The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  Isabelle came back to class only an hour or two each week, like a visitor, a woollen shawl over her shoulders, her pallor phosphorescent before the window. Then she was absent for a few weeks. Jean Calmet learnt from his students that she was growing thinner and thinner and that, once again, she had ganglions showing very plainly under her collarbones. Each day, after school, a little group of classmates went to see her in her small room in Sauvabelin; they tried to keep up a cheerful front but were terrified. She was not in bed. She sketched frenziedly, she wrote poems; fatigue seemed to have left her once and for all. Her parents did not disturb the teenagers: the father, a schoolmaster at the other Gymnase, smiled enigmatically in the hall. The mother brought them Coca-Cola and rolls, then disappeared at the back of the apartment.

  Now Isabelle weighed no more than seventy-seven pounds. She came back again.

  “I don’t want to die a virgin,” she told her friends.

  She chose Marc, and they made love at the shore of the lake, hidden in the reeds, on a sleeping bag brought by Marc, one autumn night when the swans, the coots, the ducks answered one another on the misty water until dawn before the pink banks. Marc is handsome. He has a large nose, a lock of hair that crosses his brows. A boy of scarves and sweaters, who etches portraits of Isabelle on copper from which he makes prints for a few classmates, who sketches Isabelle in the nude before forests, who weaves purple and white tapestries. She chose Marc. She made love three or four times.

  The necklace of ganglions showed on her neck horribly, an adornment of eternity. “We can’t operate on them,” the doctors said. She did not come to school at all any more.

  When she weighed seventy-five pounds (that was two weeks before her death) she organized an outing to Crécy, a village on the Broye, hung on an amphitheatre of hills. Why Crécy? Her grandmother had a farm there. A small legacy. Childhood vacations. Harvest times. The cold spring at dawn after the first nocturnal stroll with a married soldier, just before her Communion, at fifteen and a half, he playfully threatens to splash you, all of a sudden he scoops up water in his hand, he pushes you back against the stone basin, smacks you with icy water and kisses you violently: his mouth – which still smells of wine and his cigar – thrusts a long tongue into your mouth, which takes away your breath and gathers your saliva right to the back of the antrum and the interstices of the teeth. You are fifteen and a half. Fresh young hair curling in your panties. Having your period for three years now – you are still not used to it. And your whole life ahead of you because you never dreamt that you would die at seventeen, the lord’s angel, hypostasis of seventy-three pounds, now, little martyr tortured by the Auschwitz of God.

  Isabelle was the one who led the expedition. They had their cameras. Marc was there, and Jacques, Eugénie, Anna, Alain and the Turk, Surène. They took the bus as far as Moudon, and from there they walked to Crécy, where they went straight to the cemetery without stopping at the café or the church, as Anna, who has a taste for the theatre, wanted them to marry Isabelle and Marc before the Lord’s Table. The cemetery of Crécy lies a few hundred yards from the village, gently sloping over the immense valley. It was the time of year when the grass sprouts bright green, when the buds sparkle on the branches and the tepid wind melts the last patches of snow at the edge of the forests.

  Isabelle knew that she had only two weeks to live.

  At the end of the last lane, the last place before the fields, a pit is ready; the conical mound of earth waits to cover the coffin buried in the sweet, cold earth of Crécy.

  The sun floods the cemetery.

  Isabelle walks to her grave, stops for an instant at the edge of the hole, bends down and gathers in the palm of her hand a little of the earth that will cover her in two weeks.

  The boys and girls are seated on two benches a few steps away; companions, brothers and sisters, quiet guardians obviously weakened by terror and tenderness. The dead girl now lies down in the bright sun on the grave next to her own. The gentle breeze goes through the cypresses, stirring them; a jay calls in the hedgerow, and from the valley rises the smell of brush fires on the far-off farmland hillsides.

  Isabelle, they see her breathe, she is lying on the grave next to her own. She has crossed her hands over her breast, now she uncrosses them and, with her left hand, her arm outstretched, she touches, she caresses the sandy rim of her grave.

  Anna has begun crying, she stands, she goes away by herself to the far end of the cemetery.

  Alain and Jacques take pictures: Isabelle lying on her neighbour’s flat tombstone, Isabelle feeling the edge of her grave, Isabelle walking to her grave barefoot, her wooden clogs under her arm, the wind lifting her dress over her thighs – perhaps it is a ghost going away down the long lane, the ghost’s hair flies around her head, the jays talk to her about the beyond, where she must return – “Come back, adorable ghost of the most beautiful girl there ever was, return to the paths of lunar shadow where you were born, come back down into our ravines full of perfumed night!”

  But Isabelle does not believe it. It is the stony soil that awaits her, and rotting, and melting in her planks that come asunder. Disgusting. God is a bastard. And Anna is still crying, her forehead crushed against the lichen-covered wall where strings of dark-pink lice run, the brothers of all the stillborn infants of the blissful valley.

  Isabelle has moved on her flat slab, hiding her eyes from the terrible sun.

  Silence. Then the jays. Crows, very far away, I’ll never know them, they’ll soar over this grave, they’ll live two or three winters more than me, I’ll be nothing but bones clad in a shred of cloth when they come plummeting down in their turn, little heaps of viscosities and frozen feathers, behind a November hedgerow. I don’t want to think about my last dress. But I’ve already chosen the white one with the gold braid. The white one, the innocent one, my dress, O Marc, my Marc, since we’ve made love together. I won’t die a virgin, Marc, my sweetheart, and you’ll see me in my white dress, my hands clasped over the gold braids; Papa and Mama will seal the coffin, and you will come along with me to Crécy.

  A bee has alighted on the tepid gravestone, Isabelle opens her eyes again, stretches out her arms alongside her body and touches the stone with her palms. Good sun, little bee already powdery with pollen. You have toiled in the first catkins of the hazel bushes, the primroses, the arnica, little bee, your honey will be warm this winter and I won’t be here to taste it any more.

  On this day, Isabelle weighs only seventy-seven pounds.

  Through the cloth, the sun warms her round breasts, so well preserved, so fresh, so young on her impoverished ribs.

  Now something tender is happening. Marc has got to his feet, he has gone up to the girl, he has seated himself beside her on the flat slab, he has placed his brown hand on Isabelle’s pale forehead. He does not move, he says nothing, he sinks his gaze into the girl’s intensely black eyes, he speaks to her with his gaze, he loves her, he stays on the border of day and night, he will remain in the light with the honey, the birds, the summer, she will go away, cold shadow, wandering shadow, into desolate space! O Marc. How noble your gesture was on that grave, that March afternoon, above the sunlit valleys. How gentle your hand was on the white brow, how your gaze was mysterious and clear in the gaze of that living girl who already speaks to you of the night.

  Their eyes have filled with tears. They are crying, the children, they are crying noiselessly over their love, they are crying over their fearful loneliness. Who decides? Who condemns? Marc, Isabelle. She will live ten days, two weeks, they will put the white dress on her, the hearse will bring her from Lausanne to the cemetery that she wanted, to her little grave, to this sun.

  Orpheus and Eurydice have lain down side by side on the slab, they listen to the wind in the grass, they breathe the smell of brush fire, shiver when they hear the jay’s short, whistling call. The boys and girls have gone off to the far end of the cemetery, they watch the scene from afar, they will never forget it.

  All
of these things were told to Jean Calmet at the end of March, quite a long time afterwards, at the moment when the buds appeared on the branches, when the catkins covered themselves with yellow powder, when the bluish and pink pigeons made love on the turrets of the cathedral.

  Always worried about being on time, Jean Calmet was the first to arrive at Les Peupliers, and he had to endure his mother’s anxious conversation. He looked at the small grey woman with a pity full of hatred. He had come out of her. From her he got his slenderness, his frailty, his oversensitivity, and that all-too-famous intelligence which his father extolled in a loud voice, the better to make fun of him and humiliate him. Grey. Greyish. That was it, all right. His mother was some kind of startled and terrified old mouse.

  She did not dare broach the one subject that interested him, she beat around the bush, fled. For the first time, Jean Calmet studied without fear the vast dining room where the polished brass gleamed in the rays of the setting sun. A bench ran along the wall, the big table was empty, but high-backed straw chairs marked each one’s place. The head of the table, against the wall, was the father’s territory. The doctor sat with his back a few inches from the solemn pendulum clock, a Morbier tall as a coffin, which came from the bottom of a Jura valley where a great-granduncle, guzzler of kirsch and psalms, had fiddled over it for a whole winter behind his little frost-covered windowpanes. Jean Calmet looked at the clock. The copper of the dial stood out in the twilight. The slow, distinct tick-tock cut into the silence, and again Jean Calmet marvelled at the fact that his father had gone on sitting for years in front of this machine that stood like a monument behind him: as if he had wanted to associate himself symbolically with this power, as if he had wanted to warn all of them of his irrevocable domination. But his father was dead, and the tall Morbier went on hammering out its strokes in its case.

  “You had today off too?” asked his mother, timidly.

  Out of pity, Jean Calmet questioned her about the doctor. His mother brightened up. With a frightened pride in which he perceived everything that he hated about her – that pride of the tortured slave boasting of the master’s harshness – she told him about his last days.

  “He worked right up to the very end, you know, my poor Jean. Right up to the very end! Since his last attack, he’s had trouble breathing, but he insisted on seeing all his patients every morning. He wouldn’t let anybody down, and, in the afternoon, he never cut the visits short. He could have eliminated his house calls! But he wanted to see every one of his patients at home, without forgetting a single one. Not a single one. Right up to the end he cared for each and every one of them. He was a saint, my poor Jean. Can you imagine the effort that his sick heart must have had to make! He was choking, he had dizzy spells…”

  With mounting anguish Jean Calmet recalled his excitement on those mornings when he had gone along with his father on house calls; he was eight, nine years old, they climbed interminable flights of stairs, they slammed doors of decrepit elevators; after the doctor had rung the doorbell twice, they would go into cluttered, airless apartments, into rooms thick with the sour smells of an unshaven, moaning old man.

  Then came the hard, monotonous ballet: the sheets drawn back, the nightshirts raised up to the hips, the doctor palpating, driving a finger into a belly, pinching a roll of fat, stooping like a cannibal over a heart, grinding this flesh, flaccid and puffy, or dry, reddish, feverish, wounded, which succumbed to his formidable hands. Each time, genitals, buttocks spread apart, forests of hair. Moaning, hoarse breathing, dirty tears or tumours, pustules, spots, and all this wretchedness naked, all these exposed genitals, all these pubic regions like streaks of soot on deathly pale flesh made up a frightening, pallid gallery over which reigned the master of pain-racked, humiliated flesh. Seated in a corner and silent, or standing in the shadows, a little haggard, Jean Calmet stared wide-eyed at the scene, fascinated by the precision of his father’s movements, sick with his strength and submitting, himself, to his sovereign rule. Sometimes the doctor needed him. He had to go back down to the courtyard, go after a bottle or a clean hypodermic needle in the trunk of the old Chevrolet, make tea in the kitchen for the sick person, dilute a powder in lukewarm water, carry it back to the bedside whose sourish odour brought a lump to his throat.

  But, three days ago, the doctor’s heart had burst. In his turn, the master had suffocated, throwing off the sheets, gesticulating like the ones he had treated, pushing away grotesquely the death that was tightening its grip on his chest. The tyrant had choked for hours, making a death rattle, rolling wild eyes, striking the air with his arms like a big baby; and, finally, the big red heart had exploded in its cage of ribs and meat.

  Jean Calmet looked at his mother with new curiosity, wondering how she could have borne that guardianship for nearly fifty years. He was angry with her for her submissiveness. Everything could have been different – his life, Jean Calmet’s own life would have been another life if she had rebelled. But for fifty years she had lived shrivelled up under the weight of the doctor’s shouts, orders, furious caprices, voracious appetites and authoritarian manias. His father and mother both came from rather poor, rural families. They had married very young. He had worked like a madman to pay for his tuition – hod-carrier, ditch-digger, railway porter. At twenty-five years of age he had opened his surgery in Lutry and had stayed there. The wine-growers had adopted him: with them he drank hard, they were impressed by his strength. When the opportunity presented itself, he kissed their daughters, helped himself to the whorish waitresses of the cafés. He had a red face, an aquiline, shining nose, a large mouth. He reeked of cigars and white wine. He perspired… She was small, somewhat stooped. She kept in the background. They would find her stupefied and motionless for a moment, not daring to enter the room where the doctor was reading his newspaper, belching curses aimed at the world as a whole. Or the craned neck, listening, more of a mouse, more of a shrew than ever, for the heavy footfalls crunching in the gravel of the terrace and the slam of the car door: a moment of peace. But the master came back soon, exploded, turned everything upside down, and the trotting from one room to another recommenced, the quick, uneasy running, the hesitation, the long waits before the doors where her children surprised her, embarrassed, wounded by her terrors, and too sure of their own fear to dare push her to audacity.

  The mortuary representative arrived at the same time as his brothers and sisters. Everyone sat around the table. Ceremonious, dressed in black, the man took a long brochure from his briefcase and opened it, deliberately, on the table.

  “First of all, I’d like to offer our firm’s condolences,” he said in a gentle voice. “We know that stricken families need our services. And we make every effort to give them complete satisfaction. For Monsieur your father, he was cremated yesterday, and, I believe, you want to order an urn…”

  Everyone fell silent. The mortuary representative paused, to make the importance of his message felt, then he resumed with impressive eloquence:

  “Naturally, our firm offers twenty different models – from the most expensive, the most sophisticated to the most modest item. Exactly the same for the caskets. The whole range, from massive oak upholstered with silk, to the plain pine box rented for the occasion. But that’s beside the point. Let’s look at the urns.”

  He coughed slightly and held his catalogue open so that everyone seated around the table could see distinctly the sketches and photos that shone with electric colours on the slick, gleaming paper. His colourless face beamed with gravity against his dark mortuary salesman’s suit. Carrion-eater, thought Jean Calmet, you make money from a dirty trade, you fatten up your bosses with an odd kind of ash. Then he realized that he envied the self-confidence of the pale, serene man with the face of a bold ibis who, several times a day and perhaps each evening, helped to solve the problems of families that bereavement had just ensnared in inextricable obligations. The man paraded the catalogue under the eyes of the onlookers.

  “You see, Mesdames and
Messieurs, that we have all kinds of urns.” (He was very pleased with himself.) “Type A1,” he resumed, “the most expensive, is made of white Carrara marble. The item is heavy: twenty-seven pounds, twenty-four inches high. A very stable model. Obviously, it isn’t cheap, but you won’t find a more beautiful one on the market. Look at those curves, those brilliant reflections. A work of art!”

  And he stuck his index finger respectfully under the photo of a large vase that looked as if it had been carved out of a block of snowy, intolerably pure ice.

  “Type A2,” he continued after striking an admiring pose, “is also very fine work. It’s made of pink cherry with red and brown spots, with mouldings, round foot, matching lid, warranty of origin, twenty-four pounds, twenty-two inches. Your cat or dog can play around it and there’s no chance of his knocking over a piece like that. Model B1 is also made of marble, a genuine clouded marble. Look at the little encrusted shells, they’re specially imported for our firm. This article comes in two sizes. On request, we’ll supply you with the large size, which can hold the ashes of two persons. It’s practical, by the way: lots of people find it reassuring to know that someday their ashes will be mixed with the ashes of the deceased.”

  Jean Calmet gave a sudden start. Around the table, nobody had moved. The solemn bird turned the page:

  “Model B2 is a very handsome imitation marble, green or black, inscription in gold at the firm’s expense. Model C is a handcrafted bronze. Sides trimmed with embossed designs, choice of tulip corollas or ivy leaves. Type D is made of steel, with studded handles, and a little lid fitted with a key gives you the same security as a strongbox. Let me point out, by the way, that this model also comes in miniature, the size of a pigeon egg, for the ashes of stillborn babies: the item can be slipped easily into your luggage, into a suitcase, for example, into a lady’s handbag, so you can take your little dear departed on trips. Naturally, for the big urns, the adult urns, it’s more difficult. But all our merchandise is supplied with base, on request. We do the installing ourselves in your parlour, in your living room, in your office, to suit your requirements. That way, you aren’t separated from your dear departed.”