At one o’clock Meyssonnier reminded me of the night watch we had shared and disappeared for a short nap. At three, rather pleased with myself at having broken Meyssonnier’s endurance record by two hours, I too had reached a total exhaustion point and had to stop. However, by then Peyssou had more than enough stones and was asking Jacquet to start helping him with the actual building. Meyssonnier was just returning—two hours later—from his “short nap,” so I handed over the command to him and announced to no one in particular that I too was going to take a rest. As I walked away, I heard Meyssonnier sending a very tired Thomas to replace Colin at the advance post on the La Roque road.
Once in my room, I scarcely had time to take my clothes off. Despite the coolness of the enormously thick walls, it was very hot in there. I fell like a great weight onto my bed, completely inert, legs like lead, arms drained of strength, and just went out like a light. It was a very disturbed siesta though, ending in a series of nightmares. I won’t describe them. There are enough horrors in real life as it is. And besides, they were the kind of dreams that everyone has. You are being hunted down by people who want to kill you. When they catch up with you, you lash out at them, but there is no strength in your blows. If only you dreamed it just once it wouldn’t be so bad, but no, it comes again and again. What’s so wearing is the repetition. And what was particularly horrid on this occasion was that my pursuer was Bébelle, dressed in a skirt, his long blond hair floating out behind him, his knife in his hand.
Just as the edge of the knife touched my throat, I woke up. I opened my eyes. And there was a woman in my room, but not, thank heaven, Bébelle. It was Catie.
She was standing at the foot of my bed, eyes dancing with wicked mischief. She stared down at me without saying anything. Then suddenly she hurled herself on top of me, weighing my body down with the whole weight of hers, and crushing her lips against mine.
I was still half asleep, and Catie could almost have been part of my dream, especially since she took control of matters with a dexterity that amazed me. When I was at last completely awake, it was too late. I was already ensconced. Remorse came at the same moment as pleasure, then faded as the pleasure became more intense. And it became intense to the point of frenzy, given and shared by a partner totally abandoned to her task, attaining the very peaks of participation right away and finding the means to die and be reborn two or three times in the short while I myself took to collapse into satisfied release.
With some difficulty I regained my breath. I looked at her. I hadn’t thought she was all that pretty. So presumably it must be my eyes that had changed. I saw her now, in the warm disorder of that bed, as being quite ravishing. At the same time, however, my moral sense resurfaced, and I said with reproach, though without much real sting in the reproach, “Why did you do that, Catie?”
It was a bit feeble. And a bit hypocritical too, since after all, what she had done had not been done alone.
She answered immediately, “First, because I find you attractive, Emmanuel, even though you are old.” (Thanks.) “Really, leaving Thomas out of it, if I had to make a list, I’d put you only just after Peyssou.” (Thanks again.)
She paused briefly, then lifted her head, and there was a little flame in her eyes. “But mainly, I wanted you to know that Catie is somebody. Catie isn’t just a thoughtless little troublemaker, the way you thought. Catie is a woman, a real one!”
I ignored the rather unkind implication there (poor Miette). Squatting cross-legged on the bed, hair in fine disorder, cheeks pink, small breasts still on fire, Catie gazed down at me in triumph, her eyes shining bright with pride. At first glance it might have seemed rather absurd that she should be so proud of sexual attributes for which she could claim no merit, since she had received them at birth. But what about men? Don’t we—myself included—pride ourselves just as much on our virility? Don’t we strut and preen like peacocks, proud of our prowess? And besides, it’s not so stupid after all. Because the fact was that during the past few minutes my consideration for Catie had increased by leaps and bounds. I too found that she was “a woman, a real one.” Had it not been for Thomas, and the unfortunate moral sense with which I was afflicted, I might have been inclined to see this end to my siesta as the beginning of a habit.
