Malevil, Page 59

  Behind the altar (a plain marble slab resting on two rectangular piers and facing the congregation) the Lormiaux had insisted on reopening a Gothic arch that had been walled up and putting in a very fine stained-glass window. The idea was that the sun should filter through it and light up the priest from behind as he celebrated Mass. Unhappily, however, the Lormiaux had failed to notice that the window faced west, and that it was therefore not possible—short of a miracle—for it to provide the officiant with a halo of glory in the morning. Nevertheless, no one had ever disputed the usefulness of the window, since the infrequent and very narrow openings in the side walls produced no more than a cryptlike gloom in the nave, even on the sunniest of days. In this mysterious semidarkness, in which the faithful moved so wanly, like the future shades they were preparing to become, at least they could now see the altar—and the hope being offered them from it—in a somewhat clearer light.

  The entire population of La Roque was in there, at least as far as I could judge. Because coming in from the warm bright afternoon sun, I could see almost nothing in that medieval cave, whose damp cold fell on me like a shroud. As agreed, Vilmain’s four armed men ordered me to sit on one of the chancel steps. Then they sat down themselves, two on each side of me, looking very grim and determined, rifles upright between their legs. Behind me was the stark modern altar already described, and behind that again, higher up, the stained-glass window. It ought to have been lit up, since it was now past four, but in fact it wasn’t, because the sun had gone behind a cloud at the very moment I walked in. I sat with the small of my back against the upper chancel step, folded my arms, and set myself to making out the faces before me in the gloom.

  For a moment I could see no more than shining eyes, with here and there the white patch of a shirt. It was some time before I was gradually able to identify individuals. Some of them, I noted with sadness, were avoiding my gaze. Old Pougès among them. But on my left, lit by the miserly light from one of the narrow side windows, I finally made out the central core of my supporters: Marcel Falvine, Judith Médard, the two widows—Agnès Pimont and Marie Lanouaille—and two farmers whose names I couldn’t quite remember at the moment. In the first row I recognized Gazel, limp hands folded on his lap, narrow forehead crowned with those beautiful curls that always reminded me of my sisters’.

  When I walked in through the little side door at chancel level, I had not seen Fulbert. I presumed that he was pacing up and down the central aisle, and that as I entered he had been approaching the great Gothic door at the far end, about to make his turn and walk back. As I sat down, I still couldn’t see him, because the far end of the nave was also its darkest area, there being no side windows at all near the door. But in the silence that settled on everyone at my entrance, long before I saw him I heard his footsteps ringing on the great stone flags. The steps came nearer, and Fulbert emerged gradually from darkness into half darkness. Neither his charcoal gray suit nor his gray shirt and black tie caught much of the light. What I perceived first was his white forehead, the white wings of hair at his temples, his eye sockets, and his hollow cheeks. After a second I could also see his silver cross swinging on his breast at the mercy of the indubitably very human passions that were agitating it.

  Walking toward me without haste, with firm and measured tread, heels ringing imperiously on the stone floor, head held well out in front of his body and poised like a snake’s about to strike, he looked as though he had every intention of devouring me alive there and then. But instead he stopped about three paces short of me, stood with his hands behind his back, swaying backward and forward slightly on his feet, as though before he struck he wanted to hypnotize me, and looked me slowly up and down in silence, shaking his head from side to side. Even at that distance I could only just make out his body, because its dark clerical garb melted into the darkness of the chapel beyond. But his head, apparently floating disembodied above me, his head I could see extremely well, and I was startled by the look in his magnificent squinting eyes. Because they were expressing nothing but kindness, compassion, and sadness, as indeed were the accompanying motions of his head, so that his whole appearance was that of a man caught up in a situation he was finding very painful indeed.

  I was disappointed, and even uneasy. Not that I believed in the sincerity of his compassion for a moment; but if he continued to play this evangelical game to the end, then my little comedy would become indefensible, my plan would collapse under me, and it would be difficult for me in the sequel to pass sentence on a man who had just refused to judge me. Because it was in fact a refusal to pass judgment that his pitying attitude seemed to indicate.

  The silence lasted for several interminable seconds. All the townspeople looked alternately at Fulbert and myself, astounded that Fulbert wasn’t opening his mouth. Meanwhile, my uneasiness faded. This preliminary silence, I realized, was simply a preacher’s trick to command attention, and also, I would swear, a sadistic ruse to inspire false hopes in the accused. As I studied Fulbert’s shifty gaze fixed upon me, I had just noticed that his squint wasn’t solely the result of a divergence of the pupils but also of the fact that his right eye had a totally different expression from the left one. The left one, in harmony with the paternal head-shakings and the melancholy grimace of the lips, was brimming with fathomless pity. The right one, on the other hand, was glittering with malice and completely contradicting the messages being conveyed by its fellow. By concentrating solely on that one eye and ignoring the rest of his features I could perceive the phenomenon quite plainly.

  I was very pleased with this discovery, because it seemed to me to complete the whole Janus-like picture I had been forming of Fulbert’s personality: the coarse hands with their flattened fingers belying the intellectual brow, the emaciated face giving the lie to the plump torso. His whole body, eyes included, was in itself a series of lies and contradictions without his needing to open his mouth at all.

  But at last he did. He began to speak in a deep, resonant voice that sounded like a cello. It was musical, unctuous. And the content, right from the word go, exceeded all my wildest hopes. Fulbert just hadn’t the words, he informed us, to deplore the situation in which he now saw me. A situation that was causing him personally grievous affliction (I’d have bet a hundred to one on that!)—especially given the “great warmth” of the friendship he had felt for me, a friendship I had betrayed, and which he had been obliged with great sadness to renounce, as a consequence of the errors into which my pride had led me, errors that were today receiving a punishment in which he saw the hand of God...

  I will skip the rest of this nauseating preamble. It was followed by an indictment that deviated further and further from the initial suavity of tone. And in fact, at the very first accusation he hurled at me—it was concerned with what he termed Catie’s “kidnaping”—there were murmurs in the nave, and these murmurs continued to grow, despite the increasingly threatening looks that Fulbert shot around him and the ever-increasing sharpness and hardness of tone he employed in the enumeration of his grounds for complaint.

  These were of three kinds: I had kidnaped a young woman from La Roque, in violation of the parish council’s decree, and after abusing her I had abandoned her to one of my men after a simulacrum of marriage. I had profaned the sanctity of the Christian religion by having myself elected priest by my servants and by conducting, with them, a parody of the rites and sacraments of the Church. I had moreover taken advantage of this first blasphemy in order to give free rein to my heretical tendencies by discrediting the sacrament of confession by my words and by my practice. Lastly, I had done everything within my power to support and encourage the evil and subversive elements in La Roque, in open revolt against their pastor, and I had made threats in writing to intervene by force of arms if they were punished. I had even laid claim, with the use of fallacious historical arguments, to the suzerainty of La Roque. It was evident, Fulbert concluded, that if Captain Vilmain—that was how he referred to him—had not taken up r
esidence in La Roque (cries of “Lanouaille! Lanouaille!”), then La Roque would one day or another have been the target of my criminal intentions, with all the consequences that could easily be imagined for the liberties and the lives of the town’s citizens. (Loud and repeated cries of “Lanouaille! Pimont! Courcejac!”)

  The situation in the chapel at that moment could hardly have been more tense. Three quarters of those present, eyes lowered, were keeping a hostile silence, but appeared for the moment at least to be sufficiently terrorized by Fulbert’s tone and the threatening looks he was flashing at them to make no protest. The remaining quarter—Judith, Agnès Pimont, Marie Lanouaille, Marcel, and the two farmers whose name I was still vainly trying to recall—were in a state of unrestrained fury. They were protesting, yelling, and even waving their fists at Fulbert as they stood leaning forward in their places. The women especially were beside themselves, and if it hadn’t been for my four supposed guards, I had the feeling that they would be quite capable of throwing themselves on their curé and ripping him to pieces in the middle of the chapel.

  I had the impression that my trial had worked like a detonator. It had finally set off the buried charge of execration the opposition in La Roque felt for their self-appointed leader. And it was now exploding out into the open for the very first time, with a violence that had clearly stunned Fulbert.

  A pastmaster at lying, he must have been equally clever at self-deception. Ever since he took over command in La Roque, he must have been convincing himself that the fear he inspired was in fact respect. It was clear, at all events, that he’d had no idea he was so hated by his flock—by all his flock, since the attitude of the majority, though more cautious and expressed in nothing louder than murmurs, was for all that one of hostility. The impact this hatred had on him was frightening. I could see him literally shake on his base, like a statue about to be toppled from its plinth. He flushed, then paled, clenched his fists, began several sentences without managing to finish a single one, his hollow face convulsed, while terror and fury alternated in his flashing eyes.

  But he was no coward. He stood up to them. He strode firmly over to the chancel steps, climbed them, and taking up his stance at the top between Jeannet and Maurice, he spread his arms in a request for silence. And staggeringly enough, after a few seconds he got it, so strong was the habit in La Roque of listening to him speak.

  “I see that the moment has come,” he said in a voice quivering with anger and indignation, “when we must separate the wheat from the tares. There are people here who call themselves Christians and who have not hesitated to plot against their pastor behind his back. Those conspirators should know one thing: I shall do my duty without flinching. If there are those here who besmirch the community’s good name and seek to corrupt it, then I shall cast them out from the church. I will cleanse my father’s house from its floor to its ceiling! And if I find filth in it, then I shall surely cast it out!”

  This address produced further indignant cries and violent protests. I noticed Marie Lanouaille especially, almost breaking from Marcel and Judith’s grasp, shouting in a high-pitched voice, “You are the filth! You, eating with my husband’s murderers!”

  From my seat on the steps I could see my prosecutor’s right eye only. It was flaming with mad hatred. In his fury, Fulbert had lost all his usual self-control and cunning. He was no longer maneuvering, he was going for an all-out confrontation. He wanted to beat the opposition down by force. With Vilmain’s rifles behind him he felt strong. He was determined to defy the rebels. And smash them. In a few short minutes he had regressed, perhaps as a result of contagion by proximity, to a mentality as primitive and brutish as Vilmain’s own. At that moment, standing confronting his fellow citizens, drunk with rage, he had no other thought in his mind, I’m certain, than mowing them down with bullet or blade.

  When Fulbert once again stretched out his arms, a relative silence returned, and in a changed, high, almost hysterical voice, which had nothing in common with his usual cellolike tones, he almost howled, “As for the true instigator of all these plots, Emmanuel Comte, your present attitude leaves me no choice! In the name of the parish council I condemn him to death!”

  The tumult that broke out then was wilder than I could possibly have imagined. And I could sense that Hervé, on my right, was becoming uneasy. He was afraid that the townspeople might actually attack and disarm him and his fellow “guards,” so violent had their demonstrations of anger become. The fact that they didn’t make that transition from words to action was due, I think, to lack of prior planning, and above all to their lack of a leader. But also to the fact that Fulbert, simply by his presence, by his courage, by the open hatred blazing on his face, was still exercising a measure of his old power over them.

  Gazel had started when his ex-confederate mentioned the parish council, then he had shaken his head and lifted his limp hands up to his face in a gesture of repudiation.

  I leaned over to Hervé and said quietly, “Let Gazel speak. I think he has something to say.”

  Hervé stood up, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he did so in order to convey his peaceful intentions. He stood there for a good second, elegantly posed with his weight on one foot, hand raised to request attention, an amiable expression on his youthful countenance. As soon as he had obtained silence, he said in a calm and courteous voice, in striking contrast to the furious howling that had preceded his intervention, “I think Monsieur l’Abbé Gazel has something to say. He has the floor.”

  After which he sat down again. Hervé’s youth, elegance, and politely self-confident tone, plus the fact that he had gone over Fulbert’s head in order to give Gazel the floor, produced a stunned pause. And the most stunned of all those present was undoubtedly Fulbert, who simply couldn’t understand why Vilmain’s spokesman was going to let Gazel express his opinions: Gazel, who had criticized Lanouaille’s murder and Vilmain’s “excesses”!

  Gazel for his part was not a bit happy to find himself being offered an opportunity to speak that he had certainly not asked for. He would have been quite content with his original gesture, a much less compromising form of protest. But since cries of “Speak, speak, Monsieur Gazel!” were by now rising from the nave behind him, while Hervé was making encouraging gestures in front, he steeled himself to stand up. Beneath the beautifully arranged graying curls, his long clown’s face looked flabby, bewildered, sexless, and when he spoke it was in that neutered, fluting voice that no one could hear without a quiet smile. But all the same, he said what he had to say, in front of us all, in front of Fulbert, and that took some courage.

  “I should like to point out,” he said, hands clasped against his chest, “that since I left the château on account of all the wicked things that were happening in La Roque, the parish council has not met.”

  “And what has that to do with anything?” Fulbert jumped in immediately with crushing contempt. “What importance do you think it can have, you cretin, whether you’ve resigned from the parish council or not?”

  Something rose inside Gazel’s long goitery neck, and his flabby face hardened. If there is one thing that semi-invalids of his kind never forgive it is a wound to their self-esteem.

  “I beg your pardon, Monseigneur,” he said in a quite different voice, a sharp, vinegary old maid’s voice, “but you said that you condemn Monsieur Comte in the name of the parish council. And I was pointing out to you that the parish council has not met, and that I personally do not agree with the sentence you passed on Monsieur Comte, as it happens.”

  Gazel was applauded, and not only by the five opposition members but also by two or three of the majority, who, I assumed, had been made to feel ashamed by his courage. Gazel sat down again, blushing and trembling.

  Fulbert immediately turned all his thunders on him. “I can do without your agreement, believe me! You have betrayed my trust, you little nonentity. I shan’t forget this, and I shall see to it you pay for it!”

  These words were greete
d with a storm of booing, and Judith, suddenly remembering her Christian Radical days, began yelling at the top of her voice, “Nazi! S.S.!” And Marcel, I noticed, was not trying anywhere near as hard to restrain her as he had been earlier. I was afraid that Judith might prove the leader the townspeople needed to lead an attack, and afraid above all for the safety of my escort.

  I stood up and said loudly, “I demand the right to speak.”

  “Granted,” Hervé said immediately with relief.

  “What?” Fulbert cried, rounding on Hervé in fury, “you are allowing that wretch to speak? That false priest! That enemy of God! You cannot be serious! I’ve just sentenced him to death!”

  “All the more reason,” Hervé said, stroking his little pointed beard with great calm. “The least he should be allowed is a few last words.”

  “But this is intolerable!” Fulbert raged on. “What does this mean? Is it stupidity or treason? Do you think you can do as you please here? It’s incredible! I order you to keep the prisoner silent, do you hear?”

  “It is not for you to give me orders,” Hervé replied with dignity. “You are not my leader. In Vilmain’s absence, I am in command here,” he added, tapping his rifle butt with the flat of one hand, “and I have decided that the accused shall be allowed to speak. In fact he can speak for as long as he likes.”

  At that an amazing thing happened. Hervé was applauded by a good half of those present. Though it was true that he was only a recruit in Vilmain’s band and had taken no part in the “wicked things” referred to by Gazel, so they had no grievances against him personally. But all the same, to applaud any member of Vilmain’s crew! They were obviously in a state of total confusion.

  “This is intolerable!” Fulbert shouted, clenching his fists, squinting eyes almost bursting out of their sockets. “You seem to be unaware that by allowing that creature to speak you are making yourself an accomplice of conspirators and rebels. But you are not going to get away with it! I warn you now, I shall report you to your leader and he will punish you!”