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Trio

Page 16

by Robert Pinget


  This Louis, anyway, you might wonder who he was, but what was the point, like all the rest a relic of a situation that had become illusory.

  A missing link.

  Or, once again asking himself the question about Louis and that meeting one morning, he told himself that it was of no importance, a minor matter, a minor matter, he’d probably come to arrange a date for the move, the books, the kitchen utensils and the dog, what was its name, Léo or Dodo or something.

  Ask Marie name of dog.

  Even so it was the meeting in the cemetery that he came back to the most frequently in his moments of lucidity, the circumstances changed from day to day, as did the identity of the person encountered, sometimes he spoke of an old man, sometimes of a young man, sometimes even of a dog, which couldn’t fail to be touching, unless he took it into his head to draw some philosophical or whatever conclusions from it, I’ve always had a horror of that, also of his propensity to see symbols in the slightest hazards of existence.

  But we really weren’t spoiled, what with the maid and Théodore, and you know how it is, the evenings are long in the country, so that the old crackpot’s monologue sometimes entertained us, and there was the advantage that we could always leave the room at any time, he took not the slightest notice of our presence, a bit like an old record, if you like, which went on playing nonstop and in whose outmoded music we might discover contrapuntal details which had previously escaped us or which we’d forgotten from one time to the next.

  At such and such a page he says what illness, I’ve never been ill.

  At such and such a page he says old record, old record, contrapuntal my ass.

  At such and such a page the maid asks where the corpse has gone.

  At such and such a page Magnin is standing another round.

  The holy water sprinkler hidden behind the counter which was being used as a catafalque.

  And the family vault had become a puppet theatre where the ancestors’ mugs appeared on All Saints’ Day, jabbering for the delight of the faithful a dialogue of the dead in pure showbiz tradition, crowned by an Aunt Sally where you chucked pots of chrysanthemums, wham on Auntie Jeromine’s phiz, wham on Grandma Estelle’s phiz, and then that character, who was he, with his curé’s hat, wham on his phiz, wham.

  Even so he was sometimes amusing, was Uncle Alexandre, but it never lasted very long.

  A candle was burning at the deceased’s bedside.

  A handle was churning up his diseased backside.

  The poor man took one word for another.

  His dossier in facsimile in the drawer of the deluge.

  Cut.

  This imposition, invincible fatigue.

  Ah yes said the excellent Marie, what didn’t he put me through with his drunken babble, no sooner was he back from the bistro than he started spouting for hours, his stories were only ever about putting an end to it, finishing it, cutting it short, yes but was it logical, either you talk or you keep your trap shut and there was me, great ninny that I was, listening to him and thinking he was unhappy, but just between you and me that kind of fellow never believes a word he says, I ought to have dismissed at least half of what he said or told him to go jump in the lake, especially on those occasions, what an idea, to drink yourself silly just because you’ve made a mess of your life, can you see me running around from one bar to the next.

  The time it takes to transcribe a phrase.

  June, its flowers, its crickets, its perfumes.

  Ah, poetry, ladies, he was saying, our town clerk at the parish fête, do you even know what it is, and Madame Thiéroux answered sweetly, oh, Monsieur, all ladies know that, it’s when people write verse when they’re twenty, all our sweethearts did that for us.

  Poetry, yes, it’s something, but just imagine if it went beyond the twentieth year, where would that get us, but that poetry is addressed to ladies, there they were all agreed.

  A really nice fête with a cavalcade and everything, pity it had rained but it’s the same every year, and apropos of rain, snails, because her boy catches them in the hedges, sometimes there are a hundred or even two hundred, obviously she’s obliged to cook them, it’s a shitty job salting them, excuse the expression, and it takes such a time, after that you need a lot of garlic and parsley to make them really taste like snails.

  Poetry, yes, but that kitchen was enough to make you sick.

  She was fed up, just between you and me, with never being able to get away from her stoves, especially on fine evenings, sunsets, she could put them you know where, it’s true, the condition of women, basically …

  And that every time you had to say to yourself, we mustn’t let ourselves get depressed again, there’s a far more beautiful sunset elsewhere, unique of its kind, within everyone’s reach, whence we derive the strength to overcome all life’s sadnesses, just a little effort and you’ll see it and all your troubles will pass, a bit like that old remedy, the Fountain of Youth, that Abbé what was his name used to make, you remember, well that’s what poetry is, but as for the effort, in the first place it takes some making and there are days when it’s easier to say shit.

  Or else she was kicking herself for having got married, what the hell does that have to do with anything, she was in favor of free love and no children, or just love children that you put into a modern institution so they lose all taste for family life, and the mother can take an interest in politics and reform the man-made society we live in, men, the stinkers, good God, they bash up our cunts, our hearts, our brains, and, oh come now Madame Buvard, watch your words, there are a young girl’s ears here, it was strawberry time, doesn’t it fly, and the first cherries … blather, that’s all pure blather.

  And ass time too, yeah, and time for the first nettles, careful, you lovers, nature’s all very fine but it stings, it stings, I remember one day my boyfriend had forgotten the rug, and me in the meadow stark … Madame Buvard, that’ll be eight francs seventy-five, plus fifty centimes for the parsley, nine twenty-five.

  But what does he do all day.

  I can see him in the mornings, opening his shutters at eight, and then, toward nine o’clock, he walks around his garden, at that season he bends over a rose, and then over the honeysuckle, according to Madame Marie he’s very sensitive to smells, and then all of a sudden he stops, he seems to be thinking, unless his intestines are bothering him, then goes on toward the well, always that well, I wonder what it inspires in him, you never know, he may chuck himself in it one day.

  Rose time, goodness.

  And then.

  And then I see him going back to the house, and he comes out again around two o’clock, and then around five, and finally around seven, until the moment when his maid calls him in to dinner with her boozy voice.

  Ah, because she drinks too.

  She says she doesn’t, but ask the grocer’s wife.

  What she couldn’t understand, then, was what some other people said about him, that he spent his days in the bistro or elsewhere, let’s not be too specific, led the dissolute life of an old vagrant, and when I say vagrant, picking up any old junk, never sleeping at home, or pretending to be a beggar, a low-grade salesman, a third-rate actor, a down-and-out and everything, how could you make sense of all these contradictions.

  To which the other retorted, if you believe all the tittle-tattle you’ll never make sense of it, and anyway what do you make of the passing of time, he might have led a different sort of life in the old days but have settled down now, the old rumors could still be around and getting mixed up with the recent ones, no difference in their nature and that’s just as well, if we always had to be sorting out the old from the new in every domain nothing would ever take shape, nothing, d’you hear me, that’s what civilization is.

  Settled down, settled down, with his mug, does a man who’s settled down have a face like that, look at Uncle Théo, at least he inspires confidence.

  The horror of memory.

  Or else a double life, why not, that would be
come interesting.

  Cutting in from time immemorial.

  The old rumors being mixed up with the new ones, poor Alexandre repeated, that’s why my head feels like a factory.

  And he went back up to his room and made notes, voices from all around, from before, from last night, from afterwards, I am their spokesman here, traces of effacement.

  Surging back, the old myths.

  Blather, that’s all pure blather.

  The time of larks and poppies.

  In the mornings he used to go and pick bunches of flowers in the fields, do you call that normal at his age, preceded by the dog which used to disappear into the grass, sniffing out the traces of hares and sparrows, a charming rustic picture and a hymn to the far off times when nature, that old trap for halfwits, reigned over pure hearts.

  Monsieur Théodore, even so, I used to say to him, couldn’t you do some useful work, I don’t know, well, gardening, planting trees, leeks, salsify, that would be cheaper for us, a packet of seeds in the spring, for the vegetables I mean, and there we are, safe for the season, instead of spending good money every day at the grocer’s, a sou is a sou.

  You remind me of my mother, he used to answer, and anyway, salsify, that muck again, they say it causes cancer.

  Because a single word was enough to set him raving again, he used to come out with puns like in his father’s day, his father despised all those larks and he called his boy a sissy.

  Because personally, his illness …

  Why his illness, why always harping on that, is it essential, we deplore his state, of course we do, but to have it shoved down our throats as our daily bread, what a bore, has he at least got a doctor, and anyway, let him get on with it, said Étiennette, ever since she’s been working in an office and has her own car she hasn’t been the same, you remember what a delightful girl she used to be, so discreet, so humble, so much the better for her in a way, but so much the worse for us, neither discretion nor modesty have ever been any use to anyone who wants to succeed but why bring up Étiennette again, I have a feeling that there was something about her on the tip of my tongue but it’s gone, unless it was the fact of classifying those damned papers, maybe I caught sight of her name casually, or else it could have been the horrible episode in the cemetery you were just talking about, Mortin’s body found dead on the grave, then we shall never get away from these retrospective visions, a fine method to make progress.

  Because he was like that, Monsieur Théodore, enough good intentions to pave the whole of hell, unforeseeable reactions against his saturnine temperament which, in the eyes of a third party who wasn’t in the know, could make him pass for cheerful or dynamic, so that the rumors about him were nothing like him, and as they always reached his ears they disturbed him deeply, making him ask himself questions and answer them badly, he would have done much better to withdraw a long way away from the tittle-tattle and gossip and take no more notice of what people said, his deeper nature would have taken the upper hand, and if it was of an irremediable melancholy, well then, he could throw himself into the well and adieu, and anyway why should we at all costs want people we like to be artificially healthy, that must distress them far more than accepting their unhappy fate, destiny is destiny it’ll always have the last word, and it isn’t by relieving people with pills, or pellets, or persuasion, that you’ll make them any happier, personally, psychology … and then really, happiness, has anyone ever known what it was, and love confused with pleasure does that make sense, come now, reread the great authors and don’t let’s descend to this sort of concierge’s talk anymore.

  For indeed, the dead do answer.

  Full of horrible photos of people who’d been strangled, or hanged, or had their throats cut.

  Answer, but in a language of their own, something like that of the dream, that benediction, ah if only it would return.

  Great ninny, not a word of truth in what he tells you, how do you think you can make a life between the fear of the cemetery and the horror of memory.

  Or if that was what people call life.

  Because you, then, you don’t believe in the progress of science.

  Dear Mademoiselle, one does not believe in progress, that’s for idealists, one observes it, and furthermore it all depends on what we mean by progress, the sense it is given today is a shoddy derivative, its real meaning is of another order.

  Oho, aren’t we uppity.

  A missing link.

  He saw his maid going upstairs surreptitiously, reaching his study, entering it, the room was filled with a pink light, she goes over to the writing desk, ferrets through its drawers and the dossiers, jots something down in a notebook, steals the drafts from the wastebasket and, leaving without a sound, goes and locks herself up in her bedroom and writes in her concierge’s language a journal consisting of a hodgepodge of reflections on existence, the fate of maids, religion, the condition of women and the cost of living, alternating with culinary recipes and accounts of dreams in which the poor creature’s unconscious had a whale of a time, she’s a …

  The room was filled with a pink light, she goes over to the bed, puts the breakfast tray down on the bedside table and, before the sleeping man has had time to open his eyes, plunges the potato knife into his throat.

  Why does she bring the breakfast tray, tell me, Uncle.

  Because she’s used to it, and so as not to arouse any suspicion in her master’s mind, in case he was already awake.

  What’s suspicion.

  It’s the disease of the washouts, go on.

  The room was filled with a pink light, she goes over to the bed, puts the tray of potatoes down on the chamber pot and, before the wide-awake man has time to say oof, strangles him with the …

  Cut.

