Viper's Tangle
Page 4
What struck me as rather terrible was Hubert’s optimism. He said that he was sure stocks would go up soon, with the air of a man to whom it was a question of life or death. After all, he is my son. This man in his forties is my son; I know it, but I don’t feel it. It is impossible to look a truth like that in the face.
Still, if his business should go wrong! A stockbroker who pays such dividends plays for high stakes and takes big risks....If a day comes when the honour of the family is at stake...
The honour of the family! There’s an idol to which I am not going to sacrifice. Let me make up my mind firmly in advance. I must stand up to them and not get sentimental—especially as there is always old uncle Foudaudѐge, who will come into action if I don’t....
But I am straying from the point, I’m rambling...or, rather, I am shirking the summons of that night when, unknown to yourself, you destroyed our happiness.
It is strange to think that probably you do not even remember it. Those few hours of warm darkness, in this room, decided our two fates. Every word you said separated them a little more; and you had no idea of it. Your memory, stuffed with futile recollections by the thousand, has retained nothing of that disaster.
Bear in mind that from your point of view, as one who professes to believe in eternal life, it was my eternity itself which you staked and compromised that night. For our love at the beginning had made me sensitive to the atmosphere of faith and worship which bathed your life. I loved you, and I loved the spiritual part of your personality. I was touched when you knelt down in your long schoolgirl’s nightgown....
We slept in this room where I am writing these lines. Why, on our return from our honeymoon, did we come here to Calѐse to stay with my mother? (I had refused to let her give us Calѐse, which was her own creation and which she loved.) I have remembered since, to feed my resentment, some circumstances which at first escaped me, or to which I closed my eyes.
In the first place, your people seized upon the death of an uncle once removed as a pretext for a quiet wedding. It is obvious that they were ashamed of such a modest alliance. Baron Philipot was telling everybody how, at Bagnѐres-de-Luchon, his little sister-in-law had “fallen for” a young man who was attractive enough, with a future before him, and very rich, but of obscure origin.
“In short,” he said, “he has no birth.” He talked about me as though I were an illegitimate child. On the whole, however, he found it a good thing that I had no family to make one blush. My old mother was, after all, presentable, and she seemed to know how to keep her place. Finally, according to him, you were a spoilt little girl who did what she liked with her parents; and my fortune was respectable enough to persuade the Fondaudѐges to consent to this marriage and shut their eyes to everything else.
When this gossip came to my ears, it told me nothing that, as a matter of fact, I did not know already. Happiness distracted me from attaching any importance to it; and I am bound to say that, on my own side, I found this almost clandestine wedding to my advantage.
Where could I have found groomsmen in the little starveling crew of which I had been the leader? My pride prevented me from making advances to my former enemies. This brilliant marriage would have made reconciliation with them easy; but I am blackening myself enough in this confession not to need to disguise this trait of my character: independence, inflexibility. I bow down to nobody. I remain faithful to my ideas.
On this point my marriage awakened some remorse in me. I had promised your parents to do nothing to turn you away from your religious observances, but I gave no undertaking on my own side except that I would not join the Freemasons. For that matter, your family did not dream of asking anything more of me. At that time religion did not concern anybody but women. In your world, a husband “accompanied his wife to Mass”: that was the accepted formula. At Luchon I had already shown your family that I had no objection to that.
When we came back from Venice, in September ‘85, your parents found various pretexts for not receiving us at their château of Cenon, where their friends and those of the Philipots left no vacant room. We discovered, therefore, that it would be to our advantage to go and stay for the time being with my mother. The recollection of our harshness towards her did not embarrass us in the least. We arranged to live with her as long as it suited us.
She was careful not to “crow over us.” The house was ours, she said. We could entertain whom we liked. She would keep to herself, and nobody need see her. She said: “I know how to keep out of the way.” She also said: “I’m out of doors most of the time.” As a matter of fact, she kept herself very busy with the vines, the cellar, the poultry and the laundry. After meals, she went up to her room for a little, and excused herself when she joined us in the drawing-room. She knocked before she came in, and I had to tell her that that was not done.
She even went so far as to offer to let you do the housekeeping; but you spared her that mortification. For that matter, you had no desire to undertake it. Oh, your condescension towards her; and what humble gratitude she showed you!
You did not separate me from her as much as she had feared. I even showed myself pleasanter to her than before our marriage. The way we used to laugh surprised her. This happy young husband was really her son, who used to be so reserved, so hard. She had not known how to take me, she thought. You were making good the harm she had done.
I remember her admiration when you daubed paint on fans and tambourines, when you sang, or when you played on the piano, always pedalling at the same places, a Song without Words of Mendelssohn.
Girl friends of yours came to see you sometimes. You used to tell them: “You must see my mother-in-law, she’s a character, a real country lady—they don’t exist now.” You discovered that she had a lot of “style.” She had a way of talking patois to her servants which you thought very smart. You even went so far as to exhibit the daguerreotype of Mamma, at the age of fifteen, still wearing the kerchief. You quoted a couplet about the old peasant families, “more noble than plenty of nobles.”
How conventional you were at that time! It was maternity that made you natural again.
I still recoil from the story of that night. It was so hot that we could not keep the shutters closed, despite your horror of bats.
We knew very well that it was the rustling of the leaves of a lime-tree against the house; but still it seemed to us as though somebody were breathing at the other end of the room. Sometimes the wind in the leaves imitated the sound of rain. The moon, in its setting, lit up the floor and the pale phantoms of our clothes lying about. We had ceased to hear the rustling of the meadow, whose murmur had died away.
You said to me: “Let’s go to sleep. We must get to sleep.” But over our weariness a shadow hovered. We had not come up alone from the depths of the abyss. He rose up too, that unknown Rodolphe, whom I awakened in your heart as soon as my arms closed around you.
And when I opened them again, we sensed his presence. I did not want to suffer. I was afraid of suffering. The instinct of self-preservation applies to happiness too. I knew that I ought not to question you. I let that name burst like a bubble on the surface of our life. What slept beneath the sleeping waters, that principle of corruption, that rotten secret—I did nothing to stir it from its source.
But you, wretched woman—you felt a need of words to liberate that disappointed passion which had remained hungry. A single question that escaped me sufficed.
“Well, this Rodolphe of yours—who was he?”
“It’s something I should have told you....Oh, nothing serious, don’t be afraid.”
You spoke in a low, hurried voice. Your head was no longer lying on my shoulder. Already the infinitesimal space that separated our outstretched bodies had become impassable.
The son of an Austrian mother and a big industrialist of the North....You had met him at Aix, where you had gone with your grandmother, the year before our meeting at Luchon. He had just left Cambridge. You did not describe him to me, but I
at once attributed to him all the graces which I knew I lacked. The moonlight on the bed lit up my big, knotted peasant’s hand, with its short nails.
You had done nothing really wrong, though he was, you told me, less respectful than I had been. My memory has retained no details of your confession. What did it matter to me? It was not a question of that. If you had not loved him, I could have consoled myself for one of those passing weaknesses in which a child’s purity suddenly collapses.
But already I was asking myself: “Less than a year after this great love, how could she have loved me?” Terror froze me.
“It was all a sham,” I said to myself. “She lied to me. I am not set free. How could I have thought that any girl would fall in love with me? I am a man whom nobody can love.”
The stars were twinkling before the dawn. A blackbird awakened. The breath of wind that we heard in the leaves, long before we felt it on our bodies, filled the curtains and bathed my eyes, as in the days when I was happy. That happiness had existed ten minutes ago—and already I was thinking: “In the days when I was happy....” I put a question.
“He didn’t want to marry you?”
You kicked against the pricks of that, I remember. I still have in my ears the special voice that you put on then, when your vanity was in question. Of course, on the contrary he had been very much in love with you, and would have been very proud to marry a Fondaudѐge. But his parents had learned that you had lost two brothers, both carried away when they were adolescent by consumption. As his own health was not good, his family was immovable.
I questioned you calmly. Nothing warned you what you were in process of destroying.
“All this, my dear, was providential for the two of us,” you told me. “You know how proud my parents are—rather ridiculous, I know. I may as well tell you: for our happiness to become possible, it was necessary that this marriage that didn’t come off should stick in their heads. You don’t know how much importance is attached in our world to anything that has to do with health, once it is a question of marriage. Mamma imagined that the whole town knew all about my misadventure. Nobody would ever want to marry me again. She had the fixed idea that I should be an old maid. What a life she led me for the next few months! As if I hadn’t enough to bear with my own disappointment....She ended by persuading us, both Papa and me, that I was not ‘marriageable.’”
I refrained from saying a word which might awaken your suspicion. You told me again that all this had been providential for our love.
“I fell in love with you at once, as soon as I set eyes on you. We had prayed a lot at Lourdes before we went to Luchon. I realised when I met you that our prayers were answered.”
You had no glimmering of the irritation that these words aroused in me. Your adversaries, secretly, have a much higher idea of religion than you imagine, or than they believe themselves. Otherwise, why should they be hurt by seeing you debase it? Or does it really seem quite simple in your eyes to ask even temporal blessings from that God Whom you call Father?...
But what does all that matter? It emerged from what you said that your family and yourself had swooped hungrily upon the first snail you saw.
How unequal a match ours was had never entered my head until that moment. It was only because your mother got a crazy idea and conveyed it to your father and yourself....
You told me that the Philipots had threatened to disown you if you married me. Yes, at Luchon, while we were laughing at that idiot, he was doing all he could to persuade the Fondaudѐges to break off the match.
“But I stuck to you, my dear; he took all that trouble for nothing.”
You told me over and over again that certainly you had nothing to regret. I let you go on talking. I saved my breath. You would not have been so happy, you assured me, with that Rodolphe of yours. He was too good-looking, he didn’t really love anybody but himself, he let people fall in love with him. Anybody might have taken him away from you.
