A Singular Man

by Emmanuel Bove

  Perhaps I become a little too animated when talking about estates. It's that they have occupied a large place in my life. They influenced my childhood. Like those unsuccessful lawsuits which for certain people are reminders of some sort of past splendor, these estates for a long while gave me the illusion of origins of which I could be proud.

  Monsieur Jules Dechatellux was the sort of whom people used to say (they do not say it anymore nowadays): "Ah, what a modest man!" They forgave him his coldness. Monsieur Vialatte alone disliked him. Whenever he met Jules Dechatellux it was to be made conscious that he possessed the smaller fortune, and to feel himself somehow a child. He felt without authority, without weight. This hostility provided me an ill-defined delight. In my imagination the two men were equally powerful. And whenever Monsieur Vialatte went over to visit the wealthy sugar producer, I would watch for his return, for I had noticed that he would treat me then with great gentleness.

  One autumn afternoon, Jacqueline took me for an outing in the forest. To invite someone to come on an outing, is that not a great mark of friendliness? The rays of sunshine blended with the forest colors. I remember how I had come running when Jacqueline called me, how when a few steps away I had come to a halt, docile and respectful.

  Jacqueline was accompanied by Etienne, a son of Monsieur Dechatellux. I see him now. He had an odd, waddling gait. In any sport you need long training in order to execute certain movements. When you have not had such training, you cannot, simply through imitation, execute those movements. Well, Etienne seemed not to have been trained in life's simplest movements.

  It was time to go back. Feelings of regret at bringing a child back to where we had got him at a time when we are continuing to do things that cause him such joy—I sensed those feelings in Jacqueline, and they consoled me. She was a woman who was tortured by the suffering of children. I now understand why she was so slow to commiserate with me. She knew that if she allowed me to place some hope in her, she would not have the courage to rebuff me.

  A few days after this outing, Monsieur Vialatte installed me in Sceaux, in the home of one of his friends, a professor at Lakanal. Jacqueline took me to the train. She opened the door to a compartment. She had only to bid me to step up inside for me to obey. Had she changed her mind, had she told me to get off, I would have climbed back down. That omnipotence affects me to this day.

  Jacqueline married shortly afterward. She was twenty-eight. To wait for a man who is worthy of one's love—that is a fine thing, especially when it is not a wait that will go on for a whole lifetime, but a reasonable kind of wait.

  As a youngster Etienne had been one of those who are continually prey to severe illnesses. He had never finished school. When he had revealed his love for Jacqueline, his father had shown great surprise. For miles around there was no other girl from a middle-class household. That she somehow possess all the virtues, all the qualities making her worthy to become his daughter-in-law, this would indeed have been a most curious coincidence. You did not have to be a great psychologist to understand that this was a love born from circumstances and not from a true community of feelings and of interests. Monsieur Dechatellux opposed this marriage.

  It was celebrated all the same, Etienne's state of health preventing his father from maintaining his refusal for very long. Immediately afterward, they left Cuts. I was thirteen at the time. I shall always remember the distress which invaded me when, on returning from Sceaux, I found that Jacqueline was no longer there. I was learning that absence is always fraught with danger.

  Yet I had been away for hardly any time at all. I should say that, above all else eager to have me off his hands, Monsieur Vialatte, who was not a very scrupulous man, had not given his professor friend a clear account of my situation. He must have thought that once I was gone, he would find a way not to have to take me back. After all, I did have a mother who might invoke her rights. Madame Mobecourt had never officially ended her involvement in my care. Once I was no longer on the premises, Monsieur Vialatte did not see what made his obligations toward me greater than, for example, Monsieur Rigal's. The professor had questioned me at length. More familiar than his friend Vialatte with the problems brought on for their guardians by the improbable situation certain children are in, he had been prompt to have me sent for on some excuse or other. In his reply Monsieur Vialatte begged the question, pretending not to have understood what was asked of him, in order to buy time. The professor dispatched a registered letter to him by return mail. That was how, having gone off for an indefinite period, I was back in Cuts after three months.

