A Life on Paper: Stories Read online

  At last, the barman indicated someone with a jerk of his head. The maestro rose and timidly approached the skipper. It was Esmeraldo. I was there, at my usual spot, and watched the scene from afar. It went on for too long. I was struck by the sight of a maestro used to having the world at his feet speaking humbly as a beggar, and at length, to an uneducated fisherman whose hands were chapped by the sea. It wasn't a complicated transaction. All the trawlers asked about the same price. They came to an agreement at last. The maestro hadn't gotten a raw deal. Esmeraldo wasn't the most taciturn of the ones who went. He still spoke willingly when spoken to, and sometimes even laughed! In pointing him out as someone dependable, the barman was merely cleaving to popular opinion. But in light of what happened next, it's clear Esmeraldo wasn't adequately hardened to the task, hadn't cut himself off enough from the world, sealed himself in silence and indifference. To ply this trade, it's best to let yourself go beast-dumb. That's why they no longer speak, why words must be torn from them. For them, silence is essential. They know it protects them, out there and back here. It's clear now that the lengthy conversation between Esmeraldo and the maestro the night before they left was too much. Anyway, they shook on it, and arranged to meet early the next morning at the port. The maestro walked out, tottering slightly from the mulled wine.

  Esmeraldo never confessed exactly what happened out there the next day. We pieced it together from his trailing sentences, his sighs and shrugs and muddled denials, and also that conversation of theirs. Not its content, which we would never know, but the simple fact that it had lasted much longer than needed. The only sure thing was that Esmeraldo was at fault. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The boat might have capsized, and no one survived, but this couldn't have transpired had the skipper been aware of his responsibilitieshad he kept watch over his client, protected the man from himself. No need to be a psychic to see that the maestro wouldn't settle for the same excursion as everyone else: a few seconds of rapture and torment, writhing like a worm against the ropes lashing you to the mast before the skipper plugged your ears again with wax like in his own and you returned to port, broken, radiant, initiated. The maestro wanted more. Much more. That was why they'd stayed and talked so long that night at the bar. The maestro had negotiated, insisted, even begged maybe, and Esmeraldo had given in. The next day they'd hugged the shore too closely, and lingered too long in those perilous waters.

  So the maestro, too, was to blame in the matter. Why had he come here, anyway? What had he wanted to confirm? We would've had to know where he was at in life to tell. It's said artists are like temperamental machines that work fine for a while and then suddenly stop, for obscure reasons. Too much fame, not enough, too much love, not enough… What keeps them going? What fuel? What fire? No one knows. That flame can gutter out, go astray, get lost. In some people it seems to last their whole lives, and still be burning strong, when one day something else goes missing, or breaks down: a single organ, or a whole body pushed too hard. With others it burns and blazes and suddenly stops, the tank empty, the boiler snuffed out, and there they remain, alive but from then on inert and sterile. Had the maestro broken down? What led us to believe he'd been driven more by worry than curiosity was that he clearly hadn't told anyone where he was going. Otherwise someone would have come looking for him by now.

  Someone still might soon, for when a man like that disappears, it doesn't go unnoticed. They must have been looking for him. Someday they'd pick up his trail and follow it here. Then a helicopter streaming rain will drop from the sky to land on the field where our children play. Its arrival will sound the death knell for our way of life, and for what we are, in our way, the last to preserve. At a rare town council meeting, or what passed for one, no one cherished any illusions on the matter. If we just let things continue, we'd soon see a helicopter full of detectives, worried friends and family, and journalists brandishing cameras: our way of life would be blown to smithereens. All of it. For the world beyond the curtain of rain, which had until now been more or less unaware of our existence, neither respects or really tolerates any other world. It is a jealous world. What it names, it kills. Its people claim or hope for the opposite, but the truth is bleak and simple: their cameras despoil all they gaze upon, and destroy all they depict. When the reporters learn where Esmeraldo took the maestro, nothing will stop them from going and filming it from a helicopter. And they'll come back unharmed with their freight of dead images, for the noise of their rotors will drown out the song that turned our illustrious visitor into the village idiot of sorts that he has since become.

  In order to keep these things from happening, we decided to wipe out all traces of the maestro's brief trip here, as a child might a chalk line from a blackboard with one swipe of a sponge. His path never brought him to us. Esmeraldo and I have been appointed by the council to see him back to his own kind. We've prepared a sign for him with his name on it, and we will hang it round his neck before abandoning him in the middle of a big city, blowing dumbly into a comb, as he has done unceasingly since his return from the sirens' isle.

  Palaiseau, September 1999

  La The

  ermit me to remain anonymous; my name would mean nothing to you. My profession, however, is not unrelated to the story I am about to tell. I am a doctor. I've seen many a woe in my line of work. Some I've eased, and in other cases forestalled what, without my intervention, wouldn't have been long in coming. Well, you'll say, that's all you can ask of a doctor, and I quite agree: we save those patients of ours whom death vies for distractedly. Should its interest in the game be aroused, all our efforts are in vain, and death reaps another victory… It was fifteen years ago-the summer of 1905, to be exact-while in the exercise my profession, that I made the acquaintance of a young man who introduced himself to me as Bennett Riven. He was a stranger to the small seaside town where I had my practice. I knew as much at the first sight of him in my waiting room, crowded that Saturday as any other. After twenty years of being a doctor in a small town, one knows, or can at least place, everyone. By all counts a strapping lad, he wasn't one of my regulars nor, I would have sworn, among those of my two competitors. I say "strapping" because I've known few people with his physique. On seeing him, I remember thinking that if the whole town had his constitution, I could've tucked the key under the mat and retired. Twenty years old, with a marble worker's shoulders and a peasant's cheeks, the neck of a glassblower and hands big enough to throttle a horse. He had health to spare; I would have bought some if I could. Still, something was the matter, since there he was in my packed waiting room. I took the time to study him, and in his blue eyes, with their corneal patina of faience, easily identified a brightness and fixity of stare that, in such an irritatingly vital giant, could have but one cause: terror.

  What a fickle thing is a man, no matter how settled in his ways. Simply arouse his curiosity, and he forgets his compunction, his seriousness, and soon thereafter even his duties. In my newcomer's eyes, I'd chanced upon an expression that so intrigued me I examined Mrs. BlancDubourg with appalling absentmindedness; the most unsuitable noises might have come from inside her without my so much as batting an eye. One sole question preoccupied me: in this time of peace at home and abroad, what could possibly have so badly frightened a boy of twenty years built, for all appearances, to live a hundred more? After seeing Mrs. Blanc-Dubourg all the way to the front steps in apology, I strode into the waiting room with the imperious air of someone about to abuse his power and pointed at the young man.

  "You're next!" I said in a tone that brooked no rebuttal.

  He rose. From all around came astonished sighs and a rebellious rustling of knees. In all fairness, he shouldn't have made it into my office for another two hours. Sweeping the room with an icy gaze, I silenced any inclination to revolt. Was I not the master of my house?

  The party concerned, whose already ruddy cheeks had further reddened, gathered a canvas sack from beneath his seat. He held it close to him and preceded me
into the office I'd pointed out with a movement of my chin.

  I never begin an appointment before my patient and I have taken our respective places on opposite sides of my old leather-topped desk. This desk, as my patients are dimly aware-this desk is the gulf that separates sickness from health. I hold out my hand to them across this desk, and if my patients are obedient enough, and lucky-if I'm lucky-I pull them gently across to my side, to life… But what am I blathering on about? The young man was sitting across from me-that's all that matters. He remained silent, eyes lowered, chest canted forward, arms hanging between his knees, hands fiddling with the drawstrings of his sack. I used my most confident, jovial tone of voice. A doctor's voice is fully half of doctoring.

  "Well, well, my boy! What can the matter be?"

  He lifted his eyes, then dropped them again almost as quickly, coughed slightly, and spoke at last in the voice of a lost child.

  "Aw, Doc, everything was going swell…" He stopped, not knowing how to continue.

  "You felt the need to see me."

  "Yeah…" He fell silent again. Timidity. Shame. Anxiety. A-ha! Often as not, shame + anxiety = venereal disease! I should have hit on it earlier, I thought; a lad like that surely leaves a trail of hearts in his wake. Hearts and everything else, too. I laid a clean sheet of Bristol on my blotter and uncapped my pen.

  "Let's begin at the beginning. What's your name?"

  "Bennett Riven, Doctor."

  "Bennett Riven? R-I–V-?"

  "E-N. Bennett."

  "Date of birth?"

  "November 22, 1885, Doctor."

  "Why, you're only twenty! It's the springtime of your life! You're enjoying it to the hilt, I gather?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I said I gather you're enjoying the springtime of your life to the hilt!"

  "Uh, yes…"

  "Good! So, you've enjoyed yourself so thoroughly that…"

  I left the end of my sentence hanging. Would the young lion wind up taking the line I'd thrown? He did nothing. He was beginning to irk me. After all, I'd surely upset good and faithful patients to hear him out, and now he threatened to be a waste of time…

  "You can tell your doctor everything, my boy. I'll even go so far as to sav: you must. This kind of affliction-"

  He understood what I was getting at, and at the same moment, I understood, as he slowly shook his head, that I was barking up the wrong tree.

  "No, Doc, it's not that-" Suddenly, his voice broke and he burst into tears. My heart is hardened, as it must be in my line of work, but his distress touched me all the more because I couldn't fathom its cause.

  "Come, come! Are you a doctor? You're not the one who should decide if this is worth crying over. I'm here to help, but I can't do a thing if you won't tell me where and why it hurts."

  "It's not me, Doc, it's him-"

  "Him? Who?"

  Bennett Riven kept right on sobbing as he placed his sack on my desk and undid the drawstrings. He reached in and pulled out the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. I leapt back so fast I knocked over my chair.

  "Madman! Killer! Go! Get out of here now! Take that thing away!"

  I groped about the desktop for the brass bell that would summon Edgar, my nurse-gardener-errand boy. My patient saw my hand, and his voice became pleading.

  "Please, Doc, don't! I'm not a killer or a madman. I just came to get help! For him, Doc! For him! He's alive!"

  And in a barely audible whisper, the thing he held aloft with fingers clenched around a lock of black and gleaming hair confirmed his words:

  "It's true, Doctor. I'm alive… Have mercy, for the love of Christ, have mercy!"

  At the time, I was a robust fifty years of age; should such a scene occur today it would surely kill me. As a student, then intern, I'd seen far worse than a severed head, but this wasn't the same. In such cases, context is everything. During my studies, anatomy was all parts and pieces. My friends and I examined and handled these in a university setting, under the supervision of our professors, and with their support. Besides, the body parts smelled of formalin, and that powerful, distinctive odor dehumanized them-"thingified" them, if I may… What my patient now thrust into my face was no anatomical part, but well and truly a man's head. I would have preferred a hundred times over for it to give off the wholesome odor of formaldehyde rather than a blend of rotting flesh and the cheap cologne it had been sprayed with. But above all-above all! The sliced-off head moved, wept, and spoke. Or rather, it shivered, sniveled, and whispered. The free play of its functions-facial mobility, lachrymal effusions, phonation-was considerably impaired. But the simple fact that these manifested themselves at all flew in the face of what the entire medical establishment took for granted. That said, I am a progressive and an optimist; if it's proven tomorrow that babies will henceforth be born from their mothers' ears, that's where I'll await them. The decapitated head spoke? So be it! "Who is it?"

  "His name's Henri Languille, Doctor."

  "Yes-I'm Henri Languille!" whispered the head.

  "Languille? Never heard of him! Where did you get it?" I asked the young man.

  "You called me a killer-well, he's the killer!" he replied. "As for me, I'm apprenticed-well I was, till recently-to Mr. Deibler, the executioner. Mr. Deibler and me chopped Languille's head off on the twelfth in Orleans."

  "The twelfth? It's the twenty-fourth! That's almost two weeks-well, go on. What happened?"

  "Dr. Beaurieu in Orleans and my boss agreed to try something out. Even Languille was on board with it. Weren't you, Languille?"

  "I admit I was, I was," Languille mumbled.

  "So it was settled, then. Right after the execution, Mr. Deibler would ask the head, `Can you hear me, Languille?' And if Languille could hear him, he'd blink."

  The scientist in me bridled at this simple-minded protocol. "What were you trying to prove? A blink could quite easily be nothing but a reflex! And besides, guillotines cut off heads, not ears!"

  "All right, but anyway he blinked… and he's still blinking now!"

  I had to face facts: twelve days after his beheading, Languille was still blinking away.

  "Fine! The experiment was a success, if you must. Then what?"

  "After that, I did something dumb. The whole thing had gotten me all turned around. He could still hear, see, think… What was going on in that bodiless head? Do you realize-? Anyway, I was supposed to bury him on my own, Mr. Deibler was already on the train back to Paris, but at the last moment I wanted to try the experiment again, just to see."

  Bennett Riven fell silent. At the end of his fist, the head was silent, too. A single mysterious emotion held the two consciousnesses in a single embrace-the hardened killer and the apprentice executioner, so different and yet so close in that instant beyond all guilt and innocence.

  "Well?"

  "He didn't just blink again, he spoke to me. He said it hurt, that he was scared. Of the dark, especially. The darkness of the grave. I should've put him right back in that coffin of raw wood, with his uncomplaining body, and nailed it all up tight and buried him and not given it another thought, but put yourself in my shoes… I couldn't. After all, Mr. Deibler and me aren't paid to kill them but once. I felt sorry for Languille, because of how he talked about the dark. I couldn't, and well… here we are."

  Where had Languille come up with those tears, those heavy tears that trailed down his creased and greenish cheeks?

  "How did you make it all the way here? What did you do for those twelve days?" I asked Bennett Riven.

  "I hid him in this bag I usually use for lunch, and I took him home with me-I mean, to the room I was renting in Orleans. That night we talked a lot. I reassured him as best I could. He was thirsty, so I gave him some moonshine."

  "You gave it a drink?"

  "I had to put him in a bucket, of course. But it did him good, or so he said. Just the taste of it made his head spin, I mean. And I could keep using the same moonshine over and over…"

  That first n
ight, Bennett Riven had understood that he'd committed a great wrong in the eyes of Mr. Deibler, the administration, and perhaps authorities even higher still. Imagine that night and those that followed. A young soul of twenty interrogating himself on the consequences of an ill-considered act, the crushing responsibility he had undertaken while from the shadows on the table that terrified and terrifying presence, that nightmare curio, clicked its teeth from time to time in the quiet of the night.

  The next day, the boy did not return to Paris, where his master Deibler was waiting. He panicked and ran away with his charge. Together, one carrying the other, they wandered the highways and byways at random, sleeping in small inns but also in fields, beneath bridges, on the beach. And always, the head complained-it ached; it was afraid of the night, of the day, of everything! It was fear incarnate, absolute, confined to the tiny chamber of a human skull. And it was beginning to reek. Bennett washed it in the sink when he dared take a room for the night, or in a brook, or the sea. But the saltwater stung… In the villages he passed through, he bought lotions and vials of perfume for it. Nothing did any good. The head was rotting alive. The decomposition manifested itself not only in sight and smell, but also in memory loss, hallucinatory episodes, delirium, and fits of dementia. Several times, the head tried to bite its benefactor. Bennett was afraid of it now. He wanted to have done with it, smash the head against a wall or a rock, free it once and for all-even it had been begging him to do so for several days nowbut he dared not, and that was why they were here before me. They'd thought a doctor might know how to do it. It was forbidden, of course, but what exactly was forbidden? Practicing euthanasia on a lopped-off head? What article of the law forbade that?