‘I’m not challenging you,’ I said, ‘and for me to agree to hear your confession, you would have to be near to death. Absolution will come in its due time, I hope, and from a hand other than mine, that’s for sure!’
‘Oh, that’s an easy thing to predict. Daddy has vowed to obtain your transfer, and everyone here now takes you for a drunkard, because—’
I turned abruptly. ‘Enough!’ I said. ‘I have no wish to show you any disrespect, but don’t start your nonsense again, you’ll end up making me ashamed. Since you’re here – again against your father’s will! – help me to tidy the house. I’ll never manage it alone.’
When I think of it now, I cannot understand why she obeyed me. At the time, it seemed quite natural. The appearance of my presbytery changed almost before my eyes. She remained silent, and when I observed her out of the corner of my eye, I found her increasingly pale. She abruptly threw down the cloth with which she was wiping the furniture and again approached me, her face overwhelmed with anger. I was almost afraid.
‘Is that enough for you? Are you happy now? Oh, you’re a dark horse. People think you’re harmless, they rather feel sorry for you. But you’re hard!’
‘It’s not me who’s hard, only that part of yourself that is inflexible, which is God’s.’
‘What are you talking about? I know perfectly well that God loves only the meek and the mild … Besides, if I told you what I think of life …’
‘At your age, one doesn’t think much. One simply desires this or that.’
‘Well, I desire everything, the good and the bad. I want to know everything.’
‘That won’t take long,’ I said, laughing.
‘Come on! I may be only a young girl, but I know perfectly well that many people have died before they managed it.’
‘That’s because they weren’t really looking. They were dreaming. You will never dream. Those you speak of are like travellers in a room. When you go straight ahead of you, the earth is small.’
‘If life disappoints me, no matter! I’ll take my revenge, I’ll do evil for evil’s sake.’
‘At that moment,’ I said, ‘you will find God. Oh, I daresay I’m not expressing myself well, and anyway, you’re a child. But what I can tell you is that, in leaving, you’re turning your back on the world, for the world is not rebellion, it is acceptance, first of all the acceptance of untruth. So thrust yourself forward as much as you want, one day the wall will have to give way, and all breaches open to heaven.’
‘Are you talking like this from your … your imagination … or …’
‘It is true that the meek will inherit the earth. And those who are like you will not fight them for it, because they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Those who try to steal steal only the kingdom of heaven …’
She had turned quite red and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I feel like answering you with – oh, I don’t know – with insults. Do you think you can do with me what you will? I can perfectly well damn myself, if I want.’
‘I answer for you,’ I said without thinking, ‘soul for soul.’
She was washing her hands at the sink, and didn’t even turn. Then she calmly put her hat back on – she had taken it off to work. She came slowly back towards me. If I didn’t know her face so well, I might say that she was calm. But I could see the corner of her mouth quiver a little.
‘I suggest a deal,’ she said. ‘If you are what I think—’
‘That’s just it, I’m not what you think. It is you who see yourself in me as in a mirror, and your destiny along with it.’
‘I was hiding under the window while you were speaking to Mother. Her face became so gentle suddenly! At that moment, I hated you. Oh, I don’t believe in miracles any more than I do in ghosts, but I think I knew my mother! She cared as little for fine phrases as a fish cares for an apple. Do you have a secret, yes or no?’
‘It’s a lost secret,’ I said. ‘You will find it then lose it again in your turn, and others will carry it on after you, for the race to which you belong will last as long as this world.’
‘What race is that?’
‘The race that God Himself set in motion, and which will never stop, until everything is consummated.’
III
It is embarrassing that I can no longer hold my pen. My hands are shaking. Not always, but in very short bursts, a few seconds each time. I force myself to note this.
If I had enough money left, I would take the train to Amiens. But I did that absurd thing when I left the doctor’s earlier. How stupid of me! All I have left is my return ticket and 37 sous.
