The Catalans: A Novel (14 page)

“Ah, there you are, Alain,” he said. “I was about to come—I should like you to meet Madeleine.”

There was the triangle; Xavier at the apex, Madeleine on his left at the bottom of the room, Alain on his right still by the door; and the lines of consciousness and regard made the three busy sides of the figure. Xavier was the most self-possessed; precise, cold-showered, well-shaved; and he was in his own room. But even Xavier was in some degree of flurry, and there was a hint of color in his gray face, a certain empressement in his movements that showed he was not entirely at his ease. Alain, confused by having the door suddenly opened on him, felt as uncomfortable as if he had been found listening at the keyhole. This was not the girl he had seen in the town some time ago, but another, and far, far prettier; she was perhaps the prettiest creature he had ever seen, for a European, and now that she was standing up at her desk, a little awkwardly because of the nearness of her chair to the desk, and a little awkwardly because she was not sure whether she should stand up, a blush mounted in her cheeks: she looked so agreeable, so very agreeable, that Alain smiled with pleasure, and when they shook hands he said, with unwonted cordiality, that it was a long time since he had seen her. It was an inept remark, so far as the words were concerned, and untrue in suggestion, but it conveyed, and it was meant to convey, civility, kindliness, and even approbation.

For a moment nobody said anything more, and in the silence Alain regretted his bristly face: his unshaved jaw rasped under his hand. Then Xavier said that Madeleine was very kindly finishing the report on Aspullabalitris’ vineyard; she was now on the last page, and from what was already done Alain would be able to judge the effect of the new culture. He passed the sheets to Alain and said, “I thought you would like to see this before we go up there.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Alain, sitting down. “Thank you very much.” He glanced down the column of figures, but he could hardly bring his attention to bear, and before he had grasped even their general significance Xavier spoke again. He was standing behind Madeleine as she finished her page, and he said, “I really do not know how we managed with these tabulated accounts before Madeleine was kind enough to come and help us out.” As he spoke he put his hand on her shoulder, and Alain saw the embarrassed smile on her face turn to something a little more forced, a smile still, held by politeness, but more artificial now and forced; and he saw her shoulder give to avoid the contact. It moved only enough to hint at the gesture of withdrawal before she held it still, but even that very small movement was enough to put an unnaturalness into the poise of her body, and now she had an air of constraint, almost of fixed rigidity.

Alain looked at Xavier, but there seemed to be no awareness on his face: no, he went on talking about the benefits of office machinery, with an animated, unusually cheerful expression; and apparently without thinking about it he left his hand there.

“I thought,” said Xavier, when the typing was done, “I thought that we would have our lunch up at Puig d’en Calbo. We will walk up by the chapel and Aspullabalitris will bring the basket up by the road in his cart.”

If the girl—it was difficult to think of her as a married woman—had not been there Alain would have protested: it was a long way to the Puig d’en Calbo, a very long way and a steep and dusty way. But he weakly agreed, with the proviso that he must be allowed time to fulfill his promise to visit Aunt Margot, and after a few haphazard remarks they parted, Xavier to the kitchen and Alain to his room for his shoes.

“So that is how it is,” he said, sitting on the edge of his bed, holding a shoe in his hand. “So that is how it is.”

“Or is it?” putting on his second shoe and standing up.

“GOOD MORNING, ALAIN,”
she said, kissing him on both cheeks; then “Dear me, you look very poorly, Alain; are you quite well? I could make you a tisane in no time at all. I am sure a nice tisane would do you good.”

“No, no, I am quite well, thank you very much. I did not get any sleep last night, that’s all.”

“Oh, Alain, I hope you did not go to those dreadful creatures in Port-Vendres?” Once, long ago, Alain’s youthful curiosity had taken him to the bawdyhouse there, and he had been seen coming out by his Uncle Gaston, Aunt Margot’s late husband.

“No,” he answered seriously. “Xavier and I sat up in the garden, talking. You know, Aunt Margot, we have no earthly right to interfere; not the least right in the world.”

“Come and sit down, and tell me all about it. I am longing to know what he said.”

“Well, I am afraid I cannot tell you all that: in the first place it would take hours and hours, and in the second it was not talk that one could decently pass on.”

“I see. But come into the morning room anyway, and I will make us a pot of coffee. You would like some coffee, wouldn’t you, Alain?”

She had led the way into the quiet, sunny room; she had made the coffee herself, and now the empty cups were cold on the little table.

“. .
. so you see, I cannot range myself on the family’s side against him,” said Alain. “I told you, did I not, that I should probably turn out a disappointing ally?”

“Oh, do not say that; you are not disappointing at all. But how he must have suffered, poor fellow: he must have suffered dreadfully.”

“I am afraid he must.”

“He should have gone to Father Aurillac. I wonder why he did not go to Father Aurillac.” She reflected for some minutes and then said, “Alain, you will probably think me an unfeeling old woman, but don’t you think, as a friend, you ought to advise him to take a blue pill and keep to a low diet? Then some mineral waters like Evian or Boulou for the liver?”

“Oh,” said Alain, a little staggered, “that is a very dampening view of it.” He turned it over in his mind, and said, “But it is wonderful what a pill will do, I must admit. Wonderful and disheartening, the link between one’s liver and one’s mind.”

“Why disheartening?”

“Because one likes to think of oneself as a free agent.”

“I am sure, Alain, that all the oil in the cooking down here, and the heavy red wine, is what makes the people so violent, miserable, and irreligious. Have you never noticed that churchgoing and white wine or cider and cooking in butter go together?”

“Well, if he ever consults me, I will tell him what you say. But seriously, Aunt Margot, that is not all that is wrong with Xavier. I wish I were better at conveying the feeling of a conversation: if I had managed to convey even a tenth of the profound sincerity—the shocking . . .” His voice died away.

“No. I am sure that that is not all that is wrong. Oh, I would not suggest that for a moment; though I have no doubt that it has more to do with it than some people might imagine.”

“Aunt Margot, if you had heard Xavier last night, as I heard him, you would not speak lightly about it.”

“Oh Alain, how can you be so unkind? I was
not
speaking lightly: I just said that—but I will not say any more about it, if it angers you.”

There was a short silence, and she said, “But seriously, and very seriously, Alain, I am deeply sorry for Xavier, very deeply sorry for him indeed. I understand something of what he is suffering from, I think. I knew his father and his grandfather.” She hesitated, patted Alain on the knee, and said, “I do not include you, my dear, when I say that the Roiges are a hard, unaffectionate family; but they are, indeed, and sometimes, living among them, I wonder whether I have grown like them. I do not say that they have not all kinds of virtues: but they are not an affectionate family. Xavier’s grandfather was my father-in-law, of course, and I knew him very well: he was a tyrant. Your Uncle Gaston went in fear of him to the end of his life. He was a very able man, no one could deny it, but he had a wicked, wicked temper, and everyone in the family knew it. Gaston used to tell me stories about their life as children—so hard and bullying and domineering: no love in the house at all, it seemed. You know how much brutal authority a peasant has over his family. It must have been very much like that, only the little peasant children escape quite soon: here in Saint-Féliu with old Monsieur Roig mayor and deputy there was nowhere for them to escape, and he held on to them all to the end of his days. He used to badger his eldest son worst, and I remember dreadful scenes even when Hercule was a gray-haired man.

“And then I saw the whole thing repeated again with Hercule and Xavier. There seemed to be no tenderness in Hercule, none at all. He was quite unloving, at least as far as his son was concerned: but he would not leave him alone, whatever the boy did. It is a dreadful thing to say, but I think it was as good a day for Xavier when his father died as it had been for Hercule when
his
father died.

“And then it was the same with Dédé. Xavier was easily the most intelligent of the three, you could see that very early; but he has made a worse mess of his son than either his father or his grandfather did. He had the poorest of material to work upon, it is true: but it was pitiable to see the poor, wretched little boy . . . Oh it is miserable to think of it, Alain, generation after generation of unhappiness. Old M. Roig was an unhappy, discontented old man, and Hercule, except when he was in court or at some political meeting, was sour, bitter, harsh, and overbearing: I do not think that either of
them
knew why they were miserable, but Xavier is more intelligent. Yet he has no more sense than to think it can be cured by marrying this girl.

“Poor Xavier. Poor fellow. I am sure that that is what it means in the Bible when it says ‘suffering for the sins of your fathers.’ And I am sure that you must be loving, not only to save your soul, but to avoid entailing misery on the generations—how many generations?”

They sat quietly together, each thinking a great way off. Alain had in his mind the accusation against his family: it was true, he reflected, they were an unaffectionate lot. They hung together, they were fiercely clannish; they were loyal; but they were unaffectionate. There was very little tenderness in their lives: they admired efficiency and success: but they were unaffectionate. Côme and Renée, Aunt Ursule and Uncle Gaudérique after all these years, Aunt Marinette, Yvonne and her children: there was that peasant hardness remaining, running through the generations. The word “unaffectionate” haunted him, and he wondered how much it applied to himself. He had a fair number of friends, but did he really care whether he saw any of them again? And his family? With Xavier, for example, was his feeling of concern and disquiet caused by affection? No: probably it was not. There was, even now, something repellent about Xavier: or if repellent were too strong a word, at least something that prevented the closeness of friendship.

There was Aunt Margot, of course: he was certainly very fond of her; and Martin in Hanoi. But the others . . .

“These sort of marriages never work,” said Aunt Margot,
suddenly.

“Why not?”

“Haven’t you always seen that they never work?”

“I cannot say that I have. I do not remember ever having seen one.”

“Of course, you see very little of life, living there at the back of beyond. Sometimes, Alain—you must not be cross—it is almost like talking to a girl straight from the convent. You have been shut away there among your black men, and you have the same romantic ideas and ignorance of the world. But you have seen a European marry a native, have you not?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have no doubt the same thing happens. A few weeks of bliss, then the native family starts presuming, the other Europeans’ unkindness begins to be felt, and eventually there are coffee-colored children, neither one thing nor another, and everybody is miserable.”

“Oh but come, Aunt Margot, there is no parallel at all. You talk as if we were Bourbons or Hapsburgs or something very grand. But you know that we are only middling bourgeois: in fact this is the first generation to suspect that the word bourgeois is perhaps something less than a compliment. The Fajals are not perceptibly different from us in any way, and .
. .”

“Oh, you are not going to start your piece on democracy again, are you, Alain? Of course, I know one has to say all kinds of fine things in public, but no one really believes it, do they? Except the lower classes. They are very good people, often, astonishingly good when you consider what kind of lives they lead, but it is just hypocritical nonsense to pretend that they are not brutish, insensitive, gross, and terribly, terribly limited. There is just as much difference between a man of an educated family that has had money for two or three generations and a laborer as there is between a white man and one of your Hottentots, as anyone knows who has lived or worked among them.”

“Is Madeleine a Hottentot?”

“No. But her relations are: and staying here, Xavier would of necessity marry them all. Then think of this, Alain: whatever he may say Xavier values his position very much. A man of his intelligence does not slave away day and night to build up something without valuing it. It will crumble away. You must see that it will. And then he will blame the girl.”