Small Lives (23 page)

At last, regretfully, we walked among the tombs, we descended the steep path. Below, the whole village opened before my eyes, beautiful Chatelus, all slopes with big old houses, calm shadows, and moss; but this Chatelus was an illusion, the real one was behind us; the real one was the one Félix prayed for, worn out and unoccupied in Mourioux, gently disappointed, when he said, “when I go to Chatelus.” I took his hand, his scent of thick velour comforted me, and if he leaned over I felt his heavy breath on my cheek. Each time, my mother and grandmother showed me the school where they learned to read; memories came back to them, words, and with them, the dead, the dead little girls whose braids they had pulled and the playful dead boys who had courted them, the astonishing dead who had lived; they, too, had grown dark behind us. Often we went to Les Cards on the same day, and if the weather was good, we walked by the chestnuts, bristled in autumn, or the blazing gold broom in summer, along the bird-filled
paths. We arrived unexpectedly in holier lands, the lands of Les Cards that would be mine one day, I was assured lovingly and with something like fleeting pity, and Félix's emotion confirmed for me that these fields were of a different nature in which you had to see the bursts of broom as more vivid, the impatience of the grass as more intense. In the end, lively music danced inside me, my shadow made me drunk, the house appeared in its grove, its lilacs, its recounted past, the house that was already burying itself slowly under useless harvestless seasons and no longer enclosed anything within its empty walls but gnawing time; it did not matter. I would be grown up and have the money to restore it; I would prune the wisteria; in the little garden where Elise lamented over the brambles, I read a future of wallflower and hydrangea; here, children would play and the future would triumph; I would come there for vacations and would devote myself to cheering the old dead.

Félix was not lying; he is indeed in Chatelus; at a crossroads near Séjoux, in sight of a sleeping hamlet, no one points out the Gayaudon lands any more, where the grass is patient; the property was sold for a song to allow my insignificant existence to continue. The house remains to me; my love for it has not diminished. A dead wisteria despairs there; storms and my negligence have brought it all to ruin; the rare species that Félix had planted for me are collapsing one by one on the barns; there are sudden cracks and slow weathering; heavy winds toss drunken slate tiles at the sides of the chestnut trees, stagnant water collects where the living slept, portraits fall and in the backs of armoires, others smile in the dark at the neglect showered upon them; rats die and others come; patiently everything falls to pieces. Oh come now, all is well; the merciful angels pass over in slate
gray flight, shatter and are reborn in the blue air; by night, they brush aside the spider webs, near broken windows, moon after moon, they look at photos of ancestors whose names they know, suavely whisper and perhaps laugh among themselves, blue as the night and deep, but crystalline as a star; let them enjoy my uninhabitable inheritance; the miracle is consummated.

My sister was born in 1941, in autumn I believe, in Marsac where my father and mother held teaching positions; Marsac has a small train station and a large mill, the Ardour runs through it downstream from Mourioux; the Chatendeau, Sénéjoux, and Jacquemin families live there, who give apples as presents and grow old in their little gardens; when I was small I went there with my mother by bicycle; she was still very young, perhaps my memory retains her that way, gently pedaling one morning in a light colored dress, in the gold patches of high summer – and how alone she is, with that chatterbox son who rides too fast. Here, then, they conceived, him, the man with the glass eye, the man created fallible and accepting himself that way, the enigmatic one-eyed master of what legions of forgetfulness who may or may not still be alive, and her, the peasant girl from Les Cards, fallible in a different way and not believing that anything was owed to her, shy and gay, a child from the first and forever after. It was during the war, at the ends of roads, German columns rolled slowly past, gloomy and terrible, and the people from the hamlets watched them with exactly the same eyes as their ancestors watched great companies ride through, the troops of the Black Prince, ancient eyes, credulous and caught up in legend; the Maquis with its young ghosts roamed the woods,
crossed the switches, blew up the convoy trains and set off the alarms, shattering the night around Marsac. My mother had other worries besides that incomprehensible, noisy war in which you could not know who was lying; the one-eyed master paid court here and there, lied and yet no doubt loved her, drank; she awaited a first child without really believing it, she who still saw herself as a little girl at harvest time in Les Cards, upset or laughing at the little nothings that formed the weave of language there and made up a life: a moustache drawn with charcoal on a little face and nobody recognized you, how chocolate tasted better if you ate your snack in the big meadow in summer beside the spring, grandfather Léonard's tireless, knock-kneed mare bringing him home drunk from a fair – my God how funny he was, staggering under his goat-hair cloak, and goodness knows what else. Her time was approaching and in Les Cards the old woman crossed the old threshold and with her stick, set out walking, cut through the woods by Le Châtain where Antoine's great-niece, full of years and smiles, opened a can of sardines for her, then through Saint-Goussand and the shaded slope of Arrènes, and in her pocket she had the relic, the inexpugnable legacy of the Peluchets, their burden of powerlessness, their gris-gris midwife; and since it was autumn Elise trampled the new heather, the lofty foxglove, purple and crossed as the bishops, and since she was cheerful and without illusions, she smiled softly. Between Elise, the relic, and an old style country doctor, the child was born in the Marsac school. That daughter was named Madeleine.

She had big dark blue eyes – which came from Clara surely, married name Michon, maiden name Jumeau – and, they said as they always do, she would have been pretty. She was carried about Marsac, in the little
gardens where sweet peas played among the apple trees, the passing smoke plume from the trains called her, her hands reached out toward the distance and knew only how to gather the near; she was carried to Les Cards, the dense darkness covered her under the chestnut tree, she was set down for a moment on the old threshold and an obscure patois word overhead, mixed with the sky-bright wisteria, offered to her astonishment an angelic language echoed at a distance by the lucid Cézannian shadows, inhabited with calls, of woods still light in the late afternoon; those so-called primitive scenes that touched her did not have the time to disrupt the superb harmony. Maybe once she passed through Mourioux, but she was sleeping on the bus, or maybe her little cheek was laughing against our mother's cheek; she did not see the steep clock tower, the gilded signs and the eternal linden tree, the inexpiable childhood buried here of the rival she would not know, her brother. Félix's hands were too big and clumsy, she was frightened, and over her face that heavy, loving breath lingered; Eugène breathed in the same way and had hands just as big; Aimé took up her, one eye laughing, but the other was dark, distant and implacable as the heavens. Perhaps she had the time to observe that the males are powerless, all firm-handed but gripping only what is distant, not the diapers but the name, and that the flesh thoroughly bores them, the forever restless flesh that they watch nevertheless and even try awkwardly to love, all caught up as they are in the task of adjusting the visible to their dreams and eventually turning that adjustment into a kind of intoxication, but inevitably they sober up, the infant cries, the mother is exasperated, they go out and gently pull the door shut; on the threshold, sobered, they indulge themselves in pathetic boasting, olympian and lost, they
look at their sky and their woods, once again become the angel, go off to drink. The child is sleeping when they return.

She did not know her name and the monster of inadequacy that is a name, and her own image had not yet concealed from her the world, which is for us only the wardrobe where our image clothes itself; she suddenly felt pain and did not know how to say that: the pain itself seemed to her no different from the universal harmony of which she formed one of the rests, like the too-blue sky, the mother returning, or the wholly black night, only more vibrant, more acute and close to an unbearable source, in the fever of a nursling whose wordless delirium, scalding with tears, is forever incomprehensible to us, as denied and perhaps as miraculous as the last tier of the choirs that encircle the throne of the Father. It was during the hottest days of June; an open touring car of that era arrived from Bénévent and Doctor Jean Desaix climbed out of it, two-tone shoes and light suit, useless and handsome as a priest; paternal, of the old style, he leaned over the crib in his bow tie, palpated that agitated flesh, interrogated it soundly; nothing answered him but the old, indifferent, unfathomable enemy; he wrote a prescription as a matter of form; breaking my mother's heart, the gleaming touring car made a U-turn in the courtyard gravel and roared off. The rest held for so long shattered; perhaps there was a hiccup or a flight of dead eyes; in exultation or inconceivable, unthinking terror the flesh withdrew from the summer and something bound itself more closely to the summer: Madeleine died on June 24, 1942, the day of Saint John the Baptist, in the immense heat that rose over Marsac, when the pure ether reigns in tyranny in the throats of the roosters, disperses in radiant tears, boils in the golden hearts of the lilies, and from there reflects back to the three times holy sun.

