The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  For the second time, Jean Calmet shuddered violently. At all costs he must avoid having his father’s urn remain at Les Peupliers. It had to be locked up far from here, imprisoned behind a solid iron gate, one that was permanent. He took the floor in an anxious voice:

  “Isn’t there some way of leaving the urn at the columbarium? Surely there are vacant pigeonholes? That way, our friends could pay their last respects to our father without invading this house…”

  “Nothing simpler,” replied the salesman, to Jean Calmet’s great relief. “A simple phone call and we straighten the affair out with the crematorium. We make no charge at all. Later on, we submit a bill, it all goes like clockwork. You can also acquire a grant for twenty-five years. At the end of the twenty-fourth year, you’re notified of the expiration by the proper authorities – in this case, the Bureau of Burials and Cinerary Monuments, down at the Town Hall, and you’ve got plenty of time to make your arrangements. Besides, there are periodic reminders printed in the newspapers.”

  He added, as if for himself:

  “Yes, that’s a good way to handle it, the columbarium. And then you’ve got the caretaker who keeps the pigeonholes spic and span, he dusts them every morning, your urn shines like a new penny!”

  Jean Calmet imagined the caretaker in a blue smock, a cotton mop in his hand, carefully dusting each piece of marble or brass, persisting, searching the nooks behind the sinister vase, hunting down the dust on the partitions of the box and on the handles, on the indentations, on the grooves of the lid, on the raised design of the belly of the urn, with the meticulousness of a maniac supervised by an assembly of shadowy ghosts. But there was one word that troubled him more than anything: it was pigeonhole, which immediately stirred up visions of watered-silk flights, cooings, swellings of grey and pale-pink feathers, amorous little conversations – all of which “columbarium”, another word suggesting the caress of wings and tepid feathery embraces, had already begun to evoke after the mortician’s salesman had uttered it in complete innocence. Thus, that place of refuge in its enclosing wall of cypresses acquired a subtle grace, the lightness of a precious birdcage where the sun, filtered in regular rays by the black trees, cast rainbow colours on wing quills, lit up a beak, set ablaze coral eyelids, pink-pearl feet, interminable demonstrations of tenderness at the back of cool cubicles.

  The salesman gone, they passed the catalogue around the table for a long time. Jean Calmet looked at his brothers and sisters in amazement. Never had he felt so distant from them. Having been forced to remain silent during the fellow’s explanations, they were now excited and spoke all the louder. His gaze went from one to the other with amenity. Étienne, the agricultural engineer, tall, ruddy like his father, but not so strong, less powerful; he had married too soon in order to escape the doctor. Then Simon, the teacher, tawny and slender – Simon, who had been in trouble because he had locked himself up with some boys all summer in a mountain chalet. Simon, the mother’s favourite. Simon who had spent his childhood curled up in her, taking refuge in her skirts, in her secrets, in her plaintive whisperings. Simon, the ornithologist. Simon who ran through the woods, with a pair of field glasses screwed to his eyes, Simon whom Jean Calmet envied because he always had a young man lying beside him on lookout, or kneeling at his side, to put bands on the foot of a jay, to caress with a gentle finger the silken head of a titmouse caught in the net they had stretched between two apple trees in the garden. He did not like his two brothers. But, still, he understood, he fathomed those two, the eldest and the younger one. From his sisters, on the contrary, emanated an opaque mystery, which had constantly alienated him from them and had created in him a fear mingled with anguish and remorse. Hélène, blonde, robust, the nurse who spoke with the doctor for hours about operations, shock treatments, and all the nasty tittle-tattle of the hospital. And Anne, who was two years older than he was, Anne, who did nothing, who travelled; they got postcards from Sweden, from the United States, she would disappear, come back engaged, she became engaged again and learnt a new language, a new country, before burying herself in other complications on her return.

