The Guardians

Dear friend,

Here is a story I meant to give to Commerce. But first let me tell it to you alone.
Let us suppose it is a woman speaking:

My mother had never been talkative. A few months before she died, she stopped speaking to me altogether. But she began speaking to my father much more often, and more loudly, than ever before.
And at times they even had sharp arguments, which I heard through the walls. I was astonished. I did not understand what it meant until a little later, when my mother died in her sixty-second year: my father was losing his mind.
(I do not much like mad people in stories, and neither do you. Above all because they are so often presented with an air that says: if only you were capable of going mad... Rest assured: this one, or rather these two, will be drab enough, and not very uplifting.)
My father was a little younger than my mother. He more than made up for it, and lived three years longer, during which his madness only deepened. From the discussions he later had with me, I can now imagine those he had with my mother. I only sought to convince him, without reproach, and we never came as far as a real quarrel; my mother, who had always dealt with him as an equal, naturally could not have my patience.
And I do not even think she ever had a fully accurate sense of her husband's condition. She had an absolute character: if my father, for instance, wanted to have tea with me or walk out with me, that already struck her as absurd enough. So she could scarcely find anything more absurd in his setting the curtains on fire without trying to put them out, or in the candles of every color he hoarded in a corner of the cupboard.
From then on, everything to do with light and fire obsessed my father. He lived in fear that electricity would fail. Electricity, not oil lamps, not candles. I later noticed that his madness lay less in absurd ideas than in mistrusting whatever in the world seemed strange or badly explained. Electricity, of course, is mysterious; candles are the safer belief. By that single wisdom my father chose to guide himself. He no longer trusted what our electric lamps showed him. He bumped into chairs and groped before finding his fork or cane, until he had seen them by the light of one of the candles he carried in his pockets and lit at every turn, or by a small wax taper, in which he placed special trust.
Pride alone might have kept my mother from admitting that her husband could go mad. Yet she already had one example in the family: my brother.

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(I never thought to give you a title. It might be "The Keeper," or rather "The Woman Keeper." Naturally the most interesting figure is the one who tells the story. But you will only see her at the end.
I believe the story could take place anywhere.)
My brother Georges lived with us. I do not think Doctor Chardon's treatment, which he followed for two years, improved his condition much. I never saw him on the verge of intelligence except when Mademoiselle Georgina came every day to teach him. He was twelve then; not only did he enjoy reading, he asked for new books himself and told us what they were about. Yet from the day Mother required him to read aloud to her while she embroidered,
(I do not know whether you notice that this mother is a sort of devil)
his curiosity began to fade. At that time he asked for books of ancient history; but he soon became unable to pronounce proper names. Each time he met one, he would hand the book to my mother, who would stop embroidering.
(Forgive me for saying so. But it is important, for what follows, to notice that if Georges was naturally somewhat backward, he had to help his own madness, agree to be a little madder, so that people would stop pestering him.)
Soon he read mechanically between proper names, and clearly understood nothing of what he was reading. The sessions became so painful that my mother, despite her wish to aid Georges's progress, had to ask him to stop. Later he showed a deep mistrust of books. If he opened one, it was always in secret.
His tongue curled back in his mouth, which in any case prevented him from reading aloud clearly, or pleasantly.