So once again the old couple came from Les Cards, and the other old couple from Mazirat, the former in their cart, the latter in their Rosalie; and perhaps each asked themselves what black blood had revolted there, what just vengeance had made only a mouthful of this little body, what peasant daughter of Atreus had been eaten. And mounting the steep slope of Villemony, Félix in his black hat, reins in hand, obstinate, abusing the horse, thought that it was the Gayaudons who made expiation there, and his own heedlessness, his old dragoon's taste for easy ceremony, chestnut mares, military accoutrements, roses, his harebrained agronomy that was already ruining Les Cards; and the old Mouricauds came back to life in Elise; the ancestor Léonard rose straight up from the shadows, disappeared in a jolt of the cart, muttered condemnations in a swarm of gold flies, the founder with the shriveled heart who had bought Les Cards, dime by dime, the man who, in his only portrait, held a wallet in his hand, seated like a patient, moustached iguana between Paul-Alexis and Marie Cancian, the son and the wife standing on either side, smiling, uncertain and blurred, posing for the glory of the tyrant alone, Léonard who loved gold and his mare and detested men; and from other shadows abruptly rose into the daylight the prodigal, renegade sons, Dufourneau the taciturn, and parricidal Peluchet, disheveled like John the Baptist, and in the undergrowth, the green Erinyes blew their hair from beyond the grave. From the other direction, in the already cracked rattle-trap of a car that I knew, passing near Chambon under the porch where the old men of the Apocalypse simply hold small harps, Clara knew that old Jumeau, the intractable master of the Commentry forge who starved men and ruined himself nonetheless, old man of the apocalypse and the foundry who had already cost the son an eye, received
this little corpse in posthumous debt to further darken the hell where he had bellowed for a quarter century; and as for Eugène who wept and was the most surprised, I do not know his thoughts; of the precarious inhabitants of the name I bear I know nothing beyond him, except that they were poor and busy, that the somnambulist women cleaned houses and caused scenes when they came home, and that the incapable men fled into bars and boasting, fled for good. Thus Eugène, inebriated, gentle, looked out at the yellowing wheat through the window, remembered, and he too discovered a lineage rich enough to produce this tender green death. Thus all the old sons of Adam arrived in Marsac, and perhaps, at the same time, upset and unsteady, they embraced one another, rough velour against rough velour, Felix's small brimming blue eye against Clara's dry blazing blue eye; under their thick soles the warm gravel rasped in the courtyard; there they are, going in through the door, it closes upon their well-known secrets and their clumsy griefs, these inept magi around a dead child. The summer laughs in the lindens, shadows bend over the closed door, everything gently changes.

Then, in that season of lilies, the wreaths of lilies woven by the school children, and in the Marsac church, the stifling white odor, depraved as the summer, the organ swell of the repulsive calyxes, suave, clerical, mixed with the rich mildewy odor of the old walls; the little casket floating over that
unda maris
, the young peasant woman leaning unsteadily on the arm of the one-eyed master; Elise all hunched over; the ritual pacings of the priest, the audience of root eaters, all things already said; and in the cart once again the little lily-covered ghost who is traveling laboriously along the lost paths toward the encounter with
her peers, the summer smiling on her, the swarms of gold flies lending her voice; and under the thick shadows climbing back up toward Arrènes, Saint-Goussaud, the founders, the saboteurs, lining the road again, those who once labored and were incarnate, Léonard, seated quietly under the Lavaux oak, who is counting something and does not lift his eyes, the Peluchets, changed into stones and stones even while alive, at the cross in Le Châtain, all the others amassed, and the blue of wisteria in Les Cards, which you see there in front of a neat and tidy house, and finally Chatelus, where the paths lead.

If somehow, should I write his name, Léonard roams about on the nocturnal paths, wallet jingling in his goatskin cloak, between the Lavaux oak and the heart of Planchat, if he has some business with the Beautiful Impassive Ones who dally in the ruins of Les Cards, who know everything and rejoicing in everything break into song; if he kindly tosses them old coins that ring on the threshold, as I at this moment toss them these lines; if a bit of him survives in me, just as the tales of descendency would lead us to believe, then he knows what follows: three years after that debauchery of lilies, Andrée and Aimé begat me; two years later, the one-eyed master, like a pirate, took to the open sea, and henceforth in that absence, more distant than those whose failure is confirmed “in Chatelus,” celestial, magisterially paternal, he reigned undivided, drumming out my hollow life like Long John Silver with his wooden leg pacing the rigged deck of his ship in
Treasure Island
. In 1948, the door in Les Cards was shut behind the routed Félix, the old vessel began to rot, rustling presences inhabited it; Elise and Félix died about 1970; the tomb in Chatelus is full, the moss-covered stone will never be opened again until the day of Final
Judgment, and I would like to believe that Elise, young and unbent, will emerge from it, a newborn girl in her arms; perhaps at that same hour in Saint-Goussaud, rising rejuvenated among the Pallades, the Peluchets, and other anonymous ghosts, I will know how I should have written in my lifetime so that, through the bombast that I deploy in vain, a little of the truth may come to light. In the meantime, my experience is almost that of a dead child without language; but I have no commerce with the angels.