Malevil, Page 41

  After the ceremony I took Meyssonnier aside and we strolled up and down the outer enclosure together. There was a subtle change in him. He still had the same long, serious face, the two very close-set eyes, and that way of flickering his eyelids all the time when he was upset. No, the change didn’t lie there. It was the brushcut hair that was different. For want of a barber, it had at first grown straight upward, as I have already said, as though reaching for the sky. But now, having grown longer still, it was falling back away from his forehead, introducing a curve into his features that they had always lacked before.

  “I noticed that you took communion,” I said in a noncommittal voice. “May I ask why?”

  A slight flush rose into his honest face and the flickering began. “I hesitated,” he said after a moment. “But then I thought it might offend the others if I abstained. I didn’t want to set myself apart.”

  “Well, I must say I think you were right,” I said. “Why not give communion that meaning? A participation.”

  He looked at me in astonishment. “You mean that’s the meaning you give it?”

  “Certainly I do. The social content of communion seems to me very important.”

  “The most important?”

  An insidious question. I had the impression that Meyssonnier was somehow trying to pull me over to his side of the fence. I answered no, but without enlarging on the subject.

  “Now it’s my turn to put a question to you, if you don’t mind,” Meyssonnier said. “Was it solely in order to keep Gazel out of Malevil that you had yourself elected abbé?”

  If Thomas had asked me that question I would have thought twice before replying. But I knew that Meyssonnier would never jump to conclusions. He would chew over what I was going to say at leisure and draw cautious conclusions from it. Weighing my words, I said, “Let’s say, if you like, that in my opinion any civilization needs a soul.”

  “And that soul is religion?” He pulled a face as he said it. “Soul” and “religion” were two words he found distasteful. For him they were “obsolete.” Meyssonnier was a trained militant; he had attended one of the Party’s “officer schools.”

  “In the present state of things, yes.”

  He meditated on this assertion, which was at the same time a qualification. Meyssonnier is slow, he advances only one step at a time. But there is nothing shallow about his mind. He pinned me down even further. “The soul of our present civilization, here, in Malevil?” He put quote marks around the word “soul” with his voice, as though he were handling it from a distance, with pincers.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean that this soul is constituted by the beliefs of the majority of those living in Malevil?”

  “Not only that. It is also the soul corresponding to our present level of civilization.”

  In fact, things were a little more complicated than that. I was simplifying things in order to avoid shocking him. But I had shocked him nevertheless. He went a little red and began blinking. That meant he was about to counterattack.

  “But this ‘soul,’ as you call it, it could just as well be a philosophy of some sort. For example Marxism.”

  I thought that was coming. “Except that Marxism was derived from a study of industrial society and was intended to apply to it. It has no purpose to serve in a primitive agrarian communism.”

  He halted, and turned to look me in the face. He appeared to be very impressed by what I had just said. And all the more so because I had spoken quite dispassionately, as though simply stating an everyday fact. “Is that how you define our little society here? Primitive agrarian communism?”

  “What else can we call it?”

  Looking a little unhappy, he went on: “But this primitive agrarian communism, it isn’t the real Communism?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “It’s a regression then?”

  “As you well know.”

  It was odd. Even though I wasn’t a Marxist, he seemed to place more confidence in my judgment than in his own. And he looked very relieved suddenly. Although he could no longer aspire to the “real Communism,” at least he could keep it enshrined in his mind as an ideal, a touchstone to which reality could be referred.

  I went on: “Yes, it’s a regression, in the sense that so much of our knowledge and technology has been destroyed. Our existence is therefore more precarious, more threatened. But that doesn’t mean that we are any more unhappy. On the contrary.”

  As soon as I’d spoken the words I regretted them, because the man standing there opposite me, I suddenly remembered, had lost his whole family only two months ago. Yet Meyssonnier didn’t look as though he was remembering them at the moment, nor did he look shocked. He simply looked at me, then slowly nodded his head in agreement, without saying a word. So he too had found his love of life intensified since the day it happened, the pleasures of social intercourse more acute.

  I didn’t speak any more either. I was thinking. Values had changed, that was all. Take Malevil, for example. Before, Malevil had been that rather artificial thing: a restored castle. I had lived in it alone. I was proud of it, and half out of vanity, half to make money, I had been about to open it as a tourist attraction. But Malevil now was something very different. Malevil was a tribe—with its lands, its flocks, its stocks of hay and grain, its workers and fighters united like the fingers on a hand, and its women who would bear our children. It was also our stronghold, our den, our lair, our eyrie. Its walls were our protection, and within those walls we knew that we would all one day be buried.

  At the dinner table that evening, at which she appeared still coughing, Evelyne managed to oust Thomas from his chair on my right. He simply moved along one without comment, while Catie took the chair to the right of him. There were now twelve of us at table, and the rest of the seating remained unchanged, except that Momo had somehow or other—I have no idea why—replaced his mother at the bottom end, and La Menou had moved to Colin’s left. This meant that Momo now enjoyed an enviably strategic position. When winter came again he would have his back to the fire. And above all, he had an extremely good view of Catie, next to him on his left, and of Miette on the other side of the table. And he certainly took advantage of this situation, gazing at them alternately the whole time as he stuffed down his food. He didn’t look at them both in quite the same way. Catie he looked at in a sort of delighted surprise, like a sultan suddenly perceiving a new face in the seraglio. Miette he gazed at in pure adoration.

  Nor did Catie seem at all put out by Momo’s proximity. By no means averse to male homage, she might have found one of Thomas’s companions too reserved. With Momo there could be no complaint on that score. His gaze managed to combine the innocence of a child with the licentiousness of a satyr. And also he wasn’t offensive to the nose any more, now that Miette was washing him. Apart from the fact that he crammed such enormous pieces of food into his mouth, then pushed at them with his fingers, he was very presentable. And Catie now forcefully took his table manners in hand too. She took his plate away from him, cut up his ham into small pieces, broke up his slice of bread, then replaced it in front of him. He watched her spellbound as she did it. Then when she had finished, he put out one of his long, rather simian arms, gave her two or three little taps on the shoulder, and said, “Nhice, nhice.” La Menou made no attempt whatever to interfere throughout the scene.

  As a matter of fact, I had been rather apprehensive of La Menou’s reactions when I brought Evelyne and Catie back to Malevil. Though in the event they were very restrained. “My poor Emmanuel,” she said, “I see you’ve brought us two more barrens and two more mares.” In other words, more useless mouths to feed. But La Menou’s fear of famine had decreased slightly now that the wheat was up. Above all, with a marriage at Malevil, she was in her seventh heaven. She had always been passionately addicted to marriages. Whenever one took place in Malejac, even when she scarcely knew the people involved, she would drop everything at Les Sept Fayards a
nd rush down on her bike to the church. “Idiotic old goat,” my uncle used to say. “Off to have herself a good cry again, I suppose.” And he supposed right. La Menou would station herself just outside the porch—she would never go inside on account of the curé’s refusal to let Momo take communion and her subsequent quarrel with him—and as soon as the young couple appeared, the tears would start to flow. In someone who was such a realist it was a quirk that never failed to amaze me.

  Momo was also fascinated by Evelyne, but Evelyne paid him not the slightest attention. She never once took her eyes off me. Whenever I turned my head I found them on me, and even when I didn’t I could still sense their gaze. I had the feeling that the right side of my face was going to start heating up just from being looked at so hard. And whenever I laid down my fork and let my right hand rest on the table, another, much smaller hand would immediately slide under it.

  After the meal, as I took a few turns around the great hall to settle my digestion, Catie came over to me. “I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “What’s this?” I said, “Don’t I intimidate you any more?”

  “What do you think?” she said with a smile.

  Except that her eyes didn’t have the same animal gentleness, she was very like her sister in looks. For her wedding she had divested herself of all her gaudy finery and was wearing a very simple navy blue dress with a small white collar. She looked much better that way. There was a look of triumph and happiness on her face. I’d have preferred to see only the happiness, but all the same she was giving off a sort of radiance that bathed every one of us there in its warmth. There is a certain generosity there, I thought to myself. Oh, nothing to be compared with Miette’s, who is nothing but generosity. But after all, she did cut Momo’s ham up for him, and she bent around Thomas several times during the meal to feel Evelyne’s forehead or speak to her when she coughed.

  “Do you still find me as cold?” I asked, putting an arm around her neck and kissing her cheek.

  “Oh, what’s this?” Peyssou said. “Watch out, Thomas!”

  General laughter. Catie returned my kiss, half on the mouth moreover, then disengaged herself without any sign of haste, in a state of high delight because now she could add my scalp to her belt. And I was quite pleased too. The fact that I was never going to sleep with Catie would give our relationship a pleasant freedom.

  “First,” she said, “thank you for the room.”

  “It’s those who gave it you who deserve the thanks.”

  “They’ve already had them,” Catie said simply. “But thank you, Emmanuel, for arranging it. Thank you most of all for letting me come to Malevil. And also, well, thanks for everything,” she added with a sudden flash of embarrassment.

  I realized that she was alluding to the little argument that Thomas must have told her about, and I smiled.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she went on in a lower voice, “that Evelyne is certainly going to have an attack tonight. She’s been coughing for two days now.”

  “And when she has an attack, what does one have to do?”

  “There’s not much you can. You stay with her, you comfort her, and if you have some eau de Cologne you rub some on her forehead and her chest.”

  That “you” did not escape me. I could see from Catie’s face that she was finding the rest hard to say. I decided to help her. “And you want me to look after her tonight?”

  “Yes,” she said with relief. “My grandmother, you see, she’ll just get herself in a panic, run round in circles, cackle all the time, all the absolute opposite of what’s needed.”

  A very recognizable description of La Falvine. I nodded.

  “So if Evelyne does start an attack,” she went on, “my grandmother can come and fetch you?”

  I shook my head. “She won’t be able to. At night the door of the keep is bolted from inside.”

  “And you can’t, just for one evening...”

  In a stern voice I said, “Absolutely not. The security regulations admit of no exceptions. Ever.”

  She looked at me, very crestfallen.

  “There’s another solution,” I said. “I can have Evelyne sleep in my room. There’s the sofa free now that Thomas has gone.”

  “Would you do that?” she cried with joy.

  “Why not?”

  “Only I must warn you,” Catie said with commendable honesty, “if you let her sleep in your room once, then it’s all over. She won’t want to leave again.”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry. She’ll clear out willingly enough one day.”

  Catie smiled back. I could see that she was immensely relieved.

  Evelyne, who had slept upstairs with La Falvine and Jacquet in the house on her first night at Malevil, was wild with joy at the news that she was to share my room. But she wasn’t given much time to express it. She was scarcely in her bed on the sofa, and Miette—who had helped me make it—scarcely out of the room, when her attack began. She was suffocating, her nose was pinched, the sweat was streaming down her forehead. I had never seen anyone having an asthma attack, and what I saw now was terrifying: a human being unable to breathe any more.

  It took me a few moments to control my own distress. But that was the very first thing that had to be done. Evelyne was staring up at me with anguished eyes, and I knew I had to recover my own calm if I was to keep her calm too. I sat her up against her pillows, but they kept slipping because the sofa didn’t have a headboard. I picked her up and carried her over to my own bed, a big double one inherited from my uncle. It had a padded headboard I could prop her up against. I avoided looking at her. From the way she was struggling to get her breath, it sounded to me as though she was about to die of suffocation at any moment. Our tiny lamp didn’t give much light, but it was a clear night, and I could see the contortions of her face only too clearly. I went over and opened the window as wide as it would go, then I took the last bottle of eau de Cologne from my closet, shook some onto a washrag, and wiped it over her brow and the top of her chest. She was no longer looking at me. Incapable of speech, eyes staring straight in front of her, head tilted back, cheeks streaming with sweat, she just lay coughing and panting. I noticed that her hair kept falling over her face and seemed to be bothering her, so I fetched a piece of string from my desk drawer and tied it back for her.

  That was the sum total of my medical equipment: one bottle of eau de Cologne, one length of string. I had no medical dictionary. My knowledge in that field was nil, and I was afraid my uncle’s ten-volume Grand Larousse wasn’t going to be of much help either. Nevertheless, as best I could by the lamp’s dim light, I did struggle through the “asthma” entry. All it told me was the names of now vanished drugs: belladonna, atropine, ephedrine. Well naturally it wasn’t going to give me a lot of old wives’ remedies. And yet that was precisely what I needed.

  I looked down at Evelyne. I was face to face with our impoverishment, our impotence. I remembered briefly that operation I’d neglected to have while the chance was there, and wondered what would happen if my appendix flared up again.

  I sat down beside Evelyne. She threw me a look full of such pain and panic that my throat knotted. I talked to her, I told her it would soon be over, and as soon as her eyes were no longer on me, I observed her. I noticed after a little while that she was having more difficulty emptying her lungs than in filling them. I don’t know why, but till then I’d assumed the contrary. As far as I could make out, she was being deprived of oxygen on two counts: first because she couldn’t reject her used up air quickly enough, and second because she couldn’t get fresh air in quickly enough to replace it. But the blockage seemed to act to some extent like a valve, making the breathing-out part even more difficult than the breathing in. And on top of that there was the cough. The purpose of that, I took it, was to expel whatever was blocking her breathing. It was a dry, hacking cough that shook her whole body and exhausted her. And it wasn’t expelling anything at all.

  Watching her thin chest pumping
desperately up and down, I had an idea. What if I helped her breathing by purely mechanical means? Not by stretching her out flat on her back, but just as she was now, in a position that would enable her to continue coughing and also, if the need arose, to spit. I sat myself on the bed, back propped against the headboard. Lifting her in my arms, I placed her between my legs with her back to me. Then I grasped her upper arms with my hands and began accompanying her every attempt to breathe out with a double movement: pushing her shoulders forward and together while at the same time bending her thorax forward and down. When she was trying to breathe in, I did the same thing in reverse, pulling her shoulders and thorax back and up toward me until her back was against my chest.

  I had no idea whether I was doing her any good. For all I knew a doctor would have found my efforts ludicrous. But I must have been bringing Evelyne some degree of comfort, even if only morally, because at one point, in an exhausted, scarcely audible voice, she murmured, “Thank you, Emmanuel.”

  So I went on. Eventually she let herself relax entirely in my hands, and after a while I noticed that despite the extreme lightness of her torso I was now finding it heavier to manipulate. I assumed that tired as I was I must have dozed off at some point, because I saw that the lamp had run out of oil without my having noticed it go out.

  In the middle of the night—I think, because I had left my watch on the desk and had by now lost all notion of time—Evelyne was shaken by a long fit of coughing and asked me in a muffled voice for my handkerchief. I heard her spitting and clearing her throat for quite some time. There were several more coughing fits after that, and each time she had to spit into the handkerchief. Then she fell back against my chest, exhausted but having obviously obtained some relief.