Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  What was he about to do? They weren’t sure right away. In fact, Cripure looked at them for a long time, one after the other, then he shook his head from right to left, his mouth opening, his finger lifting slowly into the air.

  “No,” he said.

  Moka gaped with astonishment. His hand still rested on the paper.

  It was Maïa who responded. “What’d you mumble, just then? You don’t wanna sign?”

  He crossed his arms and let them fall again pained to have to refuse a prayer. “I said no.”

  “No what?”

  “I won’t . . . I won’t sign it.”

  “You . . .” She didn’t say anything more, choked with anger, red not only in the face but also her neck, and once more Moka saw her tremble from head to toe.

  He intervened in his turn.

  “My dear professor, come now! Please listen to me . . . I beg you, listen! Don’t take this decision lightly . . .you must . . . I would like . . . My God, but what are you saying!”

  He tangled up his words, unable to find any more. It was so unexpected. What was happening here? Cripure refusing to sign!

  “Oh!” cried Moka.

  And playing to the drama he hid his face in his hands and murmured a prayer, “All powerful God, our father! Have mercy! Have mercy! Save him in spite of himself!”

  Cripure let his head drop back into his fur collar, and when Moka had finished his prayer he could see nothing of his dear professor but the tip of his nose and a little bit of his forehead. Cripure looked oddly like a child someone has scolded, who bows his head under the onslaught. But he also looked like he was thinking: talk as much as you want.

  Maïa took a step. From her angry air, Moka feared the worst. With a gesture, he tried to appease her.

  “This agreement,” he continued, “puts you in a very honorable light. I don’t see what reason . . . So then, in refusing to sign, you put yourself in a bad way . . . and so they . . .”

  But understanding that his words had no impact, he turned towards Maïa with a look that clearly said what should we do? It’s your turn, give it a go!

  Maïa didn’t have to think twice.

  “What’s all this nonsense,” she cried in a screeching voice, taking another step towards Cripure. “You will sign!”

  A little strangled laugh, which could also be an angry groan, replied to this order.

  “Going once . . .”

  “No.”

  “Going twice?”

  “No.”

  “Going three times . . .”

  “No.”

  And as it had a moment ago, Cripure’s head rose from his necklace of goat hairs and his look turned towards Maïa. Was one of those horrible and brutal scenes from the day before going to start up again, and this time in front of a witness, the pale ghost with the red forelock, the man with the stamps, Moka the fly? In his floury face, Moka’s vast eyes widened like saucers, eyes that could not believe what they saw, and his mouth opened, looking like it was ready to scream.

  Maïa raised her hand, a round, short hand, but fat, powerful, thickening at the end of that red wrist, solid and flat as a stake, the exact hand on which Cripure, not so long ago, had placed a furtive kiss.

  Was the blow going to fall?

  Moka wanted to shout something, to stop that hand. But the wench waited another instant, wanting to give Cripure one last chance.

  “Are you so sure you’re not signing?”

  He repeated, “No, never.”

  Maïa’s hand fell, but into emptiness. He’d dodged the blow, slipping away suddenly like an agile dancer, while Maïa, carried by her force, tried not to break her head open on the floor like someone toppling.

  “Bastard!”

  “I beg you! I entreat you!” cried Moka, placing himself between the two of them, his arms held out to keep them at a distance. “Come now! Calm down! Let’s not make a scene, come now! We’ve got to explain things calmly . . . calm . . . calm . . .” And saying those words, his large hands beat the air three times.

  Cripure looked at him with an expression that said, This has nothing to do with me, I’m not the one who started this . . .

  “Come now, Madame,” said Moka.

  She was trying to push him, wanting to get to Cripure and give him a whack.

  “Don’t get yourself mixed up in all this,” she said.

  “Calm down! See here—be quiet!” he said, feeling like he was still in study hall, facing a mob of schoolboys.

  And once Maïa quieted, letting go of her belligerent intentions, Moka started twisting his red forelock, murmuring, “What should we do now?”

  It was Cripure himself who responded to that question, in a clear, energetic voice: “What should we do? But I’ll tell you! It’s very simple! You’ll see . . . I’ll take care of it myself!” he said, crossing to the desk, his hand out, ready to grab the document.

  “He’s going to tear it up!” cried Maïa.

  “No,” Moka replied, hurrying over in turn, and covering the document with his hand. You’re not going to do that, no, my dear professor. No! I’m begging you,” he said, bending down in supplication. “You must not . . .”

  Cripure didn’t seem to understand then and there what Moka was asking him, but his hand which had been ready to seize the paper rested on the edge of the table, and the other wandered vaguely around a pocket, searching, without finding, the opening it could slip into.

  If he’d really wanted to, he could have gotten rid of the document. Nothing simpler. Moka wasn’t defending it very well. It would have been enough to forcefully bat away his hand. It was only Moka’s look, he thought, which stopped him.

  “Why?” Cripure finally asked.

  “Wh . . .why? You have to ask! He asks why!” he said, looking at Maïa.

  “Will you sign?” the wench shouted.

  “Ah!” said Cripure, turning around, but still leaning on the table. “You again! It’s unbearable,” he said. And softly, “Go . . .”

  “What?”

  “Go away . . .”

  “Me?” she said, a hand on her heart.

  “Yes.”

  The nerve! Who did he think . . . did he really imagine . . . did he really think she would go? “Oh, and this isn’t my own house?”

  “Leave us.”

  “For what? No, I’m not leaving.”

  “But go, go on, that’s enough! I, I’m telling you, I have something to say to this gentleman in private.”

  Moka frowned. This gentleman? What was that supposed to mean? Cripure was really upset. Wisely, Moka stopped covering the agreement. He folded it and put it in his pocket—this way Cripure wouldn’t think of destroying it anymore.

  “More stupidity,” said Maïa.

  “Get!”

  “You’ll sign?”

  Pushed to the limit, he replied, “We’ll see.”

  “You call me, you hear?” she said to Moka. “I won’t be far, just there in my kitchen.”

  “Ah! No,” said Cripure, finally letting go of the table, “no! Not in the kitchen. I don’t want you to listen, to hear . . .”

  “Listen? What d’you take me for?”

  She stormed out, furious, slamming the door, and ran to the end of the garden, in her bathrobe, with the idea of shutting herself in the cellar.

  What idea was he still keeping in the back of his mind?

  AFTER Maïa left, Cripure started to pace around his study with sagging steps, as if he were lame in both feet. Hands deep in his pockets, the goatskin down to his slippers, with only his little head, round and short, emerging, he didn’t say a word, and soon Moka uncomfortably cleared his throat and fidgeted. He didn’t dare sit down or start pacing like Cripure. A delicate position! And what’s more, he couldn’t stand still. He would have happily paced a few steps, but then he would’ve been next to Cripure, or going the opposite direction, those were his choices. He thought about it. What a spectacle! That would be really . . .what? Comical? I walk, you walk. I meet y
ou, you greet me . . . oh excuse me! I stepped on you. Did I hurt you? Absurd ideas. Moka’s ideas. What a delicate situation!

  Cripure seemed to have completely forgotten Moka’s presence. Even the way he cleared his throat, which he began again, a little louder, couldn’t succeed in getting his old professor’s attention. For a long time yet, he paced around his study, his head bent, his look abstracted.

  In the end it became . . . oppressive. This wasn’t what Cripure would call speaking one on one with someone—this, clearly, wasn’t why he’d sent Maïa away?

  “Ahem, ahem!” Moka coughed again.

  But Cripure’s large shadow continued to pass back and forth in front of him, in silence. Moka started to get scared. Still standing in front of the desk, he started to tremble. Was all this actually real? Had he not, as they said in novels, fallen prey to a dream? This happened to him so often! He must be sleeping, dreaming. A nightmare weighed on him and he’d arrived at the moment in the dream when the intensity of the horror brought the quick unraveling of waking, deliverance! He wanted to speak but as always in dreams his paralyzed throat was incapable of making the slightest sound, not even the little coughs with which he’d so recently hoped to interrupt that ghost’s hallucinatory stroll, to crack the spell, to break the enchantment or the curse which held him prisoner. But the phantom didn’t change his course. He still passed back and forth, huge and slow, before Moka’s eyes. What’s happening to me? Moka wondered. Once again his hands joined and crossed over his face. He prayed. It went on for a long time. But when he’d stopped praying and lifted his hands from his eyes, the ghost was still pacing, pacing, it seemed since eternity and for eternity. Following the random pattern of his steps, the glow of the lamp struck Cripure’s pince-nez, the lenses shining with a fast reflection, uniform and pink, giving Moka the very painful impression that Cripure’s eyes were lit from within, in the manner of those grotesque heads that peasants sometimes sculpted from hollowed-out beets to amuse themselves, putting a candle on the inside, with two large notches for eyes. To Moka’s great relief, this phenomenon soon stopped. The lamp started to smoke. Cripure hadn’t known how to set it up correctly, and Maïa probably hadn’t thought of refilling it in a long time. As the store of gas ran out, the little glow weakened, diminishing more and more without either of them paying any attention; soon there was nothing left beneath the green shade but a little red crown around the wick of the lamp like a ring, a trembling glow, and a thread of blackish smoke from it, which expanded as it rose and filled the room with an acrid smell, a stink of burned bone. The ghost of Cripure became even more ghostly, caught between two glowings—the ending of the lamp and the rising day.

  For once, the shutters weren’t closed. Cripure had forgotten to shut them that night, after his journey to get the star, as he’d forgotten to put out the lamp, and so the first rays were able to enter into this hole where they never penetrated. It seemed like the whole thing was planned, that it wasn’t by chance that Cripure’s lamp completed its life at the very moment when the sun, a still waterlogged sun, it was true, beat back the shadows moment by moment with an explosive force of triumph, appearing here, where, it seemed to Moka, there was nothing for it to do. Cripure was better in the shadows. He found himself more at ease there, more at home. The way Cripure fled from the window made Moka understand that the arrival of day offended and hurt this ghost-like man, that he would have preferred from the bottom of his heart to be able to stay as still as possible with his lamp, meditating on himself and the nothingness of life. Cripure gave the dying lamp a pathetic glance, and when the light went out, after two or three sputterings, with a little noise that sounded a bit like a glug-glug, he lifted his arms, a discouraged gesture, and his bitter lip folded. But he still didn’t say anything. He barely paused in his pacing for a moment, looking very different from the way he’d appeared until then. The golden light of the lamp had transformed that fat, heavy silhouette with a sort of warm, romantic sheen, which the cold light of day, barely risen, tore away with sudden harshness. The hairs of the goatskin, which had shone, under the gas lamp, with many varied shades from white to blue and red, suddenly became a uniform color—gray and dirty. His face, too, looked gray, and Moka could no longer see the lenses of his pince-nez sometimes catching the lamp and gleaming like beacons. No, the lenses themselves were tarnished. Everything, the person and the objects, seemed to have suddenly become cold, and in his goatskin, Cripure looked to Moka like a monstrous animal coming out of the water where a cruel hand had thrust it and submerged it for a long time. Or perhaps like some poor fellow, walking a hundred steps on the platform of a station, waiting for his train and shivering with cold.

  Moka’s heart was beating as fast as it could, and this time, without bringing his hands to his eyes, he contented himself with closing them, saying another prayer: Lord! Deliver us! If all this is a dream, well then, Lord, wake us up! And pressing the force of action into that prayer, he decided, without even considering it, to leave the table and move towards the ghost.

  Then he would see!

  Ghosts, apparitions, and, well, flies, never let themselves get caught between your fingers. All the examples of similar happenings went like that. Ghosts and apparitions in general vanished as soon as you made some brave gesture toward them. And if the great bear-like body that wouldn’t stop going back and forth was a ghost, at the first real gesture he would disappear, go back where he’d come from, back into shadow and obscurity.

  So Moka went towards him, holding out a shaking hand, large and bony, whose knuckles he so expertly cracked, and at the moment Cripure passed by him for the hundredth time, Moka fearfully put that hand on his shoulder.

  •

  The ghost, if it was a ghost, materialized immediately—a new trick, perhaps? In any case, it wasn’t empty air at all that Moka’s hand encountered but, under the hair of the goatskin, cold and slippery as scales, something hard and resistant, Cripure’s very real body that so encumbered him. In response to that pressure, however light, Cripure came to himself, emerging as from the depths of a dream. His little round head made a wounded movement and bent towards his shoulder, and in the dirty gray light, still so weak in the rising day, Moka could make out, behind the lenses of his pince-nez, a morbid look, drowning in reproach.

  “You betrayed me,” murmured Cripure in a little voice, after quite an effort, as if the slightest speech was beyond him for the moment, or as if he thought there was no use in speaking anymore.

  Then Moka was decidedly unsure of everything—neither what he was seeing, nor what he was hearing. Him! Betray Cripure!

  “Me?” he said, but so softly, pressing his two hands against the sagging front of his shirt.

  And he took a step back.

  “You, you exactly,” replied Cripure, in a voice that wasn’t that of anger or even reproach. Moka searched for the word—it was an educating tone. He’s informing me, that’s all.

  “Betrayed?”

  “To a man.”

  “Never!” stammered the unhappy Moka. “How could an idea like that come into your head? I ask myself,” he said, with some strain, “I who have always defended you, I who, for you, I . . .”

  “Ah, ha, ha!”

  This bitter laugh spared Moka the trouble of saying he would have thrown himself into the fire for Cripure.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Cripure took his time. He started walking, then stopped and looked Moka in the eye. “No.”

  He refused friendship too!

  “Lord!” groaned Moka, “come to our aid! Make him understand that I love him!”

  The way he joined his hands over his face made Cripure think he was crying.

  “It’s about time,” Cripure murmured. “What difference does it make to you?” He’d spoken with passion this time, and anger had broken out in his big blue eyes.

  “What do you mean?” said Moka, uncovering his face.

  “If I die?”

  Moka turned his
eyes away, unable to bear Cripure’s look. How could he respond to a question like that! How could he be indifferent to anyone’s death? He thought to reply that friendship . . . no. Since he didn’t want to use that word, then admiration? Not that either. Awe? Even more wrong, and respect too. And yet! “Something in you—”

  “Yes?” said Cripure.

  “Something in you,” Moka continued, overcoming his emotion, “something says that we . . . that I . . . that men like me can’t consent to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “To what you said a moment ago.”

  “Oh! Me, I call things by their names: this was about death, my death, isn’t that right? And you act like a little thing means that we . . . that I . . . that men like . . . So what is that little something, my dear Moka?”

  Moka wanted to say: a sorrow. He murmured, “a soul.”

  This time Cripure burst into a loud, careless laugh. As much as the goatskin would permit, he raised his arms to the sky in a gesture of stupefaction.

  “Are you toying with me? Look at me,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know where I stand on that front? A soul?” Cripure repeated. “I will tell you,” he went on, after a moment of silence, “I believed for a long time in a certain smile of the gods. But that’s been finished since . . . for years. Yes, my dear Moka. I don’t believe in anything, I don’t want anything more.” He paused. “I can’t bear anything more. It’s a dead man you’ve been trying to save,” he said with effort. And he finished through clenched teeth, “If this is a joke, it’s a bitter one.”

  He’s crazed with sorrow, thought Moka, unable to say a word. And anyway, Cripure didn’t leave him time.

  He became animated: “You’ve simply pitied me,” he went on, grabbing Moka by the lapels of his vest. “Admit it! You wanted to save my carcass, eh? Ah, ah! Is that it? Tell me!”

  “My dear professor!”

  “Tell me! Admit it!”

  He didn’t let go of Moka. He bent towards him and their faces nearly touched.