Trio (27 page)

Inexplicable passions.

When the morning was well advanced, went the rounds of the buildings, keeping his ears open for the slightest sounds that insinuated themselves at this hour above the birdsong, sometimes found the sentry asleep under a shelter, woke him with a tap on the shoulder, he muttered a few apologies and went off to drink his coffee, the master continued on his rounds, inspected the remotest corners and very often tried out the barn echo by uttering a groan that came back to him as something quite innocuous, evanescent phantasms, then he too went home and the maid who was singing softly in the kitchen brought in the coffee.

Was noting in the margin beside an empty phrase.

Sprawling over his table, loss of consciousness, the doctor gets busy and with the maid carries him on to his bed, when he opens his eyes he starts talking about the flight of the crows again, while the servant was making one last cup of beef-tea for this caricature, the word would be written, salutary for the incarnations to come, a warning, she brought the beverage but he’d given up the ghost, the doctor was sobbing in the next room, it was all over.

There was nothing left of the false mystery of the night.

In town they were remarking on the event, they said they’d known him, they were amazed that they’d lost sight of him for so long, they recalled some acts of his childhood and youth which ought to have made them smell a rat, was it believable in this day and age, practicing magic or whatever it’s called, the schoolmaster said that it was still traditional somewhere or other, he’d studied, all sorts of ridiculous words, fetishes, the evil eye, amulets, and one thing leading to another very old memories of our parts, we weren’t too clear whether they were grandmothers’ tales or children’s nightmares, it seems that they were still dormant in people’s consciousness, well and now that thing what d’you call it appeared today, there were proofs, a real danger for the population, we were at its mercy, sorcery or Middle Ages what is it exactly, a group of sadists who made books of spells and love philters, it was enough to make you tremble.

The other neighbor, the woman who sells fruit and vegetables in the market, that little stall in the corner on the right as you go in, not all that fresh, she’s always smuggling in bad tomatoes or overripe fruit, started to say that her little girl had been odd for several months, she was always at Mass or in the cemetery and didn’t look well and no appetite, they questioned her, she answered yes when it should have been no and things that didn’t follow like for instance some tale of a pin in her pants or her catechism book hidden under her pillow, such a gay child and from one moment to the next she became moody and overscrupulous adding I think to everything she said or starting to cry because she’d make a mistake in giving change at the grocer’s or what’s more serious asking her father questions about death and babies’ corpses and the life everlasting, you can imagine my husband, he tells me about it in the evenings, he’s sure the child ought to see a doctor, well those things down there that aren’t normal come up here, a sort of influence like the flu or foot- and-mouth disease, that’s what she said.

Or like the plumber for some time now all the pipes he repairs are blocked in the same place, he can go to it with his eyes shut, and a sort of fungus the like of which he’s never seen runs all along the drains or sink pipes or I don’t know what, and what’s even more disturbing is that it’s always at the same moment between eight and eight-ten that his customers telephone him, he can’t keep up with the demand, he saw his colleague in the new part of the town and he says the same, there’s something fishy behind it all.

Or other signs that people wouldn’t have noticed in normal times like two people talking to each other who keep stumbling at short intervals over the same word.

This question of talking or of keeping quiet, of being precise or not, of saying too much about it or not enough was apparently more or less what the schoolmaster was pointing out in his lecture on tragedy except that then we wouldn’t have understood anything mysterious thinking that it was a question of a specialist in French who had to do his job conscientiously like everyone else, not suspecting I repeat that the thing in one sense making all due allowance concerned us all and that it was only our naivety that prevented us seeing thank God the appalling abysses on the brink of which we play around with our slightest word, yes this affair brought us right up against something of this sort, this man had a power, he acted covertly without ever getting mixed up in anyone’s life.

Whereas other people described these subtleties as nonsense, the master had always been an impostor and went on sowing discord at the same time as he was giving himself airs, they quite bluntly reminded each other of the dishonest things he’d done as a young man, not just telling lies but the shady schemes he’d been involved in, do you remember that so-called antiques business, all the articles were new fakes neither more nor less.

Or that none of it had anything to do with anything, they were imagining things, you had to let everything find its own level and life goes on, none of this makes us any wiser or any richer.

People we don’t know go past on the road in their car, they stop outside the neighbor’s, we see them talking to the wife, then outside the other one’s place but there’s no one there at this hour, then go off again still very slowly, they’re certainly looking for something, when they pass a man on his way back from the fields.

They were to find out little by little that he sometimes entertained people from the town but never the same ones, different cars, someone seems to have carried his curiosity so far as to take their numbers.

And so without anything having apparently changed, the work goes on, the worries and little joys typical of these parts, in short, life, nevertheless it looked as if some profound mechanism had been set in motion which would undermine the foundations of our edifice, that laborious accumulation of straws in the wind, no power could oppose it, no resistance.

Or other signs that we wouldn’t have noticed in normal times.

That story of contagion and foot-and-mouth disease had put them on their guard, where would all this lead us the plumber added, we’d have to institute proceedings but there wasn’t any accused, against whom to take action, it was just simply that strange events had followed one another like the blocked pipes and that cat that had eaten her kittens, or irritating ones like a supplementary tax on agricultural machinery which hadn’t been published in the local paper because of some intrigue or other, in short trifles which assumed dramatic proportions, this concurrently with certain remarks
 
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So the neighbor and his wife and child went to identify him, it was in fact the postman panting on the dunghill, a hereditary disease which becomes aggravated with age, they had to take him home somehow, luckily the mechanic was passing with his breakdown van, they called out to him, picked up the unfortunate man and laid him down in the car, they took him home and his wife immediately said it’s happened then I knew it would, when he goes off like that in the morning to the bistro it always ends up the same way but what got into him to go up to the marsh, what got into you she asked the sick man, he was practically out for the count and couldn’t answer, all the time carrying him up to the bedroom with the mechanic, there wouldn’t be anything to do there but give him his medicine and wait, she was used to it.

He could have seen it all from his window, it looks onto that side, but at that sort of time he’s often going for a walk over by the marsh, the maid wouldn’t have heard anything though, the kitchen faces east, and yet the noise of an engine in that remote part where no one ever goes by
 
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as for the doctor he wasn’t there yet, it must have been about ten o’clock, spring weather, the morning mists had not long dispersed.

Careful, you never know.

On the table a bunch of dried flowers made in the autumn of thistles and hemlock, the sort of country occupation at the time of year when people start living indoors again, chilly evenings, a fire in the hearth, a smell of mildew and tepid ashes, pleasant hours spent meditating on the book which was still there this glacial night, open at the page with the engraving, when suddenly a window bangs, the wind sweeps into the room, there was no one there.

Impossible said the sentry, I’ve just seen the master arrive to inspect the premises, he walked round the garden, he went in, didn’t open the shutters seeing that it was so late.

Alchemist of the nothings that enabled him to survive.

The neighbor went down to the village to tell the mechanic that there was a tractor stuck in his field, whose was it, no driver, a model that didn’t come from our parts but a recent design, no one had heard anything, the ploughing season was over or hadn’t yet begun, he’d alerted the others who had no idea, no one knew what was going on.

Or that the previous evening they apparently saw a tourist tinkering with the engine of his sports car by the light of a torch or a storm-lantern, then he went off in the direction of the forest, the wife apparently said for a townie he seems to know his way around I’d never have believed it, the kid was there too, he doesn’t go about with his eyes shut and he said that the machine was a German or American make, in any case red with a black hood that was torn, the mica or plastic that takes the place of the back window was missing.

In the direction of the forest but he branches off before, goes down a mud path and comes out at the marsh, gets out of the car, observes the exceptional level of the water and makes a detour of a good half mile on foot to get to the pinewood, therefore not an ordinary tourist, he knew the region but why go there in the middle of the night.

As for the goatherd she’d been home for ages, six hours at the very least, at sunset, unless in that season she didn’t go out at all with her livestock, it’s too cold and she’s completely crippled with rheumatism, the nanny goats stay in the shed, yes that’s probably it, remember to ask the neighbor since you can’t get anything definite out of the witch, she’d be capable
 
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Dissipation of a haze, semblance of a line.

Immersed in his reading, hours and hours, numb with cold, couldn’t even make out the shapes, night was falling, couldn’t even make out the lines, sleep, it was then that the woman after she’d taken her goats home went back to the crossroads, she must have lost something, a knitting needle, her handkerchief, kneeling on the ground, fumbling in the stubbly grass, the mechanic apparently saw her on his way down, he stopped his machine and asked her through the window if he could help her, she stood up, she laughed, toothless mouth, little eyes of different colors, they say she’s pretty wily.

She must have seen the corpse on the dunghill, she must have been within three feet of it because on her way home she followed the hedge, the master who was closing the shutter called out goodnight to her, she didn’t answer, could she be deaf too, a very prevalent infirmity in our parts, especially the women, unless he didn’t say anything, he’d only just woken up, still in a sleepy haze, one day less in which to brood on all those snippets, he wouldn’t go to bed until daybreak, would spend the night wandering between his room and the kitchen.

The good days were over.

They would come with the mayor and the doctor, they would certify the death, the body was already stiff, trousers and shirt stained with dung, he must have fallen and dragged himself there, in fact they find both the appropriate traces and the red and blue checked handkerchief on the gravel, the goatherd is by the fireplace, her different-colored eyes are ferreting about the room, she says I saw him just a short while ago before dinner, he was sitting on the bench watching the sunset, a habit of his, he never really saw us at those moments he was dreaming or was he asleep, the doctor trying to do the right thing heated up the coffee for everyone, outside the barn roof was gleaming in the cold moonlight.

But when they discovered the will what a business, it was the doctor who came across it while he was sorting out the papers in the top drawer of that kind of chiffonier in the right-hand corner of the bedroom as you go in, yes what a business, he sees this is my last will and testament written on a blue envelope and he immediately thought that he was the only one who had any sort of right to open it in his capacity of intimate friend of the deceased, then he hesitated, if occurred to him that he didn’t know what the legal position was but his affection for the dead man got the upper hand, telling himself that the document might fall into the wrong hands he opens the envelope and finds a second one inside it and then a third, whereupon he said to himself careful now, there may be something important in this, he couldn’t explain his feeling to the lawyer and yet God knows he didn’t pass for a particularly cautious character nor for one given to dramatising things.

So he gave the envelopes to the lawyer who said this is a special document which is a matter for the magistrate, we’ll pass it on to him, which they do and the complications begin, you’d need to know the proper terms if you didn’t want to put your foot into it, in short six months of beating about the bush to make sure first of all that the deceased person was in his right mind and the experts hesitated given that everything seemed to be so bizarre but the witnesses especially the maid were able to certify that he was indeed of sound mind, next the will named as heir a nephew who was dead who had himself left as heir a nephew who had also died in the meantime, now by God knows what process of deduction the testator must have foreseen that this was how it would be, in short little by little they arrived at the certainty that the doctor was the only beneficiary in the deceased’s mind, why not quite simply have mentioned him, with, what was more, a description of the property such that you might well wonder whether it really existed at all, the dead man had spent his life establishing a system of affirmations and negations that was undeniably logical and unassailable, to avoid, it seems
 
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