The Catalans: A Novel (22 page)

Would he have been deceived if he had not seen Marcel? For Marcel had supplied Francisco with his attitude, and Marcel had assured Francisco that his one paying line was to remain the simple, wide-eyed fisherman. Marcel had not been sure that his advice had sunk in: he had told Alain, with some vexation, that Francisco had for some time opposed his wishes, had prated about “integrity,” had covertly gone on painting in a manner as un-primitive as he could manage; and he feared that once Francisco was away from his immediate influence he might very well continue in this disastrous way. “Disastrous,” he had repeated angrily, for he had a real affection for Francisco, and he wished to put him on the right road. Privately, of course, Marcel thought the pursuit of any of the arts ridiculous for a man, allowable only if the pursuit were undertaken with the intent of diddling the art snobs: for Marcel did not believe that any sane man gave a damn for painting, nor for sculpture, music, or poetry, and that those who pretended to were either fools or were trying to make something out of it.

Would he have been deceived if he had not seen Marcel? It was difficult to say, and indeed it was a useless speculation, because having seen Marcel, and having stripped Marcel naked, he could not be deceived by hearing Marcel’s words all over again, uttered seriously now from an ingenuous countenance. It was strange to hear them repeated, occasionally distorted but generally exact enough, but with the ludicrous difference of stress: the difference between the violent cynicism of Marcel’s voice, aping the phrases that were to pierce the bourgeois hide to the soft marshmallow vulgar heart within, and the solemn, earnest tones of Francisco saying the self-same words. Alain had heard them twice, once as it were an accomplice, the second time as the legitimate audience: the effect was to take a great deal of the humanity away from the second speaker and to give him the strange, disturbing air of an automaton.

And yet what did it all prove? Did it prove anything more than that Francisco had been very much too much influenced in his vocabulary by an older man who was, in his eyes, a considerable writer and a man of great abilities? Could not his painting still be perfectly valid?

Alain looked carefully at the pictures Francisco showed him. He looked very carefully, and as objectively as he was able: apart from the primary necessity of piercing through the painting to the painter, there was the fact that Alain was going to have to buy one of these canvases, and he felt that he might as well have something that he would like. But try as he would, he could not see anything much in them. There was a certain talent, and the color was effective enough sometimes; but there was so much gesticulation, so much emphasis, so much literature. They were
not very convincing. It would have been difficult, very difficult for them to have made a convincing show in the circumstances: Alain acknowledged it and made a great allowance for his foreknowledge, his kind of moral eavesdropping, but even so he grew more and more oppressed by his certainty, his ever-increasing certainty, that they were based in affectation, that they were slick, pretentious, and above all that they were dull, dull, dull.

Francisco was pleased with them, however. His voluble explanations and the exertion of bringing them out and putting them on the easel made him sweat: the atmosphere that he created reinforced his self-esteem, and his face shone—shone a little too greasily, in Alain’s opinion. But by this time it was clear enough to Alain that he did not like Francisco, and that he never could like him.

And yet again, what did the painting matter? A very good man could be a wretched painter, and certainly a very good painter could be a miserable, vaunting failure as a man. It was absurd (however tempting) to make an equation of moral and artistic worth.

But studied insincerity in painting? It was a kind of forgery to which a man would have to shape his whole life, was it not? In that case the falsity would run clean through: the man would be lost, drowned in his own pose. This was not a case of technical ineptitude, nor of aesthetic insensitivity, nor even of vulgarity of soul: no, although all those entered into it, they were nothing compared with the conscious forgery.

Drowned, gone for ever under his own pose, extinguished, a man would be, after such a course. Or at least, if he were not quite lost, as Marcel for example was not lost, then he would have to have a little secret inner life, where he could live with some truth to himself. But that was not the way Francisco was made, surely?

This much was clear. Francisco was a sentimental; that is to say, he could be as hard as nails when he chose, but when he was confronted with a set “pathetic” situation, he dissolved. When Alain, forcing himself to the task, spoke of Madeleine solitary, nagged, mocked, and deserted, Francisco wept like a woman at a cinema. But it was equally clear that this susceptibility to simplified and dramatic situations had involved him hopelessly: it was clear too that he could not resist gestures, gestures of the grander kind, those that involve leaving all, eternal renunciation, perpetual fidelity. Involved hopelessly. He had already “left all” for the middle-aged cinema actress, and then for the fat young woman: he had eternally renounced a great many people and things, and now he was being perpetually faithful to three women at once and presumably to his art as well.

But would the involvement have remained quite so hopeless if Alain had mentioned the establishment, the money settlement? Alain had plowed on to the end, unwilling to leave anything unsaid that he felt he ought to say—this although he was by now convinced of the inutility of his visit—but he had not mentioned the money. He might have come to it in the end if he had not gradually become aware that Francisco was enjoying all this, that the fellow’s vanity was charmed by the idea of broken hearts behind him, and that Francisco was pumping him for details that would flatter his conceit.

Alain had gone on out of a kind of obstinacy, and, it must be said, out of stupidity, for he knew very well that although he went on talking his reason for being in that room, that horrible underground room, lit by the unshaded glare of the daylight lamp, had come to an end, and that all he had to do was to pay for his picture and go away. Yet he had stayed a good half-hour after he knew that it was hopeless, after he knew that he was deeply convinced that this man had no integrity left, that he was selfish to the ultimate degree, that he was shallow, callous, and a fraud, and that his only remaining quality was a kind of flabby charm. He was no longer concerned with the painting, true or false: for him the great fact was that buying this fellow back would be an impossible solution for Madeleine. Better, far better, to abandon her to
X
avier.

“The beefy, wicked lout,” he exclaimed in anger; and pressing on the accelerator to escape from the thought of the past he made the big car run faster and faster down the white road between the trees.

CHAPTER EIGHT

B
Y ELEVEN O’CLOCK
the great heat of the day had begun: in the enclosed valley the sun beat down from its height on to the sloping vineyards, tilted to receive its power, and the heat reverberated from the stone walls, the stony paths, and the crumbling, powdery earth that lay naked between the newer vines. Higher up on either slope, beyond the terraced vineyards, the hills were brown, light khaki brown, desiccated and parched beyond description; the bare soil that stood between the crackling, withered scrub blew up in acrid clouds whenever the breeze stirred over it. There had been no rain now for seven weeks, and it was hardly conceivable that in the spring those same higher grounds had been green, a brilliant living green, and that the goatherds had been afraid to let their flocks go up there, for fear of gorging.

From the too-perfect sky, from the scorched and sun-drenched hills behind, and from the arid slopes above, the eye fell with gratitude to the vines: everywhere, on all the unnumbered terraces, there were the vines; and among the vines the vendangeurs, moving among the dark green rows; for now the grapes were ripe, and now the families were assembled, friends, cousins from as far as Marseilles and Toulouse, relations to the farthest point of kin. For them the vendange was a feast, a ritual, a time of strange excitement, more intense by far than the harvest of the corn in the north, more religious.

These hillside vendanges were entirely different from the vendanges in the plains, where the enormous, dull, flat vineyards stretched in precise commercial rectangles to the horizon, and where the pickers, hired troops from the towns and mountain villages, labored under the driving of an overseer: here there was no hired labor, here there were no flat rectangles, for here the vineyards, cut by the loving hands of the generations, climbed in mad shapes up to the limit of fertility, hand-planted in basketfuls of carried earth, hand-grafted, hand-hoed; the evidence of hands, the uninterrupted generations for how many hundred years? They had found the pieces of a jar from Samos when they dug to enlarge the well some twenty years ago. Long enough, at all events, to have changed the face of nature, to have given the whole of the lower mountain the appearance of—Alain, though he straightened for a moment to regard the mountain, could find no term for his description. There was the valley: it was covered with vineyards, with tiny white box-like houses, rose-tiled and prim; it had been labored upon, cut, hewn, blasted, and piled into one vast coherent pattern: it was like nothing else, and there was no point in dragging for a simile.

But the hands that had done this work had been harder hands than his: every year, every single year, those hands like his had been stained purple by the grapes, sticky purple hands, covered with dust; but under the stain and the dust they must have been horny, callused, protected against the use of tools, familiar with the rub and scratch of branches. Already there was one blister on his right forefinger, in the crook of the joint, where his minute sickle pressed for every cut, and there was probably another developing there where his left hand seized the bunches. Certainly there were no less than three gashes on that same left hand: at the beginning of the vendanges he always nicked that blind left hand as it groped darkly in the leaves for the main stem, which his right hand, equally blind, was to cut with the bright-edged sickle. Three certain gashes, if not four: in a spasm of professional dismay he remembered the case of tetanus that he had seen in Prabang—risus sardonicus. “That is the most perfect example of the risus I have ever seen.” He remembered the tone of Martin’s voice: yet Martin was the most humane of men, and he had struggled for that man’s life as though his own depended on it.

Their backs, too; they must have been much more supple. For a long time now his own had been a broken bow, painfully mended with sinews, creaking as it straightened. It was not surprising: since half-past five it had been bending, straightening, bending. For these were not the high-trailed vines of the Georgics: these were bushes, waist-high or lower, and the bunches hung low to the ground. They were bushes that were cut right back to the stump, the black, gnarled, tortured stump, in the winter, and it was only the one year’s growth that stood now, shielding the grapes, tangling criss-cross in the older rows where the stony soil was rich; dusty and worn outer leaves, a few of them already scarlet.

He was out on a little triangular apron of vineyard by himself: it was a patch of soil, poised over an enormous boulder, and there was no room for the main body of pickers, who were moving along the rows above him. They were laughing and talking still: the handkerchiefs on the women’s heads were brilliant in the sun. The Fajals were there, over on his right. Certainly they were there, helping to pick the Roiges’ grapes as they had done every year since Roiges and Fajals had begun in Saint-Féliu: they were neighbors, vineyard neighbors, and the Roiges picked the Fajals’ vineyard in their turn. Certainly they were there. Aunt Margot did not understand this: but neither did she understand the primordial importance of the vendanges. She did not see that the vendange was a truce of God: or rather she did not know the god whose truce it was; and if Alain had tried to make the explanation clear he would have had a very short answer, with “unhealthy mysticism” and “modern earthy nonsense” in it. Or she would have looked at him with an amused and cynical eye, saying nothing.

They were laughing up there. The effect of breakfast must still be with them, he thought. That immense breakfast eaten down there by the little square white casot: sausage grilled over the embers of a fire made from last year’s vine cuttings, hard-boiled eggs and anchovies, sardines, ham, cold chops, black pudding, white pudding, and olives, Roquefort at nine in the morning and welcome, membrillo; bread, bread, bread, and a dozen skins of wine. Perhaps it was the last Hellenic touch that lingered with the Catalans, that feast on the brown earth in the morning.

But nine o’clock was long ago. Longer ago still, removed to another time altogether, was the beginning of the day, that dewy beginning under a sky still green, when the grapes were exquisitely chilled by the night and the dust had not yet begun to fly.

There was no more left on that vine. Half straightening with a grunt, he moved his basket and himself on to the next. This was a muscat; he recognized it with joy: the pale, indented leaves hid great swagging inverted pyramids of grapes. His left hand plunged in and found a tight and solid bunch: as the sickle cut the stem the bunch fell heavy in his palm. He bit a mouthful from it, huge golden grapes, cool still, despite the hours of sun. Kneeling, he devoured the whole cluster of them, and now his throat was clear of dust. There was a refreshment—nothing to equal it. For the last hour he had been picking the small, dark, fiery, thick-skinned Grenache, no good for thirst at all. A wonderful crop, big, firm bunches, a bucketful from a single vine, a deep satisfaction in the taking; but no good for thirst now that the sun was up. The muscat vine; he remembered it from former years. Once he had known where each one was, scattered up and down the vineyard for the relief of the people working there, but now he remembered them only when he reached them.