Small Lives Read Online Free Page B

pallor grasped it nevertheless; and wicked claws grasped it, vicious and inert as the embedded nail, already from beyond the grave and yet still on this side, like dying words and inexorable hope. And the same impassive object had welcomed them, no less terrified and refusing with all their strength, when they had exited their mothers’ wombs (when the harvest blazed in August, or in sad winter); because the relic aided the women in their labor, when with great cries the name is carried on. There was not a single squall from a creature newly arrived in stupor and trembling, in the secrecy of small rooms and soaked sheets where, once more, a young girl ceased to be one, over which the relic did not preside, kneaded by the mother and soiled by the child, little ever-virgin doll, enigmatic and comforting, bathed in sweat. Marie clutched it and cried out (and her mother Juliette before her) until the little expelled Philomène cried in turn, still without name or face; and twenty years later, Philomène clutched it and uttered a cry hardly different, and what would become Elise cried; and Elise, twenty years later, and the little Andrée, and the latter, a quarter century later, and finally me, who will not start the cycle again.
    No more than Antoine was able to restart it, the son of Toussaint Peluchet and Juliette who delivered him in tears in about 1850.
    He was born in Le Châtain. It is a place with thick vegetation but stony, with vipers, foxglove, and buckwheat, and the ferns grow highthere under arches of blue shade. From the village windows, from the time he could see, the child saw the low steeple of Saint-Goussaud, eaten away and enlivened by moss, and under the porch of which a painted wooden saint keeps watch, his simple, old-style deacon’s robe sweeping the black flank of a reclining bull that the people here call Le Petit Boeuf , and revere. The deacon is the good Goussaud, hermit, exalted shepherd or rigid scholiast, founder from the year 1000; the bull’s coat is studded with a thousand pins planted there by awkward, laughing, tearful girls making love vows, or women, with hands more sure and already weary, wishing for children. Like me, the young Antoine was led before these Household Gods; in his father’s enormous fist, his small hand, daring and tender, was lost. His father lowered his voice, explained in a whisper the inexplicable world, how warm breathing herds depended on cold wooden idols, how impassive, painted things reigned secretly in the dark over the great fields of summer, in the flash of a wing more imperious than the eye of a kite, more decisive than the ascent of a lark. In the church blinded by its moss-covered windows, the dark reigned; finally the father struck a light. The thousand pins sparkled all at once in the candle’s flame; the chasuble trembled, the ochre hands high above opened; and revealed, interminable, the gaze of the saint, ironic and naïve, hung over the child.
    (Perhaps later, when he was sixteen or eighteen years old, he came to say goodbye to the worm-eaten group bristling with the pointed little desires of women, to find confirmation there of what, as a child, he had grasped without knowing it; to verify just this: what mattered to him – a rage to leave, and it hardly matters if you call that flightsaintliness or highway robbery, refusal and inertia in any case – was not the fact of the age-old pinpricks where each had left its tiny mark and its shard of desire, but the single massive desire of the sterile, solipsistic founder, the saint with the wooden gaze. Like the monk Goussaud of the past, undoubtedly violent and immoderately vain, who cloistered himself in the nearby forest, raging with hope that those jeering crowds, having driven him from the cities, would come imploring him, whose effigy now ruled over the harvest in five parishes, enflamed the girls, impregnated the women, and finally offered the violence of the roads to