Climates (3 page)

His last lecture, prepared in that year but never delivered, was called
Illusions
. In it, he included a kind of manifesto of his art and life. Most of human existence is neither extreme nor tragic, he says, yet:

The only possibility of introducing meaning into such a world lies in art, he concludes, and especially in literature. It is the author’s task to create stories that are orderly enough to be coherent, but not so neat that they fail to reflect the true mystery and complexity of human life.

Climates
is such a story. It is orderly, yet unsettling. It breathes an air that is profoundly civilized, yet there is something violent and shattering about it too. “Even when it’s mutual, love is terrible,” says Philippe. It is terrible simply to be human—and there can be no subject more interesting to write about, or more beautiful, than that.

You must have been surprised
when I left so suddenly. I apologize for that but do not regret it. I cannot tell whether you too can hear the hurricane of internal music stirring inside me over the last few days like Tristan da Cunha’s towering flames. Oh! I would so like to succumb to the tempest that, only the day before yesterday, in the forest, urged me to touch your white dress. But I am afraid of love, Isabelle, and of myself. I do not know what Renée or anyone else may have told you about my life. You and I have sometimes talked of it; I have not told you the truth. That is the charm of new acquaintances: the hope that, in their eyes
and by denying the truth, we can transform a past that we wish had been happier. Our friendship has gone beyond the point of overly flattering confidences. Men surrender their souls, as women do their bodies, in successive and carefully defended stages. One after the other, I have thrown my most secret troops into battle. My true memories, corralled in their enclave, will soon give themselves up and come out into the open.

I am a long way from you now, in the very room in which I slept as a child. On the wall are the shelves laden with books that my mother has been keeping for over twenty years “for her eldest grandson.” Will I have sons? That wide red spine stained with ink is my old Greek dictionary; those gold bindings, my prizes. I wish I could tell you everything, Isabelle, from the sensitive little boy to the cynical adolescent, and on to the unhappy, wounded man. I wish I could tell you everything in complete innocence, exactitude, and humility. Perhaps, if I manage to finish writing this, I will not have the courage to show it to you. Never mind. It is still worthwhile, if only for my own sake, to assess what my life has been.

Do you remember one evening on the way back from Saint-Germain when I described Gandumas
to you? It is a bleakly beautiful place. A torrential river cuts between our factories, built in the depths of a wild gorge. Our house, a small nineteenth-century château like many others in Limousin, looks out over heather-clad heaths. As a young boy I was already proud that I was a Marcenat and our family reigned over the canton. My father took the tiny paper business that had been a mere laboratory for my maternal grandfather and built it into a huge factory. He bought up local smallholdings and transformed Gandumas, which had been all but neglected before his time, into the very model of an estate. Throughout my childhood I watched buildings being constructed and saw the hangar housing paper pulp stretch out along the river.

My mother’s family was from Limousin. My great-grandfather, a notary, had bought the Château de Gandumas when it was sold off as national property. My father, an engineer from Lorraine, had been in the region only since he married. He summoned one of his brothers, my uncle Pierre, who settled in the neighboring village of Chardeuil. On Sundays, if it was not raining, the two families met by the ponds in Saint-Yrieix. We traveled in carriages, and I would sit facing my parents, on a
small, hard pull-down seat. The horse’s monotonous trot sent me to sleep; I used to like watching its shadow on the walls in villages or on the banks by the side of the road: it contorted and moved forward, overtaking us, and then, as we went around corners, it reappeared behind us. Every now and then the smell of droppings (a smell which, like the sound of bells, will always be associated with Sundays in my mind) would hang over us like a cloud, and great fat flies would land on me. I hated the hills more than anything; the horse slowed to a walk and the carriage climbed unbearably slowly while the old coachman, Thomasson, clicked his tongue and cracked his whip.

At the inn, we met up with my uncle Pierre, his wife, and my cousin Renée, who was their only child. My mother would give us bread and butter, and my father would say, “Go and play.” Renée and I used to walk under the trees or by the ponds, collecting pinecones and chestnuts. On the way home, Renée climbed into the carriage with us, and the coachman folded down the sides of my seat to give her somewhere to sit. My parents did not speak during the journey.

Any form of conversation was made difficult by my father’s extraordinary sense of propriety; it seemed to pain him if the least feeling were expressed in public. At mealtimes, if my mother mentioned our education, the factory, our uncles, or our aunt Cora who lived in Paris, my father would gesture anxiously, pointing out to her the servant clearing the plates. She would fall silent. I noticed very early on that if my father and my uncle had some small criticism to direct at each other, they always ensured it was their wives who conveyed this with tremendous tact. I also grasped very early that my father abhorred sincerity. In our house, it was taken for granted that all conventional feelings held true, that parents always loved their children, children their parents, and husbands their wives. The Marcenats liked to see the world as a decent, earthly paradise, and I feel that, in their case, this had more to do with candor than hypocrisy.

The sunlit lawn
at Gandumas. And, on the plain below, the village of Chardeuil veiled in a shimmering heat haze. A little boy stands waist-deep in a hole he has dug, beside a heap of sand, scouring the vast expanses around him for an invisible enemy. This game was inspired by my favorite book, Driant’s
Fortress War
. I was a soldier, Private Mitour, stationed in that hole for skirmishes to defend Fort de Liouville, under the command of a colonel for whom I would gladly have given my life. I must apologize for writing about these puerile ideas, but in them I see the first expression of a need for passionate devotion that has been a dominant
feature of my character, although it was later applied to quite different subjects.

If I analyze the tiny but still identifiable trace of the child I was then, I can see that, even at that early stage, there was a hint of sensuality in this sacrifice.

Besides, my game quickly developed into something else. In another book, one I was given on New Year’s Day that was called
Little Russian Soldiers
, I read about a gang of schoolboys who decide to form an army and choose a fellow pupil as their queen. The queen was called Ania Sokoloff. “She was a remarkably beautiful, slender, elegant, and able girl.” I liked the oath the soldiers swore to their queen, the work they undertook to please her, and the smile that was their reward. I did not know why this story suited me so well, but it did, I loved it, and it must have been from that book that I formed the image of the woman I have so often described to you. I can see myself walking beside her on the lawns at Gandumas; she is talking to me in a serious voice, her sentences sad and beautiful. I do not know at what point I started calling her the Amazon, but I know the notion of audacity and risk was always mingled with the pleasure she afforded me. I also loved reading with my mother about Lancelot of the Lake and
Don Quixote. I could not believe that Dulcinea was ugly, and I tore the engraving of her from my book so that I could imagine her as I chose to.

Although my cousin Renée was two years younger than me, she studied alongside me for several years. Then, when I was thirteen, my father sent me to the Lycée Gay-Lussac in Limoges. I lived at a cousin’s house and went home only on Sundays. I really enjoyed school life. I had inherited my father’s love of learning and reading, and was a good pupil. The characteristic Marcenat pride and shyness were becoming apparent in me, as inevitably as their shining eyes and rather high-set eyebrows. The only counterpoint to my pride was the image of the queen to whom I remained faithful. At night, before going to sleep, I told myself stories with my Amazon as the heroine. She now had a name, Helen, because I liked Homer’s Helen (a Mr. Bailly, one of my teachers, was responsible for that).

Why do some images remain as clear to us as when we first saw them, while others that might seem more important grow hazy and fade so quickly? Right now, on a perfectly focused internal screen, I am projecting Mr. Bailly coming into the
classroom with his slow, steady step, on a day when we are to do French composition. He hangs his distinctive coat on a peg and says, “I have found a wonderful subject for you: Stesichorus’s palinode …” Yes, I can still see Mr. Bailly very clearly. He has a thick mustache, a shock of hair, and a face heavily lined by what were no doubt painful passions. He takes from his briefcase a sheet of paper and dictates: “The poet Stesichorus, having cursed Helen in his verse for the ills she brought to the Greeks, is struck blind by Venus and, now realizing his mistake, composes a palinode expressing his regret for blaspheming against beauty.”

Oh! I would so love to reread my eight pages from that morning. Never again have I found such a perfect reconciling of deeper life and the written word, never, except perhaps in a few letters to Odile and, scarcely a week ago, in a letter intended for you that I never sent. The theme of sacrifice to beauty awakened such profound resonances in me that, despite my tender years, I felt terrified and worked with almost painful ardor for two hours, as if I could sense that I too would have many, many reasons to write Stesichorus’s palinode during the course of my difficult earthly life.

But I would be giving you a very false idea of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy’s nature if I did not admit that my exultation remained internal and perfectly hidden. My conversations with my classmates about women and love were cynical. A few of my friends described their experiences in brutal technical detail. I, on the other hand, had incarnated my Helen in a young woman from Limoges, a friend of the cousins with whom I lodged. Her name was Denise Aubry; she was pretty and was said to be fickle. If I heard anyone say she had lovers, I thought of Don Quixote and Lancelot, and wished I could hurl lances at these slanderers.

On the days when Madame Aubry came for dinner I was beside myself with a blend of happiness and fear. Everything I said in her presence sounded absurd to me. I loathed her husband, an inoffensive and well-meaning porcelain maker. I always hoped to meet her in the street on the way home from school. I had noticed that, around noon, she often went to buy flowers or cakes on the rue Porte-Tourny, opposite the cathedral. I made sure I was on the sidewalk between the florist and the patisserie at that sort of time. On several occasions she allowed me to escort her, with my schoolbag under my arm, all the way back to her door.

When summer came, I found it easier to see her at the tennis court. One particularly warm evening a number of young couples decided to dine there. Madame Aubry, who knew very well that I loved her, asked me to stay too. It was a lively, cheerful supper. Night fell. I was lying on the grass at Denise’s feet; my hand drifted to her ankle and I gently encircled it, with no protest from her. There were syringas behind us, and I can still smell their strong fragrance. You could see the stars through their branches. It was a moment of perfect happiness.