At that little green hour of the dawn when the first male pigeons of the cathedral give their first beak-to-beak kisses to their Ronsardian hen pigeons, Jean Calmet, the nice young teacher, would never have guessed what the morning had in store for him, and the fatal effect which that discovery was to have on his own life, already worn away by a number of onslaughts and moods severe enough to drive him mad.
But it was the time for reading La Tribune. Jean Calmet, sipping a tepid ristretto, glanced over the newspaper, marvelling at the amount of rubbish that graced its greyish pages.
A second ristretto scarcely warmer. Arrival of some hurried students. Cigarette smoke. Cups of Ovaltine. School bell perceptible through the open door.
Suddenly, the carnival.
About a hundred teenagers come running up from the Rue de la Mercerie and sit down in the lower courtyard of the Gymnase; they laugh, they shout slogans. It is a sit-in: as on an American college campus, they are seated, they are having lots of fun, the teachers step over them to get into the building. Gesticulating, about fifty boys rush into the upper schoolyard. A megaphone calls on the students of the Gymnase to rebel against the decision of the principal and the Board. Milling of the crowd. Shouts. Groups prepare to enter the Academy building. All of a sudden, there is silence, everyone stands petrified: in the doorway of the Academy, massive, immense, skull shining, his nose fitted with his fearsome dark glasses, Monsieur Grapp appeared, contemplating the adversary, almost dreamily. But despite the concentrated strength that he embodies, there is something else that stupefies the onlookers: in his hand – a new monstrosity, an object emerging from earliest times, an aggressive, dominant symbol, as astonishing as an archaic beast – Grapp holds a whip, a long cannoneer’s whip as curly as a snake ready to strike, a long thong of braided leather gushing from a shank gleaming and thick as a truncheon. A moment of amazement, a boy gives a shout, the megaphone takes up his refrain and the crowd of demonstrators marches on the main door. Grapp raises the whip, makes it whistle and springs at the besiegers. Bewildered, the boys fall back. Later on, they will explain why: it is not fear, or respect, it is shock that made them yield. They are confused, flabbergasted, several laugh nervously. Alain and Marc take pictures. But the whip still whistles, Grapp moves forward, all of a sudden the whole group starts running away, reaching the main gate in disorder. Then Grapp no longer restrains himself, he runs from one to the other, the whip on high, he overtakes the fugitives, he bounds up to the wooden barracks at the western entrance, he comes leaping back, the whip still raised, whistling, he goes through the gate, he pursues the survivors into the Rue de la Cité-Devant, he retraces his steps, he seizes the venerable gate, he heaves the iron grille shut. The courtyard is empty. Monsieur Grapp is master of the field.
Jean Calmet saw the whole scene from a window of the teachers’ room. He, too, is stupefied. In the days that follow, the students will give him details which he could not catch from the floor above: Monsieur Grapp drooled and foamed at the mouth as he ran, he uttered inarticulate cries, a student caught a whiplash in the eye… Nothing can heighten the panic created by the spectacle of that colossus armed with the hideous, deadly braid. In the days that follow, caricatures, photos, messages will rain in. Grapp will be written about in Le Monde: his portrait, armed with the whip, will appear in Le Canard enchaîné: glory, and forced laughter, black humour or red humour, once more the people in the region are divided and cursing at one another.
What is a whip? Jean Calmet mused on the instrument and its powers. The whip of the executioner, the whip of the lover, the whip of humiliation and pleasure. Whip up the blood. A whiplash. The whipping post. Whip a disobedient child. You’ll get a whipping! A whipping father. And Grapp was immediately nicknamed le Père Fouettard by everyone. But in the photos, in the newspapers, the dark glasses, the dented baldness and the rictus sternly rectified anything good-natured that those words might suggest. On the contrary, that nickname, “Père Fouettard”, had a sadistic air, and the man’s stature, his enormous shoulders, his thick neck, his hairy hands gave him tremendous support. Seeing the newspaper pictures that the printer’s ink darkened and simplified in a sinister way, even people who had never met Monsieur Grapp sensed his irascible strength, violent-tempered, concentrated, as an almost unbearable fact. Like a kind of obscenity.
One night, Jean Calmet saw the whip in a dream; he cried out, he awoke, angry at his fear and promising himself to keep watch over himself. It was no use: Grapp’s size had increased even more since the incident, and the grotesqueness, the buffoonery, the madness of the scene had served only to increase, mysteriously, the irrational, brutal authority that Jean Calmet saw in him. He realized, in the conversations that he had almost every day with his students at the Café de l’Évêché, that they had reacted and were continuing to react exactly as he had: they had been subjected to the whip as a paternal warning willed by destiny. Exasperated, furious, or simply ironic, they had given ground, they had fled under the threat of the terrible thong. But rather than to it and its whistling, gleaming leather, they had yielded to its authoritarian symbol, to the symbol of the Father, to the sceptre of order, and that hierarchic fatality comforted them obscurely, deeply, as much as it annoyed them on the surface. Authority had manifested itself, glorified by its badge of office: all was well. They could go on being children since the Father was in power. Since he was watching. Since he had shown himself in all his stormy, domineering magnificence.
Zeus! Jupiter thundering! Paternal analogies emerged from the depths of the ages. And the lieutenant of the Creator, the King-God, the father of the State, the prince-father of his subjects, all the hypostases of the paterfamilias, stern and punishing in his rough benevolence.
In class, one of those mornings, The Golden Ass was neglected for talk about the event, and Jean Calmet became aware once more of the attention that all of his students had given to it. It was not so much because dozens of posters and piles of handbills bore witness to its impact. It was more serious: like the discovery of the Dependence, and they were curiously relieved and comforted by it.
That morning, from his desk, Jean Calmet was watching Marc particularly – Marc who was fleeing him. Marc is sitting at the back of the classroom, in the corner opposite the windows, next to Sandrine Dudan. They get on well together, Marc and Sandrine, they back each other up, they cheat together, they draw, they make movies. Sandrine is small, dark, quick, a she-goat of the scree slopes. Marc was fleeing him… Something was bothering Jean Calmet: since the first demonstration, Marc had been leaving more and more frequent traces around Thérèse’s place: first, it had been a loose-leaf book, a scarf, then his assignment book and, with a kind of provocative audacity, the Romans grecs et latins de la Pléiade that Jean Calmet had lent him. From the doorway, Jean Calmet had recognized the thick green book, on the only chair, at the side of the unmade bed.
“Who gave you that book?” Jean Calmet had asked, gasping. He had not even greeted Thérèse, had not taken her in his arms, nor placed a brief kiss on her sparkling temple.
“It’s one of your students – Marc. I wanted to read The Golden Ass. Since the time that you spoke to me about it…”
“You could have asked me for it.”
Jean Calmet was going to ask the question that was choking him:
“He brought it to you here?”
“He forgot to take it when he left. Does that bother you?”
The tramp. Well, that’s that. It’s all over. Now I don’t have anything. Marc… Jean Calmet sees the handsome, insolent face, the forelock down over the nose, the eyes that burn with soft fire, the slow strides and the movements, so tender, so plain on the grave at Crécy… He feels the rending to the bottom of his soul.
“He spent the night here?”
“Goddamn it, Jean! I’m nineteen years old! I do what I please – understand? What I please!”
Her eyes full of lightning. The Cat Girl spits, she pulls back, she is going to spring. Marc on the g
ilded bedspread. Marc and the little coffee cups. Marc in the hollow of the bed. Marc crucified, Thérèse crawls over him, adorable succubus, ghoul on the move, vampire coiffed with light gold. Oh the little room is a castle on a forested mountain, an accursed fortress into which the bad genie draws the unfortunate passers-by! Witch, executioner, wicked fairy, the Cat Girl has the neighbourhood boys delivered, she grinds up their flesh, she feeds on it, she thrives on it, that blood-covered creature!
Thérèse does not fly at his face.
Jean Calmet walks to her.
Thérèse welcomes him, opens her arms, rubs her mouth against his throat, where his beard scratches a little, draws him onto the unmade bed. It is five o’clock, the end of the afternoon, the streets must be full of busy people. She puts Jean Calmet to bed like a baby, removes his clothing without haste, covers him with the sheet and the thick eiderdown, she undresses in her turn, lies down on him, encloses him like a sun shower. Marc’s gaze is still fleeing. Fascinated, Jean Calmet could not take his eyes off the handsome, dark face, the restless forelock… Where was he last night? In the little room on the Rue de la Cité-Devant? It’s a sure thing that they made love. All I have to do is turn my back and they get together. Marc, eighteen; Thérèse, nineteen…
The classroom was seething with excitement. The students interrupted one another. Tempers were rising. Their cheeks grew flushed with excitement. Jean Calmet was no longer trying to referee the debate. He was leaning at the back of the classroom, right next to Marc, with his elbow he was touching his thick woollen sweater and the boy did not move away, as if he were stupefied by fatigue. He woke up at the Café de l’Évêché, while the bells of the cathedral were striking noon, at Jean Calmet’s table, when Thérèse, who had stopped on the threshold a moment, in the light, as if she were at the mouth of a shadowy grotto, spotted them and came towards them, laughing.
“Good morning, mister teacher, sir. Good morning, Marc.”
She wore a white and yellow cashmere kerchief over her hair, like an icon. “Good morning, Marc…”
All three knew. Jean Calmet watched their eyes. Happy children. A boy from the Gymnase and a girl student at the École des Beaux-Arts. The three ate, Thérèse, Marc, Jean Calmet, then the children went back to school and Jean Calmet, who was off, returned to his residence, where he had letters to write and papers to mark.
He went out again about five o’clock and drank a beer. At the Brasserie de la Sallaz, before the window, a young man was making notes in a Bible. He was a bearded fellow, a shade over twenty, broad-shouldered, thoughtful, bespectacled, he read, he entered things in a notebook, he continued his reading, and, with a slim silver pencil, he made notes in the margin of the text and underlined long passages with the aid of a little ruler like those mathematicians and surveyors have. Jean Calmet looked at that bearded fellow with envy: despite the hubbub, the boy was absolutely isolated in his reading, absorbed in the text, possessed by the words like a hermit in his cell. He gave off an impression of compact strength and serenity. He went on writing in the margin of his Bible, underlining, writing briefly and carefully in his memo pad. Who was he? A theology student or perhaps some young probationary pastor in one of the parishes of La Sallaz or Chailly? It was Friday. No doubt he was preparing his Sunday sermon. Or was he one of those countless evangelists who scour the region, draw in young people and found disorganized communities which they hasten to leave for stable places? This fellow seemed too serious for the role. Perhaps a teacher then? Chaplain at an institution? At the House of Training in Vennes, for example? Jean Calmet shuddered. The House at Vennes had hung like a threat over his whole childhood. If you aren’t nice, we’ll put you in Vennes!… Oh, that kid, said the mother of one of the doctor’s patients, a labourer at Paudex harbour who had trouble with his boy: he’s at Vennes, of course! In those days, they used to speak of the “Reform School”: Jean Calmet imagined the place full of naked children covered with welts, and brutes armed with birch rods and whips. As in an English print, which Jean Calmet had seen in one of the doctor’s old books, the boys were tied to their beds, fastened to the wall with iron rings, beaten with riding crops, at the far end of the dormitory, by enormous, mirthful guards.
But there was nothing of the torturer about this bearded fellow. He read diligently with manifest serenity, and Jean Calmet wondered at the way that, thousands of years ago, the speeches of Moses, David or Solomon could captivate and fill a heart with fresh strength; that a parable of Jesus was capable of teaching the most everyday truth; that the accounts of the disciples or the letters of St Paul were as comforting as plain, solid dwellings, as actual facts. A breath passed over the tables of people drinking beer and white wine. A very ancient murmur haunted the café: God the poet, the God of words, was sending his Word through that little garnet Bible open beside a mug of beer, and millions of clamouring voices from the Old Testament repeated in their turn the Lord’s word, the laments and praises of the Gospels sent back the echo of His voice.
Dumbstruck, Jean Calmet yielded to a catastrophic ecstasy, as if he had expected it for months. A brushwood bush blazed. Flowers filled up with blood. Armies of frogs invaded the streets and went into the houses. Clouds of mosquitoes came out of dust on the ground. Venomous flies emerged. The herds of May died at the side of the roads, the Jorat was nothing more than a stinking charnel house. Ulcers, pustules covered the limbs of all those that Jean Calmet had ever approached from far or near, as if they had to be punished for having met such a hopelessly guilty person. A huge cloud of hail suddenly burst over the region, massacring the already tall grass full of bellflowers and the orchards with shining petals. Then the whirling foehn threw tons of locusts on the towns and villages, they adhered to the ears and eyes of those who still dared to go outside. Jean Calmet’s relatives, students – all the people he knew – were half-dead, on their knees, weeping and begging for mercy: a night thick as pea soup covered the land completely. It was sticky, it hung heavily, and when all the firstborn died at the same hour, Jean Calmet finally rejoiced at being the Benjamin of the tribe and at escaping for once the Lord’s anger.
The fellow with the beard was still reading his Bible.
Jean Calmet had long since finished his beer. Where was Marc? Where was Thérèse? Were they making love under the gold-coloured bedspread? Naked, sweating, nimble, they traded their saliva, their young breath, and, from their bed, they heard the bells of the Gymnase every forty-five minutes. Jean Calmet bore them no grudge. He suffered. A needle pierced his heart when he imagined the embrace of shoulders and arms, Marc’s black armpits glued to Thérèse’s blonde armpits. A knifepoint drilled a hole in his skull when he remembered the smooth area, curved, evenly silvery around the childish little navel of Thérèse. The blade of an axe came down on his wrists, shearing his flesh to the bone the moment he remembered the very delicate toenails on the foot that Thérèse stretches towards him, from the far end of the bed: “Bite me,” she said, “take my toes in your mouth, that’s how it was when I was little, with my father, ‘I want to eat you up,’ he used to shout, it tickled, he would put my foot in his mouth, he used to bite, ‘Ah, I’m hungry, I’m hungry,’ he used to say, I really thought that he was going to swallow me whole!”
The picture brought back strange memories to Jean Calmet. It was a very old game, he must have been three or four years old, and he never remembered it without feeling again, shivering, the kind of horror with which the sound of the knife on the rough stone filled him. The doctor had just come home from his rounds, his face red, bathed in sweat, or his hair plastered down by the rain. They had finished supper, the older children had gone back up to their rooms, the maid was washing the dishes, Jean Calmet and his mother were the only ones left at the big table downstairs. The child was colouring pictures, humming, Madame Calmet was knitting. Suddenly, the car! The slamming door, the heavy, hurried footfalls on the gravel. The front door, noise in the vestibule, and the father comes into the room. His place is set at the head
of the table, before the clock taller than him. He pats his wife’s shoulder, he picks up Jean Calmet, turns him upside down, roughhouses with him, kisses him, corrects his drawing with one stroke, makes fun of him, kisses him again, puts down the child, who remains standing before the famished diner. Madame Calmet brings meat, pours another glass of wine.
“Why are you standing there before me?” exclaims the doctor, who stares into Jean Calmet’s eyes while chewing his meat with gusto. A silence, during which the ferocious eyes do not leave him.
“I’m going to eat you up if you don’t run away. I’m going to eat you for my supper, my little Jean!”
Jean Calmet cannot run away. Neither does he want to. He knows what comes next, he is waiting for it. He quivers with pleasure and fear thinking about it.
“So you don’t want to hide! All right, you’re going to see what you get!”
The doctor seizes the carving knife in his right hand and brandishes it before him; the blade sparkles. In his left hand he has his table knife, and slowly, carefully, he sharpens the two blades, rubbing them vigorously one against the other, while he makes cruel faces, rolls his eyes, shows his teeth, runs his tongue over his mouth.
“Ah! Ah!” he cries, making his voice deeper. “Ah, ah, ah, I’m going to eat you, Tom Thumb, I’m going to add you to my supper! See? I’m sharpening my big knife!”
And Jean Calmet looks with wonder at the blade shining and flashing under the lamp.
“Listen, the steel is growing sharper. Listen to that pretty concert!”
The Tyrant Page 11