“Herbart has made his life into a blank sheet, but it has taken everything
he had. He will die seated in front of his blank sheet.” Indeed, according to
Jean-Luc Moreau, from which I take this quote about Pierre Herbart, he did die
a pauper, and a sick man as well. So poor he was buried in a common grave. Not
the ending one would have predicted for a man who was Gide’s secretary in the
1930s, an editor of a famous communist magazine in Moscow for a time, an
agitator in the colony of Vietnam, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a
resistor in occupied France.
He’s not well known. I came across this story from the late
twenties, when Marxism was becoming Sur-marxism, and I thought that it was a
rather wonderful enigma. A tale torn from a dream. So I translated it.
Miriflores
One evening in a little
village in Hungary I witness a strange show put on by a showman with a donkey
in the village square. He beat a drum. I easily recognized in this scene one of
the images in Madame de Segur’s “Memoires of a donkey”, which showed Miriflore,
the intelligent ass, his master and the latter’s family. I couldn’t be
mistaken. The son had exactly the stupid air that Madame de Segur lent to our
village obscurities. The little slattern girls were clothed in hoop skirts and
the boys wore baggy pants and close fitting shirts The papas and mamas were walking
up and down, ignoring the donkey man, and Cadichan – Segur’s donkey – absorbed the
whole thing through its evil eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, as I expected some
show of this kind this evening.. I following the doing with a certain
curiosity, then retired back to my room in the inn, although not without a
certain trepidation brought on by my reading the news of an innkeeper who had
recently been arrested for killing foreign tourists in order to make a paté
much appreciated by his customers. Nevertheless, I fell asleep, only to wake
myself up in the middle of the night murmuring: “I’m in Hungary.” Upon which I
became sad. What to do? I decided that the next day I would find the donkey man
and attach myself to his destiny. “He would certainly let me if I gave him a
little money”, I thought. “And besides, I can do a few card tricks to follow
the end of his routine.” This project returned to my mind when the servant brought
me my cup of coffee in the morning. I decided not to argue with it. In the
dining room I asked for the innkeeper and then asked him how I could find the
place where I could meet up with the donkey man.
- What donkey man? The man
asked.
- The one who was there
yesterday. In the square.
The innkeeper took a long look
at me and , without replying, went across the room to consult with his wife.
Sometimes he glanced over at me and I understood that he had decided I was
crazy. That could be dangerous. Thus I decided to get out of there with a
feigned indifference. I haled a passing carriage.
- I will give you a one
hundred franc tip if you get me to Cassal in half an hour.
The horses raced like the
wind. We passed the last house in the village when a man came out of the stable
and took off in pursuit of us. I recognized the donkey man. He ran as fast as
he could, signalling to us. I watched him from a little porthole cut into the
roof of the cart. He was manifestly losing ground. At a road crossing he went
down the wrong path and continued running in the opposite direction. I was
saved.
The coachman turned to me. “We never show that we see him”, he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment