“And your feet?”
“Don’t talk to me about my feet, understand? Finish your fucking story and then we’ll see. I thought I heard a siren. Didn’t you hear a siren?”
“Yes,” Tristan admits, without adding that it was far away and had seemed to get even farther before disappearing in the ambient racket.
The light has suddenly grown so dim that it looks like dusk. But it’s the middle of the afternoon. Almost tea time. They won’t be drinking any tea, nor any of that marvelous coffee with the taste of scrap metal they’d enjoyed a few hours ago.
“Peretti could’ve left us his thermos, at least,” Dumestre grumbles.
“At this point, we would’ve been better off with Farnèse’s plonk,” answers Tristan in an awkward attempt at manly fraternization.
The mere act of uttering the word “plonk” makes Tristan uneasy. He would also rather refer to their alcoholic hunting companion by his first name, but he doesn’t know what it is. When people don’t call him Farnèse, they call him Titi. Titi for Thierry, probably. But if no one says Thierry, then… then…
“Don’t make fun of Farnèse,” says Dumestre after a moment. “He’s an unlucky guy. Before, he was sharp. He worked as a roofer. The love of a job well done, that’s what he had. Gotta have lots of balance in that job, lots of composure. They called Farnèse ‘the Tightrope Walker.’ He used to skip across rooftops, never wearing a harness, even for a church restoration that went up some fifty or sixty feet. Never wore a hard hat. Just a strange pair of diving fins, totally unorthodox. You know what I mean. No one in the trade wears anything like it. Those guys wear heavy boots. And him—that’s how you know he’s a character—he does it in rubber flippers. Speaking of which, this word, ‘unorthodox’—like something from Greek or Chinese—it’s his word. He’d say: ‘Might be unorthodox, but it works!’
“He had a thing with the school principal when he was still just a kid. The principal, would you believe it? Not a teacher. The principal herself, who was gorgeous. He must’ve been about eighteen. The principal wasn’t old, maybe in her thirties. Still, it was impossible love, you know? He was working as an apprentice with Lamalle, the roofer, but he had this taste for the finer things. Who knows where quirks like that come from? Like poppies at the edges of wheat fields. A seed must’ve been carried by the wind and planted in his head. For example, you put a musical instrument in his hands—any kind, right?—and he makes it sing for you. So of course, we call him ‘the Gypsy.’ Tightrope Walker at work, the Gypsy at the café.
“He used to love complicated words too, like ‘unorthodox.’ I don’t remember the other ones. The principal didn’t really give a damn about it, she knew more complicated words than he did. What she was looking for was adventure. She was a beautiful woman, but a sad one, and that’s a terrible thing. A sad woman, that’s something that shouldn’t exist. It’s the most dangerous thing for a man. Shit, my teeth are chattering. What’s the temperature you freeze to death?”
“I don’t know,” goes Tristan, dumbfounded. (He had gotten caught up in Farnèse’s romantic tragedy and forgotten the rain, the cold, the thunder.) “I don’t know,” he says again, “but I do know we’re going to get through this. I’m going to dig a hole.”
“We just got out of a fucking hole!” Dumestre growls.
“A different hole. Like a burrow. Really solid, one that won’t cave in on us. The temperature is consistent underground. With that, plus our body heat, we’ll surely be able to withstand this better. We can even spend the night in there if we have to.”
He gets to work immediately. Since the earth resists him, he cuts into the crust with the butt of his rifle.
“I hope that’s not loaded,” says Dumestre.
Tristan checks, takes out the cartridges, wipes the cold sweat running along his temples.
He almost put a bullet in his head.
He starts up again, with the butt of the rifle, with the barrel, his hands, his feet. He’s surprised he knows what to do, performing the motions with such precision. Surprised he’s not panicking, and even estimating the danger so precisely. He has realized that this isn’t an ordinary storm. What’s beating down on them, what’s about to come down hard on them, is something else. It’s what insurance policies designate a “natural disaster.” But the more adequate term would be “supernatural disaster,” because in a few hours, nothing will be recognizable anymore. The heights will have joined the depths, the depths will replace the heights. Tristan doesn’t have the least experience with an event like this, but it’s as if some disposition within him, dormant until now, has suddenly awoken, picked up the vibrations, the undulations, the rattling, the rolling, the slamming, the grating. The more his hands feel the earth, the more they’re learning about the nature of what’s going to sweep over them.
The skepticism that systematically keeps him from picturing the improbable doesn’t intervene. It’s not a question of plausibility, it’s certain: in a few hours, but maybe less—maybe it’s nothing but a few minutes—chaos will get the upper hand. Freed from who knows where, it will extend its monstrous hand, deft at kneading the earth with no regard for its inhabitants.
Emma.
Emma, alone in their house.
He forgot about her. He abandoned her. His wife. His wife who wants him to join the men, to fit in; his wife who sent him hunting. He agreed. She knew. Emma is like the ancient peoples. She has an innate sense of savagery.
He doesn’t understand why he’s suddenly so annoyed with her. As if she betrayed him, as if she sent him to his death. Yet she’s the one who’s in danger, in their poorly insulated house, with its pointed roof, flood prone, perhaps already flooded. Inside him, like outside, a storm is brewing. A voice that has long kept quiet rises up and growls. They’re not connected anymore, not united as two against the world; they’re trained on each other in opposing combat. Her will against his. Her idea against his. Their love has gone wrong. Their love has turned into a business deal, a millstone to grind away the days. Their consideration for each other suddenly disgusts him, this polite rubbing of shoulders, this reasonable effort so their business can function, so they can fit in, become like the others.
What is a female for, where you come from? asks the rabbit. Why don’t you have children?
Tristan refuses to hear this question, refuses to continue these crazy thoughts, these doubts inspired by fear. He must dig. He digs. Like a maniac. When he’s already waist-high in the earth, warmed up by the effort, he slips out of the burrow to give Dumestre his jacket.
Poking his head out of the hole, he catches sight of his companion, who, unaware he’s being observed, bends one knee, then the other, in order to reawaken his legs. Instead of rejoicing and congratulating Dumestre on the return of his mobility, Tristan crawls back underground and calls out to his comrade from the bottom of the burrow: “Do you want my jacket? I’m burning up down here.”
He pulls himself out for the second time and discovers Dumestre, his legs out and motionless, propped up on his elbows to get closer.
“Looks like your arms are better,” risks Tristan. “And your legs, still nothing?”
“You want me to draw you a picture or what? I have a broken spinal column, isn’t that clear? You think the Holy Spirit’s just going to bless me with some miracle?”
“Sorry,” says Tristan.
He clambers over to Dumestre and drapes his jacket over his companion’s large chest.
“Your coat’s soaked,” grumbles the cripple.
“It’ll still protect you a little,” says Tristan, tucking in Dumestre’s immobile body as best he can. Then he takes off his sweater and puts it around the thick neck like a scarf. “I’m making headway. Don’t worry.”
His hands are trembling. Is it because of fatigue, hunger, thirst? Is it because of fear? He isn’t equipped to deal with dishonesty, never has been. Like something vital is missing.
22
The usual. The everyday. The new life
chases away the old life. Sometimes Tristan forgets that he hasn’t always lived in London, that he wasn’t born in Seven Sisters. He pronounces the two syllables of “ma-ma” in his head the French way, with the stress on the second syllable. He’s become so used to her death that it’s almost as if she never existed. And in these moments, these moments when he remembers who he was and what he went through, he is overcome with a sense of grief deeper than loss. The loss of loss, that’s what threatens him. An immaterial grief, boundless, with infinite dominion.
English comes into his mouth, settles down in his palate, behind his teeth, on the tip of his tongue. His voice changes, the muscles in his cheeks and lips reorganize themselves around this new nucleus. His jaw learns to loosen, slacken, yield, allowing the vertical vowels of the learned language to stay up, to occupy all the available space from his nose to his chin. A new soft palate forms, a palate like a sail swelled up with the wind of the aspirated “h.” Although “aspirated” is the official term, it actually comes from exhalation. “HER,” he pronounces: a long, uniform vowel, standing at attention, no diphthong to be found, preceded by the billowing of his palatal jib sail. Sometimes he even has the impression that his face and body are changing as a result of this learning process. English has penetrated him, and now Tristan feels liberated from his old shell. His voice is different. He’s being reborn.
