Small Lives

by Pierre Michon

  My sister was born in 1941, in autumn I believe, in Marsac where my father and mother held teaching positions; Marsac has a small train station and a large mill, the Ardour runs through it downstream from Mourioux; the Chatendeau, Sénéjoux, and Jacquemin families live there, who give apples as presents and grow old in their little gardens; when I was small I went there with my mother by bicycle; she was still very young, perhaps my memory retains her that way, gently pedaling one morning in a light colored dress, in the gold patches of high summer – and how alone she is, with that chatterbox son who rides too fast. Here, then, they conceived, him, the man with the glass eye, the man created fallible and accepting himself that way, the enigmatic one-eyed master of what legions of forgetfulness who may or may not still be alive, and her, the peasant girl from Les Cards, fallible in a different way and not believing that anything was owed to her, shy and gay, a child from the first and forever after. It was during the war, at the ends of roads, German columns rolled slowly past, gloomy and terrible, and the people from the hamlets watched them with exactly the same eyes as their ancestors watched great companies ride through, the troops of the Black Prince, ancient eyes, credulous and caught up in legend; the Maquis with its young ghosts roamed the woods, crossed the switches, blew up the convoy trains and set off the alarms, shattering the night around Marsac. My mother had other worries besides that incomprehensible, noisy war in which you could not know who was lying; the one-eyed master paid court here and there, lied and yet no doubt loved her, drank; she awaited a first child without really believing it, she who still saw herself as a little girl at harvest time in Les Cards, upset or laughing at the little nothings that formed the weave of language there and made up a life: a moustache drawn with charcoal on a little face and nobody recognized you, how chocolate tasted better if you ate your snack in the big meadow in summer beside the spring, grandfather Léonard’s tireless, knock-kneed mare bringing him home drunk from a fair – my God how funny he was, staggering under his goat-hair cloak, and goodness knows what else. Her time was approaching and in Les Cards the old woman crossed the old threshold and with her stick, set out walking, cut through the woods by Le Châtain where Antoine’s great-niece, full of years and smiles, opened a can of sardines for her, then through Saint-Goussand and the shaded slope of Arrènes, and in her pocket she had the relic, the inexpugnable legacy of the Peluchets, their burden of powerlessness, their gris-gris midwife; and since it was autumn Elise trampled the new heather, the lofty foxglove, purple and crossed as the bishops, and since she was cheerful and without illusions, she smiled softly. Between Elise, the relic, and an old style country doctor, the child was born in the Marsac school. That daughter was named Madeleine.

  She had big dark blue eyes – which came from Clara surely, married name Michon, maiden name Jumeau – and, they said as they always do, she would have been pretty. She was carried about Marsac, in the little gardens where sweet peas played among the apple trees, the passing smoke plume from the trains called her, her hands reached out toward the distance and knew only how to gather the near; she was carried to Les Cards, the dense darkness covered her under the chestnut tree, she was set down for a moment on the old threshold and an obscure patois word overhead, mixed with the sky-bright wisteria, offered to her astonishment an angelic language echoed at a distance by the lucid Cézannian shadows, inhabited with calls, of woods still light in the late afternoon; those so-called primitive scenes that touched her did not have the time to disrupt the superb harmony. Maybe once she passed through Mourioux, but she was sleeping on the bus, or maybe her little cheek was laughing against our mother’s cheek; she did not see the steep clock tower, the gilded signs and the eternal linden tree, the inexpiable childhood buried here of the rival she would not know, her brother. Félix’s hands were too big and clumsy, she was frightened, and over her face that heavy, loving breath lingered; Eugène breathed in the same way and had hands just as big; Aimé took up her, one eye laughing, but the other was dark, distant and implacable as the heavens. Perhaps she had the time to observe that the males are powerless, all firm-handed but gripping only what is distant, not the diapers but the name, and that the flesh thoroughly bores them, the forever restless flesh that they watch nevertheless and even try awkwardly to love, all caught up as they are in the task of adjusting the visible to their dreams and eventually turning that adjustment into a kind of intoxication, but inevitably they sober up, the infant cries, the mother is exasperated, they go out and gently pull the door shut; on the threshold, sobered, they indulge themselves in pathetic boasting, olympian and lost, they look at their sky and their woods, once again become the angel, go off to drink. The child is sleeping when they return.

