16

Corporal Raguse had long since left the military and indeed had never been a corporal. He could barely be said to have been a soldier at all. Too young for the First, he was almost too old for the Second World War. He had nevertheless acquired some nursing and mule-driving skills while waiting six months for an improbable Italian attack. He had used firearms only during the German occupation and very rarely against human targets. The whitewashed room where he put Gerfaut after fetching him with his mule was oddly decorated with a portrait of Stalin and one of Louis Pasteur (the latter, in reality, being a photograph of Sacha Guitry playing Pasteur in an old film). Gerfaut spent a week in bed in that room, reading the Vermot Almanac, Maurice Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, and the startling autobiography of one Father Bourbaki, missionary and aviator. Gerfaut’s imagination was especially piqued by the part of this last work wherein the bloodthirsty cleric, between two bouts of boche-killing, tried to solve a problem concerning his pennant. A tricolor adorned by the sacred heart of Christ, this pennant was continually ripping on account of the speed of the black-beetle-cum-warrior’s airplane, to whose bracing wire the thing was attached. Bourbaki eventually solved his problem by laminating the pennant in Muscovy glass. The remainder of the book, thronged by “leprous negroes,” was tedious in the extreme.

Raguse had put Gerfaut’s foot in plaster, and for the first few days he brought food to his bedside: in the morning, light coffee, fresh cheese, and a rotgut brandy that the former male nurse distilled himself from overripe fruit, notably pears and quinces; and, for both lunch and dinner, soup and bread, dried sausage with great blotches of rancid fat, cheese, sometimes mackerel in white wine from a long narrow can, and an acidic, light-colored red wine.

“You have to eat, Sorel,” the Corporal would tell him. “Have to get your strength back. Your tissues have to repair themselves.”

Before long, Gerfaut was able to hobble from his bedroom to the table of the main room. The Raguse house, built into the side of a hill away from the village, had mortarless stone walls and a slate roof. Inside, the walls were covered with a mud-andsand roughcast and whitewashed. Large blocks of granite rested on the roof to ensure that the slates didn’t fly off in a high wind. Properly speaking, it was a single-story house, but because of its hillside situation there was space beneath for a combination cellar and stable opening over the downslope. Here Raguse kept his bottles, his provisions, his still, and his mule. Above were the main room, with a very large fireplace and a basalt sink, and two bedrooms. The rooms had small windows with small panes and small wooden shutters with heart-shaped cutouts.

“I knew right away you weren’t a real vagrant,” said Raguse, his mouth full of cheese, pouring them both wine. They had just sat down to lunch. The massive table was thickly overlain with dirt. Glowing embers sputtered in the fireplace. An unkempt fair beard now covered Gerfaut’s lower face. His injured foot was still weak. The wound on his scalp had healed, but a stripe of white would mark the spot amid Gerfaut’s otherwise blond hair for the rest of his life.

“I dumped my wife. Yes, that’s it—that’s what I did.”

“I’m not asking you anything. Come with me.”

His mouth still full of cheese, his felt hat on his head, the old man got to his feet with a grunt, closed his Opinel knife with a guillotine-like snap, and thrust it into his jacket pocket. He then went toward his bedroom. At a loss for words, Gerfaut got up too and quickly drained his glass.

“Can you shoot, Sorel?”

“What?”

“Shoot,” repeated Raguse, disappearing into his room.

Gerfaut followed him. It was the first time he had set foot in Raguse’s room, which scarcely differed from his own. Old furniture, metal bedstead—just the same. A post-office calendar offered a nighttime view of the Champs-Elysées. On a shelf stood a frame aerial for a radio receiver—though no radio was to be seen anywhere in the place. It incorporated a hideously tinted portrait of Martine Carol. There was a large chest. A wardrobe. And a gun rack holding a double-barreled Falcor, a Charlin, and a Weatherby Mark V rifle with Imperial sights. Raguse took down the Weatherby.

“Well, we’ll just see.”

“I’m not some kind of crook on the run, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I know that, son.”

Raguse had opened the chest and taken out ammunition, which he was now loading into the weapon. This done, he plunged his hand back into the chest, where folded fabrics could be seen, along with rusty tins, assorted boxes, tools, and the like. He produced a pair of binoculars. The two men left the room, then the house. Gerfaut limped along with his plaster. The sunshine made him dizzy. Raguse took a few steps, then indicated the grassy slope that rose behind the house toward the forest above. He narrowed his dark eyes, which all but disappeared in the folds of flesh. He looked irritable now, pained.

“There has to be an empty green-pea can on a stick about a hundred meters up there. Can you see it, young fellow?”

“No. Oh, wait a second. Yes, maybe.”

Raguse passed the gun to Gerfaut. “Make sure there’s nobody about and take a shot at it.”

The old man brought the glasses up to his eyes, paying no further attention to Gerfaut. Far from comfortable in his role, Gerfaut awkwardly fitted the weapon into his shoulder. In the sights, once he had properly brought them to bear, he could see his target clearly. He aimed as best he could. When he pressed the trigger nothing happened; he had omitted to release the safety. He released it and tried again. The gun went off, but he missed the can and couldn’t even see a point of impact.

“Ridiculous,” declared Raguse without lowering the binoculars. “Imagine you’re shooting at something you want to hit, young fellow. An animal, whatever you want. A guy.”

Gerfaut pulled back the bolt, his gaze fixed on the ground, and accidentally ejected a new cartridge. Then he took aim again carefully, held his breath, and blew a large hole in the green-pea can at a hundred meters.

They went back to the house.

“A very fine gun,” said Gerfaut politely, handing the Weatherby back to the old man so he could clean it and put it back in its place.

“You said it!” cried the old man. “It’s worth its weight in gold. A German it was that gave it to me, twelve years ago. I saved his life, more or less. A hunter. I found him with a leg bust to blazes—a bit like you, but it was higher up.”

“I’m going to have to leave here soon.”

Raguse looked at Gerfaut sharply.

“I’m not looking for payment. I have everything I need. My granddaughter sends me money every month, and I don’t even spend it all. I put it in the savings bank in Saint-Jean. I don’t need a thing. If what you’re thinking, young fellow, is that you have to go off and earn money just to pay me for my trouble, you can think again.”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life here.”

“Till I take the plaster off, you’re as well off here as anywhere. Then, if this place is not to your liking.…”

“Not at all,” Gerfaut hastened to reply. “I like it fine here.”

“You can help out,” said Raguse with enthusiasm. “Have you ever hunted?”

Gerfaut shook his head. Raguse returned the Weatherby to the gun rack and closed his chest. They went back into the main room.

“Hunting is my only pleasure,” said Raguse, looking sly and boyish now. “The National Forest of La Vanoise can kiss my ass,” he declared contentedly. “But I can’t see clearly anymore. Once I get that plaster off, perhaps you’ll help me. We can go hunting together, and you can be my extra pair of eyes, as you might say.”

“Why not?” answered Gerfaut with an affable smile—was it a derisive smile or a plain dumb smile? “Why not? I’m no use anymore. I’m nowhere. Lost. I might as well be someone’s extra pair of eyes.”

That night Gerfaut had nightmares with Béa and the girls in them, and the two killers in their red car, and Baron Frankenstein transporting glass jars filled with extra pairs of eyes.

At the beginning of September, Gerfaut’s plaster started falling apart of its own accord. Raguse finished the job. Gerfaut was greatly relieved to be able at last to scratch his foot. He still limped a little, and the old man muttered that it would never straighten itself out, and Gerfaut said that he could care less. Then Raguse rooted in his old chest and began poring over greasy old manuals with bindings crumbling away by themselves. They had anatomical drawings of men with mustaches. The Corporal gave Gerfaut an exercise program to be followed every day in order to reduce his limp and, above all, to obviate any possible misalignment of the spinal cord or of other bones.

Gerfaut made himself useful by running little errands in the village; he would pick up tobacco, for instance, or Riz la Croix cigarette papers, or lighter fluid when the need arose. Occasionally, at the café-tabac, he would glance through the regional paper, Le Dauphiné Libéré, to see what was happening in the world. Sporting events took up as much space as ever. Third World riots, famines, floods, epidemics, assassinations, palace revolutions, and local wars still followed one another in quick succession. In the West the economy was not working well, mental illness was rife, and social classes were still locked in struggle. The Pope deplored the unrestrained hedonism of the age.

After a brief period of natural curiosity, the villagers, old for the most part and less numerous than the houses, were content to accept a few half-truths and stopped asking Gerfaut questions. In the past, Corporal Raguse had taken in injured animals, lodged stray hikers, and allowed British campers to pitch tents in the meadow behind his house. Gerfaut seemed like just another of his broken wings, a taciturn semi-vagrant, a bit simple but serviceable enough, who gave the old man a hand. He even helped the local police shove their vehicle out of the mud one time when they had ventured this far up the mountainside during an early-autumn rainstorm. On another occasion, he had paid for a round of drinks at the café-tabac, then told his troubles: his wife had left him; he had once been a manager in a big firm, but he had left everything behind—just as a lot of people did, so it was said, in America: they become dropahoutes.

“A dropahoute, yes, that’s it!” said Gerfaut. “That’s me exactly! Cheers, everybody!” And he emptied his glass.

When fall came, Raguse began getting Gerfaut used to long mountain walks. These became longer and longer, and after a few weeks the two men took guns with them and the walks turned into hunting trips.

Usually, they rambled in the wooded area. From time to time, they would bag game birds: partridge, plover, hazel grouse, capercaillie, or else a squirrel or hare. Raguse, whose eyesight had become really poor, missed everything he took aim at. After a time, he virtually gave up shooting altogether and let Gerfaut take over.

One day in late October, with the Weatherby, Gerfaut and Raguse climbed higher than they ever had before. There had been a few snowfalls, then milder weather had returned. They crossed the forest and went up through the mountain pastures with their bilberry patches and clumps of rhododendrons. Granite crags and snowy hillocks soon defined their whole horizon. The two men followed the rock-strewn path upward. The old man seemed delighted. Gerfaut’s feelings were amorphous. Indeed, for as long as he had been on the mountainside he had remained in a kind of stupor. At this moment, he contemplated the scenery without finding it either beautiful or ugly; he felt his bad leg protest but gave no thought to pausing; sweat trickled down his back and over his rib cage, the wind raked his face, but he paid these things no mind.

In mid-afternoon they halted at a stone refuge with wooden partitions, a hearth, and charcoal inscriptions on the rock of the interior walls; hikers had clearly wanted to leave a trace of their visit to a place so high above sea level. Gerfaut felt no such compulsion. They carried on, and an hour later Raguse, whose enfeebled vision the Weatherby’s sights made up for quite effectively, succeeded for once in bringing down a horned animal at some four hundred meters. Whether a chamois or an ibex Gerfaut had no idea, for he didn’t know the difference; it might as well have been an antelope or a snail—he didn’t give a damn. They went to retrieve the carcass and spelled each other dragging it downhill. By the time they got home, it was darkest night. Raguse was producing an endless stream of taunts and obscenities directed at the National Forest of La Vanoise and its gamekeepers. Gerfaut never did try to discover the motive for the old man’s animus.

During the night they cut up their prize. They salted quarters. The hide was set aside, as was the halved head. In the days following, Raguse set about tanning the one and stuffing the other.

“I’ll sell them to idiots. They can stick them in their drawing rooms.”

“What in God’s name am I doing here?” asked Gerfaut irritably. “Can you please tell me that?” He had just downed several healthy tots of fruit brandy; these days he was drinking more and more heavily. “I spend my time doing sweet fuck-all.”

“Look here, Sorel. You can leave, you know. Any time you want. You’re a free man.”

“Yes,” said Gerfaut, “but it’s the same shit everywhere.”

By and large, though, Gerfaut got on pretty well with the old man. They went on more expeditions. On other days, and more and more often now that the cattle had come down from the Alpine pastures and been returned to their cowsheds, Raguse was called on for veterinary help, and Gerfaut would go along to give him a hand, hold the lamp, and the like. He learned how to grasp a cow’s horns and force her head down so that Raguse could remove a foreign body from the beast’s eye, which he did with the help of a butter-soaked feather or sometimes merely by flinging powdered sugar into the eye, causing it to water so violently that the irritant was washed out. This was just about all Gerfaut learned.

In early April, with the cold and the bad weather hanging on, a night came when Raguse, after tying one on, caught a wicked cold. Around midnight he called for Gerfaut and announced that he was going to die. Being three sheets to the wind himself, Gerfaut took this as a joke. But, when dawn came, Raguse was dead.