The High-Life (4 page)

Every evening, as usual, I left the shop at seven o'clock. Now it was my job to close the metal shutter. The August light was relentless, still, at that hour. Not a shadow in the street. And yet, I was shivering. My overcoat offered poor protection. My ears rang. The ivy was motionless. Not a breath of air. Sometimes I went to sit down in front of the statue of Ludovic Trarieux, 1840-1904, among the old men who, like me, no longer wanted anything and weren't taking off for vacation. I hadn't the slightest desire to leave rue Froidevaux. Traveling terrifies me. Anyway, where would I go? The world is a prison. My cell was enough for me. Sometimes a hot wind stirred up the dust on square Georges-Lamarque. The acrid smell of dog urine brought tears to your eyes. I often thought of that Japanese movie director, Ozu, who had this simple word carved onto his grave: "Nothingness." I too walked about with such an epitaph, but while alive. I was falling into the void of time, and nothing, no one, could hold me back. The world, to my ears, was just funeral music. Around eight o'clock, I went back to my apartment. My summer evenings were very full since the rifle with telescopic sight had been delivered. Admirable object. Sometimes, at night, I got up to caress it. Sometimes I even took it into my bed. It was a wonderful mistress, so chaste, so cold. In the morning, I opened the window wide, and I aimed the gun at my father's grave. Yesterday, I shot a dog that got a little too close. The first bullet only wounded its paw, it tried to run away, but I put a bullet through its head. As an example to others. Word to the wise. The world is strange through a telescopic sight. Geometrical. Clean. Snow crystal. A circle, a cross: absolute concision. Void. Sometimes, I amused myself by shooting butterflies, like that, just for the fun of it. They vanished in a puff of dust in the summer light I felt a sense of power I'd never felt before. And to think that I had so long thought of myself as a runt! I'd had no idea there was such strength in me! Henceforth I would be hard and cold, as is proper when entrusted with a mission. Every now and then I amused myself by aiming my rifle at passersby. With just one gesture, I would have been able to send them to the nothingness from which they came. But I spared them. I took pity on them. I had practically stopped thinking of Madame C. I barely suffered anymore, or rather, my suffering was of another order, it was the solitude of kings, of Gods, of great conquerors, the tender sadness that swept over me when I saw my subjects, those poor worms, crawling under my window. I had mastered nature: the trees, in my telescopic sight, bowed before me, they begged my forgiveness, and the birds in the sky, and the seasons, and the clouds, all guilty. But was it their fault? I would have probably done better not to create them in the first place.

Every morning, I greeted my people, the dead, my only friends, with a big wave of my hand. I watched over them the way God watches over the living. I no longer even knew who Madame C. was. Or M. Rameau. I had stopped going to work. The day before, three cats had been sent to the firing squad, three scrawny white cats that had gotten into the bad habit of sleeping on my father's grave. And why would I have spared them? Rene Marlaud, 1902— 1953, had called for their heads, I had to give them to him, for his anger would have been terrible. More and more often I felt the urge to shoot at passersby, at random. This morning, in my telescopic sight, appeared the nasty girl who had called me a slug at the shop. I spared her, this time, but don't let me see her pass by in the street again! She was no longer in mourning, of course. I followed her as far as I could with my telescopic sight, and when I lost sight of her I was so excited that I couldn't keep still. Yes, how long would I be sparing my subjects? At night, often, I suffocated. I seemed to hear my father breathing near me. His breath was fetid. I thought with horror what Strindberg said in
Inferno
: "For the dead have bad breath, like debauchees after a sleepless night." I usually only fell asleep early in the morning, when the birds began to taunt me.

At the beginning of September, there was a letter from Madame C. She was still at Sainte-Anne. She complained about the food, which wasn't good, and the overcrowded conditions. She was still calling me her "little blue cat." She missed me. She asked me if I could send her the photo of Luis Mariano in
Violettes Imperiales
, the one that was above the dresser. She told me it would give her a bit of company. She made some incoherent remarks about the Spanish border, and spoke to me of Hondarribia right across from Hendaye, where the light was so beautiful. Might I be able to dig up a color postcard for her of Biarritz in the spring? The Casino, if possible. If not, the Rocher de la Vierge. She would also very much like a box of marrons glaces, and some big shiny lollipops, the "Marquise de Sevigne" brand. But did they still make those? She asked me for some news about her little Persian cat, Missia, which had died in 1938. I was put in charge of kissing and cuddling it for her. She wasn't too unhappy, here, they were pretty nice to her, but she knew that when she left, she would be a very old woman, with white hair, and that attracting a man would then no longer be possible. That worried her sometimes, and she didn't sleep as well. But in the end she was dealing with it. She thanked me in advance, she kissed my hands, and wished me a merry Christmas, and my dad, and my mom, and all my brothers, and all my sisters, and also the humble captain, and also all my pets, all my toys, my teddy bear, and, of course, the farmyard turkeys, her cousins. I really wondered how I'd been able to read such a pack of nonsense all the way to the end. And yet, I was crying, Adolphe Marlaud was crying. He swallowed his tears, silently. He found that they tasted strange, not even salty. Suppose his father had caught him? Oh no, he mustn't be caught red-handed. He was like his father, a real man, not a whimperer. What the hell did it matter to him, Jewish children herded into a stadium? He obeyed orders. He had to guard the grave.

He rolled up Madame C.'s letter into a ball and threw it in the trashcan; then he went to carefully wash his hands, because he had read somewhere about madness, that it could be contagious.