Trio

by Robert Pinget

  Or as if to do away with the pillow would at the same time banish death.

  Ah, if it was a question of poetry, then we understand your …

  Cut.

  Let’s have a think, she said, and let’s proceed with a little method, one, leeks, two, potatoes, three, radishes, four, lettuce, five, washing powder, that makes five plus four, nine, plus three, twelve, plus two, fourteen, plus one, fifteen, you owe me fifteen francs, but she’d got the wrong columns and was taking the numbers for the prices, and started adding it all up again.

  As for the rumors about the maid, you know these hayseeds, a lot of thickwitted beasts, bastards, backbiters, vultures, if they don’t like the look of you, right away they accuse you of being a damned soul, I imagine that Marie, being so compassionate, forced herself to listen to her neighbors’ tales of woe and gave them advice their husbands couldn’t stomach, hence their vengeance.

  That room sealed off from every gaze.

  Familiar images developed in it which were immediately replaced by others, and others again, incessant movement, those of the necropolis, hypotheses about the history of the place, those of childhoods, those of cataclysms, those of monsters, those of clouds, of roads, of skies, of circles, of heads, heads everywhere, that neurosis, hypothesis about the origin of evil, which gave tragic relief to the slightest appearance.

  Carrying, dangling from a string, the parcel containing his bones, that’s where we’ve got to.

  Find elsewhere the reasons for that fierce determination.

  Apart from the vestiges of a ravaged conscience.

  That letter addressed no one knows to whom.

  My dear nephew, I’m recovering, I’m waking up, I renounce you, disinherit you, loathe you.

  An end to tergiversations.

  I went back into my tomb, where I’m awaiting the resurrection of the dead.

  To pass the time, and to earn two or three sous, I’m guarding a herd of pigs near the cemetery.

  In the evenings I go back into my hole where believe it or not I reflect on unheard-of things, I who thought myself dedicated to perpetual repetition.

  The smell of my livestock never leaves me and it’s given me a new soul, the miracle has occurred.

  I have found my slate again, I no longer note down regrets on it, but other …

  And then immediately efface them.

  In touch with putrefaction and decomposition, hence oriented toward the future.

  A wonderful thing, now it is I who am expected, waited for elsewhere, remember the parable.

  This ridiculous attempt at evasion will have been necessary in order to discover where the beyond resides.

  The beyond resides.

  Residence assigned to what cannot have one.

  Which is to tell you, my dear nephew, that I am in possession of all my faculties, which were so frequently doubted by people like you.

  Find another way of formulating the unformulatable.

  Say ah, say oh.

  Ah.

  Oh.

  This ridiculous attempt at anamnesis will have been necessary to discover where the immemorial resides.

  The immemorial resides.

  Which is to tell you that finally, deprived of all my faculties …

  That business of the pigs, could it be an inspiration.

  I get up before daybreak, awoken by the revolting stench and the grunts of the pigs around my tomb, they want me to open the cemetery gate for them.

  For in fact they are parked there for the night.

  Just imagine the state of our necropolis, hygienewise, that’ll discourage the All Saints’ Day fans.

  I get up, then, and I go out, and I go and open the gate, jostled by the animals who squeal as they rush outside.

  My task consists in not letting them stray and overrun the crops.

  A missing link.

  Can anyone imagine the picture, heavy with symbols.

  Around ten o’clock I break my fast with a beetroot, and I meditate, with acid belches.

  My God, how many belches and acidities will have been needed.

  And beetroots.

  Cut.

  To give the impression of structure, that old trap for the unwary.

  Let us cast our pearls.

  Epicure and Saint Anthony.

  Afflux of reminiscences, cave canem.

  Apropos of dogs, he must have died in the tall grass, he’ll be eaten by my pigs, it’s not my business anymore.

  So we’ve arrived at detachment.

  The moment that word is out, back comes desire.

  The hermit and temptation.

  On the slate, the progression of desire, we’ll never make an end of it.

  Toward midday I pick up my beetroot again, and when I’ve eaten it I doze in the heavy July sun, difficult digestion, while the pigs wander all over the crops, then I have to run and chase them out.

  To touch on the question of the master and of the wages, there must be a master who will remunerate me, new complication, where does he live, what is our relationship, probable link with the parable, you see dear nephew I’m not leaving anything out.

  The cemetery swineherd.

  They’d call me Popo, being lacking in imagination, but I should have inner resources which it would be better to conceal, to make the pleasure last longer.

  That of jabbering one last secret while one still holds the floor.

  Unless it’s already too late to mention the pigs, maybe not knowing how to fit them in.

  Unless we give them all a name to replace the dear departed, there’d be Théo Dodo Louis Alfred Alexandre et cetera, as well as Marie mother Magnin mother Chenu and Étiennette for the sows, would that be appropriate, maybe a bit too obvious.

  The harvest, doesn’t time …

  Blue chicory among the corn.

  As for detachment, no progress in spite of the fable.

  But the grave, I’m keeping that, from now on it is my inalienable property.

  Return to the fold very gently, go through the gate, alley number three hundred and thirty three and so on, all things considered it’s no sadder than anywhere else and there at least no one will have the nerve to come and turn me out.

