The Fool and Other Moral Tales

by Anne Serre

  So he emerged from the undergrowth and I began to make out his face and attributes. Yes, I thought to myself, with a kind of melancholy horror, it’s him all right, it’s the fool. You think such things appear only on playing cards; you couldn’t be more wrong. In reality, they exist in life. You’re scared but, at the same time, it’s horribly exciting to find yourself faced with an event of this kind. At that moment, you cease to possess that survival instinct characteristic of all living organisms, it seems. You’re ready for anything, even defeat. It’s the great orgiastic battle, the sublime point of existence, the great moment of bliss, should you choose to look at it that way. The long-awaited event which many people — and I, too, had labored under that illusion — confuse with falling in love.

  He appeared a few yards off, and as with the angel from the Bolivian Altiplano and the figure in the tarot arcana, there was clearly something not right about him, something almost impossible to describe. Something unthinkable, unnameable, in the figure’s composition, an abnormality easy to sense but difficult to pin down.

  A child can confront an apparition of this kind. Knowing that, I became a child again. The moment I did this I found a way — someone must have shown it to me in the past, I imagine — I began telling a story at such high speed that it came as a surprise even to me. There was nothing he could do since I was speaking, and the story I was telling was quite good, it hung together nicely, unlike The fool, who did not hang together nicely and, if anything, was falling apart. I managed to create a real landscape, the elements came easily, slotting neatly into place, I even managed to introduce a bit of color, there was no end to it and I didn’t feel tired. Time, of course, as in any experience of this kind, had stopped. A different form of time came about, which in homage, ever since, I always write with a capital T. This particular form of Time — I understood this many years later — is the one found in narrative.

  At this point, it’s not a wall I come up against but a void: I have no idea what became of the fool during our discussion — a discussion in which I did all the talking but which he responded to in a way. Sometimes I think I breathed new life into him and that, having started out as a dead figure, he went off alive, with his arms and legs henceforth in the right places, and his animal the identifiable kind, with its own unique coloring. Sometimes I think he vanished and, having rid myself of the Mistigri on the road to Yonville, I was able to return home, have pleasant little affairs, watch Berthe growing up and live a splendid life.

  .

  The fool isn’t only this last, however, since he’s also the walking companion, love. When Carl appeared to me disguised as the fool, we were making our way along a sunken footpath under the leaves. Moving below us to our left was a very clear stream where trout were darting about. Carl pointed out the trout to me, which I hadn’t noticed. During our hikes, he often points out fish or birds to me. I never see them. Somehow I just can’t disentangle the landscape. When he patiently persists in showing me a bird I can’t see in the distance, like a pupil who doesn’t dare tell his teacher again that he hasn’t understood the explanation (if he’s valiant and upright he will ask him twice, but the third time will give up, knowing that the teacher will lose patience), I eventually cry out — Oh yes! There it is! I can see the kestrel now! Fortunately, it’s often just at that moment that the bird flies up.

  I also go walking with Carl, then, so that he can point things out to me which I can’t see. It’s as if I were blind and the fool had eyes. The fool describes the landscape to me and I listen in order to learn. Thanks to the fool I possess an additional set of bearings with which to find my way about in life: without him, I’d have to fumble around in a world where everything is so thoroughly tangled that all I can make out is this one puzzling image, not the component parts of that image, each in its proper order and place.

  This particular fool is not in the least bit hostile or frightening. On the contrary, it’s the one I have made a pact with. Is this perhaps what happened at the moment of the great meeting on the mountain? Is it this I know nothing of and am condemned to surmise? I didn’t breathe new life into him to make him go away. He didn’t vanish. I made a pact with him. To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.

  What’s no laughing matter, of course, is the cap and bells. Lepers used to have bells which they would ring on their approach to warn those in good health that they should stand aside or flee. Sometimes, to muffle the tinkling, I wrap the bells in my hands, an exercise that requires a certain contortion of the limbs. The fool, then, is also myself, and whenever I see this wretched playing card, this pitiful cardboard rectangle with its crudely drawn and colored figure at the foot of my desk lamp, I tell myself that one day I must extend my range, spread my wings a little, for to be reduced to so wretched a figure is a little sad perhaps.

  I’d like the frame to be bigger, and to no longer be frozen in the position of a revenant–vagabond–piper by this small strip of cardboard. Sometimes I take my angel from the Altiplano down and turn him face to another wall in a room I use for storage. I put my playing card away in a drawer. But what I then encounter is a void, not a space. If I go traveling to take my mind off things — and I’ve done a lot of traveling — I get bored without my fool. Something that exists only in my own home tugs at me, calling me back, and eight days later I’m home again. They say people who have been held hostage experience this: if they yield to their emotions, they want to go back into the trap, with its alternation of evil and healing powers. It’s this back and forth that fascinates, this whirling round and round. It’s this that sends you into raptures, mingling fear and ecstasy, ecstasy and fear.

  There are all kinds of magic tricks you can perform to keep something threatening at bay. Children ought to be taught these things in school, like music and math. If, for example, I choose to focus on the fool’s luxuriant, springlike, cheerful aspect, how charming and good-natured this piper becomes! He’s a good little companion who initiates you in the sciences of nature and painting and walks merrily at your side, playing pure and sprightly airs. He’s a one-man spring. First magic trick: turn your other into spring.

