by Michel D
‘I saw, and you have three minutes to take your heap of junk out of my Bugatti’s garage and put it somewhere else.’
‘But the Bugatti’s not there!’
‘All the more reason. Would I put another woman in your bed when you’re not there?’
‘I must say I think you’re being extremely fussy to include a car in your respect for the conventions.’
‘Then you respect them too!’
‘I knew you were attached to your car … but to such an extent … more than to your wife, more than to your children …’
‘Have I ever specified the degrees of my passion? No. So stop making things up and go and get the woodshed behind the outhouse cleared out. You can park your dinosaur there.’
Marie-Thérèse did as she was told, and the Model T Ford did not cohabit with the Bugatti, which returned from Molsheim one afternoon with a mechanic in white overalls at the wheel. Antoine, who had been brought down to the ground floor on a chair, studied his car, its engine still ticking from the road and its bodywork spattered with squashed mosquitoes. He had it washed as he sat there, with a sponge, warm water and hose. The blue paintwork and spoked wheels gleamed in the warm afternoon light. Everyone came to watch: Adèle, Jeanne, Marie-Thérèse, Albert, Jean, Michel, Antoinette and two other servants, whose names I shan’t bother with because they were only casual staff. Hands caressed the bodywork, the chrome and the oak steering wheel, felt the still-warm bonnet secured with a leather strap, the gear lever and oil pump lever. Antoine managed to squeeze himself into the passenger seat, and the mechanic took the wheel again. They did a lap of the park to the sound of eight cylinders firing like organ pipes, raising a delicate cloud of white dust behind them. When they arrived back at the front steps, the abbé Le Couec was waiting, a handkerchief in the neck of his cassock.
‘The golden calf!’ he said in his rich, gravelly voice. ‘How we love the golden calf! And the sinners they do increase … Pity the heavens as they empty!’
He nevertheless helped Antoine to extricate himself from the cockpit and get back upstairs to his room, where they remained alone with the carafe of calvados and the box of cigars. A strong smell rose from the abbé, who did not always take great care of his cassock. Domestic matters did not preoccupy him. He lived in one room of the rectory, which functioned simultaneously as bedroom, library and kitchen and which, very occasionally, he allowed a female parishioner to sweep and dust. But as a former infantryman, trained by the Manuel d’infanterie, he paid very particular attention to the health of his feet. The faithful souls who visited him often found him sitting in a chair and reading his breviary with his cassock hitched up to his knees, revealing his sturdy legs and hiker’s calves and his feet soaking in a bowl full of water, in which he had dissolved coarse salt collected from the hollows of the rocks. Grangeville’s parish priest needed this treatment: he walked a great deal. To walk to Dieppe and back did not trouble him in the slightest. He had walked to Rouen in twelve hours once, to answer a summons from his bishop, and returned the following day at the same pace, relieved of a number of bitter feelings after a stormy audience.
Antoine, whose nose was sensitive, offered the abbé a cigar, which the priest lit after clearing his throat.
‘Not bad! So how goes it? I’m not talking about your knee, naturally.’
‘Another fortnight and I’ll be as nimble as a deer,’ Antoine responded, pretending not to understand.
‘It’s been two months, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes, two months.’
‘Two months without sin! Some people up there will be very interested in your soul.’
‘How very kind of them.’
Antoine recounted the story of Jean and Michel, of the punctured hosepipe and the cut-up headscarf. The abbé listened less than attentively. The first glass of calvados, drunk a little too quickly because he had been thirsty, distracted his attention. He would have liked to know its vintage, but when Antoine began to think aloud he was not to be interrupted.
‘I’m very drawn to Jean. If you could see how serious he is, how closely he looks at you, if you could read his thoughts as they pass across his face, you’d be asking yourself the same question as I do: where does he come from? And it is doubly frustrating that when I look at him, I say to myself every time: I know that face, I’ve seen it somewhere before. In a dream? In the real world? Impossible to tell. Will we ever know?’
The abbé maintained a prudent silence. He knew, but no one would make him betray a confidence. Or possibly later, if circumstances demanded it. He poured himself another glass of calvados and sipped.
‘One thing at a time. Don’t get too interested in Jean Arnaud. Your son has priority, and he needs it. Jean, on the other hand, has all sorts of advantages: a mother of admirable virtue, a father who is both a hero and an idealist …’
‘You’re suggesting that Michel doesn’t have those advantages?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. By the way, how are matters at Saint-Tropez?’
‘Excellent,’ Antoine replied, put out and instantly withdrawing into himself in the wake of his rebuff. Quite understandably, he did not hold with a priest reminding him, in conversation, of things said in the confessional. But the abbé Le Couec, a man of excessive integrity, could not forget words murmured in an unguarded moment. Antoine’s life, both internal and external, belonged to him, and he intended to maintain his right to oversee it outside the church as well as inside.
‘You’re fortunate,’ the abbé said. ‘You might have been a lot less lucky.’
‘I’m obliged to you!’ Antoine said drily.
‘As a matter of fact, I have never understood what drove you away from Madame du Courseau.’
‘If only I knew myself!’
‘She has great qualities.’
‘I shan’t contradict you on that point.’
‘She’s an excellent mother.’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘She is beyond reproach.’
‘Who would dare say anything to the contrary?’
‘So?’
‘She bores me,’ Antoine said wearily.
The abbé did not know what boredom was, and supposed it to be some sort of illness that a healthy man would fight with prayers, calvados and long, strenuous walks. Perhaps Antoine’s illness was the result of him never going out without his Bugatti.
‘When your leg’s out of plaster, we’ll take some exercise together.’
‘I had a sufficient dose of that to last me a lifetime between ’14 and ’18.’
‘The doctor will most certainly prescribe another one.’
‘The park will be quite enough for me.’
Shouts and laughter came from outside. Antoine lifted the curtain. Antoinette was chasing Jean, who was running away from her with all the speed his legs could muster, round and round some armchairs and a bench. Finally she cornered him and threw her arms around him to kiss him. He wriggled out of her grasp and kept running, looking behind him and paying no attention to Michel who, as he ran past, stuck out his foot. Jean went sprawling, but made no sound, and got up again with knees, hands and chin covered in blood. Grabbing a stick, he launched himself at Michel, but Adèle, who had come running, took the stick from him and let Michel run away. Antoine heard snatches of his daughter vehemently arguing, accusing Michel. Madame du Courseau and Adèle took Jean inside to clean him up and paint him with iodine.
‘Did you see that?’
‘Yes. Strange. Very strange. I’m surprised at Michel. At Sunday school he’s a very attentive and devout little boy. A good Christian in the making. He’s very talented, you know. On Sunday he sang a solo in church, in a marvellous soprano. I would have given him absolution without confessing him. If you give him modelling clay, he’ll sculpt you miniature saints that are little masterpieces. I intend to ask him to make the Nativity models for me at Christmas.’
‘An artist in the family? That’s all we need. Where does he get it from? I have nothing to hide.
Not a creative bone in my body. Generations of unambiguous Normans going back as far as you like. I’m the first of my line who’s even dreamt in his sleep. Nothing on the Mangepain side either. Not a glimmer of sensitivity anywhere.’
‘Let’s not make too much of Pasteurian inevitability. It’s a perfect case of spontaneous generation. We should wait … all children are gifted. It’s afterwards that it goes wrong.’
They carried on talking as the dusk fell, one of those long conversations containing many overtones, peppered with Antoine’s occasional acid and cynical remarks and the abbé’s stolid common sense. When the latter stood up to go, the house swayed a little around him. The room stank of cold cigar smoke. The carafe was empty. On the stairs the abbé missed his footing and travelled the rest of the way on his bottom, laughing like a lunatic. Marie-Thérèse offered to drive him back to the rectory.
‘No, thank you, my dear. I’ve filled my tank and I need to burn it off.’
‘You talk like my husband, Father. Like a mechanic.’
‘They don’t yet have their saint, but they will. They deserve him. If need be, I shall go to Rome personally to petition His Holiness Pius XI. Actually, you’ve hit on something, I shall go and make my request this instant.’
He caught his foot on the doormat inside the front door and nearly fell over again.
‘Father!’ Marie-Thérèse said in a voice full of reproach.
‘My dear penitent, one does not dictate his conduct to a priest such as myself. I have certainly overdone the calvados in your husband’s company, but it is when the spirit elevates itself and is released from material contingencies that ideas come in their multitudes. On which note, the Lord bless you and keep you.’
Taking down his wide-brimmed hat from the coat hook, he placed it on his head with an energetic gesture and strode out into the darkening night. She watched him until he was past the gates and was surprised to hear him, just as he presumably thought himself out of earshot, let go two crisp and substantial farts that rippled through the evening air. But with what circumlocutions could she report that to his superiors, especially when the abbé couldn’t care less? He had two more calls to make, before returning to the rectory and a dinner of cold potatoes and a bowl of curd cheese.
The purchase of her Model T Ford changed Marie-Thérèse’s life profoundly, and even her appearance. She abandoned her Lanvin for a more sporty look, exchanged high heels for flats, bobbed her hair and started smoking two packs of caporal cigarettes a day. Her stubbed-out butts filled the ashtrays at La Sauveté, and when she spoke her breath, laden with cold, sour smoke, hit you in the face. She drove prudently and without haste along the region’s narrow roads, venturing twenty-five or thirty kilometres from Grangeville but never overstepping the confines of her self-imposed kingdom. She often took the children with her, including Jean, to show them churches and ruined abbeys and the châteaux of friends, where they were invited in to nibble snacks in large, gloomy rooms that smelt of furniture polish and old ladies. The château that fascinated Jean Arnaud the most was the Malemorts’: an elegant residence in red brick, flanked by two turrets and a pretty dovecote. The Marquis de Malemort, who had recently turned thirty, was struggling valiantly against the hard times. He had razed three-quarters of his parkland to turn it into fields and taken back his two tenanted farms to run them himself. Each year this solid Norman with his highly coloured complexion lost a little more of his aristocratic manner and looked a little more like a peasant, but on Sundays, dressed in grey and wearing white gloves with a carnation in his buttonhole, at the reins of his trap, in which sat the marquise and their daughter, Chantal, he still possessed a definite style. People bowed low to him not from servility, but as befitted a proud picture of the past in an era without pity.
You will be saying: what is all that doing in here? Why don’t you tell us about Antoine’s road trips instead, about Marie-Dévote and Théo, about Charles Ventadour, about the man with the mangled face at Roquebrune, about Geneviève? My answer is to beg you, please, to allow me a little time. This is a long story and the Malemorts have their place in it, especially Chantal, who is exactly Jean’s age and a ravishing child, with black hair and eyes of forget-me-not blue. At four years old Jean would willingly stand in front of her and just adore her, or if he could would stroke her porcelain cheeks and her long and graceful neck; but the Malemorts were intimidatingly grand, and Chantal was a shy child who spoke in a quiet though not affected voice. Marie-Thérèse, of course, occasionally daydreamed of marrying into the family, and with her tendency to long-range calculation had already mentioned it to Michel.
‘What a gorgeous girl she’ll be! And how well you’ll get on together! Next time you ought to bring her one of your little sculptures. They have a piano. I’ll accompany you and you can sing “Auprès de ma blonde” …’
‘But her hair’s black!’
Madame du Courseau was not so easily discouraged.
Albert hated ‘lending’ Jean and consented reluctantly, under pressure from Jeanne who said, over and over, ‘Our little boy needs to see the world.’
The ‘little boy’ had already decided to see it. The closed universe behind La Sauveté’s high walls made him feel uncomfortable. At every step he encountered either the traps Michel set or Madame du Courseau’s smothering affection, and if it was neither of those it was the haughty disdain of the governess who, like clockwork, a fortnight after taking up her post, turned into the biggest snob in the house. At least when they were in the car Michel felt car-sick as soon as they started moving and spent the best part of the journey throwing up out of the window, and the black woman was never invited. And sometimes out on the road they would see the blue Bugatti overtake them or pass them going the other way, and for a split second they would make out Monsieur du Courseau at the steering wheel, his cap back to front and his big mica goggles shielding his eyes from the wind and dust. As soon as his plaster cast came off he had started training again, criss crossing the country to get back into condition. One day, on a bend he was deliberately taking as tightly as he could, he nearly collided with the Ford. Wrenching the wheel over to avoid him, Marie-Thérèse put her nearside wheels into the ditch. Antoine reversed back to her.
‘Nothing broken?’ he asked, not getting out of the car.
Antoinette was crying with laughter, Michel was moaning. Madame du Courseau, pale and furious, snapped, ‘No!’
‘I’ll ask them to send the oxen then.’
An hour later a farm worker hauled the Ford out of the ditch, but that evening Antoine was not to be found at La Sauveté. He had left for the Midi.
For three years his route had not changed by a kilometre. The only difference was that he now followed it less madly, no longer sleeping in ploughed fields, stopping instead to rest at Montargis before pushing on to Lyon where, at the same bistro each time, a sausage and a jug of Beaujolais were waiting for him. At Montélimar he stocked up on nougat, and at Aix he stopped to have dinner with Charles and listen to his stories of an imaginary war so much more glorious and heroic than the one they had lived through that it was almost a pleasure to recollect it. Charles’s skill lay in never merely going off into fables of his own heroism, but instead weaving Antoine into them with such conviction that Antoine let himself be carried away, involuntarily holding himself straighter, looking for the stripes on his sleeve, covering his ears when the crash-bang-wallops of his former driver rang out, marvelling at his own cheek towards his colonel, and at the offhand way he treated the liaison officers dispatched by headquarters. He protested mildly at Charles’s story of how he had picked him up at the roadside, wounded in the buttock by a Bulgarian cavalryman’s lance, but Charles – who, like every good storyteller, brooked no interruptions – stuck to his version and refused to back down, even when Antoine, by now rather tipsy, jumped up and began to drop his trousers to prove that his buttocks bore no trace of the alleged shameful gash. The restaurant owner halted this affront to public decency just i
n time, and Antoine resigned himself to accepting that the shrapnel wound in his right shoulder had metamorphosed into a less dignified laceration as the result of a heroic confrontation with a moustachioed horseman who had the yellow-tinged face of a Tatar and had been terrorising and violating the gentle Serbian peasant women in the countryside all around. In fact, Charles’s conviction was so strong that Antoine surprised himself on his return to his hotel by contorting himself in front of his wardrobe mirror to try to verify the mechanic’s words. All he could see was his slightly fat, fairly white and very ordinary bottom, and he went to bed nursing a pang of regret that he had not really had a truly heroic Balkan war.
Antoine’s appreciation of Charles Ventadour had grown at each meeting since their first in 1920. He was particularly grateful for Charles’s substitution of his own appalling and pitiful memories by an epic of men’s valour, an adventure in which Justice advanced in triumph at the head of armies marching to drive out the oppressors and restore the happiness of the oppressed. Alas, there remained the memory of Les Éparges, from which a man could not free himself so easily, and often at night Antoine woke up covered in an icy sweat, the taste of earth in his mouth, his temples thumping as if a mortar had just exploded, face to face with that colossus with the black, mud-covered head who had erupted in front of him in the small hours one morning leading a shrieking horde behind him, and whom he had had the good luck to kill with a single pistol shot to the heart. Who could transform the memory of such panic-stricken terror and cowardly slaughter into a knights’ joust, in which French elegance would crush Teutonic brutality? No one, sadly, and Antoine, sedated every three or four months by Charles on his way through Aix, found himself exposed afresh to the obsessive images of his nightmare as soon as he returned to La Sauveté. But Provence offered remission, and it would have been excessively ungrateful of him to complain. A new life began there, and whenever the Bugatti, singing down the route des Maures, rolled into Grimaud to the buzz of cicadas, the resin smell of pines, and the perfume of thyme and lavender, whenever a first bend suddenly disclosed the glittering Mediterranean, the roofs of Cogolin and Ramatuelle, and the small port of Saint-Tropez cluttered with tartanes and smaller boats, Antoine’s heart swelled with an inexpressible happiness. Often he would pull up to gaze at the view and delay the pleasure to come, to relish for a moment longer that wonderful ‘before’, so full of the promises of Marie-Dévote, of grilled fish on an open fire, of olives kept for him in oil and vinegar, of dried figs in winter or melting in the mouth in September, of Var rosé and glasses of pastis distilled secretly by Théo, drunk in the evening in the open air, bare feet on the table, chewing langoustines. Those people knew how to live.