Small Lives (2 page)

His vocation was Africa. And knowing it not to be the case, I dare to believe for a moment what called him was less the vulgar lure of
fortunes to be made than an unconditional surrender into the hands of intransitive Fortune herself; that he was too much the orphan, irremediably coarse and low born, to embrace the devout nonsense of social ascension, proof of strong character, success acquired through merit alone; that he left as a drunkard swears an oath, emigrated as a drunkard falls to the ground. I dare to believe that. For in speaking of him, I speak of myself; and I, too, would not deny what, I imagine, was the chief motive for his departure: the assurance that over there, a peasant became a White Man, and, even if he was the last of ill-born sons, deformed and repudiated by the Mother Tongue, he was nearer to her skirts than a Fulah or an Akan. He would speak the language aloud and she would recognize herself in him; he would marry her “beside palm gardens, among a very gentle people” a people enslaved, upon whom to found these nuptials. With every other power, she would grant him the only one that matters: the power that throttles all other voices when the Fine Speaker raises his own.

His military service over, he returned to Les Cards – it may have been in December, there may have been snow, thick on the bakehouse wall, and my grandfather, who was shoveling the paths, saw him coming from afar and raised his head with a smile, singing softly to himself until he drew level – and announced his decision to leave, “for overseas,” as was said in those days, into the sudden blue and the irreparable distance. You took that plunge into the color and the violence; you left your past on the other side of the sea. The declared goal was the Ivory Coast; the motive, just as flagrant, was greed. A hundred times I heard my grandmother recall the arrogance with which he must have avowed that “over there he would become rich, or die.”
And today I imagine the tableau that my romantic grandmother had sketched for herself, rearranging the details she remembered around a more noble, overtly dramatic theme than her impoverished reality, marred by belonging to the commonality, could have provided, a tableau that must have remained alive in her until her death, heightened with colors that intensified as the original scene, lost to time and the additions of reconstructed memory, disappeared. I imagine a composition in the manner of Greuze, some “departure of the eager child,” hatching its drama in the large country kitchen darkened by smoke as a glaze darkens a canvas, and where, in a great whirlwind of emotion that undoes the women's shawls and raises the coarse hands of the men in mute gesticulation, André Dufourneau, proudly posed against a bread hutch, calf muscles bulging in puttees neat and white as eighteenth century stockings, extends his whole arm, palm open, toward the window flooded with ultramarine blue.

But, as a child, it was with very different strokes that I painted this departure. “I will come back rich, or die there.” As unmemorable as it is, I have said how, a hundred times, my grandmother exhumed that phrase from time's ruins, unfurled its brief, sonorous standard again in the air, always new, always from the past. But I was the one who asked her for it, who wanted to hear over and over this commonplace of those who are leaving. As explicit as the crossbones of the Brothers of the Barbary Coast, the flag it made snap in the wind for me proclaimed the inevitable second term, death, and that fictive thirst for riches you oppose to death only to better abandon yourself to it, the perpetual future, the triumph of destinies hastened along by rebelling against them. I shivered then in the same way as, when reading, I was seized
by poems full of rumors and massacres, by dazzling prose. I knew it; I touched something similar there. And no doubt, these words were indeed “literary,” uttered with satisfaction by a being who wanted to emphasize the gravity of the moment, but who was too badly educated to know how to heighten it by pretending to couch it in a clever phrase, and was thus reduced to marking its singularity by drawing from a more “noble” repertoire. But there was something more; there was the redundant, essential, and summarily burlesque formulation – one of the first in my life, to my knowledge – of one of those fates who were the sirens of my childhood, to whose song I would, in the end, surrender myself, wrists and ankles tied, right from the age of reason. These words were, to me, an Annunciation, and like the Blessed Virgin, I trembled without penetrating the meaning; my future incarnate and I did not recognize it. I did not know that writing was so dark a continent, more enticing and disappointing than Africa, the writer a species more bent on getting lost than the explorer; and, although that scribe may explore memory and memory's libraries instead of sand dunes and forests, may return flush with words instead of gold, or die there poorer than ever, “to die of it” was the alternative offered to him as well.

And that was the departure of André Dufourneau. “My day is set; I am leaving Europe.” Already the sea air shocks the lungs of this inlander. He looks at the sea. There he sees old peasant men lost beneath their caps and women, black and naked, being offered to him, labor that soils the hands and enormous rings on the fingers of flashy adventurers, the word “bungalow,” and the words “never again.” He sees
his desires and his regrets; he sees the light infinitely reflecting. He is certainly standing there, arms resting on the ship's rail, unmoving, his eyes vague and set on the horizon of visions and light, the sea wind ruffling his hair like the hand of a romantic painter, draping his black cotton jacket with antique style. This is a good opportunity to sketch the physical portrait of him that I have been putting off. The family archives kept one picture, in which he is photographed standing, in the blue uniform of the infantry; the puttees wrapped around his calves made me think of Louis XV stockings just now. His thumbs are hooked in his belt, chin raised, chest out. His proud posture is the one often favored by small men. Come now, admit it, he really resembles a writer. There is a portrait of the young Faulkner, a small man like him, in which I recognize the same haughty yet drowsy air, the eyes heavy but with an ominous, flashing gravity, and under the ink-black moustache formerly used to hide the coarseness of the lip, alive like the din silenced by the spoken word, the same bitter mouth that prefers to smile. He moves away from the deck, stretches out on his berth, and there he writes the thousand novels out of which the future is made and which the future unmakes; he is living the fullest days of his life. The clock of rolling waves disguises the hours, time passes and place changes, Dufourneau is as alive as the stuff of his dreams; he has been dead a long time; I am not yet abandoning his shadow.

This gaze, which thirty years later will fix on me, now skims the African coast. Abidjan can be seen beyond its lagoon savaged by the rains. The Grand-Bassam sandbar, as witnessed and described by Gide, is an engraving from an old magazine; the author of
Paludes
wisely assigns the sky its traditional leaden aspect, but the sea under his pen
takes on the image and color of tea. Like other travelers history has forgotten, in order to cross the estuary wave, Dufourneau must be lifted above the water, suspended in a hammock moved by a crane. Then the big, gray lizards, the little goats, the Grand-Bassam officials, the port formalities, and beyond the lagoon, the trail toward the interior where great and small tales of adventure alike are born in the same uncertainty, dazzling desires from the womb of drab reality. Doumpalm trees where snakes of glue and gold sleep, gray rain showers on gray branches, species bristling with fierce thorns and sumptuous names, the hideous marabous that are supposed to be wise, and the Mallarméan palm, too concise to give shelter from sun or showers. In the end, the forest closes again like a book; the hero is delivered over to chance, his biography to the precariousness of hypotheses.

After a long silence, a letter arrived at Les Cards in the thirties. The same one-armed postman brought it, the one Dufourneau used to watch for from the field, during childhood and the war. (I knew him myself, retired in a little white house near the village cemetery; pruning rosebushes in a tiny garden, he spoke readily and loudly, with a joyful rolling of his r's.) And no doubt it was spring, sheets long since gone to dust steaming in the sun, flesh now decomposed smiling in the lightheartedness of May; and under the violently tender clusters of lilac, my mother, fifteen years old, was inventing a childhood already flown. She had no memory of the letter's author; she saw her parents moved to tears; in the violet scent and shadow, sacerdotal as the past, she herself was filled with a delicious, literary emotion, dense as foliage.

Other letters arrived, annually or biannually, recounting of his life what its protagonist wished to tell, and which he no doubt believed he
lived: he had been employed as a forester, a “woodcutter,” and finally a planter; he was rich. I never mused over those letters, with their exotic stamps and postmarks – Kokombo, Malamalasso, Grand-Lahou – all gone now. I imagine I have read what I never read. In them he spoke of minor events and small pleasures, of the rainy season and threats of war, of a French flower that he had succeeded in grafting, of the laziness of the blacks, the brilliance of birds, the high price of bread; in them he was low and noble; he closed with his best wishes.

I am also thinking about what he left untold: some insignificant secret never disclosed – not out of modesty, surely, but it amounts to the same thing, since the linguistic resources at his command were too limited to express the essential, and his pride too intractable to allow the essential to be embodied in roughly approximate words. Some mental gyrations over a pathetic piece of work, a shameful pleasure in all he lacked. We know this, because the law is the law. He did not have what he wanted; it was too late to confess. What good is appealing when you know the sentence will be for life, and there will be no suspending it and no second chance?

Finally that day in 1947: the road once again, the tree, the same sky and trees outlined against the same horizon, the little garden of wallflowers. The hero and his biographer meet under the chestnut tree, but, as is always the case, the interview is a fiasco. The biographer is a babe in arms and will retain no memory of the hero; the hero recognizes in the child only an image of his own past. If I had been ten years old, no doubt I would have seen him in the royal crimson robes of a Magi, placing rare and magical goods on the kitchen table with a haughty
reserve, coffee, cacao, indigo. If I had been fifteen, he would have been “the fierce, wounded soldier returned from the hot climes,” whom women and adolescent poets love, fiery eyes set in dark skin, with furious word and grip. Even yesterday, and especially if he was bald, I would have thought that “savagery had caressed his head,” like the most brutal of Conrad's colonials. Today, whatever he may be or say, I would think what I say here, nothing more, and it would all amount to the same thing.

Of course I can linger over that day, to which I was a witness, on which I saw nothing. I know that Félix opened many bottles – his then sure hand firmly grasped the corkscrew, skillfully releasing the pleasing noise – that he was happy in the effusions of wine, friendship, and summer, that he talked a lot, in French to ask his guest about faraway countries, in patois to recall memories. I know that his small, blue eyes sparkled with mocking sentimentality, that from time to time, emotion and a taste of the past broke off his words before they left his mouth. I suppose that Elise listened, hands resting on her lap in the folds of her apron, that she gazed long and with unallayed astonishment at the man the young boy she was searching for had become, beneath whose features he was sometimes restored to her in a fleeting expression, a way of cutting his bread, of launching into a sentence, of following the flash of a bird out the window, or a ray of light. I know that patois sentences came back to Dufourneau unbidden to marry his thoughts (as perhaps had never ceased to happen) and carry them aloud into the echoing day (as had not happened in a very long time). They spoke of the old people who had died, Félix's agronomic setbacks, with embarrassment, about my father who had run off. The wisteria on the wall
was in blossom, the day drew to a close like all others; in the evening they bid one another farewell until the next time, which would never be. A few days later, Dufourneau left again for Africa.

There was one more letter, accompanying a shipment of some packets of green coffee – I have held those beans in my hand for a long time; when I was a child, I often rolled them dreamily out of their rough brown wrapping. The coffee was never roasted. Sometimes my grandmother, straightening the back shelf of the cupboard where it was kept, would say, “Here, Dufourneau's coffee.” She would look at it for a minute, then her look would change, and she would add, “It must still be good,” but in a tone that said, “No one will ever taste this.” It was the precious alibi of that memory, of that word; it was the devout image or epitaph, the call to order for minds too apt to forget, all drunk and distracted as they are by the racket of the living. Roasted and consumable, it would have waned, profane, into an aromatic presence; eternally green and arrested at a premature stage in its cycle, it was each day more from the past, from beyond, from overseas; it was one of those things that make the timber of the voice change when speaking of them. It had really become the gift of a Magi.

That coffee and letter were the last signs of the life of Dufourneau. A definitive silence succeeded them, which I can and want only to interpret as his death.

As to the way the Wicked Stepmother struck, conjectures can be infinite. I imagine a Land Rover turned over in a furrow of blood red laterite, where blood hardly leaves a trace; a missionary preceded by a choir boy whose white surplice pleasingly silhouettes a soot black face, entering the straw hut where the master gasps out the last measures
of a vast fever; I see a flood carrying off the drowned, a companion of Ulysses asleep, slipping off a roof and crashing to the ground without completely waking up, a hideous snake with ashen scales that the fingers graze and immediately the hand swells, then the arm. In the final hour, I wonder if he thought of that house in Les Cards that I, at this moment, am thinking of.