The Mahé Circle (13 page)

People had kept telling him:

‘This is your church … your village, your friends …'

To prove it to him, they had written his surname up on all those shop fronts.

And one fine day, he didn't exactly know when, and didn't want to know, he'd discovered it wasn't true, just as a child, at a certain age, discovers that his aunts and uncles, whom he's been taught to kiss when he
sees them, mean nothing to him.

He found that at thirty-five, here he was, too big, too fat, too full of rather vulgar life, with a wife and two children and an existence all laid out for him, a fixed schedule worked out for every day of the week.

He followed it. He made a big effort to follow it, because he could see no other solution, because he refused to admit there could be one, but he was floating inside this world that had been arranged for him as if inside a suit of clothes that
didn't fit.

One evening, as he was going to bed, his wife said to him, in a good-humoured tone meant to cancel out the reproach concealed in her words:

‘You haven't been drinking this afternoon, have you?'

He lied to her in reply:

‘Just a glass at the Bertauts'.'

It wasn't true. He had visited the farm: a labourer had fallen from a ladder. Normally he never accepted a drink from his patients, since, as he told them, if he drank a glass in every house, he wouldn't get to the end of the day.
They all knew this so well that even when the other men were drinking, they would say:

‘Not for you, eh, doctor?'

He had drunk three glasses at the Bertauts'.The day before he had had a drink with a farmer who had been drawing wine from his cask.

His wife could detect it on his breath. And that too was inadmissible: that he should be condemned his whole life long to sleep in the same bed as her! He had never been able to accustom himself to her smell, which was bland. He didn't like
the feel on the pillow of her hair, which she insisted on keeping long. He didn't like to see her legs at bedtime: too white, with the veins already showing blue, on their way to becoming varicose.

Especially when he had had a few drinks here and there, it seemed to him that he had been tricked, that from the start an obscure conspiracy had been woven round him.

It even extended to the furniture! It had belonged to his mother, and some of it dated back to his grandmother: he had been seeing these pieces of furniture all his life. They had their own special names. They would say: ‘grandma's
chest of drawers' or ‘the good sideboard'. It was the same with the cameo brooch that Hélène had inherited and wore on Sundays, which also came from a grandmother he had never seen. It was as if all this was arranged round
him as if
to imprison him inside a holy circle, within a boundary he could never cross.

The moment he came in, they would make the children be quiet, lay the table immediately, clear away any objects around the room.

‘Quick, Jeanne. Your father's home.'

And Jeanne would close her school books.

‘Quick, Marie' – the new maid – ‘I can hear Monsieur's bike.'

And Marie, flustered, would drop whatever she was holding.

They made a great play of treating him as the head of the family. But he saw in this concerted attitude a way of enslaving him even more.

In what way was he the head? What freedom, what kind of freedom, did he have?

Who knows? He was beginning to wonder whether the same had been true for his father, the famous Mahé, for all that he was two metres tall and weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. Perhaps when, after a few drinks, he had taken on the other stock
dealers, it was just a way – a poor effort – to convince himself that he was worth something.

Sunday succeeded Sunday. The Péchades would come in turn to have lunch and tea at Saint-Hilaire. Everyone noticed that he was the first to go and fetch the cognac bottle from the cupboard and that he helped himself to several glasses.

It was Madame Péchade who put her foot in it one Sunday. Not only by pronouncing the taboo word, but
then, as soon as it escaped her lips, by blushing and looking round as if to apologize.

She had simply said, in her pleasant and stupid way:

‘Will you be going to Porquerolles this year?'

It was too late to take the words back. Hélène felt the immediate need to busy herself with the children. Péchade lit a cigarette. Everyone waited.

‘I'm not sure yet,' he said.

But he was sure. And this time it was far more serious than the other years. Not only would he go, but he knew what he was going to look for there.

‘Do you think the climate in the south is good for the children?'

Poor Péchade!

‘No reason it shouldn't be.'

And perhaps to try to redeem herself a little, Madame Péchade hastened to say:

‘Hélène was telling me she was getting used to it.'

‘Of course. She'll get used to it.'

Without meaning to, he pronounced the last words like a verdict, with arrogant indifference. She'd get used to it, or not. Too bad for her.

Had anyone ever asked him if he would get used to her? Had anyone worried so much about turning him into a country doctor, and then a married man and a father?

That was life.

If you admitted that, you would have to admit that there might be other lives; and he was thirty-five years old, and believed he now had the right to follow his own path, not that of other people any more.

He didn't feel resentment towards his mother. Or towards Hélène, when he thought about it calmly. He would have been inclined, if anything, to feel sorry for her. It wasn't her fault either. He
tried to ration his moments of ill humour, and certain gestures, words and expressions, which, he knew, did not pass unnoticed by his wife.

She was not particularly intelligent, but a woman always notices those little things.

‘Will you go fishing there?'

They had to talk about it, now that the subject had been raised.

‘Yes … I do sometimes go fishing.'

‘Do you go swimming?'

‘Yes, that too.'

He would have found it hard to say exactly what he did there, what was attracting him. And anyway they wouldn't have understood.

He could have drawn a comparison. Here, every morning as he shaved, he could see from his window teams of huge oxen, bowing their heads under the yoke as they moved towards the fields, pacing so slowly that it seemed they were measuring
eternity.

