The Fool and Other Moral Tales Read online

  The Fool

  Also by anne serre

  The Governesses

  Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2102 by Anne Serre

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Mark Hutchinson

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in French as “Le mat” (Editions Verdier, Paris, 2005), “Le narrateur” (Mercure de France, Paris, 2004), and “Petite table, sois mise!” (Editions Verdier, Paris, 2012). Published by arrangement with Mercure de France, Editions Verdier, and the French Book Office, New York. “The Narrator” was originally published in a longer version: Anne Serre shortened her French text in 2019.

  New Directions gratefully acknowledges Christopher Middleton and Ralph Manheim for their translations of the excerpts from Goethe’s “Erlkönig” (in “The Fool”) and a Grimms’ fairy tale (in “The Wishing Table”).

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 1458 in 2019

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Serre, Anne, 1960– author. | Hutchinson, Mark, translator.

  Title: The fool : and other moral tales / Anne Serre ; translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.

  Description: First New Directions edition. | New York : New Directions Publishing, [2019] | Series: New Directions Paperbook ; 1458 | “A New Directions Paperbook Original” |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019026073 | ISBN 9780811227162 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811227179 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Serre, Anne, 1960– —Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PQ2679.E67335 A2 2019 | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026073

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  Contents

  The Fool

  The Narrator

  The Wishing Table

  Landmarks

  Cover

  The Fool

  .

  I came across this little figure rather late in life. Not being familiar with playing cards, still less with the tarot, I was slightly uncomfortable when I first set eyes on him. I believe in magic figures and distrust them. They have powers, of that you can be sure. A color can derail a train, a figure observing you can turn the world upside down.

  One day a friend called Michel gave me a tarot pack. Some friends play a peculiar role in your life. You think your friendship is based on certain shared tastes and interests — and there’s some truth in that — then you discover — time has to have gone by — that they’ve sprung up like traffic police on the highway of the imagination, just when you were least expecting them, to hand you a secret package or message, though they themselves know nothing of their role, and you yourself had no idea they were on a mission. You part, and the message slowly deciphered — again, late in the day, since nothing ever happens on time — starts to unwind its coils in you. Ten years later, you examine this tarot pack you have been given, and you see the fool, who gives you quite a start.

  For a long time, I had a small statuette in my flat that another friend, Mark, advised me to throw away. There are friends who lead you abruptly to switch roads, friends who save you from disaster: valuing friendship is one of the few things one gets right in life.

  When I read the instructions for the tarot (in the booklet that comes with the pack), I felt uneasy and on edge. I don’t like esoteric language. Esoteric language is evil, unlike the language of poetry, which has only healing powers. The language of poetry — we know this, but it’s worth repeating — is a medicine, and because, like every narrator in the world, I need to look after myself, I take a regular dose.

  Reading the little handbook, I couldn’t help thinking that the friend who had given me the tarot was much more agile than I was when it came to understanding a language I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Michel is the kind of young man who some people think fantastical. I don’t. His flights of fancy are woven in a poetic web: he has to work through them, flitting about like a bottle imp — and laughing all the while — before making his way among the more valuable threads of his books. We were on vacation in the Alps with Mark and other friends. It was the summer when Michel was so taken with his tarot pack that girlfriends would call him to find out about their future, and he, on the other end of the line, would play around with his cards, genuinely doing his utmost to reveal their fates. Sometimes he would tell us he had work to do and would go off in his car for a couple of days.

  We were walking in the Alps with Mark and had made our way down into a dried-up riverbed. I was picking red flowers, I think. Mark then said something extremely important, which, needless to say, I have forgotten. A phrase like the one Hans Castorp heard one day in the mountains: a farmer was walking by and said to someone, “Good day to you.” And it changed Hans Castorp’s life.

  At the chalet Michel spent the mornings translating Jerusalem Delivered on his computer. He had conversations with little Hugh, the son of a friend of ours, who would tell him his dreams over breakfast. Perhaps because Michel was a psychotherapist at the time, he had a way of speaking to little Hugh (who was six or seven) that made me prick up my ears. Personally, I would love to be spoken to like that. We swam in a very cold lake, some of us would go walking in the mountains (I stayed behind at the chalet). I was very fond of the little vegetable plots that the local people had laid out in their enormous meadows, and their way of stacking wood for the winter under a lean-to beside the house. I’ve always liked things arranged in rows.

  I wasn’t ready yet to meet the fool. The image of the vagabond was one I’d long been familiar with; it was taking shape, but very slowly. Things need time to take shape, especially if you’re burdened with a neurosis. If you’re willing to treat it on your own, you can disentangle the threads and advance. But it’s slow going. Psychotherapy speeds up the process: but only on condition you don’t consent to it in extremis. Then again, you might not like things being picked apart too quickly. You might like desiring something intensely before having the satisfaction of disentangling it all.

  It’s funny, that little dot in the fool’s French name, le • mat. The instructions explain that everything in the arcana is important, everything has to be taken into consideration: each little color, each little form or sign. I understand what that means: it’s the same in life, where you have to be both extremely vigilant and in a state of intense reverie in order to take in all the clues which later, assembled, examined and studied, will enable you to progress a little. Yet while I’m fairly accustomed to this in life, with the cards I come up against a wall. They arouse no emotions in me. The drawings strike me as crude, the colors ugly. Only death which is never named gives me a little flush of warmth. The hanged man reminds me vaguely of something. He’s a fine figure of a young man: hanged, but with an unassuming air, as though he was picking fruit from the tree.

  When we were children we used to play Mistigri. And whenever one of us — a cousin, a sister, it may even have been me — found the Jack of Clubs in her hand, she would let out a cry of terror, not in jest but because she was genuinely afraid. When Madame Bovary meets her Mistigri �
� the blind man at the foot of the hill who blocks the path of the Hirondelle on the road to Yonville — she’s terrified. One other figure in particular has always frightened me: that of a young or a grown-up girl, utterly bizarre and abnormal, lying in bed in a Fellini film. I certainly wouldn’t write a book about an image that has frightened me. I would try, by writing a book, to reach the point where the terrifying image is canceled out and rendered innocuous.

  The fool, for all his peculiarities, is still the tarot figure I’m most familiar with. What’s strange is his way of placing the staff his bundle hangs from over his right shoulder while grasping the staff in his left hand. The gymnastics involved are so acrobatic that even in a sentence it’s hard to give an account of them: sometimes I place the left hand first, followed by the right shoulder, sometimes the staff first, followed by the bundle, then I switch around, trying a different order without ever finding a proper balance. The fool, to begin with, prevents you from writing properly.

  Another peculiarity: an animal is standing behind him, but you would be hard pressed to say if it’s a dog, a cat, a fox, a hyena or a chimera. To crown it all, this nameless animal is the same hideous flesh color as the fool’s dangling bundle, which it’s trying to reach. If he didn’t have his animal, the fool would be a bit lonely treading the desolate earth (I screen out the animal with my hand and find that something is lacking to make the fool the fool). Apart from that, he’s wearing a cap and bells, which comes as a surprise to no one, and the way he holds the staff from which his bundle hangs, with the extraordinary gymnastics this entails, is similar to the way one holds a flute.

  He reminds me of Hamelin and the Pied Piper, the man who leads a whole town to its death. But where did I read that? My memories are truncated and deformed, they always contain an error. To console me, some people, especially Mark, tell me that’s why I write fiction. But it worries me, as the errors are getting bigger. In the past, my memories contained one small error; one or two. Nowadays they all contain one huge error. Between my memory and me there’s this all-out wrestling match. And a gap that keeps getting bigger. Soon, if I grow old, I shall be saying things, when reminiscing, that have no connection whatsoever with anything I have read or learned. When I read “Marion goes to the ball,” I will understand it as “Pierre works in the factory,” which doesn’t correspond to reality at all. I worry about these magnifications. What on earth is going on in the gap between what I have learned and what I say?

  Above my bed (but off to the side, so that I can see it when I’m lying down) is a painting of an angel that I bought in Rome twenty years ago. Without realizing it, I had bought a very interesting painting (for 700 francs, which was a lot for me, since I was a student at the time), seventeenth-century if you please, depicting a baroque angel in court dress. Apparently — a scholarly friend told me this — it’s a work from the Bolivian Altiplano, a school of painting the epicenter of which was situated south of La Paz and which was noted not only for depicting angels armed with blunderbusses like conquistadors, but for always portraying them with cast shadows, “which is odd for disembodied creatures,” as my friend pointed out.

  My angel, like my fool, is peculiar. It’s hard to tell, for example, where his arms begin. Often, in the evening, I look at him while thinking about something else and in my mind correct the outline so that the arms emerge at the right place. It’s the same with the legs, which are oddly positioned (like the fool’s). As for the shadow, it always reminds me of the word elytron, which I have to look up in the dictionary, for there are certain words whose precise meaning obstinately refuses to lodge in my brain. Elytron means “the hard outer wing case of a coleopterous insect, which is not used for flying but covers and protects the hind wings in the manner of a sheath.” Proof that I muddle everything: I associate elytra with butterflies. I used to think that, before turning into a butterfly, the poor, hapless insect had elytra and was forced to suffer this indignity. Not at all! I invent things, and it can be tiresome at times. It reminds me of a wonderful story by the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel, “Yodok,” where a man starts using the same one word for everything: the word yodok. If he wants to say “that table is pretty,” he says “that yodok is yodok.” I love that story, it makes me laugh so hard it brings tears to my eyes.

  I think that all writers would like to whittle things down to just one word. I also think that the most interesting writers of the last twenty, thirty or forty years are the German-speaking writers of Austria or Switzerland. If a writer is Austrian or Swiss, I read him. There’s always a gap between him and his language. I also read him for the mountains. A writer without a mountain always leaves me with the impression that something is missing. The writer with a mountain doesn’t go around botanizing all the time, but it’s most unusual if, at some point or another, he doesn’t go walking in his landscape.

  It wasn’t exactly in the mountains but in a fold in the hills that Mark met Cézanne one day. He had set out on the road to Le Tholonet to take photographs here and there, details of the landscape, for his private use. Perhaps it was hot — I no longer remember at what time of year he made the pilgrimage — no doubt he was carrying a little backpack — I don’t know, I wasn’t with him — but that his mind was full of Cézanne’s work and thoughts, of that you can be sure. Then, lo and behold, slightly higher up on a path nearby, he saw a man approaching whom he immediately identified as a vagabond. The man’s presence and gait made an odd impression, but he didn’t really know why. They passed, and Mark made out the man’s face clearly. It was only when he was back in Aix that he recognized him.

  A vagabond isn’t necessarily a revenant but there’s definitely something of that kind about him. If he’s a revenant it’s because he has come back from the dead. The fool walks in the grassy mountains in his cap and bells, holding the staff from which his bundle hangs at such a peculiar angle that you might mistake it for a flute, the flute with which he leads a whole town — of children, I believe — behind him. Orpheus did things like that.

  .

  I wasn’t particularly fond of walking. It was the idea of walking I liked. And in a book, I always enjoyed the moment when the narrator or one of the characters sets off on a walk. On the condition that the walk was in the mountains or the woods, or, at a pinch, if all else failed, in the countryside; but in a town, no, never. A walk in a town is of no interest to me. I know what there is in a town, the things worth seeing in this or that establishment, this or that street or square: photography exists to point them out to us, not language.

  I wasn’t particularly fond of walking, but I knew quite a bit about the activity from novels and from my daydreams and desires. Then one day with Carl, because we needed to pass the time, and because, all things considered, the idea of a walk was the only thing that really appealed to us, we started walking in actual landscapes, and always, given the choice, in the mountains. With his knife, Carl would lop off hazel boughs and make walking sticks for us. At first, we would set out unprepared. Little by little, we got ourselves kitted out: a small backpack with a picnic, waterproof clothing and proper walking shoes.

  At the point in the walk where I would have turned back, Carl always wanted to go a little further, a little higher, just a little, but steadily on. In the end, we would always go much further and much higher, and had someone said to me down in the valley: you’ll be going all the way up there, I would have protested vigorously, refused and turned away.

  It wasn’t reaching the summit that I liked — views and panoramas leave me cold — it was the act of walking. Carl had a knack, so that, at one stage or another, every time, on every walk we undertook, we would stray from our appointed path for an hour or two. At first, this worried me. Being a city dweller, I was afraid we’d lose our way. Then, little by little, it became the high point of the walk: the moment when we were so completely lost in the mountain expanse that we had to abandon any idea of a past existence or turning back and were forced to vent
ure forth and make our way through unknown defiles. On my own, I could never have managed this.

  From time to time, I would observe Carl with his staff and bundle out of the corner of my eye. I would see him making his way over tufts of grass and stones in a desolate landscape that we didn’t understand. Then one day, a good ten years or so after my friend Michel had given me the tarot pack, we were making our way along a sunken footpath under the trees when I saw that I was walking with the fool and realized that the fool was not only Orpheus or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, not only a revenant or a vagabond, but was also love. And that love, perhaps, was all of these things rolled into one.

  Yet when I think of the fool it’s a vagabond I think of, a quite terrifying vagabond whom I myself must have met one day in the distant past; and that meeting on the wasteland must have so affected me that I lost, not my powers of speech — on the contrary, I recovered them — but my memories. Everything that had happened up until that point vanished into thin air. I remember that I was very scared but, at the same time, knew straightaway that it was the meeting I had long been waiting for: I was prepared for it. Before that, without knowing it, I’d been bored.

  It took place in the mountains; far from the world, that is, far from life in society, under conditions of the utmost solitude. When I saw him arriving, with his cap and bells moving through the bracken, and had taken stock of just how isolated I was, with no possibility whatsoever of turning back, I naturally put on my mental armor. Here he is, I said to myself, don’t be too afraid. If you’re destined to meet like this, it’s because you’re able to face him. Don’t try to flee, you would miss the most important meeting in your life. Meanwhile, the fool’s cap was drawing nearer. Face him, I repeated to myself. You’re about to find yourself in the presence of death: you have what’s needed to confront him. Speak to this man as you’d speak to anyone, and for heaven’s sake don’t try to put on clever airs, don’t slink off — in any case, he won’t let you.