A Fable

‘Ah yes,’ the division commander said. He drank and returned the flask; he said, ‘Thanks,’ and made a motion, but before he could complete it the aide, who had been in his military family since he got his first brigadier’s star, had already produced a handkerchief, immaculate and laundered, still folded as the iron pressed it. ‘Thanks,’ the division commander said again, taking the handkerchief and wiping his moustache, and then stood again, the handerchief open now in his hand, blinking rapidly and painfully. Then he said, simply and distinctly: ‘Enough of this.’

‘General?’ the aide said.

‘Eh? What?’ the division commander said. Then he was blinking again, steadily though not painfully now, not really fast. ‘Well——’ he said. He turned.

‘Shall I come too?’ the aide said.

‘No no,’ the division commander said, already walking on. ‘You stay here. They may need you. There might be something else.…’ his voice not fading but simply ceasing, already chop-striding again, virile and impregnable, the gunners now standing along the crest of the opposite escarpment as he approached, carrying the loose handkerchief in his hand as though bearing under orders a flag of truce of which he himself was inflexibly ashamed and grieved. The major saluted him. He returned it and got into the car. It moved at once; the driver had already turned it around. The boche crash was not far; soon they reached it. ‘Stop here,’ he said. He got out. ‘Drive on. I’ll overtake you in a moment;’ not even waiting for the car to move but already climbing the bank into the cordite-blasted weeds, still carrying the handkerchief. This was the place; he had marked it, though naturally his sudden advent would have alarmed the tiny beast. But it would still be here; by squatting and hunting patiently enough, parting the weed-stems gently enough, he could probably see it in the Pyrenean grass, crouching and unterrified, merely waiting for him to become still, resume the solitude which was his origin and his ancestry and his birthright, the Sisters—the Father himself when he would arrive with his inconsolable dedicated eyes and his hands gentle enough but sonless, which had never caressed nor struck in anger and love and fear and hope and pride, boy’s flesh sprung from his flesh and bearing his immortality in the same intolerant love and hope and pride, wiser perhaps than the Sisters were, less tender than they were tender, but no less compassionate, knowing nothing as the Sisters knew nothing too—saying: ‘The Mother of Christ, the Mother of all, is your mother;’ not enough, because he didn’t want the mother of all nor the mother of Christ either: he wanted the mother of One; only necessary to become still and wait until the tiny creature was accustomed to his sudden advent, then the first sound would come, tentative, brief: a rising, almost an interrogative inflection, almost a test as if to learn if he were really there and ready; then he would whisper the one word against the noon-fierce stone under his face: and he had been right: not the Pyrenean cicada of course, but certainly its northern sister, the miniature sound insistent and impersonal and constant and unobtrusive, steadfast somewhere among the jumble of rusted engine and guns and blackened wires and charred sticks—a purring sound such as he imagined might be made by the sleeping untoothed mouth itself around the sleeping nipple.

His divisional headquarters was what its owner called his country house, built by a man who had made several millions on the Paris Bourse and returned to the district of his birth to install an Argentine mistress, establishing not only the symbol and monument, but bringing the proof of his success back to the scene of his childhood and youth, his I-told-you-so to the elders, mayor and doctor and advocate and judge, who had said he would never amount to anything; and who was well served not only in his patriotism but in his devotion too when the military demanded the use of it, since the Argentine had quitted Paris only under pressure in the first place.