by Gaetan Soucy
“You went to the village for a coffin. Where’s your coffin?”
“First of all it’s not my coffin, it’s papa’s. And second of all I couldn’t find one.”
Brother snickered as I’d never heard him snicker before, though there had never been a lack of opportunities to hear him do so. He broke off sharply and shot me a very dark look, with his eyelids creased and his pupils filled with things that had been stepped on.
“We don’t have a box big enough to put papa in,” he said, “and it’s your fault.”
I gave him a scandalized look.
“Yes, your fault! So we’ll burn him. We’ll take his ashes, if you see what I mean, and we’ll put them in his hot pepper jar so we can bury it with him inside. Now then, have you noticed the size of our oven? Try putting the mortal remains of a dead man in there!… We’d have to proceed by inches.”
And already the teeth of the handsaw were settled on papa’s leg. Listen, I’ve panicked at less.
“No, stop! We can’t do that!”
“Have you got another solution, maybe?”
And the handsaw he was waving near my face rippled and produced a music that would have made me giggle on other days, in other ways.
“And then we’re going to take all his papers and the fairies’ box of magical effects and we’re going to bury them along with him. And the Fair Punishment too, I’ll have you know. We’re going to cast all of that, and the Fair Punishment too, into the same hole!”
“The Fair Punishment?” He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that. “But we’ll lose the power of speech!”
Luckily papa’s mortal remains had become like stone, this morning’s rigidity was spruce beer in comparison, and I knew that deep down my brother was lazy and would quickly grow discouraged in the face of such a task. Only a few sickly drops of blood had started dribbling, their colour already peculiar, the blood was thick and wouldn’t move very quickly and that gave me some time to have an illumination, if it warrants that name, and eventually I did.
“They’ll come to our property in gangs! Entire hordes of neighbours! They’ll take everything away from us and we won’t be able to live in the kitchen any more.”
That paralyzed him on the spot. “What are you saying?”
There are circumstances beyond our control when we have to repeat what we’ve just said, I apologize to the words. I repeated the above paragraph more or less verbatim.
Kid brother had gone green around the gills.
“I’ll explain,” I said, and took advantage of his stupor to remove the handsaw from his grip. Without a word he let himself be guided, his jaw gaping, and he took stunned, docile little steps, comparable to papa’s after he’d knocked his skull repeatedly against a tree trunk by way of exercise. I dragged kid brother into the library.
On the matter of dictionaries, I’m sure we have more than there are trees in the pine grove, maybe even more than there are thorns on the branches of all the trees in the pine grove, myriads of them if such things exist. I don’t know if I’ve read half of them, yet I want you to know I have read. I keep telling myself that one day I’ll have devoured all of them, at least those that aren’t rotten and decomposing in my hands like a damp block of flour, but I can’t help myself, I always come back to my favourites, the ones that talk about magnificent cavaliers with outfits that sparkle like spoons, and the ethics of Spinoza, which is baffling like all great truths, to say nothing of the memoirs of the due de saint-simon. I don’t know where in the universe all those stories took place, in what foreign lands, I find it hard to believe such things could have happened on this earth from what I’ve been able to see of it, especially now that I’ve been able to verify with my own eyes what the village looks like, which seemed to me not much compared to my imaginings, but I go into a waltz when I read the due de saint-simon. There is dancing in the darkest shadows deep in my head, like the roar of phantom armies that vanish into smoke, for the little goat can’t grasp more than a few simonian crumbs, but my chest goes up to the sky forthwith when I read him, and shoo. For instance, to avoid disputes and difficulties the king did away with all ceremonies resolving that no formal betrothals would be held in his chambers but the marriages would be performed at once taking place in the chapel to make unnecessary the wearing of the long tailed coat with flaring panels which would no longer be worn ceremoniously except by the bodyguards on duty to the princess as they wore it every day, and further that the pall would be held by the bishop of metz who had been appointed first almoner to the king as a relic of his uncle and by the district almoner of the king who would be the abbé morel by day that msgr the due de bourgogne alone would give his hand to the princess both going to and returning from the chapel and no prince would sign the cure’s book after monsieur le prince, that is a sentence from saint-simon, and if I’ve learned anything at all as secretarious I owe it to the due, to his thunderous language and his extraordinary stories, to his sentence which shoots up to its summit like farts from a burning log, I beg you to believe me, if you see what I mean.
