This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 Julien Aranda
Translation copyright © 2017 Roland Glasser
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Le sourire du clair de lune by the author via the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform in France in 2014. Translated from French by Roland Glasser. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781542047777
ISBN-10: 1542047773
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
To Élodie, to my parents, to my grandfather, to my family, and to my friends.
CONTENTS
START READING
NEW MOON
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
CRESCENT MOON
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
QUARTER MOON
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
FULL MOON
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Kerassel, Morbihan, 1992
I was resting on my bed one evening when the doorbell rang. It gave me a bit of a shock, since I wasn’t expecting anyone. My bedside clock said 8:30 p.m. I got up in the half-light and peered out the window. A brown-haired man, around forty years old, was standing on my doorstep in a spotless suit. He didn’t look like anyone I knew. Must be a salesman, I thought. Throwing on a jacket, I went to open the door and found myself facing a beaming smile.
“Good day, Mr. Vertune,” said the man, in a Spanish accent.
“Hello. Can I help you?”
“Yes,” he replied, looking me straight in the eye. “I want to thank you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Thank you with all my heart,” he said, bursting into tears.
NEW MOON
1
There’s no such thing as chance in life. Except for life itself. One day my father glimpsed my mother. Or maybe it was the other way around—it doesn’t matter. They met and there was a magic spark. It was love, or at least that’s what it said on the document they signed in front of the village mayor. My story begins with their meeting, although the key moment was really that of my birth. An optimist would say that I was born in early summer. A pessimist would say late June. But one thing everyone agreed upon was the heat wave. For years afterward, old folk would regale anyone who’d care to listen with dramatic tales of the impact on their crops, their words heavy with the bitterness and resentment of those who have suffered, those whom nature did not spare. I came into the world slap-bang in the middle of this solar frenzy, having judged the climate favorable to make my way down the birth canal. Birth is to life what boredom is to imagination: one is not possible without the other. My mother felt her first contractions in the garden of the family farm, as she bent over the soil, picking the sun-gorged vegetables. Maternity leave had yet to be invented. Pregnant or not, women were at the service of their families. There was no question of taking time off. Clutching her belly, on her knees, my mother sent for the doctor and the village priest, who barely had time to gather their instruments, mount their bicycles, and furiously pedal the two miles to our farm. My father had also been informed but considered it insufficient reason to abandon work. I was merely his fourth child, after all. Doubtless it sickened him to see the bloody heads of his brats emerge from between his wife’s thighs. Nature at work has no beauty but that which we give it, and my father was no artist in that regard. He preferred the solitude of his fields to the plaintive cries of his son. Farming was his life. The rest was unimportant.
The priest and the doctor arrived at the same time. They leaned their bicycles against the garden fence.
“Good day, Doctor. How are you?” asked the priest, his voice full of that warmth one so often finds in men of faith.
“I am well, thank you,” replied the doctor coldly.
“We don’t often see you at mass on Sundays.”
“That’s because I don’t like the taste of the wafers.”
“If that’s all it is, you are not obliged to swallow them!” joked the man of the cloth.
The doctor, put out by the priest’s repartee, shrugged his shoulders. The holy man lowered his head, disappointed at having failed yet again to establish a dialogue with the doctor. All his attempts had been in vain, despite his commitment to Catholic tradition. His faith in humanity had not wavered—quite the contrary—but the doctor certainly didn’t make life easy for him. The priest had to contend with that lack of open-mindedness that men of science sometimes have regarding spiritual matters: the barely masked intolerance that seems to make geniuses of them, holders of an age-old secret that ordinary people cannot even begin to glimpse, let alone understand, so ignorant are they. He took a chance every time he saw the doctor, just in case, but he never succeeded. The truth was that one of them considered procreation to be God’s masterpiece, while the other saw it as a mere fact of life related to the survival of the species. It was a major difference of opinion. I was not yet born, and already a paradox of life had me in its clutches. My umbilical cord had barely been severed, and already my body was buffeted between the doctor’s instruments and the priest’s holy water.
“Let me baptize him,” the priest insisted.
“Hang on a second so I can check that his heart is beating properly!”
“Thank you, Lord, for this gift full of grace . . .”
“For heaven’s sake, will you shut up, I can’t hear a thing!” declared the doctor.
“I’m sorry, but I must proceed with the traditional rites of my church.”
“To hell with your rites, let me do my work!”
The priest blanched at such a blasphemy.
The doctor passed his stethoscope across every part of my body; palpated my genitals; examined my pupils, my ears, my scalp, my fingers, and my feet. He tested my reflexes with a series of increasingly forbidding instruments. His medical ritual went on so long that my mother began to doubt its usefulness. She wondered whether all this fuss wasn’t intended purely to infuriate the priest, who was so anxious to baptize my newborn body. Finally the doctor completed his meticulous examination.
“All is well, madam. Your son is in very good health.”
“Thank you.”
Turning to the priest, standing just behind him, he remarked scornfully, “He’s yours now. Bless him with your nonsense!”
The priest gently picked me up and plunged my head into the holy water. He recited a few words of Latin before wrapping me in a towel. Some s
cientists affirm that on the day of our birth, our brain draws its own conclusions as to this strange masquerade that is life. These thoughts affect our existence for the rest of our days, as if attached to our heads by long strings.
Unfortunately, few people remember the day of their birth. The details of mine were related to me a few years later by one of my older brothers. He told me that as soon as each man grabbed me, my little brow furrowed and I howled inconsolably. I was already pining for my cozy nook deep in the maternal belly, where it all began, where nothing mattered, where all was silence and repose. But devious despair had gathered me as I exited the vagina. Nothing good awaited me out there. Or if there was any goodness, I would have to strive to unearth it. Perhaps that was my destiny. Perhaps the leitmotif of my life was determined the moment daylight tore into my retina: smooth out sharp corners, calm conflicts, understand rather than impose, love rather than hate.
Then, when the priest placed me in my mother’s arms, my yelling ceased, as despair’s spring suddenly ran dry. I somehow understood that my mother was my ally, my light in the darkness. Even then, a woman’s presence gave me a pleasant feeling, different from that of men. But the true miracle of birth occurred next—not in the literal sense, the mechanics and blood of it, but the metaphorical, spiritual one. I cracked a wide smile, an offering to my mother, who was both moved and relieved to be separated from a part of herself. At that precise moment, a piece of theater was playing out in my unconscious, its protagonists serving up a spectacle bursting with conclusions. The first: beware of men and their unhealthy thirst for power. Second: if you must suffer, at least keep smiling while you do so; it costs nothing, as they say in the countryside. Third: live intensely and never seek refuge behind excuses you only half believe. A glow appeared in my eyes then, my pupils shimmering like a torch in the night.
2
On that hot summer day of June 26, 1929, I offered myself to life in all my nakedness: I was physically, intellectually, and emotionally raw. My mother took me in her arms and kissed me at length, and I snuggled against her, a fragile little animal, reliant on her care and affection. The priest observed the scene, a soft smile playing across his face. As for the doctor, he packed his instruments away in his bag without paying us any attention. He seemed in a hurry to leave the room.
“What will this little boy be called?” the man of the church asked my mother.
“Paul,” she replied.
“That’s a lovely name. Paul was the thirteenth apostle, according to the Catholic tradition. He was thought to be different from the others: sensitive, a poet and a dreamer, ‘the apostle to the Gentiles.’ Your son will wear his name well. I sense that he too is different.”
“In what way?” the doctor interrupted. “He has a heart, two legs, two arms, two feet, two hands, a head! There is nothing as ordinary as a newborn, madam, with all due respect.”
“I was speaking not of his corporeal envelope, Doctor, but what lies inside.”
“Inside? There are guts, viscera, miles of veins through which a reddish liquid flows, bones to keep everything in place, nerves to make him move, muscles to help him carry wheat in the fields so he can feed his family, ligaments and tendons that will wear out with age, cells full of water—so much water, nothing but water everywhere—and, finally, a brain to give him a sense of priorities, of reality. That’s what’s inside this boy, Reverend, not a fiction that nobody can prove! Now excuse me, but I must go. I have other patients waiting for me to attend to their sick bodies, and it’s not with a load of nonsense that I’ll be treating what ails them. Goodbye, madam. Come see me regularly so that I may check on the good health of your child.”
“Goodbye, Doctor,” said the priest, disillusioned but never resentful.
The doctor hurried off, his bag hanging from his arm, then suddenly halted in the doorway and turned around.
“And I . . . My congratulations, madam, that’s a lovely baby you have there,” he uttered hesitantly before leaving.
My brother told me how the priest gave a slight smile as he congratulated my mother again before also leaving. He walked along the farm wall to his rusty old bicycle, mounted it, and slowly rode away, humming a hymn full of hope, its pleasant melody filling the country lane like a trail of human kindness put to good use, the sense of a duty properly accomplished. Then he disappeared from view.
When my father returned to the farm that evening, he stopped to peer at me. His face bore no emotion except the fatigue of a man exhausted by work.
“He doesn’t look like me,” he declared indifferently.
“Really? I think he has your eyes and lips,” my mother replied.
“He looks like a wimp.”
“It’s a bit soon to tell.”
“As long as he can help in the fields, that’s all I care about.”
Once he had satisfied his curiosity, he turned from the crib and went to tend to the animals. I represented nothing in his eyes but another mouth to feed and two more arms to help him harvest his fields. No more, no less. My destiny was already sealed in stone. I would follow my begetter’s path in every detail, sowing the fertile earth with fistfuls of seed, bending to reap the golden stalks. In his mind there was no other path imaginable, no other way possible, no magic capable of supplanting the cruel reality of our country life. Fortune-tellers wouldn’t be able to hustle me as they read my palm at the village fête; there would be nothing for them to remark upon, just a long, straight life line that met the demands of my progenitor.
My father was a mysterious man I never really knew. His features, betraying no emotion—not even a hint—never conveyed any sort of love for me. His eyes reflected an abyssal emptiness, a bottomless well that had filled with desolation when he was only a little boy, soaking deep into the surrounding rock. But the well’s structure remained firm, unaffected by the stagnating putrefaction. His extreme coldness frightened me, as did his lack of humanity. A wall of incomprehension rose between us. I possessed all the emotion he lacked. Not to mention my enthusiasm, in overwhelming contrast to his gloomy, blinkered view of existence. We never became close. What did my mother love about such a stern man? I was unable to unravel the mystery of this paradoxical union, for the ways of love are, like those of the Lord, impenetrable.
Mama was the exact opposite of her husband. A fervent Catholic who attended mass every Sunday, she praised the glory of God while singing out of tune. Her attractive physique seemed unaffected by a series of pregnancies and a litany of household chores. Her body remained slender, soft, and childlike. Our physique often reflects our character. Open-minded, affectionate people appear younger, and those with closed minds and hearts, older, as if some interplay between our organs could inexorably curb our destiny. My mother loved me with all her might, with all her being, and she protected me from her husband’s authority as best she could. She comforted me through the ups and downs of life with a courage my father sorely lacked.
3
My first years were punctuated by the mooing of cows, the smell of hay, the scent of raspberry bushes in the garden, and the salty spray of the sea lapping at the Brittany coastline a few hundred yards from our house. It was a carefree time, a golden age where the pleasure of experimentation was my sole concern, where I could appreciate life without thinking about tomorrow. I learned to talk, walk, and run full tilt through the varied landscapes of the Gulf of Morbihan. My three brothers, Jacques, Guy, and Pierre, introduced me to this environment where everything astonished me, be it insects, plants, shellfish, crustaceans, wheat fields, or the roads along which cars passed, their engines throbbing.
“Paul, look, a glowworm!” cried Jacques every time he spied one of the strange beetles that bathed the undergrowth with its pale light.
“Glooooowworm!” I shouted in wonder, emphasizing the o to such an extent that the word was soon no more than a shadow of itself.
I approached the insect, intrigued, believing it to have come from the era of the dinosaurs, devoting the s
ame metaphysical worship to the beetle as the Incas did to the sun. I was fascinated by its world, a world of silence and rustling. A child’s imagination is unspoiled, yet to be short-circuited by pernicious thoughts to come. No adult worships an insect, except perhaps an entomologist. I picked up the creature with infinite care and admired its delicate, soothing, greenish light. Occasionally this light would extinguish for no apparent reason, and I would put it back, feeling guilty at having disrupted its luminous peace. Jacques always understood my disappointment and wrapped his arms around me. He was a great guy in those days.
Sometimes, when my parents’ backs were turned, I went out to our garden and explored the scattered apple orchard. I would sit in the shade of those huge trees, which every now and then would release a ripe fruit that made me jump as it hit the ground. I could spend hours with my eyes fixed on the sharply delineated leaves as they danced in the breeze, hypnotized by this aerial ballet. Often one would detach from its branch and glide above my head, twisting in the gusts of wind, twirling through empty space to land, rustling on the ground. Tiny insects streaked back and forth across the bark, winding their way around the branches without making a sound despite the millions of feet striking the wood. I would stretch out on the ground and admire the sky for hours, marveling at that bright blue stretching as far as the eye could see, or, when night fell, the dark cloak pricked with points of light. But something else up there intrigued me: a kind of luminous pebble perched in the black void. I would scrutinize it with concern, not understanding what it was doing there. Sometimes I would glimpse it overhead during the day, yet paler, more subdued. Its shape was always changing, from a crescent to a circle. What strange message was it trying to send us? I tried to discern a logic, a meaning, my childish brain running at full capacity. But the enigma remained. When I was old enough to talk (and unable to contain myself any longer), I asked my mother.
Seasons of the Moon Page 1
