The Avenging Tree

Translated by Nathalie Dupont and Thangam Ravindranathan

From the journal I have been keeping since September 2007, L’Autofictif, published online daily, then in book form every year, I have extracted, roots included, these notes dedicated to trees. I give this anthology the title of “L’Arbre vengeur” [“The Avenging Tree”], which is also the name of the journal’s publisher.

 

09 25 07
Autumn first touches the chestnut trees of the Luxembourg gardens. It gives its spectacle in Paris before going on tour throughout France. Always this contempt for the provinces.

11 3 07
Lazily lying between two blue cypresses, it suddenly appears to me that my presence adds to the picture a delicate touch of human melancholy, and I then envy to the point of rage, to the point of fury, the blessed ones who have for a horizon this Tuscan hill.

02 02 08
I rain punches on the giant sequoia. Its spongy bark takes the blows without hurting me back. But neither does it crash down with a sinister crack. It’s a draw.

04 28 08
To leave a trace of your passage in this world, you must write a book, have a child and plant a tree, the proverb says. But bad fortune is on my side and my annihilation is certain, for there is not an acorn to be found.

05 12 08
I am listening to a report on the radio on the situation in Burma—60,000 people killed by Cyclone Nargis—while mechanically nodding my head to modify the composition of the lilac bunches through a windowpane. It is impossible to take stock, to make sense of this simultaneity of things and events. How does it all fit together? What is this scattered world? Where are we living?

05 22 08
A single tree in the center of the island where I have washed up. And what does this morning’s wave bring me but a hammock.

07 11 08
While the oak counts up to a hundred years, the other trees of the forest hide behind it.

09 15 08
He used all his persuasion, he painted life in the most beautiful colors, he knew how to find the words that console, and the weeping willow slowly straightened up. Then, finally, he was able to tighten his rope and hang himself.

09 16 08
No one has ever pushed the chestnut very far with the tip of their shoe. For after some time, a large tree takes root in the ground, against which the toe breaks.

10 16 08
We finally thought we were building something solid and durable by launching towards the sky these fine silver poplars, by raising these massive holm oaks, these plane trees and these shady chestnut trees. Yet here we are—new deception, new failure, new fiasco—it’s autumn, and everything has fallen to the ground.

01 05 09
And suddenly, I see the infinite ramifications of the genealogical tree as the zigzag trajectory of being’s passionate flight away from the origin.

03 15 09
This grass everywhere without imagination, fine and green. The eternal round of seasons around the tree nailed to its post. The countryside repeats itself. I regret that animals did not fill it with their cities. It would have been something, really, deer city, owl city, weasel city. What monuments! What theaters! What restaurants! What errands!

09 03 09
I hug the oak’s trunk; I press my cheek against its bark. To no avail. The energy does not transfer. I should have suspected that though. How could I believe for one second that I would communicate my vital force and my young blood’s ardor to this centenarian, eaten away by anthracnose and downy mildew?

09 26 09
Well, what were you thinking? It is because the fir tree turns nimbly on its feet that its needle dress flares out so magnificently flower-shaped around its trunk, and that we sometimes glimpse its panties.

11 05 09
Modern man’s activities are held accountable for deforestation and global warming, but understand that it is about expanding, at the cost of heavy sacrifices, the natural habitat of the fennec fox and the jerboa!

06 01 10
A plaque on the lawn: This tree was planted on March 8, 2005 by the Uzbek Foreign Minister—behind which, a sickly and stunted shrub, pointlessly reinforced by an iron armature, strives to symbolize the concept of freedom, of mutual understanding, and of universal fraternity.

08 06 10
We attribute the disappearance of the great apes to poaching or the destruction of their habitat, whereas they simply leave their forests to merge—without a trace—with the human crowd. I am one of them.

09 06 10
Neither oak nor fur: it is my burial and I have nothing to wear!

03 08 11
One can undoubtedly understand the desire that leads a man to pose as responsible for something as big as a forest fire.

03 26 11
Loud noise of wings in the chestnut trees. It is the leaves that are unfolding. Prepare for takeoff.

03 28 11
That’s the last straw. We cut the tree, we split it into planks that we assemble, that we varnish, from which we make a pretty table, stable and convivial—a long job—and here are these ladies and gentlemen unpacking their meal on the stump!

04 03 11
My cherry tree is blooming. Modestly, I step aside to let it enjoy, unrivaled, its ten days of glory.

04 04 11
The Liberty tree having been planted too close to the Equality tree, its shadow was suffocating the latter which had to throw its roots a little further to survive, thereby depleting the resources of the Fraternity tree which completed this little grove, and only stayed up by twisting itself like an ivy around the trunk of the Liberty tree, which died shortly thereafter.

04 21 11
A magpie couple is building their nest in a fir tree in the park. I observe their comings and goings, astounded by the size of the branches they bring back. More planks than twigs. Then I remember that, for them, it is about holding four or five small eggs between earth and sky; and I start to find them still much too careless.

05 22 11
The blackbird has tasted every cherry on my tree; but clearly, no, he does not like cherries.

08 08 11
While the return to nature is an increasingly clear temptation among young city dwellers, and while many are putting on their boots to take the leap and settle in the countryside, both for economic reasons and with the hope of leading a more serene existence, populations of wild animals, squirrels, weasels, hedgehogs, foxes, birds of prey (even bears and wolves in certain regions), pushed out by the shrinking and deterioration of their habitat (deforestation, pesticides, etc.), are showing up in cities where food waste abounds and will logically end up colonizing them once we are gone, having, as for us, taken up residence in their burrows and in their nests.

08 19 11
When they gave up the back garden which was therefore cut in two, I was a student and no longer lived with them. A hedge was planted; the new neighbors cut down the old trees to build their house. Then, when it was time to retire, my parents sold the rest to move to the city. When I talk about this garden, the recent years’ transformations do not last long. The hedge is pulled out, the trees are hoisted up again and the terrified neighbors do not understand why their walls are suddenly cracking. Then the roof collapses on them. I should have warned them, though, that they were building on eruptive, unstable ground, subject deep below as well as on the surface to the unpredictable laws of the tectonics of memories.

08 26 11
We would have long made friends with extraterrestrial peoples if man did not persist in pissing at the foot of all the trees that line the roads of this world, as if to fiercely demarcate his territory and prohibit it to other creatures.

10 12 11
Having demolished a wall five meters high and twenty meters long with the sole force of his sap, my lilac became aware of his power. He had enveloped our loves in his fragrant shadow for too long. No more cutesy tenderness! Gone is the sweet, heady lilac! We would see what wood he was made of. And since then, he has pushed his roots ever further, ever deeper. Where will his new taste for destruction and rampage take him? What is he aiming for? What if he were thinking of cracking the globe…?

10 21 11
– Don’t go to all this trouble for me, I’ve already seen the spectacle, I said to the fall which was beginning to rust the leaves and strip the trees. So, it abstained and I was fortunately exempt from it this year.

11 26 11
Every day, I stopped for a moment in front of the old tree; and sometimes I even came back to it. Over time, I knew the pattern of its bark, and the sound of the wind in its foliage had become familiar to me like a friendly voice.
It was a venerable tree but I found myself believing that my daily visit did not leave it indifferent. And, as I often sang, I dreamed that perhaps it would learn my language, that its moving branches would know how to reproduce the sounds of my vocal cords and that it would then teach me its ancient wisdom. Just think: to learn from an old tree! Well, this morning, in fact, it spoke to me.
– Hey man, will you one day finally stop pissing on me?

01 30 12
The man cuts down the tree to make his nest.

08 30 12
I pushed aside a branch and entered under the forest’s cover. Immediately I saw, standing on a mushroom, a little being wearing a red cap who was smoothing his white beard: a gnome.
– Sorry, I’m not a gnome. I am a kxörghol!
– Yet you have everything of the gnome, my little old man, even that hatchet on your shoulder.
– I am a kxörghol. I use it to cut herbs for my potions.
– There you go. You are therefore exactly a gnome.
He sighed. Then he pulled at his beard. It was fake.
He was a kxörghol.

09 01 12
Open ping-pong table under the tree. This year, the oak is not stupidly dropping its acorns. It is smashing.

12 24 12
The rope is tied to the lowest branch of a young maple tree. I tie it around my neck. Passers-by are astonished, as my feet touch the ground. But I point to the tree with my chin: – It will grow fast enough, and I am in no hurry to die.

08 05 13
After biking down the smooth, beautiful winding road past the big lighthouse, I pick a green, sour, delicious apple from the little tree which has given me one every year for at least thirty years. It is one of the rare pleasures of age: these ritual gestures, whose symbolic value and accompanying enjoyment increase precisely with the passage of time and the emotion attached to repetition, fidelity, reliability, and permanence—my life is not threatened, since it has always been linked to that of the indestructible, munificent Cadouère apple tree, and there is no reason for it to stop.

11 05 13
He walked into a plane tree, then a fir.

12 25 13
Frightened or saddened, the child comes to snuggle up to me. Ha! For God’s sake! He has come to seek refuge under the great oak, against its rough bark!
And I who am so weak, so insecure, so perplexed—I, cracked, worm-eaten, windy—I, stunned, eaten by ivy, moss, mushrooms—I, the hollow shelter of the gloomy owl!
Then I mobilize the last of the sap, I push my roots into the depths, I throw my branches towards the light, I stand up like a column, like a pillar, like a single stream of thick wood between earth and sky, and I reassure the child.

03 22 14
Then the tree evolved and conceived a digital fruit. Yum.

05 11 15
– It’s a mistake you often make, scolded the cherry; in picking me, you also pull the tail off the tree.

12 12 15
I cannot bring myself to tell my daughters that Christmas trees do not exist, that they are really just fir trees like you and I in disguise.

02 16 16
The ravenale, commonly known as the traveler’s tree, has only one piece of advice for travelers: – Take root there!

07 01 16
The scent of honeysuckle surprised me as I turned down the alley. A sweet nostalgia came over me. I found myself forty years back in a sunny garden, running between the trees with Lise, Grégoire and Alexis… Then I froze. Lise, Grégoire, Alexis? I had never known these children, or this garden for that matter. These memories were not mine!

11 16 16
The tree that supplies your paper and pencil will be absent from your landscape. That is probably why it also supplies the eraser.

01 18 17
Shallow is the forest with a single tree. Yet the wolf haunts it. Its breath ruffles its tail.

03 16 17
Sometimes I think about the trees I once knew well.

03 31 17
I have never seen such an enormous weeping willow. What grief! What happened? What happened?!

04 13 17
In an early version of the divine project finally scrapped, the tree grew thanks to the steam produced by a wood-fired boiler.

05 31 17
With patience, twig by twig, I built a nest to my size. Then I found a tree big enough, with branches strong enough to hold it. It was the egg that would not come.

08 22 17
Ingenious though he may be, man has not been able to grow the imitation oak tree that would have made carpenters’ lives so much easier.

09 17 17
The big plane tree paddles with all its branches in the wind. All that remains is to cut the trunk and dig the pirogue.

12 19 17
This deep forest where the panther and the anaconda lived, where several primitive tribes subsisted unbeknownst to the modern world, was in reality a clever labyrinth made up of only three trees…

08 01 18
As often happens, an aroma wafting from the kitchen announces the dessert as soon as the drinks are served: this fig tree’s scent pervades the olive grove.

10 29 18
Hacking away with an axe, he cuts down the ash tree at the back of the garden; she now places in the stove the log with their intertwined initials carved forty years earlier into the bark; the old couple is feeling a little cold.

12 18 18
– What a magnificent porcini mushroom!
– Yes, I came across it by chance while looking for corpses in the forest.

01 07 19
One tree for lightning, another for shelter. One tree for ambush, another for refuge. The forest protects me from all that it threatens me with.

02 25 19
Like the woodpecker banging its beak on the tree trunk to draw out the tasty larvae buried in the bark, I knock on my neighbor’s door to ask her for some brown sugar.

03 30 19
ME – Look how beautiful is the cherry in blossom!
SUZIE (8 years old) – Yeah… I prefer the cherry in cherry.

04 05 19
Man can make anything out of planks, except a tree.

04 18 19
The lumberjack’s job used to be rough and thankless, but since the advent of treetop adventure trails, with all those children suspended between the trees, it has become undeniably more fun.

04 27 19
In the hope of repopulating the impoverished imagination of our contemporaries, twelve unicorns, five griffins, three basilisks and a couple of Tarasques have just been introduced into the forest of dreams. A belated measure, will it be enough to lift our species out of its lethal prosaism?

05 02 19
make your cradle in the shrub
then your coffin in that same oak
centenarian

06 05 19
All the tree needs is a little earth and water to create air and fire.

12 12 19
Then the fruits of the orchard he had tended, pruned and watered all his life, with doggedness, with ardor and without sparing any effort, came to maturity…
…but then, as he raised his arm towards the branches, it occurred to him that he was too weak now, too old, too stooped to reach and pick them, and he had to wait again, patiently…
…for them to fall of their own accord, when they were completely rotten, onto his back and shoulders.

05 25 20
Having harvested all its fruits, the man cut down the tree and chopped it into planks: he now needed a cupboard to store his jams.

06 08 20
If the baby bird were born directly from the chestnut, the tedious stages of tree growth and nest building would be profitably bypassed, wouldn’t they? Everything would be so much faster. An idea worth exploring further?

06 10 20
Hacking away with an axe, I cut down the cherry tree, the apple tree, the mirabelle plum tree, the linden, the cedar, the damson and the lilac in the garden: I am going to plant oil palm, it yields better returns.

07 22 20
This oak tree has been searching the earth with one hand and the sky with the other for a century: but nothing’s to be found, clearly, nothing at all!

09 01 20
I was 15 when my kayak flipped over. I, trapped in the cockpit. The well of green water opened up. It was bottomless, it was hopeless. It was all over. Farewell, my friends, I die. I waved my arms desperately and my hand found a branch reaching out from the nearby bank and caressing the water. I owe my life to an alder. How can I repay my debt?

05 08 20
The skinny branch of the chestnut tree bears large, ultra-sticky buds, broad palmate leaves, large red or white thyrses, thorny burs containing a heavy, hard fruit… You have to wait until winter, the season of modesty, for it to show itself as it is, without airs: mere kindling.

06 10 20
Do we even know where this slew of trees, earth and houses that the high-speed train has lifted in its path will fall?

09 24 20
What a magical moment! One would live and breathe for it… I was threading my way between the trunks, voluptuously inhaling the strong scents of humus, leaves and mushrooms, when suddenly, as I reached a small clearing, I saw it, superb and majestic, and I felt faint.
A branch cracked; it raised its head and froze. We exchanged a long look, both of us trembling with emotion, then, without haste, it disappeared behind the trees.
So spoke the doe, recounting our encounter to the members of its herd.

10 09 20
It was not the first time a hanged man had been untied from its branches. The tree was cut down this morning by court order. It was feared that the tree had taken a liking to it.

12 15 20
Forests, too, are slaughterhouses—if tree sap were red, we would probably be more painfully aware of it.

02 27 21
The cross on the map clearly indicated this location, to the right of the large tree, between the two rocks. Here I was! The treasure was there, beneath my feet! It then occurred to me that, carried away by impatience and greed, I had come without tools.
No matter! I set about scraping and digging the earth with my bare hands. I broke my nails. My fingers soon bloody, my knees skinned to the bone. I extracted heavy stones, sliced roots with my teeth. My back was broken; my hands, two raw wounds. Finally, after several hours of effort, groping around at the bottom of the hole, I came across something hard, cold… some metal…
A shovel!

01 01 22
The oak counted to a hundred years. And when he started looking for us, we were all dead in our hiding places.

03 23 22
My garden only exists when I am in it. Every time I am there, it never misses, it spreads out right there, around me. Does that make me one of its trees?

06 15 22
Fire has ravaged the forest. The only wood I have left is the handle of my axe.

11 02 22
On beaches and forest paths, the trunks of the dangerous mancenillium, whose sap, leaves and fruit are highly toxic, are marked with a red ring. It would indeed be regrettable if we got the species wrong and offered our worst enemy, as a lethal infusion, a delicious tamarind juice!
Thin trunks entwine with lianas to form gigantic nests in the rainforest. What hatching will we one day witness? I stay on the lookout for a while and then, on reflection, I decide I would rather not be there when it happens, so I scurry off.

11 07 22
A dead tree is also an extinguished fire.

04 21 23
Too fragile or too high were the branches of his small garden’s only tree for him to attach a rope and hang himself. Fate had decidedly taken its toll on this desperate man, who had to patiently wait for a stormy day to press himself against the trunk and die at last, struck by lightning.

08 21 23
Do not forget your saw! Then I took my carpenter to the foot of the 300-year-old oak, for I wanted a Louis XV period living room.

09 15 23
When the time comes, I will use a macaque’s tail as a walking stick—thus neither age nor impotence will prevent me from climbing trees.

12 26 23
The tree grows in one spurt from the cellar to the attic.

03 18 24
In a well-ordered world, the dice would fall from the trees when chance had really brought its plans to fruition.

03 21 24
Practice your dribbling in the forest.

03 29 24
Then the tree that hid the forest was in turn cut down.

04 03 24
Rather learn the proper use of slingshots from the forked cherry tree.

04 10 24
The tree has no doubts about its destiny. Barely out of the ground, it is already triumphantly raising its arms to the sky.