Malevil, Page 64

  Judith Médard, at the request of the town council, made a rather long speech in which there were certain expressions that went rather over her listeners’ heads. Insisting on Emmanuel’s humanity, she spoke of “his fanatical love for mankind and his almost animal attachment to the continuation of the species.” I remembered that phrase particularly, because it seemed to me very accurate, and also because I had the feeling it hadn’t been understood. As she neared the end of her speech, Judith was forced to break off momentarily to wipe away her tears. Everyone was grateful to her for her emotion, and even for her obscurity, since it gave her funeral oration a dignity that seemed suitable to the occasion.

  We were not at the end of our griefs. About a week after the funeral, La Menou broke off all communication with her fellow beings, stopped eating, and fell into a state of mute prostration from which nothing and no one could make her emerge. She had no fever, she complained of no pain, she showed no symptom of any kind. She would not even go to bed. All day she stayed sitting on her hearth seat staring into the fire, lips pressed together, eyes empty. At first, when we asked her to get up and come to eat with us, she used to answer, as Momo had so often done when he was alive, “Leave me be, can’t you, for God’s sake!” Then gradually she stopped answering at all, until one day, as we were all seated at table, she slid off the hearth seat and fell into the fire. We rushed over. She was dead.

  Her disappearance left us in a state of shock. We had assumed that the sheer force of her own vitality would carry her over Emmanuel’s death just as it had over Momo’s. But that was counting without the cumulative effect of two losses one on top of the other. I think too that we hadn’t quite understood the fact that La Menou’s energy needed another source of strength to rely on, and that source had been Emmanuel.

  After the burial, the Malevil assembly wanted to appoint me military leader and elect Colin Abbé of Malevil. I refused, on the grounds that Emmanuel had always been absolutely opposed to any separation of the spiritual and temporal powers. It was then proposed that I should assume the ecclesiastical functions at Malevil as well as the military ones. Again I refused. Emmanuel’s criticism of me before he died had been accurate: I was still pettily attached to my own personal opinions.

  It was an appalling error on my part. Because Colin was then chosen to fill both functions in my stead.

  While Emmanuel was alive, Colin was shrewd, sweet-natured, helpful, and gay. But he was all those things only as long as he could bask in the affection of Emmanuel, who had always protected him. Emmanuel once dead, Colin took himself for another Emmanuel. And since he had neither Emmanuel’s natural authority nor his powers of persuasion, he became tyrannical without becoming any more respected. When I think that I had been half afraid Emmanuel might become Lord of Malevil in good earnest! Emmanuel was the spirit of democracy itself compared with his successor! Colin had scarcely been elected before he stopped convening the assembly and began ruling as an autocrat.

  Malevil’s new “leader” was soon having serious and almost daily altercations with Peyssou, with me, with Hervé, with Maurice, and even with Jacquet. And Colin succeeded no better with the women. He fell out with Agnès Pimont because he had tried, though without any success, to monopolize her affections. Nor was he any more fortunate in his dealings with La Roque, which, having heard through us of his despotic tendencies, refused to elect him bishop. He was very mortified by this, half quarreled with Meyssonnier, and attempted—unavailingly—to draw us into the quarrel on his side.

  It was certainly no easy task to succeed Emmanuel as leader, but Colin’s vanity and need for psychological self-aggrandizement verged on the pathological. As soon as he was elected Abbé of Malevil and military leader, he began talking exclusively in the lower register of his voice, became very aloof, shut himself away at table in a haughty silence, and frowned when one of us spoke first. We noticed that little by little he was hedging himself around with a childish system of little privileges and points of protocol which no one could infringe without causing him grave affront. His native shrewdness—which Emmanuel liked to praise—seemed powerless to help him correct the absurdity of his behavior, and served only to make him aware of how much we disapproved of it. He began to think of himself as persecuted. And because he had isolated himself, he felt alone.

  Disunity had put down roots in Malevil. There were unpleasant looks, unbearable tensions, and no less unbearable silences. On two occasions Agnès Pimont and Catie both spoke of going back to live in La Roque. These threats of secession did nothing to mollify Colin’s attitude. Quite the contrary. He no longer addressed a word to any of the men except to give an order. And eventually there came the moment when he decided to believe that he was in personal physical danger. He began wearing his pistol on his belt all the time, even at the dining table. And as he ate he looked around at us with eyes alternately raging and hunted.

  Since everything that was said caused him offense, conversation at table ceased altogether. And that did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. The castle’s somber walls began to sweat with boredom and fear.

  Colin was terrified of the plots he thought we were hatching, and eventually, of course, we hatched one. We were considering convening the Malevil assembly without his permission and voting his deposition. But we were not given time to put our plan into execution. Before it happened, Colin got himself killed. It was during the course of a battle with a tiny band of looters consisting of no more than six badly armed men. Colin, perhaps counting on regaining some luster in our eyes with a demonstration of his military prowess, exposed himself as insanely as he had done that day in the battle against Vilmain, and he took the discharge of a shotgun in his chest at point-blank range. His face recovered in death the childlike expression and mischievous smile that had led Emmanuel, when they were both alive, to treat him with such indulgence.

  After his death I agreed to assume the twin powers in Malevil. I renewed the links of friendship with La Roque that Colin had allowed to lapse, and at the end of another year La Roque elected me bishop.

  The harvest in 1978 had been good, that of 1979 even better. I convinced the council of La Roque, with some difficulty, that all future harvests should be considered common property and divided up in proportion to the number of inhabitants. For the moment, two thirds for La Roque and one third for Malevil, since there were ten of us and a score or so of them. In a normal year we gained a great deal from this arrangement, on account of the fertility of La Roque’s rich alluvial soil. But I pointed out to them, with justification, I thought, that their flat terrain was much more vulnerable to invasion than our hills. If La Roque’s fields were one day ravaged by looters, then they would be only too happy in their resulting state of destitution to receive two thirds of all that we produced.

  Meyssonnier, whose allegiance by now had been wholly transferred to La Roque, made no concessions during these negotiations. But I remained resolutely patient and, as Emmanuel would have said, “flexible in my firmness.” Back in Malevil, after I had successfully concluded the affair, I was offered warm congratulations by the assembly. “Well, I’ll even say this,” Peyssou said. “Emmanuel couldn’t have done better himself. Do you remember him with Fulbert and the cow?”

  Even while Emmanuel was still alive, a veritable cult of the child had developed among us with the introduction to the castle in 1977 of Christine Pimont, then ten months old. We couldn’t believe our eyes. She seemed so new among those ancient walls. Although imported, she was our first baby; and adopted by us all with almost insane delight, she spent all her early life in the arms of one or other of us. Constantly carried, coaxed, amused, and played with by everybody, Christine soon began calling all the women in Malevil mama, and all the men papa. When I was elected leader, I decided, with the approval of the assembly, to make this spontaneous practice of hers into a law. For since 1977 other children had been born to us: Gérard, son of Miette; Brigitte, daughter of Catie; Marcel, son of Agnès, who was born four month
s after Emmanuel’s death. Agnès, for obvious reasons, would have liked to call her son by the name of the departed, but I succeeded in dissuading her, and on my suggestion, the assembly of Malevil also forbade that constant search for physical resemblances between the child and its progenitors which I consider an undesirable habit even among couples, and all the more so in a community like ours.

  The arrival of Agnès Pimont at Malevil after Fulbert’s death upset the balance of power among our womenfolk. Agnès very soon took to the freedom Emmanuel had allowed her like a duck to water, but without ever distributing her favors impartially, as Miette did. Like Catie, she made use of exclusivities, caprices, coquetry. But she employed them better, with a more accomplished art. In Catie’s arms one had the feeling that one was dancing on the brink of a volcano before being drawn into its central fires. Agnès, “gentle and serene as an April stream” (Emmanuel), enchanted you at first by her very freshness, before enveloping you in her flames.

  The rivalry between the two women, underground during Emmanuel’s lifetime, exploded into an open struggle for power after the death of La Menou. The war of words raged for several weeks before finally degenerating into fisticuffs. At which point Miette intervened, and before the astounded gaze of our sole witness, Peyssou, “beat the living daylights out of the both of them.” After which she asked them both for forgiveness, kissed them, consoled them, thus assuring her future domination as much by her sheer goodness as by her superior strength.

  Colin, through his tyranny, made enemies of both the rivals and thus completed their reconciliation. They entered into a league against him and plagued him ceaselessly with their stings. Unhappily, however, they acquired a taste for this sport, extended it to the rest of the companions, and by the time of Colin’s death had become quite unmanageable. It required a great deal of firmness and patience on my part to disarm our two Amazons. I think that in their heart of hearts they bore us a grudge for the liberty we allowed them, even though they could not have borne to be deprived of it. I also think that with Emmanuel’s death a certain necessary father image had disappeared, and that they felt the loss of it very acutely. I discovered that the three women were given to holding meetings in Miette’s room, and I surprised them in there one day. They were all three weeping and praying in front of a table on which they had placed a picture of Emmanuel, as though on an altar. I don’t know whether I did right or wrong, but I let them continue. And before long, having first infected the women of La Roque with the same contagion, they had organized that cult of the dead hero that has almost become a second religion here with us.

  In 1979, partly thanks to two successive years of good harvests, partly thanks to the agreement I had negotiated with La Roque, Malevil was rich, if you accept an abundance of grain, fodder, and stock as wealth. Moreover, in 1979 we were subjected to only a single incursion by looters, the one during which Colin lost his life. Although still as determined as ever to maintain perpetual vigilance, Malevil and La Roque then held consultations to consider what should be done with this peace, or rather with any interludes of peace that we might possibly be permitted to enjoy.

  There was a private discussion first, attended by Meyssonnier, Judith Médard, and myself, followed by a public debate that confirmed the decisions at which we had already arrived.

  Fundamentally, the question was that which Meyssonnier and Emmanuel had asked themselves the day we liberated La Roque from Fulbert’s tyranny. Apart from the little library in Malevil, we also had the one in the château in La Roque, a collection particularly well provided with scientific works, since Monsieur Lormiaux had been a former student at the Polytechnique, that pinnacle of scientific training in France. So, on the basis of all the knowledge lying there ready to hand—and of our own very modest personal acquisitions—were we going to engage in research aimed at the development of tools to make our lives easier, and weapons to defend them? Or, knowing only too well, from the terrible experience we had just been through, what the dangers of technology were, were we going to outlaw all scientific progress and all production of machines once and for all?

  I think that we would have chosen the second of these alternatives if we could have been sure that other surviving human groups, whether in France or farther afield, would not choose the first. For in that case, it seemed incontrovertible to us that those groups, once they held an overwhelming technical superiority over us, would immediately conceive the project of subjugating us.

  We therefore made our decision in favor of science, without optimism, without the slightest illusion, all wholly convinced that though good in itself it would always be misused.

  At the assembly of La Roque and Malevil during which the problem was discussed, Fabrelâtre, who had been appointed storekeeper for La Roque, called our attention to the fact that our ammunition for the .36 rifles was nearing exhaustion, and that the rifles would be of no further use to us once our last bullet had been fired. Meyssonnier then pointed out that it would doubtless be possible to manufacture simple gunpowder, since there was an old coal mine not far away, there was sulphur available from the sulphur springs, and it would be easy enough to collect saltpeter from our cellars and old walls. As for metal, we had a reasonable abundance of that, with the combined resources of Fabrelâtre’s hardware store and Colin’s former workshop. There remained only the problems of the casting and crimping, neither of which seemed likely to prove insoluble.

  In the end, the general assembly of La Roque and Malevil decided, on August 18, 1980, that practical research into the manufacture of .36 rifle bullets should be instituted immediately and given top priority.

  A year has passed since then, and I may say that results have so far exceeded our expectations that we are at present attacking other projects—still in the realm of defense—considerably more ambitious in their scope. From now on, therefore, we feel increasingly able to put our trust in what the future has to bring. Though “trust,” of course, may perhaps not be quite the right word.

 

 

  Robert Merle, Malevil

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends