Tristan makes it up as he goes along. He can’t see how to put this improvised plan into action. Words come out of his mouth, like a charmed snake.
“I’m going to feel my way there, hands in front of me”—and saying it, he does it—“head down. I’ll hang on to the roots,” and saying it, he does it. “There, that’s good, it’s not too steep. I can’t see anything, but I think I can hear you breathing. That’s good. Don’t panic. I can hear you. You’re on my right, I think, a little to the right. Yes, there, I’m putting my hand on a rock. It’s steady. Like stairs. There, I’m crawling. Hanging on with my feet too,” and saying it, he does it. “Ow, nicked my finger. Nothing serious. I’m still coming. Don’t move, whatever you do. Don’t try anything. I’m the one coming to you. Trust me. I can hear you better and better. Can you talk? Say something. That’ll help me move toward you. Mind you, I don’t really have a choice. It’s cramped down here. Don’t worry, I’m not going to fall on you.”
The tunnel narrows, then widens, levels out. A reflection ricochets off a wall. Dumestre’s watch has captured a beam of sunlight that snuck in who knows how, from who knows where. With his gamebag on his stomach, Tristan now moves forward on his backside, heels in front. The rabbit is in his element. The plan is his idea. In case of danger, there’s nothing better than a burrow. It’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. As long as you’re in a burrow, there’s nothing to worry about. The young man is his first student. An apprentice who, though lacking in agility, makes up for it with caution. There’s nothing to fear in the earth. We start and end our days in it. It’s a trusted ally. A source of comfort.
As for this old mine shaft, the rabbit knows all of its nooks and crannies. Many galleries lead to it. Those hollowed out in the past by men have long since collapsed, which leaves the other ones, dug out by animals, each with his own technique: gnawers, scrapers, burrowers. In certain places, narrow, vertical channels lead to the surface, like chimneys. He doesn’t know who created this masterpiece. It’s through here that the morning sun, leaping to and fro, full of cunning, has slipped down to position itself on the glass face of the watch, as precise as a lacemaker’s needle.
“Okay, almost there. Say something. No, it’s okay, don’t talk. Don’t wear yourself out. I’m coming. Really slowly. You can’t fall any farther. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Hey, there we go, I can see you. Your gun is shining. Your watch. I’m touching your hair.”
“Fucking hell, kid,” grumbles Dumestre. “Don’t enjoy it.”
Tristan slides down next to Dumestre. He’d like to hug him but knows that he shouldn’t.
“Are you hurt?”
“What do you think?”
“You had quite a fall. But it’s okay. You’re alive. That’s what counts.”
“I don’t hurt,” moans Dumestre. “I don’t hurt anywhere. I can’t feel anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t feel my legs or my arms. I can feel my head, that’s it. You know what that means?”
Tristan doesn’t answer.
“It means a vegetable in a wheelchair. Oh, fuck, this can’t be happening.”
“No, it’s the shock,” says Tristan. “Farnèse and Peretti went to get help. We’re going to pull you out of here.”
“I’m buried alive. Shit.”
Tristan doesn’t know how to respond. He slides his hand into his gamebag, makes sure that the rabbit is still alive too. The animal nibbles on his finger.
“You’re gonna get me out of here,” Dumestre mutters. “You hear me? I’m not staying here like an idiot in a hole. You better figure it out. You get me up there, if not I’ll beat the crap outta you.”
Tristan knows that Dumestre can’t do anything to him. With paralyzed arms and legs, he’s at his mercy.
“I think it would be better if you stay still,” he says. “If the spinal cord is affected…I’ve heard that somewhere… that you should never move an injured person.”
“I’m not an ‘injured person.’ I’m the guy who’s gonna beat you to a pulp if you don’t get me out of this hellhole. You do what I say. Fuck, I need to piss.”
“Oh, that’s a good sign!” Tristan exclaims. “That means… well, you know. That’s what I was thinking. It’s the shock, but the spinal cord isn’t affected, otherwise—”
“Spare me the anatomy lesson, kid. Do what I tell you. You get me out of here. And fast. I don’t want to piss on myself.”
Tristan studies the sides of the hole. He peers up the narrow chimney through which the sunlight is coming to land on the watch’s glass face. Looks back behind him where he came from, examines the slope he went down. Thinks. He seems to remember that the ground above them inclined steeply from where the hole was. He notes that the distance between them and the light directly over their chests is less than the distance he crawled in his descent. He draws a triangle in his head, calculates without numbers, nothing but the help of mental pictures, of illuminated points of impact, pretending to be Pythagoras.
“We’re going to get out through the bottom,” he explains.
“What kind of bullshit is this? You trying to get me trapped?”
“No, no. It’s too steep at the top. I’ll risk hurting you if I carry you. And I’m not even sure if I actually can carry you.”
“When you have to save a man, believe me, you can carry twice your weight. When you kill an animal, a big one, it’s the same. Whatever the weight, a man can carry it on his back. The other week, I bagged a gorgeous one with these big, beautiful princess eyes. Shot him right in the heart. Didn’t spoil anything. A beaut. And I carried him on my own, right to the car. I don’t know how much he weighed, but when I put my arm under him, I was already short of breath. Then I lifted him over my head and brought him back on my shoulders. We have a lot more strength than we think, you know. We’re just afraid of getting hurt.”
Tristan tries picturing the handsome male with princess eyes. He doesn’t even know which species it was; Dumestre didn’t specify and Tristan doesn’t dare ask. He imagines them, man and animal, like the illustrations in the Greek mythology book he used to look through as a kid. Gods, demigods, mortals—it was all so well organized. How sad to give it up. No one believes in that anymore, he’d been told. But it’s so logical, so orderly, he had retorted—he must have been five or six years old. They’d laughed at his naïveté. But what about God, the God of the church, he had added, are there still people who believe in that? The laughter grew quiet. He had made a mistake. He didn’t really know what it was. He had made someone angry. He had made everyone angry. But it was logical: if no one believed in the Greek gods, even though they were so interesting, so meticulously described, so cunning, so powerful, what good was it to believe in another one—singular, newer, more modern, certainly, but so much sadder? He had never brought it up again. He had accurately pinpointed the impropriety of his thoughts.
It was one of those times when he and his mother had been invited to Vigie. Vigie was the name of the village or the house, he didn’t know. A big square yellow building with a double spiral staircase, columns, floors that glistened like lakes, vases with no flowers in them, long-legged dogs who would come and drool on the plates with gold borders and navy-blue monograms, on the silverware, the napkins, big tough squares like bedsheets that were heavy on your knees and that absolutely must not be used to wipe your mouth.
On the train that took them there, Mama made him repeat the lesson. Silverware: always from outside to inside. Napkin: as white at the end of the meal as it was at the beginning. Elbows: off the table. Hands: never in your lap. Please. No thank you. Yes, I’d love some. Bread: don’t touch. Conversation: listen, smile, don’t speak except to answer a question. You remember the last time, what a fuss! Gaze: rather low, somewhere between the tablecloth and the speaker’s chin. Tristan knew it by heart, but he would repeat the lesson to his mother, her eyes lost in the distance on the other side of the train window, who was the most be
autiful woman in the world. At the train station, a car was waiting for them. Mama gave courteous kisses to the chauffeur on his cheeks before climbing in the backseat in a rustle of silk.
Once the car door slammed in the driveway, Mama didn’t say good-bye to the uniformed man, didn’t look at him. On the front steps, a gentleman and a lady—he an owl; she a turkey—opened their arms wide with two identical smiles. The Parisians! they exclaimed. A second later, the enthusiasm subsided. They coldly shook hands. The emotion had worn everyone out.
Just before lunch—long and solemn, during which, in spite of everything, you didn’t have time to eat anything—Astre, a little girl who had brown eyes with dark rings under them, a yellowish complexion, pale lips, and hair pulled back so tightly into her ballet bun that her eyebrows and eyelids lengthened toward her temples like a Chinese mask, asked him in the hallway, “Have you read this? It’s great stuff!” while, from under her skirt, she took out a magazine whose title he couldn’t manage to decipher. At age six, he knew how to read, but he was too distracted by the booklet’s appearance and disappearance under her little-girl plaid skirt to concentrate. Without waiting for his answer, she skipped in front of him—just enough time to make her kilt dance—before quickly going back to her senator’s gait, chin out, shoulders back, which made her look just like the turkey hostess.
Was Astre his cousin? Was Astre pretty? Was he in love with her?
In the train compartment, his mother had made him repeat the guests’ names: Uncle Évariste, Aunt Cyprienne, Cousin Luc, Cousin Paul, Little Léon, Little Lollet, Vava and Mimi, Jeanne-Christelle, Astre, Amaury, Georgina, Darling Paul, Darling Cyprienne, Baby Louise, Baby Véronique, the twins, Arthus and Jean-Christophe; and then the friends, of course: Dodo, the prefect, Irène, Gégé, Loulou, the duchess. The faces he associated with this garland of names were more or less similar to those of the characters in the game of Clue. The young ladies and the little girls had the face of Miss Scarlet; the impressive, white-haired gentlemen, that of Colonel Mustard, and so on.
When he really wanted to suck his thumb at the table, or when he felt his back, which he wasn’t allowed to rest against his chair, start to dangerously slouch, he would recite to himself the litany of names that had never been synonymous with family.
How many times had they gone for lunch at Vigie? Two, maybe three. But it quickly becomes easy to think of an exceptional excursion as something normal when you have only a few years of experience on the earth. Tristan thought they’d be going there for their entire lives, that he would get married to Astre, and, one day, they’d be opening their arms wide on the front steps to welcome “the Parisians.”
But there had been a scandal.
The word used to make Mama laugh until she cried. A scandal! Ha ha ha! she’d exclaim. Almost as hilarious as when Tristan had asked her who his father was. Your father! Ha ha ha! I have absolutely no idea, really, not one!
The scandal. Mama, on the train. Not quite as beautiful, constantly moving, fragile, divided. The dress that gapes open at her chest and rides up on her knees. The weak, glazed-over look. A small, strange smile. At the table, a sleeve that comes up the moment she extends her arm to reach for the wine carafe—“Come now, Love, Éloi is going to serve you.” Love was the name they had given to her at Vigie. Tristan would call her Mama, other people called her Madame Rever. Her ID card said Amandine Bartole de La Houssaye.
The sleeve that rides up attracts stares—there’s something in the hollow of her elbow. Mama doesn’t listen to what they’re saying to her; she knocks over one glass, then two. She wants that wine. Why? Anyone’s guess. It’s her grail. She grabs it. Drinks right from the carafe.
“Didine!” shouts the prefect.
On the train ride back, Tristan studies his mother’s arms. He contemplates the little red dots.
“Does it hurt?” he asks.
She trembles a little.
“Do you like those people?” she asks. “I hate them. We’re not going there anymore.”
Tristan thinks of Astre, who, though a brunette with brown eyes, becomes inscribed in his memory as a blonde with blue eyes, like Miss Scarlet in the original version of Clue.
14
Tristan has been digging straight in front of himself, under Dumestre’s stream of insults. With his hands, with his feet. The rabbit helped him. Whatever you do, don’t think about it, just throw yourself into the earth like you would into water, into the air. All the elements are equal. Don’t estimate what’s left to accomplish, don’t congratulate yourself for what’s already been done. Dig for the pleasure of it, forgetting that necessity is what drives us. Dig for the sweet, sharp smell that emerges with each swipe of your paws. Go for it with your eyes closed, feeling confident, armed with nothing but your joy. Keep your body tight, act as though the earth is opening itself up, on its own initiative, moved by its desire to welcome you in. Provoke this desire. Make yourself long, make yourself soft.
There, that’s good, that’s it, exactly, there you go.
The rabbit is becoming more and more satisfied with his student. He appreciates how docile he is, how flexible his body is. But one thing annoys him: he doesn’t understand why Dumestre is shouting, or why Tristan is saving him.
Let the fat one die. He’s injured and angry—he won’t hold up for long.
We don’t do that. We don’t let people die.
A mother for her young, okay. Is the shouting fat one your child? (The question is sincere. The rabbit is unaware of everything, or almost everything, to do with human life and reproduction.)
No, he’s not my child, but we belong to the same species. He’s my brother, if you like. My human brother.
If you were the one who was injured, the shouting fat one would save you too?
He would save me too. That’s how it is with us.
How touching, says the rabbit. No, “touching” isn’t the right word. It’s beyond the words I know. It’s something I can’t understand, something I can hardly grasp. Is it what you humans call love?
No.
You’re sure?
Absolutely sure.
“What are you doing, digging another tunnel under the English Channel?” Dumestre yells. “I need to piss. It’s not like I’m waiting around for you to smuggle us across some fucking border. Shit, I just want to get out. See the sky.”
Tristan wonders if he still has his fingernails. He’s afraid the earth might have torn them off his fingertips at some point. He continues nonetheless. The soil is becoming looser, mixed with pebbles and leaves—he’s almost there.
His right thumb is the first to shoot out. The feeling of the outside air on his skin elates him and doubles his strength. He pulls his arms in alongside his body and plows headlong into the dirt, pushing with his feet, head forward, eyes shut, mouth closed, breath held, like a human cannonball, like a baby. His face suddenly bursts forth from the hill. No one can see this incongruous cameo, the colors almost tone on tone because Tristan’s skin has turned brown from the dust and mud. Only the relief of his nose and his blue eyes looking out over the valley distinguish him from the exposed, knotted roots just a few yards away. He breathes in. He smiles. He’s afraid.
The rest of his body is behind him, inaccessible. He’s cut off from it, can’t see it, and is uncertain of whether he can still feel it. He gently moves one hand, then the other, fearing he might knock down the tunnel he’s just dug. He’ll have to back in, turn around inside, and make the opening bigger. He is overcome with fatigue, a rapid and full equinoctial tide, wiping away everything in its path. He is overcome with a limp feeling, like an infant being lulled to sleep.
“The fuck you doing, goddammit?!”
Moving his arms away from his neck as much as possible, Tristan slowly pushes himself back toward the interior of the earth while preserving the porthole of daylight cut out by his head.
“It’s fine,” he says in an almost inaudible voice. “We’re going to make it, I promise.”
“Where’s Newspaper?” Dumestre suddenly asks in a distraught voice.
Newspaper is Dumestre’s dog, a springer spaniel. On the day Dumestre introduced him to Tristan, he took more care than he’d taken in speaking about his children, two boys (one an IT specialist, the other a manager of a sporting goods store, both big wigs). Dumestre called him Newspaper because it wasn’t a common name, and also because the dog brings him his newspaper in the evening, when he gets home from work.
“Newspaper, ya like that?” Dumestre had asked him. “For a dog, I mean?”
“Yeah, that sounds nice. It’s not too long or too short.”
“It’s not pretentious either,” Dumestre remarked, tenderly petting the dog’s head, which was white with ginger spots. “This dog, he’s… how can I say it? He’s me, except he’s a dog.”
Their friendship, if that’s what you could call the restless and furtive feeling that unites them, was born that day, at that moment, around that confession. Because Dumestre had found the courage to say it and Tristan hadn’t made fun of him.
“Yeah, I get it. You understand him and he understands you.”
“Shit, kid, I like you.” To Newspaper: “I like him. Should we have a drink?”
Following Emma’s suggestion, Tristan had gone to ask Dumestre to borrow a tool.
“It’s a pretext,” she had explained to him. “You have to make contact. The rest will follow.”
That was three years ago.
It took three years for Dumestre to finally invite him to go hunting.
Hunting Party Page 4