Small Lives Read online

  Pierre Michon

  Small Lives

  Translated from the French

  by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays

  archipelago books

  English Translation Copyright © Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, 2008

  Copyright © Pierre Michon, Editions Gallimard, 1984

  First Archipelago Books Edition

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Michon, Pierre, 1945 –

  [Vies miniscules. English]

  Small lives / by Pierre Michon;

  translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-9357447-0-2

  I. Gladding, Jody, 1955– II. Deshays, Elizabeth. III. Title.

  PQ2673.I298V513 2008

  843'.914–dc22 2007050889

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third St. #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Cover art: Portrait of a One-Eyed Man by Vincent van Gogh, 1888

  This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation,

  the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts,

  a state agency, and the French Ministry of Culture.

  to Andrée Gayaudon

  Contents

  The Life of André Dufourneau

  The Life of Antoine Peluchet

  The Lives of Eugène and Clara

  The Lives of the Bakroot Brothers

  The Life of Father Foucault

  The Life of Georges Bandy

  The Life of Claudette

  The Life of the Little Dead Girl

  Par malheur, il croit que les petites gens

  sont plus réels que les autres.

  ANDRÉ SUARÉS

  Small Lives

  The Life of André Dufourneau

  Let us explore a genesis for my pretensions.

  Was one of my ancestors a fine captain, a young, insolent ensign, or fiercely taciturn slave trader? East of the Suez, some uncle gone back to Barbary in a cork helmet, wearing jodhpur boots and a bitter smile, a stereotype warmly endorsed by younger branches of the family, by renegade poets, all those dishonored ones full of honor, shadow, and memory, the black pearls of the family trees? Did I have some colonial or seafaring antecedent?

  The province I am speaking of has no coasts, beaches, or reefs; no exalted Saint-Maloin or haughty Moco hears the call of the sea when the west winds, purged of salt and coming from far off, pour over the chestnut trees there. Nevertheless, two men familiar with those chestnut trees no doubt took shelter there from the rain, perhaps they loved and certainly they dreamed there, then sought very different trees under which to work and suffer, not to assuage their dreams, perhaps to continue to love, or simply to die. One of these men I have heard about; the other I believe I remember.

  Once in the summer of 1947, under the big chestnut tree in Les Cards, my mother carried me in her arms to the place where the village road can suddenly be seen emerging, hidden until that point by the wall of the pigsty, hazel trees, shadows. It was a beautiful day, my mother no doubt wearing a light dress, me babbling; on the road, preceded by his shadow, was a man unknown to my mother. He stopped, he looked, he was moved; my mother trembled a little; the inhabitual held its rest, suspended among the fresh notes of the day. Finally the man took a step forward and introduced himself. It was André Dufourneau.

  Later, he said he thought he had recognized in me the baby girl who had been my mother, likewise an infant and still helpless, when he left. Thirty years, and the same tree that was the same, and the same child that was another.

  Many years earlier, my grandmother’s parents had asked the state to place an orphan with them to help on the farm, as was common practice then, at a time before such contorted, complacent mystification turned parenting into an extravagant, flattering and flattening mirror, in the guise of protecting the child. Then, it was enough if the child was fed, slept under a roof, and, from contact with his elders, learned the few gestures necessary for that survival from which he would make a life. As for the rest, it was assumed that youth in itself made up for the lack of tenderness, the cold, hardships, and long labor, sweetened by buckwheat cakes, beautiful evenings, air as good as the bread.

  André Dufourneau was sent to them. I like to think that he arrived one October or December evening, soaked from the rain or red-eared from the bitter frost. His feet struck that path that they would never again strike for the first time. He looked at the tree, the cowshed, the way the landscape stood out from the sky, the door. He looked at the new faces under the lamp, surprised or moved, smiling or indifferent. What he was thinking we will never know. He sat down and ate the soup. He stayed for ten years.

