The Fool and Other Moral Tales

by Anne Serre

  The hour of judgment has come. They’re seated in a circle in Madame Saintier’s sitting room, and the narrator is of two minds: is he willing to die, or alternatively, can he face losing them all? He’s willing to grant a few concessions, but not all of them: to say a green dress instead of a red dress, or Pierre instead of Alain, or Madame Vent instead of Madame Saintier . . . But that’s not what they’re asking him to do. What they’re asking him to do is to throw away his book. It’s only fair. “There is a way,” he suggests pitifully, “and that would be for you not to read me.” It’s such a silly idea that nobody answers. “For heaven’s sake!” he exclaims, “do I once show you in a ridiculous, pitiful or pathetic light?” “On such and such a page,” one of them declares, “you say that you’re surrounded exclusively by losers, which is not exactly a compliment since I’m part of that group.” “And what about me!” cries out Yvan, “whom you pretended to like and had so many conversations with, you make me look like an idiot!” “But I really did enjoy talking to you,” says the narrator, in a sweat, “and that’s precisely why I was able to seize on certain ingredients . . .” “Ingredients, I ask you . . .” scowls Patricia. “Why have you only pointed up our weaknesses and failings? We have our good points, too, you know!” And she bursts into tears.

  “Quite right,” Fanny chimes in, “you describe all of us solely in terms of our weaknesses. That, narrator, is what is unacceptable. Your book is a way of seizing power, and by the same token, an attempt to destroy us.” “And when you do describe our qualities,” Madame Saintier pitches in, “you’re so supercilious and patronizing that they come across as ridiculous and pitiful!” “I think we’ll have to kill him,” someone remarks. “Or at least get him to write another book,” says another, a little alarmed by the turn events are taking. “Write another book? You know full well that’s impossible!” groans the narrator. “Each book has first of all to be written, and then made public, in order for the next one to be born. If you bury this one, what will become of me? Two years’ misery, back to square one, trying to think differently, without your . . .” “So what?” says someone devoid of compassion, “what’s two years’ misery to us?”

  He’s tempted to throw away his book. What’s a book, after all, compared to life or your loved ones’ feelings? Some passages he likes — the one about death, for example. No one will object to death. And the one about babies. What baby would ever criticize him for mentioning him? Or the poor people in the sad neighborhoods whom he was tempted to collapse in a heap among in the aniseed-colored pollen: they won’t pick a quarrel with him. They don’t read. Only those who don’t read can love me, thinks the narrator. Which is a bit odd. And those who aren’t acquainted with me in one form or another, who don’t know me. It makes for an odd sort of company. It doesn’t really make for company at all.

  They haven’t killed him yet this evening, so the narrator will spend the night asking himself why he’s so intent on describing people’s weaknesses. “Perhaps it’s because it’s what I know best,” he tells himself. A bit lame. “Perhaps it’s because, at bottom, hardship is all there is in life.” Not true. There are the heroes, my friend, the ones who are stronger than you, the ones who don’t drag a numb limb behind them all the time, the alpha narrators. Where are they? The narrator, wavering: “Well . . . they’re on my bookshelves . . .” No! thunders the voice. I’m talking about the living, your contemporaries. Who do you admire? Who has created a perfect world? “Well now . . . There’s so-and-so . . . And then there’s that fellow . . .” Their names! “No! I refuse to mention their names in a work of fiction!” Oh you do, do you? And you don’t mention your friends’ names in a work of fiction, I suppose? “It’s terrible what you’re putting me through,” says the narrator. “It’s like torture. It’s as though you were trying to get me to confess. And not to a crime, which is all too easy to confess to, but to a wish, a jealousy, which is distinctly less so.” But you’re getting warm, aren’t you? “Yes, I’m getting warm,” concedes the narrator, as his coat falls to the floor.

