Four Novels (14 page)

“The moon was almost full last night. You could see your garden very clearly, how well kept it is, smooth as glass. It was late. The light was still on in the hallway on the second floor.”

“I told you, sometimes I have trouble sleeping.”

He pretended to turn his glass in his hand to make things easier for her, put her at her ease, as he suspected she wanted him to, so she could look at him more closely. She looked at him more closely.

“I’d like a little wine,” she said plaintively, as if she were hurt. “I didn’t know you could acquire the habit so quickly. I’ve almost acquired it already.”

He ordered the wine. They drank it together avidly, but this time nothing made Anne Desbaresdes drink except her nascent desire to become intoxicated from the wine. She drank, then paused, and in a soft, half-guilty voice began to question the man again.

“I’d like you to tell me now how they came not to speak to each other any more.”

The child appeared in the doorway, saw that she was still there, and ran off again.

“I don’t know. Perhaps through the long silences that grew up between them at night, then at other times, silences they found more and more difficult to overcome.”

The same trouble that had closed Anne Desbaresdes’ eyes the day before now made her hunch her shoulders forward dejectedly.

“One night they pace back and forth in their rooms, like caged animals, not knowing what’s happening to them. They begin to suspect what it is, and are afraid.”

“Nothing can satisfy them any longer.”

“They’re overwhelmed by what is happening, they can’t talk about it yet. Perhaps it will take months. Months for them to know.”

He paused for a moment before going on. He drank a full glass of wine. While he was drinking the sun was reflected in his eyes with all the exactitude of chance. She saw it.

“In front of a certain window on the first floor,” he said, “there’s a beech tree, one of the most beautiful trees in the garden.”

“That’s my room. It’s a big room.”

His mouth was moist from having drunk and, in the soft light, it too seemed implacably exact.

“They say it’s a quiet room, the best room in the house.”

“In summer this beech tree hides my view of the sea. One day I asked to have it removed, cut down. I must not have insisted enough.”

He glanced above the bar to try to see what time it was.

“In a quarter of an hour work will be over, and very soon after that you’ll be going home. We really have very little time. I don’t think it matters one way or the other whether the beech tree is there or not. If I were you I’d let it go on growing, let its shadow grow a little every year on the walls of the room that is called—wrongly, I believe—yours.”

She leaned way back in her chair, displaying her bust in a movement that was almost vulgar, and turned away from him.

“But sometimes its shadow is like black ink,” she said softly.

“I don’t think that matters.”

He laughed as he handed her a glass of wine.

“That woman had become a drunkard. At night people found her in the bars out beyond the dockyards, stone drunk. There was a lot of bad talk.”

Anne Desbaresdes feigned astonishment, but overdid it.

“I suspected something, but nothing as bad as that. Maybe in their case it was necessary?”

“I don’t know any more than you do. Talk to me.”

“Yes.” She dug deep. “Sometimes, on Saturday, one or two drunks also come along the Boulevard de la Mer singing at the top of their voices or making speeches. They go as far as the dunes, to the last lamppost, and come back, still singing. Generally it’s late when they come, when everyone else is asleep. I think they’re brave to wander around in that section of town, it’s so deserted.”

“You’re lying in bed in that big, quiet room, and you hear them. The room has a disorderly air about it that’s not like you. You were lying there, you were.”

Anne Desbaresdes stiffened and, as was sometimes her custom, went limp. Her voice deserted her. Her hands began to tremble slightly.

“They’re going to extend the boulevard beyond the dunes,” she said, “They’re talking about doing it sometime soon.”

“You were lying in bed. No one knew. In ten minutes it will be quitting time.”

“I know it,” said Anne Desbaresdes, “and . . . these last years at whatever time it was, I always knew, always . . .”

“Whether you were asleep or awake, dressed or naked, they passed outside the pale of your existence.”

Anne Desbaresdes resisted, guilty, and yet she accepted it.

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “I remember, anything can happen . . .”

“Yes.”

She kept staring at his mouth, which was the only thing still lighted by the dying rays of day.

“It would be easy to mistake that garden from a distance, since it’s enclosed and overlooks the sea. Last June—in a few days it will be a year ago—you were standing facing him on the steps, ready to receive us, the workers from the foundries. Above your breasts, which were half bare, there was a white magnolia. My name is Chauvin.”

She resumed her usual position facing him, leaning on the table. Her face was already unsteady from the wine.

“I knew it. And I also knew that you left the foundries without reason and that you’ll soon have to go back, because no other company in town has a job for you.”

“Keep talking to me. Soon I won’t ask you anything more.”

Anne Desbaresdes began mechanically, like a schoolchild reciting a lesson she had never learned.

“When I came to this house the privet hedges were already there. When a storm approached they grated like steel. When you get used to it, it’s like . . . like listening to your own heart. I got used to it. What you told me about that woman was a lie, about their finding her dead drunk in the bars by the dockyards.”

The siren went off, right on time, deafening the whole town. The patronne checked the time and put her red sweater aside. Chauvin spoke as calmly as if he had not heard.

“Lots of women have already lived in that same house and listened to the hedges at night, in place of their hearts. The hedges have always been there. They all died in their room behind that beech tree which, by the way, you’re wrong about: it has stopped growing,”

“That’s as much a lie as what you told me about their finding that woman dead drunk every night.”

“Yes, that’s a lie too. But this house is enormous. It covers hundreds
of square yards. And it’s so old that you can conjecture endlessly about it. It must be frightening.”

She was seized by the same emotion, and closed her eyes. The patronne got up, moved around, began rinsing some glasses.

“Hurry up and say something. Make it up.”

She made an effort; her voice was almost loud in the café, which was still empty.

“People ought to live in a town where there are no trees trees scream when there’s a wind here there’s always a wind always except for two days a year in your place don’t you see I’d leave this place I wouldn’t stay all the birds or almost all are seagulls you find them dead after a storm and when the storm is over the trees stop screaming you hear them screaming on the beach like someone murdered it keeps the children from sleeping no I’ll leave.”

She paused, her eyes still shut with fear. He looked at her attentively.

“Perhaps we’re wrong,” he said, “perhaps he wanted to kill her right away, the first time he saw her. Talk to me.”

She couldn’t. Her hands began to shake again, but for reasons other than fear and the turmoil that any allusion to her existence threw her into. So he talked instead, his voice calm again.

“It’s true that it’s so rare for the wind to stop in this town that when it does you feel stifled. I’ve already noticed it.”

Anne Desbaresdes wasn’t listening.

“Dead,” she said, “even after she was dead she was still smiling happily.”

The children’s shouts and laughter exploded outside, greeting the evening as if it were dawn. From the south other shouts—of grown-ups, of men released from work—rose above the dull humming of the foundries.

“The wind never fails,” Anne Desbaresdes went on wearily, “it always comes back and—I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed it—it varies from day to day. Sometimes it comes all of a sudden, especially at sundown, and sometimes very slowly, but then only when it’s terribly hot, and in the wee hours of the morning, at dawn. The privet hedges shout, you know what I mean, that’s how I know.”

“You know everything about this one garden, which is almost exactly like all the other gardens on the Boulevard de la Mer. In summer, when the privet hedges shout, you close your window to shut them out, and you’re naked because of the heat.”

“I’d like some wine,” Anne Desbaresdes pleaded. “I keep wanting more wine . . .”

He ordered some wine.

“The siren went ten minutes ago,” the patronne warned when she served them.

The first man arrived, and drank the same wine at the bar.

“In the left comer of the garden,” Anne Desbaresdes went on in a near whisper, “there’s an American copper beech to the north. I don’t know why, I don’t know at all why . . .”

The man at the bar recognized Chauvin, and nodded to him in a slightly embarrassed way. Chauvin didn’t see him.

“Tell me more,” Chauvin said, “you can tell me anything at all.”

The child appeared, out of breath, his hair all mussed. The streets leading to the docks resounded with men’s footsteps.

