Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  HENRI BOSCO (1888–1976) was the fifth and only surviving child born to parents of mixed Provençal and Italian descent; his father, whose family was related to Saint John Bosco, made a career as an opera tenor. In 1907, Bosco left his native Avignon to enroll at the University of Grenoble; in 1913 he moved to Algeria to teach French, Latin, and Greek. He fought in World War I, then decamped for Naples in 1920, where he would teach French and write for the next ten years. His first novel, Pierre Lampédouze, was published in 1924, and in 1930 he returned to France and married Madeleine Rhodes. They moved to Rabat in 1931, where Bosco again taught classics, served as president of the Moroccan Alliance Française, and edited the literary journal Aguedal. Over the course of his career he published dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essays, including Le Mas Théotime (The Farm Théotime, 1945), L’Enfant et la rivière (The Boy and the River, 1945), Malicroix (1948, winner of the Prix des Ambassadeurs), and the biography Saint Jean Bosco (1959). Bosco was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times, and was awarded the Grand prix national des Lettres, the Grand prix de la Mediterranée, and the Grand prix de l’Académie française, as well as named a Commander of the Legion of Honor. In 1955, he and Madeleine returned to France, where they divided their time between a farmhouse (La Bastide) in Lourmarin and La Maison Rose in Nice. Bosco is buried in the cemetery in Lourmarin; Madeleine was buried next to him in 1985.

  JOYCE ZONANA is a writer and translator. She is the author of a memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey, and her writing has been published in The Hudson Review, Signs, and Meridians, among other publications. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Tobie Nathan’s Ce pays qui te ressemble (A Land Like You) and the Global Humanities Translation Prize for her translation of Jóusè d’Arbaud’s La Bèstio dóu Vacarés (The Beast of Vaccarès).

  MALICROIX

  HENRI BOSCO

  Translated from the French by

  JOYCE ZONANA

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1948 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Joyce Zonana

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Susan Derges, River Taw, 22nd July 1997 (Rowan), 1997; courtesy of the artist and Danziger Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bosco, Henri, 1888–1976, author. | Zonana, Joyce, translator.

  Title: Malicroix / by Henri Bosco ; translated by Joyce Zonana.

  Other titles: Malicroix. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2018]. | Series: New York review books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019039479 (print) | LCCN 2019039480 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374109 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374116 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ2603.O627 M2513 2018 (print) | LCC PQ2603.O627 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039479

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039480

  ISBN 978-1-68137-411-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Notice

  Mégremut

  Dromiols

  La Redousse

  A Spell

  Balandran

  A Name of This Earth

  Halt

  Malicroix

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  To Paul and Édith Loyonnet

  Notice

  A READER who wanted to date this tale could set it during the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

  The region evoked is indicated by the names of the river, the Rhône, and the land, the Camargue.

  Specific place-names, however, are deliberately invented, as are names of individuals. Any attempt to identify either one or the other would thus be fruitless.

  It was thought best that it be so, and also to have removed from the narrative some forty pages that form a separate, private account. Only someone truly qualified for such revelations might one day break the seal.

  MÉGREMUT

  I WAS NOT expecting anything from my great-uncle Malicroix. No one, in fact, had ever expected anything from him. We had not seen him in half a century. Holed up in the Camargue on his barren land, he was, for us, the embodiment of wildness. Neither good nor bad, but solitary—in other words, unnerving, perhaps terrible. And yet, cut off from him by this half century of unbroken absence, we had never suffered any harm from those dreadful qualities with which our imaginations clothed him. He ignored us with a kind of scorn. Very grandly, he was called Cornélius de Malicroix, and he was poor. Or so everyone said. His way of life, lost among the lagoons with only a few herders as rough and wild as he, let us think it, and we did. If he were wealthy, would he have chosen such a rude, mean existence in that land of sorrow? No one thought it possible. We are people of fertile lands, people who assign spiritual value to a measure of material ease. If our great-uncle Malicroix had withdrawn into the desert, his withdrawal, as far as we could tell, had been inspired by pride. He was hiding his poverty. To put it plainly: we did not love him.

  Still, I admired him. I knew little about him, for he was rarely mentioned, and then more by ironic and veiled allusions than clearly. But his name and the rough land where he lived, the pride with which he was involuntarily endowed, gave grandeur to his form.

  Reduced to imagining him, I did so with such violent sympathy that the moment I saw him—created in me, by me, body and soul, and as fierce as possible—a strange wildness, akin to his, emerged from my own being. I felt as if, through our taste for solitude, I shared his blood. I am a Malicroix only through my mother. But it is through our mothers’ blood that our passions flow into us, and from which a strong line draws the distinctive trait that stamps its spirit.

  The gentle and patient Mégremuts, my father’s people, have over long years possessed the calm soul of the family into which I was born. It is to them that I owe a certain gentleness. Because of this, they loved me as one of theirs and have always believed that, regarding old Malicroix, I thought exactly as they did. Whereas I—I loved him silently, and how happy I was to be, among them all, alone in that love.

  I never saw him. Deeply ensconced in old age, he had outlived all the other Malicroix. I was the only one who, without bearing his name, still preserved his blood. But despite his passionate attachment to that blood, he never—from the day I was born until the day he died—showed the least interest in me, the last representative of the line. Did he even know I existed? The whole family maintained he did not. And I, while secretly suffering, was compelled to agree. “You come from the women,” they said. “You don’t have the name. You’re no one.” I had no choice but to believe them. Then they added, right away and with their usual warmth, “You’re a Mégremut, from head to toe. There are other advantages.” I admitted as much, albeit grudgingly.

  Because my parents were dead, my family was made up of my uncles and male cousins, plus a whole affectionate world of aunts and female cousins who grew tender at the slightest touch. With them I too grew tender, and I felt myself to be a Mégremut when I was among them, for their gentleness is quite contagious. But, once alone, I re-became a Malicroix, with a sort of s
ecret drunkenness and a strange fear. For this Malicroix, unknown to all, hidden within the darkest part of myself, seemed more alive than all the Mégremuts who inhabited me with such ease. He never mingled with them, and his reluctance to show himself created a spiritual solitude within me, strong as a bare flat land, worked by winds and waters. And that is where I would meet him.

  At twilight on a barren heath, I would see him approaching with long strides. Once near me, he would signal; I would follow. Wordlessly, we would walk until night, always with long strides, through that land where in the end he disappeared. Then I would be afraid. But only for a moment; for, in turn, I too would enter into solitude.

  Such—until I was twenty-five—were my relations with my great-uncle Malicroix. I knew them to be fictitious, but able neither to know him nor to do without him, I was content with this fiction.

  One day, we learned he was dead. No one showed the slightest emotion. But a month later a notaire wrote to me. Cornélius de Malicroix left an inheritance: some marshland, a few livestock, a ramshackle house. And, by name, he made me his heir.

  The family was stunned and began to worry. “You should sell,” advised Uncle Mathieu, a man of common sense and wide experience. “You won’t get much for it, but as far as I can tell, this estate”—he began to laugh—“must be a land of troubles. And what people!” With horror, the family also spoke of marshes, mosquitoes, miasmas.

  “Above all, don’t go there,” begged dear Aunt Philomène, always so tormented about my health. “You’ll catch quartan fever. It’s the place for it.”

  “I’ll go in his stead,” Uncle Mathieu concluded. “I know about these things” (inheritances, for he had been an attorney).

  Everyone joined in support of Uncle Mathieu. But I said no. I said it with the greatest gentleness, as a Mégremut who does not want to hurt the people he loves. Still, I said it, and I clung to my word with grim obstinacy, against which the family’s united efforts were fruitless. My uncles, aunts, and all the cousins were stricken with dismay. “He’s gone mad,” they declared darkly. I did not believe a word of it, and yet my decision troubled me. What would I see? And, more deeply, what would I discover? For it seemed impossible that there was nothing to discover in this bequest.

  And so I wrote to the notaire to announce my plans. He took his time replying and sent an itinerary that surprised me. For it was strange. He set a date, November 12, and a meeting place. “The coach will drop you,” he wrote, “at the La Gachole crossroad. It is in an open field. A man will wait for you there. All you need do is to follow him. He will lead you to your destination.”

  I took only some light luggage and departed.

  • • •

  It was November 11 when I left my home, Le Castelet, where I was then living with my Mégremut uncles and cousins. Because the region I was traveling to was so remote, I journeyed for two days, as much on foot as by coach. In this way I crossed some seventy-five miles.

  Toward evening, I reached a plain. It was large, bare. A few small clusters of trees twisted along the ground. The coach came to a stop in front of an old signpost at the intersection of two poor tracks. I was the only passenger. Once I disembarked, the coach drew away sadly toward the west. Tall, narrow, black-clad, it rolled and pitched down the rutted road.

  The wind had torn the two signboards off the post. Not a house in sight. I sat on a rock at the foot of the post.

  In the distance, at the far end of this bare plain, toward the west, the horizon was marked by a bluish wall. A forest, to judge from the mists drifting above that dark screen; it must be hiding vast, dank stretches.

  Day was coming to a close. The earth was growing gray. I waited, my eyes fixed on the line of trees, where one of the two paths directly led. I was worried. At last I saw someone. He must have come from the forest, and he was walking toward me. I rose and went to meet him. When I drew near, he stopped.

  He seemed to be some kind of woodsman, a poacher perhaps. Old, wary. I gave him my name. He signaled for me to follow. After an hour’s walk, we entered the forest. Night was completing its descent. With each step we took, the path grew dimmer; at times we lost its trace under the dry leaves. But still the old man forged ahead without faltering. He walked, his chest thrust forward, a heavy staff on his shoulder.

  After we had plodded for a long time through the woods, we reached a clearing, where a leaf-covered hut stood. The man pointed it out to me, then vanished. I sat down in front of the hut. I knew it to be my stopover for the night, and that I would be alone. Inside were a bed of wooden planks, a straw mattress, and a pitcher.

  The clearing was surrounded by huge trees. They were not stirring. Above, the faces of a few stars sparkled. Not one sound disturbed the sky, the trees, the earth. From the ground rose the smell of gorse roots, dry silt, and rotted willow. But through the silence I made out a steady hum. Most likely some muffled movement of water behind the curtain of trees. Hidden by leaves, a furtive river must be flowing along the woods on an immense bed. The heavy displacement of its liquid masses was making its unseen banks quiver imperceptibly.

  I slept straight through until midnight.

  At midnight, someone touched my shoulder, and I awoke.

  “Time to get up,” I heard a voice say.

  I recognized my man. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To the river,” he replied in a low voice. “Not far.”

  We left the hut. The woodsman walked in front of me. The darkness was so thick that at every moment I stumbled against roots and bushes. After fifteen minutes, we reached the riverbank.

  The old man drew a flat boat from a tangle of gorse and pushed it onto the sand of the bank.

  We hopped into the boat. It began to drift alongshore through half-submerged willows and tamarisks. The old man was plying a long pole. As the heavy boat noiselessly slid between branches, he leaned into the pole with his whole body, to free the boat from the silty bank. At last we caught a faint current under the stern, and the river appeared. We could not see its banks, but the vast, wet, moving span was flowing onto us. We swung around slowly and, for a moment, were held, fixed, at the center of the waters. The old man had picked up an oar, and he began to steer. In the sky, two large constellations stretched limbs of light. I thought I recognized Altair and Andromeda. They were reflected in the river’s breast.

  We descended swiftly. The current was rough, brutal. In the stern, the old man was not moving. He was holding steady. No one spoke. The banks had receded, and it was as if we were floating on a shadow lake, itself adrift through the night’s dark. Then, just in front of us at the center of the river, a shape appeared—a dark, tree-covered island that slowly grew as it pushed the waters away from its banks. The boat steered toward the island and we landed smoothly on the sands of a beach deeply hidden in a cove wreathed with dense thickets.

  The old man moored his boat. We got out and immediately plunged under the trees. The island seemed vast to me, as we had to walk for a quite a long time. Wordlessly, we made our way through forest and scrubland. A wet wind that had risen in the west brushed our faces. It blew gently, bringing with it the sweetish smell of stagnant waters. Between the branches of the tall trees where I had seen them sparkling, the constellations were going out one by one, as large low clouds coursed over the Camargue.

  Suddenly, in a clearing, I glimpsed a low structure with whitish walls. The old man went toward it. He pushed a door, vanished, then struck a flint and kindled a small lamp. It lit up a modest room with whitewashed walls. In the back, a hearth, where a poor fire of roots was burning. The rest was lost in shadow, as the lamp (a weak little lantern, hung on the chimney against the wall) hardly gave off any light.

  “Here you are, at home,” said the old man.

  And, with no further ado, he took his leave. I wanted to call him, to hold him back.

  He was no longer there.

  • • •

  I went to close the door. I bolted it. Then I unhooked the
lantern to see the room more clearly. It was low, long, with a reed ceiling. Not much furniture. In front of the fire, a wooden armchair and a footstool. Against the back wall, a low iron bed. Above the bed, hung horizontally from two nails, an old shotgun. At the head of the bed, a cross made from two reeds. At the foot of the bed, a chest. On the other side of the room, all the way in back, a closed door. On the floor of beaten earth, two rush mats. The four walls and ceiling in good condition, whitewashed; the floor clean. Aside from the fire stirring feebly on its ashes, everything seemed caught in unearthly stillness. And yet, it was alive—if only the way a thought, reduced solely to its presence, might live, unmoving, beyond the real. In the bareness of the room, my little lamp in hand, I was inside this simple thought, and I was listening.

  Outside, the river waters. They were murmuring dully. Then the slow, steady passage of a wet breeze, the western wind. Inside, nothing. The fire was not crackling; it was ebbing. I was alone, watchful (vainly watchful), yet the strangeness of this place did not surprise me. My nerves were on edge, and nothing could escape me that might reach my senses—eyes, ears, nose—ready to seize the slightest sign. Yet nothing came to me other than this simple thought, whose presence I perceived, but not its ineffable meaning.

  It was, all the same, a clear thought, bare, like the room where the fate of my lineage had just led me in the dead of night. The strangeness of the stop; the taciturn guide so suddenly vanished; the place; the silence; my puzzling solitude—it all troubled me. Yet nothing struck me so vividly as the austerity of this place. Everything was so clearly reduced to the most sober utility; it revealed intention and will. What intention? What will? I could not say. But this spareness, which bore no marks of poverty, suggested perhaps in what direction I should seek the spirit of the place.

  I was brought back to myself by a stronger gust of the western wind. It was hovering somewhere, above, on the roof, which took this opportunity to groan. The light wooden peak became as plaintive as the world of trees, where, all around the house, other cries were sounding. Then the wind dropped down to the ground and raised up a dank layer of air that rattled the shutters and whistled through invisible cracks. I felt the coldness of this air, and, as the fire was fading, I shivered. I told myself, “I should lie down to wait for day.” But just then I was gripped by a strange fear—the fear of the bed.