Malevil

  As for Peyssou, his case was hopeless. He was a good half a head taller than Meyssonnier and myself, with shoulders to match, which meant he couldn’t even get into my jackets. It preyed on his mind rather, our poor giant, the thought that he was going to find himself one of these days walking about naked. Happily, however, his problems were eventually solved, as I shall explain later.

  La Menou grumbled from morning to night about all the things that had disappeared from our lives. Ten times a day she would flick electric switches, or out of sheer habit plug in her coffee grinder (she had several pounds of beans still in reserve), and every time the disappointment caused her to swear with a very downcast air. She was very much attached to her washing machine, to her electric iron, to her electric roaster, to her radio, which she had listened to (or rather hadn’t listened to) while cooking, to the television, which she had watched every evening right through to the end of the final program, regardless of what was on. She had adored the automobile, and even in my uncle’s time had already begun inventing insidious excuses to have herself driven into La Roque during the week, on top of the regulation visit to the Saturday mart. She even began to miss doctors—though she had never consulted one—as soon as there weren’t any. Her ambition to beat her mother’s record and live to be a hundred now seemed to her gravely threatened, and she lamented the fact daily.

  “When I think of all the idiocies the left-wing press used to reel out about the consumer society!” Meyssonnier remarked to me one day. “I mean, just listen to La Menou. What could be worse for her than a society where there’s nothing left to consume?”

  Or for him than a society in which one could no longer read the Party newspaper. Because it was a terrible loss to Meyssonnier, his Party newspaper. As was that division of the world into two neat camps, socialists and capitalists, that had always given a meaning and a spice to his life, the former fighting staunchly for the truth, the latter plunged into darkest error. Now that both had vanished from the world, Meyssonnier was totally disoriented. An optimist as befits the true militant, he had based his whole life on the vision of a glorious socialist future. And the future wasn’t going to be glorious for anyone, that was quite clear.

  Eventually Meyssonnier came upon an old bundle of newspapers in the boiler room. They were all copies of Le Monde (dating from 1956, the year of the Republican Front!), and he took immediate possession of them, despite the vast scorn with which he commented to me, “Le Monde! You know what I think about their so-called objectivity!” But that didn’t stop him reading his way through every one of them, copy by copy, from first page to last, totally engrossed. He even tried to read out extracts to us.

  But Colin promptly told him, in very sharp tones indeed, “Meyssonnier, we don’t give a bugger about your Guy Mollet and his Algerian war! That was twenty years ago, all that! Keep it to yourself!”

  “My Guy Mollet!” Meyssonnier exclaimed indignantly, turning to me. “Did you hear that?”

  It was from La Menou that I first learned things weren’t going too well between Colin and Peyssou in their room; then little by little they brought their complaints to me.

  Peyssou was allowing his grief over his family to overflow a little too freely: anecdotes and memories in an unending flow that was beginning to wear down Colin’s nerves.

  “And Colin, well, you know him,” Peyssou said in his turn, “touchy as they come. But these days you should hear him, pure vinegar, always letting me know what a great dumb ox he thinks I am. And on top of it, not being able to smoke his packet of tobacco every day, that has him on edge all the time. He flares up at the slightest thing, and he’s forever going on at me because I’m so big. As if I can help it.”

  I asked Meyssonnier if he would mind very much taking Colin’s place in the room with Peyssou. For on one point I was adamant: Peyssou mustn’t be left alone.

  “Basically, you know,” Meyssonnier said, “I am always the can carrier, aren’t I? Even back in the Club days I was the one who always got landed with the boring little chores. Peyssou not clever enough, Colin not responsible enough. And you were always too busy giving the orders. The others we needn’t go into.”

  “Ah, now come on,” I said with a smile. “As secretary of your cell you were used to boring little chores, weren’t you? Did you mind then?”

  He didn’t take that one up. “I want you to know though,” he went on, “that as far as Peyssou’s concerned, I rate him a long way above Colin, even though I know Colin’s always been your little pet. Colin can be charming all right, but he can also be very difficult. Peyssou is pure gold all through. But all the same, if I’m going to be sharing a room with him, then someone’s got to ask him to go easy on all those reminiscences, because I’ve got a headful of memories too, you know.”

  He froze and suddenly began blinking, the corners of his mouth sagging, all his features drawn downward. “Yes,” he went on, “there’s one memory above all, and I’m going to tell it to you. Then after that I’ll never mention it again. The one thing I want to avoid is going on about the past. But here it is. The morning of Zero Day my little François wanted to come with me to Malevil. He wanted to see the castle, and I’d already said he could. Then Mathilde said no he couldn’t come, that I wasn’t to drag him into our filthy politics at his age. I hesitated. I can see myself still—hesitating. Because the kid was looking very disappointed. But it was only the evening before that I’d had a row with Mathilde over politics, and you know what women are, they yak on and on and on, then they sulk, and there’s no end to it. Right, I thought. Suddenly I’d had it, all that, up to the back teeth. So I said all right, keep him here then, your son, I’ll go on my own. In other words I just couldn’t face another scene just then, not so soon after the one before. I behaved like a coward. So François stayed. He stood and watched me go with the tears running down his cheeks. And if I hadn’t been such a coward—you see the point, Emmanuel—he’d be here now, my François.”

  After that he was unable to speak for a good minute. Me too. But all the same, I think it did him good to share that nagging pain with me. I can’t remember now what we talked about afterward, though I remember we did talk. And all the while I was wondering how I was going to set about telling Peyssou not to share his sorrows so much. Because basically he was in the right. Meyssonnier had just proved it.

  Almost as soon as our terrible burial rites were over, Adelaide decided it was time she gave birth, and promptly dropped a dozen or so piglets. But, since she was even more unapproachable than ever while farrowing, we were unable to count them exactly until she finally got to her feet. Then we discovered that she had in fact produced fifteen, a pretty respectable figure, though still short of her previous record.

  It was Momo who gave the alarm, hurtling into the great hall just as we were about to eat our midday meal, all filth and hair, waving his arms in the air and yelling even more unintelligibly than usual. As soon as his yells had been interpreted, we all left our places around the table and ran full speed down to the Maternity Ward, where Adelaide, lying grunting and groaning on her side, suddenly saw the wall of her stall crowned by a row of seven greedy and chattering human heads. She grunted and grumbled, but since nothing more happened she soon returned to her labors and went on extruding more offspring. While we, chins propped on the top rail of her stall (which was nearly five feet high, because it had been intended for horses, and La Menou had to stand on two blocks in order to get her head to the right height), promptly embarked on a lively discussion as to the most judicious use to which this abundance of new provisions could be put. Because unfortunately we just didn’t have enough feed to keep fifteen pigs. Which meant that some of them at least would have to be sacrificed as soon as they had finished suckling, a prospect we fell to envisaging with a totally fake objectivity, pretending it distressed us no end, while all the time our mouths were already watering at the thought of a plump suckling pig roasting on its spit over a great fire in the hall. And I noticed how th
is gluttony had a kind of feverish intensity about it. It wasn’t just part of enjoying the good things in life as it had been once; it sprang from our fears about the future. Accounts of past feasts had begun to play an abnormally large role in many of our conversations, I suddenly realized, which showed that the fear of famine was still always there, lurking at the back our minds, nagging at our guts.

  Two days later Princesse dropped a bull calf, thereby insuring the survival of her race, at the price of future incest. It was by no means an easy birth, however, and La Menou had to take charge. Oddly, when she asked Peyssou to help her he refused point-blank. That was the one thing, he said, that he’d never been able to face at his own place. He was always afraid of hurting the cow, and it was Yvette who always saw to it. Or when it was very difficult and they needed to pull, then he’d go and fetch Colin. “All right then, Colin,” La Menou said curtly.

  But in fact we all went. It was at night, and so La Menou could see what she was doing I found myself squatting on my heels in the stall holding one of the big candles from the cellar. The wax kept running down over my fingers, and I was sweating profusely, partly because of the excitement and worry, partly because of that overpowering smell of cow which I’ve never been able to stand. The delivery took four hours, and we were all speechless with concern and worry. After a while, what with the hot wax and the proximity of the cow itself, I couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer, so I handed the candle over to Meyssonnier, and from then on it continued to change hands every quarter of an hour, until the time came when I found it was my turn again.

  Momo was quite useless, sobbing like a calf himself in Bel Amour’s stall at the thought of losing our only cow, and even, who could say, perhaps Bel Amour herself, since she too was very near her term by now. He insisted on expressing all his apprehensions aloud in a sort of whining litany, and once or twice La Menou raised her head to give him a verbal drubbing, though without her customary vigor, since she was in too much distress herself to give her whole attention to the task. Momo sensed this, and consequently paid very little attention to his mother’s warnings, his only concession being to replace the litany with a series of little rhythmic moans, as though he was the one giving birth.

  When the bull calf finally did emerge into that world so devoid—for the moment at least—of all pasture, La Menou, without putting her imagination to any great strain, named him Prince.

  The good recovery made by the mother, together with the sex of her offspring, soon made us forget the agonies we had been put through and there was a fresh burst of optimism all around—unhappily killed in the bud a few days later when Bel Amour also gave birth, without difficulties, but alas to a filly.

  Bel Amour was fourteen, Amarante three. And Malice (which was the name chosen by Momo, perhaps because she had been such a disappointment to us) one day. Three mares of different ages and varying distinction, but all three destined to die without progeny.

  That evening in the hall was a sad vigil.

  —|—

  After the burial of the dead animals used up our last drop of diesel oil, I had decided to devote my stock of gasoline—apart from one gallon can which I put on one side to meet some possible emergency—entirely to the power saw. And while Meyssonnier and Colin were constructing a horse-drawn plow with parts from the one hitherto drawn by my tractor, I set out with Peyssou and Thomas to begin getting in a stock of wood for the winter, taking great care never to touch any trunks, however splintered, in which the presence of sap could be discerned.

  Amarante proved as easy to break in to the shafts as she had been to the saddle, and in no time at all she would allow herself to be harnessed to my trailer—henceforward known as the “cart”—which Meyssonnier had adapted for the purpose before attacking the problem of the plow. The blackened wood that we gathered together into great piles at odd intervals, often at quite a distance from Malevil, was then carted to the castle and piled up in one of the stalls in the outer enclosure. Wood burns so quickly, and it takes nature such an infinite time to make it, but at least we started with the one great advantage of being the only consumers around, and of having a vast territory at our disposal. All the same, as much out of prudence as in order to keep us all busy, I refused to stop until we had filled the entire stall, and even the neighboring one as well, which I calculated represented enough for two winters, provided we never burned more than one fire and used it for cooking as well as keeping ourselves warm.

  Ever since the day it had happened, the sky had continued to be a uniform dark gray pall weighing down on our heads. It was cold. The sun had never once appeared. Nor had there been rain. Because of the consistent drought, the ash-covered earth had acquired the look of a vast dust bath, and at the slightest breath of wind blackish clouds of fine ash rose into the air, obscuring the horizon even further. In Malevil itself, protected from the outside world by its age-old walls, huddled together around the table, we could still feel a breath of life. But as soon as we emerged from the ramparts to collect our wood, the world was a desolation. The charred landscape, the blackened skeletons of the trees, the leaden pall pressing down on us, the silence of the annihilated valleys, everything combined to crush us into nonexistence. I noticed that we all spoke in whispers, and even then very rarely, as though we were in a graveyard. Whenever the gray light became less dark we began to hope for a sight of the sun; but then the gray blanket would darken again, surrounding us from morning till night in a wan twilight.

  Thomas thought that the reason for this twilight was that the dust from the atomic explosions had formed a thick layer up in the stratosphere and was cutting off the rays of the sun. But he also said that in his opinion we ought to hope that it wouldn’t rain for a long time. Because if dirty bombs had been used, even a long way away from France itself, the drops could well bring radioactive dust down with them to earth. Every time we went any distance from Malevil he insisted that we take raincoats, gloves, and head coverings with us on the cart, while at the same time stressing how inadequate this protection would be.

  In the evenings in the great hall the cold was so intense for the time of year that after supper we kept a small fire going as we sat in a circle around one of the room’s two vast fireplaces and talked for a little while, simply in order “not to just go and lie in our stalls like animals” (La Menou).

  I took part in these evening conversations, but sometimes I read instead, sitting on a small stool, back against the side of the fireplace, with the book tilted toward the fire so that its flames lit up the pages. La Menou’s customary position was on one of the two facing hearth seats, and when the flames died down too low she would feed the fire with logs or one of the bundles of twigs she had laid ready under her seat.

  In the letter I had received after his death, which I now knew by heart, my uncle had recommended me to read the Bible, adding the comment “It’s a book in which you have to go deeper than just the way people behave; it’s the wisdom there that counts.” But I had been so busy with restoring Malevil since his death, and then with the worries of running it, that I had never found the time to do as he recommended. And now I was almost more overworked than before, but somehow time itself, strange to say, had subtly changed; it had become more malleable, and I noticed that I was now able to “find” it quite easily when I wanted to.

  When Bel Amour gave birth to Malice—I don’t like to suggest that it was the influence of the name she was given, but never was filly from so gentle a dam more difficult—the evening sank, as I have said, into a morass of gloom. For a start, during our evening meal, you could have cut the silence with a knife. And even when we had settled around the fire, La Menou and Momo facing each other on the hearth seats, me reading with my back against the side of the fireplace, the silence went on so long that we were almost grateful to Colin for remarking that in twenty-five years’ time there wouldn’t be a single horse left.

  “Twenty-five years? That’s being a bit gloomy,” Peyssou said. “I remember
myself, at the Girauds’ place—not the Volpinière Girauds but the ones at Cussac—I remember seeing a gelding they had that was nearly twenty-eight then, going a little blind, I admit, and so rheumaticky you could hear its joints grating when it walked, but it was still cleaning old Giraud’s vines for him even then.”

  “All right then, let’s say thirty years,” Colin said. “What’s another five years here or there? In thirty years, Malice will be dead. And Amarante too. And it will be many a long day since Bel Amour breathed her last.”

  “Now stop that,” La Menou said to Momo. Sitting, or rather half lying on the hearth seat opposite her, he had promptly burst into great sobs at this threat of Bel Amour’s future demise. “We’re not talking about tomorrow; we’re talking about thirty years from now. And where will you be yourself in thirty years’ time, you great booby?”

  “I don’t know,” Meyssonnier put in. “Momo is forty-seven now. So in thirty years he’ll be seventy-seven. That’s not so very old.”