Small Lives (5 page)

Then, on a morning of Pentecost when the saint flanked with the bull, shabbily opulent among coarse hands, is hoisted to a litter on men's backs and goes out facing the roadways, refreshed with new leaves, his two arms calling the dead to him and delivering the living from evil, when, between priest and peasant ceremony, he smiles
from above, impassive and gilded against blue sky or storm, this was observed: like the antique saint with open palms and vacant look, symbol of a shade or wish, perpetuating something that perhaps did not exist, Toussaint Peluchet the taciturn smiled. At the lamp of the dead the saint stopped as always; with an even glance he verified one more time the deep valleys, the woods, the hamlets and their suffering hearts, the vast horizon of his parishes; small peasants in surplices shook small bells, a cold wind passed in silence, Latin phrases were lost, the villagers knelt. At a short distance, standing, “magnificent, total and solitary” as the wooden Image, arrogant as a deacon and patient as an ox, the ever entranced father held in his slack hand something no one saw, like one holds a feather or the hand of a small child.

Another time in Antoine's room – and no one saw this but the walls of the old house with its blind façade, erect, violent and mute – trembling, he opened one of the three books. Perhaps in
Manon Lescaut
, he was astonished by the expression, clear enough to be confused, and the incomprehensible mechanics of the passions that, dumbfounded, he understood, more astonished than by anything he had read until that day, even, in those same pages, the inns and night flights in covered wagons, the daughter lost and son bankrupt, the myriad causes for tears, predestined deaths. Perhaps an old monk (it could almost have been one of those who had long ago transported the relic by donkey beaten and bowed under the reliquary, a ghost among the ghost army of terrified clerics glancing back at the hermitage burning in the tumult of Saracen battle cries – the relic that Juliette, below in the kitchen, now kept with her always), perhaps this old annotator of Benoît whispered to him at random, from the first page that fell open,
that “if one of the brothers shows himself to be attached to something, it is important that he be immediately deprived of it,” and that if he himself banishes this thing, all the more bitter but all the more certain will be his salvation. Perhaps with its rigid symbolism, which at first he could not make out, the atlas taught him that all the arable and non-arable corners of the earth were equal under the same signs, as a few beggarly cantons were to the eyes of a wooden saint; and certainly this book opened to him the son's pathways, all the possible outcomes of the wandering that began one evening in haying time and for which he, Toussaint, had served as the instrument, all the possible paths except death: the son was there somewhere under his gaze, or he was no more. Evening came; raising his head, Toussaint saw through the window what Antoine as a child has always seen: the bell tower over there, the impalpable distance that bore the call to prayer, a skylark suspended or black rag of a crow; below the skylark, a few hundred square meters of Peluchet land; his gaze skimmed over them as if they had been painted, returned to the living skylark, to the blue of the bell tower.

(It is also possible, but unlikely, that he did not understand a bit of all that; he slammed the book closed again and, cursing, got angrily drunk; he was, after all, a peasant and already old.)

Finally, one year Fiéfié from the Décembres helped him with the ploughing; he came again that spring, during the summer, and more and more often. He was somewhat simple and liked his drink; he probably spoke too fast and too much; very thin, with hands that shook, he had watery eyes that looked out of a sagging, feverish face. He slept in an old cottage already abandoned at that time, the ruins of which I
am familiar with today, in the brambles, far from everyone by necessity more than taste, near La Croix-du-Sud. He gradually put more and more distance between himself and the Décembres, his father and brothers; he had tumbled down the gentle, unconscious slope of daily drinkers: living on nothing but wine and drinking enough for four, having diluted in this potion the model of ancestors and the taste for heirs, the little reserve and secret foolish pride that comprise the honor of the humble. He looked at things as we all do, without revealing what he saw there, being neither grown man nor young man grown old, but simply a drunkard, everywhere gently mocked or harshly treated by the worst of them. But he was welcomed at the table because he had two good hands that he had to put to work the rest of the week if he wanted to pickle himself in alcohol on Sunday, dissolve his attachment to them as he had all his other attachments. After such days, reeling from the cafés in Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, he would collapse in the closest barn, in the docile sheaves, and talk to himself long into the night in wild fits, laughing proudly, issuing decrees, until the village children would creep up and, throwing a bucket of water in his face or the cold streak of a slowworm down his shirt, carry off his fragile monarchy, dispersed in the fleeing laughter.

So they were seen together, Fiéfié bounding unevenly along in the shadow of the old man, always very upright, overbearing, distant. They yoked the oxen in the courtyard and solemnly set off; Fiéfié at the shaft called to the heavy curled brows, jeered at them in loud bursts with his bawling voice, jerky and misshapen as a cripple or an Elizabethan clown, and the old man standing straight at the front of the tipcart, stiff, his moustache all white now, the wheels creaking under
him, also conforming to images, kings defeated, or grown old and defeated all the same, furious and powerless lords, abdicators. Sometimes his great brusque voice fell on the dull withers of the oxen, on Fiéfié whom he abused; but sometimes he may have been cheerful and smiled, and only Fiéfié and the pathways knew it. They went home; Fiéfié brought up another bottle from the cellar, sat down, drifted off; the mother, shapeless and always moaning under the ruined citadel of black underskirts, muttered, prepared who knows what, was not there; and between them, the old man, who did not drink or moan, entranced perhaps, nostalgic or self-assured, the old man, it seemed, spoke.

About this time, in the cafés of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, in the talk born of wine and increased by fatigue, in the endless gossip of the day laborers, and from there into the houses where men report back in that necessity for quarrelsome, combative conversation with their wives, backward-looking and inescapable on drunken evenings, Antoine rose from the dead.

He was, Fiéfié said, in America. It is true that Fiéfié was not credible, and that he would have been laughed at if it had not been known that through his mouth and however betrayed, however demeaned, it was the other who spoke, the old banisher, the enigmatic, peremptory one. Thus he was lent the distrusting ear, the secretly excited and envious ear that is lent to prophets, whose squealing voice and tattered appearance, whose overgrown hovel I can well believe Fiéfié shared. Thus America was spoken of, and the shadow of Antoine over there; and Fiéfié and his listeners alike saw America as a country similar to the adjoining cantons, those known by hearsay but never seen, beyond
Laurière or Sauviat, on the other side of the Jouet Mountain or the Puy des Trois-Cornes. They saw a wealthy but perilous country, of cutthroat caravansary, where there are Sinais of thorns and Canaans of village feasts, full of lost young women who love you, splendid or disastrous destinies, or the two combined, as destinies are in countries known only by hearsay. There they saw Antoine, little Antoine with the almost childlike features by which they had known him ten years earlier and which would never age, and there they found him some dubious or perilous occupation that suited his arrogance, his quiet obstinacy, his silences: pimp or engineer, ruffian cap over one eyebrow or driving a railway train at breakneck speed, and in his tanned face, those eyes always had that gallant, indolent dignity.

(Thus, surely the dominical reign of Fiéfié – and I wonder how much of all this he could really understand, how he could be equal to his mandate as the father's herald, as the link to the son's history, simple as he was and certainly not capable of stringing two reasonable thoughts together, but devoted to Toussaint and having seized from his lips the word “America”; this word, repeated indefinitely, was to the father what the relic was to the mother, and thus as transmissible, summarizing all the possible fictions and even the very idea of fiction, that is to say, what he, Fiéfié would never possess, which did not exist and was nevertheless, mysteriously, named – surely Fiéfié's dominical rule, that obscure throne of straw and scepter of drink, that grandiloquent monarchy dedicated to spiders, outraged by a bucket of water and the evil deeds of children, became an unimaginable reign over a single, impoverished word.)

Antoine had written, from Mississippi or New Mexico, barbarian
countries beyond Limoges; and nothing, after all, allows me to affirm with conviction that these letters, which no one saw, did not exist. Perhaps their signatory actually drove black locomotives under the yellow sun of distant El Paso; perhaps the second California gold rush swept along with it this bit of a soul from Le Châtain in its wave of rattletraps, brawls, wild gold panners, and lost innocence; perhaps he walked surrounded by mythic machinery, massively virile, Confederate Stetson and Yankee Colt, wheeler-dealer and horse thief, and as he drove multitudes of stolen cattle across the frontier by night, perhaps he remembered, at the carved base of a saint, a small docile bull; or “unnaturally sober,” perhaps he lived in the bourgeois comfort of some small trade, in a wooden house on the edge of the desert with a woman taken to be his lawful wife, who attended services in white gloves at the Baptist church, but whom he had won playing dice in a bordello in Galveston or Baton Rouge. Or again, too weary to face more distant coasts, he might have gone no further than the lap of a woman on a violet hillside in the West Indies, unless he had become a Benedictine in the Azores, like the sailor in
Mémoires d'outre-tombe
, which he had not read. That is what I myself would imagine. But as for Toussaint, he did not have access to the materials necessary to imagine that, scraps of language, popular engravings, or Hollywood images; of America, desperately as he tried, he could imagine nothing; nevertheless he knew that the son had two legs for walking, and then perhaps a steamer had taken over to convey him across the sea; he knew what a locomotive was, a taste for gold, and a bordello, and he could imagine Antoine in one of those three states or those three places. The elements that no one knew and that he patched together
to construct a plausible American son were different from mine, more limited no doubt, but of a richer, freer, more astonishing arrangement; and then, in the little atlas, he had read these names: El Paso, Galveston, Baton Rouge.

