The Bark Tree (28 page)

“We’re listening to you,” they replied in chorus.

“And me, what the hell am I doing?”

“You’re talking,” they replied once again.

“And what am I saying?”

“You’re saying rather vague things,” they replied, still in unison.

“I’d really like to give you more details, but you’ll understand, I can’t. Course, there’s something very simple, and everyone knows that: Taupe’s wife’s going to die, cos sooner or later, that finally happens, and if we live it’s because we’re going to die. In that right? And then, there’s something else, something very simple. Since I’m dying and there’s nothing to be done about it and that’s just the way it is, well, zno point in making a song and dance about the fate of my little voice that talks in my head when I’m by myself, or in knowing what’s been the point of me living twenty-one years on this planet. To sum up, as I was saying, I’m disappearing like so many other people have done before me and like even more will do after. There. But I’d say that’s a good five minutes I’ve been talking.”

“A barber’s five minutes, even,” said Saturnin, politely.

“Then I’ll get a move on.”

“Just a moment,” said Saturnin.

“Yes?” said Ernestine politely.

“If we live, it’s because we die, that’s what you said, dint you?”

“Yes, I did say that.”

“You might just as well have said the opposite,” he observed.

“I agree,” replied Ernestine.

“Ah, good,” said Saturnin. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

“You see what a good girl I am. Just when I was going to get rich, I’m dying, and I’m d
...
”

“When you were going to get rich!” exclaimed Mme. Pic, amazed.

“She’s getting delirious,” Mme. Cloche hastened to say.

“When she was going to get rich!” exclaimed Meussieu Pic, flabbergasted.

“Ernestine doesn’t know what she’s saying any more,” declared Mme. Cloche.

“Let her speak,” said Peter.

“Yes of course, we must let her speak,” Themistocles agreed.

“She’s only got five minutes to live and you won’t let her speak, it’s idiotic,” said Mme. Belhôtel.

“Start by keeping quiet yourself, then,” said Mme. Pic.

“I’ll keep quiet when I want to keep quiet, Madame,” replied Mme. Belhôtel.

“Come, come, ladies, you surely aren’t going to quarrel
now,”
said Dominique.

“Someone’s got to start keeping quiet,” said Mme. Saturnin.

“
You
start, then,” said Mme. Pic.

“And this girl is dying without the sacraments of the Church,” exclaimed the curé, who was called the Abbé Leslaines.

“Ah! If that one’s going to start, there’s more to come!” exclaimed Peter.

“Silence, then!” shouted Themistocles.

“Not so much noise,” whispered old Taupe.

“Oh, you know, I’m a good girl,” said Ernestine. “If it bothers you to listen to me, I’ll keep quiet.” And she kept quiet.

—oooooo—oooooo—

Along the river, where antiquated hats and abandoned shoes were rotting, down by the river, where fishermen’s lines were vainly trying to tempt the nonexistent gudgeon, by the banks of the river, where a barge occasionally crept past, laden with sand and adorned with a Flemish flowerpot, along the river, it was dark. It was also dark elsewhere, but never mind; by the banks of the river, the darkness was deepening. Through this darkness, two beings were walking. These beings were human; better still, they were brachycephalic; one female and the other male, they belonged the same family, they had had the same mother, and no doubt the same father; and if they did not bear the same name, that is because French law gives the married woman the name of her husband. Now, the sister had married, in lawful wedlock, one Cloche, and the name had remained with her even though she had been the winning party in a widowhood case. The brother had never given up the name of Belhôtel, of which he was in nowise proud. But this brother might well have been another, for two existed, whom a skillful subterfuge made it possible to distinguish, In fact, their father, foreseeing that the same nomenclature might be a source of inconvenience to his two male children, had given them a second appellation: he called the one Dominique and the other Saturnin. In this way people were able to distinguish them. It is with the former that we are here concerned.

Mme. Cloche and Dominique Belhôtel, then, were walking in the dark along the tarry river and, apart from this occupation, were exchanging ideas and interjections. In short, by the side of the mourning-crepe river, Mme. Cloche and Dominique Belhôtel, enveloped in the darkness like truffles in chocolate cream, were having a discussion under cover of the opaque shades of night.

“The little bitch, she nearly let on,” the one was saying.

“What a mess,” the other was saying, “we’ll have to start from the beginning again.”

“
They’ve
had us.”

“They’ve had
her.”

“They’ll get
us.”

“They
will not
get us.”

“What we going to do?”

“Look at this water, it’s safe, it’s calm, it’s water that doesn’t talk. When the old boy’s at the bottom, he’ll never come up again. He’ll’ve committed suicide out of a broken heart.”

“How you can go on,” murmured the brother.

“And that idiot of a Mme. Pic, she’ll go and blurt it out everywhere. There’s another one ought to go down to the bottom. Into the mud!”

They walk in silence for a few moments, moving in the darkness along the black, shoe-polish river.

“So you think
They
killed her?” asked the brother.

“Plain as the nose on your face,” replied the sister.

The sister added:

“Pore Ernestine! She suspected something of the sort.”

“And we’ve been had.”

“Yes, we’re the marks, unless the old boy disappears. It’s simple.”

“Not so simple as all that. And after, have to find his hiding place.”

“It’s behind the door.”

“What if we don’t find it?”

“Dominique, I believe you’re getting yellow.”

“Yellow, seasy to say. You’re getting me involved in some lousy goings-on. Personally, I don’t need it, the old boy’s money. I’ve got my own. Ten years from now I’ll have made my fortune. I’m hard-working, I am, and I know how to look after my cash. When it was just the business of the wedding, that was all right. Just a little favor I did you. But now, to chuck the old boy in the river just for the sake of maybe getting a little sweets, no thanks. An anyway, I’m like Ernestine, I’m wary of the others. They’re stronger’n us. We’ve just seen that, haven’t we? Well, no thanks! The cemetery or the guillotine, that’s what you’re offering me.”

“You’re talking like a sock merchant or a ham actor,” Mme. Cloche told him. “You may not look it, but you’ve got noodles in your veins stead of blood. You look tough, but your heart’s made of macaroni. Won’t you just drool at the mouth when you see me go in my Rolls with my gigolos when you’re rotting in your whorehouse with three poxy sluts and a Negress. You’re like Ernestine. If she’d listened to me right away, she wouldn’t be where she is now. You won’t play now, and then in a week you’ll want to be in on it. Twon’t bring you any luck. Snuff chat. S go back.”

They turned around. The moon was swimming with difficulty in mid-air, and the rare stars were blacked out in the dark mud of the river. Trains whistled now and then, and dogs howled from time to time. A cock even crowed; which didn’t cause the dawn to appear. Behind their fragile fences, kitchen gardens were peacefully sleeping, and onions were dozing side by side with lettuces and tomatoes. Over in the direction of Paris, there was a huge glow, because it’s a big town with lots of streetlamps and luminous signs. On the other side of the river, a long way away, a factory was still lit up; on the Chemicals and Linoleum side, a few lights spoke of reduced activity. Occasionally, everything subsided into abysses of silence, only to be dragged out of it once again by a train whistling, a dog barking, a cock crowing or a car humming; after which, the houses and the huts and the little gardens and the factories were once more engulfed in an oleaginous silence.

In Blagny itself, one house alone was still alive, and toward this house the brother and sister Belhôtel turned their steps. When they got to the town hall, Sidonie said:

“And whatever you do, you that’s in good with the cops, try and see they keep their noses out of this.”

“Well, that’s one more thing I’ll do for you,” said the brother.

Then he added:

“What if you informed on the others?”

“Brilliant—and that’s all you can think of. When I’m just precisely asking you to see that no one sticks their nose into it. This business is between me and the others. Got it?”

“All right, all right,” replied Dominique.

As they were coming to the café, they could see its lights, she said:

“Are you very upset about it?”

“About what?” he said.

And then he remembered the young body that had been murdered, and started to cry, because after all he was very fond of Ernestine. Mme. Cloche turned her head to look at this brother with the heart of macaroni, but the look did not express any precise thought, nor any more blame than approbation.

