by Tony Duvert
He came across a first earthworm, small, wriggly and very red, like the ones for fishing. He amused himself, putting it on the back of his hand. The invisible hairs scratched at the skin and the worm expelled a whorl of digested earth. Serge threw it away.
He continued to dig, and found another: a big fat pointed end which waved slowly at the entrance to a tunnel as round and neat as a pipe. Serge seized it and pulled at it valiantly. It was stretchy; but better than chewing-gum: it resisted, it was muscled. And interminably long. Curious, and vaguely alarmed, Serge gave it a last pull and let it drop. Completely exposed, the worm twisted and turned on the damp earth.
‘Disgusting!’ Serge shouted at it.
That was the moment he went back in to the kitchen to look for things.
In the meantime, the worm had disappeared; but Serge prodded at the earth with an old spoon and found it again. ‘Aha! You’ll see!’
He examined the objects he’d brought with him. He tried a few unidentifiable things, hesitated, then chose a tin box that had held medicinal pastilles.
‘You wait there, and don’t you move!’
Back in the kitchen: ‘Jonathan, uh, have you got any wire? Have you got matches?’
‘There, on the stove. Thin wire or thick?’
‘Thick! …no, thin. What’s it like, the thin one? Oh, I can take that old candle there, it’s really old.’
This time, the worm was still visible.
‘Right then, fatso, wait a moment, you just wait!’
Serge opened the tin, and, picking the worm up with a little stick, he put it inside. The tin was a bit small, but Serge folded the worm up neatly and quickly closed the lid.
What came after needed some work. Serge cut two lengths of wire, twisting them for a long time so as to produce a break; he tightened them round the box, then twisted the end and suspended the box from a stick.
‘Now I need two like that.’
He made a ‘V’ with his fingers and studied the form. He looked at the redcurrant bushes, an espaliered pear tree, the twigs on the ground, didn’t find what he was looking for. He got up, and walked round the garden. It took a good while. He pulled a small forked branch from a young wild cherry tree: on its trunk were scattered tears of amber gum. Serge picked one off: it was soft, it was sticky, he pressed it here and there before flattening it onto the middle of his forehead like a wart. He fingered it so as to be able to feel his new face. The other fork was a piece of dead wood.
Having planted the forks in the hole, Serge rested the other stick with the box hanging from it across them, like a spit. He put the stump of candle just underneath. He had to try very hard to light it. The wick was embedded in the wax, it was delicate work, and the matches kept going out.
Eventually, a wavering flame began to lick at the tin, and the worm it contained. Bending over it, his teeth suddenly flooded by an acidic saliva, Serge watched, listened, protected the flame, listened again. But no sound escaped from the tin. Except, later, a sizzle; and a little water came through between the tin and its lid. Not onto the candle, luckily. Serge was surprised by the soot which accumulated. Now and again this deposit lifted off in flakes, under the effect of the paint underneath, which was coming off with the heat; the metal appeared and was immediately blackened. Serge swallowed down his spit, and his heart thumped.
‘Ah aah! You’re well cooked now, you disgusting thing!’
Serge blew out the candle. He would have liked to open the tin, but it was burning hot. He blew at that too, gave up, rushed once more into the kitchen.
‘I’m taking some water,’ he said.
‘Is there a fire?’ asked Jonathan.
‘Oh no.’
He lied: ‘It’s for the pond. ‘Cos I’m making a pond. Need lots of water.’
‘The bucket’s under the sink. But look for the tap outside, it’ll be easier, by one of the windows, very low down.’
Jonathan, who’d been getting on with his drawing in red chalk, was touching it up now with white chalk and charcoal.
Serge took the bucket. He didn’t use it. He cooled the tin directly under the tap. At last he could touch it and undo it from the stick. His fingers were covered in black. He untwisted the wires and opened the lid. In the tin, charred remains, five or six sausages which seemed to be made up of hollow, crumbly rings. Other ashes had dissolved in the water. The examination of the remains fascinated the child even longer and more intensely than the incineration.
He inflicted the same death on two giant slugs, one brown, the other grey, tiger-striped, or rather, marked with black stripes at head and tail. The grilling of the brown slug was a disaster: this flesh resisted better than that of the worm. When Serge opened the tin, the slug wasn’t burned to a cinder, it remained whole, and still damp even, but it had exploded and the guts were spilling out in an enormous bundle. Serge, nauseated, threw the corpse and its box far away.As a precaution, the tiger-striped slug was given a proper bonfire of twigs, which Serge kept properly fed. This one’s coffin, or oven, was a fat tube for effervescent tablets. The plastic cap caught fire, giving off a nasty smell and a thready smoke. Then it popped. Liquids and foams flowed out. Much later, the cinders Serge emptied out were light, tinkling and granular.
‘Why haven’t they come, the cats?’ he asked. Jonathan had asked to see the pond, but Serge refused:
‘It’s not finished. You can see it tomorrow. Is tomorrow alright?’
‘Yes, that’s alright.’
And Jonathan, for his part, hadn’t dared show his drawing to Serge, for the drawing was obscene. It showed one of their secrets. Often, Serge busied himself alone, and Jonathan preferred this. Time passed quickly; the child’s stay was drawing to a close, and Jonathan made an emptiness in himself, so as to become accustomed to his departure. He continued to respond to the boy’s desires, to his affectionate gestures, but as if his presence were merely imaginary.
Serge was not someone who could be loved, a free and rational man who had chosen this place and this tenderness in accordance with his own requirements. He was no more than a child, whose possessor had loaned him, deposited him indeed. Barbara didn’t belong to anyone, nor did Jonathan, but Serge did. So he didn’t exist; the feelings he inspired or experienced didn’t exist either. To think he was alive, to listen to him, to follow him with your eyes, these were ridiculous mistakes. He hadn’t left his child’s play-pen, down there at the feet of those who oversee these things and the creatures shut up in them. You got it wrong, because these captives were allowed to travel, were there to be seen, aroused passions, raised smiles; but against all this they had their labels, police documents, legal and commercial papers, which proved they were possessions — that they were not themselves.
Jonathan was tormented by these facts. He had no notion of childhood. What was thus named and loved made him nauseous. To him, Serge seemed a completed being, different from any other, like to any other, as good as any other. A man, who would grow old like all the rest, but more slowly at first. He would grow up; this was little change compared to the thinning hair and wrinkling lips, the flabby breast, the legislative voice, the fat arse, the comatose slumber, or the ponderous weariness of false existence which, once manhood comes, weighs down the limbs and makes their action weak. For many years yet, Serge (but not Jonathan) would remain himself, solar, perfect, whole, and death would have no hold on him.
This was why Jonathan felt in childhood a robustness of savour, a sureness of touch and a fulfilment which were lacking later. But the word ‘child’ ordained the very opposite, and made Serge’s bountiful childhood a nightmare — just as a teenager’s face, infinite in its possibilities, becomes nightmarish when we see it in the criminal’s cell, in the family circle, in a gang of hooligans, a row of schoolchildren or workers. This same sentence of annulment had been pronounced on Serge, on his feelings, his thoughts and on the limitless energies of his body.
In the presence of this boy, suppressed by a single wor
d, Jonathan stood aside. He chose to be a servant, not daring even to be a witness. He did the dishes and the laundry, he cooked, he cleaned the bog, he tidied up, he did the shopping, he allowed himself to be hugged, offered up his nakedness, his sex, his sleep, and observed in the house a diffident splendour in which there basked, as if tomorrow had no existence, the aerial kingdom of the little boy. But there was no other future than the return of Barbara, protectress, mistress and determined lover of a dog called Serge.
The old woman went out with the watering-can when the sun no longer shone on the beds. It was five or six in the evening. The smells of the dinner Jonathan was cooking were beginning to waft through the air. Serge wanted to water as well, the little square of flowers in the grass, or the grass itself. But the sun here disappeared more gradually than on the other side of the fence, more slowly fading into gilt. Serge waited patiently. Held in a wet hand, the watering can was pulling down on his whole arm. On the young shoots, he watched the tongue of sunlight being swallowed up by shadow, and he could already imagine the damp smells, the dripping earth, brown and shining, shit-coloured, grainy with the tiny pebbles washed down by the water.
