When Jonathan Died

by Tony Duvert

  Or being a little monkey with a big monkey, keeping warm together, tickling each other a little, protecting each other. It wasn’t that, but Jonathan had this idea of it, and he had drawn monkeys, happy. They looked better than the real ones, or people.

  Jonathan worked a great deal, without thinking about it. In this way he occupied the hours which Serge preferred to spend elsewhere. As soon as the child left him, Jonathan would pick up his brush; as soon as he returned, Jonathan would put it down and forget the canvas he was working on. These moments of solitude were no longer part of his life; what he did then didn’t matter to him.

  Simply, like a housewife who knits woollies while the kids are at school, Jonathan covered with paint the canvasses he was contracted to produce. He had fallen behind, but the summer months were enough to put him ahead. Never had he painted while thinking less and looking less at his work, having fewer plans, less ambition, less critical concern. Yes, the stuff pleased him; it wasn’t difficult to do; he didn’t find it boring; it wasn’t that wonderful; his dealer would be happy.

  So Serge’s presence didn’t produce in Jonathan any desire to create, to express himself: just the ease and productivity of the reliable worker. Sometimes he thought his new canvasses were beautiful, better than the others. He didn’t give a damn. He had no need to judge himself. The common opinion, that one fulfilled oneself in one’s work, made him shrug his shoulders. Everything collective is limited, everything soli­tary is null: between these two convictions, Jonathan was hardly able to think much of being an artist.

  He was in a hurry to finish and put all this idiotic stuff away. Perhaps they would like what he had to offer, but he didn’t think much at all of the art-public. Just to spend five minutes with a connoisseur was enough to have him shaking with anger. He liked good people, that is to say, no one; he suffered from being appreciated by little cliques whom he would not even deign to spit at.

  The September days were spoiled by visits. The carriers came to take away the paintings. The dealer himself came down, and a few friends turned up: Parisians doing well up there, in­tellectuals, middle-aged women, schoolmasters, daddies’ boys, talkative failures. The atmosphere was laboured. It only needed these people, who all believed themselves more origi­nal and more precious than the rest, to come down here, and normality and all its filth came alive again. Talent, like shit, attracts the worst sort of flies.

  And Serge? A tiny little kid, hardly visible, as grey as the walls. The mood was unclear, faces featureless, gestures im­possible. Kingdom of parasites, stinkers, liars and idiots. At the feet of a gallery-owner, the island with the match-houses became so much grotesque rubbish, the sort of junk you trip over in a garden when you don’t look where you’re going. Suffocated, crushed by the false personality imposed on him by these false relationships, Jonathan was overwhelmed. Of course, they left; but a few hours were enough for them to complete their work of deception, violence and death. After­wards, between Jonathan and Serge, it was never the same again.

  This violation was the forerunner of another, and perhaps helped them cope with it better.

  One afternoon they were in the garden, busy on the ground, when they heard the sound of voices in the lane coming up from the road.

  Then several men and women came through the garden gate, looking for Jonathan. It was Barbara’s new crowd — the American woman, her admirers, her hangers-on, and Barbara herself. The two boys’ hearts stopped. They had to get up off the grass where they were sitting. Respond to what was said. Put out a hand. The visitors themselves were relaxed, elegant, free, and so proud of themselves that, seeing Jonathan’s embarrassment, they thought themselves intimidating, which pleased them. They spoke in loud voices, pedantic, conde­scending, while smiling as if, egalitarian snobs, they were talking to a friend’s gardener. They were the town-dwellers, the adults, and the actors.

  After an hour, they went, Serge all alone in the middle of them. They carried his cases, one on the left, another on the right.

  When the rain came, Jonathan heard it on his ceiling. For the bedroom where he hid himself away was tucked under the roof; part of the roof sloped down over his bed and prevented him from lifting his head up completely.

  This regular sound, almost cheerful despite the greyness of the day, despite the clammy chill and the trees stripped bare, filled him with a mournful calm. He wouldn’t do anything while the rain fell. You kill yourself only on a more violent day, which reminds you of the world, the seasons, or of somebody.

  Jonathan thought again of leaving everything, going back to Paris, seeing Serge again quickly, suffering anything — even his contemporaries — as long as he could save the little boy.

  But save him from what? The world in which one could believe oneself happy wasn’ t Jonathan’s world. Serge had spent three or four months here, months which might be counted happiness; but he wasn’t yet of an age to recognise or go looking for any happiness at all. His stay with Jonathan was rather the stuff of sixty-year-old memories and of ‘if I had known. For when we get old we finally remember an age when we were happy, which we lived without knowing it would never come back; and these are the first years of our life, and the only life ever.

  And only by chance. What Jonathan knew of Serge’s life as a small child struck him as shocking. What he remembered of his own was no better. And what they had told him later, before he abandoned his family, his friends, his country — and humanity too, so-called humanity — had simply made him want to commit murder. What’s more, they (the old) were proud to tell what they had done to you, when you had grown old enough to understand.

  The rain was falling. Soft and even, it reconciled him, like a discreet caress, to life, life all alone and without point.

  Not to die. These drops of water, making their tranquil noise, would surely be enough to allow one to love life, while they were there.

  Jonathan watched the leaves fall, time passing, he wrote letters to Paris in the morning, and then, a few evenings later, he realised they were being intercepted. A child of eight doesn’t reply on his own; Serge wouldn’t be given even three lines in the emphatic letters Barbara wrote him if she needed money, or to tell him about some new eternal love.

  Jonathan wasn’t unhappy that his own life was now fin­ished. It had only begun when Serge had borrowed it and taken it over in order to live himself. But Jonathan suffered from the thought that this might not be enough for the child to survive.

  The violent rains of September gave way to the enormous gilded lustre of autumn, an autumn shot through with a tender and luminous light, which, from sunrise to sunset, was like the image of another summer.

  So Jonathan didn’t die, and all alone he loved a departed child.

  At the first rains, the neighbour’s old black dog became crippled. Jonathan heard the old woman shouting as she pushed it outside so it wouldn’t shit in the house. It was loth to walk. It couldn’t see very well, and bumped into things as it went along; its stiff legs couldn’t carry it any longer, and folded beneath it with the first kick the old woman, out of patience, gave it in the backside. It would lie down out of the way as long as its mistress would allow. But this wasn’t enough; it couldn’t be allowed to die without the old woman making it realise — she, still a little bit active, who was waiting her own turn and bent on revenge.

  In the autumn damp, the dog was on its last legs. The old woman put it on a doormat, and then pulled the mat to the door. She tipped the animal over, and it defecated there. Jonathan saw this, and he trembled in distress.

  Late one afternoon, because she’d had enough, or because, for her too, Serge had gone for good, or because winter and its threat of death was on the houses, she got rid of the dog.

  Jonathan was in the garden. He maintained Serge’s pond with manic attention, and had taken its furnishings inside. Through the wire-netting and the dried-up tendrils of with­ered bindweed, he saw the old woman pulling her dog along by a thick rope, unusually long.

 
The dog couldn’t walk any longer, and fell over on its side. The old woman dragged it by the neck and took it round the corner. They went to the other side of the house.

  Jonathan knew what was going to happen next. He’d already heard from the shopkeepers in the village (as he had seen many hunting dogs and guard-dogs, and had asked about them), that it was usual to hang the old animals. It was free, and it didn’t hurt.

  At first, Jonathan remained on his haunches, cleaning away like an idiot at the little semicircular canal that belonged to the pond. Skinny weeds grew in the bottom, almost springing up in a day, despite the cold; he pulled them up. The only scenery left on the island, the little people planted on their matchstick legs, were falling over on account of the rain, which unstuck them; Jonathan stuck them back in. He was reluctant to take them inside; he would rather the little men rotted away than see the island altogether bare. While he worked, he wasn’t sad. His imagination recreated for him each gesture, each attitude, each look on Serge’s face and each intonation of his voice as he had played in the garden: and he was astonished at how much he had remembered, for he thought he had forbidden himself to watch the child.

  ‘Dear God!’ the old woman cried out as she came back to the side where Jonathan could see her. ‘The bastard! Stupid little git! Oh Jesus Christ!’

  The woman, who was limping a little with her stick, snatched up the spade from the ground and went away again with heavy tread.

  Terrified, Jonathan took a few moments to understand what this meant. She obviously wasn’t going to dig a grave. No: lacking strength in her arms, she must have failed to hang the animal, and she was altering her method.

  Jonathan got up suddenly and rushed out into the lane. He went into his neighbour’s garden and ran towards the back of the house.

  It was too late. Or too early. The woman was breaking the dog’s neck and skull, as it lay upon the ground, with the edge of the spade. She shouted insults at the same time; she was leaning over to one side, with the stick jammed under her elbow. The dog didn’t bark, but at each blow it let out a little groan, fallen from its feeble lungs. Its head and neck, cut open with many shining wounds, were covered with dark red blood. It was alive, it was groaning, it shook with every blow of the spade. The old woman was shouting:

  ‘Will you die, you stupid thing!’

  But she couldn’t strike cleanly.

  Jonathan threw himself on the old woman, snatched the spade from her hands, and with all his strength, he smashed in the old dog’s skull. The legs went rigid, to the tips of the toes. The tail moved more gently, and then fell to the ground with a horrible slowness. The bloodied ears pulled back, as if for sex.

  Jonathan put down the spade, and as he turned round, he shouted insults at her, pushed her with his arm. She fell on her bottom, and cried out against strangers, young people, and foreigners.

  ‘I’ll come back and bury it,’ said Jonathan, wet with tears, his hands filthy.

  PART II

  Jonathan was affected for a long time by Serge’s abduction. Paralysed and brutish, he aroused himself from his torpor only in order to get drunk. He started to eat a lot, but without doing any cooking: he bought any old thing all ready to eat, which he devoured in bed during his wakeful nights. His depression made him sleep up to twelve or fifteen hours a day (in gentle souls, unhappiness often produces this excessive sleep). The alcohol helped, of course.

  Within this fog, he received some news of his paintings, news of sales. Everything was going very well. The contract would be extended, the monthly payments increased, the number of works to be supplied each year would be less. He didn’t give a damn.

  But he had to fight, not to go to Paris, not to meet clients or prattle with the critics, to be absent from the show they would do that winter. The gallery-owner came in person to look for him, but had the misguided vanity to announce his arrival by telegram — like whistling himself for a dog that paid no attention to the servants. That day, Jonathan wandered in the frozen fields, like boys who disappear when they expect to be punished. He returned, cautiously, in the middle of the night; he was worried that this weighty leader of men, instead of leaving, might have gone to bed to wait for him; he was an unassuming millionaire, a simple man.

  He didn’t write to Serge’s mother, but received spontane­ous letters from her. It was Jonathan’s growing fame that did it. A snob, Barbara boasted of knowing a fashionable painter:

  But he used to wash my little boy! He’d make food for us! I swear it! And he cooks — divinely!

  It wouldn’t have taken much for her to suggest that Serge was his.

  Just the same, she was very careful not to invite Jonathan to visit, and her letters, more sharp than friendly, always very brief when it came to the child, told of some very strange things. Serge, it seemed, had complained of his holiday: Jonathan was a real nuisance, bossy and boring, he had no radio, no television, he stopped you doing anything, you had to eat too much, you were cooped up, he lectured you about anything, he only thought about work, he lived in a dirty and stinking old place, you weren’t even left alone to sleep, there was only one bed, and Serge was very glad to get back to Paris.

  ‘You were a right cow to leave me with that guy!’ he had told Barbara (according to her).

  Jonathan’s cheeks were aflame and his stomach felt empty when he read the news.

  He believed, at first, that Barbara had written these cruel­ties from jealousy, and that Serge was guiltless. Indeed, after the first unhappiness, he would have shown Barbara the difference he saw between her and Jonathan. And she wasn’t a woman to put up with that. Overseer of relations between the two boys, there was plenty she could do to disturb them.

  But if she was telling Jonathan that Serge detested him, what was she telling Serge? That could be guessed without difficulty:

  Jonathan has written to me that you were impossible at his place, and he doesn’t want to see you again. There’s no point you telling me your little stories, he just doesn’t seem to agree with them…

  The obvious solution, to see Serge again, would do no good at all.

  If they met, and assured each other of their friendship, what would they do then? Barbara was making it clear she had no intention of sharing the child. Their war against her was lost in advance. Barbara would become overtly hostile, forbid them to see each other again, send Jonathan away. There would be nothing but more suffering again for Serge and for himself.

  Simple prudence advised him rather that he should remain on good terms with her and seem not to care very much for the child. Jonathan didn’t know what less unhappy future might be safeguarded by such a course of action. But if he were to go to Paris, if the child should come out forcefully in his favour, in his frank and unflinching fashion, then everything would definitely be endangered.

  It would be impossible to inflict on Serge the dramas flowing from a face-to-face struggle with Barbara. Impossible to see him without her knowing. Impossible even to write to him directly. There was nothing for Jonathan to do but to sit back and wait.

  Then he began to ask himself whether, at bottom, Barbara hadn’t written him the truth. Perhaps Serge had complained.

  Jonathan thought again about the events of the summer. It was true that his impression of happiness and absolute agree­ment between the two of them rested on nothing that could be expressed. Insignificant gestures, fragments of sentences, tiny pleasures. He knew nothing about Serge. He had rejected the usual ways of listening, judging, loving and accompany­ing a child; he had relied on a hundred nameless things, denied by adults and forgotten by children. So it could all be imaginary; would someone else have seen and understood what he thought he had believed and understood? There had been nothing, nothing. A few ideas too sweet in the brain of a man half-mad.

  Serge had seemed to be happy, but kids seem happy any­where, even between two tyrants and two blows. He was pleased with everything, but children get used to anything. He liked to make love, but he hadn’t the r
ight, it was only the false pleasure of an uneducated little animal, a desire which should have been restrained and disciplined, not welcomed and shared. And anyway, children preferred to sleep.

  That was their friendship, described by anyone else; so that was the truth.

  As he continued to torment himself, Jonathan thought too that the child could have had a deeper reason to disown him, once he had got back to Paris. For his life with Jonathan had made him very different from what normal people expected a little boy to be. No child could bear to find himself a stranger amongst the people he is obliged to live with. It was an infe­riority, a misfortune. In a world of dog eat dog, to respect a child is to pervert him; to encourage in him his fugitive humanity is to change him into a monster his parents, his friends and his school will no longer recognise. Serge must have felt the first painful consequences of this; he wouldn t have had a friendly reception, and the feeling would be mutual. He was no longer of the same kind. He was suffering. And it was because of Jonathan. Now, if he wanted to save himself, he would have to go back on his tracks, take his place again amongst the dogs and bark in the same way. Otherwise, he was too weak, and too alone.

  A capitulation or dishonour? Certainly not. To tell the truth, for three or four months Serge had suffered the danger­ous and promiscuous attentions of a neurotic; and then his own good health had come out on top, under the benign influence of the mother, and the child was returning to equilibrium, readapting to the norm. This language wasn’ t Jonathan’s?