The Decadent Book

The Decadent Book ‘What the fuck do they mean by ‘decadent’?’ ‘Mind your language, boy, I never brought you up in this way. I told you never to express your anger with that kind of gross words.’ ‘But what do they mean by ‘decadent’?’ This time the tears come. He looks at the picture on the front page of the Irish Times and cries. His mother stares straight into his watery eyes. ‘Listen, R., if you hadn’t written this book in the first place, you wouldn’t be pondering on the meaning of ‘decadent’ now.’ ‘Why are you so unfair to me?’ R. is ten years old again, wondering why his mother never supports him when he has problems or sorrows, why she stares blankly at him in the times of crises. ‘And you, dad, you never say anything; what do they mean by ‘decadent’?’ His voice is feebler and though big tears are rolling down his cheeks, he does not really cry. But the mental dam that retains the enraged river of his feelings, sadness, incomprehension and anger blended together in ashy waters shows severe chinks; the water, dripping from these chinks in slithery trickles, has accumulated at the feet of the dam and has formed a growing, irrevocable, brackish pond. ‘Son, your mother is right not to encourage you; you shouldn’t have written this bloody book.’ ‘Your language, husband! Ah, now I know where the foulness in R. comes from –’ ‘Oh leave me alone, Maggie, will you, just for a while.’ The clock strikes seven, producing a discordant ‘ding’ sound that makes R. start. ‘The news!’ announces R.’s mother, carefully and self-consciously drawing her chair back. She hates when the feet of a chair scrape against the tiled floor. She goes straight to the other end of the room, to the TV set hidden under a home-made patriotic flag. She piously lifts up the piece of dyed cloth, and turns the TV on with a febrile hand. The old machine groans for a second and then reluctantly opens its unique eye; the TV presenter speaks but only his lips are moving. No sound. R.’s mother slaps the machine, rather angrily, on the top. The presenter is thus allowed to finish his sentence: ‘…the decadent book.’ Quickly follows an image, taken from an amateur camera. It is the same image than on the front page of the newspaper that lays scattered in front of R.. It is the same image but animated, and the addition of the sound is like putting salt or vinegar on a nasty wound. Hundreds of people at the top of their ire are throwing books on a burning heap. These people shout and scream, they pass in front of the camera and their angry simian faces and mouths are stinging needles to R.. Some tear the books apart before throwing them insultingly on top of the flaming accumulation. Some dance around the reddish mass of embers. © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2005

The crackling fire is glowing red and white; some people are very close to it and are sweating; the cameraman stands back to get a wider angle. The phlogiston emanating from the holocaust blurs the shadows of people in the background. There is confusion in their orchestration. When such a spectacle excites people, they just retrieve their innermost roots, what they were when they lived in caves, ate roots and berries, sniffed his each other’s arse and venerated obscure and forlorn spirits instonated in some quartz or basalt. There are children, women and men of all ages, of all nationalities, of all religions and cultures. They’re all there to make sure the auto-da-fé is performed correctly, like in the olden days. R. cries bitterly. A stern-looking man with a white collar has just said the word: auto-da-fé, stressing on it as if stressing on its own right of perennity. The cameraman gets rid of the man and focuses on a child who sheepishly walks towards the pyre, holding a book between his thumb and index at the end of his extended arm, in ostentatious disgust. The child is not more than eight or nine, perhaps seven, his hair is as black as the deep waters of the Styx. The heat and the flames undulating threateningly keep him at a distance. He turns to his mother who screams at him, her purplish face convulsing with rage. Some veins can be seen on her neck as she yells something at her son. The child shivers, but with panic. He quickly presses the book with his two hands on his chest, his lips move – time folds on itself – in slow motion the boy heaves a profound sigh – time unfolds its wings then, rather awkwardly, the sad child tosses R.’s book into the bonfire, along with the other copies. These people are making an auto-da-fé with his book. They’re vultures even with him, thinks R.. He does not see his parents anymore, he does not see the pyre in the cyclopean eye – what the TV really represents – but he does fully realise what is happening. Some leaves are swirling around the flames that lick the cerulean sky. Even the sun of May is shadowed by the conflagration, by the thick black smoke spiralling under the soft breeze. Then the off-voice of the TV presenter almost bellows that such a scene has been reported and witnessed in many places all around the country. Clicking rapidly like animated slides, the same scene repeats itself – indefinitely, thinks R. – and every time the same angry faces hooting and dancing; every time thousands of copies of R.’s book being consumed in the unbearable violence of the auto-da-fé; every time the same word, ‘decadent’, being chanted; every time the clenched fist thrown at the sky beseeching a divine judgement. The repulsive show lasts more than twenty minutes, during which the invisible presenter very professionally utters almost no word. Twenty minutes, during which the same atrocious scene echoed itself, like a fractal after-image duplicated up to infinity. R.’s mother does not move – cannot move. His father’s face has dropped, but we can say he stands up heroically to the offence.

© Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2005

R. is devastated, his nether lip is trembling and his eyes are flooded with tears. He does not understand the world anymore. ‘You shouldn’t have written the book, son, you shouldn’t have’, mutters his father who cannot remove his eyes from the screen. He even puts a comforting hand on R.’s shoulder. The voice of his father is still echoing in his head, blended with the hideous images of ferocious and vengeful pyres all around the country. ‘I don’t understand,’ chokes R., never before this knot in his throat had been so strong, unswallowable, ‘it’s just a tale, a simple tale for kids…’ The dam collapses. The brackish pond is immediately swept away by the furious stream that carries huge slabs of the dam along. The shreds of R.’s mental dyke are drifting downstream like erected gravestones with no name and no epitaph on them. ‘A tale for kids?’ shrills his mother. ‘Did you actually dare write a tale for kids? ‘But what’s wrong with that?’ moans R.. ‘Oh don’t put on this plaintive tone with me, it has never worked and it will never work! You actually wrote a tale? Husband, I demand you say something! Banish your son, exile him or I’ll have to send the matter to more capable hands!’ ‘Maggie, stop at once!’ This time R.’s father is standing up and has found the courage to oppose his wife. Everything comes to him who waits. R.’s mother becomes white with anger. R. notices, through the cloud of vaporous tears, that her fists tighten; as far as he can remember he never saw his father rebelling nor his mother in such a revolted state. ‘Fine, husband, I am going away then,’ says she without slackening her teeth. ‘No, Maggie, I am going away. You stay here and take the responsibility of your education on this poor soul that’s lost enough to write kid’s tales and to conceal them from his own parents who could have guided him if they weren’t so…so…so miserable.” True to his words, R.’s father brutally drags the chair on the tiled floor – his wife winces – with a smile that says “I’m not sorry this time”, grabs his coat and walks over the threshold, never to come back. R.’s mother collapses on her knees on the cold floor, and rubs her arms crossed on her chest. What had happened to her son? She had strict principles, indeed; she had taught her only son the respect due to his parents, the love of Christ and of the Church, the love of his Country. She had been taught the same principles, but she had never used the stick her father had. Should she have? She had by far preferred the impact of words and feelings like guilt to inculcate her human law-abiding, church law-abiding dogmas. Her son really could not write tales for children, she had taught him how to behave decently, and how not to believe in such trifles and illusory demons. She could not have failed. She gazes at the pattern on the flag. © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2005

‘Mum?’ Even though R. is nearly thirty and has a good job as a journalist, he stays at home. His mother looks sternly at him, with this same air when he does something wrong. ‘Mother’, R. corrects, ‘don’t abandon me, I need you –’ ‘Oh no you don’t need me. You decided, against my will, to take this dratted job in this filthy newspaper; you decided, against my will, to write. You concealed from us what you were writing about, you concealed from us the fact that you were going to be published. You made your own choices boy, and look now where it has led you. You don’t need me. We have always treated you well, provided you with a shelter; we gave you love, respect, attention, food, patience, and you covered all this, as well as our names, with mud and contempt and hatred. Look at the face of this people! Boy, look at them! R.! They – are – burning – your – book!” R.’s mother is shaking him by the shoulders. She had stood up and had walked towards him without noticing it. R. is trying to bury his head in the maternal womb, but she holds his whole body back from hers. She does not know what to say to hurt her son. ‘This is a nightmare, I’ll wake up, I must wake up. This is unreal, people like tales, they don’t burn them, they read them to their children who enjoy them and dream about them’ says R. to himself or to no one in particular. ‘I just wanted to make people’s lives easier, not thinking about their everyday difficulties. I wanted them to turn to a simpler lifestyle, and I thought a tale would do this.’ But R. realises that people do not appreciate change, especially when it is a drastic change that gets them back to their childhood, because people want to forget, not to remember, their childhood. They all want to forget their childish, unattainable dreams, their juvenile expectations that can’t pay the bills and their tender beliefs that all ended up in the disillusioned frying pan. So when somebody puts enough pluck in a tale for any person to recall these bitter moments, not all of them treasure the courtesy. Today has become a different world. Today is full of hypocrisy and contempt, of selfishness and regrets. Furthermore, as people do not want to justify themselves for their actions, they pretend to be angry, and they get angry in mass. Because the mass never had to justify anything just as long as the mass agreed with itself. They burn because they dread to see what they have become. “I’ll wake up. I like tales because I am human, the mass is human therefore they like tales. God I must wake up, and quickly.’ But he is perfectly awake as he can feel the tears streaming down his face. The shattering of the dam allowed the river of his feelings to flood his entire mind and body – otherwise, where could all these tears come from? The TV is still showing a scene from an unknown place, the fire sitting in the middle of a street, near a bookshop. The cameraman is bumped into by the mob: the unstable image is trying to show the burning cover of the book. The front cover shows a little boy, the hero of the story, arms in arms with his friends the heron and the toad. R. chose the drawing himself, and © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2005

the editor had agreed. The editor had liked his story; he had never shown any sign of hesitation to publish the book. “A simple tale” – the camera remains a long time on the title. When was the last time a raging mob had burned a book? ‘It happens everywhere, all the time’ adds the enthusiastic off-voice of the TV presenter, ‘it seems that there’s a recrudescence of decadent books such as R.’s all over the world.’ People do not even know why they hate and burn the book; they hide behind words like ‘decadent’ because they do not understand the fantasy from which the story emerges and returns. People do not like fantasy, it frightens them out like the plague. Recently, R. has heard of an auto-da-fé in China, a Chinese female writer had been banned by the populace. Like Confucius’ works two thousand years ago, her book had also been called ‘decadent’ and been savagely burnt; but at the time China seemed so remote, so far away to R.. But now he is not in China, he is at home. He cannot understand his fellow compatriots. He ought to wake up. ‘Oh God, oh God, wake me up and tell me it was a nightmare.’ ‘R.?’ The shrill anxious voice of his mother wakes him up. He is covered with sweat, but he is in bed. He looks at his mother and embraces her heartily. She embraces him too. The confusion in his head is gone but for a faint drone; the dam is whole again. ‘Oh mum, I had such a bad dream! I dreamt I had written a tale for children but people were burning the book – my book – everywhere. They called it ‘decadent’, ‘amoral’, even ‘impious’. God it frightened me!’ R.’s mother relaxes her embrace and looks maternally at his sweaty face and neck: ‘You’ve been sleeping for so long, son. But don’t you worry, I’m here. I’ve always been there for you and will always be – unlike your father this Judas who has deserted us.’ She plunges her gaze into his dumbfounded eyes: ‘Son, the police is there to take you – be strong.’ She stands up, leaving a trough where she had been sitting and walks backwards to the opposite wall. Two men appear in the doorway of R.’s bedroom, and look at him severely. The first man in black is holding handcuffs ready to clasp round R.’s wrists – he can almost hear the ‘click’ already – ; the other is holding R.’s manuscript of the tale of a little boy arms in arms with his friends the heron and the toad, in a transparent plastic bag with the labels ‘Evidence’ and ‘Warning – Decadent’ written in red letters.

© Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2005