Mrs. Klimt announces a surprise. A visit. He’s going to be “extremely happy.” She squeezes him in her arms and pats him on the back. Tristan is currently mastering the choreography of the hug, so different and nevertheless equivalent to that of the French bise—the kiss. He has often wanted to kiss both of Mrs. Klimt’s rosy cheeks, but he knows it’s forbidden, as forbidden as cleaning the teapot. In England, you don’t embrace with the mouth, you embrace in the real sense of the word: you entwine, you take the other person’s body in your arms, you pat their back. The face has no part in it; it remains inactive, over the partner’s shoulder. At first, like a reflex, Tristan’s lips tried to plant themselves somewhere, but he quickly realized. The awkwardness he created in the beginning with his French mouth, which was absolutely set on smacking a kiss, had been sufficiently painful. This seems ridiculous to him now, as if he’d asked to suck on the person’s face.
He has no idea who is coming to visit him. He doesn’t know anyone. Mrs. Klimt alluded to the extreme happiness the meeting would lavish on him. Tristan can’t think of who would be in a position to provide him with such a thing. “Extremely happy.” He never has been, or then again, yes, as a child, in the beginning. Mama, naked, running on the beach; Mama running naked with her childlike body, not a strange, revolting body like those of other mamas. His own mama is very small, very thin, very wiry, very tan. She looks like Mowgli in The Jungle Book. She grabs Tristan by his feet and whirls him around. He flies. He extends his arms. Then he really flies. His mother has that kind of strength, the strength to make him fly.
On the specified day, the doorbell rings at six in the evening. Special meals are served later than five o’clock tea at Mrs. Klimt’s. Tristan is in his bedroom, reading a novel Hector lent him: Typhoon. “This book,” his teacher had explained, “was written in English by a man who didn’t grow up speaking our language. Joseph Conrad learned English, like you’re doing today, and became one of the greatest modern novelists. You can change the course of things, don’t you see? In my opinion, territorial blessings and curses don’t exist. The world belongs to us. Languages belong to us. We just have to take hold of them. They don’t resist. For them, it’s an honor to be had.” Hector converses more and more to his student, always speaking slowly and articulating excessively to assure himself the boy understands. He isn’t just satisfied with his pupil—he’s blown away by the young man, by his curiosity, his gentleness, the emptiness inside him and around him. Hector had a son, in the past, with Mrs. Klimt, but no one ever talks about it, no one knows, Tristan remains unaware.
Typhoon is a difficult book. Tristan understands English, but he doesn’t understand Typhoon yet. He’s been struggling on the first page for three days. Mrs. Klimt calls him. Tristan reads the word “bashfulness,” wonders what it means. He hears Mrs. Klimt pronounce his name with her lips that can’t make the French nasal sound of “an.” She says, “Tristam, you don’t mind, do you?”
She calls him once more. He closes the book on the page he doesn’t need to dog-ear, because it’s always the same one.
At the bottom of the stairs, he sees an ankle and a high heel poised on the first step. This is the foot of the person who’s going to bring me extreme happiness, he thinks.
23
The wind redoubles in force. The storm is unleashed. Rain had been forecasted, but no one expected this. Fire trucks go up and down the roads to sound the alarm. They start by evacuating the school. Children jump in puddles, get slapped, cry. Adults yell, push them, carry them. Someone shouts that the river has burst its banks. This makes them laugh. A river bursting the banks! Ha ha! They laugh and cry at the same time. The youngest ones call for their mommies. The mommies, in their houses, wring their hands, look out the window, turn on the radio. No more electricity. Night falls as if someone suddenly pulled a black curtain over the village. Cars lift up off the ground, wobble, gently swirl, then, like a docile herd being led to the slaughterhouse, move into the streets, tossed about by a torrent of mud, rumbling as it rolls along. Basement windows shatter under the pressure. Cellars fill with pebbles, water, earth, rubble, silt vomited by the river. The most adventurous residents—the brave, the crazy, the miserly—come out of their homes wearing fishing boots to save what they can.
The children are safe in the community center adjoining the town hall, located on higher ground. They are given stale cookies from last Christmas. They eat them. One of the teachers is crying. She says her baby is at his nanny’s. The nanny lives in the old windmill, at the river’s edge. The firefighters reassure her, explaining that this isn’t going to last; they’ve evacuated the school as a precautionary measure, but everything is under control. She doesn’t believe them. She races toward the door. She wants to go save her baby herself. The children cheer her on. Go, teacher! The teacher knows how to do everything. She knows how to swim. She is good at geography. She knows the names of all the rivers and all the streams in France, maybe even in the world. She knows how to make bumps disappear and how to put on Band-Aids that never come off. They trust her. But the firefighters grab her by the waist, scold her, tackle her to the ground. She doesn’t have the right to go save her baby. The children throw themselves onto the firefighters. They want to save the teacher so she can go save her baby. They kick and bite. Go, teacher! They all know her baby. She brought him to class when he was born. His name is Nino. He is very small. He doesn’t have any hair. He wears pajamas all day. Go, teacher! The other teacher, the one who has a grown son at reform school because he keeps stealing mopeds, grabs the children by their collars and sends them flying, all the while screaming that if they keep it up, they won’t go to the forest, the pool, the fair; that they’ll never see their mommies again. They don’t listen to a thing. They’re like the river. They’re bursting their banks. Nothing will stop them, nothing will make them be quiet.
But then the nice teacher, Nino’s mommy, who has escaped from the free-for-all, suddenly stands up in front of them and says: “It’s okay, children, I’m going to tell a story now.” She’s not crying. She has regained her normal voice, her normal head. The children stop their assault, sit cross-legged, like she taught them to do, in order to really concentrate. A sweaty fireman with disheveled hair and scarlet cheeks offers her a chair. She sits down and puts her hand under her chin, like she always does when thinking of what story she’s going to tell.
“What about Nino?” asks a small voice from the group at her feet.
“Nino is very strong,” she says.
“Does he know how to swim?”
“Yes.”
“How did he learn?”
; “He learned in my stomach,” she responds.
The children nod seriously. Of course, they say to themselves, that’s normal. He’s the teacher’s son.
24
After the kicking of the tires, the mutual accusations—“It’s your fault!” “And you couldn’t have thought of it?”—the threats, the hands reassuring themselves on the butts of the rifles, Farnèse and Peretti have decided to be efficient. They call the fire department. But no one answers at the station.
“Firefighters never really give a fuck about anything. What a cushy job!” says Peretti.
“Maybe there was a fire,” Farnèse remarks.
“Do you see smoke anywhere, stupid?”
“No, but I thought I heard a siren earlier.”
“You and your sirens,” says Peretti, chuckling. “To stop hearing them, you have to stop listening to ’em.”
Farnèse doesn’t take offense. He tilts his head to the side. Notices something. Doesn’t mention it to his companion. Isn’t sure what to do with it. Something is absent from the scenery. A piece is missing. Like a table leg, thinks Farnèse. A pillar without which the world would collapse. He thinks. Racks his brain. Knows he must absolutely not give anything away. The scenery, yes, that’s it, except it’s not a visual concern. Nothing is lacking from the landscape. Everything is in its place. The problem is the sound. No birdsong. Nothing. No chattering, no chirping, no cawing. Reassured to have discovered it, but worried by his discovery, Farnèse sets off, with Peretti on his heels. They calculate that by walking at a good pace, they’ll reach the village in less than an hour.
Farnèse scampers along, hops. He doesn’t know how to walk, so he inevitably starts running, he can’t help it. Peretti struggles to keep up, remembering the time when they used to call him the Tightrope Walker, with his funny diving flippers. He also remembers something else. It’s like a shadow, a border. He doesn’t want this memory, but it’s stubborn, it comes back, clings to Farnèse’s bounding silhouette. The Tightrope Walker was never alone. Beside him, stuck to him, right there, clinging to his pants, was the child.
Hunting Party Page 7