by Trevanian
She laughed at me. “That’s not really true, you know. I believe I am a handsome woman. Healthy. Pleasant to look at. But I am not beautiful, and it’s foolish of you to say so.”
I suffered in silent confusion. I wanted to explain that my gesture of affection implied no disrespect. It was simply that she seemed so free and fresh, so . . . modern, I guess . . . that I felt she would understand my frank— Ah! I couldn’t find the words to explain myself.
“Does it please you to hold my hand?” she asked with a tone of mild interest.
“Ah . . . yes. Of course.”
“Very well, then.” She stood quite patiently, her hand unresisting but mute in mine, until growing feelings of awkwardness caused me to release it with a last pressure of farewell.
I feared that my boldness had ruined our former effortless amicability, so I searched for anything to say. “Ah . . . your father, I take it, is unwell?”
I was surprised at the effect of this random observation. Her expression clouded and she stepped back from me. “Why on earth do you say such a thing?”
I stammered, “Well . . . you said your family was here for reasons of health. You are obviously . . . healthy.” I sought to make a little joke. “And, apart from his compulsion for leaping from moving bicycles, your brother seems fairly normal. So I naturally assumed that it was your father who was ill.” I shrugged.
“Oh. I see.” Her expression cleared and she smiled. Then, to my surprise, she slipped her hand into the crook of my arm and led me back up the path towards the house. “I’m afraid my bicycle is going to be a bit of a problem,” she said, with what I would soon come to recognize as a characteristic habit of shifting from topic to topic with a glissando of non sequiturs that made internal sense to her but to no one else.
“Problem of what sort?”
“Of a minor sort, I suppose. I don’t really feel like returning to Salies just now. I wonder if you would mind collecting my machine from the square and keeping it for me until tomorrow?”
“I should be delighted. But how will you get into town tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “I’ll walk of course. It’s only a short ways.”
“Ah yes. Exactly two and six-tenths kilometers, as I recall.”
A look of delighted wonder animated her eyes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if it really were? I’ve never actually measured it, you know. I have noticed that people are impressed by exact measurements, so I provide them out of my imagination. But wouldn’t it be amazing if one of them were accidentally correct?”
I dared a slight pressure on her hand by flexing my arm. “You are a strange and exceptional person. Do you know that? May one say that much without being guilty of boring you with automatic, boyish gallantry?”
“One may.”
We passed around the terrace to the sulky, where the patient old mare stood stoically, occasionally fluttering a shoulder muscle to discomfit the flies.
“Until tomorrow then?” she said.
I smiled at her and nodded. “Until tomorrow.” And she returned to the house.
As I approached the trap I noticed a pebble of particularly interesting veining beside the wheel, and I automatically picked it up, following a senseless habit from boyhood, a habit that used to annoy the aunt I lived with after the death of my parents. She would throw away scores of pebbles whenever she came across them in her cleaning. The loss never disturbed me, as I was not interested in collecting stones, only in picking them up. And the reason I picked them up was one that made excellent sense to me, though I knew better than to expect anyone else to understand: If I didn’t pick them up . . . who would?
The sulky had not gone thirty meters down the rutted lane when I heard Katya’s voice calling after me. I reined in and turned to see her running towards me, one hand holding her skirt aside, and my doctor’s bag in the other. I had climbed down to meet her by the time she arrived, flushed and a bit out of breath. “What must you think of the doctor who forgets the tools of his trade?” I asked.
She laughed. “Our Dr. Freud would say you did it on purpose.”
“And he would be right, Mlle Treville. And I’m afraid I have left more behind here than my kit.”
She shook her head sadly and smiled as one might smile at a persistent, mischievous child not totally lacking in redeeming charm. Then, on an impulse, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek lightly.
I searched for words, but before I could speak she touched the place on my cheek with her fingertips, as though to seal it, and said, “Hush.” Her lucid grey eyes searched mine for a moment. “May I tell you something? You are the first man outside my family that I have ever kissed. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Yes . . . remarkable. I . . .” But I could find no words. “Here,” I said, pressing something into her hand.
“What’s this?”
“A gift. A pebble.”
“A pebble?” She looked at the little stone in her palm; then she smiled up at me. “I believe this is the first time anyone has ever given me a pebble. In fact, I’m almost sure it is.” She searched my eyes with that amused curiosity of hers. “Thank you, Jean-Marc Montjean.” And she turned and walked back up the lane.
THE return to Salies was filled with a young man’s daydreams of the most common and delicious sort. I had never met anyone remotely like Katya (to myself, I already used her first name). I was fascinated by the disturbing blend of quixotism and blunt frankness in her conversation, by her intelligence and freshness of thought, by an absence of conventionality that was not, as it is in so many modern young women, a desperate effort to be original at any cost.
An hour later, still in a gentle swim of delight, I was pushing Katya’s bicycle across the village square towards my boardinghouse.
“Here! What’s this?” Doctor Gros called from the shadows of his favorite café beneath the arcade that enclosed the square. “Come over here this instant, young man!”
I propped the bicycle against an arcade column and joined him, my sense of well-being so strengthened by thoughts of Katya that I felt benevolent even to Doctor Gros and his vulgar buffoonery.
“Sit down, Montjean, and prepare to face the music! Let’s examine these macabre events in sequence; see if we can find a pattern here. Primo, an attractive young woman arrives on a bicycle. Beta, she leaves town in the company of a young doctor of singularly modest accomplishments whose practice of holding forth in a high moral tone makes him automatically suspect. Third, the doctor is seen skulking back into the village with the bicycle, but without the young lady. Clearly, there is dirty work afoot here. Come take a little apéro with me, Montjean, while we squeeze the ugly truth out of this mystery.”
He was in a jovial mood, and I was pleased to sit with him for a time, sipping a glass while the light drained from the eastern sky and the western horizon grew purple.
“How did you know about the young lady?” I asked.
He tapped the side of his veiny, bulbous nose and winked with burlesque iniquity. “I was an unwitting contributor to her tragic fate, my boy. The yellow journalists who swarm all over nasty cases like this will record that it was I, Hippolyte Gros, physician of note and fellow of many unappreciated qualities, who suggested that she consult you, not twenty-four hours before she met her ghastly end. My dear boy, if I had had the slightest hint that you lusted so for a bicycle, I should have contributed anything short of money. You have gone too far this time, Montjean! The judges in their square bonnets will agree with me that you’ve gone too far this time.”
I chuckled as the waiter brought me a pastis. “So it was you who suggested she consult me?”
“Just so. She came to the clinic, describing the accident to her brother as a trivial matter that anyone at all could handle. Naturally, the phrase ‘anyone at all’ brought you to mind. I was myself occupied with a patient whose confidence I have been cultivating for some time, and anyway the girl was too young for my taste. Give me married women of a certain age every
time. They are so discreet . . . and grateful. So? Tell me all! Did she plead to retain her bicycle? Were you deaf to her pitiful cries? Blind with passion to be astride her machine?”
“No.” I laughed.
“Blind with lust, then?”
“No.”
“You must have been blind with something. Being blind is a characteristic of your generation. Ah! Blind drunk, I’ll wager. I’ve always mistrusted your addiction to strong waters, Montjean. Particularly as it is accompanied by an equally strong reticence to offer rounds. Very well, I see that you intend to be churlishly secretive about your conquest; so let us settle between ourselves the minor problems of the planet. The newspapers are full of talk of war. Germany is glowering, France is snarling, Britain is vacillating, and Bosnia—where in hell is Bosnia anyway? One of those half-mythical nations down at the lower right of the map, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve never trusted that lot. If they had honorable intentions they wouldn’t hide and cower down there. The whole business is as angry and gnarled as the probate of a peasant will. Clarify it for me, Montjean. Focus your fine, Parisian-trained mind on the matter and tell me for once and all: Are we to have war or not? Have I time to order supper before the bombardment begins?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“There you go again, being so cocksure of things. Overconfidence is an ugly characteristic of your generation—that and being blind. And refusing to offer rounds. Well, if you don’t know, I do! There will be no war! You have my word on it.” He drew a sigh and made a comic face. “But then, I must tell you that I am the fellow who assured everyone that the Prussians were only bluffing back in ’ 70 .”
“Dr. Gros, may I ask you something seriously?”
“You certainly have a gift for taking the brio out of a conversation. But, very well. Fire away.”
“What do you know of the Trevilles?”
“Ah-ha! Just as I thought! Curiosity. The Eighth Deadly Sin and notorious felinocide. It’s worse than lust. God only knows how many sordid affairs have been generated by sexual curiosity. There’s strong aphrodisiac in the question: I wonder how she’d be in bed? Nothing, of course, to the saltpeter of finding out. You ask what I know about the Trevilles? I know what the village knows. Nothing and everything. The Trevilles have been most unresponsive to the oblique questioning of the maids, merchants, and tradesmen they have dealt with during their year among us. Therefore, rustic logic feels free to confect—nay, obliged to confect a suitable biography in which to set the few thin facts known. There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Fine. I shall share with you the subtle mélange of fact and fancy that passes for truth hereabouts. In imitation of Genesis, I shall begin ‘in the beginning’—a dangerously close relative of ‘once upon a time,’ as every conscientious theologian knows. Well, the Trevilles came here from Paris a year ago. Three of them. A father and two children who, as I suppose even you have observed, are twins—a thing vaguely suspect in itself. They took a lease on the decrepit mansion called Etcheverria at terms that so delighted its owner that he rushed into town and bought drinks all around—an excess of generosity he has regretted ever since, and doubtless confessed as a sin of profligacy. Ever since their arrival, the Trevilles have lived as virtual recluses—a thing for which the village gossips cannot forgive them. May I offer you another little glass? No? It’s not charitable to flaunt your abstemiousness in this way, you know. One of those careless cruelties of Youth. The father is rumored to be something of a scholar, with all of the stigma appropriately attached to that nefarious craft. The son is accounted a wastrel, a snob, and—as he has not been caught climbing out of a peasant girl’s window—there are hints that he may be a bit of a pédé. After all, he comes from Paris, and we all know what that means. But it is the daughter—dare I call her your young lady?—who has attracted most of the old crones’ attention. She has been seen walking alone in the fields from time to time. Walking alone.” Doctor Gros pumped his thick eyebrows up and down to underline the salacious implications of that. “Furthermore, it is said that she rides a bicycle. A bicycle, no less! Stare hard enough at that fact and you’ll find double—nay, triple!—entendre. Also, she constantly wears white dresses, and we all know what that means. As she has never been observed doing anything in the least compromising, the gossips reason that she must do these things in secret. All in all, I’m afraid I must tell you that the Trevilles are the scandal of the community. Our local pride is bruised by their having chosen this corner of France in which to hide from whatever their sins and indiscretions may be. It’s as much as saying that we’re a Godforsaken, out-of-the-way backwater! And the fact that this is an accurate description of our community adds to the sting of it. There it is, Montjean. In a capsule, this is what is known and rumored about the Trevilles. And in addition there is the matter of the mother—whom no one has met and who is therefore rumored to be a dwarf, a Protestant, and left-handed. But I have a feeling this description is based on rather sketchy evidence.”
“The mother is dead,” I said.
“A dwarf, Protestant, left-handed, and dead? My, my. There is food for gossip. She’s a handsome one, your young lady. I congratulate you. A bit healthy for my own taste. Men of our profession must always be alert to the possibility that healthy people are doing it on purpose to ruin us.”
“So there’s nothing really known about them at all.”
“Nothing at all, as I have just said at some length.” The café waiter having delivered yet another Berger, Gros measured into his glass just enough water to cloud the drink without weakening it, then he stared at me for a moment before asking, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well what? What the devil are we talking about? Have you and your young lady . . . ?” He made a palm-up gesture cutting across his chest.
“I barely know her!”
“Shame on you! Engaging in such intimacies with a girl you barely know. There’s the youth of today for you! No sense of decorum. You do realize, I hope, that you’ve contracted the disease.”
“What disease?”
“Love, man! I spotted the symptoms as you crossed the square pushing that silly bicycle. The vague, purposeless smile, the eye gone dim with inward-directed vision, the—”
“Oh, really!”
“Smitten, by God! Ah well, it happens to the best of us. In proof of which, I confess that I was once infected by love in my youth. But alas,” he drew a fluttering sigh, “it developed that she was a shallow thing attracted only by my physical beauty and ignorant of the depths of sensitivity beneath.”
“I’d really rather not discuss—”
“You have been good enough to share with me your conviction that mine is a quackish branch of medicine. As I recall, you were appalled that the nation of Pasteur could also be the nation of medicinal spas and curative waters. Well, for my part, I am appalled that the culture capable of producing de Sade could also produce the billet-doux and the tender assignation. Love resides in the loin, my boy, not in the heart.”
“I should warn you that I take offense at this turn of talk.”
“Oh, my, my! Forgive me! Misericorde!”
“There is something further I would like to know.”
“Oh, really? I would have taken it from your attitude that you knew everything—everything worth knowing, that is.”
“Can you tell me anything about the house, Etcheverria?”
“Only that it’s a terribly damp old place that might have been designed by a member of our profession specializing in lung disorders.”
“You have never heard anything about its being haunted?”
“Haunted? No. But I would be delighted to add that bit of information to the mass of rumor surrounding the Trev
illes, if you wish.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Ah! Here come the municipal thieves, eager for their nightly shearing.” Indeed, the lawyer, Maître Lanne, and the village banker were approaching across the square. Each evening they joined Doctor Gros in games of bezique at which he inevitably won, not without muttered accusations of cheating. “I perform a useful service for these worthies, you know. I disemburden them of worldly wealth, making it possible for them to pass through the eye of a needle, as it were.”
“I’ll be going.”
“As you please. May I look forward to the pleasure of your company at the clinic tomorrow? Or have you decided to abandon medicine in favor of bicycle theft and girl molesting?”
“I’ll be there in the morning. But . . . I may want to take off a bit of time in the afternoon.”
“Ah-h-h, I see.” His voice was moist with conspiracy.
“Mlle Treville will be coming into town,” I explained needlessly.
“Ah-h-h, I see.”
“No, you don’t see!” I felt at one time both anger at his implication of wrongdoing and a childish sense of pleasure at being teased about her . . . as though she were mine to be teased about. “She has to fetch her bicycle,” I clarified.
“Ah-h-h, I see. Yes, of course. Her bicycle. To be sure.”
“I offered to bring it out to her, but she . . . I don’t know why I am bothering to explain all this to you.”
“Confession is good for the spirit, Montjean. It empties the soul, making space for more sin.”
I rose as the village worthies arrived and excused myself for having to run along without the privilege of their conversation.
After scribbling sketches and impressions in my journal and finding myself several times frozen in midsentence, staring through the page and smiling at nothing, I blew out my lamp and lay back against the bolster. The details of the room slowly emerged through the blackness as my eyes accustomed themselves to the moonglow that softly illuminated the curtain. All that night I drifted in and out of a sleep lightly brushed with images and imaginings that were not quite dreams.