The Catalans

by Patrick O'Brian

  So although he could not remember the child Madeleine as a person, he could fix her exactly in her place, surround her with her relations and her contemporaries. He could define her, like a geometrical locus, in relation to a number of determined entities, a very large number in this case. Still, it was irritating not to be able to manage his memory better: he had often heard about the girl, and that should have perpetuated a visual image. Heard about her, that is, before all this fuss; for she had been something of a protégée of his Aunt Margot. He had heard about her accompanying Aunt Margot to Perpignan to see a parade, helping with Aunt Margot’s orphans: “I made the rest of the silk you sent me into a collar and cuffs for Madeleine.” But particularly he had heard about her when she married one Francisco Cortade: it was a marriage very much disapproved by Aunt Margot and by all the girl’s family—a most unequal match, by all that he heard. It had made Aunt Margot angry to see Madeleine, an educated girl, able to speak correct French and to present herself anywhere, capable of holding a serious position (she could type), throwing herself away in marriage to a young fisherman with nothing at all, a young man furthermore who was said to be idle and to have absurd pretensions. She had been angry, too, because she felt that Madeleine had been deceitful; she had never told Aunt Margot the full state of her feelings, and the marriage had come as a disagreeable surprise. She had been so angry, indeed, that she had not fully restored the girl to favor until the marriage ended in disaster. Dr. Roig had heard about this: the young man had apparently run away with a film star—an event for Saint-Féliu—and Madeleine, having taken her desertion very hard, had been comforted and sustained by Aunt Margot.

  Now it cannot have been so very long after that, he reflected, arranging the chronology of events in his mind, that I had that letter from cousin Côme with the facetious reference to Xavier making his typist work overtime: that was the beginning. Though perhaps in fact it was not the true beginning, for cousin Côme had an obscene mind and he could not see a man and a woman together without being sure that they coupled furtively, that they had a guilty relationship—a state of affairs that was in itself intrinsically amusing, very funny indeed to Côme.

  Perpignan. In the fury of the arrival Dr. Roig slipped back into his corner seat, where he could keep safely out of reach of the contending parties, the strong body of those who wished to get out, and the still stronger body of those who were going to get on at any cost at all. With each stop in its southward journey the train had met a more determined set of boarders (with each kilometer the fiery rudeness of the people grew) and here, almost at its last halt before the Spanish frontier, almost at the extremity of France, it was received by a horde so fierce that it might have been fleeing from the plague, or a devouring fire behind. By this alone he could have told that he was in his own country, but now all the voices were Catalan too, for further proof; and that familiar harshness stirred him as no harmonious tongue could ever have done. It was not a beautiful language, he was bound to admit, and the people who were speaking it were neither decorative nor well-mannered; but it was his own language, this was his native country, and these were his own people.

  The compartment was crowded, and he could distinguish the accents of Elne in the plain, of the mountain villages, and of his own Catalans of the sea: the man whose elbow was sticking so painfully into his side was certainly from Banyuls, by the way he had of speaking. He gathered that the grapes were doing quite well, and that if nothing went wrong for the next two or three weeks they would be beginning the vendanges in the plain; that the price of apricots and peaches had been so low that it had barely been worth picking them; that the price of everything was going up and up; and that the youth of today was worthless.

  The well-known phrases came out again with a predictability that was charming for a returning exile: the conversation was like a familiar childish tune on a musical box; it might prove maddening in time, but after a long interval it could be heard again with affection and delight.

  “They are all bandits. All of them, Communists, Socialists, Radical-Socialists, MRP and Gaullistes: all bandits. Every one is in it for what he can get out of it, and the country can go to the devil.”

  “They do nothing to protect their own people. It is not worth selling our wine at the market price; our early vegetables and fruit rot on the ground, and all the time ships are arriving at Sète and Port-Vendres loaded down with wine from North Africa and fruit from Italy. Someone says to a minister ‘Té, here is a million francs: I want a license to import a hundred tons of peaches’ and it is done. It is as simple as that, and meanwhile we starve,” said the fat man.

  “I never vote for any of them.”

  “They are all bandits.”

  “When I was young the father of a family had some authority. At dawn he showed his son a mattock and said ‘To the vineyard.’ And to the vineyard the boy would go. He would take a loaf and a skin of wine and an onion and work there until dark. Now what does he do?”

  The train was running fast now, lickety-lick across the plain, the plain with its drilled armies of peach trees, almonds, and apricots stretching away in interminable files: a hundred times a minute a perspective opened, a straight lane of precise trees with a green stream of garden-stuff running down between; the perspective opened, slanting rapidly to the full, held there for an instant, slanted fast away and was gone as the next began to open; and between each pair there was a fragmentary hint of diagonals, opened and closed so quickly that nothing could be distinguished but a sense of ordered space. Most of the peaches were picked already, but still there were a few late orchards with the fruit glowing among the leaves, peaches that looked too big for the trees: they would be the big dorats, he thought, and the word brought the memory of that wonderful bitter-sweet prussic-acid taste and the smell of the downy skin.

