Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992).

  MONSIEUR DUDRON’S ADVENTURE

  Around two in the afternoon on April 17, 1939, M. Dudron, comfortably ensconced in his folding deck chair, was taking a siesta in his office-studio. As often happened when he wasn’t working, his thoughts turned to painting. “Painters,” he said to himself, “today and even for some time past, no longer make painting; they do not paint; they lay out pigment on the canvas to dry. Now, a beautiful painting is never dried pigment but beautiful colored substance. I understand very well how it is that no one understands. It’s been ages (two or three quarters of a century) since that precious thread of Ariadne was lost. Is it my task to find it again and present it to the painters, my contemporaries, who yawn over their palettes until their jaws are dislocated and try to save face by a pretentious and skeptical attitude which, nonetheless, is basically nothing more than dissatisfaction and annoyance? For that matter there is enough to be dissatisfied and annoyed with,” M. Dudron continued to himself. “Painters today no longer enjoy themselves when they paint. They all feel, most confusedly it’s true, but they feel it anyway, that it’s no use, that it’s no longer any use. A few, out of despair, dive into the swamp of so-called invention or so-called spirituality; they try to entertain themselves and also to entertain others by talking of inspiration, lyricism, astonishment, strangeness, mystery, oh yes, mystery most of all, but these, alas, are nothing but minor subterfuges which, if they can furnish a few results from the practical point of view, ease their consciences only up to a certain point, while basically, in their heart of hearts, they all yearn with infinite nostalgia for that distant land, that paradise lost, of beautiful, of very beautiful painting.”

  He had reached this point in his meditations when the tremendous roar of a motor caused him to get up and go over to the window. Down below, before his front door, he saw a magnificent automobile, long and gleaming as a terrestrial torpedo boat. A female acquaintance of his got out. She was a woman with passionate tresses, dressed with an elegance both severe and athletic that suggested a cross between Athena and a modern Valkyrie, but more Valkyrie than Athena. Bursting into M. Dudron’s room, she began without sitting down or even greeting him to speak to him very quickly and breathlessly, meanwhile pacing up and down the room. “Be ready this evening at seven o’clock sharp, Maître, when I shall come by in the car to pick you up.” Then, still striding back and forth, she proceeded to explain that she had arranged to meet several friends at an inn about fifty kilometers away, on a hill above a small town situated on a lake. It was there, close to the inn, that an acquaintance of hers, a superrich industrialist whose specialty was the manufacture of bushings for hunting rifles, had created a snail farm. Hence it was a matter of going out there to dine at the inn, eat the snails, and afterward visit the famous breeding grounds. “It seems, Maître,” she informed M. Dudron, who was listening with a benevolent and resigned air, “it seems they have immense fields there full of cabbages and salad greens of every sort. There are also peach trees, lots of peach trees, for snails are very fond of peaches. In the fields and under the peach trees, by tens, by hundreds of thousands, by tens and hundreds of millions, live the snails. When an overripe peach falls from a tree, the snails direct their ocular antennae toward the fallen fruit, as the cannons of a fleet would take aim at the fort on the enemy’s coastline. Slowly, but surely, they begin the offensive; they cling like leeches to the unfortunate peach, and in a few moments nothing remains but the pit, as dry as if it had been exposed to the desert sun for a week. Then, sated, the voracious mollusks move off, even more slowly than they came, leaving behind them that trail that everyone recognizes. Before snails are eaten they must be purged; to purge them one lets them fast for a period of from five to eight days.” All these vivid descriptions were scarcely what was needed to encourage M. Dudron to eat snails, especially since he had a horror of mollusks in general and snails in particular. He had an innate aversion to all flabby substances lacking an internal armature. This was one reason why he disliked the painting of his contemporaries. Yet it would be wrong to deduce from this that he liked hard substances; thus, he felt no empathy for certain materials such as cast iron and steel. In painting as well he disliked hardness and stiffness; he liked neither the Primitives nor certain painters like Mantegna and Botticelli. He made an exception for Dürer. “But Dürer n’est pas dur,” he had the habit of saying with a secret smile, “even though Vasari in his Lives calls him il Duro.” For M. Dudron an ideal substance ought to be soft and fluid, but at the same time firm and solid; consequently his favorite painters were Veronese, Tintoretto, Velázquez, and Rubens. M. Dudron would have liked to explain all this to the lady who was trying to drag him off to the snail breeding grounds, but, whether he feared lest she understand not a word of what he was saying and even think him subject to attacks of lunacy, or whether on the other hand his atavistic politeness forbade him to contradict his interlocutrice, he pretended to accept enthusiastically the idea of going to eat snails that evening.

  Precisely at seven the same roar he had heard that afternoon informed M. Dudron that the hour of departure had struck. The modern Valkyrie pushed her car to incredible speeds, but drove with such assurance and mastery that the vehicle was completely transformed; it was no longer an automobile made of metal and wood, but something tremendously elastic; it lengthened or shortened itself as the case required; it passed between two obstacles, grazing them with its metallic flanks, and emerged from them like an enormous flow of paste, with the movements of a gigantic and ultraswift caterpillar, only to plunge between two more obstacles even closer together than the first ones. They passed through the suburbs of the city. It was the hour when crowds of workers, having finished work, were bicycling home. They were returning home pedaling patiently and obstructing the whole street. They were pedaling patiently toward hearth and home, where their wives, their children, their parents, all those they loved, whom they cherished above all others, despite the quarrels that often broke out, and the misunderstandings, even though sometimes on Sundays, to amuse themselves and escape the boredom of family life and enjoy a few hours of liberty, they might abandon the house for nearby inns so as to meet their fellow workers, with whom they would empty bottles of wine and cider and stoppered bottles of beer, meanwhile playing cards and billiards and, when the weather was fine, at skittles behind the inns, in courtyards surrounded by fences among whose pickets stems of sunflowers were entwined.

  Despite the vehicles of every sort which encumbered the street, the modern Valkyrie, with an assurance and ease which amazed and enchanted M. Dudron, transformed her car into a sort of reptile, a moray eel, slithering between one cyclist and another, between a car and a pedestrian, between two pedestrians, with a litheness that was wondrous to behold. Once the city’s suburbs were left behind the car turned onto the highway. Meanwhile, night had fallen. To the north, near the heights they were approaching, storm clouds had piled up. The livid glow of lightning flashes picked out the black crests of mountains, of which one, very distinctive because its crenelated summit bristled with enormous teeth, like the jaw of a vanquished dragon, had been nicknamed the Great Saw. Finding herself alone on the highway, the driver accelerated. M. Dudron began to feel slightly ill. With a worried eye he followed the movements of the speedometer’s needle: 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 100, 105, 115, 120, 125, 130. A hundred and thirty kilometers an hour in total darkness far from the city, and it was the seventeenth of the month, an ill-omened day. A few drops of rain began to fall, making the road terribly slippery. M. Dudron was afraid. The night was complete; inside the car too, darkness reigned, except for a few dials in front of the driver that were faintly lit by a bluish, cold, wan, lunar, disturbing light, which made one think of clinics where seriously ill patients dozed, patients who had recently undergone surgery, and also of the laboratories of future centuries, where strange and infernal in
ventions would have been perfected by ingenious scientists with hydrocephalic heads like monstrous fetuses preserved in alcohol. Against the windows and sides of the car one heard the continuous murmuring of the riven air at an always increasing speed. They passed through a small town already half-asleep; in the dim light at the end of a park M. Dudron perceived for a moment the monument erected by the inhabitants to the memory of the monarch who, at that spot several decades previous, had been struck down by the regicide’s dagger. This fleeting vision transported M. Dudron back to the remote time of his childhood; like scenery at the back of a stage which is gradually lit up, images defined themselves in his mind. He saw himself in his father’s house; it was also a stormy evening; his father had come in holding a newspaper on which was printed, in huge letters, news of the king’s assassination. M. Dudron remembered his father’s anxious and saddened face. On the walls of the study, amid photographs of various models of locomotives, were two large portraits of the king and queen in black carved-wood frames. M. Dudron was seated at his desk on which was placed a small kerosene lamp with a conical glass shade that was the green of a baize-covered billiard table. M. Dudron remembered that, while his father was speaking, he himself was seated on the corner of a divan, looking at the portrait of the king on the wall as it melted into darkness and seemed to slide, to sink into the immense night of history and of time. From outside one could hear the lugubrious howling of the tempest that descended from the nearby mountains. Shaken by the wind, the branches of the eucalyptus trees in the garden tapped against the shuttered windows.

  The violent glare of a lightning flash revealed the presence of a hill, a lake, and a small town. This brought M. Dudron back to reality. He rejoiced to think that the end of the mad race was approaching and that his fears and discomfort would soon be over. Having traversed the lacustrine town, the car began to climb a slope. The lady behind the steering wheel pointed out to him a villa in a garden; in that villa had lived and worked a famous novelist, whose monument stood in the town square, facing the lake; in the novelist’s study everything had been left as it was: the table at which he wrote, his inkwell and pens, his armchair, his library, and even bits of bric-a-brac that happened to be there at the moment of his death. He died while working; one spring morning the old maidservant who tended him had, on entering the study, found him with his head on the table, as though asleep; outside the birds were twittering and the flowering trees shed their perfume; it has been claimed that the old servant had, in talking to her neighbors, recounted that on the eve of her master’s death she had dreamed she saw him asleep, seated in his armchair, his head resting on the table, just as she had found him the next day. It was said also that on the day he died, despite the fact that no fire had been lit in the house, a very white puff of smoke had emerged from the chimney on the roof, climbed into the blue sky, and disappeared. The local citizenry believe it to have been the soul of the novelist flying off up into the depths of the sky.

  As they climbed the slope, the speed of the car noticeably decreased. That made M. Dudron feel more optimistic. Finally they stopped in front of a vague building which gleamed white in the darkness. Several windows on the ground floor were illuminated. A glance revealed to M. Dudron an inn with a grocery shop and delicatessen beside it; he also had the impression that one could find lodging for the night there. However, this last impression was suggested to him by his subconscious in order to calm him: Nothing, in fact, allowed one to suppose that in this house there were rooms to let to travelers; yet, trusting the impression suggested by his subconscious, M. Dudron imagined that if, when the moment came to take his seat again in the car to return to his lodgings, a sudden discomfort followed by a gastric indisposition, produced by the fear of experiencing anew the fears and the emotions which had already shaken him, were to render his return impossible, he would have found a room there which would perhaps not have offered all the desirable comforts, but in which he might have been able to double-lock himself; a bed which mightn’t perhaps have been too good, but in which he would have at last been able to stretch out and rest.