The Bark Tree (7 page)

Just his imagination. Still, if it’ll please him, she’ll tell him. Right. So long.

No sooner has Mme. Cloche disappeared around the corner than Mme. Belhôtel number two reappears.

“The old bitch gone?”

“Mm hm, she’s gone.”

“What did she have to tell you this time?”

Saturnin gives an accurate report, which is interrupted by the arrival of a telegraph messenger; it’s a telegram for Narcense. This is a rare and important occurrence. Will they have time to steam it open and discover some secret? 
...

Saturnin seals the telegram up again; nothing of any interest; “Grandmother dead.”
That’s
not a secret. They’d have known about it anyway.

—oooooo—oooooo—

The night light revealed three to four shapes, deflated by slumber, trying in vain to find a comfortable position to sleep in. The head of one of them, who was merely sitting, was oscillating; the feet of another adjoined a cavernous face, its eyes bunged up with fatigue and embellished with an incipient rheumy discharge. Narcense, sitting motionless in a corner, with staring eyes, didn’t see the badly dressed bodies but, beyond the brown boards of the third-class coach, caught sight of a house that hadn’t had the strength to reach its second floor and remained acephalous. Now and then his grandmother went by with her retinue of foraging hens and her prehistoric old woman’s idiosyncrasies and her three aggressive teeth and her never-ending need to piss. She’d been a decent old woman. In the kitchen, getting the dinner, that very beautiful woman. One of the slumberers went out into the corridor, which made the man next to him move restlessly and automatically take up more room. The other came back a few minutes later and insinuated himself into the reduced space.

A multiplicity of little lights announced the approach of a big town. A bridge was suspended over a suburban street. Narcense caught sight of a mangy dog zigzagging about in search of garbage. Then, in the station, the train, gradually, stopped. Some passengers got out, with swollen eyes and flabby hands. Narcense leaned out of the window, watching the people walking up and down and fussing, and the buffet on wheels, and the man hiring out pillows and blankets. Five minutes later, the train started off again, asthmatieizing. Narcense sat down again. A newcomer was occupying one of the corner seats left vacant by the departure of the first slumberers. This was a person of extremely singular aspect; not on account of the fact that he possessed two arms, two legs and a head, but because these arms, these legs and this head were of such exiguous dimensions that it would have been possible, without much fear of being mistaken, to call the man a dwarf. What was more, a pointed white beard adorned his face, in which scintillated two beady eyes; the beard reached as far as the penultimate button of his waistcoat, starting from the top.

He asked if it was all right to leave the light on. It didn’t worry Narcense. Wasn’t sleepy. The dwarf began to read a number of
Gay Paris
with great attention. When he’d finished, he crumpled it up, threw it under the seat and started muttering into his beard: “What a life, what a life, what a life,” which made Narcense laugh; he had been scrutinizing this odd bird for the past forty-five minutes.

“Anything wrong?” he asked him, nicely.

“Shit,” replied the dwarf, and, taking a tiny comb out of the top right-hand pocket of his waistcoat, he started to comb out his tangled, whitish beard.

Narcense didn’t insist. When he’d finished combing his beard the little creature picked his nose with an index finger, contemplated at length the product of his explorations, and then rolled it up into a ball.

“It’s awful, it’s awful,” he started grumumbling again. “What a job!”

“What job?”

“That any of your business?”

Narcense was really beginning to be amused by so much misery and bad temper reduced to such minute proportions. By this impotent, squashable ringworm.

“I bet,” said Narcense, “I can guess what your profession is.”

“Let’s bet! Ten francs you don’t guess!”

“Ten francs I do guess!”

“‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ as my very dear friend, the Countess of Rut’s farmer, used to say. What
is
my profession?”

“Well, adventurer.”

“Let’s say you’ve won five francs,” said the dwarf, and took them out of a greasy wallet.

Narcense was enjoying himself.

“I’m glad I met you,” he said, pocketing the five francs. “You’re taking my mind off things.”

“Is that what you needed?”

“That any of your business?”

The cow-pat deigned to smile.

“And to what do I owe these five francs?” Narcense went on.

“Oh yes. Well,” (he lowered his voice) “I’m a parasite.”

“Ha ha.”

Parasite, just look at it, that mite, that micron, that molecule, that neutron—a parasite!

“And I operate—through fear.”

Fear, just look at it, that crumb, that shaving, that scraping, he operates through fear!

“Yes, I frighten old women and children. Sometimes adults, even. I live on other people’s cowardice. Stupid, isn’t it, eh, to be afraid? Just imagine what sort of a shithouse the person’s soul must be. Don’t you think, Meussieu? Meussieu?”

“Narcense.”

“Nice name, and you’re
...
?”

“A musician.”

“Delighful.”

“Jobless and penniless.”

“Like me. Just think, I was on to a gold mine, and then
...
But it’d take too long to tell you all that. Here’s the K. tunnel. I get out at the next station.”

“I’m going as far as Torny,” said Narcense.

“Tell me. You don’t happen to know of a house where they’d put me up, do you? It’s for in a few months.”

“No.”

“Never mind.”

Suddenly, just like that, it occurs to Narcense:

“Just a minute. I know a house. Rue Moche. In Obonne. Half built. There’s a child. A father. And a
...
Yes, that’s it. A horrible brat.”

The tiny tot wrote the address down in a notebook.

“Do you always succeed in frightening people?”

“Yes. When I want to. Even you, I can make you
...
”

“You don’t say?” laughed Narcense.

The train braked. The dwarf was already in the corridor, suitcase in hand.

“One day I’ll do the dirty on you, you’ll see, I’ll play such a dirty trick on you, it’ll knock the bottom out of your life.”

He disappeared.

Narcense smiled. Poor, miserable, blighted creature, unjustly reduced by nature to the proportions of a louse. And he’s going to knock the bottom out of your life. As if he had any need of that. Poor sap.

—oooooo—oooooo—

Marcheville, some thirty miles from Torny, the industrial center, is more like a large village than a small town; a peasant population, a few bourgeois, among whom are the lawyer and his dog. The lawyer’s dog is a white poodle, answering to the name of Jupiter. Jupiter is highly intelligent; if his master had had the time, he would have taught him arithmetic, perhaps even the elements of formal logic, fallacies and all. But his various pursuits have obliged him to neglect Jupiter’s schooling, and he only knows how to say woof woof from time to time and sit on his behind to get a lump of sugar. However, though there may be some doubt as to the extent of his learning, there can be nothing but admiration for the care he takes of his person. Shorn like a lion, he swaggers about within a radius of fifteen yards of the notarial house. At any greater distance, enormous beasts, jealous of his elegance, menace him with their vulgar, ill-bred fangs.

On this particular morning, Jupiter’s habits are upset; so are those of the lawyer and his family. Everyone is restless, and dressed in black. Forsaken, Jupiter goes to sleep in the hall. A person with a small suitcase in his hand comes in; woof woof, says the poodle intelligently; the lawyer, who has lost his collar stud, comes down in his shirt-sleeves. Good morning, good morning, he seems to be saying; Jupiter shows his approval with his tail and gets a smack on the thigh for his pains. Then another meussieu arrives, a very tall, very fat one. The greetings start all over again; Jupiter wants to take part in the palaver, but the tall-and-fat person treads on his toe nails. Owch, owch, says Jupiter, and goes and hides under a chair. The meussieus talk with restraint and compunction, like the day of the little boy’s first communion. Eulalie brings some coffee. Maybe there’s a chance of a lump of sugar. Jupiter sits up and begs, but he realizes from the uninterested looks of the meussieus that he’s put his foot in it. This isn’t the moment for playing the fool. He goes over to the door to get some air; so far and no farther, because Caesar, the Butcher’s dog, is watching for him out of the corner of his eye.

The meussieus start walking. He follows at their soles. Caesar is close behind. They get to a house that Jupiter knows well; it belongs to an old lady who’s generous with her sugar. The old lady isn’t there; there’s a meussieu dressed up as a widow, it’s true, but that’s not the same thing. The meussieu in petticoats starts singing, accompanied by two little boys dressed up as girls whom Jupiter recognizes only too well as being the bullies who, last Sunday, tied a corned beef tin onto his stump of a tail. Then they take a great big packing case out into the street; he goes and has a sniff to see what it is; it smells of the old lady. A kick in the ribs teaches him to respect the dead.