  Jean Calmet was the youngest, the “benjamin”, the little Benjamin, as they had told him thousands of times throughout his childhood, to the point that this word became detestable to him, so that he would blush with shame and anger, in Sunday School and at catechism, when the pastor told the story of Jacob’s last son: “Rachel died in labour, she had wished to name her son Ben-oni, son of my sorrow, but her father called him Benjamin, which means son of my right hand…” And he, Jean Calmet, bore the middle name Benjamin, which was written on his official papers, which explained the repulsion he felt on showing his passport, his identity card, his military-service booklet or any other document reminding him of this hated name.

  He would repeat it to himself when he was alone, to make himself suffer, feeling the weight of its consonants: Jean-Benjamin Calmet, he persisted. Jean-Benjamin Calmet, Les Peupliers, Lutry, Vaud. Jean-Benjamin Calmet, student of literature. Rifleman Jean-Benjamin Calmet, Company VII, section 4, in the field. Jean-Benjamin Calmet, teacher at the Gymnase Cantonal de la Cité, No. 78, Chemin de Rovéréaz, Lausanne.

  The children of Doctor Paul Calmet and Madame Calmet, née Jeanne Rossier. A family. A lineage. Come my sons, run my daughters, you shall warm my limbs, your strength shall soothe the days of my old age, and when I am no more, you will care for my ashes. In this way you will know that I am not completely dead, since my race lives on in you until the end of generations. Étienne, Simon, Hélène, Anne and Jean. The end of generations… Jean Calmet restrained himself from smiling ironically: Étienne alone had children and the doctor did not want to know them – far from it, his nephews having struck him as dishevelled, screaming savages on the rare occasions when he had come upon them unexpectedly at Les Peupliers.

  Jean Calmet looked pensively at the faces of his brothers and sisters under the lamp. So his father’s death had changed nothing? They had the same tense expressions, the same irritating and almost fearful gestures as they passed around the catalogue. His brothers were still trying to take themselves seriously. They played their orphans’ role with a diligence that was painful. Hélène and Anne were still those strangers who attracted and repelled with their wrinkles full of sticky moistness. No, nothing had changed; just as before, the ticking of the clock haunted the room interminably, the lamp had the same orange colour, tinting the brass work and the dark bench; he saw the lake through the open window, the night was blue against the black water, and all the way at the back of the landscape, under the mountains, shone the little lights of Évian. Just as before. Nothing had changed. Sadness invaded Jean Calmet’s flesh, burdening it like an intolerable weariness. He busied himself looking at the catalogue to escape himself; he shook himself, suddenly he exulted inwardly. The father was dead and they had burned him at the crematorium. The doctor, dead. A little heap of ashes! Aloud, commenting on them, he read over the description of the articles most recommended by the salesman, describing in detail certain points, reconsidering others, he spoke offhand in a clear, loud voice, as if he had analysed a text before his students.

  They agreed on the brocaded urn. Type B1. Everyone admired this shelly marble, the grey-brown of the stone tended slightly towards gold, its delicacy and name reminded them of velvet. The item had a very natural look because of the fossilized shells that brightened up the marble: everyone thought that it suited the father’s elementary tastes. They chose the single-place model. Étienne was assigned the task of placing the order with the Mortuary.

  On his way home, Jean Calmet came across a porcupine and looked at it for a long time. He had left his car in the garage; he was climbing back up the Chemin de Rovéréaz with short steps, when he noticed a scraping in a hedge, then a breath, a sort of melodious, repetitive moan that stifled itself in grunts. It may seem strange to relate this encounter with a porcupine so absent-minded that he did not even notice Jean Calmet. For several days, this meet
ing was to have a benevolent meaning for him: as an auspicious omen given to him by the animal; a lesson in savagery on the edge of the damp gardens under the half-moon in the blue grass.