Now, behind the screen of bindweed, the neighbour was speaking to him:
‘So, you’re watering?’
She must have been smiling and watching him at work, Serge could imagine it. He answered: ‘Yes, I’m watering.’
Well-behaved, quietly spoken, as if to a mother. He sniffed, among the exhalations of the earth and the plants, to see what the old woman was eating that evening. He couldn’t smell anything, and he didn’t dare ask. With all the vegetables and all those hens, the dahlias in front and the sunflowers, it was surprising all the same. Her watering can was older, but on the other hand it was much bigger.
‘You got rabbits? No… oh you have,’ said Serge, belatedly remembering to use the polite vous.
‘Rabbits?’ said the woman, ‘I’ve got one big rabbit, she’s got four little ones. D’you want to see them?… You do the watering, then, and we’ll go and see them.’
Standing there, Jonathan too was invited into this garden he had never entered before. The-rabbit-hutch was on the other side, towards the rubbish, where the washing was hanging on the line and the lucerne sprang upward.
‘Look at that fruit!’ murmured Jonathan, pointing at a bunch of stiff stems, where swollen like oak galls hung big pale green balls veined with a darker colour. (They were gooseberries.)
‘They’re very hard, ah, that’s my garden for you,’ said the woman. ‘Me, I haven’t my teeth, if you’d like some for the little one… they’re not very ripe. So you’re called Serge, are you?’
‘…You heard!’ exclaimed Serge, laughing despite himself. Jonathan saw something coquettish in him, with a charming flash of canine he hadn’t seen before.
‘We hear a out things here, can’t help it.’
‘But why is she all alone in her cage, the rabbit?’
‘My dear, they eat their little ones, the horrid things, you can never leave them together, the bitches.’
‘She eats them? Really? It ought to be the rats,’ offered Serge. ‘She doesn’t!’
‘Well, well, there you are! Knee high to a grasshopper and he knows everything already. I’m telling you, she’ll eat them all: every last one!’
‘And the others there, they eat the little ones as well?’ ‘Ah, those others, well they do sometimes, yes. Look, I’ll get a little one out for.you.’
Dextrously, Serge took hold of the young rabbit, which was russet-brown and white, and he fussed over it with girlish gestures. He really would have liked to put it down on the ground, he felt that one could have a good run with an animal like that.
‘It smells of straw,’ he said. ‘It smells nice. It’s straw!’ ‘Yes, it smells of rabbit droppings, you be careful of your little shirt,’ said the woman.
Jonathan had the bad idea of buying the rabbit. It wasn’t easy. As it was, it wasn’t worth anything. And the old woman was too proud to sell it for the price of a grown animal, ready to kill and ready to cook.
‘But you can give me the lucerne,’ Jonathan insisted. The bargain was concluded, with the promise of greenstuff and bolted cabbages, they wouldn’t heart.
‘Well, look who’s been a lucky one!’ said the old woman, stroking the rabbit and looking at Serge’s face. ‘You won’t go and eat him up all raw, will you my pretty boy, will you?’
Busy pressing their noses together, the child and the animal failed to reply to this question, which wasn’t clearly addressed to either of them.
Jonathan had raised animals already, and he knew more or less what to do with this one. Tonight, the rabbit would sleep in the bedroom, on a bit of straw from the hutch and some cabbage leaves. Tomorrow they would knock up a home for it. Jonathan was afraid it had been taken away from its mother too young. His neighbour had insisted that it hadn’t, and in any case, the mother rabbit was old. Jonathan still thought the little rabbit would soon die. But that would be after Serge had left, and he would surely leave the animal behind.
Jonathan was glad he hadn’t already cooked rabbit for the boy. Serge did like to eat identifiable animals, though, rather than faceless pieces of meat. They’d got through the poultry repertoire; fine fish; frogs; undersized crayfish, caught illegally and sold under the counter.
‘Would you eat it?’ asked Jonathan.
‘You know? You know what we’re going to do? We’ll put it outside! We’ll send it out!’
Jonathan sighed: ‘Into the countryside… It would be nice, but he’d never survive. He couldn’t cope, he’s not wild.’
Serge didn’t believe him. Jonathan described what it was like in the wild. He said he would repair the garden fence; the animal would be able to go around without a cage and without risk. This half-measure left Serge disgruntled, his hunger for freedom in the shape of a rabbit still unsatisfied.
‘You can let him go if you like,’ said Jonathan, resigned. ‘Perhaps he would die here with us, you know.’
‘Well,’ said Serge, ‘We’ll put him in the garden, but you won’t block up the holes. You leave them alone! We’ll put plenty of food down to eat, and there we are! Like that, if he dies, it’ll be his own fault. Shall we do that?’
Jonathan smiled and nodded his head.
‘Yes then… But come on, say so! Say yes!’
Jonathan said yes.
As the sun shone brightly every day, Jonathan put the washing to dry outside. In any case, there was too much now to hang it up in the kitchen as he used to.
He did the washing in the old way, with ancient equipment he found in the cellar: a concrete sink, a copper with its chimney, a gas ring, a beetle and a scrubbing-brush which had lost half its bristles. He liked this solid labour — which pleased him all the more when there was Serge’s dirty clothing mixed in with his own. He took very great care with it. Serge, curious, watched him all the way through. He only knew the laundries in town, and this domestic laundering pleased him. It was the second-to-last day. Everything would be clean, mended and ironed ready for his departure.
Jonathan had felt the secret urge to steal some of the boy’s clothes, to hide them. He didn’t dare. Barbara and Serge were carefree enough for the theft to go unnoticed, but in Jonathan’s solitude, these clothes would take up too much space, would be too much present, in the bottom of their cupboard, where Jonathan would never look at them, except perhaps the one time before rolling them up into a ball and throwing them into a river very far from here, well, weighed down with stones.
His neighbour’s face clouded when she saw him hanging the pretty washing on the line. These small sizes of clothes were women’s property, no gentleman should touch them. She shrugged her shoulders, murmured to herself, remained hidden. It was well washed, the whites white, the colours bright, the woollens light and fluffy, fresh as a daisy. Bad work, of course, would have pleased her more. She could have intervened, said what she knew, been a little bit in
charge.
Serge helped to hang the washing. He pulled out his own clothes from the basket, as he didn’t dare touch Jonathan’s. Then he decided to hold one item out, and another, with a lewd laugh, almost dancing. Jonathan, clothespegs in his mouth, did not react. Their fabric silhouettes waved about in the wind, shone in the sunshine, very naked and very naive among the sheets and the napkins.
When they washed together, Serge was not so ironical: true nakedness wiped out the differences that clothing indicated or created. They would heat a big saucepan of water and get the tin bath ready in the middle of the kitchen, pushing the table and chairs aside. It was done late in the afternoon, so Serge wouldn’t get cold, and lasted almost till dinner. First of all Jonathan washed the boy; he did this in workmanlike fashion and he remained clothed. Serge behaved himself, standing straight as a soldier. But then Jonathan would undress, pour more water into the bath and stand up in it; the boy, his face scarlet with heat and his body pearled over with drops of water, would begin his provocations, his tricks and his dirty talk. A carnival of nakedness, damp, cool air on bare bottom, sex upright, in the kitchen, at tea time, time for leaving school.
‘Big balls!’ he chuckled, squinting sideways at Jonathan’s penis, then grabbing it, slapping and twisting it before declaring: ‘I’m going to wash you!’
He would soap Jonathan vigorously all over, thoroughly, leaving nothing out, as carefree and energetic as a housewife flannelling her kids. Jonathan washed only his face and his hair, too high for the boy to deal with them without difficulty.