers is posted at the gate. Failing to realize that this refers to concessions about to expire, I look at first for the wrong Renard in the wrong plot. The cemetery’s only other (living) occupant is a woman with a watering can, moving slowly among her favoured graves. I ask her where the writer might be found. “He’s down there on the left, next to the tap,” is her reply.

The village’s most famous inhabitant is indeed tucked away in a corner of the graveyard. I remember that Renard
père
was the first person to be buried here without any religious ceremony. Perhaps that is why the family grave seems positioned a little below the salt, or next to the tap (if the tap was there then). It is a square plot, backed against the boundary wall, and protected by a low, green-painted iron railing; the little gate in the middle sticks from successive repaintings, and requires a certain force. Two stone planters sit just inside this gate. The squat tomb lies horizontally across the rear of the plot, and is surmounted by a large stonework book, open at a double page on which are inscribed the names of those lying beneath.

And here they all are, six of them anyway. The father who didn’t speak to his wife for thirty of their forty married years, who laughed at the notion that he might kill himself with a pistol, and used a shotgun instead. The brother who imagined that his mortal enemy was the central heating system in his office, who lay on a couch with the Paris telephone directory propping his inert head, and whose end made Jules angry at “death and its imbecile tricks.” The mother, silenced at last after a garrulous life by an “impenetrable” death. The writer who used them all. The wife who as a widow burnt a third of her husband’s
Journal.
The daughter who never married and was buried here in 1945 under her nickname Baïe. This was the last time they opened the deep pit at whose edge Jules had seen a fat worm strutting on the day his brother Maurice was interred.

Looking at the vault, thinking of them all crammed in together—only the writer’s sister Amélie and son Fantec escaped—and remembering their history of wrangling, hatred, and silence, it strikes me that Goncourt would be justified in returning a
Hé! hé!
back at his younger colleague: for the company he is keeping, for that embarrassing sculptural cliché of the open stone book, for the naff planters. And then there is the inscription beneath which Renard lies. It begins, unsurprisingly, “
Homme de lettres,
” after which you might expect, in a filial echo, “
Maire de Chitry.
” Instead, the writer’s subsidiary identification is as a member “
de l’Académie Goncourt.
” It feels like a tiny flicker of revenge for that diary entry: “. . . they thought that was enough.”

I look again at the stone planters. One is quite empty, the other contains a stunted yellow conifer, whose colour seems to mock any idea of keeping the memory green. This grave is no more visited than that of the Goncourts, though the proximity of the tap must bring a little passing traffic. I notice that there is still room on the stone book for a few more entries, so go back to the woman with the watering can and ask if there are any Renard descendants still in the village or its environs. She doesn’t think so. I mention that no one has been added to the vault since 1945. “Ah,” she replies, not entirely apropos, “I was in Paris then.”

It doesn’t matter what they put on your tomb. In the hierarchy of the dead it is visitor numbers that count. Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave? On the first anniversary of Maurice’s death, a mass was said for him in Chitry; only three old women from the village attended; Jules and his wife took a glazed earthenware wreath to the grave. In his
Journal
, he noted: “We give the dead metal flowers, the flowers that last.” He went on: “It is less cruel never to visit the dead than to stop going after a certain time.” Here we are less in the territory of “What they would have wanted” than of “How would they have reacted had they known?” What will happen to my brother in his garden grave when the cropping llamas and his widow are also dead and the house is sold? Who wants a decomposing Aristotle expert turning slowly into mulch?

There is something crueller than leaving the dead unvisited. You may lie in a
concession perpetuelle
for which you have paid, but if no one comes to see you, there is no one to hire a lawyer to defend you when the municipality decides that perpetual doesn’t always or necessarily mean perpetual. (So the Goncourts’ neighbour was supplanted by “Miss Bluebell.”) Then, even here, you will be asked to make way for others, to renounce finally the occupation of space on this earth, to stop saying, “I was here too.”

So here’s another logical inevitability. Just as every writer will have a last reader, so every corpse will have a last visitor. By whom I don’t mean the man driving the earth-digger who scoops out your remnants when the graveyard is sold off for suburban housing. I mean that distant descendant; or, in my own case, that gratifyingly nerdy (or rather, charmingly intelligent) graduate student—still bibliophilic long after reading has been replaced by smarter means of conveying narrative, thought, emotion—who has developed a quaint and lonely (or rather, entirely admirable) attachment to long-forgotten novelists of the distant Print Era. But a last visitor is quite different from that last reader whom I told to fuck off. Grave visiting is not an emulative pastime; you do not swap suggestions like swapping stamps. So I shall thank my student in advance for having made the trip, and not ask what he or she really thinks of my books, or book, or anthologized paragraph, or of this sentence. Perhaps, like Renard when he went to Montmartre to see the Goncourts, my last visitor will have taken to cemetery-tramping after being given a death-warning, a Fayum moment, by the doctor; in which case, my sympathies.

Were I to receive such a diagnosis myself, I doubt I should start visiting the dead. I have done enough of that already, and shall have eternity (or at least, until perpetuity no longer means what it says) in their company. I’d rather spend time with the living; and with music, not books. And in those last days I must try to verify a number of things. Whether I smell of fish, for a start. Whether dread takes over. Whether consciousness splits—and whether I shall be able to recognize it if it does. Whether my GP and I are going to make that journey of hers together; and whether I feel like forgiveness, memory-invoking, funeral planning. Whether remorse descends, and if it can be dispelled. Whether I am tempted—or deceived—by the idea that a human life is after all a narrative, and contains the proper satisfactions of a decent novel. Whether courage means not scaring others, or something considerably greater and probably out of reach. Whether I have got this death thing straight—or even a little straighter. And whether, in the light of late-arriving information, this book needs an afterword—one in which the
after
is stressed more heavily than usual.

So that’s the view from here, now, from what, if I am lucky, if my parents are any sort of guide, might be three-quarters of the way through my life; though we know death to be contradictory, and should expect any railway station, pavement, overheated office, or pedestrian crossing to be called Samarra. Premature, I hope, to write: farewell me. Premature also to scribble that graffito from the cell wall: I was here too. But not premature to write the words which, I realize, I have never put in a book before. Not here, anyway, on the last page:

THE END

Or does that look a little loud? Perhaps better in upper and lower case:

The End

No, that doesn’t look . . . final enough. A last would-you-rather, but an answerable one.

Note to printer: small caps, please.

THE END

Yes, I think that’s more like it. Don’t you?

JB
London, 2005–2007

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION
Arthur & George
The Lemon Table
Love, etc.
England, England
Cross Channel
The Porcupine
Talking It Over
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Staring at the Sun
Flaubert’s Parrot
Before She Met Me
Metroland

NONFICTION
The Pedant in the Kitchen
Something to Declare
Letters from London 1990–1995

TRANSLATION
In the Land of Pain
by Alphonse Daudet

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Julian Barnes

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London.

A portion of this book appeared in
The New Yorker.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, Julian.
Nothing to be frightened of / Julian Barnes.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Barnes, Julian—Psychology. 2. Authors, English—20th century—Biography. 3. Fear of death. 4. Barnes, Julian—Philosophy. 5. Barnes, Julian—Religion. 6. Barnes, Julian—Childhood and youth. 7. Barnes, Julian—Family. I. Title.
PR6052.A6657z46 2008 823’.914B—dc22 2008019603