The Catalans: A Novel (21 page)

He stood with his hands on the inside of the windowsill, resting his weight on them like a shopman standing at his counter: his shoulders were hunched, and his shape, dark and colorless, cutting out the light, oppressed Marcel. And Alain, standing there on the edge of his crisis, did not see anything of the stretch of garden in front of him, nor the pine trees falling away to the sea: he did not see the hoopoe that walked on the grass, suspicious and wary because of the voices from the house, but still too pleased with the garden to fly away. Every other moment it would stop, cock its head, half-raise its crest, and crouch to take off; but then it would change its mind and hurry with busy steps about the parched lawn again. But Alain saw nothing of this; and Marcel, when he was alone again, saw as little.

Alone again, moved by some obscure feeling of substitution, he had taken up exactly the same position as Alain: to replace that dark, ominous, expressionless, and dominating back he stood there, swaying on his hands, his shoulders hunched; and like Alain he saw nothing.

Now, hunching there, he made his familiar secret indraught and now he fancied, or was it more than fancy?—that there was a feral smell, the rank smell of terror, the smell of a wild animal that has just escaped from a trap, an animal running free at last, free from great danger, but with the smell of dread strong and harsh upon it still.

I
N
S
AINT
-F
ÉLIU
they were at her again. The three women and Jean Pou-naou. They had insisted on her coming back for the meal, and she had been too weary to find any good excuse. It had begun before the meal, even while Dominique was cutting up
the bread, and now that the plates were pushed away it still went
on.

They wanted to know if Xavier had said anything. “He must have said
something,
” pursued Thérèse. “He cannot sit there without a word.”

“Your mother has a right to know these things, Madeleine,” said her Aunt Mimi. And now they would go on again, round and round the same track—openness and confidence, the right to know, the wickedness of secrecy: conjectures, cunning plans. She would tell them if there were anything to tell; but what was there she could say? It was going slowly on and on, but there was nothing fresh each day.

What contact was there left? She would be loving if she could: indeed she loved them very much. They meant to be kind, she knew; but looking round that familiar room she saw it with a stranger’s eyes. Her mother’s face, poised in the act of speech: it was like a woman she had seen before, but long ago. And yet for all these years she had been so kind; so good and loving, and so kind.

They had switched on to Francisco now.

“They say he was seen in Perpignan.”

“Who says?”

“La Patta: he was there.”

“She’s writing letters to him,” said Mimi with a scream.

“I’m not. Truly I’m not,” said Madeleine, but Dominique and Thérèse had taken the alarm. They were shrieking. How could she tell them that it was quite dead? They would not listen: they were so frightened and grasping that they could not believe it even if they heard. The voices went on screaming in the little room. Denunciations, threats, recrimination.

“I always said . . .”

The man’s voice cut through and said, “If he comes back, I’ll serve him out. I’ll serve him out, by God. Mother of God, I’ll rip him up . . .”

On and on: she had heard it so often. Now Mimi was shaking her by the shoulder. “Say he is a bandit. Say he is a bandit.” The force and venom gave her the voice and aspect of an evil woman.

“He is a bandit,” said Madeleine.

This was a great victory. They had always tried to make her say that, and now she had: they had gained something, and now they were quieter, almost kind to her.

It had died slowly, but it was dead. The last dying hurt it gave her had been that woman passing through again in her car—that first one, Claire Delahaye. They had passed on the high road, months ago, one second’s recognizing glance: then the next day she found that she did not mind.

It was Xavier again, what he would do, what he possessed: everything that he had ever said was passing in review, with commentaries from them all.

If only they did not start on Alain again: they had canvassed his presence fifty times, the concert, the drives to Perpignan, the walk. Was he a valuable ally, drawing his cousin on by jealousy? Was he a danger? What was the wisest trick?

“Oh God, do not let them start on that,” she prayed. She could bear the rest, all the sorting out and prying, the picking over of her life: but would they leave just that untouched, if only for today?

T
HE PASSAGE OF TIME
. The passage of time: it is a platitude to say that it is not measured by the turning of the hands of a clock. Nor, Alain reflected, by any mechanical means: the engine of the car was turning at three thousand revolutions a minute, a well-nourished steady hum with the feeling of great power in reserve; the wheels turned at—he tried a complex piece of mental arithmetic: his speed was sixty-one kilometers an hour, and the diameter of the wheels .
. . But the answer came out to an improbable figure, and he abandoned it. It did not signify. The essence was that the last twenty-seven kilometers had been rendered tedious beyond measure by a huge lorry, a long-distance hauler who would not let him pass. The great blind square tail of the monster was blundering along at sixty-one kilometers an hour with a cloud of dust behind it, and in this cloud Alain had chafed the whole length of the straight and narrow road that led south from Rancy. It was not that he wished to go so very much faster; this was not far from the speed he would have chosen, for he liked a gentle, gliding cruise on an empty road (and it was much too fast for the lorry, which was bumping about on the crown of the road in a way that would have made the forcing of the passage horribly dangerous)—it was not the slowness that made the time so tedious in its passing; it was the constraint.

And yet it was not tediousness that counted in the right measurement of time: far from it. Indeed, almost exactly the reverse was true, for if one came to measure it by some truer standard than the clock, the vast deserts no longer counted; at the time they seemed interminable, those gray years in station waiting rooms, in aeroplanes, in ships, but once they were over they were finished and done with forever, while those apparently shorter spaces spent in intense and significant activity grew and grew, spread themselves . . . yes, the right measurement would be in terms of nervous energy, in units of personal anxiety. Or if not of anxiety, then of tension, nervous expenditure.

Before him there was a wide patch of road, a sudden widening with a border of yellow sand or gravel, very close and quite short. His foot went down on the accelerator and at once the steady, rather languid hum changed to a full-throated roar; a great force thrust at the small of his back, and leaning over the wheel he shot forward: he was embodied in the machine, he was the machine’s eyes, gauging the space between the lorry and the yellow verge. Now his foot was on the floor and he was surging furiously past the long gray bulk of the lorry’s side. A glimpse of the sullen, angry face of the driver and it was over: he raised his foot gently and blew a hoot of derision on the horn.

Now, with the road open before him he let the speed slacken and the roar of the engine die; the needle sank back to seventy-five and he relaxed in his seat. What a lovely thing that engine was: the car—it was Côme’s car—was a vulgar, scarlet affair with exaggerated lines: but the engine, that was something else again. And it was surely very strange that Côme, an earthy soul if ever there was one, should be capable of appreciating it. There was no doubt at all that he did: when Côme spoke of a new sodium-alloy valve, or triple carburetion or any of the mysteries of the car’s interior, the habitual knowing leer of the “big operator” left his face, and it was replaced by an open ingenuous look of enthusiasm, an earnest look that made him, in those moments when he held a balanced crankshaft in his hands, almost pleasant to look at. Côme, confronted with religion, patriotism, the arts, the seven virtues, could only respond with a horse-laugh: yet there was the capability for genuine, unselfconscious admiration in him. Why this partial development? Perhaps it was an immense shyness that spread over everything but this one small admitted area. Poor Côme: and decent Côme, on this occasion. He worshiped his rakish, supercharged, scarlet monster; he had the utmost contempt for Alain’s driving; yet he had lent it for this journey with hardly more than a whine—and that without knowing why Alain had been obliged to go to Paris with such urgency. It would not, after all, have been decent to borrow Xavier’s car. There was another car with a personality: a rigid, square, and upright car, black and shining, a car that ran perfectly well, though in a grudging, irresponsive way, in spite of its twenty years.

But to revert to the question of time: it had struck him very forcibly when he was wandering down the interminable boulevard Saint-Germain that the only significant time is that during which you are aware of being in the present. At that particular moment he was living solely in relation to the future—the future that would start when he found the right number and that would become the living, active present when he found the right door—and at most other times he lived almost entirely in relation to the past, to the present that had gone before. He had time and enough to chew over this reflection, for he had started at the wrong end of the boulevard, the comparatively clean end by the river, and he had the long and weary walk all the way along it, past the poor, railed-in dirty ghost of the abbey, past the tourist cafés with the charabancs outside—those strange places where the Americans play at being French and the French at being American—past all hope of quiet and peace, until he came to a gaunt tall building, high and comfortless, with all the sordid venom of a slum and none of that picturesque vitality a slum may have.

It had been a curious interview. At least one of his preconceived ideas had been scattered in the first moment, for he had had to go down the hard and angular naked staircase instead of up it. It had been naive to suppose that a poor young painter must, from the fitness of things, necessarily live in the garret, a romantic notion, too: but it had disturbed him to go down into the underground passages, the square, dark and humid passages that wandered vaguely in the gloom, like the approaches to a fifth-rate hell. He had been disconcerted, too, when more or less by chance he walked in at Francisco’s open door, intending only to ask the way, and found himself in the middle of a roaring scene. A large, fat young woman was addressing a harangue to a man sitting in a wretched attitude on the floor: both stared at him, and Alain, with some words of excuse bumbling in his head, was about to step back into the darkness when the young woman, crying with great bitterness “Oh, I leave him to you,” thrust her way out behind him and slammed the door. As she went, Alain noticed that she was far gone in pregnancy.

That was the beginning; ill-omened, awkward, disagreeable. Francisco must have changed a great deal, judging by the descriptions Alain had received in Saint-Féliu: and in fact he had coarsened terribly; all the fineness of his face had sunk under fat, and fat had invaded his body. The wonderful litheness and grace was gone, and now he gave the impression of bulk, muscle-bound bulk. The same black hair (too much of it, and curling down his neck) and the flashing teeth were there, but the hair was dusty, unwashed, and the teeth that had gleamed in a sun-tanned face no longer had the brown for contrast: and the whites of his eyes were yellow. The eyes themselves were shockingly diminished by the fat around them. Yet still he had the leaping spirit of his earlier days. Or had he? Was not this confusion of canvases, this vie de Bohème, these old patched fisherman’s trousers all a little too good to be true? Too good to be true, together with the eager, boyish, confidential, would-be infectious enthusiasm? And were not these newspaper cuttings rather too carefully preserved? And then the paintings themselves . . . Primitive, of course. Very well: so primitive. No objection; though perhaps there were rather too many primitives in the present world already. But what was the explanation of the big and glossy book of reproductions on the table? Reproductions of other primitives. And why was the book covered up with a cloth—surreptitiously covered after he had been there a little while, covered while he was looking at a series of drawings?