“Ridiculous,” declared Raguse without lowering the binoculars. “Imagine you’re shooting at something you want to hit, young fellow. An animal, whatever you want. A guy.”
Gerfaut pulled back the bolt, his gaze fixed on the ground, and accidentally ejected a new cartridge. Then he took aim again carefully, held his breath, and blew a large hole in the green-pea can at a hundred meters.
They went back to the house.
“A very fine gun,” said Gerfaut politely, handing the Weatherby back to the old man so he could clean it and put it back in its place.
“You said it!” cried the old man. “It’s worth its weight in gold. A German it was that gave it to me, twelve years ago. I saved his life, more or less. A hunter. I found him with a leg bust to blazes—a bit like you, but it was higher up.”
“I’m going to have to leave here soon.”
Raguse looked at Gerfaut sharply.
“I’m not looking for payment. I have everything I need. My granddaughter sends me money every month, and I don’t even spend it all. I put it in the savings bank in Saint-Jean. I don’t need a thing. If what you’re thinking, young fellow, is that you have to go off and earn money just to pay me for my trouble, you can think again.”
“I can’t spend the rest of my life here.”
“Till I take the plaster off, you’re as well off here as anywhere. Then, if this place is not to your liking.…”
“Not at all,” Gerfaut hastened to reply. “I like it fine here.”
“You can help out,” said Raguse with enthusiasm. “Have you ever hunted?”
Gerfaut shook his head. Raguse returned the Weatherby to the gun rack and closed his chest. They went back into the main room.
“Hunting is my only pleasure,” said Raguse, looking sly and boyish now. “The National Forest of La Vanoise can kiss my ass,” he declared contentedly. “But I can’t see clearly anymore. Once I get that plaster off, perhaps you’ll help me. We can go hunting together, and you can be my extra pair of eyes, as you might say.”
“Why not?” answered Gerfaut with an affable smile—was it a derisive smile or a plain dumb smile? “Why not? I’m no use anymore. I’m nowhere. Lost. I might as well be someone’s extra pair of eyes.”
That night Gerfaut had nightmares with Béa and the girls in them, and the two killers in their red car, and Baron Frankenstein transporting glass jars filled with extra pairs of eyes.
At the beginning of September, Gerfaut’s plaster started falling apart of its own accord. Raguse finished the job. Gerfaut was greatly relieved to be able at last to scratch his foot. He still limped a little, and the old man muttered that it would never straighten itself out, and Gerfaut said that he could care less. Then Raguse rooted in his old chest and began poring over greasy old manuals with bindings crumbling away by themselves. They had anatomical drawings of men with mustaches. The Corporal gave Gerfaut an exercise program to be followed every day in order to reduce his limp and, above all, to obviate any possible misalignment of the spinal cord or of other bones.
Gerfaut made himself useful by running little errands in the village; he would pick up tobacco, for instance, or Riz la Croix cigarette papers, or lighter fluid when the need arose. Occasionally, at the café-tabac, he would glance through the regional paper, Le Dauphiné Libéré, to see what was happening in the world. Sporting events took up as much space as ever. Third World riots, famines, floods, epidemics, assassinations, palace revolutions, and local wars still followed one another in quick succession. In the West the economy was not working well, mental illness was rife, and social classes were still locked in struggle. The Pope deplored the unrestrained hedonism of the age.
After a brief period of natural curiosity, the villagers, old for the most part and less numerous than the houses, were content to accept a few half-truths and stopped asking Gerfaut questions. In the past, Corporal Raguse had taken in injured animals, lodged stray hikers, and allowed British campers to pitch tents in the meadow behind his house. Gerfaut seemed like just another of his broken wings, a taciturn semi-vagrant, a bit simple but serviceable enough, who gave the old man a hand. He even helped the local police shove their vehicle out of the mud one time when they had ventured this far up the mountainside during an early-autumn rainstorm. On another occasion, he had paid for a round of drinks at the café-tabac, then told his troubles: his wife had left him; he had once been a manager in a big firm, but he had left everything behind—just as a lot of people did, so it was said, in America: they become dropahoutes.
“A dropahoute, yes, that’s it!” said Gerfaut. “That’s me exactly! Cheers, everybody!” And he emptied his glass.
When fall came, Raguse began getting Gerfaut used to long mountain walks. These became longer and longer, and after a few weeks the two men took guns with them and the walks turned into hunting trips.
Usually, they rambled in the wooded area. From time to time, they would bag game birds: partridge, plover, hazel grouse, capercaillie, or else a squirrel or hare. Raguse, whose eyesight had become really poor, missed everything he took aim at. After a time, he virtually gave up shooting altogether and let Gerfaut take over.
One day in late October, with the Weatherby, Gerfaut and Raguse climbed higher than they ever had before. There had been a few snowfalls, then milder weather had returned. They crossed the forest and went up through the mountain pastures with their bilberry patches and clumps of rhododendrons. Granite crags and snowy hillocks soon defined their whole horizon. The two men followed the rock-strewn path upward. The old man seemed delighted. Gerfaut’s feelings were amorphous. Indeed, for as long as he had been on the mountainside he had remained in a kind of stupor. At this moment, he contemplated the scenery without finding it either beautiful or ugly; he felt his bad leg protest but gave no thought to pausing; sweat trickled down his back and over his rib cage, the wind raked his face, but he paid these things no mind.
In mid-afternoon they halted at a stone refuge with wooden partitions, a hearth, and charcoal inscriptions on the rock of the interior walls; hikers had clearly wanted to leave a trace of their visit to a place so high above sea level. Gerfaut felt no such compulsion. They carried on, and an hour later Raguse, whose enfeebled vision the Weatherby’s sights made up for quite effectively, succeeded for once in bringing down a horned animal at some four hundred meters. Whether a chamois or an ibex Gerfaut had no idea, for he didn’t know the difference; it might as well have been an antelope or a snail—he didn’t give a damn. They went to retrieve the carcass and spelled each other dragging it downhill. By the time they got home, it was darkest night. Raguse was producing an endless stream of taunts and obscenities directed at the National Forest of La Vanoise and its gamekeepers. Gerfaut never did try to discover the motive for the old man’s animus.
During the night they cut up their prize. They salted quarters. The hide was set aside, as was the halved head. In the days following, Raguse set about tanning the one and stuffing the other.
“I’ll sell them to idiots. They can stick them in their drawing rooms.”
“What in God’s name am I doing here?” asked Gerfaut irritably. “Can you please tell me that?” He had just downed several healthy tots of fruit brandy; these days he was drinking more and more heavily. “I spend my time doing sweet fuck-all.”
“Look here, Sorel. You can leave, you know. Any time you want. You’re a free man.”
“Yes,” said Gerfaut, “but it’s the same shit everywhere.”
By and large, though, Gerfaut got on pretty well with the old man. They went on more expeditions. On other days, and more and more often now that the cattle had come down from the Alpine pastures and been returned to their cowsheds, Raguse was called on for veterinary help, and Gerfaut would go along to give him a hand, hold the lamp, and the like. He learned how to grasp a cow’s horns and force her head down so that Raguse could remove a foreign body from the beast’s eye, which he did with the help of a butter-soaked feather or sometimes merely b
y flinging powdered sugar into the eye, causing it to water so violently that the irritant was washed out. This was just about all Gerfaut learned.
In early April, with the cold and the bad weather hanging on, a night came when Raguse, after tying one on, caught a wicked cold. Around midnight he called for Gerfaut and announced that he was going to die. Being three sheets to the wind himself, Gerfaut took this as a joke. But, when dawn came, Raguse was dead.
17
“I didn’t picture you the way you are,” Gerfaut said to Alphonsine Raguse.
“How did you picture me?”
