by Michel D
‘He’s the only one you can rely on. It must be his religion. You see, I’ll end my days believing there’s something to be said for religion after all. What about you, do you feel religious?’
‘No, Papa, I don’t. But because of the abbé, who’s been so good to me, I’ll never say anything against it.’
‘There’s another thing I want to ask you. You know I’ve believed in peace ever since the armistice. I’ve voted socialist, because I thought socialism meant peace. Well, I was wrong. Socialism doesn’t mean peace any more than the Right does. There’s going to be a war, in two or three years at most. You have to promise me that you won’t fight. How? I haven’t a clue. But you’ll see. When you were born, that was the vow I made: that this little lad would not be cannon fodder.’
Jean hesitated and murmured, ‘When I was born?’
Albert seized his arm and gripped it violently.
‘You know?’
‘Yes.’
Despite the darkness, Jean knew that there were tears rolling down his father’s lined cheeks and that, despite being so tough and reluctant ever to complain, he was silent now because he could not speak without his voice breaking. They parted after kissing each other goodnight. Albert disappeared into the shadows of the small garden and reappeared against the light of the glass-panelled front door, a limping silhouette whose left shoulder had started to drop some time ago, hunching his back. Jean returned to the rectory, where the abbé was already snoring. There was nothing to do but go to bed, worn out by the long day, and try to banish the image of Antoinette, her dress still rucked up above her bare stomach, sobbing into the mattress ticking.
At the end of the year Joseph Outen declared bankruptcy, closed his bookshop and started work at La Vigie in charge of the regional sports page. The film club swallowed half his salary, but a small core of cinephiles had formed, twenty or so young men and women who shared the costs. Their ambition was to collect enough money to invite a director to come and talk about his art. Joseph had written to René Clair, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, and all had responded favourably but regretted that they would be too busy in the months ahead. This had not discouraged him, and he still had a long list of interesting film-makers he intended to approach. Jean realised that the admirable thing about Joseph was his ability to rise above any disappointment; he was one of those men born to undertake all sorts of projects and never see a single one succeed. At the newspaper, Grosjean the supervisor looked furiously askance at the visits by one of the sacrosanct editorial staff, disturbing his drudge’s labours. He disapproved of the mixing of ‘classes’; it disturbed the rigid structure of a society founded on a hierarchy of workers and supervisors.
The winter was cold and gloomy and seemed to Jean like a long tunnel, and, because of his youth, he was scared that he could not see the light at the end of it. In an apathetic Europe France continued to show itself to be the least imaginative of nations. The one and only idea it could be commended for was the government’s creation of a Ministry of Leisure, run by a charismatic socialist called Léo Lagrange. It was now on this man, far more than on Léon Blum, that the French rested their hopes. The number of strikes went down. Wages were no longer the unions’ objective. They sought instead to purge the socialists from their own ranks of officials, while the communists reserved their fire for Blum, whom they nicknamed the ‘social traitor’, an insult that must have seemed mild to him in comparison to what Maurras called him, refusing to refer to him as anything other than ‘that jackal-camel-dog’. But Jean could not get interested in politics, although people around him discussed it endlessly. He heard news from Ernst, who was going on with his history and philosophy course and researching a dissertation about Nietzsche. His solemn, enthusiastic letters were sprinkled with Nietzsche quotes, in which the democratic tendency was characterised as ‘a decadent and enfeebled form of humanity, which it reduces to mediocrity at the same time as lessening its value’. Germany had found the ‘new philosophers’ Nietzsche had called for, he emphasised. Their names were Hitler and Rosenberg. German youth had found itself an incomparable leader in the shape of Baldur von Schirach. Jean showed the letters to Joseph Outen, who roared with laughter.
‘Let them dream. They’ll have a cruel awakening. The French army will retake the Rhineland in a week. In a fortnight it will be in Berlin. The Germans have no petrol or steel, and their army corps have no officers. A fortnight, I promise you, three weeks at the most. You can sleep soundly in your bed.’
