Small Lives (4 page)

What is there to say about a Le Châtain childhood? Skinned knees, hazel sticks to while away the days and beat down the grass, clothes out-of-date and “stinking of the fair,” patois monologues in the luxurious shade, gallops along narrow swaths, wells; the herds do not vary, the horizons persist. In summer, the afternoon is fixed in the gold eye of the hen, the patient tipcarts raise the sundial of their shafts; in winter, the racket of crows holds the land, reigns over red evenings and wind; the child nourishes his torpor on hearth fires and ringing frosts; heavy, he makes the heavy birds scatter, is surprised that his cries mist over in the icy air; then another summer arrives.

His parents, I suppose, loved this late-coming child. Juliette has her silences; bread under her arm, she stops, she sets a bucket on the threshold and the grayer stone drinks the fresh water, or stoking the fire, she turns her head and one cheek blazes while the other falls into shadow; she gazes at the blessed boy, the little thief, the last of the Peluchets. The father is tall; he can be seen small and far off in the fields and already he is framed there in the doorway, high as the day and all in shadow, a yoke or flintlock across his shoulder, and he hands the child a ringdove, a fistful of broom. He is loving; one day he makes Antoine whistles from fresh bark, alder or aspen; the big knife has the precision of a needle, the sap beads on the raw wood, in his rough hand the whistle is light as a feather, fragile as a bird; the serious child blows diligently, the father experiences great joy. And finally, he is brutal.

In Saint Goussaud, there is a school master, or a parish priest with a bit of culture, who dispenses it. Beginning in November, in the grip of January, and until the March muds, early each morning the child brings his log, settles into the odor of the cassock and the mangy odor of the village children, year after year learns bits and pieces: that words are vast, that they are uncertain; that beggars' grass is also called
la clématite
, that the five herbs of Saint John, from which you make crosses to nail over cowshed doors, and the herbs of Saint Roch, Saint Martin, Saint Barbe and Saint Fiacre, are also called
molène, scabieuse
, and
cirse
; that patois is not coextensive with the universe, and neither is French; that Latin is not only the violin of angels: that it bears presences, names the joy one feels in sleeping and the joy one tastes at waking, gives rise to the tree and the edge of the forest as much as the wounds of the Savior, and is itself insufficient; finally – and perhaps this is the same
thing – that other objects are gold besides the ciboria, wedding rings, and old coins.

I invent nothing here. There is – and at this moment, small creatures blindly gnaw at it, owls indistinct in the night cover it with droppings – there is, I say, stored away in Les Cards, a tin box that Elise called “the Le Châtain box” and there rest the meager remains of the House of Peluchet: among the Shepherds' Almanacs, a few wedding menus and old bills registering receipt of barrels or coffins, and other odds and ends, three books are my witness, three books, incongruous and marvelously right, in which the universe is almost contained in its entirety, three improbable books that bear the clumsy initials of Antoine Peluchet, too legible, right in the middle of the page. They are a cheap edition of
Manon Lescaut
, a brittle Saint Benoît rulebook, and a small atlas.

The child grew up, became the adolescent. The books are already in his possession or not, it hardly matters; his clothes still stink of the fair; under his cap, he has two large dark eyes that look away, and probably an excessive, hungry soul, which, having only itself to feed upon, is discouraged from the outset. He is as tall and strong as his father, but his arms are of no use to him, embrace nothing, would like to wreak havoc and drop to his sides again; in the little buried church, permeated with the odor of his tomb, the Saint, the Useless One, the Blessed, watches over the grain and ruins the harvest, his palms imperiously open, imponderable.

Thus we must imagine that one day, Toussaint perceived something in the son – and from that moment would go on perceiving it – some gesture, word, or more likely some silence, which displeased him: too
light a weight on the handles of the plough, a sluggishness in living, a look that remained obstinately the same, whether it rested on perfect rye or wheat flattened by a storm, a look equal to the vast unchanging earth. For the father loved his patch of land: that is to say, his patch of land was his worst enemy; born into this mortal combat that kept him going, took the place of life for him and slowly killed him, born into the complicity of an interminable duel that began well before him, he mistook his implacable, essential hatred for love. And no doubt the son laid down his arms, because the land was not his mortal enemy; his enemy might have been the lark that ascends too high and too beautifully, the vast barren night, or the words that hang loose on things like cast-offs bought at the fair; and if that was so, what was there to pit oneself against?

Then came that terrible night, and I am sure it was in spring, in the dark of the moon, under the heavy spell of hay and a sky full of nightingales. The men (because Antoine is a man as well now), the men returned late, armpits enflamed by the scythe handles, their shadows, stretched long by a giant sun, colliding with one another on the rough stone path; the fictive observer, dispersed with the evening in the scent of the huge elder tree opposite the door, watches them enter, the same silhouette and sweaty cap, the same sunburnt neck, vaguely mythological as father and son always are, double time overlapping in space here below. The father changes his mind and goes to piss under the elder; he has a dull look and seems to be chewing on something dark. The door closes again, the patient night comes. The candle is lit; through the window, all three of them can be seen bent over their soup; in Juliette's hand, the ladle comes and goes, a
large alarmed moth beats against the panes; wine flows, much wine, into the father's single glass. Suddenly he looks at Antoine, his face ink-black in the darkness; a slight wind shifts the fearful umbels of the elder tree, they lean close, lightly brush the glass; from the candle bursts a brighter flame: revealed in Antoine's look, that arrogance, that indifferent dignity, exasperated and groundless. Then a shout in the kitchen, a large gesticulating shadow leaps toward the beams, then shrinks back, banged chairs are knocked over. From the elder tree, who strains to hear in vain? Only the rumbling drumrolls of the storm clear the thick walls, the demented rumor of hollow stones rubbed together that makes children sob and unnerves dogs, the wild voice of the family, ancient and terrible in its most heightened state. The father is standing, brandishing something that he curses and throws to the ground, a full glass, a book perhaps, and his big fists strike the table with full force, with truths that no one hears, the only truths, the simple, terrified, desperate truths that speak of forefathers, deaths in vain, and endless hardships. And in that far corner, poor body slumped beside poor sideboard, shadow seeking deeper shadow, what does the mother do, who has quit picking up the miserable broken pottery? Perhaps she sobs, or keeps quiet, or prays; she knows something, she is guilty. And finally, the old patriarchal arrogance rediscovers its old final gesture, the father points straight toward the door, the candle gutters, the boy is standing; the door opens like a tombstone, the light strikes the elder tree, which trembles gently, interminably. Antoine is framed for a moment on the threshold, dark against the light, and no one, not the tree, the father, or mother, can know his features then; overhead the nightingales widen the night, sketch the roads of the
world: let those mossy ways underfoot be bronze, those singing skies overhead be iron. He leaves; he is no longer of this place. And perhaps still woven there, between the father forever raging or suddenly mute, his head in his hands, the son lost from view whose steps grow faint, never again to be heard, and the silent, ghostly, nonexistent observer, merged with the elder blossoms, and the elder tree itself, more vanishing than a scent in the night, more vain than the brief flowering of the year 1867, perhaps still woven into it is a vague reality, brutal and heavy, like an old painting or capital of a Roman column, a reality I only half perceive and do not understand.

The candle goes out, a nightingale escapes from the elder; maybe in Saint-Goussaud someone hears the worm-eaten door of the church creak – but it could just as well be a cowshed door or two opposing branches in a thicket. The stars flee, or the gold salamanders when one strikes a light behind the moss-stained windows. What else does the night complain of, when the dogs wear themselves out, blind and thundering? What old family drama is perpetuated in the throat of the rooster? The shadow scrolled with ferns thickens in the rising day. Swords of light cross the paths, unless it is the moon finally risen over the birches. Let us leave this foliage; the elder tree died off, I believe, about 1930.

I am left with Toussaint.

