Then came a gentle flow of honeyed words, as if sung—or, rather, twittered by the chirping of a swallow departing for the lands of the sun: “And we shall be three to tell it, that fairy tale, three, amon, three, one a man who will not be your father, but will be, will be, will be...”
And, in a repetitive whisper like that of a little child lulling itself to sleep endlessly singing the chorus of a nursery rhyme—“il faut, il faut, tirlifaut, tirlifaut, tirlifaut”—she ruminated, in indistinct soft, dribbling syllables, swallowed with trickles of saliva, the Breton litany of forenames, names, titles and soubriquets of...
To escape the oppression, which had become nightmarish, Geneviève abruptly interrupted Aunt Line, shaking her wrists.
“Come on, then!” she said. “What the devil has he to do with the Alexandra Prize? Hear me, in your turn, eh?”
She immediately regretted her brutality, however, on seeing the sudden deathly pallor that covered Aunt Line’s face like a shroud, and listening to the hoarse whistle of her respiration, resuming a natural rhythm, and observing in her eyes, ceasing their dance, the vitreous tone that advertised the end of the hypnotic and divinatory crisis—which is to say, the momentary death of the Sibyl Aunt Line.
Indeed, Geneviève could not get any more out of her thereafter, save for vague replied like: “It’s over now; I no longer see; I no longer know.” Or bleak jokes such as “Was I saying stupid things again, amon? About the young man?” She pronounced the last phrase in a comical fashion, in order to make Geneviève laugh—but applied to Joson, it was sinister.
“I’m no longer a ch’tiote,” Geneviève replied, rather bitterly. “And Joson, today, must be nearly forty.”
Aunt Line persisted stubbornly in her comical vein, and retorted—mischievously, she thought; stupidly, in Geneviève’s opinion: “Do you think he’s too old to marry you, cattelinette who has coiffed Saint Catherine?”
That image of marriage, with the evocation of herself as an old maid, offended Geneviève, who left the amazed old woman there, behind a slammed door, in order to go rejoin the two men who were still talking excitedly about the Alexandra Prize. But Yvernaux was waxing lyrical in a fashion she knew all too well, about Siberia becoming the world’s granary, and Gasguin was only taking about the roubles to come. Both of them irritated her. She left them alone too, intemperately.
“What’s wrong with her?” Gasguin asked. “One might think that winning the lovely prize doesn’t please her.”
As Yvernaux continued to wax lyrical, in an epic fashion, Gasguin emphasized: “The patent’s been taken out, however, firmly guaranteed. Besides, thanks to my advice and prudent editing, the theory alone is explained in the paper; the practice is carefully reserved.” Then, with a grandiose gesture, he added: “What, then? What does she want? The moon?”
And it was, in fact, “the moon,” in the coarse terminology of Gasguin, a son of “sod-busters,” Gasguins all, in his bones. Yes, the moon, since her anguish came primarily from this: that now that electrical fertilization was resolved, she would finally have to resolve “radioactive aviation.” Now, she sensed that it was ready to spring from her unconscious, which was solely occupied by it; but at the same time, Aunt Line had just revealed to her that in the ultimate depths of that unconscious, still subsisting, alive, tenacious, also ready for resolution, with whatever force, toward whatever end and by whatever actions, there was Joson. And was it not wanting the moon, like a spoiled child, to dream of that wing, open in mid-air, with him?
“To dream” is an understatement! To know that something was about to hatch, and to know, too, that he would be involved in that hatching: HIM!
In the “accumulators” of profound electricity, of slow magnetism, that had been working within her for some twenty years, which she had thought discharged, she perceived an enormous change, an imminent activity, and she wondered if there was any means of avoiding it—for she was afraid, without knowing why.
She remembered her terror regarding the possible solution of radioactive aviation. She remembered having said to Aunt Line: “I have an urge, with regard to that which it remains for me to know, no longer to want to be the person who will know it.” And also this statement, heavier still in its menacing prognostication: “I would rather not be the person who will know it, because I’m a coward, because I have an idea that knowing it will do me harm.”
Now, all of a sudden, a little while ago, while Aunt Line was playing the sibyl, her eyes dancing, the prophetic foam at the corners of her mouth, her voice distant, or authoritarian, or litanizing, or twittering, or falling asleep on the thread of a dream, while she evoked the two months of paradisal vacation and the first communicant’s childish love, and the resurrection of that love, during those few moments, Geneviève too had had a kind of aura of prescience—and how cruel and suppliant!
She had had a vision of Joson winged, wanting to fly toward her in order to ask her for the figures and the practical solutions of the paper on electrical fertilization—and she had had great difficulty stopping herself crying out recklessly: “No, no! Don’t fly like that! You’ll have a horrible fall! Wait! Wait a little longer! Your wings are poor. It only needs one. That wing I shall furnish myself. Wait! Wait!”
And that vision had been succeeded by another, in which she offered him the promised wing, but without being certain that he would be able to make use of it, nor, especially, whether she wanted to let him make use of it—because someone whispered in her ear: “If you are not gods, you will die miserably.”
And she ended up alone in her room, saying to herself, while her teeth chattered: “That’s what I meant when I said to Aunt Line last year that I didn’t want to be the person who would know it, because I had an idea that knowing it would do me harm. And I fear it now. Already, I feel that it’s doing me harm.”
XXXIV
It is via Yvernaux, on the threshold of the “displaced state,” in private, religiously listened to as if he were reciting a poem, that it is necessary to hear the meeting of Geneviève and Joson recounted. Then, and only then, can you grasp the strange scene, the violent color and savor of it, positive and mysterious at the same time, including the most obscure underside, often impossible to clarify in rational terms but also often illuminated, suddenly and fundamentally, by a lyrical tone or gesture, a crazy analogy or a fulgurant image. An approximate translation of that living poem, complete, or rather incomplete, with all the approximations that translation involves—being always insipid and bloodless—will be given here.
It is undoubtedly appropriate first, however, in order that the scene may be put in context, to indicate the place, the time, the surroundings and the state of mind of the participants. Yvernaux, primarily a poet, paid little heed to that. The poem he recited was, however, a kind of dramatic poem, requiring this short expository preface to set the scene.
It was evening, after dinner, in the Rue Malebranche, in the bare tiled room that Geneviève laughingly called her “thinking room.” Its furniture comprised a sofa-bed sheathed in faded yellow rep; four rickety mahogany chairs upholstered in the same rep, redolent of an old hotel-room; a little faience stove like those in concierge’s lodges in the poor quarters, inactive in the present month of July, on which books and papers were stacked; a blackboard attached to the wall, cluttered with numbers and diagrams traced in chalk; and finally—and most especially, this last item taking up a good third of the room—a large high-topped architect’s table in white wood, set on two trestles. The last-named appeared to be for the use, not of a woman, even a scientist, but someone who was indeed an architect, and also an electrician, a manufacturer and an engineer, not to mention an agronomist, and perhaps even a practitioner of astrology or kabbalism, for scattered upon it, pell-mell, were construction-plans on tracing-paper, drawings of buildings and machines, catalogues and ready-reckoners relating to various trades, and a whole heap of sheets of paper that looked like pages torn from a grimoire, so replete were they with calculation
s mounted on top of one another, drawings and eccentric graphic designs, equations entangling the obscurity of their figures, signs and symbols, encircled, underlined or crucified with multicolored pencil-strokes.
Ordinarily, no one except Aunt Line ever came into the “thinking room”—which the lyrical but sometimes mocking Yvernaux also called, when he was in an irreverent mood, “the ‘ladies only’ compartment.” Geneviève liked to be able, in that corner sealed like an animal’s den, to let herself be carried away by thoughts of any kind: the formless abortions of her projects, the most chimerical fetal monsters of her hypotheses. It was her capharnaüm—which Aunt Line pronounced, in the Thiérachian fashion “cafourniau.”
That evening, Geneviève had not only admitted into it, but invited in her father and her godfather, in order that they might have a serious discussion. It was a matter of deciding whether the 65,000 francs of the Alexandra Prize, available in a few days, in a first practical exercise in fertilization by electricity, or whether to resume the work on aviation that had been suspended. In reality, though—as she admitted later—that was only a pretext.
“What had led me,” she said then, “to the unusual idea of gathering around me in my den the only three individuals whose affection for me was assured, was a secret fear of what was about to happen that evening. I didn’t know what it would be, but I needed not to be exposed to it on my own.”
And Aunt Line corroborated this retrospective testimony in advance, by saying as soon as she came in, as if she had smelled that anxiety— of which Geneviève had given no evidence: “Have no fear, ch’tiote. There are three of us to defend you, amon!” Against what? She did not know, any more than Geneviève did—in fact, she experienced a short of cheerfulness herself that evening, and found herself, as she put it, “quite well.”
The question raised had been formally discussed, Gasguin opining in favor of the practical experimentation that might allow is theory to bear fruit and make money, Yvernaux supporting the opposite opinion, in favor of the risk of pecuniary sacrifice in order to resume the progress—or, rather, the flight—toward the “conquest of the gulfs,” and Geneviève seeming only to be concerned with impartially weighing the pros and cons without issuing any personal preference. As for Aunt Line, she was only listening to Geneviève’s heartbeat, and that of her own heart, which were in harmony in drumming in their temples—she explained later—a hum of “news en route.” And she saw and heard clearly that Geneviève, while putting on a show of following the debate between her father and her godfather, was entirely extended inside herself toward that warning noise, which was increasing her anxiety.
The little room was it by two oil-lamps, and, the window being closed on that stormy July evening, there was a heavy and numbing warmth therein. Nevertheless, Gasguin had not succeeded in having it opened. In response to the gesture he had sketched, Geneviève has stopped him with a cry of alarm: “No, no! Don’t open it, on any account!”
“Why?” he had asked, not understanding her fear, devoid of any apparent cause.
But Aunt Line had relied, in a peremptory tone, approved by Geneviève’s affirmative nod of the head: “Because they’ll hear us in the courtyard.”
“Bah!” said Yvernaux. “What we’re saying here is of no interest to anyone in the house.”
“What we’re saying at present, no,” said Geneviève.
“But,” Aunt Line added, mysteriously, “what we’ll be saying shortly is.”
Gasguin and Yvernaux looked at the two women, and then looked at one another, having observed that, although they themselves still did not understand, the others certainly did. And Gasguin, winking and taping is forehead with his index finger, secretly signaled to Yvernaux that they were in “in one of their funny moods.” But Yvernaux, in his turn, felt that their anxiety was also taking hold of him.
“Should we send out for a little beer?” he asked, by way of diversion.
On which Aunt Line went out, in order to give their only maid orders to go and fetch some. “From the tavern in the Rue Soufflot,” shouted the beer connoisseur. “Not from the little café next door, which only has hogwash.”
“Oh, Godfather!” Geneviève observed. “Such preoccupations at a time like this!”
“What is it about this moment that renders it so solemn, then?” Gasguin wondered.
But Yvernaux had lowered his eyes, in confusion, feeling for the second time that he shared Geneviève’s anxiety without knowing its source.
While the maid carried out her mission, Aunt Line stayed in the kitchen, where they could hear her nervously doing odd jobs. There was an embarrassed silence in the “thinking room,” the door of which remained open. Before the black hole of the corridor, Geneviève shivered—which Aunt Line apparently perceived at a distance, for she hurried back, picked up one of the lamps and placed it on the sideboard next door in the dining-room, in order that it would brighten the darkness of the corridor.
When the maid came back, Aunt Line was heard telling her to put the liters of beer in the sink, under the tap, in order to keep them cool. Then she added, obligingly: “Now go to bed, my girl. We don’t need you any longer. I’ll open the door myself if...”
Geneviève coughed, as if she did not want anyone to hear the rest of the sentence, but Aunt Line waited until the pretended cough was complete in order to articulate clearly, in the silence, what she undoubtedly intended to be heard:
“If, by chance, someone comes.”
With the maid gone and the entrance door firmly closed, Aunt Line came back at a slow and heavy pace—emphatic, Yvernaux had noted—and said, on the threshold of the “thinking room”: “What? Yes, someone.”
One might have thought that she was replying to a remark regarding the impossibility of that visit—a remark that no one had made, however. Except that Gasguin had vaguely thought about making it, and then limited himself to formulating it internally, and no more, accompanying it with a furtive shrug of the shoulders.
That was enough for Aunt Line, nailing him down with her stare, to insist: “Who, you ask? Can one every know?”
And on that, Geneviève, trembling from head to toe, her teeth clenched, had begged: “Shut up! Shut up! Don’t say anything!”
Then she had abruptly seized the sponge hung up beside the blackboard and effaced, with rapid and feverish gestures, all the numbers and diagrams traced thereon, while she unclenched her teeth to mutter, angrily: “He mustn’t! He mustn’t! He mustn’t!”
With a similar gesture, even more agitated, still punctuated by those voluble and repetitive prohibitions, she had gathered together the pieces of paper scattered on the table into a single pile, which she stacked, folded, rolled up and rapidly stuffed into the fireplace of the little stove. After which, unwinding and going limp, all of her feverish excitement melting into slow tears, she threw herself on to the sofa-bed, covering her face with her hands, as if ready to go to sleep.
“Are you feeling poorly?” Gasguin asked, affectionately—but an affection that seemed slightly mechanical, accustomed to cruses of this sort.
“Shh! Shh! Let’s leave her alone,” said Yvernaux, in a whisper, heading for the corridor with a muffled tread.
But as Gasguin prepared to follow him, she recovered from her abasement with a start and, standing up, with her hands together, without a word, imploring pity merely by her attitude, she had made it understood that she did not want to be abandoned and left alone. And Aunt Line, taking her in her arms like a besotted old nurse and sitting her down on her knees like a grandmother expert in coddling babies had sung into her ear, childishly, an old Burgundian nursery rhyme imported to Picardy by the “red-legs” of old, and which, since then, had been gradually rounded off, its conquering words modified into the caressing hisses of Thiérachian endearments:
Chés cloch’s d’Avallon
N’ony nin d’cotillons.
Ch’est chell’ d’Epône
Qu’in ont d’chés longs.
Pain
bis, pain blinc, pain d’orche,
Djormiras-tu bintôt, ma ch’tiote?
Djormiras-to bintôt, min ch’tiote?65
Had Yvernaux and Gasguin’s hearts been stirred to their most intimate fibers by that cantilena, with words that they had heard when they were in their cradles, to the rocking music into which so many grandmothers had put their loving and consoling souls? Or had Aunt Line brought out, that particular evening, all the souls flourishing collectively in her own? Was there not an entire race, an entire country, expressed therein for Thiérachians? Or, again, had their real and essential worship of Geneviève, for the adored daughter and goddaughter, for the admired genius, which they felt while prey to such a profound and intense disturbance, rendered them more able to identify with her? All of that had truly increased their emotion at that moment, making the tears rolling down their cheeks heavy and inflating he sighs that broke into sobs in their throats, without their being ashamed of it, sexagenerians reverted to being “ch’tiots.”
It was at that exact moment that the doorbell rang, violently and imperiously—all the more so because it was absolutely unprecedented at such an inappropriate hour—ten o’clock in the evening—in the Gasguins’ house. Immediately, everyone in the “thinking room,” even Gasguin, understood that the “someone” about whom Aunt Line had said “If, by chance, someone comes” was on the landing.
And everyone—even Gasguin—had the sensation that the “someone” in question had not come by chance at all, was awaited anxiously by Geneviève and had virtually been announced by Aunt Line’s subliminal and divinatory thought—and that the arrival of the someone had something fateful about it,
That impression of mystery and fatality could not be attributed to Yvernaux’s lyrical imagination, working retrospectively on the incident and enlivening it with involuntary embroideries. Three facts authenticate the special character of the telepathy concluding in the final combination of the two elements in the supreme spark.
The Wing Page 25