by Tony Duvert
‘If you really want,’ Jonathan eventually murmured, quiet as a dying man, ‘if you really want, mademoiselle, to… to do good… really do good… then listen to me: just leave them alone! Do it for their sakes, at least. Now you’ll please excuse me.
And he went into the church, where the young girl didn’t dare to follow him. As she’d listened to Jonathan, her ample cheeks had taken on a bluish tint, her lips had disappeared, pressed the one against the other; it made her eyes squint, narrowed behind two short pink eyelids, reddened, like pig’s ears scalded and stripped of hair, but not yet of down.
What Jonathan liked in churches, and wasn’t offered in the same way by other architecture, was very simple. After the ruts under his feet, the constraints on every side, the pressures above his head, there were now smooth paving-stones, vast spaces, empty depths. Like true music, good buildings moved from slow to fast, from wide-open to closed-in, from the crushing to the diaphanous, from light to dark, from caress to brutality, a thousand motions of pleasure and a thousand impulses of the body — which seem each second and at every step to change size, shape, age, species, becoming one and many, and there awake in one all the hours one has ever lived, or dreamed.
For Jonathan, a desirable building would then offer a particular place where, having heard that long polyphony, he might go to earth, let himself go, his thoughts uncommitted, colourless, inexpressible. In the little romanesque church, this spot was a chilly refuge at the foot of an arch in a corner of the north transept, near a pulpit with a back and canopy in ugly woodwork, which smelt of priests’ feet and whose stairs looked just like a pair of housewife’s steps. Up there before him, in the airy space created by a silence in the masonry, was a long stream of light that cut through the shadows but remained contained within itself. Jonathan compared this narrow and rectilinear ray to a beam of light under grey skies, full of unmoving dragonflies, their wings dulled like dead insects or dirty windows. A memory of streams, of sad springs, of childhood’s poverty.
This happiness, without joy and without activity, made him feel better. He was alone. He wanted to leave, but he was afraid of meeting the young woman collecting, and he started again to walk around the church.
‘And where did you fish this one up, then?’ said the young mother of the three railway engines, cheerfully, when she saw Serge on all fours along the electric track.
She was coming back from shopping; she was pretty; she had a peasant dress of flowered cretonne which fell down to her feet, on which she wore heavy-heeled Parisian clogs.
‘Nowhere,’ muttered one of her sons.
‘Oh, very funny, you lot! Just the same, I do have the right to know where you live, don’t I?’
‘I don’t live here!’ said Serge, shrugging his shoulders, ‘I live somewhere else!’
‘Oh well, that’s that sorted out then!’ said the woman. She busied herself unpacking the things she’d just bought, food and cleaning things.
‘Just the same,’ she said, offended by the mute hostility of the boys, ‘I’ve had just about enough. It’ll be more bother, all over again. You’ve got to remember how old you are. You don’t care, but any moment now we’re going to have another woman descending on us and blowing her top because her kid isn’t at home. So your little friend is going to be very good, he’s going to pick up all his bits and bobs and he’s going to go home nicely, if that’s not too much trouble.’
‘My mother’s in America,’ Serge remarked as he got up. ‘Well, isn’t she lucky!’ said the young woman. ‘But you are
staying with somebody, I suppose? Your grandmother?’ ‘My grandmother’s in Peronne,’ said Serge.
‘Well, your father then.’
‘My father’s in Paris, well, I think so,’ said Serge.
‘All right then, you’re all on your own, you’re just travelling round the country,’ she said with a sigh. ‘You don’t miss a trick, you lot, not one…!’
‘I’m with Jonathan, we took the bus, he’s a friend.’
‘Oh well! So it’s his mother you’re staying with then?’
‘No, just the two of us,’ said Serge. ‘He’s waiting for me at the cafe, he’s getting drunk!’ he added mischievously.But one of the boys intervened and said that Jonathan wasn’t a boy but a grown-up.
‘Oh, you really are smart, you lot,’ the woman said again.
‘Yes, and he’s American,’ Serge suddenly decided, ‘and he’s given me lots of dollars, a hundred thousand dollars! To go and play!’
He burst out laughing and showed the banknote he had from Jonathan.
Lost in this confusion, the young woman decided to take Serge back to the café herself.
‘And you don’t move from here, you hear me?’ she ordered her sons (who were a bit footloose, and had sometimes been brought back by two policemen, or a neighbour or shopkeeper).
She locked the door with the key, just in case.
Jonathan wasn’t at the cafe.
‘He’s not there,’ said Serge. ‘He was sitting at that table but it’s not him any longer. We’ll just have to wait.’
This prospect didn’t make the young woman very happy, but eventually she discovered from Serge that perhaps his friend was ‘at the little church’. Being told that was where he was reassured her. And it was very close.
And so Jonathan was surprised, having Serge returned to him by a young and charming mother, whose clogs cracked on the church floor like whips laid in unison across the backs of a thousand heretics. She was smiling, and she told the story without complaining or offering advice, apologising in fact for having brought the boy back, for fear of the problems that always cropped up. Jonathan’s manner often made people well-disposed. And he was less surprised by Serge being returned than by the three children having invited him; he knew that in France you’re never asked into people’s houses — and hardly ever go out. He thought the young woman was kind and attractive. Serge thought otherwise, and said so in front of her, in one word, his voice muffled. Jonathan heard the word with one ear, and it was this that he responded to straight away after the young mother had left them:
‘Yes, but there’s nothing we can do.’
The only thing left was to cancel the hotel and catch the last bus.
As they passed the toy shop, Serge pointed at the window: ‘Look, that’s the train they’ve got, just like that! That’s it exactly!’
Jonathan offered to buy it (he’d got plenty of money out of the bank). Serge said no:
‘You can’t play with it all by yourself.’
He accepted a pop-gun firing arrows tipped with rubber suckers, whose enormous target had attracted his eye.
The return journey went cheerfully, for Serge, who had opened the packet, had discovered that the suckers would stick to your skin if you licked them a bit. He put an arrow on his forehead, then two and then three, tried them on his cheeks, made faces to unstick them, tried again, and eventually transformed Jonathan into a horned devil. He looked at the young man’s new face with an inexpressible pleasure, and he challenged him with his own horns, like a young kid at play.
The ladies in the bus, many of whom must have gone into town to have their hair permed, decided, despite the din the young boy was making, that today an indulgent smile would suit them better than an air of reproof, granted the distinction of their coiffure and the voluntary-social-worker tint of their puce and ash-grey locks. A little later the driver turned the radio on, and Jonathan, discovering the loudspeakers along the length of the bus, understood that it was intended for the passengers. This racket extinguished Serge’s, and he began again to scratch at his book of fruit and poison, without removing the arrows, which fell of their own accord when the saliva dried.
‘What you could do with is a bike,’ said Jonathan, surprised not to have thought of it earlier.
‘Me, a bike?’ asked Serge. ‘Are you going to get me a bike? Why?’
For Serge had never thought about it before. Not very greedy for pr
esents, he hardly ever asked for anything, and in shops he had to be left alone and unconstrained, like a robber, if he was ever to decide he wanted anything.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I’ll buy two. We could come here without taking the bus, if you’re up to it. It would be better.’
This plan of Jonathan’s inspired in the young boy no pleasant imagination. He liked the bus a lot, himself; nor did he hate the radio, and he loved the grannies with their freshly-permed hair.
‘I don’t really want one, a bike,’ he said, after he’d had a think.
Jonathan felt an awkward pride, the boy looked so happy to have come back here, to their home, to Serge’s home, with night falling, his limbs tired, his belly hungry, his mind excited, drunken, full of the emotions of the long day.
‘Stephane’s cock’s as big as this,’ said Serge, showing with his hands.
‘Oh,’ Jonathan said absently, busy taking the breast off a duck, ‘who’s that then?’
‘Stephane, the big one.’
The breast of duck, which he was going to slice and marinate in brandy, was to go in the middle of a pâté which he’d make tomorrow with the rest of the bird, with fat pork, bacon, veal, liver, eggs, pistachios, lemon, coriander-seed and herbs. More from a taste for the Flemish masters than from love of food, Jonathan liked to make a pie or a pâté in a pastry case, and he had many handsome moulds for the purpose. The pattern of the moulds seemed not to have changed through the centuries.
‘Oh yes. Why did the others…’
‘Dunno, I didn’t see.’
Serge seemed thoughtful, he’d got something he wanted to say. Jonathan didn’t try and help him. He carried on boning the fat Nantais duck, its gaping bottom bloated with yellow fat.
‘Does he take his trousers down to play trains?’
‘Course he doesn’t!’ protested Serge. ‘You are stupid.’
In speaking to him like that, Serge had used the word con, which in French can also mean cunt. Serge had never before said con, nor bite, cock; it was the young mother who said con; the other word must have come from her sons.
‘Is it women who say con?’ asked Jonathan. ‘Boys don’t say it, do they? Or is it conne? I don’t really know the French.’ ‘Yes they do. My mother doesn’t though.’
In fact, Barbara said it very often. Until now the boy mustn’t have noticed hearing it.
Jonathan gave him the pistachios to peel. He’d only been able to find them salted and roasted, but they’d do, perhaps, if they were soaked.
‘No, ‘cos I saw it,’ Serge began again, ‘the end’s all red.’ ‘Red?’
The bird was really old, it would be better to marinate it for longer than he’d thought.
‘Yes, and do you know why? Because it’s got no skin on it. Because the doctor cut it off. Didn’t you know? Stephane… the doctor cut it off all three of them, d’you know why? Because their mother said it’s dirty it ought to be cut off, because she said they’d be ill.’
Jonathan sighed.
‘It’s not true. But mothers do what they like,’ he said.
‘It’s none of Barbara’s business!’ Serge cried out, suddenly furious. I’ll smash her face in! Anyway, she’s got no right.’
‘They have all the rights in the world. If she wants to, they’ll do it to you.’
‘I’d kill her!’ yelled Serge. With a sweep of his arm he knocked over the bowl of pistachios and they flew all over the kitchen; his two cheeks suddenly flooded with tears.
Jonathan, his face burning, shared in his anger but dared not show it. He remembered the little railway-train, undressed it, imagined the three mutilations. He said:
‘They do it because the doctor says they should. Mothers believe anything the doctors say. They’re the real bastards,’ he insisted gently.
‘Yes, they’re bastards,’ echoed Serge, whose lowered voice was shaken by sobs.
‘Is it because it was cut he showed it to you?’ asked Jonathan.
‘No, he didn’t show me. He looked, when I went to the toilet, ‘cos I didn’t know where it was. It was afterwards he showed me.’
‘Ah… and which does he prefer?’
‘Like me. But not when I pee, because I have to do like this.’
He showed on his thumb the gesture of pulling back the foreskin. The difficulty of the description seemed to have calmed him down.
‘Then I put it back, otherwise it doesn’t look nice. But we’ll see them again anyway, won’t we?’
‘Of course. But if their mother throws you out every time… You know, people in your country…’
‘She’s a bitch!’ Serge shouted. ‘They’re bastards!’ (He was thinking of the doctors again.) ‘Look,’ he said, in a suddenly cheerful voice, ‘Thomas gave me this… look at this then, thingummy!’
Thingummy too was a new word, only this time affectionately intended. Serge took a little packet from his pocket, and unfolded the wrapping, which was a new ten-mark note. Inside there was a fine horse’s head in ivory, perhaps broken off from a large chess-piece, and a gold chain, short and very fine, no doubt what was left of a baby’s identity bracelet that had lost its nameplate.
