When I pulled out the little packet of ham that La Menou had handed to me as we set out, La Falvine protested at this offense against her hospitality and began buzzing around me. I couldn’t sit there and eat off the table when she had plates! I must have an egg with her, she would fry it now, to go with my ham! And a little wine, that I must have with her too! I accepted all her offers except the wine, which I suspected would be pretty poor stuff, and instead asked for milk, which she poured out for me in copious quantities into a big bowl decorated with flowers, accompanying her largesse with a flood of words. Only the day before it happened, they sold the calf, that’s how it was, and now there was so much milk, what could they do with it, almost drowning in it they were, and even when she’d made her butter, still some left over for the pig.
But my eyes nearly jumped out of my head when I saw her come to the table and set down a huge loaf and a block of butter.
“Bread! You have bread!”
“Oh, bread, yes,” La Falvine said. “That we’ve always made ourselves here at L’Étang. Because Wahrwoorde, you know, he always had to be different. Every year he would always sow enough wheat so we had enough for a whole year, and longer even. It didn’t matter that we had to make our own flour in the horse mill, not to him, and we’ve no electricity here. And the butter, just the same, in the hand churn. He wouldn’t buy anything, that Wahrwoorde.”
As I jammed the loaf upright in the drawer at the end of the table, then cut us off a slice each, as the father must have done while he was alive, I meditated on all this information. Clearly Wahrwoorde, with something of the wild animal in his nature, was determined to live tucked away from the world, self-sufficiently, in an autarchy with himself at its head. Even extra-marital love, apparently, was not allowed to go outside the family.
However, when I alluded to the Catie affair, La Falvine hedged slightly. “As to it happening,” she said with modestly lowered eyes, “there’s not much doubt about it. But to start with, poor Catie she brought it on herself in a way, the way she carried on. And then, you know, she wasn’t his daughter after all. Any more than Miette. They were my daughter Raymonde’s daughters not his.”
At the name Miette, it seemed to me that Jacquet, at the far end of the table, lifted his head and glanced at La Falvine apprehensively. But it was no more than a glance, and it was all over so quickly that I was almost prepared to doubt whether I had really seen anything.
I was scarcely touching my bread. I wanted to wait till the promised egg arrived. But all the same, the taste of that slice of homemade bread, thickly buttered (and they salted their butter at L’Étang, unlike the very few other farms that still used to make their own around here), seemed delicious, and also a little sad, so strongly did it conjure up our life before.
“And who bakes your bread here?” I asked, to express my gratitude.
“Until only a little while ago,” La Falvine said with a sigh, “it was Louis. But since he died it’s Jacquet.”
She talked on and on, La Falvine, all the while bustling around and around the room, breathless and constantly sighing, taking ten times as many steps as she needed, pouring out ten superfluous words for every one that was really required. To fry three eggs, because ostensibly she was not going to eat one herself (I assumed that she must sneak one for herself occasionally when all the others were out, and a “drop of wine” to go with it), it took her a good half hour, during which time, although I remained unfed, since I was waiting for the egg before eating my ham, I was at least crammed with information.
La Falvine—and it was the only thing in which she resembled La Menou—was an old woman with a considerable family tree. And she found it necessary to explore it back as far as her great-grandparents, simply in order to explain to me that her own daughter, Raymonde, had had two daughters by her first husband, Catie and Miette, and after losing that husband she had remarried Wahrwoorde, who happened to be a widower himself at the time, and with two sons, Louis and Jacquet.
“And what I thought about her marriage, well I don’t need to tell you, especially because my poor Gaston was dead too, so I had to come here with her, to live among savages, you might say. No electricity, no water in the sink, and not even so much as a cylinder of butane gas, because Wahrwoorde, naturally, he wouldn’t hear of such a thing, so there we were cooking on the fire, as you see, like the olden days. Ah, the bread you eat in another’s house,” she went on in patois, eyes raised to heaven, “it is bitter to the tongue. Even though I’ve never eaten more of his food than I had to all the years I’ve been in that Wahrwoorde’s house!”
