Four Novels (31 page)

He sits there not loving this child whom he would love if he could, and he is dying from not being able to, of a fictitious death which does not kill him. Someone else loves her, to distraction, who is not he but who he might be and who he will not be.

He waits for the passing of his intense surprise at discovering that he is not dying from believing so strongly that he is dying. Filled with this impossible desire to change his feelings, to love differently, he looks at the trees with all his strength, begging himself to find them beautiful. But they are of no help to him. He imagines that other child, so delightful, who is watching, without being able to see it at the edge of the pond, the imperceptible growth of the grass forcing its way toward daylight, but she is of no help to him. His preference for Valérie, his child, still remains shining and indescribable. That was it.

“That man, how rude he is,” he continues.

In vain. Oh, how he tries to get back into this long wait to which he has relegated himself long before and which he can so conveniently call his despair! Oh! let Valérie’s blondness roam the world, let the whole world look dull, if it so desires, next to so much blondness, why should one think about that? Mr. Andesmas thinks. At the same time knowing that one cannot think about it. And, if it were thinkable, why think about it with this crushing pain and not tenderly? Mr. Andesmas goes on thinking, knowing that he is lying, that one can only attempt to think about it with terrible pain.

This young, hatefully young pain lasted, Mr. Andesmas claimed. How long? He was never able to say. But long enough for him to
become, in the end, its willing prey. And his mind, never a threat in his life but always, on the contrary, praised as one of the best possible minds, it, too, put up with this deviation from its normal course.

Mr. Andesmas agreed never to know any other adventure but the one of his love for Valérie.

“Why wait for Michel Arc, who won’t come this evening anyhow?”

He had spoken aloud again. No question, he was speaking aloud. And it seemed to him that his voice was questioning. He answered himself without fear because, next to the discovery of Valérie’s universal blondness, what comparable fear, actually, could he experience?

“Who would actually do it,” he answered himself. “Who, in my place, wouldn’t get angry?”

He ventured a glance toward the left, toward the path down which that other betrayed child should soon be coming, and he stayed that way, sitting straight in his wicker armchair, while that child did not come back from the pond and the afternoon reached its full measure of yellow, soft sunshine.

It was in this position that Mr. Andesmas fell asleep.

Mr. Andesmas claimed later that he had, that afternoon, been the victim of a discovery—a penetrating and empty one, he said—which he had not had time to make in the course of his life, and which, probably because of his age, tired him more than it should have, but which he felt was nevertheless a very common one, he said. For convenience and perhaps also because of his failing vocabulary, he called it the understanding of his love for his child.

He went on with his speech, of which Michel Arc was the main target, but he never knew exactly what this speech had been. Strong and violent words were pronounced on the plateau during the period that followed his gain of wisdom. He heard them.

Having just tasted the delights of this funereal feast at which he would have devoured his own entrails in a fear that went unbearably beyond the strength he had left, and probably because of this fear, Mr. Andesmas laid the blame for it on Michel Arc’s negligence.

After which he collapsed into drowsiness facing the soft, yellow light of the chasm.

In certain places in the valley, above the already-watered crops, there were fine mists which this soft, yellow light of the chasm dispelled with more and more difficulty.

This day in June was monotonous, perhaps, but of a rare perfection.

How long did this respite of Mr. Andesmas last? This also he was never able to say. He said that he dreamed, as long as it lasted, of ridiculous satisfactions related to his previous talks with Michel Arc about the estimate for Valérie’s future terrace, facing the sea of all seasons.

Actually, this respite was brief, just long enough to let the little girl play near the pond and return. Then she was coming back from the top of the hill.

Until the last moment of his life, Mr. Andesmas remembered the arrival of this other child.

In the forest, at first from far, then closer and closer, the ground was struck by the tapping of a step. But this step, so light on the dry leaves of the path, did not go unnoticed in Mr. Andesmas’ sleep. He heard her. He recognized a human presence, which he placed on the southern side of the hill; he even told himself that the child was coming back from the pond, but he thought she was still far from the plateau and that he had time to sleep a little more, and instead of getting ready to greet her, he fell asleep again, so deeply that he soon no longer heard her at all, even when she was a few yards from him.

The child returned. Mr. Andesmas, plunged in this beneficent sleep, probably still had his head bent in the direction of the path through which she was to come back from the pond.

Did she look at him in silence for a moment? He did not know. Nor how long her walk had lasted. Or this sleep.

“Hey, Mister,” the child said very quietly.

She softly kicked the sand on the plateau.

When he opened his eyes, Mr. Andesmas recognized upon him the immaculate rudeness of a stare already seen. She had come very close to him, not like the first time, and in the sun he saw her light eyes better. He realized he had forgotten her.

“My, oh my, I fall asleep all the time, everywhere, everywhere,” Mr. Andesmas apologized.

The little girl did not answer. She examined him all over with an insane, insatiable, curiosity. This time, Mr. Andesmas tried to meet her gaze. But he did not succeed.

“Michel Arc hasn’t come, you see,” Mr. Andesmas went on.

The little girl frowned and seemed to think. Her eyes left Mr. Andesmas and tried to find something behind him, on the white wall, to discover something they wanted to see and didn’t see. Then, her face suddenly expressed an overwhelming brutality, a revulsion at some nonexistent vision. She was looking at a dream and she was suffering. This dream she was looking at could not be seen.

“Sit down, rest,” Mr. Andesmas said softly.

Her face relaxed a little. But her eyes did not recognize the old man when they rested on him again. However, she obeyed. She sat at his feet and put her head against the leg of the armchair.

He counted his breaths, forced himself to make them deeper to harmonize them with the calm of the forest and the calm that had taken hold of the child.

Very slowly, she raised toward Mr. Andesmas a narrow, long, dirty hand, displaying the franc piece. She spoke without turning her head.

“I found this on the path,” she said.

“Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine,” murmured Mr. Andesmas.

Had he really seen her just before? Her forgetfulness must be fleeting, must crush her for short moments, only to release her again.

She remained silent, her head against the leg of the armchair, in the shade of the wall.

Did she close her eyes? Mr. Andesmas could not see her face; only her motionless, half-open hands. In her right hand was the franc piece. So much stillness was choking Mr. Andesmas.

When the lilac blooms my love

When the lilac blooms forever

She didn’t move while the song lasted. When it stopped, she raised her head and listened to the laughter and shouting coming up from the village square. The laughter and shouting stopped, but she remained as she was, her head raised. That was when Mr. Andesmas moved in his armchair.

The child burst out laughing:

“Your armchair, it’s going to break,” she said.

She stands up and he recognizes a child he has already seen.

“I’m fat,” he says. “This armchair wasn’t made for me.”

He too laughs. But she quickly becomes serious again.

“My father hasn’t come yet?” she asked.

“He’s going to come,” Mr. Andesmas says hastily. “He’s going to come, you can wait for him if you like.”

She stands there, but reasonably, trying to decide what she prefers to do with her time, orphaned all of a sudden by this father who has forgotten her. Her eyes remain wild, also abandoned, but by this frenzy which just before had carried her away as she was crossing the forest. She raises her hands to her face, crosses them over her mouth, and rubs her eyes as she probably does when washing.

What game had she played near the pond? It was dried mud that had dirtied her hands. She must have dropped the coin after holding it out to Mr. Andesmas. That’s right, her hands had fallen empty, alongside her dress.

“I’m going,” she says.

Then suddenly Mr. Andesmas remembers what Valérie had told him:

“Michel Arc’s oldest daughter is not like the others. Michel Arc thinks his daughter is not like others. It isn’t so serious, they say. At times, she forgets everything. Poor Michel Arc, whose daughter is not like the others.”

She didn’t seem in a hurry to go now that she had decided to do so. Perhaps she felt secure near this old man? Or, equally indifferent to being there or elsewhere, did she prefer to wait for a better idea than the one she had had, of going back?

“Shall I tell my father that you’ll wait for him much longer?”

She smiled. Her face collected itself completely. Cunning filtered into her smile as she waited for Mr. Andesmas’ reply, and Mr. Andesmas, his cheeks glowing, shouted merrily:

“Well, as long as it’s light, I’ll wait for Michel Arc!”

