Lovers (9781609459192) Read online

  Europa Editions

  214 West 19th St., Suite 1003

  New York NY 10001

  [email protected]

  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2008 by Éditions Stock

  First publication 2012 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Howard Curtis

  Original Title: Des amants

  Translation copyright © 2012 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  On the cover: John Everett Millais, Chill October (1870)

  ISBN 9781609459192

  Daniel Arsand

  LOVERS

  Translated from the French

  by Howard Curtis

  To Christel Paris

  To Claude Pujade-Renaud

  To Bruno and Franck

  1

  God, how commonplace, in that time before the chaos and the proclamation of liberties, to have a father who tills the soil and a mother who makes invigorating concoctions! It is 1749.

  While Alain Faure trudges up and down the fields, panting and sweating, clutching the handle of his plow, growing old before his time, and while his wife Élise feeds the poultry and gathers lemon balm and wormwood, their son Sébastien takes his little flock of goats and ewes out on the moor.

  Sébastien is fifteen. A skinny boy with hair like frozen hay. Seemingly placid by nature. A dreamer, a contemplative. Not a common type for a peasant. Anyone with a faraway look in his eyes and his head in the clouds is chastised, forced to perform the hardest tasks, heaped with insults. There are evenings of heavy drinking when some kind souls take a boy of this kind and smear him with excrement, to teach him that reality has a bad smell and you just have to put up with it. If the Devil does not protect him, he will become one of those persecuted people who are found dangling from the end of a rope, encircled by jackdaws. So far, Sébastien Faure has not been covered with shit, has not been the subject of venomous jibes. Thanks no doubt to the terror his mother inspires. Her potions and incantations have made many a strapping lad as soft as chewed tobacco.

  He admires Élise, respects her, but, as for loving her, he is not sure, perhaps he does not love her enough for it to really be love. He must be one of those men who are born with a cold heart. After all, being alive does not guarantee having a heart.

  2

  It is 1749, then, and it is September.

  The little flock is idling. It grazes on the short grass between the prickly bushes. The brambles are taking over. They seem constantly on the verge of multiplying, of catching both the shepherd and his animals, and perhaps one day the whole world, in their twining nets.

  Sébastien is sitting on a pile of stones, his crook lying across his knees. Here he sits every day, for hours on end, watching over his meager livestock. Boredom makes his brown eyes even more intense. Yet everything distracts him: the breeze that abruptly gives way to a strong wind, the rooks swooping down onto the wild cherry trees behind the pond, the scurrying of a field mouse, the rustling of insect wings. But he is not always fixed in the present. Like everyone else, he has his memories. One of them haunts him: about four months ago he surprised two men in a clearing, their breeches down around their knees, their bodies interlocked. He was a virgin—he still is—and he broke out in a sweat and began trembling all over. At the sight of that scene, he felt both terror and joy. He did not know that this is quite normal when desire becomes too intense.

  3

  Until he witnessed that eloquent bout of lovemaking he had never conceived of pleasure as anything but solitary, and all flesh had seemed neutral. Since the scene in the clearing, he has been ogling the boys in his village. He is a hunter tormented by illusions.

  4

  The wind and the rooks have fallen silent. Sébastien becomes aware of a strange silence throbbing around him, broken suddenly by the galloping of a horse. And there it is, emerging from the broom. Its rider is yelling curses. The mare only slows down when it comes to a muddy stretch. It wades into the mire, sinks into it a little, tries to extricate itself, fails, and panics, unseating its master. Sébastien is stunned into silence. So, even a baron, a duke or a prince can end up in the mud? The stained-glass window is shattered. Three more riders emerge from the tall undergrowth. They dismount, they wade, they curse, they bend over the first man, who is gasping for breath.

  Balthazar?

  Three young men make the acquaintance of fear, even terror.

  Alain de Saint-Polgues, Laurent d’Esparres, Anne de Rive­franche—strange boys, rough but precious, not averse to tenderness. Just like Balthazar de Créon, the fourth member of the group, who is lying there with his eyes closed.

  5

  Sébastien abandons his rustic stone seat and sets off in the direction of the supine figure, filled with the irrepressible desire to touch him, feel him, sound his chest. Resuscitation, he tells himself, is a man’s business. He creeps up to the group and slips lightly between these gentlemen with their plumed tricornes.

  Who are you?

  Hands, arms—or claws. There is a flurry of movement, and the young fops stop him, pin him down with their bodies and their voices. He does not try to escape, for that would mean leaving the injured—or apparently injured—man alone. Instead, he talks to them. The leather bag tied to his waist conceals a treasure, some dried plants, the smell of which is enough to wake a dead man. They snigger, then argue, then resign themselves: let him prove the effectiveness of these plants, or they will beat him. The boy kneels, crushes a small handful of yellowish leaves in his palms until they are reduced to powder, then pours the fragrant dust over the face of the young man, who seems to be asleep.

  6

  Rainfall can sometimes be miraculous.

  There is a flicker of the eyelids, there are sighs and curses. The young man has sat up.

  Saint-Polgues places a hand on the shoulder of the shepherd, the sorcerer, the wonderfully placid adolescent.

  Thank you, on Créon’s behalf.

  If Sébastien were not so overcome with the pleasure of having performed a miracle, he in his turn would have uttered an oath and angrily brushed away the insolent paw.

  He is the stuff healers are made of, that much is certain, he says it to himself over and over again. And he vows never to find himself, like this man, on a bed of mud. No, never! Not even when he’s dead!

  He helps Balthazar de Créon to his feet, and when the man leans on his shoulder for a moment, he whispers: I am yours.

  7

  I am yours.

  D’Esparres and Rivefranche bring their friend’s mount, which has been grazing under the wild cherry trees. Créon hoists himself up on to his charger as best he can. He throws Sébastien a gold crown. The coin feels warm and soft, it is priceless.

  Spurs digging into flanks, whinnying, clods of earth thrown up in all directions: they are gone.

  Sheep and goats, broom and heather, short grass and rooks, horses and riders—it is all about to become a memory, and for days Sébastien Faure will have the impression that Balthazar de Créon is the only person who will ever occupy his thoughts.

  8

  He does not tell his parents what happened that afternoon. In any case, he would not have had the words to describe three strapping young men smelling of musk, a horse trapped in the mud, a prince with soiled garments. How to tell them about Créon?

  The crown is buried deep in his leather bag. It must smell of herbs by now.

  It is dinnertime. As Sébastien laps up his bowl of soup, his mind wand
ers. He could never have imagined it was possible to lose oneself in a dream. He is undergoing a transformation. Secretly, he welcomes the coming of night. On the straw mattress he pretends to sleep, letting a powerful silence overwhelm him, a silence of unprecedented happiness. The darkness is the place in which to experience it fully. But when dawn comes, he tells himself that Balthazar was merely passing through his life. He only regains hope by persuading himself that he will have a long, tortuous life, full of chance occurrences. One of these will be a name and a reunion. For one cannot wait indefinitely. He prays to his God for Créon to come back to earth, unaware that it took only a rider, a man lying on the ground, a man resuscitated, for the heavens to become no more than the sky, blue or dark, but forever uninhabited.

  I am yours, that was what he said. I am yours.

  9

  In the fields and on the moor, by the water and along the paths, everything around him is stone. It is as if he is surrounded at all times by something eternal and hostile, while his own inner feelings are undulant, vulnerable, immense, real, unalloyed. The landscape is familiar to him, yet he feels as though he is constantly bumping against it, grazing himself, even breaking his bones, and it makes him dizzy with fear. Until now he has thought that only the body could be hurt. The heart, the soul, those infinite spaces: pipe dreams, his mother has always called them, the fruit of simple minds.

  Blinding mineral expanses, precious stones—emerald grass, ruby horizon at evening, amethyst sky.

  Sharp stones—flint silence, granite fields, quartz roads.

  He waits for the rider’s return and some days the waiting is like a madness. It grinds him down, paralyzes him, it is deadly.

  He drowns in it.

  And Créon does not return.

  During the interminable wait, disappointment and sorrow turn to stone.

  I am yours. A phrase that leads nowhere, a phrase that radiates sadness, a phrase like a heap of bones.

  Winter, then spring, summer, and soon autumn. All seasons are one, ice-cold, featureless, a hell of dreariness.

  A year passes, as taut as a bowstring.

  One September morning, a coach comes through the village.

  10

  He is sitting on his usual heap of stones, his crook again across his knees. His animals are grazing. He does not see them. Insects buzz. He does not hear them. The rooks caw. He does not listen to them. The world is on one side and he, Sébastien Faure, on the other, buried, cloistered in his thoughts and daydreams.

  And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creak.

  A horse is galloping nearby, as yet unseen.

  The world is again perceptible.

  A horse, a rider standing out against the undergrowth, and the rider jumps down from his mount.

  I am yours. Sébastien does not even remember that he once uttered those words. He is here and not elsewhere, with no past, no future, nothing to offer.

  It is the end of a fine bronze-tinted afternoon with purple shadows and febrile scraps of cloud.

  Hello.

  11

  He gives up his makeshift seat to Balthazar de Créon, and settles at his feet. Each time they meet, and they will meet many times, he will take up the same position. Without preamble, Créon asks him what the beneficial mixture was composed of. Lemon balm, wormwood, mint—these names blossom between them. Balthazar’s curiosity is aroused. He demands, gently though, that the shepherd reveal other medicinal secrets. Primrose, chamomile, sage, wild thyme, mallow. Créon marvels at the adolescent’s knowledge. He is excited. This boy will be able to keep death at bay.

  12

  Balthazar is staying with his friend Saint-Polgues, who owns both the moor and the village. The Créon chateau is leagues away. He will return home across the plains, following improbable roads, plunging into the dark forests, but this time it will be an uneventful journey, in other words a safe journey. Because the trees and animals he encounters will be the same as those that surround them now, in this place where they have been meeting for days. There will be nothing out of the ordinary.

  They have already met several times. Some of the villagers have seen them in conversation, one man’s shoulder resting on the other’s thigh, in a kind of embrace. Tongues have started wagging. The Faures are dismayed at having a buggerer as a son. He is regularly whipped, with insults added to the lashes. They scorn their son, although they cannot bring themselves to hate him. They predict that he will burn at the stake one day, as will that ogre Créon, with his powdered hair and satin bow. Those two wretched buggerers should have their throats cut, roars père Faure. Everybody knows Sébastien is seeing that bastard with a noble name every cursed day. Both should be killed, one after the other, but which to kill first?

  There will be no killing.

  One October evening, the coach with the Créon arms comes to a halt outside the Faures’ house. It is as a prince that Balthazar crosses their threshold. Faure yells and screams with anger, with the disgust he feels for sodomites, his humiliation at having fathered one. But his rage subsides as soon as Balt­hazar puts a heap of gold crowns down between the two of them. During her husband’s outburst, and then while the deal is being concluded (Sébastien will live with Créon, everything possible will be done to make him a doctor of renown, he will go to Court, he will treat the King of France—predictions that reduce his father to silence), Élise Faure does not leave the dark corner to which she withdrew when Créon arrived. Henbane, hemlock, digitalis, she mutters. An incantation that no longer works, Elise knows, she has been defeated, and that is something new to her.

  I’m ready, says Sébastien.

  13

  The curtains have been drawn, the seats are padded with cushions, from a basket there wafts a rich smell of roast poultry, fresh bread, and pears.

  The coach is a trundling cage, a swaying cradle, a cave.

  It is dark and cold. Yes, the trees that line the road are doubtless the same as on Saint-Polgues’ property, and so are the animals that loom up out of the darkness, little owls and roe deer, but to Sébastien this world, however familiar, is imbued with a sense of the unknown. In a state of elation, he says farewell to this thing and that, a bridge, a wood, a fallow. What traces will these surroundings leave in him? Do some things sink into oblivion forever? Landscapes, feelings, habits.

  14

  In calm but unequivocal words (though Sébastien has stopped hearing him: his head nods, his body sags, his eyes close, and he falls asleep), Balthazar ventures declarations, dares to announce what his protégé’s future will be, wonders about the indestructibility of all friendship.

  You will be my pupil, you will be my master, you will achieve fame, you will be faithful to me, you will abandon me, you will always come back to me.

  And at dawn we will say to each other: We are together.

  15

  Créon will forget nothing of this journey, the only one that will ever truly matter to him.

  Amid the reds and silver of the cushions, their silk smelling of chalk, and against the damask covering the window, a fifteen-year-old boy, thin, frail, very frail, but beneath his rough clothes his flesh is warm. A young peasant, a boy exceptionally gifted to feel love. Créon will often tell himself that.

  He will never forget the darkness glimpsed through the chinks in the curtains. Soot studded with slivers of moonlight, blackish-brown velvet for league after league. It was deadly boring, and his eyes were constantly drawn back to the confined, shimmering space where his friend was dozing.

  He will never forget any of it. But what does that mean exactly? It is vain to believe that one’s memory is infallible.

  To believe, to hope, to live.

  16

  Créon’s chateau is not far from Moulins. Its gardens are adjacent to a broad, deep forest. Throughout the year, an army of gardeners labors mightily to ensure that the flowerbeds, statues and ornamental lakes are not overrun by tall grass and bramb
les. Referring to this conquering vegetation, the Princesse de Créon writes to her cousin Angélique de Fombeuse: It watches us, threatens us, soon it will cover the marble.

  17

  Dear Angélique,

  It is a theater of box trees and roses that I gaze upon, but a theater where no actor performs. The audience is unusually restricted, a mother and her son, and a young man forced upon me by Balthazar. When will I see you, my dear?

  18

  From the terrace that runs the length of the chateau’s façade, Anne de Créon watches them. They have jumped down from the coach, and are now coming toward her. It is almost noon. The sun breaks through a sky honeycombed with clouds. Behind Anne de Créon, a tall French door in which her figure is reflected, fragmented by the eighteen panes. That is how Sébastien sees her for the first time and that is why, to him, she will always be two women, a creature of flesh and blood and a shimmering ghost.

  Balthazar wrote to his mother: There will be someone with me. I wager that once you set eyes on him you will fall under the spell of my friend Sébastien Faure. In any case, I order you to like him.

  Curious, skeptical, horrified, she looks the stranger up and down.

  Is this the marvel of whom he spoke? she wonders.

  She tells herself again: They are not lovers, I’d stake my life on it. But they are in love.

  Anne de Créon accepts defeat.