The Fool and Other Moral Tales by Anne Serre

Author:Anne Serre
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811227179
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2019-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

XII

To take stock of his books, thoughts and remarks and make sure they’re not confined solely to the affluent classes, the narrator sometimes goes to visit the poor quarter of this or that city, where he encounters hunched bodies and tired, leaden faces. These are the measuring rods he employs to gauge his sentences. Faced with this sad, slow man doing his shopping or this anxious young mother, he asks himself: “Does my book also say something about you? Does it take your existence into account? Does it say anything of your thoughts, your preoccupations, your emotions? Does it somehow do you justice?” The answer is highly uncertain. Much of the time it seems to him: no, neither his book nor his conscience has taken these poor, tired people into account. And, as he makes his way back uptown and comes across people who are increasingly well-dressed, with fewer and fewer worries, with rested faces and well-groomed bodies, he no longer has anything to measure his book against.

So he goes back. And very often, faced with a man or a woman with an embittered mouth and a slow step, he says to himself despairingly that he might just as well throw his book away when he gets home. He doesn’t feel for these people the sympathy he feels for the lunatics with their astonishing speech, yet in their company he throws off his oversized narrator’s outfit like a coat that is much too heavy, and only then does he have the impression of belonging to the human race. He stops playing to the gallery. He stops pretending to be in love. He makes his way along the sidewalk without ceremony, without gloating, without puffing out his chest. He walks gravely at their side, musing that one day he will die and these people will die with him. Were he to fall here among them, were he to collapse in a heap on the sidewalk, which is covered this summer with beautiful, aniseed-colored pollen, they wouldn’t cry out or make a fuss. They would call an ambulance perhaps, without saying much. He’s tempted to fall here among them. Were he to fall one day, he would like it to be among them.

In the meantime, there’s his great story to be told. And there are moments when the landscape’s demand for the story is so vociferous as to be deafening. No matter where the narrator is walking, he can never find rest, since the rivers gleaming white in the sun and the haughty, high trees, the landlocked lakes and slender branches, the immovable summits and seemingly blameless meadows are all in conversation with him, demanding he intervene, in the same way that someone who is deeply unhappy will sit before you in grim-faced silence, hoping with all his soul that you will find the word that will free him to tell his story.

Whenever the narrator sits down by a green lake or a tall tree and is sad, as he is just

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