Crossing a street, I almost hit a skinny old man dressed as a gendarme. Just in time, my friend grabbed the reins from me with all the equanimity of the father confessor he’d once been — back when the hymens of his parishioners were in his personal, pious care. In exchange for the pleasure of the reins, which he didn’t return, he told me the story of my near-victim, now behind us.
“Back when I was a boy,” the coachman said, “that man we just passed by was the forest warden for the Lord of Croissic, though he never really knew how to take advantage of his job. His conscience was always getting in the way — he was too taken with his responsibilities, and then with the memory of a strange incident from his first years on the job. Making his rounds one day, he saw a buck behind some shrubs. He began to move as quietly as he could manage, as though he was a hunter himself and not the supposed protector of his master’s game. He let himself be tempted by a catch so beautiful that even his boss would have to approve of his taking a shot. He saw all the many kilos of meat and the pelt he could use later to clean the copper saucepans in his kitchen. He aimed and fired. He heard a cry. His bullet had hit the buck, which toppled over.
“When he went over to retrieve his kill, imagine his surprise when he saw, instead of a buck, a dead poacher. The man’s chestnut-colored pants had tricked him.
“A tragedy. And he blamed it all on his imagination. The imagination is what ennobles the savage, you know, and turned our Hottentot grandparents into wise men, kings, and priests. In this man, the poetry of his imagination had led him to commit murder. He was always sorry. And his pain was all the greater because he couldn’t now serve as an example to his children of the moral superiority that makes for a happy life. How could he ever be ashamed of their behavior now that he had made himself a criminal?
“For instance, one of his daughters let it be known that she had a lover. How could he counsel his daughter? How give her the moral direction she seemed to lack? Our man, again trusting to his imagination, decided to put on his old uniform and his two decorations — one from helping with a rescue operation and the other honoring twenty-five years of service — the better at least to make a show of exterior dignity for the benefit of the wandering sheep he hoped to lead back to the path of righteousness…
“But when his daughter finally remembered to come home, her father’s high seriousness, the two or three words he saw fit to push around his mouth, only made her straighten her shoulders and march right over to her sister, asking when carnival time was coming, so she could get into worse trouble still.
“With an equal disregard for etiquette,” the coachman said, “you almost ran this man over without even noticing his uniform. And if there’s some small penalty for hitting a tramp, there are certainly numerous penalties for hitting a forest warden — even if it’s only a man dressed as a forest warden. The costumes the world makes us put on aren’t anything to be ashamed of, you know. No. Clothes should spur our imaginations on, until we bow at last before the radiant creation that is our nation’s foremost costume: the king’s!”
DECEMBER 24, 18—
Women gradually began to replace men in the factory. This is why the women of Bougival began to look so terrible. Particularly the women from the lower-class neighborhoods, whose hair smelled bitter because they were still too fond of the Jewish custom of rubbing almond oil into their hair…
It was a factory where they made telephone receivers. At six in the afternoon they closed the shop and the women walked in a line along the Seine. They walked in wooden clogs and sang. They sang, and as they sang they went about in wooden clogs like women from a Greemvaneco, taking great strides.
And I’m going to tell you why they sang. The first shift was of young women between seventeen and twenty years of age. One of them, a friend to all — they always put her in the middle of the line — seemed so delicate that she might break. She was my age. She’d taken an interest in me, and her friends suspected her secret. I always waited for her at a bend in the road. In those days, they didn’t sing: I would hear their vulgar laughs approaching, their sour shouts, the cheap ironies of those girls who so often picked fights with one another — their cacophony not unlike the clattering of the machines they had to listen to all day. When they saw me, the workers went quiet. They acted innocent, and only Isabel would look directly at me. The sweet look in her green eyes was as bright as the sunlight falling that same instant. A few meters further down the road, in response to an order that she didn’t give, the silence would come to an end, and I’d hear the laughter and jokes once again; then, after some distance…she’d turn her head for a last look.
One day she wasn’t among her friends, but still feeling the strange power of that fragile girl — destined to die far too early — her friends fell silent as they passed me, same as on all the other days, without the least self-consciousness. Not a single one looked at me. And I knew the truth. Isabel was dying.
Having decided a few days later to inquire about her health, I installed myself again along the bend in the road, where I soon heard a song coming down the way. The women from the factory of supersensitive telephone receivers had replaced their dead friend with a song.
DECEMBER 25, 18—
I shall report to you now a particular moment about which I can be as self-righteous and dishonest as a police informer. The day was sunny and the rumble of a carriage coming along the road hurt my ears. I was thinking about a girl whose enormous eyes, as she blossomed, were the color of green grapes.
I was losing my virginity. I was about to bend down and pick it back up again when I stopped. The indolence that has always given me the indifference of a man in love, that has always set me apart from others, stopped me from bothering.
I went home and only then understood — in the faces of my family — the extent of my loss. I couldn’t go back. Who knows where on the path I’d left it; it would be impossible to find. The afternoon was over. A summer storm had blown off the bright canvas of the bohemian circus that had set up shop nearby. A thick, fleeting rain had fallen.
I preferred to distract myself by going to the circus. To watch the lines of the umbrella and the tightrope walker converge — lines that are never entirely perpendicular. To follow a clown through the square where the picadors gather.
I arrived early. The circus hadn’t begun its show. As I watched, they lit three lines of gaslights. There were also a few Chinese lanterns at the door and a garland of small oil lamps atop the ticket office.
The band — a bugle, bass drum, clarinet, violin, and triangle — played a waltz. Later they performed a polka.
The triangle marked time. And I saw that the drummer boy had recently attached his triangle to the metal frame of his bass drum with a fresh piece of tendon. Was that, perhaps, my virginity?
DECEMBER 28, 18—
My military service was negligible. I was shuttled back and forth between the barracks at Tunis, Zaghouan, and Sousse, and spent a memorable year in Kairouan. It’s a holy city for Arabs, in Africa. A great Saracen wall still surrounds it. Past the train station, progress peters out. The last gasps are in the European neighborhood. There, progress is comprised of a post office, a “Hotel de Francia,” and a few brick houses where rent collectors live. Otherwise, the whole neighborhood consists of various isolated multistory houses, which used to remind me — in the shadows of the quick-falling desert dusk — of the wide-mouthed jars in Galard’s barbershop, where he kept the leeches that my father used to use once a week.