The Erl-King

Michel Tournier

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781848878532
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782392071
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, The Erl-King is a magisterial tale of innocence, perversion and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to adult misfit - a man without a sense of belonging until he finds himself a prisoner of war, and then a teacher, and then the 'ogre' of a Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn. Taking us more deeply into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum, Tournier's masterpiece rivets us until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich; it is a novel that shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.

Contents

I	Sinister Writings of Abel Tiffauges
II	The Pigeons of the Rhine
III	Hyperborea
IV	The Ogre of Rominten
V	The Ogre of Kaltenborn
VI	The Astrophore
	Notes
	Note on the Author

I

SINISTER WRITINGS OF

ABEL TIFFAUGES

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

January 3, 1938. You're an ogre, Rachel used to say to me sometimes. An Ogre? A fabulous monster emerging from the mists of time? Well, yes, I do think there's something magical about me, I do think there's a secret collusion, deep down, connecting what happens to me with what happens in general, and enabling my particular history to bend the course of things in its own direction.

And I do believe I issued from the mists of time. I've always been shocked at the frivolous way people agonize about what's going to happen to them after they die and don't give a damn about what happened to them before they were born. The heretofore is just as important as the hereafter, especially as it probably holds the key to it. As for me I was already there a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. When the earth was still only a ball of fire spinning round in a helium sky the soul that lit it and made it spin was mine. What's more, the dizzying antiquity of my origins explains my supernatural power: being and I have travelled side by side so long, we're such old companions, that while we may not be especially fond of one another, by dint of being together almost since the world began we understand one another and can't refuse each other anything.

As for being a monster . . .

To begin with, what is a monster? Etymology has a bit of a shock up its sleeve there: ‘monster’ comes from ‘monstrare’, ‘to show.’ A monster is something which is shown, pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on. And the more monstrous a creature is, the more it is to be exhibited. This makes my hair stand on end: I can't live except in obscurity and I'm sure I only live at all through a misunderstanding, because the mass of my fellow creatures don't know I'm there.

If you don't want to be a monster, you've got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species, the image of your relations. Or else have a progeny that makes you the first link in the chain of a new species. For monsters do not reproduce. Two-headed calves are not viable. Mules and hinnies are born sterile, as if nature wanted to cut short an experiment she considered unwise. And here I link up with my eternity again, for with me eternity takes the place of both relatives and progeny. Old as the world, and as immortal, I can have none but putative parents and adopted children.

I've just read over what I've written. My name is Abel Tiffauges, I run a garage in the Place de la Porte-des-Ternes, and I'm not crazy. What I've just written should be taken completely seriously. So? So the essential function of the future will be to demonstrate, or more precisely to illustrate, the seriousness of the above.

January 6, 1938. The winged steed of ‘Mobilgas’ outlined in neon on the damp dark sky is reflected briefly on my hands, then gone. The pink palpitation of Pegasus and an all-pervading smell of old oil combine to form an atmosphere which, though I hate it, gives me an unavowable pleasure. To say I'm used to it is putting it mildly: it's as familiar as the warmth of my bed or the face that greets me every morning in the mirror. But the reason I'm sitting down for the second time with my pen in my hand in front of this blank sheet of paper – the third page of my ‘Sinister Writings’ – is that I sense I'm standing at a crossroads, as they say, and because to a certain extent I'm counting on this diary to help me escape from the garage, from the paltry preoccupations that keep me here, and in a sense from myself.

All is sign. But only a piercing light or shriek will penetrate our blunted sight and hearing. Ever since my years of initiation at St Christopher's I've always been aware of hieroglyphs written across my path, and a confused murmur of words in my ear. But till now I didn't understand them. It's true they did serve as repeated proof that the heavens are not absolutely void; but apart from that all they did was add to my already existing doubts about what to do with my life. Yesterday, however, the most banal circumstances produced the necessary flash of illumination.

A commonplace incident temporarily deprived me of the use of my right hand. I was trying to crank an engine that wouldn't respond to the battery when the starting-handle kicked back on me – as it happened, at a moment when my arm was slack from the shoulder. My wrist bore the brunt of the impact; I'm pretty sure I heard the ligaments give. I almost vomited with pain. I can still feel a throbbing in the big elastic dressing resting against my chest. As I couldn't do any work in the garage with only one hand, I took refuge in the little room on the second floor where I keep my account books and old newspapers. And to occupy my mind I thought I'd try jotting down a few words at random with my uninjured hand.

It was then I had the sudden revelation that I could write with it! Yes, without any practice, quite fast and without hesitation, my left hand produces perfectly firm characters, not at all childish or clumsy, and, what's more, completely devoid of any resemblance to my ordinary writing. I shall come back later to this staggering event. I think I know its origin. But to begin with I must set down the circumstances that have led me for the first time to take up my pen with the sole purpose of unburdening myself and proclaiming the truth.

Must I go back to the other, perhaps no less decisive circumstance of my break with Rachel? But then I'd have to tell a whole story, a love story, my love story. It goes without saying I loathe the idea, but perhaps that's only want of habit. For anyone as reticent as I am it's extremely disagreeable at first to pour out one's innards on paper. But once I've got started my hand runs away with me, and I doubt if I'll be able to stop. It may be that from now on there can't even be a sequence of events in my life without that verbal reflection called a diary.

I've lost Rachel. She was my wife. Not my wife before God and man, but the woman in my life or, to put it differently though without stressing the matter unduly, the feminine element in my particular universe. I met her several years ago, in the same way as I meet everyone I know: as a customer in the garage. She drove up in a broken-down Peugeot four-seater, visibly pleased by the effect created by a woman driver, greater then than it is now. From the start she adopted a familiarity based on our common concern with cars. This familiarity so soon moved on to include everything else that it wasn't long before she turned up in my bed.

What first attracted me was the assurance and ease with which she wore her nakedness, with no more and no less self-consciousness than if it had been any other attire – a travelling suit or an evening dress. There's no doubt that the most uncomely thing in a woman is not to know it is perfectly possible to be naked – that there is not only a habit but also a ‘habitus’ of nakedness. And I can tell at a glance, from a certain aridity about them and the strange way their clothes cling to their skin, the women who don't possess this knowledge.

Beneath her small head, with its aquiline profile and helmet of little black curls, Rachel had a round and powerful body, surprising in the femininity of its generous hips, violet-circled breasts, deeply hollowed back, and entire gamut of faultlessly firm curves too ample for the hand and making up a whole that was impregnable. She was not particularly original in temperament – a ‘bachelor girl’ of the type made fashionable by a recent best-seller. She preserved her independence by working as a travelling accountant, visiting shops, workrooms and small factories to keep their owners’ books in order. She was a Jewess herself, and I had occasion to notice that all her clients were Jewish too: the explanation being the confidential nature of the documents she dealt with.

I might have been put off by her cynicism, her destructive view of things, a kind of mental itch that made her live in constant dread of boredom. But her sense of the comic, her skill in detecting the absurd element in people and situations, a tonic merriment she managed to draw out of the dreariness of life, all had a beneficial influence on my own naturally bilious temperament.

Writing all this down makes me realize what she meant to me, and I have a lump in my throat when I say I've lost her. Rachel . . . I couldn't say whether we loved each other, but we certainly had some good laughs together, and that's something, isn't it?

As a matter of fact she was laughing, without a trace of malice, when she laid down the premises from which, by different paths, we both ended up at the same conclusion: our parting.

Sometimes she would dash in and hand her little car over to the mechanic for a repair or to be serviced, and we would take the opportunity to go up to my room. She always used to make some indecent joke or other, comparing the car's fate with that of its owner. On that particular day she said casually as she was dressing that I made love ‘like a canary.’ I thought at first she was criticizing my expertise, but she soon undeceived me. It was only my haste she was referring to, comparing it to the desultory thump with which the little birds acquit themselves of their conjugal duties. Then she musingly recalled one of her previous lovers, probably the best she ever had. He promised to take her as soon as they went to bed and not to leave her till sunrise. And he had kept his word, hammering away until the first gleams of dawn. ‘Of course,’ she added punctiliously, ‘we did go to bed late and the nights are quite short at that time of year.’

This reminded me of the story of M. Seguin's little goat, who made it a point of honour to fight the wolf all night and not let herself be eaten up till the first ray of sunlight.

‘It would be a good thing, as a matter of fact,’ said Rachel, ‘if you thought I was going to eat you up as soon as you stopped.’

Immediately when she said this I saw she looked rather like a wolf, with her black brows and flared nostrils and big hungry mouth. We laughed once more. The last time. For I knew her travelling accountant's brain had totalled up my inadequacy and located another bed to lie on.

Like a canary . . . In the six months since the phrase was uttered it has developed long and deep in me. I had known for a long time that one of the most frequent forms of sexual fiasco is ejaculatio precox, the sexual act insufficiently held back and deferred. Rachel's accusation has wide implications: it tries to place me on the brink of impotence, and what's more reveals the great misunderstanding of the human couple, the enormous frustration of women, always being fertilized and never fulfilled.

