Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  “Do you understand?”

  “I don’t give a hoot about those howlers over there,” cried Maïa, getting angry. “You can’t even figure out what they’re bawling.”

  He smiled anyway. He understood.

  •

  She finally stopped crying, dried her tears the way children do, rubbing her eyes with her fists. And paying no more attention to him, thrusting herself forward, which was her way of showing resolve, she drank down her soup while he poured himself glass after glass of wine. But he could drink and even get sloshed for all she cared! He could do whatever he felt like, and fight that cow pie of a Nabucet tomorrow morning, that was his problem! Was that all he’d found to say to her when she started to cry, which, in her language, she didn’t call crying but braying?

  He had not a kind word—“leave me alone”—and he’d started cursing. What was she to him then? Nothing but a servant? Fine then, since she was nothing but a servant, she’d act like a servant. And her soup drunk, she changed the plates, bringing not the lentils, which she’d thrown out, but a cassoulet she’d set aside, one of those canned cassoulets she always kept on hand in case something went wrong. It only needed twenty minutes warming in a double boiler to be ready, and besides, he adored it.

  She could see the way he helped himself. Had she let him, he would have doubtless taken the whole thing, even though the can held more than would have satisfied four hearty eaters. But him! He didn’t hide his glee.

  “Oh! A cassoulet!”

  Those were the only words he spoke until the end of the meal.

  Everything was repaired, it seemed, with the arrival of this well-timed cassoulet. He ate unsparingly, happy, with obvious pleasure, and outside the singers could keep on singing, nothing in Cripure’s face betrayed that he was listening to them again, that he was aware of Maïa’s presence, of her recent tears and the anger that had seized him.

  Did he know why her tears had upset him so much? Did he know that he had to fight tomorrow? He recovered a little piece of fat and drowned his cassoulet in a big slug of red wine, calling for his coffee and his finger of rum. Maïa served him without saying anything. Afterwards, as usual, she started on the dishes while he leaned both elbows on the table, falling into a reverie. Or perhaps into the simple heaviness of men who are stuffed.

  Holding onto her bad mood, which was really a cover for something deeper in another part of herself, Maïa calmly did the dishes, with excessive care. To break her boss’s dishes! God forbid! Good maid that she was, she would do anything to avoid such a calamity. And it was also on this disastrous day that the kitchen would be more orderly than ever, everything in place in perfect neatness.

  If it hadn’t been so late, if this business had come up in the morning instead of at night, she knew very well what she would have done! Her dishes organized, her table wiped, and her sweeping done, she would have polished her brass, that’s what! The handles of the stove to start, then the pots, then the doorknobs. And the silver. With a bit of chamois too, like they did in those great mansions. And if all that wasn’t enough to show him who she was, once the knives and the spoons were nicely put away, she’d wash the floor.

  Kneeling on the ground, dunking her rag again and again into the bucket, it would be obvious what she was capable of and whether or not she knew how to tackle her work. A servant! He wouldn’t have stayed there, dozing off in his chair. He would’ve fled to his study, amongst his papers since he wasn’t comfortable anywhere else, leaving her free to work.

  But there could be no question about it. It was getting late, and despite all the good reasons in the world—night wasn’t the time to start washing a kitchen. So once her dishes were done, she started to undress for bed. What else could she do?

  But here too, she was treated like a servant. He didn’t notice that she was undressing, not showing the slightest interest in coming to bed too, and passing, next to her, this night that might well be his last. While Maïa got under the sheets, he shook himself out of his lethargy with difficulty, moving toward the glass door. He entered his study, where the lamp was still lit. So many things to do before this encounter! It had just occurred to him that one didn’t expose oneself to death like this without at least taking care of certain papers.

