Small Lives (19 page)

I liked him well enough, but I did not want to be seen in the village in the company of these poor people; to degeneracy, to loss, I did not want to add public humiliation. Jean, who joined me, was not the worst of them; he was rather gentle, and stubbornly, somberly faithful to those who showed him some consideration. He told me that a friend was waiting for him in Saint-Rémy; we could go together and return together, too, if I would stop by for him at the village café on my way back; I did not dare refuse. We walked along side by side, him silent, his square head sunk into his heavy shoulders, muttering from time to time and clenching his fists, me observing him from the corner of my eye. I knew the nature of his anger; he had just lost his mother, with whom he had lived until then as a bachelor, and he had grafted onto his grief an ancient peasant feud; he was convinced that the neighbors around his farm, who had always been on bad terms with him, dug up his mother by night and came to throw her resilient cadaver in his own well, to bury it under his manure pile, to toss it into the trough
of his pigsty, or, covered with hay, to stretch it out under the muzzles of the cows; he lay quaking until dawn from their horrible nocturnal labor that made the doors creak, the dogs bark, the wind rise; at the first pink glow of dawn, he found the ghost everywhere, dirty, half-eaten, a rooster on her head or ivy twisted nastily around her limbs, a pitchfork in her jaw; he had taken the police who came to get him for corrupt gravediggers, hired by his old enemy. And against those arrant desecraters, false police and false neighbors, all of them strange morticians, all of them sectarians of the tomb, he raised his fist toward the sky as he walked, silently railed against the trees, irreproachable space; I felt pity and could only scoff in secret; I had laid blame in the same way on the tourists, on the Loire, surely guilty of preventing me from writing, on that universal troublemaker, the blank page, two months earlier in Sancerre.

I wasted time in the tobacco shop searching for the last readable titles among the cheap thrillers that I had already scoured; when I went out, the sharp winter night was falling, the first star shone in the clear, pure sky. A vertiginous arrogance seized me, my heart overflowed; in the celestial supernatural absence, the defection of the Grace that I had so vainly begged for seemed to me an unbearable guilessness: in being granted to me, it would have been soiled. Marianne had withdrawn, nothing separated me any longer from the painful emptiness of the heavens on a beautiful icy evening: I was that cold, that devastated clarity. A dirty, whistling child walked by, casting a mocking glance toward that great literary half-wit who stood gaping at the crows; shame and reality returned. I would have liked to touch a woman and have her look at me, see the white flowers in the summer fields, be
the scarlet and gilded greens of a Venetian painting; I walked quickly through the dark village, my lousy books under my arm. The paltry light from the Hotel des Touristes, the village's only café, wavered at the end of the square. I entered the sad room with its formica tables, its mopped faded floor; there was nothing exotic about the bar worthy of the worst neighborhoods, the eye of a television above the thickset, worn-out proprietress, and the heavy odor of manure about the dimly lit jukebox. The muddy, taciturn customers raised their heads; Jean, bright-eyed, was sitting at a table with Father Bandy.

Between them was a bottle of red wine, three quarters empty, and that same shade blotched the tired faces of the dissolute companions in an unhealthy way; I suspected this was not their first bottle.

When I reached their table, Jean asked, “You know Pierrot?”

Without responding, the priest extended a vague hand. Once again he looked at me; he did not act as if he recognized me; nor as if he had never seen me before. Simply, and perhaps intentionally, he did not know me; I could have been anyone at all, and was henceforth to him a tree in the forest, a stool at the bar, a flower of the field, irresponsible object before his irresponsible eye; all useless and necessary, worn-out extras acting in a play run too long, born of the earth and returning there; looking at you, he contemplated that course, and not what each little nobody had made of it.

Accepting my gaze however, and despite refusing to recognize in it a particular destiny, I want to believe that for an instant he saw there, as in a stain glass window kindled by a ray of light, a young, luminous priest whom a dazzled boy regarded through tears, struck by dancing, enchanted, heraldic words; that he saw in it the look of all those people
for whom he had been and remained, pedant or drunkard, rhetorician or pathetically charitable, “
monsieur le cure
.” His attention shifted, returned to the bottle from which he served Jean, himself; lead covered the stained glass once again. His gaze was once more buried in snow; “
monsieur le cure
” was simply Georges Bandy who had aged. “Here's to you!” said Jean, bitterly jovial. The priest downed his wine, holding the thick glass with a delicate firmness, as if it were gold.

I had not sat down, I waited uncomfortably, imposter who did deign even to reveal another imposter, or a saint; timidly I hurried Jean along; should we not be getting back in time for dinner? Besides the bottle was empty; they rose. The priest went to the counter to pay; over the miserable blue jeans, gaping at the small of his back, he wore his grubby boots like a lofty missionary in jodhpurs; he held himself relentlessly straight in one of those ribbed wool hunting jackets with pockets in the back, a hunting horn in relief stamped on the metal buttons, that farmers there order from the factory in Saint-Etienne; he could just barely walk with the stiffness of drunkards for whom everything is an abyss and who, like tightrope walkers, pretend not to see it. Furtively gesturing toward the priest who was getting his change from the gloomy proprietress, Jean made a comic face, at the same time mocking and admiring; I had never seen him so relaxed, almost proud, all grief put aside. The impassive priest shook hands all around and preceded us out the door; a stream of stars made him lift his head:
Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei
. The haughty mouth, from which a Virginian cigarette glowed, quoted nothing; I thought how it had also long since finished kissing the naked breasts of an impassioned Marie-Georgette, or some other village Danae open to its shower of gold. Of the word
and the kiss, of the oral riches once so loved, all that remained was this vestige, soon reduced to ashes, this blond cigarette with the golden tip and the odor of women.

He crushed the cigarette under his boot and nodded to us. His moped was leaning against the roughcast wall; resolutely he grabbed the handlebars, straddled the machine, and, head too high as he continued to look at the stars and refused to demean himself under that blind, multiple eye, nearly human in short, he pedaled to start the motor; the moped made a weak zigzag, he fell. Jean let out a little, astonished laugh. His two hands pressed to the ground, the priest raised his head; the stars, the pure, cold stars, created in the Beginning and guides to the Magis, the stars that bear the names of creatures, swans, scorpions, does with their fawns, the stars painted on vaults among naïve flowers, embroidered on chasubles, and cut from gold paper by children, the stars had not vacillated; the fall of a drunkard does not enter into their eternal narration. Painfully the priest got back to his feet; he could no longer resist the rolling of this earth sodden with wine; pushing his machine beside him, he set off stiffly into the night, down that little village street at the end of the world. “The earth staggers before the Lord like a drunken man”; he was the gaze of the Lord, he was the movement of the earth, and perhaps after so many years, finally, he was a man. He had disappeared, in the dark we heard once more the sound of metal; no doubt he had botched a second attempt.

On the way back, we walked quickly; Jean, perky, talked of his family home; all ghosts were absent from it; come on, it was only the doctors who believed that morbid tale of undertakers endlessly reviving an old witch from beyond the grave; they would have ended up
convincing him, too; the dead really were dead, he had told him that, the priest, who, if anyone, should know. He was going to get better, he would be home for Midsummer's Day, and we would go there to eat ham, with the priest, with all his friends, to have a leisurely drink there in the cool kitchen. As we crossed through the forest, he fell silent; the moon had risen, danced in the tall trees, here and there brought to life the ghost of a birch; on the cold roadsigns, the painted deer leaped endlessly through the night. I thought of the cassocked centaur who once leaped onto his motorcycle; then, he had eyes only for gracious, perfumed creatures, all flesh won by his word; I do not know when the day came that he lost faith in such creatures, which is perhaps faith in pleasing beautiful creatures – no one had more faith than Don Juan. Thus with surprise, perhaps with terror, with that astonishment he felt at the flight of a bird or an epileptic, he had learned that other creatures exist; he had come to know that age makes us more like them every day, more like a tree or a madman; when he had ceased to be a handsome priest, when the lighthearted had turned away from the old curate, he had called the others to him, the disgraced, those who no longer had words, very little soul, and not even flesh, and whom Grace, in a great departure, is said to know all the better how to bless; but whatever efforts he had made, in his arrogant resolve to love these poor souls and desperately become their equal, I did not believe that he had been successful. Perhaps I was mistaken; what I had witnessed with my own eyes remained: the
enfant terrible
of the diocese, the seductive, rakish theologian, had become an alcoholic peasant hearing the confessions of crackpots.

