The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  And Jean Calmet marvels at the hideous hissing of the two blades.

  “Ah, ah, ah, the big man is going to eat the little boy who’s dawdling in the forest!”

  The doctor is still grinning. All of a sudden, with incredible agility, he throws out his paw, catches Jean Calmet by the nape of the neck, pulls the boy to him, bends him over his knees and places the cold blade on his throat.

  “Well, now, my lamb!” cries the doctor. “We’re going to cut his gullet! We’re going to bleed this little fellow!”

  The knifepoint pricks the skin, the doctor bears down a little, that is the game; the steel is driven a fraction of an inch into the skin, where a few little blood vessels yield almost at once. The doctor’s left hand grips the frail shoulder. The right runs the knife over the white neck. The executioner growls and grumbles. The victim gives himself up and swoons with pleasure. At the far end of the room, in the dark, Madame Calmet, motionless, contemplates the ritual scene with an expressionless stare.

  Now the doctor has released the child, he finishes his supper as if nothing had happened. There, it is all over. Besides, it is time to go to bed. Fearfully, Jean Calmet places a kiss on his father’s cheek. And his mother takes him to his room upstairs, puts him to bed after a quick wash… Jean Calmet paid for his beer and left. The street lights went on. Thérèse and Marc might have fallen asleep. Jean Calmet returned home and sat dreamily at his desk: by an ironic coincidence, on the pile of papers to be corrected, Marc’s was the first. Jean Calmet read aloud: Marc Barraud, Latin translation, Classics 2G. M.T. Cicero: De finibus. He took the exercise, placed it before him, and, with a weary pen, he began to cross out in red the mistakes and mistranslations that the fatigue of love had prompted his blissful student to make.

  The next day, which was a Saturday, an especially urgent and solemn teachers’ conference took up the whole morning. Monsieur Grapp had convened it in response to the unrest that the recent events had spread among the teachers, staggered by the speed of the reactions of students and their overexcited parents. A painful session for Jean Calmet, who was struck dumb by a feeling of guilt at the back of the vast room, wainscoted and austere like a parish hall of the Église du Réveil. On their chairs – lined up as for a show – nearly a hundred fellow teachers were seated gravely. Even the youngest ones looked stern and tense. All of them were married or engaged; the few women in the gathering were unequivocally proper. Jean Calmet, for his part, was the rival of one of his students over a girl from the École des Beaux-Arts. Hubbub. Chairs pulled over the floor. At exactly fourteen minutes past eight, the Director made his entrance, and silence settled over the room. Monsieur Grapp took a seat at the big table that faced the rows of chairs, in the middle of the deans and the secretary, who was already busying himself with his papers.

  Monsieur Grapp presided in a loud voice, and, on that morning, the memory of his still recent act charged his speech with convincing emotion. As he spoke, recounting the event in detail, analysing the circumstances, judging the reactions of the authorities and the public, he gained added sway over the assembly, where the sneers and sceptical looks of the leftists and the hotheads gave way to the worried faces of serious times. Member of the Vaud Council, staff colonel, Grapp was skilled at handling an assembly, and his stature – he was standing behind the table, dominating the room with his two hundred and twenty pounds – discouraged any uproar. Panic-stricken under an impressive face, Jean Calmet pondered the gulf that separated him from that man and from most of his fellow teachers. Here, everyone was in the service of order, which tolerated no deviation… And who am I? thought Jean Calmet. I’m adrift. I’m floundering. I’m going under. I’m hanging around. Exactly what my father used to say. I’m in love with a kid who’s half my age. I’m fighting over her with a student. That’s all it would take to ruin me for ever in the eyes of this assembly and the sacrosanct Board. And what a kid! Rather loud, and with the freedom of a tart. I’m in a mess again. What am I doing among these people? I’m fooling them all. I’ll be punished. Besides, Grapp hasn’t stopped looking at me. Why are people turning around to stare at me? They see my fears. I must be livid, yes, smeared with vile guilty fear. Guilty of what? After all, Thérèse is nineteen. So I’m a bachelor? It isn’t against the law. So I eat at the Café de l’Évêché with students? I don’t do them any harm. On the contrary. But where does this fear of mine come from? I’ve been caught in the wrong. Found out. The principal’s eyes on me. He has removed his dark glasses, he’s holding them in his hand; I see his eyes that don’t let me go. It’s for me that he’s speaking so loudly. It’s me that he’s warning, threatening! It’s true – I must be filthy and slobbering with terror like a drunk who has just vomited and still has the puke on his lips, on his chin; when he opens his mouth you smell the sour odour of his debauchery, and it makes you want to vomit too. I stink with fear. That’s my fate… And Jean Calmet, who does not recall that he is a good Latin master, that his students like him, that he serves the Gymnase perfectly, accuses himself and flogs himself at the back of the room, while his principal responds to the questions of the conference.

