Читать книгу Farewell My Only One - Antoine Audouard - Страница 13

IV

While I was unconscious, I found myself dreaming that I was at the very top of that hill on which the entire city had been revealed to me, teeming with animal life and shimmering with fierce energy. My spirit hovered above men’s houses and time enfolded me and carried me away. The absolute freedom I revelled in gave me a pleasant sense of well-being. I was rudely awoken by a slap.

I wept, all of a sudden aware of a pain in my back, a pain in my balls, a pain in my ribs, and feeling that the earth was cold and the world unjust.

‘Are you dead or alive?’ enquired a voice belonging to the realm of shadows.

I sat up, still groaning and blinking, and brushed my hand over my mouth and cheeks. A lantern was swinging above my reeling head.

A powerful hand, as broad as a saddle, raised me to my feet. I found myself face to face with a dark countenance over which the lantern cast a ghostly light.

‘What are you doing there?’ he growled.

‘How about you?’

‘I see a poor wretch lying on the ground. What would you do if you were me? Would you strip him bare before kicking him to death?’

I laughed along with him. The full moon lit up the ruined tower of the cathedral of Saint-Étienne and to my left I could make out the dark mass of Saint-Jean-le-Rond and the walls of Notre-Dame Close. Apart from the odd cry in the night, everyone was asleep in the Hôtel-Dieu. It was the time when only madmen, stray beasts, and the dying are to be heard. Restless souls could be glimpsed, furtively hurrying by.

He placed his hand in mine; this fierce grip which had crushed necks and abducted women could be gentle.

‘My name is Arnold,’ he said, suddenly affable, ‘and I come from Brescia, in Italy, land of the unworthy popes.

‘And I am William, who set off from Oxford and journeyed through many a town and country in order to learn and to watch others quarrel.’

‘Are you thirsty, William?’

He gave me no time to reply. We walked past the Grand Pont and crossed the deserted Grève. The rain had stopped. There was no longer a breath of air; the heat rose up our legs; the stench of rotten fish tickled our nostrils. In a tavern hidden away at the bottom of an alleyway in the Monceau Saint-Gervais, I drank strong ale with my new-found friend.

He spoke in the natural way a child does, without fear or restraint. He had been brought up in a spirit of anger against those in power, which was rekindled whenever he witnessed injustice, malice or folly. He loathed oppression and he believed that God wished men to be free. He asked me what I was searching for in Paris. I demurred.

‘My master,’ I said eventually in a low voice, staring into my glass of ale.

‘What do you mean?’

I repeated what I had just said, looking into his dark eyes.

‘My master, I tell you.’

He struck the wooden bench on which he was sitting and his face lit up.

‘Friend,’ he said, enunciating his words, ‘I am your salvation. I have just the master you need – the only master I can abide myself – and to speak truthfully the only master there is around here.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Peter Abelard.’

‘How do you know of him?’

I told the story of my wanderings, about Brother Andrew, about Fontevrault and its women. Arnold gazed at me wide-eyed, as if I had come from another planet. I also told him that I knew nothing about Abelard – apart from the power of his mind and the solitude he kept. That made him laugh. Solitude? The philosopher could not take a step on the Île de la Cité without crowds surrounding him. He was the greatest philosopher of his age, a man who could clench a stone in his hands and make it ooze with syllogisms, a man who spoke of the unity of the divine trinity in daring analogies, who caused the brave to tremble and cowards to flee.

‘When he speaks,’ said Arnold, ‘it’s as if Aristotle and Plato were re-embodied in this one man so that mysteries crumble and reason triumphs. With him, you feel prompted to go where no man has been before, due to ignorance and fear especially, and you realise that it is not wrong to understand everything we believe in. He’s a man who opens doors, and if he can’t open them he overcomes them . . . He speaks the languages of others better than any other master – and that’s why everyone fears him, hates him and refuses to confront him. Have you heard about how he destroyed William of Champeaux, and held old Anselm of Laon up to ridicule?’

‘No.’

‘It was as wonderful as Jesus in the Temple . . .’

There was a look of childlike emotion in his eyes.

‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘You will love him.’

After that we spoke about the sins we had committed, our cowardly acts, our derelictions of duty, about Cordoba and Rome, about Jerusalem where we would soon be going; he and I had both seen soldiers of Christ returning from that place, their hands bloodied and laden with gold, their eyes still wild from having seen the face of Yahweh – and not that of his Angel. I told him what he wanted to hear about my past. He made me laugh with his gesticulations. We were happy in one another’s company and we didn’t want to part. After the beer came the wine, a light wine from the Orléans region, which flowed down the corners of our lips as though we were drinking it from the vine itself, and which made us sing psalms.

Arnold had climbed up onto the table and was dancing with all the dexterity of a bear, singing Italian songs. He was denouncing all hypocrites and liars and claiming to settle his accounts in private with God.

He wanted us to perform a raucous dance together, but I was feeling as heavy as an oak door, I could scarcely keep my eyes open and I believed I was participating in some new Bible, at the mercy of the curses of a drunken Jeremiah.

That night, once Arnold had at last succumbed to silence, he hauled me over streams and across gardens; we encountered shadows which could have been those of lost animals, or could have been creatures that return to the city when it’s dark and which tremble with fear at every noise, every glimmer of light and every breath of wind.

We arrived at what he informed me was an inn, where students, poor pilgrims, vagabonds and brigands all slept together, waiting for sunrise, at the time of the Lendit fair. It was a large wooden house behind the Saint-Lazare leper hospital.

‘Don’t worry about anything,’ he whispered as I was about to fall asleep on a straw mattress that smelled of corpses, ‘you only get woken up by prayers and the dead.’

That night I slept like a man who has found himself, a free man. A soft voice was whispering in my ear that she would not forget me.

I was woken by the sound of groaning. It was the death-rattle of a dying man not far away from me, a man among a heap of others, some of whom were asleep and resembled corpses, while others were shivering and covering their ears, if that could be called being alive. It mattered little to me: dawn had come; I was eager for the city. I had travelled too much to have to wait long for my first morning among the streets, the smell of stables and rubbish, and the yellow sunlight on the stone. I shook Arnold’s elbow, and he had barely given a grunt before he was on his feet. Be ready! says the Apostle. He was.

‘Let’s go,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Come.’

He looked down his beard at me, as if contemplating a new breed of animal and rubbed his eyes with his fists as if he wanted to force them back into their sockets and down into his body. My Arnold, my luster for life, how I loved this simple gesture of yours and how nostalgic I felt at the same time at the thought of losing you! And then he grunted:

‘Stranger, you’re crazier than a madman . . . And believe me I’ve seen a few, unless I’m crazy myself, that is . . .’

I began to laugh softly, so as not to disturb the dead, while we pretended to tidy our mattresses, thumping them like large, clumsy children.

A candle was still burning, lending those who were alive the same waxen pallor as the dead and concealing them among the living. Shadowy figures came and went, dispensing unction, whispering consolation and empty promises in the ears of the sick. Arnold crossed himself and avoided them as if they were the devil. Beneath the archway at the entrance, an elderly monk dressed in black gazed at us as though we were ghosts.

Down the length of the broad street that leads down to the Seine, shopkeepers were waking up. Along the route from Saint-Denis to the Cité, on the days of the great pilgrimages, from all over Europe there came a procession of the wise and the sick, clerks, or simply men who have hope in their hearts. And when the insane arrive in a drove, bleating like sheep, there are fortunately thieves and shopkeepers to reassure the righteous man and put life back on course again.

‘Look, look!’ said Arnold as if he were inviting me to share in a drink, extending his arms towards the horizon.

Jewish and Lombard moneychangers were checking their balances and poring over their books. Butchers were returning, heavy footed, from the Grève abattoirs, covered in blood and bearing carcasses around their necks; dealers from Flanders and Lorraine were spreading out their cloths, letting the material run through their fingers; cobblers were kneading leather for sandals, while saddlers weighed down by saddles were inching forward like horses that were too small.

Everywhere there were hordes of men disappearing beneath their baskets; Italians, Moors and men in turbans whose eyes gleamed in the early morning darkness were unpacking goods whose names alone transported you to distant climes: the finest woollen items from Syria, leathers from Phoenicia or Cordoba, spices and wines from Greece, streams of silks, powders with which to colour the days, pieces of steel you could use to stab someone through the heart, little animals made of gold and ivory that looked as if they might come to life if you breathed on them correctly, amulets and spells to induce love, or death, parchments and magical rings – that morning the whole world had decided to set out its treasures, its baubles, its most incomparable arts as well as the most grotesque creations of man.

Arnold was filled with wonderment. He conversed in every language, he gesticulated, he spoke to tight-lipped Blacks, to melancholy Saracens, to conjurors who with a wave of their hands could make doves carrying small silver coins appear, to elderly dwarf women who could walk upon their hands and who had nothing to sell but a single sandal; he talked to loiterers who were preparing their wiles and their ruses. He juggled with the jugglers; he tumbled better than the tumblers. Oh, the fibs he told and the people he took up with and later dropped! – and I just followed behind, happy merely to be in the shadow of the showman.

People confided in him, they told him packs of lies, they suggested all sorts of deals, and he made light of everything, making promises in turn, leaving behind cries and jokes, songs and little gold pebbles as his pledge.

Walking at a different pace to us were the water-sellers, the swine and the soldiers. A frisky horse had unseated its rider and there were cries of ‘Watch out!’ Children wearing ill-fitting shoes went about on their own, begging for a coin, a sou, or twice as much, with varying degrees of impudence. Servants who were so well dressed that it was hard to imagine how their masters might be attired were, with a wave of the hand, claiming the very best objects, which would then disappear immediately. Beneath tents that were being unfolded men would arrive sweating under the weight of blocks of ice; they were inviting us to drink – certainly it was already hot enough. There were fragrances in the air that gave you a longing for life, a life of cravings, a craving to travel and to be sick. The sky was empty, blue and without hope, and all these people were already perspiring.

By the time we reached the île de la Cité the day had well and truly dawned, a day of burning heat that would not end without miracles or without crimes.

There were vines and fruit trees: the bishop’s garden was very much the garden of the Lord. The apse of the church had also fallen into ruin. We sat down beneath a plum tree and ate ripe black plums whose juices dripped from our fingers.

‘This evening, after Vespers, we’ll go and see the master,’ said Arnold in a delightfully solemn tone.

I didn’t reply. I let myself be lulled by the breeze that wafted through the trees and caused leaves and fruit to rustle and sway. Between the branches of a cherry tree I could see flat barges making their way down the Seine; the haulers were standing, their hands shading their eyes, their muscles tensed; the sounds of the cries and the stampede reached us in muffled bursts. Under the Grand Pont, the waters of the Seine were low and sluggish. We shall not be driven out of paradise: nobody would dream of finding us here.

Arnold continued to daydream as he thought of his hero.

‘You know, in the evening he’ll stay and drink and sing with us . . . He says that his poems are worth more than his philosophy.’

I smiled. I thought of the girl I’d rescued. I opened the palm of my hand and inhaled her lingering fragrance. Arnold looked at me, taken aback.

We left the garden, crossed the square and went down to the river bank in silence. Arnold bent down and cupped some river water in his large palm. It remained in the hollow of his hand, and he swirled it round as if it contained a secret or a treasure, or as if a spirit would emerge from it. Then, suddenly, he called to me:

‘William! William!’

He snapped his fingers shut and opened them again; his hand looked like a fish drying in the sun. His expression was serious, like that of children; afterwards, he shook his hand and burst out laughing. He moved in circles around me, dancing some strange dance:

‘William! William!’

It must be the most wonderful and funniest thing in the world to dance while you wait for it to rain. Once he had twirled me round and round, he stopped and placed his hands on my shoulders.

‘William, promise me you’ll be my friend.’

He misunderstood my silence.

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘I don’t want to hurt my friend. And what kind of friend is it who will soon leave?’

‘You’ll stay.’

I ought to have laughed at his confidence, but it warmed my heart.