Trio (29 page)

It was quite obvious that it would have been pretty childish to give any credence to those tales of magic, what does it mean anyway, nevertheless strange relationships do arise between things or to be more precise how to put it, yes, unusual relationships like that cat that ate its kittens and the fungi in the pipes, apart from what someone said about the words that everyone stumbled over on the same day, it would be interesting to know which but they don’t remember, they don’t remember, and then, too, the parallels that people drew between these incidents and certain attitudes of the master who couldn’t do anything about it, solitude confuses you, inexplicable passions, what sort of man can he be to live like that between his maid and that imbecile of a doctor, seems he’s writing his memoirs, be interesting to see that, when just having to check a bill at the grocer’s is enough to send him more or less round the bend, when he has to have at least three goes before he can explain that a tractor’s got stuck in the mud down by the marsh, three or four goes, he doesn’t remember which day it was or whether it was the boss or the apprentice that came with the breakdown van, nor whether it actually was the neighbor’s vehicle, nor whether it was in the marsh or in the quarry, in short enough to make the toes of the woman he’s talking to curl up in her shoes with irritation, she says that when she sees him come in she prays to heaven that two or three other people will come in behind him so as to have an excuse not to listen to him, if only his solitude could shut his mouth but no, you can only hope that he has a good heart attack, that at least would put a cork in it, that sort of christianery.

The other neighbor the one who sells fruit and veg in the market said that she was out for a drive on Sunday with her husband and her little girl the one who’s getting a bit strange, they’d gone the long way round by the town and the forest and were coming back along the lane, they come to the hamlet, our two or three farms, at nightfall, when she distinctly saw the goatherd open her window and put a teapot out on the sill, they stopped their car to give the child time to urinate behind the hedge, that was when a white shape came down from no one knew where, stretched its arm out towards the pot which it took and then pff, disappeared, enough to freeze your bones, the mother made her kid get back into the car instanter even though she’d only done the half of it and through the dark night they went back to the village, the headlights weren’t working neither were the sidelights, her husband couldn’t understand why not, he’d just had the mechanic check the lighting system.

And that the master had always been an impostor, without ever getting mixed up in anyone’s life he acts in secret, those people who come to see him, different cars each time, always leave by night and as if by chance the next morning we discover
 
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or someone says he’s seen
 
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mark you he’s on the best of terms with the goatherd, gives her his lucerne for her goats for nothing.

So without anything appearing to have changed
 
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Again high summer, again former images, how many years, to be able to have the wits one had then, not know anything about today, yesterday’s phantasms are in their place, this season hasn’t followed the previous one but is perpetuating itself from one break to another, so that a phrase formerly murmured at harvest time has just been said tonight or that last spring such a question will only find an answer with the next bluebells, how to get our minds going again, who has just spoken, who has just kept quiet, torn to pieces from one end of the trajectory to the other, a child’s skull caps a senile face, the mouth is still saying I love you while the bell is tolling in the ear.

Now the goatherd coming away from the slit in the shutter apparently saw in the half-light the farmhand running in the direction of the marsh, she went back somewhere near the orchard to look for her knitting-needle, a storm-lantern in her hand, she bends down and sees blood on the road, no doubt about it, a car has just come round the corner of the quarry and is branching off towards the village, when suddenly a cry makes her jump, an owl coming out of the barn or perhaps startled by the car’s headlights, all this in the space of barely a minute, how to take it all in.

What to make of these snippets.

It was in fact the farmhand that evening, the neighbor repeated it in the café this morning, he’s just asked him to clean out the shed and the lean-to, he’s employed to do all the odd jobs at his own insistence, he’s not a bad man and we all have to live, yet some people refuse to employ him, the neighbor maintains that he’s a thief but that isn’t where the shoe pinches, it’s a straightforward story of a deceived husband that’s what it is, before his marriage but it’s much the same, even though the wife has always denied it and still does deny it, in short when they found the cow dead in the byre the boss felt a bit awkward vis-a-vis the neighbor in that he’d trusted the farmhand, the fellow had taken him in, as if revenging yourself on a poor animal
 
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What to make of these snippets.

They saw the man again holding his little boy’s hand, they were passing the scarecrow and the child was pointing at it, they went up to it and the father picked his son up and holding him with outstretched arms said touch it you’ll see it’s only straw, the child touched it lightly on the shoulder and started yelling, the farmhand went by at this moment, the two men conversed for a minute, you couldn’t hear very well, while the child walked round the bush looking up in the air, not too reassured.

Phantasms of yesterday and tomorrow.

From one year to the next these great changes in depth.

Would undermine the foundations of our edifice, that laborious pile of straws.

They saw the master again at his table bending over the old-fashioned book but summer was back, you could hear the maid muttering that she would cut out their pastis, the doctor on the road shuffling along like an old pigeon was going to come and lunch off a duck, already half-past eleven, the clock on the mantelpiece is slow, the ornamental lakes reflect the clouds that don’t seem to be in the sky, it’ll soon be siesta-time and the plans for the terraced garden then the story of the removals from the town and elsewhere, hundredth repetition, to find yourself in the evening in front of the same aperitif
 
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When the maid questioned the neighbor who claims to mount guard in the absence of the master he replied that he hadn’t seen anyone in the morning but in the evening on the other hand a sports car had stopped on the bend and a man had got out to urinate behind the hedge probably, he hadn’t seen him go off again because his wife was calling him, she wasn’t well and couldn’t milk the goats, he had to do it for her, but the maid interrupts him saying that it was in the morning that the envelope had disappeared from the drawer, of that she’s certain, while she was in the village, and that it couldn’t have been a child who filched it unless of course he’d been told to do so, this thought often occurred to her, the child wasn’t excluded then, next the neighbor said he’d seen the farmhand going out of the barn that morning, now he remembers, but the servant said that he’d never been in the kitchen, didn’t know what the drawer contained.

