Trio

by Robert Pinget

  In the sempiternal morning of his mania.

  Yes in one sense there was something puerile about that friendship with the doctor, you might have wondered, hearing the two of them, apart from the hawkings and scrapings of old bronchitics and the senile rambling, whether you weren’t dealing with children their remarks were so foolish, they told each other everything including their dreams, something which to say the very least is insipid, or else how many times they’d urinated during the night or something their mothers had said or memories of their loves which once again took shape or the opposite after a Pernod or two, certainly it made interesting listening, not counting the quibbles and arguments of the yes you did no I didn’t order, all day long, giving you the impression …

  Phantasms of the night and of yesterday and tomorrow.

  Pictures to extricate from their dross. Profoundly integrated night in which every deficiency will have its alibi.

  Practices that were either magical or that dated from the Middle Ages, the schoolmaster said you’re all mad, how can people worry about that sort of thing these days, it’s all faked, exploiting people’s credulity, have you ever seen conjurers producing pigeons from up their sleeves, well it’s the same thing, sleight of hand that’s all, to accuse that old dyspeptic of being dangerous would be to do him too much honor and what have you got against him tell me that, the ridiculous things his neighbor or the plumber get up to, the troubles some people have when spring’s on the way, they’d do better to look after themselves, a good depurative and getting up early will restore them to health, do you suppose science is just a lot of rubbish, ignoramuses, that’s what you are, but he went too far, the schoolmaster, in his indignation he went too far, people began to say that he was in league with the master, so much interest in our suspicions meant he wanted to give them some substance, we aren’t all that stupid.

  In that cold house haunted by all the carefree years, phantasms of the night that leave nothing of memory’s suggestions intact.

  That mutilated corpse, with its bloodstained trouser fly.

  The apprentice when he came up with his boss to get the tractor going again apparently saw an enormous amount of crows on the dunghill, you couldn’t quite make out, why worry, something or other putrefying, they had to get a move on, get this out of the way before the heavy day ahead of them, il was harvest time so it wasn’t as if they were short of work, agricultural machinery is in a bad state of repair and every day something goes wrong for one farmer or the other, something broken in the mechanism that he’d been trying to tinker with the previous evening by the light of a storm-lantern but not knowing anything about it and hardly seeing more he only made things worse, there they all are from early morning with their vehicles at the mechanic’s.

  As if the chronicle of these countless instants.

  And it was the same morning that the neighbor’s oldest apparently came to deliver a duck and not finding anyone at home must have gone in by the kitchen, behind the house that is, it remained to be seen why he might have hung around there or even in the room, you could suppose anything you liked, we hardly knew him, he doesn’t speak but you find things out about this one and that, every morning when he goes to work, he’s a day laborer, he glances round the house but only as he goes by, he doesn’t stop, not since the time he was surprised by his father at the slit in the shutter, it must have been winter, the house is shut up, everything is in order.

  He goes into the kitchen which most of the time isn’t locked, so few people go by along the lane and how can you mistrust your neighbors they’re a decent lot, the maid has gone shopping in the village and won’t be back till eleven, as regular as clockwork, the master has gone for a walk down by the marsh, the man puts his duck down on the table and almost automatically opens the drawer as if he’d seen something in it that time the maid was looking for small change, he finds some bills, nothing he was hoping for, then encouraged by the serene atmosphere of the house this summer’s day goes into the dining room which is next to the kitchen, the door had been left open, goes straight over to the drawer in the big cupboard where the master kept his papers, opens it and doesn’t find anything or perhaps hasn’t time to search because he sees through the window the doctor coming through the little gate, he only just has time to go out and if the doctor sees him he’ll calmly call out from a distance that he’s left the bird on the kitchen table.

  But the child had been present at the massacre of the duck, the old woman went at it with might and main then plucked and drew the bird, singed it, tied it up and said to the child seeing that you’re here you might as well take it to the master you’ll get a tip, I’ve got my goats to milk, the boy took the corpse and carried it to the kitchen where the servant wasn’t, what to do, he puts his parcel down on the windowsill and pushes the shutter back, a thoughtful child, when suddenly the doctor who can’t see very well from a distance and is for ever thinking himself the victim of everybody’s indiscretions calls out what is it, who’s there, the kid skedaddled, didn’t even want to wait for his tip.

  As for the poultry dealer no contradiction, he could perfectly well have gone by with his van and the doctor as he was alone said wait for the maid she isn’t back from the village yet, here, come and have a nice pastis with me that’ll revive you, a stupid thing to say to a driver but the doctor belongs to a generation, doesn’t time pass, in which drink hadn’t yet become anathema nor had anyone pointed out the connection between its misdeeds and speed on the roads for the simple reason that people didn’t go so fast in those days, more often by bike than by car, a cyclist zigzagging or catching his foot in his chain, nothing funnier, now he’s come a cropper in the ditch and the entire contents of his little trailer emptied all over the road, the children run over to pick up the palmipeds, they had a good laugh and said to their mothers when they went home to lunch that day, lovely spring sun, we saw the poulterer he was drunk again, all his ducks on the ground and him in the ditch, we put everything back in his the cart and he went off pushing his bike, his wife’ll beat him again.

  Meanwhile the kid who could see them tippling together goes into the kitchen, puts the corpse on the table and opens the drawer he’d seen the maid take the small change from, he offers himself the tip, that’s the explanation, not realising that she knows how much is in it and when she doesn’t find the right amount she’ll suspect as much but you aren’t really going to panic over one franc and the boy had a right to it, just simply tell him next time that he isn’t supposed to help himself.

  But the maid when she came back from the village went straight to the drawer to empty the small change from her handbag into it and sees that the bills are all out of order, she re-counts the money she keeps in reserve, there’s nothing missing, on the other hand something has been taken, she won’t mention it to her master, how could anyone imagine a child would be interested in it, it wasn’t the younger one who’d put the duck on the table and the neighbor’s oldest wasn’t there at the time, early spring, sowing time, he’d been taken on some twenty miles away for a couple of weeks, the servant later discovered that the slaughteress had entrusted the bird to the farmhand telling him to put it on the kitchen windowsill and not forget to push back the outside shutter.

  So calm. So gray. At his table in the cold house making a note marginal to a murmured phrase, you couldn’t hear very well, the story will never come to light, no visible flaw.

  So at about seven the maid went into the dark room, she lit the lamp, he asked what’s the news in town, she replied that she’d met the postman and his wife with their little girl, they’d had a chat, he was very pale, still not recovered from a serious illness, his wife cut the conversation short saying he’s had a touch of bronchitis he’s got to be careful, a customer had told the servant all about it, the man suffers from fainting fits and falls down all over the place, the last attack was serious, he’s going to have to give up his rounds by the marsh and he’ll retire earlier than was foreseen.

  So t
hat the next day thinking over this conversation he doubted the validity of the doctor’s suspicions, the body, because was it a corpse, seen the previous day on the dunghill and which had disappeared a few minutes later couldn’t have been that of the postman who only goes out now on his wife’s arm, the other man answered that he had never been able to stand the postman and that he was possibly not the only one, that business of his health might well be an act, nothing in his looks or behavior had seemed suspect to him, it’s true the doctor is getting on, his judgment’s going.

  And if it was an act why did the wife minimize her husband’s condition, bronchitis at his age doesn’t put you on the retired list.

  For in fact the body or was it a corpse seen by the master had disappeared a few minutes later, when the maid is asked she declares that she heard the sound of an engine and the goatherd the same except that she didn’t see anything on the dunghill even though she’d gone by it, did monsieur really see it, because he can’t see very well from a distance, or perhaps mixed it up, this in the doctor’s opinion, he didn’t say so straight away, with a vision of a scarecrow with outstretched arms which had almost shattered him the day before, they were still laughing about it at this very moment.

  The neighbor’s child goes up to the body, touches it lightly on the shoulder and rushes home to its mother.

