Trio (6 page)

And then I went over to the door. At which point, just before I went out, I heard a murmur: “Be careful. The goatherd—is you.”

He doesn’t have a first name. When he goes past the fire station in the morning he stops and watches the firemen at their exercises. It’s a bit like an operetta. He thinks that’s why he stops, but really it’s to get to the laundry just as it’s opening. The laundress always says good morning to him. How can I let her know that my name is Paul? Then she’d say: “Good morning Monsieur Paul.” We’ve known each other long enough, for goodness’ sake!

After the laundry, the café. “A café au lait.” And he adds: “As usual.” What’s the use? It’s an obsession. That won’t tell the waiter my first name. I’ll have to think up some way. Maybe leave a letter addressed to me on the counter? The next day the waiter would say: “Monsieur Paul, you left a letter behind.”

After the café au lait, the office. They don’t interest me. They envy me my job. Poor idiots. You only tell them trivial things. “What’s your salary?” “So much.” “Who’s your mistress?” “Annette.”

“What’s your ambition?” “Director.” But: “my name’s Paul”—you never say that. Annette? She calls me “darling.” I hate that.

And he comes back from the office. He stops at the café. “Yes, Monsieur?” “The usual.” “A Martini?” “No, for goodness’ sake! half a pint.”

And he passes the laundry again. “Good evening, Monsieur.” Good evening, good evening, you old bag. My name’s Paul! Paul like Paul! Paul, Paul! Do you hear? But she doesn’t hear.

Back home, he finds a note: “Shall we go to the movies, pet?” What a drag.

Then he went on holiday. Abroad. They won’t know my name. I’ll introduce myself everywhere as “Paul.” Then they’ll have to.

After the customs formalities, he breathes again.

But wherever he went, it didn’t do him any good to say: “I’m Paul,” they simply called him “you.” Among themselves, in their own language, they referred to him as “the foreigner,” or “the nut.” He stuck a notice on his stomach with “Paul” on it. They asked him what kind of business his firm went in for.

He didn’t see a thing on his holiday. He lost a lot of weight.

On his return, his landlady takes him to court. On account of the door. She was claiming that he’d prejudiced her interests, before he went away, by not opening the door at certain times, and by opening it without being asked at other times. Some tradesmen had complained.

He explains his position to the magistrate. He says that he does his landlady a favor by opening the door occasionally, but that he isn’t obliged to do so. The landlady claims that there’s a gentlemen’s agreement between them. “Monsieur knows very well that he has to open the door between eight and nine in the morning, and that in the evening it’s my job.”

The magistrate questions the witnesses: “Has Monsieur often opened the door to you between eight and nine in the morning?”

“Yes, often.”

“Has Monsieur often opened the door to you between six and eight in the evening?”

“Yes, often.”

The evidence is contradictory. The gentlemen’s agreement can’t be proved. After some deliberation, the magistrate pronounces against the landlady. He asks:

“Are you satisfied, Monsieur Paul?”

“Oh, your Honor!
 
…
Your Honor!
 
…
Oh yes, your Honor!”

“The words of Artaxerxes, the servant of Ahura Mazda, King of Kings, sovereign of the empire of the shades.”

The manuscript dates from the second half of the fourth century B.C. If it is apocryphal, the style is nevertheless of the period: I recognize the turn of phrase “sovereign of the shades,” which was abandoned in later royal edicts. It was perhaps open to ambiguity. Originally, it meant that the king derived from the light all power over evil. In other words, that he was the supreme arbiter.

The text is on papyrus (which came from conquered Egypt), as opposed to the use of stone for decrees of this sort. It is almost incomprehensible, like everything of any importance. Nevertheless, this passage is worthy of note:

“To my sons, I bequeath the task of finding god (or the gods).”

From this may be deduced:

1) That it would appear to be a Will.

2) That Artaxerxes, in his last Will and Testament, violated the principle of the unity of succession. To delegate such a duty to several people implies that the sovereignty is to be shared.

3) That an idol had disappeared (?), or, more plausibly, that religious beliefs were on the wane.

4) That the Will was not respected, as Artaxerxes was succeeded by Darius II alone.

Which is mysterious.

I must confess that I have always been fascinated by everything to do with the civilization of the Medes and Persians. A haughty, passionate, monotonous art. A history of conquests in which cruelty and excess triumph
 
…
 

The recent archaeological discoveries at Susa and the sudden infatuation of the sciences of the Orient with the era of the Achaemenids have enabled me to establish the following facts:

The Will in question cannot be earlier than 430 B.C., six years before the death of Artaxerxes, that is. An inscription unearthed in 194
 
…
explicitly reminds us of the absence of any text relating to the succession before the thirtieth year of the reign. Furthermore, a second Will, dated 426 B.C. and known for a certainty to be apocryphal, in referring to the first, provides an interpretation of the clause: “To my sons.” The document with which we are concerned was therefore the only known Will.

We know from some tablets discovered in the foundations of the palace of Persepolis that the King’s sister, who had been converted to the Greek religion by a Phoenician, was denounced as a heretic. The sovereign had her eyes put out (bas-relief, British Museum). Would there be a clue here to the case of the missing idol? To come back to the more plausible hypothesis, it must be admitted that after the defeat at Marathon, the menacing force of Greece and the spiritual currents spreading from Athens over the whole of the Near East left people’s minds in a state of utter confusion, hence the abandonment of the ancestral beliefs.

Artaxerxes’s sons (with the exception of Darius II) perished, one after the other, while out lion hunting (see the ancient Syrian legends), hence after 430 B.C., since they are mentioned in the Will. From this it might be inferred that the court dignitaries were aware of the King’s wish to divide the power. So the “lion hunting” would merely have been a fable to which they gave substance.

Why, then, did the King not recast his last Will and Testament? Was he prevented from doing so? And by what intrigues?

To this day, we do not know.

Persuasion was held by the Greeks to the one of the supreme virtues, and I will concede that it is entitled to our deference. What is so admirable as its magic power? It is one of the faces of love, particularly when it mystifies. The Achaean warriors charged Ulysses-the-Crafty with the task of feeding all the baloney to the skeptical. He was immortalized as a hero, and as the typical lover, the man who triumphed over the sea (we would call it the unconscious, today), and who returned, ten years later, to a wife past her prime. Well yes, that’s how it is.

In Eleusis (now just a large village), they still tell a story that confirms my views.

The poet Aeschylus, at the time he was composing the
Oresteia
, resided in Athens in the Thalassa district. The main duty of his maidservant, Aglaia, was to keep visitors at bay. The poet couldn’t bear anyone to be around while he was working. One day, when he was furious because he couldn’t finish a line in the
Agamemnon,
Aglaia comes into his study. Aeschylus fumes with anger. The maid flattens herself against the wall. She explains that three young men have called and that they want to speak to the master on a matter of the greatest urgency. He doesn’t want to know. She stands her ground, and ties herself up in knots with contradictory excuses. “You’re becoming a liar, Aglaia,” says he. (The Greeks loved to play with words.) In the end she vamooses, but to get her revenge she advises the young men to start yelling under Aeschylus’s window. Which they do. The poet appears. The air calms him down. He listens to the lads. They’ve come to ask him to attend the rehearsal of a play of their composition about which they would like his advice. Aeschylus asks them:

“How old are you?”

“Between seventeen and nineteen.”

“Your play is worthless. We must suffer, to understand.” And he draws the curtains.

Ten years later, at his summer residence, the same young men come to see him. He doesn’t recognize them.

“What do you enjoy?”

“Women,” says one. “Men,” says another. “Adventure,” says the third.

“We must suffer, to understand.”

And he goes back into his hole.

Ten years later, the three make their way to the cemetery in Eleusis, Aeschylus’s hometown, and bow their heads in homage before the urn containing his ashes.

“What are you doing?” the urn asks them.

“Making war.”

“We must understand, to suffer,” it murmurs.

“A town?”

“A magnificant town! It was destroyed by avalanches, and disappeared at the end of the Renaissance.”

“On Mont-Blanc?”

“On the southern slopes of Mont-Blanc, 4,700 meters up. Founded around 1230, it was just a small alpine hamlet until the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who gave it its brief splendor. Florence, which he had endowed with the most beautiful monuments and made into the center of all the arts, was continually stirring up revolt. A clan of envious puritans was undermining the popularity of the prince. He decided to keep the Tuscan city in check, and, by a wager worthy of a great creator, entered into competition with himself.

“During his ascent of Mont-Blanc in 1488 with his friend and counsellor Luigi Campanello, nicknamed, ‘Luigi the Capricious,’ his companion, catching sight of the village isolated in the snow, cried out: ‘Che bellissima Firenze potremmo costruire qui!’ The idea was born. Within two years the wager had been won. We can imagine what a tour de force this constituted! Carrara marbles were transported through Tuscany, Liguria, and Piedmont. Thousands of masons, artisans, builders and architects headed north. An extraordinary treaty with the Duke of Savoy (February 12, 1489) fixed the toll traverse, arranged for the employment of Savoyard workers, and laid down the remuneration to be paid by the Medicis in exchange for their services.

“The chronicle of these events has been conserved in the Ambrosian library in Milan (C. 621. XI b.)

“In 1491, Botticelli completed the fresco in the Municipio, or Town Hall. This building, a replica of the Strozzi Palace, was adjacent to the dome on which Bramante had employed his genius. A square in front of it formed a belvedere above the abyss.

“On 7 June, there was a fair to celebrate the completion of the work. The most unlikely procession was to be seen in the streets: peasants from the districts of la Maurienne and Faucigny, from the Valais, and even from Lombardy, wild with admiration, mingled with the elegant gentry from the court.

“And the setting sun illuminated this prodigious spectacle: Florence resuscitated amidst the snows.

“What is to be said about the silence of the Information Service? Monopolized for centuries by a bunch of hirelings, it infiltrates everything. They make us believe the moon is made of green cheese. Open any encyclopedia and you’ll see that H. B. de Saussure was, in 1787, one of the first to climb Mont-Blanc! It’s intolerable.

“But the Savoyards haven’t forgotten. It is the tradition, in certain families, to name the first son Laurent.”

November 1

Ah, those fingernail races! They’re one of the great attractions of these parts. The whole world and his wife uproots himself with his family, his house, his terrain, and comes and camps here for several months, for as long as the races last, in a specially reserved site. Whatever his financial situation, everyone finds the means to perform this rite. The unemployed are rare, for a sizeable labor force is needed for the harvest. The collectors go to work a year in advance. They visit every residence, whether official or not, with sacks which they fill with clippings, with broken nails, with nails that have been extracted—they can acquire an inexhaustible supply of the latter in garrets, on account of the tortures. They’ve stopped bothering about animals’ claws ever since the day they ran wild and pounced on the spectators.

Once they’ve been collected, then, the nails are piled up in silos adjoining the racecourse. Usually there are only a few weeks to go before the start of the games. They are used for leveling the terrain and especially for stabilizing the atmosphere. This operation was delicate and even dangerous, only a few years ago. Today it is carried out with the aid of valves and giant compressors laid out along the track. The people who live in the neighborhood are warned when the stabilization is due to begin. They have to decamp within twelve hours. But there are always some hundred thousand laggards who get caught up in the currents and torn to shreds. This provides some extra nails.

The inaugural day arrives. People can sit wherever they like, entrance is free. It may be said that in theory people prefer to be at a certain altitude, that of the silos, for instance, or one or two thousand meters higher up. The very sight of this multicolored crowd rising up in tiers several kilometers into the sky is magnificent enough. What can be said about the entrance of the nails into the arena? There is nothing with which it can be compared—unless it be a snowstorm. At the signal, they rush off towards the East.

November 5

In high summer, mauve placards are stuck up all over the country to announce that the leaf-picking is about to start. All the natives are mobilized for a week. The territory is transformed into a veritable parade ground. The State health services are entirely responsible for the transport, board, and lodging of the workers. Given the density of the population, and that all private industries and businesses have to suspend their activities during this time, it is easy to imagine the extent of the task incumbent on the abovementioned authorities.