She was sitting in the main room, in the old man’s easy chair. She wore pearl-gray corduroy slacks, brown ankle boots, an ecru sweater, and a brown leather coat. Her hair was very black, thick, healthy, and cut simply in the form of a German soldier’s helmet by a hairdresser, the merest snip of whose scissors must have cost a packet of money. Her skin was perfectly smooth and tan, her eyes pale, her eyebrows set high, her cheekbones prominent, her nose of modest size, and her jaw determined. When she smiled, her red lips parted horizontally to reveal teeth as perfect and gleaming as one could wish. She resembled a very good ad for a vacation club (though ads for vacation clubs never actually look like that; they make you want to stay at home if at all possible). She was drinking vodka. She had brought the vodka along with her in her Ford Capri. She had also brought along a guy by the name of Max. At this moment, the guy had gone off again in the Capri to do some shopping about twenty-five kilometers away.
“Well, I don’t really know,” replied Gerfaut. “I suppose I imagined a woman about forty-five but looking older, with hands red from washing dishes and doing heavy work, and eyes red, too, from all the sad things that had happened to her. She would have got here by taxi and bus, wearing a moth-eaten black coat. But, my God—how old are you anyway? Oh, excuse me.”
“Twenty-eight. No need to apologize.”
“You can’t be Raguse’s daughter?”
“No, his granddaughter.”
“Sometimes he used to mention a daughter who sent him money....”
“That was me.”
“I see,” said Gerfaut. “Forgive me. I don’t know why I’m asking you all these questions. I have no right to. I’ll be going now. Thank you for the drink.”
He rose from his stool to put the mustard glass from which he had been drinking vodka in the basalt sink.
“You are not from around here,” she said. “You’re a Parisian.”
“Originally, yes,” said Gerfaut. He was amused by the question, and he smiled beneath his blond beard. “You would never believe it if I told you how I ended up here.”
“You could give it a try.”
Gerfaut chuckled. He felt like a kid.
“It’s quite simple, really. Until last summer I was a middle manager in a company in Paris. I went on vacation, and two men tried to kill me, twice, for reasons unknown to me. Two complete strangers. At which point I left my wife and children and, instead of informing the police, I fled. I found myself in a freight car crossing the Alps. A drifter knocked me down with a hammer and threw me off the train. I injured my foot, which is why I limp now. Your father, or rather your grandfather, found me and cared for me. That’s it.”
In the easy chair the young woman was laughing uproariously.
“That’s the simple truth,” said Gerfaut. He was having trouble keeping a straight face.
“Have another drink,” said Alphonsine Raguse, waving vaguely toward the bottle of vodka. There was still a trace of irrepressible laughter in her voice, and her gray eyes were still watering. She wiped them and sighed. Gerfaut retrieved his mustard glass from the sink, wiped its base on his sleeve, and poured himself a little more vodka. He ran two fingers lightly through his hair.
“Suppose I told you that this is the mark of a bullet wound—this white tuft here?”
“Yes, sure,” answered Alphonsine. “You are quite the adventurer.”
“No, not at all. You don’t understand. I’m just the opposite.”
“What does that mean, the opposite?”
“Someone who doesn’t remotely want adventures.”
She was still smiling. Ironically—but not in a mean way.
“I wouldn’t mind an adventure with you, though,” Gerfaut blurted. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s not what I meant to say. How embarrassing.”
She fell silent for quite some time. A worried look came over her face. Gerfaut found no way of breaking the silence, and he didn’t dare look at the woman. He felt dumb.
“How was the funeral?” she asked suddenly. “I didn’t want to come. I’m not upset that my grandfather is dead. I don’t like funerals. To like funerals you have to like death, and I don’t see how anyone can like death. But no,” she went on nervously, “that’s stupid, what I just said. Lots of people love death. Actually, I don’t know....”
She said no more, as though out of breath. She looked down at the floor. Under the suntan the skin of her face pinkened and then turned the color of a boiled lobster. She gave Gerfaut a hard look. She got to her feet, and Gerfaut politely followed suit. Then she slapped him viciously across the face—once, then again. Gerfaut failed to grab her wrist; he covered his face with his forearm and backed toward the wall.
“Forgive me, please forgive me,” he said. He giggled slightly as his back bumped the wall. “It’s because I’ve been for eight or ten months—the whole winter—in a sort of sexual stasis. Can you see what I mean?” He was mumbling—not even trying to make himself clear.
