Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  Uncle Rat refolded the testament and withdrew by the chimney.

  A great silence fell over us. The strangeness of this singular mind had gripped me. Little by little, I had sunk into myself, as if inward isolation were necessary in order to hear it. But then, separated from the world, I fleetingly experienced the sudden, disorienting sense of hearing myself speak. I was forgetting everything, even the notaire. Luckily, I returned to the world, and instead of reemerging into doubt and distraction, I brought forth with me an unaccustomed lucidity and calm.

  I looked around.

  His eyes still half-shut, the notaire seemed to be waiting. He had rested his fork on the tablecloth and was mechanically crushing a breadcrumb with his enormous thumb. Slow movement that revealed his cryptic ulterior motive. His heavy thumb was moving back and forth over the grayish bread, flattening it. From time to time he bent the tip of his finger and dug into the bread with his nail—a great square fingernail, of a piece with his flesh. The rest of his hand, motionless, betrayed nothing. It weighed. It was a monumental block, sure of its strength.

  Suddenly the thumb stopped moving and stealthily uncovered the breadcrumb. The notaire said calmly, “There is a codicil.” He pretended to study his empty plate. But a narrow glance slipped out sideways. In an undertone he said, “I have it on me.”

  And with an imperceptible nod, he directed an order to Uncle Rat. Watchful, Uncle Rat read his mind and disappeared.

  “Eskato bebeloi!” exclaimed the notaire. “Forgive me, Sir, for using the words of the deceased Pythagoras of Samos. I have a weakness for the great men of Antiquity, mother of us all. Dare I say so in this age of brainless barbarity? Omologô eînai Athenaîos, Sir. Of course you know Greek. Well, this is my profession of faith; and, with all due respect for our holy religion, whose admirable rites I scrupulously observe, I remain a faithful servant of Plato and Bacchylides. Here is the codicil.”

  He handed me a green envelope. Stamped seven times with Cornélius’s seal, it was unopened. Maître Dromiols obligingly drew a fine silver penknife from his watch pocket and offered it to me. Carefully, I opened the envelope and read these few words:

  In the event that Mégremut renounces or fails to fulfill the conditions of the will, all my goods will go to Balandran.

  Cornélius de Malicroix

  I placed the open sheet on the envelope.

  Maître Dromiols was now studying the bottom of his glass, gilded by a drop of wine. Meanwhile, the bony mask of his face revealed nothing. Nature alone spoke there, through the simple power of its forms.

  I handed the codicil to Maître Dromiols. He read it.

  “I had my suspicions,” he muttered. “You will have your work cut out for you.”

  I asked, “Does Balandran know?”

  He answered, “I cannot say. But whether he knows or not, he will not say a word. You have already seen for yourself, I am sure . . .”

  He grew silent and placed one hand on the table, palm up. With a competent and satisfied look, he began to ponder the sturdy structure of this wide-open palm.

  “Sir,” he said, “not to boast, but I can crush an almond between my thumb and index finger as easily as you can flatten a ripe muscat grape. It is my nature. I have solid fingers. That is why I trust my hand. It gives me confidence, and I always consult it before any difficult undertaking. A hand never betrays its man. Do you see this straight line, this long deep line that marches across my palm, slashing the Plain of Mars, avoiding the Mount of Moon, on its way to the Finger of Jupiter? It is my luck, Sir; you can read in it calm, vigor, circumspection. The Head Line, unmistakable, doubled, for over half its length, with a twin line that augurs well . . .”

  He could not suppress a satisfied smile. “The Malicroix,” he said, “did not have that double line. Clearly. They pushed Fortune away. Show me your hand, Mr. de Mégremut.”

  And, without further ado, he took my hand and turned it over.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed, triumphantly. “What happiness is yours! Not one sign of the Malicroix in you! Neither the phalanges nor the knots, neither the mounts nor the lines. Except, perhaps, a cross here where the Mount of Saturn would be, always very prominent in the Malicroix palm, but missing in yours. You are entirely Lunar, Sir. In other words: imagination, chastity, elegy, reverie, love of mystery, vague desires, aspirations toward the world of souls, poetry. Soft and supple palm, a character where the head too often obeys the heart! Passivity, passivity!”

  He released my hand and cried out, “Uncle Rat, the goblets!”

  Uncle Rat reappeared with goblets, poured wine, then disappeared again. We drank in silence.

  Outside, the rain had stopped; from time to time a light wind tousled a treetop, just enough to draw a brief tremor from its pliant peak.

  “It is perhaps the end of the rains,” announced the notaire. “Or so this wind portends. But the air is so changeable it is impossible accurately to predict the weather based on such slight signs.” He meditated. “And we ourselves, Sir, do we know what we will do?”

  He grew silent, meditated some more, and sighed a great deal during his meditation. I foresaw a flood of new revelations, and indeed, his words flowed freely.

  “Weak humans that we are, we never know what we will do next. With no effort on their part, outside circumstances have more power over us than we have over ourselves when we strive to exercise our pitiful wills. For in the effort we exert over ourselves, the will is pitiful. Especially here, where the elemental forces—space, water, wind—crush you. They besiege, beset, penetrate, possess you, making it impossible to resist their force effectively. To stubbornly persist in a constant confrontation against a mighty nature, as Cornélius de Malicroix did, is somehow to dissolve, Sir, little by little to lose yourself, until you can no longer distinguish between your own soul and the images that invade it. You become prey, possessed. Cornélius, Sir (as his testament reveals), was in the end unable to withstand the forces of solitude. All these mysteries, these secret plans, alarm me, I confess. And I, who admired your uncle more than any man in the world, I dread the shadow within which he has enshrouded his final wishes. He had, in my view, lost contact with the world. To hear him, Sir, you run the great risk of following in his footsteps, and his end was not, I think, one to encourage you in such a path. He died quite strangely, I assure you . . .”

  Uncle Rat, light phantom, had returned; he was silently clearing the table. Not a glance, not a sigh, just pure movement in service to matter. Still, I suspected a cocked ear. The slightest word must have stirred sensitive chords within him. For although Uncle Rat flitted about like a vain shadow, no one could think him deaf.

  Balandran had disappeared. Most likely he was keeping to himself in the storeroom. I missed him.

  The fire had been banked for a long night, and, sure of lasting until dawn, it burned with easy flames and peaceful heat.

  Outside, each gust of wind, arriving at long intervals from the sea, shook sudden sprays of rain from the treetops, and all around the warm, well-lit house, the large latticework of elms rustled beneath the thrusts of this soft, sad wind.

  “Strange!” murmured the notaire. “There is no other word, Sir, to describe this end whose causes, circumstances, consequences . . .” He paused, feebly raised his arms to signal his impotence, then completed his sentence. “Yes, even the consequences remain mysterious to me. For, Sir, attend: here was a man who, for ten years, had never left his island. For ten years! Ten years! Imagine those ten years of withdrawal, this isolation, this paltry diet! And, despite all that, always sharp, his mind keen, his wit intact. Nothing more lucid than that brain. An incisive will, an iron body—even in this climate. This climate of fever, wind, atrocious heat in summer, and so icy in winter! Not a book, not a soul, save Balandran; but is that a soul? Solitude, silence, stubbornness. Whenever I came, I gently reproved him. But although I had his trust on other matters, about the island, Sir, he was intractable. ‘I will die here,’ he told me smiling, and this
was the only time he deigned to smile. And so one fine evening when he was eighty-seven (for he was that old), he was found in the ferryboat, Sir, adrift on the river, where God only knows what he was doing! The cable had broken, and the crazy old ferryman seemed to have lost his mind; the boat, swept by the current, was ready to crash onto the reef at the tip of the island, the Ranc, Sir, a rock not to be taken lightly. Fortunately, Balandran, who’d seen everything from shore, leapt into his boat and saved the two men from death—just in time . . .”

  The notaire rose and took four steps in the room. Four giant steps.

  Uncle Rat removed the table. I remained seated in front of the fire.

  “The ferryboat was saved,” said the notaire, “and reattached to its cable, I don’t know how. Balandran and some local cowherds took care of it. They brought the ferryman back to his boat, where he lives alone, just as your uncle lived on his island. I have been told he never leaves it. As you can see, this land is not healthy for a person’s mind . . . As for your great-uncle, no sooner had he left the boat than he went home in a foul mood, and, after ten days of silence—which seemed strange even to Balandran—summoned me here. And it was here, in the presence of Uncle Rat, that he dictated the final testament we have read to you. He then took to his bed, and in one week passed progressively from this world to the next. Progressively is the word, for he suffered from no specific illness; yet, little by little, life seemed to withdraw, as if absorbed inward through a strong effort of will, so firmly did it cling to his outer shell, uncorroded by age. I was at his side until the end, and I brought him the succor of a good priest. And so he died in as Christian a way as could a Malicroix, always rebellious against the demands of fate. Indeed, during the whole time, he seemed in an inexplicably bad mood. Death certainly did not frighten him, and yet he seemed terribly angry with himself. It was as if he were dying of discontent. Several times, with his back turned, he spoke to the wall: ‘Cornélius, you have weakened.’ And his last words were: ‘If only he will complete it!’ I was there; I heard him clearly. I leant my head toward him and asked: ‘Complete what?’ But he could no longer answer. He was dead.”

  Maître Dromiols took another four giant steps and stood in front of the fire. His right thumb was thrust into his watch pocket, from which hung a massive double watch chain, golden and shining. Beneath it, his ample stomach stretched the fabric.

  “This, Mr. de Mégremut,” resumed this man bursting with eloquence, “is how Cornélius de Malicroix, Marquis de la Regrègue, your maternal great-uncle, died. Mysteriously! Because neither the circumstance of the ferry, nor the strange illness that took this strong man, nor the words he spoke, nor the terms of the will that require you—without explanation—to live for three months on this wild island seem to be straightforward, natural things. It all goes against custom and reason. For my part, although, by profession and taste, I enjoy moral questions, I have been forced to renounce seeing clearly into Cornélius’s soul. All I can do is stand back warily; for I dread secrets, especially when those who bequeath them to us take the key with them into the next world.”

  He uttered these last words in a tone of restrained yet palpable defiance. As he articulated his conclusions in ample and eloquent periods, I saw that he was swollen with self-satisfaction; from time to time the pleasure of hearing himself speak inspired in him a smug smile, quickly suppressed.

  As for me, I listened in silence, caught between curiosity and concern. I had nothing to say. To remain silent, to study, reflect, restrain both speech and thought, was, I sensed, my only defense. I kept silent in proportion to Maître Dromiols’s pleasure as he cloaked with eloquence his schemes concerning me. I guessed that, one by one, he had methodically covered all his points, from the moment when, extending his enormous feet toward the fire, he had declared the region to be harsh, too harsh for me. I did not know what these schemes were. But that he had them, I was certain, for his emphasis reeked of artifice. I am a man of straightforward and simple speech that conforms to what I think. I do not claim this as a virtue. It is my nature, but I draw some great benefits from it. Thanks to this, I easily detect speech that comes from ulterior motives. For while some do not hide the fact that they silence their thought, others hide their thought while pretending to proclaim it.

  On seeing me pensive and mute, Maître Dromiols should have grown suspicious, for he had a deep, spiteful spirit. Yet his all-pervading complacency offset his acuity; that night, he probably judged me insignificant and malleable, even as I, for the first time in my life, sensed a darker blood flowing into my peaceful heart, a bitter blood that warmed me. The arrival of this strong blood, of which I was vividly aware, coincided with the emergence of a strange thought. It was as yet only a vague cloud, where I could not read anything, but with an infectious mental force.

  It was nothing but a slight presence, but it was as if I were receiving the help of an unreal will accompanied by a feeling of grandeur. Even as it was reaching me, Maître Dromiols had settled in front of the fire. A host of words, steps, scents, and sounds still hovered around us, as if the soul of the evening. Airy and fragile substance, within which all the sensations circulated, sometimes intermingled, sometimes scattered and already in flight. Maître Dromiols, who had created the clearest part of this soul, must have planned to make use of it before it dissolved into mist. And so, sighing again, he took inspiration from his last sentence, which had invoked the next world. From there he launched forth anew, although in a darker tone.

  “Here, Sir, we fear the realm of Shadows. We have, at times, the terrifying sense that we live within its dreadful borders, on the vague Cimmerian shore.” He declaimed: “Éntha dè Kimmeríon andrôn dêmos te pólis te. ‘There were found the Cimmerians, the city and the people’ . . . An illusion, to be sure; and yet is there any region more suited for an encounter between the living and the dead? Interior solitude and uninhabited space foster the confusion of reality and dream; and those gardians, herders who live alone with their bulls in this wasteland, are only too aware of it . . . You must know the Camargue in order to understand how what you see becomes confounded with what you think you see, especially when the mind, unmoving at the center of our souls, develops that fascination with a single thought, from which mirages and obsessions are born.”

  Twice he repeated the word “obsessions,” as a heavy, dark cloud unexpectedly crossed his impassive, bony face. His feelings must have exerted on his until now so solid soul a force stronger than that soul; some yearning broke through his deliberate designs, disturbing the severity of his face. Now he was clearly surrendering to the charms of evocation. Although out of habit he still spoke too fluently, sometimes his cold voice quavered a bit. This troubled me to the core, as he seemed to be speaking in an undertone to himself alone.

  “In winter,” he was saying, almost gently, “the lonely cowherd, bent over his staff, watches the flights of gray doves and great herons in the North. His thought follows them. As he calls his animals, he tastes the bitter western wind that has sung all day on his lips. The world’s moist scent moves him and leads him to dream. In summer, the heavy sun lays him low, and he sleeps beneath a samphire. On the wide plain, he is nothing but a flesh-plant, drinking salt. When he sleeps, dreams haunt him, and when he wakes, mirages. He sees shadowy shapes slip through the pines—reflections, white shrouds cloaking wild creatures of land and sky. It is the hour when the Lady of the lagoons and lonely plains stirs the earth’s heat to trouble men’s souls. She makes asphodels bloom on desert sands. And so—among those who live alone for long days, months, seasons, and meditative years—there slowly emerges the taste and need for vision, the secret passion for supernatural beings . . . For here, demigods have been seen . . .”

  He made a brief effort of thought, as if to hold and weigh what he had just said. Then, having judged it good, he added, “It is not believable. And yet, they have been seen.” He shook his head to banish the thought, in fact scarcely believable; but he could not let it go, an
d he murmured, “What a sight!”

  And then he fell silent. For a moment we dreamt together.

  “But,” I said, suddenly emerging from my reverie, “who has seen them? Not you, I suppose?”

  He nodded. “Can we ever know? Here the least breeze is a voice, the most ordinary shadow a presence. A reflection on water or a cloud suddenly becomes the source of a myth or evokes some legend. The ancient cults are but dozing beneath this land. All it can take is a trifle to unexpectedly awaken them. And then you see the most astonishing beliefs arise.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He lowered his voice, leaned toward my chair, and said, “The one of the beast, above all.”

  “The bull?” I asked.

  Lower still, and very mysteriously: “Yes, but in this region, it is a matter of a very particular bull.”

  “Here we are, then, fully in the realm of myth,” I remarked, staring straight at him.

  He had put on a cunning look, although shot through with some anxiety. Irony was subtly sliding in—just enough to animate the lines of this face whose mask, while unmoving, still revealed something like the outline of a confused feeling.

  “A white bull,” he said. “Here all the bulls are black, small, agile.”

  I asked, “Where does it come from then?”

  He sighed. “Oh, it is simply born among the herds, now here, now there.”

  “So, people have seen it?”

  “Some people have seen it. But they are all dead today. It is born only once every hundred years, or so the story goes . . .”

  I reflected. I was suddenly struck by a strange thought. I said, “Then it was less than a hundred years ago that it made its last appearance, is that not right, Maître?”

  He shivered, but quickly recovered. “The last person to have seen it was your ancestor, Odéric de Malicroix. And certainly it would have been better, for him and for his house, if he had never had that meeting.”