Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  “Hurry!” said Cripure, giving the mayor a rude glance.

  Since not even the smallest pastry remained, he licked his lips, dried them with his handkerchief, brushed the crumbs off his pants, pulled on his gloves, and went out.

  Moka and Cripure put a hand to their hats in the same moment.

  “No time!” growled the mayor, and he went off with big strides.

  •

  Moka pushed Cripure into an alcove that smelled like a dusty cellar.

  “What’s this place you’ve dragged me into?

  The green boxes, the plaster cast of the statue of the Republic—salute!—the dusty, ripped curtains, the disemboweled couch in the back, the silence!

  “It’s like a tomb!”

  “Have a seat.”

  Once the door closed, Moka bent down and pulled a bottle of champagne and two cups from behind a hanging. He bowed deeply to Cripure, and, with a glass in each hand, he started dancing, placing the bottle on the ground. He crooned:

  “Drink again, drink to the dregs

  The wine that wakes the dead . . .”

  He was dancing without the slightest sound—Cripure could barely see the furtive pattering of his steps. His long dark silhouette went back and forth across the pale window frame, the red crest flamed on his forehead like a will-o’-the-wisp, and the little bit of light left in the chamber tumbled into the glasses as they moved with the rhythm of the dance.

  “Enough craziness,” he said, stopping. “We’re going to have a little glug glug. The important thing is that they don’t hear the cork pop.”

  With a quick movement, he grabbed the bottle and uncorked it.

  “My head is spinning,” Cripure murmured.

  “Atten-tion! The cups?”

  Cripure hastily held out the glasses and Moka turned and filled them triumphantly. The cork had slipped into his hand without a sound—not a drop had been spilled. “Aren’t I a well-prepared fellow?” he said, putting back the bottle. “I’ve got my little store, eh?”

  “Good old Moka,” said Cripure. He drank it in one gulp, then lowered his head and let the glass dangle from his hand.

  Moka sat next to him on the couch.

  How quiet it was! Even here, the silence was grimy.

  “What an innocent,” murmured Cripure. And Moka leaned closer, meeting his eyes.

  “Would you come and see me someday?” he asked timidly. “Some Sunday?”

  Cripure raised his eyes to the window. The rain was coming down, sideways and quick. “What do you do on Sundays?”

  “I go to mass. Then, in the afternoon I have my stamps . . .with my stamps—but this is my idea—you won’t tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  “I stick them to my plates, you know. I . . . cover my plates with stamps. It’s very pretty, with all the colors. You know what I mean?”

  Oh Flaubert! thought Cripure. Oh your tax collector, carving his table legs.[14]

  “Dear Moka, give me another drink.”

  They drank. Moka got up, walked around the room, worrying. His angular hand toying endlessly with the red forelock. He suddenly asked, “You haven’t heard anything . . . about me?” Standing in front of his old teacher, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and fixed two suspicious eyes on Cripure. His lower lip slowly swallowed the upper one, reached almost to his nose . . .“You haven’t heard anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “That I’m crazy?”

  Cripure pretended to think about it. Finally he shook his head twice. “No.”

  “Ah?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Because,” said Moka, sitting down (he bent as he spoke, elbows on his knees, his face tipped forward) “because I’m aware of myself . . . I think it must be apparent . . . You, you’ve never noticed anything?” he asked in what was almost a whisper.

  “Nnn—no. Nothing at all.”

  “So that’s all right! Something of that nature wouldn’t have escaped your notice. That’s all right,” he continued happily. “But all the same, as a student of psychology, what do you think of this: from time to time I see a fly . . . it’s very hard to explain. It usually goes by very quickly. A giant fly, not in the air, but crawling. It goes by like a flash, from up high on the left—vroom! Like this, and on a slant, this way,” he said, motioning toward the ceiling with a quivering hand. “I noticed,” he continued, “that it didn’t change until I went to bed. In that case, the . . . fly passed under my nose, coming from the right. It runs like a spider from one side of the bed to the other. I barely have time to catch sight of it. Hang on! Hang on! You must be wondering why I care if the fly sometimes comes from the right and sometimes from the left. It’s because I connect it to another phenomenon . . .you see, a kind of threat weighs on me, almost all the time, and it’s precisely the threat of a blow.”

  “An emotional shock? Are you expecting something bad?”

  “No, not at all! A blow like from a fist. But,” Moka continued, “that threat always comes from the left. It’s from the left they watch me. That’s why I have a tendency to run away to the right. Does that make sense?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “For example, I’ll be at my desk, totally calm, in the middle of reading—head in the clouds—or maybe gluing my stamps, when I’ll start to sense a kind of vertigo, to be forced, in spite of myself, to duck my head at the threat of a . . . fear. I don’t see, I don’t know, what to attribute the phenomenon to, but I know I always duck toward the right.”

  “And what about the fly?”

  “No, not in those cases. And another thing: in the street I start to have these . . . these panics. I feel someone behind me. Someone is threatening me and the threat lodges here, look! in the scalp,” said Moka, tapping his skull. “It makes my head feel sort of empty . . . a ticklishness . . . But I can’t turn around, and I keep on going as if it’s absolutely necessary . . . The worst is when it happens in church . . . so then . . .”

  Moka got up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and walked around the room again.

  The rain fell violently, battering the panes. Moka walked over to the window and lifted the curtain. Four o’clock. Noël rang the bell for all he was worth. Everywhere doors were slamming and students were running through the courtyard in the pouring rain. The gentlemen of the faculty put on their greatcoats and opened their umbrellas, bending their backs. Another day done! One less day, eh, thank goodness! But what were they doing here in this hole! They were drinking champagne stolen by Moka, the imp! That was also a beautiful thing.

  The little old sword-kisser trotted across the courtyard with his prop under his arm. He almost dropped it all of a sudden, after moving too quickly to keep his good Sunday hat on his bald head in a gust of wind.

  In the back of the alcove Cripure sat motionless, his head on his shoulder, his still-empty glass hanging from the end of his arm which was limply resting on the back of the couch. The bell stopped ringing. Not a sound. Moka let the curtain drop.

  “I had a fiancée,” he began, in a soft, trembling voice, “I had a fiancée and then what? She was only a typist, but so what if I wanted to marry her anyway? What harm could it do to them? Filthy bourgeois, you know, my mother and sister, real bigots. And then so righteous! Oh!”

  He whistled between his teeth and cracked his knuckles. Cripure barely stirred.

  “My father was dying of tuberculosis. He was always a bit shaky, and the war succeeded in decimating him. In short, he was fading. They very well could have sent him to a sanatorium, it wasn’t the money that was missing, but fuck! They wouldn’t admit he was tubercular. They said he was tired. You get the idea?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “He was a good man, you know, my father, bighearted. In his day he must have also fallen in love. He knew what it was to . . . But he was at the end of his rope, and, by God, I don’t think he cared about getting better. All that,” Moka went on, picking up the bottle and filling the glasses once again, “all that didn
’t prevent me from wanting to get married. He didn’t say anything. He played like he knew nothing about it, which was a great delicacy on his part.”

  He interrupted himself to empty his glass. Cripure had already emptied his own.

  “One evening,” he continued—he balanced his glass on his hand as he walked—“one evening, as you can imagine, I stayed with my fiancée for a little longer than usual, and my mother and sister put me through a horrible scene. Yelling, tears, a real showcase, something for the ages . . . they were experts! ‘A tutor doesn’t marry a typist’ and so on and so forth. All their dirty foolishness. I should tell you it was all happening on the first floor, in the dining room. When my father was in the room right above, and he was sleeping, you understand, the poor old man, he didn’t sleep much. I of course tried to signal to my mother and sister that he could hear us, but it didn’t help. Instead, it seemed to egg them on. And my mother yelled at the top of her lungs ‘and while your father is on his deathbed!’ ”

  He stopped, putting down his glass on the little pedestal that held up the statue of the Republic, and blew his nose. Cripure put his glass on the ground, and while Moka refolded his handkerchief and put it carefully back into his pocket, Cripure passed a hand across his forehead, rubbed his temples with his fingertips, readjusted his pince-nez.

  “You understand,” Moka went on, “how nasty they could be! Right away, I ran outside. I thought if I stayed, I would have killed them. I fled into the garden . . . a light was burning in my father’s room. Had he heard? Yes or no? I didn’t dare go upstairs. A word of it would have finished him off once and for all. And I’ll say again that he was a good old man I really loved. Finally, I went up there. I’ve never told anyone this. He opened his eyes when he heard me coming. He was stretched out on the bed, very calm. He held out his hand . . . imagine the scene: we were both holding out our hands without saying a word. Downstairs, my mother and sister were putting away the dishes, the forks and spoons clinked as they fell back into the drawer, that I also remember. So for a moment my father squeezed my hand tighter, and you’ll never guess what he said: ‘My poor child, one quickly gets sick of one’s wife!’ ”

  In the little room, a silence came, like when the train stops suddenly in the countryside. Moka walked around the room for a long time, wiping his forehead.

  The rain was easing up on the panes. The storm had passed.

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean, and then? Well, I went to the front. I was wounded. I came back. In the meantime my father had died and the girl . . . poof! She’d flown away . . .vanished . . . disappeared! My friend, they did that to me,” he went on in a trembling voice, taking Cripure’s hand.

  But he immediately got back up. “I beg your pardon,” he said with a childish smile. And once again, he refilled the glasses. “Do you believe in God or not?”

  Cripure shrank into himself. He huddled on the couch and his big hands fidgeted with the goatskin. “Your . . .your question . . .”

  A vague memory of the morning’s scene with Étienne went through his mind. He lowered his head, to hide his eyes.

  “When the answer is yes, it comes naturally,” said Moka.

  “Well then,” said Cripure, his head still bowed, “well then it must be no.”

  “Must be?”

  “Let’s say it’s no.”

  Moka took a few steps, still twirling his red forelock. “Glâtre also says no!” he murmured. And whirling around, “Listen: someone told me something about you, something astonishing. It seemed . . . someone told me that one day you were walking on the shore, with one of your friends . . .you were talking about poetry. And all of a sudden you cried out . . . that the most beautiful poem was the Ave Maria, and that . . . this is the most astonishing thing—that you started reciting the prayer as you walked out toward a little chapel built on the tip of a rock, which means you were walking into the sea, as if . . . and another time,” Moka continued, gasping, “in front of someone who was telling you how he’d lost his faith, how he’d suffered, how he had to forget that suffering . . .you responded—wait,” said Moka, putting his head in his hands, “I’m trying to remember the exact words . . . you replied that for you, the pain existed always, yes, it existed always, that’s what you said. Is that true?”

  “All that is too true,” said Cripure, sighing.

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So you were kidding me . . .you believe it, eh? So why don’t you say so? I also know you don’t eat meat on Fridays.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “How! How can that have nothing to do with it! It’s a lovely piece of evidence, anyway. Go on, admit it . . . say: I believe in God?”

  “The all powerful Father, creator of the earth and the heavens, and in Jesus Christ, his only son,” Cripure railed. “No my dear Moka—alas! But that’s enough philosophy! They tried to kill me.”

  “Huh?” said Moka, “What did you say?”

  “They wanted to murder me.”

  Moka’s lips started to tremble with a strange sound, as if they were chattering from cold. “But who did? Why?”

  “You’ve uncovered a riddle there, a tough one! It would be too long, and too painful. I’ve thought sometimes that they were right without knowing it. That’s enough about that.”

  And Cripure got up.

  “Right? They were right?”

  “I told you: that’s enough!”

  He grabbed Moka by his lapels, and said, in the style of Babinot, “I’m going to tell you a tragic story. It was one night in Paris, in eighteen . . .”

  He remembered all of a sudden that it was in the year he had left Toinette and he quickly hid his eyes behind his hand. Then, in a labored voice, he went on with his tale. It was a spring evening and he was strolling down the boulevard Saint-Michel. It might have been nine. He was about to sit down on the terrace of a café when two shots rang out behind him. In the blink of an eye, the boulevard was deserted. A tiny little man, a skinny Chinese fellow, was running for his life down the middle of the road, chased by the police. From time to time, he’d turn and fire at them from the pocket of his jacket, batting the air and leaping like a furious cat. With his hand that wasn’t firing, he was holding part of his pale gray jacket. His shoes, which were bright yellow, beat the air like mechanical birds. The police finally grabbed him and clubbed him almost in unison, laying him out at the foot of a tree, without a cry. Alas, he didn’t have any cartridges left, but he wouldn’t left go of his revolver. Two policemen were holding his shoulders, another one put his knee to the man’s forehead, and a fourth was pulling his revolver out of his hand, repeating in a low voice, ‘Give up your weapon, give it to me, let go . . .’ But he kept on fighting them. So no doubt they started twisting his arm, since the poor man—the brave man—started squealing like a rat. And the weapon rolled on the ground. A policeman stuck it in his pocket. Since they were sure their victim was no longer dangerous, they stood him back up and started hitting him. Two policemen held him up by the shoulders since he was already unconscious and the blood was running down his face—the other two hit him with their fists and also kicked. An Inspector in plainclothes with a big round head and black hair repeated: ‘Go on! Go on! He’s dead meat!’ In their hands the poor man became a bleeding wreck. His head bobbed right and left like a doll’s. Maybe he was already dead.”

  Cripure took a breath and went on:

  “They finally stopped hitting him and dragged him towards the station. His long black hair hanging over his forehead looked like it had been dipped in water. His pants had slipped off, showing his thin, ropey legs. And then a slender little man broke off from the crowd and skipped over to the sinister cortege. He was one of those nice little petty bourgeois from around here, some kind of bank employee or paper pusher somewhere. He was wearing a cheap black suit, with celluloid cuffs, a false pearl tie pin. But he had a straw hat and a cane, and he was already brandishing it . . .<
br />
  “I finally saw him catch right up to the little cortege, and the cane that went straight up in the air came down, yes, one strike, on the bleeding face of the dying man. There you have it,” Cripure finished. There was a long silence.

  Moka was trembling like a leaf. He babbled something indistinct, and Cripure thought he heard Moka say something about sadism.

  “Sadism!” he cried out, angry. “I don’t much like that way of rehabilitating the bourgeois with psychology, Monsieur Moka.” Cripure let go of his lapels, and shrugged.

  “What’s more,” he continued, “at that time, Nabucet certainly wasn’t in Paris.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” Cripure calmly went on, “I’m saying that Nabucet surely wasn’t in Paris then. I know enough about his life to understand that the year in question, he must have been a boarding school supervisor somewhere in the provinces, studying for his certification. If he wasn’t doing his military service. Besides, there wasn’t the slightest resemblance between that lovely man and the darting little character with the straw hat. Why then, tell me, why, each time I think of that scene, do I imagine it was Nabucet I saw, brandishing that sinister cane? Eh? Why do you think?” And without waiting for Moka’s reply: “The heart has its reasons,” drawled Cripure, and with Moka still trembling, he continued, “If it’s madness, it’s not without reasons. Through a language without words and therefore without lies, Nabucet must have told me about that little cane of horror. At least it’s clear I must have dreamed it. Let me finish, Moka my friend! So that for once I can speak, and tell you all. No, it’s not words that will give you the key to Nabucet. The cipher that will let you crack the code has elements other than those in the dictionary! A language exists that speaks in skin and blood, through which the most secret of secrets are passed from one to another with fail-safe surety, revealing, in some ordinary gentleman, the anguished beating of a heart. And this way, all men can become brothers to me, I can recognize myself in all of them and love them. There are days when I’m so close to it, when the sharp feeling of common unhappiness among brothers disarms my hate. But people like Nabucet always knew how to bring it back even stronger!”