Article 353

by Tanguy Viel

The word “heaven” came to my mind then, like a parasite that can’t be eradicated, because of all the years that had seen it wilt and rot where it stood. I could now see the word “heaven” in the living room, cracked all over, banging against the windows, falling apart and fading, as if it was soon going to slide under the closed door and spread its stench over the whole harbor. In the silence weighing on us, Le Goff made a sound with his mouth, a kind of “pff!” and opened his outstretched hand to say that the money, all the money, had evaporated, pff! And then, suddenly sober, he looked at me as if he was going to make a serious announcement during a town council session, and concluded: I fucked everything up.

  So just imagine: Me, who’d never been more than a poor guy caught up in the same story as him, suddenly he was confiding everything to me, as if we were brothers or, I don’t know, that through the liquor and the resignation amplifying each other, Le Goff no longer wanted to hide anything and it was as if all of his inner darkness was lit up by…I don’t know, by…

  Lucidity? said the judge.

  Yes, that’s exactly right, I said, lucidity. You always come up with the right word.

  And now you’re in the same boat as me, Le Goff said, and I’m sorry to say that this boat of ours, after twenty-five years of quietly cruising along the coast, has been taking on more water than it can handle. It might even be time to get off it.

  I don’t know what else Le Goff would’ve added, what tornado of words he would’ve pulled us into, if at that moment the door hadn’t been yanked open, the wind suddenly blowing into the living room, and we saw Erwan standing in front of us, his fan scarf still tied around his neck.

  We were startled, of course. I was surprised to see him, as if he had no business being there, as if he were still a kid asleep in his bedroom, whereas of course Erwan hadn’t been a kid for a long time. I was able to forget the years that had just passed while Erwan went from eleven to seventeen without my seeing anything other than the pit yawning at my feet, and I had kind of forgotten him, forgotten that he was old enough to stay up late and go out alone and come home when he felt like it. But if one of us should have been surprised, it was him, to see us up at such an hour with the nearly empty whiskey bottle and the smell of our talk from the bottom of our glasses still hanging in the air.

  If you’d seen the look he gave us at that moment, like we were two animals in a zoo, and him just saying, What is this shit? in his adult voice, I felt this was no time to argue. Erwan has grown up to be the nervous kind. You wouldn’t have taken the handcuffs off him, Your Honor. He would’ve jumped at your throat to strangle you in a second. Fathers and sons aren’t always alike, and if I’ve understood anything in this story, it’s that at some point your children aren’t an extension of yourself. But how many years it takes to realize that—not us so much, but them—how many years it takes them to eventually understand that they aren’t the avenging sword of our dreams and all the things we haven’t accomplished in life, that they’re not here to clean up our messes?

  The judge seemed to empathize, or at least his expression gave every sign of it.

  How old is your son? I asked.

  He’s seven.

  So you haven’t gone through any of this yet.

  He shook his head. No, not yet.

  Seven years old, I went on. You know what happened to us when Erwan was seven? I’m pretty sure the whole city remembers. I’m not saying it explains anything but on that day, I nearly died in front of my own son, that’s right, in front of Erwan and in front of the whole town, actually. I remember it like it was yesterday. A big Ferris wheel had been set up on the city hall square. I think it was the first year it was there, turning like that above us, its ring of cars like a big clock in the sky, so of course I suggested to Erwan that we take a spin. I bought two tickets, and we sat down facing each other, Erwan and me, on the round bench covered in fake red leather, and I told him not to move because it could be dangerous and because I’ve always had vertigo, even more for other people than for myself—especially with my own son—and the cars swinging in the wind and the city shrinking into an illustrated poster as we went up. You really got a great view of the city and our peninsula off in the distance and even our house probably in the middle of it, and this was before any question of divorce or Lazenec or all of that, and for a few minutes it was wonderful to be way up in the sky, with the ocean almost at our feet, yes it was wonderful. And then the car started back down. So when we got to the bottom near the wooden ramp, I naturally got out first to help Erwan down, and once on the ground I reached out to catch him. Only at that moment, when I almost had him in my arms, I don’t know what the guy at the controls was thinking, he must’ve been looking somewhere else or something, but the Ferris wheel suddenly started moving again, and Erwan was thrown back into the car and I don’t know what came over me, but seeing Erwan all alone above me, seeing him leaving without me, instead of letting him go, I reflexively grabbed the metal bar with both hands and started climbing too, only I was outside the car, just imagine, clinging to the iron bar by my arms and my whole body hanging in space, slowly rising like a hot-air balloon. When you look at it, a Ferris wheel goes up damn fast, I can tell you. Nobody realized what was happening except me, except me and of course Erwan, who started to scream and cry and pretty soon I was yelling like a wild man, Stop the machine, get me down, not to mention the string of curses I let loose. Loud music was blaring in the enclosures, and it drowned me and Erwan out, and the wind and the cold were increasing with every foot. I didn’t know how many more seconds I could hang on like that while the wheel kept climbing and climbing like a kind of music-box cylinder playing its notes. I could see the people down below starting to look and wonder when I was going to fall. Pretty soon I was more than a quarter of the way up, maybe seventy or eighty feet in the air, so if I let go, I was a dead man for sure. Those moments where you’re close to death don’t happen very often, do they? I can promise you, a sort of infinity opens between survival and death, the kind of gulf you fill with all the anxiety you need to keep yourself in suspense while inventing any tricks your brain can come up with to even conceive of the idea of death. Today, I don’t remember if I had time to think about all that then or if it was much later, but it remained like a breach that’s yet to be filled, and I often tell myself that dying isn’t so bad, that it would be over fast, I barely needed to believe that I would go on being part of the physical world, that I would become rock or sand or maybe part of me would still be here in a thousand years, turned into a plant, who knows? But I can tell you that I long ago ditched the idea that some part of me is going to rise into the air.

  As for rising into the air, at that moment I was like a spring stretched toward the sky that was going to snap soon. All I knew was the infinite distance that would never be filled was written in Erwan’s eyes, and his little child’s hands were trying to circle my wrists, with me saying, No, Erwan, don’t hold on to me, you’ll fall too, let me go. But at seven, what could he know about his preference and his desire to go on living after me? In a sense, it was too late to explain all that to him, to reassure him that of course he could live without me, that any child can survive and grow up without a father, and looking back now, maybe that might have been for the best.

  But here I am, in front of you. I didn’t die that day because as I screamed, the guy in the car below us screamed in turn to the one lower down and it went from one to another until a big human chain of screams reached the ears of the guy at the controls to tell him what was happening and to stop everything and quickly send the wheel turning backward. So I felt the car stop and then very slowly start coming back down, the same movie running backward, as if we were going back in time, erasing it, that nothing had happened, I hadn’t grabbed the iron bar, Erwan hadn’t cried, we’d never gotten onto the Ferris wheel. I remember that feeling, and I’d like it if it were still possible to feel that sometime in our lives we could go backw
ard.

  Except you’ll agree that in normal time, there’s no reverse gear. I haven’t seen anything that looked like that in my story, in any case, except to say that everything since then has been going counterclockwise, as if I’d fallen asleep that day at the very top of the Ferris wheel and haven’t woken up, that since then I hear murmuring deep in my dreams, and Erwan hadn’t yet grown up, I mean he hadn’t yet seen his father slumped on the sofa year after year with a calculator instead of a brain, hitting the bottle with old friends who got redder and redder, and fatter and fatter. But Erwan has grown up since then. Erwan drinks whiskey and smokes cigarettes, and his shoulders are broader than mine.

  He may well say I’m the one who has aged, that my neck is bowed with weariness at the sound of the thousand battles that should be fought, but in fact he’s just starting to understand he’s the one who has grown, that he no longer has to stand on tiptoe to kiss me, and he’s discovering within himself the only thing that has to worry him: I’m his father, just me. That’s something you learn when you’re eighteen or twenty. That you will have the same father your whole life. That you will spend your life with the same ghosts. The same singers on the radio. The same politicians. And be stuck with the same childhood.

