I would return only near nightfall. Through the walnuts my Wallachian village loomed up above, the school perched there since the three Jules reigned, the drowsing arsenal, the panoply of old men who had felt desire in the woods; and the church below with its little Jean-Gabriel within who had wished to be tortured on the Yellow River, had been so and had so been thankful; and the eternal auberge. The branches and the rain threw themselves at the windowpane. A kettle was singing, the percolator was smoking. I was soaked through but was boiling in all this wet. I sat down dumbfounded beneath the familiar fox; there were a few drinkers in smoldering oilskins, boatmen taking long draws on their beers as if stuck to the counter and yet seemingly transported to some other side, another bank that looks just like this one, where there are the same people, but that is softer, hotter, more alive; Jean the Fisherman wasn’t with them — he didn’t live there and he didn’t come by every night — I’d seen him leave before dawn to catch eel or who knows what, he’d winked while turning away and had disappeared with his hoop nets, his spider over his shoulder, toward the Little Beune. Hélène served me more of her endless ham, her musketeers’ pâtés; my desire hadn’t waned, it weighed on my stomach while I ate. My thoughts roamed the landscape, I was drifting away. In this blood red room that smelled of cigarette butts, of rotten wine casks, of saltpeter, I was imagining that all the drinkers were making for the black, for night, toward what they couldn’t resist, the tobacconist giving herself over to this call, sitting up in her bed, throwing her raincoat over her shoulders and rushing to the auberge, twisting her ankles on her high heels, this queen, coming in like the wind, opening her raincoat with two trembling hands, throwing herself naked onto one of the sticky tables, onto the silent pinball machine, shedding her earrings, her eyes white with ecstasy, all for my unique use, beneath Hélène’s thoughtful eye, behind her counter, watching Yvonne move through every position, knowing her raven hair, her orgeat thighs, her mother-of-pearl ass, all shining immoderately beneath a fox, her cries tumbling out like an eagle’s, hurtling over the cliff, startling poachers crouched along the Beune. I gutted her.
Hélène cleared the tables, deep in thought, her heavy arm wiping gracefully. I wondered what once had been beneath her fine old rags: it didn’t seem to bother her that there was no longer anything there, she had shaken off that finer flesh, that want that throws even the youngest hearts toward drama and night, both debases and blesses, felling them to all fours where they lose themselves in pleasure, and still on all fours and barely less frenzied are other times lost in pain, in grief, in misery. Hélène’s dead flesh was radiant. Her flesh was no longer hers but was elsewhere, detached, free of her, fishing eels over the Little Beune, resting on her elbows in another bistro in Saint-Amand-le-Petit, amazing the drinkers with tales of her exploits, fly-fishing, drop nets, her gift for the gab, her ruse, ancient and refined, and her tinkerings with net and lead that were no less so; her flesh wandered far afield with a pouch over one shoulder, stuffed with little fish, corn Gitanes, bait; she would stop and plant herself facing the river and whip the somber water with bright nylon, with nickel-plated flies; Hélène’s flesh had borne the finest fisherman in the district, perhaps the region. She was Jean the Fisherman’s mother and this now sufficed, he would still be there — on his heels near the water’s edge watching, grumbling, rejoicing, striking fish, brutally unveiling the mother-of-pearl scales beneath the living light — while she was becoming pulp beneath the earth of Castelnau, next to the church. She spoke to me a little, looked out at me with shrewd eyes and pretended to listen, she knew, of course — although she didn’t know that my desires were called Yvonne and they sold me Marlboros. So for a moment I saw both of them there, the one who wandered away and the one who lingered, the callipygian and the soothsayer, each immemorial in her own way. I left the blood red room, the cave with its mothers, its sons, its companions in tractors whom libations make brothers, and its great callipygian molested up above, strutting her stuff, giving this comedy the weight of tragedy, without limits and invisible. The fathers hunt far off in some elsewhere beyond imagining. I went to bed; moonlight entered my room and far off in the lost clearings caressed flints no one saw, a more furious rain burying them. Doors slammed in the black night; the hooded sexes of dogs quivered, they howled. I fell to sleep atop women who push these doors, entering the fields. Jean the Fisherman caught a carp.
And in the morning there was school, the ring of little feet. They learned penmanship while crying, grammar and spelling, all without knowing — and anyway we never know in advance that the little braids are destined to become black as ravens, that long pants will be worn even in the middle of summer — that the world becomes just words and their effects, heavy machinery, job offers, souped-up motorbikes and hunting rifles, parties and movies at the theater in Périgueux; they aren’t yet aware that’s all there will be between you and what grows from your gut, or, for the little braids, between you and what grows into your gut, pushing upward. The little feet were moving, the big, round eyes looked at me. The knees applied themselves beneath the tables, the hands wrote. The calligraphers from the Third Republic and their fine hands aged on in back while other hands, fervent and precise as well, which patiently cut Acheulean flounder, scale after scale, hone harpoons for fishing, write on water; and I who went on; I, serious as some socialist savant, who taught them spelling in his high collar, his embuttonage with its exuberant ties, his frills and flounces, his brooch, but who, when they had barely reached the courtyard under the rain, stripped and parted a woman of perfect whiteness who sold them lollipops and who smiled at them, who was mother of one of them. Yes, something in my class resembled her, it had bright eyes under plump eyelids and inky hair — but not the breasts or the ass, without even mentioning the earrings, and who therefore didn’t resemble her at alclass="underline" Bernard, her son, who was seven years old and whose flesh was entirely superfluous to hers, because hers was a flesh more impetuous and dense than these thirty little-boy kilos. So there was another form of mediation between us than just the cigarettes and the fabulous stupors that the woods where she appeared induced in me, another currency than these botched encounters, furious and courtly; it was this child.
November came and the rain didn’t cease. The Beune was fat, was drowning the fishermen’s paths. While we were in the courtyard, cranes flew low in the sky, our faces tipped back, running with water, pondering these great shapes that threw cries onto the dense whiteness of the clouds, slowly raking the sky like a net drawn through the Beune; a farmer killed one, ancient and exhausted, that had come to rest near the water and that I saw at night chez Hélène, on the counter between frothy glasses of beer. The wound was invisible; the white neck hung over this side of the counter, the beak stretched out as if in flight, its neck hanging down. Men in dripping oilskins thrust their fingers into the feathers, kneading the dead crane. She wasn’t stuffed, these people didn’t have a taste for such things.
Cranes passed and my students learned their times tables. Around this time I climbed toward my little Golgotha, hoping that Yvonne would be wearing the dress I had seen her in the day before, would be wearing the two combs I liked in her hair that bared her cheeks in such a way that one better saw the delicate plumpness that was revealed when her chin flexed toward her neck. The Tabac was filled with people, men come from the hamlets in their Sunday best to replenish their stores of loose tobacco; and the village gossips come from Mass to glean whom they should damn or perhaps spare. Behind all of these stiff-suited shoulders, these flannelette dresses, Yvonne served, as lively and open as ever. She was wearing the combs, she was wearing the dress, her face, bigger than ever, dispossessed me immediately, filled me with unspeakable happiness. A man appeared, who cavalierly swept past everyone and, leaning on the counter, bent lightly toward Yvonne; he spoke a few words that I was too far away to hear, and anyway it seemed to me that he was speaking in a low voice. Below the clean lines of the back of his hair, I noticed a not-very-well-cut suit that hung well on his sloping shoulders nonetheless, and on either side of him his delicate hands resting on the big plastic shelf where the lighters were displayed below. Yvonne looked at him. In an instant, in a blink of an eye, she, so lively just before, so self-possessed and expansive, had a complete change of face. Change? It wasn’t that she closed herself off, that she no longer appeared charitable; now she was generating something completely different. Like Jean-Gabriel, perhaps, seeing that ineffable Hand behind the one that drew taut the bow, blessing them both, trembling; but it never occurred to me to think about Jean-Gabriel. She had flushed an even crimson, her white chin hesitating, weighing whether it would continue to bear her smile. It did; but in her eyes was a sort of call, a dream, a refusal sometimes seen on women, on both those of the shadows and of the Mass, a delicious servility and a vain shudder of revolt that was yet more delicious. She bridled, she relented, she offered up both her revolt and her defeat, the two grinding against each other with neither of them prevailing. This occurred in an instant, the man’s inaudible murmur, his hands resting on the display case of lighters, Yvonne’s vacillating look and this pathos smoldering in her cheeks, the brief burst of the faltering beast, subdued. The man turned around, he was of average height, well built but that was all, with thick, dull blond hair and a low hairline, cheerful little eyes, a large mouth, generous or greedy; he had a ruddy complexion and, as I already said, delicate hands. He hadn’t said good-bye, but there was neither coarseness nor hostility in his bearing; instead, a sort of courtesy, like a sort of calm, that reigned over this droopy strongman, this low sort of elegance, his big, straightforward features that had an unexpected charm and him, this charm, this, well. Underneath it was the sort of half-drunken contentment that hunters have after a good shot. The rain fell onto his shoulders, in no particular hurry he made for an old Peugeot that he’d left with its motor running. During the instant of silence that weighed upon the store, I thought about the sound of the blood that was beating in Yvonne’s cheeks. The gossips looked at each other with little smiles, the cruelty of which nearly made them seem pretty; the farmers asked for their cigarettes in voices that were heavily tender, but laced with something wrong. As unquestionably was mine. Yvonne lowered her head, bared her cheeks. Selling me my Marlboros, she raised her eyes violently and looked at me as she never had before.