Free Small Lives by Pierre Michon Page B

shoulder and “his old arm in mine.” He was proud but bewildered to be drinking with me, whom he introduced to whomever would listen as “his grandson,” cherishing this word that he repeated indefinitely, obtusely and gently, still murmuring it as he brought the glass to his lips, tasting it with the wine; because he could not convince himself of this striking bond of kinship, and clearly saw that I did not believe it, perhaps hardly cared about it; I could not, at the same time, be the frame of tragic portraits and this inanely smiling presence, already a little blurred, of amorphous smug youth. So, with his soft litany, he was making note of the pleasure he had to feel if he wanted to remember it, and, in the days that followed, entering thecafé and recalling that not long ago I had been there and was no longer there, to say, “Did you see him? That was my grandson,” substituting the grace of the past imperfect for the ever despoiling, disappointing present. We emptied many small glasses at that old copper bar, gleaming in my memory like everything else from that summer day, and as we left the café, I was bedazzled by an obscure drunkenness as well as the illustrious sun.
    I remember little of the evening, when hands grasped mine, when eyes misted over with grief and affection. No doubt Eugène and I went out for a last little drink, for which, no doubt Clara, half joking, reproached him, whom she openly called an “old scarecrow.” Our footsteps scattered the last birds, the stars shone over our heads, outlined our provisional shadows that a passerby saw and forgot. I was given a bed in a musty little room, with a white coverlet, a pink eiderdown quilt, a window cramped and cool as van Gogh’s in Arles; and here, too, as in Artaud’s description, hung “the old peasant gris-gris,” rough towels and holy boxwood. My grandmother had arranged some flowers, zinnias perhaps, in a chipped glass – all the good vases having gone, one after another, year after year, into the insatiable boxes of odds and ends meant for me. In the morning, Clara came to wake me; hardly had I opened my eyes before she slipped a hundred franc note into my hand, giving me, along with the daylight, what she knew that, as a student, I was most often lacking; she smiled; something took place then that was very nearly an event, and my memory retains it as such: had I dreamed of glory, of exquisitely satisfied love? Was I overjoyed by a ray of sunlight? Had the uncertainty of awakening made me mistake the pictorial memory of another bedroom for delight at findingmyself in this one? Light penetrated my spirit, an inexplicable surge swept through me; transported, I reached out my arms and I wished my grandmother good morning so sincerely that it overwhelmed me. After all these years, I know that in that single moment, dawning and intact, I loved her gladly; in that jubilant instant, she appeared to me in the simple affirmation of her presence, not at all overshadowed by grief, or ghostly, but steeped in suffering and joy as I am, as everyone is; in that moment of lucidity, I lifted from her the affront that made me experience her as weighted down, hollowed out by the absence of my father. More than the conduit for an absentee god, the altar where the perpetual flame of that absence burned, she was a woman grown old, who had struggled and conceived, had fallen and gotten back up; and she loved me, truly, the most natural thing in the world.
    My desire was to prolong that epiphany; getting dressed, I noticed everything with a kind of fervor; those zinnias were here as well, their direct colors and tough petals, hardy, determined, enduring; through the open window, the world came to me, green shade and blue sky visible on the horizon gold as a Byzantine icon. No one would have questioned the magisterial presence of the sun; but below, the room with the yellowing portraits dispelled that illusion of a