  If, on one of these happy hikes, as is bound to happen, at a turn in the path or in the glance of an eye, your other should all of a sudden reveal his awe-inspiring side, that face without a past which is tantamount to a death sentence, you have only to believe and to go on believing. To believe despite all the evidence to the contrary, to believe without requiring the tiniest scrap of proof, nourishing your belief on your own vitality, your own spring. At which point the fool’s face and gait become luxuriant once more, gentle in the sense that a person in the Middle Ages was said to be gentle — noble and cheerful, that is. Second magic trick: remain vigilant and attentive throughout. Work tirelessly to furnish spring.

  Emma Bovary didn’t know how to do this, no one had taught her how to do it, and it certainly wasn’t at Tostes that she would have learned. The fool appears to her not only as the blind man on the road to Yonville, he also comes into her own home in the guise of Lheureux, the evil hawker with a name so outrageous that even with no education and no prior warning she ought to have been on her guard. Madame Homais, for example, would have been on her guard. But Emma is so tempted by the trap, so tempted by death, that barely has she made out his figure than she’s rushing out to greet him, and preferably in her finest dress.

  .

  In a book, there’s always a word missing. And the better and more finished the book, the sharper the outline of the missing word, so much so that we, the reader, can almost pronounce it. Once the book has been published, the absence of that word has a powerful knock-on effect on the author. For months he tosses and turns in his sleep. He wants to find that word he can’t find. But his life, over time, has become ever more closely bound up with his books. So much so that he always finds the missing word, not in the act of writing but in life. Overjoyed at havi
ng found it, he starts writing a new book where once again a word will be missing, and so on.

  I think fondly of the missing word in The Magic Mountain. The fondness I feel for The Magic Mountain comes not from The Magic Mountain itself but from the word those six hundred or eight hundred pages try so desperately to find, and almost do find — how close we come! — when that utterly abnormal scene occurs: Hans Castorp hears a farmer in the mountains saying to someone, “Good day to you,” and it changes his life.

  How so? When you hear a perfectly ordinary phrase of that kind, your life isn’t changed. But Hans Castorp, who so wants to die, just as Emma Bovary wants to die, has an ear that pricks up on hearing that tiny phrase, so happy and full of life, the phrase of a man who hasn’t the slightest wish to depart this life, on the contrary, aspires to endure and maintain sociable, even friendly, ties with his fellow men. The phrase goes to his head. It won’t be enough to save him, but thanks to that phrase he’ll be able to survive a little longer and love Clavdia Chauchat. The missing word may be the one that enables you to go on living.

  Because writers want to die. It’s a family secret. People think they want fame; writers think that, too, but what they actually want is to be carried off as a small child in the arms of their father on that marvelous horse making its way through a German forest. “Who rides by the night in the wind so wild?/It is the father, with his child.” “Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?/Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?/Den Erlenkönig mit Kron’ und Schweif?/Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.” (“My son, what is it, why cover your face?/Father, you see him, there in that place/The elfin king with his cloak and crown?/It is only the mist rising up, my son.”)

  But it isn’t only the mist, of course. It’s death. Fathers can’t see this. Only children can. Goethe was thirty-three when he wrote that poem. In the portrait painted by Joseph Karl Stieler in 1828, his face is magnificent. The look in his eyes (he was nearly eighty at the time) as he glances up at the Elfin King is at once skeptical and utterly transfixed, enchanted. No poem is quite so bloodcurdling: “Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fasst er mich an!/ Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!” (“Father, his fingers grip me, O,/The elfin king has hurt me so!”). The last line is full of pathos: “Locked in his arms, the child was dead.” Meeting the fool generates this kind of event. But perhaps you have to have died to become a writer?

  There was a word missing from my previous book. For a long time I was tormented by this, then one day I found it as I was walking with Carl on a sunken footpath under the trees while moving along below us was a very clear stream where trout were darting about which I couldn’t see. The word when it appeared came as a huge relief. I didn’t even have to take advantage of it straightaway, I could keep my discovery secret the way you do when you have found a piece of treasure. At times like this, I’m particularly cheerful and relaxed, and nobody understands why, especially as they are periods when nothing remotely out of the ordinary seems to be happening in my life. But I knew I had the germ of my next book: I could sleep peacefully.

  Recognizing the fool in the man I loved gave me quite a start. There comes a moment — at first, it’s not like that at all — when life and literature are so closely intertwined that it’s almost as though you possessed magic powers and could conjure up in your existence things that happen in your books. This man you love suddenly becomes a man in your book. You even managed to fit him in. If you’re a bit fearful, as I am much of the time, you try to keep the two worlds separate. No, no, you beseech I don’t know whom, I don’t want him mixed up in the landscape as well! I want him to stay behind in life! I want him as a counterpart to these (to my mind) bizarre and fascinating constructions. But it’s not to be. He comes into the book. And, to make matters worse, he wants to. If he has loved you it’s because he was there already or else wanted madly to come in.

  I look at Carl who has chosen to come into my book, and I’m at once skeptical and enchanted. I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit odd to want to be in a book and that, for once, it’s a desire I’m not familiar with. I question him about this in the act of love. Do you really want to be inside my book? Yes, yes, his body and feelings cry out in reply. He wants to be in my book, not so that he can be a character there but so that he can take part in it and live that form of life: being on the outside doesn’t interest him at all. At times I can’t help asking myself what mother could have fabricated such a son. And what father.

  The fool wants to come into a book, he wants to be part of the book, but sometimes — since the moment he looks round I discover yet another new aspect of his person — he sneaks in not as the man I love, not as a vagabond, not even as a revenant, but in court dress like my angel from the Altiplano. Just the other day, for example, Jean-Benoît came into my book clad in his lecturer’s outfit. It was shortly before a meeting with his students, we were talking about those writers who pretend to be modest while secretly gnawing on the bone of ambition. In the same conversation we talked about Jean-Benoît’s mother, who’s eighty-eight, Diloy le chemineau, the question of houses to be sold or bought when your parents are dying, and how it feels to be in the bedroom you grew up in as a child. While we were chatting away very intensely, as we always do when we’re together, I was also looking very intensely at his apartment, which I had never visited before. And it wasn’t so much with my eyes, which were focused on my interlocutor, that I was doing this, but with my back and limbs, the nape of my neck. Jean-Benoît knew this. In two hours, I took in not only all of his books, the power of all the books brought together in his apartment, but also each of his carefully chosen objects, nearly all of which were linked to his childhood. I took in the two huge-trunked pine trees facing his balcony, the naked gardens, the missing squirrel, his distant past in this apartment and his more recent past. What friend will let you do this other than the friend who’s already in your book? Then we went to meet his students, and as we always have lively conversations, he and I, the meeting went off well, the students were delighted. After that, we dined in a restaurant with A. and G. The charm might have worn off at this point, had Jean-Benoît not mentioned, for my benefit, an episode from his childhood. But the precise moment he came into my book — with his Altiplano costume, his elytra, his shadow, his cap and bells, and his staff where a flute might have been — was on the telephone the next day when he made a very brief remark about a murder. I had told him I was writing the fool: he came in so that he could carry on living.

  At this point you will say: but who or what exactly is the fool? He’s protean, forever changing shape and appearance, and has a variety of functions. I’m afraid so. If things were simple, we would know about it. If terror, love, friendship, death and madness referred to the same figure each time, we would know about that, too, and they would be less of a burden to us. What’s marvelous is to be able to approach this protean, unsettling body, these sudden transformations of countenance and purpose, without getting so badly burned that you lose your powers of speech (the worst loss of all). If you can carry on living and find the words needed to look the fool in the face, it means you’re a writer, hanging there, protected. To be stronger than him is the only way to survive.

  .

  I’m going to go back to the beginning. I’m all for doing things conscientiously, keeping a cool head. And besides, I like going back to the beginning: it brings me a kind of peace, a feeling of pleasure, like being curled up between the sheets of your bed in a quiet, warm apartment. The fool, then. It’s a nice word, with its inexplicable little dot in French. The fool on my playing card at the foot of my desk lamp since I finished writing my last book, and was missing a word in that book, and found it as I was making my way along a path with Carl, et cetera.

  That’s how writers advance. Jean-Benoît’s students asked very interesting questions. They were students from Orléans, a town where I was so unhappy. I lived there between the ages of eleven and seventeen. The town was gray,
the sky was gray, everything was gray and ice-cold. Fortunately, I had a blue moped that saved my life. On my moped I would go speeding through the gray fields, under the gray sky, among the apple trees. To my mind, there was only one pretty thing around Orléans: the trees in blossom, there were lots of trees in blossom in spring. The trees in blossom and the moped saved my life. I was horribly unhappy at the time. I was in thrall to the fool in his most baneful incarnation. The fool held sway over my poor little life as a frail young girl, he was extremely powerful, he made me want to throw up and die. So, to get some air, I would climb onto my blue moped — a Peugeot 120 — and go speeding off into the December cold, traveling twenty, thirty, forty kilometers, with sheets of newspaper stuffed under my pullover — my grandmother had taught me this as a way of protecting yourself against the cold. Sometimes I would deliberately go into a skid. Sometimes I would deliberately injure myself on the gravel and kill myself on the embankment.

  The little apples were pretty. The region around Orléans, thank heavens, is a region of market gardens and orchards. Without that springtime, I would have died. The fool wanted me dead and I responded to that desire, which was much more powerful than I, by a tactic I have adopted successfully ever since: impeccability. I was an excellent pupil, I did my homework scrupulously. There were other pupils more gifted than I, but I had a constancy and earnestness that ensured I always got very good grades. Faced with the fool: behave impeccably. That way, he can’t touch you, he can’t exert that destructive influence over you, he jumps about with all the attributes of a pernicious, murderous fool, he tries in vain to kill you. You’re impeccable, things wash over you like water off a duck’s back, you go about your life on your moped, you twist the gray throttle, and away it goes. How good it is to escape!