Small Lives Read online

  After a long silence, a letter arrived at Les Cards in the thirties. The same one-armed postman brought it, the one Dufourneau used to watch for from the field, during childhood and the war. (I knew him myself, retired in a little white house near the village cemetery; pruning rosebushes in a tiny garden, he spoke readily and loudly, with a joyful rolling of his r’s.) And no doubt it was spring, sheets long since gone to dust steaming in the sun, flesh now decomposed smiling in the lightheartedness of May; and under the violently tender clusters of lilac, my mother, fifteen years old, was inventing a childhood already flown. She had no memory of the letter’s author; she saw her parents moved to tears; in the violet scent and shadow, sacerdotal as the past, she herself was filled with a delicious, literary emotion, dense as foliage.

  Other letters arrived, annually or biannually, recounting of his life what its protagonist wished to tell, and which he no doubt believed he lived: he had been employed as a forester, a “woodcutter,” and finally a planter; he was rich. I never mused over those letters, with their exotic stamps and postmarks – Kokombo, Malamalasso, Grand-Lahou – all gone now. I imagine I have read what I never read. In them he spoke of minor events and small pleasures, of the rainy season and threats of war, of a French flower that he had succeeded in grafting, of the laziness of the blacks, the brilliance of birds, the high price of bread; in them he was low and noble; he closed with his best wishes.

  I am also thinking about what he left untold: some insignificant secret never disclosed – not out of modesty, surely, but it amounts to the same thing, since the linguistic resources at his command were too limited to express the essential, and his pride too intractable to allow the essential to be embodied in roughly approximate words. Some mental gyrations over a pathetic piece of work, a shameful pleasure in all he lacked. We know this, because the law is the law. He did not have what he wanted; it was too late to confess. What good is appealing when you know the sentence will be for life, and there will be no suspending it and no second chance?

  Finally that day in 1947: the road once again, the tree, the same sky and trees outlined against the same horizon, the little garden of wallflowers. The hero and his biographer meet under the chestnut tree, but, as is always the case, the interview is a fiasco. The biographer is a babe in arms and will retain no memory of the hero; the hero recognizes in the child only an image of his own past. If I had been ten years old, no doubt I would have seen him in the royal crimson robes of a Magi, placing rare and magical goods on the kitchen table with a haughty reserve, coffee, cacao, indigo. If I had been fifteen, he would have been “the fierce, wounded soldier returned from the hot climes,” whom women and adolescent poets love, fiery eyes set in dark skin, with furious word and grip. Even yesterday, and especially if he was bald, I would have thought that “savagery had caressed his head,” like the most brutal of Conrad’s colonials. Today, whatever he may be or say, I would think what I say here, nothing more, and it would all amount to the same thing.

  Of course I can linger over that day, to which I was a witness, on which I saw nothing. I know that Félix opened many bottles – his then sure hand firmly grasped the corkscrew, skillfully releasing the pleasing noise – that he was happy in the effusions of wine, friendship, and summer, that he talked a lot, in French to ask his guest about faraway countries, in patois to recall memories. I know that his small, blue eyes sparkled with mocking sentimentality, that from time to time, emotion and a taste of the past broke off his words before they left his mouth. I suppose that Elise listened, hands resting on her lap in the folds of her apron, that she gazed long and with unallayed astonishment at the man the young boy she was searching for had become, beneath whose features he was sometimes restored to her in a fleeting expression, a way of cutting his bread, of launching into a sentence, of following the flash of a bird out the window, or a ray of light. I know that patois sentences came back to Dufourneau unbidden to marry his thoughts (as perhaps had never ceased to happen) and carry them aloud into the echoing day (as had not happened in a very long time). They spoke of the old people who had died, Félix’s agronomic setbacks, with embarrassment, about my father who had run off. The wisteria on the wall was in blossom, the day drew to a close like all others; in the evening they bid one another farewell until the next time, which would never be. A few days later, Dufourneau left again for Africa.

  There was one more letter, accompanying a shipment of some packets of green coffee – I have held those beans in my hand for a long time; when I was a child, I often rolled them dreamily out of their rough brown wrapping. The coffee was never roasted. Sometimes my grandmother, straightening the back shelf of the cupboard where it was kept, would say, “Here, Dufourneau’s coffee.” She would look at it for a minute, then her look would change, and she would add, “It must still be good,” but in a tone that said, “No one will ever taste this.” It was the precious alibi of that memory, of that word; it was the devout image or epitaph, the call to order for minds too apt to forget, all drunk and distracted as they are by the racket of the living. Roasted and consumable, it would have waned, profane, into an aromatic presence; eternally green and arrested at a premature stage in its cycle, it was each day more from the past, from beyond, from overseas; it was one of those things that make the timber of the voice change when speaking of them. It had really become the gift of a Magi.

  That coffee and letter were the last signs of the life of Dufourneau. A definitive silence succeeded them, which I can and want only to interpret as his death.

  As to the way the Wicked Stepmother struck, conjectures can be infinite. I imagine a Land Rover turned over in a furrow of blood red laterite, where blood hardly leaves a trace; a missionary preceded by a choir boy whose white surplice pleasingly silhouettes a soot black face, entering the straw hut where the master gasps out the last measures of a vast fever; I see a flood carrying off the drowned, a companion of Ulysses asleep, slipping off a roof and crashing to the ground without completely waking up, a hideous snake with ashen scales that the fingers graze and immediately the hand swells, then the arm. In the final hour, I wonder if he thought of that house in Les Cards that I, at this moment, am thinking of.

  The most romantic – and, I would like to think, most likely – hypothesis was whispered to me by my grandmother. Because she “had her own idea” about it, which she never completely acknowledged but readily alluded to; she evaded my insistent questions about the death of the prodigal son, but recalled the anxiety with which he had mentioned the atmosphere of rebellion then reigning in the plantations – and indeed, the first indigenous nationalistic ideologies must have been rousing those wretched men at that time, bent under the white yoke toward a soil whose fruits they did not taste. Childishly, no doubt, but not without reason, Elise secretly thought that Dufourneau had died at the hands of the black laborers, whom she imagined much like slaves from another century crossed with Jamaican pirates as they were depicted on bottles of rum, too dazzling to be peaceful, as bloody as their madras scarves, cruel as their jewels.

  A credulous child, I shared my grandmother’s views; I do not renounce them today. Elise, who had laid the groundwork for the drama by teaching Dufourneau spelling, by loving him as a mother when she knew herself to be a possible spouse, who had determined the destiny of the little commoner by leading him to believe that perhaps his origins were not what they seemed and appearances were thus reversible, Elise who had been the confidant recording the proud defiance of the departure and the sibyl uttering it into the ear of future generations; it fell to Elise to write the drama’s denouement as well, and she acquitted herself justly. The end that she had appointed him did not belie her hero’s psychological coherence. As with all so-called upstarts who cannot make others forget their origins any more than they can themselves, who remain poor men exiled among the rich without hope of return, Dufourneau, she knew, had undoubtedly been all the more pitiless toward the lowly in his efforts to keep himself from recognizing in them the image of wha
t he had never ceased to be. Slave labor dug under with the seed and struggling to rise with the sap toward the fruit, sheaves of mud that the ploughshare sprays at you, that nervous air as the man in the necktie or a storm approaches, all of this had once been his lot, and maybe he had loved it, as a man loves what he knows. The uncertainty of a mutilated tongue that serves only to deny accusations and ward off blows had been his; he had come so far to flee the labors he loved, the language that humiliated him; to deny having ever loved or feared what those black men loved and feared, he brought the whip down on their backs, shouted abuses into their ears. And the blacks, concerned with reestablishing the balance of destinies, wrested from him one final terror to equal their thousand terrors, wounded him one last time to equal all their wounds and, extinguishing forever that horrified stare in the instant when he finally admitted he was one of them, killed him.

  This way of conceiving his death accords even more subtly with the little I know of his life; from Elise’s version emerged a unity other than one of behavior, a darker coherence, quasi-metaphysical and almost ancient. It was the sarcastic, distorted echo of a speech, as life is of a desire. “I will become rich, or die there.” In the book of the gods, this boastful alternative had been reduced to a single proposition: he died at the very hands of those whose labor had made his fortune; he was enriched by a sumptuous, bloody death like a king immolated by his subjects; in gold only had he become rich there, and he had died of it.

  Maybe just yesterday, some old woman sitting on her doorstep in Grand-Bassam remembered a white’s look of terror when the blades gleamed, the slight weight of his body out of which the stained blades were withdrawn; today she is dead; and Elise is dead, too, who remembered the first smile of a small boy when he was handed a bright red apple, polished in an apron. A life without consequence flowed between apple and machete, each day further dulling the taste of one and sharpening the edge of the other. Who, if I did not note it here, would remember André Dufourneau, false noble and thwarted peasant, who was a good child, perhaps a cruel man, had powerful desires and left no traces but in the fiction spun by an old peasant woman now dead?

  The Life of Antoine Peluchet

  for Jean-Benoît Puech

  Sometimes as a child in Mourioux, when I was sick or simply anxious, my grandmother would get out the Treasures to divert me. That was what I called the two old dented, decorated tins that had once contained biscuits, and that then served as receptacles for a very different kind of nourishment. What my grandmother drew from them were objects she called precious, along with their histories, those memories that are the jewels inherited by common folk. Complicated genealogies hung suspended with the charms on small copper chains; watches were stopped on some ancestor’s hour; among anecdotes strung along the beads of a rosary, coins bore, with the profile of a king, the account of a gift and rustic name of the giver. The inexhaustible myth authenticated its small token; the token gleamed weakly in the hollow of Elise’s palm, in her black apron, chipped amethyst or ring missing its stone. The myth that poured blandly from her mouth provided a stone for the ring and purified it, rich with all the verbal jewelry that glitters in the strange proper nouns of the forefathers, in the hundredth variant of a familiar story, in the obscure motifs of marriages and deaths.

  At the bottom of one of these tins, for me, for Elise, for our secret palavers, lay the Peluchet Relic.

  Of all the treasures, this was the most ordinary and the most precious one. Elise rarely failed to produce it, after all the others, as the best-loved of the Household Gods; and as such, it was – more than the others – archaic, primitive, its artwork rough and plain. Along with uneasy expectation, its appearance caused in me a kind of malaise and poignant pity. No matter how I looked at it, it was not equal to the profuse account that it elicited from Elise, but its insignificance made it heartbreaking, like that account; in both of them, the insufficiency of the world became crazy. Something endlessly concealed itself there, which I did not know how to read, and I bewailed my poor reading skills; some mystery lay obscured just inches away, pledged divine allegiance to what flees, wanes, and remains silent. I did not want that to be true; my hand released the relic fearfully and curled up in Elise’s hands; beseeching, a lump in my throat, I searched her eyes. To no avail: she spoke, her eyes summoned in the distance by who knows what, which I was afraid of seeing; and she also spoke of the hidden, of bodies disappearing and our souls forever in flight, of visible absences for which we substitute the absenteeism of loved ones, their defection in death, indifference, and departures. She inseminated the void they leave with hurried words, jubilant and tragic, which the void inhales just as the hole of a hive draws the swarm, and which, once inside the void, proliferate. For herself and her small witness, for a compensating god who may have been lending an ear, as well as all those who, up until that day, had held that object in tears, she created once again, she founded and consecrated forever, as her mothers had done before her and as I am going to do here one last time, the everlasting relic.

  The Peluchet line died out with the last century; the last, to my knowledge, was Antoine Peluchet, perpetual son and perpetually unachieved, who carried off his name to distant parts and lost it there. It was this name, fallen into disuse, that the relic carried on to me. The object of women, relayed, handed down from one to another, it compensates for the inadequacies of the males and confers upon the most sterile among them a kind of immortality, which poor peasant issue, hurried off by death and oblivion, would certainly not have assured him.

  Antoine vanished and became a dream, about which we will hear. He had an older sister who does not appear in this narrative because Elise did not speak of her; I do not know the first name of this sacrificed sister, just as I do not know the name of the rustic she married; but I know that the two of them had only one daughter, whom they named Marie and who married a Pallade. In turn, these Pallades engendered two daughters: one of them, Catherine, died without leaving descendants (I knew this ancestor); the other, Philomène, married Paul Mouricaud, of Les Cards, with whom she conceived a single child, Elise, my grandmother. The latter, from her bond with Félix Gayaudon, brought into the world just my mother, who bore a daughter who died as an infant, and me. Here is what I find moving: in this long procession of female heirs, single, well-behaved daughters in their little bonnets and smocks, I am the first man to possess the relic since Antoine, who dispossessed himself of it, but whose name it retained. Among all that female flesh, I am the shade of that shade; after so long a time – a whole century has passed – I am the closest to being his son. Over the heads of so many buried grandmothers, wives in labor, perhaps we nod to one another; our destinies hardly differ, our desires leave no trace, our works amount to nothing.

  The relic is a small ceramic Virgin with child, supremely inexpressive in a glass and silk case that contains, in a sealed double bottom, the miniscule remains of a saint. This object followed the path that I have traced right up to me, and took up all those names; and all the names I have given are attested here and there by the stone slabs in the cemeteries of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, constant under the daytime sun and the night frost; and all the inconstant flesh inhabiting those names appealed to the relic when doing battle with the essential, when, in its living nest, essence clashed with itself and, from this struggle, appeared or disappeared, when flesh had to be born or die. Because the relic is a gris-gris. It was brought to the deathbed (in the bustling heat of the harvest outside, the men in sweaty shirts returning to weep for a moment beside the dying one, then going back out to strain under the sky, the straw and its dust, the excess of wine that multiplies tenfold the tears; or in sad winter, when death is banal, naked, tasteless). It was brought in before death prevailed; they looked at it before going under; some wild-eyed, some eyes quiet, they kissed it or cursed it: Marie, who rendered her soul without a word, and Elise, who procrastinated under my vigil for three nights, and all their trembling, cocky husbands, who, eve
n breathless, chattered on to keep denying that their moment had come. Hands that could no longer grasp anything but spasm and pallor grasped it nevertheless; and wicked claws grasped it, vicious and inert as the embedded nail, already from beyond the grave and yet still on this side, like dying words and inexorable hope. And the same impassive object had welcomed them, no less terrified and refusing with all their strength, when they had exited their mothers’ wombs (when the harvest blazed in August, or in sad winter); because the relic aided the women in their labor, when with great cries the name is carried on. There was not a single squall from a creature newly arrived in stupor and trembling, in the secrecy of small rooms and soaked sheets where, once more, a young girl ceased to be one, over which the relic did not preside, kneaded by the mother and soiled by the child, little ever-virgin doll, enigmatic and comforting, bathed in sweat. Marie clutched it and cried out (and her mother Juliette before her) until the little expelled Philomène cried in turn, still without name or face; and twenty years later, Philomène clutched it and uttered a cry hardly different, and what would become Elise cried; and Elise, twenty years later, and the little Andrée, and the latter, a quarter century later, and finally me, who will not start the cycle again.