The Bark Tree Read online

  The camomile tea had been drunk for a long time, and Ma Cloche was still frustrated; then she had an idea: to stop thinking of the accident, and that way, perhaps, another would occur. She started thinking about professional matters (she was a midwife) and abortional and gynecological difficulties went running through the old bag’s head, while the waiter was looking at her contemptuously, making her feel that she should either quit her observatory, or reorder. The insolence of this character became such that Ma Cloche finally realized that she would have to remove her undesirable self from these premises. So she put her fur wrapper back on, looked at the time on an enormous old turnip which she took out of a carpetbag, paid for her camomile tea, leaving a most ungratifying gratuity for the waiter, and left, in despair. She’d hardly gone three paces when she heard a loud scream behind her, a fairly excruciating scream, then a terrific hullabaloo, whistles, people calling out, cars hooting. Her heart stopped beating for a moment, then, with unparalleled velocity, she turned on her heel and ran to the scene of the accident.

  But this time, alas, nothing serious had happened: a person had been slightly grazed by a car, but he seemed to be all right, though a bit shaken; he was dusting himself off and explaining how it had happened. He was stammering a bit as he explained. It was nothing. No, really, he felt perfectly all right, he was surrounded by people. Some took the driver’s side, others his, even though he didn’t have one, himself. He expressed the wish to forget about it, because he was going to miss his train. The taxi fare apologized to him; in a way it was his fault, he’d told the driver to hurry, he too was afraid of missing his train. He was going to Obonne; so was the other. So they went to the station. The crowd gradually dispersed. Mme. Cloche shuffled off, furious at not even having seen the taxi butting the idiot in the back. All the fault of that waiter. But she’d never go back and sit on that café terrace, no, she’d never go back there, she swore she wouldn’t, their camomile tea was too rotten, they didn’t even give you any sugar, and, even though the next day, when she went to see her brother at Blagny, she had to take a train from that station, well, she wouldn’t stop and have a drink in that café. No, that she wouldn’t.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  The two men got into the same compartment. The being of lesser consistency had skillfully managed to get his usual seat. The manille-playing quartet had disintegrated. The young lady must have found a better place. The wine salesman was sitting in a corner looking important, waving a newspaper like a flag; opposite him, the reader of the Cross was trying his hand at doing an addition problem on the back of an envelope; every so often, he scratched his head with his pencil. Two female railroad employees occupied the other two corners: they were sewing (or embroidering, or lace-making. Pierre didn’t make up his mind which of these occupations it was). Next to them, face to face, silent and hostile, an old man and an old woman of the silver wedding type.

  At the moment when the little trumpets of the people authorized to play them were making their pretty symphony heard, a young man, out of breath, penetrated into the compartment which was already as full as an egg; he remained standing, and his head was lost in the luggage racks. Opposite his jacket pockets, to the right and left, Pierre and his victim were sitting.

  Up to Blagny, nothing happened (nor after, so far as anyone could tell). The train was nonstop as far as that station; everyone was occupying himself according to his particular tastes; two women were sewing, two men were reading, two old people were dozing; the latecomer was yawning, and from time to time lowering his eyes to the seated humanity. As this individual’s father was not a glass-maker, Pierre couldn’t see the modifications in the consistency of the employee of the Audit Bank, the one who had registered on him among thousands of others.

  This second journey to the suburbs, in such conditions, he found only moderately enchanting; he remembered with horror the night he had spent at Hippolyte’s; the sheets so filthy that he had preferred to sleep fully dressed, the smell of mildew that came from a bedside table of a most uncommon style; the layer of thick dust floating on the water intended for his washstand; the sickly, yellowish light that had pretensions to illuminating the whole, and, above all, the feeling of abandonment he had experienced when the innkeeper, having taken him up to his room, had closed the door behind him. Even the first day when, in a barracks in the east of France, he had found himself dressed in the uniform of a French soldier, and realized that the next eighteen months he would have to salute innumerable N.C.O.’s and make his bed in the approved fashion, even that day, he hadn’t felt as lost, as hopeless. He didn’t sleep that night; from time to time he went to the window and contemplated the building sites of Magnificent Vista and then, full of horror, went and lay down again on the shrieking bed.

  And the hours struck at the Obonne church, the Blagny church and the Courteville church. Around 4 o’clock, the dawn began. He sat on a chair for something like an hour, and then went downstairs. Men were already going to work. Hippolyte, all smiles, was serving black coffee and calvados to this one and that.

  He wasn’t going to repeat that lamentable experience today; he’d go back to Paris by the fastest train. At Blagny, half the compartment got out, treading on the toes of the other half.

  Pierre said:

  “It’s the next station, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” replied the other.

  People looked at them.

  “And have you been living in Obonne long?” asked Pierre.

  “Nearly three years, now. I’d started having a little house built on one of the Magnificent Vista sites, but I haven’t got any further than the ground floor.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh! it’s a long story. There’s a lot of funny business with these sites. I thought I’d have enough money, I was left a little, to have a house built, and then I came up against various circumstances that made me realize my mistake. I had to give up all hope of having a second floor built. So I live in an unfinished house.”

  This narrative interests the other passengers considerably; the others, that’s the two old people and the latecomer, who has finally got a seat.

  “And you, meussieu, do you live on Obonne?”

  “No, no,” replies Pierre, who is horrified by such a possibility. “I’m going to see some friends, Meussieu and Madame Ploute. Do you know them?”

  “No, I don’t know them.”

  “A gentleman with a long black beard and gold pince-nez, and a very tall, very slim lady.”

  “No, I can’t place them. Oh, you know, I hardly know anyone here.”

  The two old people ruminate over this, and try and remember whether they know the Ploutes. But they don’t remember having seen a genleman with a black beard and gold pince-nez at Obonne, and yet they know a lot of people. What it is to have a failing memory.

  Here’s Obonne. The being of minimal reality says good-by and I hope to see you again to the observer, who apologizes once more for the taxi accident. “But really, it was nothing to do with you.” Pierre doesn’t try to see the Ploutes, and waits for the next train back to Paris.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  The next day, Saturday, was a great day. After working a couple of extra hours he took the local train to Blagny. He didn’t know that suburb. He had to ask his way because, to get from the station to the factory, you had to make a long detour. He finally arrives at the weatherboarding hut: CHIPS. There’s no one in the road. Perhaps it’s shut? He walks past it casually and stops a bit farther on, turns back, and bravely pushes open the door. And goes in. There’s nothing alarming about the place. Some tables and benches. At the back, the kitchen (?), another table where two women and a man are playing cards and sipping some marc. No one else.

  He sits down and raps on the table. Someone grunts in the back room; then a fairly immense woman comes up.

  “I’d like some French fries.” (He takes the offensive.)

  “French fries, at this hour?”

  She
looks at him curiously. Who can he be, this bourgeois?

  “Aren’t any French fries ready, but we’ll make some. And what’ll you have to drink?”

  “Some white wine.”

  The being of minimal reality doesn’t know what to think of himself. He looks at the other woman and the man in the back room. The French fries start browning. All this seems prodigiously absurd to him.

  Now he has the French fries and the glass of white wine in front of him. The French fries are delicious, the wine is excellent. He does himself proud. Goodness, another customer. It’s a workman. He calls out. This time it’s the other woman who gets up, an old woman who shuffles. As she passes him, he observes that she stinks. She goes and takes the order; the workman, an Italian, also wants some French fries and white wine.

  When she’s back in the kitchen, the old woman starts talking volubly to the two others, who look into the room. The being of minimal reality suspects that something odd must be going on. He turns around and looks at the workman, who’s quite calmly reading a paper. Could it be he himself, then, who is causing this emotion? It seems so, because all three of them are studying him with interest. He begins to feel uneasy. All this is idiotic. What a stupid idea! He calls out, wanting to pay. All three come rushing up. For his part, it’s all he can do not to take to his heels. Courageously, he stays on his bench.

  “How much is that?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” exclaims the oldest of them, “if that isn’t the most peculiar thing. It was you, wasn’t it, who nearly got run over last night outside the Gare du Nord?”

  He hadn’t been expecting that. It was indeed. He couldn’t really believe that that could confer such celebrity on him.

  “Just think, meussieu, I was there; I saw it all, when the taxi came up.”

  And she relates the whole accident. Her brother and sister-in-law (Meussieu and Mme. Belhôtel) listen to the tale with interest for the seventh time. The Italian is pretty well forced to listen, too.

  “It must have given you quite a shock,” opines the gigantic Mme. Belhôtel.

  “Oh yes,” he sighs, and feels weaker and weaker, and more and more unhappy, and thinner and thinner.

  And the old Cloche explains to him once again that he was in the right, and that he could claim compensation, and that he could get the careless taxi driver’s license taken away. Meissieu Belhôtel suggests they have a drink together. They go and open an old bottle of white wine. The customer doesn’t dare refuse. They all sit down around him.

  “Hm, I don’t know, it’s peculiar to meet again like this.”

  For old Ma Cloche now considers herself an old friend of the near-victim, whose smile is turning into a terrible grimace. Belhôtel uncorks his bottle in masterly fashion; they drink each other’s healths. Emotion is at its height; the proprietor smacks his lips.

  “This is good.”

  “Oh yes,” says the patient, “it’s terribly good.”

  He takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers him one. Belhôtel throws himself on it; it’s not possible, he’s going to eat them. Mme. Cloche accepts one, simpers, and goes on with her story.

  “And the day before, Meussieu, you can’t imagine how horrible it was. Well, that one; he didn’t have your luck, that he didn’t. A bus ran right ovaries body, the paw meussieu. Oh! there wasn’t much left of it. It was all flattened out and all over blood, and there was brains even on people on the pavement’s shoes. Then a pliceman put his cape over it and everyone was looking and the cars were hooting, on account of they couldn’t get by. Well, no, huh, zno doubt about it, he didn’t have your luck, did he, eh Meussieu? Meussieu?”

  “Meussieu Marcel.”

  “Are you a hairdresser?”

  “Oh no, my name’s Etienne Marcel.”

  A silence. The innkeepers look at each other. “But in that case,” says Meussieu Belhôtel, “you’ve already got a street named after you in Paris.”

  They laugh like mad. Etienne, to whom people have been making this joke for something like twenty years, laughs too. He finds everything more and more grotesque. He’d very much like to wake up, but he knows he can’t. A little sentence starts running through his head: “Such is life, such is life, such is life.” The little sentence turns into the vast thuds of a tolling bell. Boom that’s life, boom that’s life, boom that’s life. He drinks another glassful. Belhôtel tells how the day before there’d been a brawl between some Arabs and some Italians here. One dead. Boom that’s life, boom that’s life, boom that’s life.

  Etienne suddenly gets up.

  They look at him in stupefaction.

  “You’re not going to leave us like that?”

  But he looks so determined that they don’t insist on his staying.

  “It’s on me,” the owner declares. “Nothing doing, about paying.”

  They shake hands effusively. They make him promise to come again. Mme. Cloche calls out: “See you again soon!” A real idyll…

  Etienne makes his way to the station. The sun beats down on the grey grass of the embankment. A smell of sour candy comes from the linoleum factory on the other side of the track. Refuse and wastepaper complete the landscape of wasteland and weather-boarding. The Warsaw express goes by, making the yellowing old newspapers fly. Then silence reigns again, a Saturday afternoon silence. Etienne trudges on to the station, repeating from time to time: Such is life.

  —oooooo—oooooo—

  Everything seems to be flowing from a dense cloud that remains motionless above the rabbit hutches. Neither beginning nor end; to the right and left, the beaten track; beyond the horizon, those little rabbit hutches, the Magnificent Vista housing development. The milkman, the baker, the butcher, they only venture along the wider paths; and so, along the little tracks riddled with potholes, the housewives come hurrying, in bedroom slippers and curlers. They exchange a few words, and then quickly go back into their holes. Over there, the husband is stubbornly gardening; cleaning out the hens or rabbits; if he isn’t gardening, he’s watching the grass grow. The younger generation is playing games.

  Théo goes up to the unfinished first floor of the paternal house; this is his favorite place; he observes how the bricks are crumbling, how the walls are disintegrating, the effects of the wind and rain, the construction of a ruin. He takes with him the second volume of Les Misérables. When it bores him, he looks round at the other houses.

  In general, there’s nothing interesting to see. Backs bent over lawns, men tomatoeing or onioning. From time to time, the woman suddenly comes out and throws a big bucket of water, splosh! over the gravel, and goes in again. Over there, a little girl is running round in circles. Over there, the druggist’s son is fixing his bike; over there, Mme. Pigeonnier, draped in her kimono, is taking the air and sucking candies. Mme. Pigeonnier is forty-five, but it’s known that she has a past. Théo suspects a good many things about Mme. Pigeonnier. But Mme. Pigeonnier goes in, proudly draped. Théo once again immerses himself in Les Misérables.

  The father, down below, is pretending to be interested in string beans, but it’s not convincing. He straightens himself up and yawns, then moves on a bit; really, he isn’t doing a thing, the father. The mother comes in with the shopping. Confusion (and how!) in the kitchen. The father grinds the coffee. It’s nearing twelve. They’re going to have lunch in the garden. His father is just about to call him to take the table out. How right he was.

  “Théoooooooo;” Théo comes down from his roost. They put the table under the Lime Tree. It’s very hot. The water has to be cooled. Today, it’s cucumber salad; meat and vegetables; cheese, fruit. It’s Sunday. The two males attack the salad. The wife sits down quickly, eats a few slices and hurries off to see to the meat. With the meat, there’s a bit of peace. Théo, his nose dug into his plate, guzzles; that’s because he’s growing. Fifteen years old, I think. Next year, Théo is going to take his baccalaureate. They’re quite optimistic; they slave enough for him.

  With the coffee, Etienne opens
the Journal, and Théo the Sunday Excelsior; the wife clears the table. When she’s finished, she reads the short story; Etienne has finished the paper a long time ago, and is dozing. Théo does the crossword puzzle.

  The sun easily pierces the consumptive leaves with which the Lime Tree is trying to resist it. The Sunday calm is steeped in the lukewarm air. They can hear Mme. Pigeonnier’s maid singing a sentimental song. The druggist’s son goes off on his bicycle; he’s going to watch the E.C.F. team play the A.S.T.V. In the distance, the trains whistle. The flies apathetically drag themselves through the tired air; here and there they hold conferences around various sorts of refuse. Etienne comes out of his doze and goes and fetches his Sunday meerschaum; he fills it, he lights it, he puts it in his mouth, he pulls at it (not the way people pull in a tug of war), and the smoke spreads out around his head, but hasn’t enough energy to climb even up to the lowest branches of the Lime Tree.

  At about 2 o’clock, they decide to go for a walk in the woods around the old castle, in Obonne. Dressing operations. Théo thinks up various methods of escape; next year, he’ll start playing games; that’ll save his Sundays for him. He incidentally touches his genitals, but doesn’t insist. He’s the first to be dressed in his Sunday best. Etienne next; he’s put on his beautiful straw hat with the serrated edges, and is whistling. He’s certainly not there.

  At last, the mother’s ready; very elegant, the mother. Théo and Etienne don’t say anything, but they don’t conceal their pride. She works well and, when they take her out, what a beauty! She’s still fussing around quite a bit because everything isn’t just as it should be; at last it’s all right, and they start. The gate squeaks, once, twice, and the three beings make their way to the woods.