Small Lives (22 page)

I left Caens under shameful circumstances. At the station where Claudette left me, we were both overwhelmed, hands restless, fearfully caught in something for which there was no way out. I remembered that she had waited for me here in the same place one night, in a long dress and makeup, an offering to the hard lust of the railroad workers, to the exhausted herd of men with brutal eyes, black, grasping hands, defeated by distant jobs and insulted by the luxury of a woman in a low cut dress, fresh beauty among the crumpled tickets and drunken servicemen. I was returned to that herd, I would no longer undo her underwear; she fled; the late summer evening sped over the bright
rails, the hot trains gleamed. I hesitated vaguely between several destinations; a joking or indifferent fate tossed the dice, I climbed onto a train car, the switches did the rest; I reached Auxanges.

There I met Laurette de Luy.

I must come to the end of all this. We are in the midst of winter; it is noon; low black clouds have just uniformly covered the sky; nearby, a dog is letting out its slow cry at regular intervals, very slyly, as if through a conch shell, which makes people say that it is howling at death; perhaps it is going to snow. I am thinking about the gay yelps of similar dogs on summer evenings, bringing home the herds in puddles of light; I was a child, the light was, too. Perhaps I am wearing myself out in vain; I will never know what fled and burrowed itself inside me. Let us imagine one more time that it was as I am going to tell it.

In my memories of early childhood, I am often sick. My mother kept me close to her in her room; she watched over me devotedly; unreal cries of children rose from the playground, spiraled up and disappeared
in the swallows' flights; logs were thrown onto the fire with a great crackling; or the fire was dying and in the last reddish glow appeared ghosts, dramatic and discernible at first, with whom you could play, then so thick you hesitated to name them, until they were anonymous and all one like the darkness perched on a child. The day returned and a new flame was born in the black skirts of stooped Elise who devised it by blowing on the cinders, then smiled gently at me in the coming light. I hope that I smiled at her as well. She left me, and then I discovered everything; I discovered space through the window, the weight of the distant sky along the road to Ceyroux, the great sky weighing equally on Ceyroux, which I could not see and which nevertheless, at this hour, stubbornly maintained its tiny will of roofs and living beings behind the dark horizon of forests. I summoned invisible, named places. I discovered books, where you can bury yourself as easily as under the triumphant skirts of the sky. I learned that the sky and books can hurt and seduce you. Far from servile games, I discovered that it is possible not to imitate the world, not to intervene at all, to watch it out of the corner of your eye making and unmaking itself, and in pain that can be reversed into pleasure, to experience the ecstasy of not participating; at the juncture of space and books was born an immobile body that was still me and that trembled ceaselessly in the impossible vow to adjust what I read to the vertigo of the visible. The things of the past are vertiginous as space, and their mark in the memory is deficient as words; I discovered that you remember.

It does not matter; pomposity had not yet spoiled me. I had a piggy bank, a classic, touchingly ridiculous, pink pig with which I played for a long time among the sheets, fascinated and with a kind of distrust. It had been fed a few small coins; that invisible wealth, allocated to me
in the name of who knows what obscure laws, but unusable, which I made jingle against those hollow pottery sides, what was it about it that seemed pathetic and perhaps brutal? I was all the more disappointed because there was another piggy bank in the armoire, infinitely more worthy of attention, forbidden, fantastic; it was a small fish of deep slate or flag blue, wriggling as it swam, and agile, with conspicuous scales that I could feel with my fingers when, in secret, I touched it. In
A Thousand and One Nights
, there are mischievous, intractable fish that speak, change into gold, and their barbels are magic; from its twilight of rough sheets, this one called to me long in a low voice, like another voice calls to a small turbaned fisherman over the Persian blue where waves throw genies in the tossing pebbles. I was not supposed to touch it. It belonged to my little sister. My little sister was dead.

Once – whether I was sicker, more wheedling and insistent than usual, or my weary mother had decided to trust me, I do not know – I was granted the right to play with the fish, too. The joy of seeing it relinquished to me soon gave way to a growing unease; this bank was different from mine. So that was how it was, my sister had become a little angel and had abandoned me here below, in this unusable world; she existed only on trembling lips and in a single inexpressive photo, coldly round-faced as a putto, while I had to linger on. Outside, the pure sky reigned, absently, one of my hands opened; the little fish fell to the floor and broke. My mother wept sweeping up the blue earthenware pieces that would never again take form except in her memory, and in my own.

