By a Slow River (12 page)

When Louisette brought the ham and potted meat, she was welcomed by a cry of contentment; then, though she couldn’t recall it exactly anymore, a pleasantry by the colonel in her regard that made the judge laugh. She placed the plates, the silverware, the glasses, and all the clink-clank on a round table and served. The colonel threw his cigar into the fire and sat down first, after asking her name. He supposedly remarked, “Louisette: a very lovely name for a very lovely girl.” And Louisette supposedly smiled, pocketing the compliment—unaware the dandy was making fun of her, with her three missing teeth and her eyes slightly at odds with each other. Then the judge spoke. He asked her to go down to the cellar and advise the guard that they needed to talk with the prisoner. Louisette left the office, trembling as though she were going to Hades. The little Breton had stopped crying, but he hadn’t touched the bread and bacon. Louisette delivered the message, but the prisoner was unresponsive, and Despiaux had to grab him by the handcuffs and frog-march him upstairs.

I tracked Despiaux down not long ago. He told me his story on the terrace of the Café de la Croix at V. The weather was mild. It was a June evening, June 21. After the notorious night I’m about to describe, he left the police force and headed south, where a brother-in-law of his had a vineyard. After that he went on to Algeria, where he worked for a maritime trading post that stocked ships with provisions. He came back to V early in ’21 and still serves as an assistant accountant at Carbonnieux, the department store. A good job, he says. He’s a tall fellow, quite slender but not skinny, his face still very young, though his hair is as white as flour. As he remembered it, his hair went white all at once after the night with the little Breton. But who knows? In his gaze one sensed some kind of void. The closer one came to it, the farther away it would float. Yet it beckoned to be explored, though you’d hesitate for fear of getting lost in it. He told me, “The kid, who hadn’t said two words, had cried his eyes out. When I took him to the mayor’s office from the cool humid cellar, it was like entering the Sahara. Or a baker’s oven, which burns all day. In the fireplace there were far too many logs, but the heat didn’t blunt their appetite. I found them both with their mouths full, even though they were a breathless red. I gave a military salute. They lifted their glasses a little higher in return. I wondered, What kind of place is this?”

The little Breton came out of his torpor when he caught sight of the two lawgivers again. He started moaning and then took up his litanies of disbelief as before. This put a crimp in Mierck’s good mood, so offhandedly, between two mouthfuls of potted meat, he told him without an extraneous word about the typographer’s death. It was news to the little Breton—as well as to Despiaux, for that matter—and the kid took it like a rock to the head. Despiaux had to prop him up.

“You see,” the colonel said, “your accomplice couldn’t live with what you two did.”

“He, at least, had some honor,” added the judge. “Why don’t you make a clean breast of it?”

There was a silence, but not for long. Despiaux said the kid looked at him and the other two one by one, and then, as if having concluded there was no reasoning with them, he let out a howl— a sound, it seems, no one had ever heard before. Despiaux said he would never have believed a human being could make such a sound, and it went on and on until it was silenced by the sting of the colonel’s crop, lashed straight across his cheek. He’d gotten up deliberately for that. The little Breton was stunned. A purple welt crossed his face, and drops of blood oozed from it slowly. With a jerk of the head, Mierck let Despiaux know he could take him back down to the cellar.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Matziev said. “Take him out to the courtyard to jog his memory.”

“To the courtyard?” said Despiaux.

“Yes,” Matziev said, looking out the window. “I see there’s even a sort of post out there to tie him to. Get on with it!”

“Colonel, sir, it’s cold, even freezing—” Despiaux ventured.

“Do as you’re told!” The judge cut him short, tugging a piece of ham from the shank bone.

“I was only twenty-two,” Despiaux told me, over a second round of Pernod. “At twenty-two, what can you say, what can you do? I took the little guy out to the courtyard and tied him to the chestnut tree. It must have been about nine o’clock. We’d left the Sahara of the office and entered the Arctic of the courtyard: it was minus ten degrees, minus twelve maybe. I wasn’t proud of myself. ‘You’d be better off telling everything if it’s you. Then at least you could go back where it’s warm,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘But it’s not me, it’s
not
me,’ he swore in a low voice. There were dozens of stars in the sky, but the whole courtyard was black. The only light was from the mayor’s office, so our eyes were drawn to it. Through the window, it was an unreal scene, like the cutout of a children’s theater: two men with flushed faces eating and drinking without a care in the world.

“I returned to the office, and the colonel told me to wait in the room next door. There I sat down on a sort of bench, waiting and wringing my hands. There was a window in that room too, and from it you could see the courtyard and the prisoner tied to the tree. I stayed in the dark. I didn’t want to turn on the light and let him see me. I wanted to run, to get the hell out of there, but respect for the uniform kept me from doing it. Nowadays, that wouldn’t keep me from doing anything, believe me! From time to time I heard their voices or the steps of the mayor’s servant, who kept bringing them steaming dishes that should have smelled very good. But that day those aromas were like a terrible stink I couldn’t get out of my nose. My stomach churned. I never felt such regret to be human.”

Louisette too had suffered from the cold, shuttling between the mayor’s house and the office. The meal went on for hours. Mierck and Matziev were in no rush, and the alcohol lubricated their revels as one story glided almost without break to another. Louisette hardly looked at them as she served. It was her habit more than it was a judgment. Always kept her eyes on her feet. She never saw the little Breton in the courtyard either. Sometimes it helps matters not to see.

Toward midnight, Mierck and Matziev, their lips still glistening from the aspic of the pigs’ feet, were finishing the cheeses. They spoke louder and louder, sometimes breaking into song. Pounded on the table. They had drunk maybe six bottles. Not less, anyway.

They went out to the courtyard, as if for a bit of air. It was the first time Mierck had gotten near the prisoner since having put him out. For Matziev, who’d been going out between courses, to check on him, it was the fifth visit. They strolled around oblivious to the little Breton’s shivering and shuddering. Mierck lifted his head to the clear sky and spoke about the stars. He pointed them all out by name to Matziev. Stars were among the judge’s passions. “They console us human beings, they’re so pure.” Despiaux from his darkened window heard those very words. Matziev took out a cigar; he offered one to the judge, who declined courteously. The two of them held forth awhile longer on the stars, the moon, the movement of the planets, their heads turning toward the faraway vault. Then, as though pricked by something sharp, they got around to the prisoner.

For three hours now he’d been out in the cold. He’d had all the time in the world to count those stars, until his tears had nearly frozen.

The colonel passed the burning end of the cigar under his nose several times, asking him the same question over and over. But the little Breton was no longer speaking, only moaning, and after a while this enraged the colonel.

“Are you a man or an animal?” he shouted in his ear, but to no effect. Casting his cigar into the snow, Matziev seized the prisoner, who was still tied to the tree, and shook him violently. Mierck watched the show with fascination, blowing on his fingers. When Matziev had tired of shaking the little Breton’s shivering body, he looked all around as though trying to find something. What he found was an idea, a fine son-of-a-bitch idea.

He drew from his pocket a hunting knife, which he used to pop all the buttons off the little Breton’s jacket, one by one, methodically, and likewise the ones on his shirt; then with a single stroke he split his undershirt. Once Matziev had stripped the torso, he did the same with the trousers, the long johns, and the underpants. Slicing through the laces, he slowly loosened the boots, whistling “Caroline and Her Patent-Leather Shoes.” The kid was yelling like a madman. Matziev stood up straight again. The prisoner was completely naked at his feet.

“There, perhaps that will clear your head.”

He turned toward the judge, who said, “Let’s go back in, I’m getting cold.”

They shared a chuckle before returning to share the big steaming apple crêpe that Louisette had just laid on the table, along with coffee and a bottle of mirabelle brandy.

