by Tony Duvert
Jonathan agreed; he could remember giving his friends books that were too good, following the same reasoning.
While Serge was searching, he made a tiny hole in the horse’s head, and with an equally tiny screw he succeeded in fastening the little chain to it by its ends, forming a circle. The pendant so fashioned took its place on a piece of black garter elastic which Jonathan had preferred to all the other cords, for fear the boy should strangle himself.
He was right; Serge kept the trinket round his neck when he went to sleep. The next day, Jonathan replaced the elastic with a bookmark pulled from a big bound book; the ribbon of emerald green watered silk was frail enough not to be dangerous, and it looked good on the boy’s skin.
The little rabbit hadn’t run away. Serge touched it, stroked it, played with it every day. The little creature was almost as playful as a cat, but there was no smile on its face. It had a formal look, occasionally pretty, usually rather elderly looking. What was unusual about the breed were the long ears, very large and rounded, which stood up straight. Jonathan, used to tame rabbits, greyish brown, flabby and shy, was surprised by this rabbit, wilder and stronger than the others. It might have been descended from a wild ancestor, killed in a trap, whose little ones had been gathered up.
The young rabbit hadn’t discovered the holes in the netting. It hopped about the garden, nibbled at the cabbage leaves, looked at plants and flowers, often slept or just rested, recognised people, put up with being handled by Serge, who treated it like a tame squirrel, putting it round his neck, kissing it on the mouth, fusing his liveliness with that of the animal. He did not disdain to hold conversations with it, and generally the rabbit won the argument, though not without a struggle.
The animal had its moments of madness; it spun in circles on the grass, rolled on its back, shaking its trembling paws like a dying man, rushed around, sniffed, seemingly intelligent in its activity, but its empty eye gave it a distracted look. It lived outside; the kitchen door was opened for it when it rained, but it preferred to shelter under some big leaves.
The two cats no longer came. The time of year offered them resources which no longer depended on one place alone. But Jonathan still put food out for them in the garden before going to bed, and he usually found the dishes empty in the morning. The cats, intoxicated with the smell of life, the scent of live creatures, ran about the country like bachelors in search of love; still out of luck in the evening, they came home shamefaced to devour their food.
The pond Serge had dug had grown large enough for him to sit in it completely, in muddy water the colour of milky coffee. First of all, he’d only dipped his feet into the cream, which frothed up at the edges as he poured in the water. In less than an hour, all the water had been absorbed and he had to put more in. The walls of the hole were coated with a soft smooth shiny ooze.
Then, at Jonathan’s suggestion, the child bathed his naked bottom. It was cold, tickly, and the bottom of the pond was sticky. When he got up again, a milky and earthy border ran along his thighs, his belly and the small of his back, just as drinking from a big coffee-bowl left breakfast moustaches on the upper lip.
These baths were so agreeable that Serge, excited, hated to be left there alone. So Jonathan would slip his foot between the child’s thighs; or he would crouch down, plunge his hand into the depths of the water, gathering up the creamy mud and pushing it against the boy’s intimate places.
They would often draw together. Jonathan would get out his biggest sheets of white paper, as big as the drawing board itself. Each armed with a pencil, thick or thin, black or coloured according to the mood of the moment, they would draw away. Pictures, writing, stories followed one after another, each taking his turn like a game of cards, indecent and bantering conversations where the drawing was no more than an accompaniment, riddling burlesques, composed in silence, waiting for solutions; Jonathan and Serge made innocent love.
After watering, Serge had moved on to gardening. He’d cleared a corner of ground next to the fence, had broken it up and raked it, and looked for something to put there. He dug up plants, wild flowers and tiny saplings, replanted them in his rectangular plot, then flooded his dying garden. It wasn’t the season for planting.
But he wasn’t discouraged. In the morning, he would visit the scene of his labours. He saw the drooping plants, their tops flopping down, their petals tattered; he didn’t dare lift them to replace them with others. He talked to them quietly, lifted up the drooping stems in his hands:
‘You’re not dead. You can stay!’ and then added to himself, in front of another which was drying out, ‘That one’s done for, tomorrow then.’
Everything was blooming. Only Serge’s plot was in its death throes, making one think not so much of winter as of bunches of withered flowers thrown away in dustbins.The pond too was developing. Serge had made some boats, and put them to float there. He added to it a sort of canal, which, like a motorway interchange, made a great curve as it left the basin and then rejoined it. The island this produced, Serge populated with inhabitants and little copses. These copses were made with pieces of broken-off branch, which he would renew. The inhabitants were made from hazel-nuts, matches, and acorns — brown from the previous year, or very little green ones, pulled from the oak trees of the neighbourhood. And there were cows, lots of cows with stiff tails: the third of a matchstick which he stuck in their bums.
The island was pretty, and it prospered, again thanks to the matches. Jonathan bought a number of big boxes, and they made houses, benches and sheds, they coloured them, or made people to go in, on, or at the door. Serge dug a swimming-pool in the middle of his island, a rectangular hole where he lodged the bottom half of a hard plastic box which had contained correspondence cards. They put a little bit of blue in the water, and bathers floated in it, tanned as rotten acorns.
One of the island’s shores later had a well-organised beach, with its umbrellas and sloping sand.
A hillock garnished with mosses received a windmill, whose cardboard sails were pinned to a nut which swivelled at the top of a tower of matchsticks. Gusts of wind at ground level acted on the sails, which thrummed, if you listened to them closely.
Roads, steps and squares were laid out, and carefully swept. Finally, Jonathan installed street-lamps connected to a battery, which were lit in the evenings. Then the trees, the paths and houses seemed to come alive, the little vegetable people seemed purposeful, and it was a place where one would have liked to live.
Jonathan didn’t particularly want to go back to the town. Serge seemed to have forgotten the three children; he could in any case have gone to see them on his own, but he didn’t suggest that either. Such an expedition would not have presented any risk, Serge knew how to look after himself; his open and cheerful manner, his laugh, his attention to people, his impertinence and his vitality charmed even the brutish and the crabbed, even some of the women; there was nowhere he could go without pleasing people and receiving help.
The young painter loved this character of Serge’s. He could imagine the child six foot high, covered in hair, or even ruined by wrinkles and convictions, without this new Serge making him sad, as long as he imagined him with the child’s humour and his soul (except this doesn’t exist).
After a few days, the barbarous pendant no longer hung around the child’s neck. Jonathan didn’t ask what had happened to it. It was natural that the incident should end like that.
One morning, though, Serge said, ‘Can we go on the bus? Can we go?’ and here they were in town. They soon found the building, the floor, the door. They rang; there was no reply. It was very nearly lunchtime, though.
‘Perhaps they’re at school,’ said Jonathan, who didn’t know the dates of the school holidays. Serge asked:
‘But where do they eat then?’
‘At the school canteen, I should think, and their mother’s at work,’ said Jonathan. ‘We’ll come back after we’ve eaten.’
He reproached himself fo
r being so distant from the normal world; this freedom and this disgust closed off any access to the labyrinths and prisons which swallow up the childish population, and he no longer knew how to keep in touch. The immense daily deportation which they suffered left him upset and unresisting.
And as Serge no longer had any part in this husbandry, the children became as inaccessible to him as they were to Jonathan.
They ate lunch.
In Paris, Serge was an absolute devil in restaurants. he talked very loudly, he stared at and saw everybody; he turned his plate upside down and made puddles of food on the tablecloth; he shook the table, banged the glasses, filled them with bread, dropped his fork and followed it to the ground, where stuffed on all fours between the legs of the grown-ups he thrashed around noisily; he would order three dishes and then abandon them in favour of a crust, he fished about in the dishes with his fingers, or flecked them with his own food; above all, he used to laugh, get excited, playing up with Jonathan and provoking the waiters.
Jonathan worshipped this turbulence. He saw beyond it. Despite the disagreeable side to the situation, he could sense a truth the child was pointing out; and he recognised beneath the manners he disapproved of, a model he would have liked to follow. For with Serge he was like a wandering disciple, who through valley and mountain, river and forest, plain and coast, has searched for a master — that is to say a witness — and has found him at last. But this master does not know he knows; only those who have searched for him, after rejecting the great men and the charlatans, can understand his lesson; the others will mock, will be humiliated, will persecute, will go away.
Later, Serge had realised the displeasure he caused. Now his meals in public were well-behaved. Invariably he would eat an almost raw steak with greasy chips, after a plate of charcuterie from which he ate no more than the gherkins and the butter, and followed by a chocolate ice-cream, covered in whipped cream, which he chopped and mixed to make a pap he abandoned as soon as it got too cold, which is to say, as soon as he reached the lower part. It was useless to take him to a good restaurant; Jonathan nonetheless chose respectable ones, so the food would look good and he could enjoy a little calm.
After lunch they went up once again to the three children’s house, rang the bell and knocked at the door in vain. They gave up, and looked for something to occupy them until the bus left.
There was no matinee at the only cinema in town. There was a programme of heterosexual pornographic films, shown on another screen, on Saturdays after midnight.,
The town was deserted. Not even a child in the streets. So the holidays hadn’t started and it wasn’t Wednesday.
‘It’s a labour camp,’ said Jonathan. ‘We shouldn’t come on the wrong days.’
‘I didn’t know,’ apologised Serge.
Jonathan’s remark wasn’t aimed at the child; but he saw the streets empty, the cafés empty, the river deserted, the shopkeepers with nothing to do, and he sensed the silence within which their steps were echoing.
They walked along sluggishly. When the shops opened, they started listlessly to make some useless purchases.
Then they had some luck; in a fine square, planted with poplars and provided with an urinal, they discovered the huts and canvas of a travelling fair. It wasn’t closed; there were a dozen people strolling about, middle-aged men and women overdressed for the time of year, sorry-looking adolescents.
They approached a young fairground worker, almost naked, repairing a wheel. Jonathan looked at his muscles, his posture, then looked at Serge. The man seemed to him to be made of rubber or plaster: an appearance without being, conforming to the universal ideal of the time. This smooth body’s rounded forms made Jonathan think of a series of bald scalps, or a hawker’s bunch of balloons.
The three of them spoke together. The boy said the conjuror was just giving a performance. It was just there, close by: a caravan with an extension in green canvas, whose door, or curtain rather, opened in Arab fashion. Jonathan was worried that the performance was being given to empty benches; but Serge insisted on seeing. At the same time he climbed onto Jonathan, had himself held and carried, as if the young fairground worker’s athletic appearance had given him ideas of the jungle.
On the other side of the green canvas they were in half-darkness; the conjuror, prudently, stood in an indifferent slanting light in lurid colours, apple green and dirty red, with a single white lamp which destroyed all depth. Underfoot, the beige and dusty soil of the square.
The show had already begun. He was doing commonplace tricks. They could stay at the back, there were a few customers at the front. The conjuror was a slender youth, quiet and cheerful, with a plain and pleasant face. He must have set to work, despite its being so quiet, because he had been told to; he took it in good part, and managed his equipment with skill. But the impression of bareness and sadness was so great that Jonathan sometimes turned his eyes away from him. He felt embarrassed, as if he were committing an indiscretion by being there, or had injured a sensitive person in his self-respect.
Serge followed the magic tricks with the imperturbable cool of those who have television. But here it was in the flesh, just the same, and the boy’s almost new blue costume, his hair cut so short one might have imagined him working there between two stints in the barracks, his little Dracula cape, it was very like the real thing, that was it. The trick that impressed Serge was the one with the razor-blades. The young man took one, and cut some paper with it to show how sharp it was, then he ate a great many, quickly, using both his hands. His thin cheeks bulged greedily, his eyes almost popped out, he chewed away, almost rubbing his stomach with pleasure. Then, by a miracle incomprehensible to the profane, he pulled the blades out of his mouth — and now they made a long garland, a bright and jingling necklace. These supplies must have been very expensive; unless he made them himself, for he seemed to be good with his hands.
