The Fool and Other Moral Tales

by Anne Serre

  In his cherry-red room, the narrator reads a lot. Apart from telling a story, it’s his favorite pastime. It’s only natural: in the company of other narrators, he feels at home and finds a family and friends. It means a lot to him, since despite his peculiar station in life, the narrator has a heart, like everyone else. He has no appetite for complete solitude.

  “Hmmm,” he almost feels slightly aroused by Madame Saintier. And she’s slightly aroused by him, too. He’s not bad-looking, and there’s his solitude, which is particularly attractive to others because it seems so untroubled and, for that reason, enigmatic. When the narrator is out, little Madame Saintier goes up to his room and rummages about under the pretense of doing the dusting and tidying up. She notes the presence of a large number of books, but finds nothing in the way of papers since he takes his notebooks with him. “You’d think he was lying low,” Madame Saintier confides to her husband one evening. “He’s a strange fellow. What do you think of him?” Monsieur Saintier thinks nothing, only that his wife is troubled by this lodger, which troubles him, too, prompting him to make love to her rather more frequently than usual. “A shady character? A gangster? An ex-con?” wonders Madame Saintier as Monsieur Saintier pounds away at her. In this way, narrators give happiness wherever they may be. Their enigmatic presence boosts the erotic output of their entourage.

  Lying in bed reading, the narrator hears the Saintiers’ bed creaking. He smiles, puts down his book and listens closely. It’s confirmation of his presence, proof that he exists. “I know who I am,” he tells himself, “when the people around me make love.” “I’m like a child, in other words, a baby at the breast. Yes, that’s exactly it.” Whereupon he falls happily asleep, after placing his hand almost absentmindedly on his crotch, just to be sure. And then he dreams, for he dreams a lot. In his dreams he has elaborate adventures which he thinks about when he wakes up the next morning. He dips into them and splashes about, dwelling on words that had come to him in the dream: “Doe,” he muses, “she was speaking ‘doe talk.’” And when Madame Saintier comes into the dining room where he’s having breakfast, he already feels fired up by “doe talk” and all these words that have opened tunnels of greenery in his soul and are urging him out into the world, to live and rejoice, because he’ll be seeking traces of them there. And “doe talk” will lead him on elsewhere, further afield, even if he remains in the chalet with Monsieur and Madame Saintier.

  The narrator’s cheerfulness amazes Madame Saintier, for she can see no grounds for it. Sometimes she puts it down to a sunny disposition — “It’s very pleasant,” she tells Monsieur Saintier, “he’s always in good spirits” — and, at other times, to all kinds of horrific secrets: “What’s he so cheerful about? It gets on your nerves after a while!” And by asking the narrator about his seclusion — he’s been there for several weeks now and seems to have no plans or appointments in the region — she tries to upset him and make him unhappy, for above all she would like him to go to pieces; that way, she could comfort him and think he’s just like all the rest.

  The narrator, however, is no longer a boy of twenty — he has never been a boy of twenty, in fact — and doesn’t fall into these crudely laid traps. Over time, though, he has learned to act as if he had. Madame Saintier is so relieved when he seems willing to confide in her — a cry from the heart, a confession of failure! How her breast swells with pride! How bright-eyed and youthful she becomes! It’s at this point that all Madame Saintier’s pent-up affections come gushing out, her arms become smooth and vigorous once more, she, too, can start dancing and living again. “He’s just like us! He’s just like us,” she thinks to herself, while merrily hanging out the wash in the garden. It fills her with longing: the longing to devour.

  The narrator, meanwhile, has a pretty good idea how and when to feign a breakdown. It’s never when he’s genuinely at risk of one. At moments like that, never. It’s a golden rule, to be set down in letters of fire: never. For were he to crack, he’d be struck dead by god-awful compassion. He just has to act up slightly, without overdoing it, as though held in check by a sense of propriety, when his opponent’s belief in the imminence of his defeat has reached such a pitch that he would be abominated and cast out forevermore were he to remain unmoved. Only with his friends, the lunatics and misfits, can he reveal that, like a murderer, he never goes to pieces. They find it rather agreeable, this fellow who’s never a burden. And on days when he longs to die and lose his footing, his friends could not be more companionable: they die and lose their footing with him, to keep him company.

  IV

  Madame Saintier has cooked up a story so that she can go walking with him in the mountains: the need for a stroll, a breath of fresh air, a view of the peaks. He can’t decently refuse, so off they go together. Since she imagines he is some sort of intellectual, or interested in “spiritual matters” at any rate, she talks to him for half a mile or more about the books she’s been reading. Much to her surprise, he has nothing very interesting to say. Maybe he’s not so clever after all? He keeps up a steady barrage of questions, creating a diversion by asking her about the names of plants and rivers and villages, but she keeps coming back to the books she’s been reading. She wants a straight answer, thinks the narrator, somewhat alarmed.

  A great battle is being played out between them in the mountains. She says the most appalling things, such as: “I love poetry. And you Monsieur Real, do you like poetry?” Beads of sweat are forming on his brow. He can’t bring himself to use the word “poe­try” — not here, not with this woman. He ducks and weaves, cracks jokes. Not noticing she’s tormenting him, but sensing it a little all the same, she pushes on. She wants to force him to confess; with her womanish wiles, she has understood exactly where his weakness and his terror lie. She wants to break in there, destroy this pseudomystery with the snap of a finger, and have this man with his superior airs see himself for what he is: a windbag and a prig.

  She’s very clever at this, or else he’s particularly inept; either way, he’s incapable of defending himself. At the end of his tether, he halts suddenly on the path, wheels round and, looking her straight in the face, blurts out: “For heaven’s sake, stop!” “What is it?” she asks, feigning surprise. “Is something the matter? Did I say something to . . .” For a full five minutes, marching briskly at her side, he’ll say nothing further, not a word. Neither will she, a touch disconcerted but shrewd enough to know she has scored a hit. “You know,” she tells Monsieur Saintier in the evening, as she removes her clothes to lie down at his side, “he’s not as well read as all that. In fact, he’s not really interested in anything much.” “Hmmm . . .” thinks Monsieur Saintier, “he rejected her and she’s furious.” And because Monsieur Saintier is kind, as so many men are kind to women with desires so insane that they’re forever on the verge of losing their minds, he adds: “The walk, at any rate, did you the world of good. You look gorgeous.” And so Madame Saintier feels reassured by the two great discoveries of the day: one, she’s still desirable; and two, human beings are not so mysterious, after all.

  V

  In the cherry-red room, the images came crowding in, slowly at first, as if holding hands. The narrator was surprised to see memories he attached no great importance to arriving — they were the only ones, in fact, to appear — in the form of a troupe of actors from the afterlife. Some were giving him signals that, though he didn’t understand them, seemed familiar. They were making mischievous, euphoric, spiteful faces. It was as though, in the games they were playing, he risked being raped, or burned alive, or bewitched, and would derive unspeakable pleasure from this. “Please don’t,” he murmured. But the images were horribly enticing, for they were embodied in faces, landscapes, words. They went like a corkscrew through his soul. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” gasped the narrator. He now found himself pinned to his bed like a moth before a lamp, beating his wings and stammering while the big dipper of space and time hurtled toward him. “No,
no,” he pleaded, like a woman who had been abducted, while in his parched body and soul everything cried out yes with such force that a cataclysm erupted outside. The chalet, Monsieur and Madame Saintier, the lodgers, the woods, the meadows, the fields, the towns — all came gently tumbling down until nothing remained of the world but the dreadful, intoxicating red room, where he was going to have to wrestle with the ghostly apparitions of dreams.

  From time to time, he would go outside. Nothing remained. The narrator rubbed his hands with glee. A long way off, engulfed in dense fog, Madame Saintier continued to search for him so that they could talk about literature. On another side of the mountain, barely recognizable in the gloom, was a merry group clamoring for him to join them on a walk. Just to make sure, he went back up to his room. There was indeed a fire there, an enormous, stationary fire which wouldn’t budge, refused to budge, until he had begun the story. He was alone in the world. He was overjoyed. He had always been alone in the world.

