Malevil, Page 63

  I gave his right shoulder a squeeze and said rather awkwardly, “You’ll see, you’ll do damned good work here.” That was all I could think of to say. As though doing damned good work ever consoled anybody.

  Thomas came over to us and offered me his quiet congratulations. Then it was Jacquet’s turn. I couldn’t see Peyssou until Meyssonnier pointed him out to me, only a few yards away, firmly and apparently willingly anchored to the spot by one of Judith’s strong hands. She was delighted at having at last found a man who topped her by a good head. And while she talked to him she kept letting her eyes wander over his ample proportions. An admiration very much reciprocated, because later, back at Malevil, Peyssou was to say to me, “Did you see that piece? I’ll bet you she’d set the feathers flying in the sack, a woman like that!” They hadn’t reached that stage yet. For the moment she was just kneading his biceps. And I watched as our big Peyssou, obliging as always, tensed it into a great ball. A turgescence that must have given Judith enormous pleasure.

  “Don’t pay any attention to how I acted just now,” Meyssonnier said. “My morale was a bit low just then.”

  I was very touched that it had occurred to him to apologize for his coldness, but once I again I could think of nothing to say and remained silent.

  “The thing was,” he went on, “back there on the road, after the ambush, when you’d left me to go and collect the others from Malevil, I was there quite a while with all those bodies, and my thoughts, well they weren’t too gay.”

  “What thoughts?”

  “Well, take for instance now that Feyrac, the one we had to finish off. Well, just suppose one of us came in for a serious wound like that. What could we do? No doctors, no drugs, no operating theater. It would be pretty rotten, watching someone die like that, not being able to help.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d thought the same thing. So had Thomas, I could tell from his expression.

  Meyssonnier went on: “We’re right back in the Middle Ages.”

  I shook my head. “No. Not quite. There’s some similarity in our situation, I agree. A day like the one we’ve lived through today, yes, there must have been days very like it in the Middle Ages. But you’re forgetting one thing. Our level of knowledge is infinitely superior. And that’s not even counting the considerable body of knowledge represented by my little library at Malevil. All that has survived. And it’s very important, surely you see that? Because one day that knowledge is going to enable us to build everything up again.”

  “But when?” Thomas said disgustedly. “Right now we are just spending our lives struggling to survive. Looters, famine. Tomorrow epidemics. Meyssonnier is right. We’re back in the days of Joan of Arc.”

  “But we’re not!” I said vehemently. “How can a trained scientist like you make such a mistake? Mentally we’re far better equipped than people in Joan of Arc’s day. It won’t take us all those centuries to get back to our former technological level.”

  “You mean just begin all over again?” Meyssonnier said, raising his eyebrows in an expression of doubt.

  He was looking at me. Eyes flickering. And his question pulled me up short. Mainly because it was he, Meyssonnier—the champion of progress—who had posed it. And because I could see only too clearly what he was envisaging there in the future, at the end of that new beginning.

  —|—

  [NOTE ADDED BY THOMAS]

  It falls to me to finish this story.

  A personal note first. After the mob-killing of Fulbert, Emmanuel wrote that he read in my eyes “that mixture of love and antipathy” I had always shown toward him.

  “Love” is not exactly the right word. Nor is “antipathy.” Admiration and reservations would be nearer the mark.

  I would like to explain those reservations. I was twenty-five when the bomb exploded, and for someone of twenty-five I had acquired very little experience of life, and Emmanuel’s skill at manipulating people shocked me. I found it cynical.

  I am more mature now. I have been called upon to assume responsibilities myself since then. And I no longer think the same way. On the contrary, I now believe that a fair measure of Machiavellism is essential in anyone who wishes to govern his fellow beings, even if he loves them.

  As is often clearly apparent in the preceding pages, Emmanuel was always rather pleased with himself and always pretty certain he was in the right. I am no longer irritated by those faults. They were merely the other side of the self-confidence he needed in order to lead us as he did.

  And I would like to say this. I do not believe for a moment that a group, on whatever scale, always produces the great man it needs. Quite the contrary. There are moments in history when one senses a terrible void. The necessary leader has not appeared, and everything goes lamentably wrong.

  Our problem, despite the smallness of its scale, was no different. At Malevil we were extraordinarily fortunate in having Emmanuel. He maintained our unity and he taught us how to defend ourselves. And Meyssonnier, under his direction, also ensured that La Roque became less vulnerable.

  Even though by installing Meyssonnier at La Roque Emmanuel was sacrificing him to the common interest, it must be allowed that Meyssonnier did, in effect, do very good work as mayor. He raised the town walls, and above all he added an extra tower between the two fortified gates. It was a large square structure, the upper story of which was a habitable guardroom, with a fireplace and protected loopholes giving extensive views on all sides. This square tower was linked to the two gates on either side by a wooden gangway running along behind the ramparts. The materials for all this were taken from the ruins of the lower town, and clay was substituted for cement.

  Beyond the ramparts, Meyssonnier devised an ADZ with a whole system of traps and obstacles imitated from the one at Malevil. The ground outside, sloping fairly steeply but very open, made the construction of a barricade out of the question; but Meyssonnier found some rolls of barbed wire in the château outhouses, presumably intended for some fencing project, and he used them to close off the two access roads—the metaled road to Malevil and the main road to the county town—with a series of staggered barriers intended to remove the possibility of surprise attacks.

  Although Meyssonnier got on well with his council and the townspeople generally—thanks in part to Judith, who thought a great deal of him—he eventually fell out with Gazel on a matter of a religious nature. Meyssonnier, faithful to the promise he had made to Emmanuel, continued to attend Mass and take communion, but he refused absolutely to confess. Gazel, taking up the torch of strict orthodoxy, was determined, like Fulbert, to link communion with confession. Not without courage, he decided to have it out with Meyssonnier in front of the council, and the disagreement became rather bitter, with Meyssonnier refusing any concession whatever. “I don’t mind making a public self-examination if I’ve made mistakes,” Meyssonnier said in an ungracious tone, “but I don’t see why I should keep my little confession for you alone.”

  In the end, appeal was made to Emmanuel, in his capacity as Bishop of La Roque. He mediated prudently and skillfully, listened to both sides, and then instituted a system of community concession, which took place once a week on Sunday mornings. Everyone had to tell the others in turn what he or she felt merited blame in himself and in others, on the understanding, of course, that any person accused had the right to reply, either in order to protest or in order to admit the fault in question. Emmanuel was present, in the capacity of observer, at the first of these sessions in La Roque, and he was so pleased with the result that he persuaded Malevil to adopt the same system.

  Emmanuel called it “washing our dirty linen in public,” a very healthy institution, he told me, and quite entertaining too.

  He told me how, in La Roque, one of the women had stood up and criticized Judith for being unable to talk to a man without squeezing his arm. That was funny enough, Emmanuel said, but the funniest thing of all was Judith’s answer. She was sincerely flabbergasted. “I am not aware of doing suc
h a thing at all,” she said in that precise voice of hers. “Are there other persons here who can corroborate this statement?”

  “Which just goes to show,” Emmanuel added with a laugh, “that it’s a good thing to hear how others see us, since we are unable to see ourselves.”

  At the same time, private confession was abolished totally. And Gazel had to renounce the privilege, one he set great store by, of “remitting” or otherwise the sins of others, a privilege that Emmanuel, it will be remembered, considered “exorbitant” and had never exercised without the greatest unease.

  Before hitting upon the ingenious solution that eventually put an end to any possibility of an “inquisition” by the Curé of La Roque, Emmanuel was very concerned for some days over the dispute between Meyssonnier and Gazel. I remember he talked to me about it on several different occasions, and once in particular up in his room, with the two of us sitting on either side of his desk and Evelyne, pale and exhausted, lying on the big bed, recovering from a very acute asthma attack (due, in my opinion, to Agnès Pimont’s recent arrival at Malevil).

  “You see, Thomas, you can’t have two heads to a community: a spiritual head and a temporal head. There must only be one. Otherwise life just becomes an unending series of tensions and conflicts. Any commander in chief of Malevil must also be the Abbé of Malevil. If one day when I’m dead you are elected military leader, then you too must—”

  I protested. “You can’t mean that! It’s against all my opinions!”

  He interrupted me vehemently. “No one gives a damn about your personal opinions! They have absolutely no importance! The only important thing is Malevil and the unity of Malevil! You have to get that firmly fixed in your head: no unity, no survival!”

  “But all the same, Emmanuel, you can’t see me standing up, facing all the others, and beginning to recite prayers!”

  “And why not?”

  “I’d feel ridiculous!”

  “And why should you feel ridiculous?”

  The question was articulated with such violence that I was taken aback. Then after a moment Emmanuel went on in a much more relaxed tone, as though he was talking to himself as much as to me. “Is it so idiotic to pray? We are surrounded by the unknown. And because we need to be optimistic in order to survive, we assume that the unknown is kindly disposed toward us, and we ask it to help us.”

  In any evaluation of Emmanuel’s “faith” for lack of any genuinely “committed” texts in his hand, one is free to choose between maximal and minimal hypotheses. I personally feel no need to make any such choice, but I quote the above remarks as tending to confirm the minimal theory.

  What follows causes me so much pain to write that I shall say what must be said very quickly and very baldly, with a minimum of details. Magic, unhappily does not exist, for if it did, if by refusing to utter the event I could annul it, then I would remain silent till the end of time.

  During the spring and summer months of 1978 and 1979, Malevil and La Roque, by combining their forces, succeeded in destroying two bands of looters. We had established a system of visual and aural telecommunication with our neighbor which enabled us to give each other reciprocal warning in the case of attack, so each could immediately rush to the aid of the other.

  It was on March 17, 1979, that the most serious of these alerts occurred. The chapel bell in La Roque suddenly began to ring at dawn, and the exceptional duration of its tolling informed us of the extent of the danger. Emmanuel left Jacquet and the women to defend Malevil, and after three quarters of an hour at full gallop along the forest track the rest of us reached the fringe of the wood a hundred yards from the town walls. What we saw stunned us momentarily. Despite traps, barbed wire, and intense fire from the defenders, five or six ladders were already in place at intervals along the wall. There must have been at least fifty attackers, and we learned later that ten or more had already scaled the ramparts by the time the Malevil forces appeared and took the attackers in the rear, killing many of them with their gun and bazooka fire (it was our turn to have it that particular day) and putting the rest to flight. Emmanuel immediately organized a methodical mopping up of the survivors, who had split up into extremely dangerous small groups and were hiding in the undergrowth. This hunt lasted eight days, during which the entire Malevil forces were almost constantly in the saddle riding up hill and down dale.

  On March 25 we knew for sure that the last looter had been killed. Dismounting from Amarante that day, Emmanuel experienced a sharp pain in his abdomen. He was seized with recurrent fits of vomiting and took to his bed with a high fever. At his request, I palpated his belly and pressed the fingers of one hand at the place he indicated. He gave a cry, which he immediately repressed, then gave me a look I shall never forget and said in an absolutely flat voice, “No point going on. It’s an appendicitis attack. My third.”

  During the days that followed he told me that the first two attacks had occurred during 1976, and that he was supposed to have had his appendix out at Christmas. It had all been arranged, his room had even been booked in the hospital, but at the last moment, overwhelmed with work and feeling physically on top of the world anyway, he had postponed the operation till Easter. He added without looking at me, “A piece of stupidity, and now I’m paying for it.”

  A week after the acute attack on March 25, however, Emmanuel was back on his feet. He began eating again too. However, I noticed that he didn’t ride at all and avoided any physical effort. Moreover he only ate very little, was forced to lie down a great deal, and was continually feeling queasy. More than a month went by like that, with him in a state we all hopefully construed as a convalescence but which was in fact merely a remission.

  On May 27, during the evening meal, Emmanuel was seized by violent pains. We carried him up to his room. He was shivering, and his temperature had shot up to 106. His abdomen was swollen and hard. This hardness increased during the days that followed. Emmanuel was in appalling pain, and I was horribly struck by the rapidity with which his features changed. In less than three days his eyes had sunk into their sockets, and his face, usually full and on the ruddy side, had turned ashen and lost all its flesh. We had nothing to help him with, not even an aspirin tablet. We prowled around outside his room, weeping with rage and impotence at the thought that Emmanuel was going to die for want of an operation that only a short while before would have lasted a mere ten minutes.

  On the sixth day the pain eased off. He was able to drink half the bowl of milk I brought him up that morning, and he said to me, “I’m forty-three. I had a very strong constitution. But do you know what amazes me most? That my body, which has always given me so much joy, should suddenly present me with a reckoning like this before saying goodbye.”

  And then he looked up at me with his sunken eyes, half smiled with his bloodless lips, and said, “Well, ‘saying goodbye’ is just a manner of speaking. I’m more inclined to think we shall be leaving together.”

  That afternoon Meyssonnier came over from La Roque to visit him, as he did every day. Emmanuel, although very weak, questioned him about his relations with Gazel and seemed happy to hear that they were improving. He was entirely lucid. That evening he asked me to gather the whole of Malevil at the foot of his bed. When we were all there, he lay and looked at us, one by one, as though he was trying to engrave our features in his memory. Although he was still capable of speech, he did not utter a single word. Perhaps he was afraid that if he spoke he would be unable to restrain his emotion and we would be forced to watch him crying. Whatever the truth, he contented himself with simply looking at us with a heartrending expression of affection and regret. Then he signaled to us with one hand to leave him, closed his eyes, opened them again, and as we were leaving asked Evelyne and myself to stay. After that he did not speak at all. At about seven in the evening he clasped Evelyne’s hand hard in his and died.

  Evelyne asked to be the first to keep watch over him. Since she had made the request in a calm voice, without a tear, I gran
ted it without the slightest suspicion. Two hours later she was found lying on top of Emmanuel. She had stabbed herself in the chest with the little dagger she carried attached to her belt.

  Although none of us was an advocate of suicide, no one was surprised, or even shocked. Evelyne’s gesture had in any case done no more than hasten slightly an already predictable outcome. All Emmanuel’s efforts had succeeded in no more than keeping her alive, and she had always given us the impression that she only clung to life in order not to leave him. We held a meeting, and it was decided unanimously—with the exception of one vote, Colin’s—that we would not separate her from Emmanuel and that she should be buried with him. Colin’s negative vote—which he justified on religious grounds, although it shocked everyone else—was the occasion of the first dispute that arose among us after Emmanuel’s death.

  Having thought about it a lot since then, I am no longer surprised by Evelyne and Emmanuel’s relationship. Although, before it happened, Emmanuel had decided against monogamy in his life, and although he persisted in that choice after the bomb, for the reasons I have given, I think that the aspiration to a great and exclusive love had never faded in his heart. It was this aspiration that his platonic relationship with Evelyne secretly fulfilled. He had at last found someone he could love with all his might. But she was not quite a woman. And their marriage was not quite a marriage.

  Apart from two men posted on the ramparts by Meyssonnier to keep guard, all the inhabitants of La Roque came to attend Emmanuel’s funeral, which even along the forest track meant a fifteen-mile walk here and back. It was the first of the annual pilgrimages made by the people of La Roque to the grave of their liberator.