Small Lives (18 page)

I do not remember that day's sermon; but I suspect that as always, in the obscure, polished sermons Bandy gave, there flashed bursts of proper names, their sharp syllables speaking of omnipotence come to ruin, of terrifying angels and ancient massacres. Perhaps David was mentioned (Bandy made the final “d” sound against his palate, as if to redouble or ratify, by closing it back on itself, the royal capital “D”), who, at the end, old king assassin at death's door, needed a young servant girl like a poultice on his shriveled heart; or Tobie (he pronounced it Tobie-ah, drawing out and ennobling with a yod this vaguely ridiculous word that, as the child I was then, only evoked for me a dog), who met an angel and a fish at the edge of a river; or Achab, whose destiny was as chaotic as the axe and the grunting sound called up by his name, and who foundered; or Absalom, whose viperine consonants whistle like the perversity of this unworthy son or like the assegai that pierced him, suspended by his hair from a tall tree, heavy and cornered as the final leaden syllable of his name. Because Bandy had a taste for hammering out these proper names, royal ghosts or refrains from old battle
songs, which he left hanging over a world either nostalgic or terrified, with no other alternative.

It is my turn now to get carried away with words; but my lack of verbal skill must not let Bandy be misconstrued as a dark preacher, of the sort popularized by gothic novels and their ilk; that would be a mistake. He terrified no one, and moreover, that was not his goal, his conciliatory ethic being more an invitation to the papist gardens of indulgence than to the mediocre Lutheran jail; he threatened no calamity, and from his mouth the Seven Plagues of Egypt were more news items charged with splendor, mystery, and the past, like the
Enervés de Jumièges
or the
Mort de Sardanapale
than a just punishment from the heavens. If he wanted to subdue the world, it was for his own purposes and without injuring anyone, by the sole power of his perfect diction, by the fully achieved form of words alone, without prejudice to their moral significance; and he probably did not think that this world was bad, but on the contrary, unabashedly rich and generous, and that its richness could only be answered by opposing or adding to it a total, exhaustive verbal magnificence, in an always renewed challenge, driven by nothing but arrogance.

“He likes to hear himself talk,” said my grandmother, who had passed the age of white crepe and veils; yes indeed, he got drunk on the echoes of his words, was moved by the emotion he stirred in the flesh of women and the hearts of children; in a word, he turned on the charm. His impeccable mass was a dance of seduction; the names burst forth like feathers in the plumage a displaying bird; the shimmering perfection of the Latin consonants complemented the cyclical colors of the chasuble, white for Christ and red for the martyrs,
and on ordinary days, the discrete green of the sunlit meadows; it complemented the virile, dark, trim beauty with which nature had graced him. Who was he aiming to seduce? God, women, himself? The women, certainly, he loved; God undoubtedly, then believing that divine Grace was granted only to the rich, the fine speakers; himself surely, whom he encumbered with chasubles under the vaulted ceiling and a big motorbike under the sunlit sky, with beautiful mistresses and theology.

Mass finally ended. The last benediction was as calm and magisterial as the first; Marie-Georgette, who knew what she wanted and knew how to claim it without delay, the sharp sound of her heels louder than the shifting chairs, walked determinedly toward the sacristy, armed with what pretext I do not know. We children sat down under the portal, at the top of the flight of steps, the last of which bore the weight of an enormous black motorbike like nothing we had ever seen before; it was, I believe, one of the first exported BMWs. Marie-Georgette came out soon after, her skirt brushing our heads, her perfume and her summer smile filling me with bliss; she had not yet crossed the square when the priest, in turn, appeared. She turned around and looked at him; he did not see her and his eyes, blinking a little, followed with great astonishment the flight of a bird over the leaves, the roofs. He lit a pale cigarette; Mourioux was not familiar with such luxury, the almost liturgical, clerical, female odor; he took a few drags, tossed it, closed his jacket again, and with an ineffable movement, worthy of a great dignitary in the days of the hunt, taking his cassock in both hands and throwing all the weight of it over his standing leg, he mounted the enormous machine and disappeared. Marie-Georgette turned away,
the wisteria at her door danced a little, violet against her dress, and she too disappeared; in the wide sunlit square only three or four astonished peasants remained, who had not recovered from seeing themselves struck by so many mythologies at once: a motorcycle from a Piaf song had just passed bearing a golden-mouthed bishop with the profile of Apollo.

He stayed in Saint-Goussaud for almost ten years; when he left, I was an adolescent, timidly lusting after what he loved. He was not curious about archeology, but about girls and the Word; perhaps, between the Father who is invisible and once wrote the Book, and his superlative creatures, the most visible and present, women, he saw a place in this world for himself alone, charmer Son and rhetorician who celebrated the absence of the one in the immanence of the others; he traveled to the Holy Land, he showed us his slides, he had a few run-ins with his bishop; but we did not know anything of significance about him. He acknowledged nothing. Maybe Marie-Georgette or some other mistress that he had at the time (all the women in his five parishes who were beautiful, enjoyed men, and bought their clothes in town, that is to say, in the end, hardly more than you could count on one hand), perhaps they could say more about him; but old age has taken them, with its forgetfulness or its long-winded memory, the countryside has gently wrapped them in its shroud of seasons.

He was one of the first to give up wearing the cassock when the Holy See permitted it (and so I never again witnessed that ineffable movement, the bishop riding off to the crusades, in the din of the motorbike); he was elegant, varied in his grays, a scarf knotted over the stiff collar, or outfitted from head to toe in motorcycle gear; but never
did he evade the inflexible return of the chasubles, their complicated, invariable seasonal code: the red that blazed at Pentecost, like the indubitable flame that the Apostles received and that Bandy himself did not; the violet worn at the end of winter, which calls the first crocuses and promises the lilacs that perhaps he did not smell; and the pink for the third week of Lent, embossed and satiny as women's lingerie. Nor did he ever depart from the sonorous precision of the words for the mass, from the prelate's declamatory fullness or the austere gestural decorum that I have described; for ten years, his too perfect diction, studded with incomprehensible words, resonated under the vaults of the crude cattle-healing saints in Arrènes, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux; and I can imagine his secret rage, while he was pouring forth his pompous sermons to respectful peasant men who understood not a word and seduced peasant women, like a poor Mallarmé captivating the audience at a workers' meeting.

Outside of mass, Bandy ceased playing the angel. Neither taciturn nor elated, he forced himself to be simple and courteous, and he managed it, but always with something secretly intractable; he held his own speech at a distance from himself just as he held his cigarette at the tips of his fingers; also with something brutal perhaps, and brutally contained, as when he angrily aimed his heel at the kickstand of his motorcycle.

(He buried the dead farmers; he saw them suffer, guilelessly or cantankerously, but always awkwardly; in the nights of May he heard the nightingales, and the cuckoo in the green wheat; he heard the long bells, the cracked bells, as in Ceyroux, and the deep ones, as in Mourioux, the bells of his parishes; reapers in the countryside nodded to
him when he walked in white between the cross and the coffin; then he was just a man who passes, a mediocre volume of flesh in the immense hand of summer, sweating under the surplice like the pallbearers under their burden. Was he moved by this? I believe so.)

I remember with pleasure the catechism class, in the coolness of the sacristy during the noon break, where we learned nothing; Bandy was kind to us, arrogantly and inexorably kind; regarding the crude little peasants that we were, he had no illusions; this was not one of Bernanos's parish priests. I can still see his eyes fixed on me after I had just said something stupid, his blue, coldly indulgent gaze, barely pitying, expecting the worst.

I have a memory of high summer; no doubt it was June, when vacation is approaching and childish spitefulness, impatient with vague desires, gets drunk on itself like the bees foundering in the linden pollen, the broom. Lucette Scudéry came to catechism with us, the healthy children, the children full of rage and mirth; she was a miserable creature who, at ten years old, could hardly speak, with spindly hands she only knew how to raise at any moment to fend off blows too rarely imaginary, and a distraught face that only an ecstatic, unbearable laugh diverted from tears; but that diaphanous face had a sort of incongruous prettiness that exasperated us; that its prettiness was matched with mental weakness and epilepsy seemed to us derisive authorization from above to give free rein to our excesses. That day it was very hot, the priest was late; we sat waiting for him on the church steps; the coolness of the stone against the back of our legs did not appease our desire anymore than our foul language and mean gestures cooled our anger; our rage soon focused on Lucette. Her mother,
nearly as pathetic as she was, had made two thin braids for her, held by blue ribbons, which, in her own way, she was proud of, touching them again and again with sharp little cries. We undid them, or rather tore them out, pummeling her with blows; we ran onto the grass laughing and made the thin blue trophies dance in the air; waving her arms, Lucette moaned, stumbling on the shaded steps; suddenly she opened her mouth, her eyes widened, fixed, as though briefly granted the rationality they lacked. She fell down, foaming at the mouth.

She was wrestling in that terrible fit we knew how to recognize, having witnessed it before, when the priest arrived. In two strides, we were shrouded by his dark silhouette; his handsome, impassive face hung over us; still standing, he considered with childlike surprise that face convulsed by a need stronger than speech, that stammering through foam at the corners of the mouth, the whites of those eyes in the bright sun; he pulled himself back together, as if in a dream, searched his pockets without success for a handkerchief, and took from my hand the blue ribbon that I had not thought to let go; he crouched down and with his nicotine-stained fingers, their amber gloss still evoking for me the words, “holy oil,” “balm,” “unction,” he wiped the trembling lips; he seemed to unroll a sky-blue phylactery over the chattering mouth of a saint. In the white blossoms of the nettles, near the head of the child who was gradually growing calmer, a golden yellow butterfly flew; the saliva-coated ribbon remained in the green grass when the priest left for the mother's house, carrying the quieted, broken girl in his arms.

After catechism, I returned alone to the sacristy; I had forgotten to deliver a message from the teacher, or to have the roll book signed.
The priest did not hear me arrive; he was leaning with both hands on the low window, slightly bent forward, as though to study the distant countryside; he was speaking, in a voice disarmed, or perhaps imploring, dumbfounded, which made me freeze. In the middle of a sentence, he suddenly became aware of my presence, turned toward me, and, without surprise, looking at me as if I had been a tree in the landscape or a seat in the church, he brought the sentence to its close, not altering his tone. This is what I still believe I heard: “Consider the lilies of the fields. They neither sow nor spin, but I tell you that King Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” He signed the book and dismissed me.

I learned that Bandy was the parish priest for the small community of Saint-Rémy, of which the hospital was part; as for Lucette Scudéry, I had seen her within these walls, at La Ceylette; she had been here a long time, and permanently; she did not recognize me. From the face with the large, suffering eyes, the drooping lip, all prettiness had vanished; the years had passed over her as well, this woman without memory, for whom time, reduced to the interval between fits, was not worsened by memories of ribbons and childish Junes. From our former little parish, we had arrived, all three of us: the young priest with the promise of a bishopric, the lively boy with a bright future, and the idiot with no tomorrow; the future was now and the present reunited us, all equals or very close to it.

One afternoon at the end of November, I went to Saint-Rémy; they had there, in the back of the tobacco shop, a stock of crime thrillers, unsold for ages, dog-eared, covered with flyspecks, from which I
resupplied myself each week. The village was only a few kilometers away and, in good weather, the walk was not without appeal; the road wound through chestnut groves and old granite, along a hill at the summit of which three clusters of trees gave the impression of a triple peak, and its local name, “Puy des Trois-Cornes,” evoked for me an antlered god, painted and buried in the age of the Reindeer, with only the roots of the great trees blindly twined through its rack for witness; along the road, a sign with a leaping deer warned of the presence of imaginary, fossil, or deified game. I had not left the forest when a voice hailed me from behind; I saw Jean coming with a heavy step to meet me under the chestnut trees. I waited, not glad to see him.