by Michel Déon
‘Yes, I came to wish you a happy Christmas. We’re neighbours, are we not? I had no wish to disturb you. Having lived as a savage for some time, I’ve rather lost the habits of society …’
He must have made an effort to wash himself and to run the scissors over his beard and hair, but the smell of dirt still hung around him, a tenacious tramp’s smell. He was so outlandish and unexpected that Jean would have burst out laughing if it had not been for Claude’s trembling. He gently pushed her down into the armchair so that her back was to the visitor. Cyrille, regaining his courage, peeped at him.
‘Jean, is it the man in the woods?’
‘Ah, so I am known to this young man!’
Blaise Pascal – it was he – coughed to clear his throat, hoarse with emotion. The hand clasping the knob of his cane went to his beard to restrain possible germs.
‘Why was you lookin’ in the window?’
‘Ah, so you’re the Spanish painter? Your friend told me about you. There was a time when I was very interested in painting. Would those two landscapes on the wall be yours?’
‘Oh, the boy could do jus’ as good …’
‘Don’t you believe it, dear Monsieur. I know that modern painting claims to have rediscovered, via a complicated detour, the genius of childhood, since – as they declare – all children possess genius, except for child prodigies. But allow me to tell you that your painting – in so far as I can judge from these two pictures – displays the very opposite of childishness. You know everything and you have had the strength to harness your ability. Trust me, Monsieur, I am happy to inform you, if no one else has already done so, that you are a great, a very great painter.’
Dumbfounded, Jesús stared at him. It occurred to Jean that this pure spirit with the frame of an ox knew nothing of deceit, and he felt greater faith in the bearded stranger’s measured speech than in La Garenne’s self-interested paeans. Jesús would accomplish his work in solitude, far from sycophants and the most articulate of admirers; in truth, all he needed was friends and love … Claude turned to look at the figure whose pleasant voice, with a nuance of vanity in its assured tone, seemed to have calmed her attack of nerves.
‘Come and get warm!’ Jean said.
The snow had all but melted from the visitor, but he stayed standing in his pool of water, embarrassed, trying to please by his refined politeness.
‘I would not wish to frighten you, Madame.’
‘I’m not afraid of you,’ Claude said.
‘You’ll excuse me for having spied on you at the window for just a moment. The truth is that I couldn’t decide whether to knock at the door or not. You made a delightful, delicate picture. The child is very handsome. Is he your boy, Madame?’
‘Yes, he’s my son.’
‘Come and get warm,’ Jean repeated.
The man did nothing, not from discretion but because he had developed a habit of not accepting any invitation.
‘You’re all wet!’ Cyrille said.
‘Very true, my boy, but I had no umbrella. When I left two years ago I took only this cane with me …’
‘You left your house two years ago? What does your maman say?’
‘I haven’t got a maman any more.’
‘Show me your cane. Is it a swordstick? My father gave me one before he went away. If any thieves come, I’ll kill them.’
‘Now that sounds very brave to me!’ Blaise Pascal said.
Leaning his cane against the wall, he placed his Eden hat on the table and pulled off his gloves. He had washed his hands with their caked fingernails, but greyish traces remained in the places where his skin was cracked from chilblains. These details were at odds with his elegant appearance, or nearly elegant, since his wool suit was flapping around his emaciated body and his grey Eden had yellowed considerably. Somehow the man radiated kindness, perhaps because he was secretly revelling in his hosts’ astonishment or, better still, because after months of loneliness he felt a pleasure that amazed him to find himself among human beings again.
‘As you suspected,’ he said to Jean, ‘my name is not Blaise Pascal and I do not share his genius. The name was a homage to a product of the Port-Royal schools. As I told you this morning, I live very much with him inside me. The Pensées is one of the ten books I took with me when I went into my exile. You are familiar with the parlour game of which ten books you would take with you to a desert island? I actually did it. You know one of them. If we get to know one another a little more, I’ll tell you the others … But I have arrived at a bad moment … You were perhaps about to have dinner?’
‘Stay with us!’ Jesús said.
The man made an embarrassed gesture.
‘You know … I’ve lost the habit of eating meals … You can do without them very easily. There are blackberries, mushrooms and sweet chestnuts … and I’m forgetting watercress, watercress all year round. Very healthy, especially with a few potatoes that I grow. The human organism has no need of abundance.’
Claude got up and walked across the room to fetch some potatoes, which she put to bake in the embers. She had regained her calm, but her fine features still bore a trace of the violent emotion that had overtaken her. More and more, Jean thought, she was closing in on herself. She could be brought back to earth by squeezing her hand, or stroking her hair or cheek. Now, having overcome her fear of Blaise Pascal, she did not give him a second look. As she crossed the room, she brushed past him and he had been profuse in his apologies but Jean wondered if she had actually seen him. In any case the man saw her and could hardly take his eyes off her. He spoke for her benefit, caressingly, measuring his words’ pleasure.
‘For a man who lives alone you do a lot of talking,’ Jean said, mildly irritated.
Blaise Pascal’s eyes lit up.
‘You’re so right, Monsieur. I should have unlearnt the power of speech. It might even be fun to see me walking on all fours and barking. That was the pitfall. I foresaw it and I left this world with a mirror. I talk to my mirror and my mirror answers me. Alas, its answers do not satisfy me. As Cocteau puts it so nicely, a mirror should reflect before it offers a reflection.’
Jesús did not understand. Jean had to explain the play on words to him. Blaise Pascal was delighted.
‘Monsieur—’ he began.
‘My name is Rhésus Infante!’
‘Monsieur Jesús—’
‘There is no Monsieur Rhésus. The French, they say little Rhésus, I am the other, not the big, the Rhésus and that’s it …’
‘Shall I make an omelette?’ Claude asked.
‘Yes, Maman! Can I break the eggs?’
She let him break them into a bowl. He only missed two of them, which broke on the tiles in front of the oven.
‘What I wanted to say is that your time has come!’ the man said to Jesús, finally moving closer to the fire.
His clothes steamed, and a smell of disinfectant pervaded the room.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This suit was going to lie in mothballs until peace was declared.’
‘Who says it wasn’t declared long ago?’ Jean said.
Blaise Pascal smiled.
‘Monsieur—’
‘My name’s Jean Arnaud.’
‘Yes, without an “l”. Am I to call you “Jean”?’
‘It would be simpler, Blaise.’
‘Well, Jean, I’ve been drawing my own conclusions. I go as far as the road and I hide there. There are no cars, apart from one driven by a nice-looking woman, which has a German registration.’
‘That’s Laura,’ Jesús said.
‘Her brother was killed by the Russians,’ Cyrille said. ‘She’s gone to bury him. The Russians are killing lots of Germans.’
‘Be quiet,’ Claude said. ‘Go and wash your hands.’
She laid four places at the table. Jesús opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass and offered it to Blaise.
‘Thank you, no,’ Blaise said. ‘I don’t drink. Loneliness and alcohol don’t go together.
There are no half-measures. Either you don’t drink or you drink like a fish. I chose abstinence, although, believe me, I wasn’t always that way disposed.’
Claude served the omelette.
‘Does your diet exclude eggs?’ Jean asked.
‘No. I even owned two hens and a cock. Two months ago they disappeared. I suspect a fox had them. You will object that eggs are not vegetable. You would be right.’
He raised his finger to ensure their attention.
‘But by eating an egg I am fighting in my own way against overpopulation. By the year 2000 there will be four billion earthlings. Malthus was right. Limit the number of births and you’ll have no more need of wars to mop up the consequences of an ocean of sperm.’
‘Of what?’ Cyrille said.
‘Forgive me, my boy, I forgot you. It’s a scientific word.’
‘Sit down,’ Claude said, seeming to pay no attention to the man or his chatter.
She served them in silence and sat with her own empty plate in front of her. For three weeks she had eaten almost nothing at all, making do with a glass of water here, a piece of bread there. Trousers and sweaters concealed her new slimness, but when Jean had hugged her to him in the bedroom that afternoon he had been surprised by how thin her body, once so moving in its shapeliness, its secret harmony between flesh and frame, had become. Her failure to eat had already blighted her face, making her eyes more protuberant and her cheekbones more prominent, the avatar of a beauty that had once been placid and simple and was now impenetrable. Her looks were changing as much as if she had put a mask over her face, and her fixed expression concealed, from anyone who did not know her, a sadly etched image of fear …
Jesús, whom the visitor had so surprised as to leave him speechless, regained his composure at dinner. He had been so carried away by the compliments about the only two canvases hanging on the wall that for a moment he had been unable to assert himself. But one did not condemn a man of Jaén to silence as easily as that. Nor, at Jaén, was there any shortage of hermits. His uncle, Antonio Infante, had shut himself up in a Saracen tower on the edge of the town, on the Bailén road, at the beginning of the civil war. It was an old tower with solid walls, but its upper platform had collapsed. Antonio had walled up the outer door and moved in with a guitar. Every morning he tossed a rope over the wall to which a box was tied, full of bread, water and some fruit. He sent the box back with some trifling ill-smelling objects that were buried elsewhere. Except at midday precisely, he was always in the shade. When it rained he opened his umbrella, and on icy winter nights he wrapped himself in a quilt. One day Jesús brought a ladder that reached the battlements. His uncle was dozing, his guitar beside him. He had grown a long black beard, like Tolstoy’s. He had become much thinner in his dust-covered clothes. Sometimes he was heard singing, accompanying himself on the guitar. At the end of the war he had emerged from his retreat to shave and get married. He had two children already, had announced his intention to have another one every year until 1950, and led a modest life running a haberdashery.
‘Human foolishness knows no limits,’ Blaise Pascal said, put out that Jesús dared to steal his thunder with such a picturesque anecdote.
‘That’s exactly wha’ I sink of you!’ Jesús answered calmly. ‘You don’ do anythin’. You are simply afraid. And fear is no’ pretty.’
‘But you also—’
‘Me, señor, I don’ make somebody else’s war …’
‘What do you mean? It’s always somebody else’s war! I’ve only ever understood one war, and that’s civil war. At least one knows why one’s beating and killing one’s brother. But the Germans? Why? I don’t know them. I wouldn’t go and live with them for anything in the world. Their philosophy bores me. Musicians? Well, yes, certainly. Alas, I’m not fond of music. Their women? I’m sorry, I like – or rather I used to like – petite women with brown hair. You see, I’ve no reason to be angry with them. They leave me cold. That’s all!’
Jean tried to catch Claude’s eye. He sensed that she was not listening and was overcome by tiredness. Her eyelids were heavy and her head kept slowly sinking then starting up suddenly. He leant towards her.
‘Do you want to go to sleep?’
She answered so quietly that he could hardly hear her.
‘Yes … but you will fuck me, won’t you?’
Neither Jesús nor Blaise Pascal seemed to have heard. He took her arm and went upstairs with her, followed by Cyrille, who got undressed on his own and snuggled into his sleeping bag.
‘Will you both kiss me, please?’
Claude, sitting on the edge of the bed, smiled and blew him a kiss.
‘Go to sleep, darling.’
Jean kissed him. The boy was dog-tired.
‘He’s funny, the man in the woods, don’t you think, Jean?’
‘Yes, he is pretty funny.’
‘Will he come back tomorrow?’
‘I suspect he probably will.’
Rising from the ground floor, the muffled voices of Jesús and Blaise Pascal were still audible.
‘Jean, undress me,’ Claude said.
‘All right.’
He laid her down on the bed. Cyrille turned over.
‘Good night.’
Claude did not even appear to hear him. She raised herself fractionally to let Jean take off her trousers and sweater, then murmured something so indistinctly that at first he hardly heard her and was then shocked as he understood.
‘Be quiet,’ he said.
The Light 11 stopped at the entrance to Allée des Acacias. Palfy got out before the chauffeur had a chance to open his door. He spread his arms wide, inhaled a lungful of cold air and, catching sight of Jean waiting for him, turned to the chauffeur.
‘Émile …’
Jean hated him calling a man Émile whose real name was Jean (‘You understand,’ Palfy had said, ‘that I had to unbaptise him, because of you’).
‘Émile, no need to stay with us. I’m just going to the Cascade and I’ll be back. You can switch off the engine …’
Turning to Jean he said, ‘Émile is a splendid chauffeur. My mother called hers “my mechanic”. In those days chauffeurs knew how to keep their cars on the road. Modern engines have killed off the enterprising mechanic. I doubt if Émile knows how to change a spark plug, but he’s like a father to me. Let’s walk, shall we, I could do with some exercise. We’ll talk in vapour bubbles like the heroes of comic strips. But if we meet anyone else, they won’t be able to read them. They’ll be written in invisible ink.’
He wore a fur-lined coat with a black astrakhan collar, and a soft grey hat. His tanned complexion was a sign of wealth in an era of pallor.
‘Where did you get your tan?’ Jean asked. ‘I thought you were in Switzerland.’
‘I was. In the mountains. Wonderful sunshine. Snow and the simple life. Gstaad is a little paradise, despite meeting mostly people who are waiting for the end of the war. Anyway there weren’t only people like that there. I also met a very charming woman and we talked about you.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. I don’t know a charming woman: if I did I’d remember her …’
‘What about Claude?’
‘I’ll tell you later. But you didn’t meet her at Gstaad.’
‘No, you smart alec. I met your mother.’
Jean was silent. An image from the past suddenly came to him: the yellow Hispano-Suiza on the quayside at Cannes. Geneviève, the prince in a wheelchair, and Salah getting out. They were deserting Europe. Geneviève, in a pale dress and wearing a beret, a light coat over her arm and carrying her jewellery bag, had turned to glance at the families and curious onlookers crowding around the landing stage. Jean remembered the sadness on her hardly made-up face. She was already missing Europe, her friends, her sparkling, clever London where she had been so happy. She was leaving, resigned but not yet convinced of the necessity of her going.
‘The prince is dead,’ Palfy added. ‘Geneviève is finding it difficult to
obtain a residence permit for Switzerland. But with money everything can be worked out …’
The reader has the advantage over Jean of having known this piece of news for a long time. He or she also knows that Albert Arnaud will die the following summer at Grangeville, during the Dieppe raid. The state of war, Europe’s isolation, and within Europe the isolation of every nation forced back onto its own hardships and hopes, the censorship that weighs on every letter as much as on the press, muddle our chronology. The past, discovered so long after the event, is as hard to understand as the present. It is already hedged around with forgetting, with resignation. Its freshness is suspect; its emotion has lost its savour. It possesses almost no surprise, and to some degree it is not hard to think of it as an importunate interloper, reminding you indiscreetly of his existence. The saddest news comes so late that it is already consigned to history, minor, insignificant, cold, overtaken. The anguished longing to know what tomorrow will bring pushes yesterday back further than it should be. Trifling distances, which yet seem unmanageable, deaden the horror. No one spills old tears. They hold them back with little pity. Life expectancy numbs the most acute notes of the funeral march. The survivors take pride in still being alive when the weakest and unluckiest have vanished. It would not take much for them to accuse the victims of cowardice.
At the moment of hearing of the death of the prince who so influenced his own life, Jean is too obsessed by Claude’s state to feel more than a swift stab of sadness. As for the news of his mother being in Switzerland, it leaves him cold. He has decided that Jeanne was his mother, the housekeeper at La Sauveté, the person who gathered him up in his Moses basket, adopted him, loved and protected him. Geneviève, whatever he feels, is a mother like the one a child creates in a burst of romantic invention: beautiful, charming, intelligent, loved by everyone and more or less virtuous. When they had met in London he had fallen a little bit in love with her, and she too had probably fallen a little for him. It was nothing. Something that did not count, and yet had had some magic and that afterwards – when he had known that she was his mother – he had enjoyed mulling over like the sort of incest to be found in a popular romantic serial.