Malevil

  If Germain had reached the inner courtyard a few seconds earlier, it is possible that his life would have been saved. Because the castle itself in fact suffered very little damage, presumably because the vast cliff overhanging it to the north acted as a massive shield between it and the worst of the inferno.

  Another thing strikes me. From the moment when the trainlike thunder (again I have to admit that the phrase is ludicrously inadequate) exploded in the cellar, followed by that terrible baking heat, my companions and myself were all seized by a paralysis not only of our limbs and speech but even of thought. We spoke very little, moved even less, and what was even more surprising, as I noted earlier, was that I had no clear notion of any kind about what was happening outside the cellar, until the sudden appearance of Germain. And even then I continued to think in only the vaguest terms. I completely failed to connect or draw any conclusions from the failure of the electricity supply, the persistent silence of all the radio stations, the inhuman noise that followed, and the terrifying rise in temperature.

  And accompanying this loss of reasoning power there was also the loss of any sense of time. Even today I cannot tell how many minutes passed between the moment when the lights went out and the moment when the door opened to reveal Germain. The reason for this, I take it, was that my perception of things was interrupted by several blanks, so it no longer functioned other than intermittently and extremely feebly.

  I also lost all moral sense. I didn’t lose it immediately, since I began by coming to Meyssonnier’s assistance at considerable cost to myself. But that was the last flicker, as it were. It never occurred to me for a moment subsequently that it was an extremely unaltruistic piece of behavior to take sole possession of our only tub of water by climbing into it and remaining immersed there for so long. On the other hand, if I hadn’t done so, would I have had the strength to crawl over to the door Germain had left open and close it? I noticed, after I had done it, that not one of my companions had so much as budged, even though all their eyes were fixed upon the opening with an expression of suffering.

  I said earlier that as I knelt on my hands and knees, exhausted, head hanging, barely more than a yard away from Germain, I hadn’t the strength to move toward him. But I ought really to have said courage rather than strength, since I was able to summon sufficient of the latter to get back to my tub. The truth of the matter was that I was still in the grip of the sudden terror I had experienced when I saw his swollen, bloody body appear in the doorway, the strips of flesh hanging half off his torso like the tatters of a shirt ripped in a brawl. Germain was tall and strongly built, and perhaps because I was huddled in the tub, perhaps too because his shadow on the vaulted ceiling was so disproportionately enlarged by the low candles, he seemed to me an immense and terrible figure, as though it was death itself, not one of its victims, that had suddenly appeared. Also he was standing, whereas our weakness had reduced us all to prostration on the floor. And lastly, he was swaying backward and forward as I watched, fixing me at the same time with his piercing blue eyes, and I somehow construed that swaying as containing a terrifying menace, as though he was about to fall forward upon me to destroy me.

  I reached the tub, but to my great surprise I was forced to give up any idea of climbing back into it, because when I put one hand into it I decided that the water was too hot. I ought to have deduced that this sensation was merely an illusion, and meant in fact that the surrounding air was beginning to cool down, but the idea didn’t cross my mind for a second, any more than that of consulting the thermometer above the tap. I had only one idea in my head: to escape from contact with the stone floor. I hoisted myself with some difficulty up onto two wine casks lying on their sides and touching each other. I settled myself crosswise, sitting in the hollow between them, legs and torso raised up by the two curves. The wood gave me a sensation that was almost one of coolness and comfort, but that didn’t last. I was in too much pain, although the site of it was now different. I was perspiring less and no longer stifling, but the palms of my hands, my knees, my hips and thighs—in short all those parts of my body that had been in contact with the floor—were now hurting. I could hear a low whimpering all around me, I thought fleetingly of my companions with a feeling of concern, until eventually I realized with shame that it was I who was whimpering. Later I came to realize that there is nothing more subjective than pain. And the pain I was feeling at that point was in fact out of all proportion to the very superficial burns that were producing it. As soon as I had regained a little strength and begun to act again, I forgot them.

  A further proof of how slight they were was the fact that I went off to sleep and must have slept for some while. As I awoke I noticed that the big candles in the two brackets had burned out, and that someone had lit two of the others a little farther on. Then I experienced a sensation of icy cold all through my body, but particularly in my back. I shivered. I searched for my clothes with my eyes, failed to locate them, and then without my being aware of it my intentions changed. I had decided to get down from my perch and go over to look at the thermometer. Moving was very painful. My muscles were stiff, almost locked, and the palms of my hands hurt me every time I tried to shift position. The thermometer read plus eighty-six, but however hard I tried to tell myself that it was still hot, that I had no reason to be shaking with cold, my reasoning was unable to stop me shivering. As I turned away from the thermometer I saw Peyssou, standing up, leaning against a cask, and struggling back into his clothes. And oddly enough I could see no one except him, even though the five others were all there. It was as though my eyes were so tired that they simply refused to see more than one thing at a time.

  “Are you getting dressed?” I asked stupidly.

  “Yes,” he said in a weak but perfectly natural voice. “I’m getting dressed. I must go home. Yvette must be worried.”

  I stared at him. As soon as Peyssou mentioned his wife the light flooded cruelly into my mind. And in some strange way this illumination had a color, a temperature, and a shape. It was white, icy, and like a knife slashing into my heart. I watched Peyssou dressing, and at that moment, for the first time, I really grasped the event that I was living through.

  “What’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?” Peyssou asked aggressively.

  I hung my head. I don’t know why, but I felt a horrible sense of guilt on his account. “Nothing, nothing, Peyssou, old friend,” I said in a weak voice.

  “You were looking at me,” he said in the same tone, and his hands were trembling so that he had to abandon the attempt to pull on his pants.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You were looking at me. You can’t say you weren’t,” he went on with a look of hatred and a note of anger in his voice that his weakness made piteous.

  I said nothing. I wanted to speak, but I could find nothing to say. I glanced around me searching for support. And this time I could see my companions. Or rather I was able to see them one by one, with a series of painful reiterated efforts that made me begin to feel sick.

  La Menou, leaden-skinned, was sitting with Momo’s head on her lap and stroking his dirty hair with an almost imperceptible movement of her thin fingers. Meyssonnier and Colin were seated side by side, frozen into immobility, haggard-faced, eyes lowered. Thomas was standing, leaning against a cask. In one hand he was holding Momo’s transistor radio, with the other he was unceasingly winding the needle very, very slowly from one end of the still lighted dial to the other, vainly scanning the world in search of a human voice. His preoccupied face now had not merely the features of a marble statue but also its coloring, and almost its consistency.

  None of them returned my look. And immediately, I remember, I felt a wave of mortal bitterness toward them, the same feeling of impotent hatred that I had seen for me in Peyssou’s eyes. Like a newly born child howling with pain as the air penetrates into its lungs, each of us had lived such interminable hours turned in wholly upon himself that it was very difficult to ente
r once more into contact with others.

  The temptation to let Peyssou do as he pleased insinuated itself into my mind. I found myself saying inwardly in a coarse aggressive accent, All right, if that’s the way he wants it, let him bloody well go, and good riddance. I was so shocked at the baseness of this reaction that I immediately swung to the very opposite extreme and began thinking with maudlin tearfulness, Peyssou, my poor old friend Peyssou.

  I let my head sag forward. I was deep in the utmost confusion. My reactions were all so excessive, and none of them like me at all. With a kind of timidity, as if I were excusing myself for being in the wrong, I said, “It may still be a little dangerous to go out yet.”

  As soon as it was uttered this remark struck me as almost comic, so wildly did it underestimate the situation. But even so, it made Peyssou angry, and he said savagely, teeth clenched, but in a voice just as weak as my own, “Dangerous? Why dangerous? How do you know about it, whether it’s dangerous?”

  Apart from anything else, the tone in which he spoke was obviously artificial. He sounded like a bad actor in a play. But I knew what part he was trying to play and I felt I wanted to cry. I lowered my head, and once again at that point, out of weariness and depression, I almost gave up making any effort to restrain him. What stopped me, when I raised my head again, were Peyssou’s eyes. They were filled with fury, but there was supplication in them too. They were begging me to say nothing, to leave him as long as possible in his state of blindness, as though my words in themselves possessed the power to create the terrible misfortune that had struck him.

  I was sure now that he had understood—as Colin and Meyssonnier had. But they were attempting to evade their appalling loss by withdrawing into stupor and immobility, whereas Peyssou was trying to escape by running toward the threat, denying everything, ready to rush out, eyes closed, to the ashes that had been his home.

  I began several sentences in my head, and almost opted for one of them: Just think, Peyssou, judging from the temperature in here earlier on... No, I couldn’t say that. It was too direct.

  I lowered my head again and said stubbornly, “You can’t just leave like this.”

  “And you’re going to stop me, I suppose?” Peyssou answered in a defiant tone. His voice was still very weak, and as he spoke he made a pitiful effort to square his great shoulders.

  I didn’t attempt to answer. I was aware of a sickly-sweet smell in my nostrils and throat that made me feel slightly nauseated. When the four candles in the first two brackets had guttered out, someone, possibly Thomas, had lit the two in the next bracket, so the area of the cellar I was in, near the water supply, was largely plunged in darkness. It took me a little while to realize that the smell I was finding so unpleasant was emanating from the body of Germain, which was lying scarcely visible to one side of the door.

  I realized that I had forgotten its very existence. Peyssou, whose eyes were still fixed resolutely on mine, still with their look of combined hatred and supplication, followed my gaze, and at the sight of the body he seemed for an instant to have been turned to stone. Then he quickly pulled his eyes away with a slightly ashamed air, as though he had decided to deny the existence of what he had just seen. He was now the only one of us fully dressed; but although the way to the door was clear, and I was obviously incapable of preventing him reaching it, he still did not move.

  I said again, with a stubbornness lacking any kind of strength, “Come on, Peyssou. You can’t just leave like this.”

  But it had been a mistake to speak. My words seemed to provide him with the motive power he needed, and without turning his back on us, yet not actually walking backward either, he took several hesitant and awkward crablike steps toward the door.

  At that moment I received assistance from an unexpected quarter. La Menou opened her eyes and said in patois, as though she were sitting in her kitchen in the gate tower instead of lying pale and naked in a cellar, “Emmanuel’s right, farmer. You can’t just go like this. You need to eat something first.”

  “No, no,” Peyssou answered, also in patois. “Thanks all the same. I really don’t need it. Thank you.”

  But he had halted his steps, caught in the trap of peasant invitations with their complicated ritual of refusal and acceptance.

  “Now come on, come on, Monsieur Peyssou,” La Menou said, not to be deflected from the customary course of such courtesies. “It won’t do you any harm to stop and have something for a moment. Nor all the rest of us. Monsieur le Coultre,” she went on, in French now and turning to look at Thomas, “would you kindly lend me your little knife?”

  “But really, I tell you I’m not hungry,” Peyssou said, though it was clear that these exchanges were affording him vast relief, for he was looking at La Menou with childlike gratitude, as though she was his only lifeline to the familiar and reassuring world she represented.

  “Now come on, come on, Monsieur Peyssou,” La Menou said, with a calm confidence that he was going to accept. “Come on, you,” she went on, pushing Momo’s head off her lap, “move over a bit so I can get up.” And then, when Momo clung to her knees and began to whimper, “Now stop that, you big booby,” she went on in patois, and gave him a good hard slap on one cheek. Where she found the reserves of strength for all this I have no idea, because when she stood up, naked, tiny, skeletal, I was staggered all over again by her fragile appearance. Yet without any help she untied the nylon cord supporting one of the hams hanging over our heads, lowered it to the ground, and removed it from its hook while Momo, his face white and terrified, watched her and gave tiny yells for help like a baby. As soon as she walked back toward him and laid the ham down on a cask over his head to unwrap it, he stopped his whimpering and began sucking his thumb, as though he had abruptly regressed to babyhood again.

  I watched La Menou as with great difficulty she managed to cut off a number of small thickish slices from the ham, holding it propped against the cask, the knife handle gripped firmly in her bony little hand. Or to be more exact, I watched her body. As I had foreseen, she did not wear a brassiere, and where her breasts would have been there were just two very tiny wrinkled pockets of loose skin. Beneath her sterile belly the bones of her pelvic girdle jutted out sharply. Her shoulder blades were clearly visible, and her buttocks, thinner than a little she-monkey’s, were no bigger than your fist. Ordinarily, when I said La Menou it was a name charged with all the affection, the esteem, and the irritation that characterized our relationship. But that day, seeing her naked for the first time, I was forcibly reminded that her dialect nickname, La Menou—“Tiny”—referred also to a body, possibly the body of the only woman surviving in the world, and observing its decrepitude I experienced a boundless inward sadness.

  La Menou collected the slices of ham in her right hand, rather like a pack of cards, and proceeded to deal them out, beginning with me and ending with her son. Momo snatched his share with a savage grunt, thrust it whole into his mouth, and pushed at it with his fingers. He immediately went scarlet, and would probably have choked to death if his mother had not forcibly opened his jaws and pushed her tiny hand down his throat to pull out the obstruction. Having done so, she used Thomas’s knife to cut up the saliva-covered slice into small pieces, then put them into Momo’s mouth one by one, scolding him and slapping him meanwhile every time he bit her fingers.

  I watched this little scene only vaguely, without any feeling of either amusement or distaste. As soon as I had my slice of ham in my hand, the saliva flooded my own mouth, and holding it in both hands, I began ripping at it with my teeth, hardly less gluttonously than Momo had attacked his. It was very salty, and eating all that salt along with the pork in which it had been absorbed gave me an incredible feeling of well-being. I noticed that my companions, Peyssou included, were all eating equally greedily, moving away from one another slightly and casting almost fearful glances around them, as though they were afraid that someone might snatch their share of the meat away from them.

  I finished
eating long before the others, then looked around for the crate of full bottles and observed that it was empty. So I hadn’t been the only one to quench my thirst that way. I felt happy at this discovery, because I was beginning to feel remorse at having monopolized the tub for so long. I picked up two empty bottles and filled them with my drawing gun. Once again I handed around the glasses—this time without paying the slightest attention to which one Momo had been handling—and poured out wine for us all. While they were drinking, with the same silent avidity as they had eaten, my companions all kept their hollow, blinking eyes on the ham that was still lying on the flat top of the cask against which La Menou had leaned while cutting it. La Menou understood what their eyes were saying, but she refused to let herself be softened. As soon as she had finished her wine she wrapped the ham up again with inflexibly precise gestures and hauled it back into place, out of reach above our heads. With the exception of Peyssou, we were all still naked. Standing there in silence, bent forward slightly by fatigue, eyes greedily fixed on the meat hanging from the dim vaulting, we were not so very different from the hominids who had once lived in the mammoth cave beside the Rhunes, not far from Malevil, in the days when man had only just emerged from the primate stage.