The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  “The Waffen SS,” mused Mollendruz. “Open that album, Monsieur Calmet!”

  And he thrust into his hands a great bound notebook that was like an album of family photos: memories of parades, concerts, ceremonial parades by the glorious corps.

  “But you came to drink a beer, Monsieur Calmet! I’ve forgotten you!”

  He disappeared, the door of a refrigerator slammed; Jean Calmet heard Mollendruz handling bottles and glasses. He sat down in an armchair and waited. Embarrassed, perspiring, he could not escape the flaming of the red flag: in the centre of the crimson, in its circular area, the swastika revolved without stop, its nasty arms like the legs of an evil spider. Beneath it, gleaming in his black frame, Adolf Hitler stared intensely in Jean Calmet’s direction, as if he sought to speak to him beyond space and time, as if he sought to meet the eyes of the wretched man seated in one of his follower’s armchairs, to convince him at any cost.

  Mollendruz came back from the kitchen with bottles; he served the beer.

  “Private chat with our Führer, eh, Monsieur Calmet? I agree with you one hundred per cent – that portrait has an astonishing forcefulness. He’s alive! He’s calling. Ah the pose of the bust, that erect silhouette, the fantastic power of the eyes!”

  He added childishly, as if for himself:

  “I don’t know what I’d do without that photo…”

  And in a louder voice:

  “It was an authentic Nazi, one of the secretaries at the Kommandantur of Lyon, who gave it to me as a token of trust. Yes, the photo says it all right: our Führer isn’t dead, Monsieur Calmet. Neither is the brilliant plan of the Great Reich, or the true Europe. Look at our symbol for what it is: the swastika. You see! It’s alive! It doesn’t stop turning, like the sun, like the earth, like the planets. It’s the image of life, and nothing can stop it! What’s more, it’s a very simple sign: I’ve never gone into public urinals without finding graffiti of the swastika. Etched with the point of a pin, pencilled, scratched into the sheet metal – it doesn’t matter, the symbol was there, beaming, radiating; it’s proof that nothing can kill the cross of the Reich!”

  Then a surprising thing happened. Mollendruz set his glass of beer on the little table and marched briskly up to Hitler’s portrait. Two yards from the photograph he stopped, froze, clicked his heels with violence and raised his arm:

  “Heil Hitler!”

  He had barked in the silence of the sleeping house.

  Jean Calmet had given a start, but Mollendruz did not give him the time to recover. He turned around to his guest, an expression of defiance in his small, hooded eyes:

  “We’ll win, Monsieur Calmet. We’ll take back Europe, we’ll reconquer the whole world!”

  He was moving like a mannequin. “And what am I doing here?” Jean Calmet said to himself bitterly. “I’m dumbfounded, and this comedy is making me sick.” He had lost any notion of time. He drank his beer mechanically. He had forgotten Thérèse, and his students, and his lessons; he was sinking into a viscous insipidity. The beer was sticky. His glass was sticky. Nevertheless, he let himself go on drinking without stop, his stomach heavy.

  Nearly another hour went by, during which Mollendruz, overexcited, had Jean Calmet leaf through a stack of Gringoire and Je suis partout and study in detail a board where Jewish profiles, noses, mouths, earlobes, hairlines, shoulders, bellies, soles of feet were categorized and commented on at length under a heading in big capitals:LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE KIKES!

  Nausea burned his stomach. He got to his feet suddenly, furious, desperate. He did not have to shake Mollendruz’s hand; the latter already understood that he had gone too far. Mollendruz stood, motionless, on the threshold, somewhat bent; only his eyes searched Jean Calmet’s face with obvious satisfaction. Jean Calmet gave him a nod, started down the staircase, went out into the cold air.

  It was no longer raining. Three hours to sleep. All the humiliation of that evening on his shoulders, Jean Calmet climbed back up Villamont with the sad thought that, of the Gymnase’s faculty, he was indeed the only one to be on the street at that hour, and to come away from such an ignoble encounter. And the rest of that short night, to punish him, his father came back in his dreams: there was the bull charging down from the top of the black hill and smashing him, there was the study in Lutry, the doctor strangling him in his ogreish arms before the tall clock like a coffin standing on end. And at dawn, while the blackbirds were already singing in the gardens, someone shouted “Heil Hitler!” at the back of a courtyard, and woke Jean Calmet from his fever.

  While shaving, his eyes following the progress of the blade over his skin, he was still belching the beer that he had not had time to digest.

  The big blue trolley bus came onto the Place Saint-François by the feeding lane on the right. Jean Calmet had stopped in the sun before the shop window of Manuel, the caterer. All of a sudden, a rat came out of a cellar ventilator almost beside him and began to zigzag, panic-stricken, over the pavement. A fraction of a second! Jean Calmet had only had the time to think: A rat! – then he would say to himself that it was a big grey rat, with a hairless back, with a long pink tail, and he would believe that he had even registered the sound of the little claws on the pavement – already the rat has hurled itself into the bright light; dazzled, it runs without seeing anything, the blue trolley bus comes abreast of the church, accelerating to make the green light on the Grand-Pont, the rat dashes out. No, no, Jean Calmet thinks foolishly. The rat and the trolley bus must necessarily meet. There, it’s done, the huge right wheel has bitten into a rat’s round, tapering body; the eight yards of the vehicle roll on past before Jean Calmet, who does not move, who looks; in the sun there is a patch of gleaming red between the cars, which slow down and stop in line.

  Jean Calmet went up to the patch.

  The rat had burst under the weight.

  Up close, he saw that there were two different sets of remains. The first, the one that he had seen from the pavement, that was the rat’s envelope, the skin which was still stuck to the completely flattened skull. A red shape, outlined exactly, the tail attached to the burst bag, the head flat as crimson leaf; in the muzzle there are still two little teeth plainly visible, curved, childlike in the dust. The whole profile is an oily red that is already taking on the metallic reflections of the coagulating blood.

  The other set of remains was a bundle of pink and green viscera which had spurted two yards when the bag had burst.

  Three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Jean Calmet had a date with Thérèse.

  He climbed back up the Rue de Bourg thinking about the rat’s martyrdom. For years, the animal had dwelt in the cellars and recesses under the fashionable boutiques. The fine shoe stores, the glittering jewellery shops; for years it had roamed, ferreted, made up inventories, surveyed its labyrinth under the richest elegance of Europe. Under the stocks of minks and the rivers of diamonds. Under the loads of caviar. Under the rubies, the carats, the electronic watches, the narcissistic clock-maker’s shops. Under the box-calf and hand-sewn ankle boots. One afternoon, towards twenty minutes to three, it had come out of its lair. Chance? Pushed out by a stroke of fate? Driven out by the other rats? Boredom? Whim? Desire to see the world? It had had enough of its wildness; it had gone out into the sun and it had been squashed four yards further on. One is not safe being independent in our part of the world. Not safe staying wild and uncompromising in the city. Jean Calmet remembered the porcupine that had given him advice one moonlit night, the cat that he had followed along the lake. They, too, were francs-tireurs, madmen, hermits, panic-stricken ones. For two years, three years, the rat had lived, had defied the city, proud, violent, wrapped up in its appetites and its desires, watchful plunderer, a lord hemmed in and silent under the centre of town, lonely brain that ran like a little lamp in the corridors of shadow, underground heart beneath the public heart, beneath the noisy heart in broad daylight!

  Jean Calmet reached the top of the Rue de Bourg; he turned left,
crossed Saint-Pierre and started over the Bessières bridge, which spans, high up, the Rue Saint-Martin. It was the bridge of suicides: several times a week, people leapt out into space and crashed thirty yards below in front of the pumps of the Peugeot garage. The filling-station attendant kept a sack of sawdust within reach to sop up the puddle of blood, in which his customers’ cars might skid and be spattered. Without waiting for the city ambulance to get there, the attendant, by tradition, covered the smashed body: that blanket could be seen, at all times, carefully folded next to one of the gas pumps. It was spotted and appeared to be hardened with brown crusts.

  Crossing the bridge, Jean Calmet kept as far as possible from the guard rail because of vertigo, and he would imagine, each time, the whole delirious mechanism of the condemned person’s last seconds. I stop on the pavement; I grip the railing firmly in my hands; I swing my leg over the metal bar; now I see the street below, the garage, the dazzling pavement at the bottom of the abyss; I don’t hesitate; I want to die; I don’t hesitate; I heave my body; Christ, I’m in space, I’m falling, breath taken away… I… Jean Calmet had heard people say that the fall made you lose consciousness before you hit the ground.

  Horror.

  Middle of the bridge.

  Those who threw themselves off here were also wild, eager, silent ones whom the world had fenced off and put to death. Like the rat. Like all those heroic animals that were fighting against the concrete, the hydrocarbons, vanity, superstition, mindless pleasure, baseness: hawks gunned down at high noon, foxes tracked down with gas, badgers clubbed to death in the snare, screech owls crucified, mice drowned in their traps, bullfinches pierced with compressed-air rifles, squirrels poisoned with strychnine, fawns with legs cut by mechanical reapers, wild boar machine-gunned in their sleep, hares strangled, deer shot with automatic rifles, cats used as targets by the midnight hit-and-run drivers, toads, frogs, porcupines of the back roads like bloody omelettes under the cool breeze… Thérèse was waiting for him at the Café de l’Évêché.

  What mystery in her. Like a soft fruit, and the skin too is mysterious, she gleams gently; there is a light from her hair that illuminates her beautiful face bent over a book, her big forehead, the flawless cheekbones, the neck, where an iron necklace runs down, disappearing into the embroidered blouse. She has her jeans, wooden clogs. A girl. She will be twenty on 16 August. The sign of Leo. In the white linen, under a band of old-fashioned embroidery, her bosom makes two spheres. Jean Calmet would like to open her collar, free one breast, fasten his mouth to the aureole and suck, suck life at that spring, bury himself once and for all in the maternal sweetness.

  She raised her eyes.

  Two green fountains.

  She smiled, her teeth shone for a second, she set the book on the table. It was The Lily of the Valley.

  Standing, Jean Calmet looked at her.

  “Want to go for a walk in La Cité?” she asked.

  They went behind the cathedral, walked along the level ground where, the autumn before, Jean Calmet had seen one of his students lean over the skeleton of a monk and put a flower between the teeth.

  Thérèse went barefoot in big wooden clogs painted white; her steps rang out gaily in the little streets, deserted at that hour of the afternoon, and Jean Calmet marvelled once more that this girl was so strangely close to childhood, fairy tales, scenes etched on copper in the old books with pink covers, plates spotted with freckles, which the booksellers and antique dealers display in their front windows, hung up with clothespins. As if the clack-clack of those clogs had been enough to bring back a whole past of young marvels in which Jean Calmet recognized the power of Thérèse: his girls, his sisters, his little cousins of the hearth and the woods, and the dwarfs, the fairies, the sorcery, the animals starting to speak at the banks of rivers, girls awakened from death by a kiss, wives shut up in the red room while the road is smothered in dust and the grass turns green on the immense fields up to the foot of the Jura, where the night comes.

  That is what struck him about her the first time that he saw her at the Café de l’Évêché. That mixture of freshness and very old wisdom. The cradle part and the cat part. The candour and the suppleness. The blond, the nocturnal. The spirit of fairies, and I who wasn’t able to love you! Couldn’t. Couldn’t. The clogs clack against the pavement, it is a distinct, sweet sound, a rather loud one; all of a sudden the giants gesticulate, the little boy strews his bread in the deep woods, and already the birds are watching the light-coloured crumbs from high up in their branches. Clack-clack. Ironic clogs, they laugh, they make their happy sound, they are mocking, couldn’t, coo-coo, clack the wooden shoes, poor old fool, I’m young, I’m twenty, I come, I go, I have fun, I cry, I make love with Marc, I draw cats, I lick ice cream, I drop out of the Beaux-Arts, I go back there, I have my mother in Montreux, I don’t give a damn, the sun is falling red behind the bandstand. And I have very pretty round breasts that soon become eager under Marc’s tongue. And I have a little basket. Long-waisted, as they say in the fashion catalogues. Jean? Monsieur Calmet? I loved him for two or three days. He’s deep. I understand him without understanding him. He never talks about himself. He has eyes that tell too much about him. One afternoon, he screamed in a café. I took him to my place. I felt like making love. It didn’t work. Since then he’s been looking at me with even wilder eyes. Marc told me that one day he talked to him about his father: an odd sort of fellow, his father, as strange as he is, a little on the brutal side. An intelligent brute, apparently dangerous. I have my mother in Montreux, and Papa had the good idea of dying at high noon on a glacier. Jean used to call me the Cat Girl. Maybe because I have a little pussy that’s sweet and warm and wet. Maybe because I do as I please. I betrayed him. Is the word too strong? I love Marc. Too bad about Jean. I don’t want to make him suffer. He can come to my room as long as he likes. I won’t back out…

  But it isn’t that simple, and he knows it. But this is the way Jean Calmet tortured himself along the old streets of La Cité one summer afternoon, when the roses weighed heavily on the trelliswork of the Place de la Barre and the blackbirds were calling in the chestnut trees. He hurt himself all along the alleys; the music of the wooden clogs ended up obsessing him; the fairy beside him was humming and picking carnations in the old walls, marvelling at their vanilla odour. She slipped the flowers into her basket. Another souvenir of the fairy tales, when the highwayman watches from behind the brambles and puts on a pleasant face for going up to the little girl.

  Four o’clock. No breeze. It was stifling. A heavy, humid heat. It’s the time when one would like to get off the street, shut oneself up in the back room of a café, climb a staircase at random, stretch out in a cool room. The hour of the wolf, the doctor used to say, in Lutry, peering into the little boy’s eyes. The brick-red mug loomed before Jean Calmet, set in its cruelty. I’m made for suffering, he thought to himself while walking. Chopped meat. Flesh to be nailed. Childhood? Washed away. The rest smashed. My father, Liliane, Thérèse… There are only the prostitutes, fat Pernette, and it’s even worse afterwards. And Mother? He was ashamed, thinking about food immediately, about that old mouth that made its lonely noise in the deserted dining room, and, outside, the sun sinks over the lake, the blood of the evening falls on the floor, Mother is alone, Mother is going to die, oh in two years, in three years, she’s trembling more and more, she’s been broken since Papa’s death, she waits for a phone call all day, she talks to herself, she keeps sitting before the window for hours, and the dusk lights up her poor wrinkled face, she remembers, she stares into space…

  The sky became grey, blackish; suddenly it was purple, and the thunder split, a silvery rain fell violently over the city, ripping the leaves off the trees, hurling itself in torrents over the slopes of La Cité. Thérèse ran ahead of Jean Calmet, her clogs in her hand, turning back to smile at him. They came to her doorway.

  “Come on in and dry out,” she said, and Jean Calmet saw once again the narrow corridor, the small landing,
the card pinned on the door:

  Thérèse Dubois

  Étudiante

  Right away she was close to him, her face uplifted, her green-fountain eyes planted in his gaze, and for a few seconds Jean Calmet knew her sweetness again. By the kind of rift that opened up within him he knew that her mysteriousness was at work, filling in the wound with forests, cats, birds, magic roads at dawn, villages glimpsed on emerald hills, lucernes in the white light where the wind shifts. Thérèse drew closer still, he had her wet hair right against his mouth, he put his lips on her forehead where the tepid rain trickled.

  For a moment they remained motionless, silent. They were standing before the open window, and the storm was still cracking over the gleaming rooftops of the Gymnase.

  Then she broke away, closed the window and unbuttoned her blouse:

  “A shower,” she said. “I’m freezing!”

  Jean Calmet could never get used to that haste. In a moment, her clothes had been rolled up into a ball and tossed into a corner of the room; naked and lithe, she came into view, she ran to the bathroom, the water began spraying.

  “Jean! Come scrub my back – I’m cold!”

  Thérèse sitting in the bathtub.

  Hair, hair, open over her shoulder; all that gold, which reddens under the shower; her back arches, offers itself to the stream.

  Jean Calmet sat on the rim of the bathtub.

  “Soap me,” said Thérèse.

  She looks like a little girl, she showers her shoulders, she puts the flexible nozzle down at the bottom of the water. She lies down, stretches her legs out, sits up again, wedges her back against the head of the bathtub, brings her knees together, watches Jean Calmet with a questioning look.

  Jean Calmet is afraid. And what if his father were going to watch him? If the Ogre’s eye killed him on the spot? He would take Thérèse. Annihilating him, his youngest; and his bursts of laughter resounded in Jean Calmet’s ears.