Malevil, Page 36

  “Nothing to offer you, my poor Emmanuel,” he said as he sat down opposite me. He shook his head sadly. “You saw?”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “Mark you, we must be fair. In the beginning Fulbert did a lot of good. He was the one who made us bury the dead. And in a sense he was the one who gave us back the courage to go on. It was only gradually, with Armand behind him, that he began putting the screws on.”

  “And you did nothing to stop him?”

  “By the time we wanted to it was too late. The trouble, really, was that we weren’t suspicious enough at the start. He has a tongue like honey, that Fulbert. He told us that all the groceries had to be brought up and stored in the château, to prevent looting, now the owners were dead. Fair enough. It seemed rational at the time and we did it. Same argument for the bacon, sausages, and so on. After that he told us, ‘You mustn’t keep your guns. People will end up killing one another. Better to store those in the château as well.’ Fair enough. That too was far from stupid. And what point could there be in keeping our guns anyway, since there’s no game left? And then, of course, one fine day it dawned on us that he had everything up there in the château: hay, grain, horses, pigs, meat, groceries, and the guns. Not to mention the cow you’ve just brought us. So that was it. It’s the château that hands out the rations to us all every day. And the rations can vary from one person to the next, you get me? And also from one day to the next, according to the big boss’s mood. And that’s how Monsieur Fulbert keeps us under his thumb—by controlling the rations.”

  “And Armand, what’s his part in all this?”

  “Armand? He is the secular arm. The terror. Fabrelâtre is the information service. Though Fabrelâtre is more just a stupid asshole than anything else, mark you, as you must have noticed yourself.”

  “And Josepha?”

  “Josepha’s the cleaning woman up there. About fifty or so. Not much to look at, but she’s not there just to do the cleaning all the same, if you see what I mean. She lives in the château with Fulbert, Armand, and Gazel. Gazel is the vicar Fulbert meant to send you when he’s put the finishing touches to his training.”

  “And what’s he like, this Gazel?”

  “Gazel? He’s just an old woman!” Marcel said, bursting into laughter. And it did me good to see him laugh, because that’s how I remembered seeing him in the old days, sitting there in his little workshop, dark eyes sparkling, wart quivering, Herculean shoulders shaking with the laughter he was obliged to contain because his mouth was full of nails, which he was removing one by one to hammer into the boot on his last. And how I loved to watch him knock them in, just one blow for each, always dead straight, never a single one botched, and the sheer speed!

  “Gazel,” he went on, “is a widower in his fifties. And if ever you want a good laugh, then pop in at his house and take a look at him around ten any morning, doing his housework, his hair all wrapped up in a turban so it doesn’t get dusty, and rubbing and polishing and dusting like a little old granny. And what for? He doesn’t even live there any more, he lives up in the château! And he’s delighted, I can tell you! It means his own house never gets dirty!”

  “And apart from that?”

  “Oh, not a bad little fellow really, but what can you expect. He’s swallowed the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker! And as for Fulbert, total veneration for him! All the same, if he goes to live at Malevil, you’d be as well to keep your eye on him.”

  I looked at Marcel. “He won’t be coming to live at Malevil, don’t worry. Last Sunday evening my companions elected me Abbé of Malevil myself.”

  Evelyne let go of my thumbs, twisted around, and stared up into my face with a scared look; but what she saw there must have reassured her, because she immediately resumed her former position. As for Marcel, he opened his eyes and his mouth very wide, then a second later burst into peals of loud laughter.

  “Well, Emmanuel, if you’re not just like your uncle,” he gasped through his merriment. “And oh, what a pity you don’t live here in La Roque! You’d have got rid of these vermin for us. Though mark you,” he said, becoming serious once more, “as far as that goes, even taking extreme measures, you know, I don’t say I haven’t thought about it. But there’s no one here I can rely on, except Pimont. And Pimont, the thought of laying hands on a priest! Never.”

  I looked at him without speaking. Fulbert’s tyranny must be weighing heavy on them indeed for a man like Marcel to have started thinking in those terms.

  “Hey,” he said suddenly, “last Sunday, did you give Fulbert any bread when he left Malevil?”

  “Yes, and butter as well.”

  “Yes, and we heard about it from Josepha. She’s a talker, luckily for us.”

  “But it was for all of you, that bread.”

  “Oh, I knew that, don’t worry!”

  He spread his tanned black-stained palms in a gesture of despair. “But there you are, you see. That’s what it’s come to. If Fulbert decides tomorrow to let you starve, then you starve. Say for instance now, you refuse to go and hear Mass or to confess, that’s it. Your rations get smaller. Oh, he won’t stop them altogether, ah no! He just whittles them away. A little smaller every day. And if you complain, then you find Armand coming to pay you a little home visit one day. Oh, he wouldn’t come here!” Marcel said quickly, straightening up on his chair. “He’s still a little afraid of me, our Armand. On account of this.”

  He slipped a hand into the pouch of his leather apron and took out the razor-sharp knife he used for cutting out soles. It flashed once, then it was back in the pouch again.

  “Listen, Marcel,” I said after a moment, “we’ve known each other quite a while, you and I. And you knew my uncle. He thought a great deal of you. If you want to come over to Malevil with Catie and Evelyne and live with us, then you’ll be made very welcome.”

  Evelyne didn’t turn around, but tightening her fists around my thumbs, she tugged my arms tighter around her chest with astonishing force.

  “Thank you for that,” Marcel said, tears welling up in his dark eyes. “Really, thank you, Emmanuel. But I can’t accept, for two reasons. First, there are Fulbert’s decrees.”

  “Decrees?”

  “Oh, yes. So you don’t know about that yet? Monsieur le Curé has taken to issuing decrees. All on his own, without consulting anyone else. And he reads them out from the pulpit on Sundays. Decree number one—I know it off by heart: Private property having been abolished in La Roque, all goods, buildings, stores, victuals, and provisions at present within the perimeter of the ramparts henceforward belong to the parish of La Roque.”

  “It’s not possible!”

  “Ah, but wait! That’s not all. Second decree: No inhabitant of La Roque has the right to leave the town without the express authorization of the parish council. And that council—which he appointed!—consists of Armand, Gazel, Fabrelâtre, and himself!”

  I was staggered. My wariness of Fulbert seemed now to have been justified a hundred times over. But on the other hand, I had seen and heard enough during the last three quarters of an hour to be quite sure in my own mind that Fulbert’s regime would find precious few defenders if relations with Malevil became strained.

  “And I don’t need to tell you,” Marcel went on, “that his precious parish council is never going to give someone like me permission to leave. A cobbler is far too useful. Especially now.”

  I burst out violently, “We don’t give a damn for Fulbert and his decrees. Come on, Marcel, pack up your things and we’ll take you now!”

  Marcel shook his head sadly. “No. Because now I’ll tell you my real reason. I just don’t want to leave the folks here in the lurch. Oh, I know they’re a bit gutless. But then if I wasn’t here it would be even worse. Having Pimont and me here, it does keep them in check just a little, our friends up there. And I don’t want to desert Pimont. That would be a rotten trick... But if you want to take Catie and Evelyne along with you, do by all means. Fulbert has been pe
stering Catie for quite a while now to go up and do his cleaning for him at the château. I needn’t say any more! Not to mention the way Armand is always hanging around her.”

  I pulled my thumbs free from Evelyne’s grip, lifted her around to face me, and took her by the shoulders. “Can you hold your tongue, Evelyne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then listen. You are to do exactly what Catie tells you, understand? And not a word to anyone.”

  “Yes,” she said, with the solemn look of a bride saying “I do.” Those big blue eyes, made even bigger by the dark smudges around them, amused me and moved me at the same time with their tremendous solemnity, and taking good care to grip her arms so that she couldn’t wind them around me again, I bent down and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “I’m relying on you,” I told her as I got up.

  At that moment from the street outside we heard the sound of voices being raised, then a sound of running steps on the cobbles. A panting Catie appeared in the doorway of the little room.

  “Come quickly!” she cried. “Armand is starting a fight with Colin!”

  She vanished again immediately. I hurried over to the door, then paused and turned as I realized that Marcel was following me.

  “If you’re staying on here,” I told him in patois, “it would be better if you didn’t get mixed up in this. Stay here and take care of Evelyne; we don’t want her under our feet.”

  By the time I reached the cart Armand was in a very unpleasant situation and protesting loudly. Jacquet and Thomas had immobilized both his arms. (Thomas with a very neat lock.) And Colin, red as an angry bantam cock, was standing in front of him brandishing a length of lead pipe over his head.

  “Now then, now then, what is going on here?” I said in my most pacific tones. Ignoring Colin, I inserted myself between him and Armand. “That’s enough, you two. Let Armand go now. Let’s hear what he has to say for himself.”

  Thomas and Jacquet did as I asked, rather glad of my intervention in fact, since they had been holding Armand’s arms for some little while now, and the longer Colin put off actually hitting him the more tricky their position was becoming.

  “It was him,” Armand said, also extremely relieved, pointing at Colin. “It was your plumber there. He insulted me.”

  I looked at him. Armand had put on weight since the last time we met. The only person in La Roque who had, that was for sure. He was a big man, even taller than Peyssou, and strong, as his thick neck and vast shoulders suggested. His strength plus his reputation had always guaranteed, before the bomb, that he had only to walk into a dance for the hall to empty.

  But because he had emptied so many dancehalls, he had ended up unable to find a girl to marry him, even though with his job up at the château he had been paid regularly by the month, with free accommodation, heating and lighting thrown in. For lack of a legitimate spouse, he’d always had to make do with La Roque’s overdone leftovers and stringiest old hens, which had of course made him more bitter and vicious than ever. And with those pale eyes, white eyelashes and eyebrows, his broken nose, his jutting chin, and his pimples, he was not an attractive sight. But after all, that’s not the point. Even the ugliest man can always find someone to marry him. What put prospective parties off in Armand’s case, apart from his brutality, was that he didn’t like work. He only liked frightening people. And he was disliked because he gave himself airs as a bailiff and gamekeeper when he was in fact neither the one nor the other. He had even gone so far as to rig himself up with a paramilitary uniform, which alienated any sympathy anyone might have had left: an old forage cap, a black velvet jacket with gilt buttons, black riding breeches, and boots. And a gun. Mustn’t forget the gun. Even during the closed season.

  “He insulted you?” I said. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Go to hell,’” Armand said in tones of deep affront. “‘Go to hell and take your decree with you.’”

  “You said that!” I exclaimed, swiveling around and taking advantage of the fact that my back was now to Armand to give Colin a wink.

  “Yes,” the still scarlet Colin said. “I said it and I—”

  I cut him off. “And what kind of loutish behavior do you call that,” I said very loudly in patois. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. We haven’t come all this way to be rude to people. Take back what you said here and now, if you don’t mind!”

  “All right then, if you like, I take it back,” Colin said, at last getting the message. “But that’s not all there is to it,” he added. “He called me a little asshole.”

  “Did you call him that?” I asked, turning back to Armand and staring at him sternly.

  “Well, he’d got my back up, hadn’t he?” Armand said.

  “Maybe, but you were going a bit far there, damn it. ‘Little asshole,’ that’s much worse than ‘Go to hell.’ And after all, we’re all of us guests of the Curé of La Roque here. There are limits, you know, Armand. Here we bring you a cow, a side of veal, two loaves, three pounds of butter, and all you can do is call us ‘little assholes’!”

  “It was him I called a little asshole,” Armand said.

  “Us or him, there’s no difference. Now then, Armand, do as he’s done, take it back.”

  “If you really want me to,” Armand said with utmost ill grace.

  “Bravo!” I said, feeling it would perhaps be imprudent to push my demands any further. “So there we are, that’s settled! And now that you’ve made it up, maybe we can talk this over calmly. What’s it all about? What is this decree of yours?”

  Armand explained, which gave me time to have my answer ready.

  “And so you, naturally enough,” I said to Armand when he’d finished, “you were trying to enforce your curé’s decree by preventing Colin from moving his stock. Because his stock, according to the decree, now belongs to the parish.”

  “That’s it exactly,” Armand said.

  “Well now,” I said, “I certainly don’t say you were in the wrong. You were only doing your duty.”

  Armand eyed me with surprise, and not without suspicion, his white eyelashes fluttering over his pale eyes.

  I went on: “Only the thing is, you see, Armand, there’s one difficulty. Which is that we at Malevil have also issued a decree. And according to our decree all the property that used to belong to anyone living at Malevil now belongs to the castle of Malevil, wherever that property happens to be. So Colin’s shop and stock in La Roque now belongs to Malevil. I hope you’re not going to dispute that,” I said sternly to Colin.

  “No, I don’t dispute it,” Colin said.

  “So, in my opinion,” I went on, “this is a special case. Your curé’s decree doesn’t apply here, because Colin is not a member of the parish of La Roque but from Malevil.”

  “That may be so and it may not,” Armand said in an unpleasant aggressive tone, “but it’s up to Monsieur le Curé to decide, not me.”

  “Quite right,” I said, taking him by the arm and thereby enabling him to make his exit without loss of face. “The best thing is for you to go and explain all this to Fulbert, on my behalf, and at the same time to tell him that we’re here and that it is already quite late. The rest of you,” I said over my shoulder, “go on with the loading until further orders.

  “Without wishing to boast,” I went on in a confidential tone when we had gone a few paces, “I can tell you now that I rescued you from a very nasty spot there, Armand. They can be pretty rough, those fellows, and little Colin is the ugliest customer of the lot. It’s a miracle he didn’t split your head open for you just now. It’s not so much that you called him an asshole, you understand, it’s the fact that you called him a little asshole. ‘Little’ is something he doesn’t forgive. But after all, Armand”—I gripped his arm more tightly—“it would be idiotic for La Roque and Malevil to start fighting each other over a heap of old metal that’s no use to any of us any more! Say for instance that Fulbert is unwilling to recognize Malevil’s rights over Colin’s s
tuff, and that things turn nasty, and that it even came to an exchange of shots, it would really be too stupid to get oneself killed over a thing like that, don’t you agree? And as far as you’re concerned, if you were to hand out the guns in the château to the people here, there’s no guarantee that it would be us they’d use them on.”

  “I don’t see by what right you say that,” Armand said, stopping in his tracks and staring at me, white with fear and anger.

  “Well, now,” I said, “for a start just look around you. You weren’t exactly quiet about your scuffle with Colin just now, were you? Well, look! Go on, look! Not a person to be seen!” I smiled. “You can’t say that the people of La Roque exactly rushed to your defense, can you, when you had my three men on your neck just then.”

  I stopped to give him time to swallow this bitter pill. And swallow it he did, in silence, with my veiled ultimatum as a chaser.

  “Well, I must leave you now,” I said. “I shall rely on you to explain the situation to Fulbert for me.”

  “I’ll go and see what I can do,” Armand said, struggling to gather the tattered shreds of his pride around him as best he could.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was as though Armand’s departure had been a signal. The heads all reappeared at their windows once more. An instant later the population of La Roque was all out in the main street again. Partly because the small share of our bread and butter they had just swallowed had restored their vitality somewhat, and partly too because the discomfiture of Armand, watched from behind their little windows, had strengthened their morale. Their attitude had changed. Not that their fear had vanished by any means, as I observed from the furtive glances directed at Fabrelâtre, and also from the fact that no one even mentioned the recent quarrel or dared to go and give Colin a hand or even risked going anywhere near the cart. But they were all talking rather more loudly and gesturing with a little more animation. You could sense a restrained excitement in their glances.