‘You don't give a damn about my pleasure!’

And I can't but admit it. When I engulfed and annexed Rachel with all my body, the last thing I thought about was what might be going on behind those closed eyelids, inside that little Hebrew shepherd's head.

‘You satiate your hunger with raw flesh and then you go back to your coachwork.’

It was true. And it's also true that a man eating bread doesn't bother about whether the loaf is satisfied or not.

‘You reduce me to the level of a steak.’

Maybe . . . If one meekly accepts the ‘virility code’ women have evolved to protect their weakness. But, to begin with, there's nothing degrading about likening love to eating. Many religions make a similar comparison – first and foremost Christianity, with the eucharist. What really needs taking to pieces is the exclusively feminine notion of virility which measures it in terms of sexual power, the latter consisting simply in postponing the sexual act as long as possible. This makes it a matter of abnegation, so that the term potency ought to be taken in the Aristotelian sense of ‘potential,’ the very opposite of the act itself. Sexual potency thus becomes the converse and in a sense the negation of the sexual act. It is the promise of the act, a promise never kept, the act indefinitely veiled, held back, suspended. Woman is power or potency, man is act. And so man is naturally impotent, naturally out of step with woman's slow, vegetative ripenings . . . unless he meekly submits to her rule and her rhythm and slaves away hammer and tongs to strike a spark of joy out of the dilatory flesh presented to him.

‘You're not a lover, you're an ogre.’

By uttering this simple sentence, Rachel has conjured up the ghost of a monstrous child, both terrifyingly precocious and disconcertingly infantile, and the memory of him has taken sovereign and irresistible possession of me. Nestor. I always thought he would come back into my life in force. In fact he never really went out of it, but since his death he has left the rope slack, contenting himself with a little tug from time to time, unimportant, sometimes even amusing, just so that I shouldn't forget. My new sinister writing and Rachel's departure warns me that his power is about to be restored.

January 10, 1938. I was looking recently at one of those school photographs they take every year in June just before prize-giving. Among all those faces frozen into hangdog expressions the thinnest and peakiest is mine. Champdavoine and Lutigneaux are there, one grimacing under his clown's thatch sticking out in points like an artichoke, the other with eyes shut and sly face, as if meditating some mischief behind the pretence of taking a nap. Not a sign of Nestor, although the photograph was certainly taken while he was still alive. But actually it was just like him to get out of this slightly ridiculous ceremony, and especially to leave no commonplace trace of his life behind before he died.

I must have been about eleven and at the beginning of my second year at St Christopher's. So I was not a new boy any more. But though my unhappiness was no longer that of the first uprooting and straying in the unknown, in this calmer, more considered and apparently final form it was all the more profound. At that time, I remember, I had counted all my woes, and expected no gleam of hope from any direction. I had crossed out the teachers and the world of the mind into which they were supposed to initiate us. I had got to the point – but have I ever been at any other? – of considering every author, historical personage or book, any educational subject whatever, as automatically null and void as soon as it was annexed by adults and dished out to us as spiritual nourishment. But here and there, leafing through dictionaries, picking up what I could in textbooks, watching out for fleeting allusions to what really interested me in French or history lessons, I started to build up a culture of my own, a personal Pantheon which included Alcibiades and Pontius Pilate, Caligula and Hadrian, Frederick William I and Barras, Talleyrand and Rasputin. There was a certain way of referring to a politician or writer – condemning him of course, but that was not enough, there had to be something else as well – which made me prick up my ears and suspect this might be one of mine. I would then start an inquiry, a sort of preliminary to beatification, carried out with all the means at my disposal, at the conclusion of which the gates of my Pantheon would either open or stay shut.

I was puny and ugly, with straight black hair framing a swarthy face that had a trace of both the Arab and the gypsy, a gaunt and awkward body, rough and clumsy movements. But above all I must have possessed some fatal trait that singled me out as the object for the attacks of even the most cowardly, the blows of even the weakest. I was the unhoped-for proof that they too might dominate and humiliate. As soon as the bell rang for break I would be on the ground, and I was rarely able to get up again before we had to go back into the classroom.

Pelsenaire was a new boy, but his physical strength and the simplicity of his personality had at once won him a prominent place in the hierarchy of the form. He derived a large part of his prestige from an incredibly wide leather belt he wore round his black smock. I afterwards learned it was made out of a horse's belly-band; it had a steel buckle with no fewer than three tongues. He had a square head...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents