At first Mme Cantin was uncertain, but it quickly became obvious to her and soon it would be obvious to others. She wondered about her daughters and was concerned. She asked her husband, ‘Will we have to tell them?’
At the thought of her daughters Mme Cantin was overcome with a kind of shamefaced embarrassment. She started to blush in their presence, as if what had happened to her were abnormal, as if it were shameful, at her age, to have yielded to such sensual delights. Love has its proper season. Like a young girl hardly into puberty and already pregnant faltering in the face of her mother’s propriety, she felt uneasy in the face of her daughters’ innocence. She kept going over the same question, unable to decide whether it would be better to keep quiet about it until the very end or not.
‘They’ll understand without having to be told,’ her husband said.
‘Who knows?’ Mme Cantin replied. ‘They’re still so innocent!’
Still innocent indeed. None of them had been sent away to boarding school, they had all been taught at home, under their mother’s eye, by governesses and private tutors. No contact, none of the mixing that can initiate and pollute young minds, they had been brought up in an atmosphere of reserve and religion. They possessed the modesty of the young roses they resembled and from which their names had been taken: Rose, Rosine, Rosette, so similar to each other that it would have been impossible to tell them apart if it had not been for the difference in age. Rose was eighteen, Rosine sixteen and Rosette, the youngest, only thirteen. Nevertheless they were all similar, dressed in the same clothes, all with the blond hair which seemed to be three parts of the same tresses. They were of the same character too, open, affectionate, sensitive. When they walked, they always went with their arms round each other’s waists. A single group and in such harmony! It was as if they were propelled by the same spring, were the three sails of the same ship. They were always in agreement, had the same tastes, liked the same music, kept everything in common.
During those months Mme Cantin was in torment not knowing whether her daughters suspected anything, for her condition had become obvious and now she blushed even more in her daughters’ presence. She wore loose bathrobes all the time, thought up enfolding gestures, as if it were something shameful she had to conceal, a sin which she did not want to disturb their innocence. Yes, they were innocent, but innocence is not the same as ignorance. Did they know something of the mystery of the sexes and of motherhood? Were they aware of the event that was approaching? Or ought they to be told? Rosette, who was only thirteen, would certainly know nothing of the matter, but the eldest, Rose, was eighteen. Could she have retained her artless ignorance? When out on walks, even among her relations, she must have often seen pregnant women and wondered about them. After all, pregnancy is highly conspicuous. The second, Rosine, was sixteen. At that age children’s minds are active, so she too must be aware of what it meant. Moreover the three sisters were so similar, so close, they thought the same way and told each other everything. Rose must know and therefore Rosine as well. But did that mean that the youngest, Rosette, must also know? For some reason she could not explain their mother found the idea upsetting. Why? That she should disturb the calm of her little Rosette, with her soul that had not yet lost its bloom, her modesty intact! And since she would not be able to understand everything, she would feel a sort of disgust, a horror of her mother, as if she had discovered that her parents lacked modesty, connected with those shameful parts of the body to which she herself closed her eyes so that she would not see them when she changed her underwear.
Mme Cantin was seriously concerned, especially since at that time Rosette seemed troubled, sad, paler than usual. She asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’ She asked her sisters. They all said it was nothing, but their mother sensed that the approaching event was involved, was disturbing their young minds. But to what extent? Once again she wanted to reveal everything and suggested that to her husband.
‘No, no. Let things take their course. Everything will sort itself out.’
One evening Mme Cantin was sitting in an arbour outside in the garden. After the heat of the day it was pleasant under the green vault, which provided coolness and a sombre light, the light of an eclipse, of a church nave. The foliage was so dense, she was almost invisible there. Stretched out in a cane chair, she was daydreaming, wearied by the growing weight of her love, her love of the previous autumn, born in this garden, her remontant rose in collusion with those of the garden. She thought of the birth, which was fast approaching. She thought of her daughters, above all of Rosette, whose anxiety, which she could not bring herself to clear up and which was doubtless connected with her condition, was getting worse. All at once she saw her three daughters appear at the end of the avenue, in a row with their arms around each other’s waist as usual. It was a like a wave, breaking a little more at one side because of the height of the eldest girl. They were walking up and down the path, talking in confidential tones. They did not see their mother who, hoping she might learn something, kept quiet, hidden by the compact foliage of the arbour. She caught some scraps of their conversation. Rosette, the youngest, was crying. She said, ‘But I do! I’m sure Mama’s ill, you just won’t tell me. She’s seriously ill. I’ve seen her tummy. And it makes her look ugly. I don’t want Mama to look ugly…’
Rosette burst out sobbing. Rose, the eldest, comforted her: ‘But she’s not, I tell you. It’s nothing. Just wait a few weeks and Mama will be like she used to be. But above all don’t talk to her about it.’
Rosine, the middle one, backed her up: ‘Rose’s right. Stop crying, Rosette.’
And the harmonious trio walked up and down with the cohesive motion of a wave rolling, breaking and reforming.
In the arbour Mme Cantin, silent, holding her breath, cried tears of joy, of wonder, of delight. So Rose and Rosine knew, Rosette did not. And how scrupulously the two older ones had kept the mystery from their younger sister. Now Mme Cantin blushed even more in front of her daughters, being aware that they knew.
She withdrew, devoted herself to Rosette, who suspected nothing.
Fortunately the event came sooner than expected, cutting short the mother’s daily torment, the feeling of shame before her older daughters, a psychological unease, a physical embarrassment which grew with each day.
But as soon as the new-born baby had arrived, she had no trouble showing it to her three daughters, talking about it, expressing her rapture, her pride in it. The child had taken away all the sin.
‘Who is it?’
The extraordinary news came as a real bombshell to this northern village: ‘Ursula, the simpleton, is pregnant!’
The tale went from door to door. The majority refused to believe it. What, the village idiot? That poor, grotesque creature with the dazed expression, the misshapen body, more of an animal than a woman, shambling along like a bear as she wandered all day round the streets and fields? Impossible. No man could desire her. But people insisted it was true. What a business! There was no end of laughter, of obscene jokes. Neighbours went to ask each other. Out in the street people greeted each other with merry cries:
‘Was it the work of the Holy Ghost?’
‘No, the devil’s work, surely?’
In fact the whole village immediately, at the very same moment, had the same thought: ‘Who is it?’ With some it was simple curiosity, with others spitefulness. It was a perfect topic for idle and malignant tongues to feed on. A mystery to be solved, and a mystery with a touch of the scandalous about it at that! A murky affair, certainly, and one in which everyone could entertain the hope of compromising their enemy, of spreading suspicion and anonymous allegations about him! The pleasure of hurting people and getting one’s own back! The vicious pleasure of washing dirty linen in public! Monotonous evenings by the fireside enlivened by juicy items of gossip.
Who is it? The whole village was asking the same question, some not from a taste for scandal but out of genuine outrage at such a shameful event. The guilty man must
be found and punished by the general censure for he was guilty and despicable into the bargain, since after all the poor idiot had the defenceless simplicity of a child and should enjoy the same kind of inviolability as things of nature…
After high mass, groups formed in the square and talked for a long time amid whispers, laughter, dirty jokes and shocked expressions. All at once someone cried out, ‘Look! She’s coming.’
And indeed, there she was coming down the street leading to the church, an indistinct figure all in grey amid the garish surroundings of the low cottages with their geranium-red tiles, their white-and-green shutters.
This time everyone looked at her more attentively, in the light of what they now knew. Her body was misshapen, one hip higher, giving her the gait of a sailor unused to dry land and a slightly drunken air. Her squashed nose and the nervous tic jerking her mouth all the time, as if on a string, gave her face the look of an animal. In this rough sketch of a face only her large, clear, moist eyes retained a vestige of humanity, as if destiny had taken pity. She was leaning on the stick she always carried, which she would brandish when the village children threw stones at her—as they would at a bird—as if she were about to chase and beat them, but then, lacking the strength, she would continue with her feeble steps, constantly stumbling in the tangled web of her intentions. That day her limp was more pronounced than ever because she had lost one of her shoes. She had lost it as she came without noticing. It made her seem even more incomplete…
As she approached there were ripples in the groups, laughs, calls, quite a commotion. Everyone surveyed her with inquisitive looks. And indeed, her threadbare dress did seem shorter at the front, revealing her non-matching feet…
Still no one could really believe it. She really was too horrible. One old woman remarked with a knowing air, ‘It’s a tumour.’ A man left one of the groups, saying, ‘I’ll go and talk to her.’
They saw Ursula stop in her tracks, seized with fear. The invisible string jerked her face in a most ugly grimace. Her body trembled with the epileptic trembling of a bear.
The man said, ‘Come on now, is it true? Tell me who the father is… I’ll give you some money.’
She didn’t reply. He tried again: ‘Who is it?’ But the simpleton didn’t seem to understand, her eyes alone, with their vestige of humanity, were imploring. She pulled away from the questioner, as if she had to break free from shackles, and went off, uncertain, her caricature of a body standing out against the purple shadow of the square in the sunlit village while the children interrupted their games to throw stones at her again, as they would at a bird.
A few months later Ursula, the simpleton, did actually give birth. Until then people laughed at her, sceptical, only seeing this unlikely maternity as a subject for jibes, jokes, crude stories and smutty remarks. When they saw the child the crowd’s natural human instinct was aroused—and their sense of pity. The neighbours hurried round, the whole village arrived, cramming the little house where she lived with old Marie Nimy, an aunt over seventy who had taken her in. Everyone wanted to see the child. All the villagers made a contribution towards the baby clothes. The poor little innocent! So sweet and rosy-cheeked. There was nothing to see at that point except that it was physically perfectly normal. No deformity; but that can appear later, when it starts to grow, as had happened with its mother. What was regrettable was that she paid no attention to the child. Not a glimmer had lit up the darkness of her brain, awakening the maternal instinct. They showed her the child, gave it to her to kiss, tried to put it in her lap, but they had to pick it up again quickly. She would have pushed it away from her like a bundle of rags. What dreadful heredity, almost inevitable with such a mother. One day the poor child, sleeping there, would doubtless be like her. Oh, was it not a crime to give birth to a child that could only become a monster? Who was the guilty man? Now it was no longer a joke. People were outraged. They felt a kind of remorse. Simple-mindedness is a kind of childhood and you could say the woman lived under the protection of the village. She was the weakest of weaker vessels and someone had taken advantage of that.
