Small Lives (8 page)

When I was in high school, the visits became less frequent; they were getting old, Clara could no longer drive; they still came a few times at the end of the fifties, but the ritual was broken. By then, “I knew”; at their coming, the sky was no longer veiled in crepe, I no longer heard all of nature at work nailing a coffin shut; there was no one to mourn over. And then too, they were no longer alone; they took advantages of the visits their son, my Uncle Paul, made to Mazirat by having him drive them; the car had changed; still old for that period, it was, I
believe, a Juva, but the highly preposterous, funereal jalopy of the past had gone to the salvage yard, or slept under cobwebs in a barn, like a coffin in a tomb. As for the gift box ritual, the same old hands, more tremulous, pulled out the same old knickknacks, more cracked, but I knew that they came from back shelves and Clara knew they no longer excited me. I had other things on my mind, drunk on my success at school, which I considered more important than these ridiculous old people: life would be beautiful, I would be rich and never get old.

I went to Mazirat three times, twice while the old couple was still alive; and beyond that, I did not see them again. The house was ordinary, roughcast plaster, lost in the center of the village along a modest main street across from the school; I confirmed the odor that used to rise from the old Rosalie's interior when they climbed back into it Sunday evenings, sorry and unsteady. I breathed in the sourness, the dust, the shapeless discomfort to which excessive old-age denies even the last vain satisfaction of apparent cleanliness. There I recognized their simple feelings and their irreparable solitude; they were gentle people and would die in distress; I knew that I ranked among those responsible. There I rubbed shoulders with the absences that ate away at these walls, the insatiable past and the ungrateful sons of ungrateful time, my father, myself, and finally the whole world whose place we took, all ghosts for the two old ghosts, all absences they had once trailed along with them to Mourioux, that formed about them like a nimbus even the too-brief, too-rare presences of their dear absent ones could no longer dissipate. At Mazirat was the heart of that “dense absence”; there it was almost palpable; only the dead passed through the door,
and the old couple rose wide-eyed, tottering, clasped you in their arms as though to warm up those who could no longer be warmed by anything. They never reproached me; was I also a child?

Nevertheless, I was nearly twenty that morning when, with ill grace, I finally gave in to the exhortations of their letters, for years urging me to visit, and took the train to Mazirat; the station was some five kilometers from their village, and I walked the rest of the way. It was summer, the weather was fine, and I took pleasure in walking in the shade; as I went along, I composed a letter in my head to the too-tall brunette to whom I was then devoting my time, a bluestocking from a good family, with whom I maintained a correspondence, aside from our trite love affair, a correspondence we wished to be elevated and was, on my part at least, laughable pedantry. Already I was falsifying the account that I would give her of the approaching visit; I had to misrepresent much and lie a little, keep quiet about the discomfort, distress, and irremediable absence (we believed in Presence), pass over Eugène's nose, the tears, and the red wine, difficult items to conjure away, but not to be tolerated by the Platonic sect of the beautiful to which my friend belonged. And I tried makeup on their old faces that nothing could be done about, calmed their tremors, and filled in their silences, in order that their image would find favor with the frivolous Hellenist.

Thus betraying them, I arrived in Mazirat. The house was as I have described it; on a cabinet, a frame held photos of me at different ages, and Clara told me that my father cried when he saw them. I looked at another, symmetrical, in which there were photos of Aimé. The absent mourned for one another in this house of absences, communicated
like mediums through portraits, worm-eaten tables, smells; on that cabinet, our effigies addressed one another like two commemorative stones, exchanging the same ostentatious messages, stripped of reality, spun over a tomb; and far from this touching, sinister face-to-face encounter, we were both living, no doubt, but we were living forever separated. Like a magic amulet, our ghostly meeting here reminded us, wherever we were, that each of us carried within him the ghost of the other, and was, for the other, a ghost; we were for one another both corpse and poster image. No doubt the sun played over a gilded wooden frame; I raised my head; from the window I could see the three bright colors of the flag hung from the town hall tympanum in preparation for the Fourteenth of July; roosters crowed in the neighboring yard; Clara was standing, thin and death-like; her large, loving eyes were fixed on me.

