Small Lives (10 page)

They were very much of winter. And their muddy, pigheaded name did not lie: no doubt through some distant ancestry, and more importantly through the face and the soul revealed there, they were also deeply from Flanders. The Bakroot brothers were the lost offspring of a kind of medieval, earthy – that is to say, Flemish – madness. My memory draws them toward that North; they make their way endlessly toward their encounter in a land of peat, of empty expanse surrounded on all sides by the sea, of polders and stunted potatoes under a colossally gray sky in the manner of the first van Gogh, the older one perhaps leprous and preceded by a rattle, or serf in brown breeches
ploughing in the foreground of a Fall of Icarus, and the other, the younger one, less roughly dressed but still in the Batavian, that is, provincial, style, bedraggled, second-hand, with Spanish ruff and Toledan sword. Their faces, as I have said, were chalk white, hard chins emerging from that flaking pigment; their Puritan pallor would have been well suited to the Haarlem Protestants' high, sinister hats; below shone the bleak insanity of Delft-blue eyes that do not lose sight of infernal ice floes and bring them to bear on all they see. Too pale for anger, too stubbornly bushy for joy, the unruly blond eyebrows express nothing; but the way the thick mouth trembles, it is clear they are holding back their tears. Let us leave this legendary Brabant; let them set upon each other and become children again.

Rémi Bakroot, the younger brother, was in my class. He was cheerfully unsociable, but that cheerfulness sometimes cracked and revealed a depth of crazy indifference, a peremptory distress that was frightening. I remember one spring evening in the study hall, I could see Bakroot clearly, sitting in front of me near the open window where the breath of the chestnut trees rose as the night fell; the warm shock of hair bathed in it, violent as the odor of the blossoms. His collection at the time (he was always changing them, relinquishing one for another, or sometimes pairing them according to unpredictable connections) consisted of odds and ends used for fishing: floaters, flies, lures, bright feathers tied around vicious hooks; he had them all spread out on his desk, symbolically concealed by a file folder, and he was contemplating the collection, the order of which he sometimes altered, with a reflective air and a gesture at first hesitant but gradually acquiring more confidence through its slowness, as one sees with chess players. The
monitor noticed; everything was confiscated. The boy sulked; then, from the endless folds and pockets of his suede jacket, miraculously concealed, appeared the most beautiful fly with rainbow colored feathers; he considered it in the palm of his hand, adjusted it a little in the evening light; his stony face hardened further. All of a sudden, with a laugh that we could all hear, brief and raucous as a sob, without provocation or defiance, but as though exalted and sacrificial, he threw the thin dart of light out the window toward the already nocturnal leaves. The monitor struck a closed face, as a cart might send a stone rolling on a rough road.

At that time there was a Latin teacher at the lycée whom we baited mercilessly, and whom we named, no doubt ironically, Achilles. There was nothing warlike or impetuous about him; with the Myrmidons' ancient prince charming, he shared only stature and mastery of the language of Homer. He was an old man, huge and disgraced. I do not know what disease had left him bald, without beard or eyebrows; he wore a wig, but no disguise could have transformed the painful nudity of expression in that uniformly hairless face; and it was not a face that could be hidden, but on the contrary one of strong complexion, patrician, heavy, full of a sensuality now in ruins, with a magisterial nose and large lips, still a fresh pink. What little this architecture lacked made it enormously comic, morbid and theatrical, like an old castrato with a broken voice. He walked very erectly, dressed tastefully, and liked the short elegiacs. Virgil from his mouth became hilarious; gales of laughter greeted his entrance, even the first year students acted up, and he was resigned to his inability to do anything about it. He exceeded the permitted limits of the comical, he knew, and that power
of mind and goodness of heart, mockingly bestowed upon him, were nothing without the appropriate body.

Achilles had no persecutor more merciless than the younger Bakroot. The most outrageous insults, the cruelest laughter came from the boy's mouth, distorting it. Imperturbable, Achilles remained absorbed in his authors, his declensions; on the blackboard he traced the seven hills or the Carthage harbor. Behind his back, obscene rhymes deformed the names of gods and heroes, Hannibal's elephants became circus animals, Seneca was a buffoon, and everything turned to nonsense. Achilles, it is true, was used to it; the Barbarians had been taking the City for so long now, Caesar recognized the son's eyes behind the dagger, and how many times had Eurydice been lost – in less than an hour the lesson would be over. Sometimes, exasperated but desperately calm, he descended into the arena and sadly struck at what passed within his range. The blows only got us more fired up. We all took part in the dismemberment; but the kill, the decisive word that we knew had cruelly found its mark, the one that contorted the mouth of Achilles or staggered him into a moment of dumb silence right in the middle of declaiming a verse, was most often delivered by Rémi Bakroot. It was Rémi Bakroot who orchestrated this sad farce; he was the one who exerted himself tirelessly toward this end, with all the malicious force of his small throat, with all the misunderstood, oafish, and vulgar words gleaned from his home at the farm, or in the doors of smoky cafés Sunday evenings in winter, when, without crossing the threshold, a frightened boy calls to his drunk father that he must come home. It must be said that he had good reasons: Achilles loved Roland Bakroot, the older brother.

Roland was altogether different, and yet so similar; also unreasonable, certainly but his unreason had nothing of the urchin's panache, the slightly morose, crackpot, smart-ass humor that forced his urchin peers to admire Rémi. His eccentricity was more pure, abrupt, and almost indigent; no knickknacks, no colorful collections or brilliant acts of rebellion; nothing convertible into the currency of boys' codes, nothing for him to boast about, to win him an audience, to get the laughers, that is to say, all of us, on his side. He read books. And reading, he knit his young ruffian brow, clenched his jaw, and wore a look of disgust, as if a permanent, necessary nausea bound him without recourse to the page that perhaps he hated but passionately scrutinized, like an eighteenth century libertine dismembering another victim limb by limb, meticulously, but only for the sake of doing it, and without pleasure. He persisted in this sickening toil well beyond study hours, until meal times, and during recess in the playground where, stoic, curled into the roots of a chestnut tree, in a noisy corner of the shelter, he lost himself in some
Quo vadis
or other children's saga of ancient Rome, which tormented him. He had a hard fist; he flew off the handle at the least presumption of offence and, no less sickened but more cheerfully, hammered the offender; if his ludicrous vice and eternal grimace inspired laughter, we hid it behind our sleeves. Thus he read; he walked toward the small library at the end of the playground shelter, not far from the dark corner where I had seen him bare his teeth for the first time; if he encountered his brother, they hissed like cats, frozen, treacherous, and violently deaf to the world; then passed on their way or once again seized each other, passionately clouting the other's ears.

I wondered what their shared Sundays could have been like, over there in Saint-Priest-Palus, from which they had emerged with difficulty, on the rocky plateau toward Gentioux, under the roof of a poor farm on that barren soil where heather and springs hardly scratch the surly breastplate of lean granite with pink and coolness. To read
Salammbô
there was inexplicably comic; and what collection could have germinated there, what idea of a collection even, other than the unhoardable and unchanging series of the seasons that sweep over you, the weary oaths of the father, the heads of a herd of sheep? But I could see them, their odds and ends left in a jumble on the big table six o'clock on a winter evening, books and spinning tops spattered by the fresh milk in the big pail under the mirage of the lamp, I could see them as easily as their mother could see them through the window, on the moor in the coming night, relentlessly pursuing, approaching, recognizing, and seizing each other, devoting themselves, blow upon blow, to one another, offering their thrashings to the black pines, the first flight of owls, the dogs tied to the ground, howling at those birds soaring upwards, pious, bashed little sacrificers, their lips split, their tears bitter. And the old wind in its stormy beard of pines casts a favorable eye upon which of the two? Perhaps someone chooses one and destroys the other, or chooses one to better destroy him, we do not know which.

Thus Achilles, according to one of those strange, sad fantasies that give ruined lives passion and even a point of honor, took a liking to the older Bakroot brother. When the bell released the tired old scholar from his little hour of hell, when, unaware of the taunts of the little devils darting between his legs, he crossed the wide courtyard with
his very dignified step, always slow and as though benumbed by some calm dream, it often happened that by some rigged chance, Roland was suddenly there, not right in his path, but a few meters to the side of that dreamy trajectory, that they might thus meet. And, although they immediately perceived each other from the corner of the eye, the old man leaving the courtyard (concealing perhaps a delighted, teasing smile) and the young boy over the pages of some classic saga that sickened him, although they awaited one another without surprise, they made a show at the last minute of recognizing each other and being astonished by the unforeseeable good fortune that brought them face to face. Achilles came to a stop, then drew closer, raising his loud, suddenly cheery voice; he rested his hand heavily on the shoulder of the boy who reddened, tenderly roughing him up; he questioned, patient and ironically scolding, inquiring about his current reading; the boy stammered, and awkwardly, a bit ashamed, showed him the book's title. Then Achilles theatrically released his shoulder, and stepping back, regarded Roland with wide eyes, dumbfounded, miming an incredulous admiration that unfurled like a flag across the old castrato's face; and in that controlled voice, experienced in the lightning ellipses of the old languages, yet resonant and strong from being deployed so long over the seas of uproar, like Neptune exclaiming
Quos ego
, he said something like “Well, isn't that remarkable! Isn't that amazing! So you're already reading Flaubert?” The boy's face lit up like his mop of hair, the big chin hesitated between laughter and tears, the precious book, the terrible, duplicitous book weighed heavily in his awkward hand; well then, reading was good, so many hours of assiduous distress were worth suffering for that one instant. The bald
old man and the tousle-haired boy walked together a part of the way, they moved off toward the dark corridor, full of cooking smells, which led from the dining hall to the main courtyard, and from time to time Achilles could still be seen stopping, taking a step or two backward to better take in the boy with the magisterial regard of his approving, naked eyes. He disappeared into the stench of soup, ruminating over Flaubert, affection, or who knows what, and the boy, left there to his confused intoxication, wandered about a little, sat down and reopened the book, understanding nothing.

Over the course of the years, this surprising friendship was maintained. Achilles later became Roland's guardian, which is to say he came to fetch him at the school on Thursdays and Sundays at about two o'clock, and the boy spent the afternoon with him, in his childless home, near his wife whom I never saw, but whom I believe I can guess to have been a good maker of cakes and a patient, staunch supporter of an absurd old man whose disgrace had afflicted her, so that in the past she had no doubt bitterly reproached him in secret, but now, with age, which subjects us all equally to absurdity, she had become a smiling old woman with compassion for all things and a kind of gaiety, yes, that slightly crazed gaiety of being so often defeated, as seen in drunken old women and nuns. Much more than his Roman authors and histories, it was this gaiety that reflected back on him and that might be glimpsed sometimes in the midst of an uproar, that no doubt kept Achilles going. I do not know how the man and boy occupied themselves in this time together, but one Thursday when we were “out on our walk” along the Pommeil road – one of those dreary marches in rows, herded by a school monitor, outings that, apparently, benefited our lungs – I saw
them walking slowly down a forest ride, the high arch of the branches forming over them like a painted paradise, and “under the trees full of a gentle music,” deep in discussion like scholars, Achilles gesticulating, the scowling little puritan interrupting him, setting him off again; and the autumn wind that lifted their coats carried off their learned words, their slightly ridiculous metaphysics, but so gently that over them the attentive leaves leaned in, deaf and friendly. From the lines of walkers, Rémi shot pained glances, stretching the length of the walking path to those two small points, and perhaps his heart was with them when his exasperated mouth attempted sarcasms, sneered.

But that was in the upper grades, I should say, when the Bakroots were already older. Before that time, there had been the books, the ones that Achilles gradually began to offer Roland, pulling them out of his enormous leather bag where, from among the sad, worn out Plutarchs with the missing pages, the limp, outdated exegeses, they burst forth suddenly in new wrapping paper, sometimes tied with a ribbon, such an odd contrast to the Latinist's old paws. Thus there were the Jules Verne, a
Salammbô
of course, a bowdlerized, illustrated Michelet where we saw Louis XI with his niggardly little hat, leaning over the heavy chronicles that the monks of Saint-Denis, haughty and deferential, were presenting to him under the sarcastic eye of the bad barber whom the king loved; a few pages on, in a nocturnal image peopled with gaunt men and fleeting beasts in a ghostly forest, there was the poor Téméraire of Burgundy whom the niggard king hated to death, the Don Quixote of Charlorais, the elegant, the prodigal, the quick-tempered, on the day after his last battle lost after so many others, cadaver among the cadavers “all naked and frozen”
and the banners of Burgundy and Brabant, fallen with their aggressive heraldry, the former duke and count face down in the ice that, when they tried to extract him, held in its vice that ducal flesh, nose, mouth and cheek, the wolves of old Lorraine bearing away in their stuffed muzzles that defeated, determined meat, which so obstinately had desired the Empire and the disaster, toward this end had so earnestly ridden, plotted, besieged, and sacrificed the masses, had in pure loss waged war and despaired, in the last days losing himself in wine. He had been there for two days when, after searching for him, they found him on the day of Epiphany in the year 1477, in the great cold of those distant times, and when another barber, but this one modest and in tears, who was in the habit of doing Charles's beard and not his politics, leaned over that quarter of meat, and cried out, as could be read in the illustration's caption, as the old chroniclers tell us he said that day, what he thus truly said and it is a miracle that we heard it, while his precarious breath made a small, quickly vanishing cloud, “Alas, it is my gentle master,” then had him decently carried, and “in beautiful linens placed, in the house of Georges Marquiez, in a back bedroom,” in Nancy where the kings, at last delivered from that abusive brother, the pursuit of whom had so long been their reason to be, came to contemplate what remained of him and gently mourned the death of the best part of themselves.