When Jonathan Died

by Tony Duvert

  Precisely.

  On other days again, Jonathan refused to believe the boy would have given him up — even if he’d felt suddenly different and hated. Serge was strong. Barbara had lied. The child had complained not about Jonathan, but about being snatched away from the young artist. Just now he was strug­gling with these people and he was suffering. He was still one of those stubborn boys against whom the nursery-school she-monkeys and school-master gorillas wear out in vain their science, their love, their inquisitions, their violence, their ruses, their extortions and their bad temper. There’s only one child in a thousand that will resist them, one in a thousand who fights not to become like them: but Serge was certainly that one.

  Then once again Jonathan accused himself of giving way to illusion. What could it mean, this division between a bestial humanity and some few rebels all too human? Where was this miraculous Serge he had invented? And why anyway should he be interested in Jonathan? What was the evidence? The proof? And even if it were true, what difference did it make?

  Jonathan couldn’t think. Even if he’d been able to, he couldn’t have proved anything. A lost cause: the end of the matter.

  Jonathan stayed locked away at home, made no reply to Barbara’s letters. He drank, he wept, he died alive.

  The old woman next door died the same winter. Jonathan was there. He’d buried the dog, and he’d felt the woman would follow soon. There is a moment when loneliness beyond all sadness gives such an impression of rocky hardness, of anaes­thesia, of nakedness unashamed, that one knows death isn’t far away.

  When the old woman fell ill, he knew; the two houses were too close together for the two hermits not to notice each other. After two days of not seeing her go out, he decided to knock on the door, already thinking he would find her dead.

  There was no reply. The door wasn’t locked. He went in. There was no fire in the house. He found the woman in bed. There was a terrible smell in the room. The old woman had shitted and pissed herself; she seemed to be in a coma; she was snoring.

  Her face was green and yellow, vividly coloured. Her mouth gaped open, she still had a few teeth.

  Jonathan wanted to let her die. He rejected the idea, out of cowardice, and quickly made his way to the village. You could make a telephone call at the grocer’s (the nearest doctor was in the nearby town).

  In the shop, Jonathan changed his mind. He bought ham, wine, butter and cheese and walked home quietly without saying anything to anyone.

  ‘I haven t the right to do it to her,’ he said to himself, simply.

  He went to watch at her bedside, with his wine and his sandwiches. He felt better. He thought of Serge without pain. Wearing plenty of clothes, wrapped up in a scarf, a good glass of wine at his side, he sat at the head of the bed in a tall armchair of plum-coloured velvet, listening to the old woman snoring. It is comforting to see them die, people who mean nothing to you; you see yourself, you get used to it.

  ‘Ah, a lovely evening,’ murmured Jonathan, surprised to feel so peaceful. Clearly, things are never what people say they are: neither death nor children.

  ‘They really are idiots, real bastards!’ Jonathan said, smil­ing as he repeated Serge’s words to himself. Surely the boy would have liked to be here. Perhaps he could have spoken to the dying woman, he’d talked with rabbits.

  Because of the smell, Jonathan had opened the window a little. And this smell, now dissipated, had left no more than a scent of vomit, of bile, of empty guts.

  Jonathan left the room to eat, but not to drink.

  He made a fire in a little coal stove. He’d needed some paper, and had discovered some large sheets of writing-paper with blue lines, already folded in four to fit into an envelope. With a ball-point pen, he started to draw what he saw. It was curiosity, rather than weakness of memory — curiosity for a kind of image he had never drawn.

  Towards the middle of the night, he went home to sleep. He was drunk and he slept badly.

  He woke at mid-day with a heavy head. His first thoughts were of the old woman. This got him going again, after a brief bout of nausea. He went to the house next door.

  The smell in the room had changed. It had become very fetid, but fainter, sharp, a bit acidic, like the smell of babies’ nappies. The woman breathed without snoring. Her cheeks were cold and slack, her eyes still closed; a bluish scalp could be seen through the brushed back hair.

