The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman Read online

  The next day, at the Depot, he was unable to sort the post with his usual ease. He missed the target every second time, so he had to resign himself to proceeding in the conventional way. He was twenty minutes late setting off and hoped the morning air would buck him up, but he could feel his energy fading after walking just three miserable kilometres. It was even worse when he had to pit himself against the rue des Hêtres staircases: he’d merely got to the twenty-fourth one when he needed to stop to take a breather, and only reached the end of the street by a violent effort of will, after he’d allowed himself as many as six breaks. What was happening to him? Was he coming down with the flu?

  When he arrived at the Madelinot, he found he had no appetite whatsoever, he who normally wolfed down his food, and ordered only vegetable soup, which he didn’t even finish. He didn’t bother getting out his calligraphy tools – he didn’t feel like it – and immediately continued his round to make up for lost time. He was in an unusual state of mental confusion. Inattentive, preoccupied with he wasn’t quite sure what, he crossed an intersection at a red light and came within an inch of being knocked over by a car. But he’d only escaped Charybdis to run into Scylla: soon after, as he dropped some advertising flyers into the letterbox of a house, Bilodo was attacked by a dog on a chain. The one-eyed animal, actually called Polyphemus according to the sign on its kennel, bit him viciously in his right calf and would only let go when its master, who’d been alerted by the howls, whacked it with a shovel. That’s what happened when the gods were against you.

  * * *

  By the time the business with the dog had been dealt with – the anti-rabies vaccine administered and Bilodo’s wound dressed and bandaged after he’d spent six hours at the emergency department – when that wretched odyssey had finally ended, it was late. On his way home in a taxi, Bilodo felt like doling out a few good whacks with a shovel, too. The sharp shooting pains in his leg only intensified his fury. He wanted to rebel, but what could he possibly do against the curse that had been stalking him this whole dreadful day where everything was going wrong? Once home, he bolted the door of his cocoon and hobbled up and down the living room in search of an outlet for his anger. He turned on the computer and started venting his rage on the wicked insurgents of the planet Xion. Maltreating his console, he massacred hordes of tentacular creatures, reached the game’s higher level, achieved a record score, but didn’t succeed in soothing the rage that twisted his guts.

  Eventually he went to bed, dead tired, and found a bit of peace by gazing at Ségolène’s picture. He imagined the lovely Guadeloupean woman opening her letterbox every morning, hoping to spot that reply from Grandpré, which never came. He briefly thought he might write to her to let her know her penfriend had passed away, but he couldn’t do that of course – it would have meant betraying himself, admitting he’d been guilty of an indiscretion. How long would Ségolène wait, he wondered, before giving up?

  * * *

  It happened during the thunderstorm, on rue des Hêtres, right after the accident, but instead of Grandpré, it was Ségolène who lay helpless on the wet asphalt. She was covered with blood, dying. The young woman held out a trembling hand to Bilodo, implored him not to forget her… and he woke with a start, gasping for breath, chilled to the bone. He had trouble reconnecting with reality because the nightmare lingered, kept forcing its morbid images on him. Anxious to dispel the dread that gripped him, Bilodo spread Ségolène’s haiku around him to create a defensive circle against the crawling darkness. He began reading them out loud, like so many protective incantations, but it only deepened his distress because the words refused to generate the music he expected: as soon as they were uttered, the night soaked them up, and the comforting visions they should have produced failed to appear. The haiku proved to be sterile all of a sudden. With their neatly arranged lines on their single sheets like withered flowers in a herbarium, they were lifeless, merely exuded a faded scent.

  Bilodo shook the pages, hoping to reactivate the magic, but only managed to crumple them. Even Ségolène’s words let him down. And at that moment, for the first time in his life, really the very first time, he felt loneliness swooping down on him. It was like a huge wave submerging him, sending him down to the very depths of himself, driving him into the darkest reaches of the ocean depths, where an irresistible maelstrom swept him towards a monstrous, gaping chasm, a gigantic sewer grate, while he groped for something to cling to, anguished to the core of his soul.

  Strangely lucid, Bilodo realised he wouldn’t be able to go on living without Ségolène, he wouldn’t survive, nothing would have meaning or importance any more, beauty and desire lost to him forever, peace of mind an abstract concept drifting somewhere in the distance along with all those other emotions he’d probably never feel, and he himself just a piece of wreckage. A ghost ship, with no one at the helm and no power, carried along by the briny currents until eventually Sargasso weeds slowed him, caught him in their viscous nets, invading the timber, weighing him down so much he would founder in them.

  What a hideous prospect. Was the story going to end so stupidly? Shouldn’t Bilodo do something, try to think of something? Could the shipwreck be averted? Was there a buoy to hang on to, a way to overcome helplessness, some method or other of warding off ill fortune, of preventing Ségolène from being cast out of his life?

  It was then, when his distress was greatest, Bilodo hit upon an idea.

  * * *

  It was a brilliant idea – original, inspired, so daring that Bilodo took fright and quickly put the lid back on. Because the idea was too crazy, too dangerously absurd, far too risky, and probably unworkable anyway. A wild, unwholesome idea only a crackpot could have seriously considered, which should be rejected and forgotten as quickly as possible, for fear it might proliferate. To concentrate his mind on something else, Bilodo picked up his game console and launched a violent attack on the insurgents of Xion, but the idea refused to be evicted, kept scratching under the floor tiles, demanded to be allowed to spring into the light. And finally, tired of resisting, Bilodo resigned himself to examining it again.

  Perhaps the plan wasn’t totally crazy after all. It was absolutely terrifying, fraught with psychological danger, but might not be impossible to carry out. If there was still a chance of re-tying the thread and finding his way back to Ségolène, this was definitely the way. And just when a pale new day was breaking, Bilodo looked up: he understood he had no other option, he had to at least give it a try.

  7

  The breaking of the window was muffled by the thick, coarse towel. Straining all his senses, Bilodo listened for some reaction from the neighbouring doors and landings, probed the darkness in the alleyway down below, but nothing stirred. He pressed against the shattered pane so the fragments fell inside. Bilodo put his hand through the hole, found the bolt, and stepped inside the door, that of Grandpré’s apartment on the alleyway side, then quickly closed it behind him. He was inside. He’d done it.

  A sickly sweet odour prickled his nostrils. He was in the kitchen. He switched on his torch and moved forward, making himself as light as possible, trying to levitate above the creaking floorboards. The kitchen had neither table nor chairs. The smell came from the counter; something had been left there and was rotting in its package. Fish perhaps. After crossing the kitchen, Bilodo ventured into the passageway. Its floor was covered with a soft material – not a fitted carpet but a thin mattress of some kind, which appeared to be spread over the floors of the other rooms as well. There were three doors in the passageway. The first one opened into a bedroom, the second into a small bathroom. Straight ahead lay the living room, divided in two by a large screen of some sort. Bilodo stepped around a low, oddly shaped sculpture and slipped behind the partition, finding himself in front of a writing desk next to an armchair on casters. After he’d made sure the blinds were closed, he sat down in the armchair.

  The torch’s beam swept the desk, revealing a computer, a calendar, a few knickknacks, a
dictionary, pens, and various papers. When he examined the papers, he immediately found what he’d come for: sheets covered with writing in a hand that could only be Grandpré’s. In the top drawer he made an even more exciting discovery: poems by the deceased – haiku. A whole bundle of them. And right next to those, Bilodo discovered Ségolène’s, her original haiku, of which he only had copies. And her picture too!

  Overwhelmed with emotion, Bilodo admired that smile, so soothing to his soul, that gentle almond gaze that always set him dreaming, then he sniffed those blessed pages Ségolène’s hand had held, that her perfume still clung to, and he kissed them. One moment of such bliss was enough to justify the risks he’d taken, but the job wasn’t finished: continuing his search, Bilodo explored the other drawers. What he hoped to unearth more than anything else was a rough copy of Grandpré’s last letter, the one the sewer had so disgracefully swallowed up, because that was the ultimate goal of the expedition. But he’d only just begun this search when he heard voices outside, people talking on the stairs. Bilodo jumped up, switched off the torch. Just neighbours walking up to a higher floor? Or police coming to nab the despicable burglar he was? Bilodo wasn’t going to wait around to find out: he stuffed as many papers as he could into his jacket and bolted, crashing into that idiotic sculpture lying about in the living room. He fled through the back door, charged down the stairs, then shot at the speed of sound towards the exit of the alleyway. He didn’t dare slow down until two blocks further on, once he knew for sure he wasn’t being pursued. He forced himself to walk along as naturally as possible so as not to attract attention, but his heart kept skipping, beating like a drum.

  * * *

  After a long shower to sluice away the sweat from the crime, Bilodo sat down at his table and reread Ségolène’s haiku. He was delighted to discover that the little poems had regained their full vital power. Then, with Bill’s discreet collusion, he looked over the other stolen papers, focusing especially on Grandpré’s haiku, which confirmed what he’d long suspected: those two practised – had practised – a poetic exchange of some sort. Grandpré’s haiku seemed quite different from Ségolène’s, however. Not in form, but in spirit:

  Swirling like water

  against rugged rocks,

  time goes around and around

  Smog in the city

  it smokes far too much

  emphysema guaranteed

  They stir up the sea,

  sway the forest, draw

  a low murmur from the earth

  The rabbit’s no fool

  he bursts from the hole

  where nobody lies in wait

  To break through the horizon

  look behind the set

  meet and embrace Death

  It was a more sombre kind of poetry than Ségolène’s, more dramatic, yet just as evocative: Grandpré’s haiku made you see things too, although through a darkened lens. There were almost a hundred of them. The problem was that none were numbered. There was no indication of the order in which they’d been written or sent to Ségolène, no way of knowing which haiku was the last one, the one that never reached her.

  Bilodo put the original of Ségolène’s picture on his bedside table. Then, stretched out in the dark, he wondered what to do now that the first stage of his plan had been completed. Move on to phase two? Did he dare go through with his insane idea?

  He fell asleep and had a strange dream. He dreamt of Gaston Grandpré, who lay dying in the middle of rue des Hêtres, just as he had in waking reality, except that the dying man didn’t seem to be suffering in the least. On the contrary, he appeared to be having a good time and even gave Bilodo a knowing wink.

  * * *

  At dawn, when Bilodo woke up, he decided to go through with the scheme. For the first time in five years he phoned in sick to the Post Office; then, without even taking time to have a cup of coffee, he bent over Grandpré’s papers and studied his handwriting, calling upon all his experience in calligraphy.

  A thorough examination of the deceased’s writings soon brought out an unusual feature. All over the sheets, sometimes right in the middle of a poem, a particular symbol had been drawn. It was a circle decorated to varying degrees with flourishes – could it be a stylized O? – which the author seemed to have obsessively scribbled here and there. Did that O have a particular meaning? Bilodo could only speculate. The penmanship itself was interesting, broad and vigorous. The stroke was strong, angular, boldly combining cursive and block letters, deeply scoring the paper. Pretty much the manly kind of handwriting Bilodo would’ve liked to have. Anyhow, he felt capable of imitating it. Choosing the same type of ballpoint pen that Grandpré had used, he made his first attempts, copying with a hesitant hand certain extracts from the deceased’s poems.

  The first notepad was used up shortly before noon. Bilodo’s lunch consisted of a can of sardines which he ate standing as he trampled distractedly on the crumpled sheets. He set to work again, toiled until dusk, when he had to stop because of cramp. While massaging his sore wrist, he lost heart for a moment and considered giving up. But he pulled himself together at the thought of Ségolène waiting on her island and picked up his pen again, wielding it with fresh resolve.

  Long after dark Bilodo finally deemed himself satisfied; he was able to produce a reasonably good imitation of the dead man’s penmanship. So the second part of his plan had been completed, but he took care not to rejoice and prepared himself instead to face the next challenge, which was a sizeable one. Because the penmanship wasn’t the whole story – he had to know what to write, too.