  She did not know her name and the monster of inadequacy that is a name, and her own image had not yet concealed from her the world, which is for us only the wardrobe where our image clothes itself; she suddenly felt pain and did not know how to say that: the pain itself seemed to her no different from the universal harmony of which she formed one of the rests, like the too-blue sky, the mother returning, or the wholly black night, only more vibrant, more acute and close to an unbearable source, in the fever of a nursling whose wordless delirium, scalding with tears, is forever incomprehensible to us, as denied and perhaps as miraculous as the last tier of the choirs that encircle the throne of the Father. It was during the hottest days of June; an open touring car of that era arrived from Bénévent and Doctor Jean Desaix climbed out of it, two-tone shoes and light suit, useless and handsome as a priest; paternal, of the old style, he leaned over the crib in his bow tie, palpated that agitated flesh, interrogated it soundly; nothing answered him but the old, indifferent, unfathomable enemy; he wrote a prescription as a matter of form; breaking my mother’s heart, the gleaming touring car made a U-turn in the courtyard gravel and roared off. The rest held for so long shattered; perhaps there was a hiccup or a flight of dead eyes; in exultation or inconceivable, unthinking terror the flesh withdrew from the summer and something bound itself more closely to the summer: Madeleine died on June 24, 1942, the day of Saint John the Baptist, in the immense heat that rose over Marsac, when the pure ether reigns in tyranny in the throats of the roosters, disperses in radiant tears, boils in the golden hearts of the lilies, and from there reflects back to the three times holy sun.

  So once again the old couple came from Les Cards, and the other old couple from Mazirat, the former in their cart, the latter in their Rosalie; and perhaps each asked themselves what black blood had revolted there, what just vengeance had made only a mouthful of this little body, what peasant daughter of Atreus had been eaten. And mounting the steep slope of Villemony, Félix in his black hat, reins in hand, obstinate, abusing the horse, thought that it was the Gayaudons who made expiation there, and his own heedlessness, his old dragoon’s taste for easy ceremony, chestnut mares, military accoutrements, roses, his harebrained agronomy that was already ruining Les Cards; and the old Mouricauds came back to life in Elise; the ancestor Léonard rose straight up from the shadows, disappeared in a jolt of the cart, muttered condemnations in a swarm of gold flies, the founder with the shriveled heart who had bought Les Cards, dime by dime, the man who, in his only portrait, held a wallet in his hand, seated like a patient, moustached iguana between Paul-Alexis and Marie Cancian, the son and the wife standing on either side, smiling, uncertain and blurred, posing for the glory of the tyrant alone, Léonard who loved gold and his mare and detested men; and from other shadows abruptly rose into the daylight the prodigal, renegade sons, Dufourneau the taciturn, and parricidal Peluchet, disheveled like John the Baptist, and in the undergrowth, the green Erinyes blew their hair from beyond the grave. From the other direction, in the already cracked rattle-trap of a car that I knew, passing near Chambon under the porch where the old men of the Apocalypse simply hold small harps, Clara knew that old Jumeau, the intractable master of the Commentry forge who starved men and ruined himself nonetheless, old man of the apocalypse and the foundry who
had already cost the son an eye, received this little corpse in posthumous debt to further darken the hell where he had bellowed for a quarter century; and as for Eugène who wept and was the most surprised, I do not know his thoughts; of the precarious inhabitants of the name I bear I know nothing beyond him, except that they were poor and busy, that the somnambulist women cleaned houses and caused scenes when they came home, and that the incapable men fled into bars and boasting, fled for good. Thus Eugène, inebriated, gentle, looked out at the yellowing wheat through the window, remembered, and he too discovered a lineage rich enough to produce this tender green death. Thus all the old sons of Adam arrived in Marsac, and perhaps, at the same time, upset and unsteady, they embraced one another, rough velour against rough velour, Felix’s small brimming blue eye against Clara’s dry blazing blue eye; under their thick soles the warm gravel rasped in the courtyard; there they are, going in through the door, it closes upon their well-known secrets and their clumsy griefs, these inept magi around a dead child. The summer laughs in the lindens, shadows bend over the closed door, everything gently changes.

