Achilles had no persecutor more merciless than the younger Bakroot. The most outrageous insults, the cruelest laughter came from the boy’s mouth, distorting it. Imperturbable, Achilles remained absorbed in his authors, his declensions; on the blackboard he traced the seven hills or the Carthage harbor. Behind his back, obscene rhymes deformed the names of gods and heroes, Hannibal’s elephants became circus animals, Seneca was a buffoon, and everything turned to nonsense. Achilles, it is true, was used to it; the Barbarians had been taking the City for so long now, Caesar recognized the son’s eyes behind the dagger, and how many times had Eurydice been lost – in less than an hour the lesson would be over. Sometimes, exasperated but desperately calm, he descended into the arena and sadly struck at what passed within his range. The blows only got us more fired up. We all took part in the dismemberment; but the kill, the decisive word that we knew had cruelly found its mark, the one that contorted the mouth of Achilles or staggered him into a moment of dumb silence right in the middle of declaiming a verse, was most often delivered by Rémi Bakroot. It was Rémi Bakroot who orchestrated this sad farce; he was the one who exerted himself tirelessly toward this end, with all the malicious force of his small throat, with all the misunderstood, oafish, and vulgar words gleaned from his home at the farm, or in the doors of smoky cafés Sunday evenings in winter, when, without crossing the threshold, a frightened boy calls to his drunk father that he must come home. It must be said that he had good reasons: Achilles loved Roland Bakroot, the older brother.
Roland was altogether different, and yet so similar; also unreasonable, certainly but his unreason had nothing of the urchin’s panache, the slightly morose, crackpot, smart-ass humor that forced his urchin peers to admire Rémi. His eccentricity was more pure, abrupt, and almost indigent; no knickknacks, no colorful collections or brilliant acts of rebellion; nothing convertible into the currency of boys’ codes, nothing for him to boast about, to win him an audience, to get the laughers, that is to say, all of us, on his side. He read books. And reading, he knit his young ruffian brow, clenched his jaw, and wore a look of disgust, as if a permanent, necessary nausea bound him without recourse to the page that perhaps he hated but passionately scrutinized, like an eighteenth century libertine dismembering another victim limb by limb, meticulously, but only for the sake of doing it, and without pleasure. He persisted in this sickening toil well beyond study hours, until meal times, and during recess in the playground where, stoic, curled into the roots of a chestnut tree, in a noisy corner of the shelter, he lost himself in some Quo vadis or other children’s saga of ancient Rome, which tormented him. He had a hard fist; he flew off the handle at the least presumption of offence and, no less sickened but more cheerfully, hammered the offender; if his ludicrous vice and eternal grimace inspired laughter, we hid it behind our sleeves. Thus he read; he walked toward the small library at the end of the playground shelter, not far from the dark corner where I had seen him bare his teeth for the first time; if he encountered his brother, they hissed like cats, frozen, treacherous, and violently deaf to the world; then passed on their way or once again seized each other, passionately clouting the other’s ears.
I wondered what their shared Sundays could have been like, over there in Saint-Priest-Palus, from which they had emerged with difficulty, on the rocky plateau toward Gentioux, under the roof of a poor farm on that barren soil where heather and springs hardly scratch the surly breastplate of lean granite with pink and coolness. To read Salammbô there was inexplicably comic; and what collection could have germinated there, what idea of a collection even, other than the unhoardable and unchanging series of the seasons that sweep over you, the weary oaths of the father, the heads of a herd of sheep? But I could see them, their odds and ends left in a jumble on the big table six o’clock on a winter evening, books and spinning tops spattered by the fresh milk in the big pail under the mirage of the lamp, I could see them as easily as their mother could see them through the window, on the moor in the coming night, relentlessly pursuing, approaching, recognizing, and seizing each other, devoting themselves, blow upon blow, to one another, offering their thrashings to the black pines, the first flight of owls, the dogs tied to the ground, howling at those birds soaring upwards, pious, bashed little sacrificers, their lips split, their tears bitter. And the old wind in its stormy beard of pines casts a favorable eye upon which of the two? Perhaps someone chooses one and destroys the other, or chooses one to better destroy him, we do not know which.
