The Catalans: A Novel (9 page)

In his own village a man of a certain standing cannot leer at young women in the street, and the smile that unexpected pleasure had brought to Alain’s face was not a leer. It lacked the element of carnal invitation. It was nothing but the expression of his appreciation; but a superficial observer might have misinterpreted it.

She was coming down the steep, cobbled hill, and the leaning back, the poising of her high heels on the uneven stones and her higher position accentuated the straightness of her carriage; it made her look tall: she was little over the middle height, but there she looked far taller. She was aware that he was looking at her; the fixed unconsciousness of her face showed that, and he was aware that he was prolonging his stare to rudeness and beyond. He blew his nose to cover a slight degree of confusion and walked on up the hill, faster, and when they had passed with averted gaze he did not look back.

Was that a local girl? There were a few summer people staying in rooms, but she had more the look of a Spaniard or a Catalan. She was not dressed like a holiday person: what was she dressed in? He could not recall. Something ordinary, no doubt, or at all events not so remarkable that one would notice it with that face to look at. Charming, charming, he thought, still smiling at the recollection, a recollection of clear line, freshness, cleanliness, blossom: delightful.

He was climbing the steep lane behind the school now, and still thinking about the elegant young woman. Was she perhaps the cause of all the tumult? An efficient cause, indeed, if she were. And with this thought he came to the wall. Here was the part of Saint-Féliu farthest from the sea, and here the wall and the tower were unencumbered by houses: he walked up the hollow-worn steps to the rampart and along to the tower. He reached the low arch, and bent and cautious in the dark he felt his way up the spiral staircase; he passed the well-remembered broken step, and now he was in the brilliant sunshine, on the round platform, high above the town and sea and country.

There were seven towers, one at each angle of the wall, but this was the tallest and the best: it was also the only tower into which one could go without the disgust of filth and rubbish, for not only was it withdrawn from the houses, but the path at its foot led nowhere—had no traffic at all. It was an ancient tower, and the breastwork on which he leaned was crumbling fast, but it was modern compared with the wall. Parts of
that
were of immense antiquity—huge boulders dragged and piled by some unimaginable, brutish effort—then there was the later work, crudely dressed early medieval masonry, enormously solid: but these very old parts of the wall were not to be seen for its whole length; sometimes they wandered off and were to be found in the middle of the town, serving as the walls of houses, or even standing incongruously alone; for at different times Saint-Féliu had grown, and with its uneven, unsymmetrical growth the wall had worked outward. Now it stood in a curve that made rather less than half a circle, each end resting on the sea shore: “curved,” one says, for that was the general effect, but exactly speaking it was a series of lines, with a tower at each angle. It was a satisfactory wall in that it enclosed the town, and it was eminently beautiful; but it was not a useful wall. The town was commanded on three sides by the heights inland, and perhaps it was for this reason that the wall had shown no development later than the use of cannon-balls. Even Vauban, that indefatigable improver, had left it alone, and the wall, with its crenellated towers, continued to crumble and to mellow through his century to this, growing less efficient and more beautiful each year.

Leaning there on the parapet, hooked on to it by his elbows so that his shoulders were hunched up to his ears, Alain looked not unlike a gargoyle staring out over the town. He passed it carefully over in review, looking for changes and for known, personal landmarks. It was exactly as he remembered it, as he thought of it when he was far away, exactly the same and yet with an additional strength of life, a vibrant immediacy: his memory, however sentimental with the distance, might not have provided the shrilling of the cicadas in the oleaster that grew tortuously from a crevice in the wall below, the play of the dancing, shimmering air, the flick and dart of the lizards, and the distant sound of men hauling on a boat. The hundred roofs below him tilted in every conceivable plane, a pink mass, shaded, lichened, faded to innumerable variations, following no apparent order or plan. From this angle he could see no streets, and it was only by known trees, balconies, an occasional roof garden, that he could guide the flight of his spirit over Saint-Féliu. There, where the big cloud of old green lay at the bottom of the town, was the Place—the huge plane trees tired and dusty in the heat. To the left and up the hill there was the darker green of the oranges in his cousin Côme’s garden: a little nearer again there were the brilliant blue shutters and the palm trees that stood behind the
arcades. The arcades, where that girl lived. No, she lived by herself under the wall. His eye ran round the curve, past the next tower, past the gap where the Germans had destroyed the arch of the Banyuls gate, past that and to the returning angle, where he fixed the roof, fixed it to within two or three houses, and stared hard at it, as if he might draw some knowledge from its
tiles.

Then flying back across the town to the white shape of Xavier’s house, he brooded there, gazing on the roof that covered his cousin: it was the only slated roof in the whole swarm of them; slated, cold, urban and aloof. After some minutes his glance wavered, turned momentarily to his Aunt Margot’s—a high-thrown magnolia and green shutters against the white walls, wrought-iron balconies—and then sped away to the right-hand extremity of the town, pausing in its flight along the shore at a figure on the jetty. A figure with a white hat. Yes, that would be his Uncle Thomas, called Menjé-Pé, a fanatical fisherman: he was fishing now. He was one of the few in the family who still had a current nick-name, Fish-eater, and who did not mind it: for most of the family the called-names had been left behind a generation ago. But Menjé-Pé was something of a throwback; was it because he always spoke Catalan or was it because he was a little simple that they still called him Menjé-Pé? Not the latter, for Uncle Joseph was gaga, and he had no nickname. He was flailing about. Had he caught something? No. In all probability he had just caught up his hook and lead and lost them. Sixty years ago Menjé-Pé had started fishing; he was fourteen then, and he had the zeal and the lack of skill of his age. He still had the same zeal, but somehow he had avoided gaining any skill: he caught nothing but idiot fish.

On along the shore, past the wall where it reached the sea, past the dry river-bed to the faubourg, the extension of Saint-Féliu that lay beyond the walls. It was not the new town, as it would have been in most places: it had always been there, but in the old days, when the walls were so frequently manned against the Algerines and Tangerines and Salee rovers, the faubourg had no buildings of value—net lofts, places for storing wood, little barbarous naked houses, no more—and still it remained the poorest quarter, where the fishermen lived pell-mell in a romantic slum. His gaze hunted about the faubourg: somewhere there lived old Camairerrou, the absconding husband’s father. A wicked old man he was too, by all accounts. It was Camairerrou who had stabbed the Spanish frontier guard: and more.

The dark legend of the infamous En Jepetou, great-uncle to Camairerrou, was in his mind; but the constriction of his chest against the stone called him back to the present. He stood up, brushed the dust of stone from his coat, and turned round. For the hundredth time the theatrical contrast surprised an expression of wonder from him: here, dense town, thousands of incessantly moving lives huddled close together; there, the silent hills. For the first moment it was a complete and absolute contrast, but then it began to be diluted by the laborious vineyards, market-gardens by the river-bed, squares of cork oak, and the peppering of tiny stone huts like boxes all over the nearer hills; diluted still more by the railway line that plunged out of a black-rimmed hole, and by the half-dozen angular villas of the richer salters and wine merchants, perched up beyond the railway. Still, the farther hills remained as untouched as the sea; high, remote, arid, dark and sterile, poisoned with the sun.

The villas were a pity: they were all recent, pretentious and obtrusive. The most pretentious, the thing with an abortive tower like an excrescence and magenta shutters, was Aunt Marinette’s. His apéritif would be waiting for him there already; and somewhere under that ugly roof Angélique would now be cooking a dinner, a dinner—ah. Mentally he kissed his gathered fingers and threw the kiss into the air, and with the thought of dinner brilliantly vivid in his mind he turned and hurried down the tower.

CHAPTER FOUR

X
AVIER.
He was a tall man, taller than his cousin, a tall, thin, gray man. It was not his hair but his face that was gray, and his eyes; pale, almost colorless eyes under black hair, that gave his expression a disquieting frigidity even when he was at his most cordial.

It was that more than anything else perhaps that had made Alain feel uneasy in his company and inferior to him when he was younger—that cold, dispassionate eye. It seemed to remove them one from the other by more than the wall of years. But there were very many other circumstances: for one, nothing he had ever been able to do had ever impressed Xavier, and if he tried to reproduce some of the clever things they said at the hospital where he studied, the brilliance always dissipated and the remarks came out with a bald naivety that was painful to the young Alain. He had been second fiddle in those days. There had been no struggle, no vying. Xavier had his superiority quite secure, for he did not care about it in the least. He had been a superior young man altogether; but Alain had never disliked him for that. Xavier had never showed the hateful marks of a prig, and Alain, then a candid, affectionate youth, had admired his lean good looks, his clear, incisive brain, and his self-contained undeferential efficiency, his detachment. If it had not been for one thing, however, perhaps it would have been impossible for Alain to have liked this paragon—the passer of examinations, the model of correctness, good behavior, and application. The saving grace was that Alain knew very well, as the whole family knew, that Xavier’s father was an evil-tempered man, powerful, domineering, and restless; a ferocious domestic bully. It was not that Alain blamed his Uncle Hercule then; he accepted him as a force of nature and hated him without forming any judgment; but he was sorry for Xavier, and would have said so if ever they had been intimate enough. There was something very moving, in those days, in the sight of that proud, cold young man being humiliated and bully-ragged, and bearing it with a pale, masked fortitude.

Now Xavier was rid of his father; now there was no reason to be sorry for him; and now his superiority should have been without alloy, for he had developed in the way that his friends had hoped, and now he was not only the chief man of Saint-Féliu but one of the outstanding men of the province—too good for the provinces, but willing to remain there and rule rather than become a subordinate in Paris. But his superiority no longer oppressed Alain: Dr. Roig was not an outstanding figure in tropical medicine—not nearly as distinguished in his field as Xavier was in the law and politics—but he knew the value of his work, and he could look upon the family’s phoenix without feeling any undue reverence. The knowledge that the phoenix was an errant fowl helped a little, too.

At this moment the phoenix (a suspicion that he might be able to make an epigram about cuckoos, phoenixes, and fornication drifted across the surface of Alain’s mind) was bent over a heap of papers among the ruins of their dessert: he was running down a column of figures, double-checking them. These were the figures to do with his stewardship of Alain’s patrimony: three vineyards in part-ownership, two houses in the town and half a house in the faubourg, the bigger share of a cork oak wood, two olive groves, one mill. It was not the income that Xavier was calculating—Alain had had that with exact punctuality, and it was all gone in equipment, a new microscope, more equipment, and the indulgence of a trip to Macao to buy a Chinese painting—not the income, but the yield, to see whether Alain’s theory of mulching did in fact increase the number of grapes on a vine economically and without lowering the strength of the wine. It was a long task, and Xavier’s attention was wholly absorbed: Alain could stare at him without disguise. He was easier to see with a stranger’s eye than his house had been. The years had done more to him, so very much more. It was a big-featured face; all the room was taken up by his nose, mouth, and the deep sinking of his eyes; the features seemed to have coarsened very much. It was the kind of face that gave the impression, as Aunt Margot said, of having been slowly dried, dried without heat. Thick skin—liverish? A strong blue beard shading all the lower half. It was not an attractive face.

Xavier had always had a hard, closed, self-contained expression, and now his face was deeply marked with it: hardness, acuity, and the habit of concentration were stamped there. As he sat opposite to Alain with the papers in front of him he looked the very image of undeviating purpose; even there at his own table, after a long and excellent dinner, he sat with a certain rigidity of his shoulders that showed a mind square, angular, exact and unrelaxing. He was dark and high in his chair, dark in his black coat; the only color in him was the tiny crimson fleck of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole: an imposing figure, looked at from most angles; and from others perhaps a faintly comic one. Though it would have been a brave man who continued to find Xavier comic with Xavier looking at him: from any angle at all he was a formidable creature. One did not take liberties with Xavier.

Yet this was the man who was proposing to indulge a middle-aged folly at a price that would .
. . It was difficult to believe it at all, sitting there face to face with bourgeois integrity personified, the incarnation of unremitting attention to the family interest. It was not the folly that was surprising: any man at the sight of youth gone, gone forever, is liable to break out in a last desperate fling, looking for his lost years in a young thing’s bed. Though it was surprising, too: surprising in Xavier. His rigidity, his strength of discipline, appearance, everything, should by rule have been betrayed (if this time had to bring him idiocy) into some secret darkness at Perpignan: but even that, so commonplace, so ordinary and unremarked in dirty Côme for example, would have been unexpected in Xavier. Apart from anything else, Alain, looking at that gray, concentrated face, the hard, calculating eyes behind the black-rimmed spectacles, could not see the rigid lines ever dissolving into the shapes required by the tender passion—or indeed any passion but anger. And then again, against the likelihood of strange whorings in Perpignan, there was the fact of Xavier’s piety. To those who knew him well, it was the cardinal fact in his character: at one time Alain, pluming himself on the cynical penetration that now seemed so callow, had attributed it to policy, policy with regard to Aunt Margot’s private fortune, and above all policy with regard to the Church interest. For although Xavier inherited from his father his membership—influential membership—of the anti-clerical Radical-Socialist party, he was nevertheless able to dispose of most of the votes of the churchgoers. He owed this uncommon power in part to family connection and to the local impotence of the right-wing or clerical parties, but far more to his acknowledged excellence as a churchman: so it was not unnatural for Alain, younger then, to tap his nose with a knowing smirk. But now the callowness was outgrown—had been these many years—and now Alain, standing by his cousin in church, could respect and admire, though he could not imitate, the cold, rapt fervor on Xavier’s face. It had almost frightened him, the first time he saw and understood that sudden glimpse of Xavier naked.