By a Slow River (10 page)

I caught my breath again. I was dripping with sweat. I lifted Bourrache and helped him to the nearest table. He offered no resistance. He was sobbing and sniffling. I knew where the bottles of plum brandy were kept. I went and fetched one, along with two glasses I filled to the brim. I helped him drink his, then knocked mine back, followed by another. Like a robot, Bourrache poured himself three, tossing them down in single gulps. I saw his eyes gradually refocus on our world and look at me with surprise, as if wondering what on earth I was doing there. A prick soldier tapped on the windowpane right beside us. Clownishly, he peered into the room, pressing his nose against the glass. But then he saw us. He lost his grin and was gone. I stayed there for four hours. Four hours and two bottles of booze. Four hours and hardly three words. I thought it was the very least I could do.

During that time, Clémence was beginning to groan and writhe, alone. Without me. Without my knowing it.

XVI

When I came out of the Rébillon, a frigid rain braced me somewhat. The sky seemed to have it in for all mankind. Massive bands of water lashed the façades. There weren’t too many people in the streets. I hugged the walls as best I could, using my hands to shield my eyes at least. Joséphine in her jail cell no doubt was cursing me now, I thought, calling me every name in her substantial arsenal of insults. I believe I even smiled a little over that.

By the time I reached the post office, I was drenched. My feet were numb, but at least my mind was clear again. My head wasn’t spinning anymore, despite the brandy. The mail coach was there, and a great many people were gesticulating around it; a captain of the corps of engineers was trying to make himself heard. I drew closer. The officer’s attempt to reason with the crowd provoked some menacing stances among the men. The women, more reasonable or simply resigned, stood around waiting like cattle, indifferent to the downpour. At that point somebody laid a hand on my shoulder. It was our parish priest, Father Lurant. “There’s no way back for us. The road’s been commandeered for the convoys. Two regiments are headed for the front tonight.”

I hadn’t noticed them initially. But as soon as the priest pointed them out I could see nothing but the dozens—hundreds—of men, maybe more, waiting in utter silence, rifles on their shoulders and kits on their backs. They seemed to encircle us, almost blending into the night, which had begun to lap at day. Standing there with absent eyes, without a gesture, without a word, like the women-folk, they were indifferent to the rain. You might have taken them for an army of shadows. And yet they were the same lads who’d roamed around V all day long, heading toward the cafés like animals to a water trough, belting out songs, spewing obscenities, unbuttoning themselves in the bordellos, staggering with wine bottles in hand. Now, not a one of them was laughing. All were leaden as toy soldiers, in both their bearing and their color.

“Come,” the priest said. “There’s no point in standing around.” I followed him as submissively as any recruit.

It wasn’t the first time that staff headquarters had commandeered the road. I have to say it was very narrow and in a sorry state, after three years of passing trucks and the hooves of thousands of nags. So when they were gearing up for an offensive there was really no choice but to reserve it for the convoys, which proceeded sometimes all day and all night, without interruption, a sad jolting line of ants, filing slowly toward the gutted remains of their anthill of metal and earth.

Father Lurant took me along to the bishop’s palace, where a caretaker let us in. The priest explained the situation, and without comment the man led us, through a labyrinth of hallways and staircases redolent of wax and soft soap, to a large room where two rickety iron beds were making conversation.

When I saw the small beds I thought of ours, so big and so deep. I’d rather have been beside Clémence, seeking that sweetness in her arms I always knew how to find there. I asked if I might send her word, which I did as a rule whenever I couldn’t get home. In such cases I would call the mayor, who would send his maid Louisette with the message. But the caretaker recommended I save myself the trouble: The telephone lines, like the road, were commandeered until further notice. A pang went through me to imagine Clémence worrying, but there was nothing to be done about it. With luck I’d be back in time for lunch tomorrow.

The priest undressed, with no ado. He removed his cape, then his cassock, and stood before me in his underwear, his belly sticking out before him like a gigantic quince swinging in a flannel hammock. He arranged his damp clothes near the oven and huddled near it, spreading his hands at intervals over the lid. Without his clothes, he seemed not as old as I had thought. No doubt he was my own age, but I had never seen him as a man before. He must have suspected everything I was thinking. Priests are very clever; they know exactly how to enter people’s heads. He looked at me, smiling as the heat made his cape smoke like a censer, and his drying cassock filled the air with the scents of humus and burnt wool.

The caretaker returned with two bowls of soup, a big loaf of brown bread, a piece of cheese hard as a block of oak, and a jug of wine. He left all of it on a little table and bade us good night. I undressed and laid my outer clothes near the fire as well. They produced the scorched odors of woods and suint that mixed with those of the priest.

We ate earnestly, with no care for our manners. Father Lurant’s hands were large, hairless, and plump. Whatever he put in his mouth he chewed for an age, and he drank the wine with his eyes shut. We finished everything. We left the table clean, our stomachs full. Then, dressed as equals, we set about talking as we’d never done before. We talked about flowers—they were his passion— “the most glorious proof, if one needed any, of God’s existence,” he said. It seemed odd even then: talking about flowers in that room while the night and the war surrounded us, while somewhere nearby the villain who’d strangled a ten-year-old girl roamed free or slept in his bed. It seems ludicrous now as I imagine Clémence lying in our bed at that moment, bleeding helplessly.

I didn’t know you could talk so about flowers. I mean, I didn’t know you could talk about human beings while speaking of nothing but flowers, without mentioning the words
man, destiny, death,
and
loss
. I found out that evening. The priest knew the science of words—like Mierck, like Destinat—but unlike those two, he did beautiful things with them. He rolled them like cigarettes with his tongue, and all at once a nothing appeared to be a marvel. They must teach such things in the seminaries: how to catch the imagination with a few well-turned phrases. He told me about his garden, which we never saw because of the high walls that enclosed it behind the presbytery. He told me about the chamomiles, the hellebores, the petunias, the sweet williams, the wild pinks, the anemones, the sedums, the candytufts, the peonies, the Syrian opals, the daturas, the flowers that live for only a season, the ones that come back year after year, the ones that open only in the evening and vanish in the morning, and the ones that beam from dawn to dusk, displaying their delicate corollas of rosy or mauve convolvulus, only to close abruptly at nightfall, as if a wrathful hand had squeezed their velvet petals and choked them.

The priest spoke of these last in a different tone from the others. Not as a priest anymore—not as a horticulturalist either—but as a man full of misery and wounds. I cut him off as he was about to name this flower aloud, in the darkened room. I didn’t want to hear that name. For two days it had been drumming in my head. The little girl’s face came back to me like a slap across the face. The priest fell silent, perhaps a bit embarrassed. Outside, the rain had turned to snow again, and the flakes crowded against the windowpane like fireflies of ice. Without life and without light, for two or three seconds they yet managed to give the illusion of life and light.

Afterward, for years, I tried to get morning glories to grow in our little garden. I never succeeded. The seeds stayed in the ground, and there they stubbornly rotted, refusing to climb toward the sky, to issue from the humid, gluey dark mass. Only the couch grass and thistles flourished, invading everything, growing incredibly high, spreading over the few square yards with their dangerous corollas. In the end I let them have their way.

I’ve often thought back to the priest’s comment about flowers, God, and proof. And I’ve said to myself that there are undoubtedly places in the world where God never sets foot.

Father Lurant went off to evangelize the tribes of Annam, in the mountains of Indochina. That was in ’25. He stopped by to let me know. I really don’t know why he troubled himself. Maybe it was because one day the two of us had talked for a long time in our underpants, had shared the same room and the same wine. I didn’t question his decision to go—just like that—even though he was hardly a young man by then. I simply asked, “And your flowers?”

He looked at me, smiling, now as ever since our talk with that priestly gaze designed to reach in and pull out our souls like a cooked snail from its shell. He told me that where he was going there were thousands of flowers, thousands he didn’t know, that he’d never seen, except in books, and you couldn’t live forever in books: One day you had to take a firm hold of life and its beauties.

I was about to tell him I took the opposite view: I had had it up to here with life, and if there were books where I could live I would plunge right into them. But when two people are so far apart, there’s no point debating it. I held my tongue and wished him well on his trip.

After that, I can’t say that I thought of him often. But sometimes I did. Edmond Gachentard, my old colleague, had given me a few images of those yellow countries, in addition to his rifle. I’m not talking about images on paper, I mean the ones that get inside your head and stay there.

