Malevil, Page 25

  I pointed out that if two of us were always going to be sleeping in the gate tower, that left one of the bedrooms in the keep free. I suggested putting Miette in the one next to the bathroom on the second floor.

  As soon as Miette’s name was mentioned all animation died, and silence returned. That particular room, as Thomas alone did not know, was the former Club premises. And in those distant schoolboy days, without ever coming to any practical conclusion, we had constantly discussed how pleasant it would be to have a girl among our number, so that she could cook for us and “satisfy our passions.” The last phrase was my contribution—I had come across it in a novel—and it made a deep impression, since none of us knew exactly what “passion” meant.

  “And the other two?” Meyssonnier asked finally.

  “To my mind, they may as well stay where they are.”

  Silence. Everyone realized that Miette’s status at Malevil could not be the same as that of La Falvine or Jacquet. But as to exactly what that status was to be, nothing was said. No one seemed prepared to come forward and define it.

  Since the silence was dragging on, I decided I had better speak myself. “Right,” I said, “the moment has come to speak out frankly about Miette. On condition, naturally, that anything we say does not go beyond these four walls.”

  I looked around. Approval on all their faces. However, since La Menou remained completely impassive, her eyes fixed on her knitting, I added, “You too, Menou. Do you agree to keep what is said secret?”

  She stuck her needles into her knitting, rolled it up, and got to her feet. “I shall go to bed,” she said through tight lips.

  “I haven’t asked you to leave.”

  “It’s time I went to bed in any case.”

  “Now, Menou, don’t upset yourself.”

  “I’m not upset,” she said, turning her back on me. Then she crouched down in front of the fire to light her little lamp, muttering to herself the while, and though the words themselves were quite unintelligible I could tell from her tone that they weren’t complimentary as far as I was concerned.

  I said nothing.

  “You can stay, Menou,” Peyssou said, soft-hearted as always. “We trust you.”

  I gave him a sharp glance and continued to remain silent. I was quite pleased that she was going, in fact. Meanwhile the incomprehensible muttering continued. I could just make out the words pride and mistrust. I knew what she was angling for, but I persisted in remaining dumb. I noticed it was taking her a long while to light her lamp this evening. Quite clearly she was waiting for me to ask her to stay. She was going to be disappointed.

  She was, and boiling with rage as a result. “Come on, Momo,” she said in a very curt voice.

  Momo, fascinated by the conversation, protested sullenly. But he had chosen a bad moment, poor Momo, to try and disobey! Shifting her lamp into her left hand, La Menou raised her small bony right hand and slapped him across the face with all her strength. That done, she turned her back on him, and he followed her to the door, totally cowed. I wondered for the umpteenth time how the great ninny could still allow himself at the age of forty-seven, to be knocked about by his minuscule mother.

  “Good night, Peyssou,” La Menou said as she left the circle of chairs. “Good night, and sleep well.”

  “And you, Menou,” Peyssou answered, slightly embarrassed by her selective courtesy.

  She walked away, Momo in her wake, and he slammed the door behind them with a tremendous crash, turning his mother’s aggression on him back against me as best he could. And tomorrow he’d be sulky with me all day, just like his mother. A half century of life had still not severed the umbilical cord.

  “Right,” I said. “Miette. Let’s talk about Miette. When I was at L’Étang, while Jacquet and Thomas were out burying Wahrwoorde, I could perfectly well have had Miette and then come back and said, ‘There it is, fellows. Miette’s mine, my woman, my wife. Hands off, everyone.’”

  I looked around. No reaction, at least none that I could see.

  “And the reason I didn’t do that is so that no one else shall do it. In other words, it is my opinion that Miette must not become anyone’s exclusive property. In fact Miette isn’t a property at all, of course. Miette is her own mistress. Miette can have whatever relationship she chooses with whomever she likes, whenever she likes. Do you agree?”

  A long silence. No one spoke and no one even looked at me. The institution of monogamy was so deeply implanted in them, controlled so many reflexes, memories, emotions in their minds, that they simply could not accept, or even conceive of, a system that excluded it.

  “There are two possibilities,” Thomas said.

  Ah! I thought it would be Thomas!

  “Either Miette chooses one of us to the exclusion of all the others—”

  I broke in. “I must say right away that I could not accept that situation, even if I were the one to be chosen. And if it was someone else, then I would refuse to acknowledge any exclusive rights on his part.”

  “Do you mind?” Thomas said. “I haven’t finished.”

  “Yes, yes, finish, Thomas,” I said amiably. “I interrupted you, but I’m not preventing you from speaking.”

  “Well, that’s something at least,” Thomas said.

  I smiled at everyone in turn, without speaking. It was a trick that had always worked in the old Club days, and I noticed that it still seemed to work now. My challenger was discredited by my patience and his own touchiness.

  “The alternative possibility then,” Thomas went on, but it was clear that I had clipped his wings slightly, “is that Miette sleeps with all of us—and it’s totally immoral.”

  “Immoral?” I said. “How is it immoral?”

  “It’s obvious why it’s immoral,” Thomas said.

  “It’s not obvious in the slightest. I refuse to accept such a piece of clerical dogmatism as a fact.”

  A dirty trick on my part, attributing a “piece of clerical dogmatism” to Thomas, and I relished it in passing. But on the main question under debate he did seem so certain of himself and yet so immature, our sweet Thomas.

  “It’s not clerical dogmatism,” Thomas snapped in a furious voice that harmed his cause no end. “You can’t deny it. A woman who sleeps with everyone is a prostitute.”

  “Wrong!” I said. “A prostitute is a woman who sleeps with people for money. It’s the money that makes it immoral, not the number of sexual partners she has. There are women who sleep with everyone and anyone all over the place. Even in Malejac. And no one thinks the worse of them for it.”

  Silence. An angel flew over our heads. We were all thinking of Adelaide. Apart from Meyssonnier, who had become engaged to his Mathilde at a very young age, we had all been helped over our adolescence by Adelaide. And we were still grateful to her for it. And I felt sure that Meyssonnier himself, despite all his virtue, sometimes felt regret at what he had missed.

  Thomas must have sensed that I was exploiting the strength of some shared memory, because he made no comment.

  Almost certain now of carrying my argument, I went on: “It’s not a question of morality. It’s a matter of adapting ourselves to our situation. In India, for example, Thomas, you find a caste where five brothers will all get together to marry a single wife. The brothers and the wife make a permanent family, and they bring up their children without even wondering whose they are. The reason they live like that is because it would be quite impossible for each of them to have a wife of his own. They just don’t have the resources. So it’s their poverty that forces them into that kind of organization. And it seems to me that we’re being forced into it simply by necessity. Because Miette is the only woman here capable of producing children.”

  Silence. Thomas, who felt he’d lost out by now, I think, had given up arguing, and the others didn’t seem anxious to speak. But they were going to have to come down on one side or the other eventually, so I glanced around with a questioning look and said, “Well?”

&n
bsp; “I wouldn’t like that,” Peyssou said.

  “What do you mean ‘that’?”

  “That system of yours, out in India.”

  “But it’s not a question of liking, it’s a matter of necessity.”

  “All the same,” Peyssou said, “sharing a woman with a lot of other men, no. I say no.”

  Silence.

  “I agree with him,” Colin said.

  “So do I,” Meyssonnier said.

  “So do I,” Thomas said with an infuriating smile.

  I gazed into the fire. Something quite staggering had happened to me. I had lost a vote! I had been beaten! It was the first time it had happened to me since I was twelve, since the day when I had, as it were, assumed the post of chief executive of the Club, all those years ago. And even though I realized that it was childish of me to feel that way, I was deeply mortified. At the same time, I decided I mustn’t show it. I must behave as though nothing had happened, keep on talking, move on to the next subject on the agenda, pass it off as a trifle. But I couldn’t. My throat was too tight to speak, my mind a total blank. Not only had I been defeated, but my silence was making me lose face.

  It was Thomas who rescued me, though certainly without intending to. “So there you are,” he said without any attempt at finesse. “Monogamy wins the day!”

  I’d given him a hard time earlier, and clearly that “clerical dogmatism” was still rankling.

  Thomas’s remark was received very coldly. I looked around at the other three. They were red-faced, uncomfortable, clearly at least as embarrassed as I was myself by my defeat. Especially, as Colin was to tell me later, after a day “when you’d run such risks for us.”

  Their confusion comforted me. “I’m perfectly prepared to accept your opinions as votes and bow to them,” I said. “But we still need to know precisely what that vote means. Does it mean that we are going to force Miette to select one particular partner and stick to her choice from then on?”

  “No,” Meyssonnier said. “It doesn’t mean that at all. We’re not going to force her to do anything. But if she restricts herself to a single husband, of her own accord, then we shall do nothing to dissuade her.”

  So. The situation was quite clear now. And the stylistic difference too. I had said “partner,” he had said “husband.” I felt very much like pointing out to Meyssonnier that for a Communist he had a very petty bourgeois conception of marriage. Stoically, I refrained. I looked at the other three. “Is that what you want?”

  That was what they wanted. Let us respect the laws of marriage. No adultery, even between consenting parties. The old conventional morality was still alive and well and living in Malevil. Though I still held the opinion myself that this respectable social system of theirs was absolutely doomed to break down in a community of six men who had just been issued, as it were, a single woman. But what can you do if you’re in a minority of one? The position of the others seemed to me to be not only dogmatic but senseless: to remain celibate to the end of one’s days rather than settle for a woman who was not exclusively one’s own. Though it’s true that they were all probably hoping to be the one who was chosen.

  I sat in silence. I was worried about our future. I was afraid of the frustrations and the jealousies ahead. Perhaps even impulses to kill. And also, why not admit it, I was by now experiencing an almost painful regret at not having enjoyed Miette at L’Étang while I had the chance. I had certainly reaped very little reward for having controlled my “passions,” as we used to say in the days of the Club.

  —|—

  Next day at dawn, after a very bad night, I was awakened by the sound of the great bell on the gate tower being rung. It was a huge church bell that I bought in a sale and had mounted beside the entrance arch so visitors and tourists could ring to be let in. But it was so big, and the din it made could be heard so far away—even in La Roque, I was told—that I had had a supplementary, and now entirely useless, electric bell installed beside the door as well.

  I wondered what could possibly have happened to make anyone ring the bell so loudly and for such a length of time. I leapt out of bed, pulled my pants on over my pajamas, and thrust my feet into my boots without bothering about socks. I snatched up my rifle—followed by Thomas as soon as he’d grabbed his gun as well—half fell down the spiral staircase to the ground floor, then raced out over the drawbridge into the outer enclosure.

  Everyone in the castle was gathered there scarcely half dressed, congregated outside the Maternity Ward. The event, it appeared, was a wholly happy one. Marquise, the cow from L’Étang, had just dropped a calf in one corner of her box and was now in the process of producing another in the opposite corner. Having been told by his mother to spread the good news, Momo, wild with excitement, had decided it was an occasion worthy of celebrating with a peal on the bell.

  I gave him a severe dressing-down, reminding him of my express and repeated orders to the contrary. Then, turning to La Falvine, I complimented her on her cow’s two offspring—both heifers, it was now apparent. La Falvine was more puffed up with pride than if she had produced them herself, and she cackled away nonstop in the stall with La Menou. Both of them waited for a chance to give their assistance, though it was obviously quite unnecessary, since the second tiny heifer was already out—plump, shiny with slime, a sight to melt anyone’s heart. Peyssou, Meyssonnier, Colin, and Jacquet were all there adding their comments, dominated mainly by Peyssou’s loudly rumbled reminiscences about all the other occasions, rare but memorable, when he had seen or heard about a cow producing twins. We were all lined up along the side partition of Marquise’s stall, our chins lodged on the top rail, Miette somewhere in the middle of the line.

  She didn’t have much on, and she was still warm and rosy-cheeked with sleep, her hair rumpled up. At the sight of her my heart began pounding idiotically. Enough of that. Save your admiration for the calves, Emmanuel. They were both mahogany-colored, and not particularly small, as one might have expected.

  “And to think,” Peyssou observed at that point, “seeing the mother, you’d never have said she was going to drop the two like that when she was no bigger in the belly than for the one.”

  “Indeed, and I’ve seen cows bigger with one calf than ever Marquise was,” La Menou confirmed. “And there she goes and drops you two, and two fine ones at that. It makes you wonder where she could be keeping them.”

  “Fair play to you,” Peyssou said to La Falvine. “You’ve got a good cow there. [I don’t know why we were all paying such compliments to La Falvine on account of a cow that in fact belonged to Malevil now, unless perhaps because we were all anxious to make it up to her after La Menou’s frigid welcome.] I shouldn’t think you’ll be wanting to sell her though, Falvine, not a cow that makes you twins like that. Though even without that,” he went on, very polite, very thoughtful, “if you went and sold your calves at a week old, that would bring you in something like sixty thousand francs. And that’s not counting all the milk she’ll be giving you after. Lord, Lord, she’s worth her weight in gold, a cow like that. When you think she might bring you another two next time as well.”

  “And who would you sell them to, the calves, tell me that, you great loon,” Colin said.

  “Well, it was just a manner of speaking,” Peyssou said, more thoughtful than ever, eyes half closed. He was doubtless dreaming of some model dairy farm in a better world, with an electric milking bay and nothing but cows specially bred to give birth to twins. He was even forgetting to look at Miette. Though admittedly, after our vote the evening before, we were all tending to glance at her only occasionally, and surreptitiously. We were all afraid the others would think we were trying to steal a march.

  I did a mental inventory of our stock: Princesse, Marquise, and the two new heifer calves, which we had decided by now to name Comtesse and Baronne in order to complete our bovine nobility. Ah, and I’d almost forgotten Noiraude, whom we’d left behind at L’Étang, less aristocratic perhaps, but in full lactation
, and without a calf. So Malevil now owned five cows, an adult bull, and a bull calf, Princesse’s Prince. However, we would certainly have to keep him too, since we couldn’t run the risk of leaving ourselves with only a single male.

  On the equine side we had three mares: Amarante, Bel Amour, and her daughter Malice. Plus a stallion: Malabar. I didn’t bother to work out the number of pigs, since we now had far more than we could possibly keep. At the thought of all those animals I experienced a warming sense of security, only slightly tempered by the nagging fear that the fields would no longer be able to provide food for them, or for us either.

  Odd, the way the disappearance of money had also meant the disappearance of all those artificial needs. As in Biblical times, we thought now solely in terms of food, of land, of flocks, of the preservation of the tribe. Miette, for example. I viewed her quite differently from the way I had Birgitta. With Birgitta, as though it was something that went without saying, I had dissociated the sexual act completely from its original purpose, whereas with Miette my whole conception of her was centered on the idea of her future fecundity.

  —|—

  Even with the two carts, it took us four days to bring everything over from L’Étang. City people complain about moving apartments, they have no idea of the things it’s possible to accumulate on a farm during one lifetime, all of them useful and most of them horribly cumbersome. And that, of course, doesn’t include the stock, plus fodder, bedding, and grain.

  On the fifth day we were at last able to resume plowing our little wheat patch down by the Rhunes, which was also an opportunity to put our new security arrangements into effect. Jacquet was to do the plowing while one of the rest of us kept watch, in rotation, armed with the rifle and concealed on the hillside overlooking the valley to the west. If the lookout saw anyone suspicious approaching, then he was to fire into the air without showing himself. This would give Jacquet time to take refuge inside the castle with the horse and to warn the rest of us, so that we could come to the lookout’s aid with the rest of the guns—three now, with Wahrwoorde’s shotgun, four counting the rifle.