by Gaetan Soucy
BUT THE STRANGEST THING in the ballroom was at night, as I’m about to prove through my memories. Papa, you know what he’s like, on the nights when he cried as he looked at the daguerreotypes, that’s the right word, my brother and I could do whatever we wanted, except start fires, obviously. I mean, someone could have set off flour-crackers on his right, where pascal had an abyss, and papa wouldn’t have taken his eyes off the tears falling one by one from the tip of his nose onto his speckled wrists, I think that was one of his exercises. I took advantage of it to escape to the ballroom. Obedience to the truth forces me to say that getting there after dark required one to cross through a slice of night, because the kitchen of our earthly abode, which faced the fallow fields near the library and the portrait gallery, was made all of planks and logs, which with our tottering help father had conceived and built with his own hands and ours a golden age ago, I believe it was back when I still had the whole kaboodle between my thighs, the kitchen as I say was about sixty legs from the outbuildings behind the towers where the ballroom lay. You also had to cross through the pig wallow by fording the sleeping beasts, because we had a wallow too, I don’t know if the notion of writing that down has entered my head. Quite often, if we’d been able to extricate ourselves from the wallow, we had to walk through dead hens for a dozen legs. As for the stables, we’ll say no more about them, it had been a day of yore since anyone had moved in there and horse wouldn’t be the one to venture inside, take my word, you’d have needed cannons just to get the doors open.
From this distance, if we turned around we couldn’t see the kitchen of our earthly abode even in daylight, so negligible was it, tucked away between the monumental library and the portrait gallery. I was taking a little break in the flower pavilion, so named because quantities of friendly weeds grew there in disorder and delirium. A balcony, too, where I used to go, was hung up above like a drum and it stretched out into a promontory above the quagmires, and you could see far, far away. The pine grove went on and on, as far as the eye could see. And the mountains and the grey sky. Some evenings at dusk the horizon was so clear that I felt as if I were going to fall into it, all the way down to the other side of the world, and I’d turn my head for fear that it would start spinning in the wrong direction.
Finally, the manor house. It still had a certain look about it and it could have housed an army plus three emperors with their retinue. Only pigeons and sparrows lodged there now and they were constantly squabbling, inspired by the hens. Two wings extended it in a horseshoe and at the tips of these wings were the towers, as I’ve written. To all that were attached the outbuildings, of which no more mention will be made, to do them justice you’d need to hire a specialist in heraldry or trigonometry and I have my flaws but not those. Nonetheless I will say that if you drew a straight line on either end of the horseshoe, the famous ballroom was located where the two met, about twenty legs away, and it’s high time I talked about what went on there at night.
I arrived and settled in discreetly so as not to disturb the shadows, which I’ll say more about later, on the crates where papa piled the ingots, and it may be because of those ingots, in fact, that papa flatly forbade us to set foot in the room. First I aligned my eyes with the back of the room and the big flaking mirror, I mean it was covered with patches of verdigris scale. It no longer reflected colours, which is the fate of sick mirrors. Everything was cast back in black and white and ash, with a dry taste of bygone days. It could have been a mirror that had stopped the way a clock does, that reflected not the present nowadays time of the room but faces from the most distant memory, like when death wins out over life, believe me if you can, and this is why.
Once I had spent a long time staring at the mirror, on condition that I didn’t look away, the aforementioned murmur began to rise, and it was a murmur of murmuring, of scraps of remote laughter, of rustling silk, of fans that opened with a twitch of the wrist, of the dreams of birds as they rub their wings against their prison bars. One time I brought my brother there to be sure my head wasn’t playing tricks on me, but what do you think? No sooner did the murmuring start than he was quivering like jelly, and then he left the ends of his tether all over the place. I stayed there by myself. Too bad for cretins. I’m not afraid of things that turn out the wrong way and interfere with the everyday matters of this world, it’s a change from the pervading decrepitude and the way all things insist on wearing down, if that’s what I’m trying to say.
And then figures would begin to appear in the convalescent mirror. A hubbub of faces, with the tumult slowly rising. And gowns of velvet and velasquez, and wigs, and cavaliers in magpie-tail coats if there is such a thing, and the throng started to overflow the mirror into the room, which filled up and was taken over by them. No doubt this will surprise you but, as the figures took shape around me, behind me and on my right and on my left, I had the impression that I myself was becoming unreal, I mean little by little I was becoming invisible, I looked at my hands and I could see the battered marble floor right through them. Soon I no longer existed. I was merely the memory of that ball from another time and I want to tell you, it felt as if it were all part of my own most distant childhood, if I had one. At the heart of the crowd I could sense the arms of a slut around me, or a blessed virgin, who smelled sweet and was bending over to say things into my ear while she laughed gentle laughter, even if I no longer existed. And it also seems to me that, without my seeing him, papa too was nearby. God but that slut, if she was one, smelled good and tender and fresh, like a bouquet of wild roses. And there at the very end I could see coming towards me a bambino who was laughing too, and I had the very clear sensation that this bambino’s face was the same as mine, with the same laughter, though she wasn’t me we were like two bubbles. I don’t know if I’m making myself understood but I need only close my eyes to see it again, as clear as rock crystal, inside my bonnet. Then the throng dissipated, the murmur disappeared, I was there all alone and amazed and surrounded by a fern-like silence that the wind, coming in through the windowpanes, pierced with remnants of murmurs and with soft hissing sounds.
I was rememorying all that, thinking that I might have to go back to the ballroom one last time before disaster swept us away, as I went from the mirrored plain in the portrait gallery to the kitchen of our earthly abode. I held the lamp in one hand and the book of spells in the other, having in mind to watch over father for even the shortest length of time despite the fact that it was late. Look, you’ll tell me these are just details but I am recording the facts with probity and simplicity. When we laid father’s mortal remains on the table this morning, and I remember this very clearly, his palms were turned down towards the ground with the fingers slightly curled, like someone with vertigo who clutches the grass while looking at the sky because he’s afraid of falling all the way up to the very heights of the unroving stars. Those hands were in the same position when brother tried to hack papa to pieces, I remember noticing it anew. Now, though, papas palms were turned skywards with the fingers unfolded, as if he were receiving the stigmata et cetera, I’m saying it as it is. To which I would add that he was now as hairless as a melon, his lip glabrous, no moustache or lambchops, that’s what I would call nothing and shoo. To be my father’s son you need to have a tough hide and not be afraid of surprises, that’s what I was trying to get at.
BEFORE I ENCOUNTERED the ethics of Spinoza, which I don’t understand a tickle of and which could set dresses on fire, I asked myself a quantity of questions that, now I’m enlightened, strike me as very futile and pitiful, but they came back to my mind in spite of myself when I was watching over father’s astonishing mortal remains, trying to get a bearing on our situation in the universe. I wondered what would become of us, particularly me. If it should happen that we could no longer live on our land, where the devil would we go, I ask you? And in that case would my brother and I be taken to the same place or would we, on the contrary, be separated from one another forever, a prospect that made my head spin i
n the wrong direction so much that I had to press my palms against my chair to avoid falling to the floor, pulled down by the weight of my inflations. Or maybe they’d decide to bury us at the same time as papa, who knows, and maybe they would make us expire beforehand so they could do so, it’s only human, and then I wondered about the means they would employ to make my brother and me pass as mortal remains from the state of apprentice to that of full-fledged journeyman, if you get my drift.
And that was when all sorts of questions swept back into my mind that I used to ask myself before I read the ultra-incomprehensible ethics of Spinoza, where as recently as last year I learned, among other things, that true religion is not a meditation on death but a meditation on life — corruption! do your duty. Actually that was one of father’s sayings, that our job was to try to understand, just as the job of porridge is to be porridge, I don’t know if you see the logic. Let me explain. When I was a little goat even smaller than the one I am now, I sometimes wondered, since we knew we were mortal, whether after brother and I became cadavers in due course we would make our way to paradise, purgatory, or hell, after the age for limbo there were no other possibilities. I’d reached the conclusion that in purgatory they make people think they’re in hell. Which is enough, as I see it. No need to suffer eternally if we’ve already suffered by thinking for even one minute that this suffering will be eternal, of course. As for hell, I never declared that it doesn’t exist, but the harshest punishment inflicted on the devil, I tried to persuade myself, is that god doesn’t send anyone there, because the devil is vain and jealous like my brother, which is something that deserves to be punished, holy mother, and that’s precisely what I was worried about for kid brother, should it turn out that the author of our days did indeed hurl people down below following a decision that was in any case irrevocable. I thought to myself: “Poor devil.” Yet there was no shortage of his efforts here below, if I’m to judge by my own time here.
All that, as I was saying, was before spinozan ethics spattered me with light, inasmuch as it teaches one to puff up with haughtiness in the face of these superstitions that are only good for making low-grade noggins tremble. But faced with the fait accompli of papa’s corpse, I confess that I was no longer sure of anything. I suppose the prospect of the sly devils in the village forcing my brother and me to kick the bucket without even uncting us extremely skewered me in every direction on the barbecue grill of those ancient queries on the matter of hell and its kind. Ah la la, all these things one has to keep together in one’s head, at all times. But the earth would be a dull place if no one asked any questions about it.
I was sitting facing the body, in a wicked chair that was the chair where papa liked to sit when he treated himself to a stoppit. I sat there with my shoulders very straight and my back like a rod, in the posture prescribed for countesses, according to my own fine education. I was still holding the oil lamp in my right hand and the book of spells in my left, the hand connected to the heart, and the base of the lamp was resting on my knee. I heard stirrings in the dim dark at my side but I was used to them, our estate is a veritable gold mine for little creatures, we leave rot and corruption lying around everywhere. Still, I told myself, papas mortal remains are a grand thing. A considerable event, of interest to the universe in its pensive totality. His remains cast their shadow over our lives, my brother’s and mine, that’s the least I can say, but the shadow also extended far beyond, all the way to the land that’s called holy, if such a thing exists. And what would befall the planet, as well as the neighbours who swarmed upon it? Would they be gripped by a rage of despair and pain on learning the news, would they hurl bombs everywhere, as it is written, and burn everything, smash everything, tear out their eyes and the hair around their hole, the one where we were going to bury the body? Would god himself descend into our fields, fretful and unshaven? Would the forests perish as well? And so forth? All this was spinning in my bonnet like the wings of a mill.