‘What’s good is with fire,’ said Serge, unsatisfied.
They had to applaud. Without the little one with him, Jonathan would have hidden beneath the bench. He wanted to go and see the magician after the performance. That was surely to feel better himself. Jonathan, who worried very little about beauty or ugliness, simply felt he would like to approach him, embrace him, touch him. He recognised childhood in those who no longer had it, like its absence in those who seemed to show it. He loved the magician, and was not ashamed to have seen him. In the innocence and fragility of others, he found a means of suffering less from his. The villagers clapped hard.
‘He’s a kid, still a kid,’ said one old girl to her husband, as the audience made their way out. The husband said nothing.
Outside, Jonathan glanced at the caravan, which provided the backstage area. He saw nothing. He went closer with the child. He tried to look through the windows, in which were reflected the nearby trees. No movement inside: the caravan was empty. The boy had disappeared.
But this was no magic trick, the boy must simply have been having a pee, he would reappear. There was no time to wait, Serge was getting impatient. He wanted to climb again on top of Jonathan, who took him, kissed him, and with the hand that held Serge under the thighs, felt his balls and bounced them. Serge paid no attention, and pointed to the air-guns on one of the fairground stalls.
Small children were not allowed to use these, and in any case they weren’t tall enough. But Jonathan had a discussion with the stall-keeper, fired two or three times just for show, and as he had paid with a perfectly good banknote and hadn’t wanted the change, they both gave the boy a hand. Jonathan was on his knees, and lifted Serge a foot or so, holding him by the waist; the stall keeper took hold of the gun-barrel and pointed it. He wasn’t a bad chap; Serge got two bull’s eyes. He carried away a little bar of nougat and a doll made of artificial feathers. And his two cards, shot clean through.
He gave Jonathan his prizes, and kept hold of his marksman’s certificates. He talked a lot about the air-gun. It was better than the pop-gun; and
it made holes. He asked Jonathan if you could kill someone with it. Jonathan said yes, he supposed so, because he didn’t know; in that situation, he rarely dared answer no.
‘Then I’ll kill you with it!’ Serge concluded, laughing.
Jonathan hugged him again; he had never been loved so well that such a thing could be said.
They had to visit the three children’s house one last time. Serge still wanted to give his present (which Jonathan had been carrying since the morning, augmented now by the shooting prizes), and he wasn’t going to be put off by anything so negligible as two failed attempts.
Even before they rang, they knew the door would be opened; they could hear voices on the other side. Serge quivered with impatience, and pressed the button of the door bell with the same energy with which he put out his arm to shake hands. He laughed at the door and at the mat. Jonathan, on the other hand, was ill at ease. If the mother was there, what were they going to say? What right did Serge have to come back? And if the young woman let her children loose for a moment, she and Jonathan would have to find some way of passing the time while the four children were together. When old ladies with dogs meet, the dogs look at each other, enjoy each other, fight each other, tickle each other in the arse, but the old women hold them back — mustn’t get too familiar with that woman’s nasty little creature. They exchange a bitter politeness, a menopausal rictus: what can be done about these shameless animals, which oblige them to be almost human?
Here, it will be worse; Jonathan isn’t a woman, he can’t say one word against what the other, mounted on her maternal stilts, may claim to decide for the best.
The door opened. Jonathan and Serge saw, with the same delight, Thomas’s round cheeks and cheerful little nose; with his smile the boy showed off his milk-teeth, a missing front one giving his mouth the black patch that covers up a pirate’s eye. They shook hands almost enough to dislocate their shoulders. Mummy wasn’t there, they were lucky. The two visitors escaped a little while before she came back.