No. Tristan doesn’t want candy. Never. Because of cavities, because of how much the dentist costs. He knows about everything. Sometimes he regrets having learned so much. When he was a baby, his mama took care of him, the house, the cooking. This isn’t exactly the truth, but that’s what he believes. One day, he did the vacuuming; the next day, the scrubbing. Then he was allowed to open cleaning products, to turn the dials on the gas range. With each one of his victories, his mother withdrew a bit more. After one or two years, Mama’s territory was reduced to the square of her big bed. That’s where she smokes. That’s where she drinks. It’s also where she cries, saying, “Oh, it’s bad, it’s bad for a mama to cry.” Tristan forges her signature in his notebooks. Always good grades. Always first in his class. He has to be. With the smallest faux pas, his mother will be called in and that’ll be the end of their little life together, their burrow, with the sun that comes in from the west and lights up the photo sitting on the chest of drawers, the one where Mama has long braids, a wide smile, and a flowery dress that’s so stiff, so well ironed, you’d think it was made of cardboard.
In the end, Grandma doesn’t come. Phew, everyone can breathe. Time to turn on the radio and listen to a few songs while eating potato chips.
9
“Here, take this,” says Dumestre, walking through the brambles. He hands Tristan a partridge—elegant black coat with white spots. “That’ll please your wife.”
Tristan shakes his head.
“I can’t accept it,” he says, fearing that the immobile rabbit—probably asleep in his gamebag—would be crushed, horrified by the carcass on his back. “I didn’t shoot it. That would be cheating.”
“We always do this,” insists Dumestre, resolute, jovial, continuing on his way. “We never know who shoots what, so we share, like brothers. Really, my pleasure.”
Tristan feels it would be dangerous to refuse. He looks for a cover, a pretext. But suddenly, Dumestre disappears.
Midsentence, partridge in hand, he is swallowed up by the ground.
“Shit! Where’d he go?” cries Peretti, who was walking behind them.
They hear cracking noises, muffled sounds, a tumble, then nothing more, not one cry. For a moment, the three men remain at once speechless, amused, and horrified. It seems like a prank, a magic act. They can’t believe their eyes. Farnèse rushes forward; Peretti pulls him back.
“Watch it, don’t you fall too! It could be an old mine shaft. Dumestre!” shouts Peretti, still holding Farnèse by the sleeve. “Dumestre? Can you hear us? Say something. Fuck, Dumestre, say something.”
Tristan, after twisting his gamebag around to his back in order to avoid crushing the rabbit, squats down and crawls toward the spot where Dumestre disappeared. With his arms out in front of him, he tests the terrain. The ground crumbles under his fingers.
“There’s a hole,” he says, looking at the other two.
“Go on, go a little farther,” says Peretti, who has gotten down onto his knees to grab Tristan’s feet. “I’ve got you. See if you can make anything out.”
Tristan crawls forward cautiously, until his forearms are in the void. He lowers his head. A black tunnel opens up before his eyes. He doesn’t know how deep it is; he can’t see the bottom.
“So?” Farnèse inquires anxiously.
“I can’t see anything,” Tristan mutters. “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight?”
“And why not a torch while you’re at it,” says Farnèse in a trembling, whimpering voice. “Oh, fuck. Fucking hell. This can’t be happening.”
“Stop your whining,” orders Peretti. “We have to think. We can’t panic.”
Tristan, still hanging over the edge of the hole, listens carefully.
“Dumestre,” he calls in a very gentle voice. “Dumestre? We’re here. Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of you. Can you hear us? Dumestre?”
A groan rises from the depths of the earth. Weak, then stronger.
“He’s alive,” Tristan tells the other two. “He’s alive. That’s what counts. We’re not going to panic. We’ll call for help. They’ll send a helicopter.”
“How’re you gonna call them?” asks Peretti. “We don’t bring our phones when we go hunting. The last thing we need is our dear wives on our backs.”
Tristan wiggles gently back out and stands up a few yards from the hole.
“I have my cell phone,” he says with a smile. “It’s fine.”
“Shit,” says Farnèse, hugging him. “Man, you’re a hero. I have to say, I wasn’t too thrilled about you coming in the beginning. After all, you’re not from here, we don’t know squat about you. But then, you pull out your phone. Shit, that’s pretty great.”
Tristan takes his phone out of his pocket, opens it, and realizes there’s no service.
“Move, move,” cries Peretti. “Go on, run over there, toward the clearing. It has to pick up a signal somewhere.”
Tristan obeys and starts to run, phone in hand, checking the screen from time to time. He retraces his steps. Runs in another direction. Comes back. Starts again. Runs farther, panting.
In the gamebag, the rabbit wonders what the young man is up to. He recognizes the panic, the zigzagging, the desperate rush. Has he turned into a rabbit? What’s gotten into him? Is he being pursued, hunted? Are there guns aimed at him? The rabbit would like to tell the young man that flight is futile, that it’s better to wait, to lie low in the moss, without moving, almost without breathing.
After ten minutes of haphazard running, Tristan returns to his companions.
“We’re wasting time,” he tells them, out of breath. “If he’s injured, we need to do something fast, as fast as possible. This isn’t getting a signal anywhere. Go back to the car and get down to the village. Here, take my phone. As soon as you’re on the main road, you’ll be able to call. That’s the best thing to do.”
“The hero thinks he’s a hero,” mumbles Farnèse.
“What’d you say?” asks Peretti, teeth clenched. “I didn’t hear that very well. What did you say?”
He points his rifle at Farnèse’s thin chest. Farnèse steps back, trips over a root, falls backward.
“Nothing, I said nothing. Don’t get all pissed off. Don’t do something stupid.”
Peretti lowers his weapon. “We have to calm down,” he says. “Calm down, now. Let’s go. You’re right, kid. We’ll go on foot. You stay here with Dumestre. Okay? Talk to him. Deal with this.”
Tristan nods and watches the two men jog up the hill as they leave: Peretti, plodding along, as if the ground were sucking up the soles of his shoes; Farnèse, light and limping, like a wounded fawn. Around his neck, stirred up by the wind, a silk Indian scarf with a green-and-pink pattern unwinds its serpentine tail. Tristan notices this detail without dwelling on it. Hey, he says to himself, Farnèse is wearing a scarf, and something in this observation resonates like an enigma.
The sun has risen, imperceptibly warming leaves, branches, pebbles, skin.
Once Peretti and Farnèse are out of sight, Tristan sits on the ground and, very delicately, opens his gamebag. The rabbit’s eyes, like two polished hazelnuts, stare at him.
“Today, you’re the winner,” he whispers, stroking the animal. “I’m going to free you.”
He slips his hand under the animal’s warm, soft, and supple stomach, touching the fragile, almost brittle ribs with the tips of his fingers.
“I’m gonna die,” yells a voice from the bottom of the hole.
Tristan stuffs the rabbit back in his gamebag and closes it over him, then crawls once more toward the entrance of the tunnel.
“Dumestre? Dumestre? Help is on the way. Don’t worry. It’s fine. In twenty minutes, an hour at most. Are you hurt?”
“Shit, I’m gonna die.”
10
“You think I’m gonna die, sweetie?” asks Mama, whose tiny body can barely be made out under the sheets. Only her arms, thin and dry like cut branches, her shoulders, narrow and bo
ny, and her head, no more than a skull—sunken eye sockets, protruding cheekbones, chiseled jaw under her tight skin—are visible. “What do you say, honey? Can you give Mama a cigarette?”
Tristan lights a Dunhill Red without inhaling the smoke, which makes him nauseated, and brings it up to his mother’s chapped lips. She sucks fearlessly. She no longer has the strength to eat or drink, only to draw on the filter. Tristan is sitting on the nightstand. His healthy, slender, muscular body and his soft, smooth bronze skin disgust him. He finds his body cumbersome; he would prefer to be a wisp of straw, like his mother, to drift along with her down the weakening stream of life. He closes his eyes. Shakes the ashes into the ashtray. Puts the cigarette between her eager lips once more.
