The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir…

  and, instantly, his face faded, a look of heavy sadness settled on his features, and, without embarrassment, Jean Calmet had placed his hand over his colleague’s square hand.

  “Do you think he’ll hold out?” François Clerc asked suddenly, jerking Jean from his reverie. “He’s absolutely mad.”

  “Most of all, I think he’s suffering,” said Jean Calmet, who remembered Verret’s gaze. “He’s a very bright, very lonely guy. He’s been unlucky. Nobody’s giving him a helping hand. We’re all treating him like bastards. You and I should encourage him when school starts again. See him now and then. Defend him.”

  And he promised himself – whatever the attitude of François – to see Verret regularly from the next week on. But the memory of his colleague hung around him like remorse. The wine made him slightly drunk. He rose, excused himself and went to the men’s room.

  The corridor was dank. Jean Calmet went along it without haste, glad to be alone for a moment. Flakes of plaster were peeling off the walls, and mildew had formed on those spots. Just beside the door of the men’s room, he stopped, gripped by the sudden discomfort into which he had been thrown by what he saw – what he began to look at with his eyes popping out of his head: exactly at the side of the door, across from him, arriving without haste at the end of the hallway, waiting for him in the whitish light of a naked square to trap him, tear him, defy him, stood a rusty umbrella stand in which only a single cane – an insignificant, useless object – turned its curved handle towards Jean Calmet. Insignificant, of course, for everyone, that old thing. A bit of wood to be thrown into the garbage, or be burned, or be got rid of with the rusty scrap iron that held it and against which one might stub one’s toe, hurt oneself. Meanwhile, that filthy thing might have been there for years, and Jean Calmet could not tear his gaze from its detestable bulges. It was a knotty walnut cane with a braided look, about four feet in length, which shot at him its big handle ending in a thick bud, a particularly visible acorn from which Jean Calmet could no longer take his eyes. Why was he thinking of his father’s penis? What demon was haunting that corridor or that umbrella stand or that WC whose trickling sent cold chills down his back, what bad genii had he disturbed, behind the mildewed patches of the walls, for his fear and his aversions to freeze him immediately like a guilty thing in that wan light? His father’s penis was extended towards him above the pitted ring of the umbrella stand, first the budding, greyish glans, then the swollen organ, knotted, knobby, bent, that use had strengthened, polished, without taking away any of its thick aggressiveness. Jean Calmet tried to reassure himself by looking at the shaft of the cane, following it up to its end, which was tipped with blackish rubber in the shadow of the umbrella stand. Wasted effort, quickly he went back up the shank as far as the swelling, up to that protruding, gleaming head that turned itself towards him from the bottom of what ironic nothingness? His father’s penis forgotten in a hallway deep in the valley of the Broye: he would have to come just this way, and, absently, soothed, enter this out-of-the-way café and feel good in it; walk down this corridor unknown to the whole world without turning his eyes away from the details of its humble adornment; finally come across that umbrella stand where the doctor was waiting for him, reminder, burst of laughter, injury. And now, paralysed, ensnared, Jean Calmet was panting slightly before his father’s turgescent glans! He moved forward a trembling hand, restrained himself, then with index finger and thumb he touched the hard organ, let his fingers run over its knots, came back to the protruding knob. Exorcism? he wondered. He was ashamed, he felt a kind of horror for his act, he went on touching. All of a sudden, as if he had received an electric shock in his palm, he let go of the cane and shut himself up in the men’s room. His face was grey in the mirror. Then he rejoined François Clerc, who was quietly reading the local paper.

  A few hours later, lying flat on his bed, his armpits and forehead running with sweat, Jean Calmet dreamt ominously of a grassy field, on a considerable slope, where a certain buffalo with flaring horns charged at anything that moved around them. A certain African bullock, still hard to see, but its eye was bloodshot, its horns made a sharp lyre, its body flared out paradoxically into a yellow ball, which at each bounce became harder and struck the passer-by viciously. In his turn, Jean Calmet ventured into a vacant patch of ground at the foot of a cliff. The horned ball aimed at him, reared, charged, struck him hideously. Jean did not cry out. An umbrella stand picked him up, hugged him in its rusty ring… He awoke as one might go through a door: his father was sitting in an armchair across from his bed. No. It was a heap of file folders topped by an old photo from a holiday. He got up like a spring: he lay down again, stretched himself without pleasure. Nevertheless, he imagined the cool well-being of the urns in the columbarium of Montoie. Immediately cooings enchanted him. Rustlings of feathers. Golden, tepid caresses. Downy embraces, mossy, amorous shamming, quarrelsome feints, bounds, flights, attacks, odd leaps, oblique returns, holds clenched with pink-beaded feet, thrusts by sharpened beaks of grey gold, spitting, pecking conversations, coated tongues, courtesans’ kisses, pecks.

  The whole crypt awakened. The bodies rose all at once out of their ashes. There were gentle, silken, tender bodies like the sensual birds of his visions. There were hard bodies. Censors. Auditors. There were also white shapes hoisted above their vases like lone gigantic worms, and Jean Calmet would have wished to scream with compassion at the spectacle of those phosphorescent forms topped by a perfectly recognizable face.

  Then sleep came over him again. He saw a chimney smoking in the middle of a mausoleum that was sunlit and covered with celestial blue. He went through a country of rivers where schoolyards full of tireless adolescents opened before him. He was met by an irascible bull. And, as usual in his dreams, the monster stared at him from the top of a hillock, or from a slope, or from an abyss, and suddenly its bulk smashed Jean Calmet, who persisted in living through this adventure with a bit of humour, and a moral stubbornness that must have been inspired by the gods. Those gods who watch over the happiness of little men, from the black shore of their sorrow to the white shore, where the waves play like flashing knives.

  Part II

  The Spirit of Dionysus

  Why did the knees prevent me?

  Or why the breasts that I should suck?

  Job 3:12

  THERE WAS CHRISTMAS.

  He dug himself in.

  He wrapped himself in the cocoon of convention, his family’s customs, the somewhat fishy tepidness of Lutry, his mother’s uneasy affection, the music, the meals, the bells. There was the Christmas tree as each year, as there had always been. There were his sisters, his brothers, the cries of his overexcited nephews, the melancholy of gifts, the eyes shining with tears in the light of candles. There was the father’s empty chair. There was the big clock standing in its coffin behind the ghost.

  There was 31 December.

  He went to bed.

  The next day, he strolled along the lakeside. Still that rather sickening sweetness of the shore grown tepid in the winter sun. Mimosas bloomed in gardens. In vaguely opaque greenhouses gleamed carnations, begonias, cyclamens, reddish stains, a bit frightening, like bloodstained cotton wads under the hot glass. Palm trees rose in the blue sky among pines and plane trees with bare branches. People dawdled on the tree-lined avenues. On the embankment at Lutry, they were already having their aperitifs in the open air, and the women had those open, pulpy lips that you see them with in the spring, on the pavement cafés of La Côte.

  Jean Calmet stopped at Les Peupliers to see his mother, then walked back to Lausanne. He thought about the old house under the trees. What silence, today, in the big sunlit room where his mother spent her days between the clock and the glittering lake facing Savoy. Tender pity came to him for that grey woman with nothing to do, helpless, who trotted from the kitchen to her armchair, a teapot in her hand; then she poured his tea warily and nibbled salted breads
ticks, apologizing for making too much noise with her new dentures.

