Small Lives Read Online Free PDF

cheap edition of Manon Lescaut , a brittle Saint Benoît rulebook, and a small atlas.
    The child grew up, became the adolescent. The books are already in his possession or not, it hardly matters; his clothes still stink of the fair; under his cap, he has two large dark eyes that look away, and probably an excessive, hungry soul, which, having only itself to feed upon, is discouraged from the outset. He is as tall and strong as his father, but his arms are of no use to him, embrace nothing, would like to wreak havoc and drop to his sides again; in the little buried church, permeated with the odor of his tomb, the Saint, the Useless One, the Blessed, watches over the grain and ruins the harvest, his palms imperiously open, imponderable.
    Thus we must imagine that one day, Toussaint perceived something in the son – and from that moment would go on perceiving it – some gesture, word, or more likely some silence, which displeased him: toolight a weight on the handles of the plough, a sluggishness in living, a look that remained obstinately the same, whether it rested on perfect rye or wheat flattened by a storm, a look equal to the vast unchanging earth. For the father loved his patch of land: that is to say, his patch of land was his worst enemy; born into this mortal combat that kept him going, took the place of life for him and slowly killed him, born into the complicity of an interminable duel that began well before him, he mistook his implacable, essential hatred for love. And no doubt the son laid down his arms, because the land was not his mortal enemy; his enemy might have been the lark that ascends too high and too beautifully, the vast barren night, or the words that hang loose on things like cast-offs bought at the fair; and if that was so, what was there to pit oneself against?
    Then came that terrible night, and I am sure it was in spring, in the dark of the moon, under the heavy spell of hay and a sky full of nightingales. The men (because Antoine is a man as well now), the men returned late, armpits enflamed by the scythe handles, their shadows, stretched long by a giant sun, colliding with one another on the rough stone path; the fictive observer, dispersed with the evening in the scent of the huge elder tree opposite the door, watches them enter, the same silhouette and sweaty cap, the same sunburnt neck, vaguely mythological as father and son always are, double time overlapping in space here below. The father changes his mind and goes to piss under the elder; he has a dull look and seems to be chewing on something dark. The door closes again, the patient night comes. The candle is lit; through the window, all three of them can be seen bent over their soup; in Juliette’s hand, the ladle comes and goes, alarge alarmed moth beats against the panes; wine flows, much wine, into the father’s single glass. Suddenly he looks at Antoine, his face ink-black in the darkness; a slight wind shifts the fearful umbels of the elder tree, they lean close, lightly brush the glass; from the candle bursts a brighter flame: revealed in Antoine’s look, that arrogance, that indifferent dignity, exasperated and groundless. Then a shout in the kitchen, a large gesticulating shadow leaps toward the beams, then shrinks back, banged chairs are knocked over. From the elder tree, who strains to hear in vain? Only the rumbling drumrolls of the storm clear the thick walls, the demented rumor of hollow stones rubbed together that makes children sob and unnerves dogs, the wild voice of the family, ancient and terrible in its most heightened state. The father is standing, brandishing something that he curses and throws to the ground, a full glass, a book perhaps, and his big fists strike the table with full force, with truths that no one hears, the only truths, the simple, terrified, desperate truths that speak of forefathers, deaths in vain, and endless hardships. And in that far corner, poor body slumped beside poor