The Tanners

“Yes, a splendid fellow! Even as a boy, when his hair was still long and his trousers short and he went out for walks on the streets of our small town holding his nursemaid’s hand, already people would turn to look at him, saying: ‘What a stunning little fellow!’ He completed his assignments with a great deal of talent — his school assignments, I mean. His teachers loved him, he was docile and easy to teach. His cleverness made it easy for him to fulfill his responsibilities at school. He was a splendid gymnast, and skilled at drawing and sums. I know at least that the teachers held him up as a role model to later generations of pupils, and even to some of his older schoolmates. His soft features and those magnificent eyes filled with masculine presentiment bewitched all who came into contact with the lad. He enjoyed a certain celebrity by the time his parents sent him away to continue his studies. Coddled by his mother, which everyone could understand, and admired by all, his spirit must have acquired early on that softness that comes with privilege and recognition, that lassitude, that lovely insouciance that permits a young person to easily master the pleasures of life. When school holidays arrived, he’d come home with glorious grade reports and a horde of young schoolfellows who thrilled his mother’s ear with tales of his various successes. Naturally he concealed from his mother the successes that even then he’d begun to have with girls of easy virtue, who found him handsome and kind. He spent his holidays hiking through the lowlands; and in the vast high mountains that beckoned to him because they reached so high up and so far off into the indeterminate distance, he would spend not just hours but days in the gay company of rapturous dreamers like himself. He bewitched and beguiled them all. — In his good health and his mental and physical suppleness he resembled a god who seemed only to be spending a short time at a classical gymnasium for his own amusement. When he was out walking, girls turned to look after him as though the glances he’d cast back in their direction were drawing them on. Upon his blond, handsome head he wore a blue student cap at a rakish angle. He was enchantingly frivolous. Once — the county fair was on, and the large square where usually herds of animals were rounded up was now covered with stands, huts, carousels, slides, pony rides — he substituted a bird rifle loaded with real shot for the ordinary harmless pop-gun at a shooting gallery where he could often be seen, since the girl who worked handing out the guns there had caught his fancy. The tiny bullet pierced the canvas wall of the booth and continued on into the wagon parked right behind it and missed injuring a small sleeping child by a hair’s breadth. This was the wagon that served these itinerant folk as their family home. Naturally this prank came to light, several others were added to it as well, and the next time holidays came around, the report of the young pupil’s grades contained an acrimonious comment from the school principal, who wrote the parents a generous letter simultaneously filled with ceremonious sentiments and the warm recommendation that they voluntarily take their child out of school, since his expulsion would otherwise be an imminent necessity. The reasons: senseless behavior, inciting others, being a bad influence, and irresponsibility. The letter went on about the principal’s great responsibility, the duties to be fulfilled while also taking into consideration — in short, all those things that are always invoked in such cases: morality under siege, the need to protect those not yet corrupted, and so on—”

The man telling the story paused for a little while.

Simon took advantage of this opportunity to draw attention to his presence and said:

“Your story interests me from several points of view. Please, permit me to continue listening to you. I am a young man who has just turned his back on a career opportunity and could perhaps learn something from what you are relating; for it seems to me you always gain something by listening to a true story—”

The two men took a good look at Simon, but he seemed not to make too bad an impression on them, as the one who had been speaking invited him to go on listening if this gave him pleasure, and then he continued: