Hunting Party

by Agnes Desarthe

  The child’s name was Vladimir, but Peretti doesn’t want to remember that either. Or how they had teased Farnèse because of that name. Another one of the principal’s ideas, they’d said. They had all been wary of this woman. All of them, his friends. And they had been right. As soon as the kid was born, she disappeared—no news, no address, no heart in fact.

  Vladimir and his father had resembled each other, like two apples from the same tree. Same light feet, same clever smile, pointed nose, pale blue eyes always wide open. Farnèse kissed him all the time, carried him on his back, on his shoulders, in his arms. One time, they called him “the Kangaroo,” but it didn’t stick. Tightrope Walker, Gypsy, that was enough.

  “May he who has ever changed Vladimir’s diaper cast the first stone!” That was the type of joke they had loved to make among themselves, because Farnèse was the only one with a child at the time and they had all helped him as much as they could. Oddly, their girlfriends weren’t interested. Vladimir was a born mascot. Voilà. Vladimir wasn’t a child, he was a mascot. And girlfriends didn’t understand this, but for men, a mascot is better than a child.

  Peretti watches his companion, who’s really limping more than running because his muscles have melted from drinking so much, and he can’t help picturing a miniature Farnèse alongside. Except the mascot doesn’t run anymore. The mascot fell off a roof. And it wasn’t Farnèse’s fault. It was that witch’s fault, that bitch, that fucking principal. If she hadn’t come back, Vladimir would still be there, would have become a man, with his own little boy with a funny name, or a little girl with pigtails and a Spanish dress. But the principal came back. She wanted to see him. She saw him. Farnèse said to Vladimir, “Uh, well, this is your mother.” And the next day, Vladimir fell off the roof.

  “A child doesn’t just fall,” Lamalle, the boss, kept repeating. He had been charged because the roof was his responsibility. “In the old days, I’d take my apprentices at thirteen, fourteen years old and they’d never fall. It’s the old ones who fall, because of dizzy spells, because of being fed up, but children, never. You fall if you think about it. Children don’t think about it.”

  It seems that on that day, Vladimir had thought about it.

  “C’mon, hurry up,” says Farnèse, turning around. “Look what’s over our heads.”

  He points to the sky. Peretti sees the enormous cloud, like a roll of steel wool ready to beat down on them. He doesn’t recognize the sky. He’s never seen anything like it.

  “What is that?” he asks Farnèse.

  Farnèse shrugs his shoulders. The rain starts to fall, very hard, all at once, as if to answer the question. The drops almost hurt, they’re so heavy. It feels like they’re loaded with lead.

  After Vladimir died, Farnèse often had a nightmare in which he was lying on the ground, watching the sky, and could perceive millions and millions of eyeballs hanging over him. Today, it’s as though all those eyes were falling, and without actually thinking about it, without really making the connection, he’s delighted, in his own way, very modestly.

  The end of the world, he thinks. Phew, it’s about time.

  25

  The two men have settled into their cave. Tristan pulled Dumestre along the tunnel, then to the bottom of the hole he had widened in order to build a cave. Outside, night has fallen. Inside, the darkness is so black, so thick, it seems material. The absence of light has transformed into cotton wool. At first, the eyes strain, searching for a hint of brightness, waiting for the moment when the pupil has sufficiently dilated and the optic nerve can send new information to the brain: no, it’s not completely black. A feeling from childhood. Awoken from a dream, from a nightmare, you open your blind eyes. Where are you? Where did the room go? Where has the world gone? But the iris retracts and the scenery is repainted with the gray paintbrush of the moon, the yellow paintbrush of the streetlight on the corner, the red paintbrush of the flickering sign. The night is filled with colors.

  Tristan flicks on his lighter, makes his companion admire the walls. Even he can’t get over the work he accomplished. Alone, with his bare hands. He never would have thought he possessed such strength.

  Inside, they can’t hear the rain or the wind. Once the lighter goes out, nothing is visible. The eye bumps into what’s called blackness, but it’s no more black than it is green or blue. The eye is dismissed; it has no more sensitivity than the back of a hand, the crook of an elbow—it can see no more than the rest of the body does. The earth’s odor mixes with that of sweat. Tristan has convinced Dumestre to take his clothes off. “They’ll dry quicker if they aren’t on us,” he told him.

  “Don’t you touch my underwear!” Dumestre orders after letting himself be undressed.

  “No, no, of course not. Don’t worry. I’m keeping my boxers on too.”

  Tristan sorts the clothes by touch, spreading them out as much as possible. The sweaters aren’t as wet as the rest. The two men slip them back on, bumping into the walls, bumping into each other. They grumble. They laugh.

  “Shit, if somebody had told me,” mumbles Dumestre, “if somebody’d told me…”

  Tristan flicks on his lighter again, an orange globe making their faces come alive in the darkness.

  He turns it off once more.

  “You know ‘The Little Match Girl’?” he asks.

  “What’s that?” asks Dumestre. “A song?”

  “No, a story.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  So, as slowly as possible, Tristan tells the Hans Christian Andersen tale, which he can’t remember very well. It’s a trick. A trick to distract Dumestre from the other story, the one he started telling in the rain but can’t continue there, alone with him, almost naked, at the bottom of a hole.

  26

  “Extremely happy,” Tristan repeats to himself, all while evoking the extremely sad adventures of the little match girl.

  A little girl, on a winter evening, without shoes, walks in the snow.

  A teenaged girl, wearing high heels, sets an enticing foot on the first step of a London staircase.

  And so, like a game of point and counterpoint, the stories respond to each other and superimpose.

  This is the foot of the person who’s going to bring me extreme happiness, Tristan thinks, sixteen and a half years old, coming down the stairs to meet his surprise.

  The ankle is at once dainty and plump, a slender joint and ample flesh, fattened with who knows what, ripe, as though ready to burst. The skin sparkles between the bottom of the pant leg and the shoe’s leather.

  From the back, he doesn’t recognize her.

  Alerted by the noise, by Mrs. Klimt’s joyful cries, the visitor turns around.

  From the front, he doesn’t recognize her either.

  She seems older than he is, but barely. The skin on her face is greasy, as if she has just finished coating it with butter. Little red pimples border her hairline like a diadem. She wears her hair short, like a boy’s. Her cheeks are round, her eyes sad and brown with deep purple rings under them, her mouth painted a brick red that aggravates her skin’s brownish tint.

  “You recognize me?” she asks in a husky, powerful, authoritative voice.

  Without wanting to, Tristan lowers his eyes slightly toward her chest. Her open jacket and blouse reveal two perfect breasts. That’s how he describes them to himself, his crotch aching, before thinking, What a treat.

  “Astre,” he says.

  “Yeah,” she responds.

  What happened to her kilt? he thinks. And her ballet bun? Where are her skinny legs, her gaunt torso, her slumped shoulders?

  Mrs. Klimt is over the moon.

  Tristan wonders if he’s changed too. He quickly glances at his reflection in the mirror hanging in the lounge. He sees his enormous hands, much too big for his bony arms; his eyebrows, probably thicker than they were ten years ago; his mouth that droops a little, always half-open, except when he thinks about it and abruptly closes it again, clenching his jaw unt
il the roots of his teeth hurt. His hair is longer than Astre’s.

  Yes, I’ve changed too, he thinks, trying with one hand, which has slid into his pants pocket, to crush his swelling penis, taking up all the space and threatening to tear the fabric of his jeans, to break everything in sight…

  Tristan smiles. He realizes he’s funny. He realizes he’s joyful. Extremely happy.

  Astre is funny too.

  She eats everything Mrs. Klimt gives her with a voracious appetite, and, looking at the woman gratefully, with her hand on her heart, she says in French, “This is super disgusting, it’s dog food, right?”

  And Mrs. Klimt, who doesn’t understand a word, nods, saying, “Yes, oui, oui.”

  Tristan is a little embarrassed to be laughing at the expense of his hostess, but it’s irresistible. He has never known someone as intrepid, as crazy as this girl.

  As for Astre, she doesn’t laugh, but manages to keep a straight face and preserve her aristocratic manners, which, Tristan notices, have made a big impression on Mrs. Klimt.

  “Charming girl! Charming girl!” she confides to her protégé in a low voice, her eyes closed, her hands joined, as if Astre isn’t listening, isn’t there.

  After the meal, Mrs. Klimt refuses to let the kids clear up or do the dishes. She has a better idea. She sits them down in the lounge with a game of Monopoly. Do they know how to play Monopoly?

  “Of course we know how, you old hag!” Astre says in French in a very sweet voice, showing signs of acknowledgment. “You can go scrape the shit off your dishes.”

  Mrs. Klimt brings them a plate of cookies. The two teenagers don’t exchange a word. They play. Roll the dice. Buy properties. Go to jail. Get out of it. Tristan is winning. He becomes a billionaire. Astre sinks into mediocrity, then misery. They don’t exchange glances either. They play. Tristan grabs his partner’s last paper bills.

  “Well, I’m going to bed,” she barks, knocking over the game board by accident—a very purposeful accident. “Oh, sorry. Can you clean it up? I’m exhausted.”

  Tristan feels like he missed something. He should have… He could have… He probably did something wrong, but what? He picks up the scattered cards and pieces with trembling hands. His breath is short, uneven, as though he has a fever.

  I screwed everything up, he thinks, without really knowing what “everything” is. What was he expecting? Should he have let her win? Should he have said something special to her, looked at her in a certain way, in certain places?

  The house is immersed in silence. It’s the eight o’clock curfew.

  Tristan doesn’t know where Astre’s room is. He knows she’s going to sleep here tonight. He can almost feel her, on his skin, in his throat, on his palms, due to a particular feeling of idleness, a sense of boredom, a weariness that takes hold of certain areas of his body.

  He returns to his book, right where he left off, on the first page, the insurmountable first page, which he goes beyond this time, without effort, without understanding anything else, drifting on the surface of the sentences, compelled by an anger he doesn’t know how to handle, his thighs clenched, as he lies on his ridiculous bed, a pitiful skiff. He reads, turns the pages, going forward as though rowing, producing a mechanical effort, his gaze absent, his ear straining, listening for the noise of footsteps, creaking doors, water running from a faucet, and—much fainter, almost imperceptible, imaginary, in fact—a duvet falling on the tawny skin of a body in bloom.

  He distracts himself from reading, to the point of nausea. Yet without the help of his sight and hearing, absorbed as they are by the most urgent missions, something in him, something childish or, on the contrary, something old and wise, accepts the reading, soaks it up, thrives on it, gets lost in it, becomes enamored with it. He recognizes himself in Captain MacWhirr, this man who doesn’t understand anything at all, unshakable because of his slowness, because of his stupidity, but most of all because of something more secret and complicated, a hidden factor that Tristan feels he alone can detect. MacWhirr is always wrong and always right at the same time; when he says to Jukes, his second-in-command, Was that you talking just now in the port alley-way? With the third engineer? I can’t understand what you can find to talk about. Two solid hours, Tristan feels a deep sense of recognition. He doesn’t understand conversation either. He feels both full and empty. Full of feelings and empty of words. He lacks a point of access, which he sometimes pictures as a footbridge, but other times as the near-invisible thread of a spider’s web. Is this link supposed to stretch between thoughts and words, or between him and others? Tristan doesn’t know. Where can this missing link be found—inside or outside of himself?

  His eyes close on this question, on the disturbingly strong forces rocking the Nan-Shan, this ship, le navire in French—but in English, you call a ship “she,” or la navire, and it’s so much prettier, so much nobler than the masculine version in French, Tristan says to himself, captivated by the language that is adopting him as much as he’s adopting it—this ship that, thanks to the stubbornness of MacWhirr, her idiot captain, is rushing right into the typhoon.

  A light being turned off wakes him up for one second. Someone has slipped into his room. Someone has closed his book and set it on the nightstand. Someone has pressed the little black button at the base of the lightbulb. Someone who wants the best for him, who’s taking care of him, who’s watching over him. So he quickly sinks into a deeper, rapid sleep, inhaled as if through a siphon by the absence of conscience, the absence of light, the absence of self.

  He is still sleeping, with belligerence and passion, when a hand places itself on his hip bone. A crystal laugh as light as pollen opens up a passage in his dream. The hand on his iliac bone is the wave against the ship’s side, her side, this hermaphrodite vessel, masculine or feminine as it passes from one native tongue to the other.

  A real tongue slips into his mouth, between his lips, which are wide open. It’s a sturdy tongue, long and willful, which Tristan thinks is his, but no, his own tongue is asleep, curled up in his lower jaw. A hand slides onto the hollow of his stomach, following the slope of his skinny torso, the pointed bone springing up from the vulnerable, resting loins. A hand, a tongue, and, soon, another hand busying itself, in a frenzy, much more agitated, much more nervous than the first. The second hand is a squirrel; Tristan’s body, a trunk. The squirrel scampers about, climbs up, climbs down, digs around, nestles, scurries away. Tristan’s hands are still sleeping. Clumsy, ignorant paws. Tristan’s hands don’t know what they’re missing. They still belong, despite their size, despite the instinct propelling them toward his groin, to childhood. They are the last to be contaminated, poisoned, intoxicated. Strange knees and incredible thighs, so fleshy, so smooth and round, substitute themselves for his. Tristan becomes le/la navire. The swell makes him swing from masculine to feminine; a strange slime, a complete wetness, covers his skin, drowns him, swallows him up. His fingers brush the sheet, pull up the already-wrinkled cotton of a nightshirt, lift up an underskirt, a wave of imaginary underskirts, white foam, frothy and clammy. His tongue wakes up, called in by his hands for reinforcement: lick here, suck there. The whole crew is on deck, battling against the unrelenting waves, fastening, rowing, hauling. They all come up in order to dive further into the deep, the wet, the sea that no longer knows high or low, over or under. Tristan groans and fights the hydra with its multiple heads and innumerable tentacles, his fists pounding and plowing, his fingers separating and digging in and grabbing on. He’s bitten; he bites. He’s pleaded with; he pleads. He’s torn apart; he gives way; he consents. Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream. As long as this stops. As long as this never stops.

  That laugh again.

  “Well, there you go,” says Astre in her husky voice that makes the walls shudder. “A job well done.”

  Tristan wants to stroke her face, as if to assure himself it’s really her, it’s really him, they’re really here, but she pushes his hand away forcefully.

&
nbsp; “Stop,” she scolds. “I can’t stand sentimentalism. It’s disgusting. You and your family are such losers.”

  What family? Tristan wonders, without daring to open his mouth.

  “Like your mother, completely ridiculous. Even when I was little, I felt sorry for her. She was so full of herself. My father called her ‘Love’—wait, no, not my father, it was my uncle, the prefect. Love! She’s probably the one who invented that nickname. Who did she think she was? A rebel? What was her rebellion, sleeping around? Shooting up? Drinking? All three? Frankly, they all pretty much lead to self-destruction. But dying from AIDS, on top of everything else. Such a loser.”

  Tristan feels his jaw tense up, his fists clench, his arm muscles contract.

  “From AIDS?” he murmurs, even though he wants to scream at his cousin—but is she really his cousin if she’s the prefect’s niece?—to make her shut up. Even though he’d like to strangle her, slap her, gouge her eyes out.

  “Don’t you know about AIDS? The disease for junkies, gays, and sluts like your mother?”

  Tristan doesn’t answer.

  “Well, wanna do it again?” she asks, indifferent.

  And so they do it again, any way she says, upside down, right side up. It’s a lesson, an express Kama Sutra, a trip around the world in eighty minutes.

  27

  “My mother died of AIDS,” says Tristan, like an epilogue to “The Little Match Girl.”

  Dumestre mutters. He yawns. “Shit, I fell asleep. How does it end?”

  “She dies.”