  Erwan didn’t stay with us for long. He spun on his heel and went to lock himself in his bedroom, turning up the music loud so we could hear. Le Goff and I almost burst out laughing, like two naughty boys caught in the act, each one held up by the other’s giggling. But we heard the bedroom door slam and looked at each other, and we didn’t laugh. Then Le Goff got up, awkwardly leaning on the soft sofa armrests, and said, a little wearily: I think I’m going to go now.

  But what was strange was that now I didn’t want him to leave. I don’t know if it was the wind outside calling, or the feeling that my house was too small for our anger, or only that it wasn’t all that late, but I wound up saying, I’ll go with you, Martial, it’ll do me good. And that’s what we did. We stood up, kind of quickly. We put on our jackets and went out.

  As we walked in the night wind, it became obvious that I’d caught up with Le Goff, that is to say that in the damp air I was as drunk as he was, and also as light as he was, with the liquor and the wind like two bookends holding us perfectly upright in the clear night.

  There are two things I sometimes want to thank, I told the judge, and that’s wind and liquor. That’s right, liquor. It may shock you to hear me saying that, especially since you wouldn’t have me drinking even a beer right now, but I’m telling you, liquor and wind make an exceptional combination. Never forget that on some evenings even the worst rotgut whiskey, the stuff that’ll twist your guts all the next day, will fix your heart, it’ll tear at your heart but it will fix it, drain it of all its toxins accumulated over the months that suddenly no longer circulate in your veins because they’ve been eliminated by gallons of liquor and lost sleep. You owe it to all those things you would only do at certain hours and when you’re in a certain condition, all those thoughts you would only have at certain hours and in a certain condition, and those thoughts are like the most powerful detergent I know.

  That same detergent led us down to the beach to look at the choppy sea. With all the wind outside and all the liquor inside us that night, it did us good to look at the sea and swear at Lazenec. We said we weren’t going to give in to that asshole. We shouted at the ocean. That son of a bitch. And it was almost like a contest. That motherfucker. Each insult went skipping out over the water. That bastard. And the wind carried them far away. That fat prick.

  When I got home later, I remember that Erwan was sitting there in the living room his legs crossed like in a waiting room, with that look of his as he waited for me, just as it was like me to very quietly turn my key in the lock so as not to wake him up, in case he’d been able to go to sleep. He was looking at the whiskey bottle like it was evidence against me. He asked what Le Goff had been doing there. What the fuck was he doing here? is what he said, exactly.

  I don’t know if it was meeting his gaze from that armchair, with his head now higher than its back, but hearing him talk to me like a father to his son caused something in me to crack. That’s right, you heard me, a father to his son, because in opening the door, in stepping into my own house, I was suddenly a teenager who deserved a good hiding. It’s as if I were the one tucked deep in his pocket now, because for sure that’s where I would’ve wanted to be, hidden in the seam near his armpit, if only to escape the shame, or, I don’t know, whatever feeling of unworthiness a father might have in front of his son.

  Erwan poured himself a whiskey, and it felt weird to see my own son raising a glass of liquor to his lips.

  None of this concerns you, I told him, this is grown-up stuff. If you were a normal boy you wouldn’t be here waiting for me late on a Saturday night, you should be out with a girl, or I don’t know, in a bar drinking beer with your pals, but not worrying about things that won’t change your life. That’s it, I said, at your age, you should focus on life-changing things.

  He just went on drinking his whiskey and when he blew out a puff of cigarette smoke, his whole answer to me was written in the cloud in front of his face, without my being able to tell how much avoidance or insolence was in it. At that point, when we probably hadn’t yet finished our conversation, we heard a shot in the night, a deep, heavy sound. I think I understood right away. I think I said: Le Goff.

