Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  The review concluded, I kept only three items from among my papers: a précis of all the titles; a cadastral map of the lands; and a private memoir that I will not discuss here. I replaced all the other sheaves in the suitcase and sent them back to the notaire, accompanied by a letter in which I courteously begged him to take them once more into his care. Knowing, I said, his veneration for the law and for notarized deeds, I considered that the archives of my house could find no more secure home than with him.

  Taking the letter and the suitcase, Rat departed.

  I accompanied him to the landing. “Will he make a gesture?” I wondered. “Will he say a word?”

  He made no gesture; he said not one word.

  But just as Balandran pushed the boat off with his pole, he raised his eyes and gazed at me.

  Then he turned away.

  I went back to La Redousse, my heart constricted.

  • • •

  A packet of letters had been placed on my table. Seven. Tied with the same yellow ribbon; and, on a small card, three words:

  It was necessary. —Rat

  I understood at once—the Mégremuts, three months of intercepted correspondence, all their appeals . . .

  I did not have the heart to read them.

  I called Balandran.

  He listened. I was going, then . . .

  We agreed on my departure, my absence, my return: July 14, to be exact, in the afternoon. The same meeting place as in November when I first arrived. I would sleep at La Regrègue. He would tell Anne-Madeleine. I did not want to see her again before leaving.

  It was four o’clock; the sky was gray.

  I said to Balandran, “Before I go, I want to see the calvary.”

  He told me, “It’s hard to approach. It’s abandoned. I will moor a little farther down. But we will pass in front of it.”

  We left before night. The river was heavy. It was cold out. The water flowed swiftly. It was thick, viscous, black. I was shivering. Balandran steered across the current. He leaned on his large black rudder, sometimes with two arms, sometimes with his whole shoulder. His eyes closed with the effort; then he cast a quick glance toward the North, from where the river’s full strength was descending onto us. His forehead lowered, he took up the struggle again and pushed his oak oar against it, with an obstinate, wild look. That obstinacy and that look, whose grandeur equaled that of the water, troubled my soul. Meanwhile, the shore was approaching. It could be seen running along to our left, with its low bank where a few thin willows rose, lost in the vastness of this barren land. The calvary appeared, black, high, beside a broken-down landing.

  A door was visible, along with two large arms, a hanging body, and, above, a small wooden roof. It passed by rapidly.

  It was night when we landed, farther downriver, beside a small wood, among the reeds.

  I found the hut again, and the following day I resumed my journey. Balandran left me at the crossroad where I had awaited him, five months earlier. Tall, thin, black-clad, the coach came into view once more, arriving from the west. It carried only one traveler, an old priest, asleep. It was April 5. The sky was still low, but as we moved toward the east, rolling and pitching down the rutted road, a sweeter air was rising from the earth, and, on the margins of several small lagoons, marsh marigolds and water forget-me-nots were already in bloom.

  HALT

  I SAW THEM from afar, rising gently in the east . . .

  I had hired a hackney coach at the roadhouse in Valcadière, and because I wanted to arrive early at Le Castelet, we had left while it was still night, which is why we had already been traveling for some time before the sun came up. The road ran halfway up the hillsides of Trévidousse, and at dawn the distance came into view above the trees. It was a clear day. I could see the long hills rising. Dark at first, verging on violet, then with a little gold on their limestone peaks, they showed rose-colored hummocks and blue-tinged hollows where faint morning mists drifted in the calm of the growing light.

  The first, the peak of Escal, rose above Amelières; then the white slab of the Claparède plateau appeared. Beyond, my native hills undulated: the Puyreloubes, where our houses—Serizelle, Le Castelet, Murevallières—harbor their gardens. They make up a little hamlet, less than a mile from the village of Anthebaume. It is a neighborhood of fruit trees, flowers, and bees, fed by four springs from which griffin-headed fountains draw their water, still fresh from the earth. We were advancing slowly. From time to time, the horse sniffed the air and tossed his head with delight, jingling the bells on his copper-studded collar. Everything was clear, bright, shining with dew; every so often a crested lark’s tender warble rang a few feet from us on the morning road where the familiar bird, its crest raised, flew up in front of the horse. In the wide valley below the road a river was shining, motionless between its sandy banks; already streams of sunshine were lighting up the woods as they flowed through clusters of poplars, planes, and kermes oaks. We crossed still-sleeping villages of stones and trees. Here and there among the fields, a lonely farmhouse flanked by cypresses was waking up, a thread of smoke fading into the limpid morning air.

  It was the first Sunday in April. It was as if spring were being born; the day brightened as we moved forward, and the landscape, grown gentler, sweetened the returning traveler’s homeward path. The road smelled of wild mint . . .

  •

  I remember . . .

  We had left Anthebaume on the right and turned to climb toward Le Castelet. A hundred yards before reaching it, I got down from the coach and entered the hamlet on foot. Three houses and three barns. Serizelle to the left; Le Castelet directly in front; and a little higher up, Murevallières, the oldest of the three. All on the same gentle slope, each with its garden open to the noonday sun.

  There was no one to be seen in any of the three gardens, and not one sound was coming from the houses, which surprised me. Sunday, especially in good weather, usually grants the Mégremuts the pleasure of talking outdoors in loud voices; and the clear, echoing houses ring from time to time with young girls’ Sunday songs. Inès and Marceline sing softly, but still you can hear them in the garden. Now neither the usual voices nor the girls’ innocent song broke the strange peace of the family roofs. Outside in the three gardens, the trees, under their young leaves, were basking in the same silence. It was ten o’clock. They were probably all at mass. It is said at Anthebaume, and in good weather they go on foot.

  I pushed open the wooden gate and took the path up to the first garden. Watered, weeded, spangled with flowers, but not one soul. Serizelle, reddish beneath its old elms, was sleeping peacefully.

  Le Castelet adjoins it. Only a hedge, pierced by two passageways, separates it from Serizelle. I went through it. The same well-known, gentle slope; the same garden. Watered and weeded, flowering from one end to the other, but just as desolate. The house has a round tower where my cousins, the Méjeans, live. But not one Méjean could be seen and not one Méjean could be heard.

  I reached the little staircase that leads from Le Castelet to Uncle Mathieu and Aunt Philomène’s orchard. This is Murevallières, the cradle of the Mégremuts. The whole family comes from here, even those Mégremuts who live in the city. Six sturdy, gnarled oaks with dark evergreen leaves bear witness to our centuries-old presence. For we love the oaks, as the gentle love the strong, and the oaks love us, if it is true that they thrive around our houses and never die except from old age . . .

  Murevallières was also slumbering.

  So I climbed higher still. For higher up, against the hill, hides Pomelore: a hollow at the foot of a cliff, filled with trees and young plants, and sheltered from the wind. Everything grows here: in winter it is warm; in summer the springs are cool—the most delicate roots are never harmed. Pomelore is a common good of the Mégremuts. They speak of it with love. It is, they say, their heaven on earth; and rightly so, I believe, for I know of no other place so favorable for the life of plants and trees, or for their contemplation. I have my green
houses there.

  On this morning, Pomelore was already warm. A thin stream of water, carefully channeled, was flowing at the foot of the trees; two hundred peach trees were in bloom; and, against the rock wall, six small orange trees in their green-painted tubs were taking the sun. The air was all honeyed, and slow billows coming from the valley brought to these heights the leafy breath of other unseen orchards, with their scents of fresh bark.

  Fragrances of resin and wet stone drifted down from the pine-topped cliff. Between the sides of the hollow, a little mist floated, revealing the blue-tinged wave of a column of perfumes, stirred by the sun. In back shone the windows of my greenhouses, built against the hill. Between two cherries ablaze with flowers, I saw their roofs and old tiles. This had been my refuge, my meditative retreat. Laid out before me now was the touching image of this calm haven with all its blessings. Everything seemed be waiting for me, even the half-open door, as if someone had just stepped through a few moments before my arrival. And yet I was alone. In deserted Pomelore this morning, there seemed to be no life other than that of trees. Even the doves that usually nest here were silent.

  I entered the largest greenhouse, which also serves as my laboratory. It was already warm from the sun. Its fragrance gripped me, a light scent of phosphorus and brittle straw common to enclosed spaces where seeds germinate. The floor had been freshly covered with sand; in their clay pots, on three painted racks, all my little fall plants, still labeled, breathed out an acrid scent.

  Against the window, gleaming and smelling of new wax, the shelf where I wrote, with its books, blotter, inkwell, pencils, pen, and reams of porous paper. Nothing that was not in precisely the order I had left it in when I departed. That distant date, November 11, whose page, with its blue numbers, could still be seen on the large calendar I kept, hung in front of me, above the shelf.

  Now, just beside it, someone (but who?) had hung another, tiny one: April 7. It was the day.

  •

  Where was I? In the most familiar places of my life? Or elsewhere? I recognized everything, even that ink spot on the table—green ink. But was this not a false memory? I had the dizzying sense of seeing things already seen, things one knows one has never in fact seen. And this little world of Pomelore’s greenhouses and gardens—so enclosed, so miraculously set apart, with such a solitary welcome—was it merely a trick of memory that, far from Le Castelet, Murevallières, and Serizelle (but God only knows where), enveloped me in this wonderful hallucination?

  I felt indeed that I was here, between my painted racks and this waxed shelf, here and not elsewhere, but this point of presence, was it really where it appeared to be and not, as it seemed, in the unlocatable and perilous land of imaginary memories? This April 7 was nothing but a phantasmal date, and this greenhouse, where the sides of the smallest pots seemed solid, belonged perhaps to nothing more than a thought . . .

  A very tender thought indeed, and as such, open to desire’s most chimerical creations. My return was simply a trick of that thought, improbably corresponding to what my eyes and hands seemed to see and touch around me, but which came perhaps from some interior vision. Most likely nothing was real, because this illusion gave me such a delicately intangible pleasure that it affected only my mind, where it created a strange mental sweetness. Sweetness that excluded all sensory sweetness and that held, in the ineffable site of thought, this enchanted world of return to familial roofs. I was, myself, clear. Nothing came to me that was not a sign, a clear sign. There, not far from the yellow rack, next to the dwarf palm—the large wicker armchair and the little purple silk pillow stuck with needles, along with a thimble on top of a pin—was that not Aunt Philomène? She was there. All these details betrayed my aunt’s mysterious presence. And not far from her, Inès . . . For I was certainly not the one who had placed the blue delphinium (Delphinium consolida) in the painted porcelain vase on my shelf before I left. At the foot of the plant was a little hymnal, where a blue flower was drying between two hymns to the Virgin.

  I was touched, but I could not bring myself to believe in it fully. From this disbelief was born the inventive power that built a true dream from the humblest objects my gaze recognized.

  Still, I was alone.

  Nothing so far suggested that my family of fifteen Mégremuts had returned from ten o’clock mass. Uncle Mathieu’s brake carriage had not yet creaked at the bottom of the hill. This carriage is old, the hillside steep. I had time—time to emerge from this dream, a dream so mysterious it almost gave me the feeling of inventing myself, so simple and natural did everything seem, made just for me. Would it not be best to pull myself together, to take advantage of this unexpected solitude and to go, for example, under a tree, in the alley of pears planted with so much common sense? This greenhouse was not doing me any good.

  I remember I took an old straw hat—mine—still hanging from its nail, and I went out. I looked at the time. A quarter past eleven. The alley of pears indeed breathed calm good will. It had been limed and weeded. Not a trace of burn on the delicate branches. From the pears you pass to the arbors and from there into a still more secluded corner of the orchard. A tall hedge encloses it. A pointed archway has been cut through it, and there, dwelling apart in this retreat, are seven trees. There is nothing especially rare about them. They are apricot trees. But they are known to produce petit muscat apricots with a unique flavor, and they are quite old. And so we tend them. We tend them with great respect, because they are the orchard’s ancestors. The earth where they still thrive is, for the Mégremuts, the site of a kind of cult. Children never go there. It is spoken of solemnly. During bloom and harvest time, the trees inspire the whole family with religious reverence. Their care is entrusted to the oldest and wisest of the Mégremuts. It is he who prunes them. But he never does so without having first consulted Murevallières, Serizelle, Le Castelet, and, of course, the heavens.

  I love this corner devoted to our oldest fruit trees. Its isolation is sweet; a small spring flows into a limestone basin, and there is a bench where, in every season—when it is not raining—you can go to read, to rest, to spin some dreams. No one, or almost no one, ever comes here, except to tend those seven trees. There is no more solitary place on the calm flank of our hill.

  Which is why I never go there without fearing I might see some mysterious, furtive figure, the secret guardian of this sleeping sanctuary. During my childhood, when it was forbidden to me, I would slip along the hedge to listen to the barely audible sound of the spring. Then, because of the taboo that kept me from seeing what was happening behind the branches, I would imagine I heard a step, a breath, sometimes a murmur . . . A faint feeling of this imaginary presence has remained with me; it always makes me pause under the hawthorn arch to listen. That feeling gripped me this morning with even greater strength because an extraordinary stillness behind the leaves made the silence more palpable. The spring itself must have been quiet since early morning; you could hear nothing, not even an insect. Yet the air was fragrant, and all the old trees’ pollen, sweet and warm like incense, floated under the cliff, sheltered from the breeze.

  I crossed the threshold and took a few steps.

  •

  Someone was there.

  I only saw the round back, or rather the reddish-brown redingote with its large collar and padded shoulders. The coattails, topped at the waist with two mother-of-pearl buttons, were draped over full, fleshy calves, comfortably encased in gray wool stockings. On the head, a wide-brimmed, flat-topped, flaring silk hat shielded a plump nape from the sun.

  It was Uncle Mathieu.

  In his right hand he was holding a small pruning shear. From his left arm hung a basket, also flared, resembling a woman’s cape and adorned with a blue ribbon—Aunt Philomène’s garden basket.

  Uncle Mathieu was not moving. He was standing at the end of the alley, in front of the largest, handsomest, most venerable of the seven apricot trees, the most venerable in the world. He seemed to be contemplating the floral splen
dor of the ancient tree, amazed that, despite its age, it remained so responsive to spring, as borne out by its thousands of flowers and the plumes of perfume that steamed up through its branches toward the sun. He was rapt. He saw, felt, tasted—drank—this rapture. Every so often, two or three petals fell from one of the flowers, and, in hesitant flight, landed on his shoulder or the shining brim of his black hat.