  Then, in that season of lilies, the wreaths of lilies woven by the school children, and in the Marsac church, the stifling white odor, depraved as the summer, the organ swell of the repulsive calyxes, suave, clerical, mixed with the rich mildewy odor of the old walls; the little casket floating over that unda maris, the young peasant woman leaning unsteadily on the arm of the one-eyed master; Elise all hunched over; the ritual pacings of the priest, the audience of root eaters, all things already said; and in the cart once again the little lily-covered ghost who is traveling laboriously along the lost paths toward the encounter with her peers, the summer smiling on her, the swarms of gold flies lending her voice; and under the thick shadows climbing back up toward Arrènes, Saint-Goussaud, the founders, the saboteurs, lining the road again, those who once labored and were incarnate, Léonard, seated quietly under the Lavaux oak, who is counting something and does not lift his eyes, the Peluchets, changed into stones and stones even while alive, at the cross in Le Châtain, all the others amassed, and the blue of wisteria in Les Cards, which you see there in front of a neat and tidy house, and finally Chatelus, where the paths lead.

  If somehow, should I write his name, Léonard roams about on the nocturnal paths, wallet jingling in his goatskin cloak, between the Lavaux oak and the heart of Planchat, if he has some business with the Beautiful Impassive Ones who dally in the ruins of Les Cards, who know everything and rejoicing in everything break into song; if he kindly tosses them old coins that ring on the threshold, as I at this moment toss them these lines; if a bit of him survives in me, just as the tales of descendency would lead us to believe, then he knows what follows: three years after that debauchery of lilies, Andrée and Aimé begat me; two years later, the one-eyed master, like a pirate, took to the open sea, and henceforth in that absence, more distant than those whose failure is confirmed “in Chatelus,” celestial, magisterially paternal, he reigned undivided, drumming out my hollow life like Long John Silver with his wooden leg pacing the rigged deck of his ship in Treasure Island. In 1948, the door in Les Cards was shut behind the routed Félix, the old vessel began to rot, rustling presences inhabited it; Elise and Félix died about 1970; the tomb in Chatelus is full, the moss-covered stone will never be opened again until the day of Final Judgment, and I would like to believe that Elise, young and unbent, will emerge from it, a newborn girl in her arms; perhaps at that same hour in Saint-Goussaud, rising rejuvenated among the Pallades, the Peluchets, and other anonymous ghosts, I will know how I should have written in my lifetime so that, through the bombast that I deploy in vain, a little of the truth may come to light. In the meantime, my experience is almost that of a dead child without language; but I have no commerce with the angels.

  Nevertheless I did see her once, in Palaiseau, in July 1963. I was about to leave for England where a friend awaited me, girls much dreamed of, and even more appealing vistas than on this side of the channel. I was welcomed into the home of distant cousins, cheerful and stoic, who ate lunch outside between the autoroutes and the deafening flights from nearby Orly; I was full of hope; I wanted to embrace it all. One afternoon alone in the small garden, I got drunk on radiant things: my youth begun and still incommensurable, the entirely new excitement of wine and women, the summer sky open to my desire, burning like my desire, and the objects of my desire surely just as true, scented, profuse, and as ready to be crushed by me as these suburban flowers that I was shredding in my hand; I wanted to take the whole sky by one end and draw it to me, with its fresh flowers and mirage buildings, its changing blues, its planes high above and the pulp of clouds behind them left to play with the evening in the eyes of the living, the sky from the hillsides of Massy to Yvette where it gave way; I wanted to roll it up just like parchment, like the bibliophilic angel of the Judgment rolls it himself, when all is written, when the universal work is concluded and each is judged on his own works; to enjoy everything and write everything nevertheless; that is what I wanted and would be able to do. Swallows flew over. I wheeled in that drunkenness, my eyes came to a halt; from the neighboring garden, so close that if I extended my hand I could have touched her, looking straight at me, attentive and solid but at the mercy of a breath, at the edge of the shade fixed among the wallflowers and sweet peas though nevertheless so far from Chatelus, she was observing me. It was really her, “the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes.” She was there, before me. She held herself naturally, enjoying the sun. She was ten years old in earth years, she had grown, less quickly than I had, it is true, but the dead can take their time, no frantic desire for their end draws them forward anymore. I held her passionately in my gaze, hers bore me for an instant; then she turned on her heels and the little dress danced in the light, she went away quietly, with small, decided steps, toward a house with a veranda; the little serious feet struck the sand of the walkway, disappeared, without me hearing the sandaled steps in the enormous din of a Boeing taking off, all the walls of air below it staggering, the summer embracing its silver flanks, the invisible, impassioned threads of the celestial machinery bearing it headlong toward the high, vague paradise behind the apartment buildings. In that thunderous roar, she drew the door closed after her. The blazing rose bushes never moved.

