1772—THE FEAST OF SAINT LAZARE
Tarare’s father dies the very same day that Tarare is born. It is the Feast of Saint Lazare, whom Jesus Christ raised from the grave after four days, and of his mild sisters Sainte Marthe and Sainte Marie de Béthanie. Everyone is drunk on sweet cider, and because everyone is drunk, Tarare’s father will die.
Brawls are to be expected on feast days—on feast days and at weddings. The boys of one village bring cudgels and switches to beat the boys of the next village over, and it is all in good fun, their raising this bit of hell for themselves. A part of growing up, and of becoming men. Their fathers did it, and their grandfathers did it before that, in the old days, when half the meadows were covered thickly in trees, and wolves could talk and sometimes wore hats, and Martin Luther was no more than a sulphurous twinkle in the Devil’s eye.
But today the brawl starts and it doesn’t stop, because one of the boys, Tarare’s father, pulls a knife. At least, Antoine saw something flashing in his hand. At least, Ignace bellowed, A KNIFE! So now the boys are beating and beating the boy who pulled a knife supposedly, Tarare’s soon-to-be-father, and no one is prepared to intervene. The boys beat him for a while and then they stop. They spit at him where he lies on the ground, call him a black-tongued dog, a son of a whore, and then go off to find more cider.
Evening comes, stun-bright and violaceous. The boy, Tarare’s father, stirs. He spits two pink teeth into the trampled grass, another into his trembling hand, and then climbs to his feet. He can hear the music of organ grinder and fiddle from the fête ground, a little way away. His head feels constricted, as though something has curled itself around it. He hugs his broken arm to his chest and sets out in a shambling jog toward what he thinks is home.
There are cows and horses standing about in the parched meadows. They watch the boy totter by, acutely nonplussed. His shadow wavers on the dusty path in front of him. The boy feels that if his body stopped moving even for a moment, if he stopped putting one foot in front of the other, his shadow would simply, soundlessly detach itself from his bulk and continue in a smooth, autonomous glide eastward, away from the setting sun. And that is what death would look like. He would slump onto his stomach and reach his swollen fingers out toward that indifferent adumbration as it slid further and further away across the field, across other fields, across the rooftops, and then eventually to the sea (the sea, which the boy has never seen), where it would be lost on the fretted silver among the other shadows of the other boys gone before their time. Oh well, he thinks. At least I drank and laughed. Oh well, he thinks. At least I did a bit of fucking, and it was good.
He trudges on.
By the time the boy reaches the village, he has become Tarare’s father. An old woman is throwing the afterbirth to the pigs when she sees the youth limp toward her, then fall on to his side in the middle of the dirt road. She puts down her bloody bucket and screws her eyes against the flush of the evening sun. Over she goes to where the boy lies. She rolls him on to his back with her foot. She sees that the boy’s face is livid and very swollen. The whites of his eyes are scarlet. The old woman sighs and goes back into the cottage, wiping her hands on her apron.
The cottage is just one room of mud and piled stone, oxlip and eglantine sheltering beneath the eaves without, a dog scratching at himself within. Inside the cottage they are gathered around the bed—which is just a straw mattress on the floor—deciding what Tarare’s mother should do.
Tarare’s mother is young. As much a girl as Tarare’s father is a boy.
Jean is back from the fête, the old woman says. I think he’s maybe dead.
Dead? repeats Tarare’s mother, her mouth slack with the exhaustions of labour. She wants to sleep, but no one will let her sleep until she has decided what to do.
The old woman nods.
Go and check. For fuck’s sake. Maybe dead. There is no maybe about dead. All this she says despite the exhaustions of labour.
The old woman sighs and goes back outside.
Now the midwife, who is holding the squalling baby in her arms, speaks. Very early on Saturday, she says, what you need to do is swaddle him tight and take him to the market. Before anyone else gets there. They’ll find him and take him to the poor hospital. Done.
Or my son can take him to the Sisters in the city, says the neighbour-woman. The Sisters will take good care of the little one. Raise him up properly, good, God-fearing.
The old woman comes back inside. Not dead yet, she confirms. Will be soon.
They all look at her for further explanation.
His head is broken in pieces, she says, holding up her wrinkled hands. I felt it. And there’s blood coming out his eyes.
They all look back at Tarare’s mother. It is one thing to raise a bastard, but another thing to raise a dead man’s bastard. She is herself an orphan, come down from the Morvan, where the cows are red and the wind-blown hillsides coloured with heather, and she has no one, no people of her own, and so they pity her. She is pretty, though, so they pity her less than they might. Her pretty head lolls back against the pillow. Can he speak? she asks. He really boils my piss sometimes.
(Tarare’s father boils everyone’s piss.)
He’s still making noises, the old woman says. Wouldn’t call it speaking.
Go back outside and ask him what our son should be named, says the young mother.
The old woman obliges.
The boy is lying on his back now, in the rutted road outside. When the old woman approaches, her shadow falls across his face, and the sensation of it is pleasantly cooling. He smacks his lips together, like he is trying to drink the old woman’s shadow. She stands over him. She tells him he has a son now, you idiot, going and doing a thing like this when a girl has his baby in her, they are his mouths to feed and no one else’s, but what will happen now? They will starve no doubt, the chit and the baby too, and anyway what should this baby boy be named, this baby who may as well be starved and dead already, having no father to make sure he is fed, what should they call him, this bastard whelped in sin, in sin and joy no doubt! Children these days! But now the boy can hear nothing, nothing but the faltering drub of his heart, and see nothing, nothing but the deep quiescent blue of the July dusk up above him, an eternity rested on the wide shoulders of proleptic stars, above the sweet village smells of strawberries and manure. He understands now that it was there, always there, and hears nothing the old woman says to him.
You just wait, says the midwife in the cottage, while the boy is dying. She bobs the baby in her sticky arms. This little problem won’t be a little problem for long. He’s so small. Won’t make it through winter, mark my words.
And his head is too round, says the neighbour-woman, squinting at the baby with distaste. You ought to press on the sides a bit to make the shape better while his skull is still good and soft. The neighbour-woman reaches out her hands but the midwife slaps them away.
Tarare’s mother sighs and closes her eyes and doesn’t move even when a fat fly lands on her blood-streaked thigh, rubbing his black minikin hands together. The dog licks at his bits in the corner. Everyone is tired and everyone is hungry, and outside the little rag-covered window the fields are beginning to hum with night-time. Sweat and old copper. The midwife and the neighbour-woman exchange a grim look over their charge, who they begin to see will not be told, will not be guided, and who is about to hitch her cart to an idiot steed.
Fine, says the midwife, fine. She bends down to put the baby in his mother’s arms. God help you, girl. At least he’s sleeping now.
The old woman comes back inside. She shakes her head sadly. Crosses herself. He’s dead.
The girl opens her eyes and tentatively wraps an arm around her infant’s backside. Well? she asks. What did he say? About the name?
Nothing much, says the old woman. I don’t think he rightly heard me.
But he said something?
The old woman could declare that the boy said anything then, and she knows it. She could say the boy chose for his son a fine and a usual name before he expired. A whole retinue of saints that it is good for a little boy to be named after troop before her mind’s eye, lustrous in their robes of white and crimson, bearing the pearly wounds of martyrdom. Sébastien. Tomas. Or even Lazare, why not? But the old woman is honest. She shrugs. It sounded like… Tarare, she says. Like the village.
They all look at Tarare’s mother again. People are not named after villages. Villages can be named after people, this is true, but not people like them. Bad people with hard lives. The midwife lights a candle. The puss moths begin to drift in through the window, drawn by the small flame.
Tarare, says the young girl. Tarare it is, then.
The neighbour throws up her hands. You can’t be thinking of keeping him, Agnès. A bastard. A bastard. A bastard. There is a boy dead in the road!
And once again, they enumerate the possibilities, the avenues of dereliction. Leave him in the market, lots of girls do it! Send him to the Sisters in the city, two good meals a day, raised God-fearing, good!
But Tarare’s mother will do none of these things. She had loved—still loves—the boy who lies dead in the rutted road outside. She hopes this love will pass inside her from father to son, like warm milk poured from pitcher to cup.
And some years pass, and each passes in the usual way, with the falling of the leaves to make a yellow clot in the rutted road where the boy died, and then the falling of the snow to cover over the yellow clot of fallen leaves with whiteness. Soon the people, who at first avoided standing in that place in the road where they know a boy to have died, still avoid standing in that place, but can’t remember why. In the spring come the quiet grey-eyed men from the hills, and they go from door to door in the village, looking for a bowl of groats or a hay-bed in exchange for their afternoon’s labour. Then the summer comes and the men from the hills follow the sun north over the fields where it tawnies the grain and ripens the grapes, and some of the older boys from the village go with them, to sleep piled like puppies under the mild-faced moon. Their absence is not regretted, because older boys eat too much.
Then one year the King, who is called Louis the Beloved (though even he does not know what he has done to earn so affectionate an appellation), dies. There is a new king, a sixteenth Louis, and he is crowned far away from the village, among painted sunrays—yellow, red and gold. Holy men anoint him with oil from the beak of a dove, and say yes, the beautiful days will come.
Little Tarare sits in his mother’s lap and watches the crooked legs of drunken dancers comb the fire. The villagers drink cider and eat ash cakes with honey, and tripe sausages, and it is good. There is a great fire every night that summer. The women gather round it and sing loudly and badly of the angels in heaven, then softly of a sow asleep in a garden. They card wool and darn socks and twist straw into dollies for the small ones. Tarare sees how the women can never let their hands fall idle, how they work them until their muscles wear to strings, work their hands into ragged claws, so that to Tarare’s young eyes they look like a tribe of great fire-worshipping birds, huddled there at the veillée in their black shawls.
He will remember this, a breast in his mouth and the great birds gathered by the great fire, after he forgets most of what follows. It is where he comes from.
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