Bark Tree Read online

“Hm, that’s true,” says Dominique, “Mme. Pic, we don’t know where she is.”

  No one answers, as the family concerned is snoozing, as has been said above.

  But the facts soon take it upon themselves to answer the tavernkeeper. Facts—let us rather say: events. For there is a ring at the door, and the sniffing Camélia goes to open it. Four shod feet tap on the treads of the staircase with their discreet heels, for someone in the house is on her death-bed.

  Sh! Sh! The four feet reach the first floor, pass the dining-room door, and continue their ascent.

  “Good God!” cries Peter. “The old girl has gone and fetched a sky pilot!”

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  Ernestine, with a friendly gesture, invited the crowd into her room, adopted the position of Socrates drinking the hemlock, and uttered these words:

  “It was nice of you, Madame Pic, to think of me, but your curé, you know, well, you know what you can do with him, because I know your curé, I’ve seen him often enough, him and his dirty tricks, to know the sort of stuff he pulls, and snot only this one, it’s the ones I knew when I was just a little girl, too, they never deprived themselves of their nasty little pleasures with anything they could get hold of, from their check handkerchiefs to the little boys in the catechism class. Anyway, as you see, Madame Pic, if you thought you were going to inflict your mumbo jumbo on me, you were barking up the wrongest tree you ever could bark up, and your curé, he can stuff his crucifix back in his pants that he hides underneath his soutane. Anyway, even so, it’s nice of you to let me know nicely that I’m going to die. Praps I mightn’t even have known. You know, Madame Pic, I wasn’t so crazy about knowing, but now that you’ve shown me your gent in black I know what’s going to happen. Cept that I don’t really know. Anyway, members of the wedding party that are here to listen to me jabbering, I’m going to tell you a little about what’s going on. Snot that I want to teach you anything or start preaching at you. They don’t have me registered at the town hall for that sort of thing; even so I could do it just as well as that gent in black that’s making such horrid faces at what I’m saying. And so, members of the wedding party, open your lug-holes, like we used to say in my village where I was born, and I’m going to make you a little speech; that’s as good a way as any to use up the time I’ve got left to live, doncha think? To start with, I must tell you, then, that the fact that I’m going to disappear amazes me a little. Somehow, I can’t quite understand how it’s going to happen. I know that everyone can do without me quite all right, and that they’ll go on living after me; even so, I can’t quite essplain this peculiar adventure to myself. Ten minutes, or an hour, mnot quite sure which, from now ...”

  “Ten minutes at the most,” says Mme. Belhôtel.

  “Thanks, Madame Belhôtel. I’ll see that I finish in time. So as I was saying, in ten minutes from now I’ll be disposed of, obliterated, blotted out. That—now that’s really peculiar. Snot that I believe in the immortality of the soul, as the abbé would say, or in life after death, like the woman that sells newspapers would say, you know the one I mean, the one that’s a spiritualist. I don’t believe in all that. I’ve thought about it. Imagining yourself just like you are, only not having any eyes, or arms, or legs—doesn’t make sense. On account of I’ve realized that what you are, it’s not just a little voice that talks in your head, but it’s your whole body, too, that you can feel is alive, and everything you can do with it. If you haven’t got a body any more, how can you say that it’s still me? And so, to come back to what I was saying just now, when I find it surprising that I’m going to disappear, snot that I’m thinking about life after death or my soul in heaven or in hell or any sort of imaginative stuff like that. I’m talking, as you might say, objectively. When something else disappears, that’s already odd. But me. That’s just staggering. A tree catches fire—there’s still the smoke and ash left; and yet the tree’s gone. It’s like me. The decay will be left, but the little voice that talks in your head when you’re by yourself, there won’t be anything left of that. Mine, when it stops talking, it won’t be talking anywhere else. That’s what’s strange. Tisn’t that it worries me much especially. People can do without me. Zno doubt about that. And I can do without myself all right. Snot that I’m trying to make any propaganda for the spiritualists—I might as well use the right words. Even so, there’s things you can’t stop yourself thinking. On the yuther hand, it’s just as crazy to think that there’s any reason for you to be on earth, but all the same I can’t stop myself thinking: Here I am, dying, and what the hell will I have done here? I’ll have rinsed out some glasses and done some dishwashing—no doubt about that; I’ll have slept with some men who were a pretty lousy bunch, in the main—in the moral sense of the word, that is; I’ll have had a child that was immediately done away with; I’ll have been beaten as a child, after which I’ll have somewhat wallowed in the mud. And I’ll have married old Taupe, yes, I was forgetting, I’ll have married old Taupe. I can’t help saying that if that’s all I’ll have done, I haven’t got much to boast about. And after that, what would I have done? Well that’s another story. I’ll say some more about that in a minute. For the moment, I’m giving you a lecture. Well, coming back to that, I must have plenty of screws loose to ask myself the sort of questions I am asking myself, don’t you think? What was I doing among you all? Well, I used to do the dishes. Why try and split hairs, eh? Members of the wedding party, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “We’re listening to you,” they replied in chorus.

  “And me, what the hell am I doing?”

  “You’re talking,” they replied once again.

  “And what am I saying?”

  “You’re saying rather vague things,” they replied, still in unison.

  “I’d really like to give you more details, but you’ll understand, I can’t. Course, there’s something very simple, and everyone knows that: Taupe’s wife’s going to die, cos sooner or later, that finally happens, and if we live it’s because we’re going to die. In that right? And then, there’s something else, something very simple. Since I’m dying and there’s nothing to be done about it and that’s just the way it is, well, zno point in making a song and dance about the fate of my little voice that talks in my head when I’m by myself, or in knowing what’s been the point of me living twenty-one years on this planet. To sum up, as I was saying, I’m disappearing like so many other people have done before me and like even more will do after. There. But I’d say that’s a good five minutes I’ve been talking.”

  “A barber’s five minutes, even,” said Saturnin, politely.

  “Then I’ll get a move on.”

  “Just a moment,” said Saturnin.

  “Yes?” said Ernestine politely.

  “If we live, it’s because we die, that’s what you said, dint you?”

  “Yes, I did say that.”

  “You might just as well have said the opposite,” he observed.

  “I agree,” replied Ernestine.

  “Ah, good,” said Saturnin. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “You see what a good girl I am. Just when I was going to get rich, I’m dying, and I’m d ...”

  “When you were going to get rich!” exclaimed Mme. Pic, amazed.

  “She’s getting delirious,” Mme. Cloche hastened to say.

  “When she was going to get rich!” exclaimed Meussieu Pic, flabbergasted.

  “Ernestine doesn’t know what she’s saying any more,” declared Mme. Cloche.

  “Let her speak,” said Peter.

  “Yes of course, we must let her speak,” Themistocles agreed.

  “She’s only got five minutes to live and you won’t let her speak, it’s idiotic,” said Mme. Belhôtel.

  “Start by keeping quiet yourself, then,” said Mme. Pic.

  “I’ll keep quiet when I want to keep quiet, Madame,” replied Mme. Belhôtel.

  “Come, come, ladies, you surely aren’t going to quarrel now,”
said Dominique.

  “Someone’s got to start keeping quiet,” said Mme. Saturnin.

  “You start, then,” said Mme. Pic.

  “And this girl is dying without the sacraments of the Church,” exclaimed the curé, who was called the Abbé Leslaines.

  “Ah! If that one’s going to start, there’s more to come!” exclaimed Peter.

  “Silence, then!” shouted Themistocles.

  “Not so much noise,” whispered old Taupe.

  “Oh, you know, I’m a good girl,” said Ernestine. “If it bothers you to listen to me, I’ll keep quiet.” And she kept quiet.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  Along the river, where antiquated hats and abandoned shoes were rotting, down by the river, where fishermen’s lines were vainly trying to tempt the nonexistent gudgeon, by the banks of the river, where a barge occasionally crept past, laden with sand and adorned with a Flemish flowerpot, along the river, it was dark. It was also dark elsewhere, but never mind; by the banks of the river, the darkness was deepening. Through this darkness, two beings were walking. These beings were human; better still, they were brachycephalic; one female and the other male, they belonged the same family, they had had the same mother, and no doubt the same father; and if they did not bear the same name, that is because French law gives the married woman the name of her husband. Now, the sister had married, in lawful wedlock, one Cloche, and the name had remained with her even though she had been the winning party in a widowhood case. The brother had never given up the name of Belhôtel, of which he was in nowise proud. But this brother might well have been another, for two existed, whom a skillful subterfuge made it possible to distinguish, In fact, their father, foreseeing that the same nomenclature might be a source of inconvenience to his two male children, had given them a second appellation: he called the one Dominique and the other Saturnin. In this way people were able to distinguish them. It is with the former that we are here concerned.

  Mme. Cloche and Dominique Belhôtel, then, were walking in the dark along the tarry river and, apart from this occupation, were exchanging ideas and interjections. In short, by the side of the mourning-crepe river, Mme. Cloche and Dominique Belhôtel, enveloped in the darkness like truffles in chocolate cream, were having a discussion under cover of the opaque shades of night.

  “The little bitch, she nearly let on,” the one was saying.

  “What a mess,” the other was saying, “we’ll have to start from the beginning again.”

  “They’ve had us.”

  “They’ve had her.”

  “They’ll get us.”

  “They will not get us.”

  “What we going to do?”

  “Look at this water, it’s safe, it’s calm, it’s water that doesn’t talk. When the old boy’s at the bottom, he’ll never come up again. He’ll’ve committed suicide out of a broken heart.”

  “How you can go on,” murmured the brother.

  “And that idiot of a Mme. Pic, she’ll go and blurt it out everywhere. There’s another one ought to go down to the bottom. Into the mud!”

  They walk in silence for a few moments, moving in the darkness along the black, shoe-polish river.

  “So you think They killed her?” asked the brother.

  “Plain as the nose on your face,” replied the sister.

  The sister added:

  “Pore Ernestine! She suspected something of the sort.”

  “And we’ve been had.”

  “Yes, we’re the marks, unless the old boy disappears. It’s simple.”

  “Not so simple as all that. And after, have to find his hiding place.”

  “It’s behind the door.”

  “What if we don’t find it?”

  “Dominique, I believe you’re getting yellow.”

  “Yellow, seasy to say. You’re getting me involved in some lousy goings-on. Personally, I don’t need it, the old boy’s money. I’ve got my own. Ten years from now I’ll have made my fortune. I’m hard-working, I am, and I know how to look after my cash. When it was just the business of the wedding, that was all right. Just a little favor I did you. But now, to chuck the old boy in the river just for the sake of maybe getting a little sweets, no thanks. An anyway, I’m like Ernestine, I’m wary of the others. They’re stronger’n us. We’ve just seen that, haven’t we? Well, no thanks! The cemetery or the guillotine, that’s what you’re offering me.”

  “You’re talking like a sock merchant or a ham actor,” Mme. Cloche told him. “You may not look it, but you’ve got noodles in your veins stead of blood. You look tough, but your heart’s made of macaroni. Won’t you just drool at the mouth when you see me go in my Rolls with my gigolos when you’re rotting in your whorehouse with three poxy sluts and a Negress. You’re like Ernestine. If she’d listened to me right away, she wouldn’t be where she is now. You won’t play now, and then in a week you’ll want to be in on it. Twon’t bring you any luck. Snuff chat. S go back.”

  They turned around. The moon was swimming with difficulty in mid-air, and the rare stars were blacked out in the dark mud of the river. Trains whistled now and then, and dogs howled from time to time. A cock even crowed; which didn’t cause the dawn to appear. Behind their fragile fences, kitchen gardens were peacefully sleeping, and onions were dozing side by side with lettuces and tomatoes. Over in the direction of Paris, there was a huge glow, because it’s a big town with lots of streetlamps and luminous signs. On the other side of the river, a long way away, a factory was still lit up; on the Chemicals and Linoleum side, a few lights spoke of reduced activity. Occasionally, everything subsided into abysses of silence, only to be dragged out of it once again by a train whistling, a dog barking, a cock crowing or a car humming; after which, the houses and the huts and the little gardens and the factories were once more engulfed in an oleaginous silence.

  In Blagny itself, one house alone was still alive, and toward this house the brother and sister Belhôtel turned their steps. When they got to the town hall, Sidonie said:

  “And whatever you do, you that’s in good with the cops, try and see they keep their noses out of this.”

  “Well, that’s one more thing I’ll do for you,” said the brother.

  Then he added:

  “What if you informed on the others?”

  “Brilliant—and that’s all you can think of. When I’m just precisely asking you to see that no one sticks their nose into it. This business is between me and the others. Got it?”

  “All right, all right,” replied Dominique.

  As they were coming to the café, they could see its lights, she said:

  “Are you very upset about it?”

  “About what?” he said.

  And then he remembered the young body that had been murdered, and started to cry, because after all he was very fond of Ernestine. Mme. Cloche turned her head to look at this brother with the heart of macaroni, but the look did not express any precise thought, nor any more blame than approbation.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  At dawn, the passenger trains started running again, damp and cold, their windows foggy and whitish, like eyes covered in nubeculae. Into one of these climbed the remains of the wedding party, with thick mouths, and brains flabbier than an eider down. Saturnin and his lady were going back to their lodge; an unexpected engagement was enticing Peter and his espoused into a Walloon province; the discipline which is the strength of the armed forces had determined the hour of Themistocles’s reimbarracksing, and Mme. Cloche had an appointment for 9 o’clock, something to do with a fetus. The little group, still sprightly after their sleepless night, sat down on the arid seats and allowed themselves to be conveyed into the city with no word either of farewell or protest. Then, when the engine with the powerful whistle had already conveyed them for some minutes along the rails, which were as shiny as a bald head, one of the persons present—it wasn’t Mme. Cloche—asked. “Why the devil did she say: ‘just when I was going to get rich’?,” thus translating the gen
eral uneasiness this mystery was causing among the uninitiated. For, at Blagny, the news was already being spread from vocal chords to voice, and being completed by this anxious interrogation, which no one could answer except by imagining romantic adventures or absurd fuliginations. For example, as a result of all its cogitations, Mme. Pic’s brain was wrung out like a dishcloth that is being relieved of its moisture; Peter and his wife and brother didn’t know what to say about these unexpected riches; but Saturnin, who was more knowledgeable, was beginning to glimpse the somber machinations of his sister, the abortionist. He was reconstituting their framework, not without certain errors. But he didn’t answer. Mme. Cloche grunted, and they all became lost in thought, and only resumed contact with the world at the call of a man with a gallooned cap who was demanding in a raucous voice some pieces of cardboard which he wished to perforate.

  Then, they separated. Saturnin and his wife were able to utter some words of condolence. The two brothers, moved to tears at the memory of their defunct sister, forgot their differences. They shook each other’s hand very heartily, and then immediately turned their backs on each other, and went off toward other atmospheres, both with heavy heart and flowing lachrymal gland. Both disappear, both fade away, we shall see them no more, neither Peter Tom the Anchorite, the subtle magician and his lady, so very slim and slight, nor the trusty sergeant major, the pride of his superiors and the terror of his subordinates. They plunge into their reciprocal destinies, like shrimps into the sand, they withdraw and, as you might say, die.

  The brother and sister remain face to face, and the sister-in-law too. The sister-in-law is sick of it all; of the wedding, of defunctitude and of old Ma Cloche. She’s had her fill. She’s choked. She’s fed up. She’s pissed off … She’s had enough. She gives her spouse’s muscular arm a significant pinch, and he puts off until later the explanation he intends to demand from Sidonie. On the street, opposite the Gare du Nord, the final disintegration of the wedding party is accomplished. Meussieu and Mme. Saturnin Belhôtel, concierges by profession, catch a bus. Mme. Cloche stays there, alone and in distress.