Small Lives Read Free

out. His proud posture is the one often favored by small men. Come now, admit it, he really resembles a writer. There is a portrait of the young Faulkner, a small man like him, in which I recognize the same haughty yet drowsy air, the eyes heavy but with an ominous, flashing gravity, and under the ink-black moustache formerly used to hide the coarseness of the lip, alive like the din silenced by the spoken word, the same bitter mouth that prefers to smile. He moves away from the deck, stretches out on his berth, and there he writes the thousand novels out of which the future is made and which the future unmakes; he is living the fullest days of his life. The clock of rolling waves disguises the hours, time passes and place changes, Dufourneau is as alive as the stuff of his dreams; he has been dead a long time; I am not yet abandoning his shadow.
    This gaze, which thirty years later will fix on me, now skims the African coast. Abidjan can be seen beyond its lagoon savaged by the rains. The Grand-Bassam sandbar, as witnessed and described by Gide, is an engraving from an old magazine; the author of Paludes wisely assigns the sky its traditional leaden aspect, but the sea under his pentakes on the image and color of tea. Like other travelers history has forgotten, in order to cross the estuary wave, Dufourneau must be lifted above the water, suspended in a hammock moved by a crane. Then the big, gray lizards, the little goats, the Grand-Bassam officials, the port formalities, and beyond the lagoon, the trail toward the interior where great and small tales of adventure alike are born in the same uncertainty, dazzling desires from the womb of drab reality. Doumpalm trees where snakes of glue and gold sleep, gray rain showers on gray branches, species bristling with fierce thorns and sumptuous names, the hideous marabous that are supposed to be wise, and the Mallarméan palm, too concise to give shelter from sun or showers. In the end, the forest closes again like a book; the hero is delivered over to chance, his biography to the precariousness of hypotheses.
    After a long silence, a letter arrived at Les Cards in the thirties. The same one-armed postman brought it, the one Dufourneau used to watch for from the field, during childhood and the war. (I knew him myself, retired in a little white house near the village cemetery; pruning rosebushes in a tiny garden, he spoke readily and loudly, with a joyful rolling of his r’s.) And no doubt it was spring, sheets long since gone to dust steaming in the sun, flesh now decomposed smiling in the lightheartedness of May; and under the violently tender clusters of lilac, my mother, fifteen years old, was inventing a childhood already flown. She had no memory of the letter’s author; she saw her parents moved to tears; in the violet scent and shadow, sacerdotal as the past, she herself was filled with a delicious, literary emotion, dense as foliage.
    Other letters arrived, annually or biannually, recounting of his life what its protagonist wished to tell, and which he no doubt believed helived: he had been employed as a forester, a “woodcutter,” and finally a planter; he was rich. I never mused over those letters, with their exotic stamps and postmarks – Kokombo, Malamalasso, Grand-Lahou – all gone now. I imagine I have read what I never read. In them he spoke of minor events and small pleasures, of the rainy season and threats of war, of a French flower that he had succeeded in grafting, of the laziness of the blacks, the brilliance of birds, the high price of bread; in them he was low and noble; he closed with his best wishes.
    I am also thinking about what he left untold: some insignificant secret never disclosed – not out of modesty, surely, but it amounts to the same thing, since the linguistic resources at his command were too limited to express the essential, and his pride too intractable to allow the essential to be embodied in roughly approximate