15
In London, things had been different. He and Emma had both been strangers. Their status was clear: they were tolerated. Everything was allowed, because no matter what they did, there was no question of integrating. Tristan had stopped going to class rather quickly. They had to make money to support themselves. Emma’s salary wasn’t enough. He was eighteen years old. Everything in his life was happening too fast. He felt like someone had sped up the wheel of time and his existence was playing out in fast-forward.
This disturbance dated precisely back to his mother’s death, which happened the day after the last test for the baccalauréat. He had immediately received a letter from the person she used to call “our benefactor,” with a hint of mockery in her voice. The prefect (was that really his job? was it a nickname?) was watching over them. The opera tickets, for example, had been his gift.
He was the one who took care of the funeral. Ashes spread in the Memorial Garden.
“Benedetti’s Schumann,” he whispered in Tristan’s ear. “So beautiful. A must.”
So sad, thought Tristan. Gloomy. Sinister. Mama’s death wasn’t like that. Mama’s death was “Summertime” by Janis Joplin.
The pale rain drew awkward arabesques on the ground.
“Does the young man wish to scatter the ashes himself?” asked the funeral home attendant, a thirtysome-thing man who spoke with a lisp and was exhibiting excessive politeness.
I’ve carried her so often, thought Tristan.
The urn was heavy; this wasn’t her, this dense mass, this opaque matter. He would’ve loved to tell the mortician and the prefect—the only two witnesses to the scene—about the particular lightness that had taken over his mother’s body in the last days. A twig, a leaf, the seedlings of a dandelion, no more mass, a body that let light filter through, a strainer, a wire fence, a cheesecloth. She had become immaterial and translucent. Only her laugh still had some flesh to it.
Of the days, weeks, and months that follow, almost nothing remains. The sounds of feet, of boxes, the smell of cardboard. Tristan obeys the orders he receives by phone, by mail. He spends the summer near Bordeaux. Helps with the grape harvests. The owner of the vineyard is one of the prefect’s friends. Sometimes he invites Tristan to the winemakers’ table. Tristan refuses with a smile. Everyone is relieved (The kid’s just lost his mother, they whisper, shaking their heads). The other boys don’t speak to him. They smoke, bare-chested, at the top of the hillside, dazed by fatigue, by the sun, mentally recounting the money earned from breaking their backs.
Tristan picks up a fallen cigarette from between two vine shoots. He asks the least hostile of his colleagues for a light. He inhales. Mama!
He buys a pack of Dunhill Reds at the tabac in the village. The ashes, he thinks, I’ll never be finished scattering her ashes.
He reads a book he found among her things. He doesn’t remember slipping it in his suitcase. It’s a little volume with a sky-blue silk cover that fits in his pocket. During each break, in the morning while drinking his coffee, in the evening while eating dinner, and, later, in bed, he turns the pages. It’s his first time reading a book for himself. He’s intimidated. Mama always wanted him to read the newspaper. He would carry out the task in a loud, clear voice. She appreciated his diction, made comments, assured him that if he was well informed, he would have the means to steer his life in the right direction, to not allow himself to be cheated, to take control.
“Will we read the crime stories too?”
“We’ll read everything! It’s important to know what man is capable of. Rape, theft, murder—all that’s written in our DNA. Does that scare you?”
“No.”
And he would read all these sentences that stuck to the edges of his brain. It was the murmur of the world, of course, but he didn’t join in and never would.
The little blue book is very different; it has a special power. Up until now, the books he read (always for school, never for pleasure) would at best leave traces in his mind, inhabiting his memory. This story doesn’t force its way in. Quite the opposite—Tristan is the one who enters the paper, loses himself in it, dissolves in it. There are monsters, mermaids, beasts with a hundred eyes, chasms, animals that talk, enchanted rivers. It’s his domain. One second is all he needs. He opens to a page, no matter which one, and his eyes have hardly settled on the words before he’s swallowed up.
He doesn’t talk about it. What would he say? He doesn’t know if it’s normal. He realizes that his mother, in wanting to prepare him for the worst, neglected to teach him ordinary things.
At the end of the summer, he is driven to the airport in the prefect’s car. LONDON-HEATHROW blinks on a display board. He will stay with Mrs. Klimt, at Seven Sisters. He will receive a certain sum via money order every month. He will take classes at a language school: foundational courses. The year is taking shape before his eyes, scattered with constraints, novelties, rules. The prefect has prepared everything, written everything down.
“This notebook,” he says to Tristan while entrusting it to him, “is your vade mecum. Did you study Latin? Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say it’s like the Game of the Goose. If you follow each page to the letter, like moving your piece forward on the squares, I’ll come to your graduation ceremony in four years and we’ll celebrate at the Savoy. All the oysters and champagne you want.”
Tristan frowns. He doesn’t really know how to play the Game of the Goose, but he remembers one time in grade school when he had landed on jail and stayed there until the game was over.
Seven Sisters. In spite of his rudimentary English, Tristan knows what it means. How can this be the name of a metro station or a neighborhood? Who were the seven sisters, and how could he, an only child, get there? Over the course of his journey by train, then by subway, then by bus, he imagines seven girls with ash-blond hair, pale pink lips, freckles on pointed noses, long hands, and plump feet.
At each bus stop, he asks the driver if it’s the place where he should get off. The man, who is wearing a cap and has big tufts of red hair sprouting out of his ears, patiently shakes his head, until the moment when he finally nods, which Tristan takes as a sign of agreement, a silent benediction.
On the sidewalk, he consults the hand-drawn map on page 3 of the notebook. Turns it in one direction. In another. The clumps of grass growing between the cobblestones glisten in the sunlight. The sky above, sprinkled with little chubby clouds, is slowly turning pink.
“Excuse me, where the street?”
Tristan points to his map. He is talking to a woman wearing a scarf around her head, who puts her shopping bag on the ground, takes out her glasses, holds her chin in her hand, studies the drawing while coughing violently, looks right, left, smiles at Tristan, and gives him back his notebook without another word.
She walks away, slowly, without turning back around.
Tristan’s throat tightens. He doesn’t understand where he is, doesn’t speak English, doesn’t understand who these people are or where they’re going. No one knows he exists; no one cares about him. He could disappear. He feels so tiny that a crack in the road would be enough to swallow him up. He’s cold. He’s hungry. He’s tired. He needs to pee. He’s alone in the world.
Emma often tells him, “You’re alone. You can’t do anything about it. That’s what you know best. You’re at home in solitude.” Emma strings together expressions that all mean the same thing, like reproaches washing over him that she says again and again, as though waiting for him to ask her for forgiveness.
16
They look like two survivors of a volcanic eruption.
Their clothes are torn, covered in mud, their faces and hands powdered with soil.
They’re lying down, side by side, on the hill, regaining their breath.
Tristan feels like he’s achieved something, but this achievement is nothing compared to what awaits them.
After having gone back down into the tunnel, he widened the opening, went out again to
study the terrain, the slope that was going to welcome them. It was fine. Any steeper and they would slide to the bottom of the valley, whereas here, a sort of false flat, a terrace hanging over the vast basin of green grass, had been shaped by destiny.
Tristan seized Dumestre by the ankles and pulled, gently.
“Pull harder!” shouted Dumestre. “Faster! What the hell are you doing? I’m not made of glass. Besides, I can’t feel anything—I’m already broken. Hurry up! My mouth is full of dirt. It’s gonna collapse up there. I’m gonna piss myself. Dammit, kid, give a good tug!”
So, with all his might, supporting himself with his knees and his feet, Tristan grabbed Dumestre’s boots and braced himself at the mouth of the hole to pull his companion free.
He had hardly gotten him out when the gallery that had been sheltering them collapsed in on itself, with the groan of a dying animal.
Who’s going to speak now? What are they going to say to each other?
Tristan feels overcome with an incredible shyness.
“What time is it?” Dumestre asks softly.
Tristan looks at his watch. “Noon.”
“Noon? Shit, we’ve been here for hours. What the hell are they doing?”
They’re kicking the tires of the impenetrable Citroën, thinks Tristan. They’re cursing at each other, fighting, one shot rings out, then another. They’re killing each other.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe they had a hard time finding the road.”
“Undo my fly, kid. I don’t have hands or arms anymore. I need to piss.”
Ah, Tristan thinks. Of course. Undo his fly. He doesn’t have hands or arms, but…
Putting his weight on his elbow, he leans over Dumestre’s body, undoes his belt and the three buttons, and waits. For what exactly, he doesn’t know.
“You can’t do things halfway, dickhead. You think the cuckoo’s going to come out of the clock all by itself?”
Ah, Tristan thinks once more. Of course. The cuckoo.
With his eyes looking far, far toward the horizon, he forages in his disabled companion’s pants. His fingers don’t belong to him anymore. Rough cotton, soft jersey, smooth skin like a baby’s eyelid. There. That’s done, it wasn’t a big deal after all. He gently turns Dumestre’s body to the side so the man doesn’t wet himself, and, while listening to the solemn, ringing song of the hot stream on the wilted leaves, he watches the sky, which has suddenly changed color over the hill, there in the east, which overlooks and conceals the village.
Dumestre lets out a big, deep sigh and falls back with all his weight, disheveled, cuckoo still out.
“What the heck is that color?” says Tristan, looking at the sky.
From where they are, on their miraculous balcony, they can see the heavens sliced cleanly in two. Above their heads, it’s bright blue and a brilliant white sun; on the opposite side, just a few miles away, it’s iron gray dotted with black droplets, the light swallowed up by a rift, into which pours a muddled ink, suddenly stupefied by the starving grimace of a voltaic arc.
“The end of the world,” Dumestre declares in an indifferent voice.
Tristan thinks of Emma.
An arrow bursts from his distraught mind, planting itself at the entrance of their house. A shack foolishly perched, as though stunned, on a field, with no lightning rod on top. The roof is missing some shingles. The beams sag wearily, ashamed of the building’s ugliness. The doorframes are loose. There are so many drafts that, even in calm weather, a forgotten leaf can fly away on its own. Our haunted castle, they call it, laughing to ward off the fear that the house might collapse on them one day.
A dull, low roar, a furious belch, the lazy growl of a dragon awoken from his sleep makes the earth tremble.
“Six seconds,” says Dumestre. “Right on the village.”
“What’re you talking about?” Tristan asks.
“The storm,” Dumestre says in a weary voice, like an exasperated schoolteacher speaking to a dunce. “Six seconds between the lightning and the thunder. Light travels faster than sound. Didn’t they teach you anything in school? That shit you see over there is already falling on them. In a few minutes, if the wind direction doesn’t change, it’ll be on us.”
Tristan looks around. Down below, not the least bit of shelter. Upward is the hill, and above that, probably the forest, but from where he is, he can’t see anything but an abrupt, bare rise, a mound deformed by the recent collapse, probably filled with craters and cavities.
“The end of the world,” Dumestre repeats, and he laughs softly.
“I think…” hazards Tristan. “Well, I read somewhere… I heard that the thing to do in a thunderstorm is flatten yourself against the ground. That way you don’t attract lightning.”
“Well, as for me,” says Dumestre, “I don’t have a choice. Here I am, flat on the ground.”
“You still can’t feel anything?” Tristan asks, worried.
“Do up my fly, will ya?”
Tristan complies. Now it’s like he’s used to doing it. For some things, once is enough.
“What about your legs, your arms?” Tristan insists. “Still nothing?”
“At this point,” answers Dumestre, “what does it matter?”
“Try, at least. A finger, a toe?”
“Don’t panic, kid, I’m screwed,” Dumestre says, and he starts laughing like a madman, like a monster.
I won’t panic, thinks Tristan. At worst, we’ll be soaked. We’ll wait for it to pass. Thunderstorms never last long. It’s only water.
Water, thinks the rabbit. Lots of water knocking down unstable ground in one stroke. Water mixes with the earth, turns into mud, torrents of mud. A heavy brown avalanche carrying everything away with it. A thick river without a bed, overflowing, thirsting for speed; an unstoppable river that drags away everything—trees, houses, cars, men, animals.
“Tell me a story,” says Dumestre.
17
That’s strange, Tristan thinks. And as if it were an equation to solve, he mentally notes: an ailing body without strength, a desperate situation, the threat of death… I do what I’m told, I follow orders, I’m the nurse, the maid. But in one instance, it’s my mother, and in the other, Dumestre. In one instance, it’s a woman; in the other, a man.
Get me out of this, tell me a story, light a fire, light a cigarette, tell me I’m not going to die, find shelter. The situations are similar, but the impact is different, as if the voice giving the orders isn’t speaking to the same organ. One to the heart, the other to the brain. At the moment, Dumestre is like my father, older than me, bigger, more fearsome, quick-tempered, impatient. That’s a discovery. I feel as though by staying here alone with him, in the wilderness that’s decided to engulf us, I’ll finally have a taste of what a father is, seeing as I’ve never had one. I like it… and I don’t.
A father? asks the rabbit. What’s that?
It’s the male who got your mother pregnant.
Never saw him, the rabbit answers. Never heard of him.
There wasn’t a male figure around you or your mother while you were growing up?
No. What’s a father for?
Giving orders, teaching you the rules, Tristan says without thinking.
So he’s good for nothing, the rabbit replies. Where I come from, there are no rules. We don’t need them. Instinct, good luck, and bad luck are the three pillars of our miserable existence.
A father, Tristan thinks while watching Dumestre, trying to fully feel the harsh contact, the relationship’s suppressed violence.
“Tell me a story,” repeats Dumestre. “Like you would to your kid.”
“I don’t have children,” Tristan answers.
“I know,” says Dumestre. “So, like when you were a kid and your mother would tell you a story.”
“My mother?” Tristan says, and he bursts out laughing, doubles over, in tears, his belly aching.
“What about your mother?”
Tristan laughs even h
arder. He puts his hand in his gamebag, on the rabbit’s back, to try to calm down. Takes a breath, lets out little high-pitched cries.
“She’s dead,” he says finally. “A long time ago. I had just turned sixteen.”
“She couldn’t have been that old,” Dumestre remarks. “Was it an accident?”
“No.”
“Then what? How’d your mother die?”
And as if it were a fairy tale, a children’s story, Tristan begins: “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Astre.”
“That’s a pretty name,” interrupts Dumestre. “So that’s it, your mother’s name was Astre? Well, that’s a good start.”
“No, my mother’s name was Amandine.”
“Well then?” Dumestre protests.
“I’m starting from the end,” Tristan declares. “Sometimes it’s better, for suspense, to start from the end.”
18
Mrs. Klimt’s house smells like fried food and cloves. As soon as Tristan enters the front hall—painted a shade of bottle green and so dimly lit that he can hardly distinguish the outline of the woman who has just opened the door—his throat is seized with the nauseous aroma. A cascade of “wilshwarwer’nswishdilworn” beats down on him. It’s English. The language that Mrs. Klimt speaks and that he doesn’t understand. She turns on the light, takes his hands in hers, looks at him, takes a step back, as if to study him, and leans over to grab the handle of his suitcase.
“No, no, not touch. Très lourd!” he exclaims to spare the old lady from breaking her back.
She has blue eyes, white hair, high, rosy cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a pointy chin, and slightly protruding teeth. Tristan finds her very pretty, but he doesn’t know if it’s possible to think this, to think of an old lady as being pretty. The only one he knew was Grandma, and Grandma had dyed blond hair and wore lots of makeup and perfume. In the end, it was as if she no longer had an age or a face. Or a body. A mass of perfume. Rigidity and saturation.
Hunting Party Page 5
