The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  These merry barbarians were avenging him. They were not ones to quake before fathers or teachers. The thing that struck Jean Calmet was their health: they were all strong, loose-limbed, quick, and the tanned clearness of their skin, the transparency of their eyes, enchanted him. It was the same fascination that his students held for him: their beauty, their subtle, humorous animal nature gratified him mysteriously each moment of each lesson. They moved incessantly. They blew their noses in tissues that they dropped under their desks. The girls cleared their throats and scratched themselves like cowherds. They ran across the schoolyard shouting. They organized demonstrations at the drop of a hat: for peace in Vietnam, against the Israeli raids in Jordan, for sexual freedom, against Madame Golda Meir, against Nixon, to avenge the death of Amílcar Cabral. They handed out mimeographed flyers in the pouring rain, they peddled anti-nuclear posters in the icy north wind, they chanted ecumenical slogans in the snow; then they fought with snowballs, washed each other’s faces with big melting handfuls, ran, collapsed over their desks like exhausted puppies.

  Jean Calmet did not know that he had begun to smile. The crowd was still going by, the red and gold lighting of the storefronts made their hair shine, their teeth sparkle; badges blazed on their belts, pendants reflected the brilliance of the shop windows like mirrors. Jean Calmet was carried away with enthusiasm. In his flesh, he felt the radiating warmth of these boys and girls. Their blood flowed into his like a liqueur. He exulted. He began to laugh. Their eyes kindled his own gaze. Their breath revived his. Saps were seething in the boys. The girls secreted marvels. Jean Calmet gorged himself on both, fed, drank, strengthened himself. He recalled himself in class, after the lesson, when his students crowded around his desk, hemming him in their ring, sticking to him, leafing through his books, asking him questions, accompanying him to the Café de l’Évêché for the recess, which was spent drinking coffee, eating croissants amid the noise; then they went back up with him to the Gymnase and followed him to the door of the teachers’ room, where Jean Calmet never made more than brief appearances, as his fellow teachers – despite the esteem in which he held them – seemed like so many censors placed, themselves, under the paternal authority of the principal, the supreme censor, whom Jean usually was afraid to meet. Still this feeling of being caught at fault, of being guilty… while the turbulent, frank boys and girls healed him of his anxieties and transfused their strength right into his heart.

  Seven o’clock.

  Jean Calmet remained standing on that pavement for a long time, admiring and dreaming. Now the groups were thinning out, the animation gave way to the felt-lined opulence of an elegant street where the fashionable dress shops and the show windows of jewellery stores came firmly back into power. Jean Calmet went to Le City to eat a pizza; he drank Chianti, ordered cheese, read the newspapers with tranquillity. Lonely? Not even that. He was haunted by those battalions of beautiful children. The urn was officially, municipally, contractually sealed behind the high iron gate of the columbarium. In short, order reigned. He had to get used to this calm happiness. The winter was going to be long and mild. Jean Calmet imagined himself a fox, a marten, perpetual savage snug in his burrow while, outside, the snow is falling, falling on the fields and forests. Chimneys began to smoke in the dells. The sky was black against the hills, a car went by on the icy road… Winter was setting in. But what winter? It was only October, and this day had carried Jean Calmet far from his prisons. He listened to the copper autumn, the furrowed, rotting autumn, give way to the great white peace. Deserted depths opened up in the countryside, where gatherings of motionless birds, wood owls, great-horned owls, and stags, wild boars, badgers, animals from bygone eras that had persevered, that had stubbornly persisted deep in the woods, spoke to him in their sly tongue. Their primal language! Jean Calmet listened to them searching with their snouts, scratching with their hooves, digging defences in the ground. Claws seized, beaks cut into the flesh of panic-stricken field mice, flights of smoke spread their networks between the guardian trees.

  Every morning Jean Calmet hesitated between his two razors: the Gillette and the electric shaver. When he was not feeling well, not sure of himself, he used the electric one, which spared him from having to use water, an added advantage. When he felt strong he used the Gillette. Since the interment of the urn at the columbarium, he had decided to eliminate the controversy and use the blade every morning, naturally. For too long, the Gillette had been challenging him. Frightening him, pushing him around from the bottom of its blue case. But once the decision had been made and held, he had to handle the razor cautiously: the object was endowed with very obvious powers, and its ability to stir up memories was ironically inexhaustible. At the sight of it, on touching it, ghosts loomed up, and one of them made the bathroom, the apartment and, more seriously, Jean Calmet’s whole mind echo with its terrible, furious voice. Hundreds of times, as a child, Jean Calmet had watched his father shave. He would sit on a wooden stool, two or three steps from the doctor, and he never tired of watching him lather his face with precise, revolving little strokes, which concealed it bizarrely in the white foam. Often the doctor would turn around and, in jest, suddenly stretch out his arm: with a stroke of his shaving brush he would soap the nose of Jean Calmet, who kept the fragrant puff stuck to his skin as long as possible. Then came the whetting on a kind of cradle set in a flat steel box, and with the razor finally loaded, the operation would begin. The doctor would begin dramatizing immediately. He mimed pain, twisted his mouth with two fingers of his left hand, emitted strange moans while attacking his chin, and if he cut himself (which was frequent because of his excitement and haste) he would hold out the reddened pad of cotton to Jean Calmet, bend over him, offer him his throat, make him touch the wound from which oozed a thin, crimson thread that branched out over the brown skin in small, star-shaped channels. Then his father cried, screamed, gasped, feigning suffering, and although he knew that this was a scene which recurred like a ritual in their father-and-son relationship, the child could not help suffering, becoming apprehensive, and he remained strongly affected all day after the doctor’s tragicomic gesticulation. When he was old enough to shave, he wanted a Gillette just like his father’s. Made of silver! In the same blue case! And this morning, he stared at it glumly, that case where the sacred object lay hardening. He stretched out his hand towards the glass shelf under the mirror, which reflected his image too clearly. He opened the case: the razor gleamed in the silk. Blackish silver. He took it in his left hand and, with his right, turned the round screw at the end of the handle, the screw controlling the two plates clamping the blade: it appeared, dark blue, the cutting edges white, gleaming, and which would gleam all the more in a few minutes when he honed them on the block of leather in the cradle. Jean Calmet removed the blade and held it, cold and blue, between two fingers, like a foreboding of night. He put the razor back, he raised the thin blade towards the window: it lived with an extraordinarily concentrated and autonomous life. With a violent life. Jean Calmet went on looking at it for a few moments, then he set it on the cradle, honed it for a long time on both sides, put it back in the razor with respect.

  Saturday 21 October: it was his last morning’s classes before the autumn vacation. Everything pointed to fine weather for the end of October. There would be walks, dreamy strolls on back roads, scenery. Jean Calmet promised himself several times to go up into the Jorat valley to see the forest, the prairies. He would read. He would make notes while preparing his lessons for after the holidays. He shaved peacefully, dried the blade, replaced the razor in its little case: in the back of his memory he clearly made out his father’s face.

  Sun, a tang in the air; the trees in the parks were turning brown against the blue. Jean Calmet loved the morning. The town had been cleaned. Flights of sparrows swooped down, cheeping, onto the pavements; at the red lights, through the open window, he perceived their steady cries like a funny, happy promise. Behind the cathedral, the soft gold of the oaks in the Sauva
belin forest could be seen, and the smoke from small factories went straight up into the silken sky, as in the paintings of Lausanne from the last century, in their ornate frames in the antique shops of the Cité quarter. A squad of good-humoured gendarmes came out of the barracks building and, roaring with laughter, piled into two trucks. Once, early in the morning, at the foot of the sandstone towers, the workers from the archaeological department laid out the skeletons of Burgundian monks beside open graves, solemn-faced photographers busied themselves at setting up tripods and taking measurements under the curious looks of passers-by. Yesterday, Jean Calmet gazed for a long time at the grins of skulls, the holes for eyes; a girl from the university cleaned the sand of the grave from the skeleton’s teeth with precise little strokes of her brush. They explained to him that they were remains from the late Middle Ages: a cemetery on the hillside: the church is built over the graves; on the north-east side leans the cemetery of the cloister which has just been opened and photographed. Jean Calmet bent anxiously over the skeletons: intact, and that silent laugh of the jawbones… One of his students slipped a sprig of geranium into the corpse’s big, gasping mouth. For an instant the blonde tresses of the little Burgundian girl brushed across the bones of the saint that had emerged from eternity.

  Jean Calmet parked his car in the courtyard of the Gymnase. Groups of girls and boys were seated on the stone benches. The bell rang. He climbed the stairs to his classroom with François Clerc, one of his colleagues. He was fond of François Clerc, an independent fellow who had published some poems and who taught French. François stopped on the last step:

  “You want to get together one day next week? We can go for a ride. You could take me along in your car and we could have a drink up along the Broye, what do you say?”

  A calm, happy smile, and François Clerc’s grey eyes that said: “Say yes, you haven’t been yourself for some time, this ride will do you good, and I feel like going too.” They promised to call each other after Monday; they walked a little further down the hallway, where tardy students were running to their classes, then they shook hands. Jean Calmet went into his classroom.

  They had reached the Broye by back roads, and, once again, Jean Calmet was overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscapes. The pine trees mingling with the oaks and aspens raised black tapers in the red copper of the foliage. Meadows were turning rosy under the grey sun. Gentle, solemn flocks crossed the pastures with the tinkling of bells as in childhood poems. Villages with a pointed steeple loomed up among the hills, red tiles, low houses, farms like castles. The car passed tractors pulling tons of beets and sacks of potatoes lined up like monks on the deck of the wagons. The driver raised his hand in greeting, kids in overalls waved a scarf or cap. Thierrens, Molondin, Combremont, the country became more undulating, more secret; the road buried itself in green, deserted regions, the forests on the foothills were dense and dark, flights of crows swooped down on the slopes. Jean Calmet loved those lonely spots with their legends, and with foxes running under the orange moon. He drove without haste, and by mutual consent the two friends remained silent. That autumn day gripped them: the grass dotted with autumn crocuses, the pearls of mist in the grey, the birds, the bronze hedgerows, the roads that vanish into the bristling forest, the smoke from fires on the grassy banks where standing road workers drink beer and pass around cigarettes, laughing. They went down towards the Broye: it shone behind willows in the centre of a slack, green plain. Further on, the phosphorescent mist. They saw the water of the river palpitating among the branches and rushes; the current fled, sparkling; the whole countryside was relieved by its cool delicacy. An intoxication overcame Jean Calmet, lifted him; he looked at the road, the river, the woods, the whole background of the scenery under its layer of gauze, with marvellous pleasure. With the car parked under a poplar, the two friends made their way to the bank of the river and sat down. Noon. The bells of villages began ringing at full peal. Jean Calmet imagined the dance of the bronze belfries, all the small, cobblestoned squares before each church, the arched doors open in the soft light of the street, and, in the doorway, a striped cat licks itself clean and falls asleep…

  François Clerc stretched out in the cropped grass. He closed his eyes. Jean Calmet watched the delicate face give itself up by degrees to relaxation. The stain of his beard circled his mouth. In turn, he lay down on the grassy bank. He felt the cold of the ground on his shoulders, and the grass, sharp and dry, pricked his neck. François smoked. He was singing softly. Jean Calmet also whistled the little tune; the sun was driving off the mist, the Alps of Fribourg appeared, dazzling, in the blue sky. His eyes closed for a moment, Jean Calmet listened to the Broye run. It was a lively, silky sound: a constant rending, as if the water were breaking itself, cutting itself, coming asunder indefinitely; at the same time the current caressed the grassy shore and the gentle seething wistfully tore itself away from the gorges, from the hollows, from the scars of the bank. Jean Calmet knew himself to be the brother of that water: it ran within him, it crossed him, it carried him across the plain towards the wooded hills, the grasslands, the German towns, the Rhine… François Clerc gave himself a shake, sat up; the two friends talked for a quarter of an hour in the sun. Then they went to Lucens, following the Broye, and they entered an inn for lunch. It was the Café du Chemin de Fer: a long room broken in two by a strange angle, the proprietress young and provocative, the French waitress with a high-pitched voice; the lone customers ate at small tables, travelling salesmen, railway employees in blue smocks and – right up against the bar – the bellowing table of tipsy card-players. The French girl swung between the tables, swore at her customers, burst out laughing. Jean Calmet ate with tranquillity: the wine was good, the roast had the taste of thyme and laurel, the conversation took a happy turn that enchanted the friends. François told the annoying story of what had recently happened to one of their fellow teachers at the Gymnase: he had begun writing letters to two of his students, two inseparable friends (who were something of outsiders and sophisticates); at first, innocent notes, then rascally ones, more and more explicit lines of verse. A few suppers had followed: the pretty ones went to them in rather scanty attire and then boasted about it. The class – which did not like that teacher – had begun to grow restless. François recounted the principal’s inquiry and the teacher’s reaction, rather shamefaced and chastised. One of the poems had made the rounds of the schoolyard, and François recited it, roaring with laughter.

  Ne soyez cruelle blondine,

  Et vous perfide brunette…

  The students had laughed, too. The principal had not taken it in quite the same way. He had carried out an investigation and had made threats.

  “The guy lost his head,” said François Clerc. “He became panic-stricken. In the end, he gave himself away. He didn’t know what to do after all that. The story came out last week. You’ll see, when we come back after the holiday, the whole Gymnase will know about it. I feel sorry for him, that poor Verret. Poor old fascist. And, to top it off, with that face of his…”

  And it was true that Verret had a singular skull and torso, as if it were all welded together in one piece. He looked like a short, fat frog buttoned up tight in grey-green policeman’s shirts. But he would roll nice, big, restless eyes that touched Jean Calmet. Was it true that he had been fired from a boarding school for sodomy? No one knew much about his private life: supposedly, he had married an Austrian or German girl – nobody knew which – a girl much younger than he was. In his locker in the teachers’ room he had tacked up the photo of Gudrun Ensslin, the terrible mistress of Baader, which he had cut out of Stern. A hard, sensual face under a blonde helmet. She had done the shooting, bumped guys off, “cased” banks. A pastor’s daughter, of course. Verret had had her as a student for a whole winter at a Stuttgart high school. She was seventeen. Then the debauch, crime, the Baader gang, assassinations with hand grenades, the newspapers…

  And Verret remained that curious mixture of pride and humiliation, paradi
ng around with his frog face and his trousers that were too short, sighing dejectedly, staring at everyone with his big pathetic eyes; and fleeing sideways to treat himself to a glass of kirsch at the Café de l’Évêché to try to buck up his spirits. What did Verret dream about in front of his drink? About Baader’s gun moll? About the pastor’s daughter from Stuttgart whom he had got to recite Lamartine? About the boys of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism that he might have despaired of ever joining in the flatlands of Pomerania? About the shorts and pyjamas of the boarding school? About the two chicks who had led him on, then dropped him, after the incident of the suppers? Undoubtedly about all of that, at once, slowly, the way one chews nostalgia, and the bitterness of the thin soup would make him lower his broad forehead to the red tablecloth. He worshipped German. Often, Jean Calmet had spoken to him about the poets, and Verret, lighting up with a strange tenderness, had quoted snatches of Schiller, Heine, Kleist and Jünger. One evening, when they had met rather late, they went to drink beer in a smoky café. His eyes glowing, Verret had whispered Goethe as a girl went by, a very young, surprised creature whose lover dragged her around by the arm in the noisy crowd:Du liebes Kind, komm’, geh mit mir