Trio (24 page)

He had sat down at the table one spring day, he’d just come in, outside everything was blazing with sun, a bunch of irises in his hand which he dropped, a sudden fainting fit, and then after a period of insensibility picked up, put in a vase which he placed beside the clock, only a very few hours separated this season from the following one from which it was reasonable to presume that, if it was a question of irises, this particular variety was a late one, you couldn’t hear very well, perhaps orchids, a bunch of wild orchids in high summer when the fields were flowering with all sorts of plants, he’d been seen coming back with his harvest, what sort of a man was he to decorate his house with flowers like that, solitude deranges people, inexplicable passions, manias, you never know, prudence.

Strictly speaking there was probably only the neighbor whom he posted as a sentry on certain days, not giving any reason for his mania but the neighbor being handsomely recompensed wasn’t complaining, he kept watch, smoking his pipe, relieved by his wife who used to mind the goats and knit, bending over her needles, her hands forever active, she doesn’t remember to look up and doesn’t notice
 
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So calm, so gray. The corpse is lying flat on its stomach on the dunghill and it seems that the neighbor’s child on his way back from school caught sight of it amongst the elms, touched the inert body lightly on the shoulder and then apparently rushed home to his mother, night was falling, the father was working in the kitchen garden, they called him, they went back to the scene, that was it all right, he was already stiff.

He stays there with his head in his hands, strictly speaking it isn’t a malaise but what you might call a fit of abstraction, for hours, numb with cold, then he gets up and walks round the garden without bothering to open the shutters because night was falling, he’s caught sight amongst the elms of the child coming home from school, may have waved to him, apparently walked round the well trying to get rid of obtrusive memories, crossed the lucerne meadow and made his way towards the maize-fields, they’d already been harvested, it was winter, after that it was beetroot and then you came to the forest.

So the neighbor and his wife and child went to identify him, it was dark, with a torch, and when they had certified the death the man said let’s take him home, you take that arm I’ll take the other one, they dragged him to his bedroom and put him down on the bed, the woman was perspiring, the next thing was to declare it at the town hall and the man said I’ll go, we’d better lock the house up till I come back, you go back to your kitchen with the kid because he was hungry, this wasn’t the first corpse he’d had to cope with, the wife and child went off, he shut the door, the key was in the lock, he turned round, focused his torch on the front of the house where all the shutters were closed, not the slightest sign of the accident, there’d been no witness and no one supposed to know that the owner had come back this gray winter’s day to inspect the premises, had put the key back in the lock and opened the door again, you never know, prudence, and then went over to the village.

The road leading to it skirts some fields lying fallow. Crows fly up, or are they magpies, you can’t see very well, night is about to fall.

Something broken in the mechanism.

In the book he was leafing through there was an old-fashioned illustration, the sort he adored, queer fellow, inexplicable passions, the murmur was getting weaker, brooding over his cheerless days, the conversations with the doctor, the comings and goings in the paved courtyard, the solitude.

The difficulty for anyone who has cut across the fields is to find the road again a couple of miles further on, the paths are nothing but mud at this time of year, and then flooded meadows that you have to skirt round on the left, then the marsh on the edge of the pinewood which is a very strange place, full of birds’ carcasses and feathers among the brambles, when nature reclaims her rights in the middle of a cultivated field she’s more awe-inspiring than she is in a primeval forest, and then turn right, and there’s an old quarry, prickly hedges and bits of soft, ploughed ground which are difficult to cross.

The neighbor was going down to the village one cold gray day, he was on his way to tell the mechanic that his tractor had got stuck in the mud in a field and that nothing happened when he pressed the self-starter, he’d been tinkering with the engine all the previous evening without the slightest success, hadn’t a clue, the mechanic would come up with his breakdown van, one more bloody expense to add to those of the summer for the same machine.

The neighbor the previous evening had been tinkering with his engine by the light of a torch and a storm-lantern which he’d first put on the seat of the tractor and then balanced on the nearside front wheel.

But the goatherd bending over her knitting had started visibly when he came up, he’d teased her saying something like you must have a guilty conscience, you couldn’t hear very well, the woman had laughed, toothless mouth, cheeks as red as a lady-apple, little eyes of different colors, they say she’s pretty wily.

Went over, then, towards the forest by way of the mud paths and came to a halt because of the exceptional level of the water in the marsh, had to make a detour of something over half a mile to get to the wood and coming out by the pine-knoll apparently caught sight on his left about a hundred yards farther on of the tractor stuck in the mud and then coming along on the road the mechanic’s breakdown van. An instinctive step backwards. Fear of being seen.

Then went back to his reading, for hours, numb with cold, in that enclosed room, it was a dark night, no one unless he had his nose right up against the slit in the shutter would have suspected that he was there in this season, the goatherd had long gone home with her animals, the neighbor too had come back from the village, it was winter, it was beginning to rain, the first drops could be heard hitting the cobblestones in the courtyard.

That corpse on the dunghill.

Something broken in the engine.

The grassy courtyard today, no trace of the old cobblestones but the proportions between the buildings are still harmonious, very little change unless it’s a corrugated iron shed on the north side, a few more young elms to the east and fewer stones on the cover of the well, nothing much, if you didn’t know you wouldn’t have noticed anything but a conscience can’t be prevailed upon to cheat, he’d had his day, the solitude which was supposed to be inconsiderable had become intolerable, the old-fashioned illustration in the book, through the enlarged slit in the shutter anyone outside would have seen distinctly that cold room in the lamplight and the reader leaning his elbows on the table, he’s stopped moving, the hands have fallen off the clock-face.

Then they came with the mayor and the doctor, the door was still open, and they saw the man sprawling over the table, the book had fallen on to the floor, they decided to lift up the corpse which was already stiff, they put it as best they could on the armchair by the fire, huddled up, askew, they would wait for it to become more malleable, thanks to the cold it hadn’t started to smell yet, the neighbor’s wife prepared the bed, they would put it on it for a few hours just time for the formalities which would be simplified as there was no survivor, in the drawer in the table they found a will to be given to the coroner, they wondered what on earth could be in it, the buildings weren’t of any value, one more ruin in the district which already had its fair share.

The sentry seems to have seen something over by the elms, apparently waited, watching the path leading out of the wood to the barn, but nothing appeared, apparently went to look, not a sign of anyone, night was about to fall accompanied by its phantasms, who knew that evening how far their enticement might go, you had to be on your guard, not flinch.

There’d been that great friendship with the doctor, for years, they couldn’t do without each other, walks in the forest until nightfall, conversations by the fireside, boring things like that but they understood perfectly well, they’d gone halfway along the road together and suddenly one died and suddenly the survivor was a stranger to himself, lost all interest, there’d never be a fire in the hearth again.

The peasant stationed at the corner of the hedge explained that he’d seen the mechanic coming with his breakdown van, he was going along the road towards the marsh, and he’d wondered whether it wasn’t the neighbor’s machine again which had seen better days, he’d bought it secondhand the previous year and had had nothing but trouble with it, which only goes to show that nothing’s ever as good as new, anyway it was sheer stinginess, he knew him, even when he was quite young, you couldn’t get him to part with a sou, he needn’t go complaining then, as for the mechanic, he isn’t grumbling, he makes his living out of breakdowns, apparently he waved to him, he had his apprentice with him.

A few pictures that needed amplifying, extricating from their dross, obscuring until the moment when, having become interchangeable, their profound difference would give rise to a world of aggression and rout, that was the task he’d set himself at this very table, in this cold house haunted by years of insouciance, here everything took on the accents of nostalgia and on some evenings of terror, phantasms of the night that leave nothing of memory’s suggestions intact.

Working on marginal notes.

But the doctor continued, he had gone to the master’s that day in the morning round about ten o’clock to spend the day with his comrade, even at that time he hardly had any patients left, practically retired, he hadn’t found anyone, sat down on the terrace, on the south side that is, behind the house, he couldn’t be seen from the gate, thinking that the master must have gone for a stroll in the wood by the marsh or in the forest and would be back before noon, the peasant who claims to keep guard on certain days must have gone down the lane at about half past ten and not seeing anyone in the courtyard must have walked round to the kitchen, gone in and put a duck that the maid had ordered on the table, he apparently stayed some time in the kitchen and searched the drawer in the table and even the big cupboard in the dining room where the master kept his papers.

So calm. So gray. Crows or magpies fly up, startled by the noise of the breakdown van going down the narrow road. Leaden sky, traces of hoarfrost.

At his table in the cold house the master going back to his book was making a marginal note by the side of a murmured phrase, you couldn’t hear very well, shadows, phantasms of the night, the story will never come to light, no visible flaw. Something broken in the mechanism.

But his maid at about seven in the evening went into the dark room and said as she lit the lamp that’s you all over, don’t tell me you were working, it isn’t right to daydream like that, will monsieur kindly allow me to lay the table, she pushed his papers over to the left, he got up and poked the fire.

A few pictures to extricate from their dross in order to discover beneath their weft disorder, distress, and then progressively a lull, so many years of this work, shadows never so dense, phantasms reduced to hiccups, night would only come impromptu when it was no longer desired.

Told the story of his death that he had imagined in detail, amplified over the years, tragic or touching according to the evening, by the fire, the bottle of spirits on the table, so that the doctor fell asleep to the swaying of the hearse while his companion introduced into his memories new episodes which would be the object of comment the next time or which would be deleted from the definitive version shortly before he went to bed but his dreams recast everything, upset the order and it would take the narrator till tomorrow and even longer to restore the verisimilitude to his story.

The sentry had seen the mechanic go by, he wasn’t going towards the marsh but in the opposite direction, the doctor before he settled down on the terrace had walked right round the house, he’d tried to go in through the kitchen but the door was locked, it was probably the maid’s day off, it was harvest time, the terrace which faced south was already stifling at that hour and the doctor opened the umbrella in the center of the iron table, he lay back in a blue-striped deck chair, he had taken the book with the old-fashioned illustrations from the room and was looking through it when it seems that the man with the duck called out from the courtyard, the doctor would have answered and the man must have gone up to him and put the bird on the table.

As you went down from the terrace to the river you crossed a garden in tiers, on the top level on either side of the steps there were rose beds in the middle of which a pedestal formed the base for a vase decorated with mythological bas-relief, each bed had a box border, and yew-trees occupied the angles of the squares, a balustrade separated this first level from the next, in which ornamental lakes replaced the flower beds, the center of each being adorned with a fountain, at either end were orange trees round a bust of a satyr or a tree-nymph.

At his table was making a marginal note by the side of an empty phrase on happiness to be dispassionately revised, as if in all logic
 
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The maid brought in the soup, the master helped himself absent- mindedly, he’d got up to his removal from the town, hundredth repetition, when there was a knock at the outside door, he goes to open it, it’s the child bringing a duck, he gives him a couple of sous for his trouble and the child leaves, he calls the maid and gets her to put the bird in the fridge, after that she cleared the table and the master was noting in the margin of the book
 
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A handsome facade on the garden side, six windows upstairs, slate roof and turrets of the same material flanking the corners of an almost stately home in which the neurotic, stingy owner was moping.

So calm. So gray. Crows or magpies fly up from the beetroot field and go and perch on an elm.

The master on the terrace at the iron table was writing his memoirs, he’d got up to his removal from the capital into a largish village on the hill or by the forest, you couldn’t hear very well, the doctor was walking up and down in the lower garden, autumn weather, blueness of the air.