Thus Achilles, according to one of those strange, sad fantasies that give ruined lives passion and even a point of honor, took a liking to the older Bakroot brother. When the bell released the tired old scholar from his little hour of hell, when, unaware of the taunts of the little devils darting between his legs, he crossed the wide courtyard with his very dignified step, always slow and as though benumbed by some calm dream, it often happened that by some rigged chance, Roland was suddenly there, not right in his path, but a few meters to the side of that dreamy trajectory, that they might thus meet. And, although they immediately perceived each other from the corner of the eye, the old man leaving the courtyard (concealing perhaps a delighted, teasing smile) and the young boy over the pages of some classic saga that sickened him, although they awaited one another without surprise, they made a show at the last minute of recognizing each other and being astonished by the unforeseeable good fortune that brought them face to face. Achilles came to a stop, then drew closer, raising his loud, suddenly cheery voice; he rested his hand heavily on the shoulder of the boy who reddened, tenderly roughing him up; he questioned, patient and ironically scolding, inquiring about his current reading; the boy stammered, and awkwardly, a bit ashamed, showed him the book’s title. Then Achilles theatrically released his shoulder, and stepping back, regarded Roland with wide eyes, dumbfounded, miming an incredulous admiration that unfurled like a flag across the old castrato’s face; and in that controlled voice, experienced in the lightning ellipses of the old languages, yet resonant and strong from being deployed so long over the seas of uproar, like Neptune exclaiming Quos ego, he said something like “Well, isn’t that remarkable! Isn’t that amazing! So you’re already reading Flaubert?” The boy’s face lit up like his mop of hair, the big chin hesitated between laughter and tears, the precious book, the terrible, duplicitous book weighed heavily in his awkward hand; well then, reading was good, so many hours of assiduous distress were worth suffering for that one instant. The bald old man and the tousle-haired boy walked together a part of the way, they moved off toward the dark corridor, full of cooking smells, which led from the dining hall to the main courtyard, and from time to time Achilles could still be seen stopping, taking a step or two backward to better take in the boy with the magisterial regard of his approving, naked eyes. He disappeared into the stench of soup, ruminating over Flaubert, affection, or who knows what, and the boy, left there to his confused intoxication, wandered about a little, sat down and reopened the book, understanding nothing.
Over the course of the years, this surprising friendship was maintained. Achilles later became Roland’s guardian, which is to say he came to fetch him at the school on Thursdays and Sundays at about two o’clock, and the boy spent the afternoon with him, in his childless home, near his wife whom I never saw, but whom I believe I can guess to have been a good maker of cakes and a patient, staunch supporter of an absurd old man whose disgrace had afflicted her, so that in the past she had no doubt bitterly reproached him in secret, but now, with age, which subjects us all equally to absurdity, she had become a smiling old woman with compassion for all things and a kind of gaiety, yes, that slightly crazed gaiety of being so often defeated, as seen in drunken old women and nuns. Much more than his Roman authors and histories, it was this gaiety that reflected back on him and that might be glimpsed sometimes in the midst of an uproar, that no doubt kept Achilles going. I do not know how the man and boy occupied themselves in this time together, but one Thursday when we were “out on our
walk” along the Pommeil road – one of those dreary marches in rows, herded by a school monitor, outings that, apparently, benefited our lungs – I saw them walking slowly down a forest ride, the high arch of the branches forming over them like a painted paradise, and “under the trees full of a gentle music,” deep in discussion like scholars, Achilles gesticulating, the scowling little puritan interrupting him, setting him off again; and the autumn wind that lifted their coats carried off their learned words, their slightly ridiculous metaphysics, but so gently that over them the attentive leaves leaned in, deaf and friendly. From the lines of walkers, Rémi shot pained glances, stretching the length of the walking path to those two small points, and perhaps his heart was with them when his exasperated mouth attempted sarcasms, sneered.
But that was in the upper grades, I should say, when the Bakroots were already older. Before that time, there had been the books, the ones that Achilles gradually began to offer Roland, pulling them out of his enormous leather bag where, from among the sad, worn out Plutarchs with the missing pages, the limp, outdated exegeses, they burst forth suddenly in new wrapping paper, sometimes tied with a ribbon, such an odd contrast to the Latinist’s old paws. Thus there were the Jules Verne, a Salammbô of course, a bowdlerized, illustrated Michelet where we saw Louis XI with his niggardly little hat, leaning over the heavy chronicles that the monks of Saint-Denis, haughty and deferential, were presenting to him under the sarcastic eye of the bad barber whom the king loved; a few pages on, in a nocturnal image peopled with gaunt men and fleeting beasts in a ghostly forest, there was the poor Téméraire of Burgundy whom the niggard king hated to death, the Don Quixote of Charlorais, the elegant, the prodigal, the quick-tempered, on the day after his last battle lost after so many others, cadaver among the cadavers “all naked and frozen” and the banners of Burgundy and Brabant, fallen with their aggressive heraldry, the former duke and count face down in the ice that, when they tried to extract him, held in its vice that ducal flesh, nose, mouth and cheek, the wolves of old Lorraine bearing away in their stuffed muzzles that defeated, determined meat, which so obstinately had desired the Empire and the disaster, toward this end had so earnestly ridden, plotted, besieged, and sacrificed the masses, had in pure loss waged war and despaired, in the last days losing himself in wine. He had been there for two days when, after searching for him, they found him on the day of Epiphany in the year 1477, in the great cold of those distant times, and when another barber, but this one modest and in tears, who was in the habit of doing Charles’s beard and not his politics, leaned over that quarter of meat, and cried out, as could be read in the illustration’s caption, as the old chroniclers tell us he said that day, what he thus truly said and it is a miracle that we heard it, while his precarious breath made a small, quickly vanishing cloud, “Alas, it is my gentle master,” then had him decently carried, and “in beautiful linens placed, in the house of Georges Marquiez, in a back bedroom,” in Nancy where the kings, at last delivered from that abusive brother, the pursuit of whom had so long been their reason to be, came to contemplate what remained of him and gently mourned the death of the best part of themselves.
What did Roland think, facing that image of impeccable downfall? He looked at it often. Once I asked him to show it to me, and against all expectations, he agreed, a little condescendingly, Roland, who had read the text to which it referred and thus knew what it was about, and he even deigned to comment on it, reticent at first, his few words gruff and aggressive, offering me his fanciful interpretation according to which, by little signs that he considered significant that the illustrator surely had not intended to be, he thought he could tell which were the people of the Téméraire, which the Nancy bourgeois, which were from Burgundy and which from Flanders; the big-beaked head-piece of this one made him a duke, the less pretentious helmet of that one only a baron; and all those shadowy forms in the background, lancers or black willow trees that the falling snow and the night made indistinct, those semblances of horses mixed with men whose protruding lances were hung with banners, that was the last battlefield of the Master and Lord of Burgundy himself, represented there twice, first as a decaying carcass and there, more ethereal, all those shivering dead from the day before yesterday waiting at the heavenly gate where Saint George in full dress, visor lowered, haloed crest and gold fleece about his neck, welcomed them, and clasping them to his breast in tears, seated them at the round table, the eternal table with the scent of warm wine. These astonishing imaginings, that irrational, exhaustive, almost prophetic vision, made Roland scowl. He knew it all of course, but it caused him suffering; his efforts to extract glory from it were in vain. In his frantic exegesis there was something like a panic of interpretation, an a priori grief, the terrible certainty of error or omission, and, whatever he did to belie it, a bitter conviction of his unworthiness: a vile Swiss foot soldier, one of those disciplined second-raters responsible for the Téméraire’s death, and who, too sure of the hell promised him, would have hidden himself among the glorious Burgundy shades awaiting their celestial reward, that is how Roland thought of himself with regard to his books. And that is why he usually never talked about what he read, that is to say about his imposture. Today I think that if he consented to talk to me of that illustration, of that story of the massacred “step cousin” no longer to be envied and only mourned by a modest man while over there the traitor brother, the reader of holy chronicles, forsaken in Plessis-lez-Tours, feels bearing down on him the immense shadow of a prison of remorse and a dark jubilation, if Roland thus confessed something on this subject, it was because there, purified and written in letters of nobility, was an essential constellation of the life itself, when books no longer sufficed, of the very passion, buried, ancient, and illiterate, of Roland Bakroot.