“Not me, though!” She was shouting; she stamped her foot, then kicked Gerfaut in the shin, hard. “Not me! I didn’t spend the winter in a sort of sexual stasis, as you put it so snottily, Monsieur Sorel!”
They heard the Capri pull up in front of the house. Alphonsine turned her back on Gerfaut and went to the door, banging her heels as hard as she possibly could on the wooden floor as if she wanted to send shock waves to his brain. Gerfaut leaned against the wall and tried to relax by inhaling deeply (without overdoing it).
Alphonsine’s boyfriend Max came in. He, too, banged his heels loudly on the floor, but in his case it was to get warm.
“Monsieur Sorel will be staying tonight,” said Alphonsine in a placid, musical tone. “He’ll be able to give us more information about the place.”
“Fine, that’s fine,” said Max. He was about thirty-five or so, with dark hair and green eyes, and a triangular upper body—a good-looking guy, the sort to whom certain things come easily; he had on plaid pants and an elegantly grimy three-quarter-length suede coat over a white pullover. “But they’ve got a place to eat down there that doesn’t seem too shitty. I really don’t see why we have to go through all the hassle of cooking here.”
“You have to inhabit a place, really live in it, if you want to know what it’s like, what it—well, never mind.” Alphonsine kissed Max on the mouth and rubbed briefly up against him in a provocative manner; and for the next few minutes she manifested submissiveness toward him in a host of ways. She did the cooking, barely giving Gerfaut the chance to explain a few things about the drain or how to manage without a stove. Only on sufferance were the two men permitted to feed the fire in the hearth and lay the table.
They ate dinner and chatted. Alphonsine allowed that she had decided to keep the house and make major improvements to it.
“Yes, yes,” Max agreed enthusiastically. “What a fabulous place to come to—cut off from everything like this.”
“My sweetheart.” She caressed his elbow and nuzzled at his shoulder through the white pullover.
All the same, sitting across from the loving couple with his nose in his glass, Gerfaut caught the young woman looking at him in a way that was bright, ardent, unseemly, even slightly crazy.
Yet it would be quite some time before Alphonsine and Gerfaut fell upon each other and sought to possess each other. For the moment, the three spent the night at the house, Gerfaut alone in his room, where he slept badly,
and the couple in the old man’s room. The next morning Alphonsine asked Gerfaut rather imperiously to be the house’s caretaker. She planned to go back to Paris, find an architect, and begin major alterations that would call for local construction people and craftsmen. And Gerfaut would oversee the work, which would be finished by summer. She would pay Gerfaut. She thought he would refuse the offer of payment, but he accepted it. Sure enough, she left the same day with her guy Max. But she came back well before the summer, and she came alone. Gerfaut was still there, caretaker-ing, seemingly without a care in the world. Still, the day after the couple’s departure he had lit the fire with a copy of the evening France-Soir from the day before, which the pair had left behind. By chance, as he scrunched the newspaper up into loose airy balls, his eye had fallen upon a very short article—no more than filler—headed “Possible New Light Thrown on Disappearance of Paris Executive Georges Gerfaut After Massacre of Last Summer,” which was a very long title for such a brief item.
18
“You’re not a cop,” said the drifter.
“I’m a journalist,” said the young man with wavy black hair and such pretty blue eyes, whose name was Carlo. “The drinks are on me, if you tell me something interesting.”
“I told the cops everything, even an inspector that came down from Paris. I repeated everything over and over. Why don’t you just ask them?”
The drifter had prominent yellow teeth and a deformed mouth that gave him a perpetual smirk. He wriggled, ill at ease, licked his lips, and mechanically adjusted his dirty bowler hat over his likewise dirty hair. He regretted no longer having his hammer. The young man with the dark hair took a money clip from the pocket of his navy-blue raincoat and extracted a fiftyfranc bill. He waved it in front of the drifter, simultaneously rolling it up with three fingers like a cigarette. The drifter made an unconvincing grab for the money, then shook his head.
“Come on now,” said Carlo in reproachful tones. He took a step forward, lifted the man’s bowler and jammed the rolled banknote between his hat and his hair so that the money was attached to the drifter’s forehead.
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