Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  LÉON AND LOUISE

  This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland

  First published in German as Léon und Louise by Alex Capus

  © 2011 Carl Hanser Verlag München

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  HAUS PUBLISHING LTD.

  70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  Translation copyright © 2011 John Brownjohn

  ebook ISBN 978 1 907822 61 2

  Cover: getty images

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

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  Il ne faut pas trop regarder

  la nudité de ses parents

  ÉRIK ORSENNA

  For Aaron

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  1

  We were sitting in the cathedral of Notre Dame, waiting for the priest. Multicoloured sunlight slanted down through the rose window on to the open, flower-bedecked coffin on the red carpet in front of the high altar. A Capuchin monk was on his knees before the Pietà in the ambulatory, a stonemason perched on some scaffolding in a side aisle. The abrasive noises he was making with his trowel went echoing around the 800-year-old pile. That apart, peace reigned. It was nine o’clock in the morning; the tourists were still having breakfast in their hotels.

  We mourners were not numerous. The dead man had lived for so long, most of his friends and acquaintances had predeceased him. Seated in the front pew were his two sons, his daughter and daughters-in-law, and his twelve grandchildren, of whom six were still unmarried, four married, and two divorced. Right on the outside sat the four great-grandchildren – they would eventually number twenty-three – who had been born before 16 April 1986. In the gloom behind us, stretching away to the exit, were fifty-eight empty rows – a sea of unoccupied pews that would doubtless have accommodated all of our ancestors back to the twelfth century.

  We were an absurdly small congregation for such an enormous church. That we were sitting there at all was a final joke on the part of my grandfather, who had been a forensic chemist at the Quai des Orfèvres and was highly contemptuous of the priesthood. Were he ever to die, he announced in his latter years, he wanted a funeral service in Notre Dame. When it was objected that the location of the house of God should be a matter of indifference to an unbeliever, and that the local church around the corner would be more appropriate for a modest family like ours, he replied, ‘No, no, mes enfants, get me Notre Dame. It’s a few hundred metres further and will cost a bit, but you’ll manage it. Incidentally, I’d like a Latin mass, not a French one. The old liturgy, please, with plenty of incense, long recitatives and some Gregorian chant.’ Then he smirked beneath his moustache at the thought that his descendants would chafe their knees raw on hard hassocks for two-and-a-half hours. His joke appealed to him so much that he incorporated it in his repertoire of stock phrases. ‘Unless I’ve made a trip to Notre Dame by then,’ he would say, or, ‘Happy Easter, au revoir in Notre Dame!’ From being one of his stock phrases, my grandfather’s joke eventually became a prophecy, and when his hour actually struck we all realized what had to be done.

  So there he now lay, waxen-nosed and with eyebrows raised in an expression of surprise, on the very spot where Napoleon Bonaparte had been crowned Emperor of the French, while we sat in the pews which his brothers, sisters and generals had occupied 182 years before us. Time went by and still the priest didn’t appear. The rays of sunlight were no longer falling on the coffin, but on the black and white chequerboard flagstones to its right. The sacristan emerged from the gloom, lit a few candles, and withdrew again. The children shuffled around on the pews, the men kneaded their necks, the women straightened their backs. My cousin Nicolas produced his puppets from an overcoat pocket and treated the children to a performance whose highlight came when the stubble-chinned thief hit pointy-capped Guignol on the head with his club.

  Then, far behind us, a little side door beside the main entrance opened with a faint creak. We turned to look. Streaming in through the widening gap came the light of a warm spring morning and the sounds of the Rue de la Cité. A small grey figure wearing a bright red foulard slipped into the nave.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Is she one of us?’

  ‘Is she part of the family?’

  ‘Or could it be...?’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Didn’t you pass her on the stairs one time?’

  ‘Yes, but it was pretty dark.’

  ‘Stop staring.’

  ‘Where’s the priest got to?’

  ‘Does anyone know who she is?’

  ‘Is it...?’

  ‘Maybe...’

  ‘Would you all be quiet!’

  I could tell at a glance that the woman wasn’t a member of the family. Those short, brisk strides and the hard high heels that sounded like hands clapping as they hit the flagstones? That little black hat with the black veil and the proudly jutting chin beneath it? That deft sign of the cross and that graceful little genuflection beside the stoup? She couldn’t be a Le Gall. Not by birth, at least.

  Little black hats and deft signs of the cross just aren’t us. We Le Galls are tall, phlegmatic folk of Norman stock who take long, deliberate strides. Above all, our family is a family of men. Women belong to it too, of course – women we have married – but whenever a child is born to us he tends to be a boy. I myself have four sons but no daughters; my father has three sons and one daughter; and his father – the Léon Le Gall who lay in the coffin that morning – also sired three boys and a girl. We have strong hands, wide foreheads and broad shoulders, wear no jewellery other than a wristwatch and wedding ring, and have a predilection for plain clothes devoid of frills and furbelows. We couldn’t tell you, without checking, the colour of the shirt we’re wearing. We seldom have headaches or stomach-upsets, and even when we do succumb to them we sheepishly conceal the fact because our notion of manliness precludes the possibility that our heads or our stomachs – especially not our stomachs – are soft and susceptible to pain.

  First and foremost, though, the backs of our heads – our occiputs – are conspicuously flat, a peculiarity much derided by the women we marry. If informed of a birth in the family, the first question we ask relates not to the baby’s weight, stature or hair colour, but to the back of its head. ‘What’s it like, flat? Is it a genuine Le Gall?’ And when one of us is carried to the grave, we console ourselves with the thought that a Le Gall’s head never lolls around on its final journey but lies nice and flat on the floor of the coffin.

  I share the morbid sense of humour and cheerful melancholy common to my brothers, father and grandfathers. I lik
e being a Le Gall. Many of us have a weakness for drink and tobacco, but we have a good prospect of longevity and, like many families, we firmly believe that, although we’re nothing special, we’re unique notwithstanding.

  This illusion cannot be substantiated and is wholly unfounded. To the best of my knowledge, no Le Gall has ever achieved anything worthy of remembrance by the world at large. This is attributable first to our lack of any outstanding talents, secondly to indolence, thirdly to the fact that as adolescents most of us develop an arrogant contempt for the initiation rites of a conventional education, and fourthly to the strong aversion to Church, police and intellectual authority that is almost invariably handed down from father to son.

  This is why our academic careers end usually after secondary school but at latest after our third or fourth term at university. It is only every few decades that a Le Gall manages to complete his studies properly and reconcile himself to secular or religious authority. He then becomes a lawyer, doctor or cleric and earns the family’s respect, albeit coupled with a touch of mistrust.

  A certain amount of posthumous fame does, however, attach to my great-great-uncle Serge Le Gall, who was expelled from school for taking opium and became a warder at Caen Penitentiary shortly after the Franco-Prussian War. He went down in the annals because he tried to end a prison riot peacefully and without the usual bloodbath, an endeavour for which one of the convicts thanked him by splitting his skull with an axe. Another forebear distinguished himself by designing a stamp for the Vietnamese postal service, and my father laid oil pipelines in the Algerian Sahara as a young man. For the rest, however, we Le Galls earn our bread as scuba instructors, lorry drivers or civil servants. We sell palm trees in Brittany and German motorcycles to the Nigerian traffic police, and one of my cousins is a private detective who hunts down runaway debtors for the Société Générale.

  But if most of us cope with life quite well, we owe this mainly to our wives. My sisters-in-law, aunts and paternal grandmothers are all strong, efficient, warm-hearted women who exercise a discreet but undisputed matriarchy. Many of them are more successful and earn more than their menfolk. They handle the tax returns and do battle with school authorities, and their husbands repay them by being gentle and dependable.

  We tend to be peace-loving spouses, I believe. We don’t tell lies and do our best not to drink to a physically pernicious extent, we steer clear of other women and are DIY enthusiasts, and we’re definitely fonder of children than most. At family get-togethers it’s customary for the men to look after the babies and infants while the women sun themselves on the beach or go shopping. Our wives appreciate the fact that expensive cars aren’t essential to our happiness and that we’ve no need to fly to Barbados to play golf, and they take an indulgent view of our compulsion to frequent flea markets and come home laden with peculiar objects. Total strangers’ photo albums, mechanical apple-peelers, worn-out slide projectors for which slides of the correct format have long been unobtainable, genuine naval telescopes that display everything upside down, surgical saws, rusty revolvers, worm-eaten gramophones and electric guitars with every other fret missing – we blithely tote such curious oddments home and spend months cleaning, polishing and trying to repair them before giving them away, taking them back to the flea market, or dumping them in the dustbin. We do this to restore our vegetative system. Dogs eat grass, well-educated young ladies listen to Chopin, university professors watch football, and we mess around with old junk. At night, when the children are asleep, a remarkable number of us produce modest oil paintings. And one of us, as I know at first-hand, secretly writes poems. Not very good ones, alas.

  The front row of pews in Notre Dame was vibrating with suppressed excitement. Could the new arrival really be Mademoiselle Janvier? Had she really dared to turn up? The womenfolk looked rigidly to the front again and stiffened their backs as if the coffin and the eternal light over the high altar were their sole focus of attention. But we men, who knew our women, realized that they were tensely listening to the staccato click of the little footsteps that made their way sideways into the central aisle. They then performed a ninety-degree turn and, without the least hesitation, without any ritardando or accelerando, pressed on with the regular beat of a metronome. Those of us who were peering out of the corner of our eye could then see a little woman, light-footed as a young girl, climb the two red-carpeted steps to the foot of the coffin, rest her right hand on the side, and silently move along it to the head, where she at last came to a halt and remained for several seconds, almost like a soldier standing at attention. She raised her veil and bent over. Spreading her arms and supporting herself on the sides of the coffin, she kissed my grandfather on the forehead and rested her cheek against his waxen visage as if intending to stay there for a while. She did so with her face in full view, not protectively averted in the direction of the altar. This enabled us to see that her eyes were closed and that her red, carefully made-up lips were curved in a smile that grew steadily broader until they parted to emit an inaudible chuckle.

  She released the dead man at last and resumed her erect stance. Taking her handbag from the crook of her arm, she opened it and quickly removed a circular, dully glinting object the size of a fist. This, as we were to discover soon afterwards, was an old bicycle bell with a hemispherical top whose chrome plating was threaded with hairline cracks and had peeled off in places. Having closed the handbag and replaced it in the crook of her arm, she rang the bell twice. Rri-rring. Rri-rring. While the sound went echoing down the nave, she deposited the bell in the coffin, then turned and looked us in the eye, one after another. Beginning on the far left, where the youngest children were seated beside their fathers, she surveyed the entire row, her eyes lingering for perhaps a second on each individual. When she got to the far right she gave us a triumphant smile and set off. Heels clicking, she hurried past the family and down the central aisle to the exit.

  2

  My grandfather was seventeen when he first met Louise Janvier. I like to picture him as a very young man in the spring of 1918, when he strapped a reinforced cardboard suitcase to the luggage rack of his bicycle and left the parental home for ever.

  What I know about him as a young man doesn’t amount to very much. A surviving family photograph of the period shows a sturdy lad with a high forehead and unruly fair hair eyeing the photographer with an inquisitive air and his head on one side. I also know from his own accounts, which he delivered laconically and with feigned reluctance as an old man, that he often skipped secondary school because he preferred to roam the beaches of Cherbourg with his friends Patrice and Joël.

  It was on a stormy Sunday in January 1918, when no sensible person would have ventured within sight of the sea, that the trio discovered, amid flurries of snow, the wreck of a little sailing dinghy washed up on the furze-covered embankment. It was holed amidships and slightly scorched overall. The boys dragged the boat behind the nearest bush. In the weeks that followed, since the legal owner never got in touch with them, they personally and with great enthusiasm repaired and sanded and painted it until it looked brand-new and was unrecognizable. From then on they spent every spare hour out in the Channel, fishing, dozing and smoking dried seaweed in tobacco pipes carved from corn cobs. And when something interesting was bobbing in the water – a plank, a hurricane lamp from a sunken vessel or a lifebelt – they went off with it. Warships sometimes steamed past so close that their little craft skipped up and down like a calf turned out to graze on the first day of spring. They often remained at sea all day long, rounded the cape and sailed westwards until the Channel Islands appeared on the horizon, not returning to land until dusk had fallen. At weekends they spent the night in a fisherman’s hut whose owner hadn’t had time to board up his little rear window properly on the day he was mobilized.

  Léon Le Gall’s father – my great-grandfather, in other words – knew nothing about his son’s sailing dinghy, but he was somewhat concerned to note his habit of gallivanting on the bea
ch. A chain-smoking, prematurely aged Latin master, he had chosen to study the language at an early age purely to cause his own father as much vexation he could. He subsequently paid for this pleasure by spending decades in the teaching profession, becoming mean, hidebound and bitter in consequence.

  In order to justify his Latin to himself and continue to feel alive, he had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the relics of Roman civilization in Brittany and cultivated this hobby with a passion in grotesque contrast to the limited nature of the subject. Agonizingly monotonous and wreathed in cigarette smoke, his endless classroom lectures on potsherds, thermal baths and military roads were not only legendary but dreaded throughout the school. His pupils compensated by watching his cigarette, waiting for him to write on the blackboard with it and puff at the piece of chalk instead.

  That his asthma had exempted him from military service on the day general mobilization was proclaimed he regarded as a blessing on the one hand and a disgrace on the other, because he found himself the only man in a common room full of women. He had flown into a terrible rage when informed by these female colleagues that his only son had hardly been seen in school for weeks, and his lectures at the kitchen table, designed to convince the boy of the value of a classical education, had been interminable. Léon, who merely sneered at the value of a classical education, tried in his turn to explain why his presence on the beach was now indispensable: because the Germans had recently taken to disguising their submarines with wooden superstructures, coloured paintwork, makeshift sails and fake fishing nets.

  His father thereupon demanded to know where, pray, was the causal connection between German submarines and Léon’s absence from school.

  The disguised German U-boats, Léon explained patiently, would sneak up on French trawlers undetected and sink them without mercy, thereby worsening the French nation’s food supply situation.