Chocolat

  “Here. This is for you,” she said brightly, pushing a handful of looted treasure at me. “It’s OK. I’ve got lots more.” Then with a smile of dazzling sweetness she was off, leaving me with chains and earrings and pieces of bright plastic set in gilt weeping from my fingers onto the floor.

  Later in the afternoon I took Anouk for a walk into Les Marauds. The travellers’ camp looked cheery in the new sunlight, with washing flapping on lines drawn between the boats, and all the glass and paint gleaming. Armande was sitting in a rocking-chair in her sheltered front garden, watching the river. Roux and Mahmed were perched on the roof’s steep incline, resetting the loose slates. I noticed that the rotten facia and the gable-ends had been replaced and repainted a bright yellow. I waved at the two men and sat on the garden wall next to Armande while Anouk raced off to the river bank to find her friends of last night.

  The old lady looked tired and puffy-faced beneath the brim of a wide straw hat. The piece of tapestry in her lap looked listless, untouched. She nodded to me briefly, but did not speak. Her chair rocked almost imperceptibly, tick-tick-tick-tick, on the path. Her cat slept curled beneath it.

  “Caro came over this morning,” she said at last. “I suppose I should feel honoured.” A movement of irritation.

  Rocking: tick-tick-tick-tick.

  “Who does she think she is?” snapped Armande abruptly. “Marie Bloody Antoinette?” She brooded fiercely for a moment, her rocking gaining momentum. “Trying to tell me what I can and can’t do. Bringing her doctor —” She broke off to fix me with her piercing, birdlike gaze. “Interfering little busybody. She always was, you know. Always telling tales to her father.” She gave a short bark of laughter. “She doesn’t get these airs from me, in any case. Not on your life. I never needed any doctor — or any priest — to tell me what to think.” Armande pushed out her chin defiantly and rocked even harder.

  “Was Luc there?” I asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Gone to Agen for a chess tournament.” Her fixed expression softened. “She doesn’t know he came over the other day,” she declared with satisfaction. “And she won’t get to know, either.” She smiled. “He’s a good lad, my grandson. Knows how to hold his tongue.”

  “I hear we were both mentioned in church this morning,” I told her. “Consorting with undesirables, so I’m told.”

  Armande snorted. “What I do in my own house is my own business,” she said shortly. “I’ve told Reynaud, and I told Pere Antoine before him. They never learn, though. Always peddling the same old rubbish. Community spirit. Traditional values. Always the same tired old morality play.”

  “So it’s happened before?” I was curious.

  “Oh yes.” She nodded emphatically. “Years ago. Reynaud must have been Luc’s age in those days. Course, we’ve had travellers since then, but they never stayed. Not till now.” She glanced upwards at her half-painted house. “It’s going to look good, isn’t it?” she said with satisfaction. “Roux says he’ll have it finished by tonight.” She gave a sudden frown. “I can have him work for me all I choose.” she declared irritably. “He’s an honest man and a good worker. Georges has no right to tell me otherwise. No right at all.”

  She picked up her unfinished tapestry, but put it down again without setting a stitch. “I can’t concentrate,” she said crossly. “It’s bad enough being woken up by those bells at the crack of dawn without having to look at Caro’s simpering face first thing in the morning. “We pray for you every day, Mother,”’ she mimicked. “’We want you to understand why we worry so much about you.” Worry about their own standing with the neighbours, more like. It’s just too embarrassing to have a mother like me, reminding you all the time of how you began.”

  She gave a small, hard smile of satisfaction. “While I’m alive they know there’s someone who remembers everything,” she declared. “The trouble she got into with that boy. Who paid for that, eh? And him — Reynaud, Mr Whiter-than-White.” Her eyes were bright and malicious. “I bet I’m the only one still alive who remembers that old business. Not many knew in any case. Could have been the biggest scandal in the county if I’d not known how to hold my tongue.” She shot me a look of pure mischief. “And don’t go looking at me like that, girl. I can still keep a secret. Why d’you think he leaves me alone? Plenty of things he could do, if he put his mind to it. Caro knows. She tried already.” Armande chuckled gleefully — heh-heh-heh.

  “I’d rather understood Reynaud wasn’t a local,” I said curiously.

  Armande shook her head. “Not many people remember,” she said. “Left Lansquenet when he was a boy. Easier for everyone that way.” For a moment she paused, reminiscing. “But he’d better not try anything this time. Not against Roux or any of his friends.” The humour had gone from her face and she sounded older, querulous, ill. “I like them being here. They make me feel young.” The small crabby hands plucked meaninglessly at the tapestry in her lap. The cat, sensing the movement, uncurled from beneath the rocking-chair and jumped onto her knees, purring. Armande scratched its head and it buzzed and butted at her chin with small playful gestures.

  “Lariflete,” said Armande. After a moment I realized that was the cat’s name. “I’ve had her nineteen years. That makes her nearly my age, in cat time.” She made a small clucking sound at the cat, which purred louder. “I’m supposed to be allergic,” said Armande. “Asthma or something. I told them that I’d rather choke than get rid of my cats. Though there are some humans I could give up without a second thought.” Lariflete whisker-twitched lazily. I looked across at the water and saw Anouk playing under the jetty with two black-haired river children. From what I could hear Anouk, the youngest of the three, seemed to be directing operations.

  “Stay and have some coffee,” suggested Armande. “I was going to make some when you came along, anyway. I’ve got some lemonade for Anouk, too.”

  I made the coffee myself in Armande’s curious, small kitchen with its cast-iron range and low ceiling. Everything is clean there, but the one tiny window looks onto the river, giving the light a greenish underwater look. Hanging from the dark unpainted beams are bunches of dry herbs in their muslin sachets. On the whitewashed walls copper pans hang from hooks. The door — like all the doors in the house — has a hole cut into the base to allow free passage to her cats. Another cat watched me curiously from a high ledge as I made the coffee in an enamelled tin pot. The lemonade, I noticed, was sugar-free, and the sweetener in the basin was some kind of sugar substitute. In spite of her bravado, it seems as if she does take some precautions after all.

  “Foul stuff,” she commented without rancour, sipping the drink from one of her hand-painted cups. “They say you can’t taste the difference. But you can.” She made a wry face.. “Caro brings it when she comes. Goes through my cupboards. I suppose she means well. Can’t help being a ninny.”

  I told her she ought to take more care.

  Armande snorted. “When you get to my age,” she told me, “things start to break down. If it isn’t one thing, then it’s another. It’s a fact of life.” She took another sip of the bitter coffee. “When he was sixteen Rimbaud said he wanted to experience as much as possible with the greatest possible intensity. Well, I’m going on eighty now, and I’m beginning to think he was right.”

  She grinned, and I was again struck by the youthfulness of her face, a quality that has less to do with colouring or bone structure than with a kind of inner brightness and anticipation, the look of someone who has hardly begun to discover what life has to offer.

  “I think you’re probably too old to join the Foreign Legion,” I told her with a smile. “And didn’t Rimbaud’s experiences run rather to excess at times?”

  Armande shot me an impish look. “That’s right,” she replied. “I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I’m going to be immoderate — and volatile — I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant,” she declared with satisfaction.

  I laughed. “Y
ou are quite absurd,” I said with mock severity. “No wonder your family despairs of you.”

  But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter; that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.

  And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.

  How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, cherie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?

  But with Armande there was none of my mother’s fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time.

  I wonder what the doctor said to her this morning, and how much she really understands. I lay awake for a long time wondering, and when I finally slept, I dreamed of myself and Armande walking through Disneyland with Reynaud and Caro hand-in-hand as the Red Queen and the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with big, white, cartoon gloves on their hands. Caro had a red crown on her giant head, and Armande had a stick of candyfloss in each fist.

  Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of New York traffic, the blaring of horns getting closer.

  “Oh my, oh don’t eat that, it’s poison,” squeaked Reynaud shrilly, but Armande went on gobbling candyfloss with both hands, her face glossy and self-possessed. I tried to warn her about the cab, but she looked at me and said in my mother’s voice, “Life’s a carnival, cherie, more people die every year crossing the road, it’s a statistical fact,” and went on eating in that terrible voracious way, and Reynaud turned towards me and squeaked, in a voice made all the more menacing for its lack of resonance, “This is all your fault, you and your chocolate festival, everything was all right until you came along and now everyone’s dying DYING DYING DYING?”

  I held my hands out protectively. “It isn’t me,” I whispered. “It’s you, it’s supposed to be you, you’re the Black Man, you’re —” Then I was falling backwards through the looking glass with cards spraying out in all directions around me, nine of Swords, DEATH. Three of Swords, DEATH. The Tower, DEATH. The Chariot, DEATH.

  I awoke screaming, with Anouk standing above me, her dark face blurry with sleep and anxiety. “Maman, what is it?”

  Her arms are warm around my neck. She smells of chocolate and vanilla and peaceful untroubled sleep.

  “Nothing. A dream. Nothing.”

  She croons to me in her small soft voice, and I have an unnerving impression of the world reversed, of myself melting into her like a nautilus into its spiral, round-around-around, of her hand cool on my forehead, her mouth against my hair.

  “Out-out-out,” she murmurs automatically. “Evil spirits, get thee hence. It’s OK now, Maman. All gone.” I don’t know where she picks these things up from. My mother used to say that, but I don’t remember ever teaching Anouk. And yet she uses it like an old familiar formula. I cling to her for a moment, paralysed by love.

  “It’s going to be OK, isn’t it, Anouk?”

  “Of course.” Her voice is clear and adult and self-assured. “Of course it is.” She puts her head on my shoulder and curls sleepily into the circle of my arms. “I love you too, Maman.”

  Outside the dawn is a moonshimmer away on the greying horizon. I hold my daughter tightly as she drifts back again into sleep, her curls tickling my face. Is this what my mother feared? I wonder as I listen to the birds — a single craw craw at first then a full congregation of them — was this what she fled? Not her own death, but the thousands of tiny intersections of her life with others, the broken connections, the links in spite of themselves, the responsibilities? Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime?

  I try to recall my dream, the face of Reynaud — his lost expression of dismay, I’m late, I’m late — he, too, running from or into some unimaginable fate of which I am an unwitting part. But the dream has fragmented, its pieces scattered like cards in a high wind. Difficult to remember whether the Black Man pursues or is pursued. Difficult now to be sure whether he is the Black Man. Instead the face of the White Rabbit returns, like that of a frightened child on a carnival-wheel, desperate to get off.

  “Who rings the changes?”

  In my confusion I take the voice for someone else’s; a second later I understand I have spoken aloud. But as I sink back towards sleep I am almost sure I hear another voice reply, a voice which sounds something like Armande’s, something like my mother’s.

  You do, Vianne, it tells me softly. You do.

  TWENTY

  Tuesday, March 4

  THE FIRST GREEN OF THE SPRING CORN gives the land a mellower look than you and I are used to. At a distance it seems lush — a few early drones stitch the air above its swaying, giving the fields a somnolent appearance. But we know that in two months’ time all this will be burnt to stubble by the sun, the earth bared and cracked to a red glaze through which even the thistles are reluctant to grow. A hot wind scours what is left of the country, bringing with it drought, and in its wake, a stinking stillness which breeds disease. I remember the summer of ‘75, mon pere, the dead heat and the hot white sky. We had plague after plague that summer. First the river gypsies, crawling up what was left of the river in their filthy floating hovels, staying stranded in Les Marauds on the baking mudflats. Then the sickness which struck first their animals and then our own; a kind of madness, a rolling of the eyes, feeble jerking of the legs, bloating of the body though the animals refused to take water, then sweating, shivering and death amongst a heaving of purple-black flies; oh God, the air was ripe with them, ripe and sweet like the juice of a foul fruit. Do you remember? So hot that the desperate wild animals came off the dried marais to the water. Foxes, polecats, weasels, dogs. Many of them rabid, flushed from their habitat by hunger and the drought. We would shoot them as they stumbled onto the river banks, shoot them or kill them with stones. The children stoned the gypsies too, but they were as trapped and desperate as their animals and they kept coming back. The air was blue with flies and the stench of their burning as they tried to halt the disease. Horses succumbed first, then cows, oxen, goats, dogs. We kept them at bay, refusing to sell goods or water, refusing medicine. Stranded on the flats of the dwindling Tannes, they drank bottled beer and river water. I remember watching them from Les Marauds, the silent slouching figures over their campfires at night, hearing the sobbing of someone — a woman or a child, I think — across the dark water.

  Some people, weaklings — Narcisse amongst them — began to talk about charity. About pity. But you stayed strong. You knew what to do.

  At Mass you read out the names of those who refused to co-operate. Muscat — old Muscat, Paul’s father — barred them from the cafe until they saw reason. Fights broke out at night between the gypsies and the villagers. The church was desecrated. But you stood fast.

  One day we saw them trying to hoist their boats across the flats to the open river. The mud was still soft and they slid thigh-deep in places, scrabbling for purchase against the slimy stones. Some pulled, harnessed to their barques by ropes, others pushed from behind. Seeing us watching, some cursed us in their harsh, hoarse voices. But it was another two weeks before they left at last, leaving their wrecked boats behind them. A fire, you said, mon pere, a fire left untended by the drunkard and his slattern who owned that boat, the flames spreading in the dry electric air until the river was dancing with it. An accident.

  Some people talked; some always do. Said you had encouraged it with your sermons; nodded wisely at old Muscat and his young son, so nicely placed to see and hear, but who, on that night, had seen and heard nothing. Mostly, though, there was relief. And when the winter rain came and the Tannes swelled once
more, even the hulks were covered over.

  I went round there again this morning, Pere. The place haunts me. Barely different to the way it was twenty years ago, there is a sly stillness to the place, an air of anticipation. Curtains twitch at grimy windows as I walk by. I seem to hear a low, continuous laughter coming at me across the quiet spaces. Will I be strong enough, pere? In spite of all my good intentions, will I fail?

  Three weeks. Already I have spent three weeks in the wilderness. I should be purged of uncertainties and weaknesses. But the fear remains. I dreamed of her last night. Oh, not a voluptuous dream, but one of incomprehensible menace. It is the sense of disorder which she brings, pere, which so unnerves me. That wildness.

  Joline Drou tells me the daughter is as bad. Running wild in Les Marauds, talk of ritual and superstition. Joline tells me the child has never attended church, never learnt to pray. She talks to her of Easter and the Resurrection; the child gabbles a farrago of pagan nonsense in return. And this festival; there is one of her posters in every shop window. The children are crazed with excitement.

  “Leave them alone, pere, you’re only young once;” says Georges Clairmont indulgently. His wife looks at me archly from beneath her plucked eyebrows. “Well; I don’t see what actual harm it could do,” she says simperingly. The truth is, I suspect, that their son has shown an interest. “And anything which reinforces the Easter message?”

  I do not attempt to make them understand. To rail against a children’s celebration is to court ridicule. Already Narcisse has been heard to refer to my brigade anti-chocolat, amidst disloyal sniggering. But it rankles. That she should use the Church’s celebration to undermine the Church — to undermine me. Already I have jeopardized my dignity. I dare not go further than this. And with every day her influence spreads. Part of it is the shop itself. Half-cafe, half-confiserie, it projects an air of cosiness, of confidences. Children love the chocolate shapes at pocket money prices. Adults enjoy the atmosphere of subtle naughtiness, of secrets whispered, grievances aired. Several families have begun to order a chocolate cake for lunch every Sunday; I watch them as they collect the beribboned boxes after Mass. The inhabitants of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes have never eaten as much chocolate. Yesterday Denise Arnauld was eating — eating! — in the confessional. I could smell the sweetness on her breath, but I had to pretend to maintain anonymity.