Small Lives Read Free Page A

words. Some mental gyrations over a pathetic piece of work, a shameful pleasure in all he lacked. We know this, because the law is the law. He did not have what he wanted; it was too late to confess. What good is appealing when you know the sentence will be for life, and there will be no suspending it and no second chance?
    Finally that day in 1947: the road once again, the tree, the same sky and trees outlined against the same horizon, the little garden of wallflowers. The hero and his biographer meet under the chestnut tree, but, as is always the case, the interview is a fiasco. The biographer is a babe in arms and will retain no memory of the hero; the hero recognizes in the child only an image of his own past. If I had been ten years old, no doubt I would have seen him in the royal crimson robes of a Magi, placing rare and magical goods on the kitchen table with a haughtyreserve, coffee, cacao, indigo. If I had been fifteen, he would have been “the fierce, wounded soldier returned from the hot climes,” whom women and adolescent poets love, fiery eyes set in dark skin, with furious word and grip. Even yesterday, and especially if he was bald, I would have thought that “savagery had caressed his head,” like the most brutal of Conrad’s colonials. Today, whatever he may be or say, I would think what I say here, nothing more, and it would all amount to the same thing.
    Of course I can linger over that day, to which I was a witness, on which I saw nothing. I know that Félix opened many bottles – his then sure hand firmly grasped the corkscrew, skillfully releasing the pleasing noise – that he was happy in the effusions of wine, friendship, and summer, that he talked a lot, in French to ask his guest about faraway countries, in patois to recall memories. I know that his small, blue eyes sparkled with mocking sentimentality, that from time to time, emotion and a taste of the past broke off his words before they left his mouth. I suppose that Elise listened, hands resting on her lap in the folds of her apron, that she gazed long and with unallayed astonishment at the man the young boy she was searching for had become, beneath whose features he was sometimes restored to her in a fleeting expression, a way of cutting his bread, of launching into a sentence, of following the flash of a bird out the window, or a ray of light. I know that patois sentences came back to Dufourneau unbidden to marry his thoughts (as perhaps had never ceased to happen) and carry them aloud into the echoing day (as had not happened in a very long time). They spoke of the old people who had died, Félix’s agronomic setbacks, with embarrassment, about my father who had run off. The wisteria on the wallwas in blossom, the day drew to a close like all others; in the evening they bid one another farewell until the next time, which would never be. A few days later, Dufourneau left again for Africa.
    There was one more letter, accompanying a shipment of some packets of green coffee – I have held those beans in my hand for a long time; when I was a child, I often rolled them dreamily out of their rough brown wrapping. The coffee was never roasted. Sometimes my grandmother, straightening the back shelf of the cupboard where it was kept, would say, “Here, Dufourneau’s coffee.” She would look at it for a minute, then her look would change, and she would add, “It must still be good,” but in a tone that said, “No one will ever taste this.” It was the precious alibi of that memory, of that word; it was the devout image or epitaph, the call to order for minds too apt to forget, all drunk and distracted as they are by the racket of the living. Roasted and consumable, it would have waned, profane, into an aromatic presence; eternally green and arrested at a premature stage in its cycle, it was each day more from the past, from beyond, from overseas; it was one of those things that make the