The Fool and Other Moral Tales

by Anne Serre

  And that’s how I became a writer. Because of the fool and the tactics I employed to escape his clutches. It wasn’t much fun. It took me a long time, in fact — really, a very long time — to escape his destructive, murderous clutches. Twenty years on, it makes my head swim when I think of the childlike ruses I adopted to pull the wool over his eyes. First it was the moped, then later — ten years later — the car. Apart from writing a story, there’s nothing I like better than driving a car, alone. Each time, I escape — even if I’m only going round the corner — each time, I live through spring, the apple trees in blossom, I’m born again, I come back to life. Every summer, driving a car is my salvation.

  I know other children who have found themselves in thrall to the fool: little Miles and young Flora in The Turn of the Screw. I also know children who have never had that experience. Someone who has never crossed paths with the fool, provided he has the necessary gifts, is destined for great things. For him, life rolls out its carpet without a shadow. It must be marvelous to advance in an endless summer where the obstacles melt away of their own accord. How happy one must feel to be alive! And so in step with the world that whenever you make a move, the world smiles back. You make another move? Again the response comes back: immediately, borne aloft on a silver platter. How easy it is, in that case, to become cheerful and good. If you mention the fool to someone who has never met him, he listens politely as an expert in the art of happiness. He has never felt scared, but since he has always been happy he has become very intelligent, too: so he imagines the fool, he sees exactly what you’re talking about, he’s informed about everything. For him, however, he’s a figure on a playing card. He doesn’t invest forms with life, since for him life is already present, complete in itself, with its accidents, no doubt, but nothing you can’t skip over in a dignified fashion.

  To go back to the beginning is to see him over and over again, rambling through the mountains in his fool’s motley that separates him forever from the world of the living. Animals follow in his wake, uneasy but entranced. He’s a figure from a fairy tale who performs miracles as he advances: the moment he happens by, everything is named. He happens by? The leaf he grazes with his shoulder shines brightly for an instant, named leaf all of a sudden, when prior to that it had been asleep in a dark mass of foliage. It’s the same with grass or stones, his labors are at once unending, miraculous, and doomed to fail, for the moment he has happened by the things which have been named cease to be named, right behind his back.

  He doesn’t enjoy company, as we have seen. Anyone who spots him coming feels very uneasy; indeed, in a good many novels, and in life as well, we have seen families abruptly torn asunder, couples who loved each other hate each other, children in good health suddenly drop dead, horrific car crashes or worse in the vicinity of his ghastly, magisterial presence. He happens by and turmoil ensues. He happens by and you get one of those inexplicable moments, just when you were feeling happy and at peace with yourself, when everything clouds over, grows dark, comes crashing down. Even Virginia Woolf, who knew a great deal about the subject, went and threw herself in the Ouse when the fool happened by. There are times, however, when you want to be carried off by him, you want to curl up in his icy chill, you want to gaze into his eyes which do so much harm and yet so much good. You’re crazy when you’re a writer.

  .

  Unless you have had parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were pioneers. American writers, for example, have never had, and never will have, a fool. That old antic moon has no place in the New World. They stride on ahead without once looking back, fortified by having had parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who were courageous individuals, intent on building. Whereas we, who have done nothing but inherit, have so much land to clear if we wish to build, that after rummaging through all those ruins and coming across scraps of treasure we’re soon under a spell. If an American writer sees a strange man, a vagabond, walking by, he describes him in a healthy way, and he becomes a character, perhaps even an unforgettable one. (“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”) We, on the other hand, live on so many tons of books, pictures and stories, that fiction is our world. When we meet a man, he always belongs in a story, he’s always in a painting.

  To rid ourselves of the fool, then, we’ll have to reinvent history and the ancestors who brought us forth. To do this, like children who undress a doll to find out how it’s made, we’ll begin by removing his fool’s cap, which is also the winged helmet of Mercury. Under that cap, what’s his skull like? Hairy? Bald? How old is he? Next, we’ll disentangle once and for all the bands of his bundle to see what’s inside. A snack? The bundle is round and full: a ball? A globe? What for? Don’t hesitate to ask him. It wouldn’t be a bad idea either to throw out the bells; the man will at last stop tinkling as he walks and the conversation will be clearer, more audible. We’ll question him about his eccentric way of placing over his right shoulder the staff he holds with his left hand. Why that position? Painful left shoulder? Tendonitis? Stiff neck? Just to show off, a way of drawing attention to yourself? We’ll shoo away the dog, the beast with no color; or else we’ll take him in, but on condition he states his identity, shape, and intentions. At this point, it’s not impermissible — nothing is in this matter — to ask the fool why all the other figures in the tarot are also him, in different guises. Last but by no means least, we’ll ask him, very specifically, stressing each word, why he’s the only figure in the arcana not to have a number. There we’ll have him. Because the only creature in the world who can’t be given a number is man.

  The world has been under a spell for so long now that the spell needs to be broken if we’re to advance a little. We may have to bid farewell to pleasure, to too much pleasure: become serious and valiant like an American pioneer; purchase a few acres of land, build a house on it and live there with our wife and children. I’m all for becoming a Puritan and singing hymns like William Blake and his wife, naked in the back of their garden. I’m all for abandoning, not music or books, for heaven’s sake, nor all those pictures, but the fascination with which we look upon these things. I want to look at the world with a fresh eye, to be released from the spell that has held me captive since my birth, due to the circumstances of that birth. Being under a spell undoubtedly yields a good many poets, but it keeps you remote from the authentic man.

  The fool roams through the region of which Eudora Welty writes: “It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I’d discovered something I’d never tasted before in my short life.” And the fool really is on the mountain top, for though there are tufts of grass at his feet, on the horizon there’s nothing. He must be right at the very top, therefore, higher than everything else. Henceforth you can meet him without feeling afraid, since you know that underneath his fool’s cap he has a skull just like everyone else, and if his limbs are caught up in curious gymnastics, it’s because his left shoulder hurts. Like a small child who’s afraid of the wolves and ghosts that might be lurking in the attic, and has been led by the hand into that shadowy attic now filled with light, and been told: “There are no ghosts, you see. There aren’t any wolves. They’re just bits of old furniture, objects that have been stored here because they’re of no use anymore,” henceforth you can move freely on the mountain plateau of independent-mindedness, without being afraid you will meet some terrifying ghost from the past.

  The Narrator

  .

  A chalet. A chalet in the snow, and a road leading up to it. The snow must have fallen last night and formed this dazzling white mantle, not a bird track anywhere, just the hint of a black hole here and there, a fence post in a field perhaps, perhaps a patch of earth. A car is making its way slowly up the road, which is itself blanketed in snow.

  In the woods behind the chalet, animal eyes are gazing upon the scene from the gaps between trees. Since the color of an animal’s fur corresponds to the seasons, you can’t make
out their shape or hue, but wherever you are, you can sense those bold eyes watching you. Nature is watching you. Hold on tight.

  The moment the guilty man steps from the car, the following conviction is confirmed in him, shooting skyward like an arrow: it’s the grass, the trees, the streams in particular, and even the keen, bracing air, that are the first to tell you how you should conduct yourself, why you are mistaken, in what ways you have sinned. As for the eyes of wild animals, they’re the eyes of love, so it’s not hard to understand their purpose, scattered throughout nature, while you in your wretched existence try to cheat in everything and on everyone. Look me in the eye, say the hind and roe, and you’ll soon see if you’re cheating or not.

  Further back, the mountains begin, where in spring and summer it’s a delight for all: the grasshoppers, the seated woman reading, the couple in shorts and hiking boots with a flask dangling from their knapsack. On the other side of the mountain is a town. We can disregard towns for the time being, since they belong in other people’s books, and although we enjoy reading about them in other people’s books, on our side of the mountain we have nothing to say about them. Town is, of course, where the narrator lives; it’s where he tells the story, ensconced in his apartment. The rest of the time, however, he’s on the road, roaming about, seeing wonderful or excruciating — and above all puzzling — things. Everything is incomprehensible when you first set eyes on it.

  The narrator longs to go over to those animals with their bright, staring eyes, those vacant eyes glowing in the dark forest. Even so, he’s relieved on his walks to find people in shorts and sunscreen traveling the roads. Oh, how he loves talking to them, how he loves being someone they can converse with! How wonderful to be welcomed among people who have no idea what he’s doing out here, roaming on the edge of the forest! To hear them inquire in the evening, over supper in the dining room of the chalet: “Do you know the region well? How long will you be staying? What do you do for a living?” The narrator’s so glad not to be viewed with suspicion, so glad to be seen as someone of sound morals and to be asked about his life as though it were a real, normal existence. He invents: Yes, he’s on vacation. The question of his profession is a bit trickier, but he comes up with an answer. He even gets roped in at times: “Will you come walking with us tomorrow?” He accepts, of course. Who would be brazen enough to say: “What! Don’t you know? I’m the narrator!”

  So the next day he goes walking with them. He’s friendly and considerate and full of high spirits, for he’s eager to make a good impression, eager to gain acceptance for a moment and enjoy the fleeting sense the walk will give him of being with others. With Eva and Yvan, Véronique, Alain, and Patricia, he tries to walk at the same pace, laugh at the same things, take an interest in the same discoveries. He observes how they go about acting more or less alike. Gradually, confusedly, they begin to sense a difference. They couldn’t put a name to it, but there’s something about the narrator that unnerves them. He can sense their mistrust; it saddens him, he would so love to be mistaken for one of them. Some of them overcome the awkward hurdle and suspect the narrator is a narrator, or someone peculiar at any rate, but even so they don’t hold it against him. They don’t pry into his secret. They sense there is one but feel they shouldn’t intrude. Or else they simply have no wish to. Still, he finds these walks a bit tiresome, as he has to tread very carefully. He always comes back feeling sad because the true bonding has never occurred. But you’re an outcast, poor narrator, and an outcast you will always be. Given how much you enjoy telling a story, put a brave face on your banishment. Some outcasts can’t even tell a story.

  Outcasts who can’t even tell a story are what one might call dropouts, lunatics, misfits. With them the narrator feels on a firm footing, albeit with one huge advantage: he can tell a story. They don’t hold this against him, which is strange. Why don’t they hold it against him, when telling a story would set them free? Perhaps they have given up, worn out by the long years of suffering. Yet because they still carry the fiery tablet inside them, the one that throbs, the one that would like to tell a story for two hundred and fifty pages and would like it to be beautiful, they find in the narrator someone who can do this for them. You, they sense, will avenge us for a lifetime of humiliation and defeat; you will tell our collective story.

  The narrator’s proud to have this gift and proud that his friends encourage him to make use of it. Proud the way a child is proud when he says his father is a fireman. What’s strange is that it’s not with his friends that he feels a sense of guilt. It’s with the others, and only with the others: the Evas and Yvans, the Alains, Véroniques, and Patricias, from whom he carefully conceals his banishment, whom he mimics in order to win their trust, and in whose company he tries to learn, if only for a moment, how to live a normal life.

  II

  Sometimes he loses track of them in the mountains and finds himself alone on a bare slope, cast out into the wilderness, which questions him haughtily: “What have you done for me today? How have you celebrated me? What! You haven’t celebrated me? What on earth can you be thinking? Do you really imagine you have a thousand years to loaf around? Get to work! Get to work!” Nature is implacable. So he stands there all alone, with a few flowers he has picked wilting in his hand. Because most of the time he doesn’t tell a story. He spends the better part of his life waiting for the power to return, desiring it more than anything — more than another human being, more than another body. For a month or two, he’ll tell a story, then the walks will resume for a year, the power will return, and so on and so forth, if all goes well, until his ninetieth year, at which point you will die, narrator, just like everyone else.

