Across the Bridge (7 page)

“So what if he does leave,” said Marie, looking in vain for a clean dish towel. “A bad, disobedient boy. He ran away to Vietnam. The last man in our family. He should have been thinking about having sons instead of travelling around. Raymond’s father was called Louis. My father’s name was Odilon. Odilon-Louis – that’s a nice name for a boy. It goes in any language.”

“In my family we just have girls,” said Mimi.

“Another thing Raymond did,” said Marie. “He stole his father’s gold watch. Then he lost it. Just took it and lost it.”

“Raymond never lost that watch,” said Mimi. “He probably sold it to two or three different people. Raymond will always be Raymond. I’m having a baby. Did he tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to,” said Marie. “I guessed it when we were in the car. Don’t cry anymore. They can hear. The baby can hear you.”

“He’s already heard plenty from Raymond.”

Marie’s English died. “Look,” she said, struggling. “This baby has a grandmother. He’s got Berthe.
You’ve
got Berthe. Never mind Raymond.”

“He’ll need a father image,” said Mimi. “Not just a lot of women.”

“Raymond had one,” said Marie. “He still joined the Marines.”

“He or she,” said Mimi. “I don’t want to know. I want the surprise. I hope he likes me. She. It feels like a girl.”

“It would be good to know in advance,” said Marie. “Just for the shopping – to know what to buy. Do you want to save the rest of the shrimp or throw it out?”

“Save it,” said Mimi. “Raymond hardly ate anything. He’ll be hungry later on.”

“That bad boy,” said Marie. “I don’t care if he never eats again. He’ll find out what it’s like, alone in the world. Without his mother. Without his aunt. Without his wife. Without his baby.”

“I don’t want him to be alone,” said Mimi, showing Marie her streaked face, the sad little curls stuck to her wet cheeks. “He hasn’t actually gone anywhere. I just said I thought he was thinking about it.”

Marie tried to remember some of the English Berthe used. When she was talking to people from her office, Berthe would
say, “All in good time,” and “No way he can do that,” and “Count on me,” and “Not to worry.”

“He won’t leave you,” said Marie. “No way I’ll let him do that. Count on me.” Her elbow brushed against the handle of the refrigerator door; she felt a silvery spark through the chiffon sleeve. This was the first time such a thing had happened in Florida; it was like an approving message from Berthe. Mimi wiped her hands on a paper towel and turned to Marie.

“Be careful,” said Marie, enfolding Raymond’s wife and Raymond’s baby. “Be careful the baby doesn’t get a shock. Everything around here is electric. I’m electric. We’ll have to be careful from now on. We’ve got to make sure we’re grounded.” She had gone into French, but it didn’t matter. The baby could hear, and knew what she meant.

P
ASCAL BROUET
is fourteen now. He used to attend a lycée, but after his parents found out about the dealers in the street, outside the gates, they changed him to a private school. Here the situation is about the same, but he hasn’t said so; he does not want to be removed again, this time perhaps to a boarding establishment, away from Paris, with nothing decent to eat and lights-out at ten. He would not describe himself as contriving or secretive. He tries to avoid drawing attention to the Responsibility clause in the treaty that governs peace between generations.

Like his father, the magistrate, he will offer neutrality before launching into dissent. “I’m ready to admit,” he will begin, or “I don’t want to take over the whole conversation …” Sometimes the sentence comes to nothing. Like his father, he lets his eyelids droop, tries to speak lightly and slowly. The magistrate is famous for fading out of a discussion by slow degrees. At one time he was said to be the youngest magistrate ever to fall asleep in court: he would black out when he thought he wasn’t needed and snap to just as the case turned around. Apparently, he never missed a turning. He has described his own mind to Pascal: it is like a superlatively smooth car with an invisible driver in control. The driver is the magistrate’s unconscious will.

To Pascal a mind is a door, ajar or shut. His grades are good, but this side of brilliant. He has a natural gift – a precise, perfectly etched memory. How will he use it? He thinks he could as easily become an actor as a lawyer. When he tells his parents so, they seem not to mind. He could turn into an actor-manager, with a private theatre of his own, or the director of one of the great national theatres, commissioning new work, refurbishing the classics, settling questions at issue with a word or two.

