Small Lives (6 page)

The father did not bat an eyelid; for a long time he looked straight ahead, as if numb. Heavily, he put on his hat, paid for his drink, said his good-byes, and left. Fiéfié lost his temper but no one was listening to him anymore; they were gathered around the iconoclast. His astonished speech became the echoless speech of a slightly simple drunk. Staggering under the weight of a wrath too big for him that rendered him stupid, he, too, went out the door. Distressed, stunned by a sharp pain he found himself unable to ascribe either to a lack of wine or the
laughter of children, the clown saw the upright old man standing waiting for him near the watering place, under the wisteria, with his back to the ceaseless, crystalline murmur of the trickling water. Let them return to Le Châtain in the rain, the night in her mantle of chestnut trees gradually pulling them close, Fiéfié yelping like a hunted fox, and the lonely, hobnailed boots of the old man.

The new episode in the history of Antoine made the rounds in the cantons, where its dark logic substantiated it. Knowing gossips, who exalt in shattering reversals and can multiply splendor tenfold through its collapse, seized upon the penal colony as they had previously seized upon America, but as if the one were the crowning of the other, a sequel, written in a different, darker hand, though worthy of its antecedent and, in fact, necessary. The old man had believed he could leave out the cross: his story was perhaps ill-timed, and certainly incomplete without it. The coxcomb, the Judas, supplied the godsend of an
Ecce homo
to the prematurely glorious Ascension.

What the truth really was, no one knows; perhaps the old couple learned it (I cannot assert this) from the incongruous visit of the messenger in the top hat, but nothing will tell us who sent him or what message he brought. Maybe Antoine was happy in America, or he was a convict, sovereignly vested with striped hat, slaving away at the Rochefort port “where the convicts died thick and fast”; or he was both, in whichever order you liked; he could have been sent off under whiplash from Saint-Martin-de-Ré to Cayenne in America, to distantly fulfill the paternal fiction as well as the prison prophesies scattered throughout the little volume of
Manon Lescaut
, which he had read with a passion. But then again he could have disappeared in the vulgar
solitude of unspeakable employment tending shop or keeping books, in a dim rented room forsaken by the light, in the suburbs of Lille or El Paso; his unemployed pride would not have abandoned him. Or finally, writer who failed before becoming one and whose poor pages no one will be read, he could have ended up like the young Lucien Chardon if Vautrin's firm grasp had not dragged him from the water: a convict still. Because I myself think he had almost everything it takes to become an intractable author: a cherished, disastrously ruptured childhood, fierce pride, an obscurely inflexible patron saint, a few avidly read canonical texts, Mallarmé and how many others for contemporaries, banishment and the father rejected; and I think that he came within the usual hair's breadth – another childhood, more urban or affluent, nurtured by English novels and Impressionist salons where a beautiful mother takes your gloved hand in her own – of having the name Antoine Peluchet ring in our memories like the name Arthur Rimbaud.

Juliette gave up; she died. The other two survived without giving an inch. For the father, nothing seemed to have changed; as a revelation that, for him, was not one, or a heresy that he could contend with, the words of the Jouanhaut son did not shake him. He did not enter into the polemic, except that in the fields his step became more lively, as if some urgency bore him, and the names of the distant cities he threw to the crows more resonant, more imperious. He called to his departed and perhaps they smiled at him, attentive as they all are; proudly he bore his scythe; and those evenings in Chatelus when Saint John or Our Lady of August are celebrated with huge fires that stand out against
the horizon, he looked long at the lights and there he saw Juliette, as pretty as she had been at twenty, climbing the night toward the son.

He maneuvered within the legend; Fiéfié however, who followed him like a shadow, who had been his mouthpiece and who was his shadow, Fiéfié remained on the earth and suffered. Each Sunday he endlessly reenacted the experience of the rout, in the cafés of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, where wine no longer tasted like anything but wine, where derision had become his lot, which he could no longer endure; because there had been a time when people had listened, and having tasted their approval of the sovereign word that had, for a moment, been vested in him, he could not suffer the fickleness of his public and his sudden, total and irremediable disaffection. He sat wordlessly at the rickety tables where he spilled the morning's first bottle and whimpering, stupefied, sorry-eyed, drank alone until evening. Then, a joker let slip the word America; Fiéfié seized on it, lifted his strained face, clownish and prophetic, with its beatific mask; he hesitated a moment but the perfidious glances and goad of wine convinced him, and flushed with urgency and conviction, more carried away with each word, half rising, straightening, now fully erect, he proclaimed the innocence of the son, the distant reign of the son, the glory of the son. The sudden roars of laughter drowned him, and the young Antoine was thrown to the ground in the café, wrists and ankles bound, beaten by the guards as over there. Then the insults, the blows, the overturned chairs, and in Mourioux in the scent of wisteria, near the windswept cemetery where the defeated Juliette slept, in Chatelus on the sloping square planted with elms, and throughout the night,
Fiéfié collapsed magnificently, ranting and ruminating about America in the blood and rubble until he fell into a rough sleep in which he saw them, Toussaint proud and Juliette laughing like a bride, swept along at a gallop in a cabriolet driven by Antoine in top hat, exultant and upright in the coachman's seat, heading downhill into Lalléger on the road to Limoges, the Americas, and the beyond. Behind ran Fiéfié, and he could not catch up with them.

During the week, summer or winter, time existed for the two of them as it does when there is no longer a woman around: chaotic, indeterminate, childish without the grace or the inebriety of childhood. Though it was no longer anything more than a pilgrimage, Fiéfié arrived early from La Croix-du-Sud for work, with his sack full of pilgrim's clutter, rusted tool parts, crusts of bread and bits of string, perhaps some freshly carved whistles. Without oxen now, they went out briefly for their dreary performance in the few unabandoned fields, planted the cabbage they lived on, brought back the buckwheat in a handkerchief. They lingered over meals at odd hours; a few old women still stopped in on them, out of curiosity or charity, old mother Jacquemin, ancient Marie Barnouille; passing a leftover ham, fromage blanc, or greens through the window, they could see them in the long, unspeakably dirty and cluttered kitchen; by ducking their heads they could make out the impassive Toussaint at the far end, the back window behind him, stormily indistinct and haloed like a pantocrator, and Fiéfié galloping nonstop from one end to the other of the devastated space, like several people at once, drinking from the bottle and stirring the stew, clearing the table onto the benches or the oven, drinking as he cut the bread and evoked someone else. But the old women, who
walked away laughing and feeling sorry for them, could tell us nothing more; for if the two had doubts, they kept them to themselves, without having to admit them to anyone, and if they felt triumphant, they also kept that to themselves, it was for their kitchen and their shadows alone, for this patinated place that did not offend them, for those inoffensive ghosts, far from the world inhabited by incredulous ears and offensive mouths. At five o'clock, Fiéfié dropped his bottle and capsized, slept on a bench or the ground with his head on some sacks, and leaning over a bit, Toussaint watched him sleep, maybe tenderly, maybe with indifference.

Finally one day the clown did not come.

It was summer, I imagine. Let us say it was in August. A beautiful, mechanical sky bent over the harvest and the heather, threw harsh shadows over the house of Peluchet. The old women still left in the village, all in black, keeping watch from their doorsteps, oracular, patient as the day, saw Toussaint framed once or twice in the dark doorway. He searched the bright sky for the bluer flight of crows; he entered the cowshed on who knows what errand or thought, gazed at the ancient, useless oxen doomed to the shadows there; he called them by their names; he remembered that Fiéfié, in former times, had hopped about happily at the shaft. He returned to the small courtyard where he stayed put, near the cold well. With those old women, let us contemplate one more time, but in the sunlight, the heraldic, proletarian cap protruding above the ivory moustache of the old survivor. By noon, his waiting reminded him, with a sudden pang, of another waiting that he had forgotten; because surely he loved Fiéfié even though he often abused him, Fiéfié who called him boss, who had drunk bad
coffee with him and kept vigil over the dead Juliette, who had stubbornly stood by the son through his metamorphoses; who each Sunday suffered for the dead and for one nearly dead, in disgrace and wine, under crushing blows, that is to say, among the living; who had had an appalling childhood and a worse life, which a borrowed memory had nevertheless so ennobled that now he dealt only with angels and shades, in the chaos of a founding myth that carried him along yelping and made sport of his sickly life up to and including, necessarily, his martyrdom; Fiéfié Décembre, splayed full length under the heavy sun, was lying dead in the brambles of La Croix-du-Sud.

An old woman discovered him there in the hottest part of the afternoon, two steps from his hovel, face down among the swarming wasps. The cuts on his head bled with the blackberries; “the meadows painted with butterflies and flowers” embalmed the evening, brushed lightly against him; a corner of his jacket, caught in his fall and held taut by the intractable thorns as though starched, cast a delicate shadow over his limp neck. Maybe he had received blows, but just as likely, he could have stumbled drunk into the brambles, thick and cruel as tropical vines in the New World, and smashed his forehead triumphantly on the stones; no one ever knew. The old woman, who was going down to Chatelus, alerted the police; they arrived in their trimmed hats, their two-horned demon or ruffian shadows stretched long and overlapping in the low sun; they saw the old man on his knees in the early night, without his cap, flannel belt hanging from his pants; in his arms he clasped the dead puppet and, weeping, repeated in a stubborn, surprised voice full of recognition and reproach, “Toine. Toine.” A
horse blanket was thrown over the corpse; the open eyes that would never water again disappeared, a rough charm adorned the poor beggar's badly covered hair; the old man called to his son softly until the burial in the cemetery in Saint-Goussaud, over which the wind was blowing.

The rest can be told in a few words. Toussaint no longer called out to anyone. He survived Fiéfié as he survived the others; perhaps he merged them together and together molded and remolded their shadows to increase the large shadow upon which he lived, that shrouded him and gave him strength; to it he added the slow, easy-going shadow of the oxen, who also died. What are a few more years of life, when one is rich with so many losses? He was left with his scythe, the unbridled luxury of his kitchen, the well, the unchanging horizon. No one spoke of Antoine anymore; as for Fiéfié, who had ever spoken of him?

Until the end, two or three old women, the best and the worst of humanity, went on visiting that collapsed pantocrator, outlined sharply against his moss-covered Byzantine back window, green and luminous, his kitchen cold as a crypt; sometimes the crimson foxglove chimed there. The Sisters of Mercy placed blackberries on the grimy table, elderberry jam, the inevitable bread. They told him endless stories of bad harvests, pregnant daughters, and tumultuous drunken binges; the old man nodded slightly, as though listening, serious as a police officer, moustache as dignified as General Lee's at Appomattox after the surrender. Suddenly, he seemed to remember something; he shuddered, his moustache, caught in the light, trembled a bit, and leaning
toward Marie Barnouille, he blinked his eyelids slyly and spoke, proud and confidentially, a bit full of himself, “When I was in Baton Rouge, in seventy-five . . .”

He had rejoined the son. When by all evidence he held him in his embrace, he heaved the two of them onto the rotten coping of the well where they threw themselves headlong, as one, like the saint and his bull, their arms entwined, their eyes laughing, their indiscernible fall sweeping the centipedes and bitter plants, waking the triumphant water, rousing her like a girl; the father, or was it the son, cried out as his legs were shattered; one held the other under the black water to the point of death. They were drowned like cats, innocent, oafish, and consubstantial as two from the same litter. Together they went into the earth under a fleeting sky, in a single casket, in the month of January, 1902.

The wind passes over Saint-Goussaud; the world, of course, does violence. But what violences has it not suffered? The forgiving ferns conceal the sick earth; bad wheat grows there, inane stories, demented families; the sun looms up out of the wind like a giant, like a madman. Then it dies out, like the Peluchet family died out, as we say when the name can no longer call up living beings. Only mouths without a tongue still utter it. Who is stubbornly lying into the wind? Fiéfié yelps in the gusts, the father thunders, in a sudden shift repents, redeems himself when the wind turns, the son flees forever westward, the mother moans low in the autumn heather, in a scent of tears. All these beings are dead and gone. In the Saint-Goussaud cemetery, Antoine's place is empty and it is the last one; if he lay in rest there, I would be buried anywhere, wherever I happened to die. He left the
place to me. Here, the last of my race, the last to remember him, I will lie recumbent; then perhaps he will be completely dead; my bones will be Antoine Peluchet's as much as anyone's, beside Toussaint, his father. That windswept place awaits me. That father will be mine. I doubt that my name will ever be on the stone. There will be arched chestnut trees, immovable old men in caps, little things I remember with joy. There will be a cheap relic at some distant second-hand shop. There will be bad buckwheat harvests, a naïve, neglected saint stuck with needles by girls with pounding hearts dead now for one hundred and fifty years, my kin here and there in the rotting wood, the villages and their names, and still the wind.