And again winter, the frozen mud, hoarfrost and ice in the holes in the road, the house is empty again, everything is in order, between the bare elms the sentry sees the blue line of the forest, the pinewood, the quarry, and the bend, nothing is left of the false mystery of the night, the master will come to inspect the premises and sit down at the table long enough to brood over his memories, outside night had fallen, the barn roof was shining in the cold moonlight.

Leave nothing of memory’s suggestions intact.

That they apparently saw, then, don’t interrupt me, in the early morning a corpse on the dunghill, it must have been five o’clock, and it seems they thought it was the master because he had taken to drink, no more difficult than that, now there was nothing to justify this deduction, there were neighbors and other drunkards but things take root in people’s minds and no way of getting them out again, anyway who’s people, something more explicit was necessary, and anyway why corpse, it could have been a body which would get up a few minutes or a few hours later, a fainting fit, drunkenness not indispensable either, quite simply a loss of consciousness.

But the strangest of all was that obsession which always brought you back to the same images which because they had been evoked over the space of several months in the conversations of all sorts of people were no longer prepared to be forgotten, claimed their pound of flesh, in short would become living and not dummies anymore, but to the detriment
 
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A new reality which we wouldn’t have wanted and which made a clean sweep of all the rest, victory, what slaughter, just about all we had left was a table to eat from, a writing desk to pass the time, and a servant who even though she wasn’t
 
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but that’s not the point.

So calm. So gray.

That room where he worked, I can still see it with its whitewashed walls all cracks, its well-worn, innocent furniture, the big cupboard used as a sideboard where the servant put away the crockery that came down from grandmothers, blue patterns or birds on branches from which tulips and orchids were sprouting, six chairs round the table, a ramshackle wing-chair covered in leopardskin, a mantelpiece on which pride of place was taken by the clock that didn’t go, through the window a little garden with plum trees and moss roses, a rainy spring, vague yearnings.

The garden too but at different periods, of changing aspect, multiple, really, so that the surroundings in which it evolved are hardly ever the same, which would explain
 
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That that day in the room into which he’d just gone when he came back from the town, wintry weather, steely blue and glacial, frozen mud on the road, crows flying up cawing, without opening the shutters because night was about to fall he’d made a fire in the hearth and sat down at the table, had taken the old-fashioned book and started leafing through it then had become drowsy and fallen asleep with his head in the hollow of his arms.

That the neighbor who calls himself a sentry, not knowing the meaning of words, and who plays the part of caretaker in the master’s absence, going on his usual rounds notices a light through the slit in the shutter but for some unknown reason doesn’t go and see what's going on and when he’s got home, a hundred yards at the most, tells his wife that the master has come back to inspect the premises.

That that same day perhaps the caretaker’s child or the neighbor’s child on his way back from school sees on the dunghill by the orchard something like an outstretched body, he goes up to it and then runs all the way home.

That they’d thought for a long time that it had been a question of a fainting fit, he’d got up or rather dragged himself from where he fell to his room where the maid when she came back from the town had given him first aid while they were waiting for the doctor whom she’d sent a child to fetch.

When suddenly he jumps, he’d dozed off in the deck chair, looks round and sees in the mossrose walk the good doctor who’s given him palpitations, a few moments later he tells him the dream he’s just had, bad digestion, the other man was at his last gasp on the dunghill and the assembled neighbors explained his fall by the presence of the scarecrow in the bush, hardly logical, the poultry dealer appeared at the gate and maintained that it didn’t take more than that to give rise to mirages on the road, the detours of the unconscious are strange but to explain what or foresee what, you could imagine anything, great freedom, wasn’t that the domain of poetry, in the soft light of the setting sun, the garden is resting, the blue line of the forest marks the horizon and the servant on the porcelain tray decorated with birds and tulips brought in the aperitif, you won’t say no to a little glass the poultry dealer is asked.

When suddenly the postman at the bend in the road comes upon the goatherd and her flock, he only just has time to brake, his moped skids and he’s in the ditch with all his mail dispersed, he told the neighbor a few moments later that it was a spell the old girl had put on him, impossible normally not to see her with her filthy quadrupeds, she’d come out of nowhere like a devil, I tell you this magic business isn’t all moonshine, she brews herbal teas at nightfall, it seems that someone saw her only yesterday putting her pot out on the windowsill and a white shape coming down from the roof, but how can you believe that poor stupid postman, he’d had one too many and that’s all there is to it.

When suddenly
 
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But he continued on his rounds inspecting every barn, every hayloft, every hut, you have to keep your eye on everything with these vagrants in the neighborhood now, where can they come from, it’s my opinion that some of those young hooligans from the town, we don’t need to look any farther, have got into the habit of going poaching and even highway robbing, an organised gang, that’s the youth of today for you, vindictiveness and violence, didn’t they attack the postman the other day not a couple of steps from the grocer’s, grabbed his wallet and his sheepskin jacket and then ran away down the street round the corner.

Turn, return, revert.

And when the maid brought in the aperitif the poultry dealer had got as far as the business of the tourist in the sports car, he’d been seen first in the village and then at the quarry and then on the road to the marsh a couple of steps away from here, I wonder what on earth he can be up to, that’s three days he’s been hanging around the district, hasn’t said a word to anyone except to the waiter when he ordered a pastis, don’t you think that in such cases we ought to tell the gendarmes, he could be a spy or something, they say there are some prowling around the neighborhood at this very moment still it’s none of my business, suddenly adding this remark with some agitation, the idea had just occurred to him that the master might see in his observations a connection with what people said about certain visits received here, different cars each time, the master was trafficking in God knows what.