Her strength thus restored, she passed on to serious matters: “Emmanuel, we’re going to have to bottle the wine this morning, or there’s soon going to be none left.”
I shrugged impatiently. “Then let’s get down to it right away,” I said, “because I’m supposed to be driving over to La Roque at ten with Germain.”
“Right, I’m away now then,” Boudenot announced as he tactfully rose from his chair. I can still see his curly black hair, his broad smile, and merry eyes as he held out his hand for me to shake a second time. He was solidly planted on sturdy legs, the wine singing in his stomach, delighted at being able to visit so many people every morning and drive around in his little yellow post office van with a cigarette between his lips and his behind comfortably ensconced on his private cushion: a fine profession for a fine young lad with a good education who never made mistakes paying out the pensions and money orders and who would one day “enjoy” retirement on full pension. Then he swung around on his heels and I saw his broad back framed for a moment in the opening of the low doorway.
The little yellow deux chevaux was found later, twisted and burned out but still identifiable. Of Boudenot there remained not the slightest trace, nothing, not even a single bone.
I stopped off in my room to put on a sweater before calling Germain at Les Sept Fayards. I let him know that I wouldn’t be over before half past ten to collect him on my way to La Roque. As I emerged from the keep into the inner courtyard, I met up with La Menou and advised her to put on something warmer, since the cellar was cold.
“Oh, I don’t feel the cold,” she said. “It’s Momo who needs the warmth.” As she spoke I was looking down at her from a great height, on account of her tiny stature, so my eyes were directed down the front of her dress. And at that moment an absurd detail in her appearance struck me. She was dressed, as always, in a sort of black smock, shiny from long use, and just below the low square neckline of the smock, against her skin, scarcely visible even to me, I noticed a row of safety pins, and I remember wondering with astonishment, first what they were doing there, and then onto what undergarment they were pinned. Certainly not a brassiere, because what would there be to fit into such a thing?
“But you too, Menou,” I said, eyes still fixed on the row of pins, “you ought to put on a sweater. It’s chilly down in the cellar. There’s no point in catching cold.”
“No, no, I don’t feel the cold. I never do,” La Menou answered, though whether it was just a plain statement of fact or a piece of self-congratulation I couldn’t have told you.
In a fairly ugly mood, I inserted my wine-drawing gun into a barrel and sat down on my stool about twenty yards from La Menou, because the cellar was huge, “bigger than the school playground.” It was lit by electric light bulbs concealed in niches around the walls; but in case of power cuts there were also a number of large candles on iron wall brackets. Neither too dry nor too damp, the cellar’s temperature was invariably the same, summer and winter, just fifty-five degrees on the thermometer on the wall over the water tap. The best refrigerator you could have, according to La Menou, who used it to store all our bottled and preserved food, to say nothing of the bacon, sausages, and hams slung from the vaulted ceiling.
It was around the tap that La Menou had grouped her “tools”: a bottle rinser screwed to a big tub filled by the tap, a draining frame, and an automatic corker. She was wholly engrossed in her task, and her mood was in complete contrast with my own. For her, although she drank only with moderation, drawing the wine was a sacred ritual, an ancient festival, the joyful proof of present abundance, and a promise of future merriment. For me, it was a chore. And a chore I couldn’t get out of. Two people were sufficient for the entire operation—one to draw the wine into the bottles, the other to cork them—but neither of those two persons could be Momo. If he did the drawing, he barely got the wine running when he felt obliged to satisfy himself that it was running well by inserting the barrel of the dispenser into his mouth before inserting it into the neck of the bottle. And if he was doing the corking, then he took a sample swig from every liter before inserting the cork.
So I always did the drawing, La Menou the corking, and Momo was employed carrying the clean empty bottles from her to me and the full bottles back to his mother. Even so, frequent disruptions still occurred. From time to time I would hear La Menou shout, “Momo, do you want my boot in your bottom?”
I didn’t need to look around. I knew that Momo was hastily replacing the bottle he had been sampling into the metal crate. I knew because at the same time, totally refusing to accept the validity of eyewitness evidence, Momo always cried out in an indignant tone, “Hi hin’t hoo hehying!” (I didn’t do anything!)
As I pulled the trigger, the wine rose so rapidly in each bottle that the task demanded my constant attention. It always amazed me the way any manual task, even one as mechanical as drawing wine, made all useful cogitation impossible. Though it was true that the irritatingly insistent tunes emerging from the transistor radio slung from Momo’s shoulder (a recent and unfortunate gift from La Menou) did nothing to help my concentration.
I was gradually emerging from my initial bad temper, but without succeeding in putting much enthusiasm into what I was doing. Drawing wine is not a particularly intoxicating occupation, except when performed after Momo’s fashion. But it had to be done. It was my own wine. I was quite proud of its quality, quite happy to be working with La Menou, and at the same time slightly irritated by Momo’s antics and his pop music. In short, I was living through a very ordinary, very average moment of my life, concerned with tiny, fleeting, and only weakly felt contradictory emotions, with ideas or the beginnings of ideas that didn’t interest me all that much, and including a very average measure of residual boredom.
There was a violent knocking at the door, as though in some Shakespearean tragedy, and Meyssonnier, followed by Colin and big Peyssou, made a pretty undramatic entrance, even though Meyssonnier was in the grip of extreme anger, as I noticed immediately just from the way he was blinking.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said as he strode toward me along the length of the cellar with the other two behind him.
I noted with irritation that they had omitted to close the two doors of the vaulted passage that led into the cellar.
“It’s big, this dump of yours. Luckily we ran into Thomas. He told us where to come.”
“What,” I said as I offered my left hand over my shoulder, eyes still fixed on the wine level in the bottle, “hasn’t Thomas gone yet?”
“No, he was sitting in the sun, on the keep steps, studying his maps.” Meyssonnier’s tone changed slightly as he passed on this information, because a young man who spent so much time studying pebbles inspired him with a certain regard.
“My respects, Monsieur le Comte,” Colin said. For some reason he found it amusing to address me by this pseudo title since I had bought Malevil.
“Morning,” Peyssou growled.
I didn’t look at them. My eyes were still on the rising wine in another bottle. There was a silence in which I sensed a certain embarrassment.
“Well, what about your Boche?” Peyssou asked, sensing the same thing. “Is she on her way?”
Here was one subject at least with no complications attached. Or so he thought.
“She’s not coming back after all,” I said brightly. “She’s getting married.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” La Menou observed in a reproachful tone. “Well, fancy that!” she added scornfully. “Getting married!”
I could see that she was itching to issue a moral condemnation, but she could hardly avoid remembering how she had come to marry her own husband, so she fell silent.
“I don’t believe it!” Peyssou said. “Getting married? Well I take that badly, really I do, considering the treat I had in store for her.”
“You’re going to find yourself short-handed,” Colin said.
I couldn’t turn around to look
at Meyssonnier, the wine rose in the bottles too quickly. But I noted that he was staying very silent. “I have three temporaries coming at the end of the month,” I said after a moment.
“Girls or boys?” Peyssou asked.
“One boy, two girls.”
“Two girls!” Peyssou said. But he didn’t follow it up, and the silence started getting heavy again.
“Menou,” I said, “go and find three glasses for these gentlemen.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Peyssou said as he licked his lips.
“Momo,” La Menou said, “you go and get them. You can see how busy I am.”
The truth was that she had no intention of leaving the cellar just when the conversation looked like becoming interesting.
“Hon’t ho!” (I won’t go.)
“Do you want my boot up your backside?” La Menou asked, rising from her stool with a threatening look.
Momo was out of reach in one bound, then stood stamping furiously on the floor and said again, “Hon’t ho!”
“You will go!” La Menou said, taking a step toward him.
“Momo hon’t ho!” her son cried defiantly, one fist on the door handle poised for flight.
La Menou gauged the distance between them, then calmly sat down again.
“If you go,” she said in a quiet voice pulling down the lever of the corker as she spoke, “I’ll cook you fried potatoes tonight.”
Greed spread over Momo’s badly shaven face and lit up his little dark eyes, the bright and guileless eyes of an animal. “I ha a homise?” he asked eagerly, scrabbling with one hand in his tousled black mane of hair and with the other inside his trousers.
“It’s a promise,” La Menou said.
“Momo ho!” Momo said with a delighted smile. And he vanished so quickly that he too omitted to close the doors behind him. The sound of his nailed boots could be heard receding up the stone staircase.
Peyssou turned to La Menou. “It looks as though your boy is something of a trouble to you,” he said politely.
“Oh, he likes to have his own way sometimes, there’s no denying that,” La Menou said with an air of satisfaction.
“Well, you’ve let yourself in for some cooking this evening, just to get yours,” Colin said.
La Menou’s death’s-head face wrinkled into a grin.
“It so happens,” she said in the local dialect, “that this is my day for cooking fried potatoes anyway. But he didn’t even think of that, poor booby!”
And why it was in fact so much funnier in patois than in French I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps because of the intonation.
“Oh, they’re wily, women are,” little Colin said with his gondola smile. “They can lead you by the nose anywhere.”
“And not only by the nose,” Peyssou added.
There was laughter, and we all three looked at Peyssou with sudden affection. There he was, big Peyssou. Still the same. As filthy-minded as ever.
Another silence. In Malejac, people took their time. You didn’t just rush headlong to the heart of the matter.
“You don’t mind, I hope,” I said, “if I go on drawing my wine while you talk?”
I could see Colin signal to Meyssonnier with his eyes, but Meyssonnier still remained silent. His knife-blade face seemed even longer than before, and his eyelids were flickering at full speed.
“All right then,” Colin said. “We’d better tell you, since you are, after all, a little off the beaten track, up here in Malevil. The letter to the mayor has worked out really quite well. It’s been circulated, and people generally have reacted well. Where that’s concerned, no worries. The wind is beginning to blow our way. It’s where Paulat’s concerned that things aren’t going so well.”
“Ah, old Paulat is stirring things up, eh?”
“He is that. Especially when he saw that things were beginning to go against the mayor. He went around telling everyone that he approved of it heartily, that letter. He even managed to suggest that it was his brainchild.”
“The devil he did!” I said.
“And if he hadn’t actually signed it,” Colin went on, “that was simply because he didn’t want to sign his name next to that of a Communist.”
“Whereas,” I put in, “he would be quite willing to appear next to a Communist on a list of candidates, provided, of course, that the Communist didn’t head that list.”
“That’s it!” Colin said. “You’ve got it exactly.”
“And the name at the head of the list, needless to say, has to be mine. I would be elected mayor, Paulat would become my deputy, and since I am far too busy to run the town hall properly, he would take it over.”
I stopped my wine drawing and turned to face them. “All right. And so what? What have Paulat’s little stratagems got to do with us? We just ignore them, that’s all.”
“Yes, but you see people are pretty much in agreement with him,” Colin said.
“In agreement about what?”
“About your being mayor.”
I burst out laughing. “Pretty much in agreement?”
“That was just my way of putting it,” Colin said. “Actually they’re wholly in agreement.”
I looked at Meyssonnier, then returned to my wine. In 1970, when I had resigned my headmastership of the school to take over my uncle’s business, people in Malejac had thought me very unwise indeed. And when I bought Malevil, it was clear as day that Emmanuel, for all his education, was as crazy as his uncle before him. But the 160 acres of impenetrable undergrowth had been transformed into lush meadows. Malevil’s vineyards had been replanted and now produced an excellent wine. I was about to start earning “fantastic amounts” by opening the castle to tourists. And above all I had returned to Malejac’s fold of orthodoxy: I had begun to keep cows again. With the result that in the space of six years I had received swift promotion in local public opinion. Once a madman, I had now become a shrewd devil. And why shouldn’t a shrewd devil who looks after his own interests so well also be entrusted with those of the community?
In short, Malejac had firmly grasped the wrong end of the stick twice: first by taking me for a madman, second by wanting to make me its mayor. Because I wouldn’t have made a good mayor at all, since it just didn’t interest me enough. And meanwhile, the good mayor was there in front of their noses the whole time. But of course, true to its tradition of blindness, Malejac just couldn’t see him.
Leaving the doors open, though admittedly he did have both hands full, Momo returned carrying not three but six glasses. Obviously he had no intention of being left out. He was carrying them one inserted into another in a vertical pile, with his filthy fingers deeply ensconced in the top one.
I stood up. “Give them here,” I said, promptly ridding him of his burden. And I began the distribution with him, making sure he got the soiled glass.
I drew a bottle of ’75, the best in my opinion, and went the round of my guests, greeted by the customary refusals and protestations. As I was pouring the last glass, Thomas came in, closing the two doors carefully behind him, needless to say, and walked toward us without the slightest trace of a smile, more than ever like a Greek statue someone had dressed up with a crash helmet and a black raincoat.’
“Have a glass with us,” I said, offering him mine.
“No, thanks,” Thomas said. “I don’t drink in the morning.”
“Good morning again,” Peyssou said with a polite smile.
And since Thomas just looked at him without response, either to his smile or his greeting, he added with an embarrassed air; “We’ve already met once this morning.”
“Yes, twenty minutes ago,” Thomas said, his face still expressionless. Clearly he was unable to see any necessity for saying good morning again, since he had already been through that formality once.
“I just came to tell you that I shan’t be here for lunch this morning,” he said, turning to me.
“Turn off that trashy music, can’t you,” I yelled at Momo. “You’re driving us
all crazy with that thing!”
“You hear what Emmanuel says?” La Menou shouted.
Momo moved away a few steps, clutching his radio under his left arm with a sullen look and making no move to turn down the volume even slightly.
“That was a brilliant idea of yours last Christmas!” I said to La Menou.
“Poor Momo,” she answered, immediately changing sides. “He has to have something to amuse him while he’s mucking out your stables!”
I looked at her, effectively silenced. Then I took the line of smiling while at the same time frowning slightly, a reaction that I hoped would convey my recognition of La Menou’s victory while at the same time safeguarding my authority.
“I was saying that I shan’t be back for lunch,” Thomas said.
“Fine,” I said. And as Thomas turned to leave again I said to Meyssonnier in the local dialect, “Come on, don’t worry your head about the elections. We’ll find a way of neutralizing old Paulat.”
In my memory, everything freezes at that exact moment, as though the cellar had become a waxworks in which historic characters were forever frozen into familiar postures. In the center, the group formed by Meyssonnier, Colin, big Peyssou, and myself, glasses in our hands, faces enlivened by the prospect of the discussion ahead, all four very concerned about the future of a village with a population of 412 inhabitants, on a planet with a population of four billion human beings.
Striding away from the group, with his back toward it, Thomas. Between Thomas and us, Momo, still looking at me defiantly, holding an already half-empty glass in one hand and in the other his radio, which was still churning out some imbecilic pop song at full blast. Beside him, as though ready to spring to his defense, yet so much tinier than he, La Menou, wrinkled as a little dried-up apple, eyes still glittering from her recent victory over me. And lastly, all around and above us, the vast cellar with its great ribbed and vaulted ceiling lit from below, softening the light before reflecting it back down onto our heads.