The Bark Tree (2 page)

The assistant manager was always maneuvering her into a dark corner, and so was the manager. No sooner had she got away from their hands than she became exposed to those of the metro. And no sooner had she finished work there than she began all over again here. The child was dozing under the lamp, waiting for supper. The silhouette was waiting for supper too, feeling its feet swelling, with one arm hanging between its legs, its hand gripping the crossbar of its chair, for fear the chair might run away. He was reading the
Journal.
Or rather, he wasn’t reading it. He was staring at the letter
n
in the word Ministry. He went on staring at it until the soup was served. And after a bit of cheese with a lot of bread, he hypnotized the letter
i.
The boy didn’t wait for the cheese to make his escape, and went off in a complete daze to live through numerous pollutions in his childish bed. The wife did the dishes and various household chores. And by 10 o’clock, the trio was fast asleep.

—oooooo—oooooo—

The next day, there was a woman in his place, his usual place. He had observed this habit and thought: they’re all the same. The first day he had come to this café, he had been escaping from the rain and had had no hesitation in choosing a place; the only free one, as it so happened. And ever since, he had always gone to the same place. He mused for a moment about French café life, but didn’t linger over these ethnographical considerations and sat down at random, which meant that he happened on a table he wasn’t familiar with, studied its marble veins, and drank his Pernod. When it was time for people to stop work, once again the silhouette emerged from the wall, the wall of the enormous money market that was called the Audit Bank.

“Have you got your passport?” said a young man in a very low voice.

The woman, she was extremely young, winked. She was happy, she was going to travel. She smiled, with one hand on the very respectable young man’s knee; with the other, she was scratching the crocodile of an old-fashioned handbag, and she went on smiling. She was looking into his eyes; he was quite simply drinking mineral water.

He noticed, not on purpose, though, that his shoes were down-at-the-heels; so were those of the next man next to him, and of the next man, too. He suddenly had a vision of a civilization of down-at-the-heel shoes, a culture of worn-away soles, a symphony of suede and box calf, in the process of being reduced to the remarkably minimal thickness of the paper tablecloths in restaurants for the hard up. The silhouette’s movements followed the same rhythm as the previous day; with the same skill, it sought the shortest distance between the monumental door of the Audit Bank and the squeaking gate of its suburban house.

The silhouette owned a house; it had had it built, or rather it had started to have it built, for the money had run out, and the first floor was still unfinished. The house had something of the look of a devastated area, which was now somewhat out of fashion. The child—he has arrived at the age of puberty—his elbows on the table, was learning by heart a list of battles; the wife, who had got home before him, was starting her household chores. Habit.

His eyes moved on from the down-at-the-heel shoe to the silhouette; the daily drinker realized, with some satisfaction, that he had recognized it. At last, out of these thousands of totally undifferentiated people, one had registered on him. Why this particular one? Because of the greater speed with which it made for the metro? Because of its jacket, more threadbare than most? Because of the kind of bun its badly cut hair fell into? Not because of its worn-down heels, not that. What, then? Would he discover why, the next day? The silhouette had already been swallowed up by the shadows, and disappeared.

And, naturally enough, it reappeared at the squeaking little gate of the half-built house. You couldn’t say it was a materialization; it was strictly two-dimensional, and didn’t deserve such a grand word. But, just like that, all of a sudden, it emerged from the mud in the winter, and from the dust in the summer, just in front of the lock, by a sort of multiple hazard. The cat was purring, and scraping its back along the badly painted iron gate, where the red lead was showing through here and there. The cat was pleased to see its master again, and rubbed itself against the red lead. Pretty puss. The gate was carefully shut again. The child shut his book of battles. And they ate.

After dinner, the wife sat down for a while. The child made himself scarce, taking with him, in anguish and jubilation, a copy of
Le Sourire
which a school friend had lent him. The silhouette watched the cat, which was dreaming. The wife finished her work and, on the stroke of 10, the youngest of the three was still not asleep.

—oooooo—oooooo—

At midday, you have to go and have lunch; not too far away, because you have to hurry back to work, and it mustn’t be too expensive either, of course. A net, cast no one could say quite how, hauled a thousand human being into these premises and here, in exchange for cash, they were fed. The silhouette is one of them, it’s been caught. It eats: a magnificent rancid sardine, a very thin piece of flesh garnished with bits of wood and, when a delectable moment comes for it to sample the banana with jam, its fastidious neighbor is eating cod. The silhouette was used to it, it was the same every day. One anonymous individual, who had been caught in the first cast of the net, rapidly absorbed the muck bestowed upon him and was quickly replaced by the fastidious fish-lover, which latter started to raise hell when, having himself arrived at the yogurt or dried fruit stage, a latecomer started stuffing himself with tripe, and this by means of a fork which the day before had served to shatter the mirror of two already ancient eggs, as witness the golden yellow of its prongs. Around 2 o’clock, in the deserted, but still stinking, restaurant, a few fat waitresses were mopping their armpits.

At about 3 o’clock, the silhouette blew its nose; at about 4, it spat; at about 5, it bowed; at about 5:50 it was already hearing the squeak of the little gate of its headless house.

At 6, the other man was there, on the dot, at his café table. This particular day, the man on his right couldn’t stop choking, and was drinking a yellowish potion straight out of a little bottle; the meussieu on his left was absent-mindedly scratching his genitals while reading the racing results. To the southwest, a couple was coupling in front of a St. Raphaël-and-lemon. To the south-southwest, there was a lady on her own; to the south-southeast, there was another lady on her own. To the southeast, most unusually, a vacant table. At the zenith, a cloud; at the nadir, a cigarette butt.

At 6 o’clock, the silhouette emerged. This amused him enormously. He really did recognize this particular one. One day he’d amuse himself by following it. At this moment, he observed which great concern that the silhouette, instead of going straight to the metro, had made a detour and stopped at the window of a hat shop, where he was watching two little ducks floating in a waterproof hat that had been filled with water in order to demonstrate its primary quality. This distraction had an immediate effect on the silhouette which was not lost on the observer; it acquired a certain density and became a flat entity. This modification of its structure was, moreover, perceived by the people who were in the habit of traveling in the same train as he, in the same carriage, in the same compartment. The atmosphere became oppressive when, at the liberating sound of the whistle, the door opened and, at the last moment, the place next to the right-hand corner seat, facing the engine, was occupied. Something had changed.

A game of
manille
got going in the left-hand square. The ex-officer, now a wine salesman, made a lot of noise opening his paper; the young lady opposite went on with her crochet, which she’d begun at Easter. The man opposite the flat entity was dozing, but his sleep was agitated; he was dribbling, and every so often he would retrieve his saliva, thus exhibiting a violet tongue which made you think that its possessor must either suck his pen or have some atrocious disease, such as the bashi-bazouk, or the violetteria. Looking as if he were permanently hanging by the neck, the man opposite went unnoticed. On his right, the retired officer was nibbling at the horsehair on his upper lip and muttering politics; his eyes were fuming; a war in view, no doubt. He too was frightening. Violet-tongue emerged from his somnolence and opened a paper, the
Cross.
One after the other, two serious events occurred: the young lady pinched her finger in the fastening of her handbag and hurt herself badly and, in the other corner, the
manille
players started bawling. “Ace of spades, king of hearts, diamonds, must be a half-wit to play like that.” Speak for yourself, Meussieu, people that play cards need to watch what they’re doing, if they don’t know how to play then they don’t play, no one can play with anyone like that.”

Play, play, play, play. And the young lady gurgling and sucking her finger. The failed general, lifting his nostrils from his patriotic literature, wanted to join in. The man reading the
Cross
was watching a fly with wide-open eyes, his paper firmly popped up on his thighs. Look out! a sweeping movement with his tongue. And the others were still at it. “That’s twenty-five centimes you’ve made me lose, playing so stupidly. If you’d only realized
...
Meussieu, Meussieu, Meussieu—”

These meussieus, as emphatic as if they were titles, replaced the slaps on the face that they didn’t dare to distribute, for fear of getting them back. And it went on, and on. It would go on like that until the next station. Twenty minutes. The flat entity felt like crying. He felt vaguely responsible for this lamentable departure from the compartment’s habits. It was the fault of the little ducks and the waterproof hat.

Two of the
manille
players get out at the first station, muttering terribly, with the horrible eyes of angry tame rabbits. The young lady, sucking at her finger, got out too. The soldier in civvies spread himself out and picked his teeth with the nail of his index finger, and the Christian started avidly reading an article on the salvation of Chinese children. Things were looking up on this side of the compartment, but the
manille
players went on arguing, and their passionate voices grated on the eardrums of the flat entity, who had just that moment realized that he knew one of them. They had stayed in the same pension in Pornic. This coincidence completely changed the tenor of his thoughts, which were diverted into a little reverie about sea-bathing, it wasn’t long till vacation, in three weeks’ time he’d have four weeks off, when the wine salesman, deciding that it was getting stuffy, lowered one of the windows. The
manille
player from Pornic couldn’t stand drafts. He complained. The salesman refused to close it. And once again cries of “Meussieu, I tell you, Meussieu,” “But Meussieu,” went flying from one end of the compartment to the other, a Brennish, polite form of artillery, wretched, pathetic bullets that the man reading the
Cross
gulped down as they went by, like rotten eggs. And things were going from bad to worse, as they say; just like kids who load their snowballs with stones, these Meussieus were packing their “Meussieus” with abysses of perfidy, chasms of sarcasm, precipices of defiance and mixed grills of spite. But they wouldn’t come to blows. The flat entity again felt that it was the fault of the little ducks and the waterproof hat; the next stop cut the argument short by the premature exit of all the gabbers, plus the Catholic, the flat entity was left alone and anxiously asked himself: Why? And he went on saying, why, why, to the rhythm of the train. At the next station. He got out.

After the inevitable pushing and shoving on the way out, he made his way to his house, jumping from one mudhole in the road to the next, starting stones rolling with the sightless point of his oxford shoes. After twenty minutes of similarly arduous progress, he arrived at the squeaking gate. The cat wasn’t there. He shut the gate and went up the four steps to the house.

Now he’s in the dining room. Everything seems as it should be. The child with the rings around his eyes slowly closes a
Vindication of Socrates
in which he has hidden a photo that he prefers to keep for his private contemplation. He raises a pure forehead—pure, though heavy with numerous obscenities. The wife brings the shoup.

She thinks he looks odd.

“You look odd, So and So,” she says.

He does in fact feel odd.

“Yes, So and So-ess, I feel odd,” he says.

The child absorbs his shoup in haste. His spoon goes click click on the bottom of his plate. The flat entity takes his courage in both hands, those hands which he feels down there at the end of his arms; he takes his courage—in other words, he creates it. After a violent effort, he starts:

“You know, today, I stopped at the hat shop, the one on the left as you come out of the bank. There’s something very strange in the window. A waterproof hat.”

The child, who is waiting for what’s to follow (to eat), is listening carefully.

“They’ve put some water in it to prove, to show, that is, that it’s waterproof; and two ducks, too.”

The family meditates for a moment. The wife asks:

“Two ducks?”

The flat entity, embarrassed, answers:

“Yes, you know, two little rubber ducks.”

Now he’s furious; this stupid story
always
ends badly; the absurd idea of looking in that window. What’s more, now the child is speaking, and uttering these words:

“It’s been there for at least two years, that thing.”

The flat papa doesn’t know what to say. The noodles are brought.
Are
brought—by the wife, of course. There’s no meat tonight. Then, quite bluntly, she informs him that one of the neighbors has killed the cat. Which one, they don’t know.

Where is it?

Old Ma Tyrant brought its corpse back. She’s a poor old woman, she wanted its skin. She found it against the wall of Hippolyte’s café. It had a bullet in its head.