In his youth, Gachentard had belonged to the expeditionary corps sent to Tonkin. Apart from the fever that would suddenly turn him white as a leek, he returned with a jar of green coffee he would keep on his dining room table like a relic, a photograph of himself in uniform with rice paddies in the background, and above all a slowness in his eyes, a kind of absence that seized him whenever he spoke about them: the nighttime melodies of bullfrogs; the incessant stickiness of the body; the great muddy river carrying trees as well as goat carcasses, water lilies, and bindweed torn from its banks. At times Gachentard even mimicked the women’s dances for me, their graceful hand movements with curved fingers, the rolling of their eyes, and the flute music too, which he re-created by whistling as he pretended to play on the sawed-off handle of a broom.

I sometimes visualized the priest in that setting: his arms full of unknown flowers, wearing a colonial hat and a tropical cassock— hemmed at the bottom by a scallop of dry mud—watching the warm rain fall on glossy forests. I would see him smiling. Always smiling. I don’t know why.

When I awoke in the room at the bishop’s palace, I had an insistent thought of Clémence. I had to get home, at all costs—leave right away, bypass the road if it was still off limits—nothing mattered but to get back to her. I can’t say it was a premonition. I wasn’t worried. No, I simply had the most urgent need for her skin and her eyes, I wanted to hold her and briefly forget the works of death everywhere around me.

I put on my clothes, not quite dry. I filled the basin and scrubbed my face. Father Lurant was still dead to the world, a broad smile on his face. Beaming, really. I figured that even in his sleep, he must be finding armfuls of flowers. Looking at the table, I remembered we had finished every scrap from the night before, so I took off on an empty stomach.

Berthe is in the kitchen. I can’t see her, but I sense her huffing and shaking her head in disgust. Whenever she sees my notebooks, she huffs. What’s it to her how I spend my days? It must be the mere markings that bother her. She’s never learned to read. For her these lined-up words are a great mystery. Fear and envy, perhaps.

But whose, really? Now I am coming to the point I’ve been eyeing for months, for the longest while visible but not yet present. Like a dreadful horizon, a disfigured hill: Behind its hideous face, you don’t know what might be hiding.

I am coming to that sordid morning. To that point when all pendulums stop. To that infinite fall. To the death of the stars.

When all is said and done, Berthe isn’t wrong. Words are frightening, even to those who know and can decipher them. Here I am, a man in his fifties, flailing like a teenager trying to express himself. I don’t know how to do it on the best of days. Today it’s hard just holding the pen. As soon as I pick it up, my insides get knotted, my eyes sting. I drink a glass of wine. Then another, knocking it back. Maybe what’s said about writers is true: Words come out of the bottle. I grab my bottle and gulp it all down. I can feel Clémence draw near, her breath, always young, stirring the gray hairs on the back of my neck.

“Drinking so much in the morning—you should be ashamed. You’ll be drunk before noon!”

Berthe. I tell her off.
Mind your own business.
She answers with an indifferent shrug and leaves me. I take a deep breath. I pick up my pen again.

My heart swelled unbearably when I saw the house, the roof ’s edge fringed with tapers of ice. It was completely covered with snow, glistening under a bright sun swaggering low in the sky. Suddenly I wasn’t cold or hungry anymore; I’d forgotten the forced march that took four hours along the shoulder of the road, on which the conga line of soldiers, carts, cars, and trucks never let up. I must have passed hundreds of guys trudging solemnly along, glaring at me in my civvies and at my impatience to move in the direction they dreaded going.

I knocked my clodhoppers on the wall, less to get rid of the snow than to make some noise, a familiar noise that would say I was there, on the other side of the wall, a couple of steps, a few seconds away. I smiled as I imagined Clémence imagining me. I took hold of the latch, pushed the door open. There was no war at that moment. There was no ghost, no murdered child. There was only the prospect of Clémence and of our baby to be felt under her skin.

Life is strange. It doesn’t give you warnings. It jumbles everything so you can’t pick and choose, and bloody moments follow moments of grace, just like that. It can make you wonder if man isn’t like one of those pebbles that lie on the road, lying in the same place for entire days until someone kicks it and sends it sailing through the air for no reason. And what can a pebble do?

In the house there was a strange silence that slackened my smile: an impression that it had been uninhabited for weeks. Things were in their place but seemed heavier and colder. Above all, this great silence permeated the walls and drowned my voice when I called out. And then: At the top of the staircase, the door to the bedroom was ajar, as it never would have been; and I felt my heart go wild. I took a couple of steps until an irrational dread kept me from going any farther.