I had counted on finding the church deserted, but we had scarcely settled ourselves in the special catechism class pew before the Abbé Lebas emerged with shuffling steps and bent back from the vestry. With deep distaste, I watched his long drooping nose and bootlike chin emerge from behind a pillar into the growing dimness of the nave.
As soon as he caught sight of us, at such an unusual hour and in such an unlikely place, he swooped down the aisle like a vulture after carrion and fixed his piercing eyes on ours.
“And what are you two doing here?” he demanded abruptly.
“I’ve come to say a little prayer,” I answered, looking up at him with my bluest eyes, hands modestly folded over my crotch. Then, in the most pious of tones, I added, “As you said we should.”
“And what about you?” he asked sharply, looking at Colin.
“Me too,” Colin said, though his mischievous mouth and sparkling eyes robbed his words of their intended solemnity.
His black eyes even further darkened by suspicion, the abbé scrutinized us one after the other. “You’re sure you didn’t really come for confession?” he asked, turning to me.
“Quite sure, Father,” I told him firmly. And added, “I only confessed on Saturday.”
He straightened up angrily and said with a darkly meaningful look, “And are you going to tell me that you haven’t sinned since Saturday?”
That flustered me. Because unfortunately the abbé was not unaware of my incestuous passion for Adelaide. Incestuous, that is, in my own mind, ever since the day the abbé had said to me, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself! A woman old enough to be your mother!” And then, for some unfathomable reason: “And twice as heavy as you are!” Because love, after all, is never a question of weights and measures. Particularly when nothing is actually happening apart from “evil thoughts.”
“Oh, of course. But nothing important,” I said.
“Nothing important!” he said, clasping his hands in shock. “What, for instance?”
“Well,” I said, casting about at random, “I’ve lied to my father.”
“Yes, yes,” the abbé said. “And what else?”
I stared at him. Surely he didn’t intend to make me make confession right off like this, without my consent, in the middle of the nave! And what was more, in front of Colin!
“Nothing else,” I said firmly.
The abbé threw me a piercing glance, but I parried it with the shining surface of my limpid eyes and it sank harmlessly down either side of his long nose.
“What about you?” he asked, turning to Colin.
“The same thing,” Colin said.
“The same thing!” The abbé sneered. “So you too lied to your father! And you consider that’s not important!”
“No, Father,” Colin answered. “It was actually to my mother I told my lie.” And the folds at the corners of his mouth curved up toward his temples.
I was afraid the abbé was going to explode and drive us out of the temple. But he managed to control himself. “I see,” he said, still addressing himself to Colin but in an almost menacing tone. “So the idea came into your head, just like that, to come to church and say a little prayer?”
I opened my mouth to answer him, but the abbé cut me short. “Keep quiet, Comte, do you hear? I know you! Always ready with an answer! Just let Colin speak!”
“No, Father,” Colin said. “It wasn’t me that had the idea. It was Comte.”
“Oh, so it was Comte, eh? Excellent! Excellent! Even more likely, I must say,” the abbé said with heavy irony. “And where were you when this idea of his occurred?”
“On our bikes,” Colin said. “We were just riding along, not doing anything wrong, when suddenly Comte said to me, ‘Hey, why don’t we go to church and say a little prayer.’ ‘Good idea,’ I said. And that was that,” Colin concluded, the corners of his mouth twinkling upward quite unconsciously.
“‘Hey, why don’t we go to church and say a little prayer!’” the abbé parodied in a voice of suppressed fury.
Then quick as a sword thrust: “And where were you coming from on your bikes?”
“From Les Sept Fayards,” Colin said without a moment’s hesitation.
Which was a stroke of genius on his part, because if there was one person in Malejac the Abbé Lebas absolutely couldn’t go to in order to check how we spent our time, it was my uncle.
The abbé’s black glance flicked from my transparent eyes to Colin’s gondola smile. He was in the position of a musketeer in the middle of a duel watching his sword sent spinning out of his hand. Or that at any rate was the image I thought up later when giving an account of our conversation to the Club.
“Very well, then, say your little prayer!” the abbé finally shot at us sourly. “Heaven knows you need to, the both of you!”
Whereupon he turned his back on us, as though abandoning us to the Evil One. And shuffling away once more, back bowed, pushing his ponderous profile in front of him, he regained the vestry and slammed the door behind him.
When all was once more silent, I folded my arms on my chest, fixed my eyes on the little lamp over the altar, and said very quietly, but so that Colin could hear me, “God, I’m sorry I insulted Your religion.”
If the door of the tabernacle had opened at that moment, bathing us with light, and if a deep, resonant voice like a radio announcer’s had addressed me, saying, My child, I forgive you, and as a punishment you must recite me ten Paternosters, I wouldn’t have been in the slightest surprised. But nothing happened whatever, and I was obliged to imagine Him speaking in my voice and impose the ten Paternosters on myself. I was just on the point of adding ten Ave Marias, just for symmetry’s sake, when I decided I’d better not, on the grounds that if God were by any chance Protestant after all, then He wouldn’t be exactly delighted with me for giving the Virgin Mary equal rights.
I hadn’t finished my third Paternoster before Colin gave me a dig in the ribs. “What’s up with you? Aren’t we going now?”
I turned my head and eyed him sternly. “Wait! I have to do the penance He’s given me, don’t I?”
Colin was silent. And continued silent thereafter. Forever mute on the subject. No surprise. No questions.
And the question that comes into my own mind after all these years is nothing to do with my sincerity then. At eleven everything is a game, so the problem doesn’t even arise. What strikes me now, what I remember most, is the audacity I displayed in conceiving the idea that it was possible to pass over the Abbé Lebas’s head and establish relations directly with God.
—|—
April 1970: the next milestone. A jump of more than twenty years. It takes a slight effort to abandon my short pants and put on the long trousers of my man’s estate. I am thirty-four, headmaster of Malejac school, and my uncle is sitting opposite me in his kitchen smoking his pipe. His changeover to horses has proved a success, perhaps too big a success even. In order to expand he needs to buy more land, and any land he sets his sights on—he is thought to be rich—doubles in price the moment he appears on the scene.
“Take Berthaud. You know Berthaud. Two years he kept me on the hook. And then asked me a fortune! Though it didn’t matter that much. I never gave a pile of horse dung for Berthaud’s farm really. It was never anything but a last resort. No, Emmanuel, what I really wanted, I’ll tell you straight, what I wanted was Malevil.”
“Malevil!”
“Yes,” my uncle said. “Malevil.”
“But why?” I said, dumbfounded. “It’s nothing but woods and ruins.”
“Ah ha,” my uncle said, “I can see I’d better set you straight about what Malevil is. Malevil is a hundred and seventy acres of first-grade agricultural land that has been grown over for less than fifty years with undergrowth. Malevil is a vineyard that in my grandpa’s day was producing the best wine in the whole district. It all has to be replanted, that I grant, but the land is there. Malevil is a cellar without a rival in all Malejac: stone vaulting, co
ol, and as big as the school playground. Malevil is an outer wall against which you can build any number of stables and stalls with almost no trouble, with stone already quarried, already there; all you need do is bend down and pick it up. And on top of that, Malevil is just next door. It borders on Les Sept Fayards. Almost a continuation of it, you might say,” he added with unconscious humor, as though the castle had once belonged to the farm.
It was after our evening meal. My uncle was sitting sideways to the kitchen table, pumping away at his pipe, his belt let out one hole over his lean belly.
I looked across at him and he saw that I had guessed what came next.
“Yes, you’re right!” he said. “I bungled the deal.” Another suck at his pipe. “I told Grimaud what I thought of him.”
“Grimaud?”
“The count’s business agent. Since he had the count’s ear, and since the count (a) never left Paris and (b) wouldn’t do a thing without Grimaud, Grimaud wanted a handout for himself. He called it ‘negotiation fees.’”
“He obviously has a smooth turn of phrase.”
“I’m glad you think so too,” my uncle said. He sucked at his pipe.
“Big?”
“Two million francs.”
“Wow!”
“Not little anyway. But there was room for discussion. And instead of discussing it I wrote to the count, and the count, idiot that he is, sent my letter on to Grimaud. And Grimaud came to see me to complain.” A sigh emerged in a gust of smoke.
“Mistake number two. And this one irreparable; as I say, I told Grimaud what I thought of him. Which proves that you can still make stupid errors even at sixty. In business you must never tell people what you think of them, Emmanuel. Just remember that. Not even when they’re crooks. Because even a crook, crook though he is, always has his vanity. From that day on there was no hope. Grimaud blocked every attempt I made. I wrote twice to the count again. He never replied.”
There was a silence. I knew my uncle too well to associate myself in words with his inner regrets. He didn’t like commiseration. And anyway, before long he shrugged his shoulders, put up his feet on a chair, hooked his left thumb inside his belt, and went on.
“Well, what’s botched is botched. After all, I can live without Malevil. And I don’t do so badly. I’m making enough money, and above all I do as I please. There’s no one over me, or even beside me, to muck me about. I find life interesting. And since my health is good, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go on for another twenty years or so like this. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Even that, however, was apparently asking too much. That conversation took place one Sunday evening. And the Sunday after, coming back from a football match in La Roque, Uncle Samuel was killed with both my parents in an automobile accident.
It was no more than nine miles from Malejac to La Roque, but the journey was still long enough for a long-distance bus to smash his little Renault against a tree. Normally, Uncle Samuel would have gone to the match with his two apprentices in his Peugeot station wagon, but that was being serviced at the time, and the little Citroën pickup he used for the horse van was out on a delivery job because one of his customers had insisted on a Sunday delivery. And ordinarily, I too should have been in the little Renault, but that very morning one of my older pupils had injured himself very badly on his motor scooter, and I had gone into the nearby town that afternoon to make inquiries about him at the hospital.
If the Abbé Lebas had still been alive he would have said, It was providence that saved you, Emmanuel. Yes, but why me? The frightening thing about explanations of that sort is that they never do anything but postpone the problem. It would be better just to say nothing. Yet that’s just what you can’t do. The longing to comprehend is so strong, no matter how stupid and meaningless you know what has happened to be.
They brought the three mangled bodies back to Les Sept Fayards, and La Menou and I sat with them waiting for my sisters to arrive. The vigil was spent without a tear, in total silence, with Momo sitting on the floor the entire time in one corner of the bedroom and answering no to everything that was said to him. As the evening drew on, the horses began to whinny. He had forgotten their feed. La Menou looked across at him, but he shook his head with a stubborn, wild look, still saying no. I got up and went out to see to them myself.
I had scarcely returned to the room when my sisters arrived from the city in an automobile. Their promptness surprised me, though less so than their clothes. The were both dressed entirely in black from head to toe, as though the death of their progenitors was an event they had predicted and prepared themselves for down to the minutest detail long since. And no sooner were they over the threshold, even before their hats and veils had been removed, than the cascade of talk and tears began. It was like being trapped with two wasps inside a jam jar.
They shared a particular eccentricity that I at any rate found exceedingly irritating. They both took turns in echoing each other. Whatever Paulette said, Pélagie would immediately repeat, or vice versa. Pélagie had only to ask a question for Paulette to ask it again. It was totally maddening. Not only was everything they said idiotic, but you always had to listen to it twice.
They looked alike too: flabby bodies, tightly curled wishy-washy pale hair, always exuding a phony sweetness. And phony it certainly was, because behind those silly sheep faces they were both as ruthless as wolves.
“But why are Papa and Mama not in their beds at La Grange Forte?” Paulette bleated.
“Yes why?” asked Pélagie. “Instead of being here, at Uncle Samuel’s, as though they didn’t have a home of their own.”
“Oh, poor Papa,” Paulette went on, “how put out he would be if he were still alive. How he would hate not having died in his own home.”
“As it happens, he didn’t die at anyone’s home,” I said, “because he was killed outright in the Renault. And I couldn’t split myself in two in order to keep vigil in two places at once, one half at La Grange Forte and the other here.”
“All the same,” Paulette said.
“All the same,” Pélagie went on, “poor Papa wouldn’t have been at all happy to find himself here. Or Mama either.”
“Mama especially,” Paulette said, “feeling as you know she did toward poor Uncle Samuel.”
They were picking their way carefully. But that “poor” made me angry, because they were no more fond of my uncle than their mother had been.
“And to think,” Pélagie said, “that all this time there’s been no one at La Grange Forte to see to the animals.”
“That Papa’s cows are less important than the horses,” Paulette said.
She couldn’t say “than Uncle Samuel’s horses,” because her uncle was there in the room, under her nose, horribly mangled.
“Peyssou is seeing to them,” I said.
They exchanged glances.
“Peyssou!” Paulette cried.
“Peyssou!” Pélagie exclaimed. “Well really, Peyssou!”
I broke in almost savagely. “What’s all this Peyssou! Peyssou!? What have you to say against Peyssou?” Then I added slyly, “You weren’t always so averse to the idea of Peyssou.”
They neither of them took up that challenge. They were too busy opening the sluices for another flood of sobs. When that was over there was a dramatic pause for the mopping of eyes and blowing of noses. Then Pélagie returned to the attack. “While we’re all here,” she said, giving her sister a meaningful glance, “Peyssou is doing just as he pleases at La Grange Forte.”
“You can just imagine what scruples Peyssou is going to feel about going through all the drawers,” Paulette said.
I shrugged my shoulders. I said nothing. The sobs, the nose blowings, and the lamentations started up again. It was quite a while before they resumed their duet. But resume it they inevitably did.
“I’m horribly worried about all those poor animals,” Pélagie said. “I wonder whether I oughtn’t to drive on as far as the house to
set my mind at rest.”
“Because you can be quite sure,” Paulette chimed in, “that Peyssou won’t have given them even a moment’s thought.”
“Of course he won’t, not that Peyssou!” Pélagie said.
If you had cut open my sisters’ hearts at that moment, engraved on both, life-size, you would have found the key to La Grange Forte. They were both more or less certain that I had it. But on what pretext could they ask me for it? Not in order to feed the stock, that was for sure.
And suddenly I’d had enough of their contrapuntal whinings. Without raising my voice, I said, “You know Father. He wouldn’t have gone to a football match without locking up behind him. When they brought his body here I found the key on him.” Then, articulating very clearly, I went on: “I took it. And I haven’t budged from here since your father and mother were brought in. Everyone will tell you that. As for going to La Grange Forte, we’ll all three go together the day after tomorrow, after the funeral.”
There was a great flutter of protest and black veils. “But we trust you absolutely, Emmanuel! We know you! You can’t possibly think such thoughts had even entered our heads! Especially at a moment like this!”
The morning of the funeral La Menou asked me to help her get Momo into a fit state of cleanliness. I had already been present at more than one of these ablutions, and they were not matters of a moment. You had to capture Momo by surprise, skin his clothes off him like the fur off a rabbit, deposit him in a tub to soak, and hold him there, because he fought like a crazed creature, yelling at the top of his voice, “Lebeeoh, fahodsake ahehorter!” (Let me go, for God’s sake! I hate water!)
And that morning he put up an even more savage show of resistance than usual. The tub stood steaming in the April sun, out in the flagged yard. I held Momo under his arms while La Menou pulled off his trousers and underpants at one go. As soon as his feet touched the ground again Momo hooked one leg behind mine and pulled me flat on my back. Then he was off, naked as the day he was born, his thin legs flashing with unbelievable rapidity. He reached one of the big oaks growing below the paddock, jumped, swung, took another grip, then clambered swiftly up from branch to branch till he was wholly out of our reach.