Trio (3 page)

For ten years without a break they prospected this chasm and its side-branches. Through their abnegation they became the pioneers of modern speleology. The account of these ten years of research and work can today be found in every library.

Miss Goldwick-Baramine had a granite bungalow built on the river bank and, at the age of thirty-six, she settled there for good. She had found the habitat that suited her.

The spirit of mortification that she had inherited from her mother gradually surfaced in her: “I must expiate,” she said, “I must expiate my turbulent youth.” People recognized in this the exaltation characteristic of her race, for one could just as easily say that all she had done with her youth was to suffer it. But it was in vain that they found excuses for her. She persisted. As these years of retirement went by, her ideal became deformed. Having judged her former exploits absurd, and stigmatized their realism as horrible, (she said “howwible,” barely pronouncing the two w’s), she perched herself, if we may so put it, on the extreme point of an abstruse irreality. She paced over subliminal distances, inhaled cosmic vapors, sustained herself on pulped clay, in one-gram doses, and on the moisture oozing from the stalactites.

Nevertheless, her mannish nature suffered a convulsive movement. At the age of forty-five, Miss Bara finally became unhappy. She wrestled with her chimeras and her underground habits.

It was in this frame of mind that she was preparing to entertain her friends that day. They didn’t come. She went out onto the bank. She reached a secret stairway and climbed up it.

Her friends were waiting for her in the sun, on a terrace in Saint- Cloud.

By following the abscissa from the point 1317, Mahu emerged onto a lawn where a cat was lying in wait for a wood pigeon. He sat down, interested by this stratagem. His chair was resting against a prunus tree; he moved it a little and observed that the lowest branch of the tree was in line with the coordinate axis. But he didn’t want to think about it. The time was comfortable. The cat intrigued him.

After a moment he saw, sticking up through the grass, some fingers holding some wires. The wires converged towards the cat. They were manipulating it. Mahu was disappointed. These outdated images annoyed him: they were the negation of freedom. The scene had lost all interest. Mahu stood up and said to the other people who, like him, were watching: “It’s full of fingers.” The others counted on their hands. They understood, and turned their backs on the spectacle.

“Victory,” thought Mahu. And he sat down again. The lowest branch was now in line with the axis of the abscissa. So he must have changed chairs, and now be mentally locating point 1317 in relation to the ordinate. A simple geometrical theorem comprises many corollaries.

Mahu was relaxing when someone touched him on the shoulder. He turned around and saw a group of statues. “It’s not possible,” he said to himself, “they weren’t there just now; let’s not be a fool.” But the statues were coming closer. Mahu kicked a bronze Hercules. His foot cracked from the inner cuneiform to the astragalus. The Hercules murmured: “Well, well!” Furious, Mahu stood up and exhorted the sightseers to pass along there, please. His task was facilitated: he only had to point to the statues. They obeyed him, and were soon persuaded.

Mahu reacted further by deliberately deriving another corollary from his problem. “Given that the lowest branch starts at point 1317, determine its coordinates.” That changed the picture. On the line Y'' Y''', at one sixth of the distance from the new 1317 to the intersection of the axes, he marked a point which he very arbitrarily named S. Then, lowering the perpendicular, he put his chair down. He was not surprised to find himself thus raised to the level of the lowest branch, maybe because this branch was strictly parallel with the first level, but especially because no one is ever mathematically surprised. Seen from above, the lawn was in the form of a hexagon. This reassured him. He relaxed again.

This time, all the termini of the subway, as dishevelled and aggressive as the Furies, bit him on the thighs. Mahu howled, but out of vexation. After all, it is extremely annoying not to be able to get a bit of rest when you feel like it. But he didn’t acknowledge defeat, he went back to his calculations, repositioned his chair, and so on until the park closed.

On his way home he went down the wrong street. Fatigue. The window of a bookshop brought him to a halt. Among the visible titles, he read the following: “Formula absolutionis ad usum suicidarum.” Flabbergasted, he went in and bought the book. Its imprimatur was on the flyleaf.

All night long he annotated the text. The next day he’d got the formula off by heart. That evening, without even thinking, he recited it. The penknife with which he was about to cut a slice of bread plunged itself, of its own accord, between his two eyes.

Amused, the lady in the “Tout-Cuit” (short orders, French fries, fast food), says to the yellow customer: “Huh, you look just like Don Quixote!” Whereupon the customer shows her his ring, which is in the form of a windmill: “You don’t know how right you are.” The lady laughs like mad: “And Sancho?” The customer points to another customer, a fat one. The lady laughs a little less heartily. The yellow man takes his bag of French fries and departs. Sancho orders a boiled beef. The lady serves him cautiously. And then a croquette. The lady hesitates. “A croquette,” he repeats. Right, she adds a croquette. “A puree.” Oh-oh, what a bore. The lady ventures: “Wouldn’t you rather have a herring?” He says no. She scrapes a portion up the side of the saucepan. “And some cauliflower!” The lady beckons to a policeman. He grabs the pseudo-Panza, who drops his grub, and takes him off to the police station. The next customers give their orders without turning a hair. The lady can’t see the dishes anymore. She just gropes. She serves blindly.

At half past one, the kitchen closes. The lady drags herself into the back room and vomits. “I’ve killed him. The season of rings. Cyanide. Didn’t you announce a Mendelssohn concert? Poor beige soprano. It’d be just great if they all carried on that way
 
…
 
”

On the sidewalk, in front of the door, a man dying of hunger is lying between the tar and the asphalt. Instanter,
DANGER
appears on the door. Underneath, can be read:
Attempted poisoning.
The false Don Quixote, who’s finished his meal, passes the shop again and picks up the starving man. They go to a bistro where the starving man gulps down a sandwich. The yellow customer is as proud as anything. Which makes him quite forget that he’s lost his ring. As it’s Saturday, they play cards.

At the police station, the little fat man is released, with apologies. He decides to lose weight, so as not to look like Sancho anymore.

The beige soprano is practicing at her home. She gives a recital three weeks later but her career stops there. A question of cash, of her family, etc. The concert marks the close of the season of rings and the eatery is reopened to customers.

Rotten season of phony promises, of velleities! If only they did away with it once and for all it would put an end to people having to tremble at what, every ringed day, they saw on naive faces.

Once upon a time there was a young cucumber, but, well, he wasn’t a bit likeable. He tanned himself. He turned orange-tawny. Always the first on the beach and the last to leave it. He would swell and swell, with half-closed eyes, with provocative peduncle. The cucumbresses were crazy about him. He had a special way of sidling up to you, of rubbing himself against
 
…
And what’s more, such enormous veins.
 
…
So, well, he was the idol of the beach. Which made the beans dry up. And the viper’s grass die by the kilo. Soon the only things left in the market of this little seaside town were cucumbers. Encouraged by their colleague’s conquests, they proliferated. The police had to impose restrictive measures to control their growth. In spite of this decree, the cucumbers overran the district. They were to be seen everywhere. They climbed up balconies and smothered the nasturtiums; they filled the bathtubs; they rotted in linen baskets.

“My goodness,” said Mademoiselle Solange to herself one day, “I’m going to have to change my lifestyle. I’m going to have to eat cucumbers in the morning, make Pernod out of cucumbers, scour my pots and pans with cucumber.” And indeed, she did adapt herself. It’s incredible how a beautiful vegetable can hold you at its mercy. Mademoiselle Solange became pregnant by a cucumber, and gave birth. The mayor, with his clerk as witness, drew up an official report of the birth. He couldn’t believe his eyes: Mademoiselle Solange, on her bed of suffering, was all cucumber leaves, flowers and fruits.

At the school, it was a huge joke. Children understand everything. On their way out of school the little girls made the old ladies blush: they pulled up their skirts and exhibited cucumbers, they sucked them all day long.

As for the boys, we won’t talk about them. They invented a new game: the hooded cucumber. Stuffed with explosives and equipped with a rubber cover, you chuck it at a passerby, where it explodes. If the hood holds out, you’ve won; if not, you’ve lost.

Monsieur le curé had to preach a sermon on cucumbers. It was a terrific scandal, even though he went no further than the etymological analysis of the word.

But do you think that the guilty party, the first one, on the beach, was at all put out? Far from it. They let him indulge in his filthy goings-on in the sun for the whole of the season. So he’ll probably start all over again next year.

When the supreme neutron finally settled on the idea of Pumpkin, he couldn’t believe it. It was beyond him. The pumpkins got by very nicely. The neutron vaticinated. The prophetic style certainly suited him. When you consider the number of practical jokes he perpetrated, you can only gawp. Mystifying, that was his forte. And the poor world made mysteries out of these mystifications. Where’s the evidence? No one knows the origin of pumpkins. You can ask the greatest experts if you like—but the answer will invariably be: “It’s a mystery.”

But
I
can tell you how it happened: after the neutron’s failure, the pumpkins took it upon themselves to grow of their own accord. They started to bulge, like bottoms. They existed. There you are.

But the best of it is that they supplanted the neutron. He’d become deflated, they were the bosses. If we don’t grasp the implications of this phenomenon, we run the risk of understanding nothing about the cosmos. Anyone could have cultivated his own way of seeing, but pumpkins see in the round: they’ve imposed their own vision on the universe. From then on, everything was an excuse for roundness, sphericity, orbicity, ellipsoidicity—and gravitations in general.

Man in no way escaped the virus. Everything that touches him, from near or from far, cucurbitaces—I mean: belongs to the gourd family, like the pumpkin—starting with the spirals in shells, cow pats, and velodromes, and ending with his own body, which pullulates with oblate spheroids. But it’s in his thoughts that man is really the most pumpkin-headed. He can’t write “in the beginning” without being obsessed by “at the end.” Look at philosophy, where the summum bonum is when you come full circle. You get there, roughly speaking, by sticking on a bit of hope, “in termino speculationis,” and you’ve done the trick.

There’s no doubt that an antibiotic is within reach. Someone catches an infectious disease such as pride, pomposity, etc., you give him some pumpkin, and he gets well.

I’m bombarded by ideas, but I still can’t wait to finish this story: like the one about the cucumbers, it is indeed pretty third-rate. How do I know? Self-criticism. Soul-seaching. Vicious circle. Pumpkin.

I’ll still mention this trivial incident, though: the other day, a schoolboy had a problem that stumped him, so I expounded my theory to him. He applied it to the solution of his problem. Believe it or not, his teacher was fooled and gave him top marks. Ever since, the old idiot himself has been nuts on my doctrine. He’s become incapable of seeing a nicely-rounded behind in a tight-fitting summer dress without getting his hands on it.

Stuck out in the courtyard since time immemorial, Methuselah the parrot never saw a soul—except, sporadically, the concierge, a maid who got herself tumbled by a hawker, and a nun who had got lost on the service stairway. Until the day when a corrosive theme began to haunt him. With no experience of these phenomena, his ears throbbing and deafened with fever, Methuselah soon became no more than a decorative motif on his perch. Some people who had lost their way in the courtyard took him and exhibited him in the market square. This was where his calvary began.

Serious things should be approached obliquely. He was unaware of this. He judged, too hastily, that the only honest way was to meet them head on. The years passed in the horror of cross-purposes, of rejected passion, of vulgarity.

People got into the habit of coming to consult him as if he were a third-class prophetess. And, ever scrupulous, he prostituted himself in this service. People flocked around his perch, recipes were transmitted from mother to daughter in the new built-up area. In three hundred years Methuselah was decorated thirty times with all the orders of the magi, the sibyls, and the fortunetellers.

Nevertheless, the theme plagued him. A wild, heterogeneous orchestration, in which the leitmotif played the paradoxical role of bait, was improvised. It took the form of an internecine conflict which ravaged the city. For absolutely no reason. An illustrated magazine was conducting a survey into the origins of dialogue. Tendentiously, the author of the articles made out a case designed to prove that dialogue was a bastard form of monologue. He insisted on its degenerate character. A monologue, seen from its most abstract angle as “a reflection of oneself”—did that not contain, he asked, all the creative power of spontaneity? When you talk to yourself, your assertions and repartee have a freedom and vigor which any intrusion by a second party immediately eviscerates. The interior monologue, like the primitive forest whose vegetation later spreads over the entire globe, is a concentrate of various forms of expression—amongst which, in particular, is the dialogue—in its original, healthy form.