Small Lives

by Pierre Michon

  The idiots could not keep still – and nevertheless, curiously, they attended in their own way. They were interested in something, over there, near Bandy; this infinitely relative mass did not scare them off any more than a flight of grasshoppers in the fields, the vague murmur of trees, flies around overripe fruit; they cautiously approached the chancel, picking at the low grill with their vague, rapacious hands, craning their necks to see the outer wings tremble, listening to the wind disclose the leaves. One of them was bold enough to touch the torn chasuble with the tips of his fingers. He came back running, laughing into his sleeve, intimidated by his audacity but proud of the exploit; the grinning nurse scolded him out loud; the wretch let out the proud laugh of the bad boy who is also top in his class.

  The imperturbable priest blessed these apparitions, these unvanquished, despotic creatures, in the bankruptcy of the word.

  Calmly he came toward us, his snowy eyes brushed us lightly, he began his sermon. It was the mass of the Epiphany, which has always commemorated the Adoration of the Magi; I remembered other sermons in which Bandy’s words, triply royal and following a star, had evoked the wandering of caravan Kings and the lucidity of nocturnal skies that drew them along their way, the presumption of those bearers of myrrh mastered by the divine arrogance of the Word made child. He did not speak of the Magi; the surrender of the Kings to the Word incarnate no longer concerned him, whose golden speech had not swayed the mute, impassive Dispenser of all speech. He spoke of winter, of things in the frost, of the cold in his church and along the roads; that morning, he had picked up a frozen bird in the apse; and like an old spinster or a sentimental retiree, he felt pity for the sparrows stricken by frost, for the old wild boars devoured by hunger, frightened, and grunting painfully in the snow, that beautiful white sugar that brings starvation; he spoke of the wandering of creatures that have no star, of the obtuse flight of crows and the eternal fleeing of hares, of spiders making endless pilgrimages in the haylofts at night. Providence was mentioned for the record, perhaps ironically. All style had disappeared; the perfectly atonic sermon was stripped of all proper nouns, no more David, no more Tobie, no more fabulous Melchior; sentences without periods, profane words, the silly propriety of cliché, the meaning obvious, the writing bland. Like a Great Author who would have once had his readers dancing “on the frying pan of his tongue” in vain, never winning through them the favor of the Great Reader on high, he turned henceforth to the most ill-favored, those scared off by all reading, with everyday words and themes from popular songs; God was not necessarily a Difficult Reader; his listening could be modeled on the vague ear of an idiot. Maybe like Francis of Assisi, the priest would have liked to speak only for the birds, the wolves; because if those beings without language had understood him, then he would have been sure that he had indeed been touched by Grace.

  Crows and wild boars moved the idiots; they burst out laughing, randomly seized upon one of the priest’s words, tried it out again in various tones; the nurse bawled them out; in this mayhem, a few impassive schizos meditated contemplatively as always, lost in their angelic attributes, absence and enigma. Next to me, a bitterly delighted look on his face, Thomas regarded the corner of the sky caught on the blackened beam; the angel from an Adoration of Dürer bore down on him from afar, or the abject worms of a Temptation, with the disheveled flight of the sparrows. About all this was something vaguely shameful, unmentionable, almost the very worst. The priest took up his mass again; he consecrated the bread, the Son appeared, the crackpots shifted restlessly; the church door opened with a crash; on the threshold, breathing heavily, an Aztec god contemplated the True Body of Christ.

  The nurse rushed over, evicted the rogue in short order; beside himself with rage but terror-stricken, Jojo let out stealthy moans as he was led away, like a beaten dog. The priest had turned around; he was smiling.

  Late in the stifling August of 1976, I was passing through the small town of G., in search of books; no Grace had come to me, and feverishly I consulted all Writings in vain to find the recipe for it. I ran into a nurse from La Ceylette; he told me about the people I had known there: Jojo was dead, Lucette Scudéry dead; Jean was most likely confined for life; Thomas, who was released from time to time, punctually responded to the call of the trees, delivered them by fire, and found himself committed again. “And the priest?” The nurse laughed sadly; he told me the following which had happened just the week before.

