Small Lives (17 page)

There is no day more unbearable in my memory; I experimented with how words can disappear and what a bloody puddle, plagued and buzzing with flies, they leave of the body from which they have withdrawn; with them gone, idiocy and bellowing remain. All speech, all tears abolished, I let out the cries of a distressed cretin, I grunted; taking Marianne in the room in Les Cards like a pig mounting the peasant woman who leads it to the woods for acorns, I must have let out the same grunts; but these were even more violent; they reeked of the slaughterhouse. If I distanced myself from my distress for a
moment, named it and watched myself experiencing it, I could only laugh, as the words “pissing blood” make you laugh, if by chance you do piss blood.

Alarmed by my cries, my mother, overcome with anxiety, believed I had gone mad; the poor woman begged me to speak to her, to return to reason. Held in the gaze of that loving, desperately pitying witness, the grotesque egoism of my pain redoubled. Finally my mother left. Speech returned to me; I had lost Marianne, I existed; I opened the window, leaned out into the brilliant cold; the heavens, as always, as written in the psalm, recounted the glory of God; I would never write and would always be this infant boy waiting for the heavens to change his diaper, provide him with written manna that they obstinately refused him; my gluttonous desire would not cease anymore than its insatiability before the insolent richness of the world; I was dying from hunger at the feet of the wicked stepmother; what did it matter to me that things exulted, if I did not have Great Words to speak of them and if no one heard me speak? I would not have readers, and no longer had the woman who, loving me, had taken the place of them.

I could not tolerate the loss of that fictive reader who, with such tender consideration, pretended to believe I was pregnant with writing to come; it had been a long time since I myself had stopped believing that, and only in her did a semblance of belief survive; in some way she was, in my eyes and hands, all I had written and could ever write, I would even say, if it were not grotesque – and only too true – my life's work. With her gone, I ceased, even as a liar, to be credible to myself. But no doubt that was not the worst of it; in my dereliction, in my vain isolation, she had finally taken the place of all other creatures; I
had left it to her to represent the world for me. She was the one who arranged the bouquets so that the flowers I had not seen appeared, who pointed out the remarkable vistas and was tantamount to the things she named; from balaclava to black stockings, she occupied the whole range of the living, from the most pitiful prey to the most desired predator; she was Saint Jerome's little dog. And in fleeing, for which I was to blame, the little creature had taken with her the books, lectern, and writing desk, had stripped the erudite patriarch of his lofty crimson and his black cappa magna, leaving in his place in the charred canvas only a naked Judas, ignorant and unpardoned at the foot of the cross for which he is guilty.

The hellhounds had me at bay, deprived as I was of the little canine ally who had diverted them; I felt like a deer in its last minutes. The appalling world had to be fled; an alcohol novena, naturally my first thought, seemed to me an interminable dead-end road I would have to follow between needles; I chose a more cowardly but surer way out. I went to La Ceylette.

That year I had frequented one of those new-look psychiatric hospitals, built in the countryside and without walls, which do not lack a certain charm; I went there to consult Doctor C., a tall, indolent, young man, a bit smug and not devoid of kindness. From the huge windows of his office, the view took in the forest; on the walls hung a big map of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, which exists in no sea, and portraits of poets twice dead, from madness and then mortality. He had some learning, found that I did, too, and we connected on this point; we spoke of fashionable subjects, the cliché that links insanity to literature, Louis Lambert, Artaud or Hölderlin. (I remember
that he mentioned, with some emotion, though, that his grandfather, a man without means, had made him read Céline when he was an adolescent.) However I was there for consultation, and not without duplicity; for if I did not expect anything much from those therapeutic conversations, from the miracle of anamnesis or the open sesame of free association, I did, on the other hand, expect everything from those little pills that I slyly extorted from him and that he thought he was prescribing to me; if I went along with what he said, if I played the literary theme skillfully enough, if most importantly I directed the conversation at the right moment toward the German romantics, his particular passion, about which he spoke beautifully, it was guaranteed that at the end of an hour, he would good-naturedly pull out the providential prescription pad and while he was at it, without batting an eye, write refillable prescriptions for soporifics that could knock out a bull, which would permit me to escape from his office in the best of moods, assured of seeing the world for long days through nothing but a delightful, hazy blur.

But no blur could hide that clear, terrible October day from me; only the thick opacity of the sea which I wanted overhead could have done that; I wanted to be a slow fish in the great depths, an insensible, gluttonous wineskin, I wanted a sleeping cure; I knew that Doctor C would not refuse it to me, and in fact he needed little coaxing. Expertly weighted with the chemical aqualung, I descended into the sweetness of the sentenceless waters, where the past is calcified, where the death of fish is written on gigantic limestone pages – one variety of which is marble – where the matrix of loss fills with lead. When my lamp briefly flickered, motherly nurses fed me, made me smoke cigarettes
that my trembling hand could not grasp:
Eurpharynx Pelecanoides
, the Grandgousier of the depths, is a creature with a large mouth, without witness, and satisfied.

It was necessary to come up again. And none of the metaphors I just abused could do justice to that painful but lucid return.

The sleeping cure completed, I remained at La Ceylette for two months. No doubt I established contact again with the winter, my new bereavement, my old deferred grace; but most of all, there I saw men in practice, reduced to their flagrant offence of speech or of silence. Because at the asylum, even more than elsewhere, the world is a stage: who is feigning? who is authentic? which one mimes the grunting of a beast to engender more purely the desired song of an angel? which one will grunt forever, believing that he is singing at last? And surely everyone is acting, if we admit that the most complete madness, which can only be described as “raving,” is a kind of simulation that has gone too far.

There were a few of those educated, urbanite patients who had learned from the media or romantic bestsellers that nervous depression strikes beautiful souls, and who practiced it diligently. They chattered away as they would have done elsewhere; the conformism of mental illness, the feeling of belonging to a vast susceptible elite, the triumphalism of shared misfortune, all that rendered these chosen few generally content with their fate. Nevertheless, it was not mere affectation, these people did suffer; but, ill at ease in their company, where I could only weakly assent and join in the chorus, I fled them; I preferred the company of the backwoods cretins, whose eccentricities
were awkwardly sentimental, and who were only disfigured by words learned from popular dance tunes, a juke-box. Also, thinking had no doubt come to them with madness, without any other transition, and without any other transition, thought had been arrested in that lightning flash. I will speak more of them, who are dear to my memory, a pyromaniac in love with trees, a farmer left widowed by his mother, and others; I will speak first of Jojo.

The man who went by that name was an aristocrat stricken with acute, progressive senility. What had his name been before he responded to that infamous diminutive, always accompanied by crude laughter or threats? He could not have told us, no longer being able to speak, though he bellowed or babbled almost constantly. Georges perhaps, or Joseph? It is likely then that it was a nickname formerly assigned to him tenderly, laughingly, by a woman smiling when smiles are exchanged under calmed sheets, when one smokes naked, glorious, and humble. He had certainly had women, and had perhaps read books.

Jojo was foul; he had the incoherent gait of a jumping jack; his insatiability was constant and execrable; his desires were no longer served by words, which can tone them down and thus satisfy them, nor by a correctness of gesture, which allows the object so grossly coveted to be gracefully seized; these inadequacies made him furious. Wherever it was, in the visiting room where laughter greeted him, or on the grounds where silent things persisted, he would appear, pure block of moving anger, ejaculatory, as one imagines the Aztec gods appeared at the height of their form; like them, he fixed his thunderous gaze for a moment on the world to be destroyed; then turned on his heel and
disappeared, like them, full of massacres and sobs, flayed but earthy, walking like an axe fells a tree.

He was served his meals in the dining hall at a table custom-made to accommodate him, into which a bowl was inserted, where various types of gruel awaited him; his back was tied to the chair, a sheet in the guise of a napkin around his neck; for a utensil he had a sort of ladle; despite these precautions, his movements were so uncoordinated and his unfortunate appetite nevertheless so impetuous that after his meal in this trough, the fallen food was spattered over his whole body and the floor around him. I could see him from my place in the dining hall; in a sick way I would observe him and laugh to myself over our kinship. Once, as I automatically raised my head between two courses, I did not see the monster, but the back of a silhouette leaning over him, very close, that seemed to be speaking to him; the stranger, who was tall, wore old village-fair blue jeans and the heavy, muddy boots of a farmer. The one-sided conversation, carried on too softly to disentangle from the idiot's groans, would have been enough to intrigue me; but there was also, in that solid nape with the thick hair, in that economic hand holding a pale cigarette, not without grace, but with a hint of haughty reticence, something that struck me, that I had seen before. We left the dining hall; I saw Jojo's face; it was more human, ecstatic or mad with rage, as if his anger had finally defined a target for itself, or he remembered something that he had formerly known how to name, embrace, take with a firm hand; he let out a sort of distant, uninterrupted gurgle, that I had never heard from him before. The man was still leaning over him; reluctantly, he stepped to the side to let us pass; his coat was spattered with the idiot's wayward food; we were
face to face, we looked at each other, hesitated, looked down again. I recognized Father Bandy.

He was, however, hardly recognizable. Time had made a peasant out of him; the back country had anointed him head to foot with its thick, odorous oil. Over it lay another unctuous scent, sharper and worse, that I could not name at first; his face was extremely blotchy, under a mist, his eyes were absent; within them, his gaze was like snow at the bottom of a hole, during a thaw. It was upon frail, though hardly interesting or spectacular features that this color bloomed like makeup; his hand trembled a little, but always with that cold, disdainful but not intractable manner of holding an expensive cigarette, as if holding it was the best way of neglecting it. He clearly recognized me, and like me, let it pass without a word.

From the window of my room, I saw the priest leave shortly afterward, standing firmly facing the cold, drawing up the zipper of his jacket, tossing his cigarette butt; these gestures, too, I recognized. He mounted a moped, and took off sputtering through the acid countryside from which Marianne was absent, and all forgiveness, and the distant summer. I remembered another man.

I had then reached the age for catechism classes, and the only salvation I awaited was the one I would receive from myself as an adult, when I would be competent and strong, as long as I decided to be; I was a child; I was reasonable. The rarity of priests in charge had already made obsolete the territorial and spiritual unity of the parish; the church in Mourioux, with a few other small village churches with their old saints, was served by the Saint-Goussaud parish priest; Father Lherbier, an easygoing old man who occupied himself with archeology,
held that post at the time; he died; it was learned that Father Bandy was replacing him. Rumors preceded him; he was from a family of some standing, from Limoges or Moulin perhaps; most importantly, and prompting in the parishioners a vague pride tinged with mistrust, he was a young theologian with a bright future, but rebellious, whose vocation the bishopric had deemed necessary to test by sending him to shepherd the most humble rustic flocks, in Arrènes, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, that is to say, “
in partibus infidelium
.” He arrived in spring, and it was no doubt in May, if I can believe my memory of lilac bouquets blanketing the plaster feet of the Virgin, when he celebrated his first mass in Mourioux; that was when I learned, along with the smell of golden tobacco, that the Bible is written in words and that a priest can, mysteriously, be enviable.

Through the stained-glass windows a bright sun flooded the steps of the choir; outside a thousand birds were singing, the dense odor of the lilacs seemed like the violent, polychromatic odor of the windows; in the pooled gold on the gray stone, a richly adorned Bandy entered the altar of God. The man was assuredly handsome, blessing the faithful with a gesture all the more perfect for the way it kept them at a distance, at arm's length. I wanted to cry, and could only exalt; because the words suddenly streamed, passionate against the cool vaults, like copper marbles thrown into a basin of lead; the incomprehensible Latin text took on overwhelming clarity; the syllables multiplied on his tongue, the words cracked like whips summoning the world to render itself to the Word; the fullness of the final consonants, culminating with the precise return of the priest in the golden flow of the chasuble to the
Dominus vobiscum
, was an insidious base of tom-toms
to mesmerize the enemy, the numerous, the profuse, the created. And the world groveled, rendered itself; at the end of that nave, suddenly ineffectually sunlit, in the midst of that vividly green countryside, in the odors and the colors, someone, he of the burning word, knew how to do without the created world. At the edge of the pews, perhaps faint, the red flesh of her lips throbbing with responses murmured like promises, Marie-Georgette in pale crepe under her white veil, eyes wide, rewarded Bandy with the look by which his greyhound bitch rewards the master of the hunt, or a white-habited Ursuline once rewarded Urbain Grandier in Loudun.