  My grandmother, who got married in 1910, was still a girl. She grew attached to the child, whom she surely embraced with that gentle kindness of hers that I knew and with which she tempered the rough good nature of the men he accompanied to the fields. He had not gone and never did go to school. She taught him how to read and write. (I imagine a winter evening; the cupboard door creaks as a young peasant girl in a black dress opens it and takes down from the top shelf a small exercise book, “André’s Book,” sits down beside the child who has washed his hands. Amidst the patois chatter, one voice distinguishes itself, strikes a higher note, strives for richer tones to shape the tongue around richer words. The child listens, repeats after her, timidly at first, then with confidence. He does not know yet that for those of his class and condition, born close to the earth and quick to fall back to it once again, la Belle Langue does not lead to grandeur, but to nostalgia and the desire for grandeur. He ceases to belong to the moment, the salt of hours becomes diluted, and in the agony of the past that is always beginning, the future rises and immediately begins to flow. The wind beats the window with a bare wisteria branch. The child’s frightened gaze wanders over the geography map.) He did not lack intelligence; no doubt people said that he “learned quickly.” Thus, based on these vague signs, and with the modest, lucid good sense of peasants in those days, who equated intellect with social rank, my ancestors developed a story to explain such incongruous qualities in a child of his condition, more in keeping with how they perceived reality: Dufourneau became the illegitimate son of a local squire, and everything was restored to order.

  Who could say now if he was informed of this fantastical ancestry, born of the imperturbable social realism of the poor? It does not matter. If so, he thought of it with pride and resolved to win back, without ever having possessed, all he had been robbed of by his illegitimacy. If not, a vanity took hold in this peasant orphan, raised with vague respect perhaps, certainly with unusual consideration, that seemed to him all the more deserved, unaware as he was of its cause.

  My grandmother got married. She was barely ten years older than him, and the adolescent he had already become may have suffered because of it. But my grandfather, I will say, was jovial, welcoming, a generous man and mediocre farmer. As for the child, I believe I heard my grandmother say, he was pleasant. No doubt the two young men liked one another, the cheerful victor of the moment with his blond moustache, and the other, the smooth-cheeked, silent one, secretly called, awaiting his hour; the eager one chosen by the woman, and the calmly flexed one chosen by a destiny greater than woman; the one who made jokes, and the one who was waiting for life to allow him to do so; man of earth and man of iron, without prejudice to their respective strengt
hs. I see them going off to hunt; their breath, dancing slightly in the air, is swallowed by the fog; their silhouettes fade into the edge of the woods. I hear them sharpen their scythes, standing in the spring dawn; then they walk and the grass is laid low, and the scent of it grows with the day, exacerbated by the sun. I know that they stop at noon. I know under which trees they eat and talk; I hear their voices but do not understand them.

  Then a baby girl was born, the war came, my grandfather left. Four years passed, during which Dufourneau finished becoming a man. He took the little girl in his arms; he ran to alert Elise that the postman was on his way to the farm bringing one of Félix’s painstaking, punctual letters. In the evening by lamplight he thought about the distant provinces where the din of battles razed villages to which he gave glorious names, where there were victors and vanquished, generals and soldiers, dead horses and impregnable cities. In 1918, Félix returned with some German weapons, a meerschaum pipe, a few wrinkles and a more extensive vocabulary than he had had at departure. Dufourneau barely had time to hear him out; he was called up for military service.

  He saw a city; he saw the ankles of the officers’ wives when they climbed into carriages; he heard young men whose moustaches lightly brushed the ears of beautiful creatures made of laughter and silk. It was the language he had learned from Elise, but it seemed like some other because its natives knew so many little paths, echoes, clever turns. He knew that he was a peasant. We will never learn how he suffered, in what circumstances he was made ridiculous, the name of the café where he got drunk.

  He wanted to study, insofar as the constraints of the army permitted it, and it seems he achieved that goal, because he was a good boy, capable, said my grandmother. He held arithmetic and geography textbooks in his hands; he squeezed them into his pack that smelled of tobacco, the poor young man. He opened them and experienced the distress of one who does not understand, the rebelliousness that pushes on regardless, and, at the end of a dark alchemy, the pure diamond of pride when, for a breathless moment, understanding illuminates the ever opaque mind. Was it a person, a book, or, more poetically, a propaganda poster for the Marines that disclosed Africa to him? What bragging sub-prefect, what bad novel buried in the sands or lost in forests stretching over endless rivers, what magazine engraving of gleaming top hats passing triumphantly among gleaming faces, just as black and supernatural, made the dark continent sparkle with bright prospects? His calling was that country where the childish pacts you make with yourself could still, at that time, hope to find their dazzling revenge, provided you were willing to entrust yourself to the lofty, perfunctory god of “all or nothing.” It was there that this god played knucklebones, scattered the native ninepins, and disemboweled the forests under the enormous lead ball of a sun, staking and losing a hundred ambitious, fly-covered heads on the clay ramparts of the Saharan cities, pulling three white kings from his sleeve with a flourish. Then, pocketing his loaded ivory and ebony dice in their buffalo-skin bag, he disappeared into the savannahs, in madder-colored pants and white helmet, a thousand children lost in his wake.

  His vocation was Africa. And knowing it not to be the case, I dare to believe for a moment what called him was less the vulgar lure of fortunes to be made than an unconditional surrender into the hands of intransitive Fortune herself; that he was too much the orphan, irremediably coarse and low born, to embrace the devout nonsense of social ascension, proof of strong character, success acquired through merit alone; that he left as a drunkard swears an oath, emigrated as a drunkard falls to the ground. I dare to believe that. For in speaking of him, I speak of myself; and I, too, would not deny what, I imagine, was the chief motive for his departure: the assurance that over there, a peasant became a White Man, and, even if he was the last of ill-born sons, deformed and repudiated by the Mother Tongue, he was nearer to her skirts than a Fulah or an Akan. He would speak the language aloud and she would recognize herself in him; he would marry her “beside palm gardens, among a very gentle people” a people enslaved, upon whom to found these nuptials. With every other power, she would grant him the only one that matters: the power that throttles all other voices when the Fine Speaker raises his own.

  His military service over, he returned to Les Cards – it may have been in December, there may have been snow, thick on the bakehouse wall, and my grandfather, who was shoveling the paths, saw him coming from afar and raised his head with a smile, singing softly to himself until he drew level – and announced his decision to leave, “for overseas,” as was said in those days, into the sudden blue and the irreparable distance. You took that plunge into the color and the violence; you left your past on the other side of the sea. The declared goal was the Ivory Coast; the motive, just as flagrant, was greed. A hundred times I heard my grandmother recall the arrogance with which he must have avowed that “over there he would become rich, or die.” And today I imagine the tableau that my romantic grandmother had sketched for herself, rearranging the details she remembered around a more noble, overtly dramatic theme than her impoverished reality, marred by belonging to the commonality, could have provided, a tableau that must have remained alive in her until her death, heightened with colors that intensified as the original scene, lost to time and the additions of reconstructed memory, disappeared. I imagine a composition in the manner of Greuze, some “departure of the eager child,” hatching its drama in the large country kitchen darkened by smoke as a glaze darkens a canvas, and where, in a great whirlwind of emotion that undoes the women’s shawls and raises the coarse hands of the men in mute gesticulation, André Dufourneau, proudly posed against a bread hutch, calf muscles bulging in puttees neat and white as eighteenth century stockings, extends his whole arm, palm open, toward the window flooded with ultramarine blue.

