Small Lives by Pierre Michon

world divinely revealed. The angels vanished into the golden distances and I remained among the mortals, two of whom were approaching their end; my father was not there; I left again that same evening.
    I returned there one other summer afternoon, most likely the following year; once again it was a beautiful day; I was driving and my mother rode in the car beside me; I remember the pleasant trip we had, chatting, the austere tones of a Romanesque church in countrysidelanguishing under the weight of the wheat fields, a railway bridge lost in the green as in an illustration for a novel I had read as a child; the road curved wide to span it. I remember nothing of the afternoon we spent in Mazirat. I do not know if I saw the little bedroom again, or the portraits; the old couple might have just as well not been there. I must have witnessed their gestures, which for me were the final ones, and yet I do not know what they were; their last words are stolen from me forever, their farewells blown away behind a curtain of violent wind. Never will I remember the double silhouette on the doorstep, unsteady and apologetic, which they nonetheless offered to my ungrateful memory, wholly in the grave already and yet still waving a kind, heroic goodbye until their grandson’s car had disappeared, blurred by tears even before the forest swallowed it up, at the final bend in the road.
    Eugène died in the late sixties. I do not know exactly when or how it took place, but I lean toward the spring of 1968. I had other concerns, more urgent and noble than an old drunk’s final round. On a stage imitating the forecastle of the Potemkin where romantic children played at being unhappy (and in some cases, as they would later learn, really were unhappy), I had a leading role. The burning sweetness of that May, the fever it raised in women, as ready to satisfy our desires as the obliging headlines of the newspapers were to flatter our self-regard, all of that roused me more than the death of an old man. What is more, we hated the family, as was then fashionable, and no doubt, made up as Brutus, I was solemnly declaiming libertarian clichés the day the old clown’s blood clogged and made for him a victory mask, more crimson than ever, more wine-colored in the drunkenness of death,which is the drunkenness of a thousand wines, and finally flowed back to his heart following the inimitable performance of his death throes. Alone, with just a few neighbors, Clara bore the buffoon’s body to the grave. He died like a dog; and I take comfort in the thought that I will not die any differently.
    A few years later, I was informed of Clara’s hospitalization; the afflictions of old age tormented her and she did not want to remain alone with her ghosts in the little roughcast plaster house. No doubt, in a worn suitcase deposited in the back of an ambulance by other hands, she brought along just a few belongings, the scent of the old car I remember breathing in as a child, and the cache of absence from the portraits; she wrote to my mother, begging for me to come; I did not go. She sent a few more letters, always to my mother, one of which was the last; nevertheless, she was still alive, we knew. She did not write to me; for I was no longer a child, I had refused to follow Eugène’s ashes, I was letting her die without a word. I was busy renouncing my childhood then; I was impatient to fill the void that so many absences had left, and using the idiotic thinking of the day for justification, I held those absences against those who had suffered from them more than I did. The barren desert that I was, I wanted to populate with words; I wanted to weave a veil of writing to hide the hollow sockets of my gaze; I did not succeed; and the stubborn void of the page contaminated the world that it completely evaded. The demon of Absence triumphed, denying me the affection – among so many others – of an old woman whom I loved. I did not