“You see how old she was?” said the brother.
And he raised his voice to a scandalized, indignant pitch, but in vain, for, René thought, he had no idea what a true scandal was.
“So?” said Madame Mour. “What difference does that make?”
Neither opening his mouth nor raising his eyes, the Mour father declared:
“You’ll never talk about him again. You’ll never speak his name in my house. He’s dead. He’s gone. We don’t know who he is, where he’s buried, we don’t honor his memory.”
* * *
That evening, René said to his mother:
“The Mours sold Anthony to a lady from town.”
“For how much?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Good for him. He’ll be happier there.”
Slightly eased by the exhausting walk home on a sun-blistered road, that insistent itch of envy and spite now flooded back with new vigor, irritating every fiber of René’s body and soul. He looked at his mother and realized that the mute, outraged question he was asking her (And why shouldn’t you find the same sort of lady for me?) was being answered in kind, by her unhappy, resigned, realistic glance, by a small, dubious shake of the head (What have you got to sell, my son?). He couldn’t help blurting out:
“I’m young, after all.”
It was true, he had that, all that, but was youth without beauty, without money, without talent, emaciated youth in a tin-roofed hut hemmed in almost to the threshold by endless fields of corn that did not belong to René’s mother, was youth unnoticed by all not the equivalent of the grimmest and loneliest old age? René had thought of that, he thought about it unendingly. His youth was purely theoretical. It had neither importance nor weight nor anything he might turn to his benefit. At least Anthony’s brother, the homely Mour, radiated irrefutable youth from his hard, brutal body. René’s own body was feeble, scrawny, and misshapen.
He watched his mother’s hand slide something he didn’t want to look at across the table.
“Have some. You like it”—her voice weary, hopeless, vaguely indifferent.
He gently pushed back his chair and stood up. Lightheaded, he felt his knees buckling. He seized a piece of bread, stuffed it whole into his mouth, and left the house, chewing with difficulty, painfully and despairingly. My God, my God, my God. Outside the doorway, he stumbled over a mangled tricycle, his footsteps crushed pieces of plastic dishware, clothespins, fragments of dirty, rusting scrap metal.
The cool of night was finally coming. Although the sky was still light, the shadows of the cornstalks, taller than René, had already shrouded the house in a squalling violet darkness, insects, mysterious vermin. Through the invisible creatures’ gratings and tiny cries, René could hear the tortured breathing and restive snores of his young brothers and sisters, sleeping together upstairs in the loft, dulled by the heat beneath the tin roof, unpacified, he could picture their little bodies, so absurdly numerous, scattered every which way on the mattresses, freckled with mosquito bites.
René thought about the bread he’d just swallowed. He hopped from foot to foot in the dim light of the cornfields, spitting out tiny crumbs as his tongue dug them out of his cheeks. A bitter self-loathing stopped him from going back inside and up to bed. How feckless he was! What a coward! Had he only, a few moments before, risen from the table brusquely and decisively, his legs would have supported the pitifully slight weight of his bones as they usually did, and he could easily have forbidden his hand to reach out for the bread. Whereas. . Oh God, oh God. Was it to console his mother? Was it gluttony? Had the bread not literally leapt into his fingers? The memory of that bread strangled his stomach. He thought he could feel himself swelling up monstrously in the dark, inflated by his own cowardice. And was his mother consolable, was gluttony permissible? There was no reason, no excuse, for. . René clenched his fist and hammered cruel little blows on his forehead, his ears.
He heard the sound of slinking footsteps from the path that led down to their house — for, in a spirit of solidarity, this hovel rented from the cornfields’ owner could just as well become his house, their house, whenever one of those dispiriting men who sometimes and too often turned out to be the father of one of the little forms groaning upstairs in the heat, whenever one of those types in grimy polo shirts, yellow-toenailed in their plastic flipflops, decided to approach it, timidly, as if obeying some unknown convention, some etiquette, some requirement for courtliness and restraint, to pay René’s mother a call that might sometimes last days, or months.
“Yeah? Who’s there?” René shouted, his irritation taking his mind off himself and the memory of the bread.
His voice quavered a little, for it sometimes happened that this very question, barked out dozens of times toward the pitch-black path, met with the reply “It’s your father,” spoken calmly, coldly, objectively, and then the appearance of a man exactly like all the rest, in a tattered t-shirt and old khakis cut off at the knees.
Clenched and ashamed, René would see him glance quickly his way, the faint glimmer of interest in his eyes dimming at once.
And so René could never hear cracking twigs on the path without dread, fearing his father might show up again, smirking and remote, scarcely troubling to conceal his disdain for René, or at least for the René he’d just laid eyes on.
* * *
He continued to haunt the Mours' farmyard.
Every morning, after walking those of his brothers and sisters who still went to school as far as the bus stop and leaving them on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the cornstalks, he hurried onward down that same road, already hot and dry, soon seeing the bus pass him by, glimpsing his brothers’ and sisters’ faces pressed to the windows, their noses flattened, their eyes too close together, and raised one hand toward those unlovely faces in an attempt at a jaunty wave, thinking “They look just like me,” with pity and disgust, for how was it that such varied progenitors had each time produced this same sort of child, without spark, without strength, without qualities? There was some kind of. . something in that. . a cruel trick, an injustice? Or else. .
He stopped to rest. His head spun, his vision paled. When he finally reached the Mours’ vast, tidy farmyard, his breath came heavy and rough, he was exhausted. Sometimes Madame Mour spotted him and assigned him some chore, which he took his time with, so that he could stay a while longer and try to understand what was eluding him. He refilled the four dogs’ food bowl in the corner of the yard where they were chained up, or opened the old car’s trunk to carry in the bags of food bought at the distant supermarket for the week to come, and meanwhile he focused all his faculties, straining to pick up any sign of a change, of a metamorphosis. . of. . what? What must the Mour household be like, with handsome Anthony gone? Like the surface of a still, silent water once the stone of humiliation and regret has been swallowed and forgotten? Like the surface of a water more silent than ever before?
Madame Mour would be waiting for him on the front step, arms crossed, distant and benevolent. She watched him intently, narrowing her eyes. She tucked her shoulder-length hair behind her ears and tapped the ground with the toe of her espadrille, unconcerned by the dust she kicked up.
Soon he helped Madame Mour bring in a computer and set it up on a little table in one corner of the kitchen. And when he came the next day, there was Anthony on the screen, against a background of blue sky and glass towers, amid which René thought he could make out the smiling face of the woman named E. Blaye, Anthony so handsome, so glowing, that René couldn’t repress a brief groan.