Four Novels (33 page)

Mr. Andesmas, making a polite effort, extricates himself slightly from his armchair, and finally succeeds in speaking to the woman.

“Is Mr. Arc going to come this evening?”

She turned sharply. He was certain she had found it superfluous to give the reason for her coming.

“Of course, that’s why I came,” she said, “to tell you. Yes, he’s coming this evening.”

“Oh, you had to go out of your way,” Mr. Andesmas said.

“No, not at all,” she said. “It isn’t so far. And there was no choice.”

The song again rises from the chasm of light.

It is still a phonograph. The song varies in loudness. It fades and grows distant. The woman listens to it attentively whether it is far or near. But is she listening to it?

Mr. Andesmas sees nothing of her but the black and silky sheet of her hair spread on her shoulders, and her bare arms which, joined by her clasped hands, hug her knees. No, she is probably only looking, not listening. Mr. Andesmas thinks he can tell that she is watching this side of the village square, the side with trees and benches, the one he saw after the departure of the child for the pond.

“Are they starting to dance again?” he asks.

“No, no, it’s over,” she says.

Mr. Andesmas relaxes a little. Her voice had been even, flat, when she had answered.

An event was taking place, Mr. Andesmas knew it—which he called their meeting, much later. This event was taking root painfully in the arid stretch of the present, but it was necessary, nevertheless, that it should happen, and that the time it took should pass as well. Mr. Andesmas’ surprise was hardly fading at all, of course, but it was fading all the same, it was growing older all the same. Mr. Andesmas claimed to know it from the fact that, little by little, the slight cracklings of his wicker armchair occurred less frequently and he soon only heard around his body the reassuring ones, in time to his labored breathing.

But then something happens that baffles him at first, then frightens him. One of the woman’s shoes falls from her foot, from her raised foot. This foot is bare, small and white next to her sunburned leg. Since
the woman is still outside the stately shade of the beech tree, or rather the shade hasn’t yet reached her, her foot seems even more exposed than it would have in the shade. And her strange attitude seems even more evident: she doesn’t budge, doesn’t feel that her foot has lost its shoe. Her foot is left bare, forgotten.

Mr. Andesmas, in contrast to the preceding moment, felt then the urgent necessity to break into the woman’s thoughts. He remembered. A little girl had come by. And couldn’t the memory of this little girl play a role here, between them, breaking down their separation? About this child, who wouldn’t agree?

“Had the little girl gotten back to the village when you left?” Mr. Andesmas asked in a friendly tone of voice.

The woman hardly turned. Her voice would have been the same if she hadn’t stopped talking since her arrival. But her foot remained bare, forgotten.

“Yes,” she said. “She told me she had seen you. It was quite a while after she got back that I felt I should come to tell you that Michel Arc would be still a little later than he had thought. He had said that he would be half an hour late. An hour had gone by when I left.”

“An hour?”

“An hour. Yes.”

“She hadn’t mentioned any time, just a delay, without any details.”

“I thought so,” she said. “She must have forgotten. You too, it seems.”

The sea became a large, perfectly smooth metallic surface. It was useless to hide from oneself that slower, more stretched-out hours were giving way to others, regular like the first hours of the afternoon.

“I have time, you know.” Mr. Andesmas said.

“The child said so to her father. And even that you would wait as long as it was light.”

“That’s right.”

He added timidly, still making the same effort to pull her out of her thoughts even if it was going to hurt: “The child found this on the path. Then she forgot it. I can give it to you. I’ll give it to you right away, later I’m afraid I might not think of it. Here.”

The franc piece the child lost is buried in the sand. He takes another one from his vest pocket and holds it out into space. The woman does not even rum around, her eyes still glued to the chasm.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

She added:

“Since she didn’t mention it to me, she must have already forgotten it. She is still very childish, more than she should be. But it isn’t at all serious, it will go away someday.”

Mr. Andesmas put the new franc piece back in his pocket. His bulk moved in the armchair, crumpled up in it. Again the armchair creaked.

The woman changed position. She unlocked her arms from around her knees; without looking she found her shoe with her foot and put it on.

“Of course,” Mr. Andesmas said, “it isn’t serious, not at all serious.”

She didn’t answer.

Mr. Andesmas said that he was afraid at that moment that she would get up and go back to the village, but that if she had done so, he would have asked her to stay. Even knowing that she would never be able to satisfy his avid curiosity about her, he wanted her near him, that afternoon. Near him, even interminably silent, he wanted her near him, that afternoon.

If he saw her later, during the years that went by between these moments and his death, it was only by chance, when he rode through the village streets in a car. Never did she recognize him, or deign to recognize him.

Instead of leaving, on the contrary she stays there and talks, always in this even voice, and her words are revealed from a long interior monologue, she lets them escape at times and whoever cares to hear them.

“The music hasn’t started again for some time,” she says, “so the dancing should be completely over, even in the streets around the square where people sometimes dance because of the heat. They must have left already, but they’re taking their time, they are coming up slowly. You have to wait a little longer.”

“Oh, I have time,” Mr. Andesmas repeats.

“I know,” she says. “Everybody knows.”

The spontaneous way in which Mr. Andesmas had reassured her, as well as the gentleness of his voice, softened the firmness of her resolve. The spectacle she was offering this remarkably courteous old man would be forgotten forever.

Her voice became somewhat languid. She repeated what her child had said a moment before. But she spoke to the empty chasm.

“I’m going to wait a little; if he comes, I’ll go down with him.”

She hides her head in her arms, and for a few seconds her hair covers her face.

“I’m a little tired.”

Not only the similarity of their expressions but also her childish tone of voice would have indicated, to anyone who might have seen them one after the other as Mr. Andesmas had, that she was the mother of this little girl without memory of her sorrows.

“Why not wait, why not rest a little more,” Mr. Andesmas said, “before going down.”

“I have five children,” she said. “Five. And I am still young as you can see.”

She opened her arms wide, in an embracing gesture. Then her arms fell down and she again took up her stiff, haughty position, in the sun of the plateau.

“Oh, I understand, I understand,” Mr. Andesmas said.

Perhaps the conversation could go on like this, on the basis of the children, of this aspect of her life as a mother; perhaps it could move in this way, cheatingly, along the byways of the present hour.

“The little girl is the oldest?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Andesmas went on in a chatty tone of voice.

“Shortly before her, well, a good twenty minutes before her, a dog came by. A dog, how can I describe him? A reddish dog, I think, yes, reddish brown. Does this dog belong to your children?”

“Why are you asking me that?” she asked.

“Well, like anything else,” Mr. Andesmas said, crestfallen. “I’ve been here since two o’clock and I’ve only seen this dog and the child. So I thought that perhaps . . .”

“Don’t try so hard to talk,” she said. “This dog belongs to no one. He follows the children. He’s harmless. He doesn’t belong to anyone in the village, he’s everybody’s dog.”

The shade of the beech tree was moving toward her. And while they were both silent and while she was still stiffly and with fascination examining the village square, Mr. Andesmas saw, with growing apprehension, that this shade from the tree was approaching her.

Suddenly surprised by the coolness of this shade, realizing that it was later than she thought, would she leave?

She notices it.

She sees, in fact, a change taking place around her. She turns, tries to see where this coolness, this shade is coming from, looks at the beech tree, then at the mountain, and finally, earnestly, at Mr. Andesmas, seeking from him a final assurance that she still seems to be waiting for, that she wants to believe is definitve.

“Oh, it’s really late,” she sighs. “How could it already be so late, with the sun like that.”

“And even if Mr. Arc doesn’t come tonight,” Mr. Andesmas says cheerfully, “I’ll come back, perhaps tomorrow or at the end of the week, what does it matter?”

“Why? No, no, he’ll come I assure you. What surprised me was how easily time just goes by. But I know he’ll come.”

She turned back toward the valley, then again to Mr. Andesmas.

“Especially in summer, especially in June,” she adds.

Mr. Andesmas had noticed it.

“Anyway, didn’t Valérie promise you that he’d come?”

Mr. Andesmas didn’t answer right away. Throughout his life, it had always been easy to take him by surprise. And the slowness of his movements and of his speech, which had increased with age, caused the woman to misunderstand.

“I asked you, Mr. Andesmas,” she went on, “if Valérie hadn’t promised you that my husband would come this evening?”

“It’s Valérie who brought me here,” Mr. Andesmas finally said. “Yes, she is the one who made the date with Mr. Arc. Yesterday, I think. For the last year she has been taking care of my appointments.”

The woman rises, moves closer to Mr. Andesmas, abandons her observation of the valley, sits down, there, almost at the old man’s feet.

“So, you see,” she said. “You have to wait longer.”

Mr. Andesmas took the woman’s rebuke to heart. She came even closer, hauled herself toward him while sitting, like an invalid, and her voice was as loud as if she were talking to someone who was deaf.

“And you trust Valérie?”

“Yes,” Mr. Andesmas said.

“If she told you that he had promised her he would come, believe me, it’s only a matter of patience. I know him just as you know Valérie. He’ll keep his word.”

Her voice suddenly became more womanly, it emerged from a well of gentleness.

“You see, when he makes life difficult for people, it’s because he can’t do anything else. It’s when it is beyond his power to do anything else. It’s only in this case that he could wrong you. That’s how he is, without any ill will, but sometimes it happens that he can’t help looking as if he had ill will.”

“I understand,” Mr. Andesmas uttered.

“I know you understand. Isn’t Valérie like that?”

She was completely curled up. Her slenderness was covered by her hair and her arms. She said with an effort:

“Who, in such a case, wouldn’t act that way? Who? Neither you years ago, nor I today.”

Mr. Andesmas recounted later that he was tempted—but was he sure about his past, this old man?—to be cruel to this woman so as to protect himself from the cruelty that she, he knew it, would show him. But was this the right, the real reason? Wasn’t it rather because this woman, who a moment before had been so fiercely resolved not to let any of her feelings show, was now sitting at his feet so dejectedly, in such complete surrender of her whole body; dominated by her feelings which had suddenly become so tyrannical that they crushed her, there, in front of him, the wife of Michel Arc?

In the old days, when his strength would have allowed him to subjugate her in this way, the old man remembered he would have done so.

He was cruel. It was he Mr. Andesmas, who was the first to bring up Valérie again.

“Do you know my daughter Valérie?” he asks her.

“I know her,” she says.

She straightened, calmly raised herself up out of her silence. She spoke about Valérie as she had spoken about Michel Arc a moment before. Mr. Andesmas’ cruelty hadn’t reached her.

“I’ve known her for a year,” she stated. “You came here a year ago, didn’t you, nearly to the day? It was a Monday. An afternoon in June. The first time I saw Valérie Andesmas, your child, was on the day you arrived.”

She smiled from deep in her well of gentleness at the memory of that afternoon.

Mr. Andesmas also smiled at the thought of that afternoon.

There they are, together, facing the memory of Valérie a year before, a child.

Smiling, they do not speak.

Then, Mr. Andesmas asks her:

“Your little girl must be about the same age now as Valérie was last year?”

She graciously objects to this remark:

“Let’s not talk about my little girl. It’ll take her a long time to grow up, a long time.”

Again she is back in last year’s month of June which Valérie passed through as a child.

“People said that you had already been here, long before, years ago. They said that you had just retired from business.”

“Well! That was quite a few years before,” Mr. Andesmas says, “but she wanted to live near the sea.”

“First you bought that big house behind the town hall, then you bought land. And then this house. And more land. They said that you had already come here years ago with Valérie’s mother.”

Mr. Andesmas lowers his head, suddenly overcome. Does the woman notice?

“Am I mistaken?”

“No, no, you’re not mistaken,” Mr. Andesmas says weakly.

“You’re very rich. That was known very quickly. And people came to sell you land. They say you buy carelessly. You’re so rich that you buy land without looking at it.”

“Rich,” repeated Mr. Andesmas, in a murmur.

“One can understand and admit it, you know.”