A night came when there was a thick fog, moveless and almost hot, a fog like there had been the night I had arrived. I was eating my cold cuts when Jean the Fisherman came in with his acolytes; their oilskins were dulled as if dulled by breath. Slung across their stomachs were shoulder bags stuffed to bursting. Jean was beaming: he laughed to himself; he surveyed the scene and affected a sort of slowness beneath which his eagerness danced: the drinkers weren’t saying a word, they were laughing too, bubbly with impatience as they settled their glasses down gently; they played along with this game that Jean was offering them. At the counter, he calmly undid the straps of the shoulder bag and thrust his hand inside with a gesture that bespoke the silent transgression of some law, a transgression that brought pleasure; he withdrew two or three carp that he hoisted like an Arawak, like a Mohican brandishing by its gills the great Sturgeon one sees only in dreams. The drinkers were unprepared for what he showed them, for these weren’t common fish, weren’t even mirror carp with their large sparse scales: these were leather carp, scaleless and smooth like water, shimmering and bare. They gleamed and changed in the half-light, under the antique red. The fish collapsed one after another to the counter with flat slaps. The acolytes had them too, though they revealed them more modestly, hoping only to show that they were worthy of their master, as we would expect of vassals. Jean still had a mischievous gleam in his eye, he smiled, he wasn’t done yet; he asked the room to guess where he had caught them. Some quickly said near a dam on the Little Beune, toward Saint-Amand, where the leather carp and others sleep far from the live waters they never visit, gleaming invisibly in their darkness, in movelessness, gorging themselves on mud and from it forging a flesh imponderably smooth that barely touches one’s tongue. But they hadn’t come from there. Not from there, nor far downstream on the smooth stretches of water in Dordogne. Jean looked at the carp for a moment; then, turning his head violently toward us, he said: “I caught them down below. They were coming down the Beune.” A report of crocodiles slipping between the bulrushes toward Chez-Quéret wouldn’t have shocked us more. It was like some Old Testament marvel. Gudgeons fall in the rain, sturgeons spawn in the Vézère; queens that are carp from their bellies down are surprised in their baths by an ardent man, their tails beat fervently, splashing water into the sky. They flee, crying beneath the blade of the moon. Hélène took them pensively and went to gut them in the sink. She ran the water. She took a moment to reflect, as did Jean; they looked at all the pink hidden in fish, revealed when one opens them. Below, terrified, carp were tumbling in the current, unable to survive, shaken deep within, their white leather torn by stones; through the fog Jean the Fisherman lifted them with one movement, they swelled like wineskins, bursting, greedily, mouths open wide. Boatmen who had dismounted and were crouched in the bulrush watched them leap at last onto the grass to die. They showed us their white teeth. Hélène poured a few drops from a bottle into the sink, a scent stronger than the barrels, than the cigarette butts, this bleach that diffuses the smell of killing. Elsewhere, Jeanjean was honing this nothing, other carps trembling under his hands, making them rise from the water, reviving them indefinitely in the moss, hoisting them, suffocating, by their gills, and plunging them under again; Yvonne in this bath with her mouth open was singing a hard song, was dying, indefinitely, was saying as much. Jean the Fisherman was drinking a rum, his head nodding gently, the night stronger than he. The oilskins were departing, and suddenly outside the fog drew them in. Hélène’s hands on her apron smelled of fish, she watched her son who knew how to catch them: when you have seen the great Sturgeon, you know where to find the others, or so he told you in a dream. Down below, Bernard’s eyes were open in the dark to the bright fog. And at last we all were sleeping, while the Beune flowed on.
Afterword: Notes from Underground by Roger Shattuck
In The Origin of the World, an unnamed narrator arrives by bus in the little town of Castelnau in the Dordogne region of high plateaus and deep ravines close to the prehistoric underground sites of Les Eyzies and Lascaux. The Michelin regional map number 75 locates Castelnaud (with a final d) on the Dordogne River. Michon moves Castelnau (without the d) twenty kilometers away, to the banks of the smaller Beune River, quietly opening the space for fiction and for legend.
I arrived at night, in something close to shock, in the middle of a galloping September rain that bucked in the beams of the headlights, in the pounding of the long windshield wipers; I couldn’t see the village at all, the rain was black. I took a room Chez Hélène, Castelnau’s only hotel, perched on the lip of the cliff beneath which the Beune flows: that night, I couldn’t yet see the Beune, but leaning out the window of my room, I was just able to make out a hollow in the darkness behind the hotel.
From the dusty display cases in his elementary classroom the narrator learns about the treasures found in the caves and grottoes of the region. The fishermen in the bar talk about their pale mysterious catches from deep-flowing streams. And in the local tabac, where he buys cigarettes and a daily newspaper, the narrator becomes spellbound by a taciturn, statuesque shopkeeper in her thirties. Her son, Bernard, is in his class. In the narrator’s overheated imagination, Yvonne yields herself completely to him, and he guts her brutally like a fish. But reality follows a different course. At appointed times she ventures out across wet fields in high heels to visit a local lover. The narrator encounters Yvonne one evening returning to the shop. She is unable to hide a bleeding wound on her cheek and neck, evidently inflicted by a whip. They stand speechless at the edge of a wood.
The queen was at the bottom of the field, high-heeled like a crane, naked beneath her furbelows, like a scaled fish. Her hips were moving. I thought about what had made them move even more a little while ago. I thought about her vivacity, her cruel elegance; the arrogance of beauty; the shame that crushed her high-pitched voice; the sound of her cry. I tried to imagine her as Bernard’s mother. The dry bulrushes caressed her ankles, ran her stockings, cut. I felt this in my stomach. Beneath the shadows, beneath the coat, beneath the skirt, beneath the nylons, the earrings, the pearls and the Sunday best, beneath Milady’s braids and gathers, hugging the dark stockings, lay this dazzling daylit flesh where at its whitest I imagined, twenty times over, beaten, received during intense thrusts and punctuated by sobs, the heavy, unanswerable phrase that remained forever redundant, forever jubilant, suffocating, black, the absolute authorship she wore on her face.
Yvonne has been indelibly marked, branded by her owner. “Authorship” in the last line is an audacious translation of “écriture” (writing). The principal strand of the story comes to a standstill here, but life goes on. The narrator consoles himself with a girlfriend from a nearby town, and the action moves underground — literally. Their weekend visits to local caves inspire an evocation of our paleolithic ancestors who discovered and decorated these subterranean galleries, “the men who were the gods of these reindeer.” They explore a nearby cave that belongs to Jeanjean, Yvonne’s lover. He guides them with flashlight through endless passageways to a huge room whose walls, when flooded by installed lighting, turn out to be blank, unpainted, unclaimed. “As you can see,” Jeanjean says dramatically, “there’s nothing here.” Somehow the narrator is not disappointed but impressed by the unblemished, undecorated walls:
It was extraordinary. It was bare. It was the cupola of Lascaux at the very moment when the old bachelors had entered it, antlers on their heads, and in the torchlight their hearts had leapt in their chests; when the impeccable expanse of white limestone had been unveiled for them alone.