by Michel D
Marie-Dévote, whose instincts were more sensitive and who overheard what passing visitors said, was beginning to see the daubs as a good investment.
‘You don’t know anything. One day they’ll all be famous, and then you’ll be following them around, begging them to do you a drawing on the paper tablecloth.’
‘You’ll always know how to make me laugh.’
*
When he was at Saint-Tropez Antoine dressed in old trousers and a turtleneck sweater and went for long walks along the beach, during which he contemplated his life. He would have liked to rectify two of its big events, his marriage and the war, but in its present specifics it pleased him. He had to acknowledge, for instance, that Théo’s equivocal indulgence added fire to the few nights he spent with Marie-Dévote. If Théo had not balked at letting him enjoy her more freely, she would have had more power over him, and perhaps his appetite for her would have been sated. He loved her without her being close to him, and in truth no one was really close to him, not even his children, Michel, Geneviève and the two Antoinettes. He was essentially a shy man and, like most shy people, had impulses of tenderness that were not always returned. He was realistic; he harboured no illusions about Charles’s friendship, or the love of Marie-Dévote or Mireille Cece. Money stimulated warm feelings, and that was what one used it for, to create those momentary illusions. Without money, he would have known nothing, and if he happened not to have any one day, his existence would be a desert and no part of it would be worth living.
He left the beach and came back through the woods. He loved the fragrance of the pine groves and the silvery-pale sheen of the olive trees. At Saint-Tropez, as he waited for school to finish, he paused at La Ponche beach and sat on the terrace of a fisherman’s bar. The weathered boats pulled up on the shingle were unloading red mullet, bass and rock lobster. He drank a second pastis, and his lost rapture returned. No one talked about the war here. Had it ever happened? He could almost have believed that the past twelve years had wiped it from memories and hearts, if he himself hadn’t continued to be troubled by terrible dreams. And then there had been the death of Léon Cece, from the live grenade he had clutched to his stomach so that he exploded like a pig’s bladder. Others like him were still suffering, but now they hid themselves away. Their morbid trains of thought disturbed the pleasures of peacetime and put the younger generation off their food. Léon had killed himself so that he would stop being a blot on the world’s happiness. At La Ponche Antoine gradually found himself talking to everyone. When he bought a round the fishermen exaggerated their southern accents, and he was not fooled: that too was part of the act that everyone was putting on and that seemed, year by year, to become more real than reality.
As soon as Antoinette appeared at the school gate, she ran towards the Bugatti and climbed in next to him.
‘Uncle Antoine, will you take me for a drive?’
He drove her as far as Grasse to buy fougasse flatbreads still warm from the oven, which they ate with bars of chocolate as they rolled slowly back to Saint-Tropez. They had bought perfume for Marie-Dévote, who loved to soak herself in lavender water.
‘How are you my uncle?’ Toinette asked. ‘You’re not my papa’s brother, or Maman’s, yet everybody says I look just like you.’
‘I’m the uncle of your heart. When you love a little girl very much from the day she’s born, she gradually starts to look like you.’
‘Is that really true?’
‘Truer than anything! I swear it.’
Antoine left then, before his heart got any softer. At Roquebrune he parked outside Léon’s restaurant, which had been renamed Chez Antoine after it was extended. Mireille greeted him with a well-rehearsed tantrum and then, when her sulking and reproaches were over, this strange little vine shoot wrapped herself around him, locked the kitchen door and gave herself to him among the pots and pans. A waitress drummed on the door and went away laughing. Antoine usually stayed for a day or two, never longer, attracted by a basic and violent desire, but was eventually driven away by Léon’s ghost, which wandered through the house with its terrible smashed face, impossible to contemplate. The restaurant was doing well, and Mireille had discovered that she had ambitions after she had been written up in the food columns of several newspapers. When Antoine arrived her mother faded into the background. Sitting on a chair at the roadside, her hands lying in her lap on a grey apron that partly covered her black dress and cotton stockings, she fixed things and people alike with a look of complete vacancy, like an Indian fakir trying to escape from his earthly self. Her relations with Antoine were limited to a nod when he arrived and left. Mireille was not, strictly speaking, beautiful in the way that Marie-Dévote was, but her ascetic skinniness, the fire in her eyes, her blue-black hair curled tightly about her small face, emphasising her sharp features, the nerviness of her body with its taste of saffron, and the impression she gave of being ready to flare up at the slightest spark, attracted Antoine irresistibly. Yet each time he left her without regret. She was too fiery for his temperament, and he was afraid of getting burnt. On the road back he stopped again briefly at Saint-Tropez, kissed Marie-Dévote and Toinette, listened distractedly to another of Théo’s new plans, and drove north to Aix where he stopped at Charles’s garage but, less vulnerable to its owner’s charm, listened noncommittally, not to his war stories this time – that era had been exhausted – but to his fabulous speculations for Provence’s future.
Ah, the wonderful way back! The Bugatti sang. Antoine worked the engine hard up the Rhône valley, and as though it preferred the roads that led to cooler climates where it could carburate more happily, it gobbled up the kilometres, glued to the road and without a squeal through the bends, flew up the hills and strained at the descents. At garages where he stopped, mechanics flattered the engine with their caresses, scarcely daring to touch it, so perfect did it seem, like the creation of some heavenly watchmaker or a wizard of the road.
When he arrived home from his trip of February 1930, Antoine was surprised to see that work had already started in the part of the park he had sold at the end of the previous year. In flagrant disregard of the agreement signed at the time of the sale, the new owner, a Parisian, Monsieur Longuet, the proprietor of two fashionable bordellos at Montparnasse, although he preferred to claim that he had made his fortune in hardware, had begun building what looked like a two-storey villa for himself, his wife and son. From the first floor they would be able to see everything that went on at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse was only waiting for Antoine to come back so that war could be declared. He had not got out of the car before she came running to him.
‘Have you seen? A week! A whole week just to put up that scaffolding. We’ll be just in time to get the building stopped.’
‘Let’s plant trees instead.’
‘They’ll take fifty years to grow.’
‘Not if you plant pines or eucalyptuses.’
‘They’re not trees from around here.’
‘Then let’s put up with it.’
Marie-Thérèse shrugged angrily, turned on her heel and went back inside to scold the new Martiniquan, a Mademoiselle Artémis Pompon, who worked in the laundry, the children having grown too big to have a nurse. Artémis aroused no feelings in Antoine: she was a skinny nag, always barefoot in the house, with a disappointing bosom and a dropping lower lip. She was nevertheless a dutiful girl, who had been told that her employer would sleep with her for the same price as her predecessor, and had appeared on her first morning, giggling, at Antoine’s library door, where he, in his dressing gown and smoking the first cigar of the day, had received her with astonishment.
‘Artémis, you are mistaken. I want peace and quiet in my house. Go to bed. You need to rest. I know Madame treats you badly, but there’s nothing to be done, it’s the way she is.’
Satisfied – sometimes even beyond his capacity – he now preferred to devote his early mornings to reading, so much so that in a bold step, uncharacteristic
of his conservative nature, he had bought in a sale at a Dieppe bookseller’s a complete edition of Alexandre Dumas, whose pleasure he had not yet managed to exhaust.
4
About fifty people had crowded onto the pavement facing the offices of La Vigie: pensioners with their caps on straight, young workers with theirs jauntily over their ears, children. No women. But many bicycles stood next to their owners, one in particular, that of Jean Arnaud, red and with derailleur gears and racing handlebars taped up with gutta-percha. Whenever an employee emerged through the glass door and placed his ladder against the wall beneath the blackboard above the exhibition area, there was an ‘ahh’ of satisfaction from the waiting crowd. Calmly, in a round, well-turned hand, the man wrote in chalk ‘Stage: Nice–Gap. 1st André Leducq, 2nd Bonduel, 3rd Benoît Faure’. In the overall placings, of course, Leducq had retained the yellow jersey. The crowd dispersed, disappointed, almost without comment. Reawakened in 1930 by the return to a system of national teams, French chauvinism was bored by a victory that lacked drama. That André Leducq, a great sprinter but lamentable climber, should have won a mountain stage proved that, unless the dice were loaded, it was all over. The 1932 Tour, in stark contrast to the previous year, when there had been victory for the great Antonin Magne combined with a heroic sacrifice by his young team-mate René Vietto on the Col du Lautaret, would finish in tedium. Jean got on his bike and set off for Grangeville, this time climbing the hill without standing up on his pedals. He had been feeling on top form since the beginning of the Tour, and his bike, a Peugeot, was worthy of a champion. He had bought it at Easter with his savings, supplemented by two postal orders from the mysterious prince. Nearly thirteen years old, he looked sixteen or seventeen; he was five foot seven, with long legs and a well-developed upper body. Jeanne now bought his clothes at the men’s department in the Nouvelles Galeries. The term before, he had liberated himself from Madame du Courseau’s yoke by starting to ride to school at Dieppe, refusing a lift with Michel in her new Ford V8, still rather high-bodied and old-fashioned, but powerful and silent. He preferred his bike, however steep the hill back up to Grangeville. His height earned him the frequent (cautious) mockery of his schoolfriends, who themselves wisely remained below average in that respect. Jean stood up to their meanness without pleasure. He recognised Michel’s sly handiwork in these skirmishes: in the year above Jean, he was the one anonymously orchestrating the taunts and rallying cries. Less innocent now, Jean began to keep a tally. One day he would put an end to Michel’s campaign. His fists itched, but for now Michel continued to enjoy the aura of his family. He was the brother of the delicious Antoinette, with whom Jean’s excitements were becoming more and more specific. He was also the son of Antoine du Courseau, with whom he, Jean, had made a secret pact that was still in force, despite Antoine’s frequent absences. And he would have wounded his parents deeply by attacking one of the du Courseaus who, despite their accumulating difficulties, retained a certain magnificence for Jeanne and Albert.
Arriving at La Sauveté, Jean found his mother sitting, very straight, on a chair in the kitchen. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was a picture of suffering too deep to be expressed, but she managed nevertheless to stutter, ‘Your father’s waiting for you with Madame.’
He had just stepped into the hall when Antoinette, half-opening the door of the small anteroom, grabbed his arm and hissed imperiously, ‘Say it was you!’
She shut the door again immediately, and Jean walked into the drawing room, where his father, Marie-Thérèse and Antoine du Courseau were waiting for him. He understood that he was facing a tribunal and that this tribunal, presided over by a woman flanked by two further judges, did not expect to show clemency. Albert’s face expressed a vivid wrath, while Antoine’s was indifferent, almost absent. As for Marie-Thérèse, after several rehearsals in front of her mirror she seemed ready to play her role with the necessary dignity. It was she who found the first words, the most idiotic, obviously, that revealed very clearly her understanding of her relations with those around her.
‘Jean, we must speak to you very seriously, as we would to a man, since you insist on behaving like a man, despite being only thirteen years old. Do you recognise that up until today we have treated you as we would one of our own children?’
‘Of course, Madame.’
She sighed, and pretended to hide her face in her hands for a moment before continuing.
‘To Michel you’re like a brother—’
‘Do you really think so?’
She dismissed his doubt with a wave of her hand.
‘Oh, I know … little rivalries between boys. When you both grow up they’ll be quite forgotten. I should add – which is of capital importance – that to Antoinette you’re also a brother—’
‘Of course I am!’ Jean exclaimed. His legs were shaking.
‘You little beast!’ Albert shouted, raising his hand as if to slap him, in a gesture that was entirely out of place.
‘Calm down, Albert,’ Antoine said.
‘Captain, he is a little bastard.’
‘What have I done?’ Jean asked in a strangled voice.
Marie-Thérèse intended to lead the investigation in a proper judicial manner.
‘Where were you this afternoon?’
‘In Dieppe. I was waiting for the Tour results. Leducq won the stage.’
Marie-Thérèse’s smile indicated that she had expected just such an alibi.
‘With whom, may I ask?’
‘With his team, of course.’
‘I’m not talking about your grotesque Tour de France, whose vulgarity exasperates me beyond measure, I’m talking about you. Who were you with at Dieppe?’
‘I was on my own.’
Her smile widened.
‘Naturally! And you didn’t speak to anyone!’
Jean hesitated for a moment, thinking who he could have seen that afternoon.
‘No. No one.’
Antoine looked at him intensely. Jean met his eyes fixed upon him and found new courage.
‘What are you accusing me of?’
‘You know very well. This afternoon you were not at Dieppe. You were at the bottom of the cliffs, at the far end of the gully, well concealed behind some fallen rocks.’
Jean paled. He did not notice that she had said ‘this afternoon’ and thought he had been found out. Tears welled up in his eyes.
‘Good!’ Marie-Thérèse said triumphantly. ‘We have no need to spell it out to you. I hope you recognise the seriousness of what you have done. Is today the first time you have done such a thing, you and Antoinette?’
Jean realised his error and straightened up.
‘I was in Dieppe today.’
‘Don’t lie!’ Albert exclaimed. ‘Or I’ll disown you.’
‘I’m not lying.’
He was not lying. He never lied. He might have sinned by omission at confession with the abbé Le Couec, when he ‘forgot’ his and Antoinette’s games. Then his heart sank as he remembered what Antoinette had hissed in his ear: ‘Say it was you!’ He would not say it, but he felt a chasm open up at his feet: who had she been with this afternoon at the bottom of the cliff? He wanted to die. Antoine’s gaze gave him the courage to withstand his despair. Wanting to save Antoinette, he bowed his head and said nothing.
‘What you did is disgusting!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘You are not the only guilty party. She is too. But I shall no longer look on you as one of my children.’
‘You ungrateful wretch!’ Albert said.
‘Now, now,’ Antoine said. ‘Let us just strike it from the record, and never mention it again.’
‘I’m confiscating his bike for the rest of the summer.’
Jean looked at his father meekly, despite his anguish.
‘That will hardly undo the harm he has done!’ Marie-Thérèse said acidly.
Antoine broke in. ‘All right! It’s done, it’s over. And may it never happen again.’
He stood up, to pu
t an end to Jean’s ordeal, which he shared. Albert led his son away, grasping his arm as if he was going to try to escape. He himself was too agitated to speak. Jean walked past his mother, who pretended to be scouring a saucepan in order not to see him, and went to his room. Through the open window he caught sight of the Longuets’ villa, which a trellis covered in ivy failed to conceal. Jean shook his fist at the house, an enemy twice over, closed his shutters, and threw himself on his bed and sobbed. Over, it was all over. He would never speak to Antoinette again. A tart, an utter tart, the worst bitch of all the bitches. And how would he ever see Chantal de Malemort again? He wept until midnight, eventually falling asleep, and woke up early the next morning, his only thought that it must all have been a bad dream. But as daylight filtered through the slats of his shutters, he again felt the sinking feeling that had finished him the day before. It was completely true: Antoinette’s betrayal, Michel’s victory, his bike confiscated, and, even worse, perhaps worse than all the rest: he would never be taken to Malemort again, he would never see Chantal again. His life spread out ahead of him like a desert. He cried again briefly, then got up and, his eyes still blurred with tears, pushed back the shutters. Albert was watering marigolds along the boundary wall. Behind that wall lurked his rival, the big pimply lecher, Gontran Longuet, whom he had seen shamelessly hanging around Antoinette since the beginning of the summer. What was he doing with a name like Gontran? None of it would have happened if René Mangepain, Madame du Courseau’s brother, had not re-established relations between the two warring families. Albert, militant as ever in politics, had been outraged. It had almost been enough to make him subscribe to Action française,6 which every morning directed its spotlight on the depravities of the majority-party politicians. After keeping a low profile as a deputy in the Chambre Bleu Horizon,7 René Mangepain had switched to full-blooded radicalism. He spoke of ‘my party’, tensing his already enormous neck. Politics for him was little more than the crumbs of his daily bread, but they were crumbs he clung to with a fierce appetite. No deputy could ever remember him mounting the gallery to address the Chamber, and his rare contributions recorded in the official register provoked hilarity, even among party colleagues. What rottenness connected him to the ghastly Longuet, the sources of whose enrichment Jean was perfectly well aware of? And how adroit they were, these traffickers in human flesh! Hadn’t even the abbé Le Couec taken to repeating ‘To every sin its pardon!’ since Madame Longuet had paid for the repairs to the church roof? Life was truly vile. He would go and punch that Gontran-my-arse in the face. The thought gave him the courage to brave the disapproval of the adults who had condemned him blindly the day before, in the absence of any evidence. And then there was Antoinette: he could already feel the satisfaction of the slap he was going to give her. Jean took one of those decisions one feels one will definitely stick to for ever, and which evaporated at the first application of her charm. Although for a few days he strenuously avoided her, it was impossible for the situation to go on without an explanation, and one morning when Jeanne sent Jean to the grocer’s at Grangeville to buy some butter, he walked straight into Antoinette, stopped on the bend in the path, wearing a tennis skirt, her legs bare, pushing her bicycle. The slap that Jean had promised himself did not happen. Antoinette may have been disappointed. She was expecting a torrent of reproaches, and did not suspect that her sudden appearance, her hair pulled back in an Alice band and her pretty breasts unconstrained under her white sweater, would confuse Jean to the point that he would forget everything he had sworn to himself to say to her. Thus did he become acquainted at the very early age of thirteen with that immense power that women have to disarm us by their innocence even when they are guilty.