Nothing had happened, except what happens to everyone, age, time
passing. He had not changed much – he had simply changed tactics; in the past he had appealed to Grace in vain by demonstrating how worthy he was of receiving it, beautiful as Grace itself and as fatal; mimetic with passion, he acted the angel as some insects pretend to be twigs to surprise their prey; in his nest of pure words, he awaited the divine fledgling. Now surely he no longer believed that Grace, docile and metonymical, reached a beautiful supplicant by climbing the rope of braided perfect words toward the sky, but rather it adopted only the bold leap of metaphor, the derisive flash of antiphrasis; the Son was dead on the cross. On the strength of that evidence, Bandy, null and drunk, almost mute, worked to annihilate himself, he was the hollow that the unsayable Presence would one day fill; drunks willingly believe that God, or Writing, are behind the next bar.

I questioned Doctor C. without saying anything to him of the Bandy that I had known. He smiled indulgently; the priest was incompetent, but inoffensive; then, too, the patients liked him, they shared the same background and had the same faults, the same good qualities perhaps; he was uneducated like them, but he brought them cigarette tobacco; it could be of therapeutic interest to encourage their contact. I did not press the point; we set off on Novalis. Doctor C. remembered with a laugh that the church roof in Saint-Rémy was falling into ruins, and that the priest's negligence was letting it collapse; only a few patients at the hospital, who used it as a pretext to go out, still attended mass in the icy, sodden church where birds nested; and, as if the mention of a country church triggered an irrepressible mechanism in him, he cited the first lines of the Hölderlin poem concerning the lovely blue of a church tower and the blue cry of swallows. I reflected bitterly that in
the same poem, it says that man can imitate Heavenly Joy, and “with the divine be measured, not without happiness”; I reflected joyfully that erroneously, “but poetically still, man lives on earth”; and sadly, that in me as well, a harrowed priest and a church tower triggered mechanisms, quotations, wind: under the banner of Pathos, I rode off with Doctor C.

I am approaching the end of this story.

In the dining hall, it was my habit to eat lunch near a window, across from Thomas. Until then, I had hardly noticed anything but the obstinate, smiling, self-effacing manner of that very contemplative, guileless little fellow; I had also noticed that he was well dressed, but in the way of minor employees who wish not to be noticed, or, as they say, to stay in their place. Full of consideration for his companions at the table, he passed the dishes politely, but with no affectation or hurry, which pleased me; also, and even though he did not seem completely uneducated, neither the delights nor the afflictions of mental illness were for him a pretext for clever conversation; we had exchanged a few words on politics, the personalities of the doctors, television programs, trifles. One day, fork raised, a lost expression on his face, he gazed stubbornly out the window for interminable seconds; there was no one out there; Thomas's chin trembled; he was distraught. “See how they are suffering,” he said. His voice broke. I looked in the same direction; under a weak north wind, some acid pines moved weakly. A blackbird. A few itinerant tits flying from one tree to another, and the great blank sky. I was stupefied; what mystery did he want to show me there, which I could not see? The trees, says Saint-Pol-Roux, exchange
their birds like words; that obliging metaphor came to my mind, with a distressing desire to laugh; tapping on my plate, I could have sung out that suffering in my turn, at the top of my lungs, that suffering – whose? I thought I was in a Gombrowicz novel; but no, I was in a madhouse, and we were respecting the rules of the genre.

Thomas relaxed as suddenly as he had become excited. He ate, without a word or a look for the diffuse suffering that he had just cast upon that corner of winter. But I could not take my eyes away from that ruined earth; something had happened there, the trees, the birds no longer had names, the confusion of the species stupefied me; that must be how an animal given speech, or a human losing it with his reason, perceives the world. Jojo, released from his trough and more unsated than ever after his semblance of a ruined meal, entered that wilderness and reestablished the balance; his poor arms oared for a moment in my field of vision; at his thunderous approach, the sparrows shot out of a service tree; his numb hands once again boxed in the universal ring; trees struck by chance as he walked showered him with rain. “The God of the Smoking Mirror,” I said to myself, “who is club-footed and has two gates banging loudly on his chest.” That barbarian god staggered to the corner of a ploughed field, disappeared into the woods; I felt relieved, my desire to laugh had vanished, I ate; Jojo walked on two feet, he could be made into a god, he was very much a man.