With the big packing case being towed in front, and the crowd following behind, the ensemble makes it way toward a garden surrounded by walls and planted with huge great stones sticking up at right angles. Jupiter runs up and down and is amazed that his master, who’s usually in such a hurry, doesn’t try and get in front of the big box; he’s walking slowly, leading the way, with the young man with the suitcase and the tall, fat meussieu.

At the entrance to the garden, Jupiter’s heart misses a beat; he’s just noticed Caesar waiting for him, with an ominous look. So it’s advisable not to stray too far from the blackened bipeds.

Everyone has come to a standstill around a hole. In the middle of the gathering, the man-woman mutters a menacing song; the bullies wave steaming teapots. Two professional drunks lower the box into the bottom of the hole. Then the guests toss in drops of water. Jupiter is losing interest, and he wanders off and goes scrounging from grave to grave; but, just behind that of Madame Pain, that most worthy lady who kept her idiot daughter in seclusion for fifteen years, he finds himself muzzle-to-ass with Caesar. This encounter gives him wings; he gallops, he flees, he decamps; he jumps onto a mound of loose soil, near his master; the soil is loose, as we said, it crumbles, and Jupiter tumbles, in a cloud of humus and compost, onto the grandmother’s coffin. Some people burst out laughing; other exclaim: How shocking! and a few murmur: Putrefaction! The lawyer let out a kind of strident shout, his personal roar of laughter, and then recovered his dignity. But he wasn’t going to forgive Jupiter.

That evening, the young man said to the poodle, as he handed him a lump of sugar:

“Will they put a chin strap on
you
when they bury you?”

“Woof woof,” says the other, who hasn’t understood a word. The next day Jupiter is hanging at the end of a rope, because he has assailed the dignity of the dead and of the living.

—oooooo—oooooo—

1. I am only now answering the very extraordinary post card you sent me three days ago, as I have only just gotten back from my grandmother’s funeral. So far as I can gather, you claim to be the son of a certain person to whom I had the presumption to write. This person, it would appear, has torn up my letters, and you, it would appear, have stuck them together again? If I am not mistaken, you must be the schoolboy of perverse appearance and with decayed teeth whom I saw, some ten days ago in the little café by the river, near Obonne castle. I realized, from your narrow forehead, that you were of limited intelligence, and, from the rings around your eyes, that you were addicted to self-abuse. I now see that you combine with these deficiencies the efficiency of the informer and the pretension of the spy.

I herewith send you, young Théo, the kick in the ass that your filthy initiative deserves, and I remain, of your mother, the respectful admirer.

N
ARCENSE
.

2. Monsieur,

You polluted the gate of my stepfather’s house. I therefore demand satisfaction.

T
HÉO
.

P.S. I hope your
filthy
grandmother’s funeral was amusing.

T
H
.

3. I see it’s not possible to conceal anything from you, not even the hygienic practices of my deceased grandmother. I might add that your hope was fulfilled; a grotesque incident marred the orderly procedure of this ceremony; a dog belonging to one of my uncles went up to the grave, slipped, and fell on to the coffin, yelping pathetically. Several people laughed; my uncle was of their number. I might add that the latter, considering that on the one hand his dog had fulfilled all his obligations on this earth, and on the other that it was
human
to spare him a rheumaticky old age, hanged him from the cord on which the clothes are put to dry. For a quarter of an hour, Jupiter, the faithful white poodle, swung between a pair of pants and a napkin.

I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t also be
human
to apply a similar treatment to you; you would thus be spared a furunculous and degraded youth. Think it over. I would put the rope around your neck with loving care—a rope of tested strength; I wouldn’t need to have two shots at it. You would find it an easy death, and I would have the satisfaction of having rid Obonne of a perfect little swine.

I suppose you are on vacation at the moment and don’t really know what to do with your time. I won’t give you any advice on this subject, as I prefer not to waste mine in writing at any greater length to the most sour-faced, cross-eyed chicken it has ever been my hard luck to encounter.

Be so good as to give your esteemed mother my most humble respects.