The Bark Tree Read online

  She winked: No, that isn’t all, it’s just precisely there that they’re getting ready to do the deal. “A big deal?” says he. “At least a million,” she answered. “Well, well,” says he, and she added that if he liked, the two of them could stop them. “Yess, M’sieu Narcense, I can see what they’re after, but then I know all about it. Me, I’m only a weak woman, I can’t risk it all by myself; sa question of at least a miyun, think of that, eh, so it’d be better for it to be me and you rather than them, doncha think? That’s what she’d said to him. Then he’d answered: Who d’you think I am? And she’d told him what she thought: that his music, it was all for show, wasn’t it? Slike Marcel, that makes out he’s a bank clerk. Believe me, M’sieu Narcense, I know very well who you are. I’m not from the police, believe me. It’s on the up and up, the deal I’m offering you, and there’s no big risk. It’s a profitable deal, believe me, and it’s in the bag if you’ll only do something about it.”

  She’d said all that to him, and all that time he’d been walking up and down. “How d’you know that Marcel and Le Grand are cooking something up?” says he. “Ah, now that I can’t tell you.” Natch, she couldn’t tell him that just like that. And then he’d said: Msorry, Madame, but I can’t do anything about your business, at the moment I’m busy smuggling cream cheese in North Africa; you understand, that takes a lot of my time, and then, at the same time, I’ve got a lawyer to liquidate not far from Castelsarrazin, a little business which ought to bring me something like two million, not counting the extras, so, you understand, I’m extremely busy; naturally, this is just between you and me.

  Yuh, tswot he’d said, and after that he’d said: Good-by, mso sorry, Madame.

  But what did he mean, not counting the extras? And then, smuggling cream cheese, do people do that? It was certainly international gangsters’ slang. Like the correspondence with Théo in code, it meant something different from what was written. A guy like that who goes about hanging little children and smuggling cream cheese, better watch out. Maybe Ernestine isn’t so wrong not to get mixed up with all that. Guys like that are danjrous, they do in the people that get in their way, and they, well they never get caught. Two mijun not counting the extras, Lord, that’s something. Old Taupe certainly hasn’t got that much. You never know, though, if the yuthers are mixed up in it, then it must be a deal that’s worth something like that.

  “Yes, Madame?”

  “A Cointreau,” replied Mme. Cloche, “and make sure you fill the glass up full, I don’t want any of your half measures.”

  “Well, there’s a vulgar one for you,” said the waiter to himself, wiping his nose with his napkin.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  “Here, Saturnin—is that your sister, the old girl who just left?”

  “Yes, M’sieu Narcense. What on earth did she have to say to you?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Not a word. As she left, she said: If the meussieu wants to see me, give him my address.”

  “Hm! And she didn’t tell you anything about me?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Is she drunk or mad or drugged?”

  “Nothing like that, M’sieu Narcense. She’s in her right mind, my sister is. And she didn’t touch a drop today, my sister didn’t.”

  “Saturnin, do you know who I am?”

  “M’sieu Nar ...”

  “Not at all. I’m a crook, a thief, a dangerous gangster. Your sister just told me so.”

  “Dnever’ve thought it.”

  “Nor would I.”

  “If she said that, it’s because she had a reason for saying it.”

  “Obviously, Saturnin. Etienne Marcel is a crook, too.”

  “The guy from Obonne?”

  “That’s the way it is. He’s cooking up a scheme involving a million.”

  “Jesus,” said Saturnin.

  “I fear you may be carried away by fraternal love, Saturnin, when you say that your sister is in her right mind. Watch her closely. Examine her attentively. Ask her, for instance, if she knows anything about the traffic in cream cheese. You’ll see what she’ll answer. In any case, come what may, I don’t ever want that individual of doubtful cleanliness and repugnant aspect to set foot on my premises again.”

  “Right, M’sieu Narcense.”

  “And you can also tell her not to count the extras when she adds things up.”

  “Right, M’sieu Narcense, If I get a chance, I’ll tell her.”

