Small Lives (13 page)

Was that what Roland was thinking, too? Roland, to whom that uniform had been consecrated in particular, the Idiot, whom no one would call by that name again, seated ghostlike with his bad chin, ceaselessly touching his tongue to his tooth, which the thing laid out there had long ago broken? I wondered if they had ever been reconciled, made peace even grudgingly, if they had expressed anything to each other outside of their mad love, their stubborn anger that remained beyond words, which they had thus never expressed to each other either. Roland regarded that pallor once so intense, now so diminished; he read it like a book, scowling and stunned; Rémi might just as well have been a book at present. Around that encounter, among the walk-on parts, there were a few awkward Saint-Cyrians, their incongruous hardware sometimes clanging in the shadows, relatives from the villages, the parents themselves, the bald, Flemish father, the dazed mother with her large, washed-out Flemish eyes, both of them sorrowful, disarmed, and, for all that, proud to be burying a Saint-Cyrian. There was nothing remarkable about them; nevertheless it was there, underfoot of this busy peasant couple so much like so many others, that the exclusive rivalry was somehow fomented, that ancient-style tournament that had so often raised the two brothers above themselves, that had equipped them for their studies, had elicited, for one,
the love of a forsaken old teacher and, for the other, the favor of so many girls; and it had ended, as it had to, with one of them dead.

The hour approached, Rémi would not hear it strike, we noted it for him; someone put on his shako, over the sky-blue skull cap the trembling plume was like a small departing soul; two comrades took him by the armpits and the feet, and placed him very gently within, deferentially, as one buries an Orgaz count in military attire – but my God, how badly this one wore his collaret. They had trouble positioning the sword, one of them wanted to lay it beside him, but it was more proper, murmured the other, to place it in his joined hands, which they did as best they could. The Saint-Priest carpenter fulfilled the last terms of his contract, the unpolished lid found its exact place, and beneath it there, as Roland, leaning forward a bit, lost sight of his dear shadow, Rémi disappeared. The mother wept, the identity bracelets of the Saint-Cyrians clinked as they rose; outside, drop by drop, the snow turned back to rain.

There is no cemetery in Saint-Priest-Palus, it is too small. We had to drive to Saint-Amand-Jartoudeix, a twin village where the shipwrecked farmhouses also navigated among the rocks. Under its hood of snow, a small, flattened church stood in the middle of the cemetery, as I imagine one sees in the Belgian coal region, in La Drenthe or Nuenen, in the country of paintings and peat. There, under the tolling in the chill wind, several people were waiting; among them was Jean Auclair, already grown thicker, a horse dealer like his father, already brought down by his work in only two short years; Rivat, the most faithful, the disciple, who had also prepared for Saint-Cyr and had failed, which had come as no surprise to him, and which perhaps surprised him
now, for the first time. He regarded all those gleaming white plumes, those communion gloves over those virile hands, and those fellows in plumes and white gloves who were no more irresistible than he was, who surely had no more cunning, who wore glasses and concealed their pathetic heartbreaks. In the anonymous crowd of peasant women in black hats, shawls, those of the local town with their hair curled, ceremonial, and all of them, from the grandmothers who had known him when he was this tall to the girls whom Rémi had once seduced on the dance-floor, all old-fashioned looking, a very pretty girl stood out, like a flame against ashes; holding herself straight and aggressive, her hair was loose, hair also like frozen straw, her flesh Victorian, a redhead from a painting or sentimental song. I knew her, I had seen her around the university, in Clermont; I had never spoken to her. Our looks crossed, I nodded vaguely to her and I could not tell if she responded; four Saint-Cyrians passed slowly between us with their burden of the dead man. Roland who followed behind them was the most burdened. The little coal-country church closed its doors over us all, over its Latin, its seats that shifted as we rose and sat down again, its bizarre ambulatories, its great cold and its little golden objects, over its Dies Irae, which is every day.

The Bakroots had no family vault, the fresh tomb was dug; this hole and this mound of good earth, all new amid the old gray snow and the stone slabs with their rusted Christs and their rotted flowers, were spring-like and comforting. Into this fresh earthwork the village workcrew with their ropes gently lowered the work of the carpenter, with what was unseen inside. It was a burial like all the others, as in the paintings of Courbet, El Greco, as in Saint-Amand-Jartoudeix. Another
small plume rose from the Saint-Cyrians' lips as they breathed; there was mud on the cuffs of their red trousers; the peasant women had handkerchiefs; the redhead standing too erect and a little withdrawn looked out on the impalpable tree of blue smoke rising from the roofs, expanding, and dissipating over the nearby village. Two poplars mingled their branches with the wind; a single crow, measuring the sky's expanse from one end to the other, passed without a cry. The first spadefuls fell; Roland, suddenly, angrily, bent over the edge of the grave and his hand dropped something; the older Métraux, who was right next to him, looked hard back and forth from Roland to what the earth was covering up; we could no longer hear the sharp noise that it made on the hollow wood, but only earth on earth. It was over. Soon we were in the cars, after the polite exchanges at the door; as we drove off, I saw Roland returned there alone, on the tomb, posthumous, but perfectly erect and planted firmly like someone preparing to strike a blow; romantically, foolishly, I thought of a captain visible for the last time over his white whale, who has already foundered under him.

On the way back, amid the overturned whaling boats and dead monsters, Metraux suddenly said to me in an odd voice, “You remember those pictures that Rémi ripped out of the Kipling book a long time ago?” As if I could forget them. “Roland threw them into the hole just now.” The snow began to fall again before we had left the plateau, sparsely at first, and then very hard with big, thick flakes; the world disappeared.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee
.

It was the beginning of summer, in the early seventies, in Clermont-Ferrand. My brief sojourn into the world of theater was coming to an end; the theater company had disbanded, some having moved on to engagements elsewhere, others, like myself, passively awaiting a change in the wind of their destiny. Marianne and I were the only ones left in the big house we called “the Villa,” which a short while ago we had all occupied, on the hill at the far end of the long garden; the time of cherries had gone by; the hot bronze shadow of the large cherry tree flooded the mansarded windows on the first floor where we lived; in this fervent shadow, I slowly undressed Marianne, examined her in its blaze, threw her onto the blond floorboards baked by the torpor of the days. In the midst of these interplaying reflections, the too-rosy
passages of her thighs took on the tones of one of those Renoirs where, violently displayed in a burst of sunlight but then withdrawn into the half shadow of a haystack, the mauve sculpting of the flesh springs more nakedly, shadowed with gold, from the purple wheat. My vehement hands, her exultant leaps and excessive mouth made that heavy flesh and its heavy nuances tremble infinitely. Marianne's cries in her lifted skirts, the sweat, and the rich half-light are what I retain of that summer, before the event that I am going to recount.

Marianne had accepted some temporary underpaid summer job I have since forgotten; thus we had a little money. Tired, perhaps, of our sweaty exchanges, one evening we went out; Marianne may remember something of that late afternoon, some fragments of that moment in time, my face changing in the successive shadows and light as we crossed the main square beneath the shade of the lindens, some words I said, my glance toward the high presence of the Puy de Dôme, which turns violet in the dusk; I have forgotten all that; but I remember, and surely she remembers as well, that I was holding in my hand a book I had bought that same day, the
Gilles de Rais
by a great author, and she remembers the softened radiance of its deep red cover, like a gift book. We ate at a restaurant on the Rue des Minimes, which fills in the evening with heavily made-up presences, shady looks passed in the shade of the porches, hard, ringing heels. I drank a good deal; I completed the operation with the help of many glasses of Velay vervain, a liqueur made by monks, which is green as a Chassériau fountain and has a sly, feverish, viscous effect. I went out into the night drunk; Marianne was anxious, the indifferent gaze of the prostitutes followed us to the end of the dark street; the light from the central avenues exasperated
me. We went from bar to bar, my ire growing as my speech became thicker, more and more viscous, drowned in shadows, sonorous; I subjected myself to public abuse: if even my tongue could no longer master words, how could I ever write them? Well, in that case, better simple stupidity, gin-fizz and beer, and a return to the “ways of here, heavy with my vice”; if I had to die without having written, let it be in the most stupid exuberance, in this caricature of the inane vital functions, which is drunkenness. Dismayed, Marianne listened to me, her immense gaze taking in my mouth.

At La Lune, the lingerie-pink neon lights that carved the faces there into the raw planes of death masks, the vile chairs, and overflowing ashtrays brought my wrath to a peak; I fled; I was that formica chair, moving, and that cadaver, alive, when I pushed open the door of the Brasserie de Strasbourg; I was still holding the
Gilles de Rais
. In the bar, making faces like a street performer passing from one table to the next, from a group of hairdressers shrieking with laughter to some working girls striking lascivious poses, some show-off was staging his act; the man was young, well-built, wearing a suit and a flattering look irresistible to chamber maids; his fatuousness was inoffensive. But the laborious witticisms of a debased Don Juan, the good grace of his female audience whose makeup and immoderate giggling inflamed as much as irritated me, his superficially clever speech, too poorly disguised by a crude wit to hide its disheartening nudity, all this redirected the course of my fury. I smiled; my rage delighted in finally turning from me and aiming to lodge itself, less violently and almost with pity, in another target; I spoke.

I was seated in the back of the room, in semi-darkness; Casanova
was giving his performance near the bar, fully lit; we both spoke, one after the other, in loud theatrical voices, in malevolent complicity. Gritting his teeth and pretending not to hear me, he bravely continued with his act, but he was performing now without a safety net and, in speaking, was only offering his throat to the blade of my censure; not one of his slips of the tongue did I not correct, exclaiming with the conceit of a school master; not one of his unfinished sentences did I not twist into some deeply cynical meaning; not one of his innuendos did I not make explicit in every detail – his taste for the fat flesh of hairdressers and his desire to possess that flesh. I was assuredly drunk, and my speech had taken the appropriate turn, thick, poorly timed and believing itself to be supreme; nevertheless I struck home; I knew all the better how to wound the speaker and his desire, as his basic appetites were mine as well, as was that abuse of language, twisted by him and held captive to the flesh as flowers are twisted and held captive by the sun, abuse that is perhaps its very use. Men are not so very different. Like me, this one had wanted to please through the grace of words, and, inspired by the red of lips, the white of a shoulder in the glory of the neon, wrote a clumsy love letter, dashed off the madrigal that moves the indifferent woman; and he did move her, no doubt, or would have moved her had I not disrupted this innocent party, not rudely entered the scene with my nitpicking drunkenness and my chic book, and not answered him back with such resentment, presumption, despotic anger. In me, he found the one who undoes all speech by pretending to be above it, who refutes the work by insidiously raising his voice and mind above the voice and mind that have worked hard to create it; by this I mean the difficult reader.

And, as so often happens, it was to this reader that he gave himself henceforth, in pure loss; for this detestable shadow, he let go of his pretty prey; he was like a king in an ancient tragedy who, through an error in the stage directions, hears the chorus leader recounting which odious ashes, what clay throne his precarious monarchy is built upon – and his subjects hear the inopportune voice-off as well. The girls, of course, who threw me incensed, contemptuous looks, still seemed to be his accomplices; but they were no longer part of his court, he was deposed, they had to defend him, the sultan's charm was broken. I would only know after I was sober again that the gods had not given me nearly so prestigious a role; a chorus leader who enters the stage and takes the king to task, points out the fragility of the crown to better place it on his own head, and feigns omniscience to usurp the place of the usurper, that character ceases to be a chorus leader and becomes a rival, of the most common type. But in my drunkenness, I was a hero; I was swimming in acid bliss.

That bliss was short-lived; I continued to drink until there was hardly enough of my mind left to drive home a few darts. Besides, the man disappeared into the heavy summer night; I did not see him go out, only the gust of dense black in the swinging door. I remained there in my stupor; soon the girls in their turn flung themselves out into the night. One of them, with beautiful long brown hair and costume jewelry, had about her mouth something still of childhood under heavy, vulgar makeup; she retraced her steps to pick up a bag or forgotten glove; her rough gestures revealed her low birth and her flashy assurance her efforts and her failure to escape it; she could have been raised between a well and a hazel tree, as may be seen in Les Cards, and someone
in the country, at that moment, was thinking of her; she avoided my gaze. She was not at all so contemptible, surely; that flesh held memories, she would cry for the dead, see her desires demolished; she would never belong to me. My drunkenness mellowed; I sank delightedly into complacence.