Four Novels (35 page)

Sharing one outlook, they both listen. They also listen to the strangled sweetness of this song.

The wind mussed her hair each time she came back from the path. It blew more often and a little stronger. Tirelessly, each time she returned toward Mr. Andesmas, she would push her hair back with her hand and hold it like this a few seconds, and her bared face became the face of past summers when, swimming next to Michel Arc, she must have been told that she was beautiful, like that, for him, Michel Arc.

Once, the wind is strong enough to blow all her hair onto her face and, tired of having to make this mechanical gesture once more, of pushing it back, she does not do it. She no longer has a face, or eyes. Instead of moving forward on the plateau, she stands there, on the path, waiting for the end of the gust that mussed her hair.

The gust ends and once again she makes that sensible gesture. Her face reappears.

“So much blondness, so much, so much useless blondness, I thought, so much idiotic blondness, what could it be good for? Except for a man to drown in it? I didn’t immediately realize who would to the point of madness love to drown in that blondness. It took me a year. A year. A strange year.”

The shade starts to overtake the fields, it approaches the village.

More numerous, exuberant shouts rise from the valley.

The path remains empty.

“People are in the streets,” she says.

“You were telling me, Mrs. Arc,” Mr. Andesmas says hastily, “you were telling me that the curtain of the grocery had been pushed aside.”

“And the car isn’t there any more,” she went on. “And they aren’t dancing any more. And it’s already too cool to go to the beach.”

She comes up to the old man, slowly. And slowly, she speaks.

“The curtain was pushed aside. I have time, I have plenty of time to tell you. Yes. The curtain was pushed aside. And she crossed the whole square again, unconcerned. I already told you. I could tell you again. She appeared. The bead curtain covered her, she freed herself from it. And that day I heard the almost deafening noise, which I was to hear thousands of times, of the bead curtain falling back after her. I could also tell you how, like a swimmer, she pushed it aside, her eyes closed for fear of hurting herself with the beads, and that it was after she had gone through the curtain, in the sunlit square that she opened her eyes, with a slightly embarrassed smile.”

“Oh, I see, I see,” Mr. Andesmas exclaimed.

The woman went on even more slowly.

“And, taking her time, she crossed the square.”

The song began again.

She listened to it without speaking, attentively.

“So,” she said, “that’s the most popular song this summer.”

She starts moving toward the path again, comes back again, and then, giving up this maneuver, she sits down like a lump right where she is. She leaves her hair to the mercy of the wind, her idle hands stroke the earth.

“Beauty, we all know it,” she says, “starting with ourselves. In love, we are told, how beautiful you are. Even when mistaken, who doesn’t know what it is to be beautiful and the peace you feel to hear it said, whether as a lie or not? But Valérie didn’t, Valérie, when I first knew her, as unbelievable as this may seem, was still very far from guessing how sweet it is to hear this said, how longed for. But without knowing it, she was yearning for it, she was wondering who, some day, would come to her, speaking these very words, for her.”

“She crossed the square,” Mr. Andesmas says, “you had gotten to that.”

“She was already grown up, Mr. Andesmas, your child was already grown up, I assure you.”

There was a lull in the village.

Her mouth half open, dazed by her own intensity, she stops talking—her eyes are following Valérie’s black car on the road along the sea. Mr. Andesmas also sees this car.

She is the one to start talking again.

“It took me a year,” she goes on, “to unravel the enormous problem posed by the wonderful blondness of your child. One year simply to accept its existence, to admit it as a fact: Valérie’s existence, and to overcome my fright at the idea that she was still being offered without any reservations, to whom? To whom?”

Valérie’s car is no longer visible.

The road along the beach leads deep into the pine forest beyond it at the foot of the hill, but to the east, where it is still sunny.

The car has gone beyond the turn-off for Valérie’s house.

Again she starts pulling her hair back into place after each gust of wind. Mr. Andesmas watches her gesture as much as he listens to her words. This gesture remains the same as the one Michel Arc’s wife must have made always.

“She knew it, she already knew it, in her heart, what you were saying. . . .” Mr. Andesmas moans.

“One doesn’t know it by oneself. No, she did not know it.”

Mr. Andesmas raised himself from his armchair and whispered:

“But she knows it, she knows it.”

The woman mistakenly thought this was a question. She answered.

“You shouldn’t ask this horrible question,” she said. “Tomorrow, or tonight, perhaps she will know it?”

Severely she examined the shapeless bulk of Mr. Andesmas.

“Did you see her car go along the beach, Mr. Andesmas?”

“I saw it.”

“Then we are in the same boat, both of us, at this moment which is perhaps the very one when she will find out.”

Very quickly she is somewhere else, crucified on that sunny square Valérie was crossing.

“The first walk across the square,” she said, “that morning, of
Valérie’s, so blond, as you know, even you, her father, that walk followed by strange eyes, she didn’t pay any attention to it, certainly, and yet she says she remembers it. She claims she raised her head and saw me.”

“But you couldn’t not have known that Valérie was my child,” Mr. Andesmas wailed.

“After she had left the grocery, but long after she had gone, I understood that Valérie was a child. But only afterward. After having thought about it.”

“She walked out with? With?”

“Yes!” she cried.

A long, deep, rumbling laugh shook Mr. Andesmas’ body. And she, she burst into a loud laugh that stopped halfway in its flight.

“With candy!” she went on, “She was looking at no one, at no one, in spite of what she now says, just at the bag of candy! She stopped a second. She opened the bag and took out a piece, unable to wait any longer.”

She looks at the pine forest in which Valérie’s car has been swallowed up.

“That is how, afterward, I remembered her as a child. How old was she exactly?”

Mr. Andesmas said it again.

“Over sixteen. Almost seventeen. Two months short. Valérie was born in autumn. In September.”

Mr. Andesmas is overwhelmed with words, he trembles from this unaccustomed flow of words.

“She was still a very little girl because of your love. But you didn’t know that very soon, and no matter what you did to prevent it, she would be old enough to leave you.”

She stops talking. And in this silence, brought on by her, the graceful memory of an old suffering slides into Mr. Andesmas’ heart.

“But this other little girl, yours?” he moans.

She does not take her eyes from the pine forest which hides Valérie’s car.

“Let her be,” she says.

“Where is she? Where could she be?” Mr. Andesmas cries out.

“She’s there,” she says slowly. “There. She thinks she’s lost something, she’s looking in the square. I can see her. She’s there.”

Her eyes leave the forest, wander over the plain, move closer to the village.

“I recognize her by her blue dress.”

She points toward a spot Mr. Andesmas can no longer see.

“There,” she says. “She’s there.”

“I can’t see her,” Mr. Andesmas complains.

The graceful memory of his old suffering hardly stirs within him, hardly more than the memory of the inconsolable regret for a love glimpsed and, barely seen, stifled, and with thousands of others, forgotten.

Its grief is borne only by the very old flesh of this destroyed body. That is all. This time his head is spared the trouble of having to suffer.

“She won’t find anything,” Mr. Andesmas says. “Nothing.”

Can she really see her child, who in the sun and the dust of the square is looking for her memory?

“While she is looking,” she says, “she’s not unhappy. It’s when she finds that she’s upset, when she finds what she is looking for, when she remembers clearly having forgotten.”

Slowly she turns her head, seized again by the spectacle of the pine forest and the sea. The forest keeps its secret. The sea is empty.

Mr. Andesmas loses sight of her as suddenly as he had noticed before.

As though she is chilly, she suddenly clasps her shoulders.

“Little by little day after day, I started thinking about Valérie Andesmas, who would soon be old enough to leave you. You understand?”

With slow steps she moves closer to the chasm, not waiting for an answer from Mr. Andesmas. He is afraid she will let go of her shoulders, he thinks that once she has let go of her shoulders, nothing will keep her from going a little farther toward the chasm. But she lets go after turning back to him again. Mr. Andesmas’ fear at seeing her move toward the chasm is so violent that he could have believed that his age, right then, inadvertently, was receding from him.

“Are you asleep, Mr. Andesmas? You’re not answering me any more?”

Mr. Andesmas points to the sea. Mr. Andesmas has forgotten the child forever.

“It is not as late as you think,” he says. “Look at the sea. The sun is still high. Look at the sea.”

She does not look, shrugs her shoulders.

“Since they’ll come anyway and since the later it gets the closer the time comes when they’ll be here, why worry?”

Laughter exploded somewhere on the hill.

The woman freezes, like a statue, facing Mr. Andesmas. The laughing has stopped.

“It was Valérie’s laugh and Michel Arc’s,” she cries. “They were laughing together. Listen!”

She adds, laughing herself:

“At what, do you know, can you imagine?”

Mr. Andesmas raises his stiff, neatly cared-for hands in a gesture of ignorance. She comes toward him walking like a weasel, she seems very gay all of a sudden. Does he wish she would leave now? He imagines the plateau deserted once she has left and so when she moves close to him, he listens with all his strength.

“You know what? It’s by giving her candy that I got to meet her. A sweet tooth, hasn’t she, Valérie?”

“Yes, a sweet tooth!” Mr. Andesmas admits.

He smiles, incurable, at this memory.

“I’m the one,” she says, “who taught her to escape during your siestas.”

Mr. Andesmas leads her on.

“Was it necessary?”

“Yes. She could still hardly bear leaving you alone at your age. The only time it was possible was siesta time, your long siestas.”

“This house?”

“Michel Arc showed it to her during a walk.”

“The terrace?”

“It would be an idea, he told her. It would be nice to have a house, so high up on the hill, with a terrace where you could see good weather coming, and storms, where you could hear every sound, even those from the other side of the bay, in the morning, in the evening, at night too.”

“They didn’t laugh just now as you claimed,” Mr. Andesmas says. “We didn’t hear the car drive up.”

“If they come by way of the pond, it’s such a long walk that they
would have left the car much farther down, and that’s why we wouldn’t have heard it. It doesn’t matter actually, we’ll know soon enough.”

Again laughter exploded from another part of the hill. She listens.

“Some children perhaps?” she asks. “It’s over by the pond.”

“Yes,” Mr. Andesmas declares.

Her good mood dies away. She comes back close to the armchair, very close.

“What do you think?” she asks very softly. “Is it worth our waiting longer? A while ago I took advantage of your confidence. I told you I was sure they would come, but it isn’t true, I’m not sure of anything.”

“I can’t go back down by myself without running the risk of dying,” he says. “My child knows this.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she says.

She laughs at this joke, laughs. He laughs with her.

“I told this to your little girl. I’d wait for Michel Arc as long as there was light. There is still a lot of light.”

“And she told him.”

“Well then. There you are.”

She sits down at the foot of the armchair like that little girl a while before. One might think she no longer expects anything to happen. She closes her eyes.

Her hair lies against the wicker of the chair, caressing it.

“She refused what I would give her, candy at first,” she says. “As you had taught her. Even candy. Many times.”

She repeated, wearily:

“Many, many times. Sometimes it made me feel almost discouraged.”

She turned to him, stared at him from very close, and Mr. Andesmas lowered his eyes. Who would ever again look at Mr. Andesmas, except, at some trying time, this woman, and, a moment before, that child?

“You look as if you weren’t thinking of anything any more,” she added softly.

“She’s my child,” Mr. Andesmas whispered. “Her memory is inside me, even in her presence, always the same and it fills me with laziness so that I can’t even think.”

“And yet you listen to me.”

“You’re talking to me about her. Was she running off to your garden, during my siestas?”

“When it wasn’t too hot to stay there, yes, it was to our garden.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. But it makes no difference to me now, whether I know or not.”

“You certainly are talking a lot all of a sudden,” she said, smiling.

“When I wake up, Mrs. Arc, at my age, from these old man’s siestas you are talking about, from a sleep thick as glue, with my memories I know that it’s a very common joke to believe that it is useful to have had such a long life. I can still imagine Valérie’s mornings and evenings, I can do nothing about it. I think that I shall never reach the moment in my life when the image of Valérie’s mornings will have left me. I think that I shall die with all the weight, the heavy weight of my love for Valérie on my heart. I think that’s how it will be.”