Small Lives (11 page)

What did Roland think, facing that image of impeccable downfall? He looked at it often. Once I asked him to show it to me, and against all expectations, he agreed, a little condescendingly, Roland, who had read the text to which it referred and thus knew what it was about, and he even deigned to comment on it, reticent at first, his few words
gruff and aggressive, offering me his fanciful interpretation according to which, by little signs that he considered significant that the illustrator surely had not intended to be, he thought he could tell which were the people of the Téméraire, which the Nancy bourgeois, which were from Burgundy and which from Flanders; the big-beaked head-piece of this one made him a duke, the less pretentious helmet of that one only a baron; and all those shadowy forms in the background, lancers or black willow trees that the falling snow and the night made indistinct, those semblances of horses mixed with men whose protruding lances were hung with banners, that was the last battlefield of the Master and Lord of Burgundy himself, represented there twice, first as a decaying carcass and there, more ethereal, all those shivering dead from the day before yesterday waiting at the heavenly gate where Saint George in full dress, visor lowered, haloed crest and gold fleece about his neck, welcomed them, and clasping them to his breast in tears, seated them at the round table, the eternal table with the scent of warm wine. These astonishing imaginings, that irrational, exhaustive, almost prophetic vision, made Roland scowl. He knew it all of course, but it caused him suffering; his efforts to extract glory from it were in vain. In his frantic exegesis there was something like a panic of interpretation, an
a priori
grief, the terrible certainty of error or omission, and, whatever he did to belie it, a bitter conviction of his unworthiness: a vile Swiss foot soldier, one of those disciplined second-raters responsible for the Téméraire's death, and who, too sure of the hell promised him, would have hidden himself among the glorious Burgundy shades awaiting their celestial reward, that is how Roland thought of himself with regard to his books. And that is why he usually never talked about
what he read, that is to say about his imposture. Today I think that if he consented to talk to me of that illustration, of that story of the massacred “step cousin” no longer to be envied and only mourned by a modest man while over there the traitor brother, the reader of holy chronicles, forsaken in Plessis-lez-Tours, feels bearing down on him the immense shadow of a prison of remorse and a dark jubilation, if Roland thus confessed something on this subject, it was because there, purified and written in letters of nobility, was an essential constellation of the life itself, when books no longer sufficed, of the very passion, buried, ancient, and illiterate, of Roland Bakroot.

There was also the Kipling.

It was in my second year. I know that exactly, since in that period I was just discovering
The Jungle Book
, having no Achilles to act as mentor or patron for my reading. Thus Roland, who must have been in his fourth year, received a book by the same author, which both confirmed me in my own reading – this was not a writer just for the young, like Curwood or Verne, of whom I was beginning to be ashamed, but loved all the more for that – and made me very jealous. It was a magnificent edition, also illustrated, but not with dramatic grisailles in the style of Gustave Dore's emulators that darkened the pages of the Michelet, rather with delicate watercolors, as detailed as barbaric temples, with the Himalayas in the distance, the poisonous pagoda fruits that the jungles bear, and closer in, harnessed rickshaws conveying beautiful parasoled Victorian ladies to who knows what pleasures, almost under the feet of the waiting elephants mounted by maharajahs in rose, almond, and lime, while in the foreground, dreamy, clean-shaven, courtly and rapacious, gentlemen and scoundrels, braid-trimmed, indistinguishable
under the identical scarlet tunics and perfect helmets of the fabulous Indian army, calmly contemplated this world, the Himalayas, bearded kings and curvaceous parasoled ladies, this world that was their pasture. (Poor Achilles, pasture of the world, what could all that really mean to him? Or to the Bakroot sons, of Saint-Priest-Palus?) Gold, vile or glorious, gold qualifiable by any adjective, gold ran there “like tallow through meat,” like the indomitable blood through the heavy flesh, precious, belonging to the querulous crinoline wearers; as did the terrifying ambitions, steeped in whisky, full of brutal rides and bloody blasphemies, in the impassive eyes of the handsome captains at the dull, polite tea tables. Out of reach, all that luxurious richness must have inflamed Roland, completely in vain; and with an almost joyous resignation, he no doubt lingered over the pictures that he considered closer to himself, conforming more to what he would one day be, the fraternal images of downfall, like the picture where you could make out, in a filthy sack, transported by a madman through the jungles and rice paddies under the jeers of monkeys, the shrunken head of a man who had once wanted to be king.

I examined those pictures, often, of course, over the shoulder of Roland who did not want to share them, but especially one other time and completely at leisure. It was in study hall again, where, as I have said, in the lower grades I was seated not far from Rémi Bakroot. From one of the pockets of the reddish jacket (which he dragged around until at least his fourth year, more and more rumpled, shrunken, shapeless), he drew stiff papers, folded any which way in quarters or smaller, broken along the folds, which he carelessly smoothed flat and studied with the same slightly ironic, intense and irritable attention
that he gave a mathematics problem. Stupefied, I recognized there the helmeted highlanders, the braid-trimmed dolmans, the elephants and kings. Rémi was not stingy; the monitor that day was a good chap, the demeaned pictures were passed around. We were filled with wonder, and also a bit frightened, and we eagerly lost ourselves in that richness, that distance, that immoveable power. Rémi, his big arrogant chin held high, contemplated with a tense satisfaction this little group fighting over Roland's carcass, just as, from the height of an elephant, borne aloft by the cheering crowds, a cipaye chief directs, nod by nod, the slow death of Her Gracious Majesty's officers. Leaving the study room, Roland was waiting for him.

He was pale as wax, the redhead pallor, I would say, of a Flemish Puritan ready to take the sword to image-worshippers; he said not a word, only the impatient fists, the fanatic eyes watering with passion, were alive. The younger brother sneered, but his contempt was broken and plaintive, he too disfigured, as if offended: “It's mine,” he cried as he fled, “that book was meant for me. Thief! Thief!” Roland caught hold of him in the middle of the courtyard. They seized one another and toppled to the beaten ground, the dust mixing in their mouths with their tears; like lovers they rolled on top of each other, fervently tangling and untangling themselves, a little sporadic outburst, a straw fire under the dreaming chestnut trees, constant and inattentive. When the older one finally got up after the raging struggle, the ruined images in his hand hard won but forever lost, his mouth was bleeding. It was from that day on that he bore even in his rare smiles the mark of the younger brother, that broken front tooth you could see henceforth and
that, lovingly, impatiently, he inflamed with the end of his tongue during his abrupt reveries, refueling his passion perhaps, or appeasing it.

They grew up. The weighty adventure of growing came to an end; how astonishing that it did not last forever. Roland grew no more cheerful; he had been lost to books, as people say, as my grandmother said of me a bit later on. Lost? Yes, he was, he had always been as lost in this world he did not see as in the books that took the place of it for him, but which was a place of refusal, of supplication forever rejected, and of unfathomable spitefulness, like the hellish flirting of an armor-plated woman who is under there, beneath the close stitches of lines tenaciously tied to one another, whom you desire to the point of murder, and whose armor's chink falls somewhere between two lines, which, trembling, you surmise and search for, which will be at the end of that page, at the turn of that paragraph, is always close, forever giving you the slip, never to be found; and the next day, once again, you are on the track of that little buttonhole, you are going to find it, everything will open up, and at last you will be delivered from reading, but the evening comes and again you close the pages of invincible lead, and leaden, you collapse. He did not pierce the authors' secret; the beautiful dress they had given to writing was too well fastened for Roland Bakroot, of Saint-Priest-Palus, to undo or even to know if, underneath it, there really was flesh or nothing at all. And I, whose lyrical idiocy reached its irreversible turning point at that same time, how well I thought I understood him, the sullen melancholy scholar, his leaden voice, the wanderings of his mind, where, in giddiness, I followed him,
and where, with the Bakroots, once again I waltz toward who knows what last sentence which will land me back on square one, unable to escape my destiny.

As for Rémi, as early as his fifth year, he clearly recognized that there was something under the girls' dresses, little nothings that it was possible to know intensely. His collections – let us continue to call them by that name, since it was truly a taste for collecting and reactivating what gives pleasure that guided him still, just as when he was small – his collections were photos of women or girls, which sometimes he cut out of magazines bought on the sly, radiant bare-shouldered starlets or indecent gartered brunettes from their licentious pages, and which sometimes were schoolgirls from the other lycée, the fabulous, forbidden school where pleated skirts rustled, where these little sisters, who were not insensible to his dark young raptor appetite, his stiff straw hair, and his thuggish airs, would give him a mediocre picture of themselves, a photo taken over there in the garden the year before, in the blue dress, and which, in pretending hard to hesitate, to need coaxing, they finally relinquished to him, with whispered words and clumsy fingertips touching when the time to part comes with the night and a young girl is in love one Sunday in November. These romantic creatures, these sweet young things who were neither radiant nor indecent yet, but had astonishing flesh, astonishing even to themselves beneath their sentimental airs, they consented to Rémi's hand finding them in their skirts; and if he hardly spoke of it, except in the presence of his brother or his brother's friends and then with the sole purpose of better marking the distance between the fulfilled life of Rémi Bakroot and the stagnant, empty one of Roland Bakroot, there could be no doubt,
because on Thursdays he vanished out of reach of his schoolmates as soon as school let out, and if we happened to run into him, it was furtively, in a darkened public garden where a head leaned toward his, or in the back of an empty café, ardently engaged with an innocent maiden. For all that he was not, strictly speaking, good-looking, with his big chin and his pallor, the shade of bad linen; no doubt his clothing, which he wanted to be stylish, had those bumpkin shortcomings, that sort of Flemish insufficiency: he still somehow managed to wear the suede jacket; the fact was that he, too, was from Saint-Priest-Palus. But he lusted after them with such an appetite, these sweet young things, these tender little game birds, that surely they trembled with the uncommon hunger he showed for them, for their short skirts, their tears and their great emotion; they let their skirts be rumpled, their tears be drawn, longed for and dreaded it, and, prey to the conflicting feelings to which their burning struggle abandoned them, they swayed with all their weight toward him.

So he returned on Sunday evenings, or Thursdays, with that taste in his mouth, that burning at the lips that the little ogresses had devoured, and it happened that in the wide avenue leading pretentiously to the lycée entrance he encountered his brother, regarded him disdainfully, and perhaps despised him or briefly envied him (who knows which of the two struggled to live up to the other, the one whose intractable mistress had leaden skirts and turned his hands to lead, or the other one whose expert hands knew by heart the secret turns of undergarments?); because at that same time Roland was also returning, with some book under his arm, his lips burnt only by the cold, most often encumbered by Achilles' weighty solicitude, and he had to adjust his
young gait, even when raging, even when full of a certain vigor that he could not put to use, to the slow, stately pace, scanned like an alexandrine, of the tall old teacher. At the door, in the full light that fell from the porter's lodge, the leave-taking went on forever, and Roland, who wished to end it a hundred times, still incurred some warm advice, some endlessly rambling exegesis, some badly timed praise; Roland, stoic but writhing under the torture of it, imagined only too well the delighted jokes, the sneering looks of the returning boys, of which he and his unlovely friend were the object. At last Achilles kissed him and slowly headed back down the avenue under the lampposts, his steps marking the verse in his head, and the caesuras suddenly stopping him, one foot raised in the air, before he tipped over into another hemistich and walking on again, scanned who knows what dead verse. And the schoolgirls who were late, who had walked back with their admirers and were now hurrying to their girlish seraglio, would burst out laughing when they passed this milepost, and, with fresh peals of laughter, disappear, so happy to add to the memories of that lovely afternoon, which they would repeat with delight while going to sleep, to enliven their images of kissing and the images that make your cheeks redden, so intoxicating they are almost too much to think about, to disrupt all that, verging on high drama, with the innocent uncontrollable laughter that comes over you again and again at the mention of that crazy old bald professor, perched on one leg like a heron.