Small Lives (20 page)

I liked the nurses, optimistic fellows, with whom I played cards; from them I learned what Thomas's passion was. He was a pyromaniac, and his victims were trees; often at the height of the dry season, my nurse chums had to run here and there about the grounds with fire extinguishers. In any case, they took the whole thing philosophically;
they were cheerful types, nothing surprised them any more; and truly charitable, I believe, in their laughter; the interlacing of so much wild, infinitely relative speech had purified them, in contrast to the doctors who assumed a statutory right of inspection over those words; and they were to the psychiatrists what a Marx Brothers movie would be to the culture section of a weekly newspaper: not serious, wicked, and helpful, touching upon the essential. I laughed with them over Thomas's difficulties, Marx brother with the matches, slipping out in the night, hands sweaty like a lover or an assassin, pursued by his cronies dying with laughter behind their garden hoses. But we knew of course that it was not so simple; Thomas may have felt infinite pity, for everything and everyone; when his pity suffocated him, so that no tears or anguish could accommodate it, he sought relief by joining, for the brief time of a fiery enactment, the executioners' camp. I imagined him, facing the crackling exorcism, flaring his nostrils at the odor of glowing fir like a god breathes in a burning sacrifice, the face of the little clerk lit with violence in all the glory of a Lightning Bearer; he was the rabbit bewitched by headlights, he was the lampbearer who beats it to death, and panic-stricken between those two interchangeable roles, terrified by their interchangeability, he trembled when those fellows brought him back to his room, joking around, motherly. As to the rest of it, yes, he felt pity for this world deprived of grace since the beginning of mortal species; no doubt he wanted it released from suffering, beyond all melodrama, extinguished; in his eyes, all creation was pitiable; Nature become natural had not pulled it off. That was his way of considering the lilies of the field.

One January Sunday, the bright dawn through my window made
me rise early; under the same rising sun, schizos and fakers, and those who were both, passed one another in the dining hall with their steaming bowls, and sitting down, slowly brought their mouths to them, overwhelmed by the void of the day; many were in their Sunday best. Thomas was among them. Jokingly, he urged me to go along to mass with him. I was evasive; I had not attended mass for years; I was and still am an unconvinced atheist; moreover I would be bored there. I did not mention my primary reservation; the shame of going into the village with that unruly mob. Having understood me and looking me straight in the face, he then said with painful modesty, “You can come, you know; we are the only ones there, at mass.” We, fools and imposters, shirkers of all kinds. I blushed, went to change my clothes, and rejoined Thomas.

We made a fine procession, flanked by a nurse like a gang of convicts with their guard; they were numerous, all the possessed and the heresiarchs, dragging ball and chain, mitred in yellow, on their way to the True Cross. In front, a few of the profoundly moronic walked more quickly, too quickly as they all do in their eagerness to attain an always elusive end; their dancing breath flew ahead, they disappeared around a bend, their jabbering faded into the woods, harmonized with the chirping of purer creatures in the frost; then out flew birds, and again the limping herd appeared with their stupid invectives, their laughter and astonishing words, as the breathless nurse drove them back toward us. At the end of the pitiful procession, I walked between Jean and Thomas, between a cranky sectarian of the eternal resurrection of the Mother, and a somber Cathar imputing the bungling of creation to some drunken grandfatherly Yahweh, me, a beggar for diffuse
Grace, perpetual son in the omni-absence of the father and the flight of women, I was going to celebrate the eternal return of the Son in the bosom of the Father and his eternal bloody diffusion in the bosom of his creatures. So be it, in less clement times, a pretty trio for the stake. All that under the thin, cold silver laughter of a January sun.

We were drawing near; the roofs glinted, the village appeared to us in its small valley; in the widening space, the little church tower bell rang out. Doctor C and Thomas had spoken the truth; the joyous, sad pealing invited no one to the sadness of the sacrifice, the joy of rebirth; there was no one on the square or the church steps; from all the blue expanse that it stirred in vain, each Sunday morning, the Saint-Rémy bell called no other flock but this vague herd which, jostling, tripping over each stone and each word, descended heavily through the narrow streets, made the square ring with its frivolous galloping, surged sniveling under the porch. The hollow bronze, the lofty, radiant bronze sounded until we passed through the door; under the bell tower, the priest in ordinary chasuble flew with the rope, busy, serious, dancing.

We settled ourselves noisily; the bell lurched a few more times, then fell silent. For us alone, the priest had sedately danced with its rope and having assigned that divine voice the task of greeting us, now quieted it; moreover, it was unwise to subject the nave, considerably damaged, to that intense swinging; the very simple framework was stripped bare above the chancel, where the light from above streamed in; a black wooden beam bathed in the guileless heavens; rubble obstructed the door to the sacristy and behind the altar, a vast crack opened to the touching blue of the sky. The plaster saints had been hooded to weather the damp nights that reigned under the vaults as in a forest;
the altar was draped with thick tent canvas of a faded green. Maintaining his unhurried seriousness, the priest uncovered a few saints, among them Saint Roch the Healer in breeches and homespun smock, who displayed on his thigh the anthracic sore shared with cattle and sheep, and Saint Rémi the Bishop, erudite confessor of the old Carolingians; the priest wore what might have been a modest smile, full of unfathomable humor, plugging in a useless heater in that nave open to all winds. Finally he seized a corner of the canvas, glanced toward the congregation, and Jean, perhaps responding to a ritual repeated each Sunday, rushed forward, took the other end, and they rolled it back; thus during a halt, Moses called the worst simpleton of a camel driver from the tribes of Israel, and accomplices for a moment, together they set up the tent for the ark. In this desert, the tabernacle appeared. Bandy climbed the steps and began.

Like so many years earlier, I could only become bitterly enraptured; I was stupefied, I was reassured. Everything foundered, but the shipwreck had an intractable propriety about it; the sovereign pomposity of the gesture and the word had sovereignly fallen away, the mediocrity of the diction was perfect, the exhausted language reached nothing and no one; the bloodless words were smothered in the rubble, fled into the cracks; like Demosthenes but with the opposite effects, Bandy had, as it were, filled his mouth with pebbles. The mass, it is true, was said in French, conforming to the reformed liturgy of the Council; but I knew well enough that in the past Bandy would have seen to it that his own language, passed through the sieve of an eddying, fatal diction, resonated like Hebrew; today he made it into an inadequate idiom, limpid and mechanical, not even patois, the vain, monotonous,
crude expletive of a Being not to be found, an interminable formula of politeness eaten away by centuries of use; he celebrated the mass as a scratched record plays in an empty hall, as a maître d' asks if you enjoyed your dinner.

All that without affectation and without irony, without the pretense of humility or unction, with a furious modesty. The mask was perfect and the effort of having only that mask for a face pathetic; the chasuble was like his Sunday best, he did not know how to manage the stole; he kissed the altar cloth with the awkward reserve of a best man from the country kissing a city bride in her makeup and low-cut gown. The saints named in the confiteor seemed painted plaster, the Virgin was the Good Lady whom my grandmother had revered; the allusions to the three persons of the Trinity, to their dark commerce in a strange round, were spoken too quickly and with a sort of embarrassment, as if he were sorry for having to tire the congregation with an incomprehensible formality. In that eviscerated nave and for that audience, a hard-working peasant, frocked by chance, wore himself out trying to rise to the occasion, a murderer of words, conscious of being one and rectifying it as best he could, only just capable, by force of habit and perseverance, of saying the mass correctly.

The idiots could not keep still – and nevertheless, curiously, they attended in their own way. They were interested in something, over there, near Bandy; this infinitely relative mass did not scare them off any more than a flight of grasshoppers in the fields, the vague murmur of trees, flies around overripe fruit; they cautiously approached the chancel, picking at the low grill with their vague, rapacious hands, craning their necks to see the outer wings tremble, listening to the
wind disclose the leaves. One of them was bold enough to touch the torn chasuble with the tips of his fingers. He came back running, laughing into his sleeve, intimidated by his audacity but proud of the exploit; the grinning nurse scolded him out loud; the wretch let out the proud laugh of the bad boy who is also top in his class.

The imperturbable priest blessed these apparitions, these unvanquished, despotic creatures, in the bankruptcy of the word.

Calmly he came toward us, his snowy eyes brushed us lightly, he began his sermon. It was the mass of the Epiphany, which has always commemorated the Adoration of the Magi; I remembered other sermons in which Bandy's words, triply royal and following a star, had evoked the wandering of caravan Kings and the lucidity of nocturnal skies that drew them along their way, the presumption of those bearers of myrrh mastered by the divine arrogance of the Word made child. He did not speak of the Magi; the surrender of the Kings to the Word incarnate no longer concerned him, whose golden speech had not swayed the mute, impassive Dispenser of all speech. He spoke of winter, of things in the frost, of the cold in his church and along the roads; that morning, he had picked up a frozen bird in the apse; and like an old spinster or a sentimental retiree, he felt pity for the sparrows stricken by frost, for the old wild boars devoured by hunger, frightened, and grunting painfully in the snow, that beautiful white sugar that brings starvation; he spoke of the wandering of creatures that have no star, of the obtuse flight of crows and the eternal fleeing of hares, of spiders making endless pilgrimages in the haylofts at night. Providence was mentioned for the record, perhaps ironically. All style had disappeared; the perfectly atonic sermon was stripped of all proper nouns, no more
David, no more Tobie, no more fabulous Melchior; sentences without periods, profane words, the silly propriety of cliché, the meaning obvious, the writing bland. Like a Great Author who would have once had his readers dancing “on the frying pan of his tongue” in vain, never winning through them the favor of the Great Reader on high, he turned henceforth to the most ill-favored, those scared off by all reading, with everyday words and themes from popular songs; God was not necessarily a Difficult Reader; his listening could be modeled on the vague ear of an idiot. Maybe like Francis of Assisi, the priest would have liked to speak only for the birds, the wolves; because if those beings without language had understood him, then he would have been sure that he had indeed been touched by Grace.

Crows and wild boars moved the idiots; they burst out laughing, randomly seized upon one of the priest's words, tried it out again in various tones; the nurse bawled them out; in this mayhem, a few impassive schizos meditated contemplatively as always, lost in their angelic attributes, absence and enigma. Next to me, a bitterly delighted look on his face, Thomas regarded the corner of the sky caught on the blackened beam; the angel from an Adoration of Dürer bore down on him from afar, or the abject worms of a Temptation, with the disheveled flight of the sparrows. About all this was something vaguely shameful, unmentionable, almost the very worst. The priest took up his mass again; he consecrated the bread, the Son appeared, the crackpots shifted restlessly; the church door opened with a crash; on the threshold, breathing heavily, an Aztec god contemplated the True Body of Christ.

The nurse rushed over, evicted the rogue in short order; beside
himself with rage but terror-stricken, Jojo let out stealthy moans as he was led away, like a beaten dog. The priest had turned around; he was smiling.

Late in the stifling August of 1976, I was passing through the small town of G., in search of books; no Grace had come to me, and feverishly I consulted all Writings in vain to find the recipe for it. I ran into a nurse from La Ceylette; he told me about the people I had known there: Jojo was dead, Lucette Scudéry dead; Jean was most likely confined for life; Thomas, who was released from time to time, punctually responded to the call of the trees, delivered them by fire, and found himself committed again. “And the priest?” The nurse laughed sadly; he told me the following which had happened just the week before.

On that Saturday, Bandy had been drinking with the farm workers who had just threshed the wheat; when the Hôtel des Touristes closed, libations continued at the presbytery; very drunk, the companions went their separate ways at the break of day, making a great racket in Saint-Rémy. On Sunday morning, the usual procession left from La Ceylette; at the deepest part of the Puy des Trois-Cornes forest, the residents recognized the priest's moped leaning against the roadsign with the leaping antlered figure. Jean shot off into the woods, the nurse at his heels; at the edge of a nearby clearing, covered by the ecclesial shade of a beech tree against which he seemed to be sitting, collapsed in the thorn bushes and rumpled ivy, clutching the ferns, his rough blue cotton shirt open over his ivory chest, the priest, his eyes wide open, was looking at them; he was dead.