The ritual of this fatal merry-go-round was immutable. You pushed open a café door, you greeted the assembled company, and the company wouldn’t allow you to leave until each of its members had stood everyone a round, which, arithmetically, made as many rounds as there were drinkers, not forgetting one last one for the road. It’s not difficult to imagine the risks run by a traveling salesman circulating in a region constituting the five most alcoholic departments in France. However, Joseph must have grown weary of these summit meetings in which business is conducted by clinking glasses, because his signature is to be seen at the bottom of a document in which he signs a pledge that he will never again touch a drop of alcohol. Maybe he had gone over the limit a few days before, but he kept his pledge, and in the middle of a circle of inebriates he would order a peppermint cordial without wavering. No one would ever have had the bright idea of playing the devil’s advocate. Pure waste of time.
However meager the eventual order, it would nevertheless have obliged him to show his client the contents of ten or so suitcases crammed into the trunk and the dismantled backseat of the Peugeot 403. Every Saturday, when he got home he emptied the car of its load and replaced the backseat, with a view to a possible Sunday outing with the family. On Sunday evenings he reversed the process. As the car was not designed for such use, he had concocted a flooring of skillfully cut planks that fitted into one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and facilitated the storage of the suitcases. This gantry remained in place when the backseat was reinstalled, the result being to raise it and allow us to see over Father’s head when he was driving. On the other hand, he asked us to lower our own heads during a delicate maneuver; owing to our elevated position, we were all he could see in the rearview mirror.
Now, cram into a specially adapted cubic suitcase some fifty plates of different patterns, pick it up, cross the street, push open the shop door, put the thing down, undo the leather strap buckled around it to prevent the whole thing from coming apart, unpack, display, go into your sales patter, put up with the dumb show of the shopkeeper who by this means is from the very beginning preparing his refusal and has no wish that any signs of admiration on his part might cause a misunderstanding. Repack it without a sigh. Pick it up again, go back to square one. Repeat the operation. Bring out that suitcase full of glassware with its compartments lined with red velvet, that other one full of knickknacks (some of which may be chipped) cursorily wrapped in squares of cloth, and then that other one, and then yet another that you’d forgotten but which, knowing your client’s taste, you tell him you’re quite sure will interest him. Say: I’ll be back in a minute. Come back quickly, your arm nearly pulled out of its socket by that quasi-trunk that you almost have to drag over the ground. Never show how weary you are. Explain: top quality, seconds, special offer, introductory offer, recommended price, limited stock. Demonstrate the splendor of that cut-glass item, designed to hold fruit or whatever you like, by flicking its rim with your fingernail to make it ring. Ask about various people. Sympathize. Don’t insist. Create a diversion. Forecast the weather, say: It’s going to clear up. When your client starts telling you that life is hard for his profession at the moment, counter with: It’s the same everywhere. The order book is ready to hand, balanced on a pile of samples, its cover and the pages you’ve already filled folded back. Slip a couple of pieces of carbon paper under the original so as to make two more copies: one for the Quimper wholesaler, another for the retailer, and the third for you. Bring out your ballpoint pen, which you appreciate because it doesn’t leak in your pocket like a fountain pen, and write down, being careful to put everything in its proper column: item code, description of article, item price, quantity (you’ll do the numbers tonight at your hotel). Say: I’m listening. Two of this model, one of that one, and three of this sort. Will that be all? That will be all for today. Conceal your bitterness at the fact that the whole morning has been wasted for so little. Say thank you, pack everything back up again, say good-bye. See you next time. It’s after noon, you haven’t time to call on another client. If nothing tempts you, or if your appetite has deserted you, you don’t mind missing a meal, you make do with a bar of chocolate. You are so fond of chocolate that you claim to have eaten the equivalent of a wagonload of it. At this rate our collection grows rapidly, because you save for us the illustrated cards tucked into the wrapping, taking great care to remove the paper without tearing them — which makes a very nice pack by the end of the week.
You wait for the next shop to open by shutting yourself up in your car and smoking cigarettes, so the smell of stale tobacco in it is almost nauseating. For the passengers, that is. In the winter you like to drive with the heat turned up to the maximum. The heat, and the smoke that surrounds you like thin white gauze, they are your cocoon.
The Peugeot sagged badly over its back axle. Weighed down as it was, it looked as if it was always on the point of taking off like a plane. The heavy suitcases should have been content to demolish the car, but they had also undertaken to file down the intervertebral discs of their handler, week after week proving to be of formidable efficacy in their work of erosion. Toward the end, the pain that racked him never left him. To try to relieve it, he emptied whole tubes of aspirin at the same rate as his pack of Gitanes.
Wonder must have given way to amazement when an ancient tomb was opened and its frescoes, uncovered intact in all the brilliance of their original colors, suddenly, through abrupt exposure to the air, vanished from the sight of their discoverers. The old rural civilization must have been well and truly buried for Brittany to disappear under his very eyes as he crossed and recrossed it — as if, by making an inventory of it, he, like the wind, could blow it away.
Such as people still pretend to admire it and as memory perpetuates it, Brittany no longer exists. It has joined the legendary past of the submerged city of Ys, and the secret of the megaliths. Retinal persistence: it takes a long time before the scales fall from the eyes of memory; however quickly light travels, the image it sends back to us is already obsolete. For the appearance of this world is fleeting, and so much else disappears with it: the labyrinth of sunken roads overgrown with bracken, bordered with oaks as hollow as age-old bodies; the tall hedges that acted as a break against the sea winds and caught the teeming rainwater, laying in a store of freshness for the summer and at the same time stopping the rivers from expanding; the incurvate presence of the lines of alders and willows following the meandering course of the streams; the thickets where birds babble like gossips in the marketplace; the gorse-covered moors with their sickly sweet smell of coconut; the fields of daisies and buttercups spreading out like broken fried eggs in the triumphant springtide; the undergrowth lit from below by the pale reflection of a colony of primroses; the hedges planted with blackberry bushes, hawthorn, and wild plum trees; the ditches strewn with violets and pink pansies; the wheat fields dotted with poppies and cornflowers, thus combining the promise of bread with a “Say it with flowers” — a jumble of plant life that constituted delicate shrines of verdure around the sacred fountains, those open-air fonts that preserve, in a pious trickle of water, the miraculous memory of a hermit saint whose probable inexistence was in no way prejudicial to his certified healing virtues. For the heavens that were so miserly with the sun were prodigal of these gifts. This was proved by the little granite chapels scattered around the countryside like so many prayers sent up into the four winds. All that was needed for one to be built was for a member of the lesser nobility to have had a prayer granted, or a laborer’s ploughshare to bump into a statue of the Virgin that some mysterious hand had buried in the subsoil, like an egg on Easter morning. Once the miracle had been confirmed, each chapel adopted its own indulgence, the specialty of these devout folk who liked to dress up in their Sunday best and go on pilgrimages behind a forest of gorgeously embroidered banners, chanting songs of praise to the greater glory of their patron saint and Saint Anne, who, by a few judicious apparitions (what’s the use of appearing to the village idiot? who would believe him?) had let it be known to the Bretons that she had placed their region under her very special protection — a wink in the direction of the oldest Daughter of the Church (France) who had chosen her daughter (the Virgin Mary) without even obtaining the Virgin’s consent. These pilgrimages not only earned indulgences, they also provided an occasion to look up long-lost distant cousins who lived about eight kilometers away and to spot the marriageable girls whose native parishes could be identified by the subtle variations in their lace coifs. The processions wound their way through the labyrinthine landscape, the gold crosses and the songs of the faithful rising above the hedges, a land in such perfect harmony with the tortuous progress of its people’s souls that the indulgences disappeared with it in the great cataclysm that, in the early sixties, deliberately hastened the slow process of erosion as if, following the demolition of the confessional, the sinners had given up going to confession.