  As for a will, he had none. Despite the specter of death, which was always present in him, he’d never dared to write that document of capital importance, through which one’s assets and money were given to another. Maybe he feared, through some superstition, that the act would bring a faster death. But there was no time left to avoid it. The hour had come to apply himself, to write what he must call his last wishes in a firm, clear hand, in precise terms, so that no one could doubt the soundness of his mind. As much of it as possible written on official letterhead. He couldn’t find any, which astonished him, as he always had some saved in case he had to write to his supervisors. He looked everywhere in the drawers, rifling through his papers for a long time, and despairing of the cause, made do with a sheet of writing paper which was fairly appropriate, even if a whole piece had been yellowed by exposure to the air and the corners were bent. But too bad. He had no choice. Now for an envelope. The envelope was as essential as the rest. What would they think of a will abandoned on the table like a receipt or some scrap? He took an envelope, and forcing himself not to tremble, he wanted to write on it the ritual words that seemed so funny to him at that moment: This is my will. He finally wrote them, in large handwriting, practically the size of a sergeant-major’s, and placing the envelope at the ready on a pile of books, he grabbed his sheet of paper. But the words didn’t come. There must be laws here as there were elsewhere, as there were for the duel, rules he was ignorant of, a whole way of proceeding which, if one didn’t strictly conform to it, would render his acts null and void. Maybe, maybe! There was a set of rules in all this clutter. But to find it! No, it was better to open the drawer, taking out the titles and the cash, to make a bundle of it all, and tomorrow, before going over there, to give it to Maïa. That’s what he must do. As for the rest, the money regularly deposited at the bank, the houses, Maïa would make arrangements. Nothing to hand over but the bills and once again he didn’t know how to go about it. Would that he were already dead!

  He opened the drawer. It wasn’t any kind of secret, just a drawer that was a little more hidden than the others, larger, which he’d had lined with iron, for fear of fire, a little strongbox. He alone had the key and Maïa never had permission to see what went on in that drawer. She kept an eye on it anyway, and knew within almost a penny what it must contain. Cripure didn’t suspect anything. The drawer, when it opened, made practically no noise, barely a tiny squeaking, and with a smile reserved for looking at his “spoils,” forgetting why this evening more than another—and for what reason—he’d just opened the drawer, Cripure stared at his little hoard.

  Everything in the house could be in disorder—papers scattered everywhere, the books stuffed willy-nilly into little crevices and bookcases—but the money drawer was the image of domestic order. In the right-hand corner were the bonds he hadn’t yet deposited at the bank, for reasons of his own, and a mass of bills, carefully stacked, as carefully as if they’d been organized by the cashier of the Bank of France himself. The only difference was that Cripure had noted the serial numbers of his bills in a ledger, a precaution the cashier would have doubtless considered useless, but one that held a primordial importance for Cripure. A moleskin portfolio held his business papers: bank statements, papers related to the houses, gains from businesses, letters from tenants, taxes, and finally, in the back of the drawer, more hidden than the rest from indiscreet eyes, a twill bag, stuffed with gold Louis.

  It was for others, this idiocy, this credulity to spend their gold on war bonds, like the foolish good men they were, like poor dolts who let themselves be fooled and fleeced like sheep! He’d limited himself, since he’d been unable to do otherwise, since that also had been demanded of him, to dragging himself through the rural
municipalities of the province to give presentations and encourage people to subscribe. But to let himself be stripped of that gold, his only recourse, his only defense! He’d never considered it for a second. God be thanked, the gold was always there, far more valuable than the bonds and the bank notes. And it wasn’t that he was a filthy miser at all, but for more mysterious and poignant reasons, in the pile of his riches, it was the little sack of gold he touched. It was heavy, as if, instead of gold, it contained the earth, heavy and plump, tied at the top with a simple shoelace, which he set about untying. A long, painful process, but one that made him forget everything else. The lace untied, he grabbed a newspaper that was lying around on his table, opened it and put it on his lap; then he gently tipped out the entire contents of the little bag with great care so that Maïa didn’t hear the gold clinking. Then he shook it to make sure it was empty. Under the gaslight, the gold glimmered, and with a gesture he couldn’t resist, he thoughtfully plunged his heavy hand into the pile.