Does she hear the answer? Yes. She hears it.

As she is leaving, she sees the franc piece in the gray sand of the plateau. She looks at it, bends down, and once again takes it and shows it to Mr. Andesmas. Her eyes do not wander off.

“Look,” she says. “Someone may have lost it?”

She laughs again.

“Yes,” declares Mr. Andesmas. “Keep it.”

Her hand, ready to close, does so with a click.

Again she grows dreamy, distracted. She walks up to Mr. Andesmas and holds out her left hand, the one that does not hold the coin.

“Later I’ll be afraid,” she says. “I’ll say good-by now.”

Her hand was warm, rough from the mud of the pond. Mr. Andesmas
tried to hold it in his but she slipped away, restless; she had the flexibility, the softness of an uprooted weed, even in her motions. She held out her hand reluctantly, she did it like a very small child, in a dread understood and accepted.

“Maybe Michel Arc won’t come until tonight?”

She pointed at the chasm where the dance was going on.

“Listen,” she said.

She stayed like this, in this rapt gesture, incomprehensibly. Then the gesture collapsed without reason, or was it that the dance had stopped?

“What did you do at the pond?” Mr. Andesmas asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

She left, without making a mistake, by the path the reddish dog had taken, steadily, slowly. Mr. Andesmas made a gesture as if to stop her but she noticed nothing. Then he straightened, looked for a way to detain her, a way to express himself, and, too late, he shouted:

“If you see Valérie . . .”

She answered something after having already disappeared behind the turn in the path, but she did not come back.

Mr. Andesmas heard whistling.

He falls back in his armchair. He tries to disentangle from the silence of the forest the words the child has spoken, but he does not succeed. Did she say she didn’t know Valérie? Or that Valérie knew very well that her father was waiting for her? Or something else that had nothing to do with the question he had asked?

The echo of the childish voice floats for a long time, insoluble, around Mr. Andesmas, then, none of its possible meanings having been retained, it moves off, fades, joins the various shimmerings, thousands of them, hanging in the chasm of light, becomes one of them. It disappears.

Again Mr. Andesmas finds himself alone. Alone waiting for a man without a sense of time. In the forest.

Some day they would have to chop down many trees in this forest, pull out bushes, ravage part of this shapeless denseness, so that air could sweep into it, free, through immense clearings, and at last disrupt this monumental undergrowth.

The weather is so clear that one could see him, if one wanted to, from the village square. His shape is outlined on the site of the future terrace of his daughter, Valérie. Everybody knows about this forthcoming
construction. They know he is waiting for Michel Arc. As usual he is dressed in a dark suit. Yes, they can see him, distinguish this dark spot formed by his body squeezed into the wicker armchair which stands out against the whitewashed wall of the house he has just bought for his daughter Valérie. This spot grows darker and larger every minute as time goes by, and his presence on the bare, sunny plateau becomes increasingly undeniable. It is so sandy on this side of the mountain; yes, Valérie must be able to see him, this father, if she wants to see him, as he waits for Michel Arc. Others can too. He is there, exposed to their eyes, and everyone knows it can only be he, Mr. Andesmas. The purchase of the hill has caused quite a stir in the village. The land bought in Valérie Andesmas’ name by her father covers a hundred and ten acres of forest. They have both been living in this village, in the heart of this chasm, for a year, ever since, it is said, he decided to retire from the business that had taken up his time, having the means to do so, and even more than the means. With this child. Just because of her wish, a few weeks before, he bought her this side of the hill up to the edge of the pond. He was going to buy the pond.

“Ah! That Mr. Arc, ah, that man,” Mr. Andesmas says.

He has grown used to his own voice.

With difficulty he half rises, drags his armchair a little farther forward, closer to the edge of the plateau so he can be seen more easily from down below. But he does not look into the chasm. They are still dancing, if the singing is any sign. He prefers to look at his body spread out in the armchair—more spread out than while the little girl was there—and dressed in this beautiful dark material. His belly rests on his knees, wrapped in a vest of the same dark material chosen by Valérie his child because it was good cloth, a neutral color, and because a heavy-set man would be more comfortably and safely hidden in it.