The Catalans: A Novel (16 page)

“Demented.”

“Very well; demented. Yes, I can hear them cackling. First in hushed voices, almost whispering, ‘Mad, demented,
demented,
’ then getting louder as one tries to talk the other down, and then in the end everybody shouting together, ‘Demented, demented.’ But I tell you this, Alain: a man in my condition who does not take the chance that is offered him, the unheard-of, unexpectable chance of escape,
is
demented, demented beyond any
thing that our dear family could imagine. Put it like this: you
must love your God and your neighbor; if you do not, you are damned. And you
are
damned. The not-loving is itself damnation. Now that I have a ladder out of hell, am I going to put it aside because of a few trivial worldly considerations? Considerations, I may add, that I can see as well as anybody else, and which the family, I have no doubt, magnifies out of all proportion.”

Alain felt Xavier looking at him during the pause that followed and he turned aside, pretending to bury the ash of his cigar: the mention of God, hell, and damnation embarrassed him in the light of noonday.

“You know, Xavier, as I said, it is a state of mind that is unfamiliar to me,” he said, endeavoring to keep the tone of withdrawal out of his voice.

“Yes, I know, I know. But you can see the validity of it for another mind, can you not?” cried Xavier, eagerly.

“Perhaps I can, to some extent: but my understanding is theoretical. It cannot be anything more, my religious experience being—” He finished with a gesture.

“And yet even without religious experience, even supposing that one were entirely skeptical, don’t you see the reality of the present damnation? Quite apart from the question of eternity, the survival of an uninhabited body is . . .” He did not complete
his sentence: there was a silence, and when Xavier spoke again
his voice was more matter-of-fact; the nervous excitement and tension had gone out of it. “However,” he said, “I wanted to tell you about Madeleine. All the rest is no more than a preface to it.”

Another silence followed, a long silence, and as the minutes stretched out one after another it seemed to Alain that Xavier had brought himself to a standstill, was unable to begin again.

“I wish you would tell me how it started,” he said. “I find it very difficult to imagine.”

“Yes,” replied Xavier, hesitating; Alain darted a hurried glance at his cousin, and there indeed on his hard and graying face was a trace of the flush that matched the hesitation. “Yes,” said Xavier, “I will begin at the beginning.” But he lapsed into silence again, and when at last he did speak it was not to begin at the beginning but to wish that Alain had had more time to form an opinion of Madeleine.

“I am less concerned with her beauty—that is instantly apparent, don’t you agree?—than with her character, which is something that requires very much longer for its appreciation.”

“I am very willing to believe anything pleasant about such a lovely creature. But tell me, Xavier, just how false is the family’s account? You are assuming that I know the truth, whereas in point of fact I can only surmise it.”

“I cannot tell you how false their account is, because I do not know what they have fabricated: but I can tell you this, if there is anything in it that reflects discredit on Madeleine it is false.”

“Well: the briefest summary of what I have heard is this—I will put it as brutally and offensively as possible—your secretary is your mistress, and she has gained sufficient power over you to induce you to promise marriage.”

“Yes, I had supposed that that would be the story,” said Xavier in an even voice, but there was a dark redness mounting in his face; it suffused his forehead, and he said “Swine, swine,” with his throat choked with anger. “Swine,” he said, tearing blindly at the ground on each side of him; “Swine.”

Alain made no remark, and presently Xavier said, “It is a lie, of course. Madeleine is not my mistress: I am not her lover in the sense this kind of people use the word. As for the marriage they are so frightened of, yes, a hundred times over: I intend to ask her to marry me as soon as the divorce is complete.”

“Oh.”

“Does that surprise you?” asked Xavier, sharply.

“Not at all,” replied Alain; and then he said “I know very little about divorces: is it true that they are very lengthy and complicated affairs? One hears that, you know.”

“They can be: they can drag on for years and end in a stalemate. But in this case everything is quite straightforward—a simple desertion with adultery and certified avowal—and really there is nothing to prevent it from going through as quickly as possible. When these simple cases are delayed you will usually find that it is either a lack of diligence on the part of the lawyer or hunger for additional fees: occasionally there may be obstructive tactics on the other side, but that is less common. No; none of these will apply in this case, I assure you: the first hearing is already over; now there comes the attempt at reconciliation, then after a due interval the decree. The only thing that can cause any delay at all is our uncertainty of the fellow’s address.”

“The husband’s?”

“Yes, the husband’s,” said Xavier, with a peculiar look. “There has to be a serious attempt at notifying him for the court’s attempt at reconciliation. However, that is a trifle. If it were a thousand times graver the divorce would still go through.”

“I suppose a lawyer with your standing and political influence could get away with murder.”

“If he chose, if he had no reference to futurity, I dare say he could,” said Xavier, with a thin smile. “For my part, I certainly could, with murder. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but it is true. But do not misunderstand me, Alain: ‘getting away with it’ as you call it is one thing: falsifying the course of a suit of this nature is another. I do not think I could do it, even if I chose: and I certainly have not the slightest intention of trying. No: I can do no more than facilitate its passage through the courts and see that it is adequately pleaded: but that much I can do, and I am doing it with rather more energy, believe me, than any other lawyer in the country.