“Shit, I’m gonna die,” Mama murmurs in one breath. She starts coughing. The blood gushes from her mouth, her nose, as if her veins don’t know how to contain it anymore, as if she were pierced with thousands of holes. Tristan dips a handkerchief into the bowl of water at the foot of the bed. He skims it over his mother’s face, his fingers light as feathers, but she screams.
“You’re hurting me! Don’t press like that.”
As he cleans her, she cries and says, “My big boy. Fifteen years old. How can you be fifteen? I was fifteen once. I was a knockout. You know that. Everyone does. A knockout, with her life ahead of her and men at her feet. Free, free, free. No one to put a leash on me. What fun I could have. People don’t have fun like that today. Do you have fun? You’re too serious. You only think about school. Did you already take the baccalauréat? No, it’s too soon. Fifteen, that’s young to take the bac exam. See, I never took it, so I have nothing to say. Oh, the fire! Can you see the big flames? I’m gonna go straight to hell. On a slide. Off I go, feetfirst. And you, you go and take your bac. Always so good. Too good. Always judging me. But with me, see, it was different. Teachers? Sons of bitches. Grades? Bitches. The system? A bitch. I wouldn’t have it. But you, you do what you’re supposed to. I never knew boys like you. Do boys like you even exist? Are there other ones like you at your school? I mean, exactly like you, who take the bac at fifteen, do the shopping, the cleaning, the laundry, and wipe their mothers. Ah, yes, that’s true, it’s not the same, it’s not shit, it’s blood, it doesn’t come from the same place. It’s more respectable. But now everything’s the same for me. Up, down. Mouth, ass—same thing. That’s the difference when you’re dead. Hey, honey, I just made a big discovery. The difference when you’re dead is that there are no more differences. So I’m dead. Am I dead, Tristan? Or not yet. Tell me not yet. You want to play a game of French tarot? Ah, no, shit, you can’t do it with only two people. It’s crazy how little you can do with two, don’t you think? There’s never been enough of us in this house. That’s the problem. I should’ve done things totally different. But I wouldn’t have wanted more children. Didn’t want to be the mom with brats pulling on her skirt, the mom with her breasts hanging down. No. Something more like Snow White or Goldilocks. A girl—me—and seven dwarfs, or three bears. Some life, in fact. You don’t add any life to this place. Since you were a baby, nothing. You never cried. Are you crying? You’re crying because I’m gonna die. Shit, I’m gonna die. Five minutes ago, I was fifteen. Five minutes ago, I was a knockout.”
11
Lying flat on his stomach on top of the leaves, Tristan inspects the silent hole. From time to time, he gently calls, “Dumestre?” No answer comes back up from the pit. He waits. He thinks.
Go down. Join Dumestre. Revive him. Carry him on your back. Go back up the slope with Dumestre’s body that weighs one and a half times your own. Be a hero. Find the strength.
“Dumestre?”
The sun rises and Tristan starts to make out the contours inside the tunnel. Colors appear, melted together at first but growing more and more distinct as his vision adapts. He squints. It’s like when you don’t know how to read, and the letters, those indecipherable freight cars of the sentence train, file past and escape you.
Blood rushes into his tilted head. Dizziness overtakes his brain. Nausea in his stomach. In one bound, Tristan gets up, rubs his temples, breathes deeply. There’s nothing to do. Just wait. The others must have reached the car.
Dumestre’s car.
The key to Dumestre’s car.
In the pocket of Dumestre’s jacket.
At the bottom of the hole Dumestre fell into.
At what moment could they have realized? He’s only just thought of it. He pictures them in front of the good old Citroën, the impenetrable, locked Citroën.
He imagines their feet kicking the tires, hears the swearing. You couldn’t have thought of this, you dickhead? Dreads the fight. The loaded guns. The restless bullets. The relief of the blast. Sees them running, toward the road, making hand signals. The local highway is less than two miles away. They just need to run. In half an hour, they’ll be there, attracting drivers, calling for help on the cell phone.
Be patient. Two hours instead of one. What’s the difference?
12
Opera is so boring, thinks Tristan, age twelve, his hair styled like a model child’s, sitting next to his mother, who is wearing a periwinkle-blue dress that is slightly too big for her and slightly too chic compared to her flat lace-up shoes. “I don’t have any other ones. It doesn’t matter. Who’s going to see my feet? We’ll be sitting down. We’ll be in the dark.”
They’re sitting down in the dark, side by side, and on the stage, which is lit up from the wings and cluttered with red-painted traveling trunks, some women are singing, very loudly. They’re too still, as if their arms have turned into sticks, their feet into boulders. From time to time, Tristan looks up at the supertitles and reads bits of sentences. It’s a translation. His mother explained it to him. What’s written above corresponds to what they sing below, but none of it makes sense. Tristan would like to leave, he’d like for all this to stop. He wants to climb up onto his seat and shout, Be quiet! Shake your hands out. Say something funny.
The boredom digs a sort of cave inside him, growing darker and vaster with every moment. On the walls, other, more familiar characters appear: the female cashier at Félix Potin who tousles Tristan’s hair when he pays for the groceries—ever since he’s grown taller, she’s had to lift herself up off her seat a little bit to reach the top of his head, and when she sits back down, the cushion lets out a sort of sigh; Madame Tascaud, his French teacher, a substitute with long hair and lots of eye makeup, whose flat chest disconcerts him; Zadie Virlojeux, a tall junior who, they say, is sleeping with the assistant principal (old, so old, strict, ugly, navy-blue suit, dirty tie, how awful!); Lorette, the school nurse, who one day, while stroking his cheek for a while, said, “I know about your mama, okay?” (Know about what? he’d wanted to ask, but didn’t dare, not wanting to risk hearing the answer); women, all kinds of women, with the cave walls like screens, but this isn’t like at the movies, this is heavy, oppressive, fragmented. There isn’t a story, he thinks, as though dealing with a personal insult.
His mother leans over and whispers in his ear: “Onegin and Lensky, two poets, best friends.”
Why should I care?
He looks up in spite of everything to watch the creatures in wigs and starched collars who have just walked onstage. One is fat and sweaty, the other continuously swallowing his saliva, looking like he’s about to vomit. Two poets, best friends. Okay. On the other side of the stage, two women: a hefty, rosy-faced one and a small one who’s very pretty. Their lovers, thinks Tristan. Maybe something is going to happen. But no. They sing very loudly, as always, with their arms as straight as sticks. One of the women’s voices is different. Suddenly, it’s as if the inside of the cave, the vast cave of boredom, is lighting up.
Even though he wasn’t expecting it, something grips his heart in a very pleasant way. An unknown word has grabbed on to a scale, the music swells, and the voice, which has captured his heart, turns him upside down like a snow globe, making the imprisoned white snowflakes twirl ar
ound inside the water-filled glass sphere. Russian, he thinks, is a sweet language, soaked with “oo” sounds that glisten like syrup.
He dozes off and scratches his knee through his corduroy pants, lulled by the tiny sound his nail makes against the rough fabric. The cave plunges into darkness once more. His breath slows. He falls asleep.
When he wakes up, the stage is strewn with white-painted traveling trunks. The two men, the poets, best friends, are facing each other. What are they doing with pistols in their hands? Tristan looks up at his mother’s face and sees her tears flowing, framing a smile. He watches her chin as it traces a tiny circle in one direction, then in the other. More of an eight than a circle, as if her head were dancing imperceptibly on her neck. She closes her eyes, smiles more, places her two hands flat on the silky fabric of her dress.
The action has shifted. Now only his mother’s body dances immovably to the chords whose complex harmony convinces Tristan of… he doesn’t know what. Exaltation, jubilation, the senses overtaking the brain. He’s not used to not understanding.
A shot. The fat one has fallen backward. He’s dead. Two poets, best friends. One killed the other.
13
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Tristan says to Dumestre, who doesn’t respond, who might be dead at the bottom of the hole, with his car keys buried in his jacket pocket. “I’m going to come down very slowly. I’m going to get closer.”
Hunting Party Page 3