by Michel D
‘What about my parents?’
‘Your father has had words with both Monsieur Longuet and the son. He should have shown more patience—’
‘I wonder if they’ve emptied the cellar,’ said Antoine, who could not care less about the Longuets. ‘Actually there wasn’t much left. A cellar is the work of a lifetime. I drank my father’s and I’m not leaving one for my son. I was right about that, at least. He only drinks water.’
‘Antoinette would definitely have appreciated it!’ Jean ventured to say.
‘Antoinette? Do you think so?’
‘Let’s go and see,’ said the abbé, rather interested in the idea.
When dawn broke they were to be found outside, on a bench, with two empty bottles at their feet. Jean slept. Grangeville’s parish priest was a little pale, but his speech was clear. Antoine felt tiredness overwhelming him and calculated that caution dictated a departure later in the day. A silhouette roused them from their lethargy. Albert was watering the flowerbeds. Antoine called to him.
‘Who are you watering for?’
‘For the honour of it, Captain.’
‘There’s no honour left.’
‘You’ll never make me believe that. And Jean would be better off in his bed. I hope he hasn’t been drinking.’
‘Don’t worry. He’s a man now, and a responsible one.’
Jean opened his eyes onto a new world. La Sauveté, emptied of its furniture, no longer symbolised anything for him, and despite his persistence he had been unable to extract any information about his birth from either the abbé or Monsieur du Courseau. He felt weary and stiff, the opposite of how he wanted to feel for Sunday’s challenges.
‘Well, dear boy, we slept!’ the abbé said, retying his bootlaces before he set out for the rectory.
‘Nowhere near enough. I don’t feel at all well.’
‘You sporty types! What weeds you are! Now at your age—’
‘At my age, Father, you definitely weren’t rowing.’
‘Not rowing! What’s punting, then?’
‘We’re not talking about the same thing.’
Jean was feeling increasingly resentful towards the abbé. He was an excellent man, but he knew … Was he still supposed to feel bound by the seal of the confessional in a case like this?
‘Go to bed!’ Albert said in a tone that he intended to sound peremptory.
A day of the purest pink was breaking behind the trees. Antoine kissed Jean.
‘We shall meet again. I shan’t forget you.’
‘How will I know where you are?’
‘You and I don’t need an address. You’ll find me.’
The abbé, standing, stretched out his arms. He looked like a scarecrow. A strong smell came from his threadbare cassock.
‘I have a mass at seven o’clock.’
‘See you later, Father,’ Jean said.
‘See you later, my boy.’
Jean walked past Albert, who pretended not to see him. Antoine stroked the Bugatti’s bonnet, damp with dew.
‘We shall see the priest home, and then set out for the south!’ he whispered to his car.
‘I shall walk, if you don’t mind,’ the abbé said. ‘Some gentle jogging, that’s the way to stay healthy.’
‘I didn’t know you spoke English.’
‘Neither did I!’
‘Farewell, Albert. Don’t hold all this against me.’
‘I don’t hold it against you, Captain. Jeanne was the one who cried all night.’
‘My family didn’t cry at all.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
Antoine decided not to pursue the subject. He opened the driver’s door and climbed into his coupé. The Atalante’s starter turned once and was replaced by the engine’s soft rumble. He smiled. He waved joyfully to the gardener and the priest who were watching him, their heads bare, and he did not even glance at the house he was leaving behind him. It meant nothing any longer. He was already thinking about Marie-Dévote’s breasts and Toinette’s cool little arms around his neck. As he drove out of the gates he told himself that he would never see this house again nor, very probably, his children. Life had gone by very quickly, and all that stood out from its colourlessness were the sparkling pictures of the bay of Saint-Tropez as it appeared on the way down the scent-drenched slopes from Grimaud, and of Marie-Dévote as a girl, her skirt hitched up above her long olive-skinned legs, washing the gutted fish in the wavelets that lapped and spread on the flat sand. He was tempted to try to make it to the Midi without stopping, but after making a small misjudgement on a bend he realised how tired he was and decided to sleep just outside Rouen. After dinner, fed and rested, he set out for Lyon as night fell. The 3.3 litres of the 57S accelerated effortlessly to 150 kilometres an hour, and on the straights the speedometer needle ran out at 200.
Let us leave Antoine du Courseau for now. Relieved of all that weighed upon him only the day before, he is driving away to the only life he loves, carrying a cheque in his pocket that represents his last assets. But despite what he says, he is not a man to fear the future. When he is near Marie-Dévote, the future does not exist. Nothing counts apart from her. We are, as you will have guessed, in 1936. Léon Blum has been prime minister since June. Sylvère Maes, a Belgian, has won the Tour de France, and at the Olympic Games Germany, with forty-nine gold medals, has become the leading nation of the sporting world. We French have had to make do with Despeaux and Michelot’s golds in boxing, Charpentier’s in cycling, Fourcade and Tapié’s bronzes in the coxed pair, and Chauvigné, Cosmat and the Vandernotte brothers’ in the coxed four. But cycling has lost its fascination for Jean. Even Antonin Magne’s victory at the World Championship has failed to keep his interest alive. He has abandoned racing handlebars and competition rims for a touring bike with low-pressure tyres. Rowing has taken over as his passion, from the day he saw young Englishmen rowing on the Thames at Hampton Court. With Geneviève’s money and another postal order from the prince, he has bought himself a scull and trains regularly, every Saturday and Sunday. He has taken part in several competitions, so far without success, but he has been noticed and at Dieppe Rowing Club the coaches are keen to team him with another rower in a coxless pair. He is not sure, he prefers to row solo, find his own ideal rhythm, because he has a slow start but always finishes faster than his opponents, despite so far failing to make up all of the lost time. Rowing entirely satisfies his idea of what sport should be. It demands total energy, consummate skill and a permanently alert tactical intelligence. It’s also the most complete sort of athleticism, developing shoulders, biceps, stomach muscles and legs. At seventeen, Jean is a superb young man of almost six foot, broad-shouldered and with long, strong legs; he is not particularly talkative, as if he is afraid of wasting his strength or disapproves of the futile verbal excitement of the world he lives in. When a competition finishes he is not to be seen mixing with other club members, but in the changing room, where he showers at length as part of his rigorous routine of hygiene in both physical and dietary spheres. Lastly, in June he took his baccalauréat in philosophy and passed with distinction. Jeanne was all the prouder because she has no idea what philosophy is, and feels, with her habitual modesty, that it is too late for her to ask Monsieur the abbé to explain it to her. Albert, apparently better informed, grumbled something along the lines of ‘philosophy doesn’t put food on a man’s table’. Albert is ageing, and recent events have given his pacifism a battering. He votes socialist more out of loyalty than credulity, and no longer believes in the slogan ‘Socialism for peace’. Germany is back, united and terrifying. Not yet armed, as a nation it nevertheless represents an enormous physical mass at which no one wants to take the first shot. Its youth and enthusiasm are humiliating in a lamentably weak and divided Europe. Albert no longer knows what to think. There are times when he would prefer to die, so as not to have to see what is going to happen. To be proud of Jean he would have to forget that this handsome, healthy, intelligent boy isn’
t his son. He cannot. Jean is so utterly different. And as the months go by, the gulf between them widens, though the boy has never expressed the slightest suspicion or made the least wounding remark about his adoptive parents. Does he know? Albert wonders. Too many people around the family do. Somehow the truth must have come out.
On the evening of his baccalauréat result, after a long series of skirmishes, Antoinette at last allowed Jean to go the whole way. It happened at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was away, driving Michel to Switzerland. Antoinette organised things well, and the ceremony took place according to certain rituals that she had imagined for a long time. First they drank a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and then she said, ‘My bra is awfully tight.’
‘Well, take it off then.’
He could not work out exactly how she managed to undo it without unbuttoning her blouse, but within a minute the bra was on the table and he was touching it, a simple, modest item of girl’s underwear, its only concession to decoration a tiny satin rose stitched between the two cups. He held it to his face and breathed Antoinette’s smell. She smiled and looked down. Her blouse was transparent, and Jean marvelled at the softness and poise of her breasts. He stopped listening to her almost as soon as she began to tell some inconsequential story, no doubt to hide her own confusion, equal to his, now that he knew the moment had come. All the pain of waiting, of being forestalled, was swept away. She was there, facing him, barely protected by the width of the pine table, in which the cook’s knife had scored dark lines that danced before his eyes like cabbalistic signs. The moment was approaching and, having desired it for so long, it was delicious to postpone it a little longer with bold teasing and feigned modesty. A few minutes later, as she walked upstairs, she unhooked her pleated skirt, revealing her soft, prettily rounded bottom encased in girlish white cotton knickers. On the landing she took off her blouse. They kissed each other for a long time, standing up, leaning against the banister rail and stroking each other affectionately until Antoinette pulled Jean into her mother’s bedroom and onto a four-poster bed overlooked by a heavy crucifix. There she undressed him with disarming tenderness and countless kisses. Antoinette was no more beautiful than before, with a fairly ugly nose (her father’s) and dull blond hair (her mother’s), but her creamy skin and well-rounded figure, her deliciously soft thighs, her marvellous breasts, so free and mobile under his fingers, and the scent of her neck filled him with hunger. She was one of those creatures that you want to eat more than penetrate, as if their skin, when you bite it, will satisfy some deep, unacknowledged greed. What a mistake it would be just to enter her! He felt he would like the opposite to happen, for her to melt and disappear inside him, inside his chest, his stomach, his legs and arms, so that they would then be just one and the same being, taking its pleasure from itself. Of course he was clumsy the first time. He wanted her so much, and had so often dreamt of this precise moment, when she would squeeze him between her thighs, that he was unable to wait. Antoinette consoled him, stroking the back of his neck, before leading him into her father’s bedroom, where there was no crucifix, only some prints of the Battle of Hastings. There he managed to be less clumsy, and by the time they began again in Michel’s bedroom he had learnt how to watch for the beginnings of Antoinette’s climax by the way her pink mouth began to tremble. Finally she drew him into her own bed, where they stayed until dawn, repeating their caresses without drawing breath, and then one last time, on the floor in the hall, where she came to see him out and shut the door behind him.
‘That’s it, it’s done,’ he said to himself, heading back to the lodge, where Albert would soon be getting up, strapping on his wooden leg and making his coffee before starting his first round of morning’s watering. Jean’s body was on fire; he was bruised all over and exhausted. In a few days he would be seventeen. It was not too early or too late. He spared a thought for Bergson and creative evolution, which had inspired such a brilliant philosophy essay that Antoinette had finally granted him the reward he craved. Thank you, thank you, Bergson! As that summer began, life was starting to open up for Jean. In future all women would be like her, except that perhaps they would not often have the same fresh and creamy taste, and going to bed with them would not be such a glorious act of bravado. That night, the two of them had exorcised La Sauveté, they had got their own back on Marie-Thérèse and Michel, and even though Jean slightly regretted having used Antoine’s bed, he would never forget their last lovemaking on the hard, threadbare rug in the hall.
Jean slept, recovered his strength and, waking, wanted Antoinette all over again, but she remained invisible. He thought himself liberated from desire the following day, taken prisoner again the day after, freed once more when he saw her with Gontran Longuet in his car, a Georges Irat two-seater convertible, an inept copy of the famous English Morgan. How dare the daughter of a Bugatti-lover agree to park her bottom on the seat of such a phoney sports car? He felt sorry for her inability to appreciate the gulf that separated the two machines.
