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Malevil, Page 34

Robert Merle

  I burst into laughter.

  “What are you laughing at, may I ask?” she said, rather annoyed.

  But big Peyssou happened to come in at that moment with Colin, and their arrival prevented me from giving her my answer. A pity. But when the opportunity arose, I resolved, I would have to tell our Menou that her confession had washed her clean hand instead of the dirty one.

  That evening, after the usual communal meal, with everyone made considerably merrier by the departure of our guest, there was another plenary assembly around the fire. This led to two major decisions. First, it was decided that we would not under any circumstances accept the vicar that Fulbert had threatened us with. Second, as the result of our vote on a proposal made by Peyssou and Colin, I was unanimously elected Abbé of Malevil.

  —|—

  [NOTE ADDED BY THOMAS]

  I have just read the last chapter and also, just to make quite sure, the next one. Emmanuel makes no further references to the plenary assembly during which, as a result of our vote on a proposal made by Peyssou and Colin, he was unanimously elected Abbé of Malevil.

  I imagine the reader finds this somewhat astonishing. I certainly do. And with some justification, when I have just read the results of a meeting that lasted three hours squeezed into a bald three lines.

  There might also be some puzzlement as to how the idea of such a proposal occurred to Peyssou and Colin in the first place. And also, above all, how it came about that Meyssonnier and myself voted in favor.

  Here are the answers to those two questions:

  1. First, there is the evidence provided by Colin the day after the vote, when I interviewed him in the storeroom during Emmanuel’s training session with Malabar in the outer enclosure. I give Colin’s statement word for word:

  “Well yes, of course it was Emmanuel who asked us, Peyssou and me, to propose him as Abbé of Malevil. You don’t need me to tell you it wasn’t something we’d ever have thought of ourselves! He asked us up in his room, after Momo’s bath. And his reasons, well you know them already. We all heard enough of them yesterday evening, heaven knows. First, we mustn’t accept the spy Fulbert was trying to hang around our necks. Second, we mustn’t deprive anyone in Malevil of their Mass if they wanted it. Otherwise half Malevil would be off every Sunday to La Roque and the other half would stay behind. There’d be no unity here any more. It would create a very unhealthy situation.”

  “But all the same,” I said, “you knew that Emmanuel isn’t a believer.”

  “Ah,” Colin said, “now I’m not so sure about that as you seem to be! In fact I’d be inclined to say, if you asked me, that Emmanuel has always been rather attracted to religion. The only trouble with him was that he would have needed to be his own priest.” And then, looking at me with that smile we hear so much about, he added, “And there you are. That’s just what he is now!”

  There are two elements in Colin’s evidence between which we must, I think, distinguish: the fact—Emmanuel arranging with Colin and Peyssou secretly to be proposed as abbé—and the personal comment—“Emmanuel has always been rather attracted to religion.”

  The fact, corroborated by Peyssou, is undeniable. But the comment is open to dispute. I, at all events, would certainly be inclined to dispute it.

  2. The election was in fact the result of two votes, not just one. The result of the first vote was For: Peyssou, Colin, Jacquet, La Menou, La Falvine, Miette. Abstentions: Meyssonnier and myself.

  Emmanuel took our abstentions extremely badly. We didn’t realize what we were doing! We were weakening his position! Fulbert would certainly use those two abstentions to persuade the people of La Roque that we didn’t trust him! In short, we were undermining Malevil’s unity! As far as he was concerned, if we persisted in our attitude he would certainly not accept the office of Abbé of Malevil, he would leave the field free for Fulbert’s creature, he would wash his hands of everything and everybody.

  Let us say in short—and it is the least that can be said—that Emmanuel exerted a certain amount of pressure on us. Since the others were all beginning to look upon us as two serpents warmed in Malevil’s bosom and now preparing to bite the hand that had fed us, and since it was clear that Emmanuel was genuinely extremely distressed, and might well throw in his hand entirely, as he had threatened, we eventually gave way. We withdrew our abstentions, agreed to a second election, and the second time voted in favor.

  That was how Emmanuel obtained the unanimous vote he had set his mind on.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The night after my election the rain continued to bucket down, so much so that it kept me awake for several hours, not because of the noise but because of the almost personal sense of gratitude I was feeling toward it. I have always loved moving water, but it had been a careless kind of love till now. It is so easy to grow accustomed to the things your life depends on. You end up taking them for granted. And that’s an error, because nothing is given for all time; there is nothing that could not disappear one day. And that knowledge, as I listened to the rain, made me feel like a convalescent.

  I originally chose this room for my bedroom, the room in which I am writing now, because of the view from its tall mullioned window out to the east over the Rhunes valley and the charming Château des Rouzies on the far side. It was through this window beside me now that the sun shone in that following morning and awakened me. I couldn’t believe my eyes. As Peyssou had predicted, everything was being given us at once. I jumped out of bed, shook Thomas violently awake, and together we gazed out at our first sunlight for two months.

  I remembered a bicycle ride in the dark with the other members of the Club, followed by a good hour and a half’s uphill scramble to the highest point of the province (1,680 feet) just to watch the sun rise. It’s the kind of thing one does do at fifteen, with the sort of wild excitement that fades as you get older. And that’s a pity. We ought to pay more attention to life while we’re living it. It’s not that long.

  “Come on,” I said to Thomas. “We’ll saddle the horses and go and take a look from up on the Poujade.”

  And that’s what we did, without stopping to wash or eat. The Poujade, up above Malejac, is the highest point for miles around. I took Malabar as usual, leaving Amarante for Thomas, since Malabar still needed a sharp watch kept on him the whole time, whereas Amarante of course was docility itself.

  It is something that will always stay with me, that ride up to the Poujade with Thomas in the dawn. Not that anything happened—there was nothing up there but just the sun and us—and not that anything important was said, because neither of us opened his mouth. Nor was what we saw from the Poujade at all beautiful: a charred landscape, ruined farms, blackened fields, skeletons that had been trees. But nevertheless, above it all there stood the sun.

  By the time we had reached the top of the hill the sun was already high above the horizon and had turned from red to pink, from pink to rosy white. Although it was giving off a pleasant warmth, we could still look straight into it without blinking, so thick were the veils still masking it. The rain-soaked earth was steaming everywhere beneath us. The land was streaked with trails of rising mist that seemed even whiter because of the charred ink-colored fields between.

  With our horses reined in side by side, gazing out to the east from the summit of the Poujade, we waited in silence for the sun to free itself from its vaporous covering. When it finally rose above them—and it happened suddenly—both mare and stallion simultaneously pricked their ears, as though they had been startled by some unexpected phenomenon. Amarante even uttered a little neigh of alarm and turned her head toward Malabar. He immediately nibbled at her mouth, which seemed to reassure her. But as she turned her head I noticed that she was blinking her eyes with amazing rapidity, much more rapidly, it seemed to me, than any human eyelid could ever move. And Thomas had raised one hand to shield his eyes, as though his eyelids were no longer adequate for the task. I did likewise. The dazzle was almost unbearable. We suddenly
realized, from the pain the light was causing us, that we had been living for two whole months in a subterranean half darkness.

  However, as soon as my eyes began to adjust, euphoria drove out all discomfort. My chest swelled. It was very odd, I was sucking the air into my lungs in great gasps, just as though light was something you could breathe. I also had the sensation that my eyes were open wider than they had ever been before, and that I myself was somehow opening with them. At the same time, just from being bathed in that light, I experienced an unbelievable sense of liberation, of lightness. I eased Malabar into a turn so that I could feel the sun’s warmth on my back and neck. Then, so as to offer every surface of my body to it in turn, I began circling the summit of the hill at a walk, immediately followed by Amarante, who did not wait to ask for Thomas’s opinion before setting off in Malabar’s wake. I looked down at the earth at our feet. Battered and soaked by the rain, it had already ceased to be just dust. There was even a look of life in it again. In my impatience I even began looking around for new shoots and staring at the less badly burned trees as though I expected to see buds on them.

  —|—

  The next day we decided to sacrifice Prince, our bull calf. We already had Hercule, the bull from L’Étang, and La Roque also had a bull. So keeping Prince no longer made any sense; and since we were going to give Noiraude to La Roque, and Marquise had her twins to feed, we were going to need Princesse’s milk.

  The slaughtering was a ghastly event. As soon as Prince was taken away from her, Princesse began the most heartrending bellowing. Then Miette, who had continued cuddling and stroking Prince till the very last moment, sat down on the cobbles and burst into floods of tears. Which did have at least one happy result. This kind of “sacrifice” had always excited Momo to the most horrible degree in the past, causing him to keep up a barrage of savage shrieks the whole time the shameful business was in progress; but seeing Miette in tears, Momo remained silent, then tried to console her, and eventually, having totally failed, threw himself down beside her and began weeping too.

  Prince was already over two months old, and when Jacquet had butchered the carcass we decided to give half of it to the people of La Roque and ask for some sugar and washing powder in exchange. We also decided to take two large loaves and some butter with us—purely as gifts—plus three iron bars to lever aside the tree trunks that must certainly have fallen across the road on the day it happened.

  We set off at dawn on a Wednesday, in the cart with Malabar between the shafts, myself with a heavy heart at leaving Malevil, even for one day. Colin was happy at the thought of seeing his shop again, and Thomas delighted at the prospect of a change of scene. We all carried guns slung over our backs.

  The three ex-troglodytes were delighted at the thought of seeing Catie and their uncle Marcel again. Miette, hair freshly washed the night before, was wearing a little printed cotton dress on which we all complimented her (smacking kisses to thank us). Jacquet had shaved and was couthly combed. And La Falvine was quite beside herself with jubilation, because added to the pleasure of seeing her brother again there was also that of escaping for a few hours from domestic drudgery and La Menou’s tyrannical rule.

  The joy of it all was more than she could stand, and no sooner were we clear of Malevil than she began talking—as Colin put it—like a cow pissing. We understood the reasons for her euphoric state and no one had the heart to tell her to shut up. It was easier, as soon as we encountered our first tree trunk, for all four of us, including Miette, simply not to get back into the cart when we moved off again, leaving Jacquet to put up with that terrible verbal flux alone, except for the downhill stretches, when we did all climb back in for a while. There was no question of going faster than a walking pace anyway, because Noiraude was tied to the back of the cart and had to keep up as best she could. It took us more than three hours to cover the nine miles to La Roque. And during that whole time, even though no one was listening, Falvine didn’t stop talking once. Every now and then I briefly lent an ear, curious to know what mechanism lay behind the endless flow. But there was nothing mysterious about it. One thing just led on to the next by the simplest association of ideas. La Falvine’s conversation was completely automatic, like prayers mechanically muttered over a rosary. Or better still, like lavatory paper. One tug on the end and it just kept spilling out.

  We reached the south gate of La Roque at eight and discovered that the small door cut into one side of the main gate was open. I only had to push it in order to walk through, draw the bolts, and pull both sides of the big gate wide open. I was inside the town, and there was no one anywhere in sight. I called. No answer. It was true that the gate led into the lower town, which was just heaps of charred ruins, so it wasn’t surprising to find no one living there; but that the gate was neither guarded nor even kept closed betokened staggering irresponsibility on Fulbert’s part, it seemed to me.

  La Roque was a tiny town perched on top of a hill with its back against a cliff, entirely surrounded by a wall at its base and crowned at its summit by a château. There were a good dozen or so little towns of the same kind in France, all once dear to the hearts of tourists, but La Roque was one of the most homogeneous, since all the houses were very old, and none of them had been in any way messed about with. The ramparts were still unbroken along their whole length, with two fine gates flanked by round towers, one to the south—the one through which we had just entered—and the other to the west, leading out to the main road to the county town.

  Entering by the south gate you found yourself immediately caught in a labyrinth of narrow alleys, then beyond these you emerged into the main street. It was in fact scarcely any wider than any of the others but was called that because of the shops that lined it on both sides. This main street was also referred to as the “traverse.”

  The shops along it were really beautiful, because luckily, just as the age of modernization was dawning, the Ministry of Works slapped a preservation order on the stone arches that formed their fronts. The rest of the town was all built of a golden-toned stone, with beautiful workmanship, the joins scarcely even visible, and the roofs covered in stone slates, with patches of warm, pale new stone zigzagging through the gray-black of the old where repairs had been done. The big uneven cobbles, like the houses a good four hundred years old, had been worn to a magnificent shine by all the men they had seen come and go.

  This main street ran extremely steeply uphill till it stopped at the château gate, which was huge and ornate but lacked a gate tower or crenelated battlements or arrow slits. All such defense works had been long out of date by the time it was built. The wooden gate itself had been painted a dark green by the Lormiaux, which was something of a shock when you first caught sight of it, because all the shutters in La Roque were painted the traditional claret red. The château, like the town itself, was entirely protected by ramparts, against which a number of houses of about the same age had been built in lean-to fashion. It was entirely sixteenth century in origin, having been rebuilt on the site of an older castle gutted by fire. In front of the château itself, below the terrace, there extended a small esplanade, about fifty by thirty yards, which commanded a wonderful view—on a clear day you could even see Malevil—and up to which the Lormiaux had had enormous quantities of topsoil carted in order to provide themselves with an English-style lawn. Behind the château rose the cliff that overhung and protected it.

  As we emerged from the asphalted alleys, Malabar’s hoofs and the cart’s wheels combined to create a rare clatter on the traverse’s uneven cobbles. Heads began appearing at windows. I told Jacquet to draw up outside Lanouaille the butcher’s, so we could unload our side of veal. And we had scarcely stopped before people had begun to emerge onto their doorsteps.

  I found them thin-looking and oddly subdued. I had been expecting a more exuberant welcome. Although their eyes began to gleam when Jacquet hoisted their half of Prince onto his back, carried it into the butcher’s little shop, and with Lanouaille�€
™s help hung it from a hook, the gleam faded again immediately. The same phenomenon occurred when I produced the two great loaves and the butter. I handed these over to Lanouaille as well, and he took them, I noticed, with a certain hesitation, almost as though he was afraid in some way, while the other inhabitants, now gathered around us in a circle, gazed at the bread with eyes strangely sad for all their intensity.

  “Is it to all of us you’re giving that?” Marcel Falvine demanded in an abrupt, almost violent tone, tearing himself away from the embraces of his sister and grandniece and advancing upon me with his leather apron flapping at each step.

  I was very much taken aback by the aggression in his voice and studied him carefully. I had known him for years by sight, but whenever I had seen him before he had been in his shop, last between his knees, working on a pair of boots or shoes. He was a man of about sixty, almost bald, with very dark eyes and a large fleshy nose with a wart on the right nostril. But what struck me most forcibly about him was the contrast between his legs, which were short and twisted, and his Herculean shoulders.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “It’s for the whole town.”

  “In that case,” Marcel said loudly, turning to Lanouaille, “there’s no point in waiting. You can share it out right away. Beginning with the bread.”

  “I don’t know that Monsieur le Curé would agree with that,” Fabrelâtre said. “It would be better to wait.”

  Fabrelâtre ran the hardware and fancy goods store in La Roque. He looked like a long white church taper, with flabby features, a little gray toothbrush mustache, and blinking eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles.