by Trevanian
He heard me out and was silent for a time. As he had not removed his straw boater from his face, I could read nothing of his expression. He drew a long sigh. “Montjean . . . what a nuisance you have been, rooting about in our past and lumbering me with your unwanted and worthless advice.”
“I have not been rooting about in your affiars. And I don’t consider my advice to be worthless . . . not for Katya, at any event.”
He lifted the hat from his face and opened his eyes to look at me with an expression of fatigue and condescending pity. “You are making judgments from the dangerous position of one who knows a little . . . but not enough. I intend to flesh out your knowledge, because learning the facts is not going to be a pleasant experience for you, and I believe you have earned a little unpleasantness. First tell me what you presume happened in Paris.”
“What happened? Well . . . I assume the events were as your father presented them—an accidental shooting of a young man whom he took to be a burglar.”
Paul settled his eyes on me, his expression flat. “And what if the shooting was not accidental?”
“Not accidental?”
“What if Father had known perfectly well that the young man was not a burglar?”
“I . . . I don’t understand?”
“Oh really? I thought you understood everything.” He closed his eyes but continued to speak lazily, through slack lips. “Let me tell you a little tale. One night, about two years ago, I returned to our house in Paris after a bout of carousing. The house had an enclosed garden behind it, and in order to avoid disturbing anyone, to say nothing of announcing my profligate tardiness, I entered through the garden gate. As I navigated the path, a bit the worse for drink, I stumbled over the fallen body of a young man who had for some months been paying court to Katya. He had been shot, Montjean. And he was quite dead. A clean shot through the heart. Are you seeing the picture?”
I could not answer.
“As you might imagine, I sobered up with a jolt. I knew instantly that Father had killed him. I can’t explain why, but I was absolutely sure. He had several times given voice to his dislike of the young man—a trivial mind; not worthy of Katya . . . that sort of thing.”
“But . . . I cannot believe that your father could . . . He’s a gentle and kind man. A little befuddled, but not . . .”
Paul opened his eyes and rose up onto one elbow to address me more directly. “My father, Montjean, is insane.”
The matter-of-fact way he said this chilled my spine.
“It’s in our blood. My great grandfather died in an asylum. One of my great uncles lived out his life incarcerated within his own home, attended in secret by two daughters who never married. A cousin of ours killed himself by stepping in front of a train. It seems that the disease passes along the male line of our family. That is why I must never marry, must never have children. My own father was always a bit of a recluse, preferring to live in past centuries rather than deal with life as it is. When he met my mother he fell in love so totally, so desperately, that friends of hers warned her against the marriage, considering Father’s devotion to be almost unhealthy in its intensity. But she accepted his proposal, and for a little less than a year they were caught up in the swirl of a grand passion. She became pregnant almost immediately, and she died in childbirth. The shock to my father was staggering. It goes without saying that he never loved again . . . never even looked at another woman. He withdrew into himself and devoted all his emotional life to his studies and to us . . . to Katya and me.
“I believe I told you at one time that Katya and I resemble our mother to an uncanny degree. I’ve seen photographs, and the similarity is quite shocking. Unsettling, indeed. I don’t claim to understand the psychological mechanisms—that’s more your bailiwick than mine—but I believe that what happened was this: Father wandered into the garden, his mind all tangled in his studies, and he saw Katya in the arms of a young man. All innocent enough, of course. Young people trying to discover the perimeters of their feelings, the boundaries of their love . . . that sort of thing. But what Father saw was . . . his wife in the arms of another man. He returned to his study—stunned and bewildered. Katya bade the young man good-night and retired to her room. The fellow lingered in the garden, all aglow with dreams of a most saccharine sort, we may presume. Again Father comes into the garden. This time he has a gun—one of my target pistols. And . . .” Paul tugged down the corners of his mouth and shrugged.
He lay back on the ground cloth and closed his eyes. After a time, he continued. “I cannot know if that is exactly what happened, of course, but I fancy it’s close enough. At all events, when I arrived home that night, I came upon the poor fellow. At that time, I had not yet perfected the distant sangfroid that has become so attractive an element of my character. I was frightened, confused, shocked—indeed, I experienced the whole medley of emotions appropriate to the circumstance. Unable to think clearly, I woke Katya and told her what had happened. You can imagine her state. We talked for hours . . . late into the night. What were we to do? It was unthinkable that we could allow Papa to go to prison or, worse yet, to an asylum. For much of the time Katya was teetering on the edge of shock. She gripped my hand until the fingernails broke my skin, and she shuddered convulsively. But she did not cry. She has never cried since, in fact.
“Not knowing what to do, we agreed to do nothing. Not until morning, at any rate. I sent Katya to bed—certainly not back to sleep—and I dragged the body into the shrubbery to conceal it until I had decided upon a plan of action.”
I sat there unmoving, unable to comprehend all that I was hearing. I remember that the sun was hot on the back of my neck, but I felt a chill of horror beneath the warm skin. The breeze turned a corner of the sheet and covered my outstretched legs. To this day, for some reason I do not understand, the image of my legs covered with the white sheet epitomizes that moment for me. Finally I was able to say, “But what options did you have? Surely your father insisted on facing up to his actions and not allowing his children to become implicated.”
“Fate delights in its little ironic twists, Montjean. Father did in fact confess, but that is not to say that he faced up to his actions. That next morning, Father remembered nothing of the matter. Nothing. It was gone from his memory. Obliterated. The man with whom I took breakfast, the man who babbled on about some minor point of medieval lore, was totally innocent, had never harmed another human being in his life, was in fact incapable of harming anyone. He remembered not a trace. Indeed, ever since that night, Father’s memory has been weak and perforated to the point of burlesque comedy, as even you must have noticed. Surely you don’t imagine that a vague and distracted mind such as he now possesses could have made him one of France’s most respected amateur scholars. Before the . . . accident . . . his mind and memory were like honed Swedish steel.”
“But, I don’t understand. If the incident was gone from his memory, how could he have confessed?”
“My dear fellow, I am nothing if not clever to the point of deviousness. I availed myself of half-truths and of all the forces of my imagination to trick him into admitting to the authorities that he had shot the young man, without subjecting him to the horror of knowing that he had killed a human being in cold blood . . . without making him face the fact that he was insane. First, I told him outright that the lad was dead, shot in our garden. Then I made up the tale that he had tried to force his attentions on Katya, and that, in her panic, she had shot him.”
“What?”
“Reserve your astonishment, old fellow. It gets more baroque as it goes along. I convinced Father that, in her state of shock, Katya did not have the slightest memory of killing the man. He agreed with me that it would be cruel—and possibly dangerous to her mind—to allow her to learn the terrible truth. Between us, Father and I concocted the story that he shot the young man by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. So, you see, Father confessed to killing the boy without ever knowing he had actually done it. The po
lice accepted our story after minimal investigation.”
“Minimal?”
“We are, after all, a family of some importance. Justice may be blind, but she is not without a sense of social propriety. The poor are grilled and cross-questioned; the rich have their statements taken down, with close attention to accurate spelling.”
Paul had recounted the events with his eyes closed, lying on his back, his delivery slow and monotonic, almost bored. I wondered if this cold insouciance was a product of his unemotional character, or if it was a defense he had developed.
“And Katya?” I asked after a silence. “How did all this affect her?”
“As you would imagine. She was fond of the young man . . . perhaps even loved him. The fact of his death was shocking; the method of it—by her own father’s hand—was shattering. If she had also known that the shooting was no accident, that her father (or rather the madness hiding within her father’s flesh) had cold-bloodedly shot him down, I daren’t consider what effect it might have had on her. Fortunately, she never knew. So you see, to this day my family survives in a fragile web of interwoven misapprehensions. Katya believes Father shot the young man by error, and that his mental state was precariously shocked by the event. Father believes that Katya shot the fellow in panic after his attempt to violate her. And both of them are willing to do whatever is necessary—to pull up roots and go to the ends of the earth if necessary—each for the purpose of protecting the other. I hope you can appreciate how dangerous it would be for both of them if your probing was to expose them to the truth. Your blundering about in our affairs could easily tear the delicate web of lies that prevents my father and my sister from discovering the horrible and destructive truth.”
“And you sit at the center of the web. A spider-god controlling their fates.”
Paul vented a long, shuddering sigh, as though infinitely weary of me. He was silent for a time before continuing in his flat, almost indolent tone. “It would not have been a matter of the guillotine for Papa. It would have been an asylum. Have you ever experienced an asylum for the criminally insane, Montjean? Do you have any idea what they’re like?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. I did a year of internship at the Passy institution before coming to Salies.” I did not confide to Paul that my experiences at Passy had turned me away from all thoughts of pursuing my interest in the new science of psycho-analysis. I had found the treatment of the mentally ill, even at such an advanced facility as Passy, to be brutal, degrading, horrid. The nurses and attendants seemed to have been dredged up from the lowest orders of society. The case which, in my mind, italicized the horrors of institutionalization was that of a young woman I shall call Mlle M. She was young and very pretty, beneath her slovenly, indeed disgusting, façade. The event that had driven her beyond the boundaries of reality had to do with incest. No purpose would be served in detailing it further. Mlle M. used to wander the grounds of Passy, her expression bland and distant, her soft eyes empty. The most salient manifestation of her condition was her practice of soiling herself and refusing to allow anyone to clean her up. Despite my natural disgust, I felt particular compassion for her, and after many months of gently, slowly bringing her to have confidence in me, I learned something that shocked me and filled me with rage. During her first weeks at Passy, the gentle and withdrawn Mlle M. had been subjected to frequent and rather bizarre sexual assaults on the part of guards and attendants who, as I later discovered, considered such opportunities to be one of the privileges associated with their unpopular occupations. Mlle M. confided in me with expressions of sly pride that it was to protect herself from these assaults that she had devised the practice of soiling herself and making herself too disgusting to be desirable.
With outrage and fury I reported what I had discovered to the hospital administrator, who warned me against giving credence to the distorted rantings of persons who, by definition, were adrift from reality. But he assured me that he would look into the matter.
Over the next several months I devoted a great deal of time to Mlle M., whom I discovered to be a charming, very intelligent young woman, despite the deep bruising her mind had undergone. Slowly, and not without several discouraging setbacks, I convinced her that the danger to her person had passed, and that she could dare to live without the horrid armour of her own feces. I remember the delight and sense of accomplishment I experienced one morning in late spring when she arrived at the little conference room, fresh and clean, her hair brushed and tied back with a bit of ribbon. I knew better than to make a great fuss about her victory over her dreads, but she smiled with shy pleasure when, at the end of our chat, I mentioned in passing that she looked particularly nice that morning.
She failed to attend her next conference, but I was not unduly surprised, as she had missed several over the course of our relationship, and it is not uncommon for a patient to retreat for a day or two after some barrier has been broken through. But when she failed to appear the following morning, I went in search of her.
I found her in her cell, attended by a dour matron whose martyred “I-told-you-so” expression revealed her longstanding mistrust for this newfangled approach to treating—pampering—the insane. Mlle M. was coiled up on the floor in the corner of the cell, snarling at me like a rabid animal, her dress torn to shreds, her cheeks raked and bloodied by her own fingernails, stinking of feces she had smeared over her arms and into her hair. I realized instantly what must have happened to her—probably on her way back to her cell from our meeting. Because she had trusted me, she had dared to make herself clean . . . and desirable.
I knelt down beside her and reached out to touch her shoulder consolingly, but she recoiled and snarled at me. Hate glinting in her narrowed eyes, she snatched up her torn dress, revealing her bare privates, and hissed, “Your turn! Your turn! Your turn!”
I burst into the office of the administrator, demanding an immediate investigation leading to maximal punishment. I was met by the callous indifference of the official whose greatest desire is to avoid unnecessary trouble and publicity. It was obvious to me that he would do nothing more than go through the motions of an inquiry because, as he informed me with a slight shrug, we had to remember that the insane tended to invite this sort of thing—they enjoy it, really.
When I screamed at him that I intended to bring the entire matter to the attention of the press, his eyes hardened and he rose to face me. In cold, measured tones, he reminded me that everyone at Passy knew of my particular attentions to Mlle M., and that our activities during our “sessions” were common knowledge.
My first blow broke his glasses, my second his nose.
I was immediately dismissed from the staff, and the evaluation written into my record was such that I could give up all hope of ever being accepted into a desirable practice. It was because of this damning evaluation that I was so surprised and grateful when Doctor Gros invited me to join him for the summer at his clinic in Salies.
I had been silent for a time, remembering these experiences, before repeating to Paul, “Yes, I have some acquaintance with institutions for the criminally insane.”
“Then you know that they are unspeakable places. I visited one when I was trying to decide what I would do if Father ever had a relapse. Those poor, drooling inmates bereft of the slightest dignity. Those hectoring guardians with their brutal, meaty faces. All babble and stench. I could never allow such a fate to befall a cultured and scholarly man like my father. After our mother’s death, he concentrated all his affection on Katya and me. It was our birth, after all, that had cost him the wife he loved beyond the capacity of most men to love. Our debt to him can never be repaid.”
“But if his distorted identification of Katya with his dead wife could bring him to kill once, could it not happen again?”
“That is possible. And that is why I keep careful watch on him, looking for the slightest signs of derangement.”
“I take it these ‘signs’ have appeared again?”
&n
bsp; After a pause, he nodded.
“And that is why you made the sudden decision to flee from Etcheverria?”
He nodded again.
I understood then why Paul had demanded that I conceal from his father the fact that I was fond of Katya; why he had warned me against touching her, taking her in my arms. He saw me as the next victim of his father’s madness! All his actions and motives, which I had ascribed to an unhealthy jealousy, were now clear.
But it was not Paul who occupied my concern. “Poor Katya,” I said softly. “How unjustly life had closed in around her! And she tries so to find a little joy in the beauties of nature, to amuse herself with her silly jokes . . . those painful puns. Good God, she can’t even allow herself to be held in the arms of a man who loves her!”
“Yes, poor Katya.” Paul sat up. “Poor Paul, if it comes to that. Even poor Jean-Marc, I suppose. But—above all—poor, poor Papa.”
“No. Not ‘above all’! I am sorry for him, but his life is nearly spent. You and Katya are still young. And you’re sacrificing yourselves, wasting your lives!”
“We have no choice. We’ve discussed it, and we agree. How could Katya be happy, knowing she had purchased that happiness at the cost of her father’s being walled up with babbling madmen and sadistic keepers? As for me . . .” He shrugged. “Don’t waste your compassion on me, Montjean. I have carefully positioned myself in life so as to avoid the excesses of either happiness or pain. I have cultivated a safe and judicious shallowness. I have tastes, but no appetites. I laugh, but seldom smile. I have expectations, but no hopes. I have wit, but no humor. I cultivate intelligence, but abjure profundity. I am remarkably bold, but totally without courage. I am frank, but never sincere. I prefer the charming to the beautiful; the convenient to the useful; the well phrased to the meaningful. In all things, I celebrate artifice!” He paused and grinned. “And some might even accuse me of being self-pitying.” Then he shrugged. “At all events, the life you accuse me of gambling away is not worth all that much anyway. If indeed I gamble, it is only with small change.”