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(Is the tone a little childish? Perhaps. But perhaps too we should suppose a girl of thirteen or fourteen is telling this, for the excellent reason that one loses that kind of reason at seventeen. As you please.)
I never saw Georges very attentive to people; I even doubt he made much distinction between my mother and me. Yet when we brought old Marie into the house to help us, Georges showed surprise at seeing her sweep the room in our place, or serve dinner. He followed her with his eyes and sometimes tried to touch her hair or dress. Mother had always insisted, to interest him in anything, that he fetch his own place setting from the sideboard. But when the moment came, he now turned toward Marie, watched her patiently, and rose only when he was sure she had not understood him.
My father, in his new condition, interested him as much as Marie had.
(It is indeed a great surprise, even for your animals, to discover that men can have servants. Orso, who at first seemed embarrassed by her presence and circled her foolishly, has for several months adopted with our charwoman a proud tone and a pawing etiquette he never used with us.)
Georges often sat near him and watched him with a strained, attentive look. At table my father would sometimes, after two or three bites, suddenly fall asleep. Georges would first smile, as if at a game. But the sleep went on: he then edged closer to Father and, had I not stopped him, would have touched his eyes or forehead. Candles amused him; he gladly busied himself lighting and snuffing them out, until the day my father stuck one in my sewing box and the cloth caught fire; after the cloth, the double curtains, and even the muslin drapes. Georges was badly frightened, yet he continued, while mistrusting him, to observe my father as closely as he could.
At the same time he grew lazy: I had the greatest difficulty waking him at nine in the morning, and even then he often fell asleep again. I supposed the effort of thinking had exhausted him; but those efforts were not all useless. At times he did us real service.
Have I said my father lost his wits to the point of no longer recognizing me? Receiving his friends, he introduced me as his wife. His friends did not always know me; some may have believed he had remarried.
(So it is a young girl telling the story. No doubt about it.)
You can imagine I could scarcely leave the house. Yet one day I had to go to the dentist; I had broken a tooth the day before. I chose siesta time. But Father woke earlier than usual, asked for me, and decided to wait for me at the dentist's door. (That is what he did with my mother when she had dental work.) Marie tried to restrain him, until he called her filth and murderer. Georges then brought him his cane and hat, showed great zeal, and led him to the old garden gate, which no one had ever managed to open. They failed again that day, and scandal was avoided, not to mention all the accidents that might have happened to my father on the open road.

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At night there is not a sound I am free to ignore. A creaking door, a knock on the wall: if I were free, I would go back to sleep. But no, I must make everything clear. This creak is my father pushing back, as he rises, the chair where he lays his clothes.
Out he comes in his socks. He glances at my door, does not see me, goes down one step. At once his candle goes out. In the dark I hear him take a second step and grip the banister so hard the wood groans. Then he strikes a match. He carries his ring of keys in his hand.
The candle goes out again, though he has not moved. He strikes another match, which fails; then another: this time he lights his taper.
As soon as he reaches the ground floor, he searches the pockets of his dressing gown and counts the candles he finds there. Then he goes to the large cupboard and opens it.
I know his treasures: until six months ago Georges kept there every newspaper he could find. If I asked him for one to wrap a parcel, as gently as possible, he would not refuse, but took time and trouble choosing which one to give me. The newspapers were scattered; what remained were my father's oil lamps, his large kerosene lamp, and a box of Christmas candles. He opens the cupboard, and the taper goes out. Then the kerosene lamp throws a weak light, sputters, dies. He shuts the door and thinks only of leaving. Then yet another candle, just lit, goes out in turn. I am astonished to see, after a moment of darkness, the staircase suddenly flooded with light and my father with his hand on the electric switch.
Then, on the upstairs landing, what I took for a bundle moves slowly away. It is Georges in his nightshirt, crouched, barefoot. He is already far off in shadow when Father reaches the top step. And I am frightened to think I must have seen, more than once already, without trying to explain it, that bundle near the stairs, that man.
If he comes there every night, no wonder he is so hard to wake in the morning.

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But I only understood fully, and only later, what had happened that night and on the nights that followed: it was the day I surprised Georges, during Father's siesta, busily gluing together stubs of candles from which he had pulled the wick; the taper lay soaking in grey water. Everything was arranged to make candles less reliable than electricity had ever been, even in my father's fears.
Some evenings, as I stood on the threshold of another night of watching and alarms, I almost yielded to the thought that the mad, in their refusals, got the better part. I resisted better once I saw the care with which Georges tried to spare my father a madness he knew better than any of us.
Only later did I think he may have considered that madness his own discovery, his own property, and out of jealousy would allow no one else to share it.

Original version of the story  Les Gardiens, published in Commerce, Cahier XIX, Spring 1929_