Small Lives (7 page)

I do not know how to think about my father directly, since he is inaccessible and hidden as a god. Like a believer – though one who may lack faith – I need the help of his intermediaries, angels or clergy; and what first comes to mind are the annual visits (perhaps they were once biannual, or even monthly at the very beginning) that my paternal grandparents paid me as a child, visits that no doubt constituted a perpetual reminder of my father's disappearance. Their intrusion was a matter of protocol and consternation, all tender signs of affection nipped in the bud. I can still see those two old people in the dining room of the school lodgings. My grandmother Clara was a tall, pallid woman with sunken cheeks, the image of uneasy death, resigned but impassioned, a curious mix of such vibrant, lively expressions playing
over a death mask. Her long, frail hands clasped her skinny knees; the line of her lips, which remained impeccable however thinned by age, stretched into a smile when she looked at me, a vague smile of unspeakable nostalgia no doubt, but also the sharp, seductive smile of a young woman. I feared the acuity of her large, very blue eyes, sorrowful and pretty, that lingered on me, studied me as though to fix my features indelibly in her old memory. Under that gaze, perhaps my discomfort grew from what I guessed it held: her tenderness was not directed at me alone, it searched beyond the child's face for the features of the false dead, my father – a look both vampirish and maternal; and that ambivalence disturbed me as did the keen judgment that, rightly or wrongly, I attributed to this imposing individual, frightening and charming, familiar with the mysteries to which her unusual first name and her vocation's magic title destined her:
sage-femme
, wise woman, or mid-wife, though in Mourioux I had no idea yet what that meant, and the title, it seemed to me, belonged exclusively to her.

She almost completely eclipsed the figure of my grandfather, Eugène – although without subjecting him to that prattling, sour condescension by which certain wives circumvent their husbands, refusing to let them speak, think, and finally, live. No, what made my grandmother dominant and dominate him in my eyes, I think, was the fact and the painful disproportion of her vivacious spirit in contrast to the good-natured awkwardness, the smiling, kindly obtuseness of my grandfather, to which was added an unbelievably plebeian appearance, a likeable homely face: a bad – though pleasing – match for the clerical refinement of his companion. I was not afraid of him; he disconcerted me no more than Félix's cronies, gathered at the table over their wine.
I “quite liked him”; but if I ever loved one of the two, I believe it was Clara, whose vague, sorrowful eyes – hardly grazing things and nevertheless taking them in with their caress, their heavy, regretful pauses immediately cut short – wrung my heart.

On this subject, I see that in my childhood I could only ever admire women, at least within my family, in which no “father” could have been a model for me – and even the imaginary fathers I substituted for my own were pale figures: a too-talkative teacher, a too-taciturn family friend, whom I will mention again. But, jumping back a generation and becoming the son of another century, of the past, could I not have transferred the paternal image onto my grandfathers? No doubt I did so, and what further proof of it do I need than these pages, which, one after another, try to beget themselves from the past; no doubt I wanted to do so, although I have no grounds for congratulating myself on this fictive aging; the fact is that for both the maternal and paternal branches of my family, the women were incomparably superior intellectually to the men.

The disparity between Clara and Eugène repeated itself, if less dramatically, in Elise and Félix; although Félix's relative dimness was more likely the effect of temperament, a touchy, confused impulsiveness, slightly egotistical and careless, that obscured his judgment, rather than a fundamental insufficiency in the judgment itself – as I believe was the case with my Mazirat grandfather. Still it is true that his garrulous, easily mired thinking seemed to me no match for Elise's mental agility (she was remarkably concise sometimes, although unlike Félix, she had an aversion for decisive judgments). Similarly, although more obvious and better conserved in the tall, erect figure of Clara, something
aristocratic, nostalgic, and reflective survived in Elise beyond all physical depredation. And then too, noble, incomprehensible words – God, destiny, the future – passed the lips of them both; can I be sure that the intonation these words still have today – in some inner ear that hears them resonate at my core – that their timber was not imprinted in me by the two of them? In short, I listened to them “with another ear”; they knew how to speak: the first with some ostentation (she was regarded as a bit sanctimonious), Elise, on the other hand, with that adorably rustic refusal, even in grief, to speak of “those things,” those things spoken of nonetheless, that only seem so formidable because they are universal, those things that are thought itself. Metaphysics and poetry came to me through women: Racinian alexandrines from the mouth of my mother, recalled by her only as high school memories, and grand abstract mysteries conveyed by the benevolent and awkwardly solemn vocables of my grandmothers in their vague faith.

A few words more regarding Eugène, that massive old man, sincere, absent-minded, transparent to others, whose presence was quickly forgotten. It seems to me – but even this is not clear in my memory; my memories of him are vague, whereas the gently angular appearance of Clara is precise as a shadow cutout – it seems to me that he was a bit stooped, in the way of those who are broad-shouldered in their youth, and whose former unabashed virility becomes resigned to the rounded posture of the orangutan, manual workers grown too old, who do not know what to do with their hands and bear their bodies awkwardly, bodies all the heavier for having been powerful and efficient in their pure function as tools. He had been a mason, and no doubt an alert, untroublesome fellow worker. He would not have been
troublesome, rather, if he had not been, according to the little I know of him, the victim of a weakness of character that no doubt plagued him mercilessly and led him through one humiliating setback after another to that final state of smiling, often inebriated half-stupor in which I knew him. Though at the time, when I saw him, that was not what I thought; his illuminated, sorry face – more broken King Lear's than clown's, drunken old soldier, all shame drowned – his big red nose, his hands just as big and red, the incredible folds in his doggy eyelids, his croaking voice, all made me want to laugh – the laugh of the nervous child, which is a way of reversing the tragedy, of denying the unease. I reproached myself for that secret desire. To look dubiously, even ironically, upon “someone I should have loved,” to harbor that improper thought: “my grandfather is very ugly,” seemed to me a fault of the most serious nature; without a doubt, the faculty for such impious speculations belonged to “monsters,” and to them alone; was I, therefore, a monster? Immediately, I promised myself to love him better; and with that promise – the internal drama in which one plays all the roles is the emotional leaven of the so-called tender years – waves of affection for the poor old fellow washed over me again. My eyes misted with sweet tears of atonement, and I would have liked to follow through with manifest acts of kindness; I do not know if I dared to do so at the time.

I will add that the old fellow was sentimental. Whereas I was not surprised to see Clara often on the verge of tears (women's tears seemed to me in the order of things, no more or less comprehensible than flu or rain, and always justified), the massive, violent sobs of men, possibly drunk, such as my grandfather emitted in the evening, climbing
into his old car permeated with the same archaic odor as their house in Mazirat, those sobs disconcerted me. Of course I was used to Félix weeping like that, when a heartfelt emotion suddenly made his voice break, or when he had had too much to drink; it was the same short, dry sob, quickly retracted; it both was and was not a kind of weeping. No doubt I was already well aware that my grandfathers drank a good deal of wine on those days – and what did those two men talk about over a bottle, constrained to the silence of essential things? With the help of what evasions, what empty words, did they avoid speaking the name of the “missing person” in my presence and elsewhere no doubt, the traitor in this melodrama who was also its
deus ex machina
, whose trace my presence attested to, the director-deserter without whom they would never have been united over that bottle, at a loss for words, actors without direction or prompts having forgotten their roles? What silences avoided or evoked the flight of their former hopes, the ruin of that day, null now in retrospect, on which they had married their children, when they had wept as today, but with a different emotion? It seems to me I can hear those conversations, awkward, artificial, and yet full of good will.

I was told – probably by Elise – that in their younger days, Clara had left Eugène, surely intending to leave him for good. Then, at the age when “the mask and the blade” become useless props, when the mask is only wrinkles, and memory alone sharpens its long blades in old heads, they became a couple once again. I do not know for certain if my father is the son of the old mason. I do not know how old the child was when Eugène came back, or was once again accepted into the fold; but no doubt the latter was for the former such a nonentity of a
father that he might as well have been absent; and even if he was sometimes present, the model was intellectually unacceptable for someone for whom certain qualities of mind were surely an essential feature – if I am to credit all those who, having known him, have insisted on this point, and especially considering how that testimony comes from humble folk, from those who use the word “intelligence” to account for what they think themselves absolutely lacking. On Aimé, the influence of this father whom he loved – or perhaps detested as a distorting mirror set eternally before him at the table – must have been indirectly negative. He must have felt, as painfully as I do, the weakness of the male branches of the family, a promise not kept, a nobody married to the mother. Aimé's feminine sentimentality, of which I have so much proof, formed itself around that void, that hollowing of the heart to the point of tears; also his apparent cynicism was rooted there. No doubt he wasted his life searching for something to replace that missing link; and it was also to fill that void that alcohol entered his body and his life – to fill it with a known place, a place of plenitude forever borrowed and forever vanishing, the tyrannical place of liquid gold that, in the thighs of its bottles, harbors as many fathers, mothers, wives, and sons as you could want. But I am inclined to think that he also drank to set himself free, to flee his love for a mother he could, alas, never forget.

I think of the rather sad Sundays that Clara and Eugène spent in Mourioux, days cut short, since they were made to fit between eleven in the morning and five in the evening to avoid driving at night, although Mazirat was not more than a hundred kilometers away. I think especially of the inevitable cardboard box of assorted presents,
wrapped by anxious old hands with exaggerated care; of the endless balls of crumpled newspaper that, having been stuffed in to keep them from breaking, were pulled out with the outdated china, mirrors, prewar toys, the occasional incongruous and charming cosmetic case, lighter without its flint, piggy bank missing a leg – all objects they would not have been able to buy, being poor and far removed from everything, but which they were relinquishing to me. The handling of this box was prescribed by a tacit ritual; upon arriving, they took it out of the car and deposited it in a corner of the dining room; I continually cast sidelong glances at it, or, having forgotten for a moment, my gaze returned to it, deliciously recalling to me its presence; because, most often, it was not opened until after the meal. Clara took charge of it, with a slightly theatrical slowness, a sense of suspense, a concern for effects that – considering the small worth of the objects – she knew to be for the benefit of my eager, childish impatience alone. I believe that I amused her, and that she even found me a bit doltish; that was the only moment in the whole day when an infinite bit of mischief, slightly haughty, sparkled in her eyes. She knew better than anyone how pathetic these baubles were, and did not apologize for them; with sovereign modesty, she named each one in a few words, presented her chipped pottery with rare, exact gestures just as if she were offering fine old Dresden china, and, opening a worn case as carefully as a diamond merchant, displayed for us on her finger one of those horrible aluminum rings that soldiers used to bang out.

Of course no one ever spoke of the absent one; was this an agreement, tacit or not, between the two families? Had they deliberated, before my appearance in court as the accused already cleared, and
agreed to strike the essential from the record, like the judges in the Dreyfus affair who ruled that “the question would not be considered” even before entering the courtroom? I do not know; but I do know what the taste of those Sundays when I had two grandfathers and two grandmothers evokes today, what that constrained, muffled atmosphere, the almost sacramental hush, makes me think: we were keeping a deathwatch. The banished cadaver was the sole pretext for this familial gathering; they were only assembled for this wake; and when the poor old couple got back into their car, as antique and ludicrous as they were, I did not know where to direct my sorrow and pity: no doubt toward the two of them, who disappeared even more deeply into the cold, tearful night because I did not know the house where they went for rest and warmth again; toward the enigmatic dead one; or finally toward myself, speechless oaf, who did not dare inquire about the identity of the deceased and looked for the cadaver in the growing shadows, in the longing eyes of my mother, in my own body, knees red with cold. I was amazed not to be dead, but only ignorant, in pain, and infinitely incomplete.