He was pale as wax, the redhead pallor, I would say, of a Flemish Puritan ready to take the sword to image-worshippers; he said not a word, only the impatient fists, the fanatic eyes watering with passion, were alive. The younger brother sneered, but his contempt was broken and plaintive, he too disfigured, as if offended: “It’s mine,” he cried as he fled, “that book was meant for me. Thief! Thief!” Roland caught hold of him in the middle of the courtyard. They seized one another and toppled to the beaten ground, the dust mixing in their mouths with their tears; like lovers they rolled on top of each other, fervently tangling and untangling themselves, a little sporadic outburst, a straw fire under the dreaming chestnut trees, constant and inattentive. When the older one finally got up after the raging struggle, the ruined images in his hand hard won but forever lost, his mouth was bleeding. It was from that day on that he bore even in his rare smiles the mark of the younger brother, that broken front tooth you could see henceforth and that, lovingly, impatiently, he inflamed with the end of his tongue during his abrupt reveries, refueling his passion perhaps, or appeasing it.
They grew up. The weighty adventure of growing came to an end; how astonishing that it did not last forever. Roland grew no more cheerful; he had been lost to books, as people say, as my grandmother said of me a bit later on. Lost? Yes, he was, he had always been as lost in this world he did not see as in the books that took the place of it for him, but which was a place of refusal, of supplication forever rejected, and of unfathomable spitefulness, like the hellish flirting of an armor-plated woman who is under there, beneath the close stitches of lines tenaciously tied to one another, whom you desire to the point of murder, and whose armor’s chink falls somewhere between two lines, which, trembling, you surmise and search for, which will be at the end of that page, at the turn of that paragraph, is always close, forever giving you the slip, never to be found; and the next day, once again, you are on the track of that little buttonhole, you are going to find it, everything will open up, and at last you will be delivered from reading, but the evening comes and again you close the pages of invincible lead, and leaden, you collapse. He did not pierce the authors’ secret; the beautiful dress they had given to writing was too well fastened for Roland Bakroot, of Saint-Priest-Palus, to undo or even to know if, underneath it, there really was flesh or nothing at all. And I, whose lyrical idiocy reached its irreversible turning point at that same time, how well I thought I understood him, the sullen melancholy scholar, his leaden voice, the wanderings of his mind, where, in giddiness, I followed him, and where, with the Bakroots, once again I waltz toward who knows what last sentence which will land me back on square one, unable to escape my destiny.
As for Rémi, as early as his fifth year, he clearly recognized that there was something under the girls’ dresses, little nothings that it was possible to know intensely. His collections – let us continue to call them by that name, since it was truly a taste for collecting and reactivating what gives pleasure that guided him still, just as when he was small – his collections were photos of women or girls, which sometimes he cut out of magazines bought on the sly, radiant bare-shouldered starlets or indecent gartered brunettes from their licentious pages, and which sometimes were schoolgirls from the other lycée, the fabulous, forbidden school where pleated skirts rustled, where these little sisters, who were not insensible to his dark young raptor appetite, his stiff straw hair, and his thuggish airs, would give him a mediocre picture of themselves, a photo taken over there in the garden the year before, in the blue dress, and which, in pretending hard to hesitate, to need coaxing, they finally relinquished to him, with whispered words and clumsy fingertips touching when the time to part comes with the night and a young girl is in love one Sunday in November. These romantic creatures, these sweet young things who were neither radiant nor indecent yet, but had astonishing flesh, astonishing even to themselves beneath their sentimental airs, they consented to Rémi’s hand finding them in their skirts; and if he hardly spoke of it, except in the presence of his brother or his brother’s friends and then with the sole purpose of better marking the distance between the fulfilled life of Rémi Bakroot and the stagnant, empty one of Roland Bakroot, there could be no doubt, because on Thursdays he vanished out of reach of his schoolmates as soon as school let out, and if we happened to run into him, it was furtively, in a darkened public garden where a head leaned toward his, or in the back of an empty café, ardently engaged with an innocent maiden. For all that he was not, strictly speaking, good-looking, with his big chin and his pallor, the shade of bad linen; no doubt his clothing, which he wanted to be stylish, had those bumpkin shortcomings, that sort of Flemish insufficiency: he still somehow managed to wear the suede jacket; the fact was that he, too, was from Saint-Priest-Palus. But he lusted after them with such an appetite, these sweet young things, these tender little game birds, that surely they trembled with the uncommon hunger he showed for them, for their short skirts, their tears and their great emotion; they let their skirts be rumpled, their tears be drawn, longed for and dreaded it, and, prey to the conflicting feelings to which their burning struggle abandoned them, they swayed with all their weight toward him.
So he returned on Sunday evenings, or Thursdays, with that taste in his mouth, that burning at the lips that the little ogresses had devoured, and it happened that in the wide avenue leading pretentiously to the lycée entrance he encountered his brother, regarded him disdainfully, and perhaps despised him or briefly envied him (who knows which of the two struggled to live up to the other, the one whose intractable mistress had leaden skirts and turned his hands to lead, or the other one whose expert hands knew by heart the secret turns of undergarments?); because at that same time Roland was also returning, with some book under his arm, his lips burnt only by the cold, most often encumbered by Achilles’ weighty solicitude, and he had to adjust his young gait, even when raging, even when full of a certain vigor that he could not put to use, to the slow, stately pace, scanned like an alexandrine, of the tall old teacher. At the door, in the full light that fell from the porter’s lodge, the leave-taking went on forever, and Roland, who wished to end it a hundred times, still incurred some warm advice, some endlessly rambling exegesis, some badly timed praise; Roland, stoic but writhing under the torture of it, imagined only too well the delighted jokes, the sneering looks of the returning boys, of which he and his unlovely friend were the object. At last Achilles kissed him and slowly headed back down the avenue under the lampposts, his steps marking the verse in his head, and the caesuras suddenly stopping him, one foot raised in the air, before he tipped over into another hemistich and walking on again, scanned who knows what dead verse. And the schoolgirls who were late, who had walked back with their admirers and were now hurrying to their girlish seraglio, would burst out laughing when they passed this milepost, and, with fresh peals of laughter, disappear, so happy to add to the memories of that lovely afternoon, which they would repeat with delight while going to sleep, to enliven their images of kissing and the images that make your cheeks redden, so intoxicating they are almost too much to think about, to disrupt all that, verging on high drama, with the innocent uncontrollable laughter that comes over you again and again at the mention of that crazy old bald professor, perched on one leg like a heron.
It is true that he was a bit off his rocker, Achilles, at the end. The wig sat slightly askew, sideways and sadly cheap, his wife was dead, the gay little flame no longer burned, an uproar sometimes completely overwhelmed him and without a word he waited for it to end, his large naked eyes looking at something there in the distance, the former spouse’s naked body perhaps. Wagging tongues, which lack imagination, said that he had taken to drinking; it is true that once, on the Bonnyaud square, under pounding rain on a bitter night, I saw him leaving the Café Saint-François hammered, gesticulating as he stiffly descended the steep Rue des Pommes, his oversized raincoat frolicking a little in time to his step which, that day, was trying out the ditty rather than the al
exandrine, proudly thundering forth like a tipsy Verlaine, with his cape or raincoat flying out in the wind of his drunkenness. But these excesses were rare and surely not significant; he was a mild man, he lacked that seed of violence that regular drunks cultivate and make germinate monstrously each time they drink; above all, it was the gift that moved him, not the closed circuit that goes from the hand to the mouth and that, in this turnstile, egoistically exalts and hates itself, but rather the hand that opens toward another who takes. Thus he still offered books to Roland, but more and more often it happened that these presents, as though reduced to their sole function as a gift without concern for their specific content or their appropriateness to the recipient, missed their mark and made Roland blush, perpetually filling him with embarrassment. Thus he was already in his sixth year and no doubt drawing from the potpourri of celebrities in “pocket editions,” where, at that age, you do not know how to choose between Huysmans or Sartre – but this indecision itself flatters you and sanctions you in your desire to be adult – when Achilles presented him with an innocent Rosny’s “wild ages” and an illustrated Baron de Crac; he had not seen the boy grow up.
In the following autumn, when Roland entered his last year and I entered my fifth, there was no childish chorus and shower of chestnuts to greet the first annual performance of the slow, bewigged patrician; he had retired. He died that same year; and it is terrible to think that Roland, who was permitted special leave to go to the funeral, who, that morning in the dormitory put on the drab tie and taken-up suit toward this end, carefully combed his hair, shaved his shadow of a beard, who no doubt truly mourned for the only person he believed to have loved him, felt at the same time relieved at no longer having to be confronted with that sad mirror, to be dragging around that millstone, laughed at by the girls, to support that fallen father who was not the father of his brother Rémi, but whom he had nevertheless somehow shared with his brother for so long, the two of them flanking him in functions ideally opposed, as in cathedral images, the poor human soul between the devilish rabble-rouser and the too-stuffy angel. Thus he buried him, regretted him, and rid himself of him. In the little house on the road to Courtille where Roland had so often eaten the daft Madame Achilles’ cakes, under the kind, sententious eye of the old master, I wonder what became of the only property Achilles valued, all those heirless books. I wonder in what auction room, what attic, they are turning to dust, or in what cellar they are rotting, lying in repose like the dead, except that any friendly hand can bring them back to life, those simple books that he still meant for Roland and had not had the time to offer him, and the other books, pompous, artlessly humanist and tautological, with which he promised to amuse himself in his final years. But perhaps in heaven, the old authors, the true ones of whom we are always unworthy, and their intercessors, the gentle, goateed exegetes of the 1900s, speak their texts to him themselves, in a voice more alive than the voices of the living.
As for Roland, he suspected that authors do not speak in live voices; he remained in their interminable silence; he sank even more deeply into the vortex of those pasts that no one has ever lived, those adventures that seem to have happened to others but that have never happened to anyone. As a small boy, enchanted or uneasy, he had learned one day that in Megara, in his modern style gardens, Hamilcar had held a feast; following after two semi-twin enemies, one black and the other brown, who lust after the same princess, he lost himself forever in that country of the literary past tense, “where they crucify lions” in the simple past, that country that did not exist and that nevertheless bore the very real name of Carthage, which is in Livy. From then on, his life strayed into the simple pasts – I know because I am the same. Now, he learned that Emma eats the brotherly sugar-colored poison with two hands, that Pécuchet belatedly adopts a semblance of a brother to love him and envy him in the semblances of studies, that the devil takes all forms of the brother to bring Saint Anthony under his heel. When he raised his head, when the beautiful simple past tense of literature dissolved into what the eye at that instant sees, into the leaves that move and the sun that reappears, the invincible present was always there in the form of Rémi, the contemporary of things, the one who suffered by things themselves, Rémi, who tumbled the girls and who looked at him, laughing; and into that laughing present that Roland only knew how to approach with his fists and his broken tooth, he threw himself, he indulged himself in yet another fist fight; maybe that was enough of real life for him. After preparing for philosophy in his last year, he ended up studying literature at a university, in Poitiers, it seems to me.
Thus Rémi remained at the lycée in G. for two more years, rid of Roland or vaguely widowed. In those windswept corridors, in that ghostly playground where the boys had grown up in the lightning flash of seven years, in the pompous alley of lampposts on Sunday evenings, he must have often crossed paths with another young redhead in a shortened suit, but who no longer used his fists, perhaps Achilles as well, sometimes. It was in those years that we formed a small gang, Bakroot and Rivat, Jean Auclair, the older Métraux and myself. We had in common a taste for appearances and the secret shame of appearing only as what we were; we showed off; on Thursdays, we threw ourselves at the girl show-offs, not knowing that they were like us, puny and starved, but full of laughter. Not one among us had so much good fortune – I am speaking of the trembling, greedy grasping of rough young hands, of painful unreleased desires hours on end fused to another desire in a skirt, of pretexts for exquisite heartaches and inept poems scribbled down in study halls – nobody bore so many lovesick looks as the younger Bakroot. We made much of this philandering, jokingly or sentimentally, depending on our mood; as for Rémi, he no longer spoke of it, his only worthy audience, or the one to whom his pleasures were dedicated, henceforth being too far away to hear him or receive his offering. Of course he still had his ever growing collection of photos, but he inventoried them gloomily and with a bit of nostalgia already, as an impatient king, condemned to peace by a quietist climate, reviews his troops for the hundredth time, not a gaiter button missing, but what good are they when the enemy has demobilized and is kissing his women, his throne and duties far from the bugle call. But when, every fourth Sunday, he took the rattling blue and red bus that drove past the great fallen stones in the cropped grass, past Saint-Pardoux, Faux-la-Montagne, Gentioux, carrying its freight of peasant women and schoolboys to Saint-Priest-Palus, Saint-Priest where, perhaps, the other one would be, the one whom, around us, Rémi no longer called anything but “the Idiot,” he was jubilant as a lover before a rendez-vous.
In the classroom, the younger Bakroot was brilliant – it is true that his brother had been gifted as well, in his own, duller and almost absent way. Rémi had no fear of the world, which is an indefinitely expandable collection of words with improbable connections, in which the scholarly disciplines arrange themselves, who knows why, into one particular pattern rather than another, the little words growing close to the ground for botany, the considerable luster of words fallen from the stars for optics, and the words for optics suspended over the words for botany for French literature; thus Rémi used to favor spinning tops one day, fishing floaters the next, and the following day, realizing that floaters and tops, having the same form, can only be a single set despite their differing functions, he combined them. He knew all those erratic, tyrannical rules that allow one to master the present; he could also use the simple past, in which poor Roland had foundered, but he attributed to it no virtue other than that of impressing a purist teacher. He cobbled together Latin and mathematics perfectly; he knew how to manipulate and slyly vary the beautiful lures that, in a French composition, entice and hook tired teachers, those poor gullible prey; they, too, went into his pocket. And then, as we know, he liked trinkets, those painful little fetishes in which the thing appears whole even in its absence; he was not like Roland in having the presumptuousness to claim to arrive at an ever unverifiable essence; he was afraid of being badly dressed; the corny sha
ko and scarlet epaulettes captivated him; he prepared for Saint-Cyr, and was admitted.
He wrote a few letters to me from there, as well as to the other members of our little dispersed gang. But I only saw him again once, in full dress uniform, and then he was dead.
It was during Christmas vacation. In a university where I had not encountered Roland, I hesitated between the simple past and the simple present, and certainly I preferred the latter although I already knew that my excessive appetite for it would condemn me to the other, the skinny, scowling, anorexic one. Those Christmas vacations I spent in Mourioux; one of the gang informed me that Rémi was no longer alive; the older Métraux came to get me in his 2cv for the funeral. He knew nothing of the random fate that had struck and stopped Rémi in his tracks, and which sent the two of us off to Saint-Priest-Palus in the ramshackle 2cv.
It had snowed heavily that year; it was no longer snowing, but deep drifts, as eroding and leveling as time itself, and as gray, softened the inclines of this sloping terrain. When, near Faux-la-Montagne, we approached the plateau of fallen rocks and broken-masted pines over which the rapid clouds always foment some loss, that disastrous plateau next to which old Saint-Goussaud himself seems cheerful, the drifts grew deeper; the base of the rocks disappeared, their old anger capitulated, and, grumbling under the verminous lichen, more shipwrecked than ever, their inverted keels floated in that dirty motionless sea under a dirty sky. Our wheezing vehicle drove close between those fallen monsters like Melville’s whaler, and without Saint Elmo’s fire at our masts or, on the hood of the 2cv, a ferocious but perhaps tractable Parsi god. Within, we reminisced, Métraux sang the little gang’s refrain (it had been a century ago), we did not admit to what we were already becoming. Then we said nothing more. We arrived ahead of schedule in Saint-Priest-Palus.
Small Lives Page 9