And who said that Catie wasn’t intelligent? The eyes fixed on mine, those eyes in which I had read such pleasure a moment ago—all the pleasure that she took and all the pleasure that she was now so deliriously proud of having given me—were following and penetrating all my thoughts as soon as they appeared in my mind. She could see, or sense—her method of apprehending these things was unimportant—that the low esteem in which I had held her was now a thing of the past, and that the price I placed on her was now quite considerable. She basked in the ecstasy of this promotion. Her head was tilted back, her lips slightly open, her eyes shining. Her triumph was a wine she could feel streaming down inside her throat.
I said in a muffled voice, “All the same, Catie, Thomas will have to know.”
The thought was like a bucket of cold water to me, but not to her. She just said with a chuckle, “No need to get in a stew about it. I’ll see to it. You don’t have to bother about it at all.”
I was staggered by such brazenness. “But Catie, you can’t. He’s going to be furious, hurt...”
She shook her head. “No, he isn’t. Not in the slightest. He’s far too fond of you.”
“No fonder than I am of him,” I said, then felt rather shamefaced at having said such a thing at that moment.
“Oh, I know!” she said with a slight hint of her former sharpness returning. “You were fond of everyone at Malevil, except me!” Then she gave a chuckle and said, “But that’s all over now!”
She got off the bed and began rearranging her clothes. And as she did so she gazed down at me with an air of possession, as though she had just bought me in the big department store in our county town, and was now on her way home, her purchase tucked under her arm, very satisfied with it and herself. And perhaps I was only part of the purchase. Because her acquisitive gaze was now making a tour of my room, lingering on my desk (the photo of my Boche!), then even longer on the sofa below the window. And each of these two halts was accompanied by a little grimace.
“Well, my poor Emmanuel,” she said, “it’s a good thing I’ve taken you in hand, I’d say. No one could say you’re getting much in the way of satisfaction these days!”
And her eyes were suddenly shining again. She was standing over me, eyes glittering with insolence. “And with Evelyne? You still haven’t made up your mind?”
My God, she thinks she can get away with anything now! I was furious. Except that no, why lie, I wasn’t furious. Much less than I would have been before anyway. It was amazing how she’d managed to soften me up! And what’s more she could see it. She didn’t back down. “No answer?”
“What do you expect me to say? She’s only thirteen!”
“Fourteen. I’ve seen her papers.”
“Either way, she’s just a kid.”
She threw up her hands. “A kid? Don’t you believe it. A woman! And one who knows what she wants!”
“And what does she want?”
“You, of course!” She burst into a triumphant peal of laughter. “And she’ll have you too! I just have, haven’t I? Abbé of Malevil!”
Her Parthian shot, except that she wasn’t fleeing. She threw herself on my neck and began working her way over my face with her lips and tongue.
“I can see you’re worried, Emmanuel. You’re thinking, The discipline here, finished! With that crazy girl! Well you just think again! It’s the opposite. You’ll see! Everything you say goes! On the double! A real little soldier, that’s me now! Well, I must be off now!”
What a girl! Pure fire! The door slammed behind her. I lay there dumbfounded, ashamed, thrilled. I got up, threw my towel around my neck and went downstairs to take a shower and sort my ideas out a little. But after the shower, my thoughts were jus
t as muddled as before. And I didn’t really care. One thing was certain. For a whole hour I hadn’t thought about Vilmain, and I felt reinflated, confident, bursting with optimism.
When I reached the worksite I was greeted with complete naturalness by the men, but not by the women. They all knew what had been going on. And who knows? Perhaps they even suspected me of having sent Thomas out to keep watch on the road in order to clear the way. Whereas in fact that had nothing to do with me. It had been Meyssonnier who’d given him the detail.
The first look I met was Evelyne’s. It was black, despite the blueness of her eyes. Then La Falvine, all excited complicity. La Menou was shaking her head and carrying on one of her sotto voce soliloquies, clearly not complimentary, her annoyance increased by the fact that she couldn’t let me actually hear what she was saying because Evelyne would have heard too. The only eyes I didn’t meet were those of Miette, and that made me sad.
Catie was holding open the neck of a sack while Miette threw sand into it with a little shovel. Catie was managing to convey an air of nonchalant triumph just by the almost obscene way she was holding the mouth of the sack open while Miette toiled away like a slave, a dumb and even a blind slave now, because I passed within two yards of her without her even raising her eyes, and without my being given my usual delicious smile.
“Did you have a good sleep, Emmanuel?” Catie asked with calm impudence.
She was doing it on purpose! I wanted to answer her sharply. I wanted to let her know that she had better not start parading the fact that she had “had me,” as she put it, in front of everyone. I wanted to let her know as well that I still retained my preference, my partial preference anyway, for her sister. But Catie’s eyes confused me with their insistent glances. They were doing their work only too well.
In the end I turned my head away and said rather awkwardly, “Hello there, you two.”
Catie laughed, but Miette reacted not at all. She was now also deaf, it seemed, as well as dumb and blind. I felt as guilty as though I had betrayed her. It was as though the new value I attached to her sister had been taken away from her.
I went out through the main gate and found myself once more on the men’s side. A simpler world at once. They were doing things without thinking about anything else. Their thoughts were all objective. I looked around at them, all deeply engrossed in their work, and I felt a sense of gratitude.
The task in hand was now in its final stage, the longest and most laborious. The wall was by now nine feet high, and the last three feet were in the course of construction. This meant that there were two ladders leaning against it, up which Peyssou and Jacquet, each with a block of stone loaded onto his broad shoulders, were slowly climbing, feeling carefully for each rung with their feet, then depositing their burdens on the summit. Peyssou and Jacquet were the only two of us capable of this exploit. Colin was helping our two Herculeses as they took turns to settle a block of stone securely on the other’s shoulders. As for Meyssonnier, who apparently didn’t have the same knack for this task as Colin, he had been reduced to idleness, because there were by now plenty of stones on the site to finish the wall.
I suggested he accompany me on a scouting expedition, an offer he was glad to accept. But before we left I went back inside to ask La Menou for a yard or two of thread.
“Ah, the thing is, Emmanuel, I don’t have much left now,” she said, her deep-set eyes still heavy with reproach. “And when there’s none left, how are you going to get me more, I’d like to know.”
“Now come on, Menou, I only want a yard or two. And it’s not to play games with either!”
She made her way over toward the gate-tower kitchen, her mutters rising steadily in volume, and most imprudently I followed her. Imprudently, because once inside, out of earshot of the others, I was given the rough edge of La Menou’s tongue.
“Ah, my poor Emmanuel,” she said with an assortment of sighs and sad head shakes, all hypocritical, since she was about to enjoy herself immensely. “So you’ll never change then, that’s the way it is. Always running after your own tail! Just like your Uncle Samuel before you! I should think you’d be ashamed! A piece like that, and you yourself married her to your friend! Ah, a fine curé you’re making us, and no mistake! And to think of you hearing my confession too! Heaven alone knows which of us ought to be hearing the other! But it’s as sure as sure that you’d be the one with more to say! And surer still that the good Lord can’t be very pleased up there! Notice! I’ve said nothing about her! Nothing! I know how to behave. But I can think, and think I do. At least there’ll be no worry now if the fire goes out. We can always light it again from you-know-what, which heaven knows is hot enough! And young as she is, a tongue like a viper! And another thing you can be sure of—she’s not going to stop with you. Oh, no! It will be Peyssou next, you’ll see! And after Peyssou, Jacquet. And all the others! She can make her comparisons then!” (Just a hint of envy there, I felt.)
Like my uncle, I listened and said nothing. And while I listened, again like my uncle, I went through all the motions of the role assigned to me in this little comedy. I frowned, I shrugged, I shook my head, in short I showed all the external signs of a displeasure I was very far from feeling. Counting the attack on old Pougès, this was the second great outburst since Momo’s death. The old strength of mind, the energy, the aggressiveness, they were all still there. The little skeleton scolding me had never been more alive. Besides which, denounce me roundly though she might, La Menou was very far from condemning me in her heart. Virtuously continent, she would have despised me. Her views were simple. A bull is made for serving. The shamelessness is all on the side of the cow. Or at least it is when she goes looking for the bull instead of just submitting to him, as is her duty.
The outburst showed signs of becoming circular. I was being treated to the remark about the fire being relit from you-know-what a second time. When invention gives way to repetition I always intervene. And since it was part of my role that I should always have the last word, in a gruff, bad-tempered voice I said, “Is it coming or not, this thread?”
Those few sharp words were sufficient to make the thread appear, as if from nowhere, on the table. She measured me out a length, as small a length as she could manage, her grumbles gradually subsiding into a more and more inaudible murmur. I left the kitchen with my ears buzzing, and rather astonished, as I thought about it, that life in Malevil could still be so humdrum in its tone at a time when we were under imminent threat of extermination.
“You know what I’m thinking,” Peyssou said from the top of his ladder as he manhandled a vast block of stone the way I would handle a brick. “Those sandbags, the thing we must do is pile them up so the wall doesn’t show at all. That way Vilmain will think there’s nothing but sand for him to get through. Till he rams his head against the stone.”
I gave my approval, told Colin to take over the command while Meyssonnier and I were away, and asked him to come down and close the cat door after us. It was a very undignified way to emerge from a castle, crawling on all fours, but I wanted the habit to become second nature, so I had to give a good example. A whole band of attackers could have rushed through our main gate in a trice, but not through this little hole down at ground level, whose sliding cover—I forgot to mention this earlier—had a scythe blade affixed to its lower edge.
We set off down the La Roque road, and Thomas must have been both well concealed and alert, because we soon heard a curt “Where are you going?” and even then we couldn’t see where he was hiding. Eventually he rose to his feet, looking even more like a Greek statue than ever with his naked torso and serene watchful air.
“We’re going out to reconnoiter the forest track. I’ll relieve you on the way back if you like.”
“Oh, you needn’t bother,” Thomas said. “I’ve only been lying here keeping my eyes open. Much less tiring than what you’ve been doing.”
I blushed, and felt as though I’d been sewn alive into a traitor’s skin.
“I want to have a talk with you anyway,” I said.
I had made my decision without much prior consideration, but I was glad nevertheless. I wasn’t about to hide behind Catie. If there was to be an explosion I wanted to take the full force of it myself. I gave Thomas a little wave and hurried on down the hill, Meyssonnier beside me on my left. Although the charred tree trunks were all leafless, the undergrowth on the other hand had taken advantage of the alternating sun and rain of the past two months to break into a tropical exuberance of growth. I had never seen plants so tall, so spreading, so numerous—an amazing proliferation. I noticed bracken fronds nine feet high, and with stalks as big as my forearm, brambles like walls, hawthorns already almost trees, chestnut and elm suckers forming enormous clumps well above my head.
The Malevil end of the shortcut to La Roque through the forest is invisible from the road in summer, but all my old markers were still there and I found it without any trouble. I had often used this track to exercise my horses before the day it happened, partly because it was carpeted with rich black leaf mold, kind to hoofs, and partly because it offered a convenient proportion of hills to flat. I even used to give it a little clean-up each year, cutting away the more troublesome branches and brambles, even though the woods didn’t belong to me. I also took good care never to mention it to anyone in La Roque, in case the Lormiaux family should take to using it for their geldings. And more recently still I had cleared away all the blackened tree trunks that had made the journey back from La Roque so difficult that day I rode over with Colin to tell Fulbert of Catie’s marriage.
No animals could have survived the bomb other than those in holes. And apart from Craa, whom we hadn’t seen since the rifle shot that morning, there were no birds left at all. It was a chilling experience, walking through forest undergrowth without hearing a single bird call and without hearing or seeing a single insect.