  They passed Corneilla del Vercol, and he had hardly said to himself “Now we begin to turn” when he felt the beginning of the centrifugal pressure, his weight pressing outward against the side, as the train ran fast on to the long curve down to the sea, and the Canigou came into sight, sharp and clear in the morning sky, still the morning sky, for it was hardly more than breakfast-time. There was a belt of cloud lying across the middle height, but the three tall peaks stabbed up hard and dominating. It was the mountain that ruled the plain; and the plain seen without the mountain was nothing but a dull stretch of intensely cultivated land instead of a preparation and the foreground for a magnificent piece of set scenery: a little obvious and romantic, perhaps, but superb in its kind, composed on the very grandest scale, and instantly, overwhelming effective.

  The long curve went on: the Canigou moved imperceptibly into the middle of the window, and now by leaning against the glass and peering forward he could see the long curtain of the Pyrenees, dark, with the sun behind them. That was the limit of the plain, the wall of dark mountains that ran headlong to the sea, and that was his own piece of the world, there where the sea and the mountains joined.

  It was very near now. On the skyline he could see the towers, high up, remote against the sky, the ancient solitary towers against the Algerine rovers, the Moors who had sacked the coast for so many hundred years; they stood one behind the other, far spaced, to carry the alarm like beacons: they were his final landmarks. The train bore away and away to the left, running directly now for the edge of the sea, for there was no way through the mountains, and even at the very rim of the land it was tunnel and cutting, cutting and tunnel all the way, to get along at all.

  The round towers, remote and deserted on the high bare peaks, had always been the symbols of homecoming for him, for he had been able to see them from his bedroom window as a boy, and for ever after, when he came back from school or from the university or (as he did now) from foreign parts, it always appeared to him that this was the last of the last steps, for looking up to those far towers his line of sight could be reflected down, through his own window, back into his bedroom.

  They had crossed the
river, and the richest of the plain was left behind: there were trees and rectangles of market-garden still, but they were islands in the blue-green sea of vines. An ocean of vines, that would make your heart ache to think of the picking of all the grapes. He got up, worked through the legs and the crossing lines of talk and stood in the corridor to watch for the first arrival of the sea on the other side.

  Already the plain was finished. They were running through the first hills, the hills that started with such abrupt determination, instantly changing the very nature of the countryside. Now the sandy cuttings were crowned with agaves, some with their flower-spikes thrust twenty feet above, and the sides of the railway were covered with prickly pear, starting out of an acid, bitter-looking soil. And here the round sides of the hills were cut and cut with terraces, terraces everywhere, and on the terraces vineyards, olives, vineyards, cork oaks, pines and more vineyards, vineyards on slopes where a man could hardly stand to work them. Then suddenly there it was, the sea blue and faintly lapping in a little deep-cut bay. A tunnel cut off all light, and he stood in the eddying smoke, suspended: through the tunnel, and there it was again; the same bay, one would have said—it had the same reddish cliffs dropping down to the bright shingle and the waveless sea; but it was not the same, for here on the right was a grove of cork oaks with crimson trunks. Tunnel again, and the bay repeated. Here the difference was a boat drawn up, a bright blue boat with the strange crucifix of a lateen mast and yard.

  They passed by Collioure, with its ghastly new hotels and its seething mass of tourists: it had been such a charming little town, he thought sadly, as he peered round the bulk of the latest hotel at the tiny beach where men and women lay tight-packed on the dirty stones and overlapping into the water where a thousand stewed together in the tideless wash. Sad, sad: he thanked God that Saint-Féliu had no clock tower to be painted, no beach for bathing, no drains, no hotel, and hardly a bath at all in the whole town. And no Beaux-Arts to protect it, he added, catching the trite cynicism of the people in his compartment. Collioure, Port-Vendres, Banyuls, Puig del Mas. Now the line was a little farther from the sea, and higher up. The road ran with it, and there was a green bus, racing along to keep up with the train, passengers waving madly, and a faint shrieking audible above the thunder of the rails. At the turn he would catch a glimpse of Saint-Féliu: he opened the window and leaned out, screwing his eyes tight against the wind: there, exactly where his mind had placed it, there it was, a tight, rose-pink swarm of roofs, packed tight within the round gray walls, pressed in by the hills, a full, broad crescent that rose in steep tiers from the pure curve of the bay; and between the seaward wall and the sea, the arc of fishing boats drawn up.

  He had just that moment to receive it all, and then the wall of the cutting whipped between. Here was old Bisau’s orange grove; green bronze the oranges. Next would come the brake of tall bamboos, and then the tunnel. He was back in the carriage, standing at his seat to lower his baggage. The train screamed for the tunnel, roared in, and the light was gone. He stood there, swaying in the darkness. When the light came back he would be home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN MADELEINE was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children; there was no feminine delicacy in her face—or very little—and if her hair had been cut short she might have passed for a plain little boy.

