In Search of Lost Time (22 page)

Suddenly my father would stop us and ask my mother: ‘Where are we?' Exhausted from walking but proud of him, she would admit tenderly that she had absolutely no idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. Then, as if he had taken it out of his jacket pocket along with his key, he would show us the little back gate of our own garden, which stood there before us, having come, along with the corner of the rue du Saint-Esprit, to wait for us at the end of these unfamiliar streets. My mother would say to him with admiration: ‘You are astonishing!' And from that moment on, I did not have to take another step, the ground walked for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.

If Saturday, which began an hour earlier and deprived her of Françoise, passed more slowly than other days for my aunt, she nonetheless awaited its return with impatience from the beginning of the week,
because it contained all the novelty and distraction that her weakened and finical body was still able to endure. And yet this was not to say that she did not now and then aspire to some greater change, that she did not experience those exceptional moments when we thirst for something other than what we have, and when people who from a lack of energy or imagination cannot find a source of renewal in themselves ask the next minute that comes, the postman as he rings, to bring them something new, even if it is something worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a brutal one, and even if it might be broken by it; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to surrender unimpeded to its desires, to its afflictions, would like to throw the reins into the hands of imperious events, even if they may be cruel. No doubt, since my aunt's strength, drained by the least fatigue, returned to her only drop by drop deep within her repose, the reservoir was very slow to fill up, and months would go by before she had that slight overflow which others divert into activity and which she was incapable of knowing, and deciding, how to use. I have no doubt that then – just as the desire to replace it by potatoes with béchamel sauce ended after a certain time by being born from the very pleasure she felt at the daily return of the mashed potatoes of which she did not ‘get tired' – she would derive from the accumulation of those monotonous days which she valued so the expectation of some domestic cataclysm lasting only a moment but forcing her to bring about once and for all one of those changes which she recognized would be beneficial to her and to which she could not of her own accord make up her mind. She truly loved us, she would have taken pleasure in mourning for us; occurring at a moment when she felt well and was not in a sweat, the news that the house was being consumed by a fire in which all of us had perished already and which would soon not leave a single stone of the walls standing, but from which she would have ample time to escape without hurrying, so long as she got out of bed right away, must often have lingered among her hopes, since it combined, with the secondary advantages of allowing her to savour all her tenderness for us in an extended grief and to be the cause of stupefaction in the village as she led the funeral procession,
courageous and stricken, dying on her feet, that other much more precious advantage of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to lose, no possibility of an enervating hesitation, to go and spend the summer on her pretty farm, Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall. As no event of that sort had ever occurred, the outcome of which she would certainly contemplate when she was alone, absorbed in her innumerable games of patience (and which would have reduced her to despair from the first moment of its realization, from the first of those little unforeseen developments, the first word announcing the bad news, whose accent can never be forgotten afterwards, everything that bears the imprint of real death, so different from its logical, abstract possibility), she would from time to time resort to introducing into her life, to make it more interesting, imaginary incidents which she would follow with passion. She enjoyed suddenly pretending that Françoise was stealing from her, that she herself had been cunning enough to make sure of it, that she had caught her in the act; being in the habit, when she played cards alone, of playing both her own hand and the hand of her opponent, she would utter out loud to herself Françoise's embarrassed excuses and would answer them with so much fire and indignation that if one of us entered at that moment, we found her bathed in perspiration, her eyes sparkling, her false hair dislodged and showing her bald forehead. Françoise would perhaps sometimes hear from the next room mordant pieces of sarcasm that were addressed to her, the invention of which would not have relieved my aunt sufficiently if they had remained in a purely immaterial state and if by murmuring them half-aloud she had not given them more reality. Sometimes, even this ‘theatre in bed'
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was not enough for my aunt, she wanted to have her plays performed. And so, on a Sunday, all doors mysteriously closed, she would confide to Eulalie her doubts about Françoise's honesty, her intention of getting rid of her, and another time, to Françoise, her suspicions about the faithlessness of Eulalie, to whom the door would very soon be closed; a few days later, she would be disgusted with her confidant of the day before and once again consort with the traitor, though for the next performance the two of them would exchange roles yet again. But the suspicions that Eulalie was able at times to inspire in her amounted only to a
straw fire and died down quickly, for lack of fuel, since Eulalie did not live in the house. It was not the same for those that concerned Françoise, of whose presence under the same roof my aunt was perpetually conscious, though for fear of catching cold if she left her bed, she did not dare go down to the kitchen to verify whether they were well founded. Gradually her mind came to be occupied entirely by attempting to guess what, at each moment, Françoise could be doing and trying to hide from her. She would notice the most furtive movements of Françoise's features, a contradiction in something she said, a desire that she seemed to be concealing. And she would show Françoise that she had unmasked her, with a single word that made Françoise turn pale and that my aunt seemed to find a cruel amusement in driving deep into the heart of the unfortunate woman. And the following Sunday, a revelation of Eulalie's – like those discoveries that suddenly open an unsuspected field to a young science that has got into something of a rut – would prove to my aunt that her own suppositions were far short of the truth. ‘But Françoise ought to know that, now that you've given her a carriage. – Given her a carriage! my aunt would cry. – Oh, well, I don't know really. I thought, well, I saw her passing just a short time ago in a calash, proud as Artaban,
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going to the market at Roussainville. I thought it was Mme Octave who gave it to her.' And so by degrees Françoise and my aunt, like quarry and hunter, reached the point of constantly trying to anticipate each other's ruses. My mother was afraid Françoise would develop a real hatred for my aunt, who insulted her as brutally as she could. Certainly Françoise came more and more to pay an extraordinary attention to the least of my aunt's remarks, to the least of her gestures. When she had to ask her something, she would hesitate for a long time over how she should go about it. And when she had tendered her request, she would observe my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the look on her face what she thought and what she would decide. And so – while some artist who, reading the memoirs of the seventeenth century and wanting to be like the great King, thinks he will be making progress in that direction if he fabricates a genealogy for himself that traces his own descent from a historic family or if he carries on a correspondence with one of the current sovereigns of Europe is actually turning his
back on what he mistakenly sought in forms that were identical and consequently dead – an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness, saw, without ever thinking of Louis XIV, the most insignificant occupations of her day, those concerned with her rising, her lunch, her afternoon rest, acquire, because of their despotic singularity, some of the interest of what Saint-Simon called the ‘mechanics' of life at Versailles,
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and could also believe that her silences, a nuance of good humour or disdain in her features, were for Françoise the object of a commentary as passionate, as fearful as were the silence, the good humour, the disdain of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest lords, handed him a petition at the bend of an avenue at Versailles.

One Sunday when my aunt had had a visit from the curé and Eulalie at the same time and had afterwards rested, we all went up to say good evening to her, and Mama offered her her condolences on the bad luck that always brought her visitors at the same hour:

– I know that things turned out badly again this afternoon, Léonie,' she said to her gently, ‘you had all your company here at the same time.

Which my great-aunt interrupted with: ‘Too much of a good thing can do no harm…' because, ever since her daughter had become ill, she had believed it was her duty to cheer her up by consistently showing her the bright side of everything. But now my father spoke:

– I would like to take advantage, he said, of the fact that the whole family is together to tell you all about something without having to begin all over again with each of you separately. I'm afraid we've had a falling-out with Legrandin: he barely said hello to me this morning.

I did not stay to hear my father's story, because I had actually been with him after Mass when we met M. Legrandin, and I went down to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which diverted me every day like the news in the paper and excited me like the programme for some festivity. When M. Legrandin had passed near us as he was coming out of the church, walking by the side of a lady from a neighbouring château whom we knew only by sight, my father had greeted him in a way that was at once friendly and reserved, though we had not stopped; M. Legrandin had barely responded, with a
surprised look, as if he did not recognize us, and with that perspective in his gaze peculiar to people who do not want to be friendly and who, from the suddenly extended depths of their eyes, seem to perceive you at the end of an interminable road and at so great a distance that they confine themselves to addressing to you a minuscule nod in order to give it the proportions of your puppet-like dimensions.

Now the lady whom Legrandin was accompanying was a virtuous and esteemed person; it was quite out of the question that he was having an affair and embarrassed at being found out, and my father wondered how he might have annoyed Legrandin. ‘I would be especially sorry to know he is vexed,' said my father, ‘because of the fact that among all those people dressed up in their Sunday best there is something about him, with his little straight jacket, his loose tie, that is so uncontrived, so truly simple, an air of ingenuousness, almost, that is extremely likeable.' But the family council was unanimously of the opinion that my father was imagining things, or that Legrandin, at that particular moment, was absorbed in some other thought. And in fact my father's apprehension was dispelled the very next evening. As we were returning from a long walk, near the Pont-Vieux we saw Legrandin, who because of the holidays was staying in Combray for a few days. He came up to us with his hand outstretched: ‘My young bookworm, he asked me, do you know this line by Paul Desjardins:

Les bois sont déjà noirs, le ciel est encor bleu.
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Isn't that a fine rendering of this hour of the day? Perhaps you've never read Paul Desjardins. Read him, my child; today he is transforming himself, they tell me, into a sermonizing friar, but for a long time he was a limpid water-colourist…

Les bois sont déjà noirs, le ciel est encor bleu…

May the sky remain for ever blue for you, my young friend; and even at the hour which is now approaching for me, when the woods are dark already, when night is falling fast, you will console yourself as I do by looking up towards the sky.' He took a cigarette out of his
pocket, remained for a long time with his eyes on the horizon. ‘Good-bye, friends,' he said to us suddenly, and he left us.

At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what the menu was, dinner would already have been started, and Françoise, commanding the forces of nature, which were now her assistants, as in fairy plays where giants hire themselves out as cooks, would strike the coal, entrust the steam with some potatoes to cook and make the fire finish to perfection the culinary masterpieces first prepared in potters' vessels that ranged from great vats, casseroles, cauldrons and fishkettles to terrines for game, moulds for pastry and little jugs for cream, and included a complete collection of pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet – still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden-bed – with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.