  Sylvain Gautier, the fine Latinist, took the floor in his turn. A person with a white moustache, bent on convincing. There’s a man who doesn’t yield to anyone! Jean Calmet had him for a teacher at the secondary school, he knows his character – a solemn old Roman with a madness for integrity. When Sylvain sets eyes on him, Jean Calmet loses his composure and splutters just as in the small classroom, at the blackboard, during those terrible interrogations on Virgil or on Cicero. Then Verret, who does not talk much, let fly a few funny remarks. Little Beimberg, the aggressive mathematician with the curly brow of a ram, launched into a tribune’s diatribe. Hulliger, the handsome Hellenist, summarized the situation very calmly. The ladies admired his silvery temples; and when Jaccoud asked for the floor in his turn, when he rose, glasses sparkling, chin thrust forward, canary-yellow vest, orange jacket, everyone imagined him, with his self-confidence and peremptory tone, in the role of the next principal. Jean Calmet admired and remained silent. They voted over and over again. Charles Avenex, a breezy hidalgo with the long neck of a sophisticated writer, rose to say that he understood nothing of what was transpiring. Jean Calmet smiled several times but he did not dare speak; his head aches, he is sweaty, he is bored to death; in the last row of the solemn room he ponders what it is that separates him from these people of faith.

  The session lasted the whole morning. At noon, exhausted, Jean Calmet went home to bed, he slept and he had bad dreams. On waking he remembers one of them: he is naked, he is running in the courtyard of the Gymnase, the superintendent overtakes him and carries him gesticulating to the teachers’ room, where, still naked and terrified with shame, he is forced to speak before their eyes, which will never forget his humiliation. Then Grapp shuts him up in his office, contemplates him affectionately and lends him an officer’s overcoat to go home in.

  Sunday, Montreux. Towards the mountains pigeons plunge into the green, towards the lake swans and gulls wage war on the water crested with gaseous foam by the north wind. An ominous arrival: beginning in Clarens, the mythological buildings, the towers, the battlements, the watchtowers, the balconies hung over the gardens of palm trees, Hôtel Rousseau, Hôtel Tilda, Lorius Hôtel; to the left, the Montreux Palace dotted with Swiss flags that are waving, behind them the snow of the mountains makes intense silvery stains, then there are more hotels, to the right the Casino and the skyscraper of the Eurotel, to the left the Hôtel de Londres, the Hôtel du Parc, to the right the Joli Site and the Métropole… The middle of town.

  Jean Calmet parks his car at the covered market: a kiosk of metal, pipe scaffolding, bolts like hilarious faces, slopes of aluminium and cast iron, which recall an operetta railway station and a humbled pagoda. Jean Calmet walks along the embankment: low palm trees with fronds erect as brooms, magnolias in blossom, star-shaped daffodils, mimosas that move about like chicks at the end of their slender branch
es, pink gravel, tulips of a coaly mauve, and suddenly, leaning against a Bernese chalet with rustic, overhanging eaves, a mosque covered with blue and white tiles that brings into this bay of Nice a bedlam of panic-stricken camels, curved-knife vengeance and holy war against a background of the sandy, illiterate Middle Ages. The edifice displays its name over the door: Le Hoggar. Jean Calmet enters, climbs a few steps, makes his way into a cathedral of decorated nougat, with a ceiling like an immense ray of white honey, from which hang wire-bound brass lamps. The floor is a kaleidoscope nocturnal and cool with stars, moons; tender, welling drops of water on the deep green, like eyes that do not let it fall. Pieces of Turkish delight are lying on trays. In niches gleam water jugs painted yellow and blue. Round chapels open out at the back, behind portcullises. Reedy music sustained by tambourines fills the establishment with an unbroken monotony. Without malice, from a heavily veiled girl whose fingernails, painted a purple that is almost black, make him think of the tulips along the embankment, Jean Calmet orders the worst thing in the world: a barely potable mint tea that he forces himself to ingurgitate with a gloomy, sickeningly sweet hunk of Turkish delight.

  When he goes out again, on the canal which runs along the western flank of the mosque, he sees a black woman with a red turban walking on the arm of a boxing champ from Montreux whom he knows by sight. Jean Calmet thinks that, in the grey of the canal protected from the light of the lake, the black woman is bearing the disc of the setting sun balanced on her head.

  Towards Savoy, the sky is silky, dazzling.

  Gulls soar, lines of molten metal. A flock of pigeons with flapping wings circles between the ugly old buildings with Neapolitan tiles over the sewery water of the canal. Few passers-by. The woman and the boxer are sitting on a bench near the clumps of palm trees. The lake is turning green. The glacial north wind whips up the waves like small Alps among the red and blue hulls of boats, all of whose registration numbers begin with the victorious V of the canton of Vaud. In the distance the tiny steamer slides before the French coast. On the rooftops of hotels, the wind bites into the banners of Swiss crimson with the white cross. Coots scream, plunge, scream again. Jean Calmet is not impatient. He has a date with Thérèse at six o’clock.

  He finds her at the Café Apollo. When he enters, she is already seated close to the front window; he notices that she is outlined against the lake and the pink sky just at the level of the roof of the covered market where pigeons pursue one another. The little round wicker basket lies next to her on the bench; she has her iconic kerchief; she is reading a paperback.

  Jean Calmet draws near, she raises calm, green eyes to him, he brushes her lips with a kiss, he sits down beside her, he places his hand on the round basket.

  “Your mother all right?”

  “You know,” she said, “I didn’t see much of her, it’s always the same, she complains about not seeing me all week, and as soon as I’m here, she disappears, she sees friends, it seems like she takes advantage of the weekend to run every which way…”

  “And what did you do, Thérèse?”

  “I slept, I read, I ate, I went for a walk around Montreux. I always feel funny being in Montreux. I feel like a child again. I went walking in the yard of the Collège. It’s stupid, right? I guess I’m really sentimental… And then I made a drawing. Here, I brought it for you.”

  She unfolds a white paper that she has slipped among the pages of her book, she sets it before Jean Calmet. It is a cat drawn with a green ballpoint pen – two immense, staring cat’s-eyes that transpierce Jean Calmet with their white fire. For a moment he sees only those dilated pupils, those irises that search him. Cat-Inquisitor. Cat-Judge. He hates it instantly. Then he sees the cat’s feathery cheeks, its pointed ears, its forked moustache: the green ink has striped, pricked, scratched the picture with slight wounds that spread in a star towards the edges of the paper like explosions or rays, which the eye follows almost painfully. Wicked cat. Something is written in tiny letters under the vile beast. Jean Calmet has trouble making it out, for the fur and its crackling halo mingle with the text. He manages to read: One night in Montreux – done in the morning before the open window, and he wonders immediately what those innocent words conceal. At any rate, the cat is detestable: without saying anything, Jean Calmet folds it into quarters and slips it into his wallet.

  “Excuse me a moment,” says Thérèse, who gets to her feet and heads for the toilets.

  Jean Calmet is alone, he places his hand on the little round basket. With his palm, he tests the gentleness of the wicker flanks, the roundness of the lid secured to the basket by a loop. With his fingers, he follows the stalks of wicker, goes down into the hollows, comes back up, runs under another strand, returns to the first; he thinks about Little Red Riding Hood in the woods, about the basket hung over the little girl’s arm; it is a tender, heart-rending picture, the gift, a dream sprung from the bottom of childhood under the pine trees, where the night thickens, the little boots creep along the path, one hears the more and more hurried breath of the girl who rushes into the twilight… How many fresh little baskets are crossing how many forests at just this moment. How many wolves lying in wait. The child starts to run, she pants. The cottage is still so far away! Jean Calmet sees the child’s clear eyes, the blue gaze, the black gaze that becomes anxious, the little nose that wrinkles up, the mouth lacking a tooth, which has just fallen out, the angel’s mouth in which a sob is rising…

  Thérèse still does not come back. Jean Calmet takes the little basket on his lap, he opens it, he glances into its disorder. Right on top is a wrinkled handkerchief marked “M.B.” This handkerchief wounds Jean Calmet. He takes hold of it: the handkerchief is compact, as if starched. He lifts it to his nose: the handkerchief smells of dry sperm. That odour of rancid milk, dried fish, feverish night… A handkerchief full of sperm. Marc’s sperm. His student in Classics 2G. Marc Barraud, eighteen years old, Avenue de Beaumont, 57, Lausanne. Jean Calmet puts back the stiff handkerchief, he closes the lid, he sets the basket on the bench beside him.

  Thérèse comes out of the toilets, she smiles at him from afar; he sees her litheness, her loose-limbed movements, her long hair that streams down over her delicate shoulders. She sits down.

  “What if we take a walk?” she asks.

  Now Jean Calmet’s voice is hoarse.

  “Seen Marc this weekend?”

  “He came by to say hello yesterday. Saturday is fun. There’s dances, merry-go-rounds…”

  She has not lied. She speaks with a naturalness that pierces Jean Calmet’s heart. He has lost her. He knows it. He knows that he will remember hideously that moment when the ground gives way. He will remember, as he falls, that through the café window he notices:an ice-cream vendor with a little white cart

  a Mercedes with German plates that is moving at six

  miles an hour looking for a parking space

  a meter inspector with a pencil behind his ear

  a boxer dog pissing against a hydrant

  the palm trees on the embankment

  the greyish roof of the covered market

  the disc of the sun perfectly red in the orange sky.

  Thérèse falls silent. Jean Calmet does not speak any more. He pays, he gets to his feet, he holds open the door, he follows Thérèse onto the square. The car is a two-seater. During the ride, Thérèse hugs the little basket to her like a baby that she is protecting. A half-hour’s ride and Jean Calmet drops her off at La Cité. Her eyes are full of tears.

  “Want to come up for a minute?”

  He melts. He is saved. He locks the car, he follows Thérèse up the narrow staircase. Her door. Her key. They enter. In the room she sets the basket down on the floor; quickly she lights a candle, and the bedspread radiates with all its gold in the semidarkness.

  They stretch out one against the other, and on the moss of her temples, in the labyrinth of her ears, on the smooth areas of her neck, Jean Calmet breathes the perfume of cinnamon, of very faint perspiration,
of a flowering swamp in the noonday light: in her hair he finds the odour of the amber-coloured flint that they look for in the quarries, that they strike against a twin rock; a small column of smoke rises from the shock, and the stone that they lift to their nostrils begins smelling of tepid fire like a memory of the planet’s first cataclysms.

  The pink obscurity closed in, a draught made the candle flame tremble.

  Sweetness. Jean Calmet crucified flat on the bed, once again, Thérèse lies down on him, draws him into her, for a long, long time devours him with tenderness, then she raises herself, slides out of the embrace, she straightens up, she is kneeling, her thighs parted, she leans out of the bed, even if he closes his eyes he knows that she is reaching out gropingly, she finds the little basket, she opens it, she takes Marc’s handkerchief, she leans back a little and wipes herself quickly – the handkerchief makes a brittle sound in the wet night.

  Marc. Jean Calmet will have him for the first hour tomorrow, they will read the rest of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Thinking about Marc does not hurt, just now. And Thérèse, the Cat Girl, the witch, the succubus, the terrible silky fairy lies down beside him again, she places the handkerchief under the pillow; with his finger Jean Calmet tests it – rigid, gluey, flattened under the head with the radiant hair. The candle is still burning. Jean Calmet draws her to him, blows out the flame; given off at once is the odour of the hot wax and of the wick that is charring: the smell of Christmas! says Thérèse. They fall asleep. Tonight Jean will have no nightmares.

  Some time had gone by since Jean Calmet had seen his mother, and it made him suffer like he had committed an act of cowardice. As he was off the following Thursday, he went down to Les Peupliers to pay her a visit. They talked for an hour; Madame Calmet wanted to know how Jean was living, where he took his meals, if he gave out his laundry to be done. She told him about his brothers and sisters, she babbled a little, she looked like a grey mouse, her small round eyes without expression. While she was making tea in the kitchen, Jean Calmet came across an open newspaper in the middle of sewing boxes, on the veranda: The Cremation, “organ of the Cremation Society of the Canton of Vaud, published four times yearly.”