  Narcense hasn’t heard from Shibboleth yet; too soon; Le Grand couldn’t have had time to get around to it; it can’t be long now, though. Once again, he thinks about the old madwoman and wonders how she managed to come to such conclusions; and the frequent visits to the bistro, as she said, at Blagny. Was that true or false? What on earth could Marcel and Le Grand do there? That must be just as imaginary as all the rest. Blagny, on the Obonne line. Obonne—Narcense hadn’t been there since the Mygales business. That was five days ago—only five days.

  In the train, he looked out of the window at a landscape which he found atrociously hopeless. He liked the engines, but those hovels, those shanties. Now a row of conventional houses. This goes on for some time; there are a few trees here and there; then some waste ground, some workmen’s tenements, some more allotments studded with sheds, a factory here and there, we’re coming to Blagny. No animation in the square at this time of day. The train starts off again. More allotments studded with rabbit hutches, more wasteland and there, just before the chemicals factory, he can read CHIPS in enormous letters, and underneath, modestly, D. Belhôtel. That’s the famous bistro, then, and D. Belhôtel is certainly Saturnin’s brother. At least that much was true in the old girl’s tale. Suddenly, he catches sight of the very same old girl. In person. On the path that runs along the factory wall, just by the railroad line, she’s shuffling along with decision. She certainly knows where she’s going. Narcense can’t resist it. He puts his head out of the window and shouts : Belhôtel! Belhôtel! and waves a handkerchief. The old girl finally sees him; she stops dead, petrified, salted, desiccated. So long as the train remains in sight, she doesn’t budge. He sits down again, highly pleased.

  Obonne, houses, houses and more houses. There’s only one touching one, it’s only half finished and the paint on the gate is flaking off. He prowls around. From a neighboring “Mon Désir” come the yells of a toothless baby; at “Dun Romin” a miserable dog is howling in a destitute voice; at “Mon Repos” a duck is screaming because it just broke its foot on the flying trapeze (it’s not true); at “Mon Rêve” you can hear Rome, unless it’s Madrid or Toulouse (in any case it’s Latin, they’re playing Tortoni’s serenade, oh, to hell with it!).

  In the half-house, nothing stirs. The shutters over all the windows are closed. Meussieu Exossé watches Narcense out of the corner of his eye from his doorway. Abandoned houses provoke the immoral desires of burglars, thinks Meussieu Exossé.

  Narcense looks at the house for a long time. Then he finds he’s near the little café; will he go in? He hesitates; the door half opens, he hears: “the last time I went to Singapore,” and goes back to Paris.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  Saturnin was trying to write; but it wouldn’t come. He wasn’t in form. His pen in the air, he was staring with a baleful eye at the pigeonholes with not a letter in them. Then, lowering his pen, he committed this sentence to paper:

  the bird flue a way,

  and replaced the instrument on the inkstand. Very ill at ease, Saturnin, very ill at ease. Lurking at the back of his lodge, the shutters tight shut on account of the heat, he has opened a little exercise book, a third of which has already been written in, uncorked a little bottle of ink and picked up a slightly nibbled pen. He intended to write something. But it isn’t so easy as all that to write something when you haven’t anything to say. All the more so as Saturnin doesn’t write any old prose or romantic stuff. No no; what he writes has been thought out; so when he doesn’t write, it becomes
painful. Your stomach gets hollow, like when you’re hungry; this is especially odd. Your eyes blink and your temples get hollow like your stomach; a slight pain moves down from the fontanel to the cerebellum, and vanishes.

  Saturnin picks up his pen again and crosses out

  the bird flue away

  He hadn’t had the slightest intention of writing that; all the more uninteresting. He continues his stroke, and finishes it in a most effective doodle. He puts down his pen.

  There are some days when his head is full of things, when he makes judicious, original, profound observations, there are some days when he sees clearly that this is that, and then that, and other days when he understands this and that, and then that, and others days when he feels a little spasm at his heart because he perceives that this is not this, but that, and still other things. He often gets ideas, or if he doesn’t get ideas, there are things that can be written; then it seems so funny. Where does it come from? You really don’t know. He often gets the impression that what he has to say is very important; sometimes, even, that it’s the most important thing in the world what he’s first written or what he’s going to write, what’s in his head, huh. Yes, sometimes, the most important thing in the world is there—staring him in the face; yes, that’s how he sometimes thinks, Saturnin the concierge, whether he’s sitting on a chair, or lying in his bed, whether he’s in his lodge or at the door of the apartment building he has been entrusted to look after, whether it’s day or whether it’s night, whether he’s alone or whether he’s in the company of his wife, who detests sewer rats and prawns that are still alive; yes, Saturnin, sometimes, that’s how he thinks.

  But at other times, Saturnin the concierge, he isn’t at all like that. As we were saying just now, his head is empty and his eye baleful, he doodles on his paper and he nibbles at his pen. But he doesn’t have anything to say; it isn’t that that’s what’s painful, but that he’d thought the contrary. For, as we mustn’t forget to say, there are some times when he wouldn’t be capable of writing anything, but when that wouldn’t make him in the slightest uneasy, because he doesn’t in the least feel like it. That’s the difference, there’s the tra-la-lacuna. Spose he wz to take his feather duster and move the anonymous dust in the elevator from one place to another, then he wouldn’t suffer. Spose he wz to get some polish and a brush and make himself look so handsome in a parquet floor, then he wouldn’t suffer. Spose he had a lot to do, spose he had a lot to keep him busy, then he wouldn’t suffer. But he wants to write, and so he suffers, because there’s someone, behind him, who’s thinking. That, at least, is what he believes. He had been scratching his shoulder for some minutes and thinking vaguely of various incidents in his past, when he gradually realized that, behind him, someone was thinking. Then, immediately after, that there was really no one there, thinking.

  The various images that were interfering with his will to write began to fade away; the faces of his little friends who used to spit in each other’s mouths at school, for fun, then the silhouette of the teacher who’d fallen downstairs—these faded away, then the last echo of the laughter provoked by this incident faded away, then some vague obscene pictures faded away, the image of a warship, that of a naked, tattooed arm, more slowly, that of a bottom, and once again a few vague obscene pictures. Then a bouquet of roses he’d seen going by that morning, carried by a uniformed delivery boy.

  He drew a vertical line, and nothing was left but coenesthetic impressions: his stomach hollowing, his temples hollowing, his fontanel hollowing, and then turning into a sort of well, of well, of well without bottom or rim, into which stones fall indefinitely, without ever coming into contact with the surface of the black water entirely and forever bereft of light and movement, the surface of this perfectly carbonic, arachnoid water, the skin of a brain. His chest became constricted and his heart started beating wildly; his breath became jerky. Saturnin fell into his own well belonging to his own brain, where there was now nothing; no more well, no more brain, no more Saturnin, no more concierge, no more camels, no more sunshades, no more laundry boats.

  Saturnin, with his mouth open.

  After—after—what? he picked up his pen again and, carefully tearing up the crossed-out, scribbled-over page, he wrote on the opposite page:

  There isn’t anything.

  And reshut the little exercise book, recorked the little bottle, and put down the little pen. Then he got on with his work, while there was still time.

