Small Lives (16 page)

That was what Annecy was for me, which I left one morning in January or February. The sun had not yet risen, the cold stung; we lived a long way from the station, I had many suitcases, stupidly cumbersome, heavy with the books that followed me around like a convict is followed by his ball and chain. Marianne and I each had a moped. We had secured the luggage to them as best we could; I was angry and unhappy, I was cold, sleep made Marianne's features ugly; she had hardly gone a few meters before the bags she was transporting fell. I detested my poverty, our mittens and our balaclavas, the pathetic strings cutting into the thin cardboard of the suitcases, our awkwardness in the terrible banality of it all; I was one of Céline's characters leaving on vacation. I threw my moped into the ditch, the scattered suitcases burst open, the detested literature lurched into the mud.
Under the black trees by the black lake, my silhouette gesticulated, infinitesimal and demented; I cried in the
christus venit
, insulted my companion like a laborer setting off for work in bad shape from the night's drinking, whose wife has forgotten to pack his lunch; I wanted to be one of those insensible, overturned volumes I was stamping on. Marianne began to cry, trying to replace the clumsy packsaddle of books, her sobs making it difficult for her; her poor face, disfigured by the balaclava, the cold and chagrin, tore me apart; it was my turn to cry, we kissed, we were as tender as children. At the station, she ran along the platform for a long time, beside the train that carried me away, awkward and radiant, clownishly miming me messages, so mawkishly delicate despite the sobs that had to be catching in her throat, trotting along so ridiculously and with such admirable hope, that I cried for a long time afterwards in the overheated train car.

My journey in the train was terrifying; I was going to have to write, and I could not do it; I was backing myself up to the wall, and I was not a mason.

In Mourioux, my hell changed; it was to this one I had to submit henceforth. Each morning I placed the blank page on my desk, and waited in vain for divine benevolence to fill it; I presented myself at the Holy Altar, the ritual implements were in place, the typewriter at my left hand and the sheets of paper at my right; through the window, abstract winter named things more surely than profuse summer would have done: tits flitted about, waiting only to be said, the skies varied, its variation reducible to two sentences; come now, the world would not be hostile, reset in the stained-glass window of a chapter.
Books surrounded me, benevolent and contemplative; they were going to intercede in my favor. Divine Grace surely could not resist such good will; I had prepared myself through so many macerations (was I not poor, contemptible, destroying my health with stimulants of all kinds?), so many prayers (did I not read everything that could be read?), so much posturing (did I not have the air of a writer, his imperceptible uniform?), so many picaresque Imitations of the Life of the Great Authors, that it must come soon. It did not come.

Arrogant Jansenist that I was, I believed only in Grace; it did not fall to me; I disdained condescending to Works, convinced that the labor required to accomplish them, as relentless as it was, would never raise me above the condition of obscure, industrious lay brother. What I demanded in vain, in increasing rage and despair, was
hic et nunc
the road to Damascus or the Proustian discovery of
François le Champi
in the Guermantes library, which is the beginning of
Remembrance of Things Past
and at the same time its end, anticipating the whole work in a lightning flash worthy of Sinaï. (I understood, too late perhaps, that to go to Grace through Works, as to Guermantes through Méseglise, is “the loveliest way,” the only way at least that allows you to reach your destination; thus a traveler who has walked all night hears a church bell at dawn inviting a still distant village to mass, which he, the traveler, hurrying in the clover wet with dew, will miss, passing the porch at the cheerful hour when the choirboys, their robes put away, are clearing the cruets and laughing in the sacristy. But have I truly understood that? I do not like walking at night.) Having, like so many unfortunate simpletons, taken as dogma the juvenile boasting of Rimbaud's
Letter of the Visionary
, I “worked” to make myself like that, and awaited the
effect of the promised miracle; I awaited a beautiful Byzantine angel, descended in all its glory for me alone, to extend to me the fertile pen plucked from its remiges, and, in the same moment, to spread both its wings for me to read my finished work, written on the back of them, dazzling and indisputable, definitive, unsurpassable.

