Malevil, Page 33

  The wind dropped. Not a word was exchanged, and the fire, far from blazing and crackling, was just a faint soundless glow. The room slowly filled with a vast weight of silence. What happened next was so quick that I scarcely remember any passage from one state to the next. It’s only in books you find transitions. They don’t happen in life. The door of the great hall was flung open with a crash. And there was Thomas, eyes wild, without helmet, without goggles. He shouted in a high-pitched voice, ringing with triumph, “There’s nothing! Nothing!”

  It wasn’t very explicit, but we understood. It was a stampede. We all reached the door together and almost jammed it trying to get through.

  Just as we emerged the rain began again. It hurtled down in torrents, but what did we care now! Except for Fulbert, who stayed under the shelter of the little tower doorway, and La Falvine and La Menou, who joined him there, we were all out in the courtyard laughing and shouting under the downpour. It was even warm, or seemed so to us. It ran in rivulets down our bodies and made the timeworn black cobbles shine beneath our feet. From the keep battlements, splashing against the ancient stones in their fall, tiny cascades came tumbling from every crenelation to merge with the general downpour below. The sky was a whitish, almost a pinkish, gray. We hadn’t seen it so light for two months.

  Suddenly Miette pulled off her blouse and offered that youthful torso, which had never known a brassiere, to the caress of the falling rain. She laughed, she pranced, she swayed from side to side, her arms upstretched, her long hair brandished with one hand to the sky. We too would have danced, I feel sure, if the traditions of primitive man had not been lost. And because we could not dance, we talked.

  “You see if our wheat doesn’t come up now!” Peyssou cried.

  “Just the rain’s no good,” Meyssonnier said. “It’s not because we haven’t been watering it there’s not a blade to be seen! It’s the sun it wants.”

  “But you’re going to have it now, your sun! And more than you want,” said Peyssou, whose hope would now admit no limits. “The rain will bring it out. Isn’t that true, Jacquet?” he asked giving him a tremendous thump on the back.

  Jacquet agreed that it was indeed true, that the sun would come out now, but he did not dare to return the thump.

  “And high time!” the great bowman Colin said. “Here we are, June already, and cold as March.”

  The rain showed no signs of lessening. After the first few minutes of madness we all retired to the shelter of the doorway, all except our Miette, who was still dancing and singing, even though no sound actually emerged from her mouth, and Momo, a few paces away from her, motionless, but with head thrown back and mouth wide open to welcome and absorb the rain. Every so often La Menou shouted at him to come in, that he would catch his death (a constant prediction constantly belied, since Momo had a constitution of iron), and that if he didn’t do as she said he was going to get her boot in his behind. But he was a good twenty yards away from her, the drawbridge was down, and at her slightest move he could be away in a flash, so, certain of his impunity, he did not even reply to her. He drank the rain with ecstatic swallows, one eye on Miette’s naked breasts.

  “Oh, fair play to him. Let him alone, damn it!” Peyssou broke in. “Always after him you are! As though a little water isn’t going to do him good too. No offense, Menou, but that son of yours is stinking like a boar! He even put me off hearing Mass just now, poor fellow!”

  “Well I can’t wash him all on my own, can I now?” La Menou said. “He’s too strong, as well you know.”

  “Good God!” Peyssou exclaimed, then stopped in confusion and glanced across guiltily at Fulbert. However, La Falvine was monopolizing the cura with inquiries about her brother the cobbler in La Roque, and her granddaughter Catie. Peyssou continued. “I remember now! Do you know he hasn’t washed himself, that little wretch, since the day when I was—“ He was about to say “knocked over the head” but caught himself just in time. Unfortunately though, we all knew what he had meant. Including Jacquet, whose good-natured face was painful to see.

  “Momo, come in here!” La Menou shouted in impotent rage.

  “You won’t get him back in until Miette’s finished her shower,” Meyssonnier remarked with calm good sense. “Look how he’s drinking it all in. And not just with his mouth!”

  We all laughed, except La Menou, with her peasant’s sacred horror of nudity. She clamped her lips into a thin line and said, “A heathen that girl is—you can’t say otherwise—showing her titties to everyone like that!”

  “Ah, come now,” Colin said. “Hasn’t everyone here seen them already, except Momo?”

  And as he said it he turned and looked defiantly at Fulbert. But Fulbert, engrossed in his conversation with La Falvine, didn’t hear him, or pretended he didn’t. Nevertheless, when I noticed Peyssou glancing at me with a puzzled expression, my former fears returned, and I decided it was time to hurry things on a little and get our holy man off the premises. I shouted to Miette to come in and told La Menou to make us a big fire: “You hear, Menou, a big fire!” A quite unnecessary exhortation, needless to say, now that it was a matter of drying her son!

  Miette walked back to join us, blouse in one hand, still glowing with the innocent joy of her game (without Fulbert daring to reprimand her or even look at her), and Momo promptly followed her inside, delighted at the idea of watching her hold out her blouse to the flickering flames. Which she of course did. And there we all were, our clothes steaming in the heat, clustering around her, roasting ourselves at a fire now blazing as hot as the fires of hell, and our thoughts, from what I could see, not all that far from the devil.

  Miette looked at me, arranged her blouse over a low chair, because she needed her hands to speak to me, then drew me to one side, indicating by her manner that she had some sort of reproach to make to me. I followed her. The mime began. She had saved me a chair next to her at Mass and she had noticed (one finger under the corner of her eye) that at the last moment I had sneaked away into the second row (hand becoming a fish, swimming along, then changing direction at the last moment).

  I reassured her. It wasn’t because of her I’d avoided the chair but because of Momo, and I didn’t need to tell her why. She agreed that Momo did smell (thumb and forefinger squeezing nose). She found the fact surprising. I described the difficulties involved in washing him, the necessity of a surprise attack, the large number of assailants required, the energy consumed, the cunning and strength with which he evaded our attempts. She listened with great attention, and even laughed. Then suddenly, planting herself in front of me, hands on hips, she announced with a determined look in her eye and a shake of her black mane that from now on she would wash Momo for us.

  Then it was La Menou’s turn to take me aside and ask in a low voice whether she should serve “the company” a bite to eat. (It was feeding her son she was concerned about, the hypocrite, to fortify him against that “chill” he was sure to catch.) I answered in the same low tone that I would rather wait till the curé had gone, but that meanwhile she should wrap up a big loaf and two or three pounds of butter for Fulbert to take back to the people of La Roque.

  All Malevil was assembled at the gate tower when Fulbert left, taking advantage of a moment when the rain had eased off, modestly mounted on his gray donkey. The farewells varied greatly in their warmth. Meyssonnier and Thomas cold as ice. Colin as impertinent as he dared be. Myself generous with the oil, but distantly familiar. The only truly cordial ones came from the two old women and—for the moment at least—Peyssou and Jacquet. Miette didn’t come near, and Fulbert seemed to have forgotten her. She was engaged in an animated discussion with Momo about twenty yards away. Since she had her back to me, I was unable to see exactly what she was miming, but whatever it was, Momo was clearly putting up strong opposition, because I could hear his usual grunting cries of refusal. However, he had not taken to his heels, as he would have done if it had been his mother or myself speaking to him. He stayed there, glued to t
he ground in front of her, eyes hypnotized, face almost lulled to sleep, and it seemed to me that his refusals were gradually becoming less forceful and less frequent.

  With a friendly smile I handed Fulbert back the bolt of his gun. He slid it into the breech, and slung the gun over his shoulder. He had lost none of his calm and dignity. Before mounting his donkey, he signified to me, after a deep sigh that plumbed the depths of man’s abysmal want of charity with saddened resignation, that he agreed to the conditions I had stipulated in the matter of Malevil’s transfer of a cow to the parish of La Roque, even though he found them much too harsh. I replied that the conditions were not mine, but he received this statement with a skepticism that on reflection wasn’t really surprising, since he himself had accepted my conditions without consulting his flock. I can scarcely call them his fellow citizens, since he had spoken very pointedly of a “parish,” not of a community or township. One thing was certain. Fulbert did all the deciding in La Roque, without any help, and he had assumed that I exercised an identical power in Malevil.

  Fulbert then treated us to a little speech on the clearly providential nature of the rain that had brought us salvation just when we were all expecting our sentence of death. As he spoke, he several times held his arms outstretched in front of him and raised them from waist level to just above his head, a gesture I had never much admired when it was used by Pope Paul VI, but which seemed to me frankly grotesque when Fulbert did it. And he observed each of us in turn with his magnificent squinting eyes. He had taken good note of our various attitudes toward him, and nothing would be forgotten.

  Having concluded his speech and invited us all to join him in prayer, he reminded us that he was thinking of sending us an abbé of our own, then he blessed us and rode off.

  Colin immediately put all his weight behind the heavy iron-studded door and slammed it shut as quickly and insultingly as he could. I clicked my tongue reprovingly but without saying anything.

  In fact, I wouldn’t have had time to say much, because La Menou suddenly let fly a shriek of distress: “But where is Momo!”

  “What’s the matter?” Peyssou said. “He can’t be lost. Where do you expect him to be?”

  “I saw him only a moment ago,” I said, “arguing with Miette outside the Maternity Ward.”

  La Menou was already there, running along the stalls, shouting, “Momo! Momo!” But the Maternity Ward was empty.

  “Oh, I remember now,” Colin said. “I saw him running off just a moment ago toward the drawbridge. With Miette. They were holding hands. Two children they looked like.”

  “Ah, God in heaven!” La Menou cried. She too began running toward the drawbridge and we all followed, at once intrigued and amused. But because we’re all very fond of him really, our Momo, we divided up into groups in order to search the castle, some taking the cellar, others the woodshed, others the ground floor of the house.

  Then suddenly Miette’s plans for Momo came back to me, and I shouted, “La Menou! Here, here! I know where he is, that son of yours!”

  I led her over toward the keep. The others all trooped after us up to the second floor, where I crossed the vast landing and stopped outside the bathroom door. I tried it. It was bolted. I hammered with my fist on the thick oak paneling. “Momo! Are you there?”

  “Ho ahay! Ho ahay! Heavee he!” Momo’s voice yelled back.

  “He’s with Miette,” I said. “And I don’t think he’ll be coming out in a hurry.”

  “But what’s she doing to him? What’s she doing to him in there?” La Menou wailed in anguish.

  “She’s not doing him any harm anyway, that’s for sure,” Peyssou said.

  He threw back his head and began to laugh uproariously, accompanying his merriment with great slaps on Jacquet’s back and his own thighs. And everyone else began to laugh too. Amazing. Not the slightest hint of jealousy for Momo. Momo was one of us, not the same thing at all as someone from outside. He belonged. Even if he was a bit retarded, he was one of us. There was no comparison.

  “She’s washing him,” I said. “She told me she was going to.”

  “Then why didn’t you warn me,” La Menou said with deep reproach. “I’d have kept a closer eye on him.”

  There was general protest at this. Surely she didn’t want to stop Miette washing him! “He stinks like a billy-goat, your Momo!” “A good thing for everyone if Miette manages to scrub him a bit! Not to mention the risk of germs and disease! And the lice!”

  “Momo has never had lice!” La Menou snapped very sharply. A lie that convinced no one. She was reduced to trotting to and fro in front of that bolted door, scrawny and whitefaced, like a hen that has lost its chicks. She didn’t dare call out to Momo in front of us or knock on the door. Besides, she knew only too well what his answer would be.

  “These foreigners!” she burst out in fury. “As if I didn’t know it inside me that very first day that there was no good to be expected from people like that! Savages like that, they shouldn’t be under the same roof as Christian folk.”

  Falvine was already bending her back resignedly for the coming onslaught. It would all fall on her, she was sure of that. Jacquet was a man, La Menou wouldn’t say anything to him. Miette had too many protectors. But poor Falvine, alas...

  “Foreigners,” I said sharply. “How can you say a thing like that? When La Falvine is your cousin!”

  “A nice sort of cousin!” La Menou said from between clenched teeth.

  “And you! There’s nothing very nice about you when you behave like this,” I answered in patois. “You’d be better going for some clean clothes to put on your Momo. And you could give him his third pair of pants too, because the pair he’s wearing are a disgrace!”

  When the bathroom door did eventually open, Colin came and fetched me from my room, where I was reassembling the guns and stowing them back on their rack.

  Momo was seated on the wickerwork stool, swathed in the bathrobe printed with huge blue and yellow flowers that I had bought myself just before the day it happened. Eyes agleam, grinning from ear to ear, he was radiating self-satisfaction like the sun, while Miette stood behind him proudly surveying the results of her labors. He was unrecognizable, this new Momo. His complexion was several shades lighter, he was clean shaven, his hair had been cut and combed, and he sat there enthroned in perfumed glory like a high-class harlot, because Miette had found a bottle of Chanel left in the closet by Birgitta and emptied the entire contents over him.

  —|—

  A little later I had a fairly important conversation in my room with Peyssou and Colin, then they left me in order to go down and make a tour of inspection down by the river. Peyssou was presumably nursing an irrational hope that the wheat was going to sprout there and then. Or else it was simply the farmer’s automatic instinct to go around inspecting his fields after a storm, with no definite purpose in mind, just to set his mind at rest. As for me, I went down to the great hall. The noncontaminated rain and the departure of Fulbert had combined to put me in high good humor, and I was whistling as I wandered over toward La Menou. She was alone, with her back to me, peering into a saucepan.

  “Well, Menou, what have you got nice for dinner?”

  She answered without looking around. “You’ll see soon enough.” Then she whirled around with a little gasp, and her eyes filled with tears. “I thought it was your uncle for a moment!”

  I looked down at her, very moved.

  “Just his way of coming in whistling,” she said, “and then saying, ‘Well, Menou, what have you got nice for dinner?’ And the same voice too. It gave me quite a turn... Ah, he was a merry soul, your uncle was, Emmanuel. A man who loved life. Like you. A little too much perhaps,” she added, suddenly remembering that in her old age she had become virtuous and a misogynist.

  “Oh, bah, Menou,” I said, reading the thoughts well hidden behind her words. “You’re not going to hold it against Miette because she’s cleaned up your son for you? She hasn’t taken him away from
you. She’s only given him a good scrubbing.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe.”

  I suddenly felt very happy that she’s talked to me about my uncle, and even compared me to him. And because over the past month or so I had often had to speak to her so sharply about the unnecessarily unkind way she treated La Falvine, I smiled at her now. She was quite overcome by my smile and turned away. The old rhinoceros. She wasn’t without feelings really, even if you did have to bore your way through so many layers of tough hide to get at them.

  “And you, Emmanuel,” she said after a moment, “do you mind if I ask why you wouldn’t go to confession? It does you good, you know, confessing yourself. It gets you clean inside.”

  I would never have believed that I would one day be having a theological discussion with La Menou. I planted myself in front of the fire, hands in my pockets. This had been no ordinary day. I was still wearing my funeral suit. I felt almost as majestic as Fulbert himself.

  “While we’re on the subject of confession, may I ask you a question, Menou?”

  “Ask away,” she said. “You know you need never stand on ceremony with me.” She looked me up and down, bright eyes all attention in the little skull head, ladle poised in one bony little hand. She really was incredibly tiny, whittled away to almost nothing but bone. But what eyes! Shrewd, wise, indomitable!

  “When you were in there confessing, Menou, did you tell Fulbert that you were sometimes very unpleasant to La Falvine?”

  “Me!” she exclaimed in indignation. “Me, unpleasant to La Falvine? Well really, what a thing to say! What will people say next! Ah, that is the limit, the very limit! I who earn my place in heaven every day by putting up with that fat heap!”

  She looked at me and paused, as though seized by a sudden scruple. “Unpleasant, yes, I may be that sometimes, but not with La Falvine. With Momo yes, I can be unkind to him! Every minute of the day after him, shouting at him, making his life a misery. And even slapping his face sometimes, at his age, poor boy! That really does make me feel guilty afterward, as I told Fulbert this morning.” Then she added austerely, “But that doesn’t excuse it.”