  Huddled up in an armchair, he was already stiff.

  Go on then, tell, said the doctor.

  And the other started again on the story of his death, adding details sometimes difficult to reconcile with the old ones but his correct logic which was typical of our parts made him fall on his feet, with this reservation however that the dream remodelled everything, upset the order, and that it would take the narrator till tomorrow and even longer to restore the verisimilitude to his tale.

  A fire in the hearth, fine china hanging on the walls, the bottle of spirits on the table, the two friends sank themselves in the interminable tale, in spite of everything, that listening ear and that courteous behavior were a godsend to the talker, he’d got up to when he moved away from the town, hundredth repetition, dismayed by the inconsistency of his plans and that kind of quest for one didn’t know what, so many years to wait, in the end people were pointing at him in the streets, the ogre who eats naughty children, do you think it’s possible to go on like this, my memoirs you can well imagine I gave up believing in them years ago, and for what, good God, better to keep ourselves busy with this garden, what would you say to a terrace overhanging the river and put the greenhouse not down below but behind the barn, the doctor helped himself to another little glassful, the sort of questions that the other man asked himself didn’t interest him anymore, moral ones that is, but that voice, its inflections, the slightly inebriated subtlety of the arguments and the profusion of both funereal and rustic images still appealed to him or let’s say soothed him pleasantly, he was going to get sozzled, a friendship is based on mutual admiration and his for the orator wasn’t shaken.

  But what can be said about friendships that suddenly break up. Better to die together. He heard the maid muttering in her kitchen that she would cut out their Pernod. Already an hour and a quarter, life is becoming impossible.

  And when they’d finished the duck, went and sat out on the terrace and when they’d drunk their coffee were just about to fall asleep in the spring sunshine when the poultry dealer emerges through the outside gate, he’s crossed the garden and is hawking his wares. You won’t say no to a little glass. The fellow parks it on a chair and starts yakking, something about mirages on the road, memories that fade, peculiar sensations, you couldn’t hear very well, which makes the doctor say you want to watch your liver, come and see me, very strange yes, as if he’d just been saying …

  It was quite obvious that it would have been pretty childish to give any credence to those tales of magic, what does it mean anyway, nevertheless strange relationships do arise between things or to be more precise how to put it, yes, unusual relationships like that cat that ate its kittens and the fungi in the pipes, apart from what someone said about the words that everyone stumbled over on the same day, it would be interesting to know which but they don’t remember, they don’t remember, and then, too, the parallels that people drew between these incidents and certain attitudes of the master who couldn’t do anything about it, solitude confuses you, inexplicable passions, what sort of man can he be to live like that between his maid and that imbecile of a doctor, seems he’s writing his memoirs, be interesting to see that, when just having to check a bill at the grocer’s is enough to send him more or less round the bend, when he has to have at least three goes before he can explain that a tractor’s got stuck in the mud down by the marsh, three or four goes, he doesn’t remember which day it was or whether it was the boss or the apprentice that came with the breakdown van, nor whether it actually was the neighbor’s vehicle, nor whether it was in the marsh or in the quarry, in short enough to make the toes of the woman he’s talking to curl up in her shoes with irritation, she says that when she sees him come in she prays to heaven that two or three other people will come in behind him so as to have an excuse not to listen to him, if only his solitude could shut his mouth but no, you can only hope that he has a good heart attack, that at least would put a cork in it, that sort of christianery.

  The other neighbor the one who sells fruit and veg in the market said that she was out for a drive on Sunday with her husband and her little girl the one who’s getting a bit strange, they’d gone the long way round by the town and the forest and were coming back along the lane, they come to the hamlet, our two or three farms, at nightfall, when she distinctly saw the goatherd open her window and put a teapot out on the sill, they stopped their car to give the child time to urinate behind the hedge, that was when a white shape came down from no one knew where, stretched its arm out towards the pot which it took and then pff, disappeared, enough to freeze your bones, the mother made her kid get back into the car instanter even though she’d only done the half of it and through the dark night they went back to the village, the headlights weren’t working neither were the sidelights, her husband couldn’t understand why not, he’d just had the mechanic check the lighting system.

  And that the master had always been an impostor, without ever getting mixed up in anyone’s life he acts in secret, those people who come to see him, different cars each time, always leave by night and as if by chance the next morning we discover … or someone says he’s seen … mark you he’s on the best of terms with the goatherd, gives her his lucerne for her goats for nothing.

  So without anything appearing to have changed …

  Again high summer, again former images, how many years, to be able to have the wits one had then, not know anything about today, yesterday’s phantasms are in their place, this season hasn’t followed the previous one but is perpetuating itself from one break to another, so that a phrase formerly murmured at harvest time has just been said tonight or that last spring such a question will only find an answer with the next bluebells, how to get our minds going again, who has just spoken, who has just kept quiet, torn to pieces from one end of the trajectory to the other, a child’s skull caps a senile face, the mouth is still saying I love you while the bell is tolling in the ear.

  Now the goatherd coming away from the slit in the shutter apparently saw in the half-light the farmhand running in the direction of the marsh, she went back somewhere near the orchard to look for her knitting-needle, a storm-lantern in her hand, she bends down and sees blood on the road, no doubt about it, a car has just come round the corner of the quarry and is branching off towards the village, when suddenly a cry makes her jump, an owl coming out of the barn or perhaps startled by the car’s headlights, all this in the space of barely a minute, how to take it all in.

  What to make of these snippets.

  It was in fact the farmhand that evening, the neighbor repeated it in the café this morning, he’s just asked him to clean out the shed and the lean-to, he
’s employed to do all the odd jobs at his own insistence, he’s not a bad man and we all have to live, yet some people refuse to employ him, the neighbor maintains that he’s a thief but that isn’t where the shoe pinches, it’s a straightforward story of a deceived husband that’s what it is, before his marriage but it’s much the same, even though the wife has always denied it and still does deny it, in short when they found the cow dead in the byre the boss felt a bit awkward vis-a-vis the neighbor in that he’d trusted the farmhand, the fellow had taken him in, as if revenging yourself on a poor animal …

  What to make of these snippets.

  They saw the man again holding his little boy’s hand, they were passing the scarecrow and the child was pointing at it, they went up to it and the father picked his son up and holding him with outstretched arms said touch it you’ll see it’s only straw, the child touched it lightly on the shoulder and started yelling, the farmhand went by at this moment, the two men conversed for a minute, you couldn’t hear very well, while the child walked round the bush looking up in the air, not too reassured.

  Phantasms of yesterday and tomorrow.

  From one year to the next these great changes in depth.

  Would undermine the foundations of our edifice, that laborious pile of straws.

  They saw the master again at his table bending over the old-fashioned book but summer was back, you could hear the maid muttering that she would cut out their pastis, the doctor on the road shuffling along like an old pigeon was going to come and lunch off a duck, already half-past eleven, the clock on the mantelpiece is slow, the ornamental lakes reflect the clouds that don’t seem to be in the sky, it’ll soon be siesta-time and the plans for the terraced garden then the story of the removals from the town and elsewhere, hundredth repetition, to find yourself in the evening in front of the same aperitif …

  When the maid questioned the neighbor who claims to mount guard in the absence of the master he replied that he hadn’t seen anyone in the morning but in the evening on the other hand a sports car had stopped on the bend and a man had got out to urinate behind the hedge probably, he hadn’t seen him go off again because his wife was calling him, she wasn’t well and couldn’t milk the goats, he had to do it for her, but the maid interrupts him saying that it was in the morning that the envelope had disappeared from the drawer, of that she’s certain, while she was in the village, and that it couldn’t have been a child who filched it unless of course he’d been told to do so, this thought often occurred to her, the child wasn’t excluded then, next the neighbor said he’d seen the farmhand going out of the barn that morning, now he remembers, but the servant said that he’d never been in the kitchen, didn’t know what the drawer contained.