The Death of Marlon Brando Page 5

  On the road, he walked – and already I’d noticed that he acted like a child – with a stick in his hand, hitting it off stones, like only little kids do: looking down with his shoulders rounded.

  I think this is why we had trouble understanding what he was saying. Because of his head tucked into his shoulders, but it was also in part because of his choice of words. For example, he kept saying Windsor. He kept saying that he had relatives in Windsor; people lived there like we live in the city, but who spoke English all the time, always ready is what he kept saying. And without knowing it, he had begun humiliating me. He had said: “There’s not nothin’ but treeless fields around these parts…” and then he stopped talking. We’d arrived at the house.

  In my composition, in order to not be too direct while speaking about the monster, I didn’t write:

  He uses words like netteyer (nettoyer), caltron (carton) and bacul (palonnier).[8] To say the word fourchette (fork), he says something that sounds like couchette, and now he shows that he’s still hungry by raising his dish and saying: “Huh…” He also says, like English speakers say sometimes in French: my mine, you yours, count one, twos, threes…. He invented the verb arvenir – he says: “J’arviens,”[9] meaning, I’m coming – and sometimes, he stutters, but most often, he doesn’t say anything when there are people around.

  In my composition, still about the Ornithorhynchus, I made a silly mistake because I shouldn’t have written in my plan:

  He isn’t tall, stocky and solid on his feet; has dentures – two; one up top and one on the bottom – a gift for walking with his fly open, blowing his dirty nose on his sleeve, spying, knowing everything and making fun sometimes.

  This other sentence, too:

  He says words in English, words in French and other words that I don’t know. He continues on his way, hits stones with his stick and blows his dirty nose on his sleeve…

  In June, while reading the plan for my summer homework assignment, my teacher pointed this out: “Do you really believe that an Ornithorhynchus wears a shirt with sleeves?” I said: “I think so…”

  She raised her horn-rimmed glasses.

  I’ve already mentioned this: my teacher is part of that percentage of teachers that speak in order to say nothing. As for me, I’m becoming a specialist in historical inventions. Or an inventor of tales. You’ll understand: the more we go on, the more I have difficulty saying things directly. The further I advance in my composition, the more I put on masks and the more I create detours and set up smokescreens.

  After mass, he said: “I got the saddle outta the hangar.”

  I said: “Dad, I want to go with you.”

  He said: “Yer gonna like it. We’re gonna get up on the bay mare.

  I said: “I want to go to town today.”

  And he said, while raising his voice so that it would be heard clearly:

  “The animal isn’t well-trained an’ I don’t think I’m capable a grabbin’ it all by myself. I’d need a helper. When the horse is scared, by nothin’ but a guy, it can take the whole afternoon to be runnin’ after it.” And then he stopped talking. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and then after said: “When we go back down, I’ll put the saddle on it. Ya can get up on top…” And while saying this, he was looking at my father as if I didn’t count in the end.

  There was a moment, something like a moment of silence, a moment and I couldn’t undo it. There was another moment that arose due to an irrational fear, a moment that I had to surrender to because I didn’t know what was going to happen.

  Father took advantage of it to say: “I don’t know what time I’m going to be back at home. Sometimes, it takes a long time, that there business. Ya’d be better to stay here and go for a ride…without that, he won’t be able to bring it back all alone. There’s nothing fun for ya in town. Usually, ya like that, going for a ride?… With me you’re gonna do nothing but wait.” He then added: “Right… I gotta go. If ya don’t want to go riding, ya’ll have to go down with the others that are going to spread manure. Right!… I gotta go.”

  The other one, he said: “C’mon on over here right away. Put on yer boots. The grass is maybe still wet.” He said: “Brin’ me my umbrella, then look under the dresser in my room… There’s gotta be some candies. Bring ’em to me.”

