(It is also possible, but unlikely, that he did not understand a bit of all that; he slammed the book closed again and, cursing, got angrily drunk; he was, after all, a peasant and already old.)
Finally, one year Fiéfié from the Décembres helped him with the ploughing; he came again that spring, during the summer, and more and more often. He was somewhat simple and liked his drink; he probably spoke too fast and too much; very thin, with hands that shook, he had watery eyes that looked out of a sagging, feverish face. He slept in an old cottage already abandoned at that time, the ruins of which I am familiar with today, in the brambles, far from everyone by necessity more than taste, near La Croix-du-Sud. He gradually put more and more distance between himself and the Décembres, his father and brothers; he had tumbled down the gentle, unconscious slope of daily drinkers: living on nothing but wine and drinking enough for four, having diluted in this potion the model of ancestors and the taste for heirs, the little reserve and secret foolish pride that comprise the honor of the humble. He looked at things as we all do, without revealing what he saw there, being neither grown man nor young man grown old, but simply a drunkard, everywhere gently mocked or harshly treated by the worst of them. But he was welcomed at the table because he had two good hands that he had to put to work the rest of the week if he wanted to pickle himself in alcohol on Sunday, dissolve his attachment to them as he had all his other attachments. After such days, reeling from the cafés in Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, he would collapse in the closest barn, in the docile sheaves, and talk to himself long into the night in wild fits, laughing proudly, issuing decrees, until the village children would creep up and, throwing a bucket of water in his face or the cold streak of a slowworm down his shirt, carry off his fragile monarchy, dispersed in the fleeing laughter.
So they were seen together, Fiéfié bounding unevenly along in the shadow of the old man, always very upright, overbearing, distant. They yoked the oxen in the courtyard and solemnly set off; Fiéfié at the shaft called to the heavy curled brows, jeered at them in loud bursts with his bawling voice, jerky and misshapen as a cripple or an Elizabethan clown, and the old man standing straight at the front of the tipcart, stiff, his moustache all white now, the wheels creaking under him, also conforming to images, kings defeated, or grown old and defeated all the same, furious and powerless lords, abdicators. Sometimes his great brusque voice fell on the dull withers of the oxen, on Fiéfié whom he abused; but sometimes he may have been cheerful and smiled, and only Fiéfié and the pathways knew it. They went home; Fiéfié brought up another bottle from the cellar, sat down, drifted off; the mother, shapeless and always moaning under the ruined citadel of black underskirts, muttered, prepared who knows what, was not there; and between them, the old man, who did not drink or moan, entranced perhaps, nostalgic or self-assured, the old man, it seemed, spoke.
About this time, in the cafés of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, in the talk born of wine and increased by fatigue, in the endless gossip of the day laborers, and from there into the houses where men report back in that necessity for quarrelsome, combative conversation with their wives, backward-looking and inescapable on drunken evenings, Antoine rose from the dead.
He was, Fiéfié said, in America. It is true that Fiéfié was not credible, and that he would have been laughed at if it had not been known that through his mouth and however betrayed, however demeaned, it was the other who spoke, the old banisher, the enigmatic, peremptory one. Thus he was lent the distrusting ear, the secretly excited and envious ear that is lent to prophets, whose squealing voice and tattered appearance, whose overgrown hovel I can well believe Fiéfié shared. Thus America was spoken of, and the shadow of Antoine over there; and Fiéfié and his listeners alike saw America as a country similar to the adjoining cantons, those known by hearsay but never seen, beyond Laurière or Sauviat, on the other side of the Jouet Mountain or the Puy des Trois-Cornes. They saw a wealthy but perilous country, of cutthroat caravansary, where there are Sinais of thorns and Canaans of village feasts, full of lost young women who love you, splendid or disastrous destinies, or the two combined, as destinies are in countries known only by hearsay. There they saw Antoine, little Antoine with the almost childlike features by which they had known him ten years earlier and which would never age, and there they found him some dubious or perilous occupation that suited his arrogance, his quiet obstinacy, his silences: pimp or engineer, ruffian cap over one eyebrow or driving a railway train at breakneck speed, and in his tanned face, those eyes always had that gallant, indolent dignity.
(Thus, surely the dominical reign of Fiéfié – and I wonder how much of all this he could really understand, how he could be equal to his mandate as the father’s herald, as the link to the son’s history, simple as he was and certainly not capable of stringing two reasonable thoughts together, but devoted to Toussaint and having seized from his lips the word “America”; this word, repeated indefinitely, was to the father what the relic was to the mother, and thus as transmissible, summarizing all the possible fictions and even the very idea of fiction, that is to say, what he, Fiéfié would never possess, which did not exist and was nevertheless, mysteriously, named – surely Fiéfié’s dominical rule, that obscure throne of straw and scepter of drink, that grandiloquent monarchy dedicated to spiders, outraged by a bucket of water and the evil deeds of children, became an unimaginable reign over a single, impoverished word.)
Antoine had written, from Mississippi or New Mexico, barbarian countries beyond Limoges; and nothing, after all, allows me to affirm with conviction that these letters, which no one saw, did not exist. Perhaps their signatory actually drove black locomotives under the yellow sun of distant El Paso; perhaps the second California gold rush swept along with it this bit of a soul from Le Châtain in its wave of rattletraps, brawls, wild gold panners, and lost innocence; perhaps he walked surrounded by mythic machinery, massively virile, Confederate Stetson and Yankee Colt, wheeler-dealer and horse thief, and as he drove multitudes of stolen cattle across the frontier by night, perhaps he remembered, at the carved base of a saint, a small docile bull; or “unnaturally sober,” perhaps he lived in the bourgeois comfort of some small trade, in a wooden house on the edge of the desert with a woman taken to be his lawful wife, who attended services in white gloves at the Baptist church, but whom he had won playing dice in a bordello in Galveston or Baton Rouge. Or again, too weary to face more distant coasts, he might have gone no further than the lap of a woman on a violet hillside in the West Indies, unless he had become a Benedictine in the Azores, like the sailor in Mémoires d’outre-tombe, which he had not read. That is what I myself would imagine. But as for Toussaint, he did not have access to the materials necessary to imagine that, scraps of language, popular engravings, or Hollywood images; of America, desperately as he tried, he could imagine nothing; nevertheless he knew that the son had two legs for walking, and then perhaps a steamer had taken over to convey him across the sea; he knew what a locomotive was, a taste for gold, and a bordello, and he could imagine Antoine in one of those three states or those three places. The elements that no one knew and that he patched together to construct a plausible American son were different from mine, more limited no doubt, but of a richer, freer, more astonishing arrangement; and then, in the little atlas, he had read these names: El Paso, Galveston, Baton Rouge.
He had read them. The atlas falls open today quite naturally at North America, the page that has yellowed the most. The names of the cities that I have mentioned are underlined with a clumsy pencil, with a thick, heavy line like carpenter marks.
Should I add that the father gradually abandoned his patch of land, those eight or ten hectares of buckwheat wrested from the brush and the scree, that doleful reliquary of the lost days and useless sweat of thirty generations of Peluchets, from which the son had been excluded by his indifference on that evening when all of it, intractable scree and sweat long dried, had risen in the pointing arm of the father and had forced him out with
all its weight of stone and sheaf, of buried ancestors? The old man did battle with something else altogether now. Fiéfié cultivated confusedly here and there, gesticulated, throwing stones at the crows, mocking the oxen; as if he had smuggled in seeds from his hovel or cuttings in his bloody hands one drunken evening, the brambles won; in the Clerc meadow, the broom stood as high as a man; the elders grew in the middle of the field, white dust scared up by slight winds, sudden flights. The father, author of his son’s days and Author now of his own evening portion, scythe resting mechanically on his shoulder but as idle and magnificent henceforth as the harp of the psalmist king, slowly paced the roadways, spoke to the crows, imagined El Paso. He planted himself in front of Fiéfié and watched him, mocking but impassive, barely his accomplice; with cheerful industry, the clown gesticulated more quickly, jumped from clod to clod and harassed the oxen, played his role; satisfied, the father smoothed his moustache, withdrew to the shade of the forest edge and sat down grandly against a tree trunk; the sun set on his ruined land; over there, the dispersed son, the glorious American body, was making gold in California.
Thus the two of them attended the fields, but without purpose and celebrating who knew what, as if they had been in a church, on a fairground or theatrical stage; and beyond, in the dark house barely visible around the bend of hedges, the mother, relic in hand, the word America never passing her lips, muttered the names of Saint Barbe, Saint Fleur, Saint Fiacre.
Reality, or what would like to be taken for it, reappeared.
Let us imagine them, Fiéfié and Toussaint, early one foggy morning, leaving for the pig market in Mourioux. They have droplets of mist on their moustaches. They are happy going through the woods, their roles well in hand, living their own lives without asking confirmation of their modest joy, modestly invented, from anyone. Not without ceremony, they are driving a few recalcitrant pigs; they are joking around; I hear their laughing voices on the Cinq-Routes hill; let them enjoy this moment. There they are in Mourioux. There between the upright, immutable church, the gilded signs on the lawyers’ offices lost in the wisteria, blooming or already gone by, and the window where I could be writing these lines, let us locate the place, perhaps this one or another just like it, where the truth according to Toussaint Peluchet faltered. The market over, they went to Marie Jabely’s for a drink with the horse dealers. No doubt Fiéfié was soon drunk, had turned away from the haggling, and began talking in a loud, strong voice, spilling his heart: America appeared among the drinkers and Antoine was striding gallantly across that holy ground, he was making grand gestures from across the sea to all those over here. The old man, uncomfortable in the black tie and stiff collar of market days and weddings, the legendary starched clothes of the last century that hung absurdly from the uneasy shoulders of peasants, the old man let Fiéfié declaim and did not breathe a word, proud, tacit, indulgent as an Author abandoning to his ghostwriter the thankless, subordinate task of the dialogues. Then, from a group of young men, suddenly arose one mocking, categorical voice, the voice of a Jouanhaut son, returning from Rochefort where he had done his military service, a little of a coxcomb, I think, and conceited, wearing the polished boots or perhaps the wide epaulettes of a sergeant; that vain, categorical, coxcomb voice, like reality itself entering a country bar in polished boots, proclaimed it: the son was not in America, he had been seen on this side of the ocean. In chains and two-by-two, to the jeers of the fishwives, he had been seen at the port, with the convicts loading cargo for the Ré penal colony.
The father did not bat an eyelid; for a long time he looked straight ahead, as if numb. Heavily, he put on his hat, paid for his drink, said his good-byes, and left. Fiéfié lost his temper but no one was listening to him anymore; they were gathered around the iconoclast. His astonished speech became the echoless speech of a slightly simple drunk. Staggering under the weight of a wrath too big for him that rendered him stupid, he, too, went out the door. Distressed, stunned by a sharp pain he found himself unable to ascribe either to a lack of wine or the laughter of children, the clown saw the upright old man standing waiting for him near the watering place, under the wisteria, with his back to the ceaseless, crystalline murmur of the trickling water. Let them return to Le Châtain in the rain, the night in her mantle of chestnut trees gradually pulling them close, Fiéfié yelping like a hunted fox, and the lonely, hobnailed boots of the old man.
The new episode in the history of Antoine made the rounds in the cantons, where its dark logic substantiated it. Knowing gossips, who exalt in shattering reversals and can multiply splendor tenfold through its collapse, seized upon the penal colony as they had previously seized upon America, but as if the one were the crowning of the other, a sequel, written in a different, darker hand, though worthy of its antecedent and, in fact, necessary. The old man had believed he could leave out the cross: his story was perhaps ill-timed, and certainly incomplete without it. The coxcomb, the Judas, supplied the godsend of an Ecce homo to the prematurely glorious Ascension.
What the truth really was, no one knows; perhaps the old couple learned it (I cannot assert this) from the incongruous visit of the messenger in the top hat, but nothing will tell us who sent him or what message he brought. Maybe Antoine was happy in America, or he was a convict, sovereignly vested with striped hat, slaving away at the Rochefort port “where the convicts died thick and fast”; or he was both, in whichever order you liked; he could have been sent off under whiplash from Saint-Martin-de-Ré to Cayenne in America, to distantly fulfill the paternal fiction as well as the prison prophesies scattered throughout the little volume of Manon Lescaut, which he had read with a passion. But then again he could have disappeared in the vulgar solitude of unspeakable employment tending shop or keeping books, in a dim rented room forsaken by the light, in the suburbs of Lille or El Paso; his unemployed pride would not have abandoned him. Or finally, writer who failed before becoming one and whose poor pages no one will be read, he could have ended up like the young Lucien Chardon if Vautrin’s firm grasp had not dragged him from the water: a convict still. Because I myself think he had almost everything it takes to become an intractable author: a cherished, disastrously ruptured childhood, fierce pride, an obscurely inflexible patron saint, a few avidly read canonical texts, Mallarmé and how many others for contemporaries, banishment and the father rejected; and I think that he came within the usual hair’s breadth – another childhood, more urban or affluent, nurtured by English novels and Impressionist salons where a beautiful mother takes your gloved hand in her own – of having the name Antoine Peluchet ring in our memories like the name Arthur Rimbaud.
Juliette gave up; she died. The other two survived without giving an inch. For the father, nothing seemed to have changed; as a revelation that, for him, was not one, or a heresy that he could contend with, the words of the Jouanhaut son did not shake him. He did not enter into the polemic, except that in the fields his step became more lively, as if some urgency bore him, and the names of the distant cities he threw to the crows more resonant, more imperious. He called to his departed and perhaps they smiled at him, attentive as they all are; proudly he bore his scythe; and those evenings in Chatelus when Saint John or Our Lady of August are celebrated with huge fires that stand out against the horizon, he looked long at the lights and there he saw Juliette, as pretty as she had been at twenty, climbing the night toward the son.
He maneuvered within the legend; Fiéfié however, who followed him like a shadow, who had been his mouthpiece and who was his shadow, Fiéfié remained on the earth and suffered. Each Sunday he endlessly reenacted the experience of the rout, in the cafés of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, where wine no longer tasted like anything but wine, where derision had become his lot, which he could no longer endure; because there had been a time when people had listened, and having tasted their approval of the sovereign word that had, for a moment, been vested in him, he could not suffer the fickleness of his public and his sudden, total and irremediable disaffection. He sa
t wordlessly at the rickety tables where he spilled the morning’s first bottle and whimpering, stupefied, sorry-eyed, drank alone until evening. Then, a joker let slip the word America; Fiéfié seized on it, lifted his strained face, clownish and prophetic, with its beatific mask; he hesitated a moment but the perfidious glances and goad of wine convinced him, and flushed with urgency and conviction, more carried away with each word, half rising, straightening, now fully erect, he proclaimed the innocence of the son, the distant reign of the son, the glory of the son. The sudden roars of laughter drowned him, and the young Antoine was thrown to the ground in the café, wrists and ankles bound, beaten by the guards as over there. Then the insults, the blows, the overturned chairs, and in Mourioux in the scent of wisteria, near the windswept cemetery where the defeated Juliette slept, in Chatelus on the sloping square planted with elms, and throughout the night, Fiéfié collapsed magnificently, ranting and ruminating about America in the blood and rubble until he fell into a rough sleep in which he saw them, Toussaint proud and Juliette laughing like a bride, swept along at a gallop in a cabriolet driven by Antoine in top hat, exultant and upright in the coachman’s seat, heading downhill into Lalléger on the road to Limoges, the Americas, and the beyond. Behind ran Fiéfié, and he could not catch up with them.
Small Lives Page 4