Cara asked, “You’re not married yourself?”
“Me married? No. Tried it once and didn’t like it. I’m not motivated that way.”
“Me either. I’m married but I find women touch me better.”
“Yes, of course they do, but remember this one’s no chicken. And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Chickens, dogs, what the hell am I talking about? It’s all mixed up. Cheers! In culo alla balena, Carissima!”
“What’s that mean?”
“And you an Italian? In a whale’s arse. Italian saying for good luck. Bottoms up! Not literally. Sit well away, over there. Get thee behind me, Satan. No, not there!
Cara is impressed with the sophisticated European spouting French and Spanish and German at the dinner table and dropping the mot juste when demolition of inane conversation demands it. With no attempt to modify her language in times of stress but uttering the f-word in such a stylish way that it could be the Archbishop of Westminster starting the Lesson. Scandalous. Irreligious. Given to blasphemous sayings delivered in a monotonous sermonical voice.
“Fuck me, said Mary Magdalen, more in hope than anger, and John the Baptist, being a man of action, grabbed her by the two cheeks of her lily-white arse and dragged her on like a Prussian boot.”
That sort of improvization. Oftwhile bursting into song with the Ball of Kirrimuir when the tone becomes too utterly toffee-nosed.
“They were shaggin’ in the haystacks, shaggin’ in the ricks, ya couldna hear the music for the swishin’ o the pricks …”
The ludicrous juxtaposition of Cheltenham Ladies’ College with the Officers Mess on a Saturday night. Followed by a smile in the embarrassed silence and an “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize there were ladies present!” Has a very low threshold of boredom and intolerance.
But no. No showoff unless exploded into action. Too confident for that. Unobtrusive, superior. So self-effacing you’d hardly notice her at a dinner party but when the little ladies of Fulham or the Seventh arrondissement of Paris or Morelia tried to outdo each other with pretentious drivel about food and wine or their antecedents she was likely to come out with some pithy comment or sacreligious rhyme. Made even Dermot wince at times.
The Scotch bottle nearly empty. Cara now stoned and pissed. Mouse still declaiming.
“They say the onlooker sees most of the game. And pretty bloody silly it is at times. Tiddleywinks. Here I am in Morelia, Mexico, picking up the pieces again because Dermot’s in another crisis and cheesed off at everybody. Never again! I’ll have to make the usual excuses if the job winds up a mess. Thank God and all His saints it’s over after tomorrow.”
Cara pleads, “Stay on. Come back to L.A.”
“Me, a faded old hag in the city of teenage angels? Perish the thought. I ought to be ashamed of myself for even dallying with you. But I’m not. I’m only half Irish. The unihibited half. It was a gym mistress in the convent who taught me not to miss half the fun. Those fucking nuns! Hail Mary! Ciao Gloria! No guilt, me. No saying the beads. Take what solace you can get in this vale of tears. But L.A.? Lalaland? No, thanks, kiddo. Dese old bones must go back to Europe and mind the shop while my sybaritic boss goes playing with his poule in Denmark. Besides, my dear, I have a relationship going in Italy. I’m neutral outside that.”
Cara, maudlin, “We could have fun.”
Mouse looks up and smiles.
“Oh, no doubt we could while away the tedious hours but let’s not magnify moments of mutual rapport. Ships that pass in the night, baby. A bit of turbulence in the wake but it soon disappears and leaves things calm again.”
“You’re hard, Mouse.”
“That I am. A hoary old dyke hell bent on inflicting punishment. That’s hoary, not horny. You enjoy, and the divil take the hindmost. I have my donkeys. They bray for me. Hee-haw. Just like some people. Double-barrelled Etonians.”
9. Laure Says ‘Pax’
At the cemetery of Montdidier-les-Murs. The funeral of Tante Marie. Laure looked up and shivered. It was August but Mont Ventoux seemed capped with snow. She crossed her arms and wrapped around herself. She was chilled. She wondered why she was trying to ward off non-existent cold. She knew that even in summer the bare limestone of the mountain looks like snow. There was no snow up there this morning. It was sirocco weather, heavy and ominous, but a nervous föhn was hammering her mind. It was a day of contradictions. It must have been the cemetery and the open grave and all the death business. All the burial operatics.
“Ego sum resurectio et vita; qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit …”
Intoning tonelessly. The little threadbare priest. In Latin, by royal reactionary command. The shiny cassock. The huge boots, cracked. His matchstick legs and the hole in the heel of his left sock. Standing at the very edge of the cavity. Maybe, she thought, he’ll slide in. No chance. No levity there that day. Last time she was there it was the bishop himself who officiated. Proper dignity. Recognition of class. Respect for the benefactors up at the château. How are the mighty fallen. Tante Marie would be the last person to require solemnity. She had wanted to die for a long time. The first time in 1945 when her husband was killed.
Laure stood apart. The family froze her out. A powerful froideur. Glacial. That’s the way she wanted it. Keep them away, if necessary with all the Polar ice cap. God alone knows why she went. Well, God and Clémence, her cousin who caught her off balance. She felt nothing but resentment.
Impatience. Plain lust. Most inappropriate. To be back in last night’s situation. The replays of the first and second nights with André. The other death. La petite mort. Everybody else was doing it. She thought, ‘When they die they resurrect things. The wrong things. Words that ignite.’
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine …”
The Provençal accent struggling with the unfamiliar words. A dead language for a dead-and-alive group. The chief mourners. There’s Clémence, her cousin, Tante Marie’s daughter. And Clémence’s daughter, Camille. Sixteen. From England for the funeral. Short skirt, leggy, bored. Did she do it with Philippe? Or was she, Laure, the only wanton? Uncle René. Standing upright, despite his years. Distinguished. Red rosette in his lapel. Most of the others had little red ribbons. A moth-eaten lot. Remnants of a bygone era. Clinging to the wreckage.
The holy family. They meet only at funerals. Like this one for Aunt Marie. Everyone’s favorite aunt. Almost the last of that generation. Thank God. She doesn’t even know some of the mourners. She recognises a few. Hauts fonctionnaires, a chef de cabinet, an inspecteur des finances. Jacques, son of René, failed to get into l’ENA, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, step-ladder to greatness, now working in the cabinet of the minister for industry and proud of it. Condemned to a second-string life of obedience and anonymity. Robert, the really dumb one, who married the daughter of a rich industrialist and edits the magazine she bought for him. Hotel particulier in the Marais and a château in Burgundy. She’s the outsider. Brought up in America. Always used to ask, ‘Are you making a lot of money?’ Martine, wife of a conseiller d’Etat—a spoiled bitch, Dermot said when he met her.
Sixteenth and Seventh arrondissement types whose wives meet on the Rue du Bac and know people at ‘le Quai.’ They buy their Camembert at Barthélémy (“à point pour ce soir!”), their bread at Poilane and their ice cream, naturally, at Berthillon and dropping names, “Valéry’s coming to dinner!” meaning ex-President Giscard. Everything correct. The cousins and their deferential wives. Some of the twenty thousand products of the grandes écoles programmed to run the country. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, for ever and ever. Amen.
It was Gide who said Families, je vous hais! Well, she thought, I’ll say Amen to that hatred of families.
Mont Ventoux looming up above them. She hadn’t seen it from there for thirty years. But it’s stamped on her memory. It flashed up like a subliminal message. It dominated her childhood. It’s what she saw when she opened the shutters in the morning. When she clo
sed them at night. Hardly big enough to reach out to the clips on the wall. Cold in the moonlight. Rearing up all day, the barrier to freedom. Sinister. Looking down at you and daring you to escape. Impossible to ignore.
Mont Ventoux. Crouching there, like a sleepy alligator, with a white scaly back. It’s ugly. Not like Sainte-Victoire. You can’t imagine Cézanne painting it. It’s not even a volcano, waiting to erupt. Just a long, shapeless, boring heap. Couldn’t be a travel poster like that cliché Swiss Matterhorn. A terrestrial hiccup. A giant white slag-heap. As if someone had hammered a big pimple down, lengthened it, left it squashed with a ragged spine.
She wished it would topple and cover the small valley and the commune of Montdidier-les-Murs. Do an Etna. Smother the area in black lava. Incinerate the past and all who were in it. She wished it would obliterate the house, the cemetery and the family grave. She hated mountains, especially this one. It had been an obstacle between her and Paris, the safe zone. She hated snow, didn’t ski. Didn’t have anything to say to people who do.
“Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison …”
The priest droned on. She looked up again at Ventoux. Cold. Like her, some say. She has a natural authority, they say. Controlled. Cold? Controlled? Well, it just goes to show you. Il vaut mieux entendre ça que d’être sourd, as Granny used to say. It’s better to hear that than to be deaf.
“Fac, quaesumus, Domine, hanc cum serva tua defuncta …”
The priest did go on. She willed herself away from Mont Ventoux and dissolved to other mountains. Parnassus and Delphi. Monte Grappa, that’s in all of Bassano’s paintings. The hideous Alps that only Turner could render less awful.
The Mourre Nègre is different. She could just about stand the wooded peak she saw from the kitchen window in the village of Maurepas on the southern slopes of the Luberon. It’s just a hill, only a thousand meters. A friendly pile with a politically incorrect name, soft and quilted, with a gentle line and no bare patches. She could walk up it if she felt so inclined. God forbid. She wouldn’t even climb up to Montmartre. The Mourre Negré is the highest point on the Grand Lubéron, and the range falls away in a finger pointing east. To Italy. And it’s a barrier between her and Montdidierles-Murs.
This fortified farm is the house that Dermot bought because he liked the name. Built in 1626, after the massacre of the Vaudois in 1545. The villages running in blood. Killed because the ‘heretics’ wouldn’t go along with the priests. And in the house, the old English baronet dead in 1944, at the same time that the gallant ‘résistants’ killed the parson and his wife in Lourmarin because they complained about their murderous ways. The house was a hunting lodge, the home of the Lieutenant de Louveterie. It’s called La Louveterie—the wolf house—and Dermot identified with Jack London. It’s in a village where the compass on top of the tower of the mairie is out by ninety degrees and the indigenous by a hundred and eighty. He boasted, It’s the only place in the world where the sun rises in the north and sets in the south. It could be Ballydehob. Where the church clock stands at one minute to four because the yahoos have stolen the mechanism and flogged it. Where the WC Public is kept locked in case anyone wants to use it. A village of vandals, where the maire, full of his own importance, struts like a little turkey cock. The Little Dictator. Where the extra little sous-préfet in Avignon backed his every bloody-minded irritant. La France Profonde. Profonder than this you can’t get. Dermot had a warped sense of humor. And a low level of tolerance. She supposed they had that in common. That’s about all. He gave up on the village and left the house to her, staying resolutely in Paris, when he discovered that they were all collaborators and used to drink with the Germans during the war. He wanted to drop a 3” mortar shell into the courtyard of the mairie when the municipal council was meeting there. Then the retired little functionary from Neuilly moved in next door and brought an architect from Rabat to design a Hollywood set complete with pool under their kitchen window. Raw poolhouse and ‘plage.’ Designer shrubs. The old village filled with retired fearful diplomats and UN parasites. They bought up the village houses and all the women started to look like refugees from Surbiton or Foam Lake, Saskatchewan. Cars with Swiss and Belgian numberplates cluttered up the parking. There were no Hollywood starlets around the next door pool. Nothing to make Dermot say, as was his wont, “I’d rather be up that than up a dead policeman.” They say the Irish make good lovers and bad husbands. Well, the second part was certainly right. He lived for excitement. Was only just under control. Raging inwardly like a still-active commando. Now the house had the collection of old master drawings that they acquired over the years. Nobody knew it. The whole vaulted cave is a gallery with the pictures hidden behind sliding doors. One of each of the Italian Mannerists. Except Correggio. She wrote a book called Distortions: How to look at the Mannerists. She had nearly finished the next one on Parmigianino. Parma. That was her spiritual home.
“Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo …”
André was waiting for her in the village. When she could decently leave the burial. Get on with it, Father. Her urge made her wish again she had not come. And feel guilty because of it. She was in love with him. What started as instrumental sex had turned into a spiritual need.
“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem …”
And lead us not into temptation. Not until this afternoon, she thought. It was not the dead she minded today; it was the living. They stood around like a bunch of lead soldiers, regulation masks of solemnity clamped on their regulation faces. The mechanics of administration. She stood head and shoulders above them.
A porta iunferi. Erue, Domine, animam ejus …
She looked at the headstone. She focused on the Cross at the top and the word inside it.
PAX.
Well, yes, she thought, peace at last. But you should have thought of that before. Pax vobis to the rest of us. Instead of the constant turbulence, the unrelieved tension of our childhoods, the legacy of referred guilt and embarrassment over your words and your actions. All the dead Montriveau are there. The Montriveau of La Fontanelle, the château near Montdidier-les-Murs in the Vaucluse of Provence. Ten kilometers from Avignon, less than that from the Fontaine de Vaucluse, where Petrarch wooed his Laura. The Sorgue. Sorgue itself, a place that witnessed the worst act of man’s inhumanity to man, French style. Not all the water of the Sorgue would wash away the murderous culpability. The day they came walking through the vineyard, a sorry herd, prodded and pushed by the sadistic guards. Staggering, falling, dragged on. Her uncle pulling her back to the house, saying, “Forget it. It’s nothing. Just some criminals.” But she saw an old woman, limping. She stopped, looked at Laure and her uncle, shook her head and limped on. Laure would never forget that face. That accusation. The indelible vision.
Paris was liberated on August 24, 1944. De Gaulle marched down the Champs Elysées. Thousands lined the route. Cheering wildly. Seven hundred were not there. They were locked in a train that crossed the frontier that same day into Germany. Vichy organised it. Frenchmen rounded up the victims. The journey to the Nazi death camps normally took three days. This one, Le Train Fantôme as it came to be called, took 57. It left Toulouse on July 2. There were 640 men aboard for Dachau and 60 women for Ravensbruck. For eight weeks it meandered around, to Bordeaux, where it was strafed by Mosquitoes, to Angoulême, where it was turned back, and on August 18 it arrived near Avignon, but the bridge over the Rhône had been demolished. The detainees were forced to march seventeen kilometers, through the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape to Sorgues, and another train. Those on board had been without food and water for days. They drank their own urine. They were infested with lice. They were forced to take turns lying down in the cramped cattle trucks. The allies had landed in the south of France. Near Montélimar the train was attacked by the RAF and nine people in the first wagon were killed. It stopped at Valence on August 24. On August 25 it crossed into Germany, near Metz. It was a French train. The driver was French. During the war some 250,000 were deported
, about 75,000 of them Jews. But this was at the end, when France was almost liberated. The Allies had control of the air; the gallant Résistants claimed control of the trains. No one lifted a hand to free them. Sorgues, where the train stopped for the last time, is less than 10 kilometers from La Fontanelle and the Montriveau.
PAX.
There they lie, stacked on top of each other or side by side. Gone but not forgotten. Not much room on this headstone for many more but there’s only one left. Only Uncle René remains. The patron. The old son-of-a-fascist, defender of the misguided faith. Carrying the family’s legacy of lunatic superiority on his stooped shoulders. Obsolescent loyalties, ridiculous beliefs.
The Montriveau. She’s one of them but only on her mother’s side. Her mother, Oriane, was one of six children of Hubert de Montriveau, her maternal grandfather. But they claim her because of her childhood at La Fontanelle. The war years branded her.
PAX.
She reflected, ‘Well, you’re asking a lot.’
“Some of them should roast in hell,” Dermot said, but he’s an intemperate type, and doesn’t understand the French.
They were wrong and they were fighting a rearguard. Fighting with the weapons they had. Words.
Verbal dum-dums, they used. They ripped the psyche with words instead of the flesh with bullets. But the words were made flesh on trains, in camps, in ovens. Weren’t they just. Dermot saw some of the words written by her grandfather and published in l’Action Française at the time of the roundup of Jews in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1941.
‘Those who are sorry for the Jews are wasting their sympathy. They are responsible for all our troubles.’
Dermot quoted Yeats, ‘Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?’
Did they pay for it? Not enough. Laure put the figure her family had killed at 15,000. Minimum. Up there with Leguay, Bosquet and Papon.
PAX indeed.
Back to it. There’s not much of it about this July 1980 morning. The priest droned on. One by one they trooped up to the open grave and took the goupillon. They sprinkled a sign of the cross in holy water on the coffin below. She waited until they finished and pushed in. They closed ranks. They tried to prevent her but she was fierce in her determination. They had asked her to desist. Not to participate in the religious ritual. “Only the immediate family,” they said. What they meant was, ‘you’re not with us any longer.’ She thought, ‘I’ll show them.’ She refused the brush off. The priest looked annoyed. An infidel.
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