  When my father says: “I gotta go” this is always the last sentence that he pronounces, and this even if he hasn’t said a lot before. And this even if there’s still something you still have to say. Past experience tells me that when he says this, you know the debate is over. Most often, you stay there with words in your mouth, with so many words filling your mouth that they get mixed up and stuck when trying to get out.

  He put on his galoshes, his jacket and asked for his wallet. Then, he got into the Ford truck.

  My father even had a title in my story and it’s something like “The Abandoner.” I forgot. Even if I’m the one who gave him this title, as with the Shadows and the Ornithorhynchus, there’s a lot. What I need is a glossary or even another dictionary about the same size, a “pocket dictionary” that I could take everywhere or, better still, something that would have my own pages in it and that I could add to my Petit Larousse Illustré. Because, that’s the one that I like the most.

  That’s where I find words, pictures and maps; maps of cities, too… and machines that they take apart in it, right in front of my eyes. And photos – if I know all about the things on a film set, that’s why – portraits and other information on movies. It’s thick and full of marvellous things. At nighttime sometimes, I sleep with my head laid on it, for real.

  I put on my boots and went into his room to get the chocolate bar that he’d left there. People can always get me to do things that I don’t want to do, but I don’t do it gladly …that’s for sure. At the Grande Montée, I kept far from him. And the rest of the way, I walked at a good distance as if he were dirty and stunk. This is also partly the case.

  Too much contact with animals made it so that he smelled bad. He had bad breath, and I notice this when he attempts to play with me. Most of the time, I refuse because I find he smells so bad, that his dentures are so dirty, and that his nose runs so much and everything.

  It’s true, though, that I often let myself get tricked and end up running right into the walls of my fishbowl. I’ll admit this, but also know that I can resist, too, and get my own back. People always get me, okay, but I’m a fish that bites and you don’t get me with impunity, as I have learned to say. And because I find that this is a fine word, impunity, I repeat it in my head, as if it were a song that had only one word. While walking: “impunity, impunity…”

  I murmur the word when I find myself cornered by him, by his logic which shuts me up, and makes me his victim, albeit still rebellious. I chant it, too, on the way to school, when thinking about being in composition class and when I’ve applied myself to something and then failed at it. They didn’t ask me my opinion, just like when there’s an attacker, first of all, and then right away after, his witness. I believe that the witness is the most important of the two, when it comes down to it. Because he’s there when I come undone; it’s when he’s present that I always lose. I know that we shouldn’t say always, but… My father, once again, played his role as the witness and became an accomplice to the monster. And for me, this is the most important thing. Witness – sometimes it can be a synonym for Abandoner.

  In composition class, I didn’t write:

  I know now that the enemy has a double.

  Could it be that a father uses certain expressions deliberately to annoy his son? “The youngest of the boys,” as he’s enjoyed saying sometimes, which is an expression that embarrasses me because, until now, he’s done all he can so that this expression harms me. When he repeats this short phrase, which in itself is nothing, it’s like I was hearing “the smallest,” “the silliest,” the “most incapable” of them all. It’s like, because those words come from the Abandoner, that they were nastier, crueler o
r had a meaning other than the one that the dictionary gives. I don’t know anymore.

  I didn’t write this either, because it’s too serious.

  Could it be that a father is bad for his child? Could it be, as I’ve come to notice, that he’s an enemy spy behind my lines; undermining my plans, revealing my strategies and only pretending when saying that I can count on him? How can you tell or know? It’s a war and who do you trust when you’re my age? All I can do today is question the composition that I’m doing. How is it that the enemy, coming back up the river, is of my race and that the crime he’s readying himself to commit is permitted by Washington? My father, could you not have stopped the Ornithorhynchus before he committed the irreparable?

  That Sunday, he walked slowly; sometimes if he stopped, I did the same thing. And if the pause lasted too long, I’d step off the dirt trail right then and there and head out on a side path. After, he’d start off again, shouting sometimes: “Come”… and I didn’t answer him. I kept my head down, slowed up and dragged my hand in the water of the reservoir. This was at the Grande Montée. The alcove, where we put the bulls out to pasture and where you find cherry trees.

