Small Lives

by Pierre Michon

  I had not sat down, I waited uncomfortably, imposter who did deign even to reveal another imposter, or a saint; timidly I hurried Jean along; should we not be getting back in time for dinner? Besides the bottle was empty; they rose. The priest went to the counter to pay; over the miserable blue jeans, gaping at the small of his back, he wore his grubby boots like a lofty missionary in jodhpurs; he held himself relentlessly straight in one of those ribbed wool hunting jackets with pockets in the back, a hunting horn in relief stamped on the metal buttons, that farmers there order from the factory in Saint-Etienne; he could just barely walk with the stiffness of drunkards for whom everything is an abyss and who, like tightrope walkers, pretend not to see it. Furtively gesturing toward the priest who was getting his change from the gloomy proprietress, Jean made a comic face, at the same time mocking and admiring; I had never seen him so relaxed, almost proud, all grief put aside. The impassive priest shook hands all around and preceded us out the door; a stream of stars made him lift his head: Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei. The haughty mouth, from which a Virginian cigarette glowed, quoted nothing; I thought how it had also long since finished kissing the naked breasts of an impassioned Marie-Georgette, or some other village Danae open to its shower of gold. Of the word and the kiss, of the oral riches once so loved, all that remained was this vestige, soon reduced to ashes, this blond cigarette with the golden tip and the odor of women.

  He crushed the cigarette under his boot and nodded to us. His moped was leaning against the roughcast wall; resolutely he grabbed the handlebars, straddled the machine, and, head too high as he continued to look at the stars and refused to demean himself under that blind, multiple eye, nearly human in short, he pedaled to start the motor; the moped made a weak zigzag, he fell. Jean let out a little, astonished laugh. His two hands pressed to the ground, the priest raised his head; the stars, the pure, cold stars, created in the Beginning and guides to the Magis, the stars that bear the names of creatures, swans, scorpions, does with their fawns, the stars painted on vaults among naïve flowers, embroidered on chasubles, and cut from gold paper by children, the stars had not vacillated; the fall of a drunkard does not enter into their eternal narration. Painfully the priest got back to his feet; he could no longer resist the rolling of this earth sodden with wine; pushing his machine beside him, he set off stiffly into the night, down that little village street at the end of the world. “The earth staggers before the Lord like a drunken man”; he was the gaze of the Lord, he was the movement of the earth, and perhaps after so many years, finally, he was a man. He had disappeared, in the dark we heard once more the sound of metal; no doubt he had botched a second attempt.

  On the way back, we walked quickly; Jean, perky, talked of his family home; all ghosts were absent from it; come on, it was only the doctors who believed that morbid tale of undertakers endlessly reviving an old witch from beyond the grave; they would have ended up convincing him, too; the dead really were dead, he had told him that, the priest, who, if anyone, should know. He was going to get better, he would be home for Midsummer’s Day, and we would go there to eat ham, with the priest, with all his friends, to have a leisurely drink there in the cool kitchen. As we crossed through the forest, he fell silent; the moon had risen, danced in the tall trees, here and there brought to life the ghost of a birch; on the cold roadsigns, the painted deer leaped endlessly through the night. I thought of the cassocked centaur who once leaped onto his motorcycle; then, he had eyes only for gracious, perfumed creatures, all flesh won by his word; I do not know when the day came that he lost faith in such creatures, which is perhaps faith in pleasing beautiful creatures – no one had more faith than Don Juan. Thus with surprise, perhaps with terror, with that astonishment he felt at the flight of a bird or an epileptic, he had learned that other creatures exist; he had come to know that age makes us more like them every day, more like a tree or a madman; when he had ceased to be a handsome priest, when the lighthearted had turned away from the old curate, he had called the others to him, the disgraced, those who no longer had words, very little soul, and not even flesh, and whom Grace, in a great departure, is said to know all the better how to bless; but whatever efforts he had made, in his arrogant resolve to love these poor souls and desperately become their equal, I did not believe that he had been successful. Perhaps I was mistaken; what I had witnessed with my own eyes remained: the enfant terrible of the diocese, the seductive, rakish theologian, had become an alcoholic peasant hearing the confessions of crackpots.

  Nothing had happened, except what happens to everyone, age, time passing. He had not changed much – he had simply changed tactics; in the past he had appealed to Grace in vain by demonstrating how worthy he was of receiving it, beautiful as Grace itself and as fatal; mimetic with passion, he acted the angel as some insects pretend to be twigs to surprise their prey; in his nest of pure words, he awaited the divine fledgling. Now surely he no longer believed that Grace, docile and metonymical, reached a beautiful supplicant by climbing the rope of braided perfect words toward the sky, but rather it adopted only the bold leap of metaphor, the derisive flash of antiphrasis; the Son was dead on the cross. On the strength of that evidence, Bandy, null and drunk, almost mute, worked to annihilate himself, he was the hollow that the unsayable Presence would one day fill; drunks willingly believe that God, or Writing, are behind the next bar.

  I questioned Doctor C. without saying anything to him of the Bandy that I had known. He smiled indulgently; the priest was incompetent, but inoffensive; then, too, the patients liked him, they shared the same background and had the same faults, the same good qualities perhaps; he was uneducated like them, but he brought them cigarette tobacco; it could be of therapeutic interest to encourage their contact. I did not press the point; we set off on Novalis. Doctor C. remembered with a laugh that the church roof in Saint-Rémy was falling into ruins, and that the priest’s negligence was letting it collapse; only a few patients at the hospital, who used it as a pretext to go out, still attended mass in the icy, sodden church where birds nested; and, as if the mention of a country church triggered an irrepressible mechanism in him, he cited the first lines of the Hölderlin poem concerning the lovely blue of a church tower and the blue cry of swallows. I reflected bitterly that in the same poem, it says that man can imitate Heavenly Joy, and “with the divine be measured, not without happiness”; I reflected joyfully that erroneously, “but poetically still, man lives on earth”; and sadly, that in me as well, a harrowed priest and a church tower triggered mechanisms, quotations, wind: under the banner of Pathos, I rode off with Doctor C.

  I am approaching the end of this story.

  In the dining hall, it was my habit to eat lunch near a window, across from Thomas. Until then, I had hardly noticed anything but the obstinate, smiling, self-effacing manner of that very contemplative, guileless little fellow; I had also noticed that he was well dressed, but in the way of minor employees who wish not to be noticed, or, as they say, to stay in their place. Full of consideration for his companions at the table, he passed the dishes politely, but with no affectation or hurry, which pleased me; also, and even though he did not seem completely uneducated, neither the delights nor the afflictions of mental illness were for him a pretext for clever conversation; we had exchanged a few words on politics, the personalities of the doctors, television programs, trifles. One day, fork raised, a lost expression on his face, he gazed stubbornly out the window for interminable seconds; there was no one out there; Thomas’s chin trembled; he was distraught. “See how they are suffering,” he said. His voice broke. I looked in the same direction; under a weak north wind, some acid pines moved weakly. A blackbird. A few itinerant tits flying from one tree to another, and the great blank sky. I was stupefied; what mystery did he want to show me there, which I could not see? The trees, says Saint-Pol-Roux, exchange their birds like words; that obliging metaphor came to my mind, with a distressing desire to laugh; tapping on my plate, I could have sung out that suffering in my turn, at
the top of my lungs, that suffering – whose? I thought I was in a Gombrowicz novel; but no, I was in a madhouse, and we were respecting the rules of the genre.

  Thomas relaxed as suddenly as he had become excited. He ate, without a word or a look for the diffuse suffering that he had just cast upon that corner of winter. But I could not take my eyes away from that ruined earth; something had happened there, the trees, the birds no longer had names, the confusion of the species stupefied me; that must be how an animal given speech, or a human losing it with his reason, perceives the world. Jojo, released from his trough and more unsated than ever after his semblance of a ruined meal, entered that wilderness and reestablished the balance; his poor arms oared for a moment in my field of vision; at his thunderous approach, the sparrows shot out of a service tree; his numb hands once again boxed in the universal ring; trees struck by chance as he walked showered him with rain. “The God of the Smoking Mirror,” I said to myself, “who is club-footed and has two gates banging loudly on his chest.” That barbarian god staggered to the corner of a ploughed field, disappeared into the woods; I felt relieved, my desire to laugh had vanished, I ate; Jojo walked on two feet, he could be made into a god, he was very much a man.

  I liked the nurses, optimistic fellows, with whom I played cards; from them I learned what Thomas’s passion was. He was a pyromaniac, and his victims were trees; often at the height of the dry season, my nurse chums had to run here and there about the grounds with fire extinguishers. In any case, they took the whole thing philosophically; they were cheerful types, nothing surprised them any more; and truly charitable, I believe, in their laughter; the interlacing of so much wild, infinitely relative speech had purified them, in contrast to the doctors who assumed a statutory right of inspection over those words; and they were to the psychiatrists what a Marx Brothers movie would be to the culture section of a weekly newspaper: not serious, wicked, and helpful, touching upon the essential. I laughed with them over Thomas’s difficulties, Marx brother with the matches, slipping out in the night, hands sweaty like a lover or an assassin, pursued by his cronies dying with laughter behind their garden hoses. But we knew of course that it was not so simple; Thomas may have felt infinite pity, for everything and everyone; when his pity suffocated him, so that no tears or anguish could accommodate it, he sought relief by joining, for the brief time of a fiery enactment, the executioners’ camp. I imagined him, facing the crackling exorcism, flaring his nostrils at the odor of glowing fir like a god breathes in a burning sacrifice, the face of the little clerk lit with violence in all the glory of a Lightning Bearer; he was the rabbit bewitched by headlights, he was the lampbearer who beats it to death, and panic-stricken between those two interchangeable roles, terrified by their interchangeability, he trembled when those fellows brought him back to his room, joking around, motherly. As to the rest of it, yes, he felt pity for this world deprived of grace since the beginning of mortal species; no doubt he wanted it released from suffering, beyond all melodrama, extinguished; in his eyes, all creation was pitiable; Nature become natural had not pulled it off. That was his way of considering the lilies of the field.

  One January Sunday, the bright dawn through my window made me rise early; under the same rising sun, schizos and fakers, and those who were both, passed one another in the dining hall with their steaming bowls, and sitting down, slowly brought their mouths to them, overwhelmed by the void of the day; many were in their Sunday best. Thomas was among them. Jokingly, he urged me to go along to mass with him. I was evasive; I had not attended mass for years; I was and still am an unconvinced atheist; moreover I would be bored there. I did not mention my primary reservation; the shame of going into the village with that unruly mob. Having understood me and looking me straight in the face, he then said with painful modesty, “You can come, you know; we are the only ones there, at mass.” We, fools and imposters, shirkers of all kinds. I blushed, went to change my clothes, and rejoined Thomas.

  We made a fine procession, flanked by a nurse like a gang of convicts with their guard; they were numerous, all the possessed and the heresiarchs, dragging ball and chain, mitred in yellow, on their way to the True Cross. In front, a few of the profoundly moronic walked more quickly, too quickly as they all do in their eagerness to attain an always elusive end; their dancing breath flew ahead, they disappeared around a bend, their jabbering faded into the woods, harmonized with the chirping of purer creatures in the frost; then out flew birds, and again the limping herd appeared with their stupid invectives, their laughter and astonishing words, as the breathless nurse drove them back toward us. At the end of the pitiful procession, I walked between Jean and Thomas, between a cranky sectarian of the eternal resurrection of the Mother, and a somber Cathar imputing the bungling of creation to some drunken grandfatherly Yahweh, me, a beggar for diffuse Grace, perpetual son in the omni-absence of the father and the flight of women, I was going to celebrate the eternal return of the Son in the bosom of the Father and his eternal bloody diffusion in the bosom of his creatures. So be it, in less clement times, a pretty trio for the stake. All that under the thin, cold silver laughter of a January sun.

  We were drawing near; the roofs glinted, the village appeared to us in its small valley; in the widening space, the little church tower bell rang out. Doctor C and Thomas had spoken the truth; the joyous, sad pealing invited no one to the sadness of the sacrifice, the joy of rebirth; there was no one on the square or the church steps; from all the blue expanse that it stirred in vain, each Sunday morning, the Saint-Rémy bell called no other flock but this vague herd which, jostling, tripping over each stone and each word, descended heavily through the narrow streets, made the square ring with its frivolous galloping, surged sniveling under the porch. The hollow bronze, the lofty, radiant bronze sounded until we passed through the door; under the bell tower, the priest in ordinary chasuble flew with the rope, busy, serious, dancing.

  We settled ourselves noisily; the bell lurched a few more times, then fell silent. For us alone, the priest had sedately danced with its rope and having assigned that divine voice the task of greeting us, now quieted it; moreover, it was unwise to subject the nave, considerably damaged, to that intense swinging; the very simple framework was stripped bare above the chancel, where the light from above streamed in; a black wooden beam bathed in the guileless heavens; rubble obstructed the door to the sacristy and behind the altar, a vast crack opened to the touching blue of the sky. The plaster saints had been hooded to weather the damp nights that reigned under the vaults as in a forest; the altar was draped with thick tent canvas of a faded green. Maintaining his unhurried seriousness, the priest uncovered a few saints, among them Saint Roch the Healer in breeches and homespun smock, who displayed on his thigh the anthracic sore shared with cattle and sheep, and Saint Rémi the Bishop, erudite confessor of the old Carolingians; the priest wore what might have been a modest smile, full of unfathomable humor, plugging in a useless heater in that nave open to all winds. Finally he seized a corner of the canvas, glanced toward the congregation, and Jean, perhaps responding to a ritual repeated each Sunday, rushed forward, took the other end, and they rolled it back; thus during a halt, Moses called the worst simpleton of a camel driver from the tribes of Israel, and accomplices for a moment, together they set up the tent for the ark. In this desert, the tabernacle appeared. Bandy climbed the steps and began.

  Like so many years earlier, I could only become bitterly enraptured; I was stupefied, I was reassured. Everything foundered, but the shipwreck had an intractable propriety about it; the sovereign pomposity of the gesture and the word had sovereignly fallen away, the mediocrity of the diction was perfect, the exhausted language reached nothing and no one; the bloodless words were smothered in the rubble, fled into the cracks; like Demosthenes but with the opposite effects, Bandy had, as it were, filled his mouth with pebbles. The mass, it is true, was said in French, conforming to the reformed liturgy of the Council; but I knew well enough that in the past Bandy would have
seen to it that his own language, passed through the sieve of an eddying, fatal diction, resonated like Hebrew; today he made it into an inadequate idiom, limpid and mechanical, not even patois, the vain, monotonous, crude expletive of a Being not to be found, an interminable formula of politeness eaten away by centuries of use; he celebrated the mass as a scratched record plays in an empty hall, as a maître d’ asks if you enjoyed your dinner.

  All that without affectation and without irony, without the pretense of humility or unction, with a furious modesty. The mask was perfect and the effort of having only that mask for a face pathetic; the chasuble was like his Sunday best, he did not know how to manage the stole; he kissed the altar cloth with the awkward reserve of a best man from the country kissing a city bride in her makeup and low-cut gown. The saints named in the confiteor seemed painted plaster, the Virgin was the Good Lady whom my grandmother had revered; the allusions to the three persons of the Trinity, to their dark commerce in a strange round, were spoken too quickly and with a sort of embarrassment, as if he were sorry for having to tire the congregation with an incomprehensible formality. In that eviscerated nave and for that audience, a hard-working peasant, frocked by chance, wore himself out trying to rise to the occasion, a murderer of words, conscious of being one and rectifying it as best he could, only just capable, by force of habit and perseverance, of saying the mass correctly.