—oooooo—oooooo—

At dawn, the passenger trains started running again, damp and cold, their windows foggy and whitish, like eyes covered in nubeculae. Into one of these climbed the remains of the wedding party, with thick mouths, and brains flabbier than an eider down. Saturnin and his lady were going back to their lodge; an unexpected engagement was enticing Peter and his espoused into a Walloon province; the discipline which is the strength of the armed forces had determined the hour of Themistocles’s reimbarracksing, and Mme. Cloche had an appointment for 9 o’clock, something to do with a fetus. The little group, still sprightly after their sleepless night, sat down on the arid seats and allowed themselves to be conveyed into the city with no word either of farewell or protest. Then, when the engine with the powerful whistle had already conveyed them for some minutes along the rails, which were as shiny as a bald head, one of the persons present—it wasn’t Mme. Cloche—asked. “Why the devil did she say: ‘just when I was going to get rich’?,” thus translating the general uneasiness this mystery was causing among the uninitiated. For, at Blagny, the news was already being spread from vocal chords to voice, and being completed by this anxious interrogation, which no one could answer except by imagining romantic adventures or absurd fuliginations. For example, as a result of all its cogitations, Mme. Pic’s brain was wrung out like a dishcloth that is being relieved of its moisture; Peter and his wife and brother didn’t know what to say about these unexpected riches; but Saturnin, who was more knowledgeable, was beginning to glimpse the somber machinations of his sister, the abortionist. He was reconstituting their framework, not without certain errors. But he didn’t answer. Mme. Cloche grunted, and they all became lost in thought, and only resumed contact with the world at the call of a man with a gallooned cap who was demanding in a raucous voice some pieces of cardboard which he wished to perforate.

Then, they separated. Saturnin and his wife were able to utter some words of condolence. The two brothers, moved to tears at the memory of their defunct sister, forgot their differences. They shook each other’s hand very heartily, and then immediately turned their backs on each other, and went off toward other atmospheres, both with heavy heart and flowing lachrymal gland. Both disappear, both fade away, we shall see them no more, neither Peter Tom the Anchorite, the subtle magician and his lady, so very slim and slight, nor the trusty sergeant major, the pride of his superiors and the terror of his subordinates. They plunge into their reciprocal destinies, like shrimps into the sand, they withdraw and, as you might say, die.

The brother and sister remain face to face, and the sister
-
in-law too. The sister-in-law is sick of it all; of the wedding, of defunctitude and of old Ma Cloche. She’s had her fill. She’s choked. She’s fed up. She’s pissed off … She’s had enough. She gives her spouse’s muscular arm a significant pinch, and he puts off until later the explanation he intends to demand from Sidonie. On the street, opposite the Gare du Nord, the final disintegration of the wedding party is accomplished. Meussieu and Mme. Saturnin Belhôtel, concierges by profession, catch a bus. Mme. Cloche stays there, alone and in distress.

People have finally woken up. The traffic is already circulating—that’s the right word—and becoming thick. The cars are multiplying. They are emerging from all sides. You couldn’t count them, there are so many. It’s raining cars and cars. And the pedestrians, that’s even worse. They are rushing in all directions and treading on one another’s toes. And they really are in a hurry. They’re going to work, for goodness’ sake, and their bosses won’t have any messing around with time. The late bird catches no wages, as the proverb has it. Mme. Cloche, standing squarely on her soles, lets the flow of workers go by to her right and to her left. A memory is monopolizing her thoughts and making them firmer than a rock again which a torrent of insults is breaking. She remembers, yes, it was here, that three months ago—three months, already! —a man got made mincemeat of by a bus, and that the next day the gangster nearly got himself run over by the other gangster. Ah, this café, that’s the one where the camomile tea is so bad and the waiter so insolent. She’d forgotten that incredible sequence of events. Taupe’s treasure had been entirely dominating her, and she immediately reverts to him, abandoning the field of remembrance.

A bitter taste was grating her tongue. While Dominique was there, she hadn’t shown the white feather. Now, in the midst of this bustling crowd, far from the poisoned corpse, she felt beaten. The others had won. The treasure had eluded her. She could see no means of getting it back. This was the end of the long and copious banquets with which she had been promising herself she would stuff her old age; this was the end of the attractive young men who would have taken her dancing in night clubs; this was the end of her travels; car and low-cut evening dresses, itwoz, itwoz itwoz, and chic little dogs that were horribly ugly and expensive, and real genuine jewelry. She’d have to start all over again removing undesirables, and festering in a lousy, rancid flat. It made her sick with disgust. To have discovered a treasure trove, a real one, and then to be done out of it, what a disgusting thing. It made her pale with rage. Looking at her, a meussieu who was two minutes early wondered whether, improbable though it seemed, she weren’t feeling seasick.