The Brouets are tolerant parents, ready for anything. They met for the first time in May of 1968, a few yards away from a barricade of burning cars. She had a stone in her hand; when she saw him looking at her, she put it down. They walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel together, and he told her his plan for reforming the judiciary. He was a bit older, about twenty-six. Answering his question, she said she was from Alsace. He reminded her how the poet Paul Éluard had picked up his future wife in the street, on a rainy evening. She was from Alsace, too, and starving, and in a desperate, muddled, amateurish way pretending to be a prostitute.

Well, this was not quite the same story. In 1968 the future Mme. Brouet was studying to be an analyst of handwriting, with employment to follow – so she had been promised – in the personnel section of a large department store. In the meantime, she was staying with a Protestant Reformed Church pastor and his family in Rue Fustel-de-Coulanges. She had been on her way home to dinner when she stopped to pick up the stone. She had a mother in Alsace, and a little brother, Amedée – “Dédé.”

“Sylvie and I have known both sides of the barricades,” the magistrate likes to say, now. What he means is that they cannot be crowded into a political corner. The stone in the hand has made her a rebel, at least in his recollections. She never looks at a newspaper, because of her reputation for being against absolutely everything. So he says, but perhaps
it isn’t exact: she looks at the pages marked “Culture,” to see what is on at the galleries. He reads three morning papers at breakfast and, if he has time, last evening’s
Le Monde
. Reading, he narrows his eyes. Sometimes he looks as though everything he thinks and believes had been translated into a foreign language and, suddenly, back again.

When Pascal was about nine, his father said, “What do you suppose you will do, one day?”

They were at breakfast. Pascal’s Uncle Amedée was there. Like everyone else, Pascal called him Dédé. Pascal looked across at him and said, “I want to be a bachelor, like Dédé.”

His mother moaned, “Oh, no!” and covered her face. The magistrate waited until she had recovered before speaking. She looked up, smiling, a bit embarrassed. Then he explained, slowly and carefully, that Dédé was too young to be considered a bachelor. He was a student, a youth. “A student, a student,” he repeated, thinking perhaps that if he kept saying it Dédé would study hard.

Dédé had a button of a nose that looked ridiculous on someone so tall, and a mass of curly fair hair. Because of the hair, the magistrate could not take him seriously; his private name for Dédé was “Harpo.”

That period of Pascal’s life, nine rounding to ten, was also the autumn before an important election year. The elections were five months off, but already people argued over dinner and Sunday lunch. One Sunday in October, the table was attacked by wasps, drawn in from the garden by a dish of sliced melon – the last of the season, particularly fragrant and sweet. The French doors to the garden stood open. Sunlight entered and struck through the wine decanters and dissolved in the waxed tabletop in pale red and gold. From his place, Pascal could see the enclosed garden, the apartment blocks behind it, a golden poplar tree, and the wicker chairs where the guests, earlier, had sat with their drinks.

There were two couples: the Turbins, older than Pascal’s parents, and the Chevallier-Crochets, who had not been married long. Mme. Chevallier-Crochet attended an art-history course with Pascal’s mother, on Thursday afternoons. They had never been here before, and were astonished to discover a secret garden in Paris with chairs, grass, a garden rake, a tree. Just as their expression of amazement was starting to run thin and patches of silence appeared, Abelarda, newly come from Cádiz, appeared at the door and called them to lunch. She said, “It’s ready,” though that was not what Mme. Brouet had asked her to say; at least, not that way. The guests got up, without haste. They were probably as hungry as Pascal but didn’t want it to show. Abelarda went on standing, staring at the topmost leaves of the poplar, trying to remember what she ought to have said.

A few minutes later, just as they were starting to eat their melon, wasps came thudding against the table, like pebbles thrown. The adults froze, as though someone had drawn a gun. Pascal knew that sitting still was a good way to be stung. If you waved your napkin, shouted orders, the wasps might fly away. But he was not expected to give instructions; he was here, with adults, to discover how conversation is put together, how to sound interesting without being forward, amusing without seeming familiar. At that moment, Dédé did an unprecedented and courageous thing: he picked up the platter of melon, crawling with wasps, and took it outside, as far as the foot of the tree. And came back to applause: at least, his sister clapped, and young Mme. Chevallier-Crochet cried, “Bravo! Bravo!”

Dédé smiled, but, then, he was always smiling. His sister wished he wouldn’t; the smile gave his brother-in-law another reason for calling him Harpo. Sitting down, he seemed to become entwined with his chair. He was too tall ever to be comfortable. He needed larger chairs, tables that were both higher and wider, so that he would not bump his knees, or put his feet on the shoes of the lady sitting opposite.

Pascal’s father just said, “So, no more melon.” It was something he particularly liked, and there might be none now until next summer. If Dédé had asked his opinion instead of jumping up so impulsively, he might have said, “Just leave it,” and taken a chance on getting stung.

Well; no more for anyone. The guests sat a little straighter, waiting for the next course: beef, veal, or mutton, or the possibility of duck. Pascal’s mother asked him to shut the French doors. She did not expect another wasp invasion, but there might be strays. Mme. Chevallier-Crochet remarked that Pascal was tall for his age, then asked what his age was. “He is almost ten,” said Mme. Brouet, looking at her son with some wonder. “I can hardly believe it. I don’t understand time.”

Mme. Turbin said she did not have to consult a watch to know the exact time. It must be a quarter to two now. If it was, her daughter Brigitte had just landed in Salonika. Whenever her daughter boarded a plane, Mme. Turbin accompanied her in her mind, minute by minute.

“Thessalonika,” M. Turbin explained.

The Chevallier-Crochets had spent their honeymoon in Sicily. If they had it to do over again, they said, they would change their minds and go to Greece.

Mme. Brouet said they would find it very different from Sicily. Her mind was on something else entirely: Abelarda. Probably Abelarda had expected them to linger over a second helping of melon. Perhaps she was sitting in the kitchen with nothing to do, listening to a program of Spanish music on the radio. Mme. Brouet caught a wide-awake glance from her husband, interpreted it correctly, and went out to the kitchen to see.

One of the men turned to M. Brouet, wondering if he could throw some light on the election candidates: unfortunate stories were making the rounds. Pascal’s father was often asked for information. He had connections in Paris, like stout
ropes attached to the upper civil service and to politics. One sister was married to a Cabinet minister’s chief of staff. Her children were taken to school in a car with a red-white-and-blue emblem. The driver could park wherever he liked. The magistrate’s grandfather had begun as a lieutenant in the cavalry and died of a heart attack the day he was appointed head of a committee to oversee war graves. His portrait, as a child on a pony, hung in the dining room. The artist was said to have copied a photograph; that was why the pony looked so stiff and the colors were wrong. The room Pascal slept in had been that child’s summer bedroom; the house had once been a suburban, almost a country dwelling. Now the road outside was like a highway; even with the doors shut they could hear Sunday traffic pouring across an intersection, on the way to Boulogne and the Saint-Cloud bridge.

The magistrate replied that he did not want to take over the whole conversation but he did feel safe in saying this: Several men, none of whom he had any use for, were now standing face to face. Sometimes he felt like washing his hands of the future. (Saying this, he slid his hands together.) However, before his guests could show shock or disappointment, he added, “But one cannot remain indifferent. This is an old country, an ancient civilization.” Here his voice faded out. “We owe … One has to … A certain unbreakable loyalty …” And he placed his hands on the table, calmly, one on each side of his plate.

At that moment Mme. Brouet returned, her cheeks and forehead pink, as if she had got too close to a hot oven. Abelarda came along next, to change the plates. She was pink in the face, too.

Pascal saw the candidates lined up like rugby teams. He was allowed to watch rugby on television. His parents did not care for soccer: the players showed off, received absurd amounts of money just for kicking a ball, and there was something the
matter with their shorts. “With all that money, they could buy clothes that fit,” Pascal’s mother had said. Rugby players were different. They were the embodiment of action and its outcome, in an ideal form. They got muddied for love of sport. France had won the Five Nations tournament, beating even the dreaded Welsh, whose fans always set up such eerie wailing in the stands. Actually, they were trying to sing. It must have been the way the early Celts joined in song before the Roman conquest, the magistrate had told Pascal.