Jacques was fascinated by the four enormous rumps rocking before him with a great noise of bells or else opening as the tail went up and he would see the savory dung form then drop to the ground while the horseshoes sparked and the bells rang faster as the horses tossed their heads. In the forest, while the others settled the baskets and dishtowels under the trees, Jacques helped Michel rub down the horses and fasten around their necks the gray-brown canvas nose bags, in which the horses chomped their jaws, opening and closing their large brotherly eyes or chasing away a fly with an impatient hoof.
The forest was full of people; they ate side by side while here and there people were dancing to the sound of an accordion or a guitar, and the sea was rumbling nearby—it was never hot enough to swim, but always enough to go barefoot in the shallowest waves—while others were taking their siesta, and the imperceptible softening of the light made the reaches of the sky still more vast, so vast that the child felt tears coming to his eyes along with a great cry of joy and gratitude for this wonderful life.
But Aunt Marguerite was dead, she was so beautiful, and always stylish—too coquettish, people said—but she had not been wrong, for diabetes would soon nail her to her armchair, and she would begin to swell up in that neglected apartment until she was so enormous, so bloated she could hardly breathe, so ugly it was frightening, and around her were her daughters and her lame son who was a cobbler, all watching sick at heart to see whether her breath would fail her.r s She grew fatter still, stuffed with insulin, and at the end her breath did give out.t
But Aunt Jeanne was dead too, the grandmother’s sister, the one who attended the Sunday afternoon concerts and who held out for a long time in her whitewashed farmhouse with her three war-widowed daughters, always talking about her husband, who had died long since.u Uncle Joseph, who only spoke the Mahon dialect and whom Jacques admired for the white hair topping his handsome pink face and the black sombrero he wore, even at the dinner table, with an inimitably noble air, a real peasant patriarch, who nonetheless would occasionally lift himself slightly during the meal to let loose an incongruous sound, for which he would courteously excuse himself in response to his wife’s resigned reproaches. And his grandmother’s neighbors, the Massons, they were all dead, the old woman first and then the older sister, the tall Alexandra and []4 the brother with the ears that stuck out, who was a contortionist and sang at the matinées at the Alcazar movie house. All of them, yes, even the youngest daughter, Marthe, whom his brother Henri had courted and more than courted.
No one ever talked about them. Neither his mother nor his uncle ever spoke of the departed relatives. Nor of the father whose traces he was seeking, nor of the others. They went on living in poverty, though they were no longer in need, but they were set in their ways, and they looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.v And then, the way these two were with him, silent and drawn in on themselves, empty of memories and only holding on to a few blurred images; they lived now in proximity to death—that is always in the present. Never would he learn from them who his father had been, and even though by their presence alone they reopened springs within him reaching back to his poor and happy childhood, he could not be sure whether these very rich memories gushing out of him were really faithful to the child he had been. It was far more certain, on the contrary, that he was left with two or three favorite pictures that joined him to them, made him one with them, that blotted out what he had tried to be for so many years and reduced him to the blind anonymous being that for so many years had survived through his family and that made him truly distinctive.
The picture, for example, of those hot evenings when after dinner the whole family would take chairs down to the sidewalk in front of the door to the building, where the air coming down from the dust-covered ficus trees was hot and dusty, while the people of the neighborhood came and went in front of them, and Jacques,w with his head on his mother’s thin shoulder, leaning back a little in his chair, would gaze up through the branches at the stars of the summer sky; or that other picture of the Christmas night when, coming home from Aunt Marguerite’s after midnight without Ernest, they saw a man lying in front of the restaurant near their door, with another man dancing around him. The two men had been drinking and had wanted to drink some more. The owner, a frail young blond man, had told them to leave. They had kicked his pregnant wife. And the owner fired a shot. The bullet lodged in the man’s right temple. Now on the sidewalk that head was resting on the wound. Drunk on alcohol and fright, the other man had started dancing around him, and while the restaurant closed up, everyone fled before the police arrived. And in that out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood where they stood squeezed together, the two women holding the children tight against them, a rare beam of light gleaming on the street slick with recent rainfall, the long wet tracks of cars, the occasional arrival of the noisy brightly lit trolleys full of joyous travelers indifferent to this scene from another world—all this engraved on Jacques’s terrified heart an image that until now had survived all others: the sweet and persistent image of the neighborhood where he reigned all day long, innocent and eager, but which the ending of the days would turn suddenly mysterious and disturbing, when the streets would begin to be peopled with shadows—or rather, a single anonymous shadow would sometimes emerge, accompanied by soft footsteps and the indistinct sound of voices, and be bathed in the blood-red splendor of a pharmacy’s globe light, and the child would be suddenly filled with dread and would run to his wretched home to be back among his own.
- Sometimes named Ernest, sometimes Étienne, it is always the same person: Jacques’s uncle.
a. 9 years
b. the money he’d set aside and gave to Jacques.
c. Of medium height, a bit bowlegged, his shoulders somewhat stooped under a thick shell of muscle, he gave the impression despite his slender build of an extraordinarily virile strength. And yet his face was and for a long time would remain that of an adolescent, delicate regular features, a bit [] [a word crossed out—Ed.] with his sister’s beautiful chestnut eyes, a very straight nose, bare eyebrows, regular chin, and beautiful thick hair—no, a little wavy. His physical beauty in itself was why despite his handicap he had had several adventures with women, which could not lead to marriage and were necessarily brief, but at times had the appearance of what is usually called love, like that affair he’d had with a married shopkeeper in the neighborhood, and sometimes he would take Jacques to the Saturday night concert in Bresson Square that looked out on the sea, and the military orchestra on the bandstand played The Bells of Corneville or tunes from Lakmé, while in the midst of the crowd that was moving around the [], Ernest in his Sunday best would make sure his path crossed that of the café owner’s wife dressed in raw silk, and they would