A statement that immediately confirmed my previous suspicions about her secret and solitary feasts, her only compensation for the tyranny of her son-in-law. Needless to say, her daughter Raymonde, like poor Gaston before her, soon died too, partly from the harsh treatment, you can imagine, partly from a bad digestion in her belly, and her absence made the stranger’s bread even more bitter in the mouth.
All this saw me through to the end of my ham, my egg, and my milk, without La Falvine having at any point sat down at the table with us or eaten the least morsel of food, intent as she was on bustling quite needlessly here and there, like a hen that’s lost its chicks, determined to keep up the fiction of her abstinence even after Wahrwoorde’s death. Talkative as she was, however, she had not told me everything. In our part of the world, and I imagine elsewhere too, there are two methods of concealing something: keeping quiet or talking nonstop.
“Jacquet,” I said as I wiped my uncle’s knife on the soft center of my last piece of bread, “it’s time you found yourself a shovel and a pick and went out to bury your father. Thomas will keep an eye on you.”
Then as I clicked the blade of the knife back into the handle and slipped it into my pocket I added, “I noticed his shoes were not too worn. You’d better salvage those. You’ll need them later.”
Jacquet stood up, slightly hunched, head hanging to signify his obedience. I stood up too, gun in hand, went over to Thomas, and quietly told him, “Give me the father’s gun. Just keep your own and keep our little lad ahead of you on the way there, and while he’s digging keep well away, without taking your eyes off him.” As I spoke, I noticed that Jacquet, taking advantage of my aside to Thomas, had gone over to La Falvine and whispered something in her ear too.
“Well, Jacquet!” I said in a stern, authoritative voice.
He started, blushed, then without a word, arms swinging from his great shoulders, walked outside with Thomas at his heels. As soon as they had left, I looked across at La Falvine with my gravest expression. “Jacquet has attacked one of us and stolen one of our horses. No, don’t bother to defend him, Falvine. I know he was just doing what he was told. But the fact remains, that sort of thing merits some sort of punishment. We are going to confiscate all his belongings and take him back with us to Malevil as a prisoner.”
“But what about me then?” La Falvine cried in panic.
“I leave the choice to you. You can come to Malevil and live with us, or you can stay here. If you stay, I’ll see to it that we leave you enough to live on.”
“Stay here?” she cried, reduced to a state of terror. “But what would I do here if I stayed?”
Then came a flood of words that I listened to very carefully, and which intrigued me, because the one word missing was the one I would most have expected to hear, the word “alone.”
Because it was remaining alone at L’Étang that ought to have been frightening her. And yet she hadn’t said that, this blabbermouth who was apparently so willing to tell all. I lifted my nose and sniffed the air like a hound searching for a scent. Without success. And yet she was hiding something from me, this fat old crone, I was sure. I had known it from the start. Something or someone. I stopped listening to her. And since my nose had told me nothing I began using my eyes. I looked around the room, inspecting every detail. Then opposite me, on the bare brick wall at the front of the cave, about eighteen inches above the floor,
I noticed the shelf on which the family’s boots stood in a row. I cut La Falvine off in mid sentence and said curtly, “Your daughter Raymonde is dead. Louis too. Jacquet is out burying Wahrwoorde. Catie is in service in La Roque. Right?”
“Yes, yes,” La Falvine said, apprehensive but puzzled.
I looked her in the eyes, and making my voice crack like a whip, I said, “And Miette?”
La Falvine opened her mouth like a fish. I didn’t give her time to recover. “Yes. Miette. Where is Miette?”
Her eyelids fluttered and she answered in a faint voice, “She was in service in La Roque too. And heaven knows what—”
I cut in: “In service with whom?”
“With the mayor.”
“The same as Catie then? The mayor of La Roque had two maids, you mean?”
“No, wait, it wasn’t the mayor. She was at the inn.”
I didn’t pursue the matter. I lowered my eyes and looked at her calves. They were enormous. “Do you have trouble with your legs?”
“Do I have trouble with my legs!” she cried, short of breath now, but reassured, delighted at this diversion. “It’s my circulation. And you can see what they’re like”—she pulled up her skirts to display them—“varicose veins as well.”
“When it’s wet, do you wear boots?”
“Oh, never! I couldn’t get into boots! You can imagine! Especially since I had my clots.”
On the subject of her legs, La Falvine was clearly inexhaustible. This time I didn’t even make a pretense of listening. I got up, rifle in hand, turned my back on her, and walked over to the shelf of boots. There were three pairs of men’s boots, and large ones at that, made of yellow rubber; then beside them, a much smaller pair, black, with higher heels, clearly a woman’s. I switched the rifle to my left hand, picked up the pair of small boots in my right, turned around, and from where I stood, without moving forward, without a word, I lifted them above my head and hurled them straight at La Falvine’s feet.
La Falvine took a step backward, looking down at the two black boots on the cement floor as though they were snakes about to bite her. She raised her two fat little hands to her face and squashed them into her cheeks. She was crimson. She didn’t dare look at me.
“Go and get her, Falvine.”
A short silence. She raised her eyes and looked at me. Her fear subsided. Her expression changed. Her dark eyes peered out from the puffy flesh of her face, glinting with sly effrontery. “Wouldn’t you rather go yourself?” she asked suggestively.
And when I didn’t answer, her jowls wobbled upward on each side of her mouth, and her teeth, tiny and pointed, were bared in a greedy, sensual smile. I began to wonder if I liked La Falvine very much after all. Oh, I realized that it was quite natural from her point of view. I had conquered and killed the tyrant. So now I was in the tyrant’s place myself, surrounded by an almost religious aura, and everything was my property. Including Miette. But what she was insinuating was exactly what I was struggling to renounce. Not out of virtue, but because my reason told me it was necessary, I was determined to renounce all such feudal rights.
“I told you to go and get her.”
Her smile faded, she lowered her head and scuttled out, quivering like a jelly. Shoulders, buttocks, thighs, enormous calves, everything shook as she moved.
I returned to my chair at the end of the table facing the door. My hands, as I laid them flat on the oak tabletop blackened by scrubbing, were visibly shaking, and I made a desperate effort to control myself. I knew that what was about to appear before me in a moment or so was going to be at the same time a tremendous joy and a tremendous danger. I knew perfectly well that this Miette, who was going to be living alone in a community of six men, not counting Momo, was going to face us with a terrifying problem, and that I myself must take care not to make one false move, one mistake, if I wanted life to continue being possible at Malevil.
“This is Miette,” Falvine said, pushing her granddaughter in front of her into the room.
A hundred eyes would not have been enough to devour her with. Twenty years old perhaps. And how misleading that name Miette was! A crumb, never! The whole loaf! She had her grandmother’s dark eyes and luxuriant hair, though in her case it was raven black. A good four inches taller though, with wide, squarely cut shoulders, breasts high and rounded like bossed shields, high buttocks, well-muscled legs. It was possible, I suppose, if I could have found it in my heart to criticize her at all, that I might have found her nose a little too big, her mouth a shade too wide, her chin too fleshy. But such carping was out of the question. I admired everything about her, totally, even her peasant awkwardness.
I couldn’t see them, but I knew from the sensations they were transmitting to me that my hands were trembling worse than ever. I hid them under the table. Then, leaning forward, chest and shoulders pressed hard against its edge, cheek against the barrel of my gun, I devoured Miette with my eyes, unable to speak. I understood what Adam had felt when he woke up one fine morning to find an Eve beside him, still damp from the lathe on which she had been created. It would be impossible to be more petrified with wonder or more overwhelmed with mindless tenderness than I was then. In that cave, in whose womb I was crouching with my weapons, fighting for my very survival, Miette radiated light and warmth. Her patched blouse dazzled me, her faded red skirt, worn and moth-eaten in places, hung in folds well above her knees. She had the rather heavy legs of Maillol’s female nudes, and her generous bare feet were spread solidly on the earth from which she seemed to draw her strength. She was a magnificent human animal, this future mother of mankind.
I tore myself out of my rapt contemplation, pulled myself upright in my chair, grasped the edge of the table with both hands, thumbs on top, fingers underneath, and I said, “Sit down, Miette.”
My voice seemed to me very faint and husky. I made a note to ensure that it sounded stronger next time I spoke. Miette, without a word, sat down in the chair previously occupied by Jacquet, separated from me by the whole length of the table. Her eyes were both lovely and gentle. And she looked into mine without the slightest embarrassment, with that serious look you see on children’s faces when they are inspecting a newcomer to their home.
“Miette”—I like that name Miette—“we are going to take Jacquet away with us.”
A flicker of anxiety shadowed her dark eyes, and I added straightaway, “You mustn’t worry. We shan’t do him any harm. And if your grandmother and you don’t want to stay on here alone at L’Étang, then you can come with us too and live in Malevil.”
“Well, what an idea, staying here alone at L’Étang! That we won’t,” La Falvine said. “And I for one am very grateful to you, my boy—”
“My name is Emmanuel.”
“Yes, well thank you then, Emmanuel.”
I turned back to Miette. “And you, Miette? Do you want to come?”
She nodded without speaking. Not a chatterbox, but her eyes spoke for her. They never left my face. She was weighing up this new master who’d appeared. Ah, Miette, have no fear, you will meet with nothing at Malevil but friendship and affection.
“How did you come to be named Miette?”
“Her name is Marie really, you know,” La Falvine said, “but when she was born she was so tiny, born before her time, poor thing, at seven months. And Raymonde always called her ‘Mauviette’ because she was such a little slip of a thing. But our Catie, she was only three then, it always came out with her as ‘Miette’, and that’s what it’s always been ever since.”
Miette said nothing, but perhaps because I’d shown an interest in her name she smiled at me. Her features were perhaps a little coarse, at least according to the standards of urban beauty, but when she smiled they were lit up and softened in the most unimaginable way. It was a delicious smile, so brimming with honesty and trust.
The door opened and Jacquet came in, followed by Thomas. At the sight of Miette, Jacquet stopped, went pale, stared at her, then wheeled around toward La
Falvine as though about to hurl himself upon her and shouted angrily, “Didn’t I tell you—”
“Now then, take it easy!” Thomas warned him. He was still taking his role as prisoner’s escort very seriously.
Then as he walked farther into the room to control his prisoner he saw Miette, concealed from him till then by Jacquet, and he stopped as though turned to stone. The hand he had raised to lay on Jacquet’s shoulder fell to his side again.
I intervened, without raising my voice. “Jacquet, it wasn’t your grandmother who told me that Miette was hiding outside. I guessed without her telling me.”
Jacquet stared at me open-mouthed. It didn’t occur to him for an instant to doubt what I had said. He believed me instantly. More than that, he was deeply repentant at having tried to hide something from me. I had usurped the father’s powers as well as his place. I was now infallible and omniscient.
“You weren’t thinking you were cleverer than the Malevil gentlemen, I hope!” La Falvine said derisively.
So now I had become a “the gentlemen.” Always the wrong note. I looked at her. I was beginning to suspect a certain baseness in La Falvine’s character. But I didn’t want to judge her too soon. Who wouldn’t have been corrupted by years of slavery to the troglodyte?
“Jacquet, just before you left to bury your father, what did you whisper to your grandmother?”
Hands behind his back, head hanging almost onto his chest, eyes on the floor, he said with deep shame, “I asked her where Miette was. She said in the hayloft. So I told her not to tell the gentlemen.”
I eyed him. “So you meant to escape from Malevil then? So that you could come back for her and run away together.”
He was scarlet. “Yes,” he whispered.