The Bark Tree (38 page)

“What, no more love!”

They woke up, blinking, with matted mouths.

Outside, it was a cold as chastity.

—oooooo—oooooo—

Toward March, the fine weather returned in the form of incessant rain. The civilian and military populations splattered through the mud, seasoned with gas and shells. The French achieved a few victories as a consequence of magic operations, such as ministerial changes, the placarding of speeches, the unveiling of monuments and the execution of female spies of great beauty.

During the whole of April, no one cast a single clout, but May was superb. The vegetation vegetated admirably; the boidies perched on the telegraph wires and sang gaily, and the sky became bluer every day. In Obonne, life went by in mild and senile fashion, to all appearances extremely placidly. In fact, a lot of things were happening. Examples: Théo deflowered the cobbler’s daughter and the piano teacher’s daughter; Bébé Toutout distributed candies to young children in exchange for trifling services; Hippolyte, inflamed by the new wine, made advances to Cléopastor, the gendarme, but was rejected with scorn, for Sergeant Pourléche alone occupied his heart. Every evening, Meussieu Exossé and Meussieu Fruit became inebriated with studying the supposed plans of the general staff and moving fickle lags over a map of Europe. When they got home, with sticky mustaches and dripping noses, each got belabored by his respective missus as she thought of all those elegant officer-druggists wielding huge retorts.

One Saturday evening, the bell of the half-house rang; Théo ran to answer it. A kid with a suitcase in his hand was waiting behind the gate.

“Are you Clovis Belhôtel?” asked Théo, who’d been told by his stepfather that Clovis was coming, fleeing from Epinal where a beriberi epidemic was raging.

The gate squeaked. Clovis went in. It was 10 o’clock. It was dark. They had eaten. Bébé Toutout was looking closely at the naked women in the
Gaulois,
a rag so named in order to give its intending readers a good idea of what it was all about. Clovis put down his suitcase and did not conceal his stupefaction at the sight of this extraordinary creature; who raised his nose.

“Hello, my little man,” he said calmly.

“This is Bébé Toutout,” Théo explained. “He lives here.”

Clovis sat down. They offered him something to eat; he had. What he wanted was a drink. Some wine, preferably.

“How old are you?” Théo asked him.

“Fifteen,” replied Clovis.

“I’m sixteen. What class are you in?”

“The second.”

“I’m in the first. I’m taking my exams this year. I’ll let you have my lecture notes.”

“Thanks.”

“By the way, do you smoke?”

“Of course.”

“Well, here’s a pack of cigarettes. They don’t cost me much, you know. Sa little sort of business I do.”

“Ah.”

“By the way, what does your old man do?”

“He keeps a brothel.”

“A what?” said Théo, staggered.

“Ha ha!” cackled Bébé Toutout, “Théo that doesn’t know what a brothel is! What a boob!

Théo, disdaining the midget’s jests, showed that he did know:

“So your old man, he keeps a bawdyhouse, then?”

“Yes. It was the most terrific cathouse in the whole of Epinal. But what with this beriberi epidemic, he had to go somewhere else. To Verdun, that’s where he is now.”

“Did you take advantage of it?”

“That’s just it.”

“That’s just what?”

Clovis laughed, without deigning to explain. Then he inquired:

“What time are you going to Mass tomorrow?”

They didn’t answer. He’s going to the bad, this one!

—oooooo—oooooo—

In June, a second floor was built on to the Marcel house, and it soon got around that you could meet some pretty girls there. A bearded dwarf, armed with a revolver to see there weren’t any breaches of the peace, received the customers and sent them away with their genitories and wallets empty.

“Well now, fifty francs to sleep with a kid of fifteen with fresh, hard breasts (you’ve never touched anything like ’em), you think that’s too much, do you, you old cuckold?” said Bébé Toutout to the curé of Obonne, who’d come to consume.

The venerable priest (he’d been treating himself to the Eucharist every day for the previous forty years), rejoined:

“After all, Meussieu Bébé Toutout, for you, a sincere practicing Catholic, one of the most faithful of the faithful, a regular attendant at vespers as well as at matins, a pillar of the Church, a champion of the faith, to try and make me pay fifty francs, me! God’s representative on earth!”

“It’s not a question of God, but of cunt,” retorted Bébé Toutout. “Hand over your fifty francs. It’s a terrible thing to be such a skinflint. And when I think that you raked in at least fifty Masses after the last battle.”

Upstairs, Ivoine and Colberte, the daughter of the piano teacher were knitting socks for their brothers who were fighting the barbarians; in another corner of the room, Théo and Clovis were reading:

“Seen the paper?” said Théo to Clovis. “They explain that the so-called victory of the Etruscans doesn’t mean a thing. The Poles are going to take them from the rear—it’s a strategic maneuver, you see.”

“Ah,” said Clovis, “none of this would have happened if there hadn’t been an atheist government. This war is God’s punishment.”

“You think so?” Théo asked him anxiously.

“Of course. The padre at Epinal proved that to me. France is expiating its impiety in blood.”

Ivoine and Colberte stopped work for a moment and fervently kissed the little medals they wore hanging between their tits.

“My papa was always blaspheming. It’s a lot of balls, he used to say, meaning religion. He was killed. He must be in hell. It was God’s will,” said one of them.

“And what about mine,” said the other. “The dirty old pig. He used to deceive my mother, and how he did, and he laughed at her because she went to Mass. He seduced all the kids who came to the house. His impurity has been punished all right. He caught syphilis at Peyra-Cave and died of it.”

“Since when do people die of syphilis?” asked Théo skeptically.

“Oh, Ida know,” said Colberte, “Any rate, he died of an illness.”

“You’re slightly talking crap,” Théo went on. “My stepfather, he never went to church and he isn’t dead yet.”

“Yes, but that may be to come,” retorted Clovis intelligently.

The two girls giggled, and Théo followed suit. But this laughter was shattered by Bébé Toutout’s voice yelling:

“Ivoine! Colberte! Come on down! Za customer!”

“Coming, coming,” replied the two kids in their clear voices, putting their work down on the table.

They went down. Théo said:

“Who is it, d’you think, downstairs?”

“No idea.”

“By the way, Clovis. Have you seen in the paper that
...
”

They both started mocking the incredible absurdities of the enemy. Ivoine came back up.

“Who was it?”

“The curé.”

“Well, he’s not bothered.”

“He preached a lovely sermon the other day,” murmured Ivoine, smiling blissfully.

She took up her work again.

“He’s always asking for money,” Théo grumbled.

“What’s that matter,” retorted Clovis, “if we don’t give him any and if he comes and spends it here?”

Then he suggested enlarging the house, adding on a café, because the café trade, that rakes it in. And increasing the number of girls.

“Have to talk to Bébé Toutout about that,” replied Théo, suddenly absorbed in a passage in the fourth volume of
Les Misérables.

“Bébé Toutout, Bébé Toutout!” exclaimed Clovis, exasperated.

Then, after a silence, he asked incoherently:

“By the way, your mother then, she live all by herself in Paris?”

“Yes.”

“Whereabouts?”

“She lives with a woman friend.”

Bébé Toutout, who’d just come upstairs, added:

“You might just as well tell your pal that she went off with a guy.”

Théo didn’t flinch.

“Yes. And he was even a deserter, which is worse. She was living with him.”

“I see it all,” said Clovis, scornfully, “your mother’s just a whore.”

Théo hung his head, and Bébé Toutout, a few seconds later, bellowed with rage because he’d just caught his beard in the door of the safe where he’d been tucking away the curé’s fifty francs.

S
OME
decades later, the war was still not over. Naturally, there weren’t an awful lot of people left upright, so that Etienne had finally become a field marshal, and so had Saturnin. They were both holding out outside Carentan with an army of eight men against the Etruscan army of some thirty people, including the queen, who, with age, had become Mrs. Olini. One evening when the Gallic army (because, with time, France had become Gaul again) had fallen asleep in the middle of a clearing around a nice wood fire, a crafty Etruscan came and pinched all the dreaming soldiers’ weapons. The next morning, there was nothing to do but to surrender. The war was over. Toward evening, an Etruscan general came to fetch the two captive field marshals, who had been shut up in a hut; the queen was inviting them to dinner: A tribute to the conquered, she said. They buckled on their breastplates, polished their calves, cleaned out the interior of their noses and followed the guide.

In the forest, in the middle of the same clearing where the whole Gallic army had got itself all balled up in the manner narrated above, a vigorous banquet had been prepared, composed for a roast boar and boiled chestnuts, the whole washed down with hydromel. They took their seats. Then a herald tomtommed and the queen appeared. Not without astonishment, Etienne and Saturnin recognized Mme. Cloche.

“How are you?” asked the first, with presence of mind.

“Ah, Cloche of Cloches!” exclaimed the second.

“Well, my lambs,” said she, “you must be amazed eh? to meet me again here. Talk about surprises, this must be a surprise. Apart from that, it’s quite some time since we saw each other. Years and years. A mere nothing. And you, you’ve come up in the world. Field marshals of Gaul. That’s nothing to sneeze at.”

The two men bowed politely. Then they asked for news of their friends and relations. Most of them had been slung, kerplunk! into the clayey earth. Théo, though, was a prolific, second-class, in the Argentine.

“That’s a fine situation,” said Mme. Cloche. “And what about the guy that tried to hang him?”

“Who was that?” asked Etienne.

“Yiy-yi-yi,” said Saturnin. “Let’s not talk about all that. It’s ancient history.”

“Ah, of course,” agreed his sister. “Well, aren’t you drinking?” she exclaimed indignantly.

And torrents of hydromel flowed down their gullets.

“Howja spend your time?” she asked, a few bottles later.

“In the old days, we used to go in for metaphysics,” replied Etienne.

“We still do, from time to time,” added Saturnin, “but less and less.”

“How come?”

“Because of the rain.”

“Well,” yelled the queen, rising up into the night, which was illuminated by a bit of round tallow which someone’s demented thumbs had pummeled into the likeness of a human face, “well, the rain, that’s me
...
”

“Snot true,” said Saturnin.

“Hey, you-ou, so you take me for a liar, now, do you?”

“Oh no-o, oh no no no!”

“Well, I am, I’m the rain! The rain that dissolves the constellations and upsets kingdoms, the rain that inundates empires and macerates republics, the rains that makes your shoes stick in the mud and runs down your neck, the rain that trickles down dirty windowpanes and rolls down to the gutter, the rain that shits everybody up and makes no sense. And I am also, pay attention now, the sun that defecates onto the heads of harvesters, that skins naked women, that scorches trees, that pulverizes roads. And I am also the icy patches on the roads, that cause accidents, and the ice on the ponds, that cracks under the feet of the obese, and the snow that sends a chill down your spine, and the hail that splits your skull, and the fog that macerates your lungs. Yo soy also the summer months, the spring months that breed venereal diseases, bring faces out in pimples and cause stomachs to swell. Zhur swee the spring, that sells a sprig of lily of the valley for a franc, and the summer that kills people off because they live too intensely: I’m the autumn, that causes all the fruit to rot, and the winter that sells its boxwood on Parmesan Day. Ich bin the storm that howls with the wolves, the tempestuous tempest, the blizzard that blitzes the lizards, the hurricane that hurries you into your coffin, the gale with its hail, the cyclone on its bicycle, the thunder with its icicles, and the lightning that lights life. Eyeamme
...
”

“I insist on see-ying,” interrupted Saturnin, who was getting a little rimy.

Etienne nudged him, thus inviting him to silence.

“For the last ten years, I’ve been studying up on meteorology,” the queen explains.

“It’s very interesting,” said Etienne, conciliatorily.

“In the old days, when I was old,” Mme. Cloche went on, “I had a very different routine. In those days, I was the queen of the mustard pot, the empress of pants’ seats, the goddess of the truss. I used to inspire nocturnal dastardy and diurnal poltroonery. Always in a bad temper, I used to distribute cancer boxes. I was a bog attendant in the Tuileries gardens. I was an aborting ragpicker, a pox-promoting procuress, a lynch-promoting janitress. My lovers’ feet stank, and when we’d finished copulating, I used to beat them up with a poker.”

“Ch-charming,” mumbled Saturnin. “Cidronie, my sister, you’re ch-charming.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“You make yourself sound very clever, the way you stammer, but I bet you can’t even count up to ten any more.”

“Zat a riddle?” her brother asked. “Saul beyond me, I’ll just let you go on chatting.”

“Right; let’s go. Close your fists, open your fingers at the same time as me, and count: won, tool, tree, fore! fife, sick, zen, ate, nein! in tent. With your toes, you can go on from lemon to empty, but you’re too boozed for that.”