During the week, summer or winter, time existed for the two of them as it does when there is no longer a woman around: chaotic, indeterminate, childish without the grace or the inebriety of childhood. Though it was no longer anything more than a pilgrimage, Fiéfié arrived early from La Croix-du-Sud for work, with his sack full of pilgrim’s clutter, rusted tool parts, crusts of bread and bits of string, perhaps some freshly carved whistles. Without oxen now, they went out briefly for their dreary performance in the few unabandoned fields, planted the cabbage they lived on, brought back the buckwheat in a handkerchief. They lingered over meals at odd hours; a few old women still stopped in on them, out of curiosity or charity, old mother Jacquemin, ancient Marie Barnouille; passing a leftover ham, fromage blanc, or greens through the window, they could see them in the long, unspeakably dirty and cluttered kitchen; by ducking their heads they could make out the impassive Toussaint at the far end, the back window behind him, stormily indistinct and haloed like a pantocrator, and Fiéfié galloping nonstop from one end to the other of the devastated space, like several people at once, drinking from the bottle and stirring the stew, clearing the table onto the benches or the oven, drinking as he cut the bread and evoked someone else. But the old women, who walked away laughing and feeling sorry for them, could tell us nothing more; for if the two had doubts, they kept them to themselves, without having to admit them to anyone, and if they felt triumphant, they also kept that to themselves, it was for their kitchen and their shadows alone, for this patinated place that did not offend them, for those inoffensive ghosts, far from the world inhabited by incredulous ears and offensive mouths. At five o’clock, Fiéfié dropped his bottle and capsized, slept on a bench or the ground with his head on some sacks, and leaning over a bit, Toussaint watched him sleep, maybe tenderly, maybe with indifference.
Finally one day the clown did not come.
It was summer, I imagine. Let us say it was in August. A beautiful, mechanical sky bent over the harvest and the heather, threw harsh shadows over the house of Peluchet. The old women still left in the village, all in black, keeping watch from their doorsteps, oracular, patient as the day, saw Toussaint framed once or twice in the dark doorway. He searched the bright sky for the bluer flight of crows; he entered the cowshed on who knows what errand or thought, gazed at the ancient, useless oxen doomed to the shadows there; he called them by their names; he remembered that Fiéfié, in former times, had hopped about happily at the shaft. He returned to the small courtyard where he stayed put, near the cold well. With those old women, let us contemplate one more time, but in the sunlight, the heraldic, proletarian cap protruding above the ivory moustache of the old survivor. By noon, his waiting reminded him, with a sudden pang, of another waiting that he had forgotten; because surely he loved Fiéfié even though he often abused him, Fiéfié who called him boss, who had drunk bad coffee with him and kept vigil over the dead Juliette, who had stubbornly stood by the son through his metamorphoses; who each Sunday suffered for the dead and for one nearly dead, in disgrace and wine, under crushing blows, that is to say, among the living; who had had an appalling childhood and a worse life, which a borrowed memory had nevertheless so ennobled that now he dealt only with angels and shades, in the chaos of a founding myth that carried him along yelping and made sport of his sickly life up to and including, necessarily, his martyrdom; Fiéfié Décembre, splayed full length under the heavy sun, was lying dead in the brambles of La Croix-du-Sud.
An old woman discovered him there in the hottest part of the afternoon, two steps from his hovel, face down among the swarming wasps. The cuts on his head bled with the blackberries; “the meadows painted with butterflies and flowers” embalmed the evening, brushed lightly against him; a corner of his jacket, caught in his fall and held taut by the intractable thorns as though starched, cast a delicate shadow over his limp neck. Maybe he had received blows, but just as likely, he could have stumbled drunk into the brambles, thick and cruel as tropical vines in the New World, and smashed his forehead triumphantly on the stones; no one ever knew. The old woman, who was going down to Chatelus, alerted the police; they arrived in their trimmed hats, their two-horned demon or ruffian shadows stretched long and overlapping in the low sun; they saw the old man on his knees in the early night, without his cap, flannel belt hanging from his pants; in his arms he clasped the dead puppet and, weeping, repeated in a stubborn, surprised voice full of recognition and reproach, “Toine. Toine.” A horse blanket was thrown over the corpse; the open eyes that would never water again disappeared, a rough charm adorned the poor beggar’s badly covered hair; the old man called to his son softly until the burial in the cemetery in Saint-Goussaud, over which the wind was blowing.
The rest can be told in a few words. Toussaint no longer called out to anyone. He survived Fiéfié as he survived the others; perhaps he merged them together and together molded and remolded their shadows to increase the large shadow upon which he lived, that shrouded him and gave him strength; to it he added the slow, easy-going shadow of the oxen, who also died. What are a few more years of life, when one is rich with so many losses? He was left with his scythe, the unbridled luxury of his kitchen, the well, the unchanging horizon. No one spoke of Antoine anymore; as for Fiéfié, who had ever spoken of him?
