Trio (14 page)

So now it was a question of someone who’d had this throat cut.

The other end of the counter curves around too but there’s a passage between it and the wall for the barman and the owner’s wife who takes care of the cash desk, here too is the trapdoor for the goods elevator that takes the supplies down to the cellar, it gets in everyone’s way on delivery days, which gives rise to the odd spat.

A delivery day, precisely, anyone could have sneaked into the back of the bistro where the door to the crappers is and then gone out into the courtyard and from there up into the next-door block, why expect him to have used the big staircase of a bourgeois block with doorman and everything in the middle of the afternoon, simpler to use the service stairs, no.

Poor Alexandre, after his brother’s death he inherited the family house which he immediately wanted to live in, I can still see him moving house with a little moving van overflowing with his books and his old papers, the maid had tacked on her own bits and pieces plus the kitchen utensils plus the dog’s kennel, the whole lot jiggling and joggling along the little road, they were both sitting in front next to Louis who was driving, little Théo joined them that same evening, accompanied by his mother who was shivering in the dining room, drafts everywhere, the rain was coming through the roof, Magnin had fixed them an oil-burning stove in the little salon for the winter, it cut a sorry figure there, the paneling and tapestries may well be in a terrible state but at least all that still has class.

And then that old halfwit today dragging himself from one salon to the next, calculating the cost of the repairs, you know he hasn’t got a bean, but he still talks about maintaining his rank vis-a-vis the neighboring landowners, it’s enough to make you die laughing, and in any case he moved a long time before his brother’s death, what’s that you’re saying about him moving, Monsieur Alfred died ten years later, I can still see the funeral, but she was mixing it up with that of Alexandre, my God it’s only human, does it matter, and to mix up one move with another
 
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Human, that’s the word I was looking for.

To mix one funeral up with another, that’s what’s staring us all in the face, no offense meant.

A missing link.

Listening to them I felt I was regressing to before the flood, which is the time they still live in.

At such and such a page a time to love, at another page a time to yield up your place.

The poor man took one dossier for another, what didn’t he put me through with his checking the index cards, his classifications, his resorting, I used to spend weeks on end at it, it tired me out.

Whereas, according to Théo, the old man, after the maid’s intervention, took a perverse pleasure in shuffling his index cards like playing cards, and muddling up his papers, not because he had lost his marbles though, still according to Théo, who in the years following his godfather’s death had had a facsimile volume of Mortin’s notes printed for their friends, which revealed the extraordinary lucidity of the old man.

A candle was burning at the deceased’s bedside while the nephew opened the drawers as quickly as possible, looking for the key to the safe where he thought he would find the will, but he only discovered a dud key as if by this joke from beyond the grave
 
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Cut.

Burned in his fireplace, now autumn had come, the duplicates of some reports that were as long as they were insipid, whose originals he recopied during the winter, and then burned the copies again the following autumn.

And also, my goodness, that diary which he took up again a hundred times in the course of his existence, in which he recorded the various states of his soul caused by the coming of night, or that kind of event, some people claim that it was by his brother, they spent long evenings together writing something like the history of their family, I used to hear them asking each other about the date of birth of some of them and the date of death of others, they came of very good stock, being descended from country noblemen through the Quisards of Ballaison, I can remember the Christian name of one of their women ancestors, Josèphte-Françoise-Jéromine, isn’t that charming.

But as for the diary, it’s Monsieur Alexandre’s, I’d go to the stake for that, he was forever pestering me to get me to recollect who he’d met on such and such a day, what he’d done another day, and even what he’d had to eat at his sister’s or at the neighbors’, or a word, that’s right, that I’d heard at the grocer’s, he wanted to know who’d said it and why and how, yes, he was always pestering me but I let him, because that man was only happy when he was mulling over his memories, which by the way he often mixed up with other people’s memories, there’s no denying that, as if everything that came from the past belonged to him as of right, I’ve never known anyone like him, as I was saying to my niece.

Either as she was saying to her niece, or as her niece was saying to her.

Because contrary to what people make out, it wasn’t he who was responsible for Théo being badly brought up it was the mother, who spoiled him rotten, and it wasn’t just that it was the uncle who paid and not her, all right I know he was rich but didn’t he give the whole family the benefit of it.

Coming back to the horrible episode in the cemetery, Mortin’s body found dead one November evening on the stone of their family vault, a butcher’s knife planted in his back, when I think of it, it was half past five, something like that, night was falling, the cemetery was shutting its gates, Mademoiselle Passetant was hurrying toward the exit after putting flowers on her parents’ grave as she does every year when she noticed a form lying stretched out on a stone, she screamed and didn’t dare approach it, she ran to the caretaker who went back with her, he immediately said, as she was pointing out the grave in question from a distance, it was taller than its neighbors, but that’s the Mortins’ sepulcher, he went over to it on his own for Étiennette was feeling faint, her nerves are bad, she sat down on
 
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She had no idea where she had sat down, oh just for a brief moment, before she rushed over to the gate and got into her parked car, while the caretaker who had a torch recognized Monsieur Alexandre and then went back to his house to telephone the police, it wasn’t a butcher’s knife planted between his shoulder blades but a flick-knife.

His wallet stuffed full of banknotes, as testified by the bank where Mortin had been that afternoon, and his gold watch, and his signet ring, a sapphire as big as that set in platinum, and his cufflinks, moonstones if you please.

But he was got up like a whore, your Mortin.

In short, it had all disappeared, and what’s more, an amusing, if you can call it that, detail, so had his new shoes.

Cut.

But that the caretaker had never seen the corpse, for the reason that he had died that afternoon at the counter, macabre detail, of the bank where he had been to collect his disability pension, Étiennette had found his widow and sons at his house in the state you can imagine, it seems that this man had been a paragon as a father and husband, it was one of his sons who had come and identified Mortin’s body, which made a lot of dead people at once, counting the funerals that day, but you can’t choose.

Stabbed him in the back while the old man was stooping to straighten up a pot of chrysanthemums, an All Saints’ Day as shitty as they come, the man must have hidden behind a monument waiting for night to fall and then, no one any the wiser, gone over the wall opposite the entrance to the cemetery.

Different version each time.

To get nearer to the truth or lose all trace of it, you couldn’t hear very well.

The man by the window sees a man cross the street, pass in front of the mailbox, go into the apartment block et cetera, another stands another round, another will stand another, and so on until evening when they all go their separate ways, that’s when it isn’t nice not to have someone to be going home to but to find yourself alone, wondering what you’re doing, a question which leads to another, then another, like the rounds in the bistro earlier, you lose sight of the murderer or the burglar in another version, like the watcher in the café, he too was wondering, then another then another, and so on until when.

At such and such a page the maid visiting her niece.

At such and such a page the corpse on the bedside mat.

At such and such a page he closes the dossier.

At such and such a page she took the child off and the master wakes up out of his nightmare.

At such and such a page saw himself again with Théo in the cemetery sitting in front of the suitcase and undoing one of the piles of newspaper cuttings, looking for subjects for essays.

The slate, always come back to that.

A missing link.

Because personally, his illness, you can imagine how well I knew it, every morning the same old story, after the description of his dreams and nightmares he used to review the worries of the previous day, foresee those of the day, fear those of the following day, and the dead people in the newspaper, the list of the deceased is getting longer.

Corpses, cemeteries, a taste of putrefaction even in the rice I used to cook for him.

Say everything again, yes, for fear of
 
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On the slate they find regression of desire.

Painful anamnesis.

The days slimy, the horror of memory.

The underground passages are being hollowed out, exchanges now take place only in the opaque shadows.

Despair apparently essential for the desired mutation.

All regrets stifled.

His hands tied from now on to the words it is retracing.

As for Alexandre, as I was saying, he lived with his brother in their family house for many years, how many, my goodness, she didn’t know anymore, you don’t keep count of what happens to other people.

Or that she remembered what the maid had told her at the time, about the continual difficulties between the two brothers who each had his own idea about the education of their nephews, because at one moment Alfred was especially interested in Léo and Alexandre in Théodore, was it after their mother’s death or before, people said she had no maternal feeling but I’d be more inclined to think that it was because she was on her uppers, absolutely impossible for her to feed that horde of children, as she said to the grocer’s wife.

The contradictions you find everywhere once you stop to think.

It must have been a Sunday, then, and the ladies were talking religion, sacrament, Mass, miracle, hospital, pharmacy, salpingitis, psspss, at the grocer’s, awaiting their turn, carrots haven’t done too well this year but on the other hand the salsify, what, do you still cook that muck, I gave it up twenty years ago, anyway they say it causes cancer.

Because personally, his illness, his brother died of the same thing, it was congenital, the whole family had had a few spells in the asylum, the mother was as mad as a hatter and the grandmother was the same, in short it had carried Alfred off, an acute fit, but she couldn’t remember whether it was Théo or Léo who had inherited the family house.

The same one who the previous Sunday had bought the frozen shrimps, and mussels today, they’ve always liked seafood, saying poor Marie, I do hope she doesn’t catch her death of cold, she isn’t as strong as she looks, because the grocer’s wife had gone off the day before to her mother-in-law’s funeral a hundred kilometers away in an unheated car, and churches, you know what they’re like, the daughter-in-law was waiting on the ladies, the young one I mean, that was why things weren’t going very quickly, she isn’t very bright.

And the other lady it must have been, just a minute, no, I don’t remember, she said, but don’t you realize there isn’t a word of truth in what she says, what, after all this time are you still her dupe, her dupe, what do you mean by that, I mean that she lies to you and you’re a great ninny to have let your head be stuffed full of such ideas for so long, at your age, can you imagine.

A fat lot of good it did her to ferret through the papers, she
 
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Or, going back to all the subjects the old man kept trotting out to anyone who would listen to him, that of his death for example, or of his brother’s death.

Or else, someone point-blank, at least this is my interpretation, someone there like a pebble in a pond who would go on relating that otiose, never-ending story in which the only thing discussed would be putting an end to it, finishing it, cutting it short.

And wherever he happened to be he would never hear people talk of anything but that, was it his own end or someone else’s, or everyone’s at the same time, you see the kind of thing.

Or rather the fruit of silence all of a sudden, the voices fall silent, the world collapses.

Which could be observed by going back to the letters, the notes, the evidence in question.

Impossible to end, impossible not to end, impossible to continue, to stop, to start again.

To be something other than this accumulation of drifting nothings.

What conjuring tricks you had to get up to in order to make anything understood there.

All that crossed out, deleted, effaced.

The repetition of facts from one age to the next, only a few years’ interval and everything starts again, the voices are no longer the same but the words are, and hence the events as they unfold, from the dullest to the most dramatic, from the sweetest to the most bitter, so that a carefully worked-out chronicle
 
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Take another dossier and, here, read it, there, at that page.

The child started reading again.

The witness questioned states that he had only known the old man during the period when he was living alone, after the death of his brother that is, he is unaware of the existence of the brother, which seems surprising in such a close-knit society, everyone knowing everyone else’s business, but as for Théodore, he says he remembers perfectly having made his acquaintance at the
 
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