Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Next morning the child held its head up on its own and sipped water and Coke from a cup. Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it. She fished the cigar butt from the dirt where she’d tossed it, brushed it clean with her fingers, and smoked it in celebration.

IVI. Bouquet, the brother of the deceased Dr. Bouquet, putting the doctor’s estate in order, came to the villa with a van and a driver to claim the late doctor’s effects.

Sands had arranged to be off visiting the villages with Pčre Patrice, but when he returned at the end of the day the brother was still there, an almost elderly Frenchman, husky, lantern-jawed, dressed as if for a day of angling, in olive short-pants and a matching vest with many pockets, fanning his face with a canvas hat with a chinstrap. Sands and he took tea together. His English was better than passable. He spoke at first not of his brother, but of women. “As I get older, the older females have more attractions. Flesh which used to be ugly, now it can seem charming. The thin purple veins, you know, so frail. It’s a beautiful mystery. The new kind of grace—the grace of a calm woman, it’s even more erotic. Now I come to adore the women of the Renaissance painting. Very full, very soft from the inside. Have you a native concubine?”

Sands had no answer.

“No? I don’t know this country. But I thought it’s customary here to have a concubine. I prefer a widow. A grown woman, as I have been telling you. She has experienced love, and she realizes how to behave in bed.”

“I’ve been curious about your brother,” was all Skip could say.

“Claude was my twin. Fraternal—we didn’t look alike. I got the information that he is dead, and I didn’t cry about it. I suddenly thought, Oh, no no no, I didn’t know him, even not a little. We grew up together, but we never talked about anything, we just lived there. As far as I was concerned, he was like a visitor. But not coming to visit me —coming to visit my parents, my sister, something like that. Now, this morning, seeing everything, this house where he lived, I know more about him than I knew from many years of youth spent side by side. Looking here, I wondered if I would find a certain print of a certain painting we had in our bedroom in those days. Yes, I know, it makes no sense that he would have it after all this time. The Clown in Repose, or some similar name. A clown with his eyes closed —Dead? Unconscious? Why closed? He had it on the wall above his bed for many years. It frightened me as a child. And the fact that the clown didn’t frighten Claude—that was frightening even more. And he stayed here so many years in this place, and he wasn’t frightened. I am frightened.” M. Bouquet sighed. “We’ve loaded the boxes, as you see. Thank you for packing so much for us. I’ll leave the furniture, and those kinds of things. Someone from the family will live here again sometime—when the Communists are finished. When you have defeated them. For now I’ll go on renting the house to your Ecumenical Council and”—He looked at Skip anew. “You’re not with the CIA or something like this, perhaps?”

“No.” “Okay.” He laughed. “I’m not concerned!” “No need to be.” Skip had kept aside a few fragile items—let the brother take responsibility for packing them. M. Bouquet elected to leave the doctor’s delicate representation of the human ear, the porcelain bones. “They came so far to here. It’s pointless to take them back, it’s sad to take them. We must rescue the books and papers for the family library. Our sister makes it her passion. The papers, the papers. For her it’s our only legacy, but I say to her, Why must we have any legacy at all? Things are destroyed over and over, the good things and bad things. So many wars and storms on the earth. Destruction on top of destruction. What happened to Claude? Poof, exploded, nothing left. The same thing for all of us—ashes, dust, poof, that’s our legacy. No. I don’t take this one. It’s too breakable.” With his thick fingers the brother detached and examined each part—the outer ear with its Pavilion and Lobe, then the Conduit and Tympan and then the Labyrinthe Osseux with its Vestibule and Fenętres, its Canaux semi-circulaire and the Nerf auditif, the Limaçon, the long tube of the Trompe d’eustache heading into the skull. Even the minute inner bones had been fashioned and labeled—the Marteau, Enclume, and Etrier— and the spongy-looking Cellules mastoďdiennes. “Ah! So small, so per

feet, an antique —it comes from his school days, perhaps, I think. Claude took his certification in 1920 or 1921.” He said suddenly, “Do you know the tunnel where Claude was blown up? Have you seen it?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.” “Avez-vous Français? Un peu?” They switched to French, and the conversation quickly became triv

ial. Apparently this large, solid man enjoyed his frankest exchanges in a language in which he wasn’t facile enough to camouflage himself.

Sands encouraged M. Bouquet to stay until morning, but he seemed fearful of spending the night here, though the roads would be dangerous. Everything was in the van. He left as the dark fell.

Weeks earlier, M. Bouquet had sent a letter to the phony Ecumenical Council’s mail drop, naming this day of his arrival. In the meantime, Sands had grown attached to certain of the dead man’s texts—a few obscure quarterly magazines and dusty books—and he’d placed these in his footlockers, hidden them from the doctor’s relatives and heirs. The brother left without them.

And weeks later, Sands still worked to translate paragraphs the Doctor had underlined—bits of philosophy by French intellectuals Sands had never heard of, abstract passages that unaccountably inflamed him, one, for instance, from an article called “D’un Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras” by somebody named Antonin Artaud:

Que la Nature, par un caprice étrange, montre tout ŕ coup un corps d’homme qu’on torture sur un rocher, on peut penser d’abord que ce n’est qu’un caprice et que ce caprice ne signifie rien. Mais quand, pendant des jours et des jours de cheval, le męme charme intelligent se répčte, et que la Nature obstinément manifeste la męme idée; quand les męmes formes pathétiques reviennent; quand des tętes de dieux connus apparaissent sur les rochers, et qu’un thčme de mort se dégage dont c’est l’homme qui fait obstinément les frais —et ŕ la forme écartelée de l’homme répondent celles, devenues moins obscures, plus dégagéls d’une pétrifiante matičre—des dieux qui l’ont depuis toujours torturé; quand tout un pays sur la Terre développe une philosophie parallčle ŕ celle des hommes; quand on sait que les premiers hommes utilisčrent un langage des signes, et qu’on retrouve formidablement agrandie cette langue sur les rochers; certes, on ne peut plus penser que ce soit lŕ un caprice, et que ce caprice ne signifie rien.

With a pen and blank paper and a stack of dictionaries, he waded into battle against its horrific vagueness:

When Nature, by an odd caprice, suddenly portrays in a boulder the body of a man being tortured, one can think at first that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing. But when, during days and days on a horse, he sees the same intelligent charm repeating itself, and when Nature stubbornly manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms return; when the heads of known gods appear in the boulders, and when there emerges a theme of death for which man obstinately pays the price; when the dismembered form of a man is answered by those—become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter—of the gods who have always tormented him; when a whole region of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its people; when one knows that the first men used a language of signs, and when one discovers this language enlarged formidably in the rocks; then surely one can no longer think that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing.