Trio (5 page)

“The cashier keeps an ever-watchful eye —a far too watchful eye —on everything that goes on. Every so often she makes an imperceptible, but unusual, movement: she stretches her arm out under the counter, as if to reach some object behind the cash drawer. A switch? A bell? I wouldn’t have been worried had it not been for a few disturbing facts, not altogether unconnected with this movement, it seems to me, which put me on my guard. I will mention only the two latest ones:

“The other day I was sipping my little glass of rum when I saw the violet seller some way away, coming towards us. She was making her daily round. The cashier saw her too, and in the most casual way she bent down. Then I saw the violet seller fall all of a heap onto the pavement. There was talk of a heart attack.

“Only yesterday, a terrible accident occurred under our very eyes: a motorcyclist ran into an ambulance and was killed outright. Instinctively, I looked round at the cashier: she had just withdrawn her arm
 
…

“What do you think?”

A paraphrase would have left me skeptical. But such concision—no.

From then on I was far better able to fathom the intentionally faltering art of the sculptor: he was afraid of coming into direct contact with the cashier.

“At Whitsun? Oh, it was a drag. We only bad the Monday. I couldn’t leave the shop on Sunday. We left in the morning for Sirancy-la-Louve, just to get a breath of fresh air. My husband has an old cousin there. The train was jam-packed. You know what the suburbs are like.

“When we got to Sirancy we still had to walk two kilometers to get to the cousin’s. She’d given us up. The nurse explained to her that it was us all right, that we hadn’t been able to get away the day before but that even so we’d come to see her for a short while. She didn’t seem to recognize us. She touched our faces and necks, as she usually does, and then went back to sleep. The nurse told us to go and sit down on the terrace as if nothing had happened. That suited us fine. I was tired. I spent the whole afternoon in a chaise-longue drinking fruit juice. My husband fished for frogs in the pond.

“In the evening we had dinner with the nurse in the kitchen. We weren’t in any hurry: a neighbor had offered to drive us back in his car. We still had an hour before we were due to leave. We chatted to the nurse. She told us that the cousin wouldn’t be with us very much longer. I asked her whether the house was heavily mortgaged. She didn’t know.

“At one moment the nurse asked us whether we’d brought the chairs in. I told her no. She asked us to be so kind as to do so. Her rheumatism was predicting rain. I went out with Louis to put the chairs away in the shed. It was impossible to move the chaise-longue. Louis gave me a hand. We both started tugging at it, trying to wrench it out of the ground. It had taken root.

“When the neighbor came to fetch us he examined the feet of the chair with his flashlight for a long time. I suggested sawing them off. He replied: ‘What an idea! Let’s just simply tell the nurse.’ The nurse told us that this wasn’t the first time. We took our leave. I was even tireder than I’d been in the morning, after tugging at that damned chair.

“I nearly fell asleep in the car, which is very bad manners when you’re with strangers.”

Instead of going down the rue Gou he stops at the Swan café and orders a Pernod. It’s six o’clock. He’s just left the printing works. He puts his bread down on the little table. It isn’t every day that a café table tugs at your sleeve. Mustn’t jib.

In front of him, the fairground stalls. Multicolored pennants. From one plane tree to the next. The blues are the most attractive. In London they aren’t so bright. Kilburn, Mr. Smith’s printing works. The days were never-ending, even the least drab ones. Georgia? She thought I was faithful to her. Personally, I was counting the days.

The baker’s boy goes by on his bike. An old boneshaker you see all over the district. The boy and Monsieur Maurice bumped their heads together just now, trying to pick up a five franc piece. The boy went off, rubbing his head. A customer with made-up eyes—nothing but her eyes—said to the printer: “It isn’t Easter anymore! You’re at it again!”

Monsieur Maurice’s concierge sees a note on his door: “Dear Maurice, I’ll expect you at six at the Oublies crossroads.” She tells herself, Monsieur Maurice isn’t back yet, he’ll be late, it must be his friend Louis.

The printer, at his table, is thinking about his friends. You don’t choose them. They impose themselves on you. You go on seeing them just to please them. “Waiter, the same again!” The pennants are blue. The boy goes past again with a hamper of oysters. Oysters? Why didn’t I stay in Kilburn? And marry Georgia. She didn’t like oysters. We’d have hung up blue pennants.

The concierge sees that Monsieur Maurice is still not back. She wonders whether she should go and tell Monsieur Louis. What’s the point? He’ll soon see he isn’t coming.

The boy goes past again, whistling “God Save the King.” Georgia is sitting on his crossbar. You can guess that she isn’t wearing any panties. “Still that filthy habit,” says Maurice to himself.

He leans back in his chair. A pennant caresses his forearm: it’s the lady with the made-up eyes. She asks him: “Why are you sad?” Instead of answering: “Because I don’t love anyone,” he says: “Because the concierge’s dog has got fat.” She retorts: “Yes, but if they cut off his head and tail he’d make a nice little bench.”

“Rash? You call that rash? Good lord! Obviously, with your judgment, your wisdom, and the magnificent opinion you have of yourself
 
…
 
”

“My dear Dâd, don’t get so excited. You know very well what I mean.”

“Not at all. I acted consciously, weighing the pros and cons. I knew what I was doing. No one knows better than I
 
…
 
”

“My dear mountain-mover, once again, don’t get so worked up. You’re so impetuous. You’re on the verge of cyclothymia, if not schizophrenia. I’ve been observing you for so long that you ought to have confidence in me
 
…
Be quiet. Yes, rash, I quite agree that people need to be shaken out of their lethargy from time to time, but advisedly. Otherwise, we miss the mark. Both heart and mind must be objective. That’s the way we discriminate. How can you expect, with your temperament
 
…
 
”

“In other words, I’m incapable of acting advisedly?”

“That isn’t what
 
…
 
”

“I’m a good-for-nothing, a man who should simply stay at home and work himself into the grave to produce, just like that, in the dark
 
…
 
?”

“Let me speak. Your job is to express yourself, not to shout from the housetops. It’s for other people to discover you. You can’t assert yourself on two levels at the same time without risking catastrophe.”

“That’s the word I was waiting for! An obsession with catastrophe! What the hell do you think
I
care?”

“I’m talking about a catastrophe for your spirit, not for your entourage. If you acted like that you would inevitably dissipate your efforts, lose sight of yourself
 
…
 
”

“Lose sight of myself! I have no eyes for anyone but myself!”

“Precisely.”

“Precisely what?”

“I mean
 
…
 
”

It was thus, between a gladiolus bush and an anonymous bust, that Dâd Surprise and the doctor were conversing.

It would take far too long to enter into all the details, and in any case, no one is interested in the psychology of artists.

I will simply say this, then: yesterday, a half-finished Venus, as tall as the studio, collapsed outside the premises of Dâd the sculptor. He had himself calculated the resistance of the wall and that of the material of the Aphrodite. With the help of three movers, he had tipped it up onto the wall, which caved in, and the statue was found in three pieces on the other side, having knocked out a horse, six people and a bus.

All this in Dâd’s imagination.

The doctor knows about it—or knew about it. He quickly called the police. They didn’t find anything, and the doctor nearly got himself locked up. He mentioned this to some acquaintances, who said: “Really? Not possible!” And he wrote an article for the Medical Review.

There wouldn’t have been anything to it if the matter had rested there. But hasn’t he just rented a warehouse to enable Dâd to work on an even taller block, all in one piece?

Dear doctor.

Something that must be taken literally is language. We never think more than we express. People who never say anything are play-actors. I mistrust “eloquent silences.” You think you’re understood by someone who confines himself to adopting a thoughtful attitude after your remarks: ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you do nevertheless get him to say something, you see that he hasn’t understood a word.

Language also consists of interjections such as: ah! oh! ee! These are enough for me, for each one implies a whole world of astonishment, admiration, reproach, etc.

There are exceptions to this law, but no one takes any notice of minorities these days. They’re quite right. Let those who can’t speak, write. In books, the rule is reversed. When a fellow writes: “In the beginning was the word,” you may be quite sure that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The more hesitant and involved a text is, the more profound its author is likely to be. A style, in fact, is a technique.

This preamble has no meaning. It’s my excuse for beginning this story as follows:

It would probably be difficult to describe—or rather to suggest—the impression made on us by the memory of the voice—or more exactly: of a certain tone of voice in certain forgotten circumstances—of a dead person. I should only get sidetracked if I tried to go into subjectivities, that would be fatal to the impersonal note I’m aiming at. I am so constituted that everything close to my heart irritates other people enormously. I think I know why. But enough of that
 
…

I spent my childhood in soap boxes. My father was a filmmaker, my mother a glass blower at Murano. She had left me with my grandmother, who lived in a garret. This good old woman was a bit of a bat. I kept in a casket the membranes that joined her arms to her ribs: they’re like parchment today. She passed for a witch, but her nocturnal forays had no other object than the search for a little extra sustenance. Our everyday fare at the time consisted of bits of plaster and raw rabbits.

We were very fond of each other, my grandmother and I. We raised the rabbits in the soap boxes. We couldn’t light a fire in the garret. The advantage of living there was the solitude. The landlady was tactful and the tenants knew about us. Why didn’t we ever go out? My grandmother was mistrustful: the goats grazing on the roof (a thatched roof, where grasses grew) might have got into our garret while we were out and turned the place upside down. In her youth, she told me, she had had a bit of trouble with the local goatherd. If he was still alive he would have no hesitation in harming us. She never told me about this adventure, but I guessed that it had been painful, or even tragic.

When I was twelve, my grandmother died. I cut off her membranes and put her corpse on the roof. The goats cleaned it up, and one rainy evening the skeleton rolled off into the pond.

I left the attic dressed in my Sunday best. I went and saw the land-lady, who lived on the ground floor. When she saw me, she said: “Aren’t you like your grandmother!” “I think she’s dead,” I said. “Of course, of course, my child. I’ll have you apprenticed to a skinner. You can specialize in zebra markings. Here’s a letter of recommendation.”

I had to look for a skinnery. Quite by chance, through a fellow traveller, I found one at Sirancy-la-Louve. I sent in my letter. The boss was quite willing to take me on. And as he was enthusiastic about the idea of the zebra markings, he was even kind to me. During my apprenticeship, he and I together perfected a camouflage technique. The skin of any mammal could be made into authentic zebra. We tried this out with several of our furrier clients.

My landlady’s idea made the skinner’s fortune. Naively, I allowed myself to be cheated. At the end of my apprenticeship I could have gone into partnership and demanded a share of the profits. My boss sacked me on a ridiculous pretext. I took to the road again without a single peseta.

In the Forest of Grance, where I thought of becoming a hermit, I set up with a woodcutter’s daughter who was wild and beautiful. Our embraces left me in a bemused state which she took advantage of to get me to tell her a lot of things I would have preferred to conceal. The girl soon knew as much as I did about my deceased grandmother, and one day she declared that my armpits were becoming webbed. Very fortunately, I hadn’t told her about the casket: she would have thought up some stratagem to get hold of it, and God knows what I'd have been caught up in then.

I left her in the September of the following year, full of resentment. I’d told her too much, the busybody. The result was that I never stopped thinking about my grandmama and the goatherd. We always talk best about what we don’t know. I’d made a fable out of all my suppositions about the ancient liaison—it must have been a liaison—and given my tales a solidity and reality to which I was now a tributary.

And to pay my tribute to this tyrannical folly, I went back to the garret.

There was a new landlady. The tenants didn’t recognize me. I almost had to come to blows before I was allowed to go up to the attic on my own.

The soap boxes hadn’t been touched. The rabbits must have escaped through the skylight. The thatch on the roof had been replaced by bricks. My casket was there. I opened it. The parchment-like membranes didn’t take up much room in it. I was perplexed. What should I decide? What new trade should I choose?