  He had never known this woman. Compassion seized him. She, too, she more than any of them, had bent under the tyrant, had been broken, destroyed. She was silent. But her sad smile told all. She had not complained once, and the doctor’s absence left her deserted like a ruined city. She had opened old photo albums. She had not cried. But she stayed in her armchair, the album open on her lap, her gaze fixed, lost in the light from the window that she did not see, studying the ghostly presences that had peopled her past. Oh the destiny of a deprived Samaritan. A nurse forgotten in the depths of an abandoned hospital. Just then, evening was falling over Lutry; she must still be in the same spot, under the red bars of the setting sun, her gaze motionless before her cold teapot, Madame Jeanne-Aimée Calmet, née Rossier. She came from the isolated country, at the foot of the Jura mountains; she had been a maidservant, she had left the farms, the pastureland, the sheep runs, she had become his father’s servant. Jeanne! My glasses! Jeanne! My bag! My cane! A mug of coffee! And those lousy kids that you’re raising all wrong. And those meals that I won’t come to eat. Wait for me. You are made to wait for me, Jeanne. Your hands have stirred the soup, cooked the meat, opened the bottle. I won’t come. I’m roaming. I’m the master. I open bellies. I search through flesh. I cut. It’s me who threatens, who consoles, who heals, me who gives hope, me who keeps vigil at the door of the realm of death. Death, that miserable thing, doesn’t dare show itself! It falls back when I come, it beats a retreat, it buries itself in its domains! I cut, I pinch, I search, I set right, I tie up, I tear off, I sew up again, I’m a tireless soldier, a mercenary, a legionnaire; get out of here, Death, you don’t scare me. Do you understand? Leave me alone with your timetables and your pitiable looks, I have every right, me, the warrior, the master of life. You wait for me and submit to me. Jeanne cleans the untouched table and lies down alone in the big bed. Jeanne spends the summer waiting for the doctor, who is always on the move, waging war. The children come back, go off again, the summer ends, time ensnares itself in autumn, the lake smells of rotting fish on the edge of winter, Jeanne readies the house for the celebrations of Christmas, New Year’s Eve, she looks at the old photos. Jeanne Calmet. My mother. I was her Benjamin, her baby, her consolation and her joy. Her green grass. Her fresh air. I escaped in my turn. I didn’t return to Les Peupliers. I’ll come back more often. Her consolation. Her joy. I will outlive her. She will die in the room with the big bed, slight, shrunken on the pile of her pillows, white pillows from the song. Goodbye, Mother, gentle girl from the field of snow. You will be burned. There will be the same flowers, the same wreaths as in the month of September. The same faces at the services. We’ll have the same snack at the Café du Reposoir, white wine, tea, breadsticks, sweet wafers, and during the week, one fine evening, your children will sit at the table at Les Peupliers, around a mortuary catalogue from which they will select your urn. Goodbye, Mother, sweet austere woman of the Jura, you went to church trembling and the sky fell on your head…

  There was the new school term in January.

  Teachers’ meetings, piles of translations to be corrected. Flat boredom.

  A month went by. Nothing to be said. Then it was 21 February, and Jean Calmet met the Cat Girl.

  Then he could believe that the spirit of Dionysus had entered him.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon.

  On the doorstep of the Café de l’Évêché, Jean Calmet saw the Cat Girl sitting in the seat that he liked. He took a few steps towards her, as if he too were going to sit near the window, in the angle where the light is soft and clear. The Cat Girl! She had not looked at him. But he had given her that name right away, it was law and magic, right away she had plunged him into the mad, mysterious joy of Dionysus. She wore a coat lined with yellow and white cat fur, open over a whole intricacy of necklaces. Her hair spilt out of a yellow and white fur hat. Golden hair, bronzed hair. She was knitting with white wool, her face bent towards her work; she had removed several rings in order to work more easily and the gems, the rings of blackish metal shone on the red tablecloth before her, where a half-consumed cup of milk also stood.

  He had never seen her. Perhaps he would never see her again. He sat down at a nearby table, across from her. His heart pounding, happiness in his soul, he looked at her, he looked at her intensely, he felt cascades gushing deep within him; precipices opened up in his bones, sonorous, where age-old stones fell. The mountain wind whistled in the pines, the sea wind assailed the fig trees. He found himself borne by those forces, lifted, hurled; sap bounded into his blood, new humours shook him, starry skies, volcanos in flames, springs, storms, stampedes of horned herds, leaps of goats on slopes made wild with the smells of flowers; all these images seized him, went through him, came back to be swallowed up in him, threw him into a motionless, magnificent trance.

  The Cat Girl lifted her eyes. Joy and burning! She rested her gaze on him: two emeralds ringed with copper that gleamed deeply in the late afternoon light.

  She was still looking at him: to his own amazement he spoke to her first.

  “That’s pretty, what you’re knitting. It looks soft…”

  The Cat Girl was not surprised. She smiled, and her answer was as simple as her appearing there was marvellous.

  “It’s knitting,” she said. And she continued to smile.

  Jean Calmet noticed that, when smiling, like a cat, she ran the tip of her pink tongue over her lower lip, which began to shine.

  “What a light,” he said, and he stretched himself, while noise-makers, marching bands, fires, drums crackled and resounded deep in his skull, making a great whirling festival.

  “You like that yellow sky too?” asked the Cat Girl, who placed her knitting on the table and slipped her rings back on, massaging the joints.

  “That yellow sky,” said Jean Calmet, “that yellow sky and that pink sky. Agate… It’s as warm as spring.”

  And instantly he saw buds burst open, sap running over tree trunks covered with bees, fawns cowering in the dense hay. The miracle lasted. The Cat Girl stared at him tranquilly, as if she wanted to fix his features in her memory, and her attention did not embarrass Jean Calmet; on the contrary, he felt pleasure at being studied by that green eye spangled with light, which showed its curiosity without haste. He exulted. The red tablecloths kindled glowing fires along the walls. Rays of sunlight, where the cigarette smoke danced, striped the penumbra up to the bar. A grotto hubbub full of tenderness and passion cheered the heart. What power emanated from this girl? What enchanter had provided her with that power, near this window, in this café where Jean Calmet spent several hours each day? The sun placed orange bars on the rooftops of La Mercerie; the cathedral was a torch before the sky. The Cat Girl finished her milk; once again the pink tongue ran over the slightly swollen mouth.

  “Do you come to this café often?” asked the Cat Girl.

  He was expecting that question: as if its banality were the sign of an extraordinary understanding between the apparition and himself.

  “I come here every day,” said Jean Calmet. “I’ve never seen you…”

  “I’m from Montreux. Today I rented a room in this neighbourhood.”

  Jean Calmet would have liked to ask why she had left Montreux, what she had come to do in Lausanne. But he knew that those things would be revealed to him. The enchantment did not stop: Montreux with its solar palaces in their gardens of fig and orange trees, Montreux with its pearled turbans and Rolls-Royces across from the saw-toothed Alps, a town that a number of prodigies are metamorphosing into a surrealist cemetery, into an Anglo-Balkan postcard, into a haven for baroque theatre, into a brochure for the Orient Express, into a worldly Swiss Ali Baba’s cave! And the Cat Girl had just left that exotic reserve, aided by the spirits of the mountains and the water that inspired her and protected her like their mysterious child!

  The Cat Girl had put all her rings back on, the Afghan rings, the Arab rings. She toss
ed her knitting and skeins of yarn helter-skelter into a little basket, she slid over the bench all the way along the table and rose.

  “Are you coming?” she said simply.

  Jean Calmet put some change on the red tablecloth and followed her. He opened the door for her, and the setting sun haloed them with its crimson sparks. Towards the city, the Bessières bridge was burning. All the windows on the Rue de Bourg were Archimedes’ mirrors. The tower of l’Évêché, a square, dark mass against the sky, was crowned with charred timbers like the ruins of the castles of the heretics, and, before them, the cathedral, a sheaf of wax tapers and pink cannons, hurled its rockets into the sky.

  They walked in the direction of La Cité. Jean Calmet looked at the Cat Girl’s little round basket with gentle exasperation. She swung it against him, at arm’s length; it was all childhood, that basket, the treasure of Little Red Riding Hood in the forest, the baggage of dreams, the solicitude of mothers for lonely grandmas, and, in her little boots, a girl starts trotting under the big trees and night falls and the woods grow thicker and the wolf comes. The Cat Girl, too, she would bring her galette and her little jar of butter deep in the woods. Her present. Or has she already delivered it?

  She stopped before a door on the Rue de la Cité-Devant.

  “It’s here,” she said, and he followed her into a narrow hallway that smelt of wet cement. The timer on the hall lights was ticking away. She stopped at the second landing.

  “It’s here,” she said again, and he went behind her into a large room that the red evening flooded.

  A bed, a chair. At the foot of a wall an open suitcase where clothes and sheaves of paper were piled up. The bells of the cathedral began to strike six. He had known the Cat Girl for one hour, and already she busied herself in the kitchen; he heard her moving cups, filling a pot.