Malevil, Page 42

  When I opened my eyes again it was bright daylight. The sun was streaming into the room and I was lying twisted across the bed in a most uncomfortable position. Evelyne was still lying in my arms fast asleep. I must have slid down into that contorted position during my sleep. When I got up, I found that my left hip was aching and that I had the beginnings of a stiff neck. Since Evelyne’s position was no less uncomfortable-looking than my own, I straightened her out and rearranged the bedclothes over her. I was even able to remove the piece of string tying back her hair without waking her. There were dark rings around her eyes, her cheeks were sunken, her skin dead white, and if it hadn’t been for her breathing you could have taken her for dead.

  I woke her at eleven with a bowl of warm sweetened milk and a slice of buttered bread brought over from the house on a tray. It was a terrible business getting her to eat anything at all. But I did manage to get most of it down her in the end by dint of alternate coaxing and threats. The threat—it was in fact always the same one—was that if she didn’t eat she would find herself back sleeping in the house that evening. And it worked for two or three mouthfuls, then in a sudden burst of incredible vivacity she turned my blackmail around and used it against me. She refused point-blank to eat any more unless I promised to let her stay in my room. In the end we arrived at a compromise. For every swallow of milk she would earn a further day’s stay in my room. And a day too for every bite of bread and butter. We managed to reach agreement too, after a great deal of haggling, on the definitions of swallow and bite.

  By the time Evelyne had finished her breakfast I was owing her twenty-two days of further hospitality. But then, since I was afraid of being totally disarmed in the future, I reserved myself the right to subtract days from the total if she didn’t eat her fair share at subsequent meals. She protested at that: “Ah, yes, you cunning thing, and what’s to stop you piling heaps and heaps on my plate so that I can’t eat it?”

  I promised there would be no cheating and that the size of her portions would be fixed in accordance with her age by a consensus of all those present. Evelyne must have had tremendous reserves of vitality stored away somewhere in that frail little body, because despite the night she’d just spent she was lively and gay during the whole of this scene. Though she did begin to betray a little lassitude at the end. She even wanted to get up, but I forbade it. She was to sleep till noon, and then I’d come and fetch her.

  “Do you promise you’ll come, Emmanuel?” I promised, and as I walked away from her toward the door she followed me with her eyes, the pale head scarcely denting its pillow at all. And the eyes were enormous. No body and almost no face, just two huge eyes.

  When I emerged from the keep carrying the empty bowl on its tray, I found a little group gathered outside. Thomas, Peyssou, Colin with his hands in his pockets, and Miette, who looked as though she had been waiting for me. Which indeed she had, for no sooner did I appear than she took the tray from my hands and made off with it back to the house, though not without giving me what I thought a very strange glance as she left.

  “Now the thing is, Emmanuel,” Peyssou began, “we’d like to speak to you. Because Colin’s old iron is all put away now. And well, as I say, the thing is we’re fed up. We’ve nothing to do.”

  “What about Meyssonnier?”

  “Ah, Meyssonnier,” Peyssou said, “now he’s nicely accounted for. Working on the bow you wanted. Jacquet and Momo too, they’re mucking out the animals. But what about us? We can’t just spend our time watching the wheat grow, can we now?”

  “Mark you,” Colin said with his gondola smile, “we could always tell the women to stay in bed in the mornings, then take them up their breakfasts in bed.”

  General laughter.

  “Colin,” I said, “do you want my boot behind you?”

  “But it’s true though,” Thomas chimed in. “It’s depressing not having anything to do.”

  I looked at him. Depressed he was not. Sleepy would be more like it. And not as anxious to work as all that, not this particular morning anyway. In fact the only reason he was there, I suspected, taking part in this unemployment demonstration, instead of where he so acutely longed to be really, was because he didn’t want to look as though he was tied to his wife’s apron strings too much.

  “Well, you were quite right to come and tell me,” I said, “because I have a whole program just waiting up my sleeve for you. First, riding lessons for everyone. Second, shooting lessons. Third, building up the gate-tower ramparts a little higher so that they’re out of ladder reach.”

  “Shooting lessons?” Colin said. “But we shall just waste ammunition. And we haven’t got all that much.”

  “Not at all. Do you remember that little air gun my uncle gave me once? I’ve found it again. Up in the loft. And plenty of pellets for it too. It’s just the thing for training and practice.”

  Peyssou was more concerned about the ramparts. His father had been a mason, he himself was quite handy at that sort of thing, and the ramparts, well he wasn’t going to say it couldn’t be done. For one thing, there was the cement for it now, part of the booty from L’Étang. And sand, there had always been plenty of that; and the stones too, they were there. He’d already thought about it himself. But.

  “But,” he said, “the thing is you mustn’t spoil the look of it, you see. Now say that you make it higher, then you’ve filled in the up and down of it, haven’t you? That’s not going to look good at all, not without the up and down bits. The eye is going to miss something that was always up there.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way,” I said. “There must be some means of reconciling the look of it and our safety.”

  He pulled his mouth into a grimace of doubt and shook his head rather grimly. But I knew my Peyssou. He was delighted. He was going to be thinking about his ramparts now day and night. He would start making little drawings. He was going to create something. And when it was done, every time he looked up at the gate tower on his way back from the fields, he would think, without ever saying a word to anyone, That was me, Peyssou. I made that.

  “Thomas,” I said, “go and show them how to saddle up. Take the three mares, not Bel Amour. I’ll see you in the Maternity Ward in a moment.”

  I went into the house, where the four women, the two old and the two young, were bustling about at the far end of the great hall. The Falvine family now held a clear majority: three to one. But La Menou was perfectly capable of holding her own for all that. As I opened the door she was just putting the finishing touches to a verbal onslaught on La Falvine. The two younger women were both silent, Miette because she was dumb anyway, Catie because she was prudent.

  “Miette, can you come here a moment?”

  She ran over immediately. I led her outside and closed the door behind me. She was wearing the little patched woolen skirt and the faded short-sleeved blouse—both very clean—and nothing on her feet at all. She had just finished scrubbing the stone floor and hadn’t yet had time to put her shoes back on. I looked at her bare feet on the courtyard cobbles, then at her magnificent black mane, and finally at her eyes, whose gentleness always made me think of a horse’s eyes. Then my gaze returned to her feet. I don’t know why, but I found them very moving, even though there was actually nothing moving about Miette’s feet at all in themselves: they were broad and very solid. It was more that their bareness somehow completed the picture of the wild, untamed country child that Miette was presenting that morning. A Stone Age Eve, I told myself, returned to me from the depths of time. Idiotic fantasy. Sexual overestimation, Thomas would say. As though he had a right to talk just at the moment!

  “Miette, are you cross?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t cross.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Another shake. Nothing was the matter.

  “Now come on, Miette. You looked at me very oddly just now.”

  She just stood, docile but completely uncommunicative.

  “Miette, come o
n! Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong!”

  Her eyes, fixed on me with such gentleness, also held a hint of reproach, or so it seemed to me.

  “Miette, explain. What is it?”

  She just looked at me, arms hanging at her sides. Not a gesture, not a single mime. She was doubly mute.

  “Miette, you ought to tell me if something is wrong, because you know I love you very much.”

  She nodded. Yes, she knew it.

  “What then?”

  Impassiveness.

  “Miette?”

  I took her by the shoulders. I moved closer to her and kissed her on the cheek. Quite suddenly she threw her arms around me and hugged me very hard, though without kissing me. Then she pulled herself away again, equally suddenly, and ran back into the house and left me standing there.

  The end of the scene had come so abruptly that I stayed where I was for several seconds, staring at the heavy oak door she had not taken the time to close behind her.

  —|—

  When I think back over the two months that followed that morning, what strikes me above all is the slowness with which they went by. It certainly wasn’t that we lacked for activities. Shooting, riding, building up the wall of the outer enclosure (we all took turns working as big Peyssou’s laborers), and in my case, in addition, physical education lessons with Evelyne, to say nothing of her three R’s.

  We were very busy, and yet there was never any hurry. We had vast quantities of leisure time at our disposal. The whole rhythm of life was slow. And odd though it sounds, although the days still had the same number of hours as before, they seemed to us infinitely longer. What it meant, in fact, was that all those machines that were supposed to make tasks easier—automobiles, telephones, tractors, chainsaws, chaff cutters, circular saws—well, they did make them easier, it’s true; but they also had the effect of speeding time up. We always wanted to do too many things too quickly. The machines were always there behind us, snapping at our heels to keep us on the move.

  For example, before it happened, the journey to La Roque to announce Catie and Thomas’s marriage to Fulbert—always supposing that I had decided not to do it by telephone—would have taken me nine and a half minutes by automobile, and that’s allowing for the bendy road. Whereas when I actually made that same journey by horse with Colin—who had insisted on going with me, without doubt in order to see Agnès again—it took us more than an hour. What’s more, having arrived and handed our message to Fabrelâtre—since Fulbert wasn’t up yet—there could be no question of turning around and starting straight back, because after their nine miles the horses needed a little rest. Added to that, because I didn’t want to subject them to too much metaled road in one day, on the way back we took the shortcut through the forest, which was in fact no shortcut at all, on account of all the dead trees across the track. In short, having left really very early in the morning, we got back finally at noon, tired but nevertheless feeling rather happy, Colin because he’d managed to talk to Agnès, myself because I’d seen green shoots emerging from the ground here and there, and even some on trees that earlier had looked quite dead.

  I also noticed that our movements had slowed down. They had become attuned to the new pace of life. Because you can’t just jump off a horse the way you used to leave the wheel of an automobile. There is no longer any question of screeching to a halt and rushing up the steps to catch the telephone before it stops ringing. Now when I arrive back at Malevil, I dismount as soon as I’m through the gate, walk Amarante sedately back to her stall, unsaddle her, rub her down, and wait till she’s nice and dry before giving her a drink. In all, a good half hour.

  It is quite possible, now that the medical profession no longer exists, that lives will become shorter. But if one is living more slowly, if the days and years don’t flash past in front of one’s nose at such a terrifying pace, if one has the time to live, in short, then I can’t help wondering if anything has really been lost.

  Even our relationships with other people have been considerably enriched as a result of this slower pace to life. It’s unbelievable, when I think back, the change in that respect. Take Germain, my poor Germain, who died in front of our eyes the day it happened. Even though he was my closest coworker for all those years, it was almost true to say I didn’t know him. Or worse still, I knew him just well enough to make the best use of him. “Make use of”—what an appalling phrase to use in relation to another human being! But there it was, like everyone else then I was in a hurry. Always a telephone call to make, mail to answer, automobiles, the annual horse sales in the neighboring towns, the bookkeeping, the forms, the tax inspector. With life being lived at a pace like that, how could human relationships possibly compete?

  —|—

  Early in August we received our first visit from old Pougès, one day when he managed to extend one of his morning bike rides to take in Malevil. And I can only doff my cap in respect to such a performance from a man of seventy-five: eighteen miles there and back, over very hilly roads what’s more, and all for two glasses of wine. To my mind he’d certainly earned them. But it cannot be said that La Menou welcomed him with open arms. I took the wine bottle from her and sent her back up to the house. “Now what did I do to offend her?” old Pougès asked plaintively, tugging at the tips of his long, drooping mustache.

  “Nothing, take no notice,” I said. “Who’s to know what ideas old women get into their heads?” Though in fact I knew precisely what La Menou had against him: the fact that he had once taken her late husband, forty-seven years ago now, to visit Adelaide, with what consequences for the peace of her home life and the names of her sows we all know.

  Even half a century had not succeeded in turning the edge of La Menou’s rancor. “Well, a fine thing, I must say,” she said to me later, just before dinner. “I wonder you’ve the stomach to let a creature like that in here, a loafer, a drunkard, a low skirt chaser.”

  “Now, now, Menou! I don’t think old Pougès is catching many skirts these days, even with a bike! And as for drink, he certainly drinks no more than you do.”

  Pougès had news for me from La Roque. The Sunday before, in the chapel during the course of his sermon, Fulbert had denounced my duplicity in the matter of Catie’s departure. “Duplicity, yes that was the word, and not a polite one by the sound of it. Right away I thought to myself, He’s doing this deliberate, it’s to get Marcel angry. And it did too. But as luck would have it, Marcel had Judith there next to him. Because those two are very thick, it seems to me. So she saw him getting very red in the face, and right away she clapped one of those great hands of hers on his arm. Then she turns to Fulbert, and out loud, right in the middle of his sermon, she says to him, ‘Monsieur le Curé, pardon me, but I come to church to hear about God, not to listen to accounts of your differences with Monsieur Comte over young ladies.’ And you know the way she speaks: very sharp, straight to the jaw. Polite always, but a voice like a sergeant-major. Here’s to yours.”

  “And yours.”

  “Next day she got short rations. So right away she goes all around the town showing her rations to everyone, so they know about it. And she tells Fabrelâtre, ‘Monsieur Fabrelâtre, please tell Monsieur le Curé I thank him for helping me to fast. But if I don’t receive normal rations tomorrow, I shall be forced to go begging at Malevil.’ Well, you know, Emmanuel, you’ll never believe it, but next day she had the same as us all.”

  “Which proves it pays to have a pair of balls between your legs,” I said, looking at him hard.

  “Yes, yes, maybe you’re right there,” old Pougès murmured evasively, at the same time extracting a stained handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiping both sides of his long, yellowish-white mustache.

  This gesture was not inspired solely by a concern for hygiene, if I may so put it. No, its main purpose was to indicate to me the fact that his glass was now empty. I filled it a second time, right to the brim. Then I replaced the cork in the bottle and drove it home with a sharp
blow of my palm. I didn’t want him getting any ideas.

  While savoring his first glass, Pougès had dutifully made conversation. When it came to the second, however, he clearly felt I’d had my money’s worth already. He remained as silent as the grave. The second glass was the free one, as it were, as in the old days at Adelaide’s. Its enjoyment required meditating on. So I took advantage of this silence to write a letter to Marcel. Pougès was to leave it in the tower mailbox on his way back, then inform the addressee of its presence there by discreet word of mouth, thereby avoiding the possibility of becoming involved and compromised. I advised Marcel in my letter to organize two different forms of opposition in La Roque: the first, open and superficially polite, directed against Fulbert with Judith as mouthpiece; the second, insidious and insulting, directed against Fabrelâtre.

  —|—

  As it turned out, it was Peyssou who was right about the wheat after all. It was clearly, as he had said, set on making up for lost time. On August fifteenth, still very late it’s true, the kernels were formed, and by about the twenty-fifth they were half ripe. And it was Peyssou again who one afternoon noticed a number of crushed stems, some gnawed kernels, and the marks of paws on the fringe of the field nearest the river.

  “Now that’s a badger,” he announced, “and a big one too. Just look at those paws, how far apart they are.”

  “Badgers only eat corn,” Colin said, “or grapes.”

  Peyssou shrugged pityingly. “I won’t bother to answer that,” he said as a prelude to answering it. “You think just because there’s no corn he’s going to turn up his nasty snout at what there is? The vermin must have been in his burrow the day it happened. They can dig deep, badgers, with those great claws.”