  Though he knew perfectly well what sum the pile of gold represented, he had to resist the temptation to count the coins one by one. That game was familiar to him. Often, in the evening, when Maïa was sleeping in the kitchen, he gave in to it, not without, he had to admit, base feelings of greed—at least it wasn’t only with those sentiments, but also with the emotion of an adventurer contemplating a stolen treasure and laughing at his new accomplishments. To leave! To roam the seas! Didn’t he have the means right there? That problem so many men considered, of flight to a foreign country, of escaping not only death, but the baseness of his world, didn’t he hold the key in his fingers? The miserable ones! They never saw more than money! But in his case, didn’t he have enough to flee? There was still time. The duel and all the rest—goodbye! He could go finish out his life on some Pacific island somewhere, barely more alone than he was today, and surely more honest. They could go on saying that he’d been afraid, that he’d fled like a rabbit from Nabucet’s pistol, as he’d fled before from the blond officer’s sword—what did it matter! It wasn’t only his life he thought of saving.

  The gold kept flowing through his fingers with clear, laughing clinks, like a temptress’s voice which whispers a barely audible call, murmuring softly in his ear her corrupting and reasonable words. Flee! Pack a suitcase and flee! Take the morning train to Paris. There would be plenty of time, in Paris, to get himself a passport. They wouldn’t refuse him. A cripple, almost an old man! They might be all too happy to get rid of him—all things considered, he was one more mouth to feed.

  •

  Maïa was snoring. Her reassuring animal groans came to him from the kitchen. He carefully lifted the papers for the Chrestomathy, put the little pile of gold on the table in front of him, and put the bag in his pocket. Soon, if he decided to leave, he’d put the coins back in. But for the moment the gold was fine there, surrounded by papers, well in sight.

  Leaving wasn’t perhaps as difficult as they seemed to believe, and it was in truth the only way to prove himself, to finally be comfortable in his skin. Flee, at least break from a rotten world, since he didn’t have the force to make another!

  What time was it? He looked at his watch, left on the table out of habit. It pointed to ten. Surely it was later. If it were only ten, he would still have heard the chorus of Russian soldiers. It had been a long time since he’d heard anything, since the soldiers had gone to bed. The watch must have stopped. He raised it to his ear—no more tick-tock than in a stone.

  It even occurred to him not to rewind it. He stared at it with a bitter little frown, and put it back on the table saying, “fine, if you don’t want to work, don’t work!” And he rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers and pushed his pince-nez back into place: his tic.

  He must be stupid to think of checking his watch at a time like this! He didn’t need a watch to know . . .

  He searched without success for the flavor of that night in his youth when happiness had rushed within him unannounced. On that night he had truly failed to foresee what would happen. If later on everything had blackened and tarnished, at least his beginnings had been noble. He thought back to it as perhaps he’d never done since that moment, freer to think of it now that Toinette was dead. As opposed to what people might have thought, and what they maybe still believed, he hadn’t strategized about anything, he hadn’t courted her—he’d wanted nothing, hoped for nothing, hadn’t schemed to get Toinette’s hand. The bourgeois follies didn’t begin until later, after their marriage, but for long months he’d been content to love Toinette without saying anything. A lover! A husband! Him? The women who would put up with him—he’d always known where to find them and at what price. But for a woman to love him—that was impossible, he’d vowed to himself never to believe it, he’d told himself a thousand times. But on that night, it hadn’t been necessary for Toinette to tell him a thousand times that she loved him for him to immediately believe. It wasn’t necessary for her to say it even once. Perhaps, no, he was certain, she hadn’t even said the words “I love you.” But without needing either one or the other to say the words, they’d known all of a sudden that they loved each other and that they were meant for each other forever. How had that happened? What looks? What movements? What speech? Suddenly they’d found one another on the far side of the abyss, not knowing anything about how they’d crossed over.

  It was a night much like this one, a soft night. When he’d walked her home. And after that, he’d gone back to his place. Crushed with happiness, but freed, he’d begun to twirl around his room, and towards morning, he sat on his window ledge, his hands on his knees.

  In the depths of the night, long clouds ran across the sky in strange metallic colors; the air held a smell of hay. Everything had been etched in him, down to the tiniest details that now returned in abundance.

  Why he should think about this night above all other nights, when Toinette was dead and he was on the eve of getting killed, was another mystery he didn’t seek to unravel. In remembering his love, he was in the truth of it, as he had been in its truth when he discovered it and when he made his vow. Everything else had been nothing but lies, madness, tarnish, and contradiction.

  That night, how full the hours had been, and what perfection there was in everything, inside and outside of him! There were no words for it. His most perfect hour, his dearest memory, these were things which yet came back to him in the shape of a cloud, a smell of hay, the steps of a workman who was going to the work. This night there was no smell of hay, and the high clouds running over the neighborhood were barely visible. But suddenly there were steps which made him recoil like he had burned himself—not the steps of a worker at dawn joyfully announcing the end of such nocturnal perfection, but those well-known steps, heavy and threatening, the steps of the Clopper in the flesh.

  ONCE MORE, the Clopper, with his herald cane and his hobnail boots: clop! Clop! Clop! And his ritual of standing under the pink gaslight, prolonged, this evening beyond measure, as if to finally weary Cripure’s fascination. Never before had the Clopper stayed for so long in this spot, and God knows, his usual pauses were long. Long, but of the same length. Cripure had something to feel uneasy about, that the usual clockwork was disturbed. This surely wasn’t normal. What could he be planning? Something against me? That man is ridiculous! But it was easier for Cripure to mock the clopper than to hush the beating of his heart. And those beats became wild, his heart jumped into his throat when he suddenly saw something he’d never seen before—a second shadow appearing by the first.

  Truth be told, the second shadow didn’t appear right next to the Clopper; it came into view at least twenty paces from him, at the edge of the lighted space, and it seemed to Cripure that this second shadow was accompanied by a little dog.

  Not possible, not to be believed, that the damned hunchback with her operatic airs had left her garret and decided to walk in the night, which must so frighten her. But the skipping shadow and the little dog! No doubt that it was the little dog
, yellow and thin, the horrible cherished fido, the whole heart of that cursed hunchback. Dragging her heart on a leash in the form of a little dog, yellow and haggard . . .

  The Clopper turned around slowly like a pivot. Cripure didn’t see his feet stir, only a slow mechanical turning, like a mannequin in the window of a candy store, and he understood that the Clopper never once looked away from the movements of the hunchback and her little companion.

  This one performed a sort of dance, always at the edge of the lamplight. The hand holding the leash stretched up, the little fido stood up straight, dancing on the tips of its paws in silence.

  Nothing. Not the slightest sound, not even the sliding of feet, not even the smallest growl from this show-mongrel. And the dance went on, all around the edge of the lighted path, the Clopper turning in place to follow the hunchback’s movements.

  Shaking behind his blinds, Cripure forgot all about the duel, the gold left on the table, his decision to leave. The hunchback’s dance fascinated him at least as much as it fascinated the Clopper himself. And in order to see better without being seen, he left the window and ran to turn down his lamp. Then, tiptoeing back to his post, he silently pushed back the shutter, leaned out, and looked. The hunch-back was still dancing. He told himself she wouldn’t stop until she reached her point of origin, completing once the total (and perhaps magical) encircling of the Clopper. And in fact that was how it happened. Returning to the spot where she’d appeared, she suddenly stopped dancing, and almost beside herself, she grabbed her pup, crushed it into her arms and embraced it. So the Clopper was decided.

  He who was ordinarily so slow, whose steps battered the stones with such a heavy weight, suddenly became agile. With a single bound, he launched himself, and the little hunchback, still squeezing her dear little dog in her arms, took flight. Cripure saw her gesture—tying up her skirt for ease of running and throwing a lively look over her shoulder. The two shadows disappeared, pursuing each other into the night.