Frost: A Novel (9 page)

The children had lice, the grown-ups had gonorrhea, or the syphilis that finally overwhelmed their nervous systems.
“People here don’t go to the doctor,” said the painter. “It’s hard to persuade them that a doctor is as essential to them as a dog. They work on instinct,” he said, “they don’t like the idea of interventions. Of course.” Tree boughs often broke off in storms, and came down and killed passersby. “Because no one is protected. Never. Nowhere.” Death surprised you in your sleep, in the field, in the meadow. Between a “lower” and a “higher” conversation, people dropped dead. “Revert to their original condition.” They usually sought out a place “to die in,” where they wouldn’t be found so quickly. “Outside the borders of the commune.” Animals also went far away, far from their kind, when they have the feeling they’re dying. “Here the humans are like animals … Fragments of an alien life” often fell dead at his feet. It alarmed him. In a clearing, on a bridge, deep in a forest, “where darkness pulls the rope tight.” He would often stop and turn round with a sense of a voice calling him from behind—a sensation I’ve had as well—but not seeing anything. He explores the undergrowth and the water and the rocks and the living creatures in the water, “which can be as cruel as its deeps.” He had various methods of going through the woods: with his hands behind his back, with his hands in his jacket pockets. With his hands braced protectively across his head. He often ran on ahead to catch himself up, then hung back and chased after himself again. Talked to trees “as to members of an extraterrestrial academy, like children who are suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of being alone in a destructive chaos.” His powers of invention extend as far as “astonishing verbal constructions verging on the profound,” which he finds in the forests and fields, in the meadows and the deep snow. Or in the hollow path where he sits: “master of contemptu mundi” is one such, “uncivil engineer” another. That craze began one summer.
Once, he drowned a determinist in a hole he’d drilled in the ice crust of a pond. “Something reigns over us that, in my view, has nothing to do with us”—that often brought him up short. One might laugh about it. But it was so dangerous that “it was possible to die in it.” He always rebelled against anything superior, until “there was nothing left there” for him. “Any rebellion has to get somewhere,” he said. His rebellions no longer got anywhere. From time to time he saw people in whom he sees: amazing assets, inexhaustible assets, he never had such assets himself! He said: “It takes you hours to adjust to the palpitations that suddenly start going in you like drumbeats at such a sight. Nothing can stand up to it in the long run.” The people here had no assets, and if they did, then they didn’t have the strength to use them, on the contrary, “they fritter them away.” There, “where human potential is negated.” Where ugliness offered itself everywhere like “the sexual imperative.” The whole region was “sodden with disease.” In this valley corruption spoke “sign language so that the deaf could hear it”: things that elsewhere took care to remain hidden till shortly before their objective, here showed no such fastidiousness: “people wear their tuberculosis on their sleeves. They wear it on the outside, shamelessly, so that the glacier wind can whirl them away like a pile of dead leaves.”

“There are schoolchildren,” said the painter, “who have a three-hour journey to school. Often enough, before leaving home—at four a.m.—they do the housework, twelve-year-olds feed and milk the cows, because no one else is able to do it, because the mother is dead or ill in bed, and the brother is even younger, and the father is in jail because he owes
money at the pub. With nothing but a hunk of rye bread, they haul themselves down the mountain through the cold. There is nothing, but nothing progressive here. Storms blow up out of nothing, screams are unavailing; who would hear you. A lot of country schools have been built in mountain passes, but still children are put through the torment of a long walk to school, if they are to escape analphabetism. They have been found in twos and threes in ravines, in petrified formations, past help. The children you meet here are precocious. Cunning, bandy-legged, with a tendency to hydrocephalus. The girls pallid and scrawny and tormented by septic ear-piercings. The boys straw-blond, with shovel hands, flat low foreheads.”

Leaping up and running away and sitting down again, that was really the sum total of his childhood. Rooms full of the air of dead people. Beds that, turned back, reek of death. The odd highfalutin word in the corridor, the word “never” for example, or the word “school,” the words “death” and “funeral.” For years these words had pursued and irritated him, got him “into terrible states.” Then again, they sometimes seemed like self-raising music: the word “funeral” spreading way past the cemetery, and then past all other cemeteries as well, out into infinity, or the notion that human beings have of infinity. “My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins.” Childhood had come to him “like a person coming into a house with old tales that are grimmer than you can think, than you can feel, than you can bear: and that, because you are always hearing them, you have never heard.
Ever.” For him, childhood had begun on the left side of the road and led straight uphill. “From that point on, I was always thinking of falling. I wanted to be able to fall, and I undertook several attempts in that direction … but it’s wrong to make such attempts. It’s thoroughly mistaken.” Aunts towed him into morgues on the end of their long ugly arms, lifted him up over brass rails, so that he could gaze down into the coffins. They gave him the flowers for the departed to hold in his hands, and he had to keep smelling them, and listening to them say: “What a man he was! How lovely she is! See how elegantly dressed the dead man is! Look! Look!” They immersed him “ruthlessly in a sea of corruption.” In railway trains he can hear himself say, “Straight ahead.” In the long nights he loved the crack of light from his grandparents’ bedroom, where they are still talking or reading. Delighted himself in their shared sleep. “The way sheep sleep together” was his sense. The way their breathing knits them together. Mornings break over a cornfield. Over a lake. Over the river. Over the forest. From the top of a hill. Bird-song on the fresh breeze. Evenings deepening in rushes and silence, into which he intones his earnest prayers. The whinnying of horses plucks apart tufts of darkness. Drunks, carters, bats all terrify him. Three fellow pupils dead on the street. A capsized boat that a drowning man failed to reach. Cries for help. Enormous wheels of cheese with enough force to crush him. Hidden in a brewery cellar, he is afraid. In between gravestones a game is played where figures are tossed from one to the other. Skulls glimmer feebly in the sun. Doors open and shut. Vicarages are the scene of meals. Kitchens of cooking. Abattoirs of slaughtering. Bakeries of baking. Shoe shops of hammering. Schools of teaching: with open windows, fit to scare you. Processions show colourful
faces. Baptismal infants with feeble-minded grins. A bishop greeted with noisy cheers. Railwaymen’s caps are mistaken on an embankment, which causes men wearing workpants and nothing else to laugh. Trains. The lights of passing trains. Beetles and worms. Brass-band music. Long streets full of grown-ups: a train that makes the whole world shake. Groups of huntsmen take him with them. He counts partridges, chamois, deer. Fallow deer, red deer, the hair-fine distinctions! Snow falling on everything. His desires as an eight-year-old, as a thirteen-year-old. The disappointments sopping into the bedclothes. Floods of tears when confronted with something so baffling. Not even six, and so much pitilessness already!

Cities, bubbling up against their inventors.

“Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.” It went along rivers, and down mountain gorges. If you gave it any assistance, the evening would construct the most elaborate and costly lies. But it wouldn’t save you from pain and indignity. Lurking cats crossed your path with sinister thoughts. Like him, so nettles would sometimes draw me into fiendish moments of unchastity. As with him, my fear was made palatable by raspberries and blackberries. A swarm of crows were an instant manifestation of death. Rain produced damp and despair. Joy pearled off the crowns of sorrel plants. “The blanket of snow covers the earth like a sick child.” No infatuation, no ridicule,
no sacrifice. “In classrooms, simple ideas assembled themselves, and on and on.” Then stores in town, butchers’ shop smells. Façades and walls, nothing but façades and walls, until you got out into the country again, quite abruptly, from one day to the next. Where the meadows began, yellow and green; brown plowland, black trees. Childhood: shaken down from a tree, so much fruit and no time! The secret of his childhood was contained in himself. Growing up wild, among horses, poultry, milk, and honey. And then: being evicted from this primal condition, bound to intentions that went way beyond himself. Designs. His possibilities multiplied, then dwindled in the course of a tearful afternoon. Down to three or four certainties. Immutable certainties. “How soon it is possible to spot dislike. Even without words, a child wants everything. And attains nothing.” Children are much more inscrutable than adults. “Protractors of history. Conscienceless. Correctors of history. Bringers-on of defeat. Ruthless as you please.” As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with. Often—as it does me—it gives him a shock, when he feels a sensation he had as a child, provoked by a smell or a color, but that doesn’t remember him. “At such a moment you feel horribly alone.”

He had had “the worst education, the worst imaginable education.” The seeming advantage he had drawn from the fact that everyone ignored him later turned out to be a “catastrophic misjudgment.” Basically, they hadn’t given him a thought, right from the start. “But that doesn’t help a child get an upbringing. They took trouble, yes, but about my
shoes. Not my heart. About my meals. But not my mind. Later on, but even then much too early, when I was thirteen, I may say they stopped bothering about my shoes and my meals as well.” I think, what sort of upbringing did
I
have? And was it an upbringing? Not just a growing up? Growing wild? The way stubborn plants grow wild in a garden full of weeds? Was I not always made to rely on myself? Care? Advice? Where? When? From the age of fourteen, I had to negotiate everything myself. Everything! Intellectual things too. Impalpable things. But it was never so terrible for me as it was for the painter. It was never so bad for me. I’m different; not so agitated. He’s all agitation and irritation. I’m not always agitated and irritated.

Often he had asked himself: “How will I get out of the darkness? My head enwrapped in darkness, swaddled in darkness, I always tried to put the darkness behind me. Signs, yes, signs of idiocy … The darkness reached the pitch of insanity. At twenty, thirty, thirty-five. More and more ruthlessly with the years. I tried to get about: it seems important to me to alert you to this idea … I favor very simple explanations: a bend in the river, you must know, is like a bend in the human spine, glistening, sparkling, glistening in the afternoon sun, part of an unending spine curving over the horizon: that’s it … Under some circumstances, it’s enough to kill off the darkness in one’s own head—because it’s only inside one’s own head that there is this darkness—with the darkness in one’s own head. Mark you: the darkness is always a matter of one’s own self-contained, severed head.—The people, forced back from their own personal darkness into a more general darkness,
continually forced back, you understand … Like myself, once, leaning in my parents’ house with bare torso, in the darkness. In front of me: a bicycle wrapped in the wind, two dancing schoolchildren. A smell of raisins. And in between, the dullness that cements foundations. The face, clipped from the newspaper, of our math teacher, who confronted us with the achievements of Voltaire. The outline of Homer … dinned into my brain, in the dark, phenomena and epiphenomena, notions of time, and sub-notions of time. Riddled by all these. To all the questions of old age, no answer. The general bitterness proceeds with deadly precision: a dog writhes on the grass. It might be a dog, or a mole, or just some dirt that you suspect of wanting to exist … you dance over the abyss in which every day you smash your pains, and the pains of your pains.”

He gave me an account of how he formed relationships and broke them off. He didn’t think of telling me. Telling is reserved for other characters. Not him. How he planned journeys and went on them, or planned them and didn’t go on them after all. How he discovered his capacity for pleasure and enjoyment, and how he took these to heights that were beyond the common man, or forbidden him. He mastered collapses, everyday, all-round, personal failures. He accused himself many times of lying, and applied the criteria of incorruptibility and precision in the establishment of facts against himself. Ruthlessly, one would have to say. Undefined things struck him as too vain for him to want to approach them. Oceans appeared to him as dark lunacy in front of his eyes, drawing a line that mocks infinity. Mountain chains glittered in prospect. Abysses, black and hostile, causing a ripple
down the spine. The air often atremble with distant thunder. Before long, the looming outlines of southern limestone cliffs. All stunned with lightning. Cities assembled on uncertain coasts. Notions like “pride,” “abandonment,” “strictness,” and “deadly solitude” were formed from his unconscious gestures. Memory, which can be as clear as the air on an August day in eternity, spurred him to astonishing mental feats and an astonishing understanding of the world. History investigated him, and he returned the compliment—and there was harmony. Nothing was so clear as through his registering of it, his senses must be the purest imaginable. From infancy, schooled in heaven and hell, and the kingdom in between. But they were only moments that, to him, are native to every human being and then one day, as on command, cease to come. He was leery of opposing the “destroyers of his senses” with force. He cursed them, and they prevailed. There lay on the ground the thing that he hoped would heal him for ever. At his feet was “the kingdom of possibilities, which is blameless.” The way he learned to deal with people in the same way as with stones, with news as with antique objects. The way he found out what thoughtlessness is, how it makes one dull, lonely, desperate. The way he was able to unite future, present, and past in himself and developed a game in which he would occasionally lose himself. The way he learned to switch off his body by purposeful calculation, and his mind as well, forcing it in a direction that was then fixed, “the only direction,” an orientation that took him maybe a fraction of a second. The way he learned to live, though surrounded by the dead, the abdicated, the eliminated, the deposed, the fallen. As though in a never-ending tunnel, he lived on in himself in his darkness. He thought back on a youth that was restless but, as he now saw, stalled.