He reported at the secretary’s office, and Madame Oisel, whose green eyes and comely bosom Jean Calmet admired, asked him to wait a few minutes until Monsieur principal was free. Jean Calmet, who was becoming sweaty, fastened on to the spectacle of Madame Oisel. She had gone back to her typewriter, and her breasts were trembling in her thin blouse. Twenty-five years old, tanned, happy. But she also intimidated him by having access to the principal at all times, by being tied to the master’s humours, to his plans, to his secrets. She took part in the Eleusinian mysteries: admitted to the tripod, to the embers, to the philtres, and in the smoke of the god-principal-of-men, she exhales an initiatory power that pulverizes Jean Calmet. She is a beautiful woman. She is happy. She has found her master: a handsome, sophisticated man, a Frenchman, a trainee at the school who teaches maths and physical education.
So Jean Calmet was waiting for the principal to open the temple door to him. He sweated more profusely now, wiped his hands on his trousers, fearing that as a result of rubbing his palms over his knees and thighs he would leave obscene, comical yellow spots. Madame Oisel ripped a letter from her typewriter, applied the seal of the Gymnase to it, signed it, folded it, slid it into its envelope, licked the flap with a long tongue, pressed it quickly with her fist and threw it into a small cardboard box where the god’s mail was piled. The principal’s door opened, and Monsieur Grapp appeared on its threshold. Jean Calmet wanted to rise; something in him went mad, refused, shut itself up in a black burrow; suddenly the resistance gave way, he got to his feet with apparent ease, he moved forward smiling at Monsieur Grapp. Enormous, fantastic, the tall figure was framed in the doorway like an immense yellow, woollen parallelepiped. The dark glasses crowned the camel’s-hair sinisterly, and, above them, his bald skull gleamed, white, dented. The giant opened his mouth, saliva welled up at the corners, his uneven teeth appeared like tombstones at the back of an old graveyard for child-eaters. And his hairy hand reaches out, enormous, towards Jean Calmet… Jean Calmet, who stumbles over the doorstep, blushes, feels sweat squirting from the root of every hair on his head, stretches out in turn his moist hand, follows the glutton into his lair, drops into the thin armchair that the suzerain designates. Imposing, the suzerain is comfortably ensconced behind his desk, big-boned, massive, his dark glasses hiding and revealing glaucous globes that go through Jean Calmet’s heart.
“I won’t beat around the bush, Monsieur Calmet,” said the Director in a loud voice, and Jean Calmet noticed once again his Vaud accent, in which the humming and the thickness of the sh had retained their peasant flavour. “You’re well liked in this school, Monsieur Calmet, we respect the high level of your professional conscientiousness. Your students work, you know how to make them enthusiastic, I know through many parents that you are respected and admired. That’s why I feel free to speak to you very firmly today.”
He struck a pose, grinned; Jean Calmet prepared himself to be knocked out and devoured.
“I didn’t want to speak to you about it right away, Monsieur Calmet. You needed to get hold of yourself and think things over. I’m talking about the incident at the Café de l’Évêché. Naturally, the whole business came to my attention. Several colleagues spoke to me about it, and some parents let me know how astonished they were. Let me add that I got a discreet call from the criminal-investigation department wanting to know if drugs had been involved. We’re very much in the public eye in our trade, Monsieur Calmet, and that makes it all the harder for me to understand how you, with the keen sense of the duty that binds us all, could let yourself go in such an extreme way. What happened, Monsieur Calmet? Had you been drinking? Did you lose your head completely? An entirely understandable moment of confusion, provided that it stops there. Tell me, Monsieur Calmet. After all, I could be your father…”
Jean Calmet made a terrible effort at staring into the mysterious glasses: he could not speak; his hand, damp with sweat, was trembling on the armrest of the chair.
“I was taken ill,” he said at last.
Monsieur Grapp nodded approvingly, as he might have encouraged a child.
“I lost control of myself,” Jean Calmet continued in a weak voice. “I said incoherent things… I couldn’t see anything…”
“The trouble is that you screamed those things,” the Director broke in harshly. “In your position it’s most unfortunate. There were more than thirty students in that café… but that’s another question I’ll take up in due course. But you acknowledge, Monsieur Calmet, that your behaviour was perfectly scandalous.”
Jean Calmet admitted it, mumbling.
“Do you have a problem with your nerves, Monsieur Calmet? Shouldn’t you seek help, have yourself treated in a clinic for a few weeks?”
Jean Calmet gave a start, horrified. The clinic, the psychiatrists, his poor heart drilled right through, the cell, the diet… He dared to state that he was in good health.
“Do you drink, Monsieur Calmet? People have often seen you sitting at students’ tables, with beer, aperitifs…”
No, Jean Calmet did not drink. To be sure, he liked the company of young people. No, he did not encourage them to drink. No, no, Monsieur, he did not have any special taste for alcohol. No, wine was not necessary to him. And it never had been.
“You ought to get married, Monsieur Calmet,” said the Director. “It’s no good for a man to be alone. Especially you, who come from a large family – you must feel even lonelier now. I knew your dear father, you know; now there’s a man who lived for his family, surrounded by children, by patients! Ah, what a fine man he was. We don’t have enough people like that nowadays. This country is in real need of them. His greatness, Monsieur Calmet! His energy! His strength! His devotion! In a word—” He broke off suddenly. “I’m counting on you not to allow the little incident in the Café de l’Évêché to happen again. Think of your family, think of us. Give yourself a breath of air. Find a young lady, give her children, Monsieur Calmet. Et libri, et liberi, as your dear Latins said. You’d have time to keep your nose in a book and raise a little family. All right, good day, Monsieur Calmet. It’s been a pleasure to see you. I have complete confidence in you.”
He rose; his overwhelming figure in the yellow jacket hid the whole window, a big hairy hand reached out towards Jean Calmet, crushed his, shook it in mid-air between the cannibal’s belly and the tentatively spared victim. The survivor found himself completely bewildered in the corridor, where the bronze Ramuz stared at him with its vacant, nauseating orbs.
Jean Calmet went down to the Place de la Palud. He was not thinking, he walked mechanically, it was the end of the afternoon, a bit tepid, a bit sugary. He knew where he was going. He was not ashamed. He had to drive away the scene that he had just experienced with another uncommon scene. He had to escape Grapp’s bulk blocking the window, killing life.
Tranquilly, Jean Calmet walked down the Place de la Palud to the Place de la Louve. He pushed open a door with his right hand, started up a staircase. Fourth floor. A black-painted wooden door. A card is stuck against it: Pernette Colomb. Jean Calmet rings. The door opens: Pernette Colomb. Her big breasts in the open bodice. Her eye lengthened with glossy makeup. Fifty-eight years old. Plump, her mouth red, a vile, ironic face.
She fusses, places a kiss on Jean Calmet’s cheek, makes a curtsey and, with a comical gesture, invites him into her three-room apartment.
“How’s our little professor? It’s been a while since he’s been back to see his Pernette! He must have had lots of things to do and lady friends to love!”
Jean Calmet is not put off: under the banter, he spots a kind of veiled affection that gently drives away his anguish: Pernette slides next to him on the couch:
“We want to think about the little present first, right, sweetie? That way, we’ll have our minds clear for what comes afterwards. The usual, little prof?”
Without looking at her, into the hand that she has placed on his thigh, Jean Calmet slips the single fifty-franc note that he had ready in his po
cket. Pernette snatches it and tosses it into the drawer of a chest, which she double locks. She claps her hands, comes running back towards Jean and flings herself against him on the couch, raising aloft her bare legs that gleam. She puts her arms around him; her red mouth that smells of grenadine settles quickly on his mouth.
“Come, baby.”
She pulls him by the arms. She pushes him into the other room, stops him in front of a sink. The water is warm. She unbuckles his belt, slips her hand into his briefs, grasps Jean Calmet’s penis, lays it on the cold rim of the basin. A bar of pink soap. Two hands, under the hot stream, slowly wash his erect penis. He holds his trousers up over his thighs. He follows the fat woman to the flat bed. Slip. Pink girdle. Legs already bare. She bends over the panting belly, the grenadine mouth sucks, licks, a hand comes and goes under Jean Calmet’s narrow back with surprising speed.