He had read them. The atlas falls open today quite naturally at North America, the page that has yellowed the most. The names of the cities that I have mentioned are underlined with a clumsy pencil, with a thick, heavy line like carpenter marks.

Should I add that the father gradually abandoned his patch of land, those eight or ten hectares of buckwheat wrested from the brush and the scree, that doleful reliquary of the lost days and useless sweat of thirty generations of Peluchets, from which the son had been excluded by his indifference on that evening when all of it, intractable scree and sweat long dried, had risen in the pointing arm of the father and had forced him out with all its weight of stone and sheaf, of buried ancestors? The old man did battle with something else altogether now. Fiéfié cultivated confusedly here and there, gesticulated, throwing stones at the crows, mocking the oxen; as if he had smuggled in seeds from his hovel or cuttings in his bloody hands one drunken evening, the brambles won; in the Clerc meadow, the broom stood as high as a man; the elders grew in the middle of the field, white dust scared up by slight winds, sudden flights. The father, author of his son's days and Author now of his own evening portion, scythe resting mechanically on his shoulder but as idle and magnificent henceforth as the harp of the psalmist king, slowly paced the roadways, spoke to the crows, imagined El Paso. He planted himself in front of Fiéfié and watched him, mocking but impassive, barely his accomplice; with cheerful industry,
the clown gesticulated more quickly, jumped from clod to clod and harassed the oxen, played his role; satisfied, the father smoothed his moustache, withdrew to the shade of the forest edge and sat down grandly against a tree trunk; the sun set on his ruined land; over there, the dispersed son, the glorious American body, was making gold in California.

Thus the two of them attended the fields, but without purpose and celebrating who knew what, as if they had been in a church, on a fairground or theatrical stage; and beyond, in the dark house barely visible around the bend of hedges, the mother, relic in hand, the word America never passing her lips, muttered the names of Saint Barbe, Saint Fleur, Saint Fiacre.

Reality, or what would like to be taken for it, reappeared.

Let us imagine them, Fiéfié and Toussaint, early one foggy morning, leaving for the pig market in Mourioux. They have droplets of mist on their moustaches. They are happy going through the woods, their roles well in hand, living their own lives without asking confirmation of their modest joy, modestly invented, from anyone. Not without ceremony, they are driving a few recalcitrant pigs; they are joking around; I hear their laughing voices on the Cinq-Routes hill; let them enjoy this moment. There they are in Mourioux. There between the upright, immutable church, the gilded signs on the lawyers' offices lost in the wisteria, blooming or already gone by, and the window where I could be writing these lines, let us locate the place, perhaps this one or another just like it, where the truth according to Toussaint Peluchet faltered. The market over, they went to Marie Jabely's for a drink with
the horse dealers. No doubt Fiéfié was soon drunk, had turned away from the haggling, and began talking in a loud, strong voice, spilling his heart: America appeared among the drinkers and Antoine was striding gallantly across that holy ground, he was making grand gestures from across the sea to all those over here. The old man, uncomfortable in the black tie and stiff collar of market days and weddings, the legendary starched clothes of the last century that hung absurdly from the uneasy shoulders of peasants, the old man let Fiéfié declaim and did not breathe a word, proud, tacit, indulgent as an Author abandoning to his ghostwriter the thankless, subordinate task of the dialogues. Then, from a group of young men, suddenly arose one mocking, categorical voice, the voice of a Jouanhaut son, returning from Rochefort where he had done his military service, a little of a coxcomb, I think, and conceited, wearing the polished boots or perhaps the wide epaulettes of a sergeant; that vain, categorical, coxcomb voice, like reality itself entering a country bar in polished boots, proclaimed it: the son was not in America, he had been seen on this side of the ocean. In chains and two-by-two, to the jeers of the fishwives, he had been seen at the port, with the convicts loading cargo for the Ré penal colony.