At Dieppe Rowing Club he asked his coach what he thought about women. The coach answered, ‘Jean, physical love is physical exercise like any other. Certainly it tires you, and I wouldn’t recommend it the day before a competition, but I’m not as rigorous as many coaches I know: there are muscular exertions a man can’t do without. Love, on the other hand, is a catastrophe: I mean being in love. I’ve seen first-class sportsmen reduced to crybabies because some salesgirl stood them up. Everything that happens below the belt is healthy. Everything that attacks an athlete’s competitive concentration is unhealthy. I hope you understand what I’m saying.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
So how, from this point onwards, should he think of Chantal de Malemort? Jean reflected that she had never tormented him nor beguiled him with false hopes, that when they met in secret in the forest of Arques they talked to each other as friends would, with genuine sincerity, though when she left him he always felt slightly light-headed. The meetings had become increasingly important during the summer of 1936. Early in the morning Jean would get on his bicycle and ride to the forest, where he would put on his spikes and set off on his training run, heading for an intersection of two paths marked by a handsome clump of beeches. It was unusual for her not to arrive at the same time as he did, on her bay mare. They would push on together, further into the underbrush, he running, she at a trot, for half an hour before returning to the cross-way, where they would finally sit down together on a stump, catch their breath and talk. Chantal had not disappointed expectations. She remained the same pretty, frail-looking creature, although I say frail-looking because you only had to see her on a horse to judge her energy and her strength. Her hair had darkened and the healthy life she led at Malemort, on horseback and on her father’s tractors, had put some pink into her complexion. Her voice was no longer small and shy, which at her age – the same as Jean – would have sounded vapid and sentimental.
What did they talk about? We might be surprised to learn that two such young people, feeling a more than negligible attraction, never confided to each other what they fretted about when they were apart. The subject remained taboo. An invisible barrier separated them, of which they were not even aware. Yet the more they believed they were talking about nothing in particular, the more they were confiding to each other.
‘Have you noticed,’ Chantal said, ‘how sad a season summer is? The days are shortening, and we’re getting ready to go into the dark. The weather is lovely, but it’s an illusion. I prefer winter, when the trees have no leaves, the woods are full of skeletons, and the days are lengthening again. You feel as if you’re coming out of a tunnel.’
‘I don’t know any more, I can’t decide. I think I’d like to live in the tropics: six months’ wet season, six months’ dry. You know exactly where you are. Spring and autumn are both silly seasons, neither one thing nor the other.’
Or:
‘What are you going to do after your exams?’ she asked. ‘My father sa
ys studying is no use, you need to get to grips with life very early. Apparently the world is full of specialists and you can’t find anybody who knows how to do everything: harvest the wheat, drive a tractor, buy a horse, cook, sail a yacht, help a woman give birth on a desert island, or fix a tap.’
‘I completely agree with your father, but mine is self-taught, so knowledge fills him with suspicion and secret desire in equal amounts. He hoped he’d make a gardener out of me, but flowers bore me, and now he has decided that I should be, as he says, a “scholar”. You can see what he’s doing: it’s his dream, to make up for what he never had.’
‘What sort of scholar? You’re not very good at maths, are you?’
‘Do you suppose my father really makes a distinction between maths and literature?’
‘Well …’
‘I don’t think so!’
Having plucked up courage, he burst out, ‘I’m not Albert and Jeanne Arnaud’s son. I’m a foundling they adopted.’
‘I know.’
‘Does everybody know?’
‘Everybody? No. Some people.’
‘So I was the last to find out.’
‘Does it upset you?’
‘No, I’m just asking myself questions all the time. And I’d like to know everything about where and how I came into the world. Who’s going to tell me?’
‘You shouldn’t think about it.’
‘I can’t help it.’
Sometimes they liked to talk about their favourite sport.
‘Don’t you want to ride sometimes?’
‘No. I like having my feet on the ground. Or wheels. Or maybe a scull. In a scull I fly over the water. Speed isn’t everything, because there are ways of going a lot faster, but in a scull I feel weightless. The oars skim the surface. You can’t imagine the delicacy of what you’re doing. The drive, the catch, the recovery are all calculated to the centimetre. I’m the machine. I’m proud of that.’
