by Michel Déon
‘Nothing is ever quite as “open” as you think, my dear Monsieur. The psychology of a human being who’s been disturbed by a violent event is a delicate mechanism that in reality we don’t know how to repair, because we know nothing about the brain, the brain being, of course, the vulgar term that scientists use to speak of the soul.’
Jean emptied his glass and got to his feet.
‘Thank you very much, Doctor, goodbye.’
Dr Bertrand paled. He could get angry too. He felt wounded by this young man’s disrespectful behaviour. He stood up, his two fists on the table, leaning forward.
‘I regret to inform you, Monsieur Arnaud, that Madame Chaminadze’s mother and uncle wish you to desist from further visits to see your girlfriend.’
‘Ah, so Claude has an uncle now? That’s news to me.’
‘The family, which was decent and united before your arrival, did not judge it necessary to include you …’
Jean had sworn to himself that he would stay calm. He took a moment to collect himself, glimpsed a possible way out and, deciding to pursue it, smiled.
‘Doctor, I respect your profession too much not to consent to your experiment. I agree to abstain from further visits for the necessary period. Nevertheless, if you have any humanity you will understand that that comes at a price. I therefore wish to discuss it with Claude. Perhaps not today. Tomorrow or the day after. Give me some time to think, to weigh my words so as not to disappoint her. I’ll confess it to you again: I love Claude. And she loves me. No one is going to separate us: not a foolish mother nor a brother who lives from gambling nor an unknown uncle, nor even you, who knows exactly what I’m talking about.’
‘Of course, I entirely understand, even though I’m not certain that Madame Chaminadze is in a fit state to answer you. If you telephone me before you come, we shall arrange matters so that there is no disagreeable meeting with the family.’
‘One more thing, Doctor. Up till now I’ve paid the clinic’s monthly bill. I wanted to say that I’ll continue to do so.’
Dr Bertrand took off his glasses, revealing a victorious and amused look.
‘That won’t be necessary. The family has taken the patient into its care. I have been instructed to return your last cheque to you.’
The cheque was ready in an envelope. Jean took it and tore it up. He felt hurt, profoundly hurt, and detested the stranger’s interference in Claude’s ordeal.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dr Bertrand said. ‘Very sorry … I didn’t think you would be so affected. The truth is that I know nothing about you and I’m merely an instrument in a family’s hands. That’s the law.’
He walked round his desk to Jean, taking his arm with sudden affection.
‘You’re young; you’ve yet to discover stupidity and malice. You’ll only really be a man when you have a precise idea of what they are. Meanwhile take care.’
He let go of Jean’s arm and turned his head to add in a lower voice, ‘And fight. I’ll help you if I can, even though you don’t have a very high opinion of me.’
‘Then tell me if you think Claude’s curable.’
The doctor emptied his glass and turned back to sit behind his desk.
‘Sit down. Please. I won’t give you a lecture, but I’d like to give you some insight if I can.’
His tone had changed. It was persuasive, and Jean thought he detected a new sincerity.
‘For several years now, to distract me from the atmosphere in this rather confining place, I’ve been interested in Gérard de Nerval. You’ll tell me that literary critics are studying that writer with more talent than I’ll ever have. The one difference is that I seek to bring a doctor’s diagnosis to bear on Nerval and to imagine how I would have been able to cure him. My thesis is that he was curable, where Maupassant was not. The basis of my research is my reading of that coded document, Aurélia. No one can deny, Monsieur, that here we have the most beautiful, the most lucid testimony of what frenzy is. With this document in my hand I can confidently tell you that Nerval, who was sound in body, was also sound in mind. All that was needed was to persuade him. About Madame Chaminadze I cannot, I’m afraid, say the same thing. A question mark hangs over her case. Volition seems to escape her. She won’t regain it here. We have neither the time nor the means to help her. We can soothe her anxieties, that’s all. And offer her, relatively speaking, a refuge, since the Gestapo are not yet raiding nursing homes. Is a refuge more important than a mental status quo? That is up to her family to decide. I shan’t say what I think. My duty is to keep the maximum number of residents I can, but I’m sure you understand that an empty bed is immediately taken by a new patient. There’s a long waiting list. I’ve told you everything. You must do what you feel you should, and if you try your luck, I shan’t blame you …’
*
On the ground floor Jean met the supervisor, sorting out rags, scraps of sheets, torn clothes.
‘A lady is waiting for you at the door in her car. It has a German registration.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, Monsieur, don’t look at me like that! I’m collecting rags for Mademoiselle Durand. After a week she gets bored with putting the same ones away every time.’
Behind the closed French window the man in the panama stood drumming lightly on the glass with his hand. The supervisor wagged her finger at him.
‘No, Monsieur Carré, it’s not time to come indoors yet. Go for another little walk.’
Monsieur Carré waved and turned away to go round the lawn again.
‘You have to be firm,’ the supervisor said with a smile.
She was not trying to excuse herself, merely displaying her ability to maintain order in the nursing home, to prevent this bunch of lunatics doing as they pleased, and regarded it as proof of the mildness of her system that she was obeyed without question.
‘I’d like to see Madame Chaminadze, just for five minutes.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m afraid that’s impossible. She was very agitated after you left her and we had to give her an injection. She’s sleeping now.’
*
Jean could not summon the will to insist. Outside Laura was waiting in her green car, a book resting on the steering wheel.
‘I’d have walked back,’ he said.
‘I know you would, but I wanted to talk to you.’
They drove through the peaceful village and turned onto the road for Gif, overtaking pedestrians walking to the station, bent double under the weight of suitcases full of food, and cyclists in shorts with haversacks on their back.
‘They’re hungry,’ Laura said. ‘The French are hungry.’
‘Do you understand them?’
‘Yes. The good thing is that they admit it. In Germany no one would dare to … I came to talk to you about Blaise Pascal.’
She was silent. The private unease Jean had felt at his meeting with Dr Bertrand overcame him again.
‘Where does he live?’
‘Here, in this village.’
‘I don’t feel very strong, Laura,’ he said. ‘I really don’t want to talk about another mad person.’
‘We must.’
She was driving her noisy two-stroke car fast. Going downhill, the exhaust pipe popped drily, misfiring. Laura slowed down in the forest to park in the shade of a side road.
‘Jean,’ she said, ‘we have to clear up some misunderstandings. After Christmas, when I came back from Germany, you left Claude with us for a few days …’
‘Yes, I shouldn’t have. She was already going off the rails. I knew she needed to go to a clinic, but I was looking, I didn’t realise …’
He would have liked to see Laura’s expression, but she stared straight ahead as if fascinated by an image emerging from the shadows of the forest, which sloped down gently down towards the Yvette. Golden splashes exposed the undergrowth. He listened to her, wondering why she hadn’t spoken earlier, but it was in the character of this unusual woman to reveal herself only after a long personal struggl
e. So he learnt that Blaise Pascal – forgive me for not yet revealing his real name and possibly for not revealing it at all – that after the awkward dinner to which he had invited himself, Blaise Pascal, the lice-ridden and apparently mad dandy, had reappeared several times and it required no great perspicacity to realise that it was Claude’s presence that had drawn him out of his retreat. Of course he had acted circumspectly, delousing the ‘man in the woods’, reappearing in much more attractive guise and deploying all his charm before disappearing again. He had even succeeded in making her smile and she had ceased to consider him with dread. Laura was no longer in any doubt that the hermit had re-entered the world as a result of falling for Claude, an emotional change that had fully revealed to him the cowardice and inanity of his withdrawal from the world. He had already decided to give up his hunting lodge before Claude was admitted to the nursing home. Laura surmised that, having assumed his other identity – of a youngish man of independent means, simple, modest and good-natured – he had set himself up in the village next to the nursing home in order to be able to visit her more easily. But things had not stopped there: a fortnight earlier she had seen him with Anna Petrovna and Cyrille.
‘So now we know who the uncle is,’ Jean said.
He did not want to know any more. They drove back to Gif and the farmhouse, where Jesús was working in his studio. Laura vanished as only she knew how, and the two men remained in the room, which was already growing darker in the fading light. Grey shadows filtered through the trees and spread stealthily, murmuring over the house in the calm of the evening. On a long canvas Jesús was painting flashes of light, a luminous composition of muted gold and silver in the green sunlight of Chevreuse.
‘Is no good at all!’ he said, despairing, sitting down on a stool. ‘I am a useless idiot who ’as no talent.’
He was sincere, believing it fully. Inside his tall, solid frame there lurked a childlike soul that was prone to sudden despairs as magnified as they were fleeting. Jean, who knew him very well, refrained from reassuring him and occasionally even expressed himself in complete agreement, just to incite his friend to react in a spirit of contradiction. To him the painting on the easel looked to be of such dazzling beauty that he no longer doubted Jesús’s great talent. He had purged himself of everything, of his false daring, of the old-fashioned academicism to which his skill had long bound him, of the influences that had held him back, and now his painting radiated the force and ardour that a great original artist brought to it. Jean was sure of it: Jesús would be counted among the few masters of his generation when, matured by his retreat, he finally made his way back to the galleries.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Jean said to him. ‘That you’ve got no talent, you’re a dauber and you’d do better as a house-painter, or that you’re the artist I like better than all the others, in fact the only one? You won’t believe me either way, and you’ll spend the next hour boring me stiff with your doubts. Stop it, you’re talking rubbish. You’re a happy man and it upsets you, and that’s entirely normal, because you’ve always heard that great artists live in a state of permanent torture …’
‘Michel du Courseau suffers!’
‘He suffers, but not because of his art, which he’s totally happy with, to a degree you and I can’t imagine. His suffering is about something rather different: how can he reconcile his very real and very sincere faith with his taste for little boys? He hasn’t found an answer yet. The day he does, he’ll suddenly stop being so repressed.’
Jesús rapidly forgot his own anxieties. He had worked all afternoon with passion and pleasure. The release of tension explained his pessimism and fears.
‘’Ow is Claude?’ he asked.
‘The same. It’s me who’s not well …’
They talked about Blaise Pascal. He sometimes came to the house in the afternoons. He had even bought two canvases, but had not taken them with him. Jesús occasionally found him interesting, and at other times thought him irritatingly pedantic and self-assured. They still did not know who he was, nor whether he had really possessed a collection of paintings before he buried himself in the forest. Jesús was nevertheless aware that he had conceived a sudden, violent passion for Claude. Fulfilled himself and therefore feeling that his own love affair was the only real one, the only one worthy of interest, Jesús assured Jean that what had happened was a stroke of luck for him and would provide him with an honourable means of extracting himself from an impasse. Jean did not reply. How could he explain what he still felt for Claude, and which would never be extinguished, even if she failed to regain her sanity? In short, that he owed her his love.
Shadows filled the studio. Jesús, sitting on a high stool, his feet resting on a bar with his chin on his knees, seemed immense and invincible. He belonged to a world-view that left no room for doubt at a moment when Jean was discovering the depths of human misery, loneliness and the looming approach of a despair that, fortunately, still repelled him. He felt an intense need to see Nelly and rushed his leave-taking.
Laura drove him to Gif station and as they were saying goodbye told him, ‘I’ll help you, but it’s not so easy. We’re all being watched and we’re all watching each other. You’ll have to take her away somewhere. Anywhere. Otherwise … you’ll have to give her up.’
She had touched the nerve of a passion that, in the saddest way, was starting to fade just because it did not know how to change. In the train taking him back to Paris Jean realised that the distance, small as it was, and his return to Nelly were beginning to erase Claude from his emotions. Life could not be this love that had no way out.
Night was already falling over the Luxembourg Gardens. He reached the Comédie Française, where the matinée had just finished. Nelly was taking off her make-up in her dressing room, replacing a stage face for one shining with cream that looked tired and drawn.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t come in time, I was never ever going to see you again. I wasn’t very good this afternoon and I’m depressed. I wanted to be a genius and it turns out I’ve just got some talent. That’s mediocrity for you. There are evenings when I’m just a sad and unhappy little girl who wants to cry her eyes out. Absolutely the worst thing of all, you horrible Jules-who, is that I’m starting to ask myself whether I’m not in love with you. Undo me, will you?’
He unhooked her heavy, starched seventeenth-century dress, which held her graceful bust in a straitjacket. She emerged, naked from the waist up and cream-skinned, staring at her mirror. She held her pretty, pointed breasts in her hands.
‘Maybe these really are my best bits,’ she said, letting them go. ‘And people are wrong. I have no talent. I just have nice tits. Kiss me.’
Her dresser came in.
‘Do you need me, Mademoiselle?’
‘No thank you. I’ve got my undresser. See you tomorrow, Mauricette. I hope I’ll be less terrible than today.’
‘You were marvellous.’
Nelly was talking to her in the mirror, her face tense, smoothing her eyebrows whose natural arc emphasised her dark eyes.
‘And to think I’m a stationmaster’s daughter!’ she said.
‘My brother works on the railways too!’ Mauricette replied, folding a scarf.
They walked back to Place Saint-Sulpice together, arm in arm. Before leaving for the theatre Nelly had made a cold supper and they ate it on the kitchen table, he in his shirtsleeves, she naked under her dressing gown. The summer night, silent and heavy, drifted through the window, filling the studio. In bed, Nelly snuggled against him.
‘The time for admissions has come,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wanting to say it since yesterday. This is the situation, my scrumptious Jules-who: I believe I’m actually in love with you, though you don’t deserve it. At the same time I’m also attracted to Jérôme Callot. Why? I don’t know. Well, every night we play the most sublime love on stage so convincingly that I suppose some of it’s left behind afterwards. But he’s an awful dunce;
he got married when he was twenty and has two kids and and is never going to leave his bourgeois wife for me. So we say nothing to each other except for the cues Musset gives us, like two old hams. And I hang on to you, like you hang on to me, in spite of your Claude. See? I’m more honest than you. Now let’s go to sleep, as if you were Jérôme and I were Claude. Marvellous, isn’t it?’
Nelly’s skin still had the sweetish taste of make-up and her make-up removers. He could never confuse it with Claude’s. She fell asleep immediately, like a child consumed by sleep, her fists clenched, surrendering to her dreams with the same passion as she surrendered to the theatre. Sometimes she lived her dreams so intensely that she slept panting and out of breath, or uttered disjointed phrases that Jean memorised so that he could repeat them to her next morning. But she remembered nothing. Jean tried to summon a memory of Jérôme Callot’s face. He had seen him on stage and once in the wings at the Français: his large, leonine head, his curly hair, his superb voice, an assurance borrowed from his characters and, underneath it all, more than likely, an enormous stupidity of the sort that only actors are capable of. Nelly was attracted to him, conscious of his vanity, but knowing he lived in her world and that they shared the same double life, and Jean would never be able to do as much. He was astonished that he felt no jealousy, only a vague fear that was hard to define, possibly the fear of finding himself suddenly alone at a moment when nothing had prepared him to be. But he would always love Nelly, in his way, and an immense affection would bind them that nothing would dislodge. He leant over her and murmured in her ear, ‘My little sister …’
She snuggled up tighter.
Jean had gone back to Portugal twice and each time had found Urbano at the border, waiting for him. The young PIDE inspector made no attempt to conceal his surveillance of Jean and had become increasingly friendly.