Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  •

  Cripure pushed the book away, raising his chin with a sad, bored pout. “Turnier was a misfit,” he said, “a dissenter, of course, but . . .” His hand made a vague gesture, at once scolding and calming, then,

  with a new frown (again the dentures), he added with lowered eyes “but he was pretending.”

  Étienne startled.

  “Pretending?”

  “Oh it’s a fact! Proven. What did you expect,” he said, in a wavering little voice, “I don’t want, you see, to set myself up as a judge, but all the same . . . all the same, I’ll allow myself to entertain certain doubts, you understand. He had sides to him that were, let’s say, less than noble.”

  He lifted his gaze. Étienne caught his look, astonished to find in it something like hate.

  “What interests you about Turnier?”

  “His unwillingness to compromise, sir.”

  “Not so fast!” replied Cripure’s simpering little voice. “He was a man of faith, you understand—I find all belief suspicious. You see, I’m with Stirner, whose real name was Kaspar Schmidt—” he became pedantic, warming to the subject, “therefore I think that ‘everything sacred is a fetter’ when it is not pretense. What follows, I’m not borrowing from Stirner,” he said, raising his pointer finger. “One can develop that crack through nobility, but also through . . . its opposite, as a kind of wickedness,” he said with a disgusted frown, as if hurrying to unburden himself of the thought.

  There was a little pause, then Cripure added, “The way of living, that’s the distinction.”

  Étienne heard himself reply, “And of dying?”

  “He loved Mercédès, you see,” parried Cripure, with a sigh. “His suicide had no bearing on anyone but himself, since, after all . . . each of us is the sole judge of whether or not to make the verdict final. That had nothing to do with his faith. All the truth in that man was his love. The rest . . .”

  Once again, his hand batted the air in front of him.

  “What are you trying to say?” murmured Étienne. “Just now you said something about pretending.”

  Cripure looked like a man who is grieved to curtly disabuse another, but who is resolved, because he has no choice. His fat hands fell heavily on the books in front of him. Then, returning to his childlike pose, bowing his head and letting his joined hands fall between his knees: “Pretending . . . It’s better to say it frankly: tricking. I’m thinking of his relationships with his friends.”

  “It’s one of the most moving parts—”

  “Not at all! Now see here, it isn’t at all,” said Cripure, shaking his head. “You’re thinking of his friends’ secret intervention after he was ruined?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A tale! A fairy story. But you see, firstly: Turnier’s ruin was his own fault and not his father’s. He had only himself to blame for pissing away his little fortune, and afterward he lived on subsidies from his friends, it’s true, but the kindness of the latter only went so far as to never ask him to repay the sums he borrowed. Because in the end, dear sir, this will hurt you, but it wouldn’t be fair to let you ignore it any longer—Turnier was a damned leech!”

  And to underscore his point, he knocked twice on the edge of the table with his index finger.

  Étienne froze. Why was he so determined to discredit him? What for?

  Cripure looked him over.

  “Am I destroying your illusions?”

  “I want the truth.”

  Again the comedy of adolescence! With a face like that, he would believe in absolutes. “You are brave,” said Cripure.

  “Yes.”

  “You have to be very brave,” he continued, his voice altered. Evidently, it wasn’t Turnier he was thinking about. “I mean that in general,” he added, with a round gesture of his hand.

  “I want to be sure . . . that you’re not belittling him on purpose.”

  Cripure rubbed his temples—his tic—and frowned his frown.

  “What does it matter?” he replied, with a laugh that barely concealed its sarcasm. “To each his own aesthetic. I steer mine by a certain sense of . . . honor.” He stopped and turned away, as if ashamed.

  “Honor?”

  “A faith in the self, an absolute unwillingness to compromise,” he continued, shooting Étienne a defiant look. “Your Turnier” (that your made Étienne jump) “didn’t hold that opinion at all. But how could he! He ran for public office!”

  “Him?”

  “You didn’t expect that?”

  Étienne didn’t have to respond—his disconsolate face spoke for him.

  “It’s totally verifiable,” Cripure replied. “Of course, when I wrote that . . . thing—” he picked up his book with disgust and threw it in with the others, at the other end of the desk—“when I wrote that . . . novel, I ignored it all. I didn’t have the necessary documents at hand, you see. Besides, I was . . . rushed. I didn’t see Turnier as anything but a romantic, a man of passion and ideas, who walked by the sea at night in meditation. A very interesting figure, taken that way, you understand, a brilliant hermit. He had his years of meditation, in any case, before . . .”

  “Mercédès?”

  “Not so fast,” said Cripure, with a curious little smile. In a little nasal voice, he added, raising his pointer finger—“madness.”

  Then he laughed.

  What a strange man! And how hard it was to breathe in that murky room! Maïa lit the furnace and he could hear it snoring. She’d propped open the glass door so that the heat would spread. But with the heat, the smells of dogs and mold became unbearable. If only he could have opened a window.

  “Do you know the story of the axe?”

  “The axe?”

  “One day, he picked up an axe, in order to chop off his arm. He succeeded only in getting himself committed to an asylum. Once he got out, do you know what he did? He sold his last plot of land and he left. He became—you’ll never guess.”

  Cripure’s eyes glittered. He was watching Étienne with the malice of an underhanded haggler.

  “You can’t guess?”

  “No, sir.”

  “An accountant!” he cried with a shout of laughter, that was forced, repellent even to himself, and he stopped short. “Naturally, that didn’t work out. His accounting wasn’t the kind that pleased them. He was mired in lawsuits. Then, back to the asylum. Then, finally, here . . .”

  “Mercédès?”

  “She too . . .you no doubt believe like everyone else—no point,” he interrupted, seeing Étienne was about to speak, “I know what you think. But no, Mercédès was nothing like that, dear child, she didn’t grow up in a castle as everyone wrongly reports, and I was the first. She was the child of some bourgeois, a childhood friend, and by no means a person he met by chance. Another thing: she wasn’t the first woman Turnier had loved. Not by any means. He had affairs with many women before her. And at the time we speak of, he was closely tied to another woman, a Madame . . . her name escapes me. And it’s true that he offered to marry Mercédès, and it’s also true that she refused him. Yes! Oh come now . . .”

  This time, it wasn’t one hand that batted the air in front of him, but two at once.

  “In the end,” he finished, with a bitter twist of the lips, “you see, this Turnier was a poor fool, an unhappy fellow torturing himself, a victim! What good was a love that gave him nothing but the courage to die? It’s not about giving up. In this world where everything’s a conquest, you have to know, if need be, how to take by force!”

  He calmed down, stopped waving his arms, his hands falling between his knees as if by their own volition, his shoulders slumping, and said in a small voice that was not without tenderness, “A bankrupt in life, in thought, in love . . .”

  •

  Silence.

  Cripure lowered his head. He seemed to have forgotten Étienne’s presence. Slouched, his big hands joined between his pointy knees, what was he thinking? Of Turnier’s suffering, the day after
Mercédès had fled, or of his own, when Toinette . . . It would have been so much better to end the day courageously, as Turnier had. And since that blond officer’s sword had scared him, why hadn’t he taken his pistol and—he shrugged a little, a gesture of self-pity no doubt, but still without a word, drifting further and further, oblivious of Étienne.

  The little dogs dozed, now and then letting out innocent little sighs like the sighs of children. Étienne, perched on his chair, was motionless, fascinated by the paralyzing feeling that within these walls, the slightest noise would reverberate like the loudest echo—huge and irreverent.

  From the kitchen came the splash of dishes in a basin.

  Strange to find himself alone with this man, within these walls blackened by humidity, the dimness deepening since the rain had started to fall around the house with a little rodent sound, as if an army of rats were laying siege. Strange and suffocating. He wished he were already far away, leaving behind this conversation that was so painful, so dishonest. How complicated everything was, how tangled and fake! They had lied to themselves and told him only falsehoods. And Cripure kept on. Would he ever snap out of it? Would he find, beneath so many lies, a truth? Would he have the time? Guess or I devour you. The sphinx’s maw was already opening—tonight, the barracks, in three months—

  He passed a hand over his skull, sheared as of the day before.

  In the street, the black silhouette of the mayor, with his black umbrella in his black-gloved hand, his frock coat like crows’ wings, his galoshes: clip, clop, slosh. He began his rounds so early this morning! How many mothers and fathers today would receive from his hand—here, my friend, this one’s for you!—the little paper marked in red with the death of a beloved child? There had been too many, and Étienne had heard people saying that the mayor wasn’t keeping up. He had to hire secretaries! Étienne noticed that his belly hadn’t shrunk, that legislative belly, so perfect for the tricolored sash or a poster, a glorious belly, a real signpost, fastened like the umbrella and not less voluminous. Was he keeping track of the doors where he hadn’t yet knocked? Or where he’d knocked only once? It was like St. Bartholomew’s Day—he might as well build crosses for them all. I will no longer exist and that’s it, thought Étienne.

  What would that be like? He would want nothing, he would love nothing. Impossible to picture. Others spoke of the blank, the cruel loss played out in the person of the mother, getting out her mourning veil, saying that all the same she hadn’t expected to wear it again so soon. And the father hiding away somewhere, not at the café in those hours of pain, but in the attic, like the other time he cried there for hours, sitting on an empty box, his hair full of spiderwebs. There. That’s all there would be to say. All? No. If he had enough “luck” to not be entirely pulverized, they would be certain to collect his corpse. Ceremony at the station, the church, the cemetery. And on All Saints’ Day they would do it again—some graybeard, a Babinot, a Nabucet, would make a speech under an umbrella. Then, Chopin’s funeral march. And in the afternoon, the clergymen would process through the graves in habits, their hands joined, their backs hunched, pouring, on the pain of the world, the opium of their prayers . . .

  •

  Étienne stood up. Cripure came out of his reverie, shaking himself like a big dog.

  “What is it?” He was dead to the world. What? The young man was leaving? Already? But why? “You’re leaving?”

  Étienne wanted to say that there was nothing else left to do. But he didn’t say anything, and Cripure gave his shadowy figure an astonished glance. What did it mean, that tense, drawn face, those hard eyes, that bristling pose? Étienne’s hands made two pale stains in the gloom. Cripure could no longer see his features—only the silhouette of an adolescent with a shaved head. “I have to tell you that you are the only man I wished to speak to. I . . . I don’t know why I live, sir.” Then, in an even lower voice, “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this either.”

  Cripure wriggled deeper into his armchair. Dear God it was dark in this study, but he wished it were darker still. A sharp feeling of shame overwhelmed him, against which all considerations of youth and comedy were powerless. He was quiet. The rain had stopped. Maïa had closed the door, and they could no longer hear the furnace snoring. In the deep silence, he perceived only the young man’s quick breath.

  “Live!” he murmured, as if talking to himself. He raised his head, “You are still young—”

  Étienne didn’t budge. Was that all Cripure had to say? Really?

  Cripure turned his eyes away. The cruel silence stretched out again. Then he said, “Living is difficult.” An instant later he added, “for everyone—” How hard it was to force the reply!

  Étienne slowly lifted a hand without speaking. Then he let it fall; his two pale fists closed, hardening like two pebbles beside his thighs, his chin trembling.

  “Your question,” said Cripure, still not looking at him, “your question—” He wanted to say your question catches me off guard. Before that formidable confession, he balked. “Your question,” he was slow to continue. “Bah! ah! It’s the question, precisely—”

  “I don’t know why I must die either.” It seemed to Cripure that Étienne had shouted.

  “You’re looking for an idol,” Cripure muttered. “You’d like to put . . . an idol between yourself and your fate. Eh . . . an idol . . . hard to get around them, isn’t it? See how you can or can’t get along with idols. No, believe me, there is a point in our being where love meets the love, by which I mean the love of a thing or a person. That point is the center of the world, the world of . . . psychologists, geographers, imbeciles, geniuses. The world gravitates around that center, that gravity has laws, and now we find ourselves at the heart of an order . . . No, that’s not what I wanted to say. Not at all. Life is an affirmation,” he continued, swelling his voice, “an affirmation!” And he slapped his hand on the table.

  “Of what?”

  “Why . . . of the self!” He thought he heard Étienne say “absurd”—but he couldn’t be sure. “Absurd? Of course. Why of course it’s absurd. The world is absurd, young man, and all of man’s greatness lies in understanding that absurdity, and all of his justice, too. But,” he said again, waving his hand, “that’s enough philosophy. No, see here, life is something you seize.”

  “But let me ask again—and as for others?”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  “But then . . .”

  “Seize your happiness, that’s my advice, without thinking about anything or anyone. Don’t be a Turnier. These Renaissance men were different types anyway, gentlemen of another scope. Real men. Our questions would have made someone like Benvenuto roar with laughter. He would have felt nothing but scorn. Bah! The world is fallen. Men like that are no longer possible. We barely see the rise, from time to time, of a Mangin—what an admirable war hawk, my boy—or a Clemenceau—”

  He stood, and from the table he picked up the letter Étienne had given him. He slit it open, still talking. “I have no end of admiration, you see, for this Clemenceau who, arriving at the end of his career, seems to be independent enough, detached enough to want everything, to risk everything, to swat down a Chamber made up of idiots and goofballs.” He pulled the letter out of the envelope, waved it without reading, and continued, “When it comes down to us, my boy, ah! We’re debased, you see, screwed . . . but all things considered, it’s better to be beaten that way. There’s a certain feeling of dignity . . .” he began to read his letter, “or honor. As for the rest . . . man doesn’t deserve our attention.”

  He stopped, the letter under his nose. Suddenly everything changed.

  •

  Like someone choking, Cripure raised a hand to his throat. He stayed like that for a few seconds, then, letting loose a loud cry, he fled his table, knocking over, in his clumsy haste, a pile of books which collapsed onto the floor. He rushed toward the kitchen door, shouting at the top of his lungs:

  “Maïa! Come here. Maïa!�
� She didn’t respond fast enough for his liking. And so he yelled again, even louder, “Maïa, for the love of God!”

  From the back of the kitchen Maïa replied, “What is it, babe?”

  “Get over here!”

  “Coming . . .” The way the man shouted! What a pain he was! “Quit screaming yer head off,” Maïa said, opening the door. She planted herself on the threshold, arms dangling. Drops of water fell from her fingers onto the floor. “OK, what’s this?”

  Cripure’s voice had taken on a curious crybaby tone. “They’ve unscrewed the bolts on the bikes again, Maïa!”

  “They what?”

  “The bolts on the bikes.”

  “Oh!”

  “Pimply dunces! Scum . . . filth! They’re out for my blood, but . . .” Crazed with anger, he brandished the letter.

  At his cries, the little dogs chimed in with whimpers, growls, then, as if in agreement, they howled all together, running in circles around the room. Fat Judas, with his black and tan fur, gave the impression of a giant, dirty mole. Petit-Crû trembled from head to toe. Turlupin, his big ears batting the floor, readied himself to flee the first blow from Maïa’s clog. Only Mireille, the lovely Mireille, his noble companion on shooting expeditions by the sea, his favorite little beast, dared to approach him. She snuggled up to his leg, and, sitting on her haunches, raised her wet nose to him, lifted a paw, and with her most reasonable little barks, started scratching his thigh.

  “God almighty,” yelled Maïa, “nothing but Barnum’s circus! You can’t hear nothing. Hush! And you first of all,” she said, turning to Cripure. “Nothing but a yeller! Get along!” She waved a hand, “Out!” She took up the dogs by the armful, with the exception of Mireille, and threw them in the kitchen.