The Man Who Walked through Walls

by Marcel Ayme

  In the hall, we stop to see Marie-Thérèse, who is being carried to bed by the maid. The eldest of my children who yesterday was engaged to be married is today a little girl of three. However much I expected this change, I am still keenly disappointed and my paternal affection falters briefly. Between myself and her as a grown-up young woman, there were understandings, ways of communicating with each other that are no longer possible with such a young child. True, I shall have other joys. I console myself too with the thought that Marie-Thérèse has still the long years of childhood ahead of her, reputedly the best of one’s life.

  We go into the dining room and my wife apologises for the meal’s frugality.

  “There isn’t much for dinner. These days it’s impossible to get hold of anything. Luckily I just managed to buy two eggs and half a saucisson at Brunet’s.”

  I hear myself reply:

  “Which reminds me, I managed to lay my hands on a few provisions while I was there. Not as much as I’d have liked, but that’s always the way.”

  I list a dozen eggs, a pound of butter, a hundred grammes of real coffee, a goose confit and a small bottle of oil. In the hallway where I had put it down, I go to fetch the parcel left behind by the old lady and open it without any apprehension. It contains exactly the items I have listed. I no longer feel the slightest guilt. This parcel had to come into my hands and be opened here, right now, in front of my wife. All was in order and I was only obeying necessity. I even doubt that the parcel belonged to the old lady. Leaving my hat behind in the train now seems to me only one among the thousand tricks employed by destiny to take hold of me again and reinstall me deep within the folds of a life already lived.

  I am at dessert when the front door opens and closes noisily. A voice swears in the hall.

  “It’s Uncle Tom, drunk again,” says my wife.

  I slept soundly and dreamlessly all night. On waking, I did not have that disorientation that I had been fearing the day before. The apartment had become quite familiar to me again. I played with the children without making too many comparisons. I missed Juliette and her brother Louis, but less keenly than the night before, and the memory of their childish faces has become more like a wish within me. It seems, and it might be just my imagining, that my memory of the future is already less certain. In the morning I read the newspapers with interest. Although I already know the outcomes of the current struggles, I can only vaguely recall the different twists and turns of the conflict.

  I took the metro down to Madeleine and strolled around the town, but what I saw in the streets did not surprise me. Across the seventeen years that have melted away, the present joins up with the past. On Place de la Concorde I saw the German sailors keeping watch at the Hôtel de la Marine and I did not regret my daughter Juliette’s absence.

  During this morning, I had several rather surprising encounters. The one that made the greatest impression on me was with my old friend the painter D— We found ourselves face-to-face at the corner of Rue de l’Arcade and Rue des Mathurins. I smiled happily and almost reached out to shake his hand, but his eyes slid over me without seeing my friendly smile and he went on his way. Just in time, I remembered that it would be ten years more before he and I would make each other’s acquaintance. I could have run after him and found a pretext for introducing myself, but some sense of human respect, or deference to fate, stopped me and, although I promised myself to hasten the beginning of our friendship and ignore the order fixed by destiny, it was without conviction. Yet I can gauge the degree of my disappointment and impatience by the sadness that this incident caused me.

  A moment earlier, I had met Jacques Sariette, fiancé to my daughter Marie-Thérèse. He was clutching a stick and hoop and his other hand held tightly to his mother. I stopped to talk to Madame Sariette who enlightened me on the progress of all her children, especially Jacques. No less anxious than her husband to work towards the moral improvement of France, this excellent lady told me that they intended the little boy for a position in the clergy. I told her that they were quite right. In the metro going back up to Montmartre, I found myself sitting beside Roger L—, a youth of thirty for whom I had never had much sympathy. He is very low and confides that he is in an extremely difficult position. I look curiously at this wretched creature who, in ten or so years, will find himself master of a colossal fortune dishonestly earned through scandalous dealings. While he tells me of his current destitution, I recall him in his future luxury, triumphant—remember the famously loutish manner which was to take him so far. For now he is a poor specimen, sickly of face, with sad eyes and a timid, servile voice. I am torn between compassion and the disgust inspired by his brilliant career.

  On the afternoon of the same day, I stayed at home, pulling from its drawer the work I had in progress, of which I had already written about fifty pages. Knowing only too well those future pages that were required to follow these, I found I had no taste for working and, discouraged, thought that for the next seventeen years my life would be made up of insipid rehashings, a mind-numbing chore. All that I remained curious about were these mysterious leaps and turns through time. But still the conclusions I was reaching seemed singularly depressing. The day before, I had already imagined the simultaneous existence of two universes, one ahead of the other by seventeen years. Now I accepted the nightmare of an infinity of universes, in which the official time represented only the relative displacement of my consciousness from one to another, and then on to another. Three o’clock—I am aware of the world in which I feature holding a pen. Three o’clock and one second—I am aware of the next universe in which I feature putting down my pen, etc. One day, in a single step, the human species leapt over what is generally known as a period of seventeen years. I alone—following that collective leap, by unknowable means—I have made the leap again, back the other way.

  All these worlds multiplying my body into infinity extended before my eyes in vertiginous perspective. My head pounding, I fell asleep at my desk.

  Soon it will be a month since I wrote down the story of my adventure and, on rereading it today, I deeply regret not having been more precise. I regret not having foreseen what would happen to me thereafter. During these last few weeks, I have reinserted myself into our sad era so neatly that I have lost all memory of the future. For better or worse I have forgotten all that my life must be in the course of the seventeen years that shall follow. I have forgotten the faces of my children who are still to be born. I no longer know anything about the outcome of the war. I no longer know when or how it will end. I have forgotten everything and, perhaps, a day will come when I shall doubt that I lived through these tribulations. The memories of my future existence, recorded in these pages, have so little substance that, should I come to check their accuracy later on, I might believe them to be mere intuitions. When I open the newspapers and my thoughts turn to politics, I try to reawaken my memory, hoping to overcome this distress, but always without success.

  Only once in a while, more and more infrequently, do I have the very ordinary sensation of déjà vu.

  THE PROVERB

  IN THE LIGHT OF THE LAMP which shone over the kitchen table, Monsieur Jacotin could see the family gathered for dinner, showing, by their exchange of uneasy glances, that they feared the master of the house’s bad temper. A profound sense of his own devotion and self-abnegation, and a strict concern for domestic justice, did in fact render him unfair and tyrannical and, what’s more, his outbursts of fury, ever impossible to anticipate, kept his household in a state of tension that only irritated him further.

  Having learnt that afternoon that he was in line for the palmes académiques—that is, to be decorated for service to French education—he resisted telling his kin until they had finished their dinner. Washing down his last bite of cheese with a glass of wine, he readied himself to speak, but it seemed to him that the mood was not what he would have wished for the reception of his happy news. He looked slowly round the table, pausing first at his wife, w
hose pinched appearance, whose miserable and frightened face did him so little credit among his colleagues. He moved on to Aunt Julie, who had joined the household on the claim of her advanced age and numerous deadly illnesses and who, in her seven years with them, had surely cost more than they could possibly hope for from her will. Then came the two girls’ turn, seventeen and sixteen years old, working as shop assistants for five hundred francs a month, yet dressed like princesses, with wristwatches, gold brooches at their necks and airs above their station—one might indeed wonder where all the money vanished, and be duly astonished. Monsieur Jacotin suddenly had the horrible thought that he was being cheated of his property, that the sweat of his labours was being sucked up by others and that he was absurdly good to them. The wine rose to his head in a wave and his broad face, already notable for a natural ruddiness in repose, flamed bright red.

  This was his frame of mind when his gaze came to rest on his son Lucien, a boy of thirteen who, since the beginning of the meal, had been doing his best to remain unnoticed. The father glimpsed something shifty in the pallor of his little face. The child had not looked up but, feeling himself observed, was twisting a corner of his black school smock in both hands.

  “Do you want to tear a hole in that?” spat out the father in a voice that threatened worse. “Are you doing your very best to tear it?”

  Dropping his smock, Lucien put his hands on the table. He sat hunched over his plate, not daring to look for comfort in his sisters’ faces, and gave himself up to the looming unpleasantness.

  “I’m speaking to you there, boy. I do think you might reply. But I suspect you of harbouring a less-than-easy conscience.”

  Lucien protested fearfully. He had no hope of deflecting the accusations, but he knew his father would have been disappointed not to find fear in his son’s eyes.

  “No, you decidedly don’t have an easy conscience. Would you like to tell me what you were doing this afternoon?”

  “I was with Pichon this afternoon. He told me he would come and pick me up at two o’clock. As we were leaving we bumped into Chapusot who was out running errands. First we went to the doctor for his uncle who is ill. Since the day before yesterday he’s had shooting pains around his liver—”

  But his father saw that Lucien was trying to distract him with the anecdote and interrupted:

  “So don’t get mixed up with other people’s livers. No one makes that kind of fuss when I am unwell. Tell me instead where you were this morning.”

  “Fourmont and I went to see the house that burned down the other night on Avenue Poincaré.”

  “Just like that, you were out and about the entire day? From morning until night? Of course, since you spent your Thursday having fun, I suppose you have done all your homework?”

  The father had pronounced these last words in tones of such sweetness that breaths were held right round the table.

  “My homework?” whispered Lucien.

  “Yes, your homework.”

  “I studied yesterday evening when I got home from school.”

  “I’m not asking if you studied yesterday evening. I am asking if you have done your homework for tomorrow.”

  Everyone sensed the drama developing and would have liked to head it off, but experience had taught them that any intervention in such circumstances would only make things worse and turn choleric spite into fury. Lucien’s two sisters diplomatically pretended hardly to notice the business, while their mother, preferring not to follow the painful scene too closely, fled towards a cupboard. On the verge of exasperation, Monsieur Jacotin was still debating whether to shelve the news about his potential decoration. But Aunt Julie, moved by a generous impulse, could not hold her tongue.

  “Poor little thing, you’re always going after him. Just because he told you that he did his work yesterday evening. He should have a little fun too.”

  Infuriated, Monsieur Jacotin replied ill-temperedly:

  “I would beg you not to hinder my efforts in the education of my son. Being his father, I act as such and intend to guide him according to my own principles. When you have children I should never presume to impede your liberty in indulging their every whim.”

  Aunt Julie, who was well-embarked on her sixty-third year, sensed the bite of sarcasm in this talk of her future children. Herself offended, she ran out of the kitchen. Lucien watched her anxiously and for a moment could still see her, in the half-darkness of the spotless dining room, groping for the light switch. When she had closed the door, Monsieur Jacotin called on the whole family to confirm that he had said nothing to justify such an exit and complained of their treachery in making him appear ill-bred. Neither his daughters, who were busying themselves with clearing the table, nor his wife could bring themselves to acquiesce, though it might have relieved the tension somewhat. Their silence fuelled further outrage. Livid, he turned back to Lucien:

  “I’m still waiting for a response from you. Yes or no, have you done your homework?”

  Lucien realised that he would gain nothing from dragging the business out and so took the plunge.

  “I haven’t done my French homework.”

  Thankfulness gleamed for a moment in his father’s eyes. He would take pleasure in tackling the boy.

  “Why not, may I enquire?”

  Lucien shrugged, indicating his ignorance, perhaps even astonishment, as if the question were ludicrous.

  “I should thrash him,” murmured his father, staring fixedly at Lucien.

  He stayed silent for a moment, considering the degree of abjection to which his ungrateful son had sunk, neglecting, without any articulable reason and apparently without remorse, to do his French homework.

  “So it is indeed as I thought,” he said, and his voice began to crescendo with the vehemence of his lecture. “Not only do you continue, you persevere. Here is a French homework exercise that the teacher gave you last Friday for tomorrow. You had, therefore, a week to do it and yet you did not fit it in. And if I had not raised the subject, you would be off to school without having done it. But the most despicable thing is that you would have spent all of Thursday wandering idly about. And with whom? With some Pichon, Fourmont or Chapusot, the slowest, the worst dunces of the class. Dunces just like you. Birds of a feather. Of course it would not have crossed your mind to have fun with Béruchard. You would feel it a disgrace to go and have fun with a good student. And Béruchard himself would not want to. I’m quite sure Béruchard does not have fun. He never has fun. That should suit you. Béruchard works, he does. Consequently he is always among the best in the class. Only last week he was three places ahead of you. You can be sure that’s a nice thing for me, spending all day at the office with his father—a man who is signally less well-qualified than I. Who exactly is Béruchard?—I am referring to the father. He’s a hardworking man, if you like, but lacking ability. And when it comes to politics he’s exactly the same as he is with work. He’s never had any vision. And Béruchard knows it. When we’re discussing this and that, in front of me, he’s quite tongue-tied. Still, if he comes over to chat about his lad who is always top of the class, it’s he who takes the lead every time. This puts me in an unfortunate position. I haven’t the luck to have a son like Béruchard. A son who comes top in French, top in Arithmetic; a son who scoops up all the prizes. Lucien, do let that napkin ring alone. I shall not tolerate you listening to me with that look on your face. Yes or no, have you heard me? Or shall I box your ears to teach you that I’m your father? Such a lazybones, a hooligan, an imbecile! A French exercise set a week ago! I refuse to believe that if you had an ounce of pity or if you could imagine the pain that I go through, such a thing could be happen. No Lucien, you are oblivious. Otherwise you would have done your French homework. The trouble I take with my own work. And the cares and the worries, for present and future. When I’m of an age to retire, no one to keep the wolf from the door. Better to rely on yourself than on others. I’ve never asked for a penny. I’ve never gone whining to my neighbour
s. And my own people have never helped me out either. My father didn’t allow me to study. As soon as I reached twelve, straight on to apprenticeship. Pulling that wagon and in all weathers. In winter through the freezes and in summer with my shirt sticking to my back. But you, you take it easy. You are lucky to have a father who is so good to you. But it won’t last. When I think of it. A French exercise. Good-for-nothing, idiot! If one is good, one is always weak. And to think that just now I was thinking of taking you all, next Wednesday, to see The Burgraves. I had no idea what would be waiting for me when I came home. When I’m not here, you can be sure it’s anarchy. It’s homework going undone and the like right through the house. And, of course, this happens to be the day that … ”

  The father paused a moment. A delicate feeling, of reticence and modesty, made him lower his eyes.

  “The day on which I learn that I’ve been put forward for the palmes académiques. Yes, that is the day you’ve chosen.”

  He waited a few seconds for his words to take effect. But, coming as they did scarcely differentiated from his long lecture, they seemed not to have been understood. Everyone had heard them, as they had the rest of the speech, without absorbing their significance. Madame Jacotin alone, knowing that he had been waiting two years for a reward for services rendered in his role as volunteer treasurer at the local musical and philharmonic society (the MPS), had a feeling that she had just missed something important. The word palmes académiques had a strange but familiar ring to her, creating an image of her husband wearing his honorary musician’s cap and sitting astride the highest branch of a coconut palm. Fear of having been inattentive at last helped her to grasp the meaning of this poetic construction and she was already opening her mouth and preparing to show a deferential joy. It was too late. Monsieur Jacotin, bitterly savouring his family’s indifference, feared that a word from his wife might mitigate the affront posed by this long silence and hastened to forestall her.