Small Lives (12 page)

It is true that he was a bit off his rocker, Achilles, at the end. The wig sat slightly askew, sideways and sadly cheap, his wife was dead, the gay little flame no longer burned, an uproar sometimes completely overwhelmed him and without a word he waited for it to end, his
large naked eyes looking at something there in the distance, the former spouse's naked body perhaps. Wagging tongues, which lack imagination, said that he had taken to drinking; it is true that once, on the Bonnyaud square, under pounding rain on a bitter night, I saw him leaving the Café Saint-François hammered, gesticulating as he stiffly descended the steep Rue des Pommes, his oversized raincoat frolicking a little in time to his step which, that day, was trying out the ditty rather than the alexandrine, proudly thundering forth like a tipsy Verlaine, with his cape or raincoat flying out in the wind of his drunkenness. But these excesses were rare and surely not significant; he was a mild man, he lacked that seed of violence that regular drunks cultivate and make germinate monstrously each time they drink; above all, it was the gift that moved him, not the closed circuit that goes from the hand to the mouth and that, in this turnstile, egoistically exalts and hates itself, but rather the hand that opens toward another who takes. Thus he still offered books to Roland, but more and more often it happened that these presents, as though reduced to their sole function as a gift without concern for their specific content or their appropriateness to the recipient, missed their mark and made Roland blush, perpetually filling him with embarrassment. Thus he was already in his sixth year and no doubt drawing from the potpourri of celebrities in “pocket editions,” where, at that age, you do not know how to choose between Huysmans or Sartre – but this indecision itself flatters you and sanctions you in your desire to be adult – when Achilles presented him with an innocent Rosny's “wild ages” and an illustrated
Baron de Crac
; he had not seen the boy grow up.

In the following autumn, when Roland entered his last year and I
entered my fifth, there was no childish chorus and shower of chestnuts to greet the first annual performance of the slow, bewigged patrician; he had retired. He died that same year; and it is terrible to think that Roland, who was permitted special leave to go to the funeral, who, that morning in the dormitory put on the drab tie and taken-up suit toward this end, carefully combed his hair, shaved his shadow of a beard, who no doubt truly mourned for the only person he believed to have loved him, felt at the same time relieved at no longer having to be confronted with that sad mirror, to be dragging around that millstone, laughed at by the girls, to support that fallen father who was not the father of his brother Rémi, but whom he had nevertheless somehow shared with his brother for so long, the two of them flanking him in functions ideally opposed, as in cathedral images, the poor human soul between the devilish rabble-rouser and the too-stuffy angel. Thus he buried him, regretted him, and rid himself of him. In the little house on the road to Courtille where Roland had so often eaten the daft Madame Achilles' cakes, under the kind, sententious eye of the old master, I wonder what became of the only property Achilles valued, all those heirless books. I wonder in what auction room, what attic, they are turning to dust, or in what cellar they are rotting, lying in repose like the dead, except that any friendly hand can bring them back to life, those simple books that he still meant for Roland and had not had the time to offer him, and the other books, pompous, artlessly humanist and tautological, with which he promised to amuse himself in his final years. But perhaps in heaven, the old authors, the true ones of whom we are always unworthy, and their intercessors, the gentle, goateed
exegetes of the 1900s, speak their texts to him themselves, in a voice more alive than the voices of the living.

As for Roland, he suspected that authors do not speak in live voices; he remained in their interminable silence; he sank even more deeply into the vortex of those pasts that no one has ever lived, those adventures that seem to have happened to others but that have never happened to anyone. As a small boy, enchanted or uneasy, he had learned one day that in Megara, in his modern style gardens, Hamilcar had held a feast; following after two semi-twin enemies, one black and the other brown, who lust after the same princess, he lost himself forever in that country of the literary past tense, “where they crucify lions” in the simple past, that country that did not exist and that nevertheless bore the very real name of Carthage, which is in Livy. From then on, his life strayed into the simple pasts – I know because I am the same. Now, he learned that Emma eats the brotherly sugar-colored poison with two hands, that Pécuchet belatedly adopts a semblance of a brother to love him and envy him in the semblances of studies, that the devil takes all forms of the brother to bring Saint Anthony under his heel. When he raised his head, when the beautiful simple past tense of literature dissolved into what the eye at that instant sees, into the leaves that move and the sun that reappears, the invincible present was always there in the form of Rémi, the contemporary of things, the one who suffered by things themselves, Rémi, who tumbled the girls and who looked at him, laughing; and into that laughing present that Roland only knew how to approach with his fists and his broken tooth, he threw himself, he indulged himself in yet another fist fight; maybe
that was enough of real life for him. After preparing for philosophy in his last year, he ended up studying literature at a university, in Poitiers, it seems to me.

Thus Rémi remained at the lycée in G. for two more years, rid of Roland or vaguely widowed. In those windswept corridors, in that ghostly playground where the boys had grown up in the lightning flash of seven years, in the pompous alley of lampposts on Sunday evenings, he must have often crossed paths with another young redhead in a shortened suit, but who no longer used his fists, perhaps Achilles as well, sometimes. It was in those years that we formed a small gang, Bakroot and Rivat, Jean Auclair, the older Métraux and myself. We had in common a taste for appearances and the secret shame of appearing only as what we were; we showed off; on Thursdays, we threw ourselves at the girl show-offs, not knowing that they were like us, puny and starved, but full of laughter. Not one among us had so much good fortune – I am speaking of the trembling, greedy grasping of rough young hands, of painful unreleased desires hours on end fused to another desire in a skirt, of pretexts for exquisite heartaches and inept poems scribbled down in study halls – nobody bore so many lovesick looks as the younger Bakroot. We made much of this philandering, jokingly or sentimentally, depending on our mood; as for Rémi, he no longer spoke of it, his only worthy audience, or the one to whom his pleasures were dedicated, henceforth being too far away to hear him or receive his offering. Of course he still had his ever growing collection of photos, but he inventoried them gloomily and with a bit of nostalgia already, as an impatient king, condemned to peace by a quietist climate, reviews his troops for the hundredth time, not
a gaiter button missing, but what good are they when the enemy has demobilized and is kissing his women, his throne and duties far from the bugle call. But when, every fourth Sunday, he took the rattling blue and red bus that drove past the great fallen stones in the cropped grass, past Saint-Pardoux, Faux-la-Montagne, Gentioux, carrying its freight of peasant women and schoolboys to Saint-Priest-Palus, Saint-Priest where, perhaps, the other one would be, the one whom, around us, Rémi no longer called anything but “the Idiot,” he was jubilant as a lover before a rendez-vous.

In the classroom, the younger Bakroot was brilliant – it is true that his brother had been gifted as well, in his own, duller and almost absent way. Rémi had no fear of the world, which is an indefinitely expandable collection of words with improbable connections, in which the scholarly disciplines arrange themselves, who knows why, into one particular pattern rather than another, the little words growing close to the ground for botany, the considerable luster of words fallen from the stars for optics, and the words for optics suspended over the words for botany for French literature; thus Rémi used to favor spinning tops one day, fishing floaters the next, and the following day, realizing that floaters and tops, having the same form, can only be a single set despite their differing functions, he combined them. He knew all those erratic, tyrannical rules that allow one to master the present; he could also use the simple past, in which poor Roland had foundered, but he attributed to it no virtue other than that of impressing a purist teacher. He cobbled together Latin and mathematics perfectly; he knew how to manipulate and slyly vary the beautiful lures that, in a French composition, entice and hook tired teachers, those poor gullible prey; they,
too, went into his pocket. And then, as we know, he liked trinkets, those painful little fetishes in which the thing appears whole even in its absence; he was not like Roland in having the presumptuousness to claim to arrive at an ever unverifiable essence; he was afraid of being badly dressed; the corny shako and scarlet epaulettes captivated him; he prepared for Saint-Cyr, and was admitted.

He wrote a few letters to me from there, as well as to the other members of our little dispersed gang. But I only saw him again once, in full dress uniform, and then he was dead.

It was during Christmas vacation. In a university where I had not encountered Roland, I hesitated between the simple past and the simple present, and certainly I preferred the latter although I already knew that my excessive appetite for it would condemn me to the other, the skinny, scowling, anorexic one. Those Christmas vacations I spent in Mourioux; one of the gang informed me that Rémi was no longer alive; the older Métraux came to get me in his 2cv for the funeral. He knew nothing of the random fate that had struck and stopped Rémi in his tracks, and which sent the two of us off to Saint-Priest-Palus in the ramshackle 2cv.

It had snowed heavily that year; it was no longer snowing, but deep drifts, as eroding and leveling as time itself, and as gray, softened the inclines of this sloping terrain. When, near Faux-la-Montagne, we approached the plateau of fallen rocks and broken-masted pines over which the rapid clouds always foment some loss, that disastrous plateau next to which old Saint-Goussaud himself seems cheerful, the drifts grew deeper; the base of the rocks disappeared, their old anger
capitulated, and, grumbling under the verminous lichen, more shipwrecked than ever, their inverted keels floated in that dirty motionless sea under a dirty sky. Our wheezing vehicle drove close between those fallen monsters like Melville's whaler, and without Saint Elmo's fire at our masts or, on the hood of the 2cv, a ferocious but perhaps tractable Parsi god. Within, we reminisced, Métraux sang the little gang's refrain (it had been a century ago), we did not admit to what we were already becoming. Then we said nothing more. We arrived ahead of schedule in Saint-Priest-Palus.

The Bakroot farm, which we had pointed out to us, was a short distance from the village and half in the woods, at the so-called Camp des Merles: a dwarfish residence for potato eaters under the eternal colossal gray; the snow melted from the roofs drop by drop; opposite, on the other side of the road, a modest masonry shelter – of an annoying gray with notices for dances held in villages with impossible names – indicated a bus stop. I thought that was where the red and blue Sunday bus stopped, and that a young boy with a sardonic chin used to leap from it to go do battle with his old history, the oldest of his adventures. I also thought that most likely they often went together, on foot, to the dance at Soubrebost or Monteil-au-Vicomte, walking off side by side, Saturdays after soup, down that road, looking gaunt in their suits and ugly ties, shoulder to shoulder and sometimes brushing against but never looking at each other, with abrupt, irascible steps, till they got to the back room of the café, sinisterly spruce in its Sunday best, shaken about as in a feverish dream by brass and accordion, where they appeared in the doorway at the same time, same chin and Batavian pallor, same Flemish madness, same short mop of badly cut hair, but
not the same eye for the girls or the same hand under their skirts, not the same tongue, and in the sweaty, misled, festive room, the little Don Juan captivated the shepherd girls while the other watched, for the other who stood passionately against the wall until morning; and, returning in the dark to Camp des Merles, the younger one with the scent of girls on his fingers and the older one perhaps with the marks of his nails in his palms, again neck and neck, again walking with one furious step, they stopped suddenly like a single being and, without consulting, beat the hell out of each other for the night alone.

On the long table in the smoky kitchen, between the pot of coffee and the bottle of wine – those noble, violent liquids that farm folk think must ratify, by the heat that passes from mouth to body where the soul enjoys it, a naïve belief in life for those who come to honor the dead who are no longer thirsty – was laid out a collection of shakos, the headgear of uhlans or of Andersen's small soldiers from other winter debacles. There was no one there, a fire sparked; we pushed open another door into a damp, icy back room where candles were burning. And there he was; on two chairs the open coffin awaited him, but he was taking his time as he always had, inspecting his bric-a-brac or enticing the girls, and of course it was necessary that all these gawkers see him for a bit in uniform. Nevertheless, as far as can be judged by that final rigidity which is a much more perfect uniform, by an anonymous mannequin from which the soul, the bearing and style, the little gesture of the fingertips that brings a cuff back down to the wrist, and all the tiny flattering cambers had disappeared, I would have sworn that he had worn it badly, his uniform; after all, he was just a Flemish peasant boy weighed down with a Hidalgo sword. Standing at attention,
the big chin must have been a little comical and spiteful in knowing itself to be so, a Pétainist, ready to go wrong; perhaps it was just as well that the red pants were slumped there, over the big peasant quilt, and that the intensely soot black tunic, a darkness gleaming slightly in the candle flame, existed only to remind me of the black armor of the Téméraire, inoffensive in the end, stretched out in Nancy.