Jonathan showed Serge how the head could be fastened to the chain and how the whole thing could hang round his neck on a cord. Serge wanted the job done straight away. Jonathan, hands greasy and bloodied from the duck, promised him he’d do it after dinner. He gave up picking up the pistachios and pushed them towards the mouse corner. The bowl, a plastic food container, hadn’t broken.
Serge hadn’t given the other boy anything in exchange for the present. He felt bad about it. He explained to Jonathan that if he’d taken the picture-book with the smells with him… But he hadn’t got anything with him, except the hundred-franc note, which wasn’t a real present — or was it perhaps?
Jonathan said it was, and he smiled to think of the young mother’s face had she discovered the note amongst her son’s belongings.
All the same, Serge had better things in Paris, and it was a pity. He described a little box; Jonathan couldn’t tell whether it was made of tortoise-shell, mother-of-pearl or plastic (it seemed to be a powder-box). Then the boy went through the objects he kept in it, which he thought a great deal of. A button, golden, or rather brass, with a naval anchor on it. Two little oblong magnets of the kind you find in the magnetic fasteners on cupboard doors: they worked very well. A miniature compass which came from a key-ring, whose needle went round and round. A puzzle in a case just like that of the compass, but with a little ball inside and a concave bottom with a circle of little numbered holes. A ring with a diamond as big as a hazelnut. A spring-operated rifle, as long as a finger, which could shoot flaming matches as high as the ceiling. The present he’d received seemed to have something in common with this collection and its box.
‘They’re no good for anything though, they’re silly!’ he nonetheless declared, a bit embarrassed at having described this secret treasury, rare because of the scale of its contents, and much superior to ordinary toys — which are big and there’s nothing to look at very closely. But Jonathan can’t have shown enough enthusiasm. He was putting snails onto their baking dish, poaching brains, taking the bones from a pickled herring, draining black olives, and covering with garlic the sweetcorn salad with tomato, chicory and beetroot. This was the strange menu composed from some of the foods Serge had chosen in town. Thanks to Barbara’s bohemian dinners, the boy didn’t have boring tastes. Jonathan was especially surprised at the snails, which Serge chewed thoroughly, as if they were gum; himself, he practically swallowed them before they touched his teeth, and only when grown up had he learned to like garlic.
Nonetheless, Serge was a great eater of noodles; his taste for them was very pure, and he’d have no more than a speck of butter. He ate them without sauce, cheese or seasoning, one by one with his fingers, overcooked and rather cold. Small and slippery ones which had to be eaten with a fork or spoon only revolted him, and if, in the
grocer’s, he saw Jonathan pick up a packet of this kind, he’d stop him:
‘No! Not those! They’re no good!’
As for puddings, the boy would eat anything sweet, without discrimination. But a more touchy pastry-cook than Jonathan would have been annoyed at Serge’s passion for a certain brand of industrially produced biscuits, which he nibbled all day; the house was full of them. On the wrappers, there were little playing-cards to cut out. Serge collected them, and after much consideration of alternatives, it was these he chose as a present for Thomas. He kept just the duplicates for himself. He didn’t even think of the toys Jonathan had bought for him before he arrived; he hardly used them, they had no personal interest. He hesitated over the picture-books, but he didn’t know if the other boy could read, and he was a little bit possessive about the few publications on which he could exercise his own talent.
‘No… he can’t read…,’ he’d murmured to himself as he leafed through his reading matter, scattered about him as he lay on the floor after the meal.
Thomas was the youngest of the brothers, the one who spoke least and laughed most. He saw everything, and everything amused him. Jonathan, who’d preferred him to the others, was delighted that Serge should show such a lively and spontaneous tenderness toward a child so young (Thomas still had teeth missing, while Serge’s had grown since ages, at least at the front); and that this little one himself had been the only one of the three to give anything to Serge — this funny present, with neither meaning nor importance but those he had himself attached to it. In the end, Serge kept for himself the books he knew well; for Thomas, he chose a wonderful one which he’d found very difficult to read. He put it with the cards.
‘Because he doesn’t read, it doesn’t matter it’s difficult,’ he said, with impeccable logic.
