I was eight, but still I would often go to sleep on my father’s lap or in my mother’s arms. Sometimes, when she tucked me into my little bed, I would half wake up, put my arms around her neck and hold her tight, and we would stay like that for what seemed to me a long, long time, our breath mingling; and at last I would go to sleep without knowing when she left me.
How beautiful Mama was! Tall, slim, always elegant. You ought to have seen how she played the piano, even when I knelt on a chair behind her music stool and closed her eyes with my little hands. Mama was never meant to be a schoolmistress. My grandfather was very rich, and Mama and her sister Léontine had been to the most expensive schools in Avignon. It was not Mama’s fault that my grandfather Thierry had liked living high; her father was very kind, but because he had loved giving splendid parties in Avignon and meeting too many pretty farmers’ wives, Mama had no dowry, and she was forced to earn her own living.
My grandfather was terrific. He had a little goatee and a snowwhite moustache. Hand in hand we went round the farms in the morning, and as he was secretary of the mairie (“He has to earn his tobacco money,” said Tante Léontine), he always had papers to take to the peasants or to fetch from their homes. I noticed how right my aunt was when she said he always lingered at a certain farm where the woman of the house was good-looking. I was delighted, because it was the only farm where they let me ride the little donkey and where I could meet Mireille, a girl of my age who was much better at playing papa and mama than the girl next door at Pont-d’Ucel.
Eight, and already I was beginning to fool around. Secretly I went to swim in the Ardèche. I had learned by myself in the canal; it was deep, but it was only five yards across. We had no bathing suits, of course, so we swam naked, seven or eight of us, all boys together. Oh, those sunny days in the water of my Ardèche! The trout we caught with our hands! I never went home until I was quite dry.
1914. The war, and Papa was called up. We went with him as far as the train. He was going with the Chasseurs Alpins, and he would soon be back. He said to us, “Be good children and always obey your mother. And you girls must help with the housework, because she is going to look after both classes, mine and hers, all by herself. This war won’t last long; everybody says so.” And standing there on the platform, the four of us watched the train go, with my father leaning half out of the window to wave at us a little longer. Those four years of war had no influence on our happiness at home. We drew a little closer to one another. I slept in the big bed with Mama; I took the place of my father, who was fighting at the front.
Four years in the history of the world is nothing. Four years for a kid of eight was an eternity.
I was growing fast; we played at soldiers and at battles. I would come home covered with bruises and with my clothes torn, but whether I had won or lost I always came home happy, never crying. Mama bandaged the scrapes and put raw meat on a black eye. She would scold me a little, but gently, never shouting. Her reproaches were more like a whisper. “Be kind, little Riri, your mama is tired. This class of sixty children is utterly exhausting. I am completely worn out, you see; it’s more than I can manage. Darling, you must help me by being good and obedient.” It always ended with kisses and a promise to behave well.
Somebody was stealing our wood, stacked under the lean-to in the playground; and at night Mama was frightened. I cuddled close, putting my child’s arm round her to make her feel that I was a protection. “Don’t be afraid, Mama; I’m the man of the house and I’m big enough to defend you.” I took down Papa’s gun and slipped two buckshot cartridges into it--he used them for wild boar.
One night Mama woke up, shook me and whispered in my ear, “I heard the thieves. They made a noise, pulling out a log.” She was sweating.
“Don’t be afraid, Mama.”
I got up very quietly, with the gun in my hands. With infinite care I opened the window; it squeaked a little, and I held my breath. Then, pulling the shutter toward me with one hand, I unhooked it with the barrel; holding the butt against my shoulder, ready to fire on the thieves, I pushed the shutter. It opened without a sound. The moon lit up the courtyard as though it were day, and I saw perfectly well that there was nobody at all in the playground. The heap of wood was still neatly arranged. “There’s no one, Mama; come and see.” And, clinging to one another, we stayed at the window for some time, both comforted by seeing there were no thieves, and Mama happy at finding that her little boy was brave.
In spite of all this happiness, I would sometimes behave badly. A cat tied by the tail to a front-door bell; the water bailiff’s bicycle thrown over the bridge into the Ardèche--he had gone down to the river to catch poachers fishing with a net. And other things... sometimes we hunted birds with slings; and twice, when I was between ten and eleven, little Riquet Debannes and I went off into the country with Papa’s gun to shoot a rabbit Riquet had seen skipping about in a field. Getting the gun in and out of the house without my mother’s noticing, and twice at that, was a tremendous feat.
1917. Papa was wounded. He had many little shell splinters in his head, but his life was not in danger. The news came by the Red Cross. Twenty-four hours passed. Mama taught her class as usual--nobody knew a thing. I watched my mother, and I admired her. Normally I was in the front row in class; that day I sat at the back to keep an eye on all the pupils, determined to step in if any of them fooled about during lessons. By half past three Mama was at the end of her rope; I knew it, because we should have had natural science, but she went out, writing an arithmetic problem on the blackboard and saying, “I must go out for a few minutes: do this sum in your arithmetic books.”
I went out after her; she was leaning against the mimosa just to the right of the gate. She was crying; my poor dear mama had given in.
I hugged her tight; and of course I did not cry. I tried to comfort her, and when she said to me, sobbing, “Your poor papa is wounded,” just as if I did not know, my kid’s heart found this reply, “So much the better, Mama. This way the war is over for him and we can be sure he’ll come back alive.” And all at once Mama realized that I was right.
“Why, that’s perfectly true! You’re quite right, darling; Papa will come back to us alive!”
A kiss on my forehead, a kiss on my cheek, and we went back to the classroom hand in hand.
The Spanish coast was quite visible, and I could make out the specks of white that must be houses. The coast was becoming more distinct, just like those holidays in 1917 that we spent at Saint-Chamas, where Papa had been sent to guard the powderworks. His wounds were not very serious, but the minute splinters could not be removed yet. He was classed as an auxiliary; no more front line for him.
We were all together again, full of happiness.
Mama was radiant: we had got right out of this horrible war; but for other people it was still going on, and she said to us, “Darlings, you must not be selfish and spend all your days running about and picking jujubes; you must set aside three hours a day for thinking of others.”
So we went with her to the hospital, where every morning she looked after the patients and cheered them up. Each of us had to do something useful--push a badly wounded man in his wheelchair, lead a blind patient about, make soft bandages, write letters or listen to what the men confined to bed had to say about their families.
It was when we were going home in the train that Mama felt so ill at Vogue. We went to my father’s sister at Lanas, about twenty miles from Aubenas--to Tante Antoinette, who was a schoolmistress, too. We were kept away from Mama, because the doctor’s diagnosis was some unknown infectious disease, presumably caught when she was looking after the Indochinese at Saint. Chamas. My sisters went to the Aubenas high school as boarders and I to the boys’ high school.
It seemed that Mama was getting better. But in spite of everything I was sad, and one Sunday I refused to go out for a walk with the others. I was alone, and I threw a knife at a plane tree; almost every time it stuck there in the bark.
&
nbsp; That was how I was spending my time, in the road almost opposite the school, low-spirited and depressed. The road came up from the Aubenas station, some five hundred yards away. I heard a train whistle as it came in, and then again as it pulled out. I was not expecting anyone, so there was no point in looking down the road to see the people who had got out.
Tirelessly I threw my knife, on and on. My steel watch showed that it was five o’clock. The sun was low now, and it was getting in my eyes; so I changed sides. And it was then that I saw death coming silently toward me.
Death’s messengers, their heads bowed, their faces hidden behind black crepe veils almost down to the ground: I knew them well in spite of their funeral trappings--Tante Ontine, Tante Antoinette, my father’s mother, and then behind them the men, as though they were using the women as a screen. My father, bent almost double, and my two grandfathers, all of them in black.
I did not go toward them; my blood was all gone, my heart had stopped, my eyes so longed to weep they could not bring out a single tear. The group stopped more than ten yards from me. They were afraid--or rather they were ashamed: I was certain they would sooner be dead than face me with what I already knew, because without having to utter a sound their black clothes told me, “Your mother has died.”
Papa was the first to come forward; he managed to stand almost straight. His poor face was a picture of the most desperate suffering and his tears fell without ceasing; still I did not move. He did not open his arms to me; he knew very well I could not stir. At last he reached me and embraced me without a word. Then at last I burst into tears as I heard the words, “She died saying your name.”
The war was over; Papa came home. A man called to see him, and they ate cheese and drank a few glasses of red wine. They enumerated the dead of our region, and then the visitor said a dreadful thing: “As for us, we came out of this war all right, eh, Monsieur Charrière? And your brother-in-law, too. We may have won nothing, but at least we lost nothing either.”
I went out before he left. Night had fallen. I waited for the man to go by and then I threw a stone with my sling, hitting him full on the back of the head. He went bellowing into a neighbor’s house to have his wound dressed--it was bleeding. He did not understand who could have flung the stone at him, or why. He had no idea that he had been struck for having forgotten the most important victim, the one whose loss could least be mended, in his list of the war dead. My mother.
No, we had not come out of this accursed war all right. Far from it.
Every year when the new term began, I went back as a boarder to the high school at Crest, in the Drome, where I was preparing for the entrance exam to the Aix-en-Provence Arts et Métiers. * [* Roughly equivalent to a college of industrial design and engineering.]
At school I grew very tough and violent. In rugby I tackled hard: I asked no favors and I certainly gave none either.
Six years now I had been a boarder at Crest, six years of being an excellent pupil, particularly in mathematics; but also six years with no marks for good behavior. I was in all the roughest stuff that went on. Once or twice a month, always on Thursdays, I had a fight: Thursday was the day the boys’ parents came to see them.
The mothers came to take their sons out to lunch, and then, if it was a fine afternoon, they would stroll about with their boys under the chestnut trees in our playground. Every week I swore I would not watch from the library window; but it was no good. I just had to settle down in a place from where I could see everything. And from my window I discovered that there were two sorts of attitudes, both of which made me furiously angry.
There were some boys whose mothers were plain or badly dressed or looked like peasants. Those fellows had the air of being ashamed of them, the swine, the dirty little creeps! It was perfectly obvious. Instead of going right round the courtyard or walking from one end to the other, they would sit on a bench in the corner and never move. The rascals had already got some idea of what educated, distinguished people were like, and they wanted to forget their origins before they were Arts et Metiers engineers.
It wasn’t hard to pick a quarrel with that type. If I saw one send his embarrassing mother away early and come into the library, I would lay into him at once. “Say, Pierrot, why did you make your mother go so soon?”
“She was in a hurry.”
“That’s not true; your mother takes the train for Gap at seven. I’ll tell you why you sent her off: it’s because you’re ashamed of her. And don’t you dare tell me that’s not true, you jerk!”
In these fights I nearly always came out on top. I fought so often that I became very good with my fists. Even when I got more than I gave, I didn’t give a damn--I almost liked it. But I never went for a weaker boy.
The other kids that sent me into a rage, the kids I fought most savagely, were the ones I called the swaggerers. These were the guys with pretty, well-dressed, distinguished mothers. When you are sixteen or seventeen you are proud of showing off a mother like that, and they would strut about the yard, holding her arm and mincing and simpering until it drove me mad.
Whenever one of them swaggered too much for my liking, or if his mother had a way of walking that reminded me of my own, or if she wore gloves and took them off and held them gracefully in one hand, then I couldn’t bear it: I went out of my mind with fury.
The minute the culprit came in I went for him. “You don’t have to parade about like that, you big ape; not with a mother dressed in last year’s fashions. Mine was better looking, brighter and more distinguished than yours. Her jewels were real, not phony like your mother’s. Such trash! Even a guy who knows nothing about it can see that right away.”
Naturally, most of the guys didn’t even wait for me to finish before hitting me in the face. Sometimes the first swipe would go right to my head. I fought rough: butting, mule-kicking, using my elbows in the infighting; and joy welled up inside me, as though I were smashing all the mothers who dared to be as pretty and fine-looking as my mama.
I really could not control it; ever since my mother’s death when I was nearly eleven, I’d had this red-hot fury inside me. You can’t understand death when you are eleven: you can’t accept it. The very old might die, maybe. But your mother, full of youth and beauty and health, how can she die?
It was because of a fight of this kind that my life changed completely.
The guy was a pretentious asshole, proud of being nineteen, proud of his success in math. Tall, very tall; no good at games because he studied all the time, but very strong. One day, when we were going for a walk, he lifted a massive treetrunk all by himself so that we could get at the hole where a field mouse was hiding.
And this fellow had really let himself go that particular Thursday. A tall, slim mother, in a white dress with blue polka dots. If she had been trying to imitate one of Mama’s dresses she couldn’t have done better. Big black eyes; a pretty little hat with a white tulle veil.
And this engineer-to-be swaggered about the courtyard the whole of that afternoon, up and down, to and fro, round and round. Often they kissed; they were almost like lovers.
As soon as he was alone I started on him. “Well, you’re the wonder of the world, all right. You’re as good at putting on a circus act as you are at math. I didn’t know you were such a...”
“What’s wrong with you, Henri?”
“What’s wrong with me is that I just have to tell you that you show your mother like they show a bear in a circus, to amaze your buddies. Well, get this: I’m not amazed. Because your mother is just nothing at all compared with mine: she takes after the showy tarts I’ve seen during the season at Vals-les-Bains.”
“Take that back, or I’ll spoil your face for you; and you know I hit hard. You know I’m stronger than you.”
“Trying to get out of it, eh? Listen: I know you’re stronger than me. So to balance things, we’ll have a duel. Each with compasses. Go and fetch yours and I’ll fetch mine. If you’re not a shit and if you can stand up for yourself,
I’ll be waiting for you behind the john in five minutes.”
“I’ll be there.”
A few minutes later he went down, my compass point buried deep just under his heart.
I was seventeen when my father and I saw the examining magistrate in charge of my case. He told my father that the only way to stop the proceedings was to make me join the navy. At the gendarmerie of Aubenas I signed on for three years.
My father did not really reproach me for the serious thing I had done. “If I understand rightly, Henri,” he said--he called me Henri when he meant to be severe--”and I believe what you say, you suggested fighting with a weapon because your opponent was stronger than you?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Well, you did wrong. That is the way ruffians fight. And you are not a ruffian, my boy.”
“No.”
“Look at the mess you have got yourself into. Think of how you must have hurt your mother.”
“I don’t think I hurt her.”
“Why not, Henri?”
“It was her I was fighting for.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t bear seeing other boys flaunt their mothers at me.”
“I will tell you something, Henri: it was not for your mama that this fight and all the others before it came about. It was not out of real love for her. The reason is that you are selfish; because fate took your mother from you, you would like it to be the same for all the other boys.
“If you were really a reflection of your mother’s heart, you would be happy at the happiness of others. Now, see, in order to get out of this you have to join the navy: three years at least, and they are not going to be easy ones. I am going to be punished, too, since for three years my son is going to be far away from me.” And then he said something that has always remained engraved on my heart: “You know, my dear boy, you can become an orphan at any age. Remember that all your life.”
Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon Page 23
