Pedigree (37 page)

The gas-lamps had been alight for a long time when, one after another, the doors shut, and suddenly it was Sunday, the seven o'clock Mass, the smell of eggs and bacon in the kitchen, Mademoiselle Frida astonished by the prospect of the day before her, Mademoiselle Pauline to whom the house was being entrusted, the coming and going, the voices, and the excitement which would die down when the door had finally shut again and they were out in the empty street.

‘You haven't forgotten anything? You've put the ham in the bag?'

The tram. Roger managed to stay on the platform with his father, next to two anglers who were cluttered up with their equipment.

It was not yet ten o'clock and there they were, slowly climbing the long slope between two green hedges, with cow smells hanging in the air, Mademoiselle Frida, dressed in black and white with her boater flat on her head, holding herself as erect as in town and poking the dust with the tip of her parasol, and Désiré carrying not only their provisions, but also his jacket which he had just taken off.

‘Don't dawdle, Roger, keep walking.'

And they smiled as they looked back at the town behind them, and their breath burned their throats; for want of practice, they were rather out of breath.

I
T WAS
on 15 August 1908 that Désiré spent half the morning trying to send a kite up from the Piedboeufs' meadow, but if a gust of wind lifted the light contraption of red and green cotton, if hope finally relaxed the features of Roger who had to stand several yards away from his father, the air promptly closed up again and you could see nothing in the atmosphere which was humming with invisible insects except the hot circular waves which the sun was sending out like rings.

The day before, in the bluish twilight, Roger and his mother had been waiting, as they did every day, at the top of the Thiers des Grillons; and they had seen that Désiré, who was reading his paper as he climbed the hill, was carrying an oblong parcel. It was the dismantled kite: four fragile sticks, some cross-pieces, a piece of green cloth and one of red. What Roger had not known at the time was that his father had another surprise in store.

After supper, in Madame Laude's garden, nobody had thought of putting the boy to bed, in the room where he used to go to sleep with his window open to the stars and to the croaking of the frogs in the brickworks, and where the pale light of dawn brought the lowing of the cows on Halleux's farm.

A Désiré whose moustache was quivering with impatience bustled mysteriously to and fro. He could not wait until darkness had fallen completely: a firework exploded in the road, and a rocket soared into the sky to fall slowly to the ground in a fine shower of sparks.

Roger would never forget the three houses with their white walls growing indistinct in the dusk; the mound opposite and the hedge with the red berries; a solitary, twisted tree, at the foot of which he had recently dug his canary's grave; some silent groups of faceless figures, children who had come quietly from the pump crossroads; Désiré himself, as self-important as a stage-hand in a pantomime who can only just be glimpsed in the wings; the flame sputtering at the end of a rocket; and finally the real stars lighting up in the sky. A smell he had never known before invaded this corner of the countryside as it was transformed by the Bengal lights, and, when a rocket misfired, when the green stars went out too soon in the sky, Roger held his breath, so moved that he could not answer his mother.

‘Are you happy?'

He did not move, not daring to go forward or to turn round.

‘You're enjoying yourself? You aren't frightened?'

He wasn't frightened. And yet the creatures moving about and whispering in the shadows struck him as unfamiliar. He did not recognize either Madame Laude or the children in clogs from the other houses. A triple windmill gave Désiré a lot of trouble. One of the windmills went out too soon and he struggled to start it up again, bending double so as not to block the light. When he finally came back towards his son, Roger looked at him differently from before, rather as if he were not his father.

He walked in his sleep that night.

‘You see, Désiré, he's too sensitive.'

And the next day, he was hunting around on the road, to which the sunlight had restored its familiar appearance, for the pale blue tubes of the rockets and the twisted wires which still smelled of gunpowder, when he caught sight of his father, in his shirt-sleeves, busy assembling the kite in the Piedboeufs' meadow.

That same day, in a bigger meadow, two miles from Nevers, thousands of people were gathering together who had come by road from all points of the horizon, in carts, by motor-car and on foot. Fences had been put up and canvas stretched across stakes in the ground to prevent those who had not paid from seeing into the enclosure. In spite of that, there were more people outside the meadow than there were inside the barriers, families were picnicking on the grass, horses were grazing, and hawkers in white jackets were selling lemonade, liquorice water and scones.

It was hot. There were some youths perched on the fences with their legs dangling, and others were defending the top of a grassy mound or the branches of a walnut-tree as fiercely as you would defend your seat in a theatre.

For the first time in this part of France, some aeroplanes were going to give a flying display. The biplanes with their canvas wings and fragile fuselages were there, at the edge of the ground, surrounded by a few men who were fussing around and looking inquiringly at the sky where two little white clouds were hanging.

Nevers station had never been as empty as it was that morning when the train from Paris came in and the coaches moved slowly by; Félicien Miette was almost alone on the sunny platform where he had been pacing up and down for half an hour. Tense and nervous, he gazed fixedly at the few doors which opened and at the travellers picking up their suitcases and looking for the way out.

Suddenly he turned round. Isabelle was there, smiling at him, very much herself, although he had not seen her getting out of her third-class compartment.

He felt unreasonably furious at not having seen her sooner, among the thinly scattered silhouettes, furious at having given a start, at having failed to understand straight away why she was alone, at having shown it, at behaving in such an unnatural, nervous way in front of her, when after all he was expecting her, and last of all at seeing her just as she was bound to be, dressed in the usual way, calm and simple, with a gleam of affectionate mockery in her eyes.

He did not even think of kissing her.

‘What's the matter, my love?'

He looked past her, worried, puzzled, and to put an end to his anguish she explained:

‘My father had an attack last night. He wanted to send you a telegram. I insisted on coming, and Mother sighed:

‘ “When they've got to that point, Joseph!”'

He asked in a flat voice:

‘You haven't any luggage?'

‘What for, seeing that I'm going back tonight?'

He was going to relax. He relaxed. But he was upset, and for a moment he nearly started crying for no particular reason.

‘Come along.'

Already, while she was looking for her ticket in her bag, he kissed her, and she could feel him trembling; outside, he put his arm round her waist, as he used to do in Paris, when, in the evening, they walked along the deserted embankments.

They had been apart for only a month. For a month he had written her up to three letters a day, page after page covered with closely written lines, and yet it was taking him some time to get to know her again, and he walked along in silence, looking at the ground.

He knew that with her first glance she had taken everything in, his hair which he had allowed to grow longer, something which made him look thinner—he had in fact lost weight—the loosely tied cravat and the wide-brimmed hat. His fingers linked with Isabelle's fingers, and their two bodies leaning towards one another formed a single shadow on the pavement.

She asked gently:

‘Are you happy?'

Roger Mamelin's mother had asked the same question, the previous evening, during the firework display, and the boy had made no answer. Félicien Miette, for his part, just increased the pressure of his fingers. He had been so afraid, just now, unreasonably afraid, that she would have changed, that she would have stopped loving him, and the funny thing was that he had been even more afraid when he had not seen her parents who were supposed to be coming with her.

‘Poor Papa! I do believe that he won't be easy in his mind until we're married.'

Then, as at last it occurred to her to look around her, in the shade of the Avenue de la République lined with striped awnings, she asked:

‘Is it far?'

He hesitated and frowned, and his features became sharper, as they always did when he fell a prey to his evil thoughts.

‘No. Five minutes' walk. Do you love me, Isabelle?'

‘Already?'

How often had he asked her that question, sometimes when they had been apart for scarcely an hour?

‘Answer me!'

‘And what if I said no?'

She could not even allow herself that innocent jest without his growing as tense as a bowstring.

‘Get along with you, you big silly!'

‘You haven't any regrets?'

‘No.'

‘You're sure you haven't any regrets, any regrets at all, that you never will have any?'

‘I'm quite sure.'

‘All the same …'

She could feel that he was turning bitter, and knew that a sudden, sharp, painful violence, springing from the very depths of his being, would follow on that bitterness; and as they walked along, holding each other round the waist, with people turning round to look at them, she murmured:

‘Be quiet.'

He could not understand why anybody should love him. There were moments when he refused to believe that it was possible, when he hated Isabelle for deceiving him and looked at her with wild eyes.

‘Tell me about your paper,' she said.

‘Not now.'

It was about them that he always had to talk, without ever exhausting the subject, the subject of him and her, the subject of their love. How many times had he tried to elucidate the same mystery?

‘The first evening, after the Conservatoire, in that back-street, when I fell on you like a madman…'

‘Well?'

‘You weren't in love with me!'

He stated it as a fact. She in her turn declared:

‘Yes, I was!'

‘It's impossible. You couldn't have been in love with me, yet you let me take you in my arms. If it had been any other man…'

‘No!'

‘When I told you all that I'd done…'

‘Be quiet.'

‘You see!'

‘No, my poor love …'

He was ashamed of the past and he would go on cheating, just as he was cheating in taking her to that house whose key he kept turning over and over in his pocket.

‘It's here that you live?'

A town dwelling which looked like a country dwelling, a white house with green shutters and boundary-stones at both corners, where they found silence, cool shadows, the intimate smell of a household, children's toys in the hall and fishing tackle behind the door. It was next to a stone bridge and a stream whose limpid water flowed over the flattened grass before losing itself in the Nièvre. The greengrocer in the shop on the other side of the road watched them go in and said something about them to her customer.

‘Come along.'

The steps of the polished staircase creaked under their feet. The window of the room with the mahogany bed was open, but Félicien Miette, heedless of everything, had already taken Isabelle in his arms, and fiercely, spitefully, he crushed his lips against hers as if he wanted to suffocate her.

She gently disengaged herself and got her breath back, looking over his shoulder at the sunny rectangle of the window.

‘There's somebody watching us.'

He felt cross with her for having noticed the patch made by an old woman's face behind the window-panes opposite.

‘Close the shutters, at least!'

He obeyed her irritably, then looked at her, in the room which was now striped with light and shade.

‘What's the matter?' she asked.

‘You don't know? You don't want anything?'

‘Yes, I do.'

It was not so much her flesh that he wanted, or sensual pleasure, as to feel that she was his, more so all the time, so much his that nothing and nobody could ever make them two distinct individuals again. He clasped her to him like somebody attempting the impossible, and when he finally lay still in the ravaged bed he felt sad, she knew that, she knew him so well, she who lay looking with tender astonishment at his thin body, the body of an unfinished man.

It was he who, in a suspicious mood, broke the silence.

‘What are you thinking about?'

‘About us. You still haven't told me anything.'

And if he did tell her everything, absolutely everything, she would be frightened, or indignant, or disgusted; she would get dressed with abrupt gestures and go off for ever, without a word or a look.

All the same, he wanted to talk. Often he was tortured by the urge to confess everything to her, perhaps even to tell her more than there was, to exaggerate. She thought that she knew him because he had told her about his hideous youth and the deed he had committed to put an end to it all.

She knew nothing. The truth about the five hundred francs, for instance? Every time he thought about it his forehead broke out in an unhealthy sweat. Sometimes, at night, he tossed about in his bed without being able to banish that memory. He recalled the place, at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, just behind the eternal mass of Notre-Dame, where he had announced one evening:

‘I've received the money-order.'

They had walked along in silence, both too nervous to be pleased.