Viper's Tangle

by François Charles Mauriac

  She stopped in front of me, with her brows arched and her eyes dilated. Then she went and leant against the radiator, put her finger-tips together, and rubbed her hands.

  “Of course,” I said, “it’s a rich woman in the case....”

  “Not at all!—a teacher of singing....But you know her yourself; it’s Mme Vélard. Not in her first youth, and no better than she should be. How do you explain that?” she repeated.

  She started talking again without waiting for my reply. At that moment Janine came into the room. She was in her dressing-gown. She put up her forehead for me to kiss. She was no thinner; but in that heavy, graceless face despair had wiped out everything that I disliked. This poor creature, so affected, so mannered, had become terribly stark and simple. The harsh light of a lamp fell full upon her without her blinking an eye. “You know?” was all she asked me; and she went and sat down on the chaise-longue.

  Did she listen to her mother’s conversation, that interminable harangue which Geneviève must have been dinning into her ears ever since Phili’s departure?

  “When I think....”

  Every period began with this “When I think,” astonishing in a person who thought so little. They had consented to this marriage, she said, despite the fact that at the age of twenty-two Phili had already dissipated a nice fortune which he had inherited very young—as he was an orphan, without near relations, he had had to be released from trusteeship. The family had closed their eyes to his life of debauchery...and this was the way in which he rewarded them....

  An irritation was coming to life in me which I tried to control in vain. My old maliciousness opened an eye again. As though Geneviève herself, Alfred, Isa, all their friends, had not harried Phili, had not dazzled him with promises by the thousand!

  “The most curious thing about it,” I growled, “is that you really believe what you are saying. But you know perfectly well that you all ran after the fellow.”

  “Come, come, Father, you’re surely not going to defend him....”

  I protested that there was no question of defending him. But we had been wrong in thinking this fellow Phili even lower than he really was. No doubt it had been rubbed into him too much that, once the fortune was assured, he would put up with anything and there would be no more danger of his taking himself off. But people are never as bad as we think they are.

  “When I think that you defend a wretch who deserts his young wife and his little daughter....”

  “Geneviève,” I cried in exasperation, “you misunderstand me. Make an effort to understand me. To abandon one’s wife and daughter is a bad thing, that goes without saying; but the culprit might have yielded to baser motives rather than to higher ones....”

  “So then,” repeated Geneviève, aghast, “you think it noble to desert a woman of twenty-two and a little girl....”

  There was no getting her beyond that. She simply did not understand what I was talking about.

  “No, you’re too much of a fool...unless you refuse to understand on purpose....All I am saying is that Phili appears to me less despicable since....”

  Geneviève cut me short, crying to me to wait until Janine had left the room before insulting her by defending her husband. But the girl, who so far had not opened her lips, intervened in a voice which I barely recognised.

  “Why deny it, Mamma? We treated Phili as though he were lower than dirt. You remember, once the division was decided upon, we thought we had him where we wanted. Yes, he was just like a dog which I was to keep on a lead. I had reached the point where I ceased to suffer because he didn’t love me. I had him; he was mine; he belonged to me; I held the purse-strings; I had the whip-hand over him. It was your own expression, Mamma. Remember that you said to me: ‘Now you have the whip-hand over him.’

  “We thought that he wouldn’t put anything above money. Perhaps he thought so himself; but in the end his resentment, his sense of humiliation, were too much for him. It isn’t as though he loved this woman who has taken him away from me. He told me so when he was going away, and he threw so many cruel things in my face that I’m sure he was speaking the truth. But she didn’t despise him; she didn’t lower him in his own eyes. She gave herself to him, she didn’t take him. But I—I was offered to him.”

  She repeated these last words, as though she were flagellating herself. Her mother shrugged her shoulders, but she was glad to see her in tears. “That will do her good.

  “Don’t be afraid, my dear,” she went on; “he’ll come back to you. Hunger drives the wolf out of the woods. When he has roughed it long enough....”

  I was sure that sentiments such as these aroused Janine’s disgust. I got up and picked up my hat. I could not bear to spend the evening with my daughter. I gave her to understand that I had hired a car and that I would drive back to Calèse. Suddenly Janine said:

  “Take me with you, Grandfather.”

  Her mother asked her whether she had gone mad. She must stay where she was. The lawyers wanted her. Besides, at Calèse, “grief would get the better of her.”

  On the landing, where she followed me out, Geneviève reproached me heatedly because I had encouraged Janine’s passion for Phili.

  “If she succeeds in getting rid of that fellow, confess that it would be a good riddance. One can always find grounds for annulment of marriage; and, with her fortune, Janine could make a brilliant match. But, in the first place, she must get him out of her system. And you, who used to detest Phili—you go out of your way to sing his praises in front of her!...Oh no, above all things she must not go to Calèse. You would send her back to us in fine shape! Here, we shall succeed in taking her mind off it in the end. She will forget....”

  Unless she dies, I thought; or unless she lives a life of misery, with a pain that is always the same, over which Time is powerless. Perhaps Janine belongs to that race of women whom an old lawyer knows well: those women in whom hope is a disease, who are never cured of hoping, and who, after twenty years, still keep looking at the door, with the eyes of a faithful dog.

  I went back to the room where Janine was still sitting, and I said to her:

  “Any time you like, my child....You will always be welcome.”

  She showed no sign of having understood me. Geneviève came back and asked me suspiciously: “What are you saying to her?” I heard afterwards that she accused me of having, during those few seconds, “perverted” Janine and amused myself “by putting all kinds of ideas into her head.”

  But I went down the staircase, treasuring in my memory what the girl had said to me: “Take me with you...” She had asked me to take her with me. I had said, instinctively, about Phili just what she needed to hear. I was the first person, probably, who had not hurt her.

  I walked about Bordeaux, luminous in a day of harvest-home. The pavements of the Cours de l’Intendance, damp with mist, were shining. The voices of noon drowned the clamour of the trams. The smell of my childhood was missing. I might have found it again in those more sombre districts of the Rues Dufour-Dubergier and de la Grosse Cloche. There, perhaps, some old woman, at the corner of a dark street, still clutched to her bosom a steaming pot of those boiled chestnuts which smell of aniseed.

  No, I was not melancholy. Somebody had listened to me, understood me. We had come together. That was a victory. But I had failed with Geneviève: there is nothing that I can do against a certain quality of stupidity. One can readily reach a living soul behind the saddest of faults and failings; but vulgarity is insurmountable.

  No matter, I would make up my mind to it: one could not roll away the stone from all these tombs. I should be very happy if I succeeded in penetrating just one soul, before I died.

  I slept at a hotel, and did not return to Calèse until the following afternoon. A few days afterwards, Alfred came to see me, and I learnt from him that my visit had had unhappy results.

  Janine had written Phili a crazy letter, in which she declared that all the faults were on her side, blamed herself, and asked hi
s forgiveness. “Women never do anything but the wrong thing....” My fat friend did not dare to say it to my face, but he was certainly thinking: “She is beginning her grandmother’s follies over again.”

  Alfred gave me to understand that any suit was lost in advance, and that Geneviève held me responsible for the fact. I had purposely made Janine pig-headed. I asked my son-in-law, with a smile, what my motives could possibly have been. He told me—protesting that he did not agree with his wife’s opinion in the least—that I had acted, according to her, out of malice, for revenge, perhaps through “sheer wickedness.”

  The children did not come to see me anymore. A letter from Geneviève informed me, a fortnight later, that they had had to send Janine to a nursing home. There was no question of her being mad, of course. They had great hopes of this isolation cure.

  And I, too—I was isolated; but I was not in pain. Never had my heart given me such a long respite. During this fortnight and well beyond it, a radiant autumn lingered in the world. No leaf had fallen yet, and the roses bloomed again.

  I ought to have suffered because, once more, my children shunned me. Hubert put in an appearance only to talk business. He was cold and correct. His manner remained courteous, but he kept himself on his guard. The influence which my children accused me of having won over Janine had made me lose all the ground I had gained. I had become once more, in their eyes, the enemy, a treacherous old man, capable of anything. Finally, the only one who might have understood me was shut up, segregated from the living.

  And yet, I experienced a sense of profound peace. Bereft of everything, isolated, living under a terrible threat of death, I remained calm, interested, active-minded. The thought of my sad life did not overwhelm me. I did not feel the weight of those wasted years....

  It was as though I were not a very ill old man; as though I still had before me a whole lifetime; as though this peace which possessed me were Someone.

  Chapter XX

  THOUGH it is a month since she fled from the nursing home and I took her in here, Janine is not yet cured. She believes that she was the victim of a plot. She declares that she was shut up because she refused to take proceedings against Phili for divorce and annulment of her marriage. The others imagine that it is I alone who put these ideas into her head and set her against them; whereas in fact, in the course of these interminable days at Calèse, I have been fighting step by step against her illusions and her chimeras.

  Outside the rain mingles the leaves with the mud and rots them. Heavy clogs crunch the gravel of the courtyard. A man goes by with a sack over his head. The garden is so stripped that nothing any longer hides the insignificance of what is conceded here to the delight of the eyes. The carcases of the hedge-rows, the sparse clumps of bushes, shiver under the eternal rain.

  The penetrating damp of the bedrooms robs us of courage to leave the fire in the drawing-room at night. Midnight strikes, and still we cannot resign ourselves to going to bed. The logs, patiently piled up, crumble into ashes. In the same way I have to begin, over and over again, persuading the girl that her parents, her brother, her uncle, do not mean her any harm. I turn her thoughts away from the nursing home as much as I can.

  Always we come back to Phili. “You cannot imagine what kind of man he was....You cannot possibly tell how....”

  These phrases herald, indifferently, a harangue or a dithyramb, and only her tone enables me to foresee whether she is going to set him on a pedestal or spatter him with mud. But, whether she glorifies him or vilifies him, the facts which she quotes strike me as irrelevant. Love communicates to this poor woman, so lacking in imagination, an astonishing power of distorting, and of amplifying.

  I know him, this Phili of yours—one of those meaningless men whom fleeting youth momentarily invests with a glamour. To this spoilt child, stroked and all expenses paid, you attribute intentions subtle or scoundrelly, premeditated perfidies; but he has nothing but reflexes.

  You never understood that it was the very breath of life to him to feel himself the stronger. You should never have “held the whip-hand” over him. There are some kinds of dog that will not sit up and beg; they slink off to other leavings that they can get off the ground.

  Not even from a distance does the poor girl know her Phili. What does he represent in her eyes, apart from yearning for his presence, longing for his caresses, jealousy, the horror of having lost him? Without eyes, without a sense of scent, without antennæ, she runs about distractedly looking for him, with nothing to inform her about what the object of her pursuit really is....

  Are there such things as blind fathers? Janine is my grand-daughter; but, if she were my own daughter, I should still see her no less clearly for what she is: a creature who can expect nothing from anybody. This ordinary-looking woman, dull, heavy, with that silly voice of hers, is marked with the sign of those who never catch an eye, never arrest a thought.

  But still she strikes me as beautiful, as I look at her these nights, with a beauty apart from herself, lent to her by her despair. Is there no man whom this flame might attract? But the poor girl burns away in the dark, in a desert, with no other witness except an old man....

  Much as I have pitied her, during these long night watches, I have never tired of contrasting Phili, that fellow like millions of others, just as this common white butterfly resembles all white butterflies—and this frenzy, which he alone had the power to release in his wife, and which, for her, annihilated the world, visible and invisible. Nothing existed any longer, in Janine’s eyes, but a male already a little bedraggled, inclined to prefer alcohol to anything else, and to regard love as a job, a duty, a weariness....What a tragedy!

  She scarcely glanced at her little girl when she glided into the room at dusk. She kissed the child’s curls carelessly. Not that the little one had no influence over her mother; it was on her account that Janine found the strength not to set off in pursuit of Phili—for she was the kind of woman to harry him, to taunt him, to make public scenes. No, I would never have sufficed to restrain her; she stayed because of the child; but she derived from her no consolation.

  It was in my arms, on my knee, that the little one took refuge, in the evening, while we waited for dinner to be served. I found once more, in her hair, the scent of a bird, of a nest; it reminded me of Marie. I closed my eyes, with my lips against her head; I restrained myself from holding her little body too close; and I evoked in my heart my lost child.

  And, at the same time, it was Luc whom I imagined I was embracing. When she had been playing a lot, her skin had that salty taste of Luc’s cheeks, at the time when he used to go to sleep at table, after running about so much....He could not even wait for dessert. He went round the table, putting up to us for our kisses his face drawn with sleepiness....

  So I dreamed; and Janine walked up and down the room, marching, marching, pacing her passion back and forth.

  I remember one evening when she asked me: “What can I do to stand the pain of it? Do you think I shall ever get over it?”

  It was a night of frost. I watched her opening the window, flinging the shutters wide. She bathed her brow, her bosom, in the icy moonlight. I brought her back to the fire; and I, so inexpert in being affectionate—I sat down awkwardly beside her and put an arm round her shoulders.

  I asked her whether she had nowhere to turn. “You have your faith?”

  “Faith?” she replied distractedly, as though she did not understand.

  “Yes,” I went on, “God....” She turned a burning face towards me, looking at me with a suspicious air, and finally said that she “could not see the connection....” And when I persisted:

  “Of course,” she said, “I’m religious. I do my duty. Why do you ask me that? Are you making fun of me?”

  “Do you think,” I asked, “that Phili is all that you give him credit for?”

  She looked at me with that sulky, irritated expression of Geneviève’s when she does not understand what one is saying to her, when she does not kn
ow what to reply, when she is afraid of a trap. Finally she plucked up courage to say that “all this didn’t go together.” She didn’t like mixing up religion with such things. She was a practising Christian, but that was just why she had a horror of such wrong-minded associations of ideas. She performed all her religious duties.

  She might have said, in just the same voice, that she paid her taxes. It was precisely what I had execrated all my life—just that, nothing but that. In this crude caricature, this mean parody of the Christian life, I had pretended to find an authentic representation to justify me in hating it.

  One must have the courage to look at what one hates straight in the face. But I, I said to myself, I....Did I not know already that I was deceiving myself, that evening at the end of the last century on the terrace at Calèse, when Abbé Ardouin said to me: “You are very good...”? Later, I had closed my ears to the words of Marie, as she lay dying.

  But, at that bedside, the secret of death and life had been revealed to me. A little girl was dying for me....I had tried to forget. Tirelessly I had sought to lose that key which some mysterious hand always gave back to me, at every turning point in my life—the way Luc looked after Mass, those Sunday mornings, at the hour of the first grasshopper....And this spring again, the night of the hail....

  So my thoughts ran, that evening. I remember that I got up, pushing my chair back so violently that Janine started.

  The silence of Calèse, at that advanced hour, that thick, almost solid silence, benumbed, stifled her grief. She let the fire die down; and, as the room grew colder, she drew her chair closer and closer to the hearth, until her feet almost touched the ashes. The dying fire drew her hands, her face, towards it. The lamp on the mantel-piece shed its rays upon that heavy, hunched-up woman; and I stumbled about, in the darkness encumbered with mahogany and rosewood. I hovered, impotently, around that lump of humanity, that prostrate body.

  “My child....” I could not find the word I sought. That which stifles me, to-night, even as I write these lines; that which makes my heart hurt as though it were going to burst; that love of which, at last, I know the name ardor—