  It always happens, there comes a day and a time when things reach a tipping point and afterward you can’t act as if it hadn’t happened. It might just be one more grain of sand falling in the hourglass, but it’s one grain too many, and after that nothing’s the same, everything collapses or is renewed, with events falling one after another like the lines of a poem.

  I think the shot could still be heard beneath the black umbrellas open over the tomb the following Friday, the bullet bouncing off the walls of the bell tower for at least three days and ricocheting in the tolling of the bell before whizzing down the cemetery paths. There, with the village gathered by the hundreds, its echo joined the beating of our hearts, the crunching of the gravel, and the pounding of the rain, because it was raining that day.

  Lazenec was there, of course. I looked at him, with just the space of the open grave between us and the coffin slowly being lowered by the cemetery workers to its final resting place.

  One thing’s for sure, Your Honor, if you looked to see where the bullet that Le Goff put in his skull a few days earlier really came from, if you wanted to find the bullet’s provenance in the facts, I mean the real provenance in thought, in the inner circuit of images and shames, it wouldn’t take long to figure out who pulled the trigger.

  I tossed a rose onto the coffin and so did the others, there were dozens of them and they fell like colored tears onto the black wood. A hard rain was falling, and each person paused for a moment in the rain: friends, neighboring mayors, townspeople, and of course Catherine, holding her hat with one hand because of the wind that was still blowing hard that day. France was there, too. Dressed in black, too. I don’t dare say that France had class, because people like us definitely fall into that category called “ordinary people,” but on that day, because of the black veil that covered her face, her high heels, and her velvet coat closed at the throat, I found her beautiful, without knowing what sparked that thought in me, or not really a thought, maybe a feeling, though I’ve never quite been able to distinguish between a thought and a feeling.

  Afterward, France decided to not follow us to the mayoralty, where we’d organized a final tribute in the banquet hall. As was usual with her, France slipped away, and when Erwan and I looked around for her in the crowd coming from the cemetery, she had disappeared. On that day, even Erwan wasn’t acting the rebellious adolescent who looked down on me, because I think Le Goff’s death had shaken him, too. We walked side by side to the mayoralty, ignoring the rain, ignoring the dripping water soaking our shoes and our co
ats.

  So there we were, back in the same hall that had once been so festive, and of course we helped get things ready and fill the empty glasses that were sitting on the paper napkins. I went to the storeroom to get a couple of bottles, and there in the corner stood the old Grands Sables model, all by itself. You could still see the tiny plastic people, who seemed to not have enough air to breathe, the dust gathering on the glass like condensation that would eventually asphyxiate them.

  I brought the bottles out to the buffet table and we all ate our piece of brioche and drank our glass of cider, in one of those moments when we take a pause before resuming normal life, something to get us clear of death or the idea of death. At funerals we always dive into the grave with our dead and then invent a thousand strategies to back out and get shed of death, which seems to cling to our clothes for a long time. Antoine Lazenec was there, holding a glass of cider. I guarantee he was the only person to not have left anything in the grave, at least to judge by the way he was stuffing his face with brioche and curbing his smiles somewhat, out of respect. Our eyes met. In those long minutes with somber shapes moving around us, with everyone having a bite to eat and putting Le Goff out of their minds, Lazenec and I were like two stags in the forest watching each other, unsure whether or not to do battle.

  But just as I was about to get my coat from the cloakroom, with Erwan already waiting for me on the porch and smoking, Lazenec quickly came over and started talking to me, the way he knew how to, about how what had happened was terrible, that between you and me, he said, I wouldn’t have thought that Le Goff was so fragile.

  I answered that yes, it was terrible, that’s so, and I was already putting on my coat to leave when he took me aside, away from the crowd, adding some vague stuff—that in the world of politics it’s a pity to have to say this, but you have to be tough; that maybe Le Goff had more of a dark side than was apparent—pushing the conversation further and further. I just acquiesced without saying anything because in any case I didn’t have any appropriate answers. I just shrugged a few times as if to say, I don’t know anything about it, I’m sure he had his reasons, we never really know people, you know.