by Tony Duvert
They had sat down in a café whose front was open to the street, and their table stood almost astride the slot in the ground where the plate-glass windows ran back and forth. Jonathan, who was bored, found his boredom disturbed by sobs. High-pitched, not very loud, they must have had their origin in a very tiny breast.
Serge showed him who it was. Outside, sitting at a café table, there was a woman with her son. It was this four- or five-year-old child who was crying, and his mother was murmuring inaudible reprimands in his ear. Only the woman’s profile, distorted by the effort of speaking harshly in a low voice, made it possible to grasp the tenor of her words. The boy’s cheek, particularly plump and white, was marked by a long trickle of blood. It flowed slowly downward, vermilion, like melting lipstick. A snail’s track, you might have said, but bloody.
‘She slapped him like that, across the face, and it bled,’ explained Serge.
The stone in a ring, or a broken nail. Contrary to plan, the slap to induce good behaviour had produced a striking and indecent spectacle which the woman was trying in vain to bring back under control. Words were not enough; at the edge of the table, her hand, with rigid fingers and cupped palm, was tapping rhythmically to draw the infant’s attention to the threat of another slap to correct the results of the first.
But she no longer dared strike. With darting glances of her expressionless eyes, she looked about her. No, none of the customers in the café had reacted: they knew how difficult was the art of teaching manners to the little ones. But a few passers-by, who were obliged, on account of the narrowness of the pavement, to walk close by the table, caught sight of the bloodied child, heard his sobs, and took a quick look at the mother. She was wearing an old-fashioned black suit with a nipped-in waist and rounded skirts, her hair was long, reddish brown, waved, black at the roots. Middle-aged women, walking alone, stopped for a second, or even turned round, as if to size up the wound and to find in the face of the little one the good reason for this brutality; then they went on, impassive and discreet, without having said a word, or risked an alteration of expression.
Embarrassed nonetheless, the woman in the black suit decided to wipe her son’s cheek with a handkerchief, for the blood had reached the young boy’s collar. Perhaps he took this for a further act of violence, beginning to cry more loudly and trying to free his head, which the woman held from behind as she was wiping. Exasperated, she put away the handkerchief and threw some coins onto the table, where there still stood two glasses of lemonade and cordial, one red, the other green. She stood up with the air of a person offended; she pulled up the child from his seat, as far and as roughly as possible, plonked him firmly onto the ground, took his hand and marched him away.
‘You know why?’ asked Serge in an expressionless voice. ‘It’s because he wouldn’t drink, he wasn’t thirsty, so she hit him.’
Sure enough, the glass of grenadine was untouched.
‘If my mother did that, I’d hit her back,’ cried Serge.
‘He was too small.’
‘You could have stopped her,’ said Serge. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Nobody says anything, it was his mother. It doesn’t help. She has a row with you, and she pays him back twice over when they get home.’
After witnessing hundreds of family scenes, Jonathan had nothing else to say; oppressed by anger and by shame, he could do no more than forget as quickly as possible these tiny dramas which it would be ridiculous or dangerous to take to heart.
‘So if Barbara hit me you’d really let her?’ Serge asked, with an incredulous smile.
‘No, but I know her. With the others you can’t. You just put your fingers in your ears and wait for it to finish.’
It was Wednesday, the schools’ day off, which amused Serge because he was already on holiday. That morning, about ten o’clock, they had come into town on the bus. They hadn’t found any frogs at the shop. There were some fine toads, some with red eyes, some with gold, but Serge found them disgusting. He was more interested in the white mice, and in a smelly cage of hamsters, huddled in their excrement. Fascinated, he breathed in the over-ripe odour of urine, rotten eggs and rabbit hutch which rose from a glass tank covered with a wire grille, where there slept a knotted clump of snakes. They didn’t buy anything, and while Serge looked at the birds in their cages, dull-witted and fidgety, with the gaudy colours of feminine knick-knacks, Jonathan waited on the pavement.
The weather was really fine, and the boy very much enjoyed the walk through town. When they crossed the bridge, Serge saw the fishermen and wanted to fish himself. In the window of a nearby shop, Jonathan showed him the hooks and explained how one impaled a maggot or an earthworm, and then how the hook caught in the lip or stomach of the fish. This didn’t bother the child, who nonetheless understood that Jonathan didn’t want to buy one, and left it at that.
To tell the truth, Jonathan didn’t really care about the fishes’ fate, but since arriving in the town, contact with his contemporaries, whom he no longer usually saw at such close quarters, had brought out in him a bottled-up mixture of hate, suffering and bad temper.
Serge, for his part, seemed rather to ignore his peers than to suffer from them. When they met a little girl or boy, he did not deign to follow them with his glance, nor indeed to look them in the face. But these were unreal children, all attached to the women by whose sides they made their frigid way.
At the bridge, though, there were a handful of boys who were fishing in a desultory way. They were two or three years older than Serge. He took his hand away from Jonathan and leaned back against the parapet, silent and enchanted, looking at them as if they were some incredible fairground attraction. It must have been this image of liberty and noisy camaraderie which had made him want to fish. The youngsters allowed themselves to be wondered at, without even sparing a glance for the astonished little thing, as contemptible in their eyes as they were themselves in those of the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old youths who were fishing not very far away, and whose broken voices, loud and raucous, seemed to mark off a territory where none of the little brats would have had the nerve to venture, while the adults too, warned by this sort of baying, kept away and amongst themselves.
Down on the bank was the old men’s corner, in a shady spot provided with a few public benches. These old men weren’t grouped together, but strung out one by one along the bank, each with his canvas stool, his empty keep-net and faded tackle.
No one was catching fish. The river was glaucous, greenish and muddy, as if it had washed a hundred miles of dirty sheets and slimy handkerchiefs. Jonathan wondered what might be the taste of any fish that survived in there; and he rather imagined that towards midnight, with all the town asleep, the greedy mouths and shining eyes of a thousand rats would emerge from the water, and the two banks come alive with the quick patter of rodents’ feet.
It was a pretty little town, with gardens well looked after and fine old buildings. It had no industries, no office buildings, no housing estates. People bought and sold; they slept; they believed in the radio, television and pop songs; they died in a good hospital. They didn’t mate, but they got married and there were children.
Serge, off his own bat, had taken Jonathan by the hand as soon as they’d got off the bus. He held it gently and in a lively way; after the first moment, he twisted his own hand so that Jonathan’s fingers, pulled here and there, slowly changed their position and finally completely enclosed his own. Then his hand became very relaxed, and Jonathan felt as if he were keeping warm a sleeping bird. The arm which belonged to it just hung there, light and insubstantial; then, with the slightest impulse from outside, the bird stiffened, the arm communicated a force, a traction, the bird flew away and Serge went with it. Once he’d finished his journey, he would slowly come back; and meanwhile, Jonathan’s hand remained immobile, empty as a deserted nest.
The boy took pleasure in being seen with Jonathan, even more here than in Paris. Independent and he
adstrong, Serge would cheerfully walk ten yards apart if he was with Barbara, but from his very first outings with Jonathan, he’d taken his hand, to be held and to abandon himself to it. And when in the morning they arrived in front of the school, Serge would cling even closer. There were all the other little ones, brought by their mothers, or more often their grandmothers, bareheaded and in their slippers. They took Jonathan for a young father and gave him knowing smiles. A young papa too intimate with this sleepy and cheerful urchin, who hauled himself up to his father’s face, where, hanging on tight and well supported, he talked in his ear, almost kissing him, as we do when we really love each other.
There was a shop where Jonathan wanted to buy colours, artist’s equipment and tools, which he’d been missing since Serge had made him want to paint again. It was a bookseller’s arid stationer’s, with bibles, local crafts, barometers, religious art and the material to produce it. Serge, while exploring a pile of children’s books (he’d already put aside a bundle of transfers for tattoos), had discovered a book, whose pictures, when their surfaces were scratched, could be licked and smelt. They were printed with sugary multicoloured inks, saturated with the artificial flavours of bad sweets, the exaggerated and bewildering odour of a streetful of brothels. Despite these charms, and the place it was found, the book was not a gospel as told to little children. They were pictures of fruit, each flavoured with a chemical which bore the same relation to the true flavour as the false artlessness of the representation bore to the real flesh of the fruit.
Here Jonathan recognised the talents of those liberated young women who worked at seducing children on behalf of the advertisers and baby industries, the mothers and primary-school teachers. A fashionable occupation, without which the vast beaches of the Third World, the exposed beams and the visit to the psychoanalyst, riding a folding bike and wearing a peasant dress (full-length in flowered silk) would have remained inaccessible. To Jonathan, the naive little drawings sang their artful song:
Kids — it’s incredible what I’m just beginning to understand. You know, we don’t do anything without them, we invite a dozen, you can imagine the teachers go crazy, with sandwiches, hot chocolate, the tape recorder — I love it! They’re unbelievable!… They have incredible ideas! We get them to draw, we put our ideas to the test, because it’s them who choose, in the end, they have the final say! Well, you think you’re creative, you know, just a bit, after all, but you’re outclassed. Because then you discover what creativity really is! Oh, they’re wonderful!… Do you know, eventually, I shall have one myself really! But I can do without the man, I’ll have my child and I’ll keep it, he’s had his bit of fun, he’s happy, okay, goodnight and goodbye. But think about it! Who gets pregnant, him or me? When you get pregnant, then perhaps we’ll talk about it… And then a husband… Boys, they’re alright when they’re small, but afterwards, it’s just shit, there might be one in a thousand… Anyone would think you were shocked! Oh Jonathan, you disappoint me! Well, darling, you’re just going to have to get used to it. Women have changed, or didn’t you know? No Jonathan, it’s a job just the same, you should try it yourself I’ll give you the tapes, you can’t imagine it, it’s impossible to imagine what it’s like!… There is the dumb side, the commission, the report or whatever, I admit, only there are times, really, when you just flip. You know, you’re feeling awful, you’re just staring at these kids’ things, you’re sick of it — and then, bang, it takes off.’ Everything just goes crazy, every which way! Suddenly, you just don’t know, and you discover, well, what shall I say, you’re just a little girl again!… It’s not work any longer, you go mad, you’re hooked, really crazy, you could even end up crying and you just can’t help it! It’s
The pretty bright fruit brought back a thousand other confidences of the kind, picked up from girls who were students with him, when his patience, his silence, his gentle manner, his broad shoulders and his pleasing face had made him very attractive to young women.
Chance memories often brought him up against such things or worse. So he didn’t cultivate reminiscences. He felt himself to be ferreting in the rubbish, a dog with shit on its muzzle; he would have had to be terribly clever to follow through a memory without coming up against something that they had left there.
He bought the book (its cover showed it to be the work of two of them this time), and it brought back the crimes that used to be committed in the old days, when, having soaked the pages in poison, you gave presents of books which had to be read often, with much licking of the index finger. He was pleased by this gift in the Venetian manner. In the street, Serge bumped into lots of passers-by, he was so absorbed in the task of scratching and licking, and getting Jonathan to scratch and lick as well.
Then, in the main shopping street, there were three little boys of Serge’s age. They were very like each other, and you would have thought they were triplets if there hadn’t been a slight difference in size between them. They were walking in Indian file, not very quickly, unaccompanied by any adult. They wore shorts in the pattern of the American flag, and they were bare above the waist, tanned, with strong arms and muscular bellies. They were making their perilous way along two tightropes: beneath their feet, the stones of the kerb, a narrow path between two precipices; and above their heads the very low-hanging valance of a cafes awning, a valance which they all held with the same hand, the arm up like a pantograph, while three other hands were each carrying identical shirts.
Serge, laughing, followed this little train along its rail, and the three engines, very merry themselves, were good-natured in return; in deserts so dangerous, fellowship required it.
Jonathan took the opportunity to sit down at the cafe that lay alongside the railway. He wondered what Serge, whose gift for clarity of speech he admired (something very important, once the stage of babbling is past), was saying to the American railway, which, taken by surprise, had to let go of the overhead wire and unhitch itself, the better to lend an ear.
Very simply, Serge had invited the three little engines to join them; they made a circle around Jonathan’s table. He shook three hands. Everyone accepted a drink, apart from the middle-sized engine, which preferred an ice-cream, and ate it standing up and hopping about, as ice-creams ought to be eaten.
Jonathan didn’t want to get in the children’s way. He went to the far end of the café to make a telephone call; he had to order a few items from Paris they’d never heard of at the religious art and designer poison shop.
By the time he got back, the little train had disappeared, and Serge as well. A little later, the boy came running back:
‘I’m at their place, we’re playing trains,’ he explained. ‘Are you going to come too?’
‘No, not me,’ said Jonathan, who felt self-conscious with these cheerful children. ‘I’ll go and have a look at the little church, and we’ll meet again here. I’ll wait for you, and if I’m not here, I’ll be back in a little while. Alright?’
‘Alright. Their house isn’t far,’ said Serge. ‘It’s not difficult.’
Jonathan gave him some money and the boy left. There probably wouldn’t be a bus, they would have stopped running. Better plan to eat and sleep in the town.
Jonathan crossed the street and reached a hotel-restaurant with a red awning and a terrace surrounded by box trees. It wasn’t where they’d eaten their lunch. He booked a room with a double-bed. They gave him registration forms to fill in, but didn’t ask him to prove his relationship with the child he’d included on the form. He’d given Serge his own surname, and hadn’t mentioned that the need for police registration had been abolished some time before. He knew how much better it was for him not to make himself noticeable, and he was the most obedient of citizens, even towards laws now repealed.
He bought a few things for washing the next day. With no luggage and no car, he was worried he’d cause suspicion at the hotel, accompanied as he was by a kid with no luggage either. Obviously a kidnapper. Before the evening, he’d
have to get a good-quality suitcase, to prove he didn’t strangle children, even if he did borrow them for a little while.
These precautions, and his visit to the hotel reception, had put him in a miserable mood. He made his way to the church he loved, a black and dumpy romanesque construction.
In front of the church he was stopped by a young girl in blue jeans, navy-blue sweater and navy-blue nylon jacket, small, with big thighs, very low in the knees, her hair in a pony-tail. She clutched some pamphlets or magazines to her breast.
‘Don’t be afraid, monsieur!’ she cried out, ‘I’m not going to steal your parcel! If you could just give me a moment of your time! I won’t eat you!…’
And, having confessed her religion, she explained that the children of a certain poor part of town were left entirely to themselves; the association she represented was therefore planning to send twenty young Catholics to help them, to open a centre, to protect and guide, to be another family to them. All young people, but for children, it was important. That was her spiel.
At the same time (not smiling any longer, because Jonathan’s face had become extraordinarily dark, as if he was either going to cry, or to hit her), she held out a plastic identity card from the prefecture, with her photo, a tax-stamp and other proofs of her honesty, her rights and duties. But this exorcism wasn’t enough to dispel Jonathan’s sadness; and she again described, this time her voice yet more broken and full of pathos, the dangerous condition of these children left all to themselves, and the help the twenty young Christian girls, and a few boys as well, would bring. But they were short of money, she concluded, and every little bit…