The rain that is welling up from the ground and will never end has already done its work on part of the dictionaries, a long and slow and inexorable work of invasion by mildew and damp is exerting its powers on our estate and the dictionaries are dying a natural death like all the rest — corruption! do your duty. You have to clear a path through the piles of books, that’s what their actual name is, that stand higher than my brother’s head and mine, and since we haven’t known the wondrous lands of the cavaliers and Jesus, walking amid mounds of dictionaries like that is the most intoxicating thing I’ve experienced on this planet up till now, with the exception of the tiny moment when we shared our transports and you deigned to hold me against your chest and my tongue ran over your face, o my valiant cavalier, or else the times when I dance with my manikins of light, as you shall see.
It was out of the question for horse to follow us, there are limits after all. I forbade it with one glance and he stayed on the threshold, a pitiful sight with his walleyes. Horse lacks only the power of speech, and even that depends on what you call speech. Brother and I sat down on some antique pillows covered with old velvet curtains that apparently, in the glorious days before our time on earth, adorned the tall windows in the library with the broken panes that let in winds and hail and swarms of snowflakes, and those antique pillows and that old velvet curtain were my bed at the times when I didn’t sleep under the stars, as I recall having already written. I began explaining to brother what had taken place in the village, see above, omitting however certain details that were liable to offend my own sense of propriety, and the questions he asked me were so strange and dwelled on so many details, details so insignificant that at times I got lost myself, and it took as long as thirty-twelve days of rain but eventually he grasped the essentials, which I had him repeat like a lesson to be quite certain he’d understood the nature of the jam we were in. And after that he didn’t say even a tickle. He had picked up a bottle of fine wine, because father had always insisted that the wine be stored in the library, who knows why, and brother began to drink from the bottle and to stare straight ahead with a look as if he were making grave decisions with full-scale consequences. I know what fine wine can do to a head and it seemed to me that this really wasn’t the time for it.
“This isn’t the Friday when jesus died,” I said severely.
“And how does mister skirt know that?” he snarled, thinking it would floor me.
“All right, first of all, where is the billy goat? The friday when jesus died always comes at the time of year when the ice starts to melt on the pond.”
Saying that, I repeated to myself for the nth time that it couldn’t be a gift from god to have to die like that on a fixed date every year. If it were me, anyway, when my turn came I wouldn’t beat around the bush, I’d kick the bucket in one shot, like papa.
My brother shrugged to show that he didn’t give a fly fart. I longed to tell him that this
was no time to be rolling on the floor with laughter like a pig, the way we always did following father’s example when we got into the fine wine, but he said this thing to me that had an effect on me after all, do you know what he said to me?
“You take your inflations and scram!”
YOU TAKE YOUR INFLATIONS and scram, those are the tender words to which my brother had accustomed me — he who was, before I met you, the only being on earth the little goat had ever tried to be in love with. But with him, well, I didn’t have even a demi-urge for him to stretch out on my back, it’s not because he didn’t have that in mind if you see what I mean. Sometimes I think that keeping your balls means assuming you can do whatever you want, drive away what’s natural and it comes back as horror. Humph. But perhaps the dictionaries of chivalry have got me all worked up, have made me expect too much of the kind of love that’s possible here below on our estate.
I left my brother to the sinister secret meeting he was having with himself. I equipped myself with an oil lamp and I and my inflations scrammed. I crossed the corridors, trying to get a reading on the state of the universe. I’d brought along the book of spells. I knew I should catapult myself into this book as quickly as possible and recount all the fantasie and wonderful things that had been happening to my brother and me since dawn, but my head was spinning in the wrong direction, I hadn’t eaten a bite all day except for certain herbs, friendly mushrooms, and a few flowers past their prime that I’d picked going and coming along the road through the pine grove, maybe I’ve forgotten to mention that, they allow me to get by. Usually I need nothing more to sustain me until nightfall, along with a crumb of stoneloaf, but the day had been draining, I felt slightly askew in my body and I promised it that before daybreak I would force myself to down two potatoes. The body is an abyss, everything inside it is pitch-black.
Unquestionably the portrait gallery had suffered the least damage from the almighty mildew. The pictures were held up by frames that hung on the walls, there must have been more than twice the ten fingers of my hands. Some of them I liked very much, ones that showed landscapes impossible to imagine, so little did they resemble what I’d known hitherto on this planet of old mountains. There were also some pictures of very serious individuals who all seemed to look like one another, as if they were all the same and only their costumes changed, with the same nose, really, on all of them, and under each you could read a different name, and dates that made no sense, they went back so far compared with the dates written in our book of spells, but always there was this inscription under each of the portraits: soissons de coëther-lant. There were sluts too and blessed virgins who were called marquises, if I understood correctly, and then there were countesses, and it seems that in all likelihood I too am a soissons slut, the clarity of it suddenly sprang to my mind like a tiger, what a lot of words, thought I, I could have been in the memoirs of saint-simon.
Horse was following me and lingering in front of certain pictures, perplexed or disenchanted. Incidentally I don’t know what age horse may have reached in his lifetime. We think we know certain beings and we don’t even know their expiration date. From all appearances papa had kneaded him long before he kneaded my brother and me, assuming that he actually did knead him, perhaps father and horse had been together from the beginning of eternity, like correlative modes that express the same essence, if we’re to rely on ethics. But those are merely suppositions and their kind and they’re all tangled up with religion. Before I vacated the portrait gallery I bent down because there was something on the floor that I’d never seen before and it intrigued me. It was nothing. The desiccated cadaver of a raccoon, its paw caught in a speedtrap.
And I nearly took a nose-dive when I caught my foot in its private parts, I mean the chains. Let me explain. Underneath the north door of the portrait gallery some chains had been screwed to the hinges in such a way that one could, should one wish, attach someone there with arms outstretched and legs wide apart. The person thus chained at the ankles and wrists would resemble an x, if you want to call a spade a spade. And that person was papa. Now and then he would order us to chain him up like that, and there’s more. At the same time kid brother was required to push against father’s back with his full weight so as to stretch out his arms and legs to the maximum, which can’t have been good for him at his age, I don’t think, to judge by the cracking. And then, at the maximum point of muscular elongation, if that’s the proper term, I had to position myself in front of him and flog his naked belly with a wet rag. You could hear peculiar sounds in his chest, I hated that, and I always cried when papa forced us to do this to him. Then he would beg us to unfasten him but we weren’t supposed to, and that was how he tortured us. Since he had ordered us not to take him down till nightfall we had to wait for night to take him down, never mind his pleas, his order had been categorical. Our filial duty required us to respect his instructions, watch out for whacks. Hanging from his chains like that, papa shouted insults at the arrogant individuals who stood there framed in their portraits in the gallery, and I still can’t say what they could have done to him to incur his benedictions that way but they quite clearly didn’t give a fly fart. I took pity though, and my tears mingled with my fragrant hair. My father did such eccentric exercises. And to think we won’t see their like again.
Once past that door, I was on a vast mirrored plain and there my gaze inevitably fell far away towards the worst spot on the estate, to which we were forbidden access during father’s lifetime but where I went as many times as possible, especially at night when I bore the weight of melancholy It was a room so enormous that two hundred neighbours could have flapped their elbows, as brother and I liked to do to imitate hens, without their elbows touching, believe me if you want but you can check, it’s historic. My brother had a hellish fear of going there because there was always a murmur in the air, especially in the evening, a murmur I’ll say more about later, and my brother is a cretin in case you haven’t realized that yet. Nothing could be less like the poor kitchen lined with planks where we spent the bulk of our earthly life than this hall filled with marble, fireplace mantels, chandeliers, paned windows as high as three little goats standing on each others’ heads. Yes, chandeliers that hung from the ceiling and were shaped like strawberries, with crystal eyes and globes where the light got trapped and danced and laughed cheerily, really, things were moving on all sides, and with a little luck and a little wind which would come in through the broken windowpanes, all this was accompanied by a merry clinking as crystal-clear as a fish. But other chandeliers had fallen to the floor like overripe fruit, they had crashed to the cracked marble slabs in bunches and it made you think of some disembowelled fly, its guts full of eggs — corruption! do your duty now. And I want you to know, there was also a huge grand camel with a wing and you could have easily locked up three dead men inside it. I say wing but I don’t actually know what it’s called, it’s a kind of table and all camels have one, to go by the illustrations, but on ours it was always standing up like an open grave, and since there was a decrepit-looking wound on the ceiling above it, whenever it rained very hard the rainwater fell inside, onto the taut strings, and made lugubrious sounds and it could have been chopin, I’m choosing my words carefully. I often stepped up to it, with respect and circumspection, because that big black piece of furniture has always seemed to me like something mysteriously alive, recalcitrant and untamed, and I would run my hand fearfully over the white keys of the keyboard, which were yellow like horse’s teeth. I would have liked to hear it speak to me, to hear its true voice from the deep when it sang, perhaps it wouldn’t have been lugubrious at all if anyone had deigned to caress it, following my example so to speak, but papa never ever made music on the grand camel, don’t ask me why, yet papa had music in his very dick.
All that was in daytime, because at night, I’ll tell you about that in a moment, it was magnificent, but first I have to tell you about the silverware, that was during the daytime too. It was lined up in big cu
pboards set into the walls, which stood three times the height of the little goat and rose all the way to the ceiling, so I had to use a stepladder, and they had panels of glass in beautiful bright colours, all jack-knife dives and leaps, and that’s why it had been sheltered from the ambient mildew, the silverware I mean. I had parties there sometimes on days of miraculous circumstances, when all at the same time the sun was shining, father had trotted to the village, and my brother was far away at the other end of the estate playing with his balls. You can’t imagine how many there were, it took me four hours just to spread them out, I’m still talking about the silverware obviously. I don’t know if I’ve thought to write it down but cleanliness makes me crazy in my head I love it so much. There were spoons of every kind, of every family, and saucers and plates and cups and knives, it would never end if I listed everything that was stuck away in the drawers and cupboards of the ballroom, in gold, in crystal, in silver, in bristol glass, in philosopher’s stone, in all the most wonderful things you can imagine. I studied each utensil, that’s the proper term, I wouldn’t tolerate the slightest fog, everything had to sparkle, I polished, I germaned, never has my skirt been used so much or for a better purpose. I removed the dust and debris from the marble strewn on the ground, that verb strew again, and I arranged my manikins of light with a thousand and one loving attentions under the tallest of the windows where the sun came in to dance in this wonderful labyrinth of cleanliness and sparkling bones. I think those utensils, there were a good forty-hundred and fifty-thirteen of them, every time I tried to count them as I lined them up in rows my head began to spin in the wrong direction and I’d lose track of the number, there were so many, cross my heart. Sometimes I would waltz all around them, my bare feet on the chilly battered slabs. But mostly I stood and gazed at them with my arms stretched out like a sparrow, as still as a frightened mouse, and I felt all the sorrows and bereftments drop from my wings like the icicle stalactites that fall from the roofs in the spring, that father in his lifetime called tsoulalas because he’d been a missionary in japan when he was a fine-looking lad, don’t ask me where that is, it’s somewhere on the other side of the pine grove.
