A Nail, a Rose

by Madeleine Bourdouxhe

  ‘We can go straight in, there’s no doorbell or knocker.’

  Carrol was speaking. I didn’t realise that we’d arrived at Paulu’s house. I thought I was alone, and that the road had no end.

  The square of paved ground in front of the house was all shadows. The door opened directly into the kitchen.

  ‘Is Paulu in?’ Carrol asked.

  ‘He’s not back yet,’ Paulu’s wife said, ‘but your mates are already here.’

  Carrol walked through into the room next to the kitchen. I decided to stay with Paulu’s wife for a moment. She was folding some sheets and piling them into a basket.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bother, it’s not worth it,’ she said. ‘D’you know, I’m really worried about these schemes they’re cooking up. If only they could have at least all acted together…’

  ‘But they’ve been trying to get to that position for a month now,’ I said. ‘They had no option but to act on their own.’

  ‘The truth is…’ she said.

  ‘Come on!’ Carrol shouted. ‘Aren’t you going to come and say hello?’

  I went into the next room and shook hands with Carrol’s friends.

  ‘This is Leslie Fay, and this is Gab Ortiguez,’ Carrol said.

  ‘Have you finished working out your plans?’ I asked, for something to say.

  ‘We’re only just beginning,’ Leslie said, looking at me with his small laughing eyes. ‘Once, you see, we three got together to defend something or other to do with liberty, with the beauty of the world – but right now we’ve met to defend our beefsteak.’

  ‘The country stinks,’ Carrol said.

  ‘Oh, give over,’ Ortiguez said. ‘You and your fine phrases and your formulas.’

  These two lads weren’t at all like Carrol and I wondered what they were up to in his factory. Leslie Fay spoke with an accent that came from a long way away – not to mention his name. Fay, Ortiguez and Carrol were of an age, barely over twenty, and all three wore the enamel parachutists’ badge on their jacket lapels. Otherwise these two lads weren’t at all like Carrol. Everything about them – their attitudes, their gestures, their voices – showed that they had something to avenge, probably an adolescence that had been cut to shreds by barbed-wire entanglements, sucked in through successive layers of atmosphere at the heart of those heavy nights when they made their strange visitations from sky to earth. They had lost everything and they knew it, and this was at once their strength and their misfortune.

  Carrol had lost everything too, but he didn’t know it, and this was both his weakness and his good luck. One day, in the depths of a wood where the trees had been ripped apart, they had needed his simplicity, and this need had become rooted in them. But the friendship linking all three – an invulnerable friendship, born at the bottom of a hole of mud and solitude – was dangerous for little Carrol.

  Standing by the window, Carrol said, ‘I think I can hear Paulu coming.’

  ‘Good, I’ll leave you to your discussion,’ I said.

  ‘You want to leave?’ Carrol said softly. ‘Why do you want to leave? I don’t like you leaving me like this. I’ll come by this evening.’

  It was dark outside. I resumed my walk up the road and into the night – because the night restored to me your presence. It reunited us, you and me, but it also gave me you on your own, outside of me, exactly as you really were, your tall, skinny figure all eaten up with nerves, ready to engage with trouble whenever you saw it arising anywhere in the world.

  The night was all around me, and you were in the night by my side. I could see you in the streets of strife-torn Shanghai, in that inadequately armoured lorry; in Belgium, in a tank stuck in a muddy ditch, lying flat against the jammed door, listening for the deadly sound of the shell and regretting that you would not meet your death under a sky full of stars. I saw you near a snow-covered rock on that turning on the road to Navacerrada, the butt of your rifle squeezed between your heels, crouched in the undergrowth next to your chief, an old gypsy type of seventy; I saw you in a mauve twilight on the coast of Somalia. You were always yourself, exactly the same, never mind what part of the world you’d come back from, skinnier, nervier than ever.

  ‘Well?’ I asked you.

  ‘Nothing,’ you replied.

  You smiled at me, with that smile that’s diabolical and resigned at the same time; you smiled at me with your whole face, and then you began to talk, and your lips and teeth moved rapidly to keep up with the words that slipped and flowed out of your mouth. You spoke of Shanghai and Madrid, of the fighting in Beauce and in Burma; you spoke of a whole procession of people, of dangerous situations and countries, and how you mingled with them and drew them back into yourself, not so as to feel at one with the world but so as to tear yourself away from it. ‘Out of all that, the only thing I possess is…’

  I could hear your voice telling me that, in the presence of the royal head of black stone that you brought back to Europe: it had a death warrant inscribed on it. I was in the night that restored you to me, I was completely enveloped in a night that was more than the night which covered the trees, the stones, the animals beneath the leaves; it was a night in which you and I were together, not as one and the other but as a single being, both equally worn down by the slow impatience of time.

  Retracing my steps I arrived back at Paulu’s house, where I could see, in the square of light cast by the window, Carrol, Paulu, Leslie and Ortiguez sitting round the table. I walked softly, taking care not to stumble over the stones in the road. They didn’t hear me go past, and I walked on faster, until I got to Jasminot’s house.

  I found him sitting in the kitchen with a shoe-last between his knees, repairing the shoes of his youngest child; his wife and children were in bed. He was leaning forwards intently as he nailed, smoothed and polished the shoe of a four-year-old, all worn down at the toe. He looked up as I came in and said:

  ‘Hello, Leah, I’m glad you’ve dropped in. There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll go there together,’ Jasminot said, ‘we’ll both go over there early.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll succeed in doing anything?’

  ‘They’re kids. There’s fifty of them, that makes five pickets of ten, and there are two thousand workers. On top of that their boss is an arsehole.’

  ‘And there’s nothing we can do to help them? Nothing at all?’

  ‘What could we do?’ said Jasminot. ‘We’re nothing, we’re less than nothing.’

  I didn’t speak, as if put in my place, the only place I deserved. At regular intervals Jasminot tapped, with a sharp blow, on each nail that he had already half-inserted with his finger.

  ‘The number,’ Jasminot said. ‘The number, and the time.’

  He said these two words in a strange way, as if he was putting them in capital letters, or investing them with a sense of black magic. He went on:

  ‘One part evil is always much more powerful than one part good. Evil has a habit of leaking, spreading out, overlapping, before you know where you are – that’s just the way it is. You need at least a thousand good men to triumph over one evil one.’

  ‘Even so,’ I said, ‘it’s sometimes happened that a small number of people have…’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ Jasminot said. ‘That’s never happened. Oh, all right, maybe it is possible for one good part to triumph over an evil part of equal size, or bigger even, but only given time, given a great deal of time. You might almost say, given an eternity.’

  Jasminot’s last words, which he said softly, tenderly almost, seemed to have had a calming effect on him. Now he was quiet. Slowly he filed the leather on the edge of the shoe, so as to give the sole its proper shape. Lifting the shoe off the last he placed it on the table, where it stood quite straight, the end slightly raised up like the prow of a ship, in good shape on its bright new sole.

  ‘Shall we talk about the othe
r thing now?’ I said.

  ‘No, let’s leave the other thing till tomorrow,’ Jasminot said. ‘Now we’re going to eat something really good.’

  He put a kind of tart on the table and we helped ourselves to slices of golden pastry topped with olives and anchovies. Jasminot ate slowly, with an expression on his face that was composed but not happy.

  We made arrangements to leave very early in the morning. I shook his hand and had already begun to walk up the road when he called out to me: ‘Leah! Be affectionate with Carrol.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘As much as I possibly can be.’

  It was a calm night and the stars – those same stars which you’d regretted not being able to see when you thought you were about to die – were shining brightly. It had got warmer, and a light wind had nearly dried the cobble-stones; only a few puddles of water still remained, in places where the ground was uneven. When I arrived at my house Carrol was already there, sitting on the window-sill.

  ‘The door’s not locked,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you go in?’

  ‘I don’t dare go in when you’re not there,’ Carrol said. ‘I’m always afraid Germinie will still be in her kitchen.’

  We crossed Germinie’s kitchen in the dark. I switched on the light in my bedroom and Carrol pulled me close. I put my hand on his head, gently stroking his black hair.

  ‘You are my wife…’ Carrol said. ‘It’s true, isn’t it, you’re my wife?’

  ‘The night,’ I said, ‘look at the night.’

  ‘What do you mean, what night?’ Carrol said as I dragged him to the window.

  Carrol took me in his arms again and I went on stroking his hair. He leaned his head on my shoulder and talked, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying; I was talking too, and staring out into the darkness.

  ‘Leah,’ Carrol said, ‘Leah, what are you talking about?’

  Shutting the window I held him close for a long moment, then led him back through Germinie’s dark kitchen.

  ‘What time will you be leaving?’ I asked.

  ‘Now,’ Carrol said. ‘I am leaving now, on Ortiguez’s motorbike.’

  I turned out the light in my bedroom and opened the window.

  It was the next day. Although early morning, heat was already in the air and the sky was very clear, yesterday’s storm having swept away the clouds. Jasminot and I got on the bus together but barely spoke the whole length of the journey. As we drove down from the mountains and towards the town, the heat became overwhelming. There was a slight breeze in the vehicle, which refreshed us a bit, but once we got off the bus in town it was like walking into a furnace: there wasn’t a breath of air. And then we came to the southern entrance of the factory, a great mass of red brick. The gates were closed and the approach road strangely was calm, an outside calm surrounding the hum of the usual morning activity. I looked at Jasminot, and Jasminot looked at me.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if they made it,’ he said.

  We walked around the factory but only encountered two or three women with shopping bags. At the northern entrance there was the same atmosphere of calm surrounding the usual morning activity. The sun heated the space, burning every brick of the building and every stone of the pavement. On the road, a square of asphalt, blacker than the rest of the earth, seemed to be slowly remelting, giving off a heavy smell. We walked aimlessly, in this burning void, in this desert of stones, along these dumb bricks that enclosed the usual murmur, separating us from it, rejecting us, forbidding us. I was hot, I had never been so hot in my whole life. I leaned against the brick wall.

  ‘Jasminot…’ I said.

  I had shouted, rather than spoken, his name. Jasminot took me by the shoulders and shook me gently. ‘Pull yourself together, Leah…’

  We crossed the road into a sort of wide forecourt in front of the factory, then wandered down a tree-lined pavement. We looked instinctively inside each café, but they were all completely quiet.

  ‘Look over there,’ I said. ‘Look, I can see a motorbike near the pavement of a little café. Carrol came here on Ortiguez’s motorbike…’

  I dragged him over to it.

  ‘There’s more than one motorbike in town,’ Jasminot said.

  But I had noticed, tied to the saddle, the light blue pullover that Carrol took with him in the cool night hours.

  We found Ortiguez in the café.

  ‘Where’s Carrol?’ I asked. ‘And what’s been going on?’

  ‘Carrol’s fine,’ Ortiguez said. ‘Only a little graze on the hand; a scratch, you might call it. Otherwise…’

  Jasminot and I waited for him to continue. We had been floundering in the empty heat, and our faces must have been sweaty, bewildered, desperate for the slightest bit of information. Ortiguez looked at us and started to laugh; we went on waiting.

  ‘Don’t laugh at us like that,’ Jasminot said.

  ‘Otherwise,’ Ortiguez said, ‘it lasted for less than a quarter of an hour. We found that there were eight of us. A picket of eight,’ and he started laughing again.

  ‘What about the forty-two others?’ I said.

  Ortiguez stopped laughing and looked straight in front of him, his face seized with a terrible indifference. Out of the silence which had just been created, and without changing his expression, he said, ‘They turned up along with all the others, at the usual time, with their packets under their arms. They’d been bought off – Grozzi bought them off, yesterday evening.’

  ‘It’s even shittier than I thought,’ said Jasminot.

  ‘Who’s Grozzi?’ I said.

  ‘You must know him,’ Jasminot said. ‘He’s that skinny chap with black hair, just now he’s living on the road leading up to the old fort, past our village.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘I understand less and less about this business…’

  ‘In fact, it’s dead simple,’ Ortiguez said.

  ‘Go on,’ Jasminot said too.

  ‘So then,’ Ortiguez said, ‘smarting under the new shock of having been shamefully abandoned, we started to wave our hands about a bit – eight of us against two thousand minus eight. There were two or three punches and a lot of jeering; you couldn’t move. Paulu threw himself on to Fat Charles, the fellow we’d really counted on, and straight away three guys held Paulu back, but Paulu kept on shouting: “You’ve been paid off then, have you, you bastard? You’ve been paid off, have you?” “So what?” said Fat Charles. “It’s better to be paid off than to be out of work.” Another guy said, “You had no reason to go against the crowd when even the union hadn’t agreed.” And then lots of things along the lines of “We’re fed up with strikes, we’ve been at it for two years without achieving anything…” No, it lasted less than a quarter of an hour, then the work siren sounded and everyone was dragged along by the flood of people going in.’

  ‘What about Carrol?’ I said. ‘Did he go back to work, just like that?’

  ‘What else do you expect him to do?’ Jasminot said.

  ‘But what about you?’ I said to Ortiguez.

  ‘Oh, I don’t need the money,’ he said.

  ‘You have money?’ Jasminot asked.

  ‘I’ve got that much,’ Ortiguez said, pulling two crumpled hundred-franc notes out of his pocket. ‘That’s what I’ve got, but I really don’t give a damn.’

  ‘And you came straight here?’ Jasminot asked.

  ‘It’s been two hours since the stupid business was over, and I’ve had time to find out about a few things. I know people in this town.’

  ‘The fellows around here know what to expect when he’s involved,’ Jasminot said. ‘Whenever something fishy happens Grozzi’s behind it. Everyone loathes him. But people round here are capable of letting themselves be exterminated like rats.’

  ‘There’s more to it yet,’ Ortiguez said. ‘One of the directors came and harangued us, just the eight of us. He went on about “the untimeliness of a reassessment of salaries”. In view, he said, of the fact that increases in taxes at the production stage woul
d hardly affect retail prices at the consumer stage, and in view of the fact that it would therefore be unfair for the owners to have to bear the burden imposed by the new tax all alone. Moreover, he said, there was now a chance to reduce the hours of work, and consequently the rate of pay. I didn’t wait for the end of the lecture, I picked up my cap and walked out. I’m quite prepared to lose everything and to be on the losing side but I don’t like the idea of being made a fool of.’

  ‘What about Leslie?’ I said.

  ‘Leslie stayed behind. He can always push off, back to England, to Mama and Papa and Cambridge and all that. Maybe he didn’t like the thought of leaving Carrol.’

  Ortiguez had produced a small stick, I don’t know where it came from, which he began to slash with his pen-knife. He went on doing this for several minutes, then he put the piece of wood on the table, next to his crumpled fortune. And once again his indifferent eyes looked straight ahead.

  ‘That was a lousy business,’ Ortiguez said. ‘I really don’t give a damn.’

  ‘Who’s Grozzi?’ I said.

  ‘I told you,’ Jasminot replied, ‘he’s that tall, thin, dark-skinned guy; some say he’s Spanish, others Italian. Every now and again he comes and stays here for a month or two, and he seems to get by in some way, making money out of the land round here. At the moment he’s running a smallholding by himself on the road to the old fort. As soon as he turns up, people say that everything starts to go wrong. It might be a bad crop, or a girl leaving a man, or a kid catching fever – people always say, “It’s Grozzi’s fault.” When things come out in the open, like they did this morning, he’ll go away for a bit, he’ll go back to his own country. It’s a wonder how he manages to get across the border all the time so easily. I tell you, tomorrow or the next day, he won’t be around in the village any more, you won’t see him until enough time has passed for people to forget it. He’d do better to stay there, wherever it is he lives across the border.’