Lovers (9781609459192)
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57
One evening, the silence in the Créon mansion becomes deafening. It is the lull before the clamors, before sentence is pronounced.
Balthazar, who cannot die, who was not born to die, as they both know, is condemned to death.
My love.
Two little words that Sébastien can no longer bring himself to say, so overwhelmed is he with fear.
He rarely leaves Balthazar now.
What am I still to him, the matchless one? Balthazar asks himself, in torment.
Let me die, before I am abandoned.
But who can affirm anything at all?
Why must fate always have the upper hand?
58
She takes her meals downstairs, in a kind of boudoir, at a richly laid table next to a French door that looks out on a garden no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, green with box trees, a yellow rose bush in one corner. She no longer strolls along the three short paths. If she made up her mind to do so, if she forced herself, she would immediately begin to rail against the world, men and kings, to loathe them. Screaming will be for later. She can only imagine screaming deep in the woods, as she can only conceive of dying in one’s own bed, unless one is a man, for any man, as is well known, might meet his fate on a battlefield. Bed or battlefield, but not at the stake.
She imagines the stake, very high and very red, making a noise like a smithy.
Hell on earth—men have been accustomed to it for centuries.
She says no to hell.
He must flee.
But Balthazar rejects such cowardice.
No, he will not flee. She despairs of him. Just as he despairs when Sébastien stays out all night, although that happens less often now.
They share a room. Like the poor. They have barred their door to Anne de Créon.
This prohibition has plunged her into a terrible state of somnolence. She is heavy with lethargy. She drags herself along. It is as if she is welded to the marble of her mansion. She shivers. Chaos is nigh.
59
He paints the birth of a shadow. Balthazar’s shadow. Managing to do so is a bad omen.
He will leave me the memory of his shadow. Perhaps more. His eyes, the shape of his body, his smell, the sound of his voice. But how to paint them?
I will paint them. I will find a way. I have to find a way. I must be worthy of him. Are we not more than brothers? What can compare with lovers like us?
He has not yet tried depicting the things that fill his memory.
This morning the shadow is coral, this evening it will be golden. A changing, dazzling shadow, but no more than a shadow. There is an eternity between dawn and twilight. And people die.
There is a pounding at the gate. There are cries. The servants are thrust aside. Anne de Créon is manhandled. She screams.
Where are the forests? Where is the wooden house? Where is the night that cradled the Créons’ estate?
Today is the day of disaster.
60
She is listening to her voices. There are ten, twenty, a hundred of them, weaving a litany of despair. She talks to herself, and her words are harsh and imperious. Poor girl, are you spineless, are your legs of flannel, have you no guts? Why could you not remove the danger, why could you not persuade them to go into exile, in Spain, Italy, even Canada, over there they would name a city after them, the Créons would rule over the New World, but no, it was beyond you, you moaned, you warned, but ineffectually, being a mother was beyond you, it was as if you were paralyzed, you shriveled, a fossilized dragon, that is what you were, and even today, it was all too much for you, you were unable to be a bastion, an insurmountable barrier, you, Anne de Créon, poor girl, they took your son away, and Sébastien, the boy who made you believe in immortality, bowed to his lover’s wishes, do not move, said Balthazar, stay where you are, I beg you, all that love in him, and that insane plea on his lips, and Sébastien did not move, did not intervene between Balthazar and the King’s henchmen, haggard, as if dead, paralyzed, they arrested my child, my handsome, irreplaceable child, and young Faure held a miniature in his hands, the portrait of a shadow, he told me, a strange title, to me it was all twisted and seething, with squirts of red, gray, green, it was obscene, they took away Balthazar de Créon, the last of the line, no more heirs, no more eternity, I implore my voices to merge into one, all my voices in one, all of them, for then I would find the words to move mountains, to melt the hearts of all the judges of France and Navarre, they took him from me, they took him away, they will break his bones, and how then will I recognize him?
61
He is thirteen years old, Paris-born, unusually thin, and he is devoted body and soul to his mistress, Anne de Créon. For the past six months, he has been carrying all over Paris the missives she writes at every hour of the day, febrile and trusting. He slips through the streets, like a streak of gray in the light, sometimes melting into the light, he is perfect for this job. She has chosen him as her messenger. He carries letters to such and such a great and honorable personage, all reliable friends of the Princesse, mere scribblings, it is said. He can neither read nor write. But to him these letters are more precious than relics. He would like to keep them. They are burning hot between his skin and the cloth of his shirt. They are calls for help, requests for support, begging letters, so the rumor goes.
The Créon woman, that is what the Princesse is called now.
There are friends who do not dare remain friends.
He will kill them one day. He will always love her.
He will indeed kill a few, later, when the flames of the stake have died down.
A thirteen-year-old monster.
God is no more than a decrepit, senile patriarch, asserts Sébastien Faure, and should be buried in a common grave.
She will never abandon him. To him she is a heavenly creature. She is Madame de Créon.
She will abandon him, though, when her son is dead, when she has become the slave of an irrevocable madness.
He will not kill her. He will kill those who have killed her, the immaculate one.
She will abandon him when she has lost any sense of what it means to live, to abandon, to suffer, to die.
I am the sublime messenger of Anne de Créon.
Yesterday, his name was still Jean Cerneau.
62
Anne de Créon looks to Sébastien for support. She sees her son through him. She cannot get enough of this intimacy, fragile as it is, which a shared despair has established between them. She sees in Sébastien all his love for her son, a mutual love, she sees love itself, she understands what love is.
Tell me about this love.
She addresses him formally now, like a mark of respect. He is her son’s beloved.
He always yields to her entreaties. He tells her about their first encounter, how they recognized each other. Then he falls silent. Is what happened next capable of being expressed in words?
She sees love in this young boy, but he will not teach her what love is composed of. He is reluctant to describe its changes, its highs and lows, its very matter.
Every evening she joins him in his room, sits down in the space between the bed and the wall.
Tell me in detail about this love, make an effort, come, love me a little.
He will never go any farther than an account of their meeting.
There are evenings when she is confronted with an empty room, and feels as though she is falling through a trapdoor.
The next day she asks: Where were you?
Nowhere, here and there. Or he does not reply.
He has no hesitation in being rude to her.
There are nights when he lurks outside the prison. He calls out his lover’s name, one of those stifled, inaudible cries that rend only the heart. He is almost destroyed by this cry that cannot free itself from his flesh, this cry that is in him, that harrows him, torments him, breaks him. From the vicinity of the prison he heads for a tavern, any tavern. When some strapping lad possesses him,
the pain eases, it grows silent, but does not disappear, it cannot disappear, it goes to ground in him, very deep, it is like the sleep of pain, and its silence makes the pleasure incredibly strong. But in the morning the pain is resurgent, and unbearable.
And Anne de Créon is always waiting for him.
She needs him so much, can’t he understand that, needs him so much, needs him totally, and at the same time there grows in her a spiraling revulsion, a resentment that overwhelms her: It was Sébastien who brought this anathema down on our heads. He alone is responsible.
Immortal little swine.
63
A man’s bedroom is not a woman’s bedroom, obviously.
The smell is different.
A man’s smell is more acrid, more external, less intimate, less secretive, emanating less from within, than a woman’s. A smell of sweat and semen, basically.
He deserts his room, he is reluctant to have any more private conversations with Anne de Créon. He hates her, but in him hate is only fleeting, it comes and goes. It is not stable, not binding. A small hate, a hate that does not make a man, some would say.
His smell is everywhere, hovering in the air, impregnating the sheets, and Anne de Créon, in Sébastien’s absence, breathes it in deeply. The smell is like her son’s, strong and bitter and unforgettable. She lies down on Sébastien’s bed, and the illusion is even stronger: her son has slept here, this is his smell. But as soon as she moves away from the bed, she thinks of her child’s inevitable death.
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Where are you? What are you doing? What am I to you at this moment? The one who must be saved? The one who is loved? The one who is nothing but memory now?
He eats little, drinks a few mouthfuls of briny water. He is vegetating. Here, there is no day or night, only shadows. Let there be light! Stuff and nonsense! The hope of the simple-minded. He will leave his cell only for the final torment. It is so dark, he cannot distinguish shadows between himself and the table, himself and the door, himself and the floor. They belong to the outside world. Sébastien clothes them in colors. Indigo, like the evening sky sometimes, fern-green—a dull, almost dusty green—purple, like the rouge on his mother’s cheeks, yellow, like straw, or an oriole, or a country path in the summer light.
I think of you.
65
He is suffocating.
Here on earth, one always suffocates a little, for one reason or another, even at moments of great happiness.
He can only live on this earth, even if he is alone. He is of this world and no other.
To die, yes, sometimes he thinks of interrupting the course of his life with poison or a knife, but not before Balthazar has been tied to the stake.
A drastic, suspended, repressed decision.
It is considered good form to hide such a desire. You may think about it, of course, but not commit the act. Suicides are not worthy of a mass.
A man without God.
An unbeliever.
That is what I am, very much so, and forever.
My God! What has become of Balthazar? Are our sufferings comparable? He is condemned to the flames, and I am free.
He is not allowed to visit him.
Balthazar.
Créon.
Him.
The words of a deeply painful song. Three words. The only ones that mean anything in these days of distress.
It has been announced that the trial will begin next week.
The dice will be loaded.
His death, it is said, will be an example. To whom? Is it necessary?
Balthazar.
My love.
And the anger in me, deep inside me.
We are forbidden to meet, to touch, to be again what we have been before, lovers.
We love each other.
Even without touching, we are still lovers.
Will we meet again?
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I love you.
He writes this little phrase an incalculable number of times in his notebook.
A little phrase so real, it embraces all of reality.
He could even write: I worship you.
Love, worship, what does it matter, nothing really matters, compared with what tomorrow will be, the pain that holds you in its embrace, as no man has ever done.
To love God, to worship men, what does it really matter?
This is a century in which it is rare to say I love you.
He writes the little phrase, murmurs it in the silence.
He is in love.
He loves.
His notes containing nothing but that inflexible little phrase are intercepted, he is sure of it. He never receives any reply. But they still talk, and answer each other, unseen.
He also sent Balthazar a miniature. Light breaking through foliage. And their two shadows merging at the foot of a tree. Here again, not the slightest sign that Balthazar ever received it. Silence, a hell.
I love you, written from the depths of hell.
From there or elsewhere, they are words the other can hear.
Do you hear me, my love? Can you still hear me? What do you hear of me?
The boys he possessed, or who possessed him, are now forgotten.
Don’t die.
And Anne de Créon roams her mansion and persists in asking him questions. He has started closing his door to her. Let her die!
Apart from Balthazar, nobody has the right to approach him.
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One night, he leaves the Créon mansion, never to return.
The capital is reduced for him to the few streets close to the prison, a tavern where he dozes without any desire, and a room in the house of Saint-Polgues, the friend who has not turned his back on the Créons, do you remember Saint-Polgues, he came riding across the moor one spring day, and do you remember Balthazar de Créon lying in the mud, surrounded by brambles?
Saint-Polgues intercedes with the King for Créon to receive at least one letter from Sébastien.
He is pugnacious.
He has succeeded.
68
Sébastien Faure has vanished, the taciturn, insolent Sébastien Faure, her son’s lover. Fled without a word of explanation. Where is he? What is he up to? Has he been able to reach Balthazar?
She has been refused everything: she cannot look at him, touch him, say to him: My son, she cannot say to him: I’m here, she cannot say to him: Don’t speak, let’s stay like this, don’t speak, she cannot say to him: How are you?
One evening, an idea forms inside her, it is a beautiful idea, an exciting idea.
To feel that she is somebody a while longer.
She sends out invitations to all the nobility of France, invitations to a ball at the Créon mansion. She will be queen of the ball, and while it is in progress she will implore her guests to spare her son the stake.
Even the King has been invited.
She forgets that for weeks everyone has been avoiding her.
There will be thirty thousand candles, heaps of food, dozens and dozens of decanters filled with the finest wines in the kingdom, musicians.
Will the King come?
She is Olympian in her patience, they are taking their time, King and courtiers alike, and she waits, bejeweled, scented, rouged, wrapped in satin and lace, seated in an armchair raised up on a dais, while chaconnes and pavanes are played, it is a long way from Versailles to Paris, she tells herself.
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The street has not echoed to the rumble of coaches. The King has not come, nor have the courtiers. The night is the color of fire, the candles have already been replaced twice. Thirty thousand candles, that is quite something, is it not?
It is six in the morning, and rather cold, in spite of those thousands of flames.
What season is this?
Her faithful messenger has huddled against her. She cradles him.
They won’t come now, she says.
Madame.
I shan’t move from here.
Madame.
; Are they dead?
Madame.
I shall wait a little longer.
Madame.
And he hums her a lullaby.
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Honestly, how could we possibly have gone?”
“Personally, I did think of going.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. Don’t forget, I’m seventeen, I haven’t yet witnessed a rout, a shipwreck, for it was indeed to a shipwreck that Madame de Créon summoned us.”
“The lights burned late. I know, because one of my servants was keeping watch outside the mansion.”
“She is mad, isn’t she?”
“Anne de Créon? It seems very likely. The imprisonment of a son is often a source of derangement.”
“I thought that kind of derangement was a thing of the past, that it never happened these days.”
“The Princesse de Créon, raving mad.”
“Who gives a ball.”
“To which nobody comes.”
“And all for a son. Her own son. Who has been condemned to death.”
“Why love a son so much, if it is to see him end up in the hands of the executioner, if it is to lose your reason over it?”
“They say she was magnificently dressed. Ultramarine satin and gilded lace trimmings, it was superb, a touch extravagant, but superb all the same, exactly what was needed to clothe her madness.”
“She always did have exquisite taste.”
“Is it possible, then, to be both mad and elegant?”
“Apparently.”
“Did you know that she makes her coachman stop outside the prison every afternoon?”
“She’s constantly leaning out the window.”
“What is she hoping? That they will have pity on her?”
“She already has our compassion.”
“And that is enough. No need to go farther.”
“She is guilty of giving birth to a monster who fears neither God nor man.”