You did not realise that your very voice changed when you spoke his name. It was softer, with a kind of tremor, a kind of cooing, as though old sighs were held in suspense within your breast, which the mere name of Rodolphe released.
He would not have made you happy, because he was handsome, charming, beloved. That meant that I gave you joy, thanks to my thankless face, my surly manner which put people off. He was one of those unbearable kind of fellows who had been to Cambridge and aped English ways....Would you really have had a husband incapable of choosing the stuff for a suit, or knotting a tie, who hated sports, and did not practise that clever frivolity, that art of eluding serious subjects, that science of living happily and gracefully?
No, you had taken him, this poor fellow, because you had found him there, that year when your mother, suffering from her climacteric, had persuaded herself that you were not “marriageable”; because you neither would nor could stay unmarried six months longer; because he had enough money to provide an adequate excuse in the eyes of the world....
I suppressed my quick breathing, I clenched my fists, I bit my lower lip. When it happens to me today I feel such a horror of myself that I cannot stand myself, mind or body, my thoughts go back to that youth of 1885, that husband of twenty-three, with his two arms pressed against his breast, desperately stifling his young love.
I shivered. You noticed it and broke off.
“Are you cold, Louis?”
I replied that it was only a shudder. It was nothing.
“You’re not jealous, surely? That would be too silly....”
I was not lying when I assured you that there was not a trace of jealousy in me. How could you have understood that the tragedy was being played out beyond all jealousy?
Far as you were from realising how deeply wounded I was, still you were upset by my silence. Your hand groped for my face in the darkness and stroked it. There was no dampness of tears upon it; but perhaps that hand of yours did not recognise the familiar features in that set face, with its clenched teeth. You were afraid. To light the candle, you leant half across me. You could not reach the matches. I stifled under the weight of your hateful body.
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t lie there saying nothing. You’re frightening me.”
I pretended to be surprised. I assured you that there was nothing wrong with me to be frightened about.
“How stupid of you, my dear, to frighten me like that! I’ll put the light out again. I’m going to sleep.”
You had nothing more to say. I watched the birth of the new day, that day of my new life. The swallows twittered in the eaves. A man crossed the courtyard, dragging his clogs.
All that I can still hear forty-five years later I heard then: the cocks, the chimes, a goods train on the viaduct; and all that I breathed then I still breathe: that scent I love, that scent of ashes in the wind when there has been a forest fire in the Landes towards the sea.
Suddenly I half sat up.
“Isa, that night when you cried, that evening when we were sitting on that bench, on the Superbagnѐres path—was it because of him?”
You made no reply, and I seized your arm. You wrenched it away, with a snarl almost like an animal. You turned on your side. You were asleep, with your long hair all about you. Nipped by the cool of dawn, you had pulled the bedclothes anyhow over your huddled body, curled up as young animals sleep.
What was the good of disturbing you out of that child’s repose? What I wanted to hear from your lips—did I not know it already?
I got up without making a sound, went barefoot to the glass in the wardrobe, and looked at myself, as though I were another man, or rather as though I had become myself again: the man whom nobody had ever loved, for whom nobody in the world had ever suffered. I mourned for my youth. My big peasant’s hand stroked my unshaven cheek, already dark with hard bristles, red where the light caught them.
I dressed in silence and went down to the garden. Mamma was in the rose-walk. She used to get up before the servants to air the house.
I kissed her more lovingly than usual. She whispered:
“My dear...”
My heart (does it astonish you that I speak of my heart?), my heart was nearly bursting. Hesitating words came to my lips....Where was I to begin? Would she understand? There is an ease about silence to which I always succumb.
I went down to the terrace. Thin fruit-trees stood out vaguely above the vines. A spur of the hills raised the mist and parted it. A tower was born from it; then the church emerged from it in turn, like a living body.
You who imagine that I have never understood any of these things....I felt, nevertheless, at that moment, that a human being, broken as I was, may seek the reason, the meaning, of his undoing; that it is possible that this undoing has a significance; that events, especially those that touch the heart, are perhaps messengers whose secret has to be interpreted....Yes, I was capable, at certain hours of my life, of glimpsing things that might have drawn me closer to you.
In any case, that morning, it cannot have been a feeling of more than a few seconds. I can still see myself going back to the house. It was not yet eight o’clock, and already the sun was striking hard.
You were at your window, with your head bent, holding your hair in one hand and brushing it with the other. You did not see me. I stood for a moment with my head raised towards you, in prey to a hatred of which I can still feel the bitter taste in my mouth, after all these years.
I hastened to my desk. I opened a locked drawer. I took out of it a little, crumpled handkerchief, the same that had served to dry your tears, that evening at Superbagnѐres, and that I, poor fool, had pressed against my heart. I took it; I tied a stone to it, as I might have done to a living dog that I wanted to drown; and I threw it into that pond which, in our dialect, has a name that sounds like “gutter.”