Small Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

sideboard, shadow seeking deeper shadow, what does the mother do, who has quit picking up the miserable broken pottery? Perhaps she sobs, or keeps quiet, or prays; she knows something, she is guilty. And finally, the old patriarchal arrogance rediscovers its old final gesture, the father points straight toward the door, the candle gutters, the boy is standing; the door opens like a tombstone, the light strikes the elder tree, which trembles gently, interminably. Antoine is framed for a moment on the threshold, dark against the light, and no one, not the tree, the father, or mother, can know his features then; overhead the nightingales widen the night, sketch the roads of theworld: let those mossy ways underfoot be bronze, those singing skies overhead be iron. He leaves; he is no longer of this place. And perhaps still woven there, between the father forever raging or suddenly mute, his head in his hands, the son lost from view whose steps grow faint, never again to be heard, and the silent, ghostly, nonexistent observer, merged with the elder blossoms, and the elder tree itself, more vanishing than a scent in the night, more vain than the brief flowering of the year 1867, perhaps still woven into it is a vague reality, brutal and heavy, like an old painting or capital of a Roman column, a reality I only half perceive and do not understand.
    The candle goes out, a nightingale escapes from the elder; maybe in Saint-Goussaud someone hears the worm-eaten door of the church creak – but it could just as well be a cowshed door or two opposing branches in a thicket. The stars flee, or the gold salamanders when one strikes a light behind the moss-stained windows. What else does the night complain of, when the dogs wear themselves out, blind and thundering? What old family drama is perpetuated in the throat of the rooster? The shadow scrolled with ferns thickens in the rising day. Swords of light cross the paths, unless it is the moon finally risen over the birches. Let us leave this foliage; the elder tree died off, I believe, about 1930.
    I am left with Toussaint.
    Another day appears. The Clerc field, for example, must still be cut, which is only a slope, a fog basin in the black breath of the firs over toward the Lalléger pass; a single scythe is heard there; flushed out, thrushes pierce the fog, sharp insults leave the earth, barely suspendedthe invisible scythe falls again. When the fog lifts, the Jaquemins, the Décembres, the Jouanhaut sons, who are also cutting around Lalléger, see the father by himself: he scythes up the slope. Noon does not appease him, the afternoon sun overhead exasperates him like a horsefly, he works through nightfall. The Joauanhaut sons, who are the last to leave, amid laughter, have long since sat down to their soup; only the tall fir trees are witness, unapproachable and near, whispering among themselves and for themselves alone, deaf to all that is not their grief; between his teeth the father calls God’s fire down upon them. He heads home.
    Let us imagine him along that dark path. No daguerreotype preserves it, but destiny at this moment provides him a face – or chance: the night is propitious for forgeries. After all, his portrait is no more fictive than the one – so accurate – of his rival haloed there in the little church. The face we can discern is thickset but heavily lined: the bridge of the nose, weathered, gleams and draws toward it the high cheeks, the precise eyebrows; thus a grand air; the moustache below is the one sported by the dead of that time, by Bloy and the Southern generals: powerful, mechanical, belonging to the uniform and the patriarchy, to rigid poses. He stops occasionally and lifts his head toward the stars; this is to savor the moment near at hand when, under the lamp light, he will see Antoine returned, the child with the alder whistles who smiles at him; then we can see his warm, mischievous eyes, almost childlike. Then he sets off again