The Catalans

by Patrick O'Brian

  Somebody had brought them bad luck; for nearly all the other boats had made enough for the whole year round, and their crews would spend the winter repairing their gear, pottering about with a calking-iron and a pot of paint, preparing for the spring: somebody had brought them bad luck, and it was certainly Francisco. Not only was he unhandy and awkward, the sort of person who smelt of bad luck, but once he had hurried on board, hot from the firemen’s ball, still prinked out in collar and tie, and wearing shoes. In a gloomy silence they had thrown them into the sea: but what was that feeble act against such an omen? How much could a pair of shoes propitiate? Very little: and bad was all their fishing, very bad.

  The autumns, then, took Francisco away; but they did not take him far, only along the coast to Port-Vendres one year, and to Collioure another. There he made friends with a Swedish painter and came home with a box of colors and a parcel of brushes, filled with enthusiasm for the new way of painting. He had never given up drawing or painting little water colors since he left school, and now that he showed himself in Saint-Féliu with easel and canvas in the grand manner the people took it very calmly. They did not think much of his new way of painting; they had never thought much of his former manner—painstaking representation—for he had never had the trick of taking likenesses, which alone they admired; but they tolerated him. There are countries where it would not be permissible for a young fisherman to take up his stand and paint a street in public; the youths of his own age would not allow it for a moment, the little boys would stone him and even the dogs would be outraged; but France is not one of them. Saint-Féliu was quite prepared to watch Francisco paint, so long as he did not give himself airs.

  What little stir it did create tended to put Francisco into a slightly romantic rather than a ridiculous position, and this vexed Dominique, vexed and worried her. But if she had been able to hear the conversation of the two young people in the fragrant dusk of the orange grove beyond the tunnel she would have worried less. The conversation now took the form of a lecture upon aesthetics, very earnest, and very long: listening, Dominique would have heard nothing but Francisco’s voice going on and on, grave and expositive, sometimes deriding and sometimes indignant, but never pausing, except for the moments when Madeleine said yes. Dominique would have heard some strange things indeed, that a picture should never tell a story, that it need not even show a known form; that the cave men painted finer things than Ingres, and that it was very wicked to be an academic. She would have heard the words impressionist, primitive, futurist, expressionist, and abstract recurring again and again; and again and again the litany of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, Maillol, Dufy, and Vlaminck. She would have heard all that and much more, if she had had the patience; but she would have heard nothing to cause her alarm. Dominique need not have worried, but she did, and the more she did so, the more eagerly she looked forward to Francisco’s calling-up: all safety seemed to lie in that blessed event. In her own short bloom she had been a flighty piece, widely affectionate, and she was sure that it would be the same with Madeleine: a few months’ absence and the young man would be lost.

  But still the years passed slowly, and still he did not go. She did have one respite, for Carmen died, and at the tail of her noisy grief the recollection came to her that now Madeleine was to be secluded and dressed in black. This dried her tears, and the event that she had sincerely mourned seemed now a positive relief.

  Yet even in Saint-Féliu mourning for a cousin cannot last for ever: it can take up a great deal of energy, black cloth, and time, but it has an end, and the day came when Dominique and her two sisters sat working out the date again, the time of the young man’s removal, reckoning up the months with an angry impatience.

  As it came nearer Dominique looked forward to it with pleasure and relief: but when it came she was not in Saint-Féliu, nor was Madeleine, nor was her husband, nor any one of her uncounted relatives and friends and customers. Grass, knee-high, was growing against her shuttered door, and between the cobbles of the street grass and long-drawn weeds strained up toward the narrow slit of sky: the fishing boats, dragged up to the Place and chained there, lay sunk in a green haze of grass, and in the grass the trodden lanes showed the track of the German sentry’s round.

  The inhabitants of Saint-Féliu were dispersed about the interior, and the Fajals were far inland, right under the mountains of Andorra, where some remote cousins had a farm. Francisco, with many others, was in Germany, working at forced labor in a factory; a great many more were in camps as prisoners of war; a few were in North Africa, having escaped through Spain; and six from Saint-Féliu were dead, killed in the early fighting.

  It was a strange, slow nightmare, all that period, impossible to relate to real life. That only began again with the return to Saint-Féliu, with the opening of the long-shut familiar doors, with the re-creation of something like the known old life, going to the same pump with the same crazy, shrieking handle, going up the same number of stairs to bed, waking in the dark to hear the same cry of the fishermen waking the laggards, “Xica-té, es l’alba.”

  Real life appeared to begin again as soon as the Germans had gone, but in fact a long interval of excess came between that time and the new normality—excess of happiness, excess of relief, excess in eating. It would be wrong to add excess in welcoming the return of the men from captivity; excess is not the word at all, but rather unbounded rejoicing and a tendency in the free and overflowing generosity of that time to attribute equal worth to all who returned from that gray and brutish land. Thus Francisco and the others who had gone with him were received with almost as much joy as the soldiers whose glory was reflected on them. It was not that they did not deserve a hearty welcome from their friends, but these young men who had been taken for forced labor had done nothing heroic: they had not volunteered to go, it is true, but they had let themselves be seized, while others had taken to the mountains rather than work for the enemy, and some had gone over the seas to fight again. At the time Madeleine had wondered; even in the middle of her sorrow and wretchedness, she had wondered that Francisco had been taken: they had certainly swooped down unexpectedly; but still she had wondered.

  But that was all forgotten now in this great rush of feeling. There was no room in the whole town for anything but joyful ebullience, an almost frantic merriment; and when Francisco burst through the shop in the evening a few days after his return, plunged into the back room where all the Fajals were sitting, and told them that he was going to marry Madeleine at once, they made little more than a general, formal objection.

  There was a scene, of course. Nothing of that sort could possibly have passed without a scene of kinds: there was a fair amount of screaming, a very great deal of shouting all together, and some tears. But the elders did not really have their hearts in it, the strong-minded sister Mimi was away, and in the end tears were dried all round, and Francisco, late though it was, went off to see the mayor.

  In the interval between this emotional evening and the marriage Dominique’s objections were held in abeyance to a fair degree. She uttered some gloomy prophecies, but at the same time helped to prepare the clothes for the occasion with a lively pleasure. She defended the wedding against Mimi’s protests with so many arguments that she nearly convinced herself, and she dismissed Mme. Roig’s disapproval with a short and dry “If she does not like it, let her remain in her own house: that is all I say; let her remain in her own house.”

  She could not but admit that she had a handsome prospective son-in-law: he was well over six feet tall now, loose-limbed and gangling still with the contradictory grace of youth; his hair curled in black waves all over his head as it had done when he was a boy, but now there was an appearance of open, frank virility in his lean face. He had not come back from Germany so thin as some, not nearly, but he was lean, and he had a continual, appreciative appetite. It had been a little piping boy that Dominique had fed with caramels not so many years before, but now his big, deep barrel of a chest was filled
with a thundering baritone, and when he sang the glasses hummed on the table. And yet, for all the virility in his face and for all the depth of his voice one would not have said that there was anything very manly there—the impression was certainly not that overwhelming masculine, beer-and-skittles, hairy impression that some men give. There was an admixture of sweetness, gentleness, or docility, something very unlike the desperate male carapace of toughness that the young men of Saint-Féliu put on with their breeches, a quality that could be described as wonderfully romantic or a trifle mawkish, according to the observer’s sex or degree of liking for the man.

  It was a hint, no more: nothing could be more inaccurate than to show him as a softy, or as anything like a softy, a young man who could be made game of with impunity by his fellows. He did not look like that at all. In any country he would have been reckoned a tall man, and here he towered over the little dark Catalans: and there was enough of his father—the old Camairerrou with a proved and shocking reputation—in his face to make it clear that you could not play with him.

  As a son-in-law he had improved in his connections, by no effort of his own. Camairerrou had distinguished himself during the Occupation by drowning one of the occupying German soldiers and by taking to the mountains when the evacuation of Saint-Féliu was ordered: there, continuing his trade of smuggling over the border, he had fallen in with an organization that passed refugees down into Spain, and knowing every path and cave in that wild neighborhood, knowing them even in the dark, he had been able to pass over several Allied airmen, secret agents, and Frenchmen bound for Algiers. Whenever it had been possible he had exacted a thumping great fee for his services, but when it had been clear that no money was to be had he had taken the men over for nothing. This, and the fact that when he had been paid he had invariably performed his bargain, redounded very much to his credit after the Liberation: so did the knowledge that somewhere in his house he had all the fees surrendered by his paying customers. He was still a lamentable father-in-law for Madeleine, but no longer an unmitigated disaster.

  So they were married. They were married cheerfully, but with a background of gloomy muttering. They were married in the mairie with the tricolor, and in the temple with orange blossom, legally and sacramentally, and they were married in the Café de Gênes with dried sausage and anchovies, cakes and sweet wine, popularly.

  Throughout the day, with the increasing effect of the wine and jollity, the forebodings of the elders had died down; but in the morning, with the wine quite gone and a general deflated sense of anticlimax abroad, they began again. They were ill-timed forebodings, intrusive and sometimes ill-natured; they were founded less on logic than on emotion, but they soon began to prove themselves to be true.

  In the circumstances it would have been strange if they had not been true. The young couple lived in the upper part of a house belonging to the Fajals at the back of the town: it was a dank, narrow house stuffed into an interior angle of the fortifications, and the sun could not reach it at any time. The lower part of the house was a store, and the upper part had been arranged with the idea of letting it to summer visitors: but the scheme had been quite unsuccessful and for years the stiff, bright-yellow varnished wood furniture had stood rigidly on the shining linoleum, cold even in the flood of August. It was an unhappy arrangement: in the first generous flush the intention had been to give it unconditionally to Madeleine and Francisco as a home; but very soon the flush receded and as there had been no exact terms—nothing specified on either side—the elders began to withdraw the implied gift, until by the end of the year the place was little more than a set of furnished rooms where the young people were allowed to live.

  It had begun simply enough: the women of the family had been naturally fascinated at running in and out of “Madeleine’s apartment” as it was called at first, and naturally they came without invitation. They came to help her clean, sweep, and cook: her mother (an excellent cook) had taught her none of these things, but they were all very much surprised that she did not know how to do them by intuition. And they came, with the liveliest curiosity, to stare: there was little enough to see or know, but what little there was they wanted to see and know and talk about.

  Then, when the disapproval of Francisco began to revive, they began to come into the house even more as by right; and her father, who surprised Madeleine by showing a greater jealousy of Francisco than the others, silently rearranged the furniture to his liking—replaced it in the positions it had occupied before the marriage.

  It was a fairly slow process, this dispossession: it went on little by little, but it was nearly complete in twelve months. It was hardly a conscious process on either side; but on the side of the elders it was as efficient and unhesitating as if it had been carefully planned and concerted: more efficient.

  However, the novelty, the romantic glow, the conventional happiness carried Francisco and Madeleine through the first year. It was the second that brought so much conscious unhappiness. During the first year the sea, unfished for so long, yielded such quantities of fish that the oldest man had never seen the like, and the market, starved of fish for so long, was insatiable. There was plenty of money in Saint-Féliu, summer and winter, and even the Amphitrite earned enough to install an engine and to buy a lamparo, a little boat with a pair of huge lights to attract the fish by night, in the Spanish fashion.

  But the next year was different. The summer was cold and unnatural and the anchovies stayed away from the coast altogether; even the sardines were very scarce, and somebody—the men of La Nouvelle, it was said—began dynamiting them. Soon everybody was doing it, scooping up the shattered little fish from the surface and hurrying furtively back to port: it could not last; not only did the preventive officers come, but the fish went clean away, and not all the motors or lamparos in Saint-Féliu would bring them back.

  Madeleine and Francisco had, very early in their marriage, fallen into the habit of going to the family shop for meals. It had begun with Madeleine’s complete incapacity—she really could not boil an egg at first—and had continued because it was so much easier and because Dominique loved to have a talking crowd around the table. In the first year it had been convenient; it had not been necessary. Now it was essential, and now Francisco and Madeleine arrived with a hang-dog air, and now any quip or jibe about their extravagance in the first year’s prosperity went home and rankled. The quips and jibes, the “remarks passed” were rarely meant to be as unkind as they sounded sometimes, but it was remarkable how accurately those rather stupid women and that dull, heavy-witted man managed to say just the thing that would hurt most afterward, upon reflection.

  They had been a little extravagant, it is true: Madeleine had bought clothes; they had often gone to Perpignan for the day, and still more often to Collioure, where Francisco’s clever friends were to be found on the beach or in the cafés; he had bought canvases, colors, and a better easel. But it had seemed at the time that no one thing was more than a very little treat; there had been no single example of unjustifiable expense, and after all, as they had said to one another, a few hundred francs more or less would not make a great difference by the end of the year.

  It was not an agreeable situation, and it was less so for Francisco than it might have been for another, for his bad conscience made him vulnerable. He had not found casual work at the end of the fishing: he had not found it for the plain reason that he had not wanted to find it. He said to the family that it was not to be found (with a regretful shake of his head) and he had said to Madeleine that it was not to be found (with a grin of relief) and that he would have to pass the winter at home. They agreed that out of the evil came the blessing that he would have an uninterrupted stretch of time for his painting. He did: but it costs money to paint, and although the family could always be relied upon for help in kind, they would never part with cash.

  Now Madeleine was glad that she had learned to type: she had never ceased seeing Mme. Roig in spite of the widow’s disapproval of
her marriage, and now she went and asked for her good offices with her nephew, Maître Roig, the lawyer, who sent most of his typing to a bureau in Perpignan. She, who had disliked the marriage too much to countenance it with a present, yet felt too much engaged by her use of Madeleine and by her interior promise, as well as by her affection for her, to feel at all easy, was very happy to do what Madeleine asked: she went at once, without stopping to put on her hat, and in ten minutes the thing was done. It proved an invaluable source of supply: it not only bought Francisco’s materials and many of their meals, but it enabled him to spend a good part of his time with his friends at Collioure.

  Painting is a messy business: it cannot be carried out in a shining little parlor where the position of each object is sacred. A room that is to be kept immaculate for wakes and marriages, the polished morgue of a self-respecting house, is not suitable; and there arose a great bitterness over the drops of paint, the smell in the room, and the wrongful displacement of the central table; for now Madeleine, typing at Me. Roig’s, could not always be there to clean and to replace before one of her aunts or her mother got in.