  And to think that he had imagined that too, his maid murdering him, the old chucklehead, I knew him better than anyone and he gave me a pain in the neck with his suspicions about Marie, she changed as she got older, became shifty, went through his drawers, and was visited more and more frequently by a nephew who looked like a dubious character, he stayed in the kitchen with her for hours in the evenings, talking in a low voice, when her master asked her about him she said that the boy was in financial difficulties, he came to ask her advice and each time cadged ten francs off her, a sou is a sou, in short Alexandre had lost confidence in her, he was going to forbid her to have the fellow there, he’ll have had time to make a plan of the apartment, as for the safe in my room Marie must already have told him about it ages ago, what’s going to become of me it’s giving me nightmares, must I dismiss this maid and get a worse one, it’s frightful, I replied, you’re getting ideas into your head, what’s happening to you, Marie is the most dedicated of women, the most honest, but he didn’t listen to me.

  Murdered by his maid or by one of her nephews, that’s a new one.

  Repeat, I am dead, I shan’t keep silent anywhere.

  Repeat, to emerge from less than nothing.

  Repeat, take a hair of the night that bit you.

  And if need be we shall sleep twenty hours, he added, Uncle’s stories will drive me bonkers, for he was still sorting out the papers and numbering them, I can still see him with his greasy little hat, his little pince-nez, coming back from the library, enough to break your heart, a drink here, a drink there, so charming with his story of the little elephant and the little soup tureen full of milk, rationing, he was completely pickled, we teased him, we stood him another round, his little moustache, his little ribbon running from one folder to the next, our youth in the café of illusions.

  Cafe of illusions.

  And how we used to dream of fame, and of the public weal, and of morality and poetry, what a thing that is, gentlemen, may it last beyond the twentieth year, well, in counting the people still cultivating it Monsieur Théo couldn’t even come up with three names, taking old leaflets out of his suitcase he started reciting odes by what’s his name, elegies by thingummy, and sonnets by a …

  Betony, cow-w
heat, cornflower, poppy.

  Do-do, to bye-byes we go …

  Old chimeras, everything is disintegrating.

  The relative peace of the soul.

  Oh, it’s not that old mother Marie was a saint, no, she had set tongues wagging on account of her gifts as a witch, according to some people who went to consult her in her kitchen of an evening, speaking in a low voice about their matrimonial troubles, it seems she had second sight and used some bizarre methods to break down the defenses of the agent of trouble, if not actually to eliminate it, but no one can furnish any proof, thank God.

  Or tie the heretic to the stake.

  Seeing her so-called nephew to the gate and whispering three words in his ear.

  Used to walk around by the cemetery to observe her master surreptitiously.

  But when you think back to the last days of the master one thing is striking, the serenity he had achieved, no more aggressivity in his behavior, no more sudden changes of mood, or was it senility, maybe he had lapsed into second childhood, pee-pee, pot-pot, but all that is such ancient history, at all events one impression remains with me, that of relaxation, isn’t that your feeling.

  Oh, personally, you know, I barely knew him until he was in the hospital after the murder attempt, he was under sedation and everyone who has just had an operation reacts in the same fashion.

  In short, it’s all as clear as mud.

  And come what may.

  As for confusing one funeral with another, alas, you know what memory is, we shall all be in the same boat, the procedures don’t differ much and the same goes for the deceased, not to speak of the survivors, no one could reproach the poor nephew for being a bit vague about the subject, and also …

  … for being a bit vague about the subject, and also about that of the facsimile notes, perhaps that was what he had meant to be but he’d forgotten it when it came to delivering the documents to the Toto or Zozo Foundation, some such name, we’d have to go and check on the spot, the ladies who had been classifying the notes may well have taken the originals for reproductions or vice-versa, why attach so much importance to details which don’t have any, and what’s more …

 

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