When father existed on this side of things, at least the life of the world had a meaning, twisted and bumpy though it may have been, that’s the point I’m trying to make. The inexorable course of the stars and the path of the galaxies, the vegetables that obstinately grow beneath the hairy earth, even the little creatures that scurry so softly through the thickets and the odours they send up from the dense grasses, all of it had a direction, though it didn’t show, a direction that papa’s orders had stamped on them. Now that he was defunct, it was as if a gigantic gust of wind had swept the earth with just one blast and had left nothing standing. I don’t know if I’m making myself understood, and that has me worried sick. I’ve been feeling very insecure, you might say, ever since I’ve been using the gender of pronouns to call myself a slut.
But what would befall the Fair Punishment, that was what was bothering me most in life as I faced the mortal remains. How I became aware of it, of the Fair I mean, you’ll think I’m inventing the wheel but it happened the way I’m about to tell you. Once upon a time, long before I became a natural source of blood, I most likely still had the whole kaboodle on my bum, as religion would have it, I’d watch my father at night when he thought my brother and I had sunk into the nothingness of sleep. He would go to the woodshed, also known as the vault, and spend long hours there. You mustn’t judge my father only by the whacks, he had something under his breast, I mean inside his chest, as you’ll soon be convinced. He brought along the oil lamp, because at nighttime the vault is the realm of darkness, and dangerous too because of everything strewn there and its opposite. At the time I was already in the habit of shoulder blades in the tall grass, of all night long under the stars, that is, with my hair spread all around me in the chilly beads of dew, to say nothing of the emerald mosquitoes, with whom I’ve always been on excellent terms, or all the small creatures that avoided me, scurrying quietly away so as not to disturb my bad dreams. And as father crossed the playing fields he sometimes came so close he nearly stepped on me, but he was sunk so deep inside his own dark thoughts that he didn’t even notice me buried there in the grass, humph. Without going so far as to get my navel in a knot, I’d never had even a tickle of curiosity about him, and meddling in what was none of my business, I mean trying to find out what kept papa busy in the vault for hours at a time, had never been my strong point, up until the night when all at once my ear pricked up. I have to say that I was a little askew in my sleep, where I still sometimes talk, walk, take part in this or that activity and have no awareness of it in my bonnet, even write, write things that greatly surprise me the next day. Now on the night in question, somnambulistically, as its called, I’d shifted a few legs away from the place in the field where I customarily abandoned myself to the restorative void, so that my ear was three toad-leaps from the shed door, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Having heard a murmur of tears, I got up and, with at least a quarter of my head still in orbit, I approached the basement window of the vault, and that’s not all. Father was there on his knees, crying, his forehead pressed against the glass box which I was seeing for the first time, true as I’m, and there I was running hell-bent for leather down the endless slope of fascination that would endure for a great many seasons yet to come.
For the first time, because I have to note that, apart from certain well-defined categories of objects in this world, I have very little interest in the vanities here below and it had never crossed my mind that anything in that woodshed might have significance for me, so I’d never come closer to it than four or five legs, as is true after all for a quantity of other outbuildings on our estate, so how was I supposed to know what was inside, including the Fair Punishment?
Which I was seeing then for the first time in my bitch of a. Before that day, if anyone had told me that papa had the slightest interest in flowers, I’d have mulled it over and over inside my head and I wouldn’t have believed it. But papa was there several times a week, quite unaware of my presence on the other side of the basement window, and he was scattering petals all around
the glass box and murmuring as if he were talking to neighbours like you and me. My father had always been old for as long as I’ve known him, so old that I only think of fantasies when I try to picture him otherwise, such as back when he was a fine-looking lad in a soutane in japan. I would hear him crying more in the years to come, and more and more often, but when I saw him in tears like that for the first time, as old as the mountains and talking to a glass box as if it were perfectly normal, I had the same feeling, astonished and bereft, that I’d have had if I’d suddenly seen a drop of blood stand out on an old dry stone, cross my heart. I don’t know if I’m making myself understood.
In any event, with the passing seasons it became a kind of secret mass for me, one I attended by myself, unbeknownst even to the priest who was officiating in the vault. Obviously I didn’t want him to know I was there, because of the whacks and their kind, which I could already picture, and when he was about to finish and leave the shed at the first languors of dawn I took my legs and my heels and we all decamped, whoosh, evanescent and silent as my friend the dragonfly. What’s more, it had become easy for me to anticipate the moment when papa would be finished, you can be sure of that. When all was said and done, this priest’s ite missa est, if I may put it that way, consisted of caring for the Fair Punishment, dusting it off with great care, changing its wrappings, shifting it cautiously, then gently putting it back in its low box.