That was all Jean wanted to know, even though he disliked the idea of a military excursion to Berlin. What would he do if he ever found himself face to face with Ernst? Shoot? Or throw open his arms? He gave up trying to decide the answer to that dilemma. Circumstances would tell. Meanwhile life felt pretty vile, so vile sometimes that he missed Mireille, her sunny restaurant balcony that looked out over the coast and the blue sea, and the life of relative ease there. He did not see Antoinette again until January. After her confession to him she had disappeared, and at Christmas Madame du Courseau moved into her house, which was finished at last. Albert had a job again: to create a garden where before there had only been a meadow and a few apple trees. Marie-Thérèse had nowhere for him to stay, however, and every morning he had to cover the two kilometres to the house on foot. The way back in the evening was, if anything, more painful. At the slightest effort his orthopaedic leg hurt him badly, and he had developed varicose veins in the other leg. At least at La Sauveté he had had his own place, while at the new house, which was bourgeois and tasteless, he considered himself merely an employee. Not a word of complaint passed his lips.
At the end of January, coming home exhausted from his job at La Vigie, Jean learnt from the abbé that an ambulance had been called that morning to take Antoinette to hospital. The abbé knew nothing more.
‘Go and see her at lunchtime tomorrow, when you see your mother. And let me know what’s wrong. I feel everyone is spinning mysteries around me.’
Jean saw Antoinette the next day. She was in a room on her own, pale and swollen-faced. Lying without a pillow, she was not allowed to raise her head.
‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you, no one else. Come here. Do you remember when you were a little boy and I adored you? I protected you …’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘I love you even more now.’
‘You had a funny way of showing it.’
‘Maybe. At least it taught me that I really love you.’
‘I’d prefer you to tell me what’s wrong with you.’
‘Do you remember what I said to you that last evening we saw each other?’
‘I didn’t believe it.’
‘It was true, and even if you find it boring I’m going to tell you what happened afterwards. I was pregnant—’
‘You aren’t any more?’
No. Gontran Longuet got me in trouble. He was like you, he didn’t believe me. I threatened him and yesterday morning he took me to Anna, you know, that woman who lives in your old house. She convinced me that it was nothing at all, and then she cut me up like a torturer, the witch, and when she couldn’t stop me haemorrhaging she and her husband got scared. They put me in Gontran’s car, and he drove me to the last bend before the house. It was a hundred metres from the door. I couldn’t make it and I fell down. Michel came out and saw me. If I’m not dead, it’s because of him.’
Jean took her limp hand, lying on the sheet. He studied her face, disfigured like the night she had wept in the deserted house. She was weak and defenceless, and above all she had reminded him of their childhood and the protective love she had wrapped him in then, before all the games that had led to their misunderstandings. Perhaps something else could grow between them now, a brotherly, watchful feeling. He squeezed her hand and kissed her fingers. A smile appeared on her bloodless lips.
‘Promise?’ she said. ‘We’ll tell each other everything—’
She did not finish. Her bro
ther entered the room.
We have not seen Michel for a long time, apart from his recent furtive appearance at mass. Years have passed since his morbidly jealous childhood. He is tall and good-looking, if charmless, and the gaze he directs at others is one of haughty attention. Last December he gave a recital of songs from Fauré to Debussy at Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon, and was commissioned by an art-book publisher to produce twenty plate illustrations for a luxury edition of the Song of Songs. This recognition of his dual talent has contributed in no small measure to the making of the high idea he has of himself, and in a bedroom drawer he secretly keeps a scrapbook bound in red leather, in which his mother has religiously pasted the smallest newspaper cutting about him. His father’s departure seems to have liberated the nervous boy he once was. The house was not big enough for two men, and the day Michel was asked about his ambitions and replied, ‘I’m good at music and engraving,’ Antoine had raised his eyebrows, looked at his son in astonishment, as if he were an impostor, and answered unexpectedly,
‘You want to be an artist? It’s entirely up to you, but artists bore me. They only ever talk about money.’
Michel had shrugged his shoulders, privately dismissing his father as a philistine. He would have been astonished to learn that in ten years Antoine had absent-mindedly purchased, piece by piece, almost never putting a foot wrong, a collection of modern works that was attracting more and more visitors to Marie-Dévote’s hotel. Of course Antoine had seen several of his son’s oil paintings, and noticed some of his engravings and lithographs, but Michel’s talents as a painter were not evident to him and his engraving work, which was always dark, as if dominated by storms and haunted by the atrocities of martyrdom, and unsettlingly peopled by excessively beautiful young men, failed to appeal to a nature that now worshipped the light. He came within a hair’s breadth of rejecting his son’s work outright as old-fashioned, despite usually holding back from definitive judgements and relying purely on his emotions, although his own, more modest word for it was pleasure.
Michel kissed Antoinette and addressed Jean with a nod. Jean’s presence visibly embarrassed him, and the demeanour he had adopted before entering the room no longer suited this meeting of all three of them, largely because Jean tried to catch his eye and in failing to do so discovered the older boy for the first time, so ill at ease with himself and yet so satisfied with his own inner tensions, which he had arrogantly elevated into a Christian quest for the soul. For a long period, until the story of what had happened at the cliff, they had been brought up as brothers. Then they had ignored each other. Now they stood face to face, both men and capable of clothing their feelings in a modicum of courtesy, but Jean identified something so all-enveloping and strange about Michel that he felt deeply uneasy, kissed Antoinette, and left without saying another word.
Jeanne was in a nearby ward. Jean crossed the sunny courtyard, where a few elderly patients were walking bundled up in their coarse blue Assistance cloaks. A ruptured aneurysm had recently affected Jeanne’s faculties, and she had started to see Albert as her father and Jean as her husband, whom she attacked acrimoniously for leaving her a prisoner in the hospital.
‘You wanted to get rid of me!’ she shouted as he came to her bedside. ‘I’ll never let you. I’m going to stay alive, and even the spy you pay to inject me with poison every evening knows that I know. I’m not budging from here … At least they protect me …’
More than the senseless things his mother said, Jean suffered from the hostile, watchful silence of her bed companions. Around him toothless old ladies with flabby wattles and eyes clouded by leucomas or glaucomas gave him sly, hateful looks. They had ended up believing in Jeanne’s demented speeches and took her part, pitying her when she broke off from her endless cogitation to dissolve into tears, repeating, ‘Times are hard … times are hard …’
Jean stayed for five minutes, quickly disheartened, no longer recognising in this poor wandering old lady whose hair had gone white in the space of a few months the tirelessly kind woman who had brought him up so indulgently and generously. This was how people deteriorated with age and revealed their bewildered, animal soul. He would have given almost anything not to see her like this, for her to have had the chance to disappear before she deteriorated, leaving behind only noble and generous memories.
That evening as he came out of La Vigie he met Michel waiting for him on the pavement.
‘I’m going to Grangeville. I thought I could give you a lift.’
For the last six months Michel had been driving a Peugeot 201, a present from his mother. When he used it, which was not often, he drove cautiously, with both gloved hands on the steering wheel, neck craning forward, hooting at every bend, and with none of his father’s Bugatti-driving impulsiveness. Jean got in beside him, without thinking to thank him. He had had his fill of the day, whose habitual pointlessness had been increased by the sadness of seeing Antoinette ill and his mother half mad.
‘I much appreciated your visit to my sister.’ Michel said, ‘Such occasions bring us closer. Yesterday I thought she was dying.’
‘She’ll be all right.’
‘I prayed for her for a long time this afternoon.’
Jean refrained from making a comment that would have been repeated to the abbé Le Couec. In any case he found it hard to imagine that Michel seriously believed in the effectiveness of his prayers. Later he realised he was wrong: Michel really had cloistered himself inside a severe faith in which he fought against a forked demon with an angel’s face. The secret of that struggle permitted him, he believed, to cast his implacable gaze over the rest of the world.
‘My mother would like to see you,’ he said.
‘It’s not hard.’
‘There was a misunderstanding.’
‘Who created it?’
‘I did! I know. It took me a long time to find out the truth. I feel deeply remorseful about it.’
‘Remorseful? You?’
‘Why not me?’
‘You always hated me.’
‘Children can’t control their feelings. When I became a man, I understood. Forgive me, Jean. Whenever I’ve thought about your generous and noble character, it has helped me be a better Christian. I want to thank you for the great lesson you’ve taught me. I shan’t forget it.’
‘Let’s not speak about the past,’ Jean said.
Michel disgusted him. He felt sick.
‘There’s someone else who would very much like to see you again,’ Michel added.
‘Who?’
‘Chantal de Malemort. She’s surprised you haven’t been in touch since you came back from Italy.’
‘Aren’t you going to marry her?’
‘No. An artist doesn’t marry. My life will be solitary or it won’t. I see Chantal often. She has a deep, beautiful soul. Pure and Christian. A transparent being.’
They had arrived at Grangeville, and the Peugeot stopped outside the rectory.
‘It was good to see you again,’ Michel said. ‘We shouldn’t lose sight of each other in future.’
‘Does your faith have any room for charity?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘My father’s sixty. His orthopaedic leg hurts him badly and so does his good leg, every morning when he comes over to you. Go and fetch him in your car and take him home in the evening. It’ll be your good deed for the day.’
‘He’s never said anything to us.’
‘He puts up with pain in the name of peace. He’s a proud man.’
‘I’m perfectly happy to do that, although there are times when my work—’
‘You decide. Good evening, Michel.’
Antoinette recovered, with the sad certainty that she would never have children. Widespread rumours accused the abortionist at the lodge, who would have gone to prison without the intervention of René Mangepain, Madame du Courseau’s brother. The deputy paid frequent visits to the Longuets, who had moved into La Sauveté. When people criticised him for his closene
ss, he defended himself on political grounds. Monsieur Longuet, despite having retired from business, represented real electoral power. ‘Why,’ René Mangepain asked, ‘abandon men of such influence to a conservative and fossilised Right? Why should it always be the bishops who open their premises to pimps? Why, despite that industry’s unfair contracts, shouldn’t men of progress add their voices to those of the Left, bringing, I might add, a substantial clientele with them? We should have considered all this much earlier. I am now devoting myself to the task, despite my personal feelings of revulsion.’
In March, having saved enough from his pittance of a salary, Jean was able to buy himself a bicycle, and on Sundays he once again met Chantal de Malemort exercising her horse in the forest of Arques. They resumed their conversations, of which we have already offered an outline, full of veiled meanings, sometimes in both directions, and always ingenuous. At night, when the abbé’s grumbling snoring kept him awake, Jean no longer thought of Mireille: it was Chantal’s face he conjured up, her gloved hands on her reins, the smell of fresh grass or hay that she gave off, the seriousness with which she responded to everything. Yet she no longer appeared to be, as she had before, a disembodied creature to be shaken awake in the depths of the wood, but a woman, a desirable woman whose eyes he would have liked to kiss and whose stomach he would have liked to stroke. Where and how could that come about? Their intimacy, such as it was, remained buried, and whenever he glimpsed her unexpectedly in her father’s company, even though the marquis was hardly any different on his tractor or in his stables from any of the other farmers on his estate, Jean was acutely aware of the distance that separated him, a porter at the La Vigie printing works, from a young woman wreathed in a fabulous past, one of her ancestors, Jehan de Malemort, having been the admiral commanding the squadron of Louis XIV that had routed the English in the North Sea. He was not in an entirely inferior position in relation to her, despite his being on foot or bicycle and a gardener’s son and her on horseback and a marquis’s daughter. For Chantal de Malemort had never left Normandy. She sometimes went to Dieppe to an aunt’s house, or to Rouen to meet some cousins, but had not even been to Paris, whereas Jean could talk about Newhaven, London, Milan, Florence, Rome and the south of France. Their memory gnawed at his heart. What use was that first bagful of experience, if he had to spend the rest of his life portering parcels at La Vigie under the permanently furious scrutiny of that shit Grosjean? He was so acutely aware that his journeys constituted his one area of superiority that when he was with Chantal he began making up stories and pretending he was getting ready for another great departure on his eighteenth birthday.
