The Bark Tree Read online

  At about the same period, that’s to say, when it was still snowing, the G.M.P. heard there was a deserter in town. An anonymous denunciation. Bébé Toutout hadn’t wanted to leave it at that. A deserter? That was interesting. They sent some gendarmes to investigate the matter from a little closer. It was true. The man lodging with the Pigeonnier woman was an absentee. They went and picked him up one day when the women were out shopping. They brought him before the officers who’d baptized themselves judges: So you’re a deserter? they ask him, and he answered: Yes. And then the brass hats frowned. Seeing that he doesn’t want the enemy to kill him, right! we’ll be the ones to kill him. In short, they condemned the fellow to death and they stuck him against a wall and they inserted twelve bullets in his skin, in the name of patriotism. That’s how Narcense died.

  Alberte never knew what had happened to him; the post office is so badly run in wartime.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  They presented Etienne with a pretty little gold stripe, and stuck him in another regiment; it so happened that his immediate superior was not unknown to him; in fact, his name was Saturnin Belhôtel. They shook each other’s mitt in friendly fashion, and Saturnin said to Etienne:

  “I’ll take you to my brother’s place.”

  My brother’s place was 47 rue Thiers, the most expensive, most famous, best-frequented brothel in Epinal. Thirty of the most docile and conscientious girls imaginable worked there. The spondulics were accumulating in Dominique’s piggy bank, and when they were visited by generals, Camélia herself, in person, was prepared to do some of the work.

  There was quite a bit of pushing and shoving at the door. The two men made their way through the crowd of rutting N.C.O.’s and managed to reach the café. A suffocating smell of tobacco, wine, leather and armpits swamped their nostrils; but, triumphing over this initial revulsion, they crossed the dance floor in the midst of a colossal uproar, and reached the table the boss kept for his brother. The girls swooped down on them. There were cross-eyed ones, skeletal ones, ulcerated ones, slobbering ones, dilapidated ones, bald ones, snotty-nosed ones, elephantiae ones, bandy-legged ones; they were all smiling and wiggling their asses.

  “Lay off, lay off!” Saturnin yelled at them crudely, and then he shouted:

  “Camélia! Where are Tata and Rara?”

  Seeing that Saturnin was the boss’s brother, they were sent to him; two rather pretty girls, tuberculous to the seventh degree, came and sat down beside him, squealing a little, as they were anxious to seem gay. This tore their chests out of them, and when they’d finished scraping out their lungs, they laughed like anything. By some astonishing mystery, their eyes still seemed to expect something out of this immense fuckery. They were given some glasses and the wherewithal to fill them, after which no one took any more notice of them. The player piano gave painful birth to a waltz, and stripes and naked breasts revolved to its rhythm.

  Then Saturnin said:

  “Well?”

  Etienne replied:

  “Well?”

  These were serious questions. How could they answer them? Where could they start? With the door? When he thought about the door, Etienne couldn’t get over it. Could they talk about that now? What a bad joke. What the hell could they have done with it? But who on earth cared about it now?

  “Do you remember Les Mygales? That’s where we met. In an odd sort of way, I must say. I haven’t often had the opportunity of meeting you since. What about the guy who was strung up in the tree, do you know what happened to him?”

  “He deserted.”

  Etienne swallowed the potion that had been placed in front of him, a potion very probably made from bidet water, the nectar of brothels and the hydromel of whorehouses. To desert. He leaned over to Saturnin:

  “Braver that I am,” he murmured.

  “Don’t talk like that in front of the girls,” muttered Saturnin. “They repeat everything you say.”

  And he moved his gold braid up and down over Tata’s stomach.

  “Shall we go up?” she suggested, but the ex-concierge didn’t condescend to answer.

  “Your door, that was all hokum,” he said to Etienne.

  “I knew it was.”

  “We really went to some trouble, Narcense and I did, to find a worthy place to put it. We carted it from apartment to apartment, from castle to manor house, from hotel to barracks, always hoping to discover the lost room that corresponded to it.”

  “And you didn’t find it?”

  “No. Naturally we didn’t. And yet we were operating methodically, we were following a genuine clue. Nothing to be done, though, it was all imagination. In the end, we burned it. As we were breaking it up, I noticed the name Taupe carved on one of the bits, next to the name of a woman.”

  “Yes, his name, Gérard Taupe. I knew that, too. A souvenir of a love affair, that door “

  “Then you must also know?”

  “That he’s dead. Yes. Prewar stuff, all that. Don’t you think? Tell me, what’s happened to your sister, Mme. Cloche?”

  “Already decorated three times for heroism.”

  “It’s not true!”

  “It is. Blood excites her. And what about your pal, Pierre Le Grand?

  “Well now, I haven’t the slightest idea what’s become of him. He’s another strange one.”

  “And your missus?”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “And your big son?”

  “He’s at the lycée, working for his exams.”

  The women were getting impatient.

  “Shall we go up?” they kept asking every five minutes.

  But the two men went on talking without a break, and were swapping reminiscences of their childhood. Finally, Camélia came to call them to order; the girls were wanted elsewhere. So they went up, fucked, and came down again and went on drinking.

  The heavy atmosphere muffled the shouts and songs; the player piano barely scratched them and words were dissipated in slow and ineffective oscillations. Idle words. Outside there was a foot of snow and minus fifteen times as many degrees centigrade.

  Etienne and Saturnin couldn’t make up their minds to leave.

  “Don’t you find that nothingness absorbs being,” said the latter to the former, who retorted:

  “Wouldn’t you rather say that being conjugates nothingness?”

  When they’d reached their seventeenth glass of liquor, they fell asleep.

  A colleague, Lieutenant Themistocles Troc, recognized them dozing on their table and went up and shook them, bellowing in their ears:

  “What, no more love!”

  They woke up, blinking, with matted mouths.

  Outside, it was a cold as chastity.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  Toward March, the fine weather returned in the form of incessant rain. The civilian and military populations splattered through the mud, seasoned with gas and shells. The French achieved a few victories as a consequence of magic operations, such as ministerial changes, the placarding of speeches, the unveiling of monuments and the execution of female spies of great beauty.

  During the whole of April, no one cast a single clout, but May was superb. The vegetation vegetated admirably; the boidies perched on the telegraph wires and sang gaily, and the sky became bluer every day. In Obonne, life went by in mild and senile fashion, to all appearances extremely placidly. In fact, a lot of things were happening. Examples: Théo deflowered the cobbler’s daughter and the piano teacher’s daughter; Bébé Toutout distributed candies to young children in exchange for trifling services; Hippolyte, inflamed by the new wine, made advances to Cléopastor, the gendarme, but was rejected with scorn, for Sergeant Pourléche alone occupied his heart. Every evening, Meussieu Exossé and Meussieu Fruit became inebriated with studying the supposed plans of the general staff and moving fickle lags over a map of Europe. When they got home, with sticky mustaches and dripping noses, each got belabored by his respective missus as she thought of all those elegant offic
er-druggists wielding huge retorts.

  One Saturday evening, the bell of the half-house rang; Théo ran to answer it. A kid with a suitcase in his hand was waiting behind the gate.

  “Are you Clovis Belhôtel?” asked Théo, who’d been told by his stepfather that Clovis was coming, fleeing from Epinal where a beriberi epidemic was raging.

  The gate squeaked. Clovis went in. It was 10 o’clock. It was dark. They had eaten. Bébé Toutout was looking closely at the naked women in the Gaulois, a rag so named in order to give its intending readers a good idea of what it was all about. Clovis put down his suitcase and did not conceal his stupefaction at the sight of this extraordinary creature; who raised his nose.

  “Hello, my little man,” he said calmly.

  “This is Bébé Toutout,” Théo explained. “He lives here.”

  Clovis sat down. They offered him something to eat; he had. What he wanted was a drink. Some wine, preferably.

  “How old are you?” Théo asked him.

  “Fifteen,” replied Clovis.

  “I’m sixteen. What class are you in?”

  “The second.”

  “I’m in the first. I’m taking my exams this year. I’ll let you have my lecture notes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way, do you smoke?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, here’s a pack of cigarettes. They don’t cost me much, you know. Sa little sort of business I do.”

  “Ah.”

  “By the way, what does your old man do?”

  “He keeps a brothel.”

  “A what?” said Théo, staggered.

  “Ha ha!” cackled Bébé Toutout, “Théo that doesn’t know what a brothel is! What a boob!

  Théo, disdaining the midget’s jests, showed that he did know:

  “So your old man, he keeps a bawdyhouse, then?”

  “Yes. It was the most terrific cathouse in the whole of Epinal. But what with this beriberi epidemic, he had to go somewhere else. To Verdun, that’s where he is now.”

  “Did you take advantage of it?”

  “That’s just it.”

  “That’s just what?”

  Clovis laughed, without deigning to explain. Then he inquired:

  “What time are you going to Mass tomorrow?”

  They didn’t answer. He’s going to the bad, this one!

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  In June, a second floor was built on to the Marcel house, and it soon got around that you could meet some pretty girls there. A bearded dwarf, armed with a revolver to see there weren’t any breaches of the peace, received the customers and sent them away with their genitories and wallets empty.

  “Well now, fifty francs to sleep with a kid of fifteen with fresh, hard breasts (you’ve never touched anything like ’em), you think that’s too much, do you, you old cuckold?” said Bébé Toutout to the curé of Obonne, who’d come to consume.

  The venerable priest (he’d been treating himself to the Eucharist every day for the previous forty years), rejoined:

  “After all, Meussieu Bébé Toutout, for you, a sincere practicing Catholic, one of the most faithful of the faithful, a regular attendant at vespers as well as at matins, a pillar of the Church, a champion of the faith, to try and make me pay fifty francs, me! God’s representative on earth!”

  “It’s not a question of God, but of cunt,” retorted Bébé Toutout. “Hand over your fifty francs. It’s a terrible thing to be such a skinflint. And when I think that you raked in at least fifty Masses after the last battle.”

  Upstairs, Ivoine and Colberte, the daughter of the piano teacher were knitting socks for their brothers who were fighting the barbarians; in another corner of the room, Théo and Clovis were reading:

  “Seen the paper?” said Théo to Clovis. “They explain that the so-called victory of the Etruscans doesn’t mean a thing. The Poles are going to take them from the rear—it’s a strategic maneuver, you see.”

  “Ah,” said Clovis, “none of this would have happened if there hadn’t been an atheist government. This war is God’s punishment.”

  “You think so?” Théo asked him anxiously.

  “Of course. The padre at Epinal proved that to me. France is expiating its impiety in blood.”

  Ivoine and Colberte stopped work for a moment and fervently kissed the little medals they wore hanging between their tits.

  “My papa was always blaspheming. It’s a lot of balls, he used to say, meaning religion. He was killed. He must be in hell. It was God’s will,” said one of them.

  “And what about mine,” said the other. “The dirty old pig. He used to deceive my mother, and how he did, and he laughed at her because she went to Mass. He seduced all the kids who came to the house. His impurity has been punished all right. He caught syphilis at Peyra-Cave and died of it.”

  “Since when do people die of syphilis?” asked Théo skeptically.

  “Oh, Ida know,” said Colberte, “Any rate, he died of an illness.”

  “You’re slightly talking crap,” Théo went on. “My stepfather, he never went to church and he isn’t dead yet.”

  “Yes, but that may be to come,” retorted Clovis intelligently.

  The two girls giggled, and Théo followed suit. But this laughter was shattered by Bébé Toutout’s voice yelling:

  “Ivoine! Colberte! Come on down! Za customer!”

  “Coming, coming,” replied the two kids in their clear voices, putting their work down on the table.

  They went down. Théo said:

  “Who is it, d’you think, downstairs?”

  “No idea.”

  “By the way, Clovis. Have you seen in the paper that ...”

  They both started mocking the incredible absurdities of the enemy. Ivoine came back up.

  “Who was it?”

  “The curé.”

  “Well, he’s not bothered.”

  “He preached a lovely sermon the other day,” murmured Ivoine, smiling blissfully.

  She took up her work again.

  “He’s always asking for money,” Théo grumbled.

  “What’s that matter,” retorted Clovis, “if we don’t give him any and if he comes and spends it here?”

  Then he suggested enlarging the house, adding on a café, because the café trade, that rakes it in. And increasing the number of girls.

  “Have to talk to Bébé Toutout about that,” replied Théo, suddenly absorbed in a passage in the fourth volume of Les Misérables.

  “Bébé Toutout, Bébé Toutout!” exclaimed Clovis, exasperated.

  Then, after a silence, he asked incoherently:

  “By the way, your mother then, she live all by herself in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “She lives with a woman friend.”

  Bébé Toutout, who’d just come upstairs, added:

  “You might just as well tell your pal that she went off with a guy.”

  Théo didn’t flinch.

  “Yes. And he was even a deserter, which is worse. She was living with him.”

  “I see it all,” said Clovis, scornfully, “your mother’s just a whore.”

  Théo hung his head, and Bébé Toutout, a few seconds later, bellowed with rage because he’d just caught his beard in the door of the safe where he’d been tucking away the curé’s fifty francs.

  XCI

  SOME decades later, the war was still not over. Naturally, there weren’t an awful lot of people left upright, so that Etienne had finally become a field marshal, and so had Saturnin. They were both holding out outside Carentan with an army of eight men against the Etruscan army of some thirty people, including the queen, who, with age, had become Mrs. Olini. One evening when the Gallic army (because, with time, France had become Gaul again) had fallen asleep in the middle of a clearing around a nice wood fire, a crafty Etruscan came and pinched all the dreaming soldiers’ weapons. The next morning, there was nothing to do but to surrender. The
war was over. Toward evening, an Etruscan general came to fetch the two captive field marshals, who had been shut up in a hut; the queen was inviting them to dinner: A tribute to the conquered, she said. They buckled on their breastplates, polished their calves, cleaned out the interior of their noses and followed the guide.

  In the forest, in the middle of the same clearing where the whole Gallic army had got itself all balled up in the manner narrated above, a vigorous banquet had been prepared, composed for a roast boar and boiled chestnuts, the whole washed down with hydromel. They took their seats. Then a herald tomtommed and the queen appeared. Not without astonishment, Etienne and Saturnin recognized Mme. Cloche.

  “How are you?” asked the first, with presence of mind.

  “Ah, Cloche of Cloches!” exclaimed the second.

  “Well, my lambs,” said she, “you must be amazed eh? to meet me again here. Talk about surprises, this must be a surprise. Apart from that, it’s quite some time since we saw each other. Years and years. A mere nothing. And you, you’ve come up in the world. Field marshals of Gaul. That’s nothing to sneeze at.”

  The two men bowed politely. Then they asked for news of their friends and relations. Most of them had been slung, kerplunk! into the clayey earth. Théo, though, was a prolific, second-class, in the Argentine.

  “That’s a fine situation,” said Mme. Cloche. “And what about the guy that tried to hang him?”

  “Who was that?” asked Etienne.

  “Yiy-yi-yi,” said Saturnin. “Let’s not talk about all that. It’s ancient history.”

  “Ah, of course,” agreed his sister. “Well, aren’t you drinking?” she exclaimed indignantly.

  And torrents of hydromel flowed down their gullets.

  “Howja spend your time?” she asked, a few bottles later.

  “In the old days, we used to go in for metaphysics,” replied Etienne.

  “We still do, from time to time,” added Saturnin, “but less and less.”

  “How come?”

  “Because of the rain.”

  “Well,” yelled the queen, rising up into the night, which was illuminated by a bit of round tallow which someone’s demented thumbs had pummeled into the likeness of a human face, “well, the rain, that’s me ...”