This naïveté had its reverse side of twisted greed; I wanted the martyr's wounds and his salvation, the saint's vision, but I also wanted the crook and miter that impose silence, the episcopal word that drowns even the word of kings. If Writing was given to me, I thought, it would give me everything. Dulled by this belief, absent in the absence of my God, I sank deeper each day into impotence and anger, those two jaws of the vise that holds in its grip the howling damned.

And, turn of the screw redoubling that grip, necessary sidekick and voyeur of infernal tortures, doubt arrived in its turn, wresting me from the torment of my vain belief to inflict an even darker agony, saying to me, “If Writing is given to you, it will give you nothing.”

Lost in these pious stupidities, I smelled of the sacristy (I do not believe that the odor has left me even today); things fell away; I had forgotten creatures, the little dog that so simply watches Saint Jerome writing in a painting by Carpaccio, clouds, and people, Marianne in her balaclava running behind a train. And of course literary theory repeated to me ad nauseam that writing is there where the world is not; but what a dupe I was; I had lost the world, and writing was not there. Those seasons in Mourioux passed like a dream, and I saw nothing more than an occasional irritating ray of sunlight when it crossed the blank white page and dazzled me; I did not notice the spring and only knew it was summer because, during my inglorious escapades,
the beer was fresher then and more natural, more pleasantly intoxicating. In those disastrous months while I was seeking Grace, I lost the grace of words, of simple speech that warms the heart that speaks and the one that listens; I no longer knew how to talk to the modest folk among whom I was born, whom I still loved and had to flee; the grotesque theology that I uttered was my only passion, it drove away all other speech; my rustic relatives could only laugh at me or remain uncomfortably silent when I spoke, afraid of me when I did not.

I only escaped Mourioux to go on binges in various towns, which increased my absence in the world tenfold, but also obligingly dramatized it; leaving the station, I dove into the nearest café and drank with determination, progressing from bar to bar until I reached the town center; I only shirked from this task to buy books or randomly grab a willing female. Each drunken bout was a dress rehearsal for me, drivel from the fallen forms of Grace; because when it was time, Writing, I thought, would come in the same way, exogenous and prodigious, indubitable and transubstantial, changing my body into words like drunkenness changed it into pure self-love, grasping the pen no greater an effort than raising the arm; the pleasure of the first page would be like the light thrill of the first glass to me; the symphonic fullness of the completed work would resound like the brass and cymbals of massive drunkenness, when glasses and pages are beyond counting. Archaic method, crude subterfuge of a rustic shaman! I imagine that the terrified bipeds of the Cyclades, the Euphrates, or the Andes, thousands of years before the Revelation, likewise drank themselves into oblivion, in pure loss, to simulate His coming; and it was not so long ago that the last of the Great Plains Indians died of it, perhaps waiting
for the firewater to provide a Messiah or inspire in the weakest among them an
Iliad
or an
Odyssey
.

Marianne came to Mourioux once, at the very beginning of my stay there, in March, and it was beautiful weather. I must do myself justice; though little touched by Grace, I retained my hope for it, and had moreover written a chapter or two of a wild, devoutly modern little text, in which a cumbersome, formal “remembrance” adorned some armored knights out of Froissart or Béroul; but I was pleased with it, wanted her to read it, and the memory of Marianne in the winter sun enchants me. She got out of the taxi, beautiful, radiant and talkative, made-up; in the corridor I caressed her; I remember with as much emotion as at the time when a brutal gesture revealed her to me, her pale flesh in black stockings, her words that my hand set trembling. We walked among the moss-covered rocks, in the grass, each blade like a sweet, so delicately coated with frost; once we saw the morning sun rise out of the mist, awaken the forests, add Marianne's laughter to the thousand shards of laughter which, according to the psalm, make up God's chariot; her rosy face, her breath in the cold, her radiant eyes are still with me; never again would we experience together hours like these; and as I have said, the seasons of that whole year escaped me, except for those few winter days given to me by Marianne.

