By a Slow River Page 4

“But what kind of ideas are inside trousers—”

  “My God, she’s a stump! And your bastard, how did you acquire him, from a draft of air?”

  Clever enough to take offense at least, Louisette turned her back on them and left. The two old ladies were pleased. They had fodder for the evening: the north, men and their vices, and the young girl, too beautiful, altogether too beautiful, to be a teacher—beautiful enough to have no profession at all.

  By the following day we knew everything, or almost.

  Lysia Verhareine had been put up in the largest room of the only hotel in town, at the expense of the mayor’s office. And the mayor, dressed like a young bridegroom, had come in the morning to pick her up to introduce her all around and escort her to the school. You should have seen him, waltzing around till he almost split the seams of his Sunday-best jasper-black trousers, the pirouettes of his hundred kilos graceful as a circus elephant on its hind legs. Beside him the young lady was gazing all the while far beyond the landscape, even while she shook our hands one by one with a gentle squeeze from her slender fingers, as though she sought to wing her way into the distance, to lose herself there.

  When she entered the school and then the empty classroom, there was no doubt of her being taken aback by the stink of country children. A few ashes from the burned flag still remained on the floor. Several overturned chairs gave the place an air of high jinks just ended. Observing the scene from outside with a nose pressed to the windowpanes, one could make out the first lines of a poem written on the blackboard:

  No doubt their naked hearts have felt

  The biting cold, and halfway death

  Under the open stars

  The words stopped abruptly. The handwriting, which must have belonged to Opposed, was still there to remind us of his mad eyes and gymnastics, though by now he must have been lying on a flea-infested mattress who knows where, or shivering under a regimen of cold showers and mauve electric shocks.

  The mayor had made some remarks after opening the door and pointing out the flag; then he stuck his sausage fingers into the pockets of his silk vest and preened in silence, casting a dour glance our way from time to time—which meant, no doubt, Well, what are you doing there, you people? Why don’t you get the hell out of here and make yourselves useful? But none of us left. We were drinking in the scene like a glass of rare wine.

  The young woman took tiny steps about the room, to the right, to the left, and up to the desks, where notebooks and pens still lay neatly in place. She leaned over one desk and read the page of writing; we saw her smile. At the same time, we saw her golden hair, cascading on her neck like seafoam, between the collar of her blouse and her bare skin. Next she stopped before the ashes of the flag, righted two fallen chairs, matter-of-factly arranged some dry flowers in a vase, and without remorse erased the unfinished verses from the blackboard. She smiled at the mayor, who was nailed to the ground where he stood, stunned by this twenty-one-year-old’s smile, while less than fifteen leagues away they were slicing one another’s throats with naked blades, scared shitless, falling by the thousands each day, far from any feminine smile, on ravaged earth where even the idea of woman had become a chimera, a drunkard’s dream, an insult altogether too beautiful.

  The mayor patted his belly to give himself an air of distinction. Lysia Verhareine walked out of her classroom, her steps worthy of a dance.

  VI

  The teacher had always been lodged above the school: three tidy rooms facing due south, overlooking the hillside and its mantle of grapevines and mirabelle orchards. Fracasse had made a pretty place of it, a nook redolent of beeswax, bound books, meditation, and bachelorhood. I had seen it on occasion, one or two evenings when we had chatted about this and that, each of us a little reserved. No one had gone there since Opposed had succeeded him—and not even subsequently, after the orderlies had taken the madman away.

  The mayor had the key in the lock, but he had a hard time pushing the door open. He was a bit nonplussed at the resistance of the swollen timbers; and by the time he got in, his fine tour-guide smile had vanished: or so I suppose. I’m reconstituting the story, filling in the gaps. But I don’t think I’m inventing much, since we all remarked the anguish beaded on his forehead in fat drops of sweat and surprise, his choked redness when he came back outside a few minutes later to get some air in deep desperate gulps, as he collapsed against the wall. From his pocket he drew a big checkered handkerchief—not very clean—and mopped himself with it, like the peasant he’d never ceased to be.

  A good while later, Lysia Verhareine also came out again into the daylight; it made her squint, an agreeable effect, as she smiled in our direction. She moved a few steps away from us and knelt down to pick up two late chestnuts that had just hit the ground, bursting from their burrs wonderfully fresh, all shiny and brown. She rolled them in her hands and sniffed them with her eyes closed, and after that she gently departed. We rushed up the stairs to see, elbowing one another all the way; it was an apocalypse.

  Nothing remained of the small apartment’s former charm, absolutely nothing. Opposed had methodically devastated the place, the meticulousness of destruction carried to the extreme of cutting each book in the library into one-centimeter squares— Lepelut, a pencil pusher who was a stickler for precision, measured them before our eyes—and whittling the furniture with a penknife, piece by piece, until he had reduced it all to huge blond hills of wood shavings. Remains of meals in scattered mounds had attracted insects of every kind. On the floor, dirty linens mimicked fleshless bodies, broken and recumbent. And on the walls, on all the walls, in finely shaped letters, the verses of the “Marseillaise” were inscribed, their bellicose harangues unfurling across the wallpaper, a pattern of daisies and hollyhocks. The madman had written and rewritten those verses, demented litanies that gave us all the impression of being shut up between the pages of an atrocious book. And he’d traced each letter with his fingertips, fingertips dipped in his own filth, which he’d apparently shat in every corner of the rooms every day he’d spent with us—after his exercise perhaps, before the unbearable song of the birds, or amid the unnerving boom of the guns and the obscene perfume of the honey-suckle, lilacs, and roses, under the blue of the sky, stirred by the sweet wind.

  Opposed had ended up going to war after all—after his own fashion, at least. With strokes of razor, knife, and excrement, he had drawn up his private battlefield, his trench, his hell. And he too had wailed in agony before it swallowed him up.

  It’s true that the place reeked to high heaven; but the mayor was a total cream puff too, less than a man. The young teacher on the other hand was a lady in full: She had left the apartment without shuddering, without passing judgment. She had looked up at the sky and its transit of fumes and bulbous clouds; she’d taken a few steps, picked up two chestnuts, and caressed them as though they were the madman’s feverish temples, as though they were his wan forehead, ashen with all the deaths, with all the tortures accumulated during our long humanity, with all our putrid wounds open for centuries and next to which the smell of shit is nothing— no, nothing but the faint, sour, and sickly hint of a body still living, living, which shouldn’t in any way revolt us, shame us, much less destroy us.

  The fact remained, however, that she couldn’t occupy the apartment. The mayor was soon three sheets to the wind, having knocked back his sixth verte in a single gulp, without waiting for the sugar to melt, as he had done with the five before; he was recovering, I suppose, from his close encounter with the blackness that lurks in us all. The unexpected rendezvous had led him straight to the Thérieux Café (the nearest one), toward which the rest of us eventually ambled, still shaking our heads thinking about the lunatic’s calligraphy, his universe of confetti and stains. Before long, we too were in our cups (though more out of boredom than terror) and shrugging our shoulders, as we watched through the narrow window the east turn dark as ink dissolved in milk.

  And then, amid all his snoozing and snoring, swilling and s
waggering, the mayor’s chair finally collapses with him in it. A good laugh all around, and a round of drinks to boot. Words flow again. We’re talking and talking when one of us, I don’t remember who, brings up the subject of Destinat. And another—again the exact one escapes me—proposes matter-of-factly, “That’s where they should put the little teacher, over at the prosecutor’s house in the park where the tenant was.”

  Everybody found this a fine idea, not least the mayor, who allowed that the thought had already crossed his mind. A wave of rib-poking and knowing glances rippled through the rest of us. It was late. The church bell clanged twelve strokes against the night. The wind blew a shutter back. Outside, the rain tussled with the ground like a big river.

  VII

  By the next day, the mayor had come down from his high horse. Humbled in dress as well as demeanor, he was back in his accustomed thick corduroys, wool jacket, otter cap, and hobnailed boots. The finery and self-assurance of the bridegroom had been consigned to oblivion. His playacting, the preening of the coxcomb, was of no use now: Lysia Verhareine had discerned his soul. Besides, calling on the prosecutor in evening dress was bound to rub him the wrong way from the outset. No one likes a suppliant with airs, and Destinat would’ve regarded the mayor as you might regard a monkey wearing a man’s clothes.

  The little teacher kept her faraway smile. Her dress was never more formal than it had been on the first day, but it assumed the forest shades of autumn, trimmed with a Bruges lace that lent her garb a religious gravity. As the mayor led the way, floundering in the muddy streets, she placed her tiny feet on the water-furrowed earth, avoiding every puddle and rivulet as if she were playing at tracking a gentle animal in the sodden ground. Beneath her smooth young-girl’s features, you could still make out the mischievous child she must have been not long ago, leaving off hopscotch to slip into gardens and pick bunches of cherries and red currants.

  She waited before the steps leading up to the château as the mayor went in alone to present his request to Destinat. The prosecutor received him in the entrance hall, the two standing all the while under the ten-meter-high ceiling, in the chill of the black-and-white marble tiles on the floor. They described the checkerboard of a game begun at the dawn of time, in which ordinary men are pawns, in which the rich, the powerful, and the warlike make their moves while from afar, always falling, the servants and starvelings watch.

  The mayor played the only card he could: directness. With his eyes lowered to the tiles and Destinat’s spats (cut from firstrate calfskin), he declared himself without mincing words. He hid nothing: the shitty “Marseillaise,” the cataclysmic mess, and the idea that had occurred to everyone, and first of all to him, of accommodating the girl in the house in the park. Then he fell silent and waited, groggy as an animal that has run smack into a fence or a big oak trunk.

  The prosecutor didn’t reply. He gazed through the cathedral glass of the great door at the light as it came and went, in all tranquillity; then he made the mayor understand that he wished to see the young woman, and the door was opened to Lysia Verhareine.

  I could embroider: That’s not hard, of course. But what would be the point? The truth is so much stronger when you look it in the face. Lysia entered and held out her hand to Destinat; it was so slender he didn’t see it at first, busy as he was in examining the young woman’s shoes—slight summer pumps in black leather and crêpe, both daubed with mud at the heel and the toe. He would have noticed even had this mud, more gray than brown, not left its smudges on the floor, lightening the black squares and darkening the white.

  The prosecutor was known for keeping his shoes as shiny as the helmet of a Republican guard, no matter what the weather. A meter of snow might fall, it could rain cats and dogs, the street could disappear under the mud, but that man would keep his feet shod in immaculate leather. I had seen him brushing them off one day, in the hallway of the courthouse, when he believed that no one was observing him—while a little farther on, behind walnut paneling darkened by the years, twelve jurors were considering the weight of a man’s head. That day there was a hint of disdain mixed with horror in his gestures, and a lot became clear to me. Destinat detested stains, even the most earthly and natural. A shudder habitually seized him when he surveyed the splattered clodhoppers of the prisoners who ganged together on the courtroom benches, or of the men and women he passed in the street. The state of your shoes revealed whether you were worthy to be looked in the eyes or not. And everything depended on a perfect polish, on whether he beheld a gleam like a bald pate after a summer of bright sun or, instead, a crust of dried earth, the dust of the roads, the motling where a burst of rain had left its mark on the hard sunken leather.

  But there, before the tiny shoes spattered with mud that had altered the marble chessboard of the universe, something different happened: It was as though the forward march of the world had ground to a halt, the mechanism jammed.

  Finally, Destinat took the small proffered hand into his own and held it a long time. A very long time.

  “An eternity,” the mayor told us later. “And a long one at that!” he added. Then he continued. “The prosecutor wouldn’t let go of that hand. He kept holding it in his, and his eyes—you should have seen them—weren’t his anymore. Even his lips: They were moving, almost trembling a bit, but nothing came out. He stared at the girl as if he’d never seen a woman, not one like that, anyway. As for me, I could not have felt more superfluous, with those two lost in each other’s eyes—because the girl for her part didn’t blink, she didn’t bow her head; there was not the least shyness or embarrassment, just her pretty smile, which she shot at him with no letup. Really, the dumb fuck in the story is me, looking for some way to justify my presence; that’s when I took refuge in the big portrait of his wife, in those folds of her dress that fall all the way to her feet. What else could I do? Finally, it was the girl who withdrew her hand—but not her gaze—and the prosecutor looked at his palm, as though he’d touched the Holy Rood. After a silence, he glanced at me and said yes—that’s all, a simple yes. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  He did know very well, no doubt, but it didn’t matter anymore. He and Lysia Verhareine left the château. Destinat remained, standing a long while in the place where he’d received them. And then at last he went back up to his apartments with a heavy step; I have that from Solemn, who’d never seen him so stooped before, so sluggish and dazed. When the old servant asked if everything was all right, Destinat didn’t even answer. Perhaps he returned to the entrance hall that very evening, with no light but the penumbra of the phosphorescent blue streetlights, to convince himself of what he had seen, to look for the delicate traces of mud on the black-and-white tile, which Barbe had dutifully wiped away, and then to search the eyes of his wife: She was smiling too, but a smile from former days that nothing could light up now, and which seemed as far from him as anything could be.

  It was then that strange days began.

  The war was still going on, perhaps more evident than ever; the roads became furrows of some endless anthill, a shade of grizzled beards. The guns now boomed incessantly, day and night, and the noise marked out our existences like a macabre clock, sweeping up the shattered bodies and lost lives with its vast hand. The worst part is that we ended up almost not hearing it anymore. Every day we would see men walking by, young men, always in the same direction, still believing they could fake out death. They smiled, not knowing what they didn’t yet know. In their eyes was the light of their former life. Only the sky could remain pure and gay, indifferent to the rot and evil being spread across the earth, under its dome of stars.

  And so the young teacher settled into the small house in the park of the château. It suited her better than anyone else. She made it into a jewel box after her own image, where the breeze would enter without being invited and caress the pale blue curtains and the bouquets of wildflowers arranged on the windowsill. She spent long hours smiling—at what, no one knew—beside her window or on the bench
in the park, with a little notebook of red morocco in her hands; her eyes seemed to meet the horizon, always going beyond it toward a point scarcely visible, or perhaps visible to the heart rather than the eyes.

  It didn’t take us long to adopt her. Our town isn’t the most welcoming to strangers, maybe even less to ones of the female sex. But she managed to win everyone over with little things, and even those who might have been her rivals—I mean the young ladies prospecting for a husband—were soon greeting her with a slight nod, which she returned with the lighthearted vivacity that enlivened everything she did.

  The pupils were openmouthed at seeing her, which surprise she mocked gently without malice. Never had school been so fully or joyously attended. Fathers had a hard time keeping their sons at home; they balked at the slightest chores, and each day away from their desks seemed like a long boring Sunday.

  Every morning Martial Maire, a simpleton who’d lost half his head under an ox’s hoof, placed a bouquet before her classroom door. When there weren’t any flowers for him to pick, he’d leave a handful of lovely grasses—alfalfa redolent of sugar and wild thyme the odor of mint—which he plaited adoringly. Sometimes, when he could find neither grasses nor flowers, he might leave three pebbles he’d carefully washed at the big village spring in rue Pachamort, wiping them dry on his ragged woolen jersey. Always he would hurry away before she discovered his offering. Some girls would’ve laughed at such a loon; they would’ve brushed away the pebbles and the grasses. But Lysia picked them up carefully, as her charges lined up before her, motionless, gazing at her rosy cheeks, her hair of blond verging on amber. She held the offering of the day like a baby chick, and as soon as she had entered the classroom, she’d put it with all ceremony in its special place: if flowers or grasses, in a small blue ceramic vase shaped like a cygnet; if pebbles, along the edge of her desk. Martial Maire would be watching from outside. She’d give him a smile—and off he’d run. At times, when she came across him on the street, she would stroke his forehead as you might to detect a fever, and he would swoon at the warmth of her touch.