The black panties slide over heavy thighs. Pubis almost rose-pink. The hand of the master of Latin language and literature at Gymnase Cantonal de la Cité searches in the pubic nest, spreads lips lubricated with Vaseline.
“Come on! Come on!” Sighs. Squirms. Jean Calmet kneeling in the rotundities, the cannonballs, the casks, the smooth hams of Pernette Colomb. Once she explained that name “Pernette” to him. “Actually, my name is Denise. But my father was crazy about me. He was a drinker, my father was. He was a roofer. That was in Fribourg, before the war. He used to take me on his bike. We used to ride all around the countryside. We stopped at cafés. He would drink apple brandies, absinthes, one after the other, they had real absinthe in those days. My father called me his ladybird, his pernette, he used to laugh and tell his friends that I was his only love, his consolation and his grace. One day when he’d had more to drink than usual, he fell from a roof and split his head open on the pavement. Since then I’ve never wanted people to call me anything but Pernette. That’s all I’ve got left of him. My pen name, professor!” Jean Calmet buried himself in the fat coccinella who could feign emotion adeptly. “Chéri! Chéri!” cries the bug. Français, encore un effort, thinks le chéri, whom the word injures. But the wet sweetness presses him, sucks him; he anchors himself deep within her, almost motionless, he spills out into the happy cave.
As he leaves, Jean Calmet is not sad, and the clamour from the square promises to keep him warm in a little while. Denise has some nice words: as she has known her client for years, she offers him a glass of liqueur brandy so that he does not go out into the city too lonely.
Jean Calmet receives another grenadine-flavoured kiss. He hesitates in the doorway. He goes out. Yes, of course, I’ll come back. It is in the corridor that the sadness descends on him. He goes down the stairs. Out on the square again, he feels a shame that chills him, makes him flee the eyes of the people. Oh Jean Calmet, you know all too well that Denise is the feminine of Dionysus! The sister, the daughter, the exalted companion of the divine! Derision. Parody. But night is falling. Jean Calmet lowers his head, and, at that very moment, as one gives in to its panels of darkness, he consents to turn away from the great mountains full of gods.
Part III
Jealousy
His bones are full of the sin of his youth…
Job 20:11
DURING THAT TIME, a demonstration was held at the Gymnase, one which had everybody in the region talking and gave Monsieur Grapp lasting fame. For different reasons, the demonstration was to change Jean Calmet’s life.
It had all started at the cathedral, during the graduation ceremony, which marks the promotion of hundreds of boys and girls from secondary school to the Gymnase. While in the very solemn pulpit to recite a poem, a student seized the opportunity to criticize the system roundly, to question the curriculum, make fun of his teachers and persuade his classmates not to stand for any more.
Frightful scandal.
At the graduation, and in the hallowed pulpit of the cathedral, a radical student, a leftist, had insulted the authorities! As the newspapers played up the incident, the whole region reacted: the countryside jumped at the chance to criticize a school that turns out nothing but leftists all year long, the cities were divided equally between the pseudo hard-liners of the right and jokers with socialist tendencies, parents wrote vengeful letters to the editors and fought to have their sons’ hair cut.
Monsieur Grapp and the Board of Education made a spectacular decision: the speech-maker was suspended, so that instead of coming to school in April, he would not return to the Gymnase until September. This provided the excuse, at the end of April, for all sorts of goings-on, which the left-wing groups stirred up ceaselessly: parades with cloth and cardboard signs, impromptu gatherings on the little squares of La Cité, daily flyers from La Taupe, Spartacus, La Ligue Marxiste or Rupture, speeches by the suspended youth before the Board of Education. Let Pierre Zwahlen back in, was the slogan they chanted on the Place de la Barre; mingling with the happy, colourful crowd were lots of tramps, drunkards and phoney legionnaires, denizens of the quarter and its two broken-down cafés. It was on a fine spring afternoon, the leaves crowned the little trees of the Place de la Barre with a light fuzz and the great chestnut tree looked one hundred years younger. Gesticulating and laughing, the young people had come out of the Rue de l’Université in a disorderly procession where they danced, where they sang. Girls had flowers in their hair, pansies stuck in their braids, little roses; others brandished bouquets of tulips that they had picked in the public parks, in Ouchy, in Montbenon, since it all belongs to everyone! The flowers are ours, the festival is ours. Nothing was missing. Cheerful placards: “Make love”, “Bawl out your teachers”, “Change the school”, “Your parents are morons” and “Love again”, “Freedom”, as in a poem by Éluard. Long dresses, bare feet, jeans, all the uniforms left at the river’s edge by the Confederates at the end of that fateful day of 6 April 1865, and then pretty songs again, ‘Le Partisan’, ‘L’Internationale’, ‘Bandiera rossa’, ‘Le Temps des cerises’, and dumbfounded people on the pavements, the local alcoholics whose three-day beards are like thistles, old prostitutes delighted by all that clamour, three drunken chimney sweeps who throw their top hats into the air, a nasty grocer who wanted to call the cops but who winds up singing ‘Le Temps des cerises’ with the others, a midget projected like a cannonball from the Café du Pavement, he has a hard time stopping, he crashes into a group of flowered girls, squeezes himself against them, stretches his outsized arms, clutches a long orange skirt, seizes a waist in both hands and starts to go round and round, dances, spins with the beautiful, the tall, the sublime adolescent of all his dreams.
Jean Calmet watched the spectacle with intense pleasure. He was sitting on the little wall that bounds the car park of the police barracks, at the foot of the Chatêau, he liked the colour of the sky, that intense blue against the farandole, he was having fun listening to the slogans repeated through the megaphone, the milling of the crowd, the clamour, and when Zwahlen gave his speech, he listened to it and was gladdened by it. Suddenly, he became gloomy again, and anguish brought a lump to his throat: he had just noticed, in the middle of a moving group of girls and boys, a little round basket that reminded him pointedly of Red Riding Hood’s offering. He stared at the group: the basket appeared between two hips, half-hidden now by canvas and cardboard signs. But all of a sudden Jean Calmet made out a head of golden hair that streamed down from a yellow and white fur hat: Thérèse. And who is holding her hand? That young man with long hair? It is Marc, that melancholy boy Marc, the fiancé of the dead girl of Crécy, Marc-Orpheus with the beautiful hair who had his picture taken on the cold stone slab with the translucent Eurydice at the Gates of Hell. Marc is holding Thérèse’s hand. A whirlwind of dresses and ribbons. Shouts. Bursts of laughter. Then the megaphones incite the crowd to gather at the Place du Tunnel and, in a few minutes, the Place de la Barre is deserted, the chants can still be heard, fading into the distance, spring remains master of the field.
Jean Calmet met Thérèse at the Café de l’Évêché: she told him
about the demonstration without mentioning Marc. She had started again at the École des Beaux-Arts, Thérèse; she wanted to be an interior decorator, it’s quicker than becoming a teacher. No, she had not gone back to Montreux. She would spend the weekend there. Montreux: Jean Calmet saw the clumps of palm trees before the purple lake, under the battlements of Gothic hotels on the gulf of molten gold.
“Will you come and pick me up Sunday evening?”
“Where will you be?”
“At the Café Apollo, I think. Take a look and see if I’m there. I’m not going to spend the whole day with my mother. Yes, go by the Apollo around six o’clock. We’ll have a drink and go back to La Cité. D’ac?”
“D’ac,” said Jean Calmet. She always said d’ac for d’accord. He began speaking the way she did. “Do any work today?”
No answer. Evasive gesture. Smile wiped off by her tongue, oh cat, cat with the transparent blouse, cat with leather and copper necklaces, with Arab and Afghan rings; cat between whose thighs the hair is like frizzy bronze turnings from which emerge the sweet wings of passion and desire sputtering in the wet darkness.
Then they leave each other, Jean Calmet goes home to mark homework papers, he goes to bed early, he sleeps. In the morning he gets up reminding himself of Sunday’s rendezvous in Montreux.
It was eight o’clock when he arrived at the Gymnase. He parked his car at La Mercerie, and, as soon as he got out, he sensed that something strange was happening. Spotting him, a fellow whose face was unknown to him ducked behind a wall. Cardboard signs on sticks were heaped up on the benches of the promenade. Young teenagers – apparently schoolboys or kids in the first year of their vocational apprenticeships – were smoking cigarettes, leaning against the front window of the Café de l’Évêché.
The Tyrant Page 10