  He acquainted himself with the forms. One of them was so desperate to gain his attention and had such beautiful gray eyes that he gently kissed her foot. Another was grotesque and drove him wild: he sodomized her on the spot, howling with energy and delight. The beasts had come out of the woods and were gathered round in a circle, staring into the red room with their gleaming eyes. The narrator could no longer see any difference between these beasts and his raptures among the ghostly forms that were inviting him to one thing only: an orgy.

  Giving himself up to the task unreservedly, the narrator made love that night seventeen or twenty-seven times to bodies that were all different and all infatuated with murder. “The story! The story!” they pleaded, their wide-open mouths writhing with pleasure. “I have the story, I have the story,” he reassured them between grunts. And when he had told the story well, they would all come at the same moment with great cries. “Tell me who I remind you of!” demanded a skinny little girl with pointed breasts. Toiling away at her, he replied: “You remind me of an emotion I once felt in London, when I was waiting for a woman who failed to show up.” “Yes, that’s me all right,” said the young girl, shuddering under the blows. “Well spotted,” she went on, hiccupping, “you’re on the right track.” “And me?” asked another, a big fat one, as she slipped deftly between the narrator and the young girl. He set to work on her, too. “You’re that emotion I felt when I was twelve. I had to . . .” “Yeah, I know,” replied the girl. “That’s me all right, that’s me . . .” By midnight, the narrator was quite worn out. “I want to go to sleep,” he protested. “Are you leaving us?” asked the forms. “Yes, I’m exhausted,” he replied, “so exhausted that I want to be far away from you for the night. But I’m so enamored of you all that I’d like to see you again in the morning.”

  Needless to say, the longer this life went on — for it’s not often that forms turn up in a troupe like this and cause so much joy, only to vanish into thin air, though it does occasionally happen — the more impeccably the narrator behaved. He became a perfect little saint, insufferable, always merry, always friendly, always polite. So much so that Madame Saintier — offended, outraged by the insulting character over-obligingness can sometimes have, because of the profound indifference it displays — would throw up her arms in exasperation: “What a toady,” she would say to her husband, abandoning any pretense at distinction. Then, with a haughty air: “I hate this incessant fawning on others. I think he’s a bit obsequious, you know.”

  But for the narrator — as for those serial killers who, much to everyone’s surprise, turn out to have been good husbands, good fathers, good friends — it was a question of protecting behind indestructible walls the rites being acted out in his secret room. And since the highest and thickest of these is the wall formed by impeccable conduct, like so many others before him and in the world around him, he built it, with a little inward smile, a little thrill at the thought of presenting to the world a facade so smooth that nobody could find a point of entry as they wore themselves out looking for the chink in the armor. “He can’t be that nice,” thought Madame Saintier. “He must be hiding something. Perhaps he’s a bit kinky?” Then, lying down next to Monsieur Saintier: “I think he’s in love with me.” And shrewdly, much more shrewdly than the great clock he always came across as, Monsieur Saintier replied: “Why not? You’re eminently desirable, my love.”

  VI

  But the narrator isn’t always such a fine fellow. If he’s delighted to be a riddle to the likes of Madame Saintier, it’s not simply because it allows him to sit quietly on his own with his imaginings, but above all perhaps because it gives him an exhilarating sense of superiority. To feel holier-than-thou with your precious images, yes, yes, that’s all very fine. But to feel smug simply because you’re alone, simply because you’re different from others and in possession of a secret — morally, that’s not so good. The narrator, who’s ever so friendly and polite, who gets so much pleasure from misleading people, from appearing more foolish than he is, and from being mistaken for someone else, because of the power it allows him to wield, runs into a problem when he has to deal with someone less ingenuous than Madame Saintier. Then danger lurks.

  If he’s with Brigitte, for example, who makes films, or Valentin, who writes novels, or Olivier, who dabbles in conceptual art, the narrator feels a hundred times less comfortable than in the company of his backpacking friends at the chalet. For the terrible thing about the Brigittes and Valentins and Oliviers is that they think the narrator is just the same as them. At this point, the great show of invisibility he had put on for the ingenuous — who can be cruel at times, of course, but are so easy to dominate — is of no use whatsoever. What can he do to stay on top of things? For when the narrator’s no longer on top of things, he’s lost. Yet people like Brigitte, Valentin, and Olivier, who think he’s no different from them (god forbid!), are all but impervious to his authority. What other strategy can he adopt? What can he do to be an object of speculation and conjecture to them, to be desired and feared by them? The poor narrator’s in a sweat and looks truly pathetic.

  Still worse — for he can handle the occasional defeat — is when the ingenuous and the Brigitte–Valentin–Oliviers come together. In that case, the ingenuous will witness his defeat for themselves. They who were awaiting one thing only — his breakdown — yet were fearful in his presence and plagued by doubts; who found him annoying, yet were bound to him by the riddle of his identity: with a huge sigh of relief, they side at once with those who slay the narrator by considering him no different from themselves. The thrill this gives them (the ingenuous) is enormous. At last they have the final say.

  Fortunately, in the ingenuous camp there’s nearly always an unsullied soul who will step up to try and save the narrator. Someone who senses his panic and suffering; someone who’s never thought of dominating others and is none the worse off for it; someone who will compliment him and sing his praises from the rooftops. The narrator is so relieved — the other has saved him — and so grateful, that he will even consider laying down his life for his savior. So great is the love he feels for him (or her) that he’s ready to drop everything, to abandon his stories and his complicated games on the spot. Not that the other had asked for anything in return. He was just being kind because he sensed the narrator’s distress and because it’s in his nature to aid people in distress.

  In the presence of these ideal mothers, the narrator concedes defeat. Love me, he demands. Say I’m the most handsome, the most gifted, the most feared, the most desirable. Exaggerate my importance. The other doesn’t go quite that far, he’s much more subtle than the narrator, and not in a calculating way, but by nature. The other, who has never had a bone to pick with language and, mysteriously, has no wish to finish anyone off, does something unheard-of: he restores the narrator’s dignity without setting him apart from others. And it is here, the one truly indestructible place that the narrator has always longed to be. It’s the place he’s obscurely s
eeking when he tries to bond with the fools, who aren’t so foolish after all. It might even be, he thinks to himself, swept along by his boundless gratitude (it was a close shave), the place that will allow him to tell a sensible story at last, something truly beautiful and moving. And turning to his new friend, he declares: “The real narrator, the ideal narrator, is you.” “Me?” asks the other, glancing at him with a wry smile. “Me? I have no imagination!”

  With his new friend the narrator goes walking in the mountains. He tells him everything — his fears, his strategies for avoiding a breakdown, his hopes and desires. The other listens in silence and, every now and then, asks a question. Never once does he fall into the trap laid for him by the narrator’s eloquence. For the narrator, to see someone good-natured and affectionate avoiding the trap he has laid comes as a huge relief. However, isn’t this still a form of dominance? Is he not taking advantage of this gentle soul? Suppose his new friend were to suffer: would the narrator be responsive to his pain? Isn’t it just another of those tricks he deserves to be hanged for?

  No, there’s no getting round the fact, he’s only really at home with lunatics. That’s probably why he spends so much time in prisons and mental wards, if only as a visitor. Nothing could be more suspect, for example, than the exhilaration he feels when he goes to visit his friend Fanny, who lives, I’m sorry to say, in what can only be called a mental asylum. How he mistrusts all those fine, noble feelings that spring to their feet, jostling for attention — Me! Me!, they all cry, Me first! — the moment he boards the train that will take him to Fanny. Even the word asylum appeals to him. If he were sane, instead of spending the day there with his friend, his ears taut as drumskins, he would blow his top, get her out of there, rant and rave, shower her with blows so that she’d make up her mind on the spot to return to the land of the living. But he doesn’t. He’s all eyes and ears. He’s measuring himself against a story told by a young girl whom Fanny has introduced him to, who’s convinced she has murdered her parents and, much to her astonishment, comes across mounds of corpses in the woods. Or against this other patient who’s saying the kind of things people say in dreams. How well he understands them (he believes)! How easy it is to bond with them! Here, at least, he can be sure nobody is threatening him. He struts about like a peacock at the center of a defenseless horde.