Four Novels (34 page)

He buries himself a bit deeper in his armchair and gives a grunt. But the woman goes on, imperturbably.

“You’re going to buy the pond too?”

“The pond too,” Mr. Andesmas murmured.

“So Valérie will have a large fortune at her disposal?”

Mr. Andesmas agrees.

“But why are you talking to me about my money?” he sighs.

“It’s about Valérie that I’m talking to you,” she says smiling, “you’re mistaken. Why are you buying so much land, more and more, in this completely careless way?”

“Valérie wants to own the whole village.”

“Since when?”

“A few months ago.”

“She won’t be able to.”

“She won’t be able to,” Mr. Andesrias repeats. “But she wants to.”

The woman put her arms around her knees again and delighted in pronouncing the name.

“Ah, Valérie, Valérie.”

She sighs with pleasure, deeply.

“Ah, I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Michel Arc’s wife continues. “The moving vans stayed in the square all night. They had arrived before you. No one had seen you yet. And the next day, when I was standing at my window as I often do, looking at the square, it was close to noon, all at once I saw Valérie.”

She gets up suddenly and stays there, standing, very close to Mr. Andesmas.

“It was just before school let out, I remember. I was watching for my children. Valérie appeared in the square. I was probably the first one to see her. How old was Valérie then?”

“Nearly seventeen.”

“That’s right, yes. I was afraid I’d forgotten. So she crossed the square as I was telling you. Two men—they saw her after me—stopped to look at her walking by. She walked, the square is wide, she walked, crossing it, crossing it. She walked endlessly, your child, Mr. Andesmas.”

Mr. Andesmas raised his head and along with the woman he contemplated Valérie’s walk, a year earlier, in the light of the village square, when she didn’t yet know the splendor of her bearing.

“Indifferent to the stares?” Mr. Andesmas asked.

“Oh, if you only knew!”

The tune burst forth in the chasm of light.

Just when one might have thought they were no longer dancing, they were dancing again.

But neither Michel Arc’s wife, nor Mr. Andesmas, remarked upon it.

“Indifferent to the stares, as we were saying,” the woman went on. “We were looking at her, the two men and I. She pushed aside the curtain of the general store. We no longer saw her during the time she was in there, and yet not one of the three of us moved.”

The shade of the beech tree now reaches the chasm. It begins to sink down into it.

“In the general store,” Mr. Andesmas repeated.

(He started laughing.)

“Oh, I know!”

“Because of the moving vans that had stayed in the square all night, I knew that the people who had bought that big house behind the town hall were going to arrive, any day. Already the name Andesmas had been mentioned. You had bought that house a few months earlier. Everybody knew that the two of you were alone, a child and father, already old, they said.”

“Very old, they said?”

“Yes, in the district they were saying that you had had this child very late, from a late marriage. But you know, seeing Valérie so tall, so blond as you know, I didn’t immediately make the connection between your arrival and her existence. Such boldness, I told myself, how beautiful she must be.”

“Ah,” Mr. Andesmas moaned, “I know, I know.”

“How beautiful she must be, I told myself, but is she as beautiful as one can imagine from her walk, from her bearing, from her hair?”

She takes her time, desregarding the old man’s waiting. Then she goes on in a voice that has become clear, loud, almost declamatory.

“The curtain closed on her hair. And I asked myself who in the town had brought her, who would join her any minute, now. The two men also seemed astonished and we looked at one another questioningly. Where did she come from? We kept asking ourselves what man owned this blondness, and only this blondness, since we had not yet seen her face. One just couldn’t imagine so much useless blondness. Well? She took a long time to come out.”

She comes closer, sits down right next to the old man and this time they look at each other but only while she is speaking, exactly.

“Then,” she said, “she finally reappeared. The curtain was moved aside. We saw her as she crossed the whole square in the opposite direction. Slowly. Taking her time. Taking the time of those who were looking at her, as if it had been owed her from time immemorial, without realizing it.”

“Without realizing it,” Mr. Andesmas repeated.

Once again they were banished into that moment when she had seen, completely, fully, forever, the beauty of Valérie Andesmas.

She stopped talking. Mr. Andesmas had sunk back into his armchair.
Again, from crackling of the wicker armchair under his hands, he noticed that he was trembling.

“Mrs. Arc,” he asked, “if this house has been for sale so often, as I have been told, there must be a reason?”

She smiled, nodded.

“You certainly say anything that comes into your head,” she said.

She added, suddenly, seriously:

“But there must be a reason, I suppose, yes.”

The forest fills with sunlight. All its shadows drown in the chasm of light, too long now for the hill to contain them.

“I have known none of the owners of this house,” she says, “but it’s true that it passes from hand to hand regularly. There are houses like that, everyone knows that.”

She explores its surroundings very quickly and, again, looks at the chasm of light.

“It’s isolation probably, in the end,” she says.

“In the end, it’s possible.”

“Because,” she goes on, “at first, couples, for example, might enjoy it!”

“Ah, probably, probably,” Mr. Andesmas murmurs.

“And also this light, in summer, so harsh.”

“It isn’t any more now,” he says. “Look.”

It isn’t any more. The mist rises thicker, from the woods and the fields. The sea is softly multicolored.

“Michel Arc had planned to buy it, you see, at the beginning of our marriage,” she continues. “But your predecessors were living in it. Afterward, Michel Arc no longer mentioned it. I only saw it once, three years ago when I took the children to the pond. In the summer.”

“Nobody had thought of a terrace? This is the first time.”

“Oh, not at all, Michel Arc had thought of it.”

“Only he?”

“The others? How would I know? Even though you might think, when you see this plateau, that it calls for a terrace, why had no one thought of it before you? If you know why, tell me, Mr. Andesmas.”

“Money?”

“No.”

“Time?”

“Well, perhaps, Mr. Andesmas, time to build it before leaving this
house because of its isolation which, as we were saying, becomes unbearable in the end. Don’t you think so?”

Mr. Andesmas does not answer.

She turns.

For a brief moment she at last sees this bulk, abominably final. He no longer is even tempted to express himself. And at that point, she probably feels a certain interest in so much past existence. Mr. Andesmas realizes this from her half-closed eyes which linger on him. Later he said he had recognized this to be the woman’s greatest virtue, this ability at such a moment, even for just a few seconds, to forget about herself and take an interest in his immense, cold and burned-out life.

“Her mother left you,” she says very softly, “and she has had other children since by different men? There was a law suit?”

Mr. Andesmas nods.

“A very long, very expensive law suit?” she continues.

“I won, as you can see,” Mr. Andesmas says.

She again gets up slowly, moves still closer to him. She touches the arm of the chair and, leaning, stands there looking at him.

They are very close to each other: if she were to fall forward, her face would land against his.

“You had great hopes for her probably?”

He feels upon him the smell of a summer dress and of a woman’s loosened hair. Nobody ever comes so close to Mr. Andesmas any more, except Valérie. Is the closeness of Michel Arc’s wife more important than what she is saying?”

“I had no ideas on the subject,” he says in a very low voice, “not yet. You understand. No ideas. That’s why I may perhaps seem helpless to you.”

He adds in a still lower voice:

“I no longer know anything of what I knew before I had this child. And, you see, since I had her, I have no ideas about anything any more, I know nothing but my ignorance.”

He laughs, at least tries, as he has come to laugh now, falsely.

“I am really astounded, believe me, at such a possibility in life. The love for this child that outlives my age, my old age!”

The woman straightens up. Her hand lets go of the armchair. Her tone becomes sharper, but barely.

“I wanted to talk to someone about Valérie Andesmas,” she says. “I assure you that you can put up with this inconvenience.”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Andesmas complains, “I don’t know if I can.”

“It’s better. No one has talked to you about her and now she’s grown up, it’s better.”

The shade had now spread over the whole plateau. It was already part of the hill. The shade of the beech tree and of the house had toppled over completely into the chasm.

The valley, the village, the sea, the fields are still in the light.

Flocks of birds, in ever greater numbers, fly out of the hillside and wheel wildly in the sunlight of the chasm.

The shade overtakes this house more quickly than those in the village. Nobody had thought of it yet, neither Mr. Andesmas nor Valérie. But the woman notices it.

“Valérie will lose one hour of light here, compared to the village,” she says.

“Mr. Arc hadn’t told me that, you see.”

“Did he know it? Even when we thought of buying it for ourselves, he didn’t mention it,” she adds, “ten years ago.”

“What hurts is to see the sun so close, there.”

“One has to be here the way we are to notice it. Otherwise who would think of it, beforehand?”

She takes several steps on the path, comes back, then sits down, as if reluctantly this time, a few yards from the old man.

“Valérie makes me suffer a great deal,” she says.

She spoke in the same tone of voice about the disadvantages of the house, so that one might think the whole world in her eyes suffers from a contagious disorder, but only from that.

The sweetness of a recent past which contained a jumble of Valérie Andesmas crossing the village square, and what followed, and her suffering too, are equal aspects of this disorder.

Again she moves away toward the path with this walk which is the same as her little girl’s a while before, light, a little off balance, only her legs moving, effortlessly, beneath her straight body. And once more, even in the very depths of his old age, Mr. Andesmas is still able to perceive, dimmed, dying, but recognizable, the reasons one might have had for loving her. She is a woman who cannot help welcoming into her whole body her moods, whether fleeting or lasting. These moods might
be languid, gentle, or cruel; the ways of her body would immediately follow in their image.

When she comes back from the path, her walk is sleepy and careful, extraordinarily childlike—deceptively so—and one might imagine that she had been tempted, during the moment she was alone on the path, to escape from the calm disaster she was living. Just as her child might have been tempted.

It was when she had not yet come back that Mr. Andesmas understood he would have liked to see her again and again, until evening, until night, and that he began to dread Michel Arc’s arrival, which would prevent him from seeing her.

He smiles at her.

But she walks by him without looking at him. As she passes on the windy plateau. She pulls the wind behind her. She speaks about it.

“It’s windy. It must be even later than I thought. We have been chatting.”

“Ten past six,” Mr. Andesmas says.

She sits back down in the place she had just left. Still far from him.

Has she noticed this? Or has she noticed it before?

“Valérie’s car is no longer in the square,” she announces.

“Ah! You see,” Mr. Andesmas exclaims.

Once again, the song rose up, ravaged by the distance. The phonograph was turned down earlier than the time before.

“Then I think they won’t be long in coming,” she says. “Both of them are very decent and charming.”

“Ah, aren’t they though,” Mr. Andesmas murmured.

She gets up again, again goes toward the path, comes back again, still possessed by this occupation, the passionate listening to the forest noises coming from the path. She comes back, stops, her eyes half closed.

“You can’t hear the car coming up yet,” she says.

She listens again.

“But the road is steep, longer than you’d think.”

She glances absently at Mr. Andesmas’ motionless bulk, buried in his armchair.

“You are the only one I can talk to about her, do you understand that?”

She goes away, comes back, goes away again.

Does she realize that Mr. Andesmas never takes his eyes off her? Probably not, but even if she knew, this look would not distract her from listening to the forest, to the valley, to the whole countryside, from its most remote horizons up to this plateau. The total impossibility with which Mr. Andesmas is confronted of finding something to do or say to lessen, if only for a second, the cruelty of this frenzy of listening, this very impossibility chains him to her.

He listens like her, and for her, to any noise that might signal an approach to the plateau. He listens to everything, the stirring of the closest branches, their rustlings against one another, their jostlings, sometimes, when the wind increases, the muffled bending of the trunks of the huge trees, the gasps of silence paralyzing the whole forest, and the sudden and successive waves of its rustling by the wind, the cries of dogs and chickens far away, the laughing and talking all mixed into one conversation by the distance, and the singing, and the singing.

When the lilac

. . . my love

When our hope . . .