He went up to the first floor and put on his faded, old-rose-colored denim trousers, like the ones fishermen wear, his blue-and-gray-checked cotton shirt (his battle dress for really hard labor; when it was just odd jobs, he simply wore a white shirt and tie and rolled up his sleeves); he collected all the buckets, sponges, and dropcloths the house possessed, then addressed himself to the task of clearing out the shop. The putschists, now returned to the ranks, were immediately enrolled, and a long chain was formed. The dishes were taken out into the yard and plunged into several tubs containing successive decoctions. The water had to be changed nonstop; fertilized by the ashes, it got tipped onto the flowering shrubs, so we got one little benefit from our misfortune. But the water was so black that a plate was sometimes left in the bottom of the tub and got smashed on a stone at the foot of a rosebush. Soon the soaked flower beds were begging for mercy. We covered the whole garden with our manure. In the evening, the earth was disguised as a slag heap.
But there was a monumental quantity of crockery: mountains of plates, soup tureens, glasses, saucepans, stew-pans, bowls, casseroles, coffee services, fruit goblets, cheese platters, dishes — earthenware, faience, heatproof, stoneware — flat dishes, hollow, round, square, oval dishes, electric or hand-operated coffee grinders, vegetable mills, potato mashers, ladles, skimmers, sieves, the equivalent of the contents of three hundred kitchen cupboards were emptied out into our yard and joined by milk containers with their aluminum measures, flowerpots of all sizes, jardinieres, churns, salting tubs, plastic or galvanized basins, bottling jars, rolls of oilcloth in three widths (36 inches, 42 inches, 48 inches), light bulbs, brooms, brushes, one shelf full of hardware, another of cleaning materials, a thousand oddities such as plaster or wooden eggs used as decoys to trick hens into sitting where they are supposed to, not forgetting the wreaths with their imitation pearls and gems, the marble or granite crosses with Christ in bronze or chromium plate, and the artificial flowers that last from one All Saints’ Day to the next and thus accompany one’s eternal regrets for a longer time. When we steeped those little barometer manikins that change color according to the weather, however hard we rubbed them they remained gray. We decided that this was normal in damp conditions. Someone suggested putting them in the oven to make them turn pink.
The prevailing atmosphere was one of hard labor. The women took over from one another and sighed, “There’ll never be an end to it,” or “Soot — there’s nothing worse,” or, with a touch of humor, “And to think we’ll have to start all over again this evening.” Then, in the late afternoon, who did we see arriving? Old Maryvonne, her head covered in a little moire shawl pulled down over her forehead and discreetly knotted under her chin, as if she’d wanted to cross the square incognito for fear of being suspected of returning to the scene of her crime. Because all day long she’d looked as if she were the accused, behind her counter. Where all our caveats had failed to persuade her of the danger her method of lighting posed to the community, this time events pleaded against her. It was the perfect demonstration: luckily, our disaster was only a warning sign that had cost nothing (not to anyone else, that is), but it had to be regarded as the first flint that would light the spark of the final holocaust to which she was exposing us all. As the hours wore on, the brave Maryvonne had organized her defense, but the subtle distinction she drew between candles and an oil lamp had convinced no one, and she knew it. So, shaken by the force of events, or more probably wanting to come to the aid of the members of her occult club in their distress, she had closed her grocery store early, bundled a pair of overalls and a pair of old leather-thonged wooden clogs into a shopping bag, and, braving the looks of the people who were already interpreting her gesture of solidarity as a confession of guilt, offered her help to the group of women harnessed to the monstrous crockery.
In the meantime, the men were washing down the shop from ceiling to floor. Joseph the Great was setting the example, allocating the tasks and announcing the breaks when their arms felt ready to drop. “Don’t mind if I do,” said the workers when handed a glass of wine, and the satisfaction they displayed after the first gulp was a sign that their throats were dry and the wine well deserved. After ten hours, the first coat of paint had been applied. The walls and shelves were now of an ivory hue, which didn’t entirely correspond to the color shown in the sample on the lid of the paint cans, but this was not the fault of the manufacturers. It was an unprecedented mixture. You only had to look at the workmen as they clocked out: their faces were mottled with both cream and black. Mother suggested they might like to have a shower; some accepted, while others were content to plunge their brawny forearms into a basin and soap themselves vigorously. Not vigorously enough, though, judging by the color of the cloths they wiped their hands on as they went on chatting. As a result of this natural dye, Father’s white hair had become darker. But this rejuvenating treatment seemed on the contrary to have fatigued him. He admitted to feeling giddy but blamed it on the turpentine fumes, and, putting a hand on the small of his back in a gesture that was beginning to become familiar to us, unobtrusively straightened himself up, trying to hide the pain on his face.
After one last drink — liqueur, coffee, or herbal tea for the women — he thanked the volunteers one by one, neither exaggerating nor swearing that they had saved his life, going out on the pavement with every single one, even lending old Maryvonne a pocket flashlight, as the streetlights in the square had just gone out at midnight.
On Monday, the shop reopened. It was as crowded as it is at Christmas.
He had a passion for ancient stones. Which means that even though it’s so very close, he didn’t often take us to see the sea. When it comes to antiquity, the sea is unbeatable; it was already there when the world saw its first mornings. But its elusive side, its water lying dormant above chasms, its waves coming and going without really making up their minds, its tides ebbing and then flowing back six hours later to reclaim by stealth the bit of beach they have given you — the sea is nothing like our father. Him we spontaneously classified among things solid. We conjectured that stones, in his eyes, possessed the quality of the estimable man, the man who protects, builds, and doesn’t yield. A chaos of rocks, a menhir, or a skillfully bonded wall was like a genealogical tree to him. This monolithic kinship made him feel one of the family. Whereas water flows, forgetful of its source, breaks its word, engulfs, effaces its traces, inundates, oxidates, damages, and water doesn’t support anything — unless in a rather hard winter it is the alternating, well-balanced step of a skater on a frozen lake. Perhaps in such conditions he would have preferred an ice floe, that tangible, subdued sea that throughout the ages has imprisoned piles of fossil annals in its strata of accumulated snow, but the last Ice Age was too long ago in the Lower Loire.