The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  It was midnight. The stove had been replenished several times. Pierre had settled in, unable to free himself from the spell, to quit this vanilla-flavoured empire where time did not infiltrate, and where he would have remained until dawn had Monsieur de Rocheflamme, among other idiotic remarks and Gallicisms, not spoken of “returning to his Penates”.

  Pierre was the last to leave.

  “The staircase is Fromentine’s handiwork,” announced Madame de Boisrosé, whose old-fashioned manner matched her brother’s.

  But Fromentine, having been squeezing lemons, was rinsing her hands and so it was Hedwige who came down to open the gate.

  “Take my overcoat,” said Pierre. “I can just as easily throw it over your shoulders as over mine.”

  There was no time switch to light up the staircase. It was lit only by the lamplight on the ground floor, through the stairwell; thus it was the staircase railings that first cast their shadows on the walls and the steps, followed by Hedwige’s tall, slanting shadow, which looked as though it were descending into some caged tomb. “Everything this girl does is wonderful, the entire effect she has on me is astonishing,” Pierre mused.

  Once she was downstairs, she threw off the overcoat. What style there was in this provincial ground-floor hall, tiled in black and white, with its Pompeian starkness, and with Hedwige clad in ancient garb, wearing black and white as well, like a steel engraving!

  “Let us sit for a moment on this bench”—age unknown, ebony, moth-eaten red velvet—“I feel happy in your house, Hedwige. What tranquillity. Ever since I have known you, I’ve had solemn thoughts.”

  “Sad thoughts?”

  “Oh no! But I’ve been reflecting. For some time things have been taking a strange turn for me and all paths seem to be steering me towards marriage. And you are the only woman who appeals to me. Give the word ‘appeal’ its most intense meaning.”

  He looked at her; she was rubbing her lovely, slender hands together.

  “Hedwige, aren’t you going to answer me?”

  “I’d like to wait,” she said hesitantly. “I’m not just being flirtatious, you know, but since I feel totally happy here with my mother and my sisters, the moment doesn’t seem right.”

  Pierre interrupted her impatiently.

  “What moment? I don’t understand; give me a clear answer. Don’t you love me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in the same tone of uncertainty. “I just know that it would upset something were I to love you straight away. Wait.”

  “No, I can’t wait! When a beautiful object attracts me in a shop window, I walk in and I take it away with me immediately. I know only too well that it won’t be there the following day.”

  Hedwige said nothing and was gazing down at the ground. She was listening attentively to her inner self formulating the reply she would give to Pierre. When she looked up he had disappeared, having performed one of those instant, invisible and silent vanishing acts for which he had the untransmittable secret.

  CHAPTER XI

  “WELL, TOO BAD. Wait? No. No woman is worth waiting for.”

  Waiting was burdensome to Pierre. To him slowness always felt like kilograms, like tons. Whenever he had to slow his pace in the street in order to allow the companion to whom he was talking to catch up, who had dropped a hundred yards behind without Pierre realizing, he felt as though he had suddenly been transformed into a donkey collapsing beneath a packsaddle. Love, too, is a great weight in men’s lives; it’s a handicap. There’s nothing so weighty as the imponderable. The heart is a leaden organ. When a man and a woman meet, they don’t study one another so much as weigh each other up; they know that the day will come when one of them will have to carry the other on his or her shoulders. For a couple is not a lateral bonding, it’s a vertical assembly.

  “And now, enough of this business. Let’s get a grip on ourselves. We shall think of something else.”

  Pierre considered what his most urgent project was. The Mas Vieux. Take ten days of holiday, go down to the South of France, get the repair works under way…

  “Well, it turns out that at a certain moment I did consider marriage; I cast the net: Hedwige happened to be inside it. If the notion of marriage returns at some later date, all I’ll have to do is cast out again. Tomorrow morning, I’ll dash down to the Mas Vieux.”

