The Bark Tree (24 page)

—oooooo—oooooo—

Ernestine, escaping from the compliments of those whom, for more than a year, she had served, perceives her brother, the professor of white magic, and her sister-in-law. Goodness, isn’t she pleased! Isn’t it nice of them to have come! These remarks inaugurate a series of embraces and handshakes, the former full of affection, the latter of cordiality. When Peter meets his brother, Themistocles, he says to him: “Well, Totocle, still a mercenary?” And his brother replies: “And you—still a juggler?”

And they look very friendly. Suzy, who now feels full of contempt for the Zouave on account of his clumsiness, is attracted by Peter’s Anglo-Saxon elegance; the latter completes his conquest of her by extracting a bouquet of tricolored flowers from a bell push.

They’d had a good time in the country, all right. The new arrivals still seem all red and out of breath. They had danced to a player piano, they had drunk white wine and lemonade, they had picked little flowers in the fields, they had been boating, they had played games of
tonneau,
they had sung in chorus old ditties and new couplets. Mme. Cloche had nearly made one of the boats capsize, and Florette had nearly been bitten by a dog. Meussieu Pic had imitated a cow mooing, and Themistocles had imitated a belly dance. And when, as the sun was sinking, their stomachs had started to feel empty, they had climbed back into the car, satiated with pleasure. It had been a gorgeous day, all right!

And now a little aperitif before the great feast Mme. Belhôtel has prepared. Dominique makes the ordinary clientele evacuate the Café des Habitants; clear decks for the wedding party. Camélia serves the bitter picon and the germicidal Pernod, and sniffs more than ever; she has eyes only for Ernestine. Camélia, who is no cynic, is amazed that people should make such a fuss over the wedding of a waitress and a pauper; because old Taupe, she knows him very well, she’s seen him often enough on Sundays, in the market, displaying his old iron and junk. What amazes her most is Ernestine: Ernestine is radiant. Ernestine is resplendent. Ernestine is scintillating. Is it marriage, or the day in the country? Camélia, who isn’t in the know, thinks it’s peculiar, Ernestine’s transformation, but if she did know more about it, she would no doubt attribute it to incorrect reasons. Because Ernestine, for the moment, has completely forgotten the Taupic millions and the sumptuous life of which Sidonie Cloche has sketched so brilliant a picture; her joy has other causes: one afternoon in the country after four hundred and eighteen consecutive days of washing glasses and scrubbing floors. If she is smiling, it is not because she is thinking of her future wardrobe, but because she’s still gliding downstream; if she is smiling, it isn’t because she’s thinking of her visits to the beauty parlor, but because she can still see herself drinking lemonade under a big old green tree; if she is smiling, it isn’t because she already thinks she’s driving in her own car, but because she can still see, through the heavy atmosphere of the café, a cow majestically dunging while grazing the crimson clover. Ernestine feels, growing in her heart, an enormous little blue flower, which she waters with a Pernod whose 60 percent content of alcohol is slightly quenched by the addition of a few cubic centimeters of pure, but not distilled, water.

As one man, all the guests have raised their glasses: fifteen glasses have been raised. What does their content matter—nothing counts but the feelings that animate this symbolic gesture. Fifteen glasses, fifteen feelings: that’s fourteen too many; there should only be one: the joy of seeing the foundation of a new family, a new hearth and home. But very few are capable of rising to these civic heights; one is thinking, with hatred, of his brother, and that one’s Themistocles; another is suffering horribly because his clodhoppers are too tight, and that one’s Meussieu Pic. But zygomatic muscles are sufficiently stretched, and gullets sufficiently sonorous, for us to be able to state that sympathy and cordiality reign. Fifteen glasses have been raised, we have said: a few seconds later, they clink; everyone striking his glass fourteen times, that makes a hundred and five encounters. A hundred and five times, then, the glasses tinkle, a hundred and four times, more precisely, for Themistocles and Peter, by common consent, have not drunk to each other. Once more they shout: Long live the bride! Long live Taupe! and they drink. Meussieu Pic, putting down on the cracked table a glass snowing with anisette, says:

“Not so good as when you used to serve it, Ernestine.”

