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conceiving his death accords even more subtly with the little I know of his life; from Elise’s version emerged a unity other than one of behavior, a darker coherence, quasi-metaphysical and almost ancient. It was the sarcastic, distorted echo of a speech, as life is of adesire. “I will become rich, or die there.” In the book of the gods, this boastful alternative had been reduced to a single proposition: he died at the very hands of those whose labor had made his fortune; he was enriched by a sumptuous, bloody death like a king immolated by his subjects; in gold only had he become rich there, and he had died of it.
    Maybe just yesterday, some old woman sitting on her doorstep in Grand-Bassam remembered a white’s look of terror when the blades gleamed, the slight weight of his body out of which the stained blades were withdrawn; today she is dead; and Elise is dead, too, who remembered the first smile of a small boy when he was handed a bright red apple, polished in an apron. A life without consequence flowed between apple and machete, each day further dulling the taste of one and sharpening the edge of the other. Who, if I did not note it here, would remember André Dufourneau, false noble and thwarted peasant, who was a good child, perhaps a cruel man, had powerful desires and left no traces but in the fiction spun by an old peasant woman now dead?

The Life of Antoine Peluchet
    for Jean-Benoît Puech
    Sometimes as a child in Mourioux, when I was sick or simply anxious, my grandmother would get out the Treasures to divert me. That was what I called the two old dented, decorated tins that had once contained biscuits, and that then served as receptacles for a very different kind of nourishment. What my grandmother drew from them were objects she called precious, along with their histories, those memories that are the jewels inherited by common folk. Complicated genealogies hung suspended with the charms on small copper chains; watches were stopped on some ancestor’s hour; among anecdotes strung along the beads of a rosary, coins bore, with the profile of a king, the accountof a gift and rustic name of the giver. The inexhaustible myth authenticated its small token; the token gleamed weakly in the hollow of Elise’s palm, in her black apron, chipped amethyst or ring missing its stone. The myth that poured blandly from her mouth provided a stone for the ring and purified it, rich with all the verbal jewelry that glitters in the strange proper nouns of the forefathers, in the hundredth variant of a familiar story, in the obscure motifs of marriages and deaths.
    At the bottom of one of these tins, for me, for Elise, for our secret palavers, lay the Peluchet Relic.
    Of all the treasures, this was the most ordinary and the most precious one. Elise rarely failed to produce it, after all the others, as the best-loved of the Household Gods; and as such, it was – more than the others – archaic, primitive, its artwork rough and plain. Along with uneasy expectation, its appearance caused in me a kind of malaise and poignant pity. No matter how I looked at it, it was not equal to the profuse account that it elicited from Elise, but its insignificance made it heartbreaking, like that account; in both of them, the insufficiency of the world became crazy. Something endlessly concealed itself there, which I did not know how to read, and I bewailed my poor reading skills; some mystery lay obscured just inches away, pledged divine allegiance to what flees, wanes, and remains silent. I did not want that to be true; my hand released the relic fearfully and curled up in Elise’s hands; beseeching, a lump in my throat, I searched her eyes. To no avail: she spoke, her eyes summoned in the distance by who knows what, which I was afraid of seeing; and she also spoke of the hidden, of bodies disappearing and our souls forever in flight, of visible absences for which we substitute the absenteeism of loved