Even supposing things had gone well, I might be here anyway, writing as I am. I remember noticing this quiet little tavern, with its comfortable, deserted back room, the big, rough-hewn wooden tables. (The bakery next door smelled of fresh bread.) I even felt hungry …
Yes, definitely … I would have taken this notebook from my bag, I would have asked for pen and ink, the same maid would have brought them to me with the same smile. I would have smiled, too. The street is full of sun.
When I reread these lines tomorrow, in six weeks – six months perhaps, who knows? – I sense that I will want to find in them … My God, to find what in them? … Well, just the proof that I was coming and going today as usual. Childish, I know.
The first thing I did was head in the direction of the station. On the way, I went into an old church whose name I do not know. There were too many people. That’s childish, too, but I would have liked to kneel freely on the flagstones, lie down rather, face to the floor. I had never felt such a strong physical revulsion against prayer – it was so strong that I didn’t feel any remorse. My will could do nothing against it. I had not believed that what is called by the trivial name of distraction could have such a feeling of dissociation, of dissipation. I wasn’t fighting fear, I was fighting an apparently infinite number of fears – one fear for each fibre, a multitude of fears. And when I closed my eyes and tried to focus my thoughts, I seemed to hear that murmur as if a vast invisible crowd were huddled deep inside my anguish, as on the darkest night.
Sweat was streaming from my forehead, from my hands. In the end, I left. The cold of the street took hold of me. I walked quickly. I think that if I had been in pain, I might have felt sorry for myself, for myself and my misfortune. But I felt only an incomprehensible lightness. My astonishment at being in contact with that noisy crowd was like the sudden shock of joy. It gave me wings.
I found five francs in the pocket of my douillette. I had put them there for Monsieur Bigre’s driver and had forgotten to give them to him. I ordered a black coffee and one of those little rolls I had smelled. The tavern belonged to a Madame Duplouy, the widow of a mason who once lived in Torcy. She had been observing me out of the corner of her eye from her counter for a while, over the partition that divided the main room from the back room. She came and sat down next to me and watched me eat. ‘At your age,’ she said, ‘people love to eat.’ I had to accept butter, that Flemish butter that smells of hazelnuts. Madame Duplouy’s only son died of tuberculosis, her little girl of meningitis at twenty months. She herself suffers from diabetes, her legs are swollen, but she cannot find a buyer for the tavern, which doesn’t attract much custom. I consoled her as best I could. The resignation shown by all these people makes me ashamed. At first, there doesn’t seem to be anything spiritual about it, because they express it in their own language, and that language is no longer Christian. Which amounts to saying that they don’t express it, that they no longer express themselves. They make do with proverbs and phrases from the newspapers.
On hearing that I wouldn’t be taking the train until this evening, Madame Duplouy was quite willing to put the back room at my disposal. ‘That way,’ she said, ‘you can carry on writing your sermon in peace.’ It was all I could do to stop her lighting the stove (I am still shivering a little). ‘In my youth,’ she said, ‘priests ate too much, had too much blood. Today you’re all thinner than stray cats.�
� I think she must have misunderstood the face I made, because she hastily added, ‘Beginnings are always the hardest. Never mind! At your age you have your whole life in front of you.’
I opened my mouth to answer and … I didn’t understand at first. Yes, even before I had decided anything, thought of anything, I knew that I would keep silent. Keep silent, what a strange expression! It is silence that keeps us.
(My God, this is how You wanted it, I recognized Your hand. I thought I felt it on my lips.)
Madame Duplouy left me to resume her place at the counter. Some people had come in, some workers having a quick bite. One of them saw me over the partition, and his friends burst out laughing. The noise they make doesn’t bother me, on the contrary. Inner silence – the kind that God blesses – has never isolated me from people. It seems to me that they enter it, and I receive them as if at the threshold of my dwelling. And they do come there, they come there without knowing it. Alas, I can offer them nothing but a precarious shelter! But I imagine the silence of certain souls as vast places of refuge. Poor sinners at the end of their tether grope their way in, fall asleep, and leave again consoled, without retaining any memory of the great invisible temple where they briefly put down their burden.
Obviously, it is a little silly to evoke one of the most mysterious aspects of the communion of saints in relation to this resolution I have made and which could just as easily have been dictated to me by mere human caution. It isn’t my fault I always depend on the inspiration of the moment, or rather, to tell the truth, on an impulse of that sweet pity of God, to which I abandon myself. In short, I suddenly realized that since my visit to the doctor I had been dying to tell my secret to someone, to share the bitterness of it. And I also realized that in order to regain my composure, I simply had to keep silent.
There is nothing strange about my misfortune. Today hundreds, perhaps thousands of men around the world will hear such a verdict uttered, will hear it with the same astonishment. Of them all, I am probably one of the least capable of controlling my first impulse, I know only too well how weak I am. But experience has also taught me that I inherited from my mother, and doubtless from many other poor women of my race, a kind of endurance that is almost irresistible in the long term, because it doesn’t try to fight pain, it slips inside it and gradually makes it a habit – that is where our strength lies. How else to account for the determination to live shown by so many unfortunate women whose terrifying patience ends up wearing down the ingratitude and injustice of their husbands, their children, their nearest and dearest – oh nurses of the poor!
Only, we must be silent. I must keep silent as long as silence is allowed me. And that may last weeks or months. When I think that in the past all it would have taken was one word, a look of pity, a simple question perhaps, and the secret would have escaped me … It was already on my lips, it was God that held it back. Oh, I know perfectly well that other people’s compassion provides a momentary relief, and I do not despise it. But it does not quench our thirst, it trickles into the soul as if through a sieve. And when our suffering has passed from one man’s pity to another man’s pity, just as it passes from mouth to mouth, it seems to me that we can no longer either respect it or love it …
I am back at this table. I wanted to see that church again, the one I left so shamefacedly this morning. It turned out to be as cold and dark as I remembered. What I was hoping for did not come.
When I got back, Madame Duplouy offered to share her lunch with me. I didn’t dare refuse. We spoke about the curé of Torcy, whom she knew when he was a curate in Presles. She was very scared of him. I ate boiled meat and vegetables. In my absence, she had lit the stove, and when the meal was over she left me alone, in the warmth, over a cup of black coffee. I felt well, I even dozed off for a moment. When I awoke …
(My God, I have to write this. I think of those mornings, my last mornings of this week, the welcome of those mornings, the crowing of the cockerels – the high calm window, still full of darkness, of which one pane, always the same one, the one on the right, begins to catch flame … How fresh it all was, how pure …)
So it was very early when I got to Dr Lavigne’s surgery. I was admitted almost immediately. The waiting room was untidy, and a maid was on her knees, rolling up the carpet. I had to wait a few minutes in the dining room, which didn’t look as if it had been touched since the previous evening. The shutters and curtains were closed, the tablecloth was still on the table, breadcrumbs crunched beneath my shoes, and there was a smell of cold cigars. At last, the door behind me opened and the doctor motioned me inside. ‘I’m sorry I have to see you in here,’ he said, ‘it’s my daughter’s playroom. This morning, the apartment is all upside down, once a month, the owner brings in a team who go over it with vacuum cleaners – nonsense! On such days, I don’t see patients until ten o’clock, but it seems you’re in a hurry. Anyway, we have a couch you can lie on, that’s the main thing.’
He pulled back the curtains, and I saw him in broad daylight. He was much younger than I had imagined. His face is as thin as mine, and such a strange colour that at first I thought it was a trick of the light. It seemed to gleam like bronze. And he was staring at me with his dark eyes, with a kind of detachment, impatience, but no hardness, quite the opposite. As I laboriously removed my much-mended woollen jumper, he turned his back. I sat there stupidly on the couch, not daring to lie down. In any case, the couch was cluttered with toys, all more or less broken. There was even an ink-stained rag doll. The doctor put it down on a chair, then, after a few questions, carefully examined me, occasionally closing his eyes. His face was just above mine, and his long, dark hair brushed my forehead. I could see his scraggy neck, held tight in an ugly, yellowing false celluloid collar, and the blood gradually rushing to his cheeks now gave them a browner tint. I was scared of him and also slightly disgusted.
