“We’ll keep his share for him,” Marcel answered without looking around and with a violent gesture of the arm. “And Armand’s, Gazel’s, and Josepha’s too. We won’t do anyone out of anything, don’t worry. Come on, Lanouaille, what are you waiting for, in heaven’s name!”
“No call for swearing,” Fabrelâtre told him in tones of authority. A silence. Lanouaille looked at me as though begging for my advice. He was a young fellow of about twenty-five, as solidly built as our Jacquet, with full cheeks and honest eyes. As far as I could make out, he was in agreement with Marcel but didn’t dare ignore Fabrelâtre’s opposition.
There were about twenty people clustered around. I looked around at their faces, some familiar, others unknown, and on all I could read hunger, fear, and gloom. I knew already that I was going to intervene, and on whose side. But I was waiting till I had grasped the situation better.
Someone stepped forward. It was Pimont. He ran the little newsstand in La Roque. I knew him well, and his wife Agnès even better. Both were about thirty-five years old. Pimont had played center forward on the team that beat Malejac the day my uncle and parents were killed in their car crash. Short, square, excitable, brushcut hair, always a smile. Except that today he wasn’t smiling.
“There’s no reason whatever to postpone the distribution,” he said in a tense voice. “All of us present can guarantee that it will be fair, and that no one will be forgotten.”
“It would be more courteous to wait, all the same,” Fabrelâtre said sharply, eyes blinking behind his steel rims.
I noted that like Marcel and Lanouaille, Pimont refused to look at Fabrelâtre when he spoke. And I also noted that Marcel, excitable and quick-tempered though he was, had failed to protest when Fabrelâtre publicly reprimanded him for swearing. It only needed one glance at the crowd’s anxious, famished eyes fixed on the two loaves to see that they were all in favor of an immediate distribution. But apart from Marcel and Pimont, no one had dared speak up. The slow-witted, flabby, amorphous Fabrelâtre was holding twenty ravenous people in check!
“Ah, come, son,” old Pougès broke in suddenly, addressing himself to Lanouaille in patois, “cut it up there. My mouth is already watering, looking at that fine loaf!”
I’ll come back to old Pougès later. He had spoken in a jesting tone, with a little laugh, but no one echoed it. Another silence fell. Lanouaille looked at me, then at the great dark green gate of the château, as though he was afraid of seeing it suddenly flung open.
When the silence had dragged on for a while, I realized that the time had come to intervene. “Well, this is a crazy argument and no mistake!” I said with a jovial chuckle. “I’ve never heard such a fuss over nothing at all! It seems to me that if you find it so difficult to make up your minds, all you need do is take a vote, then act according to the majority’s decision. So let’s see,” I went on quickly, raising my voice, “who’s in favor of immediate distribution?”
There was a moment of stunned surprise. Then Marcel and Pimont raised their hands. Marcel with barely restrained violence, Pimont more soberly, but without any lack of resolution. Lanouaille lowered his eyes and looked embarrassed. After a second, old Pougès took a step forward and raised his right forefinger, giving me a conspiratorial look as he did so but keeping his hand close to his chest so that Fabrelâtre, now slightly back from him, couldn’t see the finger. This petty ruse made me feel ashamed for him and I didn’t count his vote.
“Two in favor,” I said, without Pougès protesting. “And now, those against.”
Fabrelâtre alone raised a finger, and Marcel snickered out loud, though still without looking at him. Pimont smiled derisively.
“And who abstains?”
No one stirred. I looked slowly around at the crowd’s faces. Incredible. They didn’t even dare to abstain.
“The decision is in favor of immediate distribution,” I said in an even voice, “by two votes to one. It will be carried out under the supervision of the donors. Thomas and Jacquet will represent us.”
Thomas, breaking off the animated conversation he had been having with Catie (I made a note to look her over properly later on, when I had the time), moved forward with Jacquet in his wake, and the crowd parted docilely to let them through into Lanouaille’s shop. I glanced at Fabrelâtre. He was looking very sick and put down. He must be even stupider than I’d suspected, I thought, to have not only gone along with my suggestion but also to have voted himself, thereby revealing his isolation. Poor imbecile, he was nothing in himself, I realized now. It was the power behind the green gate that called the tune in La Roque.
Lanouaille set eagerly to work, and while he began cutting up the loaves I noticed Agnès standing a little apart, her baby in her arms, leaving her husband to stand in line for their share. She seemed to me a little thinner, but still as pleasant to look at as ever, with her blond hair shining in the sunlight, and her pale brown eyes that always gave me the impression they were blue. I went over. Seeing her like that, I felt the old weakness I had always had for her stir again in my heart. And she? She looked at me as I came over with a sad, fond look in her eyes, as though to say, Well, Emmanuel my dear, you see how it is? And if you had only made up your mind ten years ago, then it’s at Malevil I’d be today, not here like this. It was true, I knew it. It was yet another of those things in life I had left undone. And I had thought about it often.
While we were exchanging thoughts in this way, we also engaged in a conversation using spoken words. I stroked her baby on the cheek, the baby that might have been mine, and Agnès informed me that it was a girl, almost eight months old now.
“From what we’ve been told, Agnès, if we hadn’t agreed to give La Roque a cow, you would have refused to let your little girl come to live with us at Malevil. Is that true?”
She looked at me with indignant eyes. “Who told you that? It was never even mentioned!”
“You know who it was.”
“Oh, that one!” she said with muted anger. But I noticed that she too lowered her voice.
At that moment I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Fabrelâtre was stealthily making for the green gate.
“Monsieur Fabrelâtre!” I called out loudly.
He stopped and turned as all eyes converged on him.
“Monsieur Fabrelâtre,” I said with a jovial smile as I walked over to him, “it seems very unwise of you to leave just as the distribution is about to start!”
Still smiling, I took him by the arm, without his attempting to resist, and said half in jest half in earnest, “You mustn’t go waking Fulbert up, must you? His health, as you know, is very delicate. He needs all the sleep he can get.”
I felt his flabby arm trembling in my grip, and without relaxing it, I led him slowly back toward the shop.
“But Monsieur le Curé must be notified of your arrival, you realize,” he said in a shaky voice.
“There is no hurry, Monsieur Fabrelâtre. It is scarcely half past eight yet! Now then, why don’t you just help Thomas do the sharing out.”
And he obeyed, the great soft creature! He did as he was told! He was soft enough and stupid enough to actually help in the distribution he had publicly disapproved of. Marcel, arms folded over his leather apron, permitted himself to laugh out loud at the sight, though without anyone daring to imitate him, apart from Pimont. But I was a little ashamed even to look at Pimont now, after the slightly overaffectionate conversation I had just had with his wife’s eyes.
I was about to go over to Catie when old Pougès intercepted me. I knew him well. If my memory serves me correctly, he must have been just over seventy-five then. He was short, had very little fat on him, very little hair, very few teeth, and very, very little enthusiasm when it came to work. The only thing he had a great deal of was mustache. It was yellowish white, drooped down on either side of his mouth, and was, I suspect, his pride and joy, since he was always stroking it with a knowing look in his eye.
“Now, to look at me, Emm
anuel,” he used to say when I bumped into him in Malejac, “I don’t look like anything, do I? But I’ve put it over on the lot of them all the same. First, my wife dying. Round one to me. A viper, as I don’t need to tell you. And then, at sixty-five, my farmer’s pension, and straightaway I get a tenant onto my farm. And there you are; me quietly sitting there in La Roque collecting from both sides, living like a king at everyone else’s expense. Doing damn-all, my old son. Ten years that’s been now! And not over yet. Ninety, that’s when I shall be leaving you all, at ninety like my old man. So that’s another fifteen years of this lovely little old life I still have in the bottle! And the others paying!”
I used to run into Pougès and his mustache in Malejac quite often, because every day, even when it snowed, he used to bike the nine miles from La Roque to Malejac in order to drink his two glasses of white wine in the bistro that Adelaide had opened next to her grocery store. Two glasses, no more. One he paid for. The second she gave him, goodhearted as ever where her exes were concerned. And even there Pougès took advantage. The free glass he made last.
“And how come then, Emmanuel,” Pougès asked me in a low voice, tugging at his mustache and giving me his knowing look, “how come you didn’t count my vote in then?”
“I didn’t see you,” I told him with a little smile. “You can’t have put your hand up high enough. Next time you’d better try a bit harder.”
“All the same though,” he said, drawing me aside, “I did vote for. Remember that, Emmanuel, I voted for. I’m not in favor of what’s going on here.”
And not in favor of getting your feet wet either, I’ll be bound, I thought.
“You must miss your little bike rides,” I said politely out loud, “and your two little glasses of white at Adelaide’s.”
He shook his head. “Ah, no, the bike rides, that’s not what I’m missing. Because, believe me or not, Emmanuel, I still take those every day, same as ever, except it has to be along the main road now. It’s the not having anything there at the end to set me up again, that’s what I miss. Because the château wine—heh!—you could ride your bike from here to doomsday and you wouldn’t get a thimbleful out of them up there!” he went on with deep fury.
“Listen then,” I said in patois. “Now our road’s been cleared, why not come on a little farther from time to time and pay us a visit in Malevil. Our Menou would be glad to draw you a glass of our red for your pains, and it’s as good as Adelaide’s white any day of the week.”
“Well, I’ll not say no to that,” he said, scarcely able to conceal the almost insolent sense of triumph he was feeling at the thought of being able to drink at our expense. “And what a good, polite man you are, Emmanuel! I shall tell everyone so too, if ever there’s any who try to say bad things about you!”
Whereupon, as a down payment on all the wine he intended to soak me for, he gave me a little friendly tap on the forearm and winked as he tugged at his long yellow-stained mustache. We parted from each other both satisfied with what had been achieved, he at having found another source of free wine, myself at having established a regular and discreet line of communication with La Roque.
In Lanouaille’s shop the distribution was drawing to an end. As soon as the inhabitants had received their share of butter and bread they all hurried back to their houses, as though they were fearful of being dispossessed again at the last moment.
“And now you’d better butcher the veal right away,” I told Lanouaille.
“Yes, but that’s going to take a little while, you know,” he said.
“Begin anyway.”
He looked at me—a nice lad, so strong and yet so timid—then he went over and lifted the side of veal down from its hook, threw it onto his block, and began sharpening his knives. The only others left in the shop by now were Marcel, Thomas, Catie, and a little girl she was holding by one hand. As soon as the sharing out of the butter and bread was over, Jacquet had gone to help Colin, whose shop was only a few yards down the street and who was occupied loading tools and metal into the cart. La Falvine and Miette were presumably visiting friends somewhere, since they were nowhere to be seen. As for Noiraude, whom, strange to say, everyone seemed to have forgotten as soon as the loaves appeared, she was tied to a ring in the wall beside the big green gate, muzzle stuck in a bundle of hay that Jacquet had shown the good sense to bring along.
At last I had time to take a good look at Catie. She was taller and less well padded than Miette, having presumably come under the influence of women’s magazines and their cult of the beanpole during her stay in La Roque. Like her sister, she had a slight heaviness about nose and chin, lovely dark eyes, though heavily made up in her case, a mouth bleeding with lipstick, and less abundant but more artfully tended hair. She was wearing a pair of very tight jeans, a multicolored cotton jersey top, a broad belt with a golden buckle, and around her neck and wrists, dangling from her ears and on her fingers, a great deal of costume jewelry. Got up and bedizened as she was, she looked as though she had just stepped off a Page of Young Miss or some such magazine, and her nonchalant, carefree posture, as she leaned with one arm against the shop wall, pelvis thrust up and out, looked to me as though it had been consciously copied from the photographs of models in a mail-order catalogue.
La Catie, it seemed to me, did not have such sweet eyes as Miette, but they must have been endowed with a very efficient charge of sexual aggression all the same, to judge from the way in which she had managed, in only a few minutes, to hook, reel in, and stun our Thomas, who was now standing in front of her in a trance of fascination. As we climbed down from the cart, Catie must have made her choice in the blink of an eye, and she had battened upon him with such rapidity and such determination that I suspected the poor victim never stood a chance.
“Emmanuel,” Marcel said, “you don’t know my grandniece.”
I shook hands with his grandniece, I spoke a few words to her, she replied, and while we were going through this social ceremony she treated me to an expert, thorough, and rapid inspection. I had been judged, measured, and weighed up not as a moral being, and even less with regard to my intellect, but as a possible partner in the only activity that seemed to her important in life. And I think I scored quite high, as a matter of fact. After which Catie swung the full force of her attention back to Thomas. What surprised me in this whole business was the extraordinary speed and almost brutality with which the process of appropriating Thomas had been set into motion. It is true that there was nothing normal about the life we had lived since the day it happened. Witness the way in which the problem of sharing out our gifts had arisen just before. Witness too the fact that not one of us had thought fit to remove the guns we had slung over our backs, even Colin, who must have found his weapon a great encumbrance while loading up the cart.
“And what about you?” I asked the little girl that Catie was holding by the hand. Abandoned to her own devices by the intense eye-to-eye infighting going on above her head, she had been amusing herself for the past few minutes by following all my movements. “What is your name?”
“Evelyne,” she said, fixing me gravely with her deep-set, darkly smudged blue eyes, which took up almost half of the thin little face framed by long, absolutely straight blond hair that fell down to her elbows. I picked her up with my hands under her arms and lifted her up to my face to give her a kiss, but she immediately wound both legs around my hips and her two thin arms around my neck. Returning my kisses with a look of delight, she clung to me with a strength that surprised me in that frail-looking body.
“Emmanuel,” Marcel said, turning toward me, “if you have a moment to spare I’d like to talk to you in my shop before those other swine turn up.”
“Glad to,” I said. “You two”—turning to Catie and Thomas—“had better go and help Colin with his loading. Down you get, Evelyne, let go of me now,” I said, trying to disengage her thin arms from my neck while Catie took Thomas by the hand and led him out into the street.
?
??No, no,” Evelyne said, clinging to me even tighter. “Carry me like this to Marcel’s.”
“Will you get down if I do?”
“I promise.”
“If you give way to her once, that little wretch, you’ll never hear the end of it, I warn you,” Marcel said. Then he added, “She’s been living with me since the bomb. Catie looks after her. And believe me, it can be pretty tiring sometimes, with her having the asthma. The nights we go through, well you wouldn’t believe.”
So this was the orphan Fulbert had told us about, the little girl that no one in La Roque could be found to look after. What an unpleasant creature, I thought to myself. He obviously just lies the way he breathes, even when there’s nothing to be gained by it.
Marcel led me through his shop and then, since we would have been too visible there, on into a tiny dining room with a window giving out onto a scarcely larger courtyard. I immediately noticed his lilacs. Protected by stone walls on all four sides, they had been scorched but not actually burned.
“You noticed,” Marcel said with a gleam of pleasure in his black eyes. “There are buds on them! They’re not done for after all, my lilacs. They’re coming again. Come on, sit down, Emmanuel.”
I did as he said, and Evelyne immediately took up her position between my legs, clasped my thumbs in her fists, and leaning her back against me, crossed them over her chest. That done, she sat good as gold.
As I sat down, I glanced up at the shelves above the walnut buffet on which Marcel kept his books. All paperbacks and book-club editions. Because paperbacks you could buy anywhere, and the book-club editions you didn’t have to go into a bookshop in order to acquire. I remembered that the first time I was surprised by Marcel was when I was twelve. Before taking down a book he wanted to show my uncle, I had watched him carefully wash his hands with soap under the kitchen tap. And when he came back I saw that they were no whiter than before. Broad hands with skin tanned like leather, and ingrained with black deep into the pores and cracks.