  But, as a child, it was with very different strokes that I painted this departure. “I will come back rich, or die there.” As unmemorable as it is, I have said how, a hundred times, my grandmother exhumed that phrase from time’s ruins, unfurled its brief, sonorous standard again in the air, always new, always from the past. But I was the one who asked her for it, who wanted to hear over and over this commonplace of those who are leaving. As explicit as the crossbones of the Brothers of the Barbary Coast, the flag it made snap in the wind for me proclaimed the inevitable second term, death, and that fictive thirst for riches you oppose to death only to better abandon yourself to it, the perpetual future, the triumph of destinies hastened along by rebelling against them. I shivered then in the same way as, when reading, I was seized by poems full of rumors and massacres, by dazzling prose. I knew it; I touched something similar there. And no doubt, these words were indeed “literary,” uttered with satisfaction by a being who wanted to emphasize the gravity of the moment, but who was too badly educated to know how to heighten it by pretending to couch it in a clever phrase, and was thus reduced to marking its singularity by drawing from a more “noble” repertoire. But there was something more; there was the redundant, essential, and summarily burlesque formulation – one of the first in my life, to my knowledge – of one of those fates who were the sirens of my childhood, to whose song I would, in the end, surrender myself, wrists and ankles tied, right from the age of reason. These words were, to me, an Annunciation, and like the Blessed Virgin, I trembled without penetrating the meaning; my future incarnate and I did not recognize it. I did not know that writing was so dark a continent, more enticing and disappointing than Africa, the writer a species more bent on getting lost than the explorer; and, although that scribe may explore memory and memory’s libraries instead of sand dunes and forests, may return flush with words instead of gold, or die there poorer than ever, “to die of it” was the alternative offered to him as well.

  And that was the departure of André Dufourneau. “My day is set; I am leaving Europe.” Already the sea air shocks the lungs of this inlander. He looks at the sea. There he sees old peasant men lost beneath their caps and women, black and naked, being offered to him, labor that soils the
hands and enormous rings on the fingers of flashy adventurers, the word “bungalow,” and the words “never again.” He sees his desires and his regrets; he sees the light infinitely reflecting. He is certainly standing there, arms resting on the ship’s rail, unmoving, his eyes vague and set on the horizon of visions and light, the sea wind ruffling his hair like the hand of a romantic painter, draping his black cotton jacket with antique style. This is a good opportunity to sketch the physical portrait of him that I have been putting off. The family archives kept one picture, in which he is photographed standing, in the blue uniform of the infantry; the puttees wrapped around his calves made me think of Louis XV stockings just now. His thumbs are hooked in his belt, chin raised, chest out. His proud posture is the one often favored by small men. Come now, admit it, he really resembles a writer. There is a portrait of the young Faulkner, a small man like him, in which I recognize the same haughty yet drowsy air, the eyes heavy but with an ominous, flashing gravity, and under the ink-black moustache formerly used to hide the coarseness of the lip, alive like the din silenced by the spoken word, the same bitter mouth that prefers to smile. He moves away from the deck, stretches out on his berth, and there he writes the thousand novels out of which the future is made and which the future unmakes; he is living the fullest days of his life. The clock of rolling waves disguises the hours, time passes and place changes, Dufourneau is as alive as the stuff of his dreams; he has been dead a long time; I am not yet abandoning his shadow.

  This gaze, which thirty years later will fix on me, now skims the African coast. Abidjan can be seen beyond its lagoon savaged by the rains. The Grand-Bassam sandbar, as witnessed and described by Gide, is an engraving from an old magazine; the author of Paludes wisely assigns the sky its traditional leaden aspect, but the sea under his pen takes on the image and color of tea. Like other travelers history has forgotten, in order to cross the estuary wave, Dufourneau must be lifted above the water, suspended in a hammock moved by a crane. Then the big, gray lizards, the little goats, the Grand-Bassam officials, the port formalities, and beyond the lagoon, the trail toward the interior where great and small tales of adventure alike are born in the same uncertainty, dazzling desires from the womb of drab reality. Doumpalm trees where snakes of glue and gold sleep, gray rain showers on gray branches, species bristling with fierce thorns and sumptuous names, the hideous marabous that are supposed to be wise, and the Mallarméan palm, too concise to give shelter from sun or showers. In the end, the forest closes again like a book; the hero is delivered over to chance, his biography to the precariousness of hypotheses.