Small Lives (9 page)

I am lying: I have one other. We went into the café where my grandfather had been happy, out of the cold so that my mother could exchange a few words with some distant relative we had encountered; I followed, unsteady and grinning. From that woman, who was common in speech and appearance, I gathered this much: my father, apparently, had reached the worst extremes of alcoholism and, it seemed, abused drugs. No one heard the terrified laugh exploding in my mind
alone; the Absent One was there, he inhabited my ravaged body, his hands gripped the table with my own, he shuddered to finally be meeting me here; he was the one who rose and went to vomit. He was the one who, perhaps, has here come to the end of the little story of Eugène and Clara.

My mother sent me to boarding school when I was still young; not to punish me, but because that was the custom, the lycée being far away, trains infrequent, and transportation expensive; also, in the eyes of those to whom fresh air and freedom teach only a few essential gestures, tiresome and monotonous from youth on, it seemed legitimate that the glorious task of learning the whys and wherefores of all things, always new and endlessly self-improving, came with, and perhaps at the cost of, a quasi-monastic, Roman confinement. As for myself, I had been prepared for it from early on. “When you are in boarding school . . .”: it was a transitive state, of course, on the way to adulthood, to the happiness and the simple glory of living that would befall me, should I want that. But it was not only a passage. It was a full seven
years during which Latin would become my estate, knowledge my nature, others students my – surely unsuccessful – rivals, and authors my peers. I would approach Racine, whose incomprehensible phrases my mother recited on my demand, phrases all different but equal, distinctive, one regularly replacing another like the balance wheel of a clock, working toward a distant end that was not the end of the day; I would know what that end was, the shore toward which those waves stretched; I would have presentable friends; I would speak in such a way that both I myself, with delight, and others, with respect, would know I inhabited the heart of language while they wandered about its surroundings; the price was confinement. It was, above all, giving up seeing my mother everyday, wandering with her in the tenderness of language's surroundings.

Destiny reserved for itself another, darker compensation, unconfessed but certain in my mind, and it made me tremble; once, many years earlier, I had had a dream: my grandfather, very high up in a cherry tree under a perfect sky, was picking cherries; he was singing, and I was at the foot of the tree coveting the lovely fruit; I called to him: he turned his head, looking down a little to smile at me, and in doing so, lost his footing. He fell slowly through crashing branches, a profusion of bursting fruit. He fell to pieces before my eyes. Yet he had smiled at me; and his tenderness had not saved him? I sobbed, cried out, my mother came. When, when will they die, I asked her, the ones I cannot do without, and who are old? She evaded the question, wanting to go back to sleep and thinking to reassure me with a date so far in the future that a child would consider it infinity. When you are at boarding school, she told me. I had not forgotten. Entering
boarding school was entering time, the only time I could identify in that it held permanent losses; I was approaching that period when immunities fall away, when nightmares come true and death exists; my appetite for knowledge would mean walking over corpses; I could not have one without the other. My grandparents died well after my schooling came to an end; but in a certain way I was always “at boarding school.” Separating from my mother had not led me to embrace things; language remained a secret, I did not take possession of or reign over anything; the world was a child's nursery and every day I had to “begin studies” there, for which I had no great hopes. But I had learned no other option.

Thus, one October day, my mother led me into that magic house from which I thought I would emerge as a butterfly. The hill where the lycée stood was planted with chestnut trees that were losing their leaves. The tall building in which faded brick alternated with granite lost the black of its slate roof superbly in the black of the sky. It appeared to me many faceted, right-angled, and fatal, cavernous as a temple, a barracks for lancers or for centaurs; I would not have been surprised if the Pantheon, or the Parthenon, the names of which I knew and confused with one another, had resembled it. There, too, lurked Knowledge, an ancient, imaginary, and nevertheless gluttonous beast, who deprives you of your mother and delivers you up, at ten years old, to some pretense of a world; that was what moved the wind in the raging chestnut trees.

The afternoon passed in the formalities of getting settled. My mother bustled about the laundry room, the dormitory, the study; my name appeared on cupboards, a bed. I did not recognize myself there;
my identity lay in those skirts that I followed, fearful and ashamed of my fear, the presence of those awkward but inquisitive boys forbidding me from cowering in them, becoming small again, renouncing my absurd prerogatives, the exercise of which terrified me. Evening came, we left one another; my heart launched itself toward the one who parted, took the railcar, arrived dismayed in Mourioux where I was not; what was my leaden body doing here? With evening recess I was thrown outside; in the dark courtyard, a great wind stirred strange crumpled wrappers, moonlit but obscure, newspapers that suddenly took off and pierced the night, all white and spectral like owls, at the mercy of the slightest breeze; whirling, they foundered. I foundered too in these minute extinctions; I wept and hid my tears. Other poor oafs, in their first year like me, stood rooted in the long exercise yard, staring wide-eyed down that shadowy well where weak things were falling. The courtyard's yellow light slanted down on their heads, diminishing them, isolating them, they only dared to make small gestures, fingered a penknife in a pocket, examined a new watch with dimwitted slowness, attempted a step and quickly retracted it, furtively sank to pick up a chestnut that they then did not know what to do with, worried its enigmatic peel a little before it vanished into a smock pocket and was forgotten. Some disappeared under their berets; in too-long smocks, others drifted like little old men. They knew they were stupid, guessed that their every movement smacked of ineptitude; they had heavy hearts.

Sometimes a galloping of centaurs came from far off in the dark through the potholed courtyard; a group of older boys suddenly appeared. Their open smocks flew out behind them like knights'
cloaks; their berets pulled over one ear gave them an air of gallantry. They had learned how, by exaggerating the incongruity of your rags and claiming as elegant that imposed ugliness, you can drape yourself in it, make it your glory, be someone else; provided that he knows how to wear it, every schoolboy hides under his smock the waistcoat of Le Grand Meaulnes. These dandies established dominance. They circled a smaller boy whose helpless confusion grew with the crude, smooth-tongued questions and the laughter, according to perverse, immediately predictable proceedings which could only end in his revolting or bursting into tears; in either case he was beaten, whether they made a show of indignation over this untimely rebellion for which he was chastised, or whether his shameful display of emotion earned him the status of girl and, as such, slaps across the face. The recess monitors shut their eyes; this was all in the order of things. When his tormenters had disappeared, the victim sniffled a little, looked hard at the ground as he adjusted his beret, located his chestnut again in his pocket; the impenetrable brown skin astonished him once more, its smooth, faultless volume gratified him, and leaning into that plenitude, painfully, he lost himself there. Everything was like that; impenetrable, closed up in itself, subject to monumental, inscrutable laws; the blind wind seizes the leaves with a passion, tears off the chestnuts and tossing them, shatters and strips them, pushes them out into the world; eyeless, under your own eyes, the chestnut rolls a little, comes to a stop.

When my turn came, I tried first one defense and then the other, and knew where I stood. The long shelter, encircling the playground on three sides, offered itself to my misery; my steps, and a dark delectation, led me toward its most windswept, desolate reaches. There,
air from outside swept through unrestrained over a wall higher than we were, behind which could just be discerned, below the black sky, a sloping field of brambles and witchgrass that was taking over behind the school at that time. A glass door opening into a bare stairwell, very wide but dilapidated, hopelessly dust-covered, banged ceaselessly in the slightest wind; the only light came from a bulb suspended over the first flight of stairs, its weak reflections in the glass panes not even reaching the edge of the playground. A cold rain had gently begun to fall; the wet newspapers became too heavy to fly about; plastered down, they grew sodden, turned to earth; a new boy was there, in the yellow light and the wind, his arms crossed.

He was bareheaded. (But were the berets I'm giving these urchins really from my own childhood? Or were they worn by even poorer, more obscure, more appalling simpletons, in old books through which I am taking perverse pleasure in aging my companions as I age myself, in burying us together? I cannot decide.) His hair, sprouting directly from his forehead in thick, stiff curls, a dull reddish-blond, was close-cropped at his temples and nape of the neck; the weak glow that illuminated this tuft divulged nothing of the face withdrawn into the night except the pale blur of a protruding, slightly heavy chin. Its bearing suggested the bizarre determination of a fixed gaze that, in these shadows, was no doubt turned on me. Over his smock he wore a suede jacket with too-short sleeves, also reddish, and its deformed pockets bulged with enigmatic contents. Covetously, I sensed they contained the patient odds and ends and gris-gris that certain boys accumulate, in motley collections over which preside laws as fatal, exact, and aberrant as so-called natural laws, but which, with age, become as doubtful as
natural laws are undeniable, even though they both remain impenetrable. I did not have the leisure to observe him for long; the older boys were upon us; they had already baited me, and remembering that, left me alone. They turned on the small, secretive one.

The monotonous ordeal began; the boy had made a weak attempt to get away, and the older ones had caught him in the rain that created a bluish halo around the group of them; I carefully kept my distance. But very soon, I started listening; something was wrong. One of the voices, no longer sarcastic or affected, but crude and angry, scolding and exasperated, stood out; soon moreover, the others fell silent, as if shocked or captivated, and I no longer heard anything but that loud forsaken child's voice. The meaning of his words was no different from those that had extorted tears from me, the same specious, preposterous questions, the same interrogatory quibbling, the same unanswerable demands, but all sadistic pleasure, all dominance casually exercised, increasing as it became increasingly casual, had deserted that discourse. There was no heart in it to accurately adjust the tone, or perhaps there was too much. That heart spoke of an impassioned, impotent fury, like the sob of an elderly victim holding his torturer at bay, imagining with the delusions of the lovesick that, to avenge himself, he is going to use the torture boot and thumb-screw under which he has so long suffered, but which he does not know how to use; his excited hands tremble, and in his agitation, the tools fall and scatter; he loses his temper and howls in vain under the torturer's impassive gaze. The smaller boy was not impassive however; I saw his big chin trembling; but opposite and slightly above, another big chin trembled; the same rain or the same tears ran down them both; and above the
two faces over which the darkness violently encroached but which in flashes revealed the same chalky hue, the wind bristled two similar shocks of hair. In this game of mirrors, both boys suffered. They were as alike as brothers.

The older one bellowed more and more and began to strike with mean little blows, using all the power of his short fists. The school bell did not faze him; the electrical ringing droned on, but in that stridency tuned to the rain and the wind, monotonous and panicked as a meteor, he persisted in his meaningless jabber, incomprehensible to all but himself, bellowing, darkly reveling in this stormy mutism that made him hoarse, that invalidated him. Something perfect occurred there. We responded to the bell's call, and the younger one succeeded in following us; as we moved away, the older one remained in place, without a word now, his hate-filled gesticulations finished, his look merged with the rain streaming down on the scene closed by the approaching night. We lined up in front of the study door; amid the odor of smocks, I saw him finally begin to move, slowly at first, and I could no longer see him when I heard his heavy steps running over the soaked ground in the dark, toward the third years' study.

Today, I would not know how to dissociate the Bakroot brothers from that rain that delivered them to me, from that wind yellowed by a tired light bulb. I can still see the younger one excelling in a silly game that we loved, a sort of duel in which each boy's champion was a chestnut which, pierced through and threaded with a string, had to smash others prepared in the same fashion; I see his cautious moves as he laid out his sorry-looking collections in the study, maimed soldiers, painted
walnuts and enormous keys, later his photos of women; I would recognize his dead voice, the one that his adult voice stole. I think of the older one in the main courtyard in the May sunshine, playing a kind of handball, his teeth clenched, all bones, awkward and proficient; he leans with his back against a chestnut tree, its stupor and muteness tenderly cradling his own, he passes the tip of his tongue over his broken tooth, the gray of his smock is drowned in the gray of the bark, he is no longer there; then he lets out a yell and I see myself on the ground again, knocked down by one of his blind rages. I see them confronting one another in so many places, at so many different ages, and no doubt today the one who has remained here below sometimes feels a breath in his face, a phantom fist in his stomach, and once more puts up his guard against that light brother borne away by the clouds. But the emblem for them both, their mantle as it were, remains that sodden night, that night of beginnings when the best of childhood came to an end, that autumn tipping over into winter where their chalky features are forever fixed.