Later, again in my mother's room on the occasion of another illness, and this time it was without a doubt winter, the hour when you inwardly debate if you should turn on the lights, carry on or give up,
exempt yourself once more, I made the acquaintance of Arthur Rimbaud. I believe, God forgive me, that it was in the
Almanach Vermot
, which Félix received each year, and which then offered, below the poor comic vignettes that were its trademark, trivial columns on literature, politics, or geography, all things that, even in rural villages, would soon be called “culture.” The article was accompanied by a bad photograph from late childhood in which Rimbaud was sulking as always, but seemed, if possible, even more closed, hopelessly obtuse, dressed up and disorderly as my schoolmates in our group photos, arriving heavily in the mornings from nights in the most remote hamlets, from Leychameau or Sarrazine, those fantastically lost places where mourning is more ineffectual, space emptier, and even the frost harsher on hands forever red and numb. I knew that stupid gentleness and those dark tics, we had shared the same bench. The title also attracted me, which I misread: “Arthur Rimbaud, l'éternal enfant,”
child
, when it was really, “l'éternal errant,”
wanderer
– I only corrected this slip much later, but, no matter. Yes, that grumpy flesh was as familiar to me as the awkward Ardennes childhood the journalist romanticized. I had other Ardennes out the window, and my father, if he was not a captain, had fled like Captain Frédéric Rimbaud; at the Mourioux mill, more forgotten than the ones in La Meuse, I had released fragile boats in May, had perhaps already released my life; the unmoving air drew tears from me; for sister passions I had pity and shame. Other points in the article left me perplexed but excited by the prospect of one day resolving these mysteries, of making myself worthy of the brusque model who had just been revealed to me; what then was this fierce poetry ill-matched to the tame recitations we droned school mornings in the
fire's first blaze, this poetry for which, it seemed, at great cost to them, you left your family, the world, finally yourself, and which, out of your love for it, you threw in the scrap heap, making you just like the dead and superlatively alive? Then too, Rimbaud had a sister who, despite everything, had loved him, had served him from afar, his protectress watching over him such a long way from Charleville in his last sweats and last repudiations; but the angel, nonetheless, was he himself. To him alone, grown boy although cut off from everything, out of all the epithets, an obscure journalist awarded
angelic
, which, until then, had seemed to me reserved for dead children – dead girls – for a faded sepia photograph, for something poignant and terrible under the earth that flowers appeased, there in Chatelus.

Alright, I would have to become an angel, one day, to be loved as the dead are loved. But if I delayed too long, who would love me then? I gazed at the fire in tears, I called to my mother, made her swear that my grandparents would not die. Today they are old corpses lying quietly beside the angel in her small box, a little below Chatelus; they no longer have eyes to see me grow wings; few flowers from my hand appease them, the seasons that unmake their old bones dull my will; I write grade school recitations and I know that one winter evening, in a room no longer remembered, between the thin pages of the
Almanach Vermot
that they too read, I set myself a trap, the jaws of which are closing.

As a child, I knew that other children died; but they had not preceded me in a magisterial flight, they were not just legend; I had rubbed shoulders with them and I knew that we were made from the same
clay; I doubted that they became, as I had been assured, full-fledged angels. Nevertheless everything changed with regard to them as soon as it became clear that they were going to die. From one day to the next, in their last hours, in what would be forever, they became horrifying hearsay, still alive. Elise and Andrée evoked them in low, plaintive voices, and I pretended to be playing, but I was listening in: what was this respect from which they, who yesterday had been nothing, suddenly benefited, these voices lowered at my approach as when they were discussing loose women, inexpiable debts, my loose and inexpiable father? Then a neighbor entered the kitchen more slowly or dramatically than usual, with a look that said everything, or Félix, invested with a brief grandeur, brought the peremptory news from the café; the winter was more vast or the summer more blue, the child was no more. In the blue trembling of the lilacs, in the snow that miraculously falls from nothing, I looked for incontestable flights.

A child in Sarrazine died of croup. It was astonishing that that gentle, archaic redhead, all steeped in the rural slumber in which his locality dozed, that numskull whom I had sadly pummeled, was henceforth part of the winged cohort, endowed with a body of thick air. Already cheated by life, was it enough to be cheated permanently by death in order to fly? My little cousin Bernadette from Forgettes had a terrible disease; I had often played with her and her sister under the huge tree, its foliage riddling their lost faces and bright dresses with dancing light, on the threshold of their enormous farm across from a great woods, and the counterfeit coin of memory returns them to me today in the guise of the little cousins, alternatively gay and austere, who appear and disappear in Gide's
The Narrow Door
as in a game of
hide-and-seek. No summer shade would assuage her again; she bled, she implored, she knew that she was dying. Elise who went by foot to watch over her and bore the summons of that terrified look, bore how this new, already null hand used an old living hand to cease to be, Elise came home in the mornings offended and mute, resigned. Finally the outcome became fatal, the child was an unbearable wound that had to be reduced to silence; Elise asked us that evening to leave the kitchen and go to bed immediately, she had to do something; for she knew old witchcraft, from other times, to stop the blood of women or quell the skies when thunder marches over the haystacks, to check the horned gods who kill off cattle by the dozens and make sheep turn in circles until they die, to delay the inevitable, that is, do something, as they say, in any fatal circumstance when there is nothing to be done; all that, which women had passed down to one another through the centuries and which Elise wisely did not pass down, was reduced to good-natured, ineffectual prayers, a few sprinklings of holy water from Lourdes, and a rudimentary pantomime that I never saw, but in which I believe struggled the goodwill of Elise, all bent and determined, frail, incredulous. To conjure bleeding, and no doubt through some mimetic decision, I know that my grandmother needed a great deal of water of which she controlled the flow, without really believing that that other red flow obeyed her, but bravely pursuing the metaphor, as one completes a task; thus that evening she offered mysterious libations, between the kitchen faucet and the formica table, to awkward, outdated saints. Leukemia was not easily taken in, it was not witchcraft, Elise knew that, of course; in Forgettes, the child died with great cries one morning as the sun danced over the enormous façade. She, too,
became an angel, or a tree stump, finally grown quiet in the Saint-Pardoux cemetery where the broom, bushes of golden rain, blazes in summer.

She was “that poor little girl” henceforth, as my sister was “your poor little sister.” In Mourioux in fact, as is perhaps generally true among those modest folk betrayed by these complacent pages, one avoids saying, “dead,” “deceased,” “departed”; even “late Mr. So-and-So” is rare; no, all the dead are “poor,” shivering who knows where from cold, from a vague hunger, and from great loneliness, “the dead, the poor dead,” more penniless than beggars and more perplexed than idiots, all disconcerted, wordlessly entangled in an irksome web of bad dreams; in old pictures, they wear such a terrible look when, in fact, they are so gentle, kindly, lost in the dark like little Tom Thumbs, forever the least of the least, the smallest of the small folk. That I readily understood; when we went to the Chatelus cemetery, I saw well enough in the dismay of the women, the heavy reprobation of Félix who took off his cap, that someone must really be suffering under there; someone who would have liked to be here and could not be, cruelly detained by something, like those distant cousins who write to you each year saying how much they want to see you again, but it is such a long trip, they cannot afford it, the millstone of their life keeps them ever more firmly fixed and grinds them down; finally shame silences them, you fall out of touch. I kept busy; I went to find water for the flowers; by hand I filled the pots with good soil, secretly buried my face in the chrysanthemums' dust of eternity; it was often winter; the church stood high on the high hill of the cemetery, the same gray, the steeple and the sky rushed headlong into my heart and the valleys
were like riches to the eye; how rapid my imagined flight toward them, how powerful the clean cry from a trampled branch, the visible bursting with laughter multiplied in the puddles; I wanted very much to be alive. But what had lived, now gone, greeted me again when I came back carrying my pitcher of water held at arm's length so as not to splash it on my Sunday trousers, and I was called back to order by the gravel acre that slow hands decorated with flowers, the handfuls of salt tossed as over a dead city, and in a crow's call the harrowing appeal from below, deeper than the salt and the flowers on which she darkly fed, the little mute girl, obscure and buried, my sister. But what, she was an angel too? Yes, the life of the angel was this misfortune. The miracle was misfortune.