This piece of gallantry gives rise to an admiring hubbub from the men, and delighted exclamations from the ladies. The latter have a weakness for Meussieu Pic, a dealer in dried and salted goods, whose civility has become proverbial throughout Blagny. Meussieu Pic is Meussieu Taupe’s friend. Meussieu Pic, too, had known better days, reverses of fortune; both had had a secondary education, and learned Latin. Even while Taupe was leading his misanthropic existence, he used to meet Pic every week and measure his strength with him at dominoes. The one would say:
tibi,
and the other, scorning the vocative: your turn,
civis romanus,
and both considered that they were soaring over the heads of the
belote
players. Meussieu Pic, though, was already married, and a father. His wife, the daughter of a druggist, if you please, appears to accept her comedown in the social scale with resignation; but when she thinks of the little Louis XV drawing room she used to have, her heart bleeds; it’s even worse when she remembers the people they used to know—Lieutenant de la Boustrofe, a titled gentleman, and M. Béquille, the lawyer, and M. Dife, who wrote poetry that actually got printed—and compares them with the people she is with at the moment: a junk dealer, a café proprietor, a concierge, an N.C.O., a magician, a midwife, and a waitress. She, the daughter of a druggist, a guest at the wedding of a waitress! and her heart bleeds, while her lips, maintaining an affected and contorted smile, dip into the contents of a glass of grenadine, around the rim of which Camélia’s fingerprints are profoundly engraved. And her heart bleeds once again when she sees her daughter, Florette, focusing her dark-rimmed eyes on the flies of all the men. The child of old parents, Florette shows a remarkable predisposition toward what Mme. Pic calls vice, and Meussieu Pic calls trifling.

Meanwhile, the general attention, concentrated for a moment on the interesting personality of the latter, chooses a new pole, determined by the bouquet of tricolor flowers extirpated from the bell push by Peter. A magician. Mme. Belhôtel tells about the guinea pig and insinuates about the billiard ball; there is noisy admiration. Peter refuses to give any sort of explanation, but promises them a session after the dessert. They certainly are going to enjoy themselves. The children jump for joy, but Themistocles frowns; for Suzy has insulted him by choosing Peter as her cavalier (if I may make so bold). He envelopes the serpents of contempt in the handkerchief of jealousy, and throws the lot into the depths of his ulcerated heart; then he thrusts out his chest, and finishes his aperitif.

Everyone meditates for a moment before the final apotheosis, which is announced by a raucous yell emitted by Mme. Belhôtel; this savage cry was answered by the joyful exclamation of the guests; couples were formed, but owing to the fact that the reduction into prime factors of the number fifteen does not cause to appear among those factors the number that comes after one—and it is thus that the most abstract theorems of the theory of numbers have occasionally in everyday life some direct application—owing, as I was saying, to the nondivisihility of the number fifteen by the number two—and you may observe that if French wedding parties walked in triplets instead of walking in couples, such considerations would become superfluous, since Ernestine’s wedding party would then appear as forming five triplets, and one can even envisage ethnographical circumstances such that, wedding parties walking in lines of five people, Belhôtel’s guests would have been able to conduct their maneuvers as a combination of three quintuplets—in short, owing to the fact that fifteen is an odd number, only seven couples could be formed, one person remaining solitary. This person is a woman; a simple piece of reasoning suffices to demonstrate this, since, out of fifteen guests, there are seven men and eight women, and since two individuals of the same sex could certainly not have been coupled together, such habits being restricted to homosexuals and, thank God, we have nothing to do with people of
that
sort. But who, then, is the woman who is thus forsaken? Two methods are available to the mind: reason and intuition. Owing to its rapidity, it is preferable to employ the second, even though by means of the first it is equally possible to arrive at the desired conclusion.

—oooooo—oooooo—

The couples form, they make their way into the private room. The table is resplendent with its fifteen places laid on a strictly white tablecloth; the knives gleam, the plates blaze, the forks sparkle, the glasses glisten, the spoons shine, a real feast for the eyes. They sit down, they unfold their napkins, which have become stiff with waiting, and the soup starts flowing over the shoulders of the guests. For things have been done properly; two waiters, lent by the Restaurant des Alliés, create a luxurious atmosphere. Mme. Pic, privately, approves of this ostentatious display. Dominique is collapsing with pride, and his spouse has really earned the right to be pleased with herself. Ernestine, still under a spell, swoops down on her plate, because country air, it gives you an appetite; as for old Taupe, he confines himself to a smiling silence, of which it would be impossible to say whether it is aping dignity or expressing degradation. At the same time as he gulps down his shoup, Totocle runs through his repertoire of jokes. Separated from him by Mme. Saturnin Belhôtel, Pic is doing the same; both are getting ready to shine. Suzy is all the time waiting for the saltcellar to turn into an elephant or the oil and vinegar into a bootblack’s box. But Peter, for the time being, refrains from demonstrating his talents. Florette, in spite of her youth, shares Suzy’s hopes, and keeps thinking she’s just about to see a flight of doves. As for Clovis, he keeps thinking that he’s going to see the
Others
suddenly appear, armed with revolvers. On his left, Mme. Cloche, forgetting her fears, abandons herself to the delights of the scalding soup; ever since her tenderest youth she has adored shoup, and that’s why she has grown to such great strength, audacity and coriacity. Mme. Peter Tom, who leaves half hers in the bottom of her soup plate, remains, on the contrary, slender, small and slight.

A certain time elapses, marked only by silence. Parallel to the soup, the duration elapses; parallel, and so close that it seems to be it the guests are drinking rather than the nutritious, steaming liquid that is being transported by the electroplated spoons. The plates are emptied, and the soup moves into the past. The varied sounds accompanying this movement deserve careful description, for great events are presaged in this concert of glug-glugs and gargles. If someone sucks in his broth with the very edge of his lips, someone else swallows his with ferocity. To cool it, some blow, and others make waterfalls out of it. Some lap, and some splash. With this one it’s a hiss, with that one a dissonance. From this music, little by little an elementary harmony is born; soon, from mouth to ears, words will fly and, passing from the animal to the social and from gluttony to chitchat, each of the fifteen persons enumerated above begins once again to be aware of the presence of the other fourteen. For, when the dinner pail is empty, the head will rise.

To eat the shoup, elbows are raised, and mouths are opened; after which the gesture becomes a habit, and, apart from the purely gastronomical satisfaction, a pleasure in itself.

The only one of the guests to be fully aware of this is Saturnin: “When they’ve finished, they’re going to feel terribly frustrated,” he says to himself. And even he, faced with his empty plate, is horribly bored. “The wisdom of nations,” he thinks, “teaches that it is easy to acquire a habit but hard to get rid of it.” That’s just what’s happening here. They’ve got into the habit of eating their shoup, and now they are all of a sudden obliged to abandon this so easily acquired habit. And so, they are sad. And so, there is a taste of ashes in their mouths. And so, they are in despair. They didn’t suspect that a full plate conceals an empty plate, as being conceals nothingness, and, without having any suspicion of the terrible consequences their inconsequentiality was about to make them suffer, from sheer wantonness—they had got into the habit of eating shoup. Ah! if only the plates were infinitely deep. Ah! If the liquid, instead of stagnating, were to renew itself and flow from an inexhaustible fountain. Then, from this eternal two-way traffic of spoons alternatively full and empty, from this eternal repetition of elbows being raised and mouths being opened, from this infinitely permissible habit, would spring something that resembles happiness, the happiness of a peaceful people
...
But that’s just fantasy! Plates have a bottom, and in this bottom, the shoup is shtagnating.

But the two waiters lent by the Restaurant des Alliés know this difficult moment and the way to relieve it: they whisk away the empty plate. It’s true that another empty plate replaces it; but this one is an expectation, whereas the other was no longer anything but a disappointment; the one is a preliminary, the other a memory. This concealing of a vacuum by another vacuum is not enough; the two waiters lent by the Restaurant des Alliés complete the operation by concealing the vacuum by a plenum; they fill the glasses with wine, which glasses take on the joyous appearance of druggists’ display bottles.

That’s how you escape from anguish, Saturnin concludes. And then you understand what is meant by the word well
-
being. Someone smiles, someone else sighs with satisfaction. Someone licks his lips, someone else wipes his mouth with enthusiasm. It’s only now that their tongues, which had been tied by hunger, will become loosened; it’s only now that their mouths will open for anything other than absorption, it’s only now that their quietened stomachs will allow their brains a little exercise; it’s only now that the guests, accomplishing a revolution analogous to that of Copernicus’ in astronomy, pass from egocentricity to polycentricity; it’s only now that, ceasing to be interested solely in themselves, the someones and the someone elses admit of the existence of the someone elses and the someones; it’s only now that, having become sociable individuals, the members of the wedding party are going to emerge from their isolation and again become what they were earlier on: the members of the wedding party. In order to make it quite clear that they once again feel they belong to this temporary community of which Ernestine and Taupe are the poles, and Mme. Cloche the indirect and hidden cause, they all stand up and, holding up their glasses, utter identical words in chorus: an exclamatory phrase, the framework of which is composed of the words health, bride and bridegroom.