  On that Saturday, Bandy had been drinking with the farm workers who had just threshed the wheat; when the Hôtel des Touristes closed, libations continued at the presbytery; very drunk, the companions went their separate ways at the break of day, making a great racket in Saint-Rémy. On Sunday morning, the usual procession left from La Ceylette; at the deepest part of the Puy des Trois-Cornes forest, the residents recognized the priest’s moped leaning against the roadsign with the leaping antlered figure. Jean shot off into the woods, the nurse at his heels; at the edge of a nearby clearing, covered by the ecclesial shade of a beech tree against which he seemed to be sitting, collapsed in the thorn bushes and rumpled ivy, clutching the ferns, his rough blue cotton shirt open over his ivory chest, the priest, his eyes wide open, was looking at them; he was dead.

  In the nascent day, clear in the glorious sky and light as the song of a drunk, the leafy Puy des Trois-Cornes called him. He entered the forest; the steps of his boots released scents, the green shade touched his forehead; he smoked; the wine within rocked him, the tender leaves caressed him; astonished, he pronounced a few syllables, what they were we do not know. Something, which resembled eternity, answered him in the fortuitous verbiage of a bird. The sudden snort of a deer nearby did not surprise him; he saw a wild sow approach him gently; the songs that he heard, all so reasonable, increased with the day. The light on the horizon revealed in the undergrowth hoopoes, jays, their plumage ochre and rose like flowers, their beaks searching, their round eyes full of spirit. He caressed small, soft snakes; he never stopped speaking. The cigarette butt burned his finger; he took his last drag. The first rays of sun struck him, he staggered, grasped tawny fur, fistfuls of mint; he remembered the flesh of women, the looks of children, the wild fits of the innocent: all that was speaking in the song of the birds; he fell to his knees in the overwhelming significance of the universal Word. He raised his head, thanked Someone, everything made sense, he fell down dead.

  Or maybe it was the false dawn, when the dumbfounded cocks crow once, are astonished in the isolation of their cry, go back to sleep; how black the night is still. Noon is far off; achieved hieroglyph, consummate form, arrayed in his irrevocable life, Bandy the priest falls silent and sleeps in the immense green chasuble of the forest where the great, fictive, ten-point stags pass, slow, a cross in their antlers.

  The Life of Claudette

  In Paris, where I went to solicit heaven for a second chance in which I did not believe, Marianne’s absence finished rotting away in me. There I spent two null, vociferating years lost in dreams; I cried for help as a way to win the luxury of refusing it; I multiplied my distress by torturing the few weak or charitable souls moved by my ever-increasing appeals. I drifted here and there in tow of these poor girls, indifferent, angry; at the Rue Vaneau, I broke down the doors at night and trembled before the concierge the next day; at the Rue du Dragon, recruited by fussy down-and-outs, I was promoted to hash dealer and slept under a sink; at Montrouge, I opted out for one whole winter; the very young thing I was persecuting at the time did the Paris rounds, her pockets full of fake medical prescriptions, and brought me back barbiturates by the basketful. Gazing at me with her mild, intensely green eyes, her child’s hand kindly offered me that dark provender, everything wavered, my waking state was sleep; my hand trembled so badly that the countless pages written in that coma are mercifully illegible. Heaven does what it does well. Once I saw lilac in blossom through the window, and that was spring. I do not know the name of the fashionable suburb where, one night in winter, I fled or was
chased from the attic studio of a modern suburban home; plaster figures sniggered in the cold box hedges, grimacing satyrs under the moon; I insulted someone; my skinned hands sought metal gates, injuries, exits. Neither the walk nor the freezing cold sobered me up; from the ruins of my then ravaged consciousness and the memory that now slips away, I recall the leaden water of the Saint-Martin canal, a grim café at the Bastille, and under the neon lights at daybreak, the defection of faces promised to the night. The great hardworking trains on the trembling girders made the dawn rise; a very gentle, exhausted mob of ghosts arrived from the suburbs, the day on their heels; I was on the Quai Austerlitz, I did not leave.

  I escaped nevertheless, saved from the splendors of the capital by the blindness of a woman who took me for an author; the business was concluded in one night, in a Montparnasse bar where a mocking waiter served me white wine in beer glasses; I pushed self-indulgence to tears. My lady friend drank lemonade as she listened to me; she found me amiable, she took me home. She was a pretty blonde, with no ill will, a pious believer in psychoanalysis.

