Small Lives by Pierre Michon

sacrificial, he threw the thin dart of light out the window toward the already nocturnal leaves. The monitor struck a closed face, as a cart might send a stone rolling on a rough road.
    At that time there was a Latin teacher at the lycée whom we baited mercilessly, and whom we named, no doubt ironically, Achilles. There was nothing warlike or impetuous about him; with the Myrmidons’ ancient prince charming, he shared only stature and mastery of the language of Homer. He was an old man, huge and disgraced. I do not know what disease had left him bald, without beard or eyebrows; he wore a wig, but no disguise could have transformed the painful nudity of expression in that uniformly hairless face; and it was not a face that could be hidden, but on the contrary one of strong complexion, patrician, heavy, full of a sensuality now in ruins, with a magisterial nose and large lips, still a fresh pink. What little this architecture lacked made it enormously comic, morbid and theatrical, like an old castrato with a broken voice. He walked very erectly, dressed tastefully, and liked the short elegiacs. Virgil from his mouth became hilarious; gales of laughter greeted his entrance, even the first year students acted up, and he was resigned to his inability to do anything about it. He exceeded the permitted limits of the comical, he knew, and that powerof mind and goodness of heart, mockingly bestowed upon him, were nothing without the appropriate body.
    Achilles had no persecutor more merciless than the younger Bakroot. The most outrageous insults, the cruelest laughter came from the boy’s mouth, distorting it. Imperturbable, Achilles remained absorbed in his authors, his declensions; on the blackboard he traced the seven hills or the Carthage harbor. Behind his back, obscene rhymes deformed the names of gods and heroes, Hannibal’s elephants became circus animals, Seneca was a buffoon, and everything turned to nonsense. Achilles, it is true, was used to it; the Barbarians had been taking the City for so long now, Caesar recognized the son’s eyes behind the dagger, and how many times had Eurydice been lost – in less than an hour the lesson would be over. Sometimes, exasperated but desperately calm, he descended into the arena and sadly struck at what passed within his range. The blows only got us more fired up. We all took part in the dismemberment; but the kill, the decisive word that we knew had cruelly found its mark, the one that contorted the mouth of Achilles or staggered him into a moment of dumb silence right in the middle of declaiming a verse, was most often delivered by Rémi Bakroot. It was Rémi Bakroot who orchestrated this sad farce; he was the one who exerted himself tirelessly toward this end, with all the malicious force of his small throat, with all the misunderstood, oafish, and vulgar words gleaned from his home at the farm, or in the doors of smoky cafés Sunday evenings in winter, when, without crossing the threshold, a frightened boy calls to his drunk father that he must come home. It must be said that he had good reasons: Achilles loved Roland Bakroot, the older brother.
    Roland was altogether different, and yet so similar; also unreasonable, certainly but his unreason had nothing of the urchin’s panache, the slightly morose, crackpot, smart-ass humor that forced his urchin peers to admire Rémi. His eccentricity was more pure, abrupt, and almost indigent; no knickknacks, no colorful collections or brilliant acts of rebellion; nothing convertible into the currency of boys’ codes, nothing for him to boast about, to win him an audience, to get the laughers, that is to say, all of us, on his side. He read books. And reading, he knit his young ruffian brow, clenched his jaw, and wore a look of disgust, as if a permanent, necessary nausea bound him without recourse to the page that perhaps he hated but passionately scrutinized, like an eighteenth century libertine