Until the end, two or three old women, the best and the worst of humanity, went on visiting that collapsed pantocrator, outlined sharply against his moss-covered Byzantine back window, green and luminous, his kitchen cold as a crypt; sometimes the crimson foxglove chimed there. The Sisters of Mercy placed blackberries on the grimy table, elderberry jam, the inevitable bread. They told him endless stories of bad harvests, pregnant daughters, and tumultuous drunken binges; the old man nodded slightly, as though listening, serious as a police officer, moustache as dignified as General Lee’s at Appomattox after the surrender. Suddenly, he seemed to remember something; he shuddered, his moustache, caught in the light, trembled a bit, and leaning toward Marie Barnouille, he blinked his eyelids slyly and spoke, proud and confidentially, a bit full of himself, “When I was in Baton Rouge, in seventy-five . . .”
He had rejoined the son. When by all evidence he held him in his embrace, he heaved the two of them onto the rotten coping of the well where they threw themselves headlong, as one, like the saint and his bull, their arms entwined, their eyes laughing, their indiscernible fall sweeping the centipedes and bitter plants, waking the triumphant water, rousing her like a girl; the father, or was it the son, cried out as his legs were shattered; one held the other under the black water to the point of death. They were drowned like cats, innocent, oafish, and consubstantial as two from the same litter. Together they went into the earth under a fleeting sky, in a single casket, in the month of January, 1902.
The wind passes over Saint-Goussaud; the world, of course, does violence. But what violences has it not suffered? The forgiving ferns conceal the sick earth; bad wheat grows there, inane stories, demented families; the sun looms up out of the wind like a giant, like a madman. Then it dies out, like the Peluchet family died out, as we say when the name can no longer call up living beings. Only mouths without a tongue still utter it. Who is stubbornly lying into the wind? Fiéfié yelps in the gusts, the father thunders, in a sudden shift repents, redeems himself when the wind turns, the son flees forever westward, the mother moans low in the autumn heather, in a scent of tears. All these beings are dead and gone. In the Saint-Goussaud cemetery, Antoine’s place is empty and it is the last one; if he lay in rest there, I would be buried anywhere, wherever I happened to die. He left the place to me. Here, the last of my race, the last to remember him, I will lie recumbent; then perhaps he will be completely dead; my bones will be Antoine Peluchet’s as much as anyone’s, beside Toussaint, his father. That windswept place awaits me. That father will be mine. I doubt that my name will ever be on the stone. There will be arched chestnut trees, immovable old men in caps, little things I remember with joy. There will be a cheap relic at some distant secon
d-hand shop. There will be bad buckwheat harvests, a naïve, neglected saint stuck with needles by girls with pounding hearts dead now for one hundred and fifty years, my kin here and there in the rotting wood, the villages and their names, and still the wind.
The Lives of Eugène and Clara
I do not know how to think about my father directly, since he is inaccessible and hidden as a god. Like a believer – though one who may lack faith – I need the help of his intermediaries, angels or clergy; and what first comes to mind are the annual visits (perhaps they were once biannual, or even monthly at the very beginning) that my paternal grandparents paid me as a child, visits that no doubt constituted a perpetual reminder of my father’s disappearance. Their intrusion was a matter of protocol and consternation, all tender signs of affection nipped in the bud. I can still see those two old people in the dining room of the school lodgings. My grandmother Clara was a tall, pallid woman with sunken cheeks, the image of uneasy death, resigned but impassioned, a curious mix of such vibrant, lively expressions playing over a death mask. Her long, frail hands clasped her skinny knees; the line of her lips, which remained impeccable however thinned by age, stretched into a smile when she looked at me, a vague smile of unspeakable nostalgia no doubt, but also the sharp, seductive smile of a young woman. I feared the acuity of her large, very blue eyes, sorrowful and pretty, that lingered on me, studied me as though to fix my features indelibly in her old memory. Under that gaze, perhaps my discomfort grew from what I guessed it held: her tenderness was not directed at me alone, it searched beyond the child’s face for the features of the false dead, my father – a look both vampirish and maternal; and that ambivalence disturbed me as did the keen judgment that, rightly or wrongly, I attributed to this imposing individual, frightening and charming, familiar with the mysteries to which her unusual first name and her vocation’s magic title destined her: sage-femme, wise woman, or mid-wife, though in Mourioux I had no idea yet what that meant, and the title, it seemed to me, belonged exclusively to her.
She almost completely eclipsed the figure of my grandfather, Eugène – although without subjecting him to that prattling, sour condescension by which certain wives circumvent their husbands, refusing to let them speak, think, and finally, live. No, what made my grandmother dominant and dominate him in my eyes, I think, was the fact and the painful disproportion of her vivacious spirit in contrast to the good-natured awkwardness, the smiling, kindly obtuseness of my grandfather, to which was added an unbelievably plebeian appearance, a likeable homely face: a bad – though pleasing – match for the clerical refinement of his companion. I was not afraid of him; he disconcerted me no more than Félix’s cronies, gathered at the table over their wine. I “quite liked him”; but if I ever loved one of the two, I believe it was Clara, whose vague, sorrowful eyes – hardly grazing things and nevertheless taking them in with their caress, their heavy, regretful pauses immediately cut short – wrung my heart.
On this subject, I see that in my childhood I could only ever admire women, at least within my family, in which no “father” could have been a model for me – and even the imaginary fathers I substituted for my own were pale figures: a too-talkative teacher, a too-taciturn family friend, whom I will mention again. But, jumping back a generation and becoming the son of another century, of the past, could I not have transferred the paternal image onto my grandfathers? No doubt I did so, and what further proof of it do I need than these pages, which, one after another, try to beget themselves from the past; no doubt I wanted to do so, although I have no grounds for congratulating myself on this fictive aging; the fact is that for both the maternal and paternal branches of my family, the women were incomparably superior intellectually to the men.
The disparity between Clara and Eugène repeated itself, if less dramatically, in Elise and Félix; although Félix’s relative dimness was more likely the effect of temperament, a touchy, confused impulsiveness, slightly egotistical and careless, that obscured his judgment, rather than a fundamental insufficiency in the judgment itself – as I believe was the case with my Mazirat grandfather. Still it is true that his garrulous, easily mired thinking seemed to me no match for Elise’s mental agility (she was remarkably concise sometimes, although unlike Félix, she had an aversion for decisive judgments). Similarly, although more obvious and better conserved in the tall, erect figure of Clara, something aristocratic, nostalgic, and reflective survived in Elise beyond all physical depredation. And then too, noble, incomprehensible words – God, destiny, the future – passed the lips of them both; can I be sure that the intonation these words still have today – in some inner ear that hears them resonate at my core – that their timber was not imprinted in me by the two of them? In short, I listened to them “with another ear”; they knew how to speak: the first with some ostentation (she was regarded as a bit sanctimonious), Elise, on the other hand, with that adorably rustic refusal, even in grief, to speak of “those things,” those things spoken of nonetheless, that only seem so formidable because they are universal, those things that are thought itself. Metaphysics and poetry came to me through women: Racinian alexandrines from the mouth of my mother, recalled by her only as high school memories, and grand abstract mysteries conveyed by the benevolent and awkwardly solemn vocables of my grandmothers in their vague faith.
A few words more regarding Eugène, that massive old man, sincere, absent-minded, transparent to others, whose presence was quickly forgotten. It seems to me – but even this is not clear in my memory; my memories of him are vague, whereas the gently angular appearance of Clara is precise as a shadow cutout – it seems to me that he was a bit stooped, in the way of those who are broad-shouldered in their youth, and whose former unabashed virility becomes resigned to the rounded posture of the orangutan, manual workers grown too old, who do not know what to do with their hands and bear their bodies awkwardly, bodies all the heavier for having been powerful and efficient in their pure function as tools. He had been a mason, and no doubt an alert, untroublesome fellow worker. He would not have been troublesome, rather, if he had not been, according to the little I know of him, the victim of a weakness of character that no doubt plagued him mercilessly and led him through one humiliating setback after another to that final state of smiling, often inebriated half-stupor in which I knew him. Though at the time, when I saw him, that was not what I thought; his illuminated, sorry face – more broken King Lear’s than clown’s, drunken old soldier, all shame drowned – his big red nose, his hands just as big and red, the incredible folds in his doggy eyelids, his croaking voice, all made me want to laugh – the laugh of the nervous child, which is a way of reversing the tragedy, of denying the unease. I reproached myself for that secret desire. To look dubiously, even ironically, upon “someone I should have loved,” to harbor that improper thought: “my grandfather is very ugly,” seemed to me a fault of the most serious nature; without a doubt, the faculty for such impious speculations belonged to “monsters,” and to them alone; was I, therefore, a monster? Immediately, I promised myself to love him better; and with that promise – the internal drama in which one plays all the roles is the emotional leaven of the so-called tender years – waves of affection for the poor old fellow washed over me again. My eyes misted with sweet tears of atonement, and I would have liked to follow through with manifest acts of kindness; I do not know if I dared to do so at the time.
I will add that the old fellow was sentimental. Whereas I was not surprised to see Clara often on the verge of tears (women’s tears seemed to me in the order of things, no more or less comprehensible than flu or rain, and always justified), the massive, violent sobs of men, possibly drunk, such as my grandfather emitted in the evening, climbing into his old car permeated with the same archaic odor as their house in Mazirat, those sobs disconcerted me. Of course I was used to Félix weeping like that, when a heartfelt emotion suddenly made his voice break, or when he had had too much to drink; it was the same short, dry sob, quickly retracted; it both was and w
as not a kind of weeping. No doubt I was already well aware that my grandfathers drank a good deal of wine on those days – and what did those two men talk about over a bottle, constrained to the silence of essential things? With the help of what evasions, what empty words, did they avoid speaking the name of the “missing person” in my presence and elsewhere no doubt, the traitor in this melodrama who was also its deus ex machina, whose trace my presence attested to, the director-deserter without whom they would never have been united over that bottle, at a loss for words, actors without direction or prompts having forgotten their roles? What silences avoided or evoked the flight of their former hopes, the ruin of that day, null now in retrospect, on which they had married their children, when they had wept as today, but with a different emotion? It seems to me I can hear those conversations, awkward, artificial, and yet full of good will.
Small Lives Page 5