Despiaux gazed at the June sky, breathing in its softness. The night edged closer. Apart from calling the waiter so our glasses would never be empty, I did nothing but listen. There were a lot of people, frivolous and merry, around our table outside the café; but I really believe we were alone, and I felt cold.

Despiaux told me how the young man had curled up like a dog at the foot of the tree. He could not bear either to watch him or to look away from him, especially when the howls resumed and sounded to Despiaux like what the old folks told of having heard back in the days when we still had wolves in our forests. The former policeman could not contain his grief even at the memory of the scene.

I can imagine Mierck and Matziev standing with their noses against the windowpane, their asses turned to the fire, glasses of brandy in their hands, and taking in the same scene as they chatted about hare hunting, astronomy, or bookbinding. I’m only imagining this, but I’m probably not far wrong.

What’s certain is that a little later Despiaux caught sight of the colonel going out again. He went up to the prisoner and nudged him with the tip of his boot, three times—small kicks in the back and the belly, as you might do to see whether a rabid dog is good and dead. The boy tried to catch the boot—to beg, no doubt—but Matziev pushed him off. The little Breton howled louder than ever when the colonel took a pitcher of water he’d brought from the table and poured it over the kid’s chest.

“His voice, his voice, if you’d heard his voice—it wasn’t really a voice anymore, and what he said was words thrown together helter-skelter, saying nothing. He was making no sense until the end of this litany when he yelled, yelled out that it was him all along, yes, it was him, he confessed to everything, the crime, all crimes, he had killed, murdered . . . You couldn’t stop him.”

The colonel summoned Despiaux. The kid was thrashing about, seeming almost giddy at unburdening himself at last of this long-sought-after story: “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me!” His skin was blue, marbled with red blotches here and there; the tips of his fingers and toes had already started turning black with frostbite. He had the white face of someone soon to be a corpse. Despiaux wrapped him in a blanket and helped him walk inside. Matziev and Mierck raised a glass to their success. The cold had gotten the better of the little Breton. Despiaux couldn’t manage to keep him quiet and listened to him repeating his story like a schoolboy proud to have memorized his lesson. The policeman gave him something hot to drink, but the boy wasn’t able to swallow it. All through the night, rather than keeping watch
on
him he kept watch
over
him. No official duty to guard him now. He was nothing anymore.

June evenings can almost restore your hope for the earth and for mankind. There are so many fragances, coming from the girls and the trees, the air so beguiling you want to begin everything anew, to rub your eyes and believe that evil is only a dream and pain but a deceit of the soul. No doubt all that partly explains why I suggested to the former policeman that we go somewhere to have supper. He looked at me as though I’d spoken a profanity. Maybe raking over all these ashes had ruined his appetite. To tell the truth I wasn’t so hungry either, only afraid we would part too soon. But before I’d had time to order another round, Despiaux got up. He stretched his massive frame and smoothed his jacket with the palms of both hands. Then he straightened his hat and looked me square in the eye—with a slightly caustic glint I’d never seen in him.

“And you,” he said, his voice suddenly stern, “where were you that night?”

I sat there, dumbfounded. Clémence came very quickly to my side. I looked at her. She was as beautiful as ever, transparent but so beautiful. What could I say? Despiaux was waiting for my answer. He stood before me, his contempt growing as I sat there, looking back at him—and beyond him—into the emptiness where I alone could see Clémence. He pulled his hat down and turned his back on me without saying good-bye. He walked off. He went home to his regrets and left me to mine. No doubt he knew—as I do—that you can live in regrets as in a country.

XIX

It was Madame de Flers who led me to Clémence’s bedside. I recognized her instantly. She was from a very old family in V: high society, like Destinat. Her husband, the major, had fallen in battle in September 1914. I remember having had a cruel thought to the effect that widowhood would suit her like an evening dress, that she would use it to scale new heights at the prefect’s parties and the charity auctions. I can be extremely stupid sometimes, so harsh, no better than anybody else. For right away Madame de Flers, forgoing the luxury of sympathy, wanted to make herself useful. She left her grand house in V and came to our town, to the hospital.

People said, “She won’t last three days; she’ll faint when she sees the blood and shit.” But she did last, in spite of the blood and shit, her boundless goodness and unpretentious mercies making everyone forget her title and her fortune. She slept in a maid’s room. Her waking hours, her days and nights, were spent at the bedside of those slipping toward death and those crawling back toward life. For all the slaughter and mutilation, all its gutting, befouling, crushing destruction, war can also put some things to rights.

Madame de Flers took me by the hand. I let myself be guided by her as she apologized. “We have no more rooms, no space for anyone.”

We entered an enormous ward, where the air was full of groans and pervaded by a tart smell of pus and fresh dressings. It was the odor of injury, of pain, and of wounds—not that of death, which is more distinct and horrible. There were thirty beds, maybe forty, on each an oblong form that you could see move a little sometimes, disrupting the uniformity of so many men wrapped like mummies. In the center of the room, four white sheets hung, describing a sort of alcove, light and undulating. That’s where Clémence was, surrounded by soldiers who couldn’t see her and of whom she was probably unaware.

Madame de Flers pulled back one of the sheets. She lay there facing straight ahead, her eyes shut, her hands peacefully arranged on her chest. She might have seemed a corpse already except for the stately slow breaths that made her chest swell but left her features impassive. There was a chair near the bed. Gently, Madame de Flers seated me. As she laid her hand on Clémence’s forehead and stroked it, she said, without looking away, “The child is fine.” Then she added, “I’ll leave you now; stay as long as you like.” And pulling a sheet aside as they do at the theater sometimes, she vanished behind that translucent whiteness.

I remained there all night long. I never stopped looking at her, but I didn’t dare speak for fear of being overheard by the wounded who flanked her and would take no comfort in the words of a loving husband. I laid my hand on her to take in her warmth and to give her mine as well; that’s how I persuaded myself that she felt my presence and would draw strength from it, the strength to return to me. She was beautiful still. Perhaps a little paler than when I had left her the night before, but sweeter as well, as though the deep sleep in which she wandered had dispelled all causes of unrest, all the worries and pains of day. Yes, she was beautiful.

I will never have known her ugly, wrinkled, and hunched. For all these years I’ve lived with a woman who’s never grown old. My back is bent, I cough and splutter, I’m broken down and wrinkled up, but she remains unwithered. Death has left me that sense at least, which nothing can take away—even if time has robbed me of her face, so that I must struggle to see it again. Now and then, by way of reward or perhaps taunt, I’m granted a glimpse, in the gleams of the wine I drink or the glare of early morning.

All night long the soldier to Clémence’s left, hidden by the sheet, made himself present by babbling a story of which I could make neither head nor tail. Sometimes he hummed, sometimes he grew angry, but he was never still. It was not clear whom he was addressing: a pal, a relative, a sweetheart, or just himself. A feverish jumble of subjects—the war of course, but also tales about inheritance, meadows to mow, roofs to patch, a wedding feast, drowned cats, trees covered with caterpillars, an embroidered trousseau, a plow, altar boys, a flood, a mattress lent out and never returned, wood to chop. This chatterbox was constantly reshuffling the moments of his life and dealing them out again by the luck of the draw, just the way life dealt them to him, I suppose. From time to time he repeated a name, Albert Jivonal, with a force and clarity such as one might use to answer an officer. I suppose it was his name and that he needed to say it to remind himself whose story this was.

His voice was like the solo instrument in a symphony of the dying—the heavy breather’s timpani, the groans of strings tuning up, the wheezing woodwinds of the gassed, the piccolo of a madman’s laughter—and, above it all, the song of Jivonal. His song became ours as I watched over Clémence, the two of us enclosed, it seemed, in the forecastle of a gauzy ship, drifting on the river of the dead.

Toward morning Clémence moved a little, unless it was fatigue that produced this mirage. All the same, I believe her face turned toward me. What I’m sure of is that she breathed a deeper, longer breath than she had up till then. Yes, there was this great breath, like a beautiful sigh, as at the end of some long anticipation; breathing this way, you show you expected it and you’re very happy it’s occurred. I laid my hand on her throat. And with that I knew. It’s surprising sometimes how you can know things without ever having learned them. I knew this sigh was the last. It wouldn’t be followed by another. I rested my head against hers. Remaining that way, I felt the warmth leave her little by little. I prayed to God and the saints to let me wake from this dream.

Albert Jivonal died shortly after Clémence. I didn’t know he was dead until he fell silent. And when his babbling could bother me no more, I hated him. I don’t know if it was rational, but I imagined that once he entered into death he would find himself right near her, waiting in some infinite line and seeing her a few meters ahead of him. So, yes, without knowing him, without even ever having seen his face—he’d suffered a chemical burn—I held his death against him. Jealous of a dead man. Wanting to take his place.

The day nurse came by at seven o’clock. She closed Clémence’s eyes; oddly, they had opened at the moment of death. I stayed until midmorning. Nobody dared tell me to go. I left of my own accord, later, alone.

Morning Glory’s burial took place at V the week after the murder. I wasn’t there. I had my own grief. I’ve been told the church was overflowing, that there were also more than a hundred people on the square outside, despite the rain. The prosecutor was there, the judge as well, and Matziev. The family, of course: Bourrache; his wife, who had to be held up on either side; and the little girl’s two sisters, Aline and Rose, who didn’t seem to understand fully or couldn’t bear to. There was also her aunt, Adélaïde Siffert, whose chin quavered like a ewe’s and who kept repeating all the way to the cemetery, “If I had known . . . if I had known . . .” Of course, you never do.

As for us, there weren’t many at the church. I say
us
because it seemed to me we still had only each other, even if I was standing and Clémence was lying in the oak coffin flanked by large candles, so I couldn’t see or feel her anymore. Father Lurant celebrated the mass. He added words of his own that were simple and right. Under his vestments, I could still see the man in underpants with whom I’d shared a meal and a room as Clémence was dying.

I’d been on bad terms with my father for a long time, and Clémence had no relatives anymore. It was just as well. I couldn’t have stood any of their embraces or pity. I wanted to be alone immediately, having understood that from this time forward my life would be that way.

We were six at the graveside: the priest, Ostrane the sexton, Clémentine Hussard, Léocadie Renaut, Marguerite Bonsergent— three old ladies who went to every burial—and me. Everybody listened with head bowed as Father Lurant read the final prayer. Ostrane rested his calloused hands on the handle of his shovel. I was looking at the landscape, the meadows that stretched toward the Guérlante, the hill with its bare trees and dirty-brown paths, the congested sky. The old ladies each threw a pathetic flower on the coffin. The priest made the sign of the cross. Ostrane started shoveling in the dirt. I was first to leave. I didn’t want to watch.

The following night I had a dream. Clémence was in the ground, crying my name. Sand and roots filled her mouth, and her eyes had no pupils anymore. They were blank and lifeless.

I woke up with a start, drenched, panting. Then I saw that I was alone in the bed. It had seemed such a small bed before. I thought of Clémence down there under the ground, on this her first night of exile, and for the first time since she died I cried like a child.

After that there were days—how many, I couldn’t say. And nights. I didn’t go out anymore. I resolved and then wavered. I would take down Gachentard’s rifle, put a round in the magazine, and stick the barrel in my mouth. It’s a miracle I lived to play this game so many days, when I was drunk from dawn to dusk. The house looked like a boar’s wallow and smelled of the grave. I drew my only strength from wine and brandy. At times I shouted and banged on the walls. Some neighbors came to visit, but their sympathy dried up when I started throwing them out. And then one morning, when I’d scared myself with the sight of my castaway’s face in the mirror, a nun from the hospital appeared at the door. In her arms she carried a little bundle of wool that stirred feebly. But that I’ll recount a bit later, not right now. I’ll tell about it once I’ve finished with the others.