The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  I was in possession of a baggage of impressions sufficient to give rise to pleasant dreams. After leaving the theater, instead of going to bed, I went to the hotel bar to get gradually merry. Full of assurance, I then found the means of buying a car from an Italian marquis of sorts, who had just been cleaned out at the roulette wheel, and who was drinking beside me. Anyway, a car would doubtless be useful. And in the juvenile delight procured for me by the slimmest possibility of intrigue offered that day by a precious hazard, I went to sleep on the threshold of drunkenness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My entry to the Château de la Colle was greeted by the barking of two Great Danes, fortunately enclosed in a kennel, which split my ears for nearly five minutes before the front door was opened by a Javanese servant. My surprise in confrontation with this Asiatic face, which I had scarcely expected, was redoubled by the sight of the colonial souvenirs—panoplies, trophies, wooden sculptures and masks—that cluttered the drawing-room into which I was shown. Even the window-panes were made of the alabaster-tinted translucent seashells that are used in Manila instead of glass. I found myself abruptly transported to the Dutch East Indies or the Philippines, when I had thought that I was in Provence.

  I was still utterly displaced when the door opened on Yvane, whose blonde and blue apparition fortunately brought me back to myself in space and time. She understood the meaning of the grateful smile with which I welcomed her.

  “What an idea to usher you into the midst of all this bric-à-brac!” she exclaimed. “My stepfather, who is Dutch, has spent many years in Batavia.” She accompanied her explanation with an ironic gesture addressed to all the Oriental ironmongery encumbering the walls. “Come on, we’ll be better off elsewhere.”

  I followed her on to the terrace situated behind the main building, which overlooked a little valley. An olive-grove climbed the slope that was facing us, and vine were discernible behind the curtain of cypresses extended over the first ridge. It was an abridged version of the Provencal countryside.

  “Here, I find you again,” I said to Yvane.

  Very simple in her dress of coarse blue fabric, she adopted a charming gaucherie, tinted with lassitude, in order to furnish the customary explanations.

  “The property comprises some 20 hectares, but it hasn’t been well-maintained. I ought to occupy myself with it, but I lack the resolve.”

  “Are you the mistress of the house, then?”

  “Yes, since my mother’s death two years ago. My stepfather leaves all the domestic details to me. As I have a horror of giving orders, that works out rather badly.”

  I assured her that even though I was an architect, I preferred untidy houses, with weeds growing in the pathways.

  “Oh, you’re an architect!” she said. Abandoning herself to the first association of ideas, she went on: “The gardeners have been pestering me to have the reservoir refilled, and I don’t know how to do it…”

  “Well, my visit won’t have been useless,” I said, laughing. “I’ll give you a consultation.”

  We climbed the slope of the olive-grove, hollowed out at the summit of which was one of those large reservoirs open to the sky, such as one finds in Provence, and which, opening at ground level, are reminiscent of swimming pools. The reservoir was dry; the bottom was in need of concreting over.

  “I’ll contact a contractor and give you an estimate…but I scarcely expected to be talking business.”

  “Me neither,” she replied, so sincerely that we both laughed.

  “I’ll change the subject, then, and pay you compliments,” I went on.

  “Why?” she asked, innocently, turning her large eyes toward me, which were the same color as her dress but which had the varnished gleam of Delft pottery.

  “Because you speak French very well,” I replied, caught off-guard by so much naivety.

  “But I am French. My mother was French before she remarried a Dutchman. My name is Yvane Suyter—that’s a Flemish name.”

  When we got back to the terrace, the tea was being served beneath a plane-tree, and various individuals were already busy about the table.

  “Delighted to see you here, Monsieur Delambre,” Dr. Mops said to me, with a briskness that I now knew to be Dutch.

  In keeping with his status as a country landowner, he had coiffed his cranium in a Panama hat and was smoking a cigar. I was introduced to a relatively young man, Dirk Linard, who was his secretary. Narda was also there, engrossed in connecting the electric wire of the toaster to a power cable running along the balustrade of the terrace.

  “You’ll get your hands dirty,” Yvane said to her.

  “Well, I’ll go wash them,” she replied, with the imperturbable logic of a child.

  As Yvane handed the doctor a cup of tea, he declared that he would prefer beer. “Here,” he said, “it’s not hot enough for warm drinks to be refreshing.”

  “That’s a physician’s theory,” I said.

  “No, a beer-drinker’s,” he replied, laughing. “Besides, that sort of medicine doesn’t interest me. I’m a neurologist—but I won’t bore you and all these young folk with the story of my research. It’s quite enough that Dirk has to suffer my speeches.”

  Without saying a word, Dirk lost himself in the contemplation of a cricket that had strayed on to the table. Narda was now peeling the plane-tree, whose bark had been separated by the heat. All that was quite banal, but collectively, these various individuals gave a rather odd impression—which, nevertheless put me at ease. Instead of forming a more-or-less closed family circle, which always resists the intrusion of a new face, everyone here appeared to be following their own train of thought. Everyday companions did not seem to count for any more than a newcomer like me. I therefore had the impression of inserting myself painlessly into the middle of a cordial disunity.

  Out of politeness, I made vague comments appropriate to the occasion. The doctor replied. By the manner in which he was holding his cigar between his teeth, I had already observed that he wore dentures. The care with which he smoothed his eyebrows, the only hairy parts of his face, indicated a certain affectation, which prevented me from taking him seriously, but when the servant brought a few letters on a tray, he put on his spectacles in a purposeful way that revealed a studious man, while his myopic gaze, circled with glass, acquired an undeniable intelligence.

  “Well,” he said, casually, “I’m going to go back to work with Dirk. On another occasion, Monsieur Delambre, I’ll show you some unusual things that might perhaps interest you.”

  His departure seemed to lighten the atmosphere. Narda continued nonetheless to scatter pieces of bark under the table.

  “Come on, stop it!” exclaimed Yvane.

  “I hear you using the voice of a mother issuing a reprimand,” I said to Yvane, while darting an amused glance at her young cousin. “What age difference is there between you?”

  “Five years. Narda’s 17, but she’s been badly brought-up at boarding-school. She’s an orphan, the daughter of one of my mother’s brothers.” Yvane offered this explanation in a low voice. “My stepfather accepted responsibility for her too.”

  There was a slight sadness in her tone that surprised me a little. I didn’t press the point. We got up to take a turn around the property.

  When we finally found ourselves back beside my car, she planted herself in front of me and said, brusquely: “I’m afraid you were bored.”

  I assured her of the contrary.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, not listening to me, “I’m putting myself in your place. I meet a young woman in the sea, go to her aid and pull her out of a perilous situation, then meet her again by chance at the theater—all that is bizarre enough, and sets my imagination working. I imagine a sporty fairy, some kind of star leading a luxurious existence, of a fantastic environment worthy of a woman fallen from the sky, and I find a poor girl living prosaically with her stepfather, almost alone in an old house. If I were you, I’d be disappointed.”

  “And
the young woman, who also has a right to dream—what does she say when she only finds a great devil of an architect who promises to get her reservoir repaired?”

  She laughed, tilting her head back, and the bursts of her laughter, which sounded young and fresh, lifted up her tanned throat. “Oh, I can see now that my reflection was indiscreet,” she declared.

  “The young woman remains more mysterious than she believes herself to be,” I assured her.

  Seeing her there in front of me, in fact, upright, simply-dressed, without make-up, with her eyes and hair bright, I found that she participated in the mystery of limpid entities and denuded artifices. She invited speculation, but in a truly magnificent fashion, as a pebble shining buy the roadside, a stem reaching up toward the sky, or a wild animal free in its movements encourages speculation about the enigma of existence.

  “May I, as a good friend, come to collect you tomorrow in order to take you out in my turn—perhaps to Cannes?”

  “With Narda?” she asked, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Of course,” I declared, starting the engine.

  Having traveled a certain distance along the road, I stopped the car in order to light a cigarette.

  The whole thing had been simple and rather odd at the same time. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. “Curious, curious,” I murmured. I smiled. I no longer recognized myself.

  When I presented myself the following day at the agreed time, I found Yvane in conversation with a gardener in the main pathway. “Narda can’t come,” she told me, immediately.

  “I don’t think that will alter our program. Your stepfather won’t see anything improper in your going out with me, I hope?”

  “Why should he?” she replied, in a surprised tone. Her tone and expression seemed decisive enough.

  “I’d love to drive,” she said, opening the door.

  I yielded the steering-wheel to her, and she set off with a great deal of assurance. She weaved her way through the little crowded streets of Cannes rather skillfully. Authoritatively, she selected one of the best-known dance-halls in the town, and we parked on the quayside. When I praised her decisiveness, she replied, bizarrely: “I’m just struggling against my inferiority complex.”

  “One of your stepfather’s terms?” I remarked.

  “No—all the idiots are talking about their complexes just now. Haven’t you noticed?”

  I confessed my ignorance, and the recent date of my return to France. She listened distractedly, while dancing. She danced well. Secretly, I compared her with the women present; in the middle of all those faces made up with applications of cream and powder, her freshness and youth were imposing. The heat was stifling, though, and the orchestra really was making too much noise.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked her.

  She looked at me, searching in my eyes for the correct response, and replied: “No.” We went back to the car and, abandoning the pleasures of the coast, set forth at hazard inland. A shared taste directed us toward deserted and honest places. By the side of the road a small inn appeared, whose terrace overlooked the region all the way to the sea. There were we able to drink lemonade in an arbor.

  Her bare hand was lying on the corner of the table. Playfully, I covered it with mine, as if to compare their dimensions.

  “My skin is darker than yours,” she declared. “After two years here, I have the right to a certain advancement.”

  “If you’d met me in shorts on Bali, I’d have beaten you for suntan. I was no longer a white man in any but name.”

  She paused thoughtfully, and then declared: “Why do you think that I’m not curious about your past? Anyway, it’s the same with everything. It’s bizarre, at my age, but I don’t experience any curiosity. The world doesn’t tempt me. At times, I think that it’s an illness.”

  I noticed that, without my being aware of it, the hand I had superimposed on hers had folded up to imprison it entirely. I didn’t move a muscle, but I sensed that her gaze was lowered, like mine, upon our immobile fingers. She remained mute.

  “I didn’t do it deliberately,” I said.

  “I know that. It’s like the tendrils of a vine. Have you seen vines in spring, creeping along a trellis? The tendrils only take a few hours to wind around the supportive wires; one might think that they were little conscious hands, and yet they don’t know what they’re doing, and more than your fingers knew…”

  “Perhaps it’s all the more revealing? The expression of a profound natural instinct…”

  She looked me in the eye and said: “I know what you’re thinking. You think that what I said doesn’t mean anything, and that I’m deliberately misinterpreting a gesture that might have made a commitment you didn’t intend.”

  “You read thoughts well,” I admitted.

  “Give me a cigarette,” she said, then, abruptly enough for me to understand that she only wanted me to let go of her hand.

  “Tell my stepfather,” she continued, in a different tone, “that I can read thoughts. He’ll be jealous—that’s his great ambition.”

  “Is his research really serious, then?” I said, slightly disconcerted by the intrusion of the stepfather into the conversation.

  “I think so,” she replied, with some gravity. As I held out a match for her, she exclaimed: “I’m glad you don’t have a lighter. I can’t bear people who use lighters.”

  “Me neither—that odor of petrol, and the vulgarity of that movement of the thumb over the flint-wheel…”

  Her expression brightened, and she added, precipitately: “Yes, yes—but I’ve discovered the real reason. Fire is a noble thing, and making fire is an operation so sacred that we must respectfully employ both hands to give birth to the flame. When, with a lighter, you light the wick with excessive familiarity, it’s a veritable blasphemy, a punishable triviality, like celebrating a mystery in a garage. The Sun, and fire are my personal gods…”

  I listened to her with a half-smile on my lips. It was getting late. In front of us the Sun was hollowing out longer shadows in the rocky hillsides. The facades of small farmhouses scattered on the terraced fields were tinted in gold. In the pine-tree above our heads, crickets were singing. For a long moment, we watched the Sun setting on the plain in silence.

  “The Virgilian hour,” I murmured.

  In a whisper, I heard her say: “Majoresque cadunt…”2 As I looked at her in surprise, she explained, with a hint of irony directed at herself: “I have my baccalaureat.”

  The Fiat was waiting for us in front of the inn. I asked her if she still wanted to drive. She shook her head. Her mood seemed to have changed again; she remained silent. I could no longer sense anything of her but the hip that sometimes made contact with mine as we went around bends. Troubled, I could find nothing to say. It seemed that we were making a proof of our silences—the most redoubtable of all.

  When I stopped the car in front of the gate of the property, the silence of the motor rendered ours even more perceptible and weighty. Noiselessly, for I can find no other word to render the significance of the movement that might, I sensed, release an internal storm within her, she turned toward me. Our faces found themselves so close that our lips touched lightly. She opened the door and, having leapt to the ground, opened the gate without looking back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next day, if the weather had been less beautiful, less sunny, with less spring in the air, I would have found myself almost reasonable. A nice shower would have set me squarely on the right road, bringing me back to an awareness of the necessary greyness that is the background of any well-conducted life. But with all those colors—there were armfuls of flowers in every room in the hotel, and the casino flower-beds were nothing but living mosaics—my head still felt lacking in solidity.

  No new rendezvous had been arranged, but the reservoir in need of repair furnished me with a pretext to manifest myself whenever I wished. Before the morning was out, I had already telephoned a contractor in Nice.
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br />   Then, as I was passing the casino, I happened upon Dr. Mops, who was climbing into his large Mercedes, driven by a Malay chauffeur.

  “Gambling already?” I asked, in a familiar fashion.

  “No, not yet. I’ll probably try it in a few days’ time.”

  “What?” I said. “Since you’ve been here, you haven’t yet tried your luck?”

  “I wasn’t ready. I’m only here to measure the interval separating two plays at the same table.”

  Not caring whether or not I understood him, he replied with that slightly naive seriousness that had already struck me in his regard. I thought that he was preparing some kind of system.

  “Be careful,” I told him, “the mathematics are precise, and chance has laws that can’t be subverted.”

  This time, he did not furnish an explanation, contenting himself with asking: “Can I give you a lift to La Colle?”

  As the opportunity was there, I took my place in the big car.

  The influence of spring was evidently not making itself felt in me alone, for the doctor’s cordiality became even more expansive as we went along the road.

  “Oh, Monsieur Delambre,” he said to me, with the sharp accent that gave his words a child-like manner, “you’re lucky to be young! When I think of my youth, though, of all the stupid things I did…would you think, to look at me, that there was a time when I thought I could photograph souls?”