  Fourth Chapter

  THEY arrived at noon; aperitifs were in full swing. Pierre’s sports car received the warm approval of the public. Alberte shut herself up in her room. Etienne started searching for Théo. This vacation was starting in an original fashion. One night in the car had advantageously replaced the ten or fifteen usual hours in the sardine can, and Pierre’s company was becoming a necessity to Etienne. Forgetting the little ducks and the hard-boiled-egg-cutter, he saw in this meeting the cause of the change whose reality he perceived daily. He didn’t even think of reproaching Pierre for the conjuring trick he had been responsible for in relation to Narcense. And in any case, he considered it preferable not to let him know of his acquaintance with the facts of this matter. At least for the moment. As he was very thirsty, he went into a local American bar and asked for a lemonade. The bartender was amazed that anyone should ask for such a strange beverage, and replaced it on his own initiative with a djinn-phiz. Etienne drank, and thought it not bad. He paid, without looking startled at the price, and left, delighted with his new experience. He loitered outside the bookstore-cum-newsstand; he felt like buying a book, not a novel, a serious book, but the display offered nothing he wanted; he contented himself with a few post cards. A little farther on, he asked the price of a souvenir; just so as to know. Then he made a detour in order to look at a few old houses, very local color, built the year before by the tourist bureau. He retraced his steps, again examined the books and papers, bought some cigarettes, and found himself back at the hotel. Pierre was waiting for him, drinking an aperitif, like everyone else. Then Etienne remembered Théo, turned around again and went to look for him.

  He asked in the hotels whether they didn’t know a young man of about fifteen, with greasy, badly cut black hair, his face covered with spots, his eyes ever so slightly rheumy, and with permanently dirty hands; but no one had seen a young man answering this description. Then he wandered through the little town, and came to the beach. Of the few bottoms still roasting there, none belonged to his stepson, the future holder of the baccalaureate.

  At 1:30 he went back to the hotel, very tired. Pierre was still waiting for him. He sat down, discouraged.

  “It’s not funny—no Théo. Alberte waiting for him in her room ... What’s in a djinn-phiz?”

  “It’s a squeezed lemon with gin,” replied Pierre.

  Etienne rubs his forehead. Where on earth can he be? The moment you look at things disinterestedly, everything changes. That’s quite obvious, and that is what makes it difficult to accept the obviousness of what you see at first. Not to take the destination of an object into account, what a strange activity! You start by not seeing anything because you’re living in a whirl, then you look because you want to do something different, and after that you contemplate because you’re tired of working.

  “And what do you intend to do?” asked Pierre.

  “Damned if I know. If I went to the police—what a business! What a bore! What a bore!

  “What sort of boy is he, your stepson?”

  “He’s a young man of fifteen; he goes to the lycée, he has brown eyes, his nose—how should I know? I don’t think he likes me very much, I even think he detests me. It often happens, doesn’t it, that a child detests his stepfather? I think he takes me for an imbecile, I didn’t go to a lycée, and until recently I didn’t know much about the world. About existence. Whereas he’s one of the first in his class; he’ll get his baccalaureate. So, you understand, he thinks he’s someone. I’m not cut out to be a father ... Not Th
éo’s father, at any rate.”

  “You ought to go and tell Mme. Marcel.”

  Etienne stood up. That was when he saw Théo. The latter, his hands in his pockets and his hat on the back of his head, had just sat down in the next café. He looked contemptuous and bored; he opened a book and started pretending to read. A few seconds later, Etienne was sitting down in front of him.

  “So this is where you are,” he said.

  Théo, prodigiously astonished:

  “Yes, this is where I am.”

  “What got into you?”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Is my mother here?”

  “Why did you go away?”

  “I wonder how you managed to find me.”

  The conversation continued on this note for some time. Théo took advantage of it to make up a tale, for his parents’ benefit, about his new escapade.

  Pierre, who was beginning to get bored, went and joined them.

  “Are you coming to lunch?”

  “Le Grand, this is my son Théo. Monsieur Le Grand.”

  “Pleaseder meecher, M’sieu,” said Théo, who had some notion of Politeness.

  “I’ll go and tell Alberte right away,” exclaimed Etienne.

  Pierre and Théo were left tête-à-tête. They didn’t exchange any interesting remarks.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  “If I ignore the practical side of a manufactured article,” said Etienne.

  “Then you’re involved in aesthetics,” interrupted Pierre. “Or magic.”

  “But I don’t want to have anything to do with aesthetics, or magic,” Etienne protested. “Men think they’re making one thing, and then they make another. They think they’re making a pair of scissors, but what they actually make is something else. Of course, it is a pair of scissors, it’s made to cut and it does cut, but it’s something quite different as well.”