There was also the Kipling.
It was in my second year. I know that exactly, since in that period I was just discovering The Jungle Book, having no Achilles to act as mentor or patron for my reading. Thus Roland, who must have been in his fourth year, received a book by the same author, which both confirmed me in my own reading – this was not a writer just for the young, like Curwood or Verne, of whom I was beginning to be ashamed, but loved all the more for that – and made me very jealous. It was a magnificent edition, also illustrated, but not with dramatic grisailles in the style of Gustave Dore’s emulators that darkened the pages of the Michelet, rather with delicate watercolors, as detailed as barbaric temples, with the Himalayas in the distance, the poisonous pagoda fruits that the jungles bear, and closer in, harnessed rickshaws conveying beautiful parasoled Victorian ladies to who knows what pleasures, almost under the feet of the waiting elephants mounted by maharajahs in rose, almond, and lime, while in the foreground, dreamy, clean-shaven, courtly and rapacious, gentlemen and scoundrels, braid-trimmed, indistinguishable under the identical scarlet tunics and perfect helmets of the fabulous Indian army, calmly contemplated this world, the Himalayas, bearded kings and curvaceous parasoled ladies, this world that was their pasture. (Poor Achilles, pasture of the world, what could all that really mean to him? Or to the Bakroot sons, of Saint-Priest-Palus?) Gold, vile or glorious, gold qualifiable by any adjective, gold ran there “like tallow through meat,” like the indomitable blood through the heavy flesh, precious, belonging to the querulous crinoline wearers; as did the terrifying ambitions, steeped in whisky, full of brutal rides and bloody blasphemies, in the impassive eyes of the handsome captains at the dull, polite tea tables. Out of reach, all that luxurious richness must have inflamed Roland, completely in vain; and with an almost joyous resignation, he no doubt lingered over the pictures that he considered closer to himself, conforming more to what he would one day be, the fraternal images of downfall, like the picture where you could make out, in a filthy sack, transported by a madman through the jungles and rice paddies under the jeers of monkeys, the shrunken head of a man who had once wanted to be king.
I examined those pictures, often, of course, over the shoulder of Roland w
ho did not want to share them, but especially one other time and completely at leisure. It was in study hall again, where, as I have said, in the lower grades I was seated not far from Rémi Bakroot. From one of the pockets of the reddish jacket (which he dragged around until at least his fourth year, more and more rumpled, shrunken, shapeless), he drew stiff papers, folded any which way in quarters or smaller, broken along the folds, which he carelessly smoothed flat and studied with the same slightly ironic, intense and irritable attention that he gave a mathematics problem. Stupefied, I recognized there the helmeted highlanders, the braid-trimmed dolmans, the elephants and kings. Rémi was not stingy; the monitor that day was a good chap, the demeaned pictures were passed around. We were filled with wonder, and also a bit frightened, and we eagerly lost ourselves in that richness, that distance, that immoveable power. Rémi, his big arrogant chin held high, contemplated with a tense satisfaction this little group fighting over Roland’s carcass, just as, from the height of an elephant, borne aloft by the cheering crowds, a cipaye chief directs, nod by nod, the slow death of Her Gracious Majesty’s officers. Leaving the study room, Roland was waiting for him.
Small Lives Page 8