Hunting Party

by Agnes Desarthe

  “I thought so,” Dumestre says. “It couldn’t have ended any other way. What about us?”

  “What?”

  “You think we’re gonna die?”

  “What do you want us to die from?”

  “Dunno. I’m hungry. Just think, if the partridge hadn’t got left in that hole, we could’ve had one hell of a roast.”

  “The partridge?” asks Tristan, dazed.

  He’s lost the thread of the conversation. The word Dumestre didn’t hear and will never hear still resounds in his own head: AIDS, like a single wobbling music note. My mother died of AIDS. He had never uttered that sentence before. He’d never had the chance. Even with Emma. When they were getting to know each other, it was too early, they were too young, and then, in the passing years, it had become too late.

  “The partridge I wanted to give you for your wife. Remember it? Pretty little thing.”

  A pretty little thing, Tristan thinks. And, for a moment, he’s no longer sure if this epithet applies to the bird or to Emma.

  He’s hungry too. He thinks of the rabbit. The rabbit in the gamebag. What have I done with him? he wonders.

  Because of fear, because of the storm, he forgot his promise, he neglected his duty.

  “I think I left my bag outside,” he says to Dumestre in an anxious voice.

  “What’s in there? A bar of gold?”

  “No, nothing, but, well, it’s bad form.”

  This sentence that makes no sense seems to satisfy Dumestre; he nods in the darkness.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Go find it. That way you can take a look around, see if the rescuers are coming.”

  Tristan crawls along the narrow tunnel and, as he approaches the entrance, he perceives the racket, louder and louder, more and more worrying, that prevails outside their burrow. Rolling, rumbling, grinding, wrenching. His eyes, accustomed to the half-light, distinguish the smallest details of the nocturnal spectacle that together are offering up the heavens and the earth.

  Anger, rage. Everything is possible: the earth can open up; it can shake, cave in, swallow things. It’s like some monster, after sleeping under the earth’s crust for millennia, has awoken from its long hibernation. It stretches its colossal limbs, its joints unfold, its thick skin unfurls, it howls, it yawns, arches its back and sets forth, breaking the horizon line, smashing ridges, trampling valleys.

  Tristan no longer knows if it’s hot or cold outside. He feels swept up by a movement that surpasses him. His body is nothing. His thoughts collide with what he sees, without understanding it.

  A pale yellow stroke slices the heavenly canopy. The clouds, which have lost their immateriality, as though loaded with iron filings, with soil, with pebbles, race toward either side of the bright arc. A cow moos, then wails, as if to announce the clap of thunder that flashes moments later, making the ground tremble. Trees several feet tall bend under the wind’s hand, making them look as flexible as strands of hair. Sparkles glisten all around. That’s water, thinks Tristan. Water in the place where, a few hours ago, there was a field.

  Farther away, a little lower down, through the rain’s dense, silvery strokes, he notices a shape that’s difficult to identify, moving about majestically. What is that? he wonders, studying the triangle—yes, it’s definitely a triangle—sliding along the valley, slowly, lazily, apparently inhabited with a different tempo. That house, Tristan says to himself, but the word “house” resists, doesn’t identify with this moving shape; so he tries “barn,” and the sentence manages to build itself: that barn is floating on the prairie.

  It’s not over, he says to himself. It’s right in the middle of happening. A storm. A rise in water level. A flood. We’re not going to die. Dumestre and I are already survivors. Nothing can happen to us here, where we are. But the others, in the village… Tristan hoists himself out of the hole to look for any lights. A wave of mud, whipped up from a puddle by the agile wind, smacks him in the face.

  Before going back into the burrow, at the bottom of their refuge, he gropes around for his gamebag, grabs hold of the strap, and takes it with him without verifying its contents. Without being able to explain why, he’s convinced the rabbit is still there. The animal hasn’t escaped. He waited and fell asleep under the orange-scented dish towel.

  “Any news from the front?” asks Dumestre, whose voice surprises Tristan at the cave’s entrance.

  Tristan wasn’t expecting him to be so close. He can’t see him. When he went outside, Dumestre was lying down, dozing, but now he seems to be seated. His voice is coming from higher up, it’s better placed, he’s articulating more clearly. Tristan senses danger, as if his companion were preparing to spring on him, but to what end? What reason would he have to harm Tristan? They’re stuck with each other.

  Tristan doesn’t answer Dumestre’s question. He doesn’t tell him about the hurricane rumbling outside. He keeps quiet. Then takes a deep breath and says, in a flat voice, leveled by fear: “You’re sitting up?”

  28

  Breakfast with Astre. Trembling knees. Tristan can smell her scent everywhere, in the white of the bread, in the steam from the tea, her softness in the butter, her sweetness. He can smell her on his fingers, in his mouth. He doesn’t dare look at Mrs. Klimt. He thinks she’s angry. How does she know? And what does that mean for him? He focuses on his hostess to avoid thinking about what’s making him suffer: What will his life be like afterward?

  He has sunk into the pain of initiation. How can he think about anything else? How can he do anything else? Or want to do anything else? Astre has become his goal, his destination. She is both question and answer, hunger and satisfaction. She is his universe.

  She’s going to leave in a few minutes. She has already put on her coat. She eats everything she finds on the table. With disgust, Tristan observes her shiny chin, her thick nose, which moves strangely when she chews. She is unattractive. But she is his master, his god, the condition for his existence.

  So, when she heads to the ground-floor bedroom to get her suitcase, Tristan springs up after her, glues himself to her back, slips his hand under her coat, under the belt of her pants. She turns around brutally and pushes him with all her might. He falls backward.

  “Are you crazy? Maniac!” she shouts.

  Mrs. Klimt hurries over.

  “It’s nothing,” says Tristan in English, in a shaky voice. “I fell.”

  He gets back up and thinks, I fell.

  Astre leaves.

  “I hope you rot, you old tramp,” she croons tenderly in French while giving Mrs. Klimt a hug.

  The days that follow seem coated in mud. Light can’t filter through anymore. Tristan regrets his past frivolity, the peaceful sweetness of his solitude, his anonymous wanderings through the streets of London. He can’t read, nor can he concentrate in Hector’s lessons. He watches women, wonders how to attain them, touch them. He carries his desire like a grail, heavy and sacred. He is the knight, the lady, and the dragon all at once. Shut away, excluded.

  How do they do it? Tristan wonders. The pedestrians, the ticket inspectors, the mothers, those adults he passes in hundreds, in thousands, on the streets—those who, like him, have done it. How do they manage to cross the boulevards, accomplish their tasks, speak, listen? What is this power holding them back, chaining them to themselves, forbidding them from throwing themselves on top of one another in a permanent embrace?

  That’s exactly what I was saying, the rabbit mumbles in a faraway voice, as though now expressing himself from some hereafter. Your kind lives under the curse of sex. Your fall is constant. It doesn’t get you anywhere, because the movement is endless. You’ve kept your instinct, but you’ve emptied it of its meaning. That’s why your existences are fated to misery, your brains to foolishness, your bodies to degeneration. You’re never appeased; you’re never satisfied. The more time I spend near you, young man, the more I love my life. I’m full of delight with the idea of being an animal. Just the thought that I escaped the pitiful hum
an destiny fills me with joy. Your kind is the ridiculous exception. You’re born losing. Young man, you give me so much in opening up to me. You give me the desire to be me, to live and to die, whether from a bullet or the jaws of a fox, the wheel of a car or a stone thrown by a child.

  In the blackness of the cave, Tristan follows his divergent paths. He has separated in two. Point and counterpoint. On one side, the faceless face-to-face with Dumestre, who’s now roaming around their cramped abode, happy with his rediscovered mobility, joking, threatening, incomprehensible. On the other, the mute conversation with the rabbit, who seems to be breathing with more and more difficulty at the bottom of the gamebag.

  Before the wheel fully starts to turn, before his companion reveals the nature of his scheme, which Tristan feels can only be deadly, he would like to find the way to defend his condition, to think up the arguments of an appeal for his species.

  What’s the point of stopping the fall? Tristan asks. What’s the point of looking for a purpose if the fall itself is good? Why must we aspire to satisfaction? Your brain is too small and your heart too lazy to understand the beauty, the grandeur, the glory of the energy that motivates us and permeates us. I wouldn’t trade anything for my fall. I’m intoxicated with speed, and sometimes, when the chance for a moment’s respite distracts me from it, it just makes me taste my comfort more, because I know it is fleeting.

  Little rabbit, you will never know victory over the absurd, something we accomplish every day, every second of our existence. What renders our exaltation superior to yours is that, contrary to you, we are desperate. I know, I understood, you’ve convinced me: I accept that your kind possesses a consciousness of death; I’m even ready to make myself its herald, to bring the news to my own kind. You know you’re mortal, but you’re saved by direction. Each of your actions is logical, useful, efficient. Let’s call it the law of nature. What relief, certainly, but what boredom! I’m going to tell you what you will never have, what you must envy us for, the nugget you must bring back to your kind: what you’re missing is the possibility to do anything you want, to act in spite of common sense, to wring the neck of productivity, reason, causality. We alone have the power to act against our own good, but sometimes, believe me, by heading toward our loss, we access a supreme good, a superior quality of being, a real presence more intense than anything you could ever see or feel. We are constantly fighting, against ourselves, against our instincts: we search, we wander, we make mistakes, and, thanks to these detours, these refusals, we raise ourselves up; even from within our fall, we fly, we transcend.

  Yes, yes, responds the rabbit in a voice pushed with difficulty through his throat by his slowing blood. “Transcendence,” a word as long as a day without wild thyme. I’ve heard it spoken of. It’s… What do you call it? Believing in God…

  Just the opposite: Believing in nothing. Believing you’re finished, kaput, at your limit, and weeping in the face of the rising sun, because of its beauty. Trying to reproduce this feeling, to summarize it. Being in love.

  Love? pronounces the rabbit, his voice becoming more and more ethereal.

  Tristan thinks about Emma and the moment when, so long ago, they entered her garden-level apartment, drowned in gray half-light because of the storm. They were soaked, hardly knew each other, had spoken to each other only three times on the bench in Brockwell Park. For some time already, he had renounced that thing he didn’t have a name for: girls, love, sex? I’m too young, he had said to himself. Too foreign, too isolated to hope for it to happen—looking at them, yes, maybe, he does that sometimes in the cafeteria at the university, where he started taking classes in September, but to slip his fingers there where it smells sweet, acidic, like the sea air, no, that will never happen to him again. He contents himself with reading books, certain books in particular, to contemplate the pictures, to be his own alpha and omega. He isn’t suffering anymore. He isn’t waiting anymore. It’s like he’s in exile, at the outskirts of the world in a place he will never leave, because he doesn’t know anyone, no one knows him, he’s foreign and no one taught him what to do.

  But Emma spoke to him, and each time she opens her mouth, he feels curious, alert, as if he is about to make an important discovery. He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t dare, doesn’t think about it. Her act of speaking creates a sort of veil, a wall. He hears her voice, her French voice with its blunt consonants, its evasive syllables. She says words like “bougie” for bourgeois, refers to drugs by their street names, pronounces words that none of his professors here ever uses. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him and even forgets to wonder why this comforts him so much. He doesn’t realize that he misses French. What importance do words have? What importance does an accent or intonation have? Did he sleep with Astre out of a love for his native tongue? Is it because Emma speaks the same language as his cousin that he takes so much pleasure in listening to her? A strange pleasure, without expectation, immediate and complete. He desires nothing more, there on the bench. On the second evening they met, he pictured himself in the same situation with Astre and it didn’t work. Astre is so rude, he thought, surprising himself with this judgment. Astre is mean. She has a viper’s tongue. She called my mother a slut and Mrs. Klimt an old hag. She speaks only to insult people.

  “Wanna do it again?” All the same, that was something. Music, power, honey, poison. He can hear her voice all too clearly expressing the irresistible proposition. “Wanna do it again?” That was nice; that was magical. But insufficient. Emma speaking, that’s another sound, no serpents, no pearls either. He searches and searches, and here’s what he finds: vigor, honesty, vision. Emma speaks, and the world finds itself simplified, clarified, expanded.

  And then, one day, she kisses him on the mouth, on the bench, and he tells himself that he should have done that, he could have taken that initiative. Just as soon, in this kiss, he feels that he hurt her, because he waited, because he forbade himself from thinking about it.

  Everything has always failed with Emma.

  Soaking wet, they enter the apartment where gray half-light reigns, and, soon, their bodies are dyed the same shade of gray, urban and stormy. They don’t know how to approach each other. They bump into each other, jostle, fall, get hurt. Their hands lag behind their mouths. Is it shyness that makes their blood pump? What is this solemn thing that hurts, that takes the heart like a bear claw and crushes it?

  Tristan doesn’t know. He doesn’t have a name for that either. With his head on Emma’s chest, staring, marveling one of her plum breasts, he wonders how in the world he’s going to protect her, his eyes full of tears, his jaw tightened against a sob born from his gratitude, from his fear of losing her, from the idea that one day, even a long time from now, she will die.

  That’s just what I was saying, grumbles the rabbit, exasperated. You separate. You split up. You think you’re superior for this reason, but you’re only fooling yourselves. I feel so much tenderness for you, young man, but I’m ashamed when I listen to you. I’m ashamed of the fragmented existence you lead. Absence of continuity. Sterilizing classification. Categorizing is murder. This woman, Emma, if everything has failed with her, leave her. And don’t tell me about love. As if I don’t know what it is. Your awkward passion, your distance, the respect she inspires in you. Bullshit.

  You don’t understand, Tristan responds, his hand on the animal’s neck. I’ve found what separates us, you and me. Your kind and mine. You’re aware of your own finiteness, I accept that, I can agree, but you’re completely unaware of the finiteness of others. That’s where love is born.

  29

  How did this happen? How long has it taken? Why couldn’t they get away? How is it that they’re now swimming against the current of a slow-flowing river of mud? Can their feet touch the ground, even only from time to time? No.

  Farnèse and Peretti, in the night, reach out their arms bogged down with mud, their legs hindered by their soaked pants. They kick their feet, let themselves float a lit
tle, then start again. If someone were to ask them where they’re going, they wouldn’t know how to respond; they’d keep quiet, frightened as they are by the necessity forcing them to thrash about in this way, as best they can, entirely spent, in order to reach a point they can’t even see and wouldn’t know how to locate any more than they’d know what to call it.

  Sometimes, the darkness lights up: a flash, a hole in the clouds and the moon shining like the sun, outlining frightening shadows, like an eclipse at midday.

  “There, to the right,” Peretti murmurs. “See it?”

  “What?”

  “On the roof. Isn’t that where the kid lives?”

  “Tristan?”

  “Yeah, the kid. Isn’t that his house over there?”

  Peretti hesitates to extend his finger and point to the exact place, fearing he’ll drown if he relaxes his efforts.

  Farnèse breathes in, breathes out, speeds up.

  “Someone’s on the roof. Look!”

  “I see,” Farnèse answers without turning around. “That’s her, that’s his wife.”

  “You know her?”

  “Not really, but I know that’s where they live. I know that’s her. Smart of her to climb up on the roof. Do you know about her and Dumestre?”

  “Her and Dumestre?” Peretti asks while swallowing a mouthful of mud that he spits back out, half coughing.

  “Don’t die,” says Farnèse.

  Peretti panics, speeds up, takes another gulp. “Shit, help me!”

  Farnèse grabs on to a branch. He feels around underneath him, manages to find his footing, reaches a hand out to Peretti. They stay like this for a few moments, docked at the top of a tree, regaining their breath.

  “Maybe it’s over,” says Farnèse. “I don’t know. They were quiet about it.”

  “How’d you know? Shit, how’d you know?”

  “What’s it matter?”