  XV

  “Oh, please let me cheat,” he implores. “Please let me cheat, again and again. Let me run along behind my mother once more! It was so marvelous, the ecstasy I felt — unheard-of, and so bracing that I felt like a torrent, a mountain spring! Let me talk to the lakes and trees, let me tell people the story, and may they love me for recounting such desirable things! Don’t prevent me from feeling glad and dominant with the lunatics, the ramblers, the friends I choose for myself. I feel so forlorn if instead of being invisible I go unnoticed; you know that. I was made that way, my friend. There’s nothing anyone can do about it, there’s nothing I can do about it, I can’t seriously wish to be anything but a narrator, because I simply don’t have the means. I’ve tried to take an interest in history, politics, other people. I swear I have struggled with all my might, as all of us narrators have. But I just can’t do it. My brain lacks the wherewithal. Suppose I were to heed your summons: what would happen? I would die, that’s what. And I don’t want to die, or not right this second at least. I want to go on having fun, go on having more and more fun. Shudder to feel myself so alone, go up into the mountains, throb with the knowledge of my invisibility.” The other, who is seated opposite the narrator, very tall and very broad, a commanding presence, doesn’t say a word. Might it be that he’s keeping silent before delivering the final blow? wonders the narrator. Or might he be shaken to the core?

  “I promise you I’ll pay more attention from now on,” continues the narrator, who’s growing younger by the minute. Lo! he’s no longer forty, but thirty, twenty, ten: “Look!” he says, as he pulls some books from his pocket. “I’m going to learn another language! I’m going to travel! And not, I swear, in order to reengage with my orgasmic dreams, but to . . . I don’t know . . . to bond with my fellow men, for example.” “Yes,” he says proudly, “I’m going to try and bond with my fellow men, then you’ll see!” But with these words, the forbidding presence, who earlier had appeared to be shrinking, to be shaken to the core and shedding a bit of his self-assurance, puffs out his chest once again, this time in a truly terrifying manner. “No, no!” cries the narrator. “Of course I’ll never bond with my fellow men, I’m done for, we know I’m done for. But, hey! I know, I’ll adopt a child!’ The Presence is even more puffed up. “No, of course I won’t adopt a child, it would be madness. But . . .” (imploring once again) “I beg you, let me lie down once more among the flowers, in a meadow high up in the mountains, and there, hum the same syllables over and over. Let me lie there, my friend, in my cradle and hum to myself until the great opening, until I’m snatched away and swallowed up, and then rise up afresh, start humming again, be swallowed up again, then rise up afresh. Let me gaze at the sky, fill my lungs with the scent of wild thyme, rub the long grass between my fingers.”

  Sensing that the Great Presence is shaken and growing weak at these words, he carries on like this for two hours, then ten. I’ll mesmerize him, too! he says quietly to himself. He rubs his hands and continues. It’s so exciting to have this power, even over him! He’s twelve now, then in next to no time, seven: “Oh, how lovely and frightening it was to clamber along the stony path behind my mother! The stones, you know, when they flew up, would knock against my ankles, so I now have a permanently swollen ankle, like Oedipus!” (He laughs.) “But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t stop me from making my way, clambering along, even when it’s very hot. I can see her long brown legs up there, they’re my horizon. She’s wearing a blue dress or skirt, the dress is dancing about her knees, it’s my horizon. I myself have short legs, of course. I’m small but quite brawny, and since I have these goats clambering all round me, I grab hold of their coarse, oily hair, something that will later become, incidentally (and with a nod to the Power), one of my sexual fantasies. Enough said . . . And then I am three,” says the narrator in a tiny little voice. “And when I arrive at the top of the mountain, I can’t see her anymore,
she has quite simply vanished. I look among the fallen rocks, I turn round and round, but no, I can tell you, my friend, she has well and truly vanished.”

  But this time, despite the moving plea he has put in, he’ll find it much harder to leave it at that. Because, all of a sudden, at the end of the book, people start to emerge from the shadows in their full reality. “But have I never loved anyone in that case?” the narrator says to himself with fright. “When I thought I loved someone, was I simply blowing bubbles? What I need to do is experience other people’s suffering, the suffering they have in common, the thing that makes them stand before you in earnest without smiling or showing off their wit. The thing that gives them such weary bodies and eyes at times.” Heavens, he almost feels fit to join them! And what a marriage that will be. Soon perhaps, when he’s strolling about, he’ll be able to feel on the same level with them all. Soon perhaps, he’ll step into a different dream, their dream, and how marvelous it will be to be on an equal footing at last. Nothing will scare him anymore, he’ll speak the same language as they do and he’ll no longer have a secret. At last, he’ll no longer have a secret!

  How good it feels to be rid of his narrator’s outfit! What a relief it is! He’s so glad not to be hamstrung anymore! Here he is, then, more or less naked. He no longer plays around, but he does align his brain differently, trying with all his might to point it in the right direction, the direction of life. The outsize brain rebels. The narrator sets to work like a journeyman, a laborer. And, needless to say, ringing urgently, stridently inside him all the while, like an emergency call, is the following question: would you really like to stop being a writer? And the madman answers yes.

  The Wishing Table

  .

  I was seven the first time I saw my father dressed as a girl. I was on my way home when I saw a woman coming toward me on the sidewalk in red platform sandals, with a long summer coat, maybe silk, or something glossy at any rate, billowing out behind her. But what really struck me was her ruffled, bleached-blonde hair, the gigantic earrings flapping about her neck, her eyelids spangled with aquamarine glitter. She was terrifying, like Laura Van Bing in Crucifixion or Crusoe Kiki in her “frenzied dance.”

  I didn’t recognize him straightaway, since he usually wore a jacket. One day, I had caught Marjorie Higgins pressing the entire length of her body against him in the hallway, and he had given her a good slap. Quite right, too, I thought. Another time, I overheard Marjorie confessing to my mother that she had once made an “inappropriate gesture,” an indiscretion she could no longer hide from her because Maman was such a dear old friend. Maman burst out laughing, they hugged each other, and their breasts brushed together as they embraced.

  Maman was naked most of the time. “You have no shame,” Papa would say. She would stand in front of the hall mirror, combing her bush with the same thoroughness and gusto with which she brushed her teeth at night. One of my classmates was astounded by this: “Your mother is naked!” she said to me with a gasp. “Yes,” I replied, “we have no shame in our family.” Later, she liked to come visit just so that she could see Maman seated naked in front of the living-room window, or watering the flowers, her voluptuous breasts swaying gently back and forth.

  If you want to know what my mother looked like, which is what everyone asks me when I tell this story, here is a brief description: she was twenty-eight, with pale skin and long fair hair, which she wore loose, streaming down her back. She was a “girl from the North.” Taller than Marjorie, she had a soft white body and long thighs. Constantly worried that she was getting fat, she would examine herself in every mirror in the house, then turn to me and say, “Don’t you think I’ve put on weight, sweetie?” She would clutch her belly in both hands, squeezing it together, and groan: “My God, what a gut! I’m getting really fat!” And I would say, “Oh, come on, you’re not fat, you’re a sylph” because the insurance agent had once told her, “Marianne, you’re so beautiful. You’re positively sylphlike!” and I had seen from the little smile she gave that it had pleased her.

  Maman was probably what you’d call an “exhibitionist,” as Dr. Mars said later. Even when she did wear clothes, her nightgown would drift open or her stockings would come free from their garters. She was always having to pull up her skirt to clip them back on. Her blouses were a stitch too tight, so that the top button might pop off at any moment. She seemed very much in love with Papa, but he was hard on her. The moment he was home, she would plead with him, “Touch me! Touch me, my love!” while they sat watching television together on the sofa. Whereupon Papa would brutally squeeze one of her breasts, or, without glancing around, tug violently at the curls of her bush.

