The Catalans: A Novel (15 page)

“Well, if that is all your objection—”

“But it is not, Alain. If it were, it would just be a dreadful mésalliance and that would be all, but the point is that Xavier does not really want to marry her at all, not
marry
her. He must know that it is madness, at the back of his mind. It is perfectly natural for any middle-aged man to want a very good-looking young woman, and if he is a good man he can easily make himself believe that it is not the young woman he wants at all, but some much grander kind of thing. With Xavier it is this plan of marriage and affection: with my own dear Gaston it was what he called escape from the stifling fetters (or was it mattress?) of provincial life; and with a man I knew long ago—such an attractive man—it was the necessity of a wider, deeper, more poetic experience of life. Then there was the poor archdeacon, you remember, who had worked it all out as a kind of mystical duty—part of a great scheme of love and forgiveness. They had to hurry him away to a monastery.”

Alain was already standing up. “You must forgive me, my dear aunt,” he said, “but I have an appointment with Xavier in three minutes, and you know what he is like if one is late.”

“You will have to run, Alain. Where is your hat? You did not come without a hat? You are dreadfully imprudent, Alain. You should have two or three wives to look after you, like a Monsoon. Here, take this one. It was Gaston’s. You
must
protect your head from the sun.”

THE ROAD WAS LONG
, of course: it always had been long, but never had it been quite so long, so excessively, unnecessarily long. Their way was the path that led out from the town along the dried-up river-bed; sometimes it was the river-bed itself, rough with loose and shifting stones, paved with old tins and
cardboard boxes, and sometimes it was a narrow path by the
side.

Why did people bring buckets here, buckets with no bottoms? And while kittens certainly had to be destroyed, who in Saint-Féliu was so eccentric as to bring their corpses up the river-bed a quarter of a mile from the town? It was not a solitary eccentric, either: there must be at least three. The single espadrille. France was littered with single espadrilles, shoes, boots, sandals; occasionally you would find pairs. But in either case they were always a great way from the nearest village or farm, and always they evoked the image of a man hobbling back from some strangely inaccessible point, partially or wholly barefoot. Yet one never met these people. Umbrellas; broken glass; something from which Alain quickly averted his eyes; an iron bedstead; a hat. Some curs from the village, reveling.

This is a fine walk, he thought, looking resentfully at Xavier’s straight back; a fine walk, with the putrid dust rising in clouds from their feet.

Xavier was saying how incomprehensible people were: they had a regular collection of rubbish; there were laws to forbid them encumbering the earth with their ordures; yet still they came far out of the town and threw their dirt abroad: it was inconsiderate, undesirable, and above all grossly unhygienic. He delivered these remarks over his shoulder to Alain, and Alain, though he agreed with them all, could not but feel suddenly and strongly on the side of individual liberty, the right of behaving like a mandrill if one chose. He said, in a dogmatic and authoritative voice, that the sun was a better disinfector than anything known to man, and that the danger from this kind of thing was much exaggerated.

He trod on the edge of an iron barrel-hoop; it shot up and struck him on the shin. The blow was exquisitely painful, but that was the least: he whipped up his torn trouser-leg, thinking with hurried alarm of the rusty metal edge and the couch of filth where it had lain. One might have supposed the direct and timely intervention of a minor god. But although the cloth was torn the skin was not: it had been a warning, not a punishment.

Xavier had not noticed at first that Alain was no longer with him, but now he stopped and stood waiting.

“You should look where you are going,” he said, as Alain came up. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“No.”

“You are limping.”

“No I am not.”

Xavier raised his eyebrows, and they went on in silence. The road mounted from the river-bed: it was now a broad path running along the edge of an olive grove, and now the last of the rubbish was left behind. Alain began to feel ashamed of his ill-temper and he tried to think of something conciliating to say. They were walking along the best part of the valley now: on their left hand were the olives, an ancient grove on a light fawn ground of withered grass and naked earth, black, rent, and knotted trunks under a cloud of green and silver; and on their right the stream, running low, unseen but audible among the deep green. On either side the walls of the valley ran up in long tiers, one after another, without a single break of scrub or uncultivated land: it was all a dark green now—no earth to be seen between the vines—except that near at hand the gold and red and purple of the grapes showed clear between the leaves.

As the valley ran away from the town, straight inland toward the higher hills, it grew narrower, its sides steeper, and there, in the farther half where the vineyards were terraced one above another in high, short steps, there were many holdings that had never been replanted after the great plague of the 1860’s, and they lay like different colored cloths on the side of the hill, always rectangular; some had been replanted with olives or cork oaks, but for the most part the cork oaks were confined to the upper valley, and these lower woods had an intrusive air. Then, in the upper part of the valley again, the part toward which they were walking, there were a few runs of the hillside that never had been planted—too stony, too much hidden from the sun—and there among the thyme and the asphodel stood the tall and lovely pines. Surely among all that, and the mountains beyond, he could find something to say? All that ancient, labored earth, terraced and piled up, turned and turned again since Grecian days. Yet how obstinately a natural remark evaded him. Ordinarily he would have been content to walk along in silence if he had nothing to say, perfectly content, but this was a special case.

“Why is it, do you suppose, that fields and vineyards are always rectangular?” he said at last. “All over the world they are square; never round, not even triangular or hexagonal. It is as if men, even the most primitive, had a natural love for the right angle and the straight line. Yet coins, on the other hand, are all round.”

They had just turned off the main path when Alain uttered this remark: they had turned off right-handed up the steep and rocky Cami d’en Jourda, a path some three feet wide, worn deep into the soft rock of the hillside, a path of immense antiquity that led over the crest to the high vineyard they were to visit. It was a scrambling, irregular path; they had to walk in single file again, and the failure of Alain’s overture passed almost unnoticed.

Toiling up behind Xavier (Xavier had said no more than the word “Convenience”), Alain said to himself “Well, the onus is on you now. I have done my duty,” and he thought in a vague and
desultory manner about rectangular fields until they reached the
top.

THE LAST PART
of the hill had been a cruel grind, he reflected, as he sat with his back to a tree. He had come to feel the most acute dislike for the springing, eagerly proceeding back of the man in front of him; a dislike mingled with surly admiration. However, that was over now, and so was the long colloquy with Aspullabalitris: so was the enormous picnic. The carcass of the chicken alone remained, flecked with a crumb or two of aspic; one green leaf showed where the salad had been, and two empty bottles lay on their sides by the leaf. They had finished all the cheese and they had eaten the peaches: now they sat in the shade, silent and motionless, while the heat of the day shimmered over the hillside.

They were on their own property now: as they sat there with their backs to the wood, looking out over the sea, the land which ran down from their feet to the town was speckled all over with their vineyards. The cork oak grove behind and the broad expanse of trim, newly reclaimed vineyard immediately below were Alain’s. Then came a stretch of garrigue that belonged to Aunt Margot: at the moment it carried nothing but a crop of oleasters, prickly scrub-oak, false lavender, and Spanish broom, but soon they would start clearing the terraces again, and next year or the year after it would look as clean as Alain’s; the lines of the half-obliterated terraces would show hard and clear on the hill again, horizontal contours to accentuate its curve and swell, and on the clean, shaley earth there would be the precise rows of young vines, as neat and formal as embroidery. Beyond that, on the other side of the long and winding road, there were the rich old vineyards that had come into the family when Côme married Renée Py, and then to the right of them there was Xavier’s land of the Puig d’en Calbo. There the vines ended in the olive trees of the Sorède d’en Calbo, family property again—a share of it was Alain’s—and from the end of the long grove it was only a jump to the flat, indifferent vineyards of La Vail, which belonged to Aunt Marinette: and that in its turn did not end before the wall of the town itself. If a man chose to scramble and go a long way round he could reach Saint-Féliu without stepping off land that belonged to a Roig. And that was not all; there were other vineyards away from these, little parcels of land that had come into the market from time to time during the last seventy or eighty years.

Alain’s gaze stayed on the town for a moment, the pink, tight mass, all roofs from this height, and then back to the Puig d’en Calbo, a rising knob of ground, a little hill, but lower than where they were sitting, and seen from above it had something of the look of an aerial photograph.

“What are you planting down there, Xavier?” he asked, cocking his eye on a square of brown among the blue-green of the vines.

“Maccabeu,” replied Xavier, after a pause. “Maccabeu and a few rows of Grenache.”

Alain digested this in silence, and then he said, “I like that palm tree, just to the right, on the Fajals’ land. It was always fun to vendange there. I suppose we shall go there this year?”

“Yes, of course. Why should we not?”

There was a small blue figure down by the palm tree: it was almost certainly Jean Pou-naou, Madeleine’s father. Alain made no comment, but in a little while he passed Xavier a cigar. When they were alight, and the blue smoke was drifting through the trees, he said, “As we were coming up the side I was thinking about fields and land in general, and my conscience began to trouble me about the amount of property we own here. It seemed to me that land, above everything, belongs morally to the man who works on it. Aspullabalitris, for example: he and his people have worked the big vineyard and the two over the other side these fifty years and more: yet we own the land and they do not—never will, however long they go on working it. He knows every stock in each of them, no doubt: I cannot even tell for certain where the Cami Real land stops or where it begins. It looked very bad to me as we came up, I assure you, and I was not at all pleased with the idea of meeting Aspullabalitris’ eye. But that was before lunch. It is truly wonderful how the face of the world changes with lunch. Now, well fed—very well fed—and at rest in the shade, I can look upon my agitation as the naive sentimentalities of a beginner in politics: and now, smoking my cigar, I can approve of myself, not merely as a capitalist landowner but as Aspullabalitris’ benefactor.”

“Yes. Yes, no doubt,” said Xavier, who had been paying no attention. “Alain, I want to revert to our last night’s talk, if you do not find it too .
. .”

Alain made a consenting murmur and Xavier continued, “I am not at all happy, in the first place, about the picture I have given of myself—I begin with the less important point, you see. I do not want to gain your sympathy under false pretenses, and it is possible that I have represented myself as being in a worse state than I am. For example, I do not know whether I made it clear that these last years of biting awareness do not represent my life for all the time between Georgette’s death and now: perhaps I should have stressed the fact that I had long periods of dull resignation—between finishing with Dédé and the outbreak of war, for instance, and in the Oflag—and of absorption in my everyday affairs. And if I have given an impression of complete emotional paralysis, it is exaggerated: I always did retain as strong an aesthetic sense as I ever had—not that it was ever very strong: I have never pretended to taste, nor to musical raptures—and a kind of sentimentality, I hardly know how to define it—” (It is wonderful, thought Alain, how he can lay himself open like this and still in some way appear to retain the upper hand.)—“a feeling of poignancy, or rather
for
poignancy. A feeling for the poignancy of a situation, I mean, rather than any pity for the people themselves in it. But I am probably being overscrupulous and refining the point when there is no need: and in all events, this picture of my mind, accurate or inaccurate, is not really very important, because it is a picture of something that no longer exists—no longer exists, thank God. It was a picture that I was trying to make clear to you so that you should really be able to understand what is going on now, and why I am behaving in a manner that the family considers—how does it consider my conduct, Alain?”