Death in Saint-Chartier

by Ivo Fornesa

  Yes, that was a portrait of a conqueror and a lone wolf. He exuded intelligence, skill and relentlessness, along with a healthy dose of worldliness, of course, and the air of someone who knows how to use his charms. The physiognomist wasn’t far off, he thought. What would she say about him? Bah! he snorted. Best not to think about it.

  Lost in his thoughts, Laurent didn’t hear Gaston approach and quietly set down before him a plate filled with all sorts of petites bouchées. He looked down in delight at the little bites and wondered which one to start with when Gaston pointed out the window toward the château park, where two people were engaged in what appeared to be a very heated debate. The one gesturing wildly was none other than Monsieur Shennan. His face was illuminated with a demonic light as he stood shaking a roll of blueprints and shouting at a large man in a hard hat, who did his best to weather the storm.

  ‘It’s not an uncommon sight with the head of the Portuguese crew. Who knows what he botched this time?’ explained Gaston. ‘His employees are excellent, but he’s a fool, and I bet Monsieur Shennan’s patience has reached its limit. I’m afraid we won’t be seeing much of them any more. I feel bad for his four employees, who are wonderful, not to mention good customers.’

  ‘Well, I imagine a restoration project like that isn’t easy to oversee. Doesn’t he have a construction manager or someone helping him out?’ He had trouble getting the last words out, because he’d stuffed a small roasted pepper filled with hot goat cheese into his mouth, failing, in his gluttony, to properly calibrate the time between the end of his sentence and insertion of the bouchée.

  ‘Yes, another idiot, a guy from Barcelona by the name of Andrés … he had us all fooled at first, but he turned out to be a cheap con artist with a fake engineering degree. Since Monsieur Shennan didn’t live here, and his business kept him away, he couldn’t keep an eye on him, but as soon as he found out he gave the guy the boot, just as he did with the carpenter, Carlo Melisso, another swindler. Believe me, a lot of people talk bad about Monsieur Shennan, but I’ve lived in front of the château since I was a kid, and it takes a pair to do what he’s doing. If it weren’t for him, in a few years the château would have been a pile of rubble.’

  Laurent speared a mini sausage with a stick of celery inserted in the middle and wrapped in a piece of fried pancetta.

  ‘I’m not one to judge, because I just got here, but from what I gather he seems to have more detractors than friends.’

  Gaston looked at him squarely in the face. ‘You can say that again. But you can also bet that none of them are from Saint-Chartier. I’d even wager that none of the people badmouthing him have ever done a thing for the town except attend the festival. Personally, I like him. He’s a straight shooter and good drinker, and he’s fixing up our monument – because incidentally, here we feel the château belongs to all of us. Your grandfather felt that way too. So Shennan’s a foreigner. Who cares? Madame Curie was Polish, Chagall was Russian, Louis de Funès was from Seville, and Yves Montand from Italy. And you’re from Chile, so you probably know that Matta, the painter, was from your country. Same with Jodorowsky. And they were all adopted by France, weren’t they? Right now the main thing is to support him so his project is a success, because it’ll be a boon for everyone, you can be sure of that. Besides, despite all the grumbling about the festival, I know La Châtre wanted to move it to the Château d’Ars, which is owned by the town government.’

  All Laurent could do with his mouth full was nod while his host held forth, especially since he saw nothing to quibble with. But mostly he wanted to give the matter a rest, because the wise diner, if the dish is good, savours his food in silence. Luckily Gaston was a professional and quickly grasped the situation. He apologised for the rant, saying he’d let him enjoy his food in peace while he went to the kitchen to check on the salad and the main course. On the menu today were Berry lentils with rice pilaf, blood pudding and fried onion. Not exactly light fare.

  Laurent spent the rest of the time relishing that simple yet superb meal, which concluded with some unreasonably delicious poached pears and a plum liqueur made in house – in a private still, as Gaston whispered in a tone meant for serious matters that require discretion. To tell the truth, he said, with all the regulations and red tape nowadays, you didn’t know which hand to wipe your arse with.

  A GREAT DANE AND

  A CHINESE CRESTED

  Saint-Chartier was a small but picturesque town, and Laurent decided to explore the area on foot in a series of outings. After he got his dog, a black Belgian Shepherd he christened Chimay (after the beer of the same name), he set about carrying out his plan with gusto, since his companion turned out to be a tireless walker.

  He spent these walks thinking about what his future might hold. He’d arrived in France with luggage and gear but without a clear, definitive plan – just the certainty that he needed a long break from his job and social life. Specifically, he needed to get away from a certain gorgeous but problematic woman … and above all from the powerful politician she was married to. It wasn’t his fault if he kept meeting unsatisfied women in search of a stud to alleviate their marital troubles – troubles of a largely sexual nature. What else could he do? ‘It’s a question of patriotism,’ said his uncle in Valparaíso, the one who had the flower nursery, stroking his white moustache. ‘A Frenchman must never let anyone question our reputation for romantic prowess.’

  A new life: that’s what Laurent had decided to build, and he believed it wasn’t too late. He hadn’t yet reached fifty, he was in perfect shape, and he’d never let himself be carried away by any dangerous pursuits save sports. He had no time for drugs, gambling, alcoholism or other vices. Nor did he smoke or eat to excess. In fact, women were his only weakness.

  His saving grace was that his interest was not merely sexual. He loved everything about women: he adored talking to them, listening to them, watching them, even going shopping with them. In fact, some of the ones he’d lived with openly mocked him for his obsession with organising their wardrobe.

  That was the problem: Laurent fell in love with each and every one. What’s worse, he fell in love with them all at the same time. If only he could become – to quote a Nobel prize-winning writer whose name he couldn’t recall – a serial monogamist! No, he was a sentimental philanderer and couldn’t bear to go without even a single one of his women. But therein lay the rub: keeping them all happy took a physical, psychic and monetary toll on him, and robbed time from everything else, since Laurent, to top it off, was a considerate man who never forgot to call, write, send a postcard or, when his grim finances allowed, buy a gift that was ‘simple but heartfelt’, as he’d say as he presented them.

  No doubt, he needed a long sabbatical, far from the temptations that Latin America offered him.

  First of all, as a form of therapy, he resolved to do all household chores himself and to maintain a Prussian tidiness. Neither cleaning, nor washing, nor cooking, nor ironing posed any challenge, but the house had a tiny yard and came with a small plot in a community garden next to the old wash house, out on the footpath to the town of La Preugne, so he’d set about learning the basics of growing and gardening to keep the landscaping in his small terrain under control. He also found he had to become a handyman, since the rates technicians charged in France were so high that when he received his first bills he nearly died of shock. Little by little he started exploring the daunting array of publications on such disciplines available in bookstores and kiosks, and gradually his intimidation gave way to enthusiasm, as he noticed a certain level of success in his work.

  He began to enjoy everything he did, even running into neighbours from the village and exchanging a courteous ‘Bonjour, Madame’ or ‘Bonjour, Monsieur’ as everyone in rural France still does when they see each other on the street. And with his two daily walks with the dog, he now had, for the first time in his life, something that could be called a methodical, orderly existence, a prospect that years back would have made
him retch.

  In the afternoons, right after lunch, he took a route that led down a path by the church and on to the cemetery, and then continued on up to the farm where Monsieur Roger raised his Appaloosa horses. From there Laurent would head down toward the police station, past the tavern and the post office, around the town hall and onto a path carpeted in dense mown grass curiously called the ‘Ladies’ Path’, which led past the Bodard chapel and along the river to the main road.

  One peaceful afternoon, not long after starting out on his walk, he heard a huge commotion of dogs barking, little girls squealing and shouting in English, and an adult woman yelling something after them in some incomprehensible tongue. Chimay went tense and pricked up his ears. Suddenly a tiny freak of a dog rounded the corner of a moss-covered wall and shot toward them. A bounding Great Dane came hard on its heels, followed in turn by three girls, each in a multicoloured parka – and not cheap ones, as Laurent, veteran skier that he was, could tell from afar. Running and stumbling after them came an inconceivably overbundled something or other, shouting in a high voice and clearly not in the local dialect. Laurent stood, mouth agape, though in his defence it should be said that he reacted with presence of mind: he’d spent too much of his life doing outdoor sports not to see that the dogs had gotten off their leashes and were heading straight for the road. As he knew, Great Danes are as dumb as they are playful, so the scene could end in a dramatic accident if that gang of dogs and girls made it to the road.

  To keep this from happening, Laurent saw that he first had to stop the freakish little dog, which, to judge by its barking, was having a ball. Its breed was anyone’s guess: it was a little thing, about as tall as a beagle but much skinnier and mostly hairless, with just a few moles on its body and tufts of fur on its ears and its lower legs, and a crest on the top of its head. It was wrapped in what looked like a doll’s dress, in a cheery fuchsia, with – and here Laurent thought he was seeing things – a purse of the same colour slung over its leg, bouncing back and forth as it ran.

  Good Lord, he thought, it takes some nerve to dress up a dog like that out here in rural Berry. But a tug by Chimay yanked him out of his thoughts and forced him to react. He had to do three things: first, make his dog obey and not bolt off; second, grab the little dog as best he could; and third, and most difficult, not let the Great Dane tear the other dogs – or him, or his clothes – to pieces.

  This is what happened: Chimay was restless but stayed put. The little pink creature leapt into Laurent’s arms (he had, after all, a certain animal magnetism), and the Great Dane … well, there was no way to stop it from tackling him and covering him in mud and strands of slobber as thick as the curtains in the Château de Chambord. At this point Chimay, instead of defending his master, began to lick the muzzle of the mutt or whatever it was in the pink dress. The damned thing must have been in heat, because it seemed to enjoy it and got so agitated and hot that it peed all over Laurent. The Great Dane, meanwhile, managed to slip its rope of a tongue inside the collar of his raincoat. To top it off, suddenly three pairs of children’s feet began to kick him in the buttocks and lower back, shouting, ‘Dog thief! We’ll tell our daddy and you’ll be sorry!’ ‘Let Barbie go, you bad man!’ ‘Olaf, kill him, he’s trying to kidnap your girlfriend!’ It should be said that this last instruction, despite shedding light on the Great Dane’s name, was none too reassuring.

  As if to prove things can always get worse, a delicate little child-sized foot hit him squarely in the jewels, and at that point Laurent realised all he could do was bear it with as much dignity as he could. Clearly the proverb about a good death bringing honour to your life wouldn’t apply here. Fortunately for him, someone appeared at his side and began pulling the animals and girls off him.

  From the person’s tone, speaking now in English, he guessed that it was the bundle wrapped up to the eyebrows he’d seen running behind the girls. Her voice was calmer now, sweet and angelic – although, truth be told, any voice of rescue, even the rum-soaked growl of a pirate, would have sounded to Laurent’s ears like the song of a castrati choir.

  Freeing him was no easy task, and the girls clearly didn’t care one whit that the woman with the heavenly voice was telling them to get off. Even in such a plight, what Laurent most desired was not to get the peeing dogs off him but to see the face that went with that siren’s voice. Perhaps the woman in question read his mind, for she unwound the scarf and threw back her hood, revealing one of the most beautiful faces Laurent had ever seen: she was small, with large eyes, golden skin, long earlobes stretched by a pair of heavy gold earrings, a mouth with coral lips and gleaming white teeth. Her smile made abundantly clear how sorry she was about the situation and what sympathy she felt for the man on the ground.

  Laurent looked up at her, silently imploring her to sort out the mess, though he knew full well she couldn’t. Even struck with Cupid’s arrow, he still had enough sense to see that this young woman, a sort of governess or nanny he supposed, was pleading in an unknown language to no avail.

  Luckily, just then, through the frigid wind of early March came another voice, clear and decisive, issuing an order that would brook no disobedience. The rabble quieted down, the slobber practically crystallised from fright, the girls leapt off Laurent as if he had the plague, and even the dogs moved a prudent distance away. Only Chimay continued rolling on the ground, eyes fixed on the little dog.

  As Laurent, now a mess, got up and tried to pull himself together, another Asian woman walked over, apparently their mother. Tall and thin, she possessed that rare, elegant beauty that has something of the supernatural about it. She had devilishly dark eyes and a face full of angles, each more unsettling, intriguing, fascinating than the last, while her marble-white skin set off the straight, jet-black hair that waved gently as she walked. Everything about her exuded elegance: no doubt her ancestors had enjoyed power and regular meals for many generations, two things that ultimately give their descendants character and great confidence.

  When the woman reached the group, she looked at the girls and the dogs, whose eyes were all glued to the ground, and then turned to Laurent with a surprisingly friendly smile. He saw a distinct sense of humour from the edges of her lips and the fine lines around her eyes, which remained firm, even if not immune to time. She extended her hand and introduced herself in proper French.

  ‘Good afternoon. My name is Mayumi Shennan, and I apologise for this mishap. Rest assured it will not happen again. The girls and I are going to have a serious talk.’ Saying this, she turned to look at them again, and all three girls were overcome by an identical shudder of terror. Laurent could tell that the Japanese woman who radiated authority was, in all likelihood, a good mother, meting out intelligent punishments, which also tend to be the harshest. He couldn’t help but laugh when he saw the panic written across the faces of each of the girls, and even those of the Great Dane and the little dog.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he reassured her. ‘Forgive them, please – they’ve practically done me a favour, since I certainly needed a little exercise,’ he said with a smile, apologising for the girls.

  Madame Mayumi looked at him fondly, and feigning seriousness, responded, ‘You’re very kind, and I appreciate your goodwill, but we can’t let them get off scot-free after the mess they’ve made of your clothes. By the way, you’ve got some saliva and a bit of moss hanging from your ear.’ She handed him a tissue. ‘And apparently our nanny lost control of the situation.’

  When the nanny heard this, a stricken look came across her face. Then, to Laurent’s surprise, Madame Mayumi put her arm around her affectionately, and she immediately recovered her calm. It was a strange gesture, as if the girl were like another daughter to her, or a little sister. Finally, Madame Mayumi issued her judgment.

  ‘Still, I think we can overlook it this time, don’t you? On one condition: that you come back with us for tea, so we can get those clothes cleaned up. I’m sure we can find something of my husband’s for you to wear
in the meantime. I think you two are the same size.’

  ‘I’d be delighted, mostly because I suspect you won’t take no for an answer,’ Laurent replied.

  Madame Mayumi gave a hearty laugh. ‘You’ve got a shrewd eye, Monsieur …’

  ‘Laurent, Laurent de Rodergues.’

  ‘So you’re Monsieur de Rodergues. We’ve heard of you; you’re the new neighbour who just moved into the vicarage. My husband is very eager to meet you. Sadly he’s in Châteauroux today, arguing with the architects from the Heritage Office. I’m sure the two of you will have a lot to talk about, such as your experiences in Patagonia and Araucanía – along with the customs and habits of the native women, no doubt.’

  When they reached the town hall, a local who was just coming out of the building stopped to stare at them with an unmistakable look of disgust. Putting his beret on his head, he muttered audibly, ‘Lovely! Now everyone’s become all buddy-buddy.’ Then he spat on the ground and walked deliberately away. Laurent had half a mind to run over to him and slap him across the face, and he made a move to do so, but Madame Mayumi grabbed him by the arm with unexpected strength.

  ‘It’s nothing, let it go. Only fools think they can be liked by everyone.’

  The farmer’s attitude and Mayumi’s words left Laurent more than a little confused. A gust of frigid air blew over him. He knew her words weren’t meant for him. And yet, taken together with the local’s scornful remark, it showed that the sleepy town of Saint-Chartier wasn’t the haven of peace and tranquillity he thought he’d moved to.

  That’s the second drop of vitriol she’s dispensed in the last few minutes, he thought. Then he began to wonder whether perhaps the life of Carlos Shennan wasn’t as carefree or happy as it seemed, at least not domestically – because if one thing was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was that his wife didn’t bow down before anyone.