Free Small Lives by Pierre Michon Page A

in the center of the village along a modest main street across from the school; I confirmed the odor that used to rise from the old Rosalie’s interior when they climbed back into it Sunday evenings, sorry and unsteady. I breathed in the sourness, the dust, the shapeless discomfort to which excessive old-age denies even the last vain satisfaction of apparent cleanliness. There I recognized their simple feelings and their irreparable solitude; they were gentle people and would die in distress; I knew that I ranked among those responsible. There I rubbed shoulders with the absences that ate away at these walls, the insatiable past and the ungrateful sons of ungrateful time, my father, myself, and finally the whole world whose place we took, all ghosts for the two old ghosts, all absences they had once trailed along with them to Mourioux, that formed about them like a nimbus even the too-brief, too-rare presences of their dear absent ones could no longer dissipate. At Mazirat was the heart of that “dense absence”; there it was almost palpable; only the dead passed through the door,and the old couple rose wide-eyed, tottering, clasped you in their arms as though to warm up those who could no longer be warmed by anything. They never reproached me; was I also a child?
    Nevertheless, I was nearly twenty that morning when, with ill grace, I finally gave in to the exhortations of their letters, for years urging me to visit, and took the train to Mazirat; the station was some five kilometers from their village, and I walked the rest of the way. It was summer, the weather was fine, and I took pleasure in walking in the shade; as I went along, I composed a letter in my head to the too-tall brunette to whom I was then devoting my time, a bluestocking from a good family, with whom I maintained a correspondence, aside from our trite love affair, a correspondence we wished to be elevated and was, on my part at least, laughable pedantry. Already I was falsifying the account that I would give her of the approaching visit; I had to misrepresent much and lie a little, keep quiet about the discomfort, distress, and irremediable absence (we believed in Presence), pass over Eugène’s nose, the tears, and the red wine, difficult items to conjure away, but not to be tolerated by the Platonic sect of the beautiful to which my friend belonged. And I tried makeup on their old faces that nothing could be done about, calmed their tremors, and filled in their silences, in order that their image would find favor with the frivolous Hellenist.
    Thus betraying them, I arrived in Mazirat. The house was as I have described it; on a cabinet, a frame held photos of me at different ages, and Clara told me that my father cried when he saw them. I looked at another, symmetrical, in which there were photos of Aimé. The absent mourned for one another in this house of absences, communicatedlike mediums through portraits, worm-eaten tables, smells; on that cabinet, our effigies addressed one another like two commemorative stones, exchanging the same ostentatious messages, stripped of reality, spun over a tomb; and far from this touching, sinister face-to-face encounter, we were both living, no doubt, but we were living forever separated. Like a magic amulet, our ghostly meeting here reminded us, wherever we were, that each of us carried within him the ghost of the other, and was, for the other, a ghost; we were for one another both corpse and poster image. No doubt the sun played over a gilded wooden frame; I raised my head; from the window I could see the three bright colors of the flag hung from the town hall tympanum in preparation for the Fourteenth of July; roosters crowed in the neighboring yard; Clara was standing, thin and death-like; her large, loving eyes were fixed on me.
    Soon my grandfather took me to the café; once again I can see his oafish silhouette dancing along the road in the glory of summer, I can feel his hand on my