Letters From My Windmill (11 page)

I was so overcome, I couldn't find anything to say. My silence troubled
him:

"Are you working?"

—No, Bixiou, I'm having lunch. Would you like to join me?"

He didn't reply, but I could see clearly from his quivering nostrils
that he was dying to say yes. I took his hand and sat him down beside
me.

While I served him, the poor devil sniffed at the food and chuckled:

"Oh, it smells good, this. I'm really going to enjoy it; and it will be
an age before I eat again! A sou's worth of bread every morning, as I
traipse through the ministries, is all I get…. I tell you, I'm really
badgering the ministries now—it's the only work I do—I am trying to
get permission to run a tobacconist's shop…. What else can I do; I've
got to eat. I can't draw; I can't write… Dictation?… But dictate
what?… I haven't a clue, me; I can't think of a thing to write. My
trade was to look at the lunacies of Paris and hold a mirror up to
them; but I haven't got what it takes now…. Then I thought about a
tobacconist's shop; not in the boulevards of course, I can't expect
those kind of favours, being neither a show girl's mother, nor a field
officer's widow. No. I'm just looking for a small shop in the
provinces, somewhere far away, say a spot in the Vosges. I will sell a
hell of a clay pipe, and console myself by wrapping tobacco in my
contemporaries' writings.

"That's all I want. Not too much to ask, is it? But, do you know what,
its hell on earth to get it… Yet, I shouldn't be short of patronage.
I have soared high in my time. I used to dine with the Marshal, the
prince, and ministers, all those people wanted me then because I amused
them—or frightened them. Now, no one does. Oh, my eyes! my poor, poor
eyes! I'm not welcome anywhere, now. It's unbearable being blind at
meal times…. Do pass me the bread, please…. Oh, those thieves! They
will make me pay through the nose for this damned tobacconist's shop.
I've been wandering through all the ministries clutching my petition,
for the last six months. I go in the morning at the time they light the
stoves and take His Excellence's horse around the sanded courtyard, and
I don't leave until night when they bring in the big lights and the
kitchens begin to smell really good….

"All my life is spent sitting on the wooden chests in the antechambers.
The ushers know who I am, as well—enough said. Inside the court they
call me
That kind man!
So, to get them on my side, to amuse them, I
practise my wit, or, in a corner of their blotters, I draw rough
caricatures without taking the pen off the page…. See what I've come
to after twenty years of outstanding success; look at just what an
artist's life amounts to!… And to think there are forty thousand
rascals in France who slobber over our work! To think that throughout
Paris, every day, locomotives make steam to bring us loads of idiots
thirsting for waffle and printed gossip!… Oh, what a world of
fantasists. If only Bixiou's suffering could teach them a lesson."

With that, and without another word, he pushed his face towards the
plate and began to scoff the food…. It was pitiful to look at. He was
losing his bread, and his fork, and groping for his glass all the
time…. Poor soul! He just hadn't had the time to get used to it all
yet.

* * * * *

After a short time, he spoke again:

"Do you know what's even worse? It's not being able to read the damned
newspapers. You have to be in the trade to understand that….
Sometimes at night, when I am coming home, I buy one just for the smell
of the fresh, moist paper, and newsprint…. It's so good! But there's
not a soul willing to read it to me! My wife could, but she doesn't
want to. She makes out that there are indecent things in the news
items. Ah-ha! these old mistresses, once they marry you, there's no one
more prudish. That Madame Bixiou has turned herself into a right little
bigot—but only as far as it suits her!… It was she who wanted to me
rub my eyes in Salette water. And then there was the blessed bread, the
pilgrimages, the Holy Child, the Chinese herbal remedies, and God knows
what else…. We're up to our necks in good works. And yet, it would be
a real kindness to read the papers to me…. But there you are, there's
no chance, she simply doesn't want to…. If my daughter was still at
home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the
Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed….

"Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on
earth and already she's had every imaginable illness… And miserable!
And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible … a real monster!…
What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my
responsibilities….

"Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family
business. And what's it all got to do with you?… Come on, give me a
bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the
public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense
of humour. They're all retired teachers."

I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by
something…. Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, glass in hand,
and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable
smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice,
as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,

"To the arts! To literature! To the press!"

And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the
most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain
could devise.

"Imagine a year's-end revue entitled
Collection of Letters of 186*
;
about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an
eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, hell in miniature, where you cut
your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the
bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve
to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old
baron T… of la Tombola going away with a
tut-tut
to the Tuileries
with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's
deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of
the delegate: the
Dearly missed! Poor dear!
over some unlucky soul
who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone
insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator
of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's
improvisation was about."

* * * * *

The toast over, his glass empty, he asked me what the time was, and
left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye…. I don't know
how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning;
but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never
felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life.

The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to
distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel
something good, real…. Good God! The hatred, the venom, the
unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That
wretched man….

Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the
giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt
something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting.
Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split
corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his
pocket of venom.

This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de Girardin's
cartoons. Rumour has it that there are some awful things in it…. I
was soon to discover the truth of it. The old over-stuffed wallet had
burst open as it fell and the papers inside fell onto the carpet; I had
to collect them one by one….

