The Foundling's War (34 page)

‘For a man who lives alone you do a lot of talking,’ Jean said, mildly irritated.

Blaise Pascal’s eyes lit up.

‘You’re so right, Monsieur. I should have unlearnt the power of speech. It might even be fun to see me walking on all fours and barking. That was the pitfall. I foresaw it and I left this world with a mirror. I talk to my mirror and my mirror answers me. Alas, its answers do not
satisfy me. As Cocteau puts it so nicely, a mirror should reflect before it offers a reflection.’

Jesús did not understand. Jean had to explain the play on words to him. Blaise Pascal was delighted.

‘Monsieur—’ he began.

‘My name is Rhésus Infante!’

‘Monsieur Jesús—’

‘There is no Monsieur Rhésus. The French, they say little Rhésus, I am the other, not the big, the Rhésus and that’s it …’

‘Shall I make an omelette?’ Claude asked.

‘Yes, Maman! Can I break the eggs?’

She let him break them into a bowl. He only missed two of them, which broke on the tiles in front of the oven.

‘What I wanted to say is that your time has come!’ the man said to Jesús, finally moving closer to the fire.

His clothes steamed, and a smell of disinfectant pervaded the room.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This suit was going to lie in mothballs until peace was declared.’

‘Who says it wasn’t declared long ago?’ Jean said.

Blaise Pascal smiled.

‘Monsieur—’

‘My name’s Jean Arnaud.’

‘Yes, without an “l”. Am I to call you “Jean”?’

‘It would be simpler, Blaise.’

‘Well, Jean, I’ve been drawing my own conclusions. I go as far as the road and I hide there. There are no cars, apart from one driven by a nice-looking woman, which has a German registration.’

‘That’s Laura,’ Jesús said.

‘Her brother was killed by the Russians,’ Cyrille said. ‘She’s gone to bury him. The Russians are killing lots of Germans.’

‘Be quiet,’ Claude said. ‘Go and wash your hands.’

She laid four places at the table. Jesús opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass and offered it to Blaise.

‘Thank you, no,’ Blaise said. ‘I don’t drink. Loneliness and alcohol don’t go together. There are no half-measures. Either you don’t drink or you drink like a fish. I chose abstinence, although, believe me, I wasn’t always that way disposed.’

Claude served the omelette.

‘Does your diet exclude eggs?’ Jean asked.

‘No. I even owned two hens and a cock. Two months ago they disappeared. I suspect a fox had them. You will object that eggs are not vegetable. You would be right.’

He raised his finger to ensure their attention.

‘But by eating an egg I am fighting in my own way against overpopulation. By the year 2000 there will be four billion earthlings. Malthus was right. Limit the number of births and you’ll have no more need of wars to mop up the consequences of an ocean of sperm.’

‘Of what?’ Cyrille said.

‘Forgive me, my boy, I forgot you. It’s a scientific word.’

‘Sit down,’ Claude said, seeming to pay no attention to the man or his chatter.

She served them in silence and sat with her own empty plate in front of her. For three weeks she had eaten almost nothing at all, making do with a glass of water here, a piece of bread there. Trousers and sweaters concealed her new slimness, but when Jean had hugged her to him in the bedroom that afternoon he had been surprised by how thin her body, once so moving in its shapeliness, its secret harmony between flesh and frame, had become. Her failure to eat had already blighted her face, making her eyes more protuberant and her cheekbones more prominent, the avatar of a beauty that had once been placid and simple and was now impenetrable. Her looks were changing as much as if she had put a mask over her face, and her fixed expression concealed, from anyone who did not know her, a sadly etched image of fear …

Jesús, whom the visitor had so surprised as to leave him speechless, regained his composure at dinner. He had been so carried away by the compliments about the only two canvases hanging on the wall that
for a moment he had been unable to assert himself. But one did not condemn a man of Jaén to silence as easily as that. Nor, at Jaén, was there any shortage of hermits. His uncle, Antonio Infante, had shut himself up in a Saracen tower on the edge of the town, on the Bailén road, at the beginning of the civil war. It was an old tower with solid walls, but its upper platform had collapsed. Antonio had walled up the outer door and moved in with a guitar. Every morning he tossed a rope over the wall to which a box was tied, full of bread, water and some fruit. He sent the box back with some trifling ill-smelling objects that were buried elsewhere. Except at midday precisely, he was always in the shade. When it rained he opened his umbrella, and on icy winter nights he wrapped himself in a quilt. One day Jesús brought a ladder that reached the battlements. His uncle was dozing, his guitar beside him. He had grown a long black beard, like Tolstoy’s. He had become much thinner in his dust-covered clothes. Sometimes he was heard singing, accompanying himself on the guitar. At the end of the war he had emerged from his retreat to shave and get married. He had two children already, had announced his intention to have another one every year until 1950, and led a modest life running a haberdashery.