  First of all, Jean Calmet saw very beautiful eyes shining under the lower branches of a laurel tree: a dark pupil ringed with gold around which long hair, also gold, watered silk, made a gaudy patch. The nose moved, greedy, wet, a little black cherry at the end of a snout with very smooth, ebony hair. Motionless, amazed, Jean Calmet wondered if the animal was going to catch sight of him and vanish. Something in him wished, almost irrationally, that it would stay. The animal had advice to give him. All of Jean Calmet’s senses reached out towards it – towards that neat, solid head which stood out, clearly lit by the moon, against its background of black leaves. There was a squealing in that shadow and the body appeared, long and lithe, borne by a belly round with strange sensuality. The short little legs ran a few inches, the nose scented the ground, the belly undulated, round and full, under the armour bristling with quills whose white points made a silvery halo that lightened, made spiritual, this prodigiously terrestrial apparition.

  Jean Calmet listened to the warning rise in his flesh, throwing him into confusion. Perfectly motionless, he suddenly felt riddled with the odours of sunken roads, wet grass, rotting humus, trails made by slugs, feather-legged insects, wily, fearful rodents, as if drops of vigour had shot into him violently from the depths of the secret ground, intoxicating him, jolting him, filling him with fresh, new excitement. The animal’s wildness was extraordinary among the carefully tended gardens, the sumptuous villas. Emerging from the earth intact and powerful, the pure animal, marvellously innocent under his crown of silver thorns, was the primitive sign that Jean Calmet had always been waiting for, the symbol of a wild, happy freedom, proof that no domination ever subjugates the great telluric forces that well up, that spurt, that run in the midst of the aberrations of buildings.

  The porcupine was silhouetted against the road with the precision of a heraldic figure. The moon turned the asphalt white. From silver stone to the squatting porcupine outlined with sand, Jean Calmet thought curiously, beginning to catch his breath. A long minute went by, during which the wind stirred the leaves of the hedges, the odour of the ground became denser, almost aggressive, so heavily was it loaded with emanations that were putrescent and, at the same time, brand new like the milky savour of roots. The porcupine remained standing there, black and phosphorescent with quills. All of a sudden, it started on its way again, it finished crossing the road, insinuated itself into the grass and vanished under a hazel bush. Jean Calmet could still hear it stirring, its needles squeaking against the bark of trees; an insect cracked in the animal’s snout, and then only the wind going through the leaves could be heard. The shadows closed up again. The animal had returned to its mystery.

  In the months that followed, Jean Calmet was to encounter a few other augural animals. On that particular night, he fell asleep without effort and slept deeply. On waking the next morning, he did not remember having had any bad dreams. No bull, no father coming down a hill and crushing him. He saw this as a favourable sign and was glad to be back at the Gymnase.

  Jean Calmet closes the door of the teachers’ room and starts down the already deserted corridor where the bust of Ramuz, black, sinister, shoots a vacant gaze at the little sink belonging to the secretary’s office. Jean Calmet walks slowly, as if some sly mechanism has just gone awry within him. Nevertheless, the morning has gone well, he has given his lessons with the gladness of new starts… He is struck dumb on the square. The bells of the cathedral are striking twelve noon. Great solemn booming at the top of the hill, bronze bouncing over the whole countryside around, celestial orchestra of the monks and bishops supplanted by Calvinists in square caps. An oblique magpie flees before trembling poplars like powdered halos. Jean Calmet stops, his legs give way beneath him, but his gaze photographs the gay scene: the little trees, the sandstone of the edifice all yellow in the sun, and the misty precipice dropping to the town square, under the hill. There is something of a tang in the air after the bells, something almost funny, mocking him… Jean Calmet begins walking again, convinced that he is the only anxious soul in that honey-coloured light. He has given good lessons: Petronius, Apuleius. His students like to read with him. The writers of the decline seem open, accomplices. They despise Cicero and Virgil, who strike them as lackeys of power and whom they associate with school boredom, compositions, marks on translations. On the contrary, the magic of the times of strife, their oriental connections, their kind of irrational passion, attract them, fascinate them, and each class, in its turn, finds itself excited by the witches, werewolves and roguery of Apuleius. But this weariness, this fear in his limbs? Jean Calmet heads towards the Café de l’Évêché. A group of girls in blue jeans overtakes him, they laugh, they speak in loud voices, their long hair hangs over their still-tanned shoulders. Jean Calmet goes into the Café de l’Évêché and sits down at the only free table before the front window. He orders a Ricard and becomes engrossed, gloomily, in contemplating the scenery. Just then, the beautiful kids in jeans go by on the right bank of the Bessières bridge, they act like fools, pushing one another, turning around, their gesticulation stands out like a challenge against the grey-blue sky. Jean Calmet feels them – marvellously gay and strong – and he receives, right in his heart, the familiar blow.

  He takes a sip of Ricard.

  Bad for worriers, Ricard. It hits the nerves too fast. Two opaque wings on each side of the brain, the sweetish taste that burns, that heaves the stomach into the gullet: he is far from being in the resounding health of the Gymnase students. Jean Calmet sinks into his malaise as if it were a woolly reverie. Why has he become a teacher? To escape adults? He knows all too well that the most terrible adult has always been his father, even in death. The classrooms that he has entered and that he will henceforth enter are refuges from the authority of that father who is bearing down with all his weight on the rest of the world. Precarious refuge, threatened all the more by the fact that the dead man’s spirit enters it more readily than his huge carcass! For what reason, at this particular moment, is Jean Calmet thinking about the chalet at one summer’s end in his childhood with an almost desperate nostalgia? Because he is lonely and weary? He recalls the scenery perfectly: in the evening, the wind comes from the bottom of the valley and puts to flight the leaves of the plane trees; they do not fly away like the leaves of the other trees, they flee horizontally towards the fabulous mountains in the shadows already full of bells. Down below lies the dried-up valley. There, it is the whirling coolness that carries off the leaves into the violent indigo of the sky… Jean Calmet recalls his father and mother seated under the red lamp of the panelled room; he alone is with them, he is reading Treasure Island, he stands up, he goes near the window and the wind blows his locks down into his eyes. The scene settles before him with sharp clarity: the grass buffeted against the chalet, the purple night, inside the lamp, his father’s white shirt open on his greying hair, his mother slightly withdrawn from the light, a magazine on her lap; they fall silent for a long time, they listen to the moan of the foehn in the plane trees. Ah, everything was possible then, says Jean Calmet to himself when the happy picture is torn: he used to carve boats out of pine, he could read pirate stories, decorate the block of butter with the tine of a fork, imagine ghosts running in the attic, try to catch up with the doctor on the scree or tirelessly follow the flight of jackdaws on the white ridge, like an embroidery with raucous cries whose threats make you smile.

  At a single gulp, Jean Calmet drains his Ricard and his eyes turn back to the old picture: he was protected in those days, cared for; life was before him, open, possible, nothing would destroy certainty and tenderness…

  He is shaken by a shudder. Around him, working men in blue overalls, shopkeepers in white smocks pay their bills before going back to their garages and shops. The first Gymnase students of the afternoon begin to replace them in smal
l, laughing flocks; they sit down and light cigarettes, order coffee, the boys put their arms around the girls’ necks. Jean Calmet cannot manage to get to his feet and leave. No determination. The morning’s strength is gone. But as if it were the revenge of the Gymnase, pure place, on the world of adults and serious people, it pleases him that the Café de l’Évêché is periodically invaded by the young people who restore their own order. Or their disorder! But nobody can read his thoughts since the doctor died; this idea also cheers him. With satisfaction, he touches the band of black silk that has crossed his lapel for six days. Some of his students give him a kindly greeting. He orders cold meat to keep up a brave face and forces himself to eat it all. Two-fifteen is drawing near, the hour of classes: the groups call to one another, get to their feet; in the street there is a colourful uproar, an elbowing of big children with long hair, a parade of necklaces made of tiny bells, saris, faded blue jeans, anti-nuclear bomb insignia, US Army field jackets, curly beards and gleaming teeth. Then nothing more. The bell in the cathedral strikes the quarter-hour. In the deserted café, the waitress empties the ashtrays into a big aluminium can that she takes from one table to the other, grumbling. Jean Calmet rises, goes out, starts up the Rue de la Mercerie with little, dreamy steps.