Malevil, Page 28

  I noticed that despite his great fondness for the sound of his own voice, Fulbert was answering my questions very briefly. I concluded from this that his description of the material conditions of life in La Roque had been intended to lead up to a conclusion, but that despite his considerable aplomb he had either not yet dared to voice it, or else failed to find quite the right words. I fell silent, eyes on the fire.

  After a moment Fulbert gave a little cough. This did not express embarrassment, but rather the fact it was only with some pain and cost to himself, having one foot already in the next world, that he was able to return to this one and occupy himself with the affairs of men.

  “I am bound to say,” he began, “that I am very much concerned as to the fate in store for the two babies and our little orphan. The situation is most grievous, and one from which I can see no way out. Without milk, I simply do not see how we can rear them.”

  Once again he paused and allowed the ensuing silence to make its effect. All eyes were on him, and no one wanted to speak.

  “I know, of course,” Fulbert went on in his reverberant voice, “that what I am about to ask you will perhaps seem monstrous, but after all, the circumstances are exceptional, since God’s gifts are at the moment unequally distributed, and in order to live, to survive even, we must all remind ourselves, I think, that we are brothers, and that we must all help one another as best we can.”

  I had listened attentively. Taken in itself, all that he said was quite true. But coming from him it sounded false. I had the feeling that this man, so ready to play upon human emotions, in fact felt none himself.

  “It is in the name of our poor little babies at La Roque,” he went on, “that I make this request. I have observed that you possess a number of cows. We should be most deeply grateful if you could possibly let us have one of them.”

  Dead silence.

  “Let you have?” I queried. “You did say ‘let us have’? May I assume that you are envisaging some form of exchange?”

  “As a matter of fact, no,” Fulbert replied with a lofty air. “I had not envisaged the affair as a commercial transaction. I had conceived of it more as a charitable act, or rather as a duty, a bounden duty, I might say, to help those in mortal danger.”

  So we had been warned. If we refused, then as far as Fulbert was concerned we were men without hearts and without morals.

  “Ah, so when you asked whether we would let you have a cow,” I said, “you meant would we give you one?”

  Fulbert bowed his head in assent, and Thomas excepted, we all stared at one another in stupefaction. Asking peasants to give them a cow! That was townsfolk for you!

  “Would it not be simpler,” I said in a soft voice (though still by no means as suave as Fulbert’s all the same), “if we were to take in the two babies and the orphan and look after them here?”

  Miette was sitting between Fulbert and myself, so when I turned toward Fulbert to put this question to him I also had a view of her gentle face, and I saw at once that the idea of having a nursery at Malevil filled her with delight. In a silent aside from the discussion, I gave her a smile. She gazed at me for a full second with those beautiful childlike eyes of hers, transparent and unfathomable, then suddenly she returned my smile. Returned it a hundredfold, I might almost say, as though she had gathered together all the affection there was inside her in order to offer it to me in that one sudden smile.

  “That would be extremely possible in the case of the orphan,” Fulbert said, “because she does in fact present us with a grave problem. She is thirteen years old, but so thin and retarded physically that she looks no more than ten. She is subject to asthma attacks, and as if that weren’t enough, she has some form of character disorder. It is sad to have to admit it, but it is proving difficult for me to find anyone in La Roque to look after her.”

  His noble ascetic’s face was plunged for a brief instant into deep melancholy as he meditated on the selfishness of mankind, and I could tell that we were not exempted from that meditation. However, he had not lost the thread of his reply, because he eventually went on with a sigh: “As for the babies, it is unfortunately impossible to board them out with you. Their mothers are unwilling to part with them.”

  Since he could not have known in advance that we did in fact possess any cows, or that we would offer to take the babies in if we had, he could hardly have already put such a question to their mothers. I suspected, consequently, that he was lying, and that it wasn’t just the babies in La Roque who would be glad of a little milk.

  I decided to push him a little further. “In that case, we would be prepared to take the mothers in as well, with their babies.”

  He shook his head. “That really isn’t possible. They both have husbands, and other children. One can’t just rip families apart like that.” And he rejected my suggestion forcibly as he spoke with a slicing gesture of his right hand. Then he waited. He had stalked us ruthlessly into a very nasty dilemma: either we gave him a cow or the babies died. He could afford to wait.

  The silence dragged on.

  “Miette,” I said, “would you mind letting Fulbert have your room for tonight?”

  “Oh, really, no,” Fulbert protested halfheartedly. “I have no wish to disturb anyone. A bale of hay in the barn will suffice for my needs.”

  I courteously brushed this evangelical project aside. “After your long journey you need a good night’s sleep,” I said as I rose to my feet. “And while you are taking your well-earned rest, we will debate your request. You shall have our answer in the morning.”

  He rose likewise at that, drew himself up to his full height, and gazed at us with solemn, slightly inquisitorial eyes. I met his gaze with the utmost calm, then after a moment, taking my time, I turned my head away. “Miette,” I said, “you can sleep with La Falvine tonight.”

  She nodded her assent. Fulbert had given up his attempt to hypnotize me. He surveyed his flock with a beneficent paternal eye, then he spread his hands out on either side of him, palms toward them. “At what hour,” he asked, “do you wish me to say Mass tomorrow morning?”

  An exchange of inquiring looks. La Menou eventually suggested nine o’clock. Everyone agreed except Thomas and Meyssonnier, who studiously took no part in the discussion at all.

  “Nine o’clock,” Fulbert said majestically. “Very well, let us say nine o’clock then. From half past seven until nine I shall be in my room [I was interested to note that “my” room] to hear the confessions of all those intending to take communion.”

  Beautifully done. He had taken us all into his charge, body and soul. Now he could depart and sleep in peace.

  “Miette,” I said, “show Fulbert up to his room. And change the sheets for him.”

  Fulbert ceremoniously bade us his good nights, naming us all by our names, one by one, in his beautiful baritone voice. Then he followed Miette as she led the way briskly toward the door of the great hall. Probably the one most mortified to watch her disappearing like that was little Colin, whose turn it was to be Miette’s guest that evening* (It will be noticed how Emmanuel here acquaints the reader, though only by implication and as it were in passing, with Miette’s polyandrous activities. [Note added by Thomas.]) and who would now have to forgo that pleasure for want of available premises. He followed her with his eyes, slightly jealous of Fulbert into the bargain. And I too suddenly wondered, remembering certain glances during the meal, whether I had been wise in assigning Miette to be our guest’s guide. I glanced at my watch: twenty past ten. I made a note to look at it again when Miette reappeared.

  As the door closed, an expression of relief appeared on everyone’s face. The pressure Fulbert had been putting on us had reached an almost intolerable intensity. And now that he was gone we felt a sense of liberation. Though not of complete liberation, because though Fulbert himself had gone he had left his demands behind him.

  It was not just relief I could read on the others’ faces, however. There was also a great deal of uncerta
inty, distress, and a variety of other rather mixed emotions. I congratulated myself on having prevented Meyssonnier and Thomas from starting a religious affray, because that would certainly have split Malevil right down the middle and added even further to the general confusion.

  I looked at them all in turn. A Gorgon or Medusa, inscrutable, eyes lowered, lips firmly pressed together, La Menou sat knitting on her hearth seat. Momo, with nothing to hold his interest now that Miette had left the room, had begun pushing at a half-burned log with his foot. Whereupon his mother demanded in a savage whisper, though without raising her eyes, whether he wanted her foot in his bottom or whether he was going to stop trying to burn off the toes of his boots.

  La Falvine was huffing and puffing amid her drapes and folds of fat, great belly flopping onto her crossed knees, sagging breasts resting on the belly, and dewlaps drooping onto the breasts. Whoever heard of such a thing, whoever would have believed it possible, her sighs and moans were clearly saying.

  Jacquet, our prisoner, whom Colin had jokingly begun to refer to as the “serf,” and who in less than a month had managed to trap me into what was almost a father-son relationship—simply by dint of following me around wherever I went and by watching my every movement with those innocent golden brown doglike eyes—Jacquet, needless to say, was gazing calmly at me, and his thoughts were as transparent as they were clearly untroubled: If Emmanuel gives the priest the cow, he will be right to do so. If he doesn’t, on the other hand, then he will certainly not be wrong.

  Peyssou’s honest rugged round face, with its great nose jutting out of it like a knife jammed into a potato, was a pitiful sight to see, so furrowed was it with agonized indecision. I could see him struggling to reconcile his budding veneration for Fulbert with the scandalous nature of the man’s demands.

  And Colin was no less perturbed, though he showed it less plainly. In addition, he was very edgy and frustrated for the reasons mentioned earlier, as I could tell from his frequent anxious glances toward the door.

  In Thomas’s eyes, however, there was not the slightest flicker of doubt. Fulbert was Infamy in person. And he held that opinion, I am absolutely positive, without having even the vaguest idea of the sacrilege that Fulbert had just committed in the rest of our eyes—he had dared to lay hands on the Cow. And the Cow, after God (perhaps even before God, come to that), was the most sacred value in our lives. Because there was no conceivable equivalence between a cow and her market value. If we demanded money when a cow changed hands, that was simply a way of giving concrete form, in cash, to the quasi-religious respect we felt for her.

  Meyssonnier, unlike any of the others, was forcefully aware of a double infamy in Fulbert’s conduct: his theoretical infamy, as it were, as a representative of “religion, the opium of the people,” and his infamy in practice, as a person who had just committed the unbelievably cynical act of demanding the gratuitous surrender of a cow. I looked at him. How little he had changed since we first went to school together! Still that same thin knife blade of a face, the narrow forehead, the black brush of hair, the gray close-set eyes that started to blink at the least emotional stress. And now, because he had been unable to visit the barber in La Roque since the day it happened, his hair, from sheer force of habit, had continued to grow straight upward toward the sky, and his long face had grown even longer.

  The door opened. It was Miette. I glanced at my watch: ten twenty-five. Five minutes. Physically impossible in that time, even overestimating (or underestimating) Fulbert’s powers. As Miette advanced toward us along the great hall, her torso swaying without any conscious attempt at provocation, she radiated a wave of warmth that spread before her and enveloped us all. Thank you, Miette. I could see from Colin’s face, from the glimmer of his returning smile, that he was greatly relieved. If our great bowman was not to enjoy the presence of Miette beside him that night, at least no one else had sneaked in and filched that privilege from him.

  Our numbers were now complete, and this was the very first time that we had ever held a plenary assembly of this sort, with the three women, Momo, and the “serf.” We were becoming a democracy. I would have to point that out to Thomas later.

  La Menou bent down to liven up the fire; because as soon as our meal was over we always thriftily extinguished the monumental old oil lamp, and from then until bedtime the fire was our sole source of light. Without poker or tongs, simply by a skillful rearrangement of the logs, La Menou succeeded in producing a bright flicker of flame.

  And as though this was the very signal he had been waiting for to blaze up himself, Meyssonnier burst out: “When I saw him riding in, the cura,” he said, mixing French and patois together in his fury, “I knew in my bones he hadn’t come here just to pass the time of day. But even so, I could never have believed this. A thing like this, I just don’t know,” he said with profound indignation. And as if no other expression could quite convey the enormity of what had occurred, he repeated it several times: “I just don’t know,” banging his knee with the palm of his hand as he said it.

  Then, quite beside himself, he rushed on: “There he was, sitting calm as you please with his arse on one of our chairs, like God the Father in person, and, Give me a cow he says, just like that. Hand me a match to light my pipe, he might have been saying! The cow you’ve raised and fed and watered twice a day for years, yes, and in the winter when the tap is frozen, and you humping the water out bucket by bucket from the kitchen, and the vet with his bills, the money for the injections, the medicines for the scour, plus the worry of the straw and the hay, wondering if there’ll be enough with the winter not ending, and how are you going to pay for more? Not to mention the terrible worry of the calving. And then what?” He rushed on in fury: “A fellow ambles in, gabbles you an Our Father or two, and hoop-la! goodbye, and thank you for the cow! Are we back in the Middle Ages or what? Is that what it’s come to? The clergy knocking on the door and ‘Pay your tithes or else!?’ Why not tallage as well, and forced labor, and all the rest of it while we’re at it?”

  This speech, impious though it was, made its effect, even on the pious members of our assembly. The folk memory of what it was like to have overlords was still a living thing in these parts, and even those who did attend Mass were always mistrustful of their priest’s powers. However, I said nothing. I waited. I had no wish to be outvoted a second time.

  “All the same, there are the babies,” Colin said.

  “But that’s just it,” Thomas put in. “Why shouldn’t they be brought over to Malevil? I find it difficult to believe that their mothers wouldn’t agree to part with them for a while, if it means their survival.”

  Not bad, Thomas. Sober, logical, but perhaps just a little too abstract to carry the right weight.

  “But that’s what Fulbert told us,” Peyssou pointed out, incapable of mistrust as always.

  Meyssonnier shrugged, and said virulently, “Fulbert told us anything that suited him!”

  There, it seemed to me, he was going a little too far for his audience. Because he had accused Fulbert, however indirectly, of being a liar, and apart from Thomas and myself no one was as yet prepared to accept such a judgment. The result was a long silence. Which I did nothing to break.

  “Well, well,” La Menou said at last, laying her knitting on her lap and smoothing it with the flat of one hand to stop it rolling up on itself, “there’s no saying otherwise, but the world is in a sorry state just now. Twenty of them over there in La Roque, and for all twenty no stock but a bull and their five horses, which a sight of good that’s going to do them, I’m sure.”

  “No one is stopping you from giving them your cow, in that case,” Meyssonnier said derisively.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. A tug of the reins needed. Mine and thine seemed to me very dangerous notions just now. I intervened. “I don’t agree with expressions of that sort. There is no Menou’s cow here, or any L’Étang cows, or any Emmanuel’s horses. There is just the livestock here in Malevil, and the Mal
evil stock belongs to Malevil, which means to all of us. If anyone thinks differently, then he has only to take back his animal or animals and go elsewhere.”

  I had spoken with considerable vehemence, and my words were followed by a slightly uncomfortable silence.

  “And what exactly were you leading up to with that, Emmanuel?” little Colin asked after a moment.

  “To the fact that if we are to part with an animal, then it’s up to all of us to decide yes or no.”

  The distinction between “part with” and “give” had escaped no one.

  “You have to put yourself in their place though,” La Falvine said. We all looked at her in amazement, because during the month she’d been with us, La Menou had given her such a thorough pecking over that nowadays she hesitated to open her mouth at all. But now, encouraged by our silent attention, she gave a deep sigh in order to drag up sufficient breath through all the folds and sags obstructing it, then went on: “Well, if there are three cows for the ten of us here at Malevil and none at all for the twenty over at La Roque, then one day there are going to be envious looks, isn’t it so?”

  “There’s nothing different in all that from what I said just now,” La Menou informed her in a cutting voice intended to put her in her place.

  Whereupon, having had quite enough of her petty tyranny, I put La Menou in hers: “Well said, Falvine!”

  The dewlaps shook, her whole body expanded, and gazing around the circle, she smiled with pleasure.

  “We’ve already had one of our horses stolen,” Peyssou said. “No offense meant to anyone, of course,” he added as he noticed poor Jacquet shrinking down into his chair. “So why couldn’t someone steal one of our cows while it’s out grazing?”