  I was wearing boots, but the dew had been there for a long time and the colour of the land was beautiful, I must say. The weather was a bit muggy, but just a bit, and if I had known these days better, I’d have said that the weather was stormy. I didn’t dare, however; you don’t know this being a child. Not me, at least, not yet in any case; I only had suspicions with respect to things. As for him, he was going up the hill in the dry grass with his golf umbrella on his shoulder. There were a few clouds, but no more than that. The land was dusty and you could hardly distinguish the furrows left by the Shadows who had gone to spread manure early in the morning.

  The weather was stormy, so much so that the boots I put on to protect me from the dew will help protect me against the rain, which will turn the trail into a hot-watered, muddy river. And we didn’t know this. We were making our way up, him about two hundred feet ahead of me; me behind, keeping this distance as we passed by the enclosed pastures. We were one behind the other, like and exactly like, when he had newly arrived at our place and was the one who would come get me at the barbershop in the village.

  I’d spent all afternoon waiting to get my hair cut and then after, to be picked up. Out of the bay window that gives onto the main street, he was the one I saw coming. I remember he entered with his boots on, all sweaty, because it was summer, and that he said to the barber, because he never spoke directly to me:

  “His mother was worried an’ then ask’d that I get him…” and I also remember that I’d been happy. Because at the time, he was still “the good innocent one who knew how to do everything,” as Dad had said, which was what we were all thinking. And this, so much so, as he knew how to be helpful and because he put so much heart into his work.

  It hadn’t been long since he’d been living with us and he was generous. I remember that for me, he always had candies and that he called them indifferently “candies,” whether they were sweets, Popeye cigarettes or chocolates. He said “candies” and the others, my brothers and sisters, the ones that were going to be called the Shadows, they laughed. This lasted some time. After, when they got used to it, they made as if they didn’t hear him. As I’ve already said: I’m the only one who seems surprised by the way he talks.

  He was the one who had come to get me in the village and we’d left one after the other because we were uncomfortable talking; hands in our pockets. And me, I dragged my feet just like him; one after the other, too, because the cars go fast, because they’re in a rush on the gravel road. It was summer. The real one, the hot one, with an afternoon sun that was beating down on my freshly shaven neck. We were making our way up. I don’t know anymore if it was because of the sun or because of the steepness of the path, but the cologne that the barber put on me was getting to me… Anymore, and I wouldn’t have been able to hear the buzz of the flies and wasps that were flying around me. On our way up, from one parcel of land to another, one farm to another, meeting a tractor sometimes with someone we knew in it or a car that was going fast with a driver that we didn’t know. We were passing by the enclosed pastures and leaving the village behind us with the church’s reflection in the river.

  Upon arriving at the first gate to our land, he had said: “Look, there’s a car that was park’d there last night. Do ya know what they stopp’d there for, right there, ya know in the open field?”…but I hadn’t understood. I’ve already said: it was a few years ago. He was still new at our place and he was still alright with me, even when there wasn’t anyone watching us.

  That there Sunday, at first there was the Grande Montée, the one which is just behind our house, and then, the farm buildings. It’s perhaps the most abrupt one in all my father’s land and which, like an initiation, once you’ve gone through it, provides you with a spectacular view of the land that’s sometimes hilly, sometimes flat and all cut up by the rivers, the fields, the ravines and the trees.

  In winter, we use our toboggans and slide down the Grande Montée.

  After, there was the Peupliers Cassés, which is a nice flat part that, in time, we learned to exploit. There, he stopped, thinking for a moment that I was going to catch up with him, but I stopped, too.

  He waited a few minutes, I don’t know how long, turned around and then continued on. In the field, like a tree. I walked on. He didn’t say anything and sometimes turned his head, maybe just to check if I was still behind. Maybe, and that’s what I thought, just to show me that he was thinking about me. We kept going up.

  Once at Timothy-en-bas – a funny piece of land made up of two parts in which one makes up a plateau in terms of the other – I went by the spring and into the barn. This is where we store the tools and equipment during winter and a little bit of hay when we notice that there’s no more room in the stable and that we have to separate the stocks of food.

  It was a building with walls made of grey planks, for the most part, that were sort of wet-like. Its roof had been sealed and solid in its day, but was now full of holes because of missing tiles, ripped off by the wind. Once there, I went around him, at least ten feet from him perhaps, without turning my head. It was terribly quiet all around.

  After the barn, there’s Tim-en-haut, which is a strip of land much longer than it is wide. It’s situated between a coulee stretching out towards the summer pastures and the neighbours’ fields and closed off by a fence. Suddenly, a cooler wind, you’d say, started to blow and you could see its direction in the grass. The word that came to mind was “gust,”[10] but I knew that this wasn’t the correct word for that particular type of wind. I was disappointed.

  Would I ever like to be in the know in terms of the weather and the seasons. Is it going to rain? Is it going to be nice out? Will the mounds of oats be dry, too? Those are the questions that I’d like answers to. This, and to know all the words having to do with the land and their precise meaning.

  Like a groundhog, I’d also like to know if the spring will go by quickly or not, and like the wasps, be able to foresee the amount of snow for an entire winter. I’m interested in this type of thing.

  I’d gotten a little farther than the barn when I heard something that sounded like a burp. He was following me:

  He was walking at some fifty feet from me and tried to catch me… I ran.

  After, it’s Chez Rose, which is also a peculiar piece of land because it’s all lacey. It has ravines all along it and overflows like a chocolate stain in the sun. It’s a bubble seeking to burst forth, which folds back on itself, and that sometimes manages to break through and there’s a leak. Chez Rose, that’s the way it is. It’s a vast chocolate stain – a parcel trying to get away in the grass. From everywhere, whether it be towards the forest or between the ravines, there are points sticking out that stretch like tongues getting pointier, little by little.

  That’s Chez Rose and it’s also the end of the land up top. Af
ter that, to stay on our land, you’d need to make a fork in the road, go left and go back from where we started in order to get back into the summer pastures.

  I took the path that goes towards Clos-à-Julie and he followed me, silently, while respecting the distance I’d established and looking around if I turned my head to see him. He was walking with his back arched, hanging onto the saddle perched on his shoulder, and was taking fast, little steps, and too many of them, as if in a rush to get it over with. He was looking up into the sky while making faces, as if he’d wanted to show me there would be rain and the land would become muddy and that we didn’t have any time to waste, either. He stayed like that the whole way along. Walking with his red and white umbrella, and waiting for the storm.

  Under a tree, the little horse waited. This was no doubt due to habit, as the afternoon air, which had become cooler, didn’t warrant the wait. We were going to put the halter around it.

  He said: “Can ya keep yerself still while I put the saddle on ya?”

  He said: “Yer quite plump. She’s good here. There was tons of hay. Do ya wanna get up? Don’t get goin’ away there, mon voleur…”

  He walked around the mare as if he were interested in her and kept talking either to me or the horse, it didn’t matter. He said: “My li’l Nouère…yer time’s up. We’re gonna look after ya.”[11]

  He said: “Ya ain’t that skittish. I won’t hurt ya.”

  He put the bridal over the halter, girthed the beast and was doing all sorts of manoeuvres just like you do when rigging up a boat. The horse was calm, more than I’d first imagined it to be. It let him do his thing without rearing up and accepted its loss of freedom, as if it had been waiting for just that. Foxes. Foxes.

  He said: “Yer quite plump, my love.”

  He said: “Don’t get goin’… I ain’t gonna hurt ya. Let go a bit. It won’t be long.”