Things had progressed between me and Monsieur Blanchart’s daughter since the day of the village’s liberation. A week or so later I’d knocked on her door. Her father opened it and invited me in for something to drink. Mathilde kept us company. We spent the entire time looking at each other. I returned frequently. Her father sensed our feelings for each other and let me court his daughter, seeing in me an educated young man rather than a filthy farm laborer. After a while, he left us alone. Life is a play of resistance and acceptance, of negotiation and compromise. In this grand ball of life where we all dance to mysterious music, it is only people who change. Some resist, others give in. Monsieur Blanchart was a man of the heart who understood that objecting would serve no purpose but to fan the flames of the forbidden. And could there be a more difficult fire to extinguish? He preferred to see us happy beneath his window rather than sad and hidden in a field. Monsieur Blanchart knew a thing or two about suffering, his wife having suffered an extremely painful death a few years earlier; no need to add to it. So it was with his blessing that we strolled through the countryside, walking around the Gulf of Morbihan, and spent Sundays lying on the beach, savoring those special moments so far removed from the routine of scything and housework. Together we tasted the first fruits of love, feasting on every delightful morsel, emotional gluttons. Stretched out on the pebble beach, we wordlessly contemplated the vastness of the sea, holding each other close. Yet we never dared kiss, for fear of breaking the charm of these magic moments. I was dying to, of course, but I wanted to enjoy this carefree period—where nothing was distorted—for as long as possible.
The two years following the war were the happiest of my existence, the kind one aspires to all one’s life—and that one refers to when nostalgic, to boost one’s morale. I lived in anticipation of my Sundays with Mathilde, that gift sent from heaven. Mathilde was a fine seamstress and was all set to enter that profession, which she loved above all else. Often she would settle herself in the shade of the tallest oak tree in the garden and sew for hours. I would watch her in silence, fascinated by her meticulousness, noting her progress as the needle pricked in and out of the fabric. Mathilde’s presence soothed the tumult of my soul. She had become a drug to which I was addicted.
My mother was no fool. Seeing her son all smiles, she could tell. But she nevertheless had the delicacy not to speak of it in front of my brothers. She was empathetic beyond belief, and I loved her for it, even though she was never able to completely fill the emotional void left by my father. Mama was one of those women who give without ever expecting anything in return.
Then there are the vampires who slake their ego with the vital energy of their victims, sucking them dry. Jacques was one of those. He grew envious of my inner strength and wanted to drill the well of my soul to enrich himself with that precious mineral. He became more attentive to me, more interested, taking advantage of the emotional abyss left by my father to weave his web. He helped me carry tools and exempted me from most of the tougher tasks in the fields. Guy, who never said anything, didn’t balk when he found himself given more work than usual. He simply nodded sadly and did what his big brother told him. On Sunday mornings, just as I was leaving to see Mathilde, Jacques would pop up out of nowhere to ask for help. Often we would end up with our feet in the sludge, digging for clams all day long, like the good old times. I would think of Mathilde waiting for me in the shade of her tree, but I never dared show my frustration to my brother, for that is how vampires feast, on the fear of others, until they have totally enslaved them.
One Sunday morning, we found ourselves once again digging for clams together. It had been two months since I’d last seen Mathilde. My brother looked up at me.
“This is nice, just the two of us, isn’t it?” he said, beaming.
“No, Jacques, I want to see Mathilde.”
“Leave her be!” he declared with a chuckle.
A light went on in my head, sparked from I don’t know where, and I suddenly understood his little game. Jacques didn’t just want to be a loving brother, he wanted to keep me away from Mathilde. Lacking love in his life, he couldn’t bear to see its strength expressed on my face. In the eyes of my brother that day, I saw the same cruelty as I’d seen in my father’s, the same tyranny, the same desire to dominate. I dumped my tools on the ground and walked off.
“Stay here, Paul,” he said in a dictatorial tone.
“No, I’m going to see Mathilde.”
“Stay here or I’ll make you eat dirt!” he yelled.
I turned to face him.
“Why are you like this, Jacques? Why are you so cruel, like Papa?”
“Don’t you mention him!” he screamed in fury. “It’s because of you he died, because of that smile stuck to your face. It’s the devil’s smile!”
“You’re crazy,” I replied, walking away.
As I continued back toward the shore, I heard Jacques’s steps getting closer. His feet made a sucking sound in the soft mud. Then he leapt at me, wrapped all his limbs around me, and shoved my head deep into the mud with almost superhuman strength, fueled by the hate boiling up in him. He swore at me, hysterical with a rage I had only ever felt in my father.
“Still smiling now? I hope not!” he shouted as if possessed.
Jacques pressed down on my head with all his might, not letting me take a breath. I was trapped by my brother’s weight, completely at his mercy, a prisoner of his will to crush me. My mouth full of mud, I tried to ration the final reserves of oxygen in my lungs, then began to struggle like a trapped fish. The face of Mathilde sewing under her tree smiled at me sadly. My body was no more than an envelope. I would die there, suffocated by a vengeful brother. For the second time in my life, I felt the Grim Reaper’s cold breath on my spine. Then Jacques yanked my head up, I breathed freely, and Death slunk away, thwarted again. I lay on the ground, coughing up black sludge.
“That’s for what you did to Papa! And don’t you ever dare smile again, you hear me, or I’ll shove your face into the mud until you croak!”
He walked slowly toward the shore without looking back. Then he mounted his bike, stood up on the pedals, and rode up the path from the beach. I rolled over on my back, spread my arms wide, and stared up at the sky. Large tears ran down my cheeks, mixing with the seawater from the incoming tide lapping around me. Why was life so darn complicated? All I wanted was to live out my days happily with Mathilde and be loved and appreciated by my brothers and uncles. But they were unrelenting in their jealous attempts to dampen my vibrant enthusiasm for life. I loved this land with all my heart, but I knew I had to get far away from there. I was no longer welcome in my own village, a place of desolation and sadness. I had put up with low blows, reproaches, hateful looks, and insults, despairing all the while at not being understood by my own family. But this time it was too much. The incident with Jacques was the last straw. I wanted to become the Paul Vertune I had always dreamed of being, the sailor cruising toward the horizon, weathering storms, hair blowing in the wind, and a smile on my face that nobody, not even my father or brother, could extinguish. It was time to embark for my destiny.
I turned eighteen a few days later and promptly received my draft papers for military service. I was assigned to an infantry regiment in a small town near Paris I’d never heard of, with orders to present myself as soon as possible.
Mama saw me absorbed in reading the document, with its French flag at the top, and immediately knew what it was. She stared sadly at the floor. The state was taking another of her sons away from her, and her favorite at that. I lifted up her chin. A single tear gleamed like a diamond in the sunlight streaming through the window. We hugged each other tightly and wept. I thought of all those years together, the moments of joy and pain, those magical days at the washhouse when she would pirouette in a whirl of bubbles, the smile on her lips mirroring my own, the image eternally fixed in my mind’s eye. We would pick fruits in the garden every morning together, enjoying the many beautiful scents. My mot
her was everything to me. And now I had to leave her.
I stuffed a few things into a bag, kissed Mama goodbye, and headed up the same dirt path the priest had taken the day of my birth. At the end of the track I turned to look back at the family farm. Mama waved her arms above her head, and I sadly waved back. By the side of the farm, near the animal pen, I imagined I saw my father standing tall and smiling at me, a sincere and kindly smile I wasn’t used to. He looked me straight in the eye and gestured encouragingly to wish me well in my journey far from our ancestral lands. His lips moved. He was trying to tell me something. I focused hard to decipher his words, and then I understood. My father was telling me I love you for the first time in his life. The image, though a figment of my imagination, warmed my heart that day, despite all the reproaches for being an inveterate dreamer that I had received since childhood. That has always been my way, fleeing the sad reality of the world around me by taking refuge within the infinite possibility of my imagination.
I headed off to Mathilde’s farm to bid her farewell. She was sewing under her tree. I took her hand and explained the reasons behind my departure, the need to fulfill my civic and military obligations. Mathilde burst into tears when she realized I would be away for two whole years. I hugged her, dried her tears with a handkerchief, promised to write long letters every week and to come back for her when my military service was over. We would leave, we’d go far from this wretched village where we were both wasting away. She smiled sadly, and I repeated my earnest desire to make my life with her, to marry her. Before she had time to reply, I pressed my mouth to hers. It was our first kiss.
CRESCENT MOON
12
A few hours later, I found myself seated comfortably on a train to Paris. The steaming, smoking iron machine had intrigued me as it approached the station. I followed the lead of the other people waiting on the platform and climbed aboard, not wanting anyone to gain an inkling of my ignorance about this contraption. From my seat by the window I watched the landscape unfold before my eyes, fascinated. The train sped past fields and villages. From time to time I would glimpse silhouettes working the land, fishing by a lake, or chatting over a picnic. Some waved vigorously as we passed.
We made a brief halt at a station. On the platform stood a couple exchanging affectionate kisses. The girl was crying, the boy trying to console her as best he could. They held each other close for what seemed like an age and then he stepped away to board the train, leaving the girl distraught, weeping even harder while attempting, in vain, to wipe away her tears. It pained me to see the girl standing helpless on the asphalt, and I thought of Mathilde, abandoned beneath her oak tree. Would she have the patience to wait two whole years for me, or, unable to bear the separation, would she fall in love with the first guy to show any interest? They would walk hand in hand along the beach, set up home not far from the Vertune farm, and start a family. Mathilde would hardly recognize me when I returned. I shivered at these thoughts, and anxiety began to knot my stomach. She would never be capable of such a thing. Or would she? How well did I really know her? As honest as her father was, he might have other ideas for her, perhaps a long-planned marriage to the son of a wheat dealer or a local politician. What did I know? I was just a simple, penniless farm boy. My thoughts began to run away with me. Mathilde smiled hypocritically, hand in hand with her new lover, who was more concerned with controlling the wheat trade in the village than making her happy. The train car was packed, and I felt like I was suffocating.
“Are you all right, sir?” inquired an old lady sitting opposite me.
“Yes, madam . . . No . . . Well, yes . . .”
“Are you sure?”
I got up and wormed my way through the crowded compartment to the passageway between the two cars, stood by the slit through which fresh air was streaming, and breathed in deep lungfuls of lifesaving oxygen. My stressed body began to relax. Imagination is double edged. It can transport us to places of such intense emotion that we would happily stay there for all eternity, but it can also expose our most primal, most harrowing fears. So there I was, standing between two train cars ripping through the countryside, anguished by the images of my beloved in the arms of a fictitious husband. There was no sense to any of it. Mathilde would wait for me, of that I was certain. She was the love of my life; there was no reason to be concerned. We would await the moment when, having paid my dues of liberty to the nation, I would return to the Breton countryside and find her sewing beneath the oak in her garden as if nothing had happened.
Having calmed down, I made my way back to my seat, which was now occupied by another passenger who had taken advantage of my absence to slip his backside onto it. The old lady frowned in indignation. I remained standing and held on to the luggage rack. Outside, the green vistas had been replaced by buildings. Paris, the capital of France. I knew all the major Paris monuments by heart, Monsieur Duquerre having lent me a book on the subject. I couldn’t wait to admire them laid out before my eyes and to explore this new world.
The train soon entered the station and braked with a deafening squeal that made us all grimace. When it had come to a complete stop, people grabbed their suitcases, jostling each other in the narrow aisle without so much as an apology before scampering off like rabbits hunted by a pack of dogs. They soon disappeared from view, lost in the mass of travelers gathered in this enormous station. I walked down the endless platform, a little spooked by the cacophony. People scurried in all directions, luggage in hand, shouting, cursing, and shoving. As huge as it was, the station seemed almost too small to accommodate such a crowd. I observed, fascinated, this strange ballet particular to city dwellers, the perpetual movement of bodies and objects in space, the contrasting dissonant sounds. And there was I in the middle of this choreography, the Morbihan farm boy who had never known anything but the sea breeze and the smell of wheat in the fields. We might well have been part of the same country, these Parisians and I, but we were clearly from completely different worlds.
I was filled with an urge to turn back, take the train in the opposite direction, and seek refuge in the garden at home, beneath the apple trees that had shaded me in my carefree childhood days. But that would have meant giving up. I already imagined my father greeting with me a hypocritical smile in front of the farmhouse. No, this time I would have to grit my teeth and be a man. Plucking up my courage, I forced my way through the pushing and elbowing, the shouts and the banging of suitcases crashing into each other. I had no idea where I was going. Torcy Barracks, it said on my draft papers. I stopped someone and asked him the way. “No idea,” he replied, not even trying to understand or offering to help me find the barracks on a map.
I made my way out of the station into the cool air. The streets were huge, thick with traffic, the cars’ engines throbbing and pumping out exhaust that made the air heavier than it was in my countryside. People walked briskly along the sidewalk, looking down. Why were they all in such a hurry? Nobody stopped, they just kept on putting one foot in front of another like automatons, unlike back home, where everyone stopped to greet each other and exchange a few words. Paris was nothing like that—there was no sense of togetherness here, and it took me barely ten minutes to realize it.
The station clock showed 1:30 p.m. I still had a few hours left to find the barracks. I decided to walk around the city a bit and set off down a boulevard, as the Parisians call these wide thoroughfares. The pale June sun barely pierced the thick clouds, but the dullness of the weather did nothing to dent my joyful mood; quite the contrary. I had fantasized about my arrival in the City of Light a thousand times as I lay in my bed at night staring up at the moon through the window, or as I toiled in the fields, bored to death.
I greeted people as I walked along, but they all seemed surprised at such attention. After a few hundred yards I reached the Boulevard des Invalides. I thought of Monsieur Duquerre with his bedraggled beard—great educator that he was, who had taught me French history. Where was my schoolmaster now? I imagin
ed him in a high school in the Rennes suburbs, instilling the values of the Republic in his attentive pupils, who drank up his words. I didn’t yet know that my poor teacher already lay six feet under, devoured by worms.
As I reached a junction, I glimpsed a gray-and-brownish structure set against the sky. I didn’t recognize it at first but very quickly realized that this was the famous Eiffel Tower, the national symbol that made France the envy of the world, though few people had ever seen it with their own eyes. As I drew nearer, it slipped in and out of view behind the buildings. I broke into a run as if nothing else mattered. I wanted to see the iron beauty in all her splendor, to feast upon her with my gaze until her figure no longer held any secrets for me. Arriving at the large park, at the end of which the metal queen stood—I later learned it was called the Champ-de-Mars—I came to a sudden halt, stunned by the soaring rigidity of this unbelievable appendage to the city. It seemed to defy the laws of nature; I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I sat on the grass for a few minutes, full of emotion. I felt free, happy to be there, just me and my bag packed with a few essentials: some warm clothes, underwear, photographs of Mama and Mathilde, and of course the picture of Catherine, the German girl I had to find. It wasn’t much, and my back was the happier for it. Some men possess colossal fortunes, large companies, cars, houses, and goodness knows what else. Me, I possessed only the bare necessities, nothing more. It was sufficient. A person’s true richness lies in their heart. I have never stopped believing this philosophy, and I would rather die than change my view.
Seasons of the Moon Page 6