Who is it? The question kept returning, tormenting everyone. They searched, they asked around in the whole neighbourhood. They questioned Marie Nimy. Did they have male visitors? What acquaintances did she have? Had Ursula not given any hints, anything that could be followed up? They questioned her, but she hardly understood what they were asking. Words had no meaning for her. They were simply a muddle of noises that reached her mind like the wordless sounds of the wind in the trees or of water lapping against the arches of a bridge.
She tried to imitate the sound of the words. They showed her the child and then, hoping to arouse an association of ideas in the chaos of her mind, asked, ‘Who is it?’ She responded with inarticulate cries, that had nothing human about them, were nothing but the sounds made by some object: the grating of a key, the tick-tock of a clock, the gurgling of a bottle…
But they needed to know.
They went to see the priest. ‘It’s a crime,’ he said, speaking in a tone he would have adopted if someone had been murdered in the region. But he thought the damage was irreparable, the perpetrator impossible to find. The people went on at him to intervene, to help them in their search. The priest was a mystic, a visionary, human affairs were of little interest to him. He repeated, ‘It’s a great misfortune,’ but already his voice seemed distant, his eyes on other things.
The general curiosity, on the other hand, did not give up so quickly. In the village there was now a whole crowd of people constantly searching, questioning, following up leads, checking information, setting up an enquiry. One fact had been established: it wasn’t some stranger who happened to be passing, for none had been reported for the time in question. That meant it was a man from the village who was keeping quiet, secretly laughing at the public concern, cowardly and despicable… but still they couldn’t find him.
One day Ursula herself almost solved the mystery. She had been seen suddenly going towards a young man who was passing with a visionary, ecstatic look on her face; she reached out towards him, tried to take his hands, made an attempt at a smile, hinted at lewd gestures—as if she recognised him. Immediately the incident was common knowledge. The wretch! They spied on him, During the following days Ursula repeated her performance, becoming bolder, provocative. She followed him, waited outside his house. The villagers were jubilant. At last they had discovered the secret. They decided to demonstrate their displeasure by serenading the culprit with a cacophony of pots and pans and lids. However, just at that moment Ursula turned her attention towards someone else, also a young man, whom she watched out for and followed with her pathetic lewd gesticulations. Then, not long after, there was another, then another and another. Ursula assailed all the men with her provocative gestures. She stared at them, tried to touch them, laughed her sad, broken laugh, like one coming from a face reflected in a pool into which stones have been thrown.
A strange phenomenon. A partial lifting of her inner darkness. She remained unmoved by motherhood but she had felt love; she didn’t understand about the child, but she had tasted man. And now, with her female instinct awakened, she went to those who were young and handsome…
The village abandoned its search. The simpleton was a simpleton, there was no point in attaching any importance to her dumb show. All the more so because at that point the child died. Immediately it was as if nothing had happened. He had been the cause of their outrage, now things were back to normal. Ursula’s liveliness only lasted a short time. She hardly went out any more, slipped back into apathy, into an almost animal life, apart from her large, sad eyes which had something human about them but were of no use since they had not even seen her lover of one night of deepest darkness…
And later on, when some neighbour would insist on asking her aunt, old Marie Nimy, about the event—‘Who is it?’— with a shake of the head she would reply in her hoarse voice, ‘It was no one’s bastard.’
Love
and Death
One Sunday afternoon, at the house of the old lawyer where one could chat at one’s ease, where, as Gautier says, one could enjoy the pleasure of immersing oneself in masculine talk, the conversation came round to the subject of love. A banal topic. It was the spring that prompted it. It rose up from the frail garden, still recovering from winter, came in through the half-open windows: the scent of the first lilac, of the new shoots, of the watered soil, which smells good. And then we had just been talking about a dramatic item in the newspaper reporting once again the death of two lovers who had committed suicide together.
The novelist, de Hornes, responded by declaring, in his voice that was always slightly husky, as if to go with his grey eyes, the grey of ashes smouldering with faint flames, ‘No one has ever truly loved if, at some point or other, he has never had the idea of dying with his mistress.’
‘How deuced romantic!’ the old lawyer exclaimed. In fact, his outlook was too close to the eighteenth century for him to be able to comprehend the tragic depths passion can reach. For himself, he had never been more than a collector, as they used to say, for whom a woman has the same value as a precious curio. But Valmy was there and balked at de Hornes’ claim for other reasons.
‘On the contrary, it’s very scientific,’ he broke in. ‘All we have there is a general law of physics, a natural phenomenon of depression, depression which becomes excessive when one is too much in love and which weak lovers are unable to overcome. Basically it’s the animal triste of the Romans.’
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Page 11