by Michel D
Jean is a few kilometres from them, sitting on a milestone. He jumps up and sticks out his thumb in the direction of Aix every time a car or truck comes past. Let us leave him there for a moment and not forget Mireille completely, even though her part in the story is coming to an end; as you will have guessed, it is far from easy to get rid of someone so overwhelming. She hangs on like a leech, shouts, weeps, scratches, flies into terrible rages, then sinks into despondency before terrorising everyone around her.
When she came back that evening, she could not find Jean and thought he must be at Menton, although she had never known him go there, and then suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, she opened the drawer of the till in which her lover had left a receipt for the sum that she owed him. The scene erupted in the kitchen, where Tomate greeted her with admirable coolness.
‘Gone? Well … it’s better that way. You were going to kick him out, weren’t you?’
‘Kick him out? Me?’
‘I swear you were.’
‘What do you mean, you swear? It’s me who knows.’
‘And what about me, then? Forget it, let’s have a pastis together.’
The waitresses came in and out, looking poker-faced and sending the patronne into a fury. She was about to throw out several customers who had already arrived, but Tomate just managed to stop her.
‘You’ll regret it tomorrow. A fuck’s only for the night, but the restaurant’s your life.’
She drank two pastis in succession that were so strong she became instantly drunk and burst into tears. Once the explosion had occurred, Tomate clammed up and went back to his corner. Eyes drooping, slack-jawed, he watched his stoves, glass in hand. Alcohol had at least had the virtue of confining his interest in Mireille to two nights only, a fact on which he congratulated himself. Now he could treat her like a grumpy father. Mireille locked herself in her bedroom, came out a dozen times to make sure that Jean had not left a message with anybody, attempted to arouse Tomate’s interest in her distress but did not succeed. The chef was back at his cooking, an ethereal realm where her problems had no purchase. Left to herself, she measured the extent of the disaster, which was not just emotional. Jean’s young, pale, gilded body materialised in her dreams. She hugged him frenziedly to her without either of them coming to orgasm. In a decision worthy of antiquity she resolved to sacrifice the prefect to her vanished lover, hoping that by some magic this offering would bring young flesh back to her. Out of the futility of this sublime sacrifice she conceived a great bitterness and fastened more than ever onto Stefano, whose regular appearances helped make the excessively long nights bearable. She took a long time to recover, discovering in the process that excesses of sexual passion involve dangers that are sometimes fatal. Stefano saw nothing of this, or perhaps pretended to see nothing. He was a more mysterious character than one at first gave him credit for. Mireille should have expected it: he read books! Nearly four years after these events, at the end of June 1940, when Italian troops, thanks to the armistice, entered Menton, he turned up as an officer in the bersaglieri, with a captain’s pips, and it rapidly became known that from his command post he controlled the intelligence service for the region. Since his affair with Mireille he had been covering the area with a close network of spies. Mireille and he renewed their relationship and, thanks to his influence, the restaurant at Roquebrune lacked for nothing during the four years of occupation, until suddenly the Italian soldiers – whose kindness and genuine distress at being involved in this absurd adventure against the French south, to which they felt so close, had not been sufficiently appreciated – were replaced by field-grey uniforms who began fortifying the hillsides against an enemy as yet invisible. Mireille hid Stefano for several weeks until he was able to join a group of partisans in the Abruzzi. At the liberation the French Forces of the Interior set up their command post inside the restaurant. Mireille was locked in the cellar, where at first, as she satisfied her new guests’ urgent needs, she thought briefly that she might succeed in extracting herself at this lesser price, but the appearance of a rival group put paid to that hope. She was tried, and hanged from a tree. But not any tree, no! The oldest known olive tree in the world, planted nearly two thousand years before by the Romans. For two days her corpse swung there in the gentle summer breeze, until some sensitive souls found her a burial place in the cemetery next to her father and her mother.
That is it for Mireille. I am sorry: she will not reappear, a victim, like Ernst, of the Manicheanism of the times, the haphazard fortunes of good and bad. Stefano returned to Roquebrune and learnt of his girlfriend’s fate. He had been responsible. Should he not have stayed to protect her? A great remorse grew in him; he thought of taking holy orders, hesitated and got married. On the day I write these words, he is a handsome old man who owns a thriving haulage business. From time to time, if there is a strike or a driver is off sick, he will still take the wheel and head onto the autostrada, without stopping, as if he were going to meet Mireille Cece again. In darkness pierced by the blinding beams of headlights, he sees again the irresistible body of the woman who waited for him on the bend at Roquebrune and whose fidelity he never had any reason to doubt. And when he does so he no longer feels alone, but drives on towards her and has the impression that nothing has changed, that the hair at his temples has not gone white and that pleasure awaits at the end of the road.
Let us return to Jean on his milestone in the Massif des Maures. He had been sitting there for two hours when a Renault Primaquatre driven by a commercial traveller stopped. The driver was bored and would happily have picked up a cow, so long as he could tell it about his problem, namely the sale of Isabelle chocolate below cost in the southern departments. Isabelle chocolate, in bars and in powder form, was not reaching its public. The company was skimping on advertising and counting on its sales representatives being everywhere. But in one of those irrational acts that demonstrate that managers inhabit another universe, far from the lives of those who actually have to work, Isabelle SA had just cut its sales force’s expenses. Jean tried hard to follow the monologue of his travelling companion, a short, fat man with podgy fingers and clearly a lover of good eating, as he frequently broke off from his lament to give marks out of ten to restaurants in the villages they passed, accompanied by brief and very specific notes: an excellent saddle of hare there two years ago, a coq au vin as tough as old boots in that pretentious joint last month, or a lovely vin de pays at this bistro which doesn’t look anything special, does it? These mindless ramblings about Isabelle chocolate and gastronomic preferences, which were enough to make an empty stomach turn over, nevertheless distracted Jean from what, or rather who, he was leaving behind him. For two hours, sitting on his milestone as he waited for a sympathetic driver to offer him a lift, he had thought of nothing but Mireille. He would have given anything to go back to her, but an invisible force pressed him into the seat of the noisy Renault, which had to change down to second at the slightest gradient. The soft shapes of the Maures near Saint-Maximin made him think of naked women, offering their round breasts up to the burning sun, and those clumps of black cypresses the tufts between their thighs or under their thrown-back arms. Tomate had been right, and he might even have been too late. Jean should have fled before he was overcome by Mireille’s obsessive nocturnal habits. Would he ever escape from her? She was like a stain on his body and his thoughts … The commercial traveller kept on with his grievances against Isabelle SA, a handful of ambitious, mean capitalists exploiting some grandmother’s recipe, which was actually fortunate, in fact, because Isabelle chocolate, in bar and powder form, was the best France had to offer, perhaps even the best Europe had to offer. Jean nodded. You don’t disagree if you don’t know anything. And he knew nothing compared to such a man. A copy of L’oeuvre was lying on the back seat, the daily paper Albert sometimes read in addition to Populaire for its articles by Michel Déat and the columns of Georges de La Fourchardière, whose caustic plain-speaking made him smile. Jean answered th
at he had heard this was true from his father, who read L’oeuvre.
‘Ahah, I see, a radical socialist like me! So what’s he waiting for to enrol you in the Jeunesses Radicales?’10
‘Do the Jeunesses Radicales really exist?’
The idea seemed completely laughable. The composite image of a radical socialist in people’s minds generally consisted of Édouard Herriot’s fat stomach, Ferdinand Buisson’s goatee and the flapping trouser seat of the man Léon Daudet had nicknamed ‘stuck-up Bonnevay’. When it came to life, the portrait had Édouard Daladier’s gravelly voice, whose only intelligible words were ‘my party’. Could young people really be tempted to rally to the banner of such men? The salesman appeared outraged by Jean’s ignorance. He was a novice to be converted, to be trained so that France – a great democracy – would be, thanks to its young people’s enthusiasm, the leading nation of Europe. Jean did not know how to answer this. To his immense relief they were coming into Aix, and the salesman pulled up at a garage to fill his tank and put some water in his radiator. Jean was startled: the garage’s name was Chez Antoine. For several minutes he was intensely miserable at the memory of Mireille’s sign. Was she going to remind him of her existence like this all the way back? Let us note in passing that Charles Ventadour was not there. He rarely appeared at his garage since he had been elected to the departmental assembly and the board of a new company that was planning to build luxury villas on a plot of land on the Marseille road. It is true that Jean and he have no reason to be interested in each other. Their conversation would resemble that of the commercial traveller who, interested only in acquiescence, was so delighted by his travelling companion that in a surge of generosity he asked him to lunch.
‘The patronne does all the cooking herself. A true woman of Aix, my young friend. Kind but firm at the same time. You’ll have her chicken with Provençal herbs. She harvests her own herbs. It’s turned on a spit over a fire of vine branches. We’ll drink a Côtes du Rhône. There isn’t much else around here. And if you want my advice, be careful with the rosés. They’re only drinkable where they’re grown, at the vigneron’s. The minute they leave the vineyard, they get adulterated with all sorts of things.’
Jean accepted the invitation, although the man bored him to tears. When the dessert came, he excused himself, went outside, got his bag out of the Renault, and hid in the town until the angry salesman had left. Shortly afterwards, on the Montélimar road, an old Mathis driven by a priest in a beret stopped.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Grangeville,’ Jean answered absent-mindedly.
‘Grangeville? Where’s that?’
‘Near Dieppe … But I meant, anywhere that takes me closer to it will be welcome, Father, Montélimar, Valence.’
‘Near Dieppe? Well, why not? I just wonder whether this car will last the journey. I lost a wheel this morning. Marvellous … I saw it roll away in front of me but I was still moving, on three legs as it were. I came to a halt on the grass verge, and the hardest thing was finding the nuts again. In any case, the wheel’s still holding with two. See … I can even let go of the steering wheel …’
The Mathis zigzagged dangerously across the road, to the priest’s great enjoyment. He was a man in his thirties with a fairly prominent nose, yellowish skin, and black slanting eyes with the lashes of an Arabian dancing girl.
‘You’re not saying that you’re going near Dieppe, Father?’
‘No, I wasn’t heading that way, but I have a taste for adventure. Having said that, I’m not certain that this Mathis will make it as far as Dieppe. She overheats as soon as I go faster than forty. You don’t smoke?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Ah, I see … keeping fit. I could have sworn you were a sportsman.’
He pulled a pipe out of his pocket, skilfully filled it with one hand, keeping his eye on the road, then held out a lighter to Jean.
‘Get me going, will you?’
A delicious scent of tobacco filled the car that was nothing like the strong, sour smell of the caporal that Albert smoked.
‘What is that?’ Jean asked.
‘My tobacco? Oh, a blend. I can give you the address: a little place in the City, behind the Stock Exchange. Ask for John Mulligan and tell him you’re a friend of mine and you’d like my tobacco. It has a number, the 253.’
‘You get your tobacco from London?’
‘Why not?’
At the slightest gradient the Mathis panted and laboured. Jean wondered if they would reach Montélimar. The priest seemed entirely confident, laughing when he was overtaken.
‘Mad! All quite mad! When we have our whole lives in front of us. How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘I’m thirty. My name’s Constantin Palfy.’
‘Jean Arnaud.’
The Mathis coughed, then sneezed. It sounded as if it really couldn’t last much longer, but the priest took his foot off the accelerator, it cleared its carburettors with a series of misfires, and resumed its sedate progress.
‘Admirable, don’t you think?’ Father Palfy said. ‘The courage of the meek: do or die. She won’t give up until she can’t go any further. When she stops, it will be to lay down her bones for the last time. She will have earned her absolution.’
