I cannot tear my eyes from the sword. Years ago I bent the tip trying to open a drawer. My aunt looks too. Does she suspect?
“That would be difficult for me to say. You say that none of what you said ever meant anything to me. That is not true. On the contrary. I have never forgotten anything you ever said. In fact I have pondered over it all my life. My objections, though they are not exactly objections, cannot be expressed in the usual way. To tell the truth, I can’t express them at all.”
“I see. Do you condone your behavior with Kate?”
“Condone?” Condone. I screw up an eye. “I don’t suppose so.”
“You don’t suppose so.” My aunt nods gravely, almost agreeably, in her wry legal manner. “You knew that Kate was suicidal?”
“No.”
“Would you have cared if Kate had killed herself?”
“Yes.”
After a long silence she asks: “You have nothing more to say?”
I shake my head.
Mercer opens the door and sticks his head in, takes one whiff of the air inside, and withdraws immediately.
“Then tell me this. Yes, tell me this!” my aunt says, brightening as, groping, she comes at last to the nub of the matter. “Tell me this and this is all I shall ever want to know. I am assuming that we both recognize that you had a trust toward Kate. Perhaps my assumption was mistaken. But I know that you knew she was taking drugs. Is that not correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know that she was taking drugs during this recent trip?”
“Yes.”
“And you did what you did?”
“Yes.”
“That is all you have to say?”
I am silent. Mercer starts the waxer. It was permission for this he sought. I think of nothing in particular. A cry goes up in the street outside, and there comes into my sight the Negro my aunt spoke of. He is Cothard, the last of the chimney sweeps, an outlandish blueblack Negro dressed in a frock coat and bashed-in top hat and carrying over his shoulder a bundle of palmetto leaves and brown straw. The cry comes again. “R-r-r-ramonez la chiminée du haut en bas!”
“One last question to satisfy my idle curiosity. What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together — or was it only I who spoke — good Lord, I can’t remember — of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?”
Another cry and the ramoneur is gone. There is nothing for me to say.
“Don’t you love these things? Don’t you live by them?”
“No.”
“What do you love? What do you live by?”
I am silent.
“Tell me where I have failed you.”
“You haven’t.”
“What do you think is the purpose of life — to go to the movies and dally with every girl that comes along?”
“No.”
A ledger lies open on her desk, one of the old-fashioned kind with a marbled cover, in which she has always kept account of her properties, sundry service stations, Canadian mines, patents — the peculiar business accumulation of a doctor — left to her by old Dr Wills. “Well.” She closes it briskly and smiles up at me, a smile which, more than anything which has gone before, marks an ending. Smiling, she gives me her hand, head to one side, in her old party style. But it is her withholding my name that assigns me my new status. So she might have spoken to any one of a number of remotely connected persons, such as a Spring Fiesta tourist encountered by accident in her own hall.
We pass Mercer who stands respectfully against the wall. He murmurs a greeting which through an exquisite calculation expresses his affection for me and at the same time declares his allegiance to my aunt. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him hop nimbly into the dining room, full of fizzing good spirits. We find ourselves on the porch.
“I do thank you so much for coming by,” says my aunt, fingering her necklace and looking past me at the Vaudrieul house.
Kate hails me at the corner. She leans into my MG, tucking her blouse, as brisk as a stewardess.
“You’re stupid stupid stupid,” she says with a malevolent look.
“What?”
“I heard it all, you poor stupid bastard.” Then, appearing to forget herself, she drums her nails rapidly upon the windshield. “Are you going home now?”
“Yes.”
“Wait for me there.”
IT IS A GLOOMY day. Gentilly is swept fitfully by desire and by an east wind from the burning swamps at Chef Menteur.
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde When I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies — my only talent — smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall — on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.