aside the rough beard of brambles that hung on the door and slipped the key into the massive lock. I imagined myself a sort of shabby prince, forcing his way over the threshold into the palace of some Sleeping Beauty—except that, on the other side of this threshold, nothing really slept anymore.
IX
I still have something I want to say before telling about the château, and its shadows and dust. I want to speak of Lysia Verhareine, since I used to see her too, as everyone else did; our town is small enough that paths always end up crossing. Each time I would raise my hat; and she would return the greeting by lowering her head a bit, with a smile. All the same, one day I saw something else in her eyes, something sharp and cutting; something like a hail of bullets.
It was a Sunday, in the beautiful hours of early evening, in the spring of 1915. The air smelled of apple blossoms and acacia tips. I knew that on Sundays the little teacher always took the same walk that led her to the top of the hill, whether the weather was fair or foul—even if it was raining buckets. At least, so I had heard.
I also used to ramble up there fairly often with a light rifle Edmond Gachentard had passed on to me; he was an old colleague who’d retired from the force to plant cabbages in the Caux region and take care of a crumpled woman in a wheelchair. That rifle is pretty as a lady’s jewelry, with a single barrel gleaming like a twenty-sou coin and a butt of cherrywood. On it, Gachentard had had a phrase engraved in slanted script:
You will not feel a thing
. The phrase was addressed to wild game, but Gachentard feared he might take the gun to his wife’s head one evening, when the sadness of seeing her like that, with her lifeless legs and ashen face, got to be too much for him. “I’d rather give it to you,” he’d said, handing it to me wrapped in newspaper—the front page had a picture of the queen of Sweden, I recall. “Do with it what you like,” he said.
I was amused by the invitation. How much can you do with a rifle, after all? Plant endives, darn your socks, take it to a dance? A rifle is for killing, period. I’ve never had much sympathy for bloodlust but I took the weapon anyway, telling myself that I might just be preventing a far-off little murder, fueled by hard cider, another blot on my conscience. Since then I’ve got into the habit of taking the rifle with me on my Sunday strolls, using it almost as a walking stick. Perhaps his suggestion was not so absurd after all. Over the years the barrel has lost its gleam and taken on a somber hue that suits it pretty well. The motto engraved by Gachentard has, for lack of proper care, more or less disappeared. Just a few words are still legible—
“not . . . a thing”
—and true enough, the rifle in my hands has never been used to kill.
Edmond Gachentard had big feet, a Basque beret, and a distressing taste for complicated aperitifs flavored with plant essences that made them seem disagreeably close to medicinal preparations. He often shook his head while looking at the sky, and would become suddenly meditative whenever large round clouds intruded on a pure blue. “The bastards,” he would say, but I never really knew whether that applied to the clouds or to some other figures, faraway and shrouded, sailing forth, so to speak, for him alone. There you are; that’s all that comes to mind when I think of him. Memory is odd. It retains things not worth three sous. All the rest goes to the grave with us. Gachentard must be dead by now; he’d be a hundred and five years old. His middle name was Marie. Another detail. I’ll leave it there.
When I say I’ll leave it there, that’s really what I ought to do. What good does writing this do, these lines serried like geese in winter, these words I string along with no apparent point? The days pass, and I return to my table. I can’t say I enjoy it, but then I can’t say I dislike it either.
Yesterday Berthe, who
IX
I still have something I want to say before telling about the château, and its shadows and dust. I want to speak of Lysia Verhareine, since I used to see her too, as everyone else did; our town is small enough that paths always end up crossing. Each time I would raise my hat; and she would return the greeting by lowering her head a bit, with a smile. All the same, one day I saw something else in her eyes, something sharp and cutting; something like a hail of bullets.
It was a Sunday, in the beautiful hours of early evening, in the spring of 1915. The air smelled of apple blossoms and acacia tips. I knew that on Sundays the little teacher always took the same walk that led her to the top of the hill, whether the weather was fair or foul—even if it was raining buckets. At least, so I had heard.
I also used to ramble up there fairly often with a light rifle Edmond Gachentard had passed on to me; he was an old colleague who’d retired from the force to plant cabbages in the Caux region and take care of a crumpled woman in a wheelchair. That rifle is pretty as a lady’s jewelry, with a single barrel gleaming like a twenty-sou coin and a butt of cherrywood. On it, Gachentard had had a phrase engraved in slanted script:
You will not feel a thing
. The phrase was addressed to wild game, but Gachentard feared he might take the gun to his wife’s head one evening, when the sadness of seeing her like that, with her lifeless legs and ashen face, got to be too much for him. “I’d rather give it to you,” he’d said, handing it to me wrapped in newspaper—the front page had a picture of the queen of Sweden, I recall. “Do with it what you like,” he said.
I was amused by the invitation. How much can you do with a rifle, after all? Plant endives, darn your socks, take it to a dance? A rifle is for killing, period. I’ve never had much sympathy for bloodlust but I took the weapon anyway, telling myself that I might just be preventing a far-off little murder, fueled by hard cider, another blot on my conscience. Since then I’ve got into the habit of taking the rifle with me on my Sunday strolls, using it almost as a walking stick. Perhaps his suggestion was not so absurd after all. Over the years the barrel has lost its gleam and taken on a somber hue that suits it pretty well. The motto engraved by Gachentard has, for lack of proper care, more or less disappeared. Just a few words are still legible—
“not . . . a thing”
—and true enough, the rifle in my hands has never been used to kill.
Edmond Gachentard had big feet, a Basque beret, and a distressing taste for complicated aperitifs flavored with plant essences that made them seem disagreeably close to medicinal preparations. He often shook his head while looking at the sky, and would become suddenly meditative whenever large round clouds intruded on a pure blue. “The bastards,” he would say, but I never really knew whether that applied to the clouds or to some other figures, faraway and shrouded, sailing forth, so to speak, for him alone. There you are; that’s all that comes to mind when I think of him. Memory is odd. It retains things not worth three sous. All the rest goes to the grave with us. Gachentard must be dead by now; he’d be a hundred and five years old. His middle name was Marie. Another detail. I’ll leave it there.
When I say I’ll leave it there, that’s really what I ought to do. What good does writing this do, these lines serried like geese in winter, these words I string along with no apparent point? The days pass, and I return to my table. I can’t say I enjoy it, but then I can’t say I dislike it either.
Yesterday Berthe, who
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