They thought she was about to earn it for certain when, a kilometre outside Pont-Saint-Esprit, she hiccuped and came to a halt at the roadside. The priest refused to be disheartened, however, and pulling a long, roughly calibrated stick from the boot, he lowered it into the petrol tank.
‘Not a drop left! My father was right.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The English say, “Cherchez la femme.” My father said, “Cherchez l’essence.” We shall push her to Pont-Saint-Esprit.’
Fortunately the Mathis was light, and in less than a quarter of an hour they were at a petrol pump.
‘Fill her up, please, my friend, while I go and rapidly pray to Saint Christopher, because we still have a long road ahead of us.’
He disappeared into the church opposite, while the attendant filled the tank with an expression of disgust on his face. The abbé returned almost immediately, smiling broadly.
‘Do you mind very much if I pay you in petty cash?’
‘We always need change.’
They lined up the money on the counter in piles of centimes that had to be recounted several times.
‘Is shrapnel all you’ve got?’ the exasperated attendant said.
‘My friend, it will be useful next time you go to mass.’
‘The priest doesn’t see me at mass a lot.’
‘It’ll come back, dear sir, it’ll come back. The strongest of us turn to the Church’s shelter when the time comes to shuffle off our mortal coil.’
‘You’re a barrel of laughs, Father, I must say.’
‘Too true! There’s no man more joyful than a priest. Goodbye, dear sir. If you ever feel in need of spiritual succour, don’t hesitate to call on me.’
It was seven o’clock when they drove into Montélimar. As Jean was beginning to ask himself whether it was time to leave the ancient Mathis and its driver behind and wait for a truck, Father Palfy was rhapsodising over the distance they had covered.
‘A hundred and thirty-five kilometres in five hours! Think how long it would have taken you to cover that distance on foot! Our civilisation’s progress is meteoric. And one does work up an appetite on the road. Let’s stop for dinner.’
‘You must be my guest, Father.’
At dinner Father Palfy ate ravenously and drank without stopping talking. Jean wondered anxiously what the bill would amount to. A month’s work had earned him enough to dress himself and buy a watch and a knapsack. What was left would not last him for several days’ driving at an average of twenty-five kilometres an hour. Having said which, the priest took his mind off the gnawing memory of Mireille. He had thought less about her since leaving Aix, but now he was dreading the night to come, a second
night without her. Wouldn’t it be better to continue on foot, to exhaust himself physically, so that he could fall into a dreamless sleep?
‘You’re preoccupied, my boy,’ the priest said, sensing that his audience was less attentive.
‘A bit. It’ll pass.’
‘Was she good-looking?’
Father Palfy was on his fifth cognac, but his complexion was as yellowish as ever, unlike Monsieur Le Couec whose face reddened after a single calvados. The priest’s extraordinary capacity could not be something he had acquired at the seminary. He was captivating and unsettling at the same time, without Jean being able to put his finger on exactly why. It was not just because his cassock went rather awkwardly with his relaxed and earthy way of expressing himself.
Jean did not answer his question, but merely looked down.
‘I hope it’s only about sex, my boy, not love!’
‘Only sex, Father.’
‘Oh, no more “Father”, please. It’s much too solemn. Call me Constantin. So you were stuck on this girl, and she left you?’
‘I left her.’
‘But that changes everything, my dear man. I was rather afraid that you were in love.’
‘I am, but not with Mireille.’
‘So she’s called Mireille. Well, I know a Mireille who will be crying her eyes out tonight. It was good while it lasted, at least?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, don’t worry! I shan’t say it again. All right. No need to panic. One gets better. Have a little cognac.’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘Impossible. Tell me … a wild guess … you’re a sportsman, aren’t you? You wouldn’t have left this Mireille because she was ruining your fitness?’
Jean opened his eyes wide.
‘How do you know?’
‘Instinct! I know everything. What’s your game?’
‘Rowing. I belong to Dieppe Rowing Club.’