There, leaning over the sea, he could watch strange combats, a perpetual life-and-death struggle: behind every rock or clump of seaweed, fish with aggressive shapes were lying in wait for others, and the very flowers that opened underwater were
on the lookout for prey to imprison in their tentacles.

Here, men drained the life out of day after day, with
tasks that followed the inexorable rhythm of the ploughman's almanac.

There …

But why talk about it? Why was this circle being formed round him, made up of anxious looks?

As soon as his back was turned, they must be whispering:

‘His mother's death gave him a terrible shock. He's a changed man. Have you noticed he's started to drink …?'

Because he was trying to escape from the circle, quite simply. He was a Mahé. And because they were Mahés, and because these other Mahés whom he didn't know were embedded throughout the region, they were all linking up to prevent him from
escaping.

So he pulled in his broad shoulders, glowered, and regarded the whole lot of them as enemies, including Péchade.

That's how it was. And it wasn't his fault. And they needn't think they'd win! They'd never be able to hold him back. On the contrary! Their resistance spurred him on, as did the puny little conspiracies they were
plotting around him.

He'd go to Porquerolles. And not only would he go, but he felt that it wouldn't stop there. He was patient. Perhaps because, in spite of everything, he
was
a Mahé, a man from here.

For four years now, it had been constantly on his mind, and he had not yet broken out, but had contented himself with ruminating a vague idea which was gradually turning into a plan.

One fine day, he would wake up in the morning and find himself in possession of a worked out idea, a fully formed project, and woe betide anyone who tried to deter him from putting it into practice.

The people in Porquerolles were beginning to get used to him. He had had occasion to treat them. He had made the acquaintance of his colleague on the island, Dr Lepage. A pale-faced little man, who had accepted the post because he had a weak
chest.

‘You must understand,' he had explained to Mahé, ‘to live here, you don't want to be ambitious. In winter, there are only about four hundred residents, and few of them are ever ill. If the Cooperative didn't pay me a
stipend to make sure there's a doctor on the island, I'd be unable to pay for my keep. There's also the TB sanatorium, which brings in a small annual sum. But I'm not so sure the climate suits me. My sister, who lives in the mountains behind Nice, is always trying to
get me to go and live with her.'

He lived in a pink house at the corner of the square, near the church. He did a bit of dispensing on the side. One hardly ever saw him, since he spent most of his time dozing in his garden under a fig tree.

Two weeks later, with summer already beginning, Hélène asked him:

‘Do you really mean for us to go to Porquerolles? It's just that I need to know, because of getting the children's clothes ready.'

‘Yes, we're going.'

‘Should Marie come too?'

He didn't care. He wrote off to Paris to get a locum for the month of August. This turned out to be a timid young man who looked at the large grey house where he was going to live all alone with
something like fear. They decided to leave Marie with him.

There was still the car to be put right and a telegram to be sent to Madame Harmoniaux, who had reserved their room for them.

The morning of their departure, when everyone was in the car, its roof covered with suitcases fixed on with ropes and straps, he turned back to look at the house. It was very hot that day. You could almost imagine slight steam rising from the
grey stones.

The doctor remembered another departure, that of his mother, who had turned around like him just as she was about to get into the ambulance. He had seen in her eyes a farewell, but a farewell full of sorrow.

She knew she would never come back. She had taken all the necessary steps as a result. She had thought of everything.

And he was going off in a cheerful mood, without any sorrow or remorse, just a slight awkwardness, like a man who knows he is at fault.

And yet he too had the feeling he would never come back. He hadn't known anything of this the day before, or even when he was tying the luggage on to the roof of the car.

It was a sudden sensation. He looked at the walls, the gate, the clipped box trees, and without any transition, it all slipped irrevocably away from him. There was nothing
there but an ordinary kind of
house, slightly forbidding, with an unknown young replacement doctor standing on the steps and waving goodbye and a fat servant girl at the kitchen window.

It was over! Finished! Well, too bad. He didn't know how things would turn out, but he trusted his presentiment.

He slammed the driver's door, put his foot down and changed gear. The houses on both sides of the road disappeared one after another, swallowed up by the past.

‘Aren't we going to say goodbye to the Péchades?'

He'd almost forgotten them. Poor old Péchade! He would have to remain in harness in spite of everything, going through the motions to the bitter end. But it didn't alter the fact that Péchade too was already part of the past.

His friend was wearing a grey suit. His skin looked greyish as well. He came out of his surgery, where he had been giving someone an injection, still holding the syringe in his hand.

‘Away for a month, then?' he called.

Madame Péchade was there too, pink-cheeked and rosy, with two of the boys.

‘Bon voyage! Do write!'

‘Of course.'

Just at that moment, and only at that very moment, his hand on the steering wheel began to tremble. It was a kind of panic, almost animal, a feeling of loss, at the exact moment that something solid was falling away, something which after a few
turns of the wheel no longer existed, but had melted behind them in the sun.

And now the white and red milestones sped past, new names, different numbers. He was alone in the front, since his wife had preferred to sit with the children in the back. Alongside him on the seat was his
hat, still bearing a black mourning band.

‘Where do you want to stop for lunch?'

She thought he hadn't heard, leaned forward to repeat the question, but he just made a vague gesture.

‘François, don't drive so fast, you know it frightens me.'

He could see her colourless face in the rear mirror and couldn't stop himself from smiling, a smile that was almost evil.

What would she have said, dear God, if she knew where he was taking her at top speed?