‘Human foolishness knows no limits,’ Blaise Pascal said, put out that Jesús dared to steal his thunder with such a picturesque anecdote.

‘That’s exactly wha’ I sink of you!’ Jesús answered calmly. ‘You don’ do anythin’. You are simply afraid. And fear is no’ pretty.’

‘But you also—’

‘Me, señor, I don’ make somebody else’s war …’

‘What do you mean? It’s always somebody else’s war! I’ve only ever understood one war, and that’s civil war. At least one knows why one’s beating and killing one’s brother. But the Germans? Why? I don’t know them. I wouldn’t go and live with them for anything in the world. Their philosophy bores me. Musicians? Well, yes, certainly. Alas, I’m not fond of music. Their women? I’m sorry, I like – or rather I used to like – petite women with brown hair. You see, I’ve no reason to be angry with them. They leave me cold. That’s all!’

Jean tried to catch Claude’s eye. He sensed that she was not listening and was overcome by tiredness. Her eyelids were heavy and her head kept slowly sinking then starting up suddenly. He leant towards her.

‘Do you want to go to sleep?’

She answered so quietly that he could hardly hear her.

‘Yes … but you will fuck me, won’t you?’

Neither Jesús nor Blaise Pascal seemed to have heard. He took her arm and went upstairs with her, followed by Cyrille, who got undressed on his own and snuggled into his sleeping bag.

‘Will you both kiss me, please?’

Claude, sitting on the edge of the bed, smiled and blew him a kiss.

‘Go to sleep, darling.’

Jean kissed him. The boy was dog-tired.

‘He’s funny, the man in the woods, don’t you think, Jean?’

‘Yes, he is pretty funny.’

‘Will he come back tomorrow?’

‘I suspect he probably will.’

Rising from the ground floor, the muffled voices of Jesús and Blaise Pascal were still audible.

‘Jean, undress me,’ Claude said.

‘All right.’

He laid her down on the bed. Cyrille turned over.

‘Good night.’

Claude did not even appear to hear him. She raised herself fractionally to let Jean take off her trousers and sweater, then murmured something so indistinctly that at first he hardly heard her and was then shocked as he understood.

‘Be quiet,’ he said.

The Light 11 stopped at the entrance to Allée des Acacias. Palfy got out before the chauffeur had a chance to open his door. He spread his arms wide, inhaled a lungful of cold air and, catching sight of Jean waiting for him, turned to the chauffeur.

‘Émile …’

Jean hated him calling a man Émile whose real name was Jean (‘You understand,’ Palfy had said, ‘that I
had
to unbaptise him,
because of you
’).

‘Émile, no need to stay with us. I’m just going to the Cascade and I’ll be back. You can switch off the engine …’

Turning to Jean he said, ‘Émile is a splendid chauffeur. My mother called hers “my mechanic”. In those days chauffeurs knew how to keep their cars on the road. Modern engines have killed off the enterprising mechanic. I doubt if Émile knows how to change a spark plug, but he’s like a father to me. Let’s walk, shall we, I could do with some exercise. We’ll talk in vapour bubbles like the heroes of comic strips. But if we meet anyone else, they won’t be able to read them. They’ll be written in invisible ink.’

He wore a fur-lined coat with a black astrakhan collar, and a soft grey hat. His tanned complexion was a sign of wealth in an era of pallor.

‘Where did you get your tan?’ Jean asked. ‘I thought you were in Switzerland.’

‘I was. In the mountains. Wonderful sunshine. Snow and the simple life. Gstaad is a little paradise, despite meeting mostly people who are waiting for the end of the war. Anyway there weren’t only people like
that there. I also met a very charming woman and we talked about you.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. I don’t know a charming woman: if I did I’d remember her …’

‘What about Claude?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But you didn’t meet her at Gstaad.’

‘No, you smart alec. I met your mother.’

Jean was silent. An image from the past suddenly came to him: the yellow Hispano-Suiza on the quayside at Cannes. Geneviève, the prince in a wheelchair, and Salah getting out. They were deserting Europe. Geneviève, in a pale dress and wearing a beret, a light coat over her arm and carrying her jewellery bag, had turned to glance at the families and curious onlookers crowding around the landing stage. Jean remembered the sadness on her hardly made-up face. She was already missing Europe, her friends, her sparkling, clever London where she had been so happy. She was leaving, resigned but not yet convinced of the necessity of her going.

‘The prince is dead,’ Palfy added. ‘Geneviève is finding it difficult to obtain a residence permit for Switzerland. But with money everything can be worked out …’

The reader has the advantage over Jean of having known this piece of news for a long time. He or she also knows that Albert Arnaud will die the following summer at Grangeville, during the Dieppe raid. The state of war, Europe’s isolation, and within Europe the isolation of every nation forced back onto its own hardships and hopes, the censorship that weighs on every letter as much as on the press, muddle our chronology. The past, discovered so long after the event, is as hard to understand as the present. It is already hedged around with forgetting, with resignation. Its freshness is suspect; its emotion has lost its savour. It possesses almost no surprise, and to some degree it
is not hard to think of it as an importunate interloper, reminding you indiscreetly of his existence. The saddest news comes so late that it is already consigned to history, minor, insignificant, cold, overtaken. The anguished longing to know what tomorrow will bring pushes yesterday back further than it should be. Trifling distances, which yet seem unmanageable, deaden the horror. No one spills old tears. They hold them back with little pity. Life expectancy numbs the most acute notes of the funeral march. The survivors take pride in still being alive when the weakest and unluckiest have vanished. It would not take much for them to accuse the victims of cowardice.

At the moment of hearing of the death of the prince who so influenced his own life, Jean is too obsessed by Claude’s state to feel more than a swift stab of sadness. As for the news of his mother being in Switzerland, it leaves him cold. He has decided that Jeanne was his mother, the housekeeper at La Sauveté, the person who gathered him up in his Moses basket, adopted him, loved and protected him. Geneviève, whatever he feels, is a mother like the one a child creates in a burst of romantic invention: beautiful, charming, intelligent, loved by everyone and more or less virtuous. When they had met in London he had fallen a little bit in love with her, and she too had probably fallen a little for him. It was nothing. Something that did not count, and yet had had some magic and that afterwards – when he had known that she was his mother – he had enjoyed mulling over like the sort of incest to be found in a popular romantic serial.

‘I hope,’ he said to Palfy, ‘you didn’t tell her I was her son.’

‘You and I had already decided that it would be out of place. If she finds out, it won’t be from us. In any case, it would age her overnight. I suspect she has decided that she’ll always be thirty. An excellent age that she’s right to stick to. She hardly looks it. The mountains suit her fragility. She’s remarkably lovely.’

‘I’m wondering how you managed to find her.’

‘It wasn’t too hard. I had dinner one evening with a Lebanese banker. I talked about her to him. He supplied the key: Gstaad. A little bit of heaven on earth!’

Allée des Acacias was almost deserted, its trees frozen, cold and grey on this January morning. Palfy liked this walk. It reminded him of his childhood Sundays, of his father and mother driving there in their Renault open tourer. The car would roll down the avenue, crowded with residents from all over the 16th: young girls in
wide-brimmed
hats, bare-headed boys, riders and a few remaining carriages conveying old ladies, their faces caked in cream and powder, their laps covered with real or imitation sable. He even claimed to have seen, on one of his last outings around 1921 or 1922, Mercedes del Loreto. His Sunday mornings belonged to the past. The only people to be seen now were women dressed like tramps, in worn greatcoats, stooped, shuffling, grey-faced and guilty-looking as they collected firewood, or riders in uniform, sitting stiffly as if at riding school, their boots black and gleaming. One greeted Palfy with a discreet movement of his hand.

‘You know all the Germans in Paris,’ Jean said.

‘No. A modest few. That was Captain Schoenberg, the blue-eyed boy of one of the generals. He won’t go to Russia. He’s been given the job of overseeing the national stud farms. Pleasure can’t go completely by the board – the French would revolt. By the way, while we’re on the subject, Rudolf von Rocroy’s got problems. The one time he’s ever shown any courage – to help your Claude – and they’re threatening to send him to the Eastern Front. It’s mayhem. Don’t worry, he won’t talk. I’ve got him under control. In any case he only needs to dig himself a tiny bit deeper into his racket to be forgiven …’

Claude. Jean hesitated. He had come to meet Palfy to confide in him, but Palfy’s blithe self-assurance silenced him.

‘It’s bizarre, I can tell you, how far one feels from all that at Gstaad, even though Switzerland’s the only place where rationing is actually
enforced. No strawberries and cream. Meat twice a week. The restaurants are quite inflexible and the Swiss are very disciplined. But I didn’t go there to eat …’

‘What did Geneviève say?’

‘She’s bored. She’s rented a floor of a country hotel, brought in a gramophone, made a place to read. She reads all the time when she’s not listening to music. The hotel’s stuffed with foreigners, who play cards while they wait for the motor shows and carnivals by the sea to resume, the selfsame world they knew before the war. In one sense, Geneviève’s isolation and loss of her little train of admirers has done her good. I found her a bit less of a bluestocking. You don’t feel you’re taking an exam every time you talk to her these days. And we talked … oh yes, non-stop. In her room, out walking, or on the sleigh. Ah, the sleighs of Gstaad! I never suspected I’d fall for their romance. A fat driver with a red nose and a leather apron tucks you in like babies. The horse wears ice shoes and trots as if there weren’t any ice. I had the great pleasure of holding Geneviève’s hand to keep it warm …’

‘That’s the first time I’ve seen your lyrical side!’

Palfy looked embarrassed.

‘Listen, my dear boy, I can only say this to you …’

‘Are you telling me you’re in love with Geneviève? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll never love a woman …’

Jean was mistaken. If Palfy was not yet in love he was soon going to be, and at the age of thirty-five, just when he thought he was safe, his whole life, his unusual sense of right and wrong and his cynicism and scorn were about to be changed for ever. We can sense just how incredible this transformation is. Palfy himself cannot foresee its repercussions. He imagines one can let oneself be attracted to a woman like Geneviève while remaining as one was, and will find out – with a mounting sense of wonder – that, on the contrary, to love
and be loved by her one must become more like her. That is how one deserves her. It is no longer a matter of surveying life with a cold and sarcastic eye, with the gaze that has so long served him as judge and defence; it is a matter of being worthy of Geneviève. Palfy cannot yet see where this metamorphosis demanded of him will take him. He will not be a second prince, for his contempt for humanity is of a lower quality, and in particular more greedy and opportunistic. The prince never experienced the vulgar temptation to become rich, for the simple reason that he always was rich. On the other hand, despite his generosity, he did not throw away his fortune and, however wise and unusual he was, it is doubtful whether he would have accepted his ruin with the elegance Palfy has displayed on several such occasions.

Palfy is still looking for that pedestal from which he can defy his critics. He knows that once a certain level of success is achieved, impunity follows. Doors open wide, respect is blind. He has been admitted to this privileged circle two or three times. Without his appetite for risk, he might have stayed there. Deep down he loves starting again from nothing, disconcerting those who have believed in him. As we now see him on this January morning in 1942, in Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne, walking briskly, his arm in Jean’s as if the better to persuade him of his sincerity, Palfy knows nothing of what awaits him. An inexpressible joy that he finds hard to contain, indeed is allowing to brim over, has taken possession of him. We have already guessed that he – the Palfy who has never felt a single moment’s tenderness – will shortly reproach Jean for not devoting his life to the delights of love. He believes his task is to be intelligent and insensitive. Geneviève will convince him that he is not as intelligent as he thinks he is and that he is almost bursting with sensitivity.

Such a revelation, naturally, is not the work of a day. It will need many journeys to Switzerland, many sleigh rides and, that summer, a visit to Lake Lugano during which they will witness from a balcony Italy falling apart on the far bank. Geneviève will not tell him her life story; she has no need to. It will be his job to tell her his, and entertain
her. Revealed, stripped naked, he will be in her power. He will be jubilant as he relinquishes his old self. For a moment he will lose his poise, that marvellous passport that has helped him so much in his life. Geneviève will smile. She will have won, and as the price of her victory she will give him back – albeit attenuated and civilised – the confidence in himself that he lost in an upsurge of passion.

