When Jonathan Died

by Tony Duvert

  He had understood neither this orientation of his life, nor the violent enthusiasm which his work had aroused ever since his teenage years. At least he’d had reasons to paint and draw, even if he couldn’t imagine the reasons for the specta­tor’s enthusiasm. At present he no longer had any reason to do anything. His only present, his only future, was Serge, his brother.

  So, do anything at all to get the money.

  He wrote to the publisher who’d commissioned, and then rejected, the Sade illustrations. It wasn’t yet August; he re­ceived a favourable reply. Jonathan didn’t know the book he was meant to illustrate; it belonged to the realm of French literature, which he didn’t know at all well. He would have accepted in any event, if there hadn’t been a problem: he had demanded, if he were commissioned, a substantial down-payment — almost the whole cost of the work. The publisher, perhaps alarmed by his previous experience, had offered only a tiny advance. Jonathan, by a sort of reflex action hitherto nourished by his indifference to money, but now out of the question, refused the commission.

  He’d also written to his dealer, to find out the lie of the land. His reply was late, and described the terrible state of the market; recalled the large number of his paintings still unsold; suggested to Jonathan that he should produce a dozen small paintings, decorative, very clear and very simple, such as he had already produced two or three times before, which had been so well received. They could be sold pretty quickly, and in this case, the dealer would advance him thirty per cent of the total value. On top of the monthly payments, of course.

  The sum offered, though modest, was enough for Jonathan and made him happy. It would be enough to cover Serge’s stay. He did the six small canvasses in a week. Coldly, he repeated himself. The dealer was enchanted and sent the money. It was a little less than expected; the paintings, it seemed, should have been a little less small, so… Jonathan smiled as he saw this discount, which came to a few hundred francs: the rich have got their secrets.

  ‘They’ve found a little pool in the sand. There’s just one fish, and he’s sticking his head out. I wanted to give him arms, look, so he’s got arms. The fingers aren’t any good. It looks like a comb, to me. With teeth missing.

  ‘Afterwards I thought, those arms are stupid. So I put that on his head — I don’t know what it’s called but you use it to put candles in, with three lighted candles, that looks pretty! — to show it’s not real.

  ‘D’you really think it’s good? I do it just for fun, that! Sometimes I do proper drawings, but it takes too long. D’you remember the animals in Africa? Well, I did those in pencil, then went over them again after. Every day. A week at least! You know, you know when I do them, the drawings, I do them in my bedroom. ‘Cos Barbara, now, I’ve got a desk, she bought it forme. That was… it was the Easter holidays. But it’s my father who’s got money. My mother’s lazy. She doesn’t even paint any longer… You haven’t seen her, have you? She’s got thinner! She’s pretty now, I think.

  ‘You know, Jonathan,’ and here Serge’s voice became very low and hesitant, ‘…if you were married to her instead of my father.’

  ‘We’ll make a big garden again! Like all the flowers you had before. I’ve got the stones from avocados, because Barbara eats them. D’you know what you do? You stick matches in, three of them, just like that, it makes it stand, in a glass, because you put some water in a glass, and then after, the top end, it opens up, it cracks, and then the shoot comes out. And then there are leaves. Then it dies, p’raps that’s not very good, that. Do you know what to do?’

  ‘No, I don’t eat them.’

  ‘I don’t either. They’re bitter. It’s like artichokes. I don’t like artichokes. Have you seen your flies?’

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’

  ‘That’s what. That, that, that!’

  ‘You see, the little one waves when he sees the fish. I show them saying hello to the captain, well, the other one. There they are. They’re shaking hands. You have to know, because doing hands is hard. Can you show me how to do them…?

  ‘Here, there’s everything. It’s funny. I’m not going to tell you, you can see for yourself.’

  Serge knew perfectly well that Jonathan and his mother didn’t get on together. His remark about their being married was not a reproach. He hadn’ t delayed in talking to Jonathan about the subject that preoccupied him above all: why Jonathan hadn’t been to see him, hadn’t even written to him for the past two years. This was the real reproach.

  But there had been no misunderstanding. Jonathan had Barbara’s letters and showed them to the boy. Now Serge could read and understand; and despite the gentleness and delicacy of his ten years, he hadn’t changed his character. When he saw what opinions his mother had ascribed to him, and with what lies she had deceived Jonathan, he blushed all over, tore up the letter in his hand as if twisting someone’s neck, burst out in tears, knocked over the chairs and showered the cupboard with kicks. But he said nothing, not even an insult; then shyly, Jonathan spoke, because the content of the letters didn’t explain everything. It was the first time that Jonathan had confided in the child.

  But Serge knew all that.

  ‘That doesn’t carry on either. They got on my nerves, both of them. I wanted to draw a house. So I drew yours. Of course! D’you think you can recognise it? You know, I remembered all the mice, so I’ve put them all over the place. There’s a few too many, more than you need. And I did the little island. You remember. Hey, I’ll make another one, tomorrow! But a big one!

  ‘What would be good is a whole river, eh, we could start at the rubbish-tip and go all the way to the door. It’d need lots of water. If you put cement, the water stays. Could we do that, put some cement?

  ‘And look! D’you see there? I’m at the door! I’ve got my bottom behind! I’m going into the kitchen! It’s Madame Morand took my underpants!… No, really, nobody goes there at all?’

  In fact, after she died, people did come, now and again, to look at the old woman’s house. As these visitors were never the same, Jonathan had concluded that the house was for sale. On whose behalf?

  Nothing had changed; or rather, things were looking bet­ter. Up above, on the attic floor, a window had opened; and the wind, blowing it about, had shattered the panes. In the garden there grew isolated vegetables, disorganised and haggard, with neither the comfortable air of vegetables well looked after, nor the free and simple attitude of wild plants. The paths were overgrown with scarlet pimpernel and dan­delion. Jonathan’s bindweed, crossing the fence, had covered one of the beds. The gooseberry bush had produced its big opaque fruits which burst in the mouth; the fruit on the trees was maggoty.

  If he were rich, Jonathan would willingly have bought the house — and the one he rented. He would have left the fence, and kept the old woman’s things intact, so as to have a strange place to discover. Unfortunately, they had already taken away the linen, the crockery, her knick-knacks, the best was gone.

  ‘There was one thing I shouldn’t have done, but I’ll tell you just the same. I went to the supermarket near us, near my mother’s, where they go, I’m always running messages. I bought a litre of wine.

  ‘I drank the whole litre. I vomited it all up after. Later, I took it down to the bin, we haven’t got a rubbish-chute.

  ‘It was just to try. To start with it was nice. But afterwards it was no good. It was too much, eh, a litre. I never drink any.

  I never tried again. It makes you feel too sick. Just the same, the beginning!… Just one glass! A little little glass! ‘Cos I was sad, I was more sad afterwards. It must be true what they say. You don’t think about anything after. Have you ever done that?

  ‘Now I won’t go back home. Never. Never!

  ‘No, I know we can’t.

  ‘You know something I read! It was in the paper. It was a boy, he killed someone. It was his father’s gun. They didn’t do anything to him. I’m telling you that, see…

  ‘Only, afterwards, they don’t let yo
u go where you want. It’s not worth it. Otherwise, I could.’ Jonathan was bored by the swimming in town. They had to try the canoe, too. It was nice to see Serge naked, or almost, among all these people. It was nice to see him messing around. It was nice to swim with him. What was unbearable, all this time, was to be normal.

  ‘It’s a big fat bottom. How do I know it’s fat? Just the same, it’s really funny, a big bottom!’ (Noise of repeated farts.)

  ‘Now it’s not your house any longer. It’s to show lots of aeroplanes. They make red white and blue smoke. They’re going really fast. You can see the head inside.

  ‘But look, the story is starting again. That one first of all, perhaps you’ve already seen it? You see, it’s in the zoo, they’re cutting their tusks. You know, you take bread, him, he’s very small but he can see everything. He really can see you! So he comes along with his big thing, he takes it off you, it’s like a dog when it licks you — but it’s really quick. Elephants are really good!

  ‘Haven’t they got any here? Not in a town over there? That’s a pity.

  ‘At home, you could have little ones. Oh little ones, eh! As big as that though! A big cow! I’ve seen little ones, I have. They haven’t got eyelashes.’

  Serge really is very big. Children of ten are thought of as larvae with dead brains; and many of them, in fact, are even worse. But Serge, Serge indeed had resisted.

  Which made him already familiar with unhappiness. This surprised Jonathan, and hurt him. While two years before he had loved a little boy who had seemed a stranger, almost, to the suffering of the world, now he had to deal with someone like himself: a man of ten years old, who lived and knew the same things as Jonathan; but who believed that to be with Jonathan was to save himself from this knowledge, to recover from it, to make of it an ordinary nightmare, from which you free yourself in the morning with a laugh. For Serge, it was still possible for the world to be like the people one likes, and not like the people who rule.

  Jonathan knew this wasn’t true. He didn’t say so. And this was the one silence that still stood between them.

  ‘There are five of them, in fact. If you count the bottoms. Each one is a different colour. They’re eating really big flowers. There must be flowers like that, somewhere. You can use them for an umbrella.

  ‘It’s in pictures you see them.

  ‘And look! there’s the water coming back again. They get out of it, look at them climbing up. It’s a ladder made of elephants. The one on the bottom has got his trunk up in the air so he can breathe, and a periscope. He mustn’t drown! I haven’t put the water too high.

  ‘But it’s a real problem for them, just the same. Now look! The one on top is doing like they do in the cartoons, he’s using his ears to fly! It’s not terribly good, you have to explain. The others see that, they say, oh, that’s a good idea! And they go. It all works out alright. And I put the water all the way up to the top. Aah!’

  After a month of this new life, Serge had asked if it wasn’t costing too much. That was the time, too, when they began, with a hundred hesitations, to talk about the autumn. They really must… must what? What could they do? How could they keep them away. How could they stay together?

  ‘We mustn’t say anything to them,’ Serge concluded, but this was a precaution, not a solution.

  As for Jonathan, he already thought the game was up; he dreamed the impossible; he said nothing.

  ‘Yes! It’s the rocket from before. It’s big, to hold five elephants.

  Or perhaps they’ve shrunk. Like that, it’s ordinary.

  ‘They’re in the sky again. The stars are different, it’s the night. You know my father’s got binoculars, really big ones! I borrowed them, if you stand at the window, and you look at the moon, if you use the binoculars you can see everything up there! The big blue patches. It’s beautiful. If it’s a quarter moon you can’t see a lot. But it’s really beautiful!

  ‘I saw the photos of when they went up there. It doesn’t look very good, from close up. But there were photos of rocks, coloured ones. They’re a secret, you can’t buy them. The rocks.

  ‘I would have liked to have some as well. It doesn’t matter, I put in all the sky. The real one, I told you.

  ‘That one, well. He’s going for a walk. It’s a sea-snake. But he’s going for a walk in the sky. He must have thought of it suddenly. He’s laughing. He’s not nasty. But they’re fright­ened, sitting there on the rocket. He’s big!

  ‘I wanted to make them say “How d’you do?” but I didn’t want to give the snake arms like the fish. What would have been good would have been for him to wag his tail, like a dog, but I don’t know how to draw that!

  ‘So he’s dead too, the dog. It didn’t hurt?

  ‘When you die in the ordinary way, d’you think it hurts? I wouldn’t like that, not really. So, you go to sleep? Is it like going to sleep?

  ‘But if you kill someone, then it hurts them just the same? Can they feel it? With a gun, say?… And with the guillotine? In America they kill people with gas. They say it takes ten minutes. Or what about the electric chair then! That must be strange. It’s funny, electricity, it tickles. Have you ever tried, with a battery?

  ‘It has to be a new one. Not the round ones for torches. There are two things sticking out like that. You’ve got to touch them both at the same time. With your tongue!

  ‘If we had a torch we could go for a walk during the night.’ Serge didn’t like humorous cartoons so much. He preferred little black and white adventure comics, with their often hide­ous covers. He read Satana, Buffalo Bill, Harry Sprint, Colt, Mystery Woman, Atomic, Strike Force, Tom Berry, Brik, Jingo, Fantastic, Crime Stories, Hallucination, Zara the Vampire, Thrills, Posse, It was midnight…, Anticipation, Eclipse, Demon, X 12, Genius, Avenger, Wolfpack, Zorro, Don Z and countless others, which he chose according to the picture on the cover, and then a quick flick through. It was difficult, this, he explained. First of all you had to look inside to make sure you hadn’t read it already, but not look too much, so as not to read ahead and lose any of the surprise. The solution was to squint a bit. This made the pictures fuzzy, and if, through this fog, he recog­nised some detail, he would take a proper look, worry about reading too much, and then cry out, relieved:

  ‘No, I’ve already got it!’

  For he took an incomparable pleasure, in bed in the eve­ning, in deflowering a really promising comic book, com­pletely untouched. It would make him forget even Jonathan, and he would go to bed at sunset.

  Not having anything to read, though, did not leave him idle. He had dozens of ways of occupying himself after the evening meal. Comics were rather the ritual close of a day spent in town, when he would come home, worn out with swimming, rowing, capering about, gossiping and the sun, and he would treat himself, as soon as the meal was over, by going to bed, where, with a good light, and cosily tucked in with a packet of biscuits and a glass of iced lemonade within hand’s reach, he could make a start on the new comics they had brought back with them. This ritual required, finally, that everything downstairs should be carefully tidied away, and that the little bed should have been made (the least wrinkle in the sheet under his bottom, the tiniest crumb of biscuit, and everything would be spoilt), and that Jonathan, in the other bed, should be lying down too, reading quietly, with himself and his bedding properly in order.

  So Jonathan pretended to read. In fact, he couldn’ t take his eyes away from the child; he was much happier to look at him here than at the swimming pool; he admired him; he was overcome by a warm and tender passion; it was his greatest happiness.

  Their beds were at right angles to each other and formed a T, its two strokes separated by a gap a yard wide. Jonathan had the vertical; his head touched the far wall, his feet were towards Serge, ensconced on the other bar of the T, which lay along the opposite wall with the head in the left hand corner.

  In this corner, white pillows at his back, there sat the papy-rivorous inhabitant Jonathan liked to watch, as he sat hig
h upon his own island.

  He made many quick sketches, without saying anything about it. He didn’t show these portraits to the boy, and he hid the sheets in a large book he used to draw in. Over there on the island of the comic books, things were happening. Serge was munching biscuits; the silence was such that one could hear the sound of biscuits being crushed between the teeth, a sound like that of a geological event, slow, massive, regular and subterranean. For Jonathan, this discreet accompaniment to the comics was a magic song which charmed his ear and made the pencil drop from his fingers. Without the calm, the particular resonance of evening, the granular, sandy murmur of biscuit being ground up without benefit of saliva would have been inaudible; it belonged to twilight; its mysterious occurrence at this furtive hour was amongst the rarest of zoological phenomena, only ever observed by naturalists of the greatest patience and power of attention, at the end of long tropic journeys, at the hour when the monkeys have ceased to cry and the predators of the night have not yet begun to prowl.

  Serge spent more time removing the sticky paste from his teeth with his little finger than in actually eating the biscuits themselves. It was difficult to decide which of these two ac­tivities he preferred. The sounds of mouth, tongue and throat which accompanied this cleaning of the teeth and gums were themselves not in the least exotic; they were pleasantly or­ganic, charming and human, and they produced an irresist­ible desire to share in that mouth’s tea-time treat.