“Mother,” the child said.

“In two minutes,” Chauvin said, “she’s leaving in two minutes.”

The man at the bar tried to pat the child’s head as he passed, but the boy broke away savagely.

“One day,” Anne Desbaresdes said, “I had that child.”

A dozen or so workers burst noisily into the café. Some of them recognized Chauvin. Again Chauvin didn’t see them.

“Sometimes at night, when the child is sleeping,” Anne Desbaresdes went on, “I go downstairs and walk in the garden. I go to the railings and look at the boulevard. It’s very peaceful there at night, especially in winter. Sometimes in summer a few couples pass with their arms around each other, that’s all. We picked that house because it’s quiet, the quietest house in town. I must be going.”

Chauvin leaned back in his chair, taking his time.

“You go to the railings, then you go away and walk around the house, then you come back again to the railings. The child is sleeping upstairs. You have never screamed. Never.”

She put her suitcoat back on without replying. He helped her. She got up and once again remained standing beside him near the table, staring past the men at the bar. Some of them tried to make a sign of recognition to Chauvin, but to no avail. He was looking at the dock.

Anne Desbaresdes finally shook off her torpor.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

He accompanied her to the door. Several groups of men arrived, in a
hurry. The child was in their wake. He ran to his mother, took her by the hand, and led her resolutely away. She followed him.

He told her that he had a new friend, and wasn’t surprised that she didn’t answer him. He stopped beside the empty beach—it was later than the day before—to watch the waves, which were rougher than usual that night. Then he started off again.

“Come on.”

She let him lead, and started after him.

“You’re walking slowly,” he whined, “and it’s cold.”

“I can’t go any faster.”

She walked as fast as she could. The night, fatigue, and childhood made him cling to her, to his mother, and they walked on together. But since she was too drunk to see very far, she avoided looking towards the end of the boulevard, so as not to be discouraged by such a long distance.

Five

“Y
OU’LL REMEMBER NOW
,” Anne Desbaresdes said, “it means moderately and melodiously.”

“Moderately and melodiously,” the child repeated.

As they climbed the steps, the cranes rose in the sky to the south of town, turning with identical movements but at different speeds.

“I don’t want her to scold you, I can’t stand it.”

“I don’t want her to either. Moderately and melodiously.”

A giant steam shovel, slobbering wet sand, swung into view through the last window on the floor, its teeth like those of a hungry beast gripping its prey.

“Music is necessary, and you have to learn it. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

Mademoiselle Giraud’s apartment was high enough—it was on the sixth floor—so that its windows overlooked a wide expanse of ocean. Aside from the flight of the gulls, there was nothing to distract the child’s attention.

“Well, did you learn what happened? A crime of passion. Please sit down, Madame Desbaresdes.”

“What was it?” the child asked.

“All right now, quickly, the sonatina,” Mademoiselle Giraud said.

The child sat down at the piano. Mademoiselle Giraud sat down beside him, the pencil in her hand. Anne Desbaresdes sat down on the other side of the room, near the window.

“The sonatina. Go ahead, Diabelli’s pretty little sonatina. What is the tempo of this pretty little sonatina? Tell me.”

The child cringed at the sound of her voice. He seemed to reflect, took his time, and perhaps lied.

“Moderately and melodiously,” he said.

Mademoiselle Giraud crossed her arms, looked at him, and sighed.

“He does it deliberately. There’s no other explanation.”

The child did not bat an eyelash. His two little hands lay clenched on his knees, waiting for his torture to end, smug in the ineluctability of his own act, repeated over and over again.

“You can see the days are getting longer,” Anne Desbaresdes said softly.

“They are indeed,” said Mademoiselle Giraud.

The sun was noticeably higher in the sky than last week at the same time. And besides, it had been such a lovely day that the sky was covered with a haze, a light haze to be sure, but unusual for that time of year.

“I’m still waiting for your answer.”

“Perhaps he didn’t hear.”

“He heard perfectly well. One thing you’ll never understand, Madame Desbaresdes, is that he does it deliberately.”