  See about linking this episode to the rest.

  A fine assembly of drifting words in honor of what is no longer imperative, but bah, all that savoir-faire is just vanity.

  Time, that old fritter for incorrigible babes in arms.

  Between two lines effaced, between two words that have become inaudible, that of resurrection.

  The mountain, that blue one over there.

  Children sliding down the hill on a sled.

  A verbena in the garden.

  The piano on the veranda was playing a waltz.

  Arches covered with fairy-roses.

  A needle in his heart.

  Abracadabra.

  When recovery is achieved, in spite of everything, start all over again with the seriousness of a child, with no other aim than pleasure, but what to do with the old man struggling on his pillow, speak to him, he can’t hear anymore, wholly occupied in gathering his strength for the fatal pass.

  Or find a different voice, which would reach him as if it were an elixir and which would suddenly return him to what he called his destiny, nothing other than his original state but without the artifice of time, an ineffable plunge into the water of the dream in which he had always moved.

  Conscience, absurd fatigue, obstacle to any culmination.

  The new law.

  And, without overstating anything, the certainty of having finally been restored to poetry.

  A different voice which must take over.

  The only object of my efforts, to make the present minute last, or let’s say to abolish it.

  At distant intervals a reminder, a friendly sign, in order to test my regained strength.

  The grocer’s wife was seen today at old mother Buvard’s funeral in the midst of all the sorrowing ladies, the deceased was a kin
dhearted woman in spite of her vulgar eloquence, we discovered that she had been wonderfully good to her neighbors when they were in trouble.

  There was a heatwave, the dead woman was loaded onto a delivery van because she was poor, but the plastic wreaths around the bier were perfectly adequate.

  Difficult to follow the new-style service at the church, the curé was the only one who was singing but on the other hand he said some sensible and consoling things.

  Madame Thiéroux didn’t go so far as to greet mother Magnin but she did turn up, though, in memory of the deceased.

  And at the cemetery the widower stood in the shade of a cypress tree so as not to get sunstroke, which showed he still had his wits about him, nothing is more distressing for a congregation than unrestrained grief.

  The cemetery overlooks the cornfields, everything was suffocating in gold and blue, it was almost worth it for such a sight.

  The new law.

  A window open onto the night.

  Crescent moon, July on the wane, the harvest will soon be at an end.

  A different voice, but all of a sudden, like a dew, the love of what has been said.

  Start all over again with the seriousness of a child, I listen to the singing of the Théo that I was, old Dodo is dead and I think back to his worries and his aversions.

  Something else is being prepared beyond people’s consciousness, it had to be reshaped first, we have been at pains to do so.

  Get back into harness again, with other aims.

  The fear of what time immemorial conceals is far away, the old forgotten myths can be tamed with a little patience.

  The house and its surroundings no longer have their former aspect, they have shaken off the obsessions of the occupant who deformed their appearance.

  To bye-byes we go.

  He wouldn’t have been loved enough, that old bird of ill omen, but he had had a presentiment of something without managing to find its formula, I shall reread his notes and put them to good use.

  What a lot of tergiversations in order finally to set foot on the land of the dream, which he sought but never attained.

  He’ll be dead before August without having paid either the interest or the principal, but another moral will take account of his passionate innocence and I shall be its author, with all due respect to the good fabulist.

  Here was the field that was opening out to the survivor.

  The route from the room to the well is now a path that crosses the garden diagonally, it’s bordered by box trees on the left, and farther on there are daisies in the summer and dahlias in the autumn, on the right is the kitchen garden where Marie methodically grows leeks, parsley and tomatoes.

  Arches covered with fairy-roses.

  A needle in the heart, which has caused us to pass from one age to the next.

  The piano on the veranda.

  It’s enough to have a phrase to transcribe.

  And what is proved by the phrase, whose meanders and modifications avoid straight lines, if not that it doesn’t trust them.

  The love of what has been said comes back to you without warning.

  And come what may.

  At distant intervals a reminder, a friendly wave, I’m not afraid of nightmares anymore.

  A new law requires a new fable, let’s wait until it takes shape with the passing days.

  Because saying and resaying are two different things, the material is expensive, a little patience ’fyou please.

  The lilies of the big sleep.

  Finally restored to poetry.

  A verbena in the garden.

  All regrets stifled, task accepted, to recompose as a defense against anguish, no matter where it may come from, that unforgotten dream, then finally leave it far behind, an old ceiling cluttered with birds and flowers in the taste of a bygone age, and progress toward the inaccessible, without landmarks, without erasures, without notes of any kind, unattainable but present, which must be believed in for fear of never dying.

  • • • PASSACAGLIA

  So calm. So gray. Not a ripple in view. Something must be broken in the mechanism, but there’s nothing to be seen. The clock is on the mantelpiece, its hands tell the time.

  Someone in the cold room must have just come in, the house was shut up, it was winter.

  So gray. So calm. Must have sat down at the table. Numb with cold, until nightfall.

  It was winter, the garden was dead, the courtyard grassy. No one would be there for months, everything is in order.

  The road up to it skirts some fields lying fallow. Crows fly up, or are they magpies, you can’t see very well, night is about to fall.

  The clock on the mantelpiece is made of black marble, it has a gold- rimmed face and Roman figures.

  The man sitting at this table a few hours earlier, found dead on the dunghill, wouldn’t have been alone, a sentry was on guard, a trusty peasant who had seen no one but the deceased one cold, gray day, must have gone over to the slit in the shutter and apparently distinctly saw him put the clock out of action and then sit there prostrate in his chair, elbows on the table, head in his hands.

  How to rely on that murmur, the ear is deficient.

  A courtyard surrounded by old buildings, paved and clean, rectangular, with on the north side, at the entrance that’s to say, a pine- wood gate and two clumps of pink hydrangeas, with on the south side between the barn and the pigsty, set back a bit, an iris bed at its best in the spring, to the west the dwelling-house, to the east a young elm wood, in the center a fountain, circular basin the worse for wear, spout the shape of a chimera.

  The story would seem to have begun a long time before this, but talk about prudence, talk about vigilance, it looks as if only two or three episodes have been revealed, and that with some difficulty, the source of information being permanently deficient, that almost inaudible murmur interrupted by silences and hiccups, so that you might well have attached no importance to it and considered that the whole thing started at the time when the clock was put out of action. Which side to take.

  He had sat down at the table one spring day, he’d just come in, outside everything was blazing with sun, a bunch of irises in his hand which he dropped, a sudden fainting fit, and then after a period of insensibility picked up, put in a vase which he placed beside the clock, only a very few hours separated this season from the following one from which it was reasonable to presume that, if it was a question of irises, this particular variety was a late one, you couldn’t hear very well, perhaps orchids, a bunch of wild orchids in high summer when the fields were flowering with all sorts of plants, he’d been seen coming back with his harvest, what sort of a man was he to decorate his house with flowers like that, solitude deranges people, inexplicable passions, manias, you never know, prudence.

  Strictly speaking there was probably only the neighbor whom he posted as a sentry on certain days, not giving any reason for his mania but the neighbor being handsomely recompensed wasn’t complaining, he kept watch, smoking his pipe, relieved by his wife who used to mind the goats and knit, bending over her needles, her hands forever active, she doesn’t remember to look up and doesn’t notice …

  So calm, so gray. The corpse is lying flat on its stomach on the dunghill and it seems that the neighbor’s child on his way back from school caught sight of it amongst the elms, touched the inert body lightly on the shoulder and then apparently rushed home to his mother, night was falling, the father was working in the kitchen garden, they called him, they went back to the scene, that was it all right, he was already stiff.

  He stays there with his head in his hands, strictly speaking it isn’t a malaise but what you might call a fit of abstraction, for hours, numb with cold, then he gets up and walks round the garden without bothering to open the shutters because night was falling, he’s caught sight amongst the elms of the child coming home from school, may have waved to him, apparently walked round the well trying to get rid of obtrusive memories, crossed the lucerne meadow and made his way to
wards the maize-fields, they’d already been harvested, it was winter, after that it was beetroot and then you came to the forest.

  So the neighbor and his wife and child went to identify him, it was dark, with a torch, and when they had certified the death the man said let’s take him home, you take that arm I’ll take the other one, they dragged him to his bedroom and put him down on the bed, the woman was perspiring, the next thing was to declare it at the town hall and the man said I’ll go, we’d better lock the house up till I come back, you go back to your kitchen with the kid because he was hungry, this wasn’t the first corpse he’d had to cope with, the wife and child went off, he shut the door, the key was in the lock, he turned round, focused his torch on the front of the house where all the shutters were closed, not the slightest sign of the accident, there’d been no witness and no one supposed to know that the owner had come back this gray winter’s day to inspect the premises, had put the key back in the lock and opened the door again, you never know, prudence, and then went over to the village.

  The road leading to it skirts some fields lying fallow. Crows fly up, or are they magpies, you can’t see very well, night is about to fall.

  Something broken in the mechanism.

  In the book he was leafing through there was an old-fashioned illustration, the sort he adored, queer fellow, inexplicable passions, the murmur was getting weaker, brooding over his cheerless days, the conversations with the doctor, the comings and goings in the paved courtyard, the solitude.

  The difficulty for anyone who has cut across the fields is to find the road again a couple of miles further on, the paths are nothing but mud at this time of year, and then flooded meadows that you have to skirt round on the left, then the marsh on the edge of the pinewood which is a very strange place, full of birds’ carcasses and feathers among the brambles, when nature reclaims her rights in the middle of a cultivated field she’s more awe-inspiring than she is in a primeval forest, and then turn right, and there’s an old quarry, prickly hedges and bits of soft, ploughed ground which are difficult to cross.

  The neighbor was going down to the village one cold gray day, he was on his way to tell the mechanic that his tractor had got stuck in the mud in a field and that nothing happened when he pressed the self-starter, he’d been tinkering with the engine all the previous evening without the slightest success, hadn’t a clue, the mechanic would come up with his breakdown van, one more bloody expense to add to those of the summer for the same machine.