There was a package of letters written on decorated paper, all
beginning,
My dear Daddy,
and signed,
Céline Bixiou at the Children
of Mary hospital
.

There were old prescriptions for childhood ailments: croup,
convulsions, scarlet fever and measles…. (the poor little girl hadn't
missed out on a single one of them!)

Finally, there was a hidden envelope from which came a two or three
curly, blond hairs, which might have come from the girl's bonnet. There
was some writing on it in a large, unsteady hand; the handwriting of a
blind man:

Céline's hair, cut the 13th May, the day she went to that hell
.

That's all there was in Bixiou's wallet.

Let's face it, Parisians, you're all the same; disgust, irony, evil
laughter at vicious jokes. And what does it all amount to?…

Céline's hair, cut on the 13th May
.

To the Lady who wants pleasant stories.

I took your letter, madame, as an invitation to change my ways. I have
been tempted to shade my little tales a touch too darkly, and I
promised myself to give you something joyful, wildly joyful, today.

After all, what have I got to be sad about? Here I am living hundreds
of kilometres from the fogs of Paris, on a radiantly beautiful
hillside, in the land of the tambourine and Muscat wine. Around my
windmill, everything is sunshine and music; I have wind orchestras of
wheatears, bands of blue-tits, and choirs of curlews from morning to
midday. And the cicadas, and the shepherds playing their fifes, and the
dark haired young beauties laughing amongst the vines…. To tell the
truth, this is no place for brooding; I'd rather rush rose-coloured
poems and basketsful of spicy stories to you ladies.

And yet—I can't. I am still too near to Paris. Every day, even here
amongst my precious pines, it finds me with its ink-stained fingers of
misery…. Even as I write, I have just heard the lamentable news of
the death of poor Charles Barbara, and my windmill is plunged into
grief.

Farewell, curlews and cicadas! I haven't the heart for jollity right
now… For that reason, madam, instead of the pretty little tale which
I had promised, you will only have yet another melancholy story today.

* * * * *

Once, there was a man with a golden brain; yes, madame, a brain made
entirely from gold. At birth, the doctors thought he wouldn't survive
long, so heavy was his head and so oversized his skull. However, he did
live and he thrived in the sunshine like a lovely olive tree. Except
that his huge head went everywhere with him and it was pitiful to see
him bumping into all the furniture as he walked about the house….

All too often, he would fall down. One day, he fell from the top flight
of some marble steps and just happened to catch his head on one. His
head rang like an ingot. It could have killed him, but when he got up,
there was nothing wrong except there was a small wound with two or
three traces of congealed gold in his blond locks. That was how his
parents learned that their child had a brain of pure gold.

* * * * *

It was kept a close secret, and the poor little thing himself suspected
nothing. Sometimes he would ask why he wasn't allowed to go outside to
play with the other boys in the street.

"Someone would steal from you, my treasure!" his mother told him….
Then the little lad, being terrified of being robbed, made no complaint
as he went back to playing alone and dragging himself sadly from room
to room….It wasn't until he was eighteen years old that his parents
told him of this monstrous gift from fate. Since they had nurtured him
and fed him all his life, they told him that it was about time he paid
them back with some of his gold. The child didn't hesitate; he would do
it that right then—but how?

The legend didn't tell him. He pulled out a nut sized piece of gold
from his skull and placed it proudly onto his mother's lap…. Then,
dazzled by the riches within his head, he became maddened by desire and
drunk with power. So, he left the family home, and went out into the
world to squander his treasure.

* * * * *

By the way he was living his life—royally—and spreading his gold
around—lavishly—you would have thought his brain inexhaustible. And
yet it did become exhausted—as could be seen by the dullness in his
eyes and his pinched cheeks.

Finally, one morning, after a night of wild debauchery, the wretched
boy, alone amongst the debris of the festivities and the dimming
chandeliers, became terrified about the enormous hole appearing in his
ingot of a brain. It was time to stop. From then on, he was like a new
man. The man with the golden brain, went far away to live alone and
work with his hands. He became suspicious and timid like a miser,
turning his back on temptation, and trying to forget the fatal riches
that he no longer wanted…. Unfortunately, a friend, who knew of his
secret, had followed him. One night, the poor man was suddenly woken up
by an excruciating pain in his head. He jumped up frantically and
caught sight of
the friend
running away in the moonlight with
something under his coat…. Another piece of brain had been stolen!…

* * * * *

Some time later, the man with the golden brain fell in love, and this
time, too, it came out very badly….

He fell deeply in love with a petite, blond woman, who loved him a lot,
too, but who loved fripperies, white feathers, and pretty, gold-tinged,
tassels bobbling along the full length of her boots, even more. In the
hands of this cute little creature—half bird, half doll—the gold
pieces just melted away at her pleasure. She indulged every known whim,
and he could never bring himself to say no to her. He even kept back
the awful truth about his fortune to the very end, for fear of
upsetting her.

—Are we really rich then? she would ask.

The poor man could only answer:

—Oh, yes… very rich!

And he would smile lovingly at the little blue bird who was unknowingly
eating away at his head. Yet, sometimes fear took hold of him, and he
had a craving to hang on to what little he'd got, but then the little
woman bounded up to him and said: