As for Monsieur Léo, we have very few souvenirs of him left, that photo as a soldier, and a pair of trousers and a pullover in his wardrobe which have been there for thirty years, as well as the little drawings pinned onto his bedroom walls which he did as a child, and the painting of the harvest when he was a young man, and even his hairbrush on his dressing table had belonged to his grandmother, no one has touched them, he left us when he was twenty-five, at first he wrote from America, and then less and less, and finally nothing at all until the announcement of his funeral.
He loved the mountain, that blue one over there, oh dear, its name escapes me, but all you could see through the window was the little garden and the fields up to the forest.
Cut.
Work of trial and error, of fresh starts, of hypotheses, no trace on the slate, and yet words were written, they appear somewhere, the limbo of the discourse to be explored, noting down those scraps, then effacing them with the sponge, searching for a problematic, urgent redemption, step by step, keep hold of the handrail here.
She listened behind the door to the child reading, he stumbled at every sentence, the master gave a little cough, he poked the fire, he poured himself out a cup of herb tea, the little voice grew fainter, the old man said go on, then he rang.
Those voices that come back to you.
No longer finds any comfort in them.
A deep, inner joy that doesn’t …
Make a note on the slate, leeks, washing powder, soap.
She went back to her stove, as if propelled by an old spring, but at that period it was a long time since she had cooked anything just for herself in her kitchen where we used to go and visit her at New Year.
What’s marvelous is fritters with sugar.
She used to make her own tonic wine, using concentrated essence of quinquina.
A slightly unpleasant smell of clothes that had been worn, and of mold and frying, a crocheted antimacassar was fastened to the back of the armchair with double-pointed gilt pins to conceal a grease mark, maybe the uncle’s head when he took his nap there.
And then, insofar as what concerns us, the end of a period of metaphorical tergiversations, of individual malaise, which had given rise to certain so-called poetic developments, all that was so long ago that when you leafed through the manuscript you were seized with vertigo at so much totally wasted activity, ah yes the end of an era, roll on the next one and to hell with our nephews.
Théo said, it was useless me searching through the papers, I didn’t find the slightest indication of any dates, impossible to establish any sort of chronology, either Uncle had systematically muddled them all up, or more likely he wrote down several samples of his bizarre thought when he was relatively young, and all he did later was return to them as the whim took him, so no development.
What conjuring tricks he had to get up to but it was only fair to his uncle, after all he owed him his fortune, his education, his house, his place in society, do you really think he could ever have managed that on his own, or pushed by his parents, you must be joking, by the way what became of them, wasn’t the mother a bit mad, it was congenital, yes, or else contagious, since the maid …
All alone in her kitchen, not a living soul to talk to, have you seen the price of oysters, where are the days when I used to buy them every Sunday, even so you can’t live on cod the whole year around, what times we live in, in the old days it was Good Friday, that’s going to be in two weeks isn’t it, doesn’t time fly, not nearly so cold, no, you’ll be with the family for the holiday won’t you, didn’t Magnin fix you up a little room in your son’s house.
Her daughter-in-law brought her her coffee in the mornings, really spoiled, she would have liked to stay there a couple of weeks but you can’t impose yourself on people, people, what people, am I people, she answered, her daughter had planted her beans too early, they may get caught by the frost this year, she would put in some begonias.
The repetition of facts from one age to the next, this never-ending story, life is just a few years of drifting nothings.
Or the fruit of silence suddenly.
Entry deleted.
Concentrated his attention on those papers, a whole maniacal existence in which he recognized his own, page after page, the terrors of the old man who used to get up in the middle of the night to make a note of his obsessions, Théo’s education, the bills to be paid, the remembrance of goodness knew whom, mixed up, when he was having nightmares, in an overwhelming confession of helplessness, the familiar illness, the fight, step by step, against its ascendancy, and the delirium finally recorded at the same time as the humble everyday duties.
Do you understand what you’re reading.
No M’sieur.
Go on.
The mountain, that blue one over there, the smell of junipers and geraniums.
The whole so allusive that you completely lost the thread, then why go on listening.
She was standing behind the door, imagining Théodore one fine day dealing with the master’s papers, invalidating page by page the legend the old man had woven around his family, his person, and his occupations, he too would get caught up in the game and then it would be his turn to use his own existence to pulverize that of his uncle, vanity too is contagious.
To pulverize, that’s to reduce to dust.
Legend, something that has to be read.
These written words that appear somewhere, we’ll get there in the end with a little method.
Step by step, this redemption.
So that everyone would have contributed to mixing things up, what an idea anyway to bring the packet of old papers up to date, would it have been Théo who had it, it’s hard to see who else to attribute it to since we haven’t had anymore news of Léo, and as for Alphonse, Alfred, and other Alberts, in short I can still hear the master saying to me, what do we know of the truth, where do you think it hangs out, down the well stark naked, poppycock, in the heads that their owners call cool, certainly not there either, the truth requires secret places to hide in, what did he mean with his secret places.
Doesn’t time fly, yes, it’ll soon be Easter.
That voice, even Marie’s that you can hardly recognize, we really are going to have to appeal to Théodore but there’s no hurry, patience, patience.
And if the great figures become blurred and the heart isn’t in it anymore we’ll find another angle.
In any case, when they came to tell him that the uncle had had a heart attack she immediately linked it to that of the brother, that was years before when everything was still in place, I mean in working order, the way of life in the gentlemen’s house, guests, visitors, servants, the alterations, the improvements, the tenant farmers to deal with, the neighbors to be polite to, people just don’t know the kind of worries that arise from this kind of idle life, you can call it that in comparison with the life of the laboring classes.
And taking advantage of a moment’s inattention to get in a remark about it’s just life, something like that, after all since it’s necessary, but regretting it very quickly because there are some words that stick in your throat.
Or trying to mention the day and the time, that mild April, a pause in his absurd movement toward what.
Only too easy to epilogue on destiny, nothingness, the nothing-you- carry-with-you, and the illusion of accomplishing anything whatever.
Cut.
Or of the opposite movement, which reimmersed him at that time in the procession of masks, figures and symbols, a whole section of collapsing memory, what were they actually, those characters who so absorbed us with their worries, their copulations and their funerals.
Uncle Alexandre, that old crackpot.
The so-called nephews, those little hoodlums, cheap gigolos who went from one old man to the next for the price of their not so fresh youth.
Ugly soul, rotten to the core.
Those moments of truth, were they any better than the others, those of the fable, you might well ask your
self.
In short, the excellent Théo had great difficulty shaking off the master’s chimeras.
It seems that Madame Marie gives him a helping hand when he needs one, she still has all her wits about her, and when he isn’t sure where to place this or that event in relation to another she comes out with her opinion, which facilitates the work.
As for me, I can still see him, our drunkard, with his suitcase full of advertising leaflets, he had them in all shapes and sizes and on all subjects, he went and picked them up in printing shops and out of dustbins, a job that filled an entire existence, he used some for toilet paper, he used to distribute them very ceremoniously in the bistros against a glass of red, he’d completely lost his bearings, the local people used to laugh at him.
And when he was home in the evenings, he fed his folly by classifying his leaflets, the vacuum cleaner pile, the washing machine one, the electric iron one, the razors, the potato-mashers, the peelers, the crushers, the concrete-mixers, the beauty preparations, the health ones, the hygienic ones …
Try to disentangle reasons for false trails.
In other words, to find out why the manuscript is stuffed full of information likely to mislead anyone who consults it.
The uncle’s motives in doing this.
Fundamentally a very ordinary story of an old artist whose imagination has deserted him and who is trying to get by with subterfuges, complications of form, fancy writing, pretensions to metaphysics and symbolism, why the hell do we have to go in for all that, Théodore said to himself, and nevertheless went on with his tidying up.
Until the day when he realizes that he himself has become this juggler at the end of his tether, and that the story of this contorted, concocted, controversial manuscript is now well and truly his own, Mortin reincarnated in his nephew, marvelous, you should have seen how …
Potbellied, my dear, hawking and spitting and not even clean in his person, ah, how right they are when they say …
Yes indeed, you wouldn’t think it, that poor old man, but I tell you, haven’t you noticed the way he looks at women, psspss, well it amuses me.
Radishes were in season now, and new potatoes and asparagus, doesn’t time fly.
And, said Mademoiselle Moine, after all why should I bother my head, my sister-in-law isn’t a princess, at that price I can’t afford to buy more than one bundle, it was always one of my mother’s principles …
To which Madame Dubard replied, I agree with you, brought up the way we were it mortifies us to see the way they squander money these days, I’m going to wait another two weeks, whereupon the other said, after all so am I, my sister-in-law isn’t a princess, and she put the asparagus back on the stall, the grocer’s wife was amused and told them they were right, but she has to keep a bit of everything for the townspeople who come for weekends, they don’t care what things cost.
Lapse into second childhood, that’s easy to say, he said, but I was the one he bored to death every morning telling me his dreams and I tell you he was foundering in it, and all his fancy writing, pretension, complication, administration …
Cut.
The thing is, I’ll tell you …
Cut.
The thing is, what is there to say …
Cut.
The thing is that I, no longer the same, no, phenomenon, yes, overwhelming, what bad luck, poor child, so nicely, all of a sudden, his head, putrefaction, phoenix, a phoenix all right, but the difficulty …
These walls, lids, shackles.
As if the adventure, poor child, wasn’t the same for everybody.
To pulverize, that’s to reduce to dust.
Legend, something that has to be read.
Step by step, this redemption.
Yes but, well, me, those as deny it, I understand them.
The whole so allusive, alas, no other way.
Sweet April is on its way out, the harm has been done, the action is starting all over again.
No longer the same, easy to say, luckily there’s the dream, and your method, you know where you can put it …
Do you understand what you’re reading, no, go on, personally I’m quite willing to take up the thread again, just to pass the time, doesn’t it … and his greasy little hat on his crown, looking for, to haunt the cemeteries, clever, to check there that he’s really dead, next week, not to be able to hear, duty, duty, this alarming imposition, I agree with you that in one sense, until we have more information, taking the circumstances into account, let’s see, adjusted his little pince-nez at the end of its little ribbon, and that’s what after so many years of hard labor …
Sweet April, yeah.
Bad luck, yeah.
Dream, oh benediction, come.
The time when he suddenly appeared out of a pumpkin, we shall see, we shall hear, we shall, yeah, remake our phrases, the only way to liquidate them.
A grand phrase that would have to be relinquished so as to shine out beyond the frightful cemetery.
So Monsieur Théodore still aping, still applying himself to discover the reason, in all that crap, given that it was all chance, I don’t mind, even though not so very pure, why some passages were so obscure, he makes a discovery when he puts on his uncle’s pince-nez, but there, how to explain it, something kind of occulted by …
Traces of effacement.
Then, putting them on the wrong way around, something else occulted by …
Then just one eye for one lens and for the other, then the other eye for the other one, and for the first one, a staggering discovery, but how to explain it.
So perturbed that he puts himself not in Monsieur Alexandre’s eye, but in his ear.
This time the discovery is indescribable, which shows that his pitch was not that of the conservatoire.
He must have suffered from a buzzing noise in his ears, he said, but can you be satisfied by that sort of evasion.
He became so cheerful it was enough to break your heart, he came out of his room saying it must be occulting an era that’s just beginning, the snag of the ana-time in which I am still struggling.
Ah, these poets.
The blue mountain comes back and the smells of … ah, what was Monsieur Alexandre’s nose like, possibility of nasal expression, he was so sensitive, so close to nature, all the more so as it turns out that his lucubrations were only produced a few days before his death.
And to come back to those little hoodlums, how many times didn’t we catch them in the mornings, don’t cut me off, fiddling around with each other, you should have seen it, not a bit embarrassed or ashamed, Madame Marie was quite right to say that it was their education, punishment, damnation, what the hell did it have to do with us, boys will be boys, that had spoiled them rotten, but the content, what do you make of that, with details to back it up, to give a bit of spice to his insipid pages, he was well aware of it, the old crackpot.
So then looked for the said details among the jumble of notes but could find nothing but entries crossed out, effaced, what a pity, we could have made some dough out of those revelations, although these days that sort of thing is a bit overrated don’t you think.
And it’s not exactly, the other woman continued, beside herself with fury, as if he deprived himself of the pleasure of stuffing it up his nephews’ assholes, the old bugger, even so you aren’t going to tell me …
Jesus, you ought to be ashamed.
In short, truth lies within other people, and apropos of assholes, on Candlemas, or Cometopass, or CometoMass day … oh, I give up … I need, look, a dart here, pointing to her breast, and the opening should come down to here, and as for the length I leave that to you, but the other couldn’t see very well, then he puts down his glasses and he wonders, is it a symbol, I’ve never appreciated that sort of thing either, but what can one do against the inevitable, a few days before his death.
Occulting an era that’s just beginning.
Because death, what can it be the symbol of, eh, you can’t answer.
Mu
ltiply its occurrences, that’s all one can do.
Those of my uncle in any case, we haven’t skimped on their number.
When for example I …
Théo gets back into his uncle’s old harness and provides a sequel to that confused mass of notes, marginal comments, scraps and memories, and Marie, who spies on him, hears him, on the evenings when he’s got very excited, cursing the dead man, a fine example of loyalty to his memory.
His uncle, his uncle, an old whoremonger neither more nor less, and the young man, he’s nothing to boast of, even so it’s about time the facts were put straight, what’s all that ridiculous highfalutin stuff, hm, asparagus has gone down but eggs, what’s the matter with them this year, maybe the Dutch hens are taking the pill, who can tell, it seems it’s even worse in Denmark, dildos for children and … oh stop it Madame Buvard there’s a young lady present, but she was having a quiet giggle, what about the darling buds of May, Mademoiselle, are they coming out, at your age I had a fabulous boyfriend.
When, one cold early morning in October for example, I was through the cemetery gate and walking along alley number three hundred and thirty-three, time immemorial, looking for that grave of that whom, good God, the aunt, her niece, her son-in-law, her daughter-in-law, the whole chrysanthemum tribe in the notebook, rustling, a smell of dead things, and when I say things, an old stump, an old asshole, in spite of the refinement of the decor that filth in his heart which messed up his Easter mornings, poor little angel, those posies of pricks under the lilacs, those poop-hole wallflowers, he was so very sad I give you my word, sniffling and snuffling, hawking and spitting, his false teeth in the little tortoiseshell box that the aunt or her niece or her son-indaw, well yes, eh, old age, he was well able to imagine Théo taking his place and sorting out the frightful pile of shit, excuse the expression, he might change the order of the pages but the ascent took place without anyone’s help and it was fatal, fatal, d’you hear me, that little girl’s voice, perfect diction up to the fatal pass, an image that comes down to us from time immemorial.
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