“But I was going to tell you how it began. It is one of the few cases of this kind where one can find a really satisfactory beginning. She was in my office, typing: I heard the machine stop, and after a little while I went in to see what was the matter—they were papers that I needed urgently. I found her drying her tears with a piece of blotting paper—the tears that had fallen on the documents, I mean. Her face was quite spoilt with crying. I pretended not to have noticed anything, picked up some piece of paper or other, and got out of the room as quickly as possible. When I was back in my own room I found that I was very strongly moved indeed: ordinarily, of course, I should have found the whole thing an irritating, embarrassing scene. I have always loathed women in tears and inefficiency in work. But this time it was quite different, and as I sat there I remembered the many papers I had had through my hands recently with little roundness on them, blisters in the paper: they must all have been tears too. I wondered what I should do for some time: in the end I did nothing, and that is the most significant thing about this episode. I cannot tell you how surprised I was at my own reaction.”

Now Xavier had stopped again: it seemed that his eloquence of the night—that torrent of words—had left him, and now as he sat silent there, apparently lost in recollection, Alain began to feel that if the pause went on much longer he would go to sleep. The long, very tiring night was telling on him now, and more than that, he had just eaten a large meal; he was warm through and through without being too hot, he was sitting on a cushion of soft grass with thyme growing through it, and through the shade of the trees above his head bees in myriads passed on their road to the long double row of hives on the mountain-side: his head was heavy on his shoulders and his eyes stung and watered; it was a relief, but a dangerous relief, to close them. He was sitting with his back against a tree; it was not perfectly comfortable, but just to the side of the tree was his jacket, and he had but to slide down on one elbow and fold the coat for a pillow to have the most comfortable bed in the world, sloping, cushioned, scented; very, very inviting. But it would not do, he knew it would not do at all; and to sustain himself he proposed to smoke for a while.

“No,” cried Xavier, interrupting him as he felt for his case, “have one of mine: I am always smoking yours.” He proffered a long, thin, black cigar, saying “There is more bite in these. I like my tobacco to taste of something.”

“This is not what we were smoking last night,” said Alain, looking at it dubiously.

“No. These are what I call my specials. I keep them for hard days—assizes and so on. I never give them away.”

Alain took off the band, and with a sudden grin exclaimed, “They’re Spanish!”

“What of it?”

“Do you mean to say that you smuggle them, Xavier?”

“I do not mean to say anything,” replied Xavier, with the contained primness that Alain recognized as his notion of humor, “but it would not astonish me to learn that they were uncustomed goods.”

“
SHE WAS ALWAYS
about the place as a young girl,” said Xavier, as if he were carrying on a thread of discourse, “when she was more or less Aunt Margot’s companion. She came to practice on the typewriter, and I took very little notice of her, except to disapprove in an unemphatic way: I thought it injudicious of Aunt Margot.”

Later he had come to appreciate her usefulness, but it was not until the divorce that she had taken on the proportions of a human being. As her lawyer he had talked with her a good deal, and he had been very much struck by the contrast between her and her family; the family interminably loquacious, raucous, bitterly vindictive, crammed with rhetoric; Madeleine quiet, restrained, wishing only to be finished with the whole business.

“One of the hardest things about being a lawyer in a case of this kind,” he said, “is that it is very nearly impossible to interview your client alone. There is not one of the family who does not feel like a principal in the affair, and you find your office stuffed with father, mother, aunts, cousins, everybody, and each one is determined to present his or her view of the case. They justify themselves and they pour hatred on the other side as if you were the judge, as if they gained something by winning you over to their side. They always reach your house in an overexcited condition, and very soon their company manners and respect give way and they are all shouting away together, striking attitudes, red in the face and sweating, vociferating: it is very tedious and very difficult to manage. It is also nearly impossible to get a clear and truthful answer to the essential questions: the family always knows better than the man or woman concerned, always interrupts, and always, always, they either lie or distort the answer to improve the appearance of their case. You can never convince their idiot cunning that it is useless, worse than useless, to deceive their own lawyer. There is nothing that gives you a lower opinion of humanity than a divorce case, unless perhaps it is a disputed succession: in either some of the bile and venom spills over on to the lawyer. However experienced and hardened you may be, you feel dirty after one of these scenes.”

Generally, he said, the injured party enjoys the scene as much as anyone—more than most, indeed, being the center of attraction, dressed for the part in a kind of mourning and supported and cosseted by one or more toad-eaters. But here it was different: the one desire and aim of Madeleine was to dispatch the business in hand, be shut of it; she loathed the whole proceeding, and sometimes she was short with her family. They, for their part, bitterly resented her reserve: they were nearly as angry with her as with Francisco. They could not understand that she had not come to them long ago when she had first known that Francisco was deceiving her; they felt that they had been wrongfully deprived, and in their indignation they filled the interview with as many hard words about her willfulness, headstrong ingratitude, and self-sufficiency as Francisco’s crime.

Xavier had a certain talent for mimicry, and he reproduced part of one of the early interviews.

X
AVIER
: Did you ever see any letters that he received from women?

M
ADELEINE
: No.

D
OMINIQUE
: How can you say so? There were dozens of them, I’m sure.

T
HERESE
: She tries to keep things back, Monsieur Xavier: I know very well that she has seen them. I’ll swear to it in any court: I don’t mind what they say.

M
IMI:
How about that bitch at Paulilles? Do you mean to say she couldn’t write? Eh? Of course she did.

J
EAN
: What bitch at Paulilles?