  ‘Oh, my pretty one,’ sighed Jonathan, ‘you’re so tired. Really tired! But I like you. People are almost lovable when there’s almost no one left inside. I really love you, it’s no lie! Look, I’ll comb your hair.’

  He watched over her until the evening, then went away again, without having had anything to drink.

  It was only the next morning he found her dead. He wasn’t sure, first of all. He tried the pulse, listened at the head and at the breast.

  Her death had been agitated; the sheets were thrown back, a naked foot stuck out, a hand grasped at the mattress, one eyelid was a little open, showing the white of the eye, the mouth seemed frozen in the middle of a shout, or a word, and the hair made damp rats’ tails with the sweat.

  This time, Jonathan went to make the telephone call.

  When they had taken the body away, and Jonathan knew it had been buried in the cemetery, right on the other side of the village, he became frightened of death, naively, when night fell, the long winter night.

  He was alarmed by the slightest movement of the curtains; and if when he put the light on at home he caught sight of the shadow of his jacket or raincoat, hanging on the back of a chair, he was overcome by terror, as if he’d actually seen her, coming for him. She walked through the gardens, pushed at his gate, prowled among the weeds, stood upright and unmoving in the middle of the woods, among the black branches. Her hair was wild, her eyes bulged, her malicious mouth half opened to show the decaying teeth, a strong blue bony hand rested on her stick. She was a creature of wind and shadow — but she came into Jonathan’s house, broad and heavy, and walked slowly about the ground-floor rooms when the boy had gone to bed.

  But Jonathan was without superstition or belief and he had neither god nor soul. What haunted him was entirely human; he could always joke about it to himself, and it would always come back. In some inexplicable way, this unreasoning fear did him good.

  He put a bolt again on the bedroom door and a lock on the shutters. When he tried to sleep, with the lamp out, he became distressed, sensing a patient presence which waited only for him to sleep before approaching; he would put the light on, look round the room, put the light out, and then do the same again, several times. During the night he woke up suddenly, alarmed, covered in sweat, searching desperately for the switch of the lamp, not finding it, stretching his hand further out, desperately afraid of finding someone there, finding the switch, but it wouldn’t work, trying again, pressing it ten times, then feeling along the wall, finding the switch for the ceiling light, that didn’t work either, he was in the dark, unable to breathe, and the old woman was coming towards him, he could feel her there, cold and stinking. She reached the bed. He shouted out.

  He woke up from the dream straight away, put on the lamp, turned over his soaking pillow.

  Slowly his pulse and breathing returned to normal. The horror of the dream had worked off his anxiety, and he made fun of himself, looked confidently about the room. But he wouldn’t have gone downstairs to get a drink of water.

  He thought of Serge lying at his side in the calmest and brightest of houses. It couldn’t have been this one. It couldn’t have become this trap, this nightmare, in so few months. Serge’s place was there on the left: a very small space, you couldn’t imagine that someone had slept there, a complete body, with nothing missing at all — and a child who was all over the place. Jonathan had never seen Serge as small, and he could have sworn in good faith that they were the same size. Serge was big, really big, his face was at the same level as his own, he had to lift his arm to put it round his neck, he didn’t have
to bend down to see him just as easily as anyone else. But this space on the left hardly offered room for two cats to lie down in. Where was he?

  The images of the child faded away. Anxious again, Jon­athan listened out and heard the noises of the house. Wher­ever it was empty and without light, it had been invaded by creatures of the night. They were looking for something. You don’t make these grating sounds, these bumps and sudden creaks when you’re just going quietly about your business. They were looking for him, patiently, step by step; they were looking everywhere, as if Jonathan could as easily have hidden himself in a drawer or a sideboard, or under the furniture, as inside his bolted bedroom. They lengthily exam­ined every trace of his life, every evidence that he was there. Darkness doesn’t trouble the dead.

  Since he longer had a neighbour, Jonathan hadn’t been coping very well with the isolation of the house. The nearest other house was a good half-mile away, possibly more. With­out a human world around, his walls became spongy, perme­able; the whole countryside, the whole night came through them and took hold of Jonathan, last living creature on a devastated planet.

  He wasn’t frightened of anything during the day. The house next door was locked, but you could get into the garden. He went there often. After the funeral, old women had taken the rabbits and chickens away; Jonathan had even given them Serge’s rabbit, big and fat by now, ready to eat. The fierceness of this sacrifice, indeed this separation, for he had become very fond of the beast, had brought him a bitter pleasure, as if he had returned to the women the last living part of Serge which yet remained, to be destroyed in the same way.

  The old women had also pulled up the vegetables that remained in the ground, the hardy ones that could put up with frost: carrots, turnips, celery, a few leeks.

  Jonathan was interested by the empty rabbit-hutch: it re­tained the sweet, downy warmth of the little animals it had sheltered. Their throats weren’t cut; the old women hung them up by their ears and took their eyes out with two finger­nails into the orbit, or with the help of a small kitchen knife. The animal would squeak for a long time; the old women would chat.

  Further on, near a dead cherry-tree, its trunk split open and powdery, there was the grave where Jonathan had buried the dog. When he was a little boy he’d buried the dead birds he found, and then he dug them up a few days later to have a look. He’d imagined vaguely that the soil protected from decay. He’d discovered a damp round mass, sticky feathers falling away all by themselves, opened and gaping full of worms. He remembered two kinds: the first, ivory-coloured, thick as cooked vermicelli, not very numerous, independent, calm enough; the others, threadlike, pure white, all wriggling at an incredible speed, flickering like watered silk; which seemed to represent a greater volume of flesh than the bird itself had contained. Worms fed on dogs and humans,ought to be less thin and less repugnant than those. Jonathan had a pressing desire to use the spade to uncover a little the corpse of the black dog. He could imagine it, but without the unpleasant details which so tormented him. The head must have been towards this side of the tree. No; he gave up.

  No one came along this way now. In the middle of the autumn, though, a young boy had made the metal gate ring, striking it with an old piece of iron, and he’d asked Jonathan whether Serge was there. Jonathan explained that Serge had gone back to Paris.

  ‘Ah, I knew him, you see,’ said the child (whom Jonathan himself had never seen before). `So he’s not here any longer?’ he asked, unable to make up his mind to go.

  ‘No, he’s not here.’

  ‘Is he coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jonathan, ‘I don’t think so, no.’ ‘Not at all?’

  Then the child had shut the gate and gone down the lane. Since this distant visit, there had been a brutal silence over this part of the countryside, the silence of abandoned places, of the empty islands of the Arctic, with their greenish skies, dizzy­ing lichen-covered cliffs, where unreal birds, wailing, swoop and dive.

  Instead of the pictures of monkeys that people inspired in him, Jonathan made pictures of corpses. He was so taken by this work that he went up to Paris to do a series of etchings. He didn’t use anyone else to engrave from his drawings, and even abandoned them himself, placidly improvising his rage in the varnish of the plate.

  These were the first figurative works he dared show. Their fury was thought pleasing; he was forgiven what might have been considered an artistic regression; he was congratulated. The etchings were a success and rapidly disappeared into the portfolios of small investors.

  During this visit to Paris, Jonathan made up his mind, one evening when he was drunk, to go and knock at Barbara’s door. The arguments he’d rehearsed to himself against such a visit no longer worked when he was so close to the place where Serge was living.

  ‘I really must try. Afterwards, we’ll just have to see.’

  Luckily or unluckily, there was no reply. He scribbled a note to say he’d been round, folded it, wrote Serge’s name on it and slipped it under the door.

  But that very night, sobered-up and in despair, he left on the train. He couldn’t find one for his own town, so took one that would take him fairly near, stepped down into an un­known town, frosty and fast asleep, and in the morning he reached his own on a local train. He was over-excited, and he looked at children with a dangerous expression. He had to wait until the afternoon to get the bus back to the village. He blamed himself for having gone to Barbara’s and left the note. He’d been wrong to drink.

  His mood became even blacker. Two days out of three, now, he’d tear up his letters without opening them, murmur­ing to himself: ‘So they think they’ll write to me, do they. Bastards.’

  All that spring, his behaviour became worse. He drank more and more, sat about the whole day without working; he talked to himself and was subject to sudden fits of fury, which he worked off on whatever lay to hand.

  Because of the success of the etchings, in March he was asked to illustrate an edition of de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine. It was an important commission and very well paid. This edition, bound and finished in luxurious fashion, was for private sale only; he would have a completely free hand. For a long time the book had been a schoolboy purchase, and grist to the rhetorical mill of every kind of pedant; this secret edition would give it back its proper place.

  Jonathan threw himself into the work. He masturbated as much in drawing as Sade must have done in writing it, and each illustration, imagined and executed without the slightest sign of effort, cost him volleys of spunk. He ate better, almost drank less and slept without nightmares. He laughed deri­sively when he thought how he owed the great ease and force with which he produced these images to long years of secret practice devoted to the sweetest of childish faces and the most delicate of bodies. He hadn’t imagined then that it would end up like this.

  When summer came, he’d finished his hundred and four­teen engravings.

  They were admired by the publisher, but rejected. Jonathan (he explained) had put too much emphasis on scenes of torture and pederasty. There weren’t enough women to be seen; and again, what the artist had really gone to town on was caricaturing the procuresses and naked old women. Finally, the whole thing was far too violent. The publisher, if he’d any sense of humour, or had just been stupid, could simply have told Jonathan: ‘Ugh! You’d think it was de Sade.’

  Instead he said that these volumes were to be sold to impor­tant people, to doctors, members of parliament, and other moneyed and honourable fathers of families, who wouldn’t be best pleased by this excess of fairies, fuckers, tortures and shit. There should have been nice clean pretty girls, plenty of female bottoms, straightforward fucking, spanking without injuries, pretty little tears, little girls, boudoirs, lechery, and a few horror-scenes, not too detailed, just for atmosphere: but not this, which brought out the nastiest aspects of the work. Sade’s novels were neither handbooks to dissection, nor reports from Auschwitz; and their humour…

  Jonathan took
back his drawings without argument. His dealer accepted them just as they were. There was an unpub­licised and limited printing, just thirty sets which went so quickly and at so high a price that Jonathan wouldn’t have to produce another canvas all year. This was just as well, as he didn’t want to paint a single one.

  He was also asked to produce other drawings of the same kind, for various elegant and smutty books, all spanking and black leather. Jonathan refused. He had, moreover, exhausted that side of himself. Drawing adults occupied in cutting chil­dren up had made up for his inability to explain that the morality of family and school, quite apart from any physical violence, was nothing but the same thing. He felt freed from his pain. As for the erotic potential of the images, or of making them rather, he no longer experienced it. He was back in a soft and lazy humour.

  These sets of prints, however, did nothing for his reputa­tion. They were talked about rather more than they were seen — in the same way as he was spoken about without anyone actually seeing him. His withdrawal, far from those who wished him well, was shocking and offensive. The little groups of the bored, the failed, the parasites, whose profes­sion it is to recognise or deny the talent of others, according to the changing fashions, would not tolerate such neglect. You have to flatter, to pay court, do little kindnesses. Jonathan’s indifference was seen as a sign of arrogance and contempt.

  And so, without doing or saying anything, Jonathan did himself more harm than if he’d lived amid the manoeuvres and the tittle-tattle. He was suspect. His drawings, admired for a short time, became the topic of gossip and slander.

  The more grotesque the calumny, the more excessive its insinuations, the more effective it is. They said you’d have to be very strange to draw such scenes (which were considered to have skewed the text and gone beyond it). Basically, Jonathan had disappeared because he had some unfortunate secret to hide.