Malicroix

by Henri Bosco

  I thought I was seeing the god of the garden.

  When he turned and noticed me, he showed no surprise. His large face with its sensible nose expressed only pleasure. He said simply, “Martial, my child, it’s you . . .”

  I went to him.

  There was no further effusion; we sat down under the apricot tree.

  He carefully lifted the tails of his reddish-brown redingote, removed his hat, placed his shears in the center of its crown, then put the hat on the basket. “The earth smells so good,” he said to me laughing, “that I let myself go. If I get dirty, all I have to do is give myself a good brushing when I go back in. Look, Martial, how beautiful our tree is . . .”

  He inhaled and closed his eyes to more fully enjoy the blessing of this voluptuous breath. You could see it going down into him, spreading, reaching the boundaries of his life, where all pleasure spreads into cosmic well-being and unites us with the universal soul.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Martial,” he was saying, his eyes still closed, “here, beside me, beneath this apricot tree in this beautiful weather. It’s a real country Sunday, the kind we love here, as you recall, when spring descends onto our three houses and Pomelore . . .”

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. “We were waiting for you.”

  I choked up.

  I wanted to speak; but, guessing my feeling, he kindly motioned me to silence. Then he continued. “They’re all at mass. I stayed. I knew you’d be arriving here this morning without any notice. You had to have a good welcome. Someone thought of me, and I thought of Pomelore. Which is why you found me here—” He deliberated, and then, more gently—“Martial?”

  “Uncle Mathieu?”

  “Don’t you think this is the most beautiful garden in the valley?”

  I thought so. How could anyone not?

  Now I could hear the spring and the usual cooing of the doves, back on the Aleppo pine at the top of the cliff. A little lizard, reassured by our calm, had, unbeknownst to us, silently slid up the scaly tree trunk. Its throat upturned to the heat, it was drawing life from the sun. One of the thin bright rays fell on him, just enough to warm his tiny body, immobilized by rapture. A few of the most fragile blossoms fell onto us from the highest branches; they alighted on my hands, and their delicacy amazed me. I did not dare move a finger, their presence seemed so precarious. Bees, all aquiver, sometimes flew in front of our faces, following the flowers’ flight.

  Uncle Mathieu was speaking. I heard him like a voice in a dream. “As you might guess, Martial, during your absence, we never thought of you without some anxiety . . . We knew everything. . ."

  •

  His eyes wide open now, he was calling up a thought that his discreet words barely hinted at—so as not to distress me. “Worry, Martial, serves no purpose. As you know, we banish it from the family. But this time, it was important. We had to face it.”

  I said, “I understand you, Uncle Mathieu. And yet, you don’t know Maître Dromiols!. . ."

  He was silent a moment and then replied, “I saw him. He came to Murevallières.”

  He smiled at my surprise.

  “We rejoiced in it, Martial. Not for him. For you. But he is quite a man.”

  “All cunning, Uncle Mathieu.”

  “Yes, precisely, Martial, all cunning. Luckily! But if he came this far of his own free will, it was because you were giving him, as he might have said, no small measure of trouble. A simple Mégremut! Aunt Philomène was in heaven . . . Didn’t he want us all to go, all the Mégremuts, with me in the lead, to wrest you from this island, about which we all agreed he had some nefarious plans? He left us solemnly, but sputtering, if I may speak so plainly about a man otherwise so eloquent, erudite, polite, gourmet—what else?—in short, redoubtable.”

  He turned his head toward me and looked at me with some pride; then, in that gentle Mégremut tone that could make a stone weep, he said, “We were firm.” Amazed to hear himself say this, he contemplated it the better to believe it and, having determined that he spoke the truth, he repeated, “The Mégremuts are firm.”

  As he uttered these four words, a sort of naive joy lit up his sensitive face. Then, because he likes moderation, he thought it best to soften the impact of this perhaps too-terse formulation. “This takes nothing away from the heart, naturally, Martial. Do you understand me?”

  But who could understand him better than I? The day, the hour, the color of the sky . . . the sounds, the trees—all joined with his simple statements. The mingling of their virtues made the thoughts so penetrating they gave our silence greater power than our words. And so what we said to each other shaped sounds, not on our lips but in our souls. Springtime made them pass between us with marvelous ease. Our thoughts moved through our bodies, and nothing separated Martial from Mathieu, the old man grown tender with the tough and trembling youth. We loved each other.

  • • •

  All my relatives joined to welcome me as if I were returning from a short trip—as if I had left seven or eight days ago and had not gone far. Sometimes a Mégremut travels like that to Péribac or Sabriez to visit family or friends. Generally, the Mégremuts are stay-at-homes. Still, we had seen Méjean de Mégremut-Sarlonges (who lives, admittedly, in Anthebaume) leave for Italy and stay there for three months; but he is the odd one in the family—old as he is, he never stops moving. Not the others. My absence must have gouged a hole in the family that was difficult to fill, for I had always lived in almost daily interchange with the three houses. Not a day would go by when I was not seen as much at Le Castelet as at Murevallières or Serizelle. I had three uncles here—Mathieu, Marcelin, and Anselme—who loved me dearly. Although the most affectionate of the three was Uncle Mathieu—who had raised me and was considered the head of the family—neither Anselme nor Marcelin was unmoved by my joys, my troubles, my hopes, and even my little illnesses (very characteristic of the Mégremuts). The three aunts—Clémence, Élisabeth, and Philomène—watched over me like three angels. Philomène was a mother to me. My six cousins admired me, and there were two—Inès and Marceline—who, young as they were, already knew how to heed my words. All this I remembered well.

  Uncle Mathieu’s welcome eased my return among these peaceful, reasonable creatures, whose every feeling is kept under calm control by a steady mind. In all three houses, all the souls had surely remained open to await me. Still, my heart was pounding as I walked back down with Uncle Mathieu from Pomelore to Murevallières. I found once more all the old things that had been dear to me. Yet the way I became reacquainted with them was slightly mysterious—they seemed not to present themselves to my eyes but to surface within me, like memories rising from my most distant childhood. I was moved; I told myself that during my absence I must have grown much older without realizing it. For the first time, I was discovering a past; and although it was still quite near, it gave me a surprising sense of time, which gripped me with some anxiety. Would I rediscover my natural place among my relatives in this, my own house? And my relatives, would I see them reassembled in the family hall, the one used for large gatherings? . . . I was walking beside Uncle Mathieu, who was silent. To judge from the sun’s position, it was close to noon, and yet an inexplicable silence continued to hover over the hill, its gardens, and the three houses. Fifteen Mégremuts speak, move, ruffle the air. They should be here by now. Mass was long since over, and the road from Anthebaume to out hamlet is not long. But the Mégremuts, uncharacteristically mute, offered none of the usual signs of their presence.

  They had shut themselves up indoors, and as I passed, they kept this extraordinary silence. I was returning in a dream. The six huge oaks, the gardens, and Murevallières seemed to come forward to meet me. I recognized them. Yet they seemed different from the inner image with which I vainly tried to link them. This discord made me vaguely uneasy. Then, suddenly, I understood: there was a stranger within me. At this thought, I was torn by a great sorrow. We were entering Murevallières. The silence there was as strange as
in the other two houses. So as not to disturb it, Uncle Mathieu was walking on tiptoe; to look natural, he was forcing a small smile. Yet he had tears in his eyes, and he did not know how to hide them. I did not see anything, but I was certain, since, despite himself, every now and then, he passed his hand under his nose and coughed quietly, for no reason . . .

  •

  We went up to the first floor. The door to the boudoir was open. You could see the sunlit window looking out on the countryside. The carpet muffled my steps and I advanced without a sound. When I was on the threshold, I turned back toward Uncle Mathieu. He had disappeared.

  •

  Aunt Philomène was in the boudoir. Nothing had changed in the little round room. It was still just as as embracing, with a mysterious friendliness. Within its walls covered in faded old blue silk, enlivened by two pastels of smiling Mégremut ancestors and two engravings—The Klepht’s Farewell to His Son and The Indian Cottage—it seemed to harbor the family spirit. That spirit is always embodied in an elderly woman, kindly and quick-witted, with a soft heart and a sharp tongue, a woman who, as she speaks, grows tender unawares. That woman was here. I saw her in her softly padded bergère. She had not heard me approaching. Now, for the first time in my life, I could contemplate her at leisure, seeing her with new eyes, the eyes of another. For the stranger had followed me. The stranger was here—I was the stranger. Caught between these two natures that nevertheless interpenetrated one another, body and soul, I was reluctant to trouble the peace of this charming old woman who, while she waited for me, bent over her rose point lace, carefully stitching. Her cape of finely woven gray straw, trimmed with ribbons and gauze, rested on the round side table. Her thick golden missal had been set near her gloves. She wore a pleated dress of gray pearl Mysore silk. I recognized its embroidery —long, branching foliage with three ribbons knotted into rosettes on the sleeves. From under the dress, resting on a mauve cushion, peeked two cloth ankle boots, tiny and still. With her beautiful white hair coiled around her head in two braids, she was an unreal woman, drawn solely from light, in an impalpable, shining silver dust. At her feet on a blue velvet stool, my cousin Anaïs, her granddaughter, serious (at seven one knows how to be gracefully serious), was looking at an album of wildflowers. She held it wide open on her knees, and she was studiously contemplating a colored sheet, on which lay a slender stalk of bright yellow cowwheat. I did not dare stir; nothing was stirring in front of me, not even the sun parakeet in its bamboo cage hung with glass bells. Its eyes closed in its red and gold head, the beloved bird seemed to be sleeping as it swung on its pliant bamboo perch. There was no other sound except the bees. Enchanted by the scent of honey spread through the tower’s ivy, they were burrowing into it all atremble, seeking rapture and perhaps some shade. The sun was high, and the day so beautiful we seemed already on the verge of summer, budding in this first warmth.

  Aunt Philomène let out a long sigh, placed her lacework on her knees, and dreamt, her gaze lost in the sky beyond the window; then, smiling mischievously, without turning her head, she said to me, “Come, Martial. I know you’re here.”

  Anaïs opened her eyes wide and murmured, “Oh! The cousin!”

  I hugged Aunt Philomène to my heart.

  Not two miles away, Anthebaume’s calm bell was already pealing the delicate chimes of the Angelus. Now Serizelle broke our Sunday peace with the sound of childish voices. A rooster was waking at Le Castelet; at Pomelore, the doves cooed; a dog started to bark on the plateau; and amid the oaks of Murevallières, the solemn note of the bullfinch, whistling gently, suddenly stirred the dark foliage. You could hear the silken flight of the little wild doves that, every April, fly low over our gardens.

  “They’re two weeks ahead of time this year,” Aunt Philomène observed. “Spring is early!”

  I was listening to her. Her speech slowed as her voice gave her words their full meaning. They went down into the depths of my being. Aunt Philomène was saying: “. . . At first, as you can imagine, Martial, he frightened us a little. There was something to be afraid of. None of us had ever reached such size, nor such weight; taken up so much space on a sofa; breathed so much of a room’s air at once; held forth so eloquently while eating with such appetite; spoken of ourselves with such easy confidence. Of course, we felt small, light—like straw. Never have Mégremuts weighed so little!”

  “I don’t doubt it, Aunt Philomène.”

  “If you don’t doubt it, Martial, it’s because he surprised you too.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you weighed as little as we did?”

  “Perhaps. . ."

  “Well then, all the better. When you’re dealing with giants, you shouldn’t foolishly play at being a giant. You should play at being a Mégremut. And that’s what we did.”

  “I did too, Aunt Philomène.”

  “Ah! You have the family spirit, Martial. Come, let me kiss you.”

  She was growing tender. We kissed.

  “He is cunning,” I said.

  I was waiting for her reply—it came.

  “By good fortune, Martial!” (Just like Uncle Mathieu.) “But he is followed by his cunning. It leaps up right in front of you. That Rat. . ."

  “Rat was here?”

  “Yes, Martial. Rat was with him. That Rat. That fragile Rat, that Rat who is all mystery! That good Rat, after all. . ." She was smiling.

  “All cunning as well, my aunt. . ."

  “I grant you that, Martial, but sometimes he’s cunning with the monster. And then, without his cunning, tell me, where would we be today? He told me everything, right from the start. . ."

  “Perhaps everything, Aunt Philomène, that is, almost everything. He betrays people even as he breathes. . ."

  “He betrays himself primarily. . ."

  “That’s his charm, and his danger. You like him, Aunt Philomène?”

  “I like him. And without him—” All of a sudden, a thought appalled her. She held it back.

  I could not keep from saying, “It’s true, without him, I’d be dead.”

  I saw her shudder. “Martial, Anaïs is here. . ."

  Anaïs feigned innocence, but her nose in her album, she slyly cocked an ear.

  Luckily, the silence disturbed the parakeet; it began to complain bitterly while smoothing its silken wings, and its nasal reproaches exploded amid a great sound of ruffled feathers.

  Still, I said, “He withheld your letters.”

  Aunt Philomène did not flinch. “Well, he must have been mistaken.”

  “He wanted me to stay—”

  “We did too, Martial, and that’s what we wrote. It cost us a great deal. . ."

  As we had nothing more to say, Uncle Mathieu, as if by enchantment, appeared on the threshold, with that cheerful, worried look of a man assailed by hunger.

  “There,” Aunt Philomène said, “that’s all, Mathieu.”

  She took me by the arm.

  Mathieu gently shrugged his shoulders, smiled, took Anaïs’s hand, and followed us out.

  • • •

  In this way I reentered my family, as simply as possible. No one questioned me, and the only discussions about my time away were held on that first day, with Uncle Mathieu and Aunt Philomène. After that, they too kept silent. Neither Anselme nor Marcelin, nor any of the cousins indulged in those effusions so natural to them. They cloaked these natural impulses in discreet movements; only occasionally did they let slip some small sign of their true feelings—a double entendre, an inexplicable sigh, an unexpected silence that troubled me. Still, it was as if a delicate spirit had arranged their thoughts and feelings, their gestures and words, to create a world in which my own thoughts, feelings, gestures, and words could have free rein.

  In these homes of such tender welcome, everything had become even more tender, and it was only through this excess—barely noticeable—that I guessed the Mégremuts’ concern. Still, they maintained a gracious ease as they played their parts, charged with the weight of thi
s concern. I admired them—they who were so inclined toward affection—as they put on this smiling indifference, including even some irony now and then, with a gift of pretense they pretended not to marvel at. And because I acted as if I saw nothing, we lived in a fiction that let me prolong the dream within which everything had grown blurred since my return to the family.

  Thanks to this dream, I saw them differently—better perhaps. These ridiculous people, against whom I had railed while at La Redousse, now seemed not at all ridiculous; they no longer annoyed me, nor did they make me laugh. Theirs were the modest manners (which I had misinterpreted) of the gravest souls, and their outward fears did not preclude inward courage—latent gravity that does not show itself in words; fears that mask strengths. And everywhere the enduring flame of secret love, the hidden cult of true silence.

  To face them for three months under this guise, in my gentle childhood homes, was, I now understood, the most difficult trial, the most treacherous—before the trial of the fear and force of water.

  Despite their wonderfully casual appearance, they too were facing a trial, and although they veiled their efforts to control their expressive hearts, that effort nevertheless made the veil tremble. I perceived it. Uncle Mathieu—who with half-shut eyes saw everything—saw that I saw; prudently, he grew a little more tender than need be, to keep me from becoming tender. In this way he hoped that my heart, whose wildness he understood, would free itself from the family’s old-fashioned charm. But he was caught in his own game, for, from the moment he first learned to love, he could not feign an excess of love. Because of this, his calm face was occasionally clouded with melancholy.

  “Anselme,” he would say, “it looks like rain.”

  Surprised, Anselme would look at the sky. It was clear. “Mathieu, where did you get that notion? Look up.”

  Mathieu looked up. Not a cloud on the horizon. He grumbled. “The sky, the sky! But the sky is not everything! I can feel it in my leg. It’s dragging. . ."