Our subsequent meetings could be told by one of Faulkner's painful idiots, the ones haunted by loss and the desire for loss, and then the dramatization of and driveling on about the loss: in Lyon (we met when she happened to be on tour there) where I drank away – or lost – in one day the little money for my visit; I climbed toward Fourvières with legs of lead; I no longer even desired to lay hands on Marianne; I
stretched naked on my back and waited for her to straddle me, like a child lets himself be tucked into bed. In Toulouse, where she watched as I pursued a childhood friend I rediscovered there, and spoiled my memory of her. Finally in Bourges, where there is a refreshment bar in the bishop's palace gardens; Bourges, near Sancerre, where Marianne had driven me, anxious to distract me from my grim thoughts, she the enthusiastic one, still hopeful, and I, who would not let her see past that sad day, declaiming between glasses, shouting at the bewildered tourists, and the immense amphitheater in the valley descending to the glorious Loire giving me the laughable illusion of composing Ajax drunk or Pentheus, when I was a meager Falstaff. Weary, faithful audience, Marianne had begun to see all too clearly that I interpreted these same roles incessantly and atrociously.

She came to Mourioux one more time, and that was the last. I was then at the height of disgrace; barbiturates taken all day long added to the alcohol; glassy-eyed, I staggered about from morning on, with hardly the energy to falter my way for the thousandth time through my fetish poems, or blurrily stammer the Joycian abracadabras that made the angels burst out laughing, and invisible, abandon me to my limbo; in the absence of Writing, I no longer wanted to live, or only force-fed, somnolent and simpleminded, and the bloody gesture that would have allowed me to absent myself for good seemed a mawkish fate, a pinprick reserved for windbags puffed up with honor, whereas I was without honor and inflated with vanity alone. Marianne found me at the depths of this interminable childishness; finally she had to accept the evidence; this was indeed where my truth lay, and my letters lied.

At that time she had a few contracts, some work; she had bought
herself a small car. One day we went to Les Cards. Pushing open the door, I did not recognize the house where sentimentally I remember being born, but a hovel of collapsing rubble, the odor of cellar; among the other tools hanging over the stairs was an axe that seemed worthy of an executioner's hands; thick rope for tying cartloads of hay enhanced the horror story atmosphere. In high heels and underwear I knew to be delicate, Marianne seemed like a fleeing queen at the mercy of a churl; I loved her nevertheless, my heart bled to be that churl with the rough hands, with the nastily unsatiated look; as I lifted her pretty skirts I was dreaming of the white dress and the golden belt of the children's song. Naked, I made her hold insane postures in the dusty room. She was exasperated but aroused, and her pleasure was as acrid as the dust she ate; I grew harder as my whole foundering being sought refuge in the rigidity of that aggressive point which I rammed into this queen, or this child, so that she would follow me into my ruination; anonymous among the spiderwebs, we were insects mutually devouring each other, fierce, precise, and quick, and that alone bound us henceforth. It was night when we returned; Marianne drove, silent and mechanical; an empty vermouth bottle rolled between my feet; flushed out, a rabbit began to run along in our headlights, as so often happens with those creatures, and it is impossible to tell if they are terrified or horribly seduced. Spitefully I watched it loping after that false fatal daylight. Marianne was careful to avoid it; I stealthily grabbed the steering wheel with my left hand, the car swerved the small distance necessary to kill the rabbit; I got out and picked it up; the amusing runner with the long ears was this soaked, sticky fur; it was still panting; I finished it off in the car with my fist. It was the brother of the little
rabbit that hops among the thousand flowers in tapestries, the hare of the
Lady and the Unicorn
, and it would have eaten out of the hand of a saint; no doubt these inanities went through my mind while I beat it to death. Clarity returned to me suddenly with a fearful mawkishness, and I was overcome with shame; I could just as well have derailed the train to crush Marianne under its weight in the Annecy station. I did not look at her, I would have liked to disappear; her disgust and chagrin were such that she moaned without being able to utter a word.

The letter arrived soon afterward. In it Marianne said that she wanted to break it off, and that she would not change her mind. The only important text the Heavens sent me that year was that one, which I held trembling, unquestionable, certainly, and prodigious in its way, but it was not in my hand and it changed me into earth; my pretentious desire for the alchemy of the word had operated in reverse. I read and reread those miraculous, fatal words, like car headlights in the night for a rabbit; it was the end of October, outside a great wind shook the old sun; I was the foliage that the wind undoes, that it glorifies but buries.