by Michel Déon
‘No, you did the right thing. With her it is all right to cry a lake of tears. She won’t forget it, although you will. Now go and get ready.’
Night was falling. A string of twinkling lights picked out the shore. With her flags lit from stem to stern, the Stella Polaris was leaving port, her next stop Genoa. Worn out by their flying visit to the Oceanographic Museum and a stop at the casino where they had quickly been relieved of their dollars, the passengers were dressing for dinner, having a cocktail, or leaning their elbows on the stern rail and watching in silence as the harbour of this operetta-like principality, of which they had only seen the gilded stage but had had no time to peer into the wings, shrank into the dusk.
Sitting on a bench on the High Corniche, with the whole Riviera at their feet, Blanche and her son watched the fire as it consumed the last of the papers. The sailing bag had not completely burnt. It had burst as it caught fire. Small fibres writhed on the concrete, and every time a car passed close by on the steep road, pages that had turned to ashes blew and fluttered into the air. Calmly Blanche had taken the wheel and, without a word, had brought them to the crescent of ground that commanded this fine view by day and night. Édouard had hardly dared look at her as they sat together. She chain-smoked, stubbing out each cigarette with a sharp twist of her heel, nudging towards the last embers an envelope with a foreign stamp or the red oilcloth cover of a notebook that the heat had rippled like an accordion. At their feet the principality was a chequerboard of ochre roofs; rare squares showed where there were gardens. It was impossible to identify in this Lilliputian world the cemetery next to the hospital and the Jardin Exotique. Behind Blanche and Édouard stood Mont Agel with its canyons of holm oaks, scrawny olive trees and pines whose roots were dug into the scree left behind by ancient snow banks which his geography teacher said had disappeared in the last ice age, twenty thousand years ago. The earth had warmed up since then. Not enough: Blanche was shivering. Édouard went to fetch her shawl from the car to put it around her shoulders.
It was barely a month since his class, led by a young botanist, had come up here. From the north flank of the ridge a goat track wound down into the valley on treacherously loose stones. Gentians, mastic and Spanish broom grew on each side of the path. The botanist was crouching down to study a clump of saxifrage that had come up between the slabs of a one-time threshing floor when a hail of small stones started landing on him and his pupils. Higher up, protected by a granite wall, a group of shepherd boys had decided to defend their territory. They restrained their dogs, but not enough: one, a big slobbering mongrel, had bitten Georges G. on his calf. Not badly, as Édouard told his mother, but the problem was that Georges G. was aggressive.
‘He pulled a stake out of the fencing and attacked the dog—’
‘Mm,’ Blanche said.
She had got as far as the hail of gravel, the stoning of one group of children by another, then lost interest.
‘They’re savages,’ Édouard said.
‘They’re young men—’
‘It’s really near here. Just on the other side of the ridge.’ In five years Blanche had probably never seen the other side of the ridge, and it was possible she hadn’t even been curious to do so. Ignorance was a blessing; another blessing was that mother and son knew each other so little. Night had fallen like a curtain. The Stella Polaris passed out of sight beyond Cap Martin.
‘Are you still there?’ Blanche asked with a catch in her throat.
‘Yes.’
Their light-coloured clothing was all that showed where they were in the dark. Blanche would have liked to say things that could not be said, things that were beyond words. Inside her head, full of the sorrow of a woman brutally sidelined by the man who had once put her centre stage, what had just happened was simultaneously too fast and too confused.
‘It’s my fault,’ she said in a low voice, ‘and your father paid the price.’
When the cemetery worker had screwed the marble plate in place, hiding the coffin from them for good – oh, that cruel grinding sound of the screwdriver twisting into the marble – Blanche had stiffened, suddenly icy, separated for ever from the friends around her, defying if not their gazes then at least their private thoughts. She would not be judged that way! The only person who had the right to ask her for a full account had never done so. What arrogance on his part, and now he lay beyond her reach, locked in his coffin, entombed, and beginning the first night of his long road towards the ultimate peace of mind, leaning on his walking stick, its handle carved with a fleur-de-lys. Gone without a word, without the slightest loving gesture, overwhelming with his trust the only woman who had ever mattered to him. What an egotist!
She stamped on the last ashes with her foot. Acrid smoke made them both sneeze.
‘Dying like that,’ she said, ‘is unforgivably selfish. What a revenge to take!’
She stood up and walked over to the car.
‘I’ve got rid of everything,’ she said. ‘Make sure it’s all properly burnt. I won’t have to shed a single tear rereading a single letter your father wrote me, nor any that I wrote him.’
‘Was it only your letters to each other?’
Blanche didn’t answer. Of course she didn’t. She was the supreme artist of the silence she then invited others to fill with their hypotheses. Édouard could put forward all the names he wanted to, some with certainty, others more tentatively, but tonight his mother was bulletproof, and the shadows added a mourning veil to her face, so much more beautiful when it was stripped of make-up, as it was now.
‘Let’s go to Nice for dinner! You and me! It’s been so long since we did that.’
So long, Teddy couldn’t remember it. Who was she trying to fool?
‘It’s a shame you can’t drive.’
‘I’m only thirteen.’
‘Of course you are … I haven’t forgotten. I was joking.’
Joking? On a night like this?
Who had she been here with before? The patron suppressed a smile, took their order without resorting to the clowning he reserved for ‘foreigners’ and Parisians. The restaurant terraces overflowed onto the cobbles of the old town, filled with strolling tourists and people from the city’s well-off districts. Passers-by studied the menus outside, little girls played hopscotch and half a dozen boys shared a bicycle between them. On rush-seated chairs outside old apartment buildings painted vermilion, ochre and yellow, matrons fanned themselves with bits of cardboard; plagued by rolls of fat at their waists, split by their enormous thighs, with their other hands they hoisted up, with index finger and thumb, the jelly-like mass of their breasts in blouses that were soaked with sweat. Up on the corniche Blanche had shivered. By the sea it was stifling. She had discarded her shawl. In her scoop-necked pink shirt she looked ten years younger and it irritated Édouard to see the number of looks she was getting. Brazenly young women strolled past the terrace once, twice, three times. Wearing espadrilles, they danced over the street’s big cobbles on their boyfriends’ arms, their legs naked and tanned.
‘Look how happy everyone is!’ Édouard said. ‘And us so unhappy …’
‘There will be moments, maybe no more than a few seconds, when you won’t think about it. Tonight it’s like that: no more than a few seconds. Tomorrow it’ll be a minute, then in a while it’ll be an hour, and in a few years’ time it’ll be days, months … But remember, whether it reassures you or not, you’re only ever cured of the ones who leave you by leaving yourself.’
Driven by a sense of lost intimacy that he felt he had suddenly rediscovered, and because it was hard always to keep everything to yourself, Édouard confessed, ‘This morning, when they were bringing Papa to us, I saw a girl I knew but who I’ve never spoken to. We smile when we see each other. She’s really pretty; she’s called Lucienne. At the lycée all the boys talk about her. She must be in mourning too. She was wearing black stockings.’
Blanche smiled, her attention distracted by an odd-looking man who was walking u
p and down in front of their table, greeting them each time by raising a grimy sailor’s cap. He wore a striped black-and-white vest and a threadbare pair of canvas trousers that flapped around his legs. With a clipped beard and a pipe clamped between his teeth, he bore an undeniable resemblance to the sailor on packets of Player’s cigarettes. The waiter served their hors d’oeuvres and a jug of rosé wine and saw where Édouard was looking.
‘He’s never set foot on a boat. He looks after the beach at the Hôtel Ruhl. He can’t even swim. If you buy him a drink, he’ll tell you how he sculled all the way to Corsica, even to the Americas if he gets carried away.’
The main thing Édouard would remember about the dinner, during which he and his mother hardly spoke to one another, was a feeling of awful sorrow that gusted over him repeatedly and exploded in his chest. When it did, his heart stopped beating. An invisible hand gripped him by the throat and began to strangle him.
‘Maman, I’m going to be sick—’
‘NO!’
Ah, that short, sharp … imperious no that gave him no opportunity to disobey orders, and no way out! Blanche was in control. She would teach him everything, by force if she had to, and with a gritty determination to avenge at all costs the insult fate had inflicted. She had hardly thought about this, but her mission suddenly exhilarated her. She passed Édouard a hundred-franc note under the table.
‘Ask for the bill.’
When the waiter put the saucer down in front of her, Blanche pushed it towards her son.
‘You glance at it to show that you’re not a stupid tourist. If the tip isn’t included, you do a quick sum in your head and calculate twelve per cent. If it’s included, you leave a franc. Never, ever take the bill with you.’
First lesson.
The apartment was suffocating. Before she left Giuseppina Staffaroni had closed all the doors and windows. Blanche rushed to open everything wide and disperse the unpleasant smell of damp that so quickly seeped into the walls, curtains and carpets. In one of those visions that had been rare until now, but were destined to multiply gradually to the point where they were simply the outward signs of a universe in which she was a recluse who was sometimes inspired by God, sometimes by Evil, Blanche, holding her head in her hands, suddenly started shouting.
‘I knew it, I knew it! He knew we were out so he came back here one last time, he touched everything and he didn’t find a thing … Because we burnt everything, didn’t we, Édouard? But why did he leave without saying anything?’
In the bathroom and in the kitchen he had certainly turned off the taps the way he had once made sure of doing each evening. In the pantry he had covered the turtledoves’ cage with a cloth, and on the library shelves she was certain that her book was missing.
‘You see,’ she said in front of the little console table, ‘he even took his packet of tobacco that smells so horrible. If he thinks he’s going to be able to roll cigarettes for himself easily in that niche of his, he’s very much mistaken.’
‘Maman. Maman,’ Édouard begged her.
Blanche raised her head and saw her son’s eyes brimming with tears.
‘I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … Do you remember those evenings when he used to come home a bit late? He was always anxious about you. “Is the little one asleep yet? I hope so,” he used to say. We must put his mind at rest. It’s been a difficult day for both of us, but we’ve done well, haven’t we? Go to bed now.’
For Édouard it was a moment of intense confusion: his bed was not made, and the bedcovers were folded on the mattress, military-style. His table and chair were draped with a threadbare white sheet. He called his mother.
‘Maman, what’s happening? Don’t I have my own room any more?’
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you the good news. That room’s much too small for a boy of your age. Giuseppina has made up the bed in your father’s room for the two months we’ll be here, before we go back to Paris. Then you’ll be going to England to spend the summer with the W.s, who are so looking forward to seeing you. Try to sleep. I’ll drive you to school in the morning.’
What time did she come into his room, without switching on the light, like a ghost in her white nightdress? Sliding her hands under the sheet where it covered his ankles, she grasped them and pulled them hard.
‘Listen to me, Édouard … and don’t forget: I’VE NEVER LOVED ANYONE EXCEPT YOUR FATHER.’
By the time he had groped for the switch on his bedside light and managed to turn it on, she had gone. All that was left of her presence was a smell of perfume and the turmoil of her tormented body. Édouard had heard her speak at the exact moment when Papa, standing in front of him, his features hollow and his voice muffled, was saying over and over again, without getting an answer: ‘Is the little one asleep yet? I hope so.’
Endnotes
1. The money from recycling silver paper was once given to help orphanages and religious missions in Asia.
2. Mémoires d’un âne by the Comtesse de Ségur.
3. A schoolboy joke that plays on the homophone ‘la bête humaine’ meaning ‘the beast in humanity’.
About the Author
Michel Déon, who was born in Paris and died in Galway in 2016 at the age of 97, was the author of more than fifty works of fiction and non-fiction, and a member of the Académie Française.
Julian Evans is a writer and translator from French and German. He has previously translated Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy, The Foundling’s War and The Great and the Good.
Copyright
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess Programme (www.frenchbooknews.com)
First published in France as La Chambre de ton père
by Éditions Gallimard
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 2004
English translation © Julian Evans, 2017
First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Gallic Books, 2017
The right of Michel Déon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 9781910477472 epub
An extract from The Great and the Good
Per Augusta ad angusta
‘You’re going to Switzerland? You should go and see Augusta. She—’
The lights turn green, unleashing a flood of cars that drowns out Getulio’s voice but fails to interrupt him.
‘… recognise her immediately. Quite unchanged, in spite of—’
A cement mixer, its drum revolving as it chews gravel, slows in front of them.
‘… still awfully attractive … you know, I … her grace … her number …’
He pulls a dog-eared visiting card from his coat pocket and reads out a Lugano phone number. Arthur tries to memorise it, unsure if he will remember it an hour from now.
‘Excuse me, must dash,’ Getulio says, raising an odd tweed hat perched on his sugarloaf-shaped skull.
The lights change again, and in three strides he is on the far side of Rue des Saints-Pères. From the opposite pavement he waves a white handkerchief over his head, as if a train was already bearing Arthur away to Switzerland and Ticino. A bus drives between them. When it has passed, the Brazilian has gone, leaving Arthur alone with a phone number that has been so long coming, he isn’t sure he a
ctually wants it any more. Especially not from Getulio.
*
As Arthur walks up Rue des Saints-Pères towards Boulevard Saint-Germain, his mind elsewhere (though not without looking back, half hoping Getulio will reappear behind him and carry on talking about Augusta), the phone number etches itself on his memory and he feels his chest gripped with anxiety. But why? To whom can he say, ‘It’s too late, too much time has passed. There’s no use reopening old wounds’? Not the hurrying Left Bank pedestrians, or the medical students queuing outside a pâtisserie who force him to step off the pavement, which he does, without looking out for traffic. A car brushes past him and its driver yells a volley of insults that make the students giggle. To get himself run over and killed … that would be bitterly ironic, wouldn’t it, twenty years later, when he would have done much better to have died back then, so that he didn’t have to drag around the burden of a failure that still haunts him as an adult, even now.
He makes his way into the restaurant where two signatories from a German bank are expecting him. He likes business: it has taught him how to lie and dissimulate. Bit by bit, a sort of double has been born inside him, a made-up character who serves him remarkably well in his negotiations: a man of few words and a dry manner, who affects a careless inattentiveness while not missing a word of what’s being said, a sober figure, a non-smoker who, in the American style, takes his jacket off to talk in his shirtsleeves, always has a cup of coffee to hand, and switches to first-name terms the moment the deal looks done. ‘That’s not me. It’s not me!’ he says to himself, if he happens to catch sight of himself in a mirror behind the table where he’s sitting. But that ‘me’, his real self, is fading by the day. Does it still exist? If it does, it lies years behind him, a heap of fragments mixed up with the love affairs and illusions of his twenties. And if, very occasionally, in the heat of telling himself yet another lie, that self happens to rise from the ashes, it still carries the scent of Augusta.
