“And he’s sixty-eight,” she said, “but he takes more risks than you.”
“I’m not running a risk if I let you drink on an empty stomach. It’s you who take the risk. It’s easy to take such a responsibility if you are indifferent.”
The polenta au vin blanc, very sweet and as liquid as soup, was appetizing to swallow. Afterwards it lay on the stomach like red lead.
“You think you’re stronger than one of my old hussars,” thought Angelo. “They eat polenta cooked with wine when they’re in a tight spot. It’s stupid things like that that give one strength of character.”
He uncorked a bottle of red wine and pushed it towards the young woman. He drank, in quick succession, four or five glasses of a thick, very strong and dark wine, which resembled nebbia but had a more delicate taste. She emptied her bottle as quickly. They had been wanting something besides tea for a long time.
“My husband is not indifferent,” she said.
“Then where is he? Dead?”
“No. If he were dead I wouldn’t be here.”
“Where would you be?”
“Certainly dead.”
“You don’t do things by halves.”
“You don’t understand me at all. I’d have nursed him and have died from the plague; if you must have everything explained.”
“Then it’s not so certain. I’ve nursed more than twenty cholera victims; I’ve washed corpses, any amount of them. I’m still on my feet. So you might be on yours, and here, even if your husband had died with all the honors due to his rank.”
“Don’t argue. I should be dead. Or at least I should long to be. Let’s talk of something else.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. We’ve found plenty of subjects for conversation up to now.”
“Yes, pistols and saber, then saber and pistols.”
“The subject is inexhaustible and full of instruction. As a bodyguard you’re certainly first class, I admit. As soon as the situation becomes hair-raising, you come into your own.”
“That’s my trade.”
“Before I met you, I little imagined such a trade existed among men.”
“I’m not forced to be like everyone else.”
“Don’t worry, you’re not. Indeed, I wonder how one should take you.”
“I don’t want to be taken. On the contrary.”
“And you like that?”
“Very much.”
“You’re not French?”
“I’m Piedmontese. I told you, and it’s obvious.”
“What’s obvious has four or five names, all very fine ones. Is that Piedmont or your character?”
“I don’t see what you call very fine. I do what suits me. I was happy when I was a child. I want to go on being so.”
“You had a lonely childhood?”
“No. My mother’s only sixteen years older than I. I also had my foster-brother Giuseppe, and his mother, who was my nurse, Teresa. She’d be astonished if she knew that I stir polenta for ladies.”
“What does she suppose you do to ladies?”
“Something grandiose; to ladies and the whole world.”
“Is she capable of knowing what this is?”
“Very. She does it herself, all the time.”
“Doesn’t that get in the way?”
“No. The house demands it, and has done so for a long time.”
“Who are you? You’ve told me your first name: Angelo, and perhaps your surname—”
“My surname’s Pardi.”
“—without my being much further forward, except to call to you more easily for help when I need it…”
“I know that your name is Pauline.”
“Pauline de Théus since my marriage. My maiden name was Colet. My father was a doctor at Rians.”
“I never knew my father.”
“I never knew my mother. She died when I was born.”
“I—I don’t know if he’s dead. No one knows; no one cares. We’ve done very well without him.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“She wouldn’t appeal to you.”
“All mothers appeal to me. Mine, it seems, was very pretty, very gentle, very delicate, and she wanted me. I’ve had plenty of time to love a ghost. Smiling at my father never altogether satisfied me, even in my cradle, if I can judge by the unfulfilled desires that have remained in me. And yet my father was an easy man to love, he could be happy with nothing at all: that’s to say, with me all his life. But a poor doctor’s house in Rians! A big white village, among rocks, where two worn valleys intersect, bare as a hand, down which rolls the wind, and only the wind, all the time. A big village worn away by the wind; the angle of every wall gnawed like a bone by a winter fox. Much wilder country than any we’ve crossed, and I know nothing sadder than its sun.
“I was alone most of the time, or with hunchbacked Anaïs; a woman of pure gold. Everyone was of gold. My father was of gold. No one ever hurt me: on the contrary. Everywhere I was caressed, cajoled, worn down, scraped by hands, lips, beards, just as that tense, restless countryside is by the wind. I was restless; I loved my little felt slippers because they let me move without a sound, straight as a die, step by step, and steal up to the creaking window, the groaning door, and listen to them from close to. I had to be sure; it was far more important than fear. Sure of what? Sure of everything.
“When I heard your stealthy steps in the house at Manosque, where I was alone in the middle of the cholera, I took a candlestick and went to see what it was. I always have to go and see. I can’t run away. I’ve no refuge anywhere, except in what threatens me. I get so frightened! Boldness is the lap I turn to.
“I think I’m a bit drunk.”
“Don’t let that worry you. Drink. We need wine. But take some of this dark one. It’s like a wine from my country and it contains tannin. That’s what you want when you’re facing a long march.”
“You know too many things.”
“I know nothing. The first time I had to command men (and I had a thousand advantages, especially the plume on my helmet, gold on my sleeves, and the walls of the Pardi palace seated on the horse with me) I asked myself: ‘By what right?’ Before me I had fifty mustaches that one could have grasped in handfuls; and Giuseppe, my foster-brother, in the ranks, at attention. He and I had had another fight the day before, like dogs, and with sabers. But there I have the advantage. When we were little, his mother wanted him to call me ‘My Lord.’ When Teresa wants something, and particularly if it’s to do with me, she sees that she gets it. He used to call me ‘My Lord,’ and add what he had to between his teeth. We used to fight. We slept in each other’s arms in the same bed. He’s my brother. He was stiff as a ramrod on his horse. I said to myself: ‘If one day you order him to charge, he’ll charge.’ I’d taken a slice out of his forearm the day before and we’d spent part of the night weeping together. It was a good three days before we went for each other again. He was my orderly. I put the captain in charge of the parade, called Giuseppe, and we went off for a walk in the woods.”
“I never believed you were an officer.”
“I’m a colonel; commission bought and paid for.”
“Then what are you doing in France?—in these peasant’s clothes?”
“I’m in hiding, or rather I was in hiding. I’m going home now.”
“Drunk with the desire for vengeance?”
“I’ve nothing to avenge. I’m drunk this evening like you, but that’s all. It’s the others who want to avenge themselves on me.”
“Followed by the faithful Giuseppe?”
“Followed by the faithful Giuseppe, who must also be roaming about the roads and woods now, after waiting for me at Sainte-Colombe and sending me to the devil.”
“—and by Lavinia.”
“The hatched girl.”
“Why the hatched girl?”
“My mother christened her that. ‘One might say I’d hatched her out like a hen,’ she said. Lavi
nia came to the Pardi palace three apples high and because she was three apples high. The rest is too delicate to tell.”
“Delicate for whom?”
“Delicate for everyone.”
“You daren’t tell me what your mother employed Lavinia to do? And why she christened her ‘the hatched girl’? And why she had to be only three apples high?”
“You’re very rash,” said Angelo. “You don’t know me. Suppose I’m a brigand. There are people at home who have good manners and even courage. They’re all republicans besides. But there always comes a moment when they think of themselves. Then, look out! Now, I’ve been drinking and you give me an excuse for losing my temper. How can you imagine that I daren’t? It’s a childish story, that’s all. My mother used to stand and make Lavinia burrow under her skirts. The little girl had to push her hand under my mother’s stays and smooth out her petticoat. That’s why she was hatched and brooded as though by a hen. It wasn’t very terrible, and Lavinia was still performing her task just before she left with Giuseppe. And about that too there’s a lot to be said. She didn’t go off with Giuseppe for love. The women at home like love, it’s true, but they’ll get up in the middle of the night joyfully to take part in some secret and heroic deed, especially if it’s clearly established that their only interest is in the adventure, or in the pleasure of brushing against, touching, some somber anxious man with great Brutus-like gestures, listening to his talk and serving him. We belong to a country where people like to have hobnobbed with the man being shot in the main square. Our political executions are morning spectacles much sought after, because everyone has a little bit of his heart involved in the ceremony.
“My mother does nothing unfeelingly. She’s the Primavera. She constantly has her finger under my nose to make me raise my head and look up in the air.”
“You were right. I don’t like your mother.”
“Because she’s not here.”
“Perhaps: but above all because you are.”
“It would have been easy to give things a different turn, if I hadn’t had that finger under my nose. Had I been prepared to look downward, I had a silver spoon in my mouth all right. Giuseppe reproaches me often enough on that account. But I don’t believe revolutions are murders, or if they are, I give up. People know that. That’s why I get shot at with red-hot bullets from both sides. I once killed a man. An informer. Is it an illusion for me to say that an informer’s a man like anyone else? Reasons of expediency are always bad. Believing that there can be two weights and two measures is bad too. It would have been easy to settle his hash at some street corner. Put out the street lamps and skewer him. Just take one’s hand out of one’s pocket. With a couple of louis I’d have had as many petty assassins at my beck and call as there are men, or even women, in Turin. It would have been enough to wave my arm, as they say: then stay cosily in my bed while the thing was being done independently of me. That’s what they call saving oneself. But it happens that there’s another little difference between me and them. I’m a good orator only when talking to myself. If one must follow great examples, if that is the price of the liberty and happiness of the people, I should despise myself for not being the first to be guilty of it. One kills, perhaps, but one doesn’t acquire a soul vicariously.”
“So you are one of those people who provide food for conversation and make such a stir by hiding in the forests on the other side of the Alps? But why talk of Brutus? Everyone more or less has killed a man. If modesty has any charm, therein lies its greatest. Will you believe me if I tell you that I was courted with a corpse devoured by the crows and foxes? Did I tell you my husband was sixty-eight? That usually makes people open their eyes. You never batted an eyelid. That’s because you’re indifferent to me, but—”
“I’m not indifferent to you at all. I’ve been making fires and polenta for you for ten days, and instead of going about my own business, I’m pushing on with you to Gap—”
“Where I shall, I hope, find my husband again. For I love him. That doesn’t seem to move you very much either.”
“It’s quite natural, since you married him.”
“One comes upon a certain gallantry often, in what you say. It’s true, in spite of his great name and fortune, if I hadn’t loved him I wouldn’t have married him. Thank you. The fact remains, he is nearly forty-five years older than I. And that still doesn’t astonish you?”
“No. What does astonish me is your way of harping on his age all the time.”
“It’s one of my weaknesses. Would you like an Amazon? Perhaps I am one indeed, and precisely over this. It’s not his age I harp on, it’s his handsomeness. Marriages like mine are always suspected of having some sordid interest. Is it really a weakness to want to clear oneself of that at all costs?”
“Let’s say, to reassure you, that as far as I’m concerned you’re merely insulting me. I know how extravagant all my worries are: they make me look a simpleton. But you shouldn’t be so sure. I recognize the worth of people very quickly. The idea that you could behave in a vulgar way would never enter my head.”
“With you I find myself constantly being abashed,” said the young woman. “And it’s far from disagreeable. I’ve suddenly forgotten what I was going to tell you for the sake of what I’d like to say here and now, if you promise not to answer.”
“I promise.”
“No one has any but blind hopes. Be less candid. And now here’s what I meant to tell you first. By dint of being a lonely little girl in a poor doctor’s house at Rians, the day came when I was sixteen. From door to door the world had grown up around me. I sometimes used to go dancing under the limes. I had seen girls get married and even become pregnant. The young bourgeois of the place courted me, that is to say, they spun round before me like plums in boiling water.
“The country, as I told you, is rough and has no springtime. My father never had a carriage. We weren’t so poor as all that, but the carriage would have been no use to him on the hill paths. He went his rounds on horseback. He bought me a mare so that I could accompany him. So I came to know the happiness of trotting and even galloping over those uplands. They’re so vast that one can easily believe one is fleeing, and even getting away.
“One evening, after a storm, returning down the valley, at a bend of the stream which had suddenly swollen, we found a man who had been thrown from his horse and hurt. The water was half over him. Though unconscious, he was clutching the mud and gave the impression that death itself could not stop him from fighting. His chief injury was a pistol wound in the chest. Naturally, we took him home. I had been hardening myself with my terrors and still more, for several years, with my desires. That abandoned body which had to be saved, and which for that very reason let itself be taken in one’s arms, that unconscious face which still wouldn’t relax its frown, touched me more than anything else ever will. Back at home, my father laid the wounded man out on our kitchen table. He boiled some water, took off his coat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The man’s first movement, when he came round, was a menacing gesture. But he recovered his wits with amazing promptness; he understood at once why my father had that little, gleaming knife in his hand, and he gave a beautiful smile, spoke a few words of apology, and submitted courageously.
“I don’t expect you will be either surprised or roused to indignation when I tell you that the bullet, once extracted, turned out to be from a musket. And more, from one of the regulation police muskets, my father said. The man’s clothes, though soiled with mud and blood, were plainly of fine cloth and very well cut. That sprang to the eyes of peasants like us. Under his spotless silk shirt he wore an emblazoned cross, attached to his neck by a gold chain so supple, so delicately woven that I thought at first it was made of a woman’s hair.
“To be brief, we installed him in a room on the first floor, where he remained in seclusion. I looked after him alone. He quickly regained his health. My father was quite astonished. ‘This man is at least sixty,’ he said, ‘and he’s pickin
g up like a youngster.’ I remembered then that I had seen his chest covered with thick gray hair, and that this had had to be cut with scissors to apply the dressing.
“He had been with us for about a month without anyone knowing. I was simply thrilled about this situation. In the early days his alert eyes kept watching my father. His look then was hard and even cruel. I knew that, most rashly and at the cost of painful effort, he had got up in spite of his dressing, and that he had a loaded pistol under his bolster. But he never mistrusted me. I could go into his room at any hour of the day or night; he never jumped. That meant he could recognize my step, even at its lightest, and that I had his confidence. I found happiness in a thousand tiny details of that nature. At length, after two weeks, he simply declared to my father that he offered him his apologies a second time. ‘And this time for good,’ he added. He had the gift of putting much grace into few words.
“One evening when I was taking the air under the lime walk, I saw a stranger leaning against a tree, watching me. He was awkwardly clad in his Sunday best. I hurried indoors. I saw that the man had followed me and was approaching the house. I ran upstairs, two at a time, to our guest’s room. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, when I had described the man, ‘ask him in and bring him up here. I was expecting him.’ And indeed, the man immediately took on the manner of a servant. When night had fallen, he went to fetch his mount from where he had concealed it and brought a trunk with clean clothes. He went away, no doubt with orders. Two weeks later, he returned openly and in livery. He brought with him an extremely handsome horse with an English saddle.
“We never knew how he had managed to let his servant know the first time. He kept it even from me, and if I now have some ideas on that subject they are purely and simply ideas. We were equally surprised, about then, at the stories running round Rians. Monsieur de Théus had apparently been our friend for a long time, and if he had honored us by visiting and staying with us, it was purely out of friendship.
“There remained, however, that ball from a regulation police musket, which nobody mentioned and which I kept in a little silk bag hung around my neck.