His examination lasted a long time. I was surprised that he should pay so little attention to my sick chest: he simply passed his hand several times over my left shoulder, where the clavicle is, and whistled. The window looked out on a little courtyard, and I glimpsed a low, soot-blackened wall interspersed with openings so narrow they looked like arrow slits. Obviously, I had built up a very different picture of Professor Lavigne and his residence. The little room struck me as really grimy and – I don’t know why – those broken toys, that doll, wrenched my heart. ‘You can get dressed now,’ he said.
A week earlier I would have expected the worst. But I had been feeling so much better in the last few days! No matter, the minutes seemed long to me. I tried to think about Monsieur Olivier, our excursion last Monday, that flaming road. My hands were shaking so hard that I twice broke a lace as I put my shoes back on.
The doctor was walking up and down the room. At last, he came back towards me, smiling. His smile was not much comfort. ‘Well, the thing is, I’d quite like an X-ray. I’ll give you a note for the hospital, Dr Grousset’s department. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait till Monday.’
‘Is it quite necessary?’
He hesitated for a second. My God, I think that at that moment I would have been prepared to hear anything without flinching. But I know by experience that when that deep silent call that precedes prayer rises within me, my face takes on an expression that is close to anguish. I think now that the doctor misunderstood it. His smile grew stronger, a very frank, almost affectionate smile. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’d only be a formality. What’s the point in keeping you here any longer? Just go quietly back home.’
‘Can I resume the exercise of my ministry?’
‘Of course.’ (I felt the blood rising to my face.) ‘Oh, I’m not saying your little problems are over, the attacks may come back. But what can we do? One must learn to live with one’s ailments, we’re all in the same boat, more or less. I’m not even going to prescribe a diet: try things out, only eat what goes down. And when what used to go down will no longer go down, don’t persist, simply go back to milk and sugar water,
I’m talking to you as a friend, a comrade. If the pains are too strong, take a spoonful of the potion I’m going to give you a prescription for – one spoonful every two hours, never more than five spoonfuls a day, got that?’
‘All right, professor.’
He pushed a pedestal table near the armchair opposite me and found himself face to face with the rag doll that seemed to raise towards him its shapeless head, from which the paint was flaking, as if in scales. He flung it angrily across the room, and it hit the wall with a strange noise and rolled to the ground, where it lay on its back, its arms and legs in the air. I no longer dared look at either.
‘Listen,’ he said all at once, ‘I really think you should have an X-ray, but there’s no rush. Come back in a week.’
‘If it isn’t absolutely necessary …’
‘I can’t really say that. Nobody’s infallible, after all. But don’t let Grousset get under your skin! A photograph is a photograph, you don’t ask it to make a speech. We’ll discuss it together, you and I … In any case, if you listen to me, you won’t change any of your habits; habits are men’s friends when it comes down to it, even the bad ones. The worst thing you can do is interrupt your work, for whatever reason.’
I barely heard him, I was anxious to be back out in the street, free. ‘All right, professor.’ I got to my feet.
He was nervously fingering his cuffs. ‘Who on earth sent you here?’
‘Dr Delbende.’
‘Delbende? Don’t know him.’
‘Dr Delbende is dead.’
‘Oh? Oh well, too bad! Come back in a week. On second thoughts, I’ll take you to see Grousset myself. Tuesday week, is that agreed?’
He almost pushed me out of the room. For some seconds now, his dark face had taken on a strange expression: he seemed cheerful, with a convulsive, wild cheerfulness, like that of a man who can barely disguise his impatience. I walked out without shaking his hand, and as soon as I got to the waiting room, I realized that I had forgotten the prescription. The door had only just closed, and I thought I could hear steps in the drawing room. I assumed the room I had left was empty and that I would only have to take the prescription from the table, that I wouldn’t be disturbing anyone … But there he was, standing in the narrow window recess with his trousers partly pulled down, preparing to inject a little syringe into his thigh. I could see the metal shining between his fingers. I can’t forget his terrible smile, which even surprise didn’t erase immediately: it was still hovering around his half-open mouth as his eyes fixed me angrily. ‘What is it?’
Diary of a Country Priest Page 24
