Small Lives by Pierre Michon Page A

write to her, she had nothing from me; no box of sweets arrived to mirror the ones that she, so patiently, so tenaciously, had once brought from the oldcar to the dining room. At last, she died; and I want to believe that in those last days, she remembered a time, a moment, when a boy bathed in sunlight had happily wished her good morning, the morning bright in a little bedroom where zinnias blazed.
    I returned one last time to Mazirat with my mother, who wanted to pay a visit to the grave of her parents-in-law; I do not know why I went with her; at that time I was incapable of the slightest desire. I was foundering; for reasons I will explain, I grandiloquently accused the entire world of having ravaged me, and I was finishing off its work. I was burning my ships, drowning in floods of alcohol poisoned with mountains of drugs; I was dying; I was alive. It was thus steeped in such a witches’ brew that I stood, absent, before the tomb, which, as always, was empty. Alas, poor ghosts! The prince of Denmark was no more inanely distracted in his simulated madness than I was in my fictive death, standing before the plot where you were laid. I hid behind a yew tree to swallow a dose of Mandrax; from the drenched branches, rain poured down on my swaying head; I sat on a gravestone to dry myself with an unsure hand, a dumb smile on my lips; I have no other memories of that day when I went to pay my respects to your remains.
    I am lying: I have one other. We went into the café where my grandfather had been happy, out of the cold so that my mother could exchange a few words with some distant relative we had encountered; I followed, unsteady and grinning. From that woman, who was common in speech and appearance, I gathered this much: my father, apparently, had reached the worst extremes of alcoholism and, it seemed, abused drugs. No one heard the terrified laugh exploding in my mindalone; the Absent One was there, he inhabited my ravaged body, his hands gripped the table with my own, he shuddered to finally be meeting me here; he was the one who rose and went to vomit. He was the one who, perhaps, has here come to the end of the little story of Eugène and Clara.

The Lives of the Bakroot Brothers
    My mother sent me to boarding school when I was still young; not to punish me, but because that was the custom, the lycée being far away, trains infrequent, and transportation expensive; also, in the eyes of those to whom fresh air and freedom teach only a few essential gestures, tiresome and monotonous from youth on, it seemed legitimate that the glorious task of learning the whys and wherefores of all things, always new and endlessly self-improving, came with, and perhaps at the cost of, a quasi-monastic, Roman confinement. As for myself, I had been prepared for it from early on. “When you are in boarding school . . .”: it was a transitive state, of course, on the way to adulthood, to the happiness and the simple glory of living that would befall me, should I want that. But it was not only a passage. It was a full sevenyears during which Latin would become my estate, knowledge my nature, others students my – surely unsuccessful – rivals, and authors my peers. I would approach Racine, whose incomprehensible phrases my mother recited on my demand, phrases all different but equal, distinctive, one regularly replacing another like the balance wheel of a clock, working toward a distant end that was not the end of the day; I would know what that end was, the shore toward which those waves stretched; I would have presentable friends; I would speak in such a way that both I myself, with delight, and others, with respect, would know I inhabited the heart of language while they wandered about its surroundings; the price was confinement. It was, above all, giving up seeing my mother everyday, wandering with her in the tenderness of language’s surroundings.
    Destiny reserved for itself another, darker compensation,