  They did things with us that it’s absolutely forbidden to do with children. Especially Maman, who loved to fondle us. She just had to see our pussies, to touch and rub us, to “gamahuche” us, as they say in Sade. Around three in the afternoon, she would call out, “Come to me, I’m on fire!” She would drape herself across an armchair, her long thighs spread wide, and Chloe, Ingrid or I, or all three at once, would set about tickling her, nibbling at her, rubbing, pinching, and licking her. When Papa was present, he would seize the opportunity, not to touch Maman, who would gaze imploringly at him with her dark brown eyes, but to have his way with us instead. His penis was obviously huge.

  Perhaps because of our family activities — it’s what Dr. Mars thought — we reached puberty very early on, my sisters and me, around ten or eleven. Maman was delighted when she discovered our budding breasts and the first sparse patches of pubic hair. “You’ll see just how much you’re going to enjoy life from now on.” She and Marjorie would excitedly massage our chests, placing bets on which of us would turn out to be the most voluptuous, probing our pussies and behinds with their fingers. “Of the three, I think Ingrid will be the most disposed to sodomy,” said Marjorie. Papa thought so, too, and would retire with Ingrid to his study whenever Maman got on his nerves with her frenzied love for him.

  II

  Our parents weren’t so dumb as to imagine the whole world would approve of our way of life. There was almost a scandal the time my school friend saw Maman combing herself in the mirror. For a week or two, the girl said nothing. She was desperate to see Maman naked again, looking forward to it whenever she came to visit, but in the end she couldn’t contain herself. She told her brother, who told their parents, and from then on she was forbidden to set foot in the house or so much as speak to me. At school, they made me see a psychologist, who asked me questions and had me make some drawings. I drew a few flowers, a few trees, and told him that no, Maman did not walk around naked.

  Dr. Mars was one of our allies. Whenever he stopped by, always in a mad rush between two house calls, he would follow Maman into the dining room, shove her down against the table and thrust himself violently inside her. But apart from a few family friends — I’ve mentioned Marjorie Higgins, the insurance agent and Dr. Mars, and I’ll come to Pierre Peloup, Myriam de Choiseul, and the Vinssé brothers soon — we kept to ourselves.

  III

  When I first saw Papa, on July 7, 1967, walking up the rue Alban-Berg dressed as a girl — for I recognized him eventually — I was amazed and wanted to follow him, which I did on several occasions. He would make his way past the small front gardens on the rue Alban-Berg to the crossroads, and from there leave our residential neighborhood for the town center. He would go into all the boutiques, trying out perfumes, clothes and a vast array of underwear. Sometimes he would go and sit in a café, sometimes a movie theater, and he would regularly stop a man or a woman passing by to ask them something — the location of a street, say, when in fact he knew every corner of the city like the back of his hand. People would turn and stare at him as he walked by. He loved that. The one time he saw me, he reverted to his man’s voice and told me to scram. He would arrive home tired after having walked all that way in such narrow shoes. Maman, all but kneeling before him, would slip them off and
lick his feet. She was always doing things like that.

  IV

  You probably think we had to be really messed up, living as we did in what other people would have called “moral squalor.” And you’d be mistaken. Our grades at school were fine, and we were on excellent terms with our friends. For nothing comes more easily to a child than lying; it’s his world, in fact, the one where he swims most freely and fares best. True, when Maman gazed up at Papa with her wild, animal eyes and he refused to gratify her insatiable desires, when she was burning with lust, waiting for Marjorie or Dr. Mars to come and set her free, when she threw herself on us and rubbed us so hard that we nearly fainted, the atmosphere in the house was tense. But the tension was part of the pleasure, something we were born to. We had no taste for the comforts of life, which bored us, and on the rare, the very rare occasions — it was most unusual, but it did sometimes happen — when Maman would put on a dress and sit by the window sewing, when our bodies had been left unattended, when Dr. Mars was away and the insurance agent had gone off on vacation, we would become fretful and start to feel the first stirrings of despair, and we were the ones then who turned into wild beasts, looking for a wrist to lick or a sex to devour. A handout, a pittance, anything!