  At the Mas Vieux, for the past four days they have been trellising, mixing cement, repairing the roof, loosening bricks, drilling holes, knocking down ceilings. A stone quarry has been cleared in the forest, where a sawyer and a polisher are cutting up blocks, carving slabs and restoring bits of missing corners, chipped window sills and doorsteps. The embellishments, the handrails, the mouldings have been destroyed; the fountain has been done away with. The garden has given up trying to be an attractive square, relinquished its geranium beds, lost its bower that was the pride of the trellis-maker, sacrificed its lawns for the sake of style, and under the gaze of its new owner is returning to forest. Fences and windbreaks made from roots of heather now cut a dark violet line through the rosemary and wild mimosa. The house looks younger, or rather it grows a century older by the day.

  Pierre is doing demolition work; he’s never had so much fun; all day long he hammers, beats, wears out his muscles, and it’s a voluptuous pleasure for him to see the rubble crumbling and watch effect succeed cause immediately. In Paris, hemmed in between four walls with thoughts that were not always pleasant, he had accumulated a potential for bad moods, which he is unburdening himself of here. He is taking out his nervous tension on the house; he uses his pickaxe as a dog uses its fangs. He forgets to have lunch, he spends his life on the scaffolding, he saws against the grain, he holds his hammer the wrong way round, he blunts the axes, he uses the chisel to bring down bits of old wattle that collapse like flaky pastry beneath his blows. When he is exhausted, he stops, adds a few finishing touches to his labours, then, having recovered his breath, he hurls himself at the clay once more and the plaster dust is blown away in a white cloud by the mistral. He treats demolition work as a physical exercise, as a brawl, as an acrobatic act.

  He had decided to pull down the old farmyard, which has no animals apart from a horse and three hens and which merely spoils the view. This yard, which adjoins the chapel, was built on the edge of a spur and consisted of four sides around which the outbuildings were situated: hayloft, garage, stable, pantry, hen house and pressing shed. All these had to be “blown up”; what’s more it was “southern” work: bamboo covered with clay and straw mortar, and nothing held firm; a prod with a stick was enough to poke a hole through it. Only the four inner walls of the courtyard still remained standing.

  That morning, Pierre was tackling the pointing in the wall by the gable; pickaxe in hand, using three times as much force as was needed, he brought the crumbling plaster down; suddenly he heard the noise of something hard beneath the iron bar.

  “Hey! There’s stone down there.”

  Some instinct made him dig more gently; throwing down his pickaxe, he began to scrape in small thrusts with a chisel; something black appeared: an old foundation stone? Pierre put his hand down, felt the cold, polished granite surface; his heart beating, he started to dig, clawing away at a crazy speed, his cheek pressed close to the ground, refusing to step back in order to see the whole thing, not allowing himself any conjecture for fear of disappointment.

  No, there was no longer any mistake: what was appearing was a granite tambour bursting out of its battered clay plinth. There was the shaft of the column, the top of the shaft, the stone volute that surrounded it and finally the pink marble capital with its sculpted decorations, heads of men or animals that were still intact and most authentically Roman.

  Pierre could scarcely believe it. He had been on excavations before, but he had never had anything jump out at him, in a leap of eight centuries, emerging quite untouched, still partly immured, but very much alive. His head was spinning beneath the winter sun and, because he had been staring so intently, his
eyes saw nothing but darkness and red stars. Large blisters of water were bursting in the palms of his burning hands, preventing him from taking up his pickaxe again; he spat on his hands, hoisted up his trousers and called to his labourers so loudly that they broke off drinking from their wineskins and ran over to him, convinced that he had discovered treasure.

  “Look at what I’ve found! A Roman column; while I was digging. There must be others!”

  His enthusiasm was so obvious that the workers, who were disappointed, but who were moved and felt for him, eagerly took part in the search. The hatchet revealed a further column, supporting a fine stone arch and the beginnings of another; very gradually the continuous festoons of the arcatures were laid bare.

  By the end of the day, two-thirds of a Roman cloister, freed of its layers of plaster, stood out against the sky.

  Pierre no longer felt weary; alone now, standing in the midst of his newly discovered little basilica, he continued to contemplate the details; within each arch a picture had been formed in the landscape, with either a pine cone blown there by the mistral, a wisp of white foam from the sea, or the branch of a fig tree. Dusk was gradually falling, shadows and a scattering of stars filled the arches, and Pierre could still see the pure movement within them.

  Cloîtres silencieux, voûtes des monastères,

  C’est vous, sombres caveaux, vous, qui savez aimer.6

  “If only Hedwige were here!” he murmured.

  How he should love to live here with her, observing the monastic rule—and he the frenetic man! Together they would walk and shelter beneath the vaults; these angles and approaches would shatter their lethargy, divide their meditations into four cardinal points. A cloister, that was what had always been lacking in his life originally, an enclosed space; once they were enclosed within this square, their movements shaped by the collapsed decay of the arches, they would enter into the perfect rhythm.

  Two kilometres from the Mas Vieux perched the village of La Penne. A minor road transformed into the bed of a stream ran down to it, spewing out schist and flint stones in torrents. Half a century previously, there were no inhabitants left in this village; fig trees grew freely, loosening the foundations of the houses that were still standing. Amid the collapsed roofs, gypsies and unemployed agricultural workers sometimes dossed down there, making their fires among the broken tiles. One of these nomads, a young Genoese man (who looked like Gambetta, what’s more), had set up camp there. He was a handsome wild bull of a creature, as tall as the Farnese Bull, with a craggy, hairy chest; he had gradually seduced the girls in this land where there was a paucity of men, had introduced some Ligurian blood into these French deserts, and had repopulated the region. He was known as Magali. A tribe of Magalis had been sired biblically among the crevices of these old walls, keeping themselves alive by burning sticks, vine shoots, beams and shutters, poaching, collecting chestnuts, repruning abandoned vines, dynamiting sea bream and sucking goats’ udders like vipers.

  Nowadays a hundred or so people lived in the village, all either legitimately or illegitimately Magalis. From being a beggar, the eighty-year-old Magali had become a village worthy; from being a vagabond, the god Terminus. He had married the most successful, the best-endowed of his grandsons to the daughter of an estate agent from Grimaud, a Mademoiselle Estramuri, a parishioner who subscribed to fashion magazines, was imperious by nature and wise in business matters, and who ran an ancient little al fresco restaurant that she had restored, which served snacks and drinks beneath the bamboo awnings to cart drivers, seasonal workers and cork-strippers.

  The Magalis rarely left La Penne; they could be seen in the autumn when they came down to the wine-growers’ co-operative in Bormes to tamper with the grapes, or at Le Lavandou station where they caught the train to Toulon. They did not live at all badly, they frequently ate meat, did some fishing for the local lords of the manor, worked listlessly, and were so lazy that they did not even bother to pick up their figs. It was only in September that they became a little busier, during the vendange, when they put a real effort into picking the grapes and producing their alcohol; they all had a fondness for drink. The father especially, puffy and red-faced, was always at the bottle. As his beard grew whiter, old Magali had exchanged his sexual vitality for political influence: a freemason and a bigwig who was listened to, for he made all his tribe vote, he had set up one of his daughters as postmistress at Hyères. With official approval, he kept a watch on neighbouring landowners and made their lives impossible unless an understanding was reached. From deep in the valley at La Penne, he scanned the horizon like a wrecked sailor; in the holiday season he found positions for his granddaughters and great-granddaughters who had not yet found jobs as maids at the summer visitors’ homes; in the winter, thanks to information they had gleaned, and with a deft Latin lightness of touch, he discreetly robbed those houses that had not been entrusted to his care. An innate malevolence, democratic impunity, and the friendliness of the police meant that the Magalis were formidable creators of myths; the girls spread slander as far as Saint-Raphaël, they listened to telephone conversations, read letters by holding them up to the light, and extended the area of their anonymous denunciations as far away as Marseille.

  Scarcely had the little cloister of the Mas Vieux seen—or rather, seen anew—the light of day, than the Magalis were alerted by one of their own kin who worked there as a labourer. Madame Magali, née Estramuri, immediately summoned the Magali tribe to a sort of council meeting and gave an outline of the situation. While those best equipped took the hint, the more ignorant ones listened to her respectfully as she emphasized the importance of the discovery and listed all the benefits that could accrue to the village as a result: the cloister would attract crowds of tourists; petrol stations would open surrounded by shops selling postcards and local souvenirs; guides and interpreters would be seen coming to and from La Penne: all this would benefit the Magalis, and the little snack bar that had become the Magali Restaurant would feature on the gastronomic pages of the Guide Michelin. A road suitable for motor cars would have to be built, of course; two kilometres from the Mas Vieux to La Penne, 500 metres from La Penne to the main road. Not a great deal in actual fact; Monsieur Niox, the Parisian millionaire, would put up the money and would make a profit from it. Without further ado, Madame Magali dispatched her husband to the Mas Vieux. Forty minutes later, he had already returned.

  “Well?”

  “Well, to put it simply, he sent me packing. And he wasn’t even polite. As far as I can see, he doesn’t want to pay for the road.”

  The following day and the day after that, the missions and delegations gathered pace. The Magalis offered their work free of charge, then did their best to obtain a departmental grant. Infuriated, Pierre refused to let them in.

  Whereupon the pirate-patriarch Magali, a serpent coiled round his staff, turned up in person. Wearing an Alpine hunter’s beret over his grimy locks, his belly squeezed in by an orange-coloured leather cartridge belt that was always empty, his gun slung over his shoulder, and reeking of wine, the elderly tramp, these days as plump as a sow but still a pirate at heart, forced his way in.

  From the back of the chicken-run, Pierre was astonished to see this Silenus disguised as Tartarin7 loom up; he wished he could have shut the door, but the Mas Vieux in its state of demolition no longer had any. Magali had already launched into a lengthy utterance that contained everything: welcoming greetings, descriptions of the beauties of the landscape and its hidden dangers, offers of protection against the natives whom Magali knew better than anyone since he was one himself, all embellished with local legends.

  “You’re very lucky, Monsieur Niox, to have this lovely little chapel, aquelle poulido picholo capello, which is famous hereabouts, dans lou païs! When you come here at Christmas, you will get a surprise! serès étouna! And I promise you, a great paour, a fright. At midnight, some Capuchin friars come to sing the Mass here, maï les verras pas, perqué ésiston pas! But you won’t see them
, ’cos they don’t exist!”

  “Is my chapel haunted?” asked Pierre in amusement.

  “Haunted, I didn’t say that,” protested the old mountebank, superficially enlightened but innately superstitious. “It’s the people from these parts that tell a tale from the year one thousand: of a little monk who got bored at the cloister, right in the plaço, the very place, where you are. He poisoned his abbot and took the crozier and the ring and the wife and lou resto, all the rest! The other monks got married the same day and then they all ran away with the vases and the chasubles and the relics and they became robbers on the road to the Alps. These brigands were friends of the devil, but they weren’t fâchas avec lou Boun Diou, they weren’t angry with God and every Sunday they came back to their chapel—your one, eh!—to say Mass. Finally, the Bishop of Digne, he expelled them and he brought back order and gentilezza dans lou païs, but they poisoned him too, put some veneno in his ciborium, and started up their hellish practices again, un vido d’inferi.”

  At this point the old man winked with his little red eye and he implied in a few enticing words that it was Pierre’s responsibility to recreate equally alluring debauchery in these deserted locations. As for the road, Magali would take care of that. In a fit of inspiration, he pointed out the site for the future Grand Hôtel du Cloître on a ridge not far away, with its tennis court, its garage and its swimming pool where the lovely tourist ladies would frolic.