  Claudette was Norman, and so I went to Normandy; only the laws of an unorthodox exogamy are strong enough to make me relocate. In Caen, I moved into the second floor of a public employee residence, among books and, out the windows, heavy with Atlantic rain, the restless trees of a park. One of them, obviously an oak, although subject to the shared downpour, was more articulate than the others; it had a past, which is one way of having a name and a language; at its foot, Claudette told me, Charlotte Corday had once vowed to kill the killer of kings before going off in her little headscarf in the drenched Auge dawn, toward another’s death and her own, toward the blade and salvation. I drew Claudette close, embraced her, touched her throat; doing so I imagined Charlotte, demented and argumentative, her few things for the journey knotted into a handkerchief, obtuse, maintaining the obtuse veneer of disjointed histories of debased queens, September massacres, daggers and divine mandates; like an author, I thought, who does not know what he is saying or for whom, but uses the out-pouring of hollow words as justification for demanding special status from the heavens, and in some appalling death, the assumption of a memorable name. Rain streamed from the blind tree.

  Despite this illustrious model and its leafy audience, I wrote nothing. I emerged from the long dream of barbiturates, having destroyed the prescriptions the first day there, out of defiance perhaps and a taste for dramatic gestures, or, less grandly, to conform to the laughable fantasy of being reborn; and Claudette’s solicitude spared me from setting eyes on the bottle. But I dreamed that I was writing; I was aided in this fiction by feasts of amphetamines, to which a girlfriend less wise than Claudette had converted me without much difficulty.

  Through the sharp prism of that cold drug, Caen was a wilderness to me; I was luminous, I was taut, at my approach, luminous tensions tore space into sharp-angled sections; nuances and depth escaped me, as did the miraculous repose of gradual shadows, blues and browns and those in which blue golds gradually disintegrate, the humble revolt and last refuge of things in the face of the skies’ intractable lucidity; the city, its vistas and its climes, was chopped into the angry cubes of the old Siena masters, and in that chill, the impalpable air turned into great, cold polyhedrons; I exulted over that ice floe, with a numb hand gripping my heart, eyes of clear glass, and the livid intelligence of the damned in the lowest circle of hell. The gentle bell towers of Caen, so dear to Proust in their damp copses and their nimbus of rain, signaled to me in vain; only the aggressive verticality of the Abbaye aux Hommes confronting the violent skies found resonance in my mind, my mind entirely clenched into a fist of snow, like a dazzling façade struck by a petrified sun’s harsh ray, unvarying and without hope of being extinguished by night.

  On that façade I wrote, in a dream.

  In the first hours, I sat down at my work table, under Claudette’s attentive, and each day more doubtful, eye; beforehand, I had disappeared into the bathroom to swallow a triple or quadruple dose, and the pretty blonde was not fooled by this game of hide-and-seek from which I returned with laughing eyes and stiff hands, ashamed perhaps but bursting with wicked gaiety. Sadly, she eventually left for her office, where social and mental cases awaited her, whom she attended with diminished solicitude perhaps, since she was concealing within her own walls a Case with a capital C, hardly ornamental and hopelessly incorrigible; I sniggered. What had I to do with those stupidities, me, whom a little white powder daily consecrated as a Great Author? An exulted, barren, funereal – but, I repeat, gay – morning routine began; I was flame and cold fire, I was ice, broken into beautiful, infinitely varied, glittering shards; sentences crossed ceaselessly through my mind, too hurried, profuse, and sinisterly perky; in an instant they changed form, their volatility increasing their richness, and blossoming forth from my lips, were spewed into the triumphant space of the room; no theme or structure, no thought hindered their prodigious babble; hidden in all the corners, tenderly bent over me and drinking from my lips, a Great Mother, dazzled, benevolent, all ears, received the least of my words as though it were solid gold; and as gold, my least word sounded in my ear, multiplied tenfold in my mind, as gold again, it issued from my mouth; avaricious, I entrusted not an ounce to paper. Nevertheless, I told myself, how well I was going to write! Was it not enough if my pen mastered a fraction of this fabulous material? Alas, it was only fabulous material because it had no master and tolerated none, even my own hand. Had I written it, only ashes would have been left on the page, like a log after it burns or a woman after orgasm. Come on, I would write just the same, in a little while; there was no hurry. By five o’clock in the afternoon, my teeth were chattering. As the artifice that had incited it wore off, my solar gaze was eclipsed under a gray night engulfing the universe; I regarded a pile of blank, untouched paper on the table; no echo in the silent room celebrated the memory of the impotent work, once again uttered, and evaded. Thus time passed; each day the historic tree out the window decked itself with ever more talkative leaves that owed nothing to the loquaciousness of a woman once inspired, long dead.

  The amphetamines shattered me; but I think now, with a pang of regret as for a woman once mine whom I no longer possess, that I owe to them my purest, and in some way literary, moments of happiness. Having taken them, I was perfectly alone; I was king of a nation of words, their slave and peer; I was present; the world was absent, black flights of concept covered it entirely; thus, over those ruins of mica radiant with a thousand suns, my pretense of writing, virtual and sovereign, spectral but sole survivor, soared and plunged, unrolling an endless bandage in which I wound the world’s cadaver. On that tomb from which I tirelessly declaimed the epitaph, the only mouth reeling off the infinite phylactery, I triumphed; I was on the side of the master, the winning side, the side of death. This happiness owed nothing to strength of soul, but it was perhaps, superlatively, human happiness; as the jubilation of beasts comes from being no different from the nature of which they are part, mine came from coinciding exactly with what is, apparently, nature for humans: words and time, words thrown out in vain to feed time, any words at all, the forgeries and the authentic, the truly felt and the insensible, the gold and the lead, plunged headlong into the current that is forever whole and insatiable, gaping and calm.

  I expected that Claudette would provide me with poison; she refused. I made love to her roughly, without consideration; I would have liked her flesh to be as amorphous and subservient as words were for me; but no, she was very much of the world, she existed without me, she desired and resisted, and I avenged myself by giving her pleasure; I believed that I was the cause, at least, of her cries; they were the words to which I constrained her. Despite my vague denials and my morning pretense, clearly she knew that I was not writing; the Mont-parnasse braggart of an author was this exalted wreck, this maniac sitting in front of blank pages; then too, I had rejected with indignant sarcasm the jobs that her connections made it possible for her to offer me; sh
e fed me; she despaired, my laughter having rendered ridiculous the poor conventional passions, as I presumptuously thought of them, that gave her a less than contemptible image of herself: tennis, piano, psychoanalysis, charter flights.

  Nevertheless she had nobility. I remember her look, one winter morning, along the ocean; she was beginning to become disillusioned already, but had not lost all hope; I was certainly not an author, I was lazy and a bit of a liar; oh well, she would put up with that, she would do her best, but for pity’s sake, could I not have mercy on her and condescend to letting her live in this world as she let me live outside of it; her look told me all of that, without insistence or tears, with dignity, with love. She had a little knitted woolen hat, yellow rubber boots, gay and childish on the dismal sand; the cold turned her pink, the rough cry of gulls added to her melancholy; my eyes left hers, scanned the immense horizon of beaches that the winter doomed to neutral violence, to complaint and endless stupor; I saw a white Volkswagen stopped over in the dunes, an intense sky, iron gray with angry little touches of ceruse gouache, and the great crawling sea, irritated, swollen, endlessly needy: the world, and not so much futile as inalienable. And Claudette there below, so small on the sand with her yellow boots, full of goodwill, who stops a moment in my memory, courageously walks on in that green and gray that erases her, a few steps more, a bit of yellow still, the sea spray carries her away, she disappears.

  I disappointed Claudette, and that is to put it mildly; the last feeling she had for me, the last look she gave me, was one of repulsion perhaps, a mixture of fear and pity. She fled what dispossessed her, and perhaps, in the course of things, found herself again. She will have married some academic, athletic and witty, with an independent mind or a promising career; she is running on the green court, her tennis skirt flutters from shadow to light, the pleasing sound of the ball comes just at the right moment, her tender thighs stop, take off again, at her waist, the soft material dances; she will have finished her thesis and blushed at the praises of the examiners; she is laughing under a small sail in the gay sea, the arms embracing her quicken her breath, the inexhaustible world is made up of kilometric distances, of high mosques and exultant flora shading infinite beaches, of flight schedules and attentive men, parading their big names and their evening attire in summer gardens, determined and serene as statues, glorious as patriarchs, passionate as youths, paying court to her. Her endless analysis is rife with unexpected rebounds that constitute her life, making up for not making her another life; losses overwhelm her, happiness never arrives; or it is even possible that she is dead and would have deserved a vaster Small Life. May she not remember me.