Another day appears. The Clerc field, for example, must still be cut, which is only a slope, a fog basin in the black breath of the firs over toward the Lalléger pass; a single scythe is heard there; flushed out, thrushes pierce the fog, sharp insults leave the earth, barely suspended
the invisible scythe falls again. When the fog lifts, the Jaquemins, the Décembres, the Jouanhaut sons, who are also cutting around Lalléger, see the father by himself: he scythes up the slope. Noon does not appease him, the afternoon sun overhead exasperates him like a horsefly, he works through nightfall. The Joauanhaut sons, who are the last to leave, amid laughter, have long since sat down to their soup; only the tall fir trees are witness, unapproachable and near, whispering among themselves and for themselves alone, deaf to all that is not their grief; between his teeth the father calls God's fire down upon them. He heads home.

Let us imagine him along that dark path. No daguerreotype preserves it, but destiny at this moment provides him a face – or chance: the night is propitious for forgeries. After all, his portrait is no more fictive than the one – so accurate – of his rival haloed there in the little church. The face we can discern is thickset but heavily lined: the bridge of the nose, weathered, gleams and draws toward it the high cheeks, the precise eyebrows; thus a grand air; the moustache below is the one sported by the dead of that time, by Bloy and the Southern generals: powerful, mechanical, belonging to the uniform and the patriarchy, to rigid poses. He stops occasionally and lifts his head toward the stars; this is to savor the moment near at hand when, under the lamp light, he will see Antoine returned, the child with the alder whistles who smiles at him; then we can see his warm, mischievous eyes, almost childlike. Then he sets off again more quickly, his cap conceals him, and there is nothing left but the wooden jaw, brutally despairing. He is an old man. When he takes the path to Le Châtain and we see him approaching, he closely resembles the one who was Toussaint Peluchet; but let us not
let that heavy peasant gait deceive us; because he carries on his shoulder something shimmering and magic, peremptory as the harp of an ancient king inventor of psalms or the halberd of an old lansquenet who sees things in the night that are not there, horns suddenly appearing on the brow of a hedge or forked hooves in the sculpted prints of cattle: a scythe, which he rests beside the door, and it falls with a clatter his hand is shaking so much. Antoine is not there.

Juliette – whose mortal frame, in my mind and in these pages, is almost totally eroded, as it must have been even in her lifetime, disguised in the many turns of phrase, the peasant bonnet of Chardin paintings, and the shapeless attire of a plain madonna or old woman, though I can well imagine it nevertheless, already bent, drawn by the years, and still possessing two big beautiful eyes – Juliette is standing, one hand perhaps clutching the back of a chair or a window ledge, the relic held in the hollow of her other hand, like a drowned bird. And yet, no one has died, no one apparently is about to be born. The father looks at her, imploring, mute; we can also imagine that he loses his temper: why did Antoine have to take him at his word? In his turn he clutches a piece of furniture, the back of a chair; for a long time he sits, gets up again, and remains standing; then it is no doubt her turn to sit. The only sound is the same sound of the clock, and outside, vaguely, the same birds as before; she rises; that is how it goes all night; when the candle burns down to its end (but it is already the June dawn), the two depositaries of the son implore the dull, hollow future, pacing their poor inexhaustible memories, the moment weighing on them with all the weight of the night sky. Or perhaps that is all premature, that consciousness of time henceforth shattered, when the past is going to
loom immeasurably large; they are awaiting Antoine, trembling, reassuring and torturing one another, the passion of hope drawing them into its vortex, rejecting them, leaving them for dead, yet breathing life back into them, a bit of life to be stolen back again, tossed to the dogs, slavishly retrieved in a flash of a memory, a brief forgetting, the punctual glint of the clock's pendulum.

The father waited one year, two, perhaps ten. The mournful doggedness of works and days filled this time, which I will skip over. The father matured however, the seed of absence germinated in him, when we would only have thought that hope was withering away there; and finally the day came, we must imagine, when he had paid off his debt to reality.

There were a few events. A cabriolet with two horses, suggesting the city, a lawyer's or clerk of court's office, stopped at their doorstep one evening; there was hardly time to see descending from it, from behind, a strange, brief silhouette in the muddy fields like out of a Russian novel, a young man all in black and wearing a top hat, who swept into the black door. Toussaint removed his cap, fingered his moustache; Juliette poured the visitor a glass of wine; he drank or did not drink; he looked at the hearth, sat down and spoke with them; no one knows about what.