Viper's Tangle

by François Charles Mauriac

  “When are they leaving Paris, your accomplices of Saint-Germain-des-Près?”

  He assured me that they had taken the evening train the day before. I cut short his show of gratitude and his promises. No doubt he was stupefied. A fantastic divinity, whose ways were unforeseeable, and whom he had betrayed, laid hands upon him, let him go, picked him up again....He shut his eyes and opened his mouth. With his tail between his legs, and his ears flattened, he carried away on all fours the bone that I tossed him.

  Just as he was going out, he thought better of it and asked me how he would receive this income, through what medium.

  “You will receive it,” I told him coldly. “I always keep my promises. Nothing else is any business of yours.”

  With his hand on the latch, he still hesitated.

  “I would rather it were a life interest, an annuity, something like that, in a sound insurance company....I should feel more comfortable, I shouldn’t worry so much....”

  I wrenched the door that he was holding wide open, and pushed him out into the passage.

  Chapter XVII

  I leant against the mantel-piece, and mechanically counted the pieces of varnished wood assembled in the waste-basket.

  For years I had dreamt of this unknown son of mine. All through my poor life, I had never lost the feeling that he existed. Somewhere there was a child, born of me, whom I could find again and who, perhaps, would comfort me.

  The fact that he was of humble condition made him all the closer to me. It was pleasant to me to think that he would be in no way like my legitimate son. I endowed him at one and the same time with that simplicity and that power of attraction which are not rare among the common people.

  Finally I had played my last card. I knew that, after him, I had nothing left to expect from anybody, and that there would be nothing for me to do but curl up and turn my face to the wall. For forty years I had believed that I accepted hatred: that which I inspired, that which I felt. But, like other people, I cherished a hope, and I had deceived my hunger, as best I could, until I was reduced to my last resource. Now it was finished.

  There did not remain to me even the frightful pleasure of laying plans to disinherit those who had wronged me. Robert had put them on the track. They would certainly end by discovering my safes, even those which were not in my own name.

  Think of something else? Oh, if only I could go on living, and have the time to spend it all—and die, and leave them with not enough to find to pay for a pauper’s burial! But after a whole life of saving, when I had made myself a slave to my passion for economy for years, how was I to learn, at my age, the ways of the prodigal?

  Besides, the children are watching me, I said to myself. I should never be able to do anything in that direction without its becoming a formidable weapon in their hands....I should have to ruin myself furtively, little by little....

  Alas! I should never be able to ruin myself. I should never succeed in losing my money. If only it were possible to take it with me into the grave, to go back to earth holding that gold, those notes, those securities in my arms! If only I could give the lie to those who preach that this world’s riches do not follow us into death!

  There were “good works”-”good works” are pitfalls which swallow up everything. Could I not send anonymous gifts to the Board of Charity, to the Little Sisters of the Poor? Could I not, in short, think of others-others besides my enemies?

  But the horror of old age is that it is the sum-total of a life-a sum-total of which one cannot change a figure. I have spent sixty years creating this old man dying of hatred. I am what I am. I should have to become somebody else. Oh God, oh God—if only You existed!...”

  At dusk a girl came in to turn down my bed. She did not close the shutters. I lay down in the dimness. The noises of the street, the light of the lamps, did not prevent me from drowsing. I came back to consciousness momentarily, as one does on a journey when the train stops; then I dozed off again. Though I did not feel any worse, it seemed to me as though I had nothing to do but lie there and wait patiently until this sleep became eternal.

  I had still, however, to take steps for the payment of the promised income to Robert, and I also wanted to go to the poste restante, since there was nobody to do me this service now. For three days I had not had any letters. That expectancy of an unknown letter, that expectancy which survives everything—what a sign it is that hope cannot be uprooted, and that there is always some of that weed left in us!

  It was this eagerness about my letters that gave me the strength to get up the next day, about noon, and go to the post-office. It was raining, I had no umbrella, and I hugged the walls. My appearance aroused curiosity, and people turned round to look at me.

  I felt like shouting at them: “What is there odd about me? Do you take me for a madman? You mustn’t do that—the children will take advantage of it. Don’t look at me like that. I am the same as everybody else—except that my children hate me and that I have to defend myself against them. But that’s not the same thing as being mad. Some times I am under the influence of all the drugs I have to take for my angina pectoris.

  “Well, yes, I do talk to myself, because I am always alone. Speech is necessary to a human being. Why should there be anything odd about what a lonely man does or says?”

  The packet which was handed to me contained some printed matter, some letters from the bank, and three telegrams. Probably they were about some Stock Exchange transaction which could not be carried through. I waited until I was seated in a cheap restaurant before opening them.

  At long tables some bricklayers, looking like clowns of all ages, were slowly eating their due portions and drinking their pints, scarcely talking at all. They had been working in the rain all the morning. They had to start again at half past one. It was the end of July. Everybody was flocking to the stations....

  Would they understand anything about my torture? Of course they would!—and how could an old lawyer imagine anything else? The very first case in which I had appeared concerned children disputing among themselves about keeping their father. The wretched man went from one to another, every three months, cursed by all of them—and he was at one with his children in clamouring for death to deliver him from them. On how many peasants’ farms had I not witnessed that tragedy of the old man who, for a long time, refuses to relinquish his property, and then lets himself be done out of it, with the result that his children kill him with over-work and under-feeding?

  Yes, he ought to know all about it, that thin, gnarled bricklayer a couple of yards away from me, slowly munching his bread between his toothless gums.

  Nowadays a well-dressed old man in a cheap restaurant excites no remark. I dissected a piece of whitish rabbit, and amused myself by watching the rain-drops trickling together on the window. I deciphered the name of the proprietor the wrong way round. I felt for my handkerchief, and my hand encountered the packet of letters.

  I put on my glasses, and opened one of the telegrams at random. “Mother’s funeral tomorrow July 23 nine o’clock church Saint Louis.” It was dated that morning. The other two, sent the day before, must have followed one another at a few hours’ interval. One read: “Mother very ill return”: the other: “Mother dead....” All three were signed by Hubert.

  I crumpled up the telegrams and went on eating. My mind was preoccupied with the thought that I should have to find the strength to take the night train. For some minutes I thought of nothing else. Then another feeling came to life in me: astonishment at surviving Isa.

  It was understood that I was going to die. That I was to be the first to go was a matter about which there was no question, either for myself or for anybody else. Plans, intrigues, plots—all had no object other than the days which were to follow my death, very near at hand. I did not entertain the smallest doubt on the subject, any more than my family.

  There was an aspect of my wife of which I had never lost sight. It was that of my widow, a woman whose crape would be in her wa
y when she opened the safe. A change of the stars in their courses could not have caused me greater perturbation, greater uneasiness, than this death of hers. Despite myself, the man of business in me started examining the situation and deciding what attitude to adopt towards my enemies. Such were my feelings until the moment the train started.

  Then my imagination came into play. For the first time, I saw Isa as she must have been in her bed, yesterday and the day before. I reconstituted the setting, her room at Calèse—I did not know that she had died at Bordeaux. I murmured: “putting her in the coffin...” and gave way to a cowardly sense of relief.

  What would my attitude have been? How should I have borne myself under the watchful, hostile eyes of the children? Those questions did not arise now.

  For the rest, the bed to which I should have to betake myself as soon as I arrived would avoid any difficulties. There could be no question of my being present at the funeral; at that moment I had just made an effort to reach the lavatory, in vain.

  This weakness of mine did not frighten me. Now that Isa was dead, I no longer expected to die; my turn had passed. But I was afraid of an attack, more especially as I was alone in my compartment. Somebody would meet me at the station—I had telegraphed—Hubert, no doubt....

  No, it was not he. What a relief when I saw the fat face of Alfred, strained with lack of sleep! He seemed frightened at the sight of me. I had to take his arm, and I could not get into the car without his help. We drove to my house in Bordeaux, cheerless under a rainy morning, through a district of slaughter-houses and schools.

  I had no need to talk. Alfred went into the smallest details, and described the precise spot in the public gardens where Isa had collapsed (just before you come to the greenhouses, in front of the clump of palm-trees); the chemist’s shop to which she had been carried; the difficulty of getting a woman of her weight up to her room, on the first floor; the blood-letting, the tapping....

  She had remained conscious all night, despite cerebral hæmorrhage. She had asked for me by signs, insistently, and then she had fallen asleep, just as a priest arrived with the blessed oils. “But she had received Communion the day before....”

  Alfred wanted to drop me at the house, already draped in black, and go on himself, on the ground that he had barely time to change for the funeral. But he had to resign himself to helping me out of the car. He assisted me up the steps.

  I did not recognise the hall. Within its shadowy walls, groups of candles were burning around a heap of flowers. I blinked my eyes. The sense of being somewhere else which I felt resembled that of certain dreams. Two motionless nuns had been provided together with everything else. From that collection of draperies, flowers and lights the usual staircase, with its worn carpet, ascended towards everyday life.

  Hubert came down it. He was in evening dress, very correct. He held out his hand to me and spoke; but from what a distance his voice came! His face approached mine, and grew enormous, and then I lost consciousness.

  They told me afterwards that this faint of mine lasted only three minutes. I came to myself in a little room which used to be the waiting-room, before I gave up the Bar. Smelling-salts pricked my mucous membrane. I recognised Geneviève’s voice: “He’s coming round....”

  I opened my eyes. They were all bending over me. Their faces seemed to me different, disfigured, red, some of them greenish. Janine, healthier than her mother, looked as old as she did.

  Tears had ravined Hubert’s face especially. He had that ugly, touching expression that he used to have as a child, at the time when Isa took him on her knee and said to him: “He’s very sorry for himself, isn’t he, my little boy?...” Only Phili, in that evening suit which he had dragged through all the night-haunts of Paris and Berlin, showed me on his handsome face indifference and boredom—looking just the same as, no doubt, he did when he went out on a party, or rather when he came back, drunk and dishevelled; for he had not yet tied his tie.

  Behind him, I could just make out some veiled women, who must have been Olympia and her daughters. Other white shirt-fronts gleamed in the shadows.

  Geneviève put a glass to my lips, and I took a few sips. I told her that I was feeling better. She asked me, in a gentle, kindly voice, whether I would like to go and lie down at once. I spoke the first words that came into my head.

  “I should have liked so much to accompany her to the end, since I was not here to say ‘Good-bye’ to her.”

  I repeated, like an actor trying to get the right key: “Since I was not here to say ‘Good-bye’ to her”; and these commonplace words, intended only to save appearances, which came to me because they were a part of my rôle in the funeral rites, awakened in me, with sudden power, the feeling of which they were the expression.

  It was as though I had told myself something which I had not yet realised. I should never see my wife again. There would never be any explanation between us. She would never read these pages. Things would remain eternally at the point where I had left them when I went away from Calèse.

  We could not begin over again, make a start on a new basis. She was dead without knowing me, without knowing that I was not merely that monster, that torturer, and that another man existed in me. Even if I had arrived at the last moment, even if we had not exchanged a word, she would at least have seen the tears that now furrowed my cheeks; she would have carried away with her the vision of my grief.

  Only my children, mute with astonishment, contemplated that spectacle. Probably they had never seen me cry, in the whole of their lives. That old, surly, terrifying face, that Medusa’s head whose stare none of them had ever been able to withstand, metamorphosed itself, became simply human. I heard somebody saying (I think it was Janine):

  “If only you hadn’t gone away!...Why did you go?”

  Yes, why had I gone away? But could I not have got back in time? If the telegrams had not been addressed to me poste restante, if I had received them at the Rue Brèa....Hubert was rash enough to add:

  “Going away like that without leaving any address....We had no idea....”

  A thought, hitherto confused in my mind, came to birth all at once. Supporting myself with my two hands on the arms of the chair, I got up, trembling with rage, and shouted straight in his face: “Liar!”

  He stammered: “Father, have you gone mad?” and I went on:

  “Yes, you are all liars. You knew my address. Dare to tell me to my face that you did not know it!”

  Hubert protested feebly: “How could we have known it?”

  “Were you not in contact with anybody in close touch with me? Dare to deny it—just dare!”

  The family, frozen into stone, stared at me in silence. Hubert shook his head like a child entangled in its own lie.

  “You didn’t pay him very much for his betrayal, either. You were not very generous, my children. Twelve thousand francs a year to a fellow who gives you back a fortune—it’s next to nothing.”

  I laughed—that laugh which makes me cough. The children could not find a word to say. Phili muttered, half to himself: “Dirty trick....” I went on, lowering my voice in response to a beseeching gesture from Hubert, who was vainly trying to speak.

  “It is because of you that I did not come back in time. You kept in touch with everything I was doing, but you could not let me suspect it. If you had telegraphed to the Rue Brèa, I should have known that I was betrayed. Nothing in the world would have made you do that—not even the supplications of your dying mother. It hurt you, no doubt, but you kept your eyes on the main chance....

  I said all this to them, and other things even more horrible. Hubert implored his sister: “Get him to stop! Get him to stop! They’ll hear him...” in a gasping voice. Geneviève put her arm round my shoulders and made me sit down again.

  “This isn’t the time for all this, Father. We’ll talk about it later on, when we’ve slept on it. I beg of you, in the name of her who is still here....”

  Hubert, livid as a corpse himself, put a f
inger to his lips. The master of ceremonies came in with a list of the people who were to be pall-bearers. I took a few steps forward. I wanted to walk by myself. The family scattered in front of me as I tottered along. I succeeded in crossing the threshold of the mortuary chapel and sinking down on a kneeling-stool.

  There Hubert and Geneviève came to fetch me. They took me one by each arm, and I went with them obediently. Getting up the staircase was a difficult business. One of the nuns agreed to look after me during the funeral. Hubert, before he left me, affected to ignore what had passed between us, and asked me whether he had done right in naming the President of the Bar Council as a pall-bearer. I turned my face towards the streaming window, without taking the trouble to reply.

  Already there was the noise of many feet. The whole town was coming to pay its respects. On the Fondaudège side, with whom were we not allied? And, on my side, there were the Bar, the banks, the business world....

  I felt a state of well-being, like that of a man who has been let off, whose innocence has been recognised. I had convicted the children of lying. They had not denied their guilt.

  While the whole house still murmured, as though this were some strange ball without music, I forced myself to fix my mind upon their crime. It was they alone who had prevented me from receiving Isa’s last farewell....

  But I spurred my old hatred like a jaded steed. It made no response. Physical prostration, or satisfaction at having had the last word—I do not know what it was that made me more gentle, despite myself.

  The sound of the appropriate prayers came to my ears no longer. The noise of the funeral died away in the distance, until a silence as deep as that of Calèse reigned in the vast house. Isa had emptied it of its inhabitants. Behind her corpse she had carried away with her the whole household. There was nobody left but myself and the nun, finishing at my bedside the rosary that she had begun beside the coffin.

  That silence made me once more sensitive to the eternal separation, to the departure from which there was no coming back. Again there was a choking in my throat, because, now, it was too late, and between her and me there was nothing more to say.