The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  “You aren’t bored, are you?” she shouted at him. “Take a look out of the window – it’s pretty.”

  Pretty, it was the courtyard of the Gymnase, the big esplanade lined with elm trees, and, behind them, harmonious, the old Bernese façade under its turret and its great roof of brown tiles. The windows of the principal and the secretary’s office were still lit. Jean Calmet came back into the room and sat down on the only chair. Then the Cat Girl brought a little coffee pot and two tiny cups on a tray. She still had her angora hat on her head and her coat of yellow and white skin.

  “Get out of there,” she said gaily. “You’re taking up the only table in the house!”

  She placed the coffee pot and the tray on the chair, and Jean Calmet sat on the bed. It was a big bed covered with a gilded spread. He sank into it with happiness. The Cat Girl took off her coat and hung it at the window. She served the coffee in the dolls’ cups and sat down next to Jean Calmet on the big bed.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” she said. “I’ve been here since early this afternoon, I needed somebody for the house-warming. I’m glad it’s you. Your health!”

  “Your health,” said Jean Calmet, and he looked at the room full of red sun the way a Welsh cabin boy studies the hold of a galleon from the Indies. The empty room that the last rays gorged with rubies and copper. They drank their coffee. Night fell. Jean Calmet did not feel the need to speak. He was borne by cool sweetness. The Cat Girl did not light her only lamp. When he knew that all the intensity of the mystery and tenderness would not disappear, he left her: in her doorway, she drew close to him, her arms glued to her body, her gaze questioning.

  “Yes,” said Jean Calmet. “I’ll come back.”

  She came closer still; he breathed an odour of cinnamon mixed with cool night, a little sweat, pollen, he felt her long hair against his neck, against his cheek. Then he bent towards her and, on her forehead, as one might reassure a little girl before the darkness, he placed a brief kiss which made them both shiver.

  In the days that followed, a host of objects arrived to fill up the Cat Girl’s red room and the gilded bed. First, there was a yellow stone, big as a man’s fist, that she wanted on the only chair, beside the bed. Then there were swan feathers on the pillow. Then came an unsteady little chest, and on the chest, some oak leaves, a five-bladed penknife, postcards from before 1914, a pocket watch with a broken crystal, an old tea can on which one saw the picture of a castle and a little lake under a hill covered with heather. Then there was a black-painted rocking chair, a small bench, a round cushion on the bench, on which the Cat Girl had crocheted a purple snail.

  “I’m furnishing the place!” she said, laughing. But nothing seemed less weighty than the booty that she brought back from her outings. The feathers and the leaves fluttered. The chest looked like something from a doll’s house. The yellowing postcards came from the back room of Melusina’s shop. The yellow rock cast gleams like the philosopher’s stone. The rocker invited children in high shoes, on the porch of a bungalow, to rock themselves endlessly before a big garden full of catalpas where a stream reflecting daffodils ran. The bench awaited a parasol bearer.

  “Where do you make your finds?” asked Jean Calmet.

  “I don’t know. At the marketplace. At the Salvation Army! You ought to come with me. They’ve got everything in their store. There’s an old sergeant who’s seen me a lot for a week now, she gives me discounts; it’s nice, she put an army overcoat away for me. A corporal’s hooded coat, with stripes, the belt at the back and everything! And the federal cross on the brass buttons, you see how beautiful it will be?” Jean Calmet loved that gaiety. And the fact that she dawdled around all day. He asked her:

  “What did you do this afternoon?”

  “I was knitting in a café.”

  “Which café?”

  “I don’t know. Not a very big café, not a very small one, near the Place de la Riponne. It was brown. I was talking to some guy, he was sad, he bought me tomato juice.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that I went for a walk in a supermarket. I looked at the posters.”

  So it was. She dreamt. She stopped. She started again. When he came back to her place on the day after their first meeting, Jean Calmet wanted to know what she did, what she lived on. She did not answer that type of question. She had a little bit of money, her room was supposed to be paid for by relatives. But what relatives? She remained evasive, she dreamt again, she imagined odd, mysterious relationships, disinterested ones, returns to a shiny past, trips into other lives, islands in time, voyages. Everything was made up and everything was true in those stories. She levitated, but in an obvious, sweet happiness that continued to bewitch Jean Calmet. Who is she? he wondered during the day. He taught his classes; a growing impatience took hold of him, threw him into confusion, and, when the pink and yellow hour came at the end of the afternoon, he heard Dionysus’ torches sputter; the landscape burst into flame, the torrents seethed, women – dishevelled, slimy with juice and sunlight – leapt in echoing vats, and Jean Calmet found, once more, that burning joy which had seized him the minute he had laid eyes on the Cat Girl.

  She was named Thérèse Dubois. Her father had died in a mountain-climbing accident. She had begun studying at the Beaux-Arts. Regained her freedom. She went home to Montreux on Saturdays, spending Sundays with her mother. Thérèse was the Cat Girl. It was law. Magic. And what curiosity would be worth this joy?

  One evening, Jean Calmet found her tacking up a huge poster over her bed. A bristling animal – a cat, a furry girl, a panther crouching to spring from the depths of a forest or from an abyss, or from a set of black walls on which its ghostly reflection trembled. Thérèse, standing on the bed with its gilded spread, was unrolling the print which she had managed to secure by the upper edge, on the left and on the right, but the photograph coiled itself back up capriciously, the panther’s paws ended up comically on its head, the dark opening behind her grew smaller, filled with wrinkles, tautened like Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin that a wicked enchanter had turned inside out on her like a glossy black coif. But the Cat Girl’s left hand succeeded in securing the wild roll, and two firm little fingers seized a thumbtack balanced on an upraised knee. The joints grew white in the effort of her finger to sink the tiny barb into the wall. A double operation. Now the Cat Girl moved back one step, two steps, she ran a caress over the smooth surface, and the feminine animal, the tigress-girl, the little female ghoul sprung from the erased prison, reflected her in the black mirror of the paper.

  “It’s pretty,” said the Cat Girl.

  “It’s pretty,” said Jean Calmet. And he sat down in the rocking chair with perfect happiness. Joy and courage! The little tray, the coffee pot from the fairy tale, the dwarfish cups. And you, coffee, in our breasts. In our neighbouring, linked bellies, and each of us drinks his little cup like a miraculous crater…

  One evening Jean Calmet masturbated and was ashamed to see Thérèse again, staring at him with her pure eyes. She had her complicated necklaces, her rings, and on her head a tiny iron chain fastened a transversal braid. Jean Calmet remembered his father’s gaze: does the sweet sorceress know? He was overcome with curiosity: and what about her – is her hand taut, her finger gluey in the nocturnal milk? The lights of the Café de l’Évêché began to circle with mystery the faces of lone drinkers, as if the wooden panels behind them were burning black, like impenetrable mirrors. An old panic stirred Jean Calmet. What other tragedy to be lived through without his father? He remembered that night’s strange quarter-hour: he had imagined the Cat Girl slipping a bottle of milk into his pyjamas and warming it between his legs. He himself had taken hold of his penis in his right hand, the sweetness had spurted without his hurrying. Avenging father, get away! I didn’t even think about you. Now Thérèse sets the green water of her gaze on you, the copper in a blazing circle deep in her pupil, and suddenly, the odour of the starched handkerchief under the pillow in Lutry came back to him, sudde
nly the red face on the wall surged back, the hard eyes burned, but it is a joyous odour, these are happy tortures, these nasty deeds which try to strike you at the core and which only succeed in making you taste even purer happiness. The Cat Girl knew, Jean Calmet was sure of it, but he felt it like glory. One of Thérèse’s rings gleamed in the sun. An iron ring encircling a stone like a bloody berry.

  “Did you sleep well?” asked the Cat Girl.

  Jean Calmet blushed violently. It was starting again. No, he had to be happy. The corridors of blue ran in his veins. A scream rent the rocks behind the vision.

  “How do you sleep?” the Cat Girl went on to ask. “On which side? Do you put your arms under the quilt?”

  She added in a dreamy voice:

  “I’d like to see you sleeping, Jean.” She repeated dreamily: “See you sleeping. See you sleeping. Maybe it’s a whim. Still, since we’ve known each other…”

  Jean Calmet was thinking about the enchantress in The Golden Ass. Was he going to be metamorphosed, too, into a quadruped to be tortured? He had reread the text that very morning, in one of his classes. The stable where the blows rain on Lucius. Was he going to be changed into an animal by this golden-tressed sorceress? And why not? With pleasure, he imagined himself in the fairy’s power. The Pamphile of the tale. And Circe. And Morgan. All the mediatresses of the gloom. And you, white and yellow coat, and you, petal face, face of transparent garden, of Alpine night? Who is calling from the back of the walls? What owl, what panic-stricken animal in the moonlight began to cry in the turbulent fibre? Jean Calmet sees the circles, the copper stria light up in the Cat Girl’s eyes. But does she screw? he wondered. Who plunders her little basket? He, who has only had whores, wretched leavings, imagines the Cat Girl’s shadowy slit, the tender, honeyed furrow that he has only touched on the shopworn, the weary, and now, for the first time, he slips his hand into Thérèse’s panties, he touches the tender, lukewarm lawn, he descends to the hole that emits white resin, he bends over the smooth pelvis, he places his mouth on the curly moss…

  The café was full of teenagers who were playing cards and chess. It was exactly ten past five. A few working men in blue smocks were eating sandwiches and drinking beer in the back room, beyond the narrow part of the bar and the toilets. Among the boys and girls who took up almost all of the tables in the main room were many of Jean Calmet’s students, those who, just today, had attended the lesson on The Golden Ass. It was then that an event took place which has not ceased to echo in the annals of the Gymnase and which the police have placed on the blotter, now that this story is over and that no one on this earth can do anything for Jean Calmet’s errant soul. It was ten past five. New teenagers pushed open the door of the Café de l’Évêché, joined the groups of players by sliding over the benches along the walls.

  All of a sudden, Jean Calmet screamed. It was a series of violent cries, a series of furious yelps, uninterrupted barking that instantly froze everyone present. He stood up at his table, his arms outstretched; he did not utter anything; he screamed. Then the hideous concert changed into a frantic speech:

  “I’m not a dirty bastard,” raged Jean Calmet, gesticulating.

  “I’m clean, I’m not a bastard, leave me alone, all of you, I haven’t done anything to you, I’m clean, I’m innocent, I have nothing else to tell you, I’m innocent, I’m innocent!” And he fell flat across the table, breaking glasses of beer and cups, cutting himself on the chin and cheek; suddenly inert, exhausted, as if struck by sacred lightning.

  After Jean Calmet’s first cries, silence had reigned in the Café de l’Évêché, and all the amazed faces were turned towards him, horrified, full of pity and sadness. Then, as the madman belched forth, cards and dice fell from hands, the waitress and the buffet waiter froze on the spot; an elderly man who was opening the door and innocently entering the café stopped abruptly, his foot in mid-air, his hat held out before him, and he remained standing, petrified, comic in the middle of that amazing scene.

  At Jean Calmet’s first cries, the Cat Girl had stared at him intensely, her eyes lifted towards him, and she smiled. She smiled with tenderness and admiration. She smiled amid the horror and scandal. Then she placed a hand on the brow of the prostrated man who was crucified on the table strewn with broken glasses, overturned cups. The waitress and the buffet waiter started up again. The old man worked his way up to the nearest chair. The playing cards resumed their places in the moist hands of forty teenagers. Pawns began to move again on seven chessboards. Hands were carried to throats, rubbing them, feeling them as one might after a shipwreck, when reassuring oneself and trying oneself out again in the fresh air full of birds after the horrible onslaught of the sea. Balls of saliva were sent to the bottom of many an unknotting stomach. Tendons unwound. Fingers grew red as though reborn.

  It was then that the terrible scales of good and evil called Jean Calmet to appear in their pans. At first, raising his eyes from the horizon of shattered glass where he was bleeding, he saw a whole assembly of young censors who were staring at him. Lenses of eyeglasses gleamed over formidable prophets’ beards. Hair of Pharisees brushed over shoulders, and the court stared at him, weighed him, gauged him; they were going to pronounce the sentence, the judges, they were going to speak words that would never cease to echo in Jean Calmet’s troubled skull. The terrible words of the father! For that was the result of the scene: the young people had changed into so many avenging fathers, and, deeper still, in the darkness of his memory and heart, it was his father himself, the doctor, the tyrant, that the scandal had brought back to life after several weeks of calm and lightness. As if Jean Calmet had begun screaming in order to bring his father out of the shadows where those five weeks had confined him. As if he had suddenly felt unbearably guilty about this relegation, as if he had killed his father a second time by forgetting him, by driving him out of his days and his dreams, by refusing him access to the Gymnase and to the Cat Girl, by driving him into the red night of the crematorium for ever, into the cold, congealed belly of the urn. But the doctor had avenged himself, he had broken the padlock, smashed the iron bars, he had got out of the columbarium, and his fleshy ghost, his lumbering footfall, his shining red skin, and his hat, his big coat, his hard eyes, his cigar, his smell of wine, his bossy voice, his persecutor’s manias, his cries, his contempt, his anger swept down on his son like a tornado! Crushed, Jean Calmet looked at his judge looming massively over the court of his students. The trickle of blood that ran over his chin tickled him like a vile kiss, but he did not dare bring his hand up to the cut, or stand up, or go away.

  All that had lasted forty-five seconds.

  Already, the waitress was carrying the debris of glass away on a tray, the buffet waiter was changing the sodden tablecloth, the conversations were resuming, the Cat Girl had taken a tissue from her little round basket and was cleaning the blood from Jean Calmet’s cheek and chin. Already the faces of the bearded youths, already the long hair of the girls were coming back into their nice sharpness before the bay window; already the evening sun was turning pink; the rooftops, the bridge, the cathedral were beginning to burn against the hill. The Cat Girl opened her little purse and tranquilly lined up her coins on the table. She rose, Jean Calmet rose too; they crossed the café, they opened the door, they were on the Rue de l’Université. Just like yesterday. Just like before. They went up to the little room. They sat down on the gilded bed, they drank coffee in the dolls’ cups. Now, for the first time, they lay down side by side under the poster, silent, breathing softly; time envelops them like a fur coat, the light is orange; through the closed windowpane they hear the bells of the cathedral strike six o’clock, and long after they have been stilled, it seems that their echo resounds in the deep stones, the corridors, the courtyards, the gardens and the crypts of the old town. In the room there is a bed; on the bed there are two recumbent figures, a young man with his chin scarred by a long gash, and a girl with a head of luminous hair. They are motionless. They listen to their
breathing. A quarter of an hour goes by. The light has grown dim in the room: pink, then grey-pink, then grey, like fire growing pale in the embers and dying out, melting like rays in that calm air.

  “I’m cold,” says Jean Calmet, and he raises the bedspread, he slides into the sheets, he pulls the woollen blanket up over his shoulders.

  The Cat Girl slips in next to him. Warmth settles in. Jean Calmet is motionless, Thérèse is motionless, the blanket encloses them, weighs down maternally, hides them from the world, brings them together. They know it and they do not move. They have closed their eyes. Jean Calmet does not struggle against the sluggishness. A torpor sets in under his brow. Has he slept for a few minutes? Or made himself believe that he is asleep? He is about to lose consciousness when a cool hand is placed on his throat; two fingers follow the cut that burns and a third finger touches his cheek, presses a little; Jean Calmet turns his head, his face is close to the face of Thérèse, who has raised herself up on one elbow and who bends her head and who places on his mouth her moist mouth whose lips move, and Jean Calmet is sucked into that sweetness, he drinks at the deep spring! He breathes an odour of cinnamon, pollen, hot flint… For an instant, it is as though he were finally living his truest childhood, days and days suspended in the green water of dreams. Fresh strength rose in him, and on his lips, in his mouth, the Cat Girl’s little tongue ran and was everywhere at once. He did not return her kisses, transported by her: he gave himself up, he let himself float in infantile delight, protected, where all fear had given way. And still this perfume of flowers, of tepid stone, of green, earthy gardens, that smell of childhood, holidays, Easter vacations when the church bells ring. Happy clouds went by in his thoughts: his eyes closed, he saw a verdant prairie, at the back of the landscape a forest scalloped the sky, and little wisps of vapour like sheep drifted over the emerald and blue. The Cat Girl’s quick tongue ran over his teeth. Jean Calmet opened his jaws, the tongue insinuated itself deep inside his mouth, it came back, followed the whole contour of his lips, came back to hone itself on the ridge of his teeth. The Cat Girl lay down against him; he breathed her warm, tart smell near her ear, where she must have washed herself with eau de cologne that morning, and the odour of her hair, riper, more hidden, like a secret that she had exposed for a moment before shutting it up again in her golden tresses.