The Catalans: A Novel (8 page)

“But if I were to try to explain all these things to you there would never be an end.” She was growing hoarse, but she could not resist adding, “Just think of one single instance—Xavier’s interest with the right-wing, old-fashioned Church party: I have been a great help to him there, and I still am; but I could not uphold him for a moment, even the bishop could not, if he were to marry a divorced Protestant. Think of it: think of the Church influence lost. You know what it is, even in these miserable days, and even in an atheistic province like this. But there really will be no end if I go on, and my throat is hurting already from talking so much.”

“You must try to come down to our base world, Alain,” she said a little later, pouring him out a glass of wine. “We must deal with things as they are.”

Alain drank half his wine, and remained staring gravely at what was left. “Yes,” he said, nodding at the glass, “of course it is quite impossible. I only thought . . . This is very good rancio: is it ours?”

“It is Xavier’s, from the Puig d’en Calbo. You know, Alain, if Xavier were to marry that girl, and she were to make him leave her the vineyard at the Puig d’en Calbo (which she certainly would try to do, to reunite it with the Fajals’ land) I think I should burst in my grave. Hercule had such difficulty in getting it from old Pou-naou, and the whole family thought it such a triumph when he succeeded. It took him twenty years.”

“Yet what can one do about it? Xavier is not a minor, nor a lunatic.”

“Oh but he is, Alain. Far madder—Alain, could you not certify him? Do: it would give us all such pleasure.”

“It would hardly improve his reputation.”

“At least it would safeguard his property.”

“But, seriously, what can one do?”

“You should use your influence with Xavier. You should go to him and say—”

“No. I mean seriously. You said just now that we must deal with things as they are: very well: we both know how much my eloquence is likely to do. Have you any clear idea of a way of stopping Xavier from making a fool of himself?”

“No,” she said, a little ruffled, “if you put it like that, I cannot say that I have. But you underestimate your influence with Xavier, I assure you.”

“Is it so great that he would stop doing what he very much wants to do just for my sake?”

“Perhaps not. No: I do not suppose that it is, really. But I had been relying on you to do something, Alain.”

“I am sorry for that. You will be disappointed, and then you will think me a tiresome fellow, you know.” He walked to the window and looked across the road to Xavier’s house; for a few moments of silence he looked at the house with a steady, critical gaze, trying to assess it as a stranger might—a stranger with a difficult interview awaiting him inside. It was a substantial house, three sides of a square, with iron railings, tall ones, finishing the square on the pavement side; a flagged court with oleanders and bushy lemon trees in tubs, a stone bench with a table in the shade of the lemons. The court was rather crowded with all this vegetation and in the winter it would no doubt look somewhat dank and somber; but now in the sunlight it looked well enough; indeed, to a passer-by on the dusty, reverberating road it stood as an inviting oasis of shade and coolness. The tall windows, one on each side of the front door, a row of three above; they, and the flanking windows in the wing that met the sun, were all shuttered against the flood of light; long, gray shutters that gave the house a reserved and noncommittal air. Only the inside angle on the left escaped the sun, and there the windows were open.

For a moment it seemed to him that he was about to seize the meaning of the house’s look in spite of its reserve, but then, almost while the thought was forming into a pattern of words, the impression dissolved and was lost in the soft, easy lines of familiarity. He knew the place too well to see it whole, and now he had lost the power that his absence had given him. For an instant it vexed him so much that he was on the point of unhanging the big looking-glass on the wall, walking with it to the window and standing there with his back to the street to look at the house, but the house reflected, to recapture in the unfamiliar change of balance that sense of comprehension that he had lost, to recapture it as one may recapture the freshness of a picture in a mirror or the outside world’s view of your lover’s face, seen daily to obliteration. But it would have startled his aunt; and what exactly did he hope to gain? She would ask him that, and he would find it impossible to answer.

From one of the open windows in the shade there came a steady high tapping. “She is there now,” said the old lady, standing at Alain’s side and looking over the road with him.

“Oh, she still goes there?”

“Yes; she goes there still. Did you suppose that she did not?”

“It was stupid of me, but I think I did. I had thought of it as a closed chapter, a part of history; and the present state of affairs appeared to be proceeding on different lines. I am not sure what I supposed exactly, but I do not think that a typewriter entered into it. That was what I was asking you at the beginning, now I come to think of it, but we strayed off on to all manner of subjects.”

“Yes, she goes there every day. That has not changed at all, and she still types just as hard as ever, which is very strange. Do you not find it very strange, Alain?”

“It sounds as though Xavier were either not very ardent or else a curiously businesslike lover. I should like to see her.”

“You will have to wait until the evening, then, when she goes: you will see nothing from here. Nothing,” she added, with a note of vexation that made her nephew smile.

“Is she handsome?”

“You will have to judge that for yourself. Some people affect not to think so. I used to think that she was quite the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life; but I think you have to feel kindly toward people to find them beautiful—at all events, since this has started I have thought her looks have gone down and down. But you will see her soon, no doubt. You go to Xavier’s on Tuesday, do you not?”

“Yes, on Tuesday. I am not sure that I altogether look forward to it. But now,” he said, looking at the clock among the bronze mermaids, “I have to go and see Aunt Marinette and Uncle Joseph.”

“My poor Alain, you have a dull evening ahead of you. Marinette will tell you all that I have just told you, whether you like it or not; and she will take much longer over it, with her profound reflections. However, you will conduct yourself very well, I am sure, and it will not last much longer than three hours, because they always go to bed at ten now. You will give them my love, won’t you?”

“I will not forget.”

THE HEAT OUTSIDE
struck him like a soft wave; the heat of the air was all round him, and as he moved out of the shade the direct sun clapped him on the back. It warmed his thin body through to the bones, and with a sensuous pleasure in the heat he walked down the middle of the road, where the sun struck hottest. After so many tropical years his blood, or the mixture of lime juice and quinine that passed for blood, was as thin as a lizard’s, and here at Saint-Féliu even in the summer a little coldness lingered in his body, to be dispelled only by the straight blast of the sun itself. The sun agreed with him: he liked it—not, perhaps, the immoderate degree of sun that weighed on Prabang before the rains, but sun within reason. It certainly agreed with him, for whereas many of his colleagues had run mad, or had returned home early as confirmed invalids, he had lasted years and years with no more than malaria: others again had been equally lucky in escaping disease, but many of them were swollen with drink, horribly obese through no fault of their own, for the drinking was obligatory; but Alain had that kind of body that goes thin and yellow in the heat, and now, with his frail, attenuated hands, and his lean, hollow-cheeked face he had an ascetic, other-worldly air—a very well-bred monk by Zurbarán. This air belied him; for although he was by nature and inclination somewhat reserved, or withdrawn, he was by no means an ascetic; in his quiet and reflective manner he had a strong tendency toward jollity; and as he was the first to admit, in his republican way, he was not at all well bred. And he was not well bred, by arms or by the Almanach de Gotha, for all his people on both sides were peasant stock; but he looked very well, a small, straight, well-compounded figure, with a round, brown head and the short, beak-like nose of the mountain Catalans. It was a face that would wrinkle with distinction in his age.

He went down to the Place; it was almost the first time since he had arrived that he had been alone, and even at the cost of being late at his Aunt Marinette’s house, he intended to make a private homecoming pilgrimage. From the Place he walked up the narrow arcades, a street where the houses stood almost touching overhead, and where the shops filled the arched-over pavement with baskets of brilliant fruit and vegetables. Opposite the Fajals’ shop he hesitated, looked in under the arch, beyond the fore-shop into the shop behind, where in the fly-blown gloom a little crowd of old black women stood croaking among the stockfish. He had a minute’s mind to go in, but he dismissed the thought and went on up the street, under the Virgin’s balcony, where a staring little doll with carmine cheeks stood in the middle of a quantity of lace and glass jewelry holding a plaster baby: she still had the same villainous tin crown, but the balcony had been repainted and now, behind the tinsel and glass, one could see something of the delicate stone tracery in which the original statue had been placed, five hundred years before—a statue that had been indignantly rejected as old-fashioned in 1865. That made him think of Aunt Margot: if she had been the leading woman of the church at that time she would have done just the same: with the approval of one and all she would have had the old stone out and replaced it with a plaster image from Saint-Sulpice. There was an odd contradiction. She was one of those women who seem born for the role of a sharp old lady; a strongly independent character; a little crotchety, but never foolish; far from womanly, yet equally far from being masculine; a being apart, self-contained, a product of no obvious sequence of development: you could not imagine her a child, nor a young woman, and only by stretching the term to its uttermost could you see her as even middle-aged. In most people you can detect the remnant of an earlier age or foresee the shape of an age that is to come: they are not wholly submerged in the age of their years, their actual childhood, youth, or age. In a little boy lost in a book one can see the form of the man; and looking sideways at the unconscious, released, upturned faces of one’s neighbors at the cinema one may see the surviving adolescent repeated and repeated, open-mouthed, in diminishing perspective to the end of the row. But there was nothing of this in Aunt Margot: she was an old lady, and probably she had been one since she was forty-five. She was a widow, and she wore a widow’s weeds from long habit, but she had nothing of the look of a once-married woman: she had recovered her maidenhood and dried it. There was no nonsense about her: she was devout, and she had a genuine sense of piety and religion; but she would discuss Church politics with a freedom that would have surprised an anti-clerical. There was no nonsense about her: yet in matters of church decoration, plaster saints, and devotional books, her judgment was obscured, her taste fled or became womanish in the worst sense, and her reason refused its aid.

It was a contradiction that Alain found insoluble: he had found it so from his earliest days, when at the first dawn of aesthetic perception he had seen her supervising the emplacement of a brand-new Saint Expédit in the parish church.

He passed by his cousin’s salting house and hurried through the reek of anchovies: from the huge brown cave filled with barrels came the girls and women, hurrying away at the end of their day’s work. The older women recognized him and called “Good evening, Monsieur Alain,” and “Are you going for a walk, Monsieur Alain?” He hurried; he could still decently avoid them. He called back “Good evening. Yes, a walk. Good evening, Marie, Josette . . .” Another time, the next time, he would stop and talk, but this evening he would permit himself to hurry on.

They were good women; excellent, kind women: but why were they so ugly? Their dress had a great deal to do with it, black, light-drinking black; black stockings and black espadrilles: with the girls it was the same, tallow-white faces, short thick bodies wrapped in frocks of undetermined color, then a short stretch of corpse-white calf, and dull blue cloth shoes. Never any freshness, even in their first youth: what was the matter? Why were they so ugly when the men were so fine, straight and brown, brilliantly colored in the sun? How was it that he had not seen a single pretty girl in his walk so far? And what a pity it was, they being such an embellishment to the day.

Perhaps Aunt Margot had caught something of this sorrowful influence, this natural inclination toward ugliness?

But looking up he saw a young woman coming down the slope toward him, and he said “My God.”

“My God,” he said, internally. “Here’s freshness; here’s bloom. Here’s the lovely sin of the world.”