The Bark Tree by Raymond Queneau Read Free Book Online Page A

all three naked, now. Etienne takes them to the art students’ ball. His right leg is relaxing a bit.
    Here, on his back, his mouth opens wide. He’s trying to buy an amusing children’s paper. He doesn’t dare, with any of the paper sellers he goes to, because there are customers. He goes to a lot of paper sellers like that. In the end, he finds himself at a butcher’s, he’s sharpening some long knives, he turns around, it’s his father. He starts. Agony. Théo gets a bit restless; sleep wins; he subsides.
    Here, a naked body is lying peacefully outstretched, windows wide open. He sees himself at his grandmother’s in the country; they’re going to kill an old cock; his mother, he can hardly make her out, is against this execution. The word execution somehow weaves the woof of a canvas on which before long an old cock is painted, a cock of the species that has a featherless red neck. He walks a bit crookedly, in a very particular way that Pierre recognizes. He’s the one who’s going to kill the cock, he’s aware of that. He wakes up very gradually, smiling. He feels marvelous; he looks at the time. Through the darkness, he makes out 4:20. He turns over and, on his other side, goes back to sleep.
    Here, a globulous, greasy mass is wrapped around dirty sheets; only a few grey hairs emerge from the conglomeration. The conglomeration is reviewing a regiment, a regiment of grenadiers. She’s their general. The grenadiers are singing as if they were in an operetta. Aren’t they handsome! Suddenly, she’s a little embarrassed; the trousers of one of them are open. She’ll have him shot. Her embarrassment increases and increases until an enormous white louse comes out of her mouth and flies away. The grenadiers cheer the unspeakable animal. Ma Cloche is dreaming.
    Here, a man is tossing and turning; he’s in a sweat; he’s stifling; what a hot night, what a warm night. He looks at the time, 4:20. He gets up, goes and drinks a glass of water. Walks around a bit, rubbing his forehead. He falls back onto the bed, which groans. He wrings his hands, in a way that he himself finds grotesque. Narcense isn’t going to get any more sleep tonight.
    The office is finished; she goes to the grocery store at the corner of La Fayette Street, to buy several things. Just as she’s crossing the street she realizes she’s forgotten the strawberries. She goes back to buy them. As she is coming out of the grocery store someone bumps into her and the bag of strawberries gets squashed against her white dress. That’s what she was dreaming.
    Meussieu and Mme. Belhôtel aren’t dreaming. They are carrying down to the river a little parcel that contains nothing other than the corpse of a dead child, that of the waitress and Meussieu Belhôtel. The waitress is called Ernestine; she has a snub nose and greasy hair. Whereas Meussieu Belhôtel, he, from time to time, makes himself useful to the local cop-shop.
     

Second Chapter
    “ H UH , here comes your sister,” says Mme. Belhôtel. “I’m off up to the fif floor.”
    “Or right, or right, you do that. If she annoys you, well, let her be.”
    “Sjust what I’m going to do, don’t you worry!”
    When Mme. Cloche arrives, she finds her brother Saturnin huddled up at the back of his lodge, like a spider; he’s examining the mail, which, today, is confined to one post card.
    “Your wife all right?”
    “Oh yes, she’s busy.”
    “Znever there when I arrive.”
    “Just the way it happens, you know. How’s our brother?”
    “Things aren’t too bad. Isn’t too much unemployment out that way. Sa good position, where he is. And then, with two bistros, he can get by.”
    “And the waitress?”
    “I fixed that.”
    She smiles.
    Saturnin gets up and puts the post card back in a pigeon hole. He spits skillfully into a receptacle for that purpose, and stretches his arms. He takes a few shambling steps.
    “Want summing to drink?”
    “If you ask me.”
    “Some