  He’d deliberately avoided thinking about that aspect until then, choosing to concentrate on the task’s technical side, but couldn’t put it off any longer. Imitating Grandpré’s hand was all very well, but, far more importantly, he needed to write what Grandpré would have written. Now Bilodo had to venture into unknown territory, into the foreign land of poetry, and manage somehow to compose a haiku that could pass as genuine in Ségolène’s eyes.

  * * *

  His aptitude for slipping into other people’s words was of no help to him in this case – when dawn broke, all he’d been able to come up with was water, just that one word, inspired by Ségolène’s last haiku about the aquatic baby. He couldn’t think of anything intelligent to add. Of course one could team it up with a variety of qualifiers: clear water, flowing water, still water. But was that really poetic? He spent the morning in a trance, struggling to join something to his water that would transcend it. Fire water? Running water? Sparkling water?

  Waterhead?

  After giving himself permission to take a brief nap, he dreamt he was drowning. He woke up just in time to fill his lungs with air and went back to the blank page. Dish-water? Holy water? Water beetle? Waterworks?

  Jump into the water?

  Walk on water?

  Then, having become captivated by the circular movements of Bill paddling around in his bowl, he got down to it and wrote: ‘A fish in water.’ That was one line of five syllables already. Almost a third of the tercet.

  Bilodo gazed at the words with a critical eye, then crossed them all out.

  Four words, and not a single one he was happy with. At this rate, he’d still be fishing for ideas at Christmas time.

  He really must speed things up. How did one go about becoming a poet, Bilodo wondered. Was it something you could learn? Maybe there was a course called Haiku 101? The yellow pages didn’t list any poetry schools, so who were you supposed to contact in an emergency? The Japanese Embassy? At least one thing was becoming clear: Bilodo needed to find out more about those infuriating haiku.

  8

  While combing the Japanese Literature section of the Central Library, Bilodo hunted out a few highly instructive books, and it didn’t take him long to learn everything he’d always wanted to know about haiku but had been afraid to ask. The principle was actually quite simple: haiku sought to juxtapose the permanent and the ephemeral. A good haiku ideally contained a
reference to nature (kigo) or to some reality not uniquely human. Sparing of words, precise, at once complex and subtle, it shunned literary artifice and customary poetic devices such as rhyme and metaphor. The art of haiku was the art of the snapshot, of the detail. It could be about an episode in someone’s life, a memory, a dream, but it was above all a concrete poem, appealing to the senses, not to ideas.

  Bilodo was beginning to see the light. Even the epistolary haiku exchange Ségolène and Grandpré had practised took on a specific meaning: it was a renku or ‘linked verse’, a tradition going back to the literary contests held at the imperial court of medieval Japan.

  Since Bilodo found all this fascinating and felt like talking about it, he told his friend Robert about his discoveries and read him a few haiku by Bashō, Buson, and Issa, classic masters of the genre, but the delicate balance between fueki – the permanent, eternity extending beyond us – and ryuko – the fleeting, the ephemeral that passes through us – seemed to be totally lost on the clerk, who regarded it as nothing but a sophisticated form of mental masturbation. Not that he had any prejudices against Japanese literature. On the contrary: Robert pointed out that he liked manga, those popular comic strips, but especially enjoyed hentai, their erotic variants, which he warmly recommended to Bilodo, whipping out a sample to back this up.

  Bilodo, eager to talk to someone more capable of sharing his intellectual enthusiasm, turned to Tania. The young waitress wasn’t particularly interested at first, because it was a busy time at the Madelinot. The twinkle he had expected did appear in her eyes, though, when he spread open for her the pages of a book called Traditional Haiku of the Seventeenth Century, a valuable publication he’d borrowed from the library, which allowed the reader to marvel at haiku calligraphed in old Japanese. Tania admitted it was very beautiful and very mysterious, very mystical. Bilodo couldn’t have agreed more: combining ideograms with a phonetic syllabary, the Japanese way of writing contributed to the haiku’s utter density, almost succeeded in expressing the indescribable.