I’ll say it again: nothing can astonish us more than this metamorphosis. It is so unexpected that it surprises us as much as its victim, whose destiny seemed preordained. We had already interned him when France was liberated, ruined him, thrown him out on the street and, since his boats had been burnt all over Europe, watched him leaving to attempt some fabulous new fraud in South America. Indeed, that was certainly what awaited him, and in a sense Palfy’s good luck had always been his bad too, compelling him to resort to his genius for mystification. We are delighted to announce instead that this time, at last, Fortune is on his side, and not, as one might crudely think, Geneviève’s fortune of which he has no need, but that ravishing figure, her form barely veiled beneath a transparent tunic, who awakens those infants slumbering incautiously on the coping of a well. The tiny wings on her back do not allow her to fly to the aid of everyone. She must choose her targets. Seductive and seduced, she attaches herself to those who will not let her go. Why should it surprise us, then, that in her generosity to a few, she is cruel to the greater number? She will desert Salah and only much later pay any attention to Jean Arnaud, after he has endured those tests inflicted by Sarastro on Tamino in
The Magic Flute
.

For the moment we are still on Allée des Acacias, where it is necessary to walk briskly to keep out the dry cold of the winter of ’41–’42, which marks the decisive turning point of a war we have spoken little about, since it is happening far away and its impact on the majority of
the French population is mainly the problem of finding enough to eat.

‘By the way,’ Palfy said, ‘how is your beloved?’

‘Not well.’

‘A cold?’

‘No. A breakdown. I’ve managed to get her admitted to a psychiatric clinic in the Chevreuse valley.’

Palfy stopped and gripped Jean by the shoulders.

‘Good heavens! Do you think …?’

‘I’m sure of it. Those twenty-four hours were too much for her. She cracked. It has all gone downhill very fast in the last few days.’

‘My dear, that is what is called a trial.’

He resumed walking, still holding Jean’s arm tightly.

‘How did you notice?’

‘There were certain warning signs I should have paid attention to sooner.’

‘What signs?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

They walked as far as the Cascade without speaking. Jean’s memory filled with episodes from Claude’s illness, whose progression had remained confused to him until the final crisis. Episodes that had in an obscure way heralded Claude’s gradual deterioration: the awful emptiness of her gaze, her indifference towards Cyrille, her periods of silence, as though she was speaking privately to someone not there, the rapidity with which she moved from formality to informality, her sudden shedding of her defences and the fevered pleasure she took in lovemaking – lyrical, elated, carried away by frenzy – followed by a deep torpor, as if only sex gave her burning body the fathomless rest she craved. That she had not been stupidly, fussily modest during their long period of unconsummated love had pleased Jean. Unable to reveal everything, she had offered her only truth, a physical one. It
has not gone unnoticed – and perhaps been exasperating – that she let Jean come close to her on so many occasions without letting go. Let us say again that she loved him, and probably loved him more than he loved her. Jean was sowing wild oats and slow to mature, though several women had already been clear about their wish to hurry him. Claude had been ahead of all of them by a long way, with her seriousness, her thoughtfulness, the understanding she had had, even in their passion, of the consequences of her acts. We might possibly have wanted her to be less thoughtful, more susceptible to passion, but we cannot remake her. That is how she is. Or more precisely, how she was, for now, abruptly, she is quite different, no longer on her pedestal, transformed in a sense as radically as Palfy, in reverse. And so Jean must learn through her, as through his friend, that there are no beings who stand still and that it needs only a meeting or an upheaval for a secret truth to be born. Claude had broken down. If Jean had resisted – but heroism has its limits after such a long wait – she would perhaps not have given way as she had. He could not reproach himself. It was too late. Since their first afternoon she had thought of nothing else but making love, casting aside all modesty, disregarding Cyrille’s presence asleep in the bedroom, murmuring streams of obscenities that froze Jean’s desire instead of fuelling it. That these words had come out of Claude’s mouth seemed monstrous. Jean had felt he was back with Mireille Cece, the sex-mad bistro keeper of Roquebrune. He felt a deep revulsion, not for Claude but for himself. A great hatred rose in him at the same time: monsters of cruelty and dishonour had destroyed the woman he loved. They were all-powerful. There was no defence against them. Jean reflected on his earlier indifference to war. It had, at last, dealt him a blow, sweeping away an image of beauty that, however pointless it seemed in the prevailing horror, mattered more to him than anything else. He had been superficial, careless, preoccupied with his own life, and now Claude lay in a clinic, stupefied by sedatives that smothered her obsessions.