  That night, while the others were sleeping — Eva with Yvan, Alain with Véronique, Patricia alone in her room — he went outside, summoned by the cold and snow which reminded him of Christmas. The moment the door was closed, he breathed in the metallic air and gazed up at the moon shining in the dark blue sky. Outside the chalet, a streetlamp lit up the road for fifty yards or so, after which there was pitch darkness. He set off along the road, his hands in his overcoat pockets and a woolly hat pulled down over his head. After fifty yards, he stepped into the darkness and disappeared.

  His heart was glutted, heavy with all the images he’d amassed. He shuffled them, then glanced through them like a deck of cards. Did he examine them in detail? Sometimes, but mostly it was just for the pleasure of manipulating them. And it was by playing this game — place this one here, cover it with that one, take up this other one — that he earned his living: a narrator must earn a living, otherwise he disappears. The others, asleep in the chalet, probably had no idea he engaged in such activities. Or did they? It comes as a surprise sometimes, in one’s superciliousness, to discover that we all know the same things. It’s one of the reasons the narrator is so drawn to people who lead normal lives and so keen to be welcomed into their midst for a spell.

  That afternoon they had climbed a hill planted with boxwood, as though they might expect to find a castle at the top. Which is exactly what happened: at the top of the hill they came across a ruined castle. Patricia was spellbound, Yvan and Eva fell in love, Alain and Véronique held hands, the narrator tagged along at the back, glad of the company of these friends. Since Yvan knew a fair bit about French history, he had some interesting things to say about the castle and what had happened there. The narrator listened carefully, but didn’t retain a thing. Yvan’s words went straight in one ear and out the other. The narrator isn’t interested in history, it’s one of his many dozens of failings. He isn’t interested in science either and can no more remember the names of stars than he can those of plants.

  In the evening, his friends at the chalet sometimes discussed politics. Here, the narrator had to bow out from the very first words. He wasn’t remotely interested in politics. At moments like this, the others were a little wary of him. What! A man of forty who was a teacher or a librarian — that was t
he profession he had given — but took no part in a discussion about politics? That was distinctly odd. They would scold him for this, especially Véronique, who knew a lot about politics and was up in arms about any number of things. He would stall, trying quickly to understand, then side with this or that speaker so as not to appear too apathetic.

  They talk about politics, they know all sorts of things and the narrator is quite lost. It’s at moments like this that he sometimes gets scared, wondering what right he has to be a narrator when he knows so little about the world. He listens and tries to learn, but doesn’t remember a thing. The same instant he forgets. These things don’t get etched in his brain. It’s as though his brain can only remember bodies, mouths, facial expressions. “Part of my brain is dead,” the narrator says to himself. “Another part is as ravenous as a mother or a bird of prey, snatching up anything that interests it.” He manages to say that he has never voted — that people on the right give him the impression he’s on the left, people on the left that he’s on the right — but that he’s certainly not an extremist. The narrator’s a laughingstock when he’s not telling a story.

  III

  Nevertheless, he’s beginning to enjoy life at the chalet, so much so that he decides to spend not only the winter there, but the following summer, too. Lodgers of all sorts come and go, since the house, which is run by Madame Saintier, takes paying guests. And as it’s pretty and nicely situated, people turn up all year round to spend a weekend or a week there.

  The narrator has opted for the “red room” — the one with the cherry-red curtains and matching bedspread — and has arranged with Madame Saintier to pay a monthly rate from now on. She’s a little alarmed by the length of his stay, and even more alarmed by the fact that he never receives mail or seems to phone anyone. “Might you be all alone in the world, Monsieur Real?” (it was the name he had given when signing in), she asks him with an awkward little laugh. He bridles at the suggestion and makes no reply. His unfailing old-world courtesy (a crucial attribute of narrators the world over) prevents Madame Saintier from inquiring further. Besides, he always pays on time, never makes a disturbance, and never invites anyone up to his room.