  Nobody considered her a good-looking child; and even her mother and her aunts, when they had finished scrubbing and frizzing and ornamenting her for her first Communion, could say no more than that the little Baixas girl (a downright ugly one) did not look half so attractive. Madeleine felt the lack of conviction in their voices, and she agreed with them entirely; but for her part she did not mind at all. Indeed, she laughed heartily when her father said what a good thing it was that she had a veil; for in her own family, in the dark room behind the cave-like shop, or in the clear, white, dustless mercery next door, she was a cheerful soul, happy to find humor in the thinnest joke, and brimming over with that élan which caused her to talk, chant, and spin about for the greater part of the day. It was only when she was out of her home that shyness came down over her: then she would blush if a stranger spoke to her, and in an unfamiliar house she had no voice at all.

  She was plain and timid, then, and even in her own opinion devoid of charm or importance; but this did not prevent her from pursuing Francisco Cortade, her schoolfellow. She pursued him openly, without disguise, and he accepted her attentions, if not with pleasure, at least without repulsion.

  She thought he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen; and without exaggeration he was a lovely little boy—huge eyes, a great deal of black and curling hair, and an absurd complexion. She brought him presents from the shop, rousquilles—the little round dry white-iced cakes the Catalans eat on holidays—twigs of raw licorice from the mountains, nuts, anything that could be concealed under her pinafore; and if she could not bring him anything from the shop she would give him the croissant or the fougasse that she was supposed to eat at eleven. It was a disinterested passion, for although he would take her offerings civilly enough, he would hardly ever let her play with him—he was too old, far too old, he said—and if he ever let her walk with him from school he would desert her instantly for a troop of boys. He treated her very badly, but it seemed just to her, and she was grateful for his kindness in always taking what she brought.

  Then occasionally he would be very kind: on Thursdays or in the holidays she would sometimes find him by the boat his father fished in, the red and yellow Amphitrite; and then, if he were alone, he would let her come aboard and be the crew or the enemy, or whatever fitted in.

  It was some time after her first Communion that the first hint of modesty showed itself in Madeleine. Up until that time she would reply “He has just run away,” or “He is down by the sea” to the question “Where is your sweetheart?”—a question that the people of the street would ask her once or twice a day. Now she would frown heavily and deny him, or she would say that she did not know where he was, and did not care: and now she stopped bringing him rousquilles, and in doing so she saved her conscience many a reproach and her heart many a wild fluttering. It was not that she stole the rousquilles or the licorice, but she took them without explicit leave: she had always felt that there was a great difference, but still she always chose the time when there was nobody in the shop, and more than once, caught standing on a chair beneath the rousquilles’ shelf, or spoken to when the offering was half hidden in her pinafore, she had gone pale with horror, or scarlet red; and afterward it needed a fair amount of argument to convince herself that she had done no wrong. But now this almost daily trial was done, and now at eleven o’clock she ate her roll or cake, and she ate it skipping or howling with the other little girls.

  At first Francisco did not notice this change, but after some days it was borne in upon him that he no longer had a devoted follower, and that the stream of rousquilles had dried up, apparently for ever. He was puzzled, worried, at a loss to understand. He could not say how it had happened, nor when it had begun: and then there was no reason; he had not been unkind to her for weeks. After some thought he began to make advances. He left the school quickly and lurked about until she appeared, but when he said that she could walk with him if she liked, she ran fast away to go hand in hand with Carmen and Denise, and he was left sad and foolish behind.

  Two days later he bought two croissants and gave her one at break: he waited until she had finished her own before he offered it, and she was glad to take it. In an access of reconciliation he said that he had a dried sea horse for her in the boat, and they shared his second croissant.

  It is true that he soon recovered the upper hand, but it was a more even friendship now, and so it continued. In the village school of Saint-Féliu such things could be; elsewhere they might have been mocked and laughed to scorn, but not here. They continued, consecrated now by habit, rising form after form
, reaching decimals and long division; they learned the Merovingian kings and passed the gap-toothed stage; by the time they reached the Revolution Francisco was already talking gruff.

  It was toward this time that Dominique, Madeleine’s mother, began to look pensive when she saw the two walk down the narrow street together. For a long, long while Madeleine and her sweetheart had been a joke with the street, and Dominique had laughed as much as any. She had called her daughter a hussy, a one for the men, and so on: she had often and often called Francisco into the shop to give him his pick of the squashed peaches, or a caramel or a piece of gingerbread. She was a fat, jolly woman in those days, and she liked to see children pleased and happy around her. In this she was in no way exceptional, in Saint-Féliu or anywhere else, but she was exceptional for Saint-Féliu in that she succeeded—succeeded, that is, in making them pleased and happy when they were with her. It was not that she was clever—far from that. She was rather a stupid woman, and given to long spells of absence, during which she would stare in front of her like a glazed cow, thinking of nothing at all; but by some gift of being she was better at the management of a child than any woman in the quarter. It may have been her plumpness, for fat people are said to be calm of spirit, or it may have been some natural sweetness, but whatever the cause, the house never knew those screaming, tearing scenes that broke out three or four times a day somewhere along the street, those horribly commonplace rows in which a woman, dark with hatred and anger, may be seen dragging a child by the arm, flailing at its head, and screaming, screaming, screaming a great piercing flood of abuse, sarcasm, and loathing right into its convulsed and wretched little face. These scenes were so ordinary in Saint-Féliu that anyone turning to stare would be known at once for a foreigner.