  With his daughter married, with the gatekeepers dismissed, Monsieur Vialatte had no alternative but to lodge me under his own roof. He did so, by the way, with good grace, for in between the failure of one maneuver and the preparation of the next, he was the best man in the world. What with the welcome I received, I soon forgot my thirteen-year-old's distress.

  Of the weeks that followed I preserve a fond memory. I roamed at will through the vast house, which until then I had seen only from the outside. The sinister gatehouse was closed up. A few days and I had ceased even to remember that I had lived in it for thirteen years. Once I was admitted into the house, the old servant woman forgot all that too. I was Monsieur Vialatte's son.

  There, one morning, stood Madame Mobecourt. She beckoned to me. I sensed that she was addressing the misfortunate child I had formerly been. Was she the cause of this new decision? Whatever its explanation, several days later Monsieur Vialatte conducted me to Compiègne, to the house of a tailor where, the day after my arrival, I began my apprenticeship.

  Much later, Jacqueline asked for me at the shop. I appeared before her with that particular look people have when one goes to fetch them at their work. What had happened? I didn't know. Jacqueline was angry. She thought what they had done to me was dreadful. I heard her say: "Under these circumstances, it would have been better to leave him at Abel's."

  Now I see myself in Paris, in a large sunny apartment from which I look out over chestnut trees in blossom. I recall another panorama, that of an enormous city. Marvelous, all of it. Sometimes I wonder what is about to happen to me. I am told to wait. One evening I am driven in a hackney cab to the Gare de Lyon. It is an unending trip that I make all by myself. I arrive in Menton. I had been standing in the corridor since Nice. These creepings back and forth before the Italian border, how slow they were! Nobody was waiting for me on the platform. I was afraid to get off. Yet I could read "Menton" on the station walls. Did several Mentons exist? Was this really the one I was supposed to go to? Leaning out, I at last caught sight of Jacqueline who was stopping to peer into each compartment. I jumped down to the platform with my little suitcase. She had seen me. She walked toward me, her arms outstretched. She hugged me, asked me a thousand and one questions, took my suitcase, led me to the exit.

  For a year Jacqueline and Etienne were able to fancy themselves happy. They were not. There is one thing you must not ask of love: it is to transform unhappy natures. You shall understand, after reading these pages, that this remark was not ventured lightly. Jacqueline and Etienne had been unhappy before marrying. Thus they had remained without being conscious of it. They became conscious of it at the end of a year. That was the point at which the problem of my upbringing served as a distraction.

  Jacqueline, who had until then thought it her duty to give me the affection I had been deprived of, discovered that what she had to do was arm me for what lay ahead. She had met with very few disappointments in life. Yet it seemed as though she was following the teachings of a dearly-won experience. Although a child, I scented the theoretical element in this education and such was my unwillingness to fall in with it that I became the cause for ever more frequent outbursts of temper. By and by the fatal words were pronounced: it was too late. That may have been true. The habits I had formed at the gatekeepers' were no doubt incompatible with those they wished to instill in me. Jacqueline remained patient. Even if it was too late, they must
try to straighten me out. She substituted severity for persuasion. Then she employed her husband as a bogy. What a psychological error! He would take my side, encourage me as soon as his wife left us alone, with the result that I began to idolize him. Wrongly, what's more, for when Jacqueline became aware of this, I underwent the deception of seeing myself betrayed by Etienne.

  Another year went by. I was beginning to live inside myself. Time, which strengthens friendship, was slowly killing what I felt for Jacqueline and Etienne. It was as if I were discovering as I grew up that they were not my parents. This was unfair. Jacqueline had not taken me away from a deeply devoted mother. It was I who had gone to Jacqueline. They enrolled me as a day pupil in a private school. I interpreted this as proof of indifference. I became unresponsive. I bridled at the slightest criticism. Jacqueline was clearly at loggerheads with herself. Once she said in front of me that it was folly to want to make for the happiness of a child who wasn't your own. She had known neither my father nor my mother. Who was to say I was not afflicted by mysterious defects? So she was waiting until I was old enough to earn my living. Until then, she would do what she felt was required of her.

  The war interfered. Etienne, called up on the first day, was killed in September of 1914. I saw his grave years later. It is located among ten or so others in a wheatfield near Château-Thierry. Not a tree, not a ditch, not a hole for shelter; a true battlefield.

  Jacqueline returned hurriedly to Paris. I remained alone with the servant in the little house on the hillside. I was sixteen years old. In October I received the order to register as a boarding pupil in the lycée in Nice. I was asked to give the servant her wages, to close up the house, to mail the key.

  I kept the wages, pocketed the registration fee, and I struck out across France, dauntless, extraordinarily conscious of my freedom.

  It would seem that adventure leaves as few traces in an adolescent's memory as discipline. Two years of wandering about, of inconsiderate open-handedness, imprudent associations, confused aspirations, nights spent out under the stars, today strike me as hardly any richer than the two previous years spent at the desks of the boarding school in Menton.

  After Marseilles, Lyons, here we are in Paris. I was seventeen and a half. Where should I go? Over to rue Saint-Jacques, to that hotel with its sides propped up by timbers, the one at the corner of rue des Feuillantines? My mother, so I had been told, had lived there fifteen years before. That constituted a reason for a young man alone in the world. I roamed the streets. The war seemed due never to end. Returning one day from Versailles (I was drawn to all those places where I thought I had moorings), I decided to join the air force. Earlier, at the château, sitting beside a woman—who was that woman?—in the embrasure of a pair of French windows, I had watched the planes, full of admiration. What time was it? What was the weather like? What money was I living on? I returned to Paris. Night was falling. That was when I announced excitedly to my female companion that I would be a hero. The next day, life took me in hand again. How much I would have liked both to love and to be loved by those countless women deprived, so it was said, of love! Those living on ground floors struck me as most accessible. It would have been so easy to enter their places, and to leave, without compromising them! And among such women—I wonder why—, those who gave piano lessons. "Lady gives piano lessons." These words, on small placards affixed by sealing wafers as brightly colored as ribbons, had come at last to appear to me like a disguised invitation. I imagined them, those piano teachers, beautiful and stern. How I would have loved to wait, in a remote room, surrounded by treats, for the lesson to end.

  Enough of this childishness.

  Warnings precede grave events. I had not paid a hotel bill—at which hotel? They intended to turn me out. I refused to leave. "You have no right to throw me into the street without a penny." I imagined I had all sorts of rights. I had a particular weakness for conscientious objection. For example, I already knew that, once inducted, I would not let them vaccinate me. "We're going for the police," they replied. This threat put an end to the quarrel. But the word police had been uttered. Before long I would hear it again. Yet I had not killed, nor stolen, nor even insulted a representative of the authorities. I did not very clearly see where the wrong lay in what I was charged with. I did not understand why accepting money from a woman who engaged in prostitution was a misdemeanor.

  Eighteen is such an awkward age! You know nothing, you see nothing, and yet you are a man. I was constantly hearing that it was enough just to knock on any door in order to obtain work, and I found none, that it was enough just to glance at a woman for her to speak to you first, and they all turned up their noses and walked past me.

  That kind of stupidity, by denying me entry into the thick of life, also kept me out of the way of dangers I was not big enough to cope with. Had I not even gone so far as to try earning money in a manner too shameful to name, strolling on boulevard de la Madeleine, like a woman? It would seem that my heredity was not as decisive as Jacqueline had claimed, for I was quite unable to put my plan into action. Although I walked up and down the boulevard for three nights in a row, not one occasion presented itself to me. I doubt whether those for whom obtaining a job or a woman's favors was mere sport would have wasted their time, as I had done.

  Then I thought anew about enlisting, this time in the infantry (I had forgotten about the air force). It is hard to believe, but I was unable to succeed. I navigated in a fog. I went to the wrong offices. When, finally, I got to the right place, I could not even produce my birth certificate. I wrote to Cuts. I never received a reply, I am absolutely certain of that. I wrote to Madame Mobecourt, also without result. Two months later I was still expecting to receive replies. I was afraid to write a second time. Why? What then were the ideas that I had about my fellow beings, about myself? One would think that I must have been timorous, uncommunicative, silent. Not at all. I was a talker, even too much of a talker. I was brazen, vain. I had turned my life into a saga. How much I liked a given person depended upon how much stock he put in my words. Yet I never mentioned Jacqueline. I dreaded her, when it came down to it. One especially self-confident day, I came out with the story of our life in Menton. An Italian man, my senior by I don't know how many years, was listening to me. "You can't leave that house abandoned that way." He convinced me that we should look after it. We took the train. He forced the lock. Yet another danger I came through!

  I went back to Paris hidden in a trainload of soldiers on leave. Their extraordinary camaraderie revived my desire to enlist. I wrote more letters. It may be that an underlying prudence held me back. Unless it was that, my involvements in life having just begun, I could not bring myself to leave it. Since in any case I would be called up when my turn came, I could, after all, without shirking my duty, take advantage of the delay granted me owing to my age.

  The women on boulevard Saint-Michel attracted me. To me they looked more beautiful than the others. But they paid no attention to me, and it hurt, for I wanted so much to please with my looks. At last, one of them, I don't know why, perhaps because she was in point of fact among the least beautiful, perhaps because she did not consort with other women in her category, took a sudden liking to me. She was a tall, thin person, whose low-cut blouses made up only incompletely for her want of bosom. She had family in Brittany. I dreamed about taking the train, about the two of us living out there, as lovers. In the evening I would wait for her in her room. I would fall asleep. In the middle of the night she would return. How strange these awakenings are for the man! And how changed it is, the flesh that offers itself to us as we come forth from a sleep in which we had forgotten about it!

  The War! What it costs me to make this confession! I did not fight in it. Was this a punishment, or was it Heaven protecting me? For a long time I thought it was Heaven protecting me. I arrive at the divisional depot, and it's the armistice. But is this not somehow indicative of the mediocrity of my destiny? I could have been exposed to death without provid
ence abandoning me. I could have returned glorious from the war.

  So I shall not talk about things I have not experienced. I shall simply say a few words about the time I spent in the army. I meant to enroll in an officers training program. How could I have imagined that at nineteen you are already a subject for inquiries and investigations? Among all the military stripes the one I most coveted was the officer candidate's, with its narrow piping. I took a dictation test. I did a problem. I was already enjoying certain privileges when I had to return back into the ranks. I still remember Captain Laîsné announcing the news to me from where he sat upon his horse during an exercise drill, I remember my shame, his reassuring words, then my tears.

  Shortly afterward, I received a letter from my mother. How did she know my address? The gendarmes had called upon her. Why? She was asking me for an explanation—asking me! How difficult to understand all this is! How, as one seeks to remember them, events seem incoherent once one has forgotten the peripeties that connect them!

  From that moment on my one thought was of getting out of uniform. My mysterious record followed me everywhere. It barred me from the howsoever modest posts I cast about for. It was the ordinary attendant who prevents you from entering. From five to nine, during the four hours I was off duty, I skipped off into the civilian world, where I planted stakes for the future. Indeed, I resembled one of those sorry soldiers who, after parading proudly before the defeated populace, proceed to fraternize with it. I was convinced that only with the aid of someone's sincere affection would I be able to take my first steps back into post-army life. Thus supported, I would dare show my face again before Jacqueline, before Madame Mobecourt. A normal life would then begin for me. What did I mean by a normal life? I didn't know. Let me be rescued from all material cares, and the rest, after that, would be of little importance.