The Bark Tree Read online

  “Snot true,” said Saturnin.

  “Hey, you-ou, so you take me for a liar, now, do you?”

  “Oh no-o, oh no no no!”

  “Well, I am, I’m the rain! The rain that dissolves the constellations and upsets kingdoms, the rain that inundates empires and macerates republics, the rains that makes your shoes stick in the mud and runs down your neck, the rain that trickles down dirty windowpanes and rolls down to the gutter, the rain that shits everybody up and makes no sense. And I am also, pay attention now, the sun that defecates onto the heads of harvesters, that skins naked women, that scorches trees, that pulverizes roads. And I am also the icy patches on the roads, that cause accidents, and the ice on the ponds, that cracks under the feet of the obese, and the snow that sends a chill down your spine, and the hail that splits your skull, and the fog that macerates your lungs. Yo soy also the summer months, the spring months that breed venereal diseases, bring faces out in pimples and cause stomachs to swell. Zhur swee the spring, that sells a sprig of lily of the valley for a franc, and the summer that kills people off because they live too intensely: I’m the autumn, that causes all the fruit to rot, and the winter that sells its boxwood on Parmesan Day. Ich bin the storm that howls with the wolves, the tempestuous tempest, the blizzard that blitzes the lizards, the hurricane that hurries you into your coffin, the gale with its hail, the cyclone on its bicycle, the thunder with its icicles, and the lightning that lights life. Eyeamme ...”

  “I insist on see-ying,” interrupted Saturnin, who was getting a little rimy.

  Etienne nudged him, thus inviting him to silence.

  “For the last ten years, I’ve been studying up on meteorology,” the queen explains.

  “It’s very interesting,” said Etienne, conciliatorily.

  “In the old days, when I was old,” Mme. Cloche went on, “I had a very different routine. In those days, I was the queen of the mustard pot, the empress of pants’ seats, the goddess of the truss. I used to inspire nocturnal dastardy and diurnal poltroonery. Always in a bad temper, I used to distribute cancer boxes. I was a bog attendant in the Tuileries gardens. I was an aborting ragpicker, a pox-promoting procuress, a lynch-promoting janitress. My lovers’ feet stank, and when we’d finished copulating, I used to beat them up with a poker.”

  “Ch-charming,” mumbled Saturnin. “Cidronie, my sister, you’re ch-charming.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “You make yourself sound very clever, the way you stammer, but I bet you can’t even count up to ten any more.”

  “Zat a riddle?” her brother asked. “Saul beyond me, I’ll just let you go on chatting.”

  “Right; let’s go. Close your fists, open your fingers at the same time as me, and count: won, tool, tree, fore! fife, sick, zen, ate, nein! in tent. With your toes, you can go on from lemon to empty, but you’re too boozed for that.”

  “O my sweatster Cloche, what a lelaugh hic,” hiccupped the ex-concierge.

  “Yes, that’s really very amusing,” Etienne acknowledged.

  “I didn’t think that one up,” said the queen. “Sin the book.”

  “What book?” asked the two field marshals errant.

  “Well, this one. The one we’re in now, which repeats everything we say as we say it and which follows us and tells about us, a sure piece of blotting paper that’s been stuck onto our lives.”

  “That’s another odd business,” said Saturnin. “You create yourself as time goes on, and then the book immejately comes and snaps you up with its fie’s fleet scrawl. Yep, that’s the way we are, and that’s how all the people around us are, o queen my sister, your shit-squittery generals, your soldier-ants, and the fish in the nearby pond that can’t get to sleep. Double life, double knots. Oo ya ya.”

  “And what ja think of what’s written down?” his sister asked him.

  “The philosophical passages, my dears, they aren’t so hot. I say that because of the progress. The progress of my thought, natch. Better and better, you understand, that’s what I’m getting. So things that go back years and years, back to my quadragenarian youth, well, you can imagine, I find them a bit transparent.”

  “Personally, after all, I’m not dissatisfied,” said Etienne. “I seem innocent, and I appear in an attractive light. And then, I have an interesting life, my story is instructive—exemplary, even.”

  “You needn’t try to be so clever,” said Mme. Cloche. “If you go on kicking each other like that, you’ll break your tibias. I’ll be frank with you. Well, I shall never forgive myself for being taken in the way I was taken in. About the door. And the infuriating thing is that it’s written down, all the way along, and right here. Ah, shit!”

  “Well,” said Etienne benevolently, “you’ll have to suppress that episode—you can just literally cross it all out.”

  “Literaturely,” added Saturnin.

  “Snot possible,” said Mme. Cloche. “It’s done, it’s done. No way of going back on it. Ah, what a shame!”

  “Personally,” said Saturnin, “I can’t see there’s anything to get in such a stew about. It happens to everybody, to get made a silly bastard of. But if it really upsets you so much, you’ve only got to start all over again.”

  “You’re screwy, my brother. Yever known people to be able to take back things they did?”

  “No, but we will know it.”

  “Then you think I can rub time out and start again?”

  “Try. In the circumstances you’re in now. Remake your life, eh, you old bitch.”

  “That’ll do, that’ll do. But it’s absurd, what you’re saying. After all, time’s time. The past’s the past.”

  “Swot you say.”

  “And what if I fall into the trap all over again?”

  “Squite likely you’ll be just as credulous. Anyway, you’ll see. Rub it all out, I tell you. I’ll come with you.”

  “So’ll I,” said Etienne.

  “Then you mean to say, time, it’s just nothing? No more history?” asked the queen.

  “What does that matter?” she was answered.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  So they left the clearing outside Carentan and, passing through the temporal miscarriages of eternity, came one June evening to the gates of the town. They separated without a word, because they didn’t know each other any more, never having known each other. A concierge took to his lodge, a midwife set up shop. A man flattened himself against the gate of a suburban half-house in which, patiently awaiting the vespertine shoup, a child was squinting at an obscene photo. The gate squeaked. The man became flat.

  A mask traversed the air, causing people of multiple and complex lives to disappear, and took human form at a café terrace. The silhouette of a man appeared in profile; so, simultaneously, did thousands. There really were thousands.

  {1} The title, Le Chiendent, has many meanings. Chiendent is the weed, couch grass. Voilà le chiendent is Hamlet’s: Ay, there’s the ruh. The word is made up of chien (dog) and dent (tooth). Dogs have always had great significance in Queneau’s private mythology ... And so on.

  {2} Bâtons, chiffres et lettres, (Gallimard, 1950).

  {3} id.

  {4} id.

  {5} Conversation with Marguerite Duras (March 1959), reproduced by Jacques Bens in his Queneau.

  {6} Bâtons, chiffres et lettres.

  {7} Queneau déchiffré (Notes sur “Le Chiendent”).

  {8} op. cit. Another enlightening study of Queneau is Jean Queval’s Queneau.

  {9} Fr. + En. – a two-handed animal.

  {10} [If you call for des cartes in a café, the waiter will bring you some playing cards.]

  {11} Théo has lifted his first line from Arvers (Alexis-Félix) (1806-50). This poet is now only remembered for just one sonnet—but this is known all over France simply as “le sonnet d’Arvers.” It begins:

  Mon âme a son secret, ma vie a son mystère,

  Théo’s version has one foot too many because, by reversing the tw
o halves of this line, he makes it necessary to pronounce the e in mystère, which, at the end of the line, would be mute.

  {12} The Continuum Hypothesis. An important open question in 1933, subsequently proved to be unprovable.

  {13} There is a pleasant French mnemonic for the square on the hypotenuse:

  Le carré de l’hypoténuse

  est égal, si je ne m’abuse,

  à la somme des deux carrés

  construits sur les autres côtés.

  {14} Inaudi. An illiterate shepherd who was a mathematical genius and appeared later in circuses and music halls.

  {15} Auri sacra fames.

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  Second Chapter

  Third Chapter

  Fourth Chapter

  Fifth Chapter

  Sixth Chapter

  Seventh Chapter

  XCI