Soon my grandfather took me to the café; once again I can see his oafish silhouette dancing along the road in the glory of summer, I can feel his hand on my shoulder and “his old arm in mine.” He was proud but bewildered to be drinking with me, whom he introduced to whomever would listen as “his grandson,” cherishing this word that he repeated indefinitely, obtusely and gently, still murmuring it as he brought the glass to his lips, tasting it with the wine; because he could not convince himself of this striking bond of kinship, and clearly saw that I did not believe it, perhaps hardly cared about it; I could not, at the same time, be the frame of tragic portraits and this inanely smiling presence, already a little blurred, of amorphous smug youth. So, with his soft litany, he was making note of the pleasure he had to feel if he wanted to remember it, and, in the days that followed, entering the
café and recalling that not long ago I had been there and was no longer there, to say, “Did you see him? That was my grandson,” substituting the grace of the past imperfect for the ever despoiling, disappointing present. We emptied many small glasses at that old copper bar, gleaming in my memory like everything else from that summer day, and as we left the café, I was bedazzled by an obscure drunkenness as well as the illustrious sun.

I remember little of the evening, when hands grasped mine, when eyes misted over with grief and affection. No doubt Eugène and I went out for a last little drink, for which, no doubt Clara, half joking, reproached him, whom she openly called an “old scarecrow.” Our footsteps scattered the last birds, the stars shone over our heads, outlined our provisional shadows that a passerby saw and forgot. I was given a bed in a musty little room, with a white coverlet, a pink eiderdown quilt, a window cramped and cool as van Gogh's in Arles; and here, too, as in Artaud's description, hung “the old peasant gris-gris,” rough towels and holy boxwood. My grandmother had arranged some flowers, zinnias perhaps, in a chipped glass – all the good vases having gone, one after another, year after year, into the insatiable boxes of odds and ends meant for me. In the morning, Clara came to wake me; hardly had I opened my eyes before she slipped a hundred franc note into my hand, giving me, along with the daylight, what she knew that, as a student, I was most often lacking; she smiled; something took place then that was very nearly an event, and my memory retains it as such: had I dreamed of glory, of exquisitely satisfied love? Was I overjoyed by a ray of sunlight? Had the uncertainty of awakening made me mistake the pictorial memory of another bedroom for delight at finding
myself in this one? Light penetrated my spirit, an inexplicable surge swept through me; transported, I reached out my arms and I wished my grandmother good morning so sincerely that it overwhelmed me. After all these years, I know that in that single moment, dawning and intact, I loved her gladly; in that jubilant instant, she appeared to me in the simple affirmation of her presence, not at all overshadowed by grief, or ghostly, but steeped in suffering and joy as I am, as everyone is; in that moment of lucidity, I lifted from her the affront that made me experience her as weighted down, hollowed out by the absence of my father. More than the conduit for an absentee god, the altar where the perpetual flame of that absence burned, she was a woman grown old, who had struggled and conceived, had fallen and gotten back up; and she loved me, truly, the most natural thing in the world.

My desire was to prolong that epiphany; getting dressed, I noticed everything with a kind of fervor; those zinnias were here as well, their direct colors and tough petals, hardy, determined, enduring; through the open window, the world came to me, green shade and blue sky visible on the horizon gold as a Byzantine icon. No one would have questioned the magisterial presence of the sun; but below, the room with the yellowing portraits dispelled that illusion of a world divinely revealed. The angels vanished into the golden distances and I remained among the mortals, two of whom were approaching their end; my father was not there; I left again that same evening.

I returned there one other summer afternoon, most likely the following year; once again it was a beautiful day; I was driving and my mother rode in the car beside me; I remember the pleasant trip we had, chatting, the austere tones of a Romanesque church in countryside
languishing under the weight of the wheat fields, a railway bridge lost in the green as in an illustration for a novel I had read as a child; the road curved wide to span it. I remember nothing of the afternoon we spent in Mazirat. I do not know if I saw the little bedroom again, or the portraits; the old couple might have just as well not been there. I must have witnessed their gestures, which for me were the final ones, and yet I do not know what they were; their last words are stolen from me forever, their farewells blown away behind a curtain of violent wind. Never will I remember the double silhouette on the doorstep, unsteady and apologetic, which they nonetheless offered to my ungrateful memory, wholly in the grave already and yet still waving a kind, heroic goodbye until their grandson's car had disappeared, blurred by tears even before the forest swallowed it up, at the final bend in the road.

Eugène died in the late sixties. I do not know exactly when or how it took place, but I lean toward the spring of 1968. I had other concerns, more urgent and noble than an old drunk's final round. On a stage imitating the forecastle of the
Potemkin
where romantic children played at being unhappy (and in some cases, as they would later learn, really were unhappy), I had a leading role. The burning sweetness of that May, the fever it raised in women, as ready to satisfy our desires as the obliging headlines of the newspapers were to flatter our self-regard, all of that roused me more than the death of an old man. What is more, we hated the family, as was then fashionable, and no doubt, made up as Brutus, I was solemnly declaiming libertarian clichés the day the old clown's blood clogged and made for him a victory mask, more crimson than ever, more wine-colored in the drunkenness of death,
which is the drunkenness of a thousand wines, and finally flowed back to his heart following the inimitable performance of his death throes. Alone, with just a few neighbors, Clara bore the buffoon's body to the grave. He died like a dog; and I take comfort in the thought that I will not die any differently.

A few years later, I was informed of Clara's hospitalization; the afflictions of old age tormented her and she did not want to remain alone with her ghosts in the little roughcast plaster house. No doubt, in a worn suitcase deposited in the back of an ambulance by other hands, she brought along just a few belongings, the scent of the old car I remember breathing in as a child, and the cache of absence from the portraits; she wrote to my mother, begging for me to come; I did not go. She sent a few more letters, always to my mother, one of which was the last; nevertheless, she was still alive, we knew. She did not write to me; for I was no longer a child, I had refused to follow Eugène's ashes, I was letting her die without a word. I was busy renouncing my childhood then; I was impatient to fill the void that so many absences had left, and using the idiotic thinking of the day for justification, I held those absences against those who had suffered from them more than I did. The barren desert that I was, I wanted to populate with words; I wanted to weave a veil of writing to hide the hollow sockets of my gaze; I did not succeed; and the stubborn void of the page contaminated the world that it completely evaded. The demon of Absence triumphed, denying me the affection – among so many others – of an old woman whom I loved. I did not write to her, she had nothing from me; no box of sweets arrived to mirror the ones that she, so patiently, so tenaciously, had once brought from the old
car to the dining room. At last, she died; and I want to believe that in those last days, she remembered a time, a moment, when a boy bathed in sunlight had happily wished her good morning, the morning bright in a little bedroom where zinnias blazed.

I returned one last time to Mazirat with my mother, who wanted to pay a visit to the grave of her parents-in-law; I do not know why I went with her; at that time I was incapable of the slightest desire. I was foundering; for reasons I will explain, I grandiloquently accused the entire world of having ravaged me, and I was finishing off its work. I was burning my ships, drowning in floods of alcohol poisoned with mountains of drugs; I was dying; I was alive. It was thus steeped in such a witches' brew that I stood, absent, before the tomb, which, as always, was empty. Alas, poor ghosts! The prince of Denmark was no more inanely distracted in his simulated madness than I was in my fictive death, standing before the plot where you were laid. I hid behind a yew tree to swallow a dose of Mandrax; from the drenched branches, rain poured down on my swaying head; I sat on a gravestone to dry myself with an unsure hand, a dumb smile on my lips; I have no other memories of that day when I went to pay my respects to your remains.