Although he felt the urge to urinate, Père Patou stood straining at the pissoir without being able to. Silently he said a quick Je vous salue, Marie for help. Nothing came. No, no, there was no getting around it—the council would be evenly divided. That meant that the mayor, M. Leschemell, as Monsieur le Président, would cast the deciding vote.
M. Leschemell was a well-to-do dairy farmer, with herds of cows and goats, who processed milk, cheese and butter. But instead of wearing a blue smock and cotton pants he dressed in corduroy. And wore a beret, not the straw hat farmers of the region wore in the field nor the cap they wore in the village.
The antiquity of the Leschemells rivaled that of the Le Tourneaus. And whereas Alexandre Le Tourneau, the grandfather of Edouard Le Tourneau, the hotelier, had been the village hero of the first Great War, Roland Leschemell, the father of Gaston Leschemell, the present mayor, as the leader of the Haute-Savoie maquis, had been a martyr for France during the Second. Exhibiting unimaginable daring and courage, he and his men had again and again caused serious disruption of the Wehrmacht’s supply lines. Most spectacularly, in December 1944 when in desperation German troops and matériel were being routed across central France to Normandy, a huge supply convoy had been blown up, killing a number of the military police on guard as it had passed on the track a few miles northwest of the village. One of these had been the devout boy-soldier.
Within hours twenty men from the village and nearby hamlets and farms had been seized. In front of the World War I memorial on the village green, they had been summarily executed by a firing squad. Roland Leschemell, who almost surely had been tortured, had been shot separately, after having been made to witness the killing of his comrades. The German commanding officer had it promulgated that Leschemell had been the leader of the local Communist guerrillas. Père Patou had been convinced immediately that someone in the village had betrayed his country by informing, although at the time he had had no idea who it might have been.
That afternoon every shutter in the village had been closed. Hearing the volley of shots break the silence—fading as his hearing was, Père Patou could still hear that crackle in his inner ear—the priest had run into the sanctuary of the church, had knelt before the Cross, and begun praying. When silence had again reigned over the village, he had stridden to the back of the nave and pulled the rope that swung the campane on its cannons twenty times, as if he were ringing the angelus or summoning the people to Mass. Though no one had dared to come that day, the bell had tolled for the dead, some of them heroes, some innocent victims. Then, violating a provision of martial law the German commandant had proclaimed, Père Patou had said the burial service in the empty church.
Yes, this was the bell, along with the clock chimes in the night and early morning, that M. Le Tourneau was contriving to have silenced. Recalling the impudence with which the hotelier had pointed out to his priest that the angelus still would be permitted to be rung at noon and in the evening, Père Patou experrienced a flash of fresh anger. By offering such a sop, the man had exposed his crassness and profaneness.
Given their family histories and the prominence they themselves enjoyed, Edouard Le Tourneau and Gaston Leschemell were the two most influential men in the village. In that M. Leschemell was the more congenial and was thought to be less concerned with advancing his own fortunes and was more devoted to the welfare of the whole community than was the hotelier, he had repeatedly been elected mayor. There was, however, no feud or bad will between the two men. They remained on good terms, though M. Leschemell did not frequent the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Le Tourneau, as did M. Renard.
To the the dismay of the priest, nevertheless, M. Leschemell, in contrast to M. Constans and M. Giradi and his brother and M. Grenier, who declined to serve any longer after having been a councilor for many years, M. Leschemell stood with M. Le Tourneau as an advocate of “le progrès.” Père Patou had heard from his lips the very sorts of phrases with which M. Le Tourneau had bombarded the priest—“change cannot be resisted,” “the village must look to the future, not the past,” “we must marry time or be jilted by it.”
Unable to relieve himself, Père Patou hoisted his shoulders, ducked his head, and shook it fiercely, as if both protecting and empowering himself, while summoning all his will to vanquish a potent temptation, one that would lead him to commit a mortal sin. If there were anything that would win M. Leschemell’s decisive vote, it would not be an appeal to his loyalty to the ancient tradition of bells chiming the quarter hour without cessation and to the ringing of the angelus thrice daily. No, no, the fact that the striking of the church bells rang the life of the village would carry no weight with the progressive mayor.
Nor would he be swayed by the argument that silencing the bells at night would be a capitulation to commerce and sinful pleasure, a surrender of the way of life of the village to the way of the world. Certainly M. Leschemell would not be persuaded by theological ideas, such as that in their relentless measuring of mortal time the bells were a memento mori, a reminder of transience and of the mutability and impermanence of all that is not divine. Or such as that the chimes mark the recording in the mind of God, in which nothing is ever lost, of everything that happens in the village. To ask M. Leschemell what God thinks of man’s notion of progress would be pointless.
These ideas and arguments Père Patou had been formulating and rehearsing to himself in order to be able, as their priest, to impress them on the council and the mayor. But at his moment he forced himself to face the fact that all such considerations would surely be swept aside. Nothing he might say would touch the souls and change the minds of half the councilors. As for M. Leschemelle, Père Patou now realized that the only way he could be brought to understand the dark forces that were at work to silence the bells of the village church would be to invalidate the family name of that champion of progress, M. Le Tourneau.
Père Patou shuddered. Just as strenuously as he’d been endeavoring to relieve himself, he was struggling to
unknow what he couldn’t help knowing. The dreadful truth, which had been revealed to him in the deathbed confession of a guilt-ridden, terrified human being, he was not permitted to know he knew. It had come to him not as a man but as a priest, as the ear of God but not His tongue. So compelling was this secret and awful knowledge, which belonged to God alone, that if at that very instant he had not expunged it from his mind by a violent sweep of his right hand across his clamped lips, he would have shouted out, loud enough to be heard through the plasterboard of the toilet by anyone inside the village hall, the name that had leaped to the tip of his tongue. As he swallowed it with a choke, only the words “le traître”escaped his lips.
Mumbling a Paternoster, Père Patou stuffed himself back into the underclothing beneath his cassock. Trying to think his mind as clean as the slate a schoolboy has just sponged spotless, he crossed himself, left the toilet, and plodded up the passageway. The church bell began tolling nine fifteen as he was opening the door of the meeting room.
To his surprise all six councillors, the mayor and the village clerk were already in place at the green baize table. As though their throats had been cut in mid-sentence, voices went silent. At the foot of the table, opposite M. Leschemelle, sitting at the head, stood an empty chair. To the right of that chair sat M. Constans, to the left M. Le Tourneau. All eyes went onto the priest.
THE BLACK SUN
When he opened the door at the top of the basement stairs, the landlady was lying in wait in the vestibule. Her eyebrows, hairy as caterpillars, met above her nose, which was flat as a platypus’, quite a contrast to his proboscis. With her elephantine bulk positioned between him and the front door, clearly she had no intention of letting him pass without a parley.
“The gentleman I mentioned that’s wanting to engage the room you’re in is after me to let him know when it’ll be available. You told me you’d only be staying for a couple of nights, remember? Well, i
f I know how to count, tonight’ll be your seventh. I don’t mind telling you I have to keep rented up and the other gentleman’s willing to back up his word with cash. So if you’re planning on staying I’d like to see the color of your money.”
In the close quarters, he smelled stale cigarette smoke, on the landlady’s breath, whiskey. Her voice came from the worn reed of a saxophone. Three twenties and a ten settled the matter. His satchel was already packed, he informed her.
Outside, pellets of rain, almost ice bullets, stung his face. Squinting, he turned up the collar of his raincoat, then jammed his hands into his pockets. He never wore a hat. By the time he’d walked a block, his hair was a wet mop. The sky hung so close it seemed he’d bump into it before reaching the museum, a thirteen minute slog.
Since arriving, he’d caught only a glimpse of the sun. For a very brief time late on the third afternoon, he’d been able to make out a white-gold ring in the smutty sky, a halo without a saint. Otherwise, rain, rain, rain.
The room he’d rented was located in the rear of the English basement in a brownstone, built in what had been a fashionable neighborhood, now a slum. Returning to the room was like entering a public toilet. He’d shake himself as wet dogs do, then rub his face and hair with the towel the landlady provided, a scrap of muslin, always damp. So clammy were the sheets on the bed, really a cot, that he’d taken to sleeping in his shorts and tee-shirt. Ordinarily he went to bed naked.
Happenstance had brought him to this city. In a bookstall beside the Thai restaurant in which he sometimes ate, in the town where he’d been living for a while now—though meticulous about hours and minutes, he’d given up keeping track of months and years—while leafing through a volume of reproductions of paintings, he’d been arrested by one that puzzled him. Even when he wasn’t having dinner next door, often he’d find himself back, staring at the print. One evening he realized he’d have no peace of mind until he’d be able to account for what kept attracting him, against his will, it seemed. The next morning he was on his way to this city, in which the museum where the original painting hung, was situated.
For the past six afternoons at four thirty, he’d positioned himself in front of the canvas. Eyeing it for fifteen minutes was all he could manage without becoming light-headed, feeling on the verge of vertigo. He had the room the painting was hanging in pretty much to himself.
The reproduction hadn’t prepared him for the real thing. At once he realized he’d been misled by the low-quality of the photographic process used to produce the volume in which he’d found the glossy print. In the original, pigments were subtly muted. Also, he’d been expecting the canvas to be, much larger than the book page. It turned out to be smaller, at most 7”x7”, inside a thin gilt frame.
Rather than being released by viewing the actual painting, he’d become more perplexed. Shapes that didn’t conform to what they purported to be occupied space in a field variously blue-toned, here and there flushed with pink. Objects were disproportionately scaled, making their locations vague, their relationships indeterminate. His inability to find a definable perspective was disorienting.
In an effort to come to some understanding of what the painting intended to say, or was asking of him, he’d decided to concentrate, one at a time, on particulars during each successive visit. First, because most conspicuous, on a large sunflower, a mottled ocher-yellow eye, inside a green rim within a wheel of white spokes. It was growing, blossom-down, on a long stalk that hung from the middle of the top edge of the canvas, like the cord and pull of a window shade.
The following afternoon, staying with what was organic, he’d fixed on some coconut palms, which grew in the same geographical zone as northern conifers. Next afternoon it was a giant cactus, which opened its fleshy, spiny arms to a single delicate rosebud, yellow. And a ghostly plant, silver-gray, out of whose thick stalk grew three symmetrical pairs of hairy scrolls. It resembled no species of vegetation he’d ever seen, living or painted.
On his fourth visit he’d moved to a red towerlike structure, rising midway up the canvas from the bottom edge. A jalousie door on the second of two stories hung open, as if someone had just stepped out into the blue and vanished. An equilateral triangle on top might have passed for a dome, had the painter employed foreshortening. As it stood, the structure looked like a rocket in a cartoon about to blast off.
Day five he fixed on another man-made object, half the height of the red tower. Its façade was the blue-green of glass characteristic of art deco. Obviously the building was designed as a pleasance. It looked fragile.
Yesterday afternoon he’d focused on a slice of an or-ange, hanging in the same sector of the sky as the sun. For the moon to be visible while standing so close to the sun was an astronomical absurdity.
#
He shook, then brushed rain from his hair with his fingers as he passed between the two central columns on the portico of the museum. Still he felt drops running down his neck. Heading for the room in which the painting hung, he fussed with the belt of his raincoat, in order to open the front and expose his body to dry warmth. The first joints of his fingers were greenish white and he shivered.
Each time he’d walked through the doorway leading to the room of the painting on his previous visits, a guard had been leaning against the jamb, seemingly half asleep. The man was short-shanked. With cuffs that covered his knuckles, his uniform, gray with crimson trim, bagged on him like a hand-me-down from an older brother. This afternoon the guard wasn’t at his post.
Reconnoitering, he spotted him at the far end of an adjoining room. On tiptoe he was wagging his finger at the nose of a woman, wearing a green beret, who was half a head taller than he was. Evidently he was reprimanding her, perhaps for permitting the child whose hand she was holding to step across the red line in front of a huge painting of a nude. Out of earshot, the guard resembled a clown mimicking a scolding schoolteacher.He himself had allowed the tip of his brogans to touch the outer edge of the red line, but he’d taken care not to cross it.
When he’d first gazed at the upside-down sunflower, he’d had to resist an urge to step across the prohibitive line, to lift the frame from its fixture, turn the painting a hundred and eighty degrees, and rehang it. The guard had seemed no more alert than a caryatid. But he’d noticed a man in a black raincoat standing in front of a painting on the other side of the room. Then, too, it had occurred to him, a tool of some kind might be needed to release the frame from its fixture. Besides which, he’d suddenly realized, righting the direction in which the sunflower was growing would turn every other object on the canvas upside down.
When he arrived for his final session with the painting, which he was determined to make decisive, there was the same man, or another in a black raincoat, back to him as he faced a picture on the opposite wall. After taking his usual stance, he glanced at his feet. On the parquet floor a little puddle was forming around his brogans, as if he’d had a bladder accident and were standing in his own urine. He watched the water creep toward the red line, touch, then spread over it. No longer chilled, he felt flushed with fever. Closing himself off from the outside world and abstracting himself from all sensation but sight, he fixed his eye on the sun, floating a bit off center in the deepest blue of the sky. Its dense blackness suggested a mass of force. Though only about the size of a shirt button, within the dimensions of the canvas it hung like a gigantic wrecking ball. Were it to lurch into motion it would annihilate whatever stood in its path. Yet never could it break free. If in some way it were to pass out of the picture, the painting would collapse and undo itself. Such a possibility was beyond imagining.
Leaning forward and peering closely he noticed purple currents emanating from the sun’s left hemisphere. Taking care to keep his toes from encroaching on the red line as he bent over it, he detected six white specks, scattered like stars inside the ball of blackness. Sunspots, surely—the source of the constant energy being radiated
to hold things in place, as well as of the latent power to destroy.
Without doubt the black sun was the asymmetrical center of the world of the painting. No tree, plant or flower would ever grow or decay, no man-made structure would ever be put to use or be demolished, nor would the slice of a moon ever wax into a whole orange or wane into nothingness. All were eternally subject to the black sun’s force.
A shock, as if he’d grabbed hold of a naked wire with current surging through it, jolted him. Power, real and potential, holding it all together—that was the secret. Theroom was spinning and pitching around him. Sensing he was about to tumble over the red line, he struggled to regain equilibrium. As the canvas came leaping toward him, he flung out his hands. The wall, which his palms smashed into, kept him from going down. Uncertain whether inside or out- side his head, a bell was ringing. Coming from behind, a pair of hands embraced him around the waist, providing support. Beside his ear, a husky voice shouted, “Help, guard, help!”
“I’m quite all right now, thank you,” he heard himself murmur as he endeavored to move his arms and break loose. When he went on to explain, his voice, though calm, sounded remote. “Just some passing dizziness I’m subject to.”
“Guard,” the voice behind him yelled again, insistently. “Help! I’ve got him.”