  I flew to Manchester; nothing significant happened there; I kept my first journal and this event was the first that I recorded. Youth is full of boasting, but this was different; my sister, yes, that child appeared to me as such at the very instant that I saw her; I recognized her and named her with the same quiet certitude that I named the wallflowers under her feet and the light around her; and I could not say by what aberration, which was then, in my eyes, proof, a daughter of working class suburbanites in a summer dress lent body to the paradigm of all the dead, to their occasional appearance in the air that they thicken, in the hearts that they wound, on the page where, stubborn and forever duped, they beat their wings and bang at the doors, they are going to enter, they are going to exist and to laugh, they hold their breath and trembling, follow each sentence, at the end of which perhaps is their body, but even there their wings are too light, a heavy adjective frightens them off, a defective rhythm betrays them; brought down, they are forever falling and are nowhere, returning almost eternally kills them, they despair and bury themselves, are once again less than things, nothing.

  That a just style may have slowed their fall, and that perhaps mine will be slower; that my hand may have given them license to marry in the air a form however fleeting created by my tension alone; that bringing me down, those who hardly existed and once more become hardly anything may have lived higher and more clearly than we do. And that perhaps, astonishingly, they may have appeared. Nothing captivates me like a miracle.

  Did it really take place? It is true; this penchant for archaisms, these sentimental shortcuts when the style is inadequate, this desire for quaint euphony is not the way the dead express themselves when they have w
ings, when they come back in the pure word and the light. I tremble that they grow even more obscure. The Prince of Darkness, we know, is also the Prince of the Powers of the Air, and playing the angel suits his purposes. That is fine; one day I will try some other way. If I set off again in their pursuit, I will relinquish this dead tongue, in which they may not recognize themselves at all.

  In searching for them however, in their conversation which is not silence, I took joy, and perhaps that was theirs also; often I was nearly born in their aborted rebirths, and always I died with them; I would have like to write from the heights of that vertiginous moment, from that trepidation, exaltation, or inconceivable terror, to write as a child without words dies, dissolves into the summer, in a great unsayable emotion. No power will decide that I have achieved nothing of that. No power will decide that nothing of my emotion bursts forth in their hearts. When the laugh of the last morning strikes the drunken Bandy, when the fictive deer carry him off in a bound, I was certainly there, and why should he not appear eternally in return – even if these pages are buried forever – in the bread he is seen consecrating here, in the decisive gesture with which he gathers up his cassock here before mounting a motorbike, unconsoled but smiling, revving up in the bright sun, tousled in the highway wind, remembering? I believe that the gentle lindens white with snow leaned close in the last look of more than mute old Foucault; I believe it and maybe it is what he wants. That an infant girl is forever born in Marsac. That the death of Dufourneau is less final because Elise remembered or invented it; and that the death of Elise is eased by these lines. That in my fictive summers, their winter hesitates. That in Les Cards, in the winged conclave that stands over the ruins of what could have been, they exist.