Malevil

  I freeze on that frame. Because the boy lying on the mattress is me. But the man, my uncle standing in the doorway, he is me too. Uncle Samuel was then more or less the same age as I am now, and everyone agrees that I am very much like him to look at. So that in this scene, during which very few words were exchanged, I have the impression of seeing the boy I once was confronting the man I have become.

  In describing Uncle Samuel I shall also be describing myself. He was of above average height, very thickset, yet with slim hips, a square face, tanned complexion, eyebrows black as soot, and blue eyes. Most people in Malejac surrounded themselves from morning till night with a constant murmur of comforting, meaningless words. But my uncle never spoke when he had nothing to say. And when he did speak, he did so briefly, always straight to the point. And he was equally thrifty with his gestures.

  It was this decisiveness of his that most attracted me to him. Because at home, my father, my mother, my sisters, everything was always so messy somehow. Their thoughts so muddled. Their speech like cobwebs everywhere.

  I also admired my uncle’s spirit of enterprise. He had cleared the maximum possible acreage on his farm for cultivation. He had divided up one arm of the river that ran through it into tanks, and now bred trout in them. He had set up a score or so of beehives. He had even bought a secondhand Geiger counter to prospect for uranium in the volcanic rocks that pushed up here and there through the soil on one side of his hill. And when “ranches” and riding stables began appearing everywhere, he promptly sold all his cows and replaced them with horses.

  “Knew I’d find you here,” my uncle said.

  I stared up at him, dumbfounded. But we understood each other, Uncle Samuel and me. After a moment he replied to my tongue-tied gaze. “The planks. The planks you used last summer from my junk shed. They were too heavy for you to carry. You dragged them. I followed the trail.”

  So he’d known for a whole year! And he’d never breathed a word to anyone, not even to me.

  “I had a look around,” my uncle went on. “The keep battlements are safe enough. There won’t be any more falls.”

  I was flooded with gratitude. Uncle Samuel had been keeping watch over me, but from a distance, without telling me, without bothering me. I looked at him, but he avoided my gaze. He didn’t want to get sentimental. He grabbed one of the stools, checked that it was strong enough to bear his weight, and sat down, straddling it as though it were a horse. Then he came straight to the point, at a gallop.

  “Now listen, Emmanuel, they haven’t said anything about it yet to anyone. And they haven’t told the police.” A tiny smile. “You know what she is like. Terrified what people will say. So here’s what I suggest. I’ll have you over to live with me till the vacation’s over. When school begins again, there’s no problem. You’ll be going to La Roque as a boarder.”

  A pause.

  “What about the weekends?” I said.

  My uncle’s eyes sparkled. Like him, I knew how to say things without speaking them. If I was already back at school in my mind, that meant I had agreed to finish my vacation with him.

  “Spend them at my place, if you like,” he said, the brisk words accompanied by a leisurely gesture.

  A short pause.

  “Though you must go over and eat now and then at La Grange Forte.”

  Just often enough, sweet mother, to keep up appearances. I saw immediately that everyone stood to gain by this arrangement.

  “Right then,” my uncle said as he rose abruptly to his feet. “If you agree, pack up your things and come down after me to the river meadow. I’m just bringing in some hay for the horses.”

  He was already gone, and I was already filling my haversack.

  Once out of the bramble tunnel and through the gate in the barbed wire, I hurtled at full speed down the bed of the dried-up stream that ran between the sheer cliff of Malevil and the dome of my uncle’s hill. Overjoyed at being out of my gloomy lair. The trees that had taken root everywhere in the cracks of the ruined walls made it dark with their overhanging branches, and I took in a great breath of relief as I emerged into the bright valley of the Rhunes.

  It lay in late sunlight, the sunlight between six and seven, the most beautiful time of all. That was something I’d learned, since my uncle had pointed it out. There was something gentle in the air. The meadows were greener, the shadows longer, the light golden. I pedaled on toward my uncle’s red tractor. Behind it was the wagon with its great yellowish mound of hay. And beyond, two parallel lines, the poplars along the banks of the Rhune, with their perpetually dancing silver-gray leaves. I loved the sound they made: like a gentle summer shower.

  Without speaking, my uncle took hold of my bike and tied it with a length of rope on top of the hay. He got up onto the tractor seat while I clambered up beside him and settled myself against the mudguard. Not a word spoken. Not even an exchange of glances. But from the slight quiver of his hands I could sense how happy he was—never having had a child by my scrawny aunt—to be driving a son of his own back home to Les Sept Fayards at last.

  La Menou stood waiting for me at the front door, her emaciated arms folded over an absent bosom, her little death’s-head face wrinkled into a smile. Her weakness for me was in inverse proportion to the strength of her antagonism toward my mother. And the antagonism she had also entertained against my aunt, while she was still alive. But don’t get any ideas. La Menou didn’t sleep with my uncle. Nor was she his servant. She had land of her own. He brought in her hay for her, she ran his house, he fed her.

  La Menou was thin too, like my aunt, but merry with it. She never whined, she trounced you with relish. Eighty pounds, black clothes included. But at the bottom of those hollow eye sockets her little black button eyes sparkled with a love of life. Though virtuous, virtuous in every way, except when she was a young girl. And in particular, thrifty. So thrifty, in fact, my uncle claimed, that she had starved herself to the point where she had no bottom left to sit on.

  And a tiger when it came to work. Arms like matchsticks, but when she was out hoeing her vines, the rows she could do in an hour! And while she hoed, her only son, Momo, then about to turn eighteen, would be out there pulling along a toy train on a length of string and going choo-choo.

  To add spice to her life, La Menou kept up a perpetual squabble with my uncle. But he was her god. And his divinity overflowed onto me. So to welcome me to Les Sept Fayards she had cooked a dinner fit to burst your belt. And as its culmination, with deliberate malice, she produced an enormous tart.

  If I were making a film I would move in to a close-up of that tart. Followed by a fade and mix into a flashback: 1947, summer the year before. Another “milestone.”

  I was eleven. I was falling in love with Adelaide, organizing the new premises for the Club in Malevil, and arriving at a new attitude toward religion.

  I have already mentioned the role played by the owner of Malejac’s grocery store in my awakening. She was thirty, and her very maturity hypnotized me. I might also add that even today, despite so many experiences to the contrary, I still, thanks to her, associate kindness with abundant curves, and thinness, thanks to you-know-who, with lack of feelings. A pity that’s not my theme. I should like to tell you about all the fevers excited by all those luscious curves. When the Abbé Lebas, beginning to show concern over the use to which we were putting our attributes, talked to us in our catechism class about “sins of the flesh,” I was unable to conceive that the flesh he was talking about was my own, since I was all muscles and sinews, so I immediately applied the expression to Adelaide, and the idea of sin began to seem delightful.

  Nor was I even put out by the fact that my idol, although so generously proportioned, had the reputation of being inclined to lightness. On the contrary, that seemed only to augur well for my own future. Though the years that were to make a rooster out of the cockerel I was at eleven seemed to stretch unendingly ahead.

  Meanwhile, that summer at least, I had plenty to occupy me. T
he “war” was at its height. The valiant heretic captain Emmanuel Comte, besieged inside Malevil with his co-religionists, was defending the castle against the sinister Meyssonnier, head of the Catholic League. I say sinister because his aim was to sack the castle and put all the heretics inside it—male and female alike—to the sword. The women were represented by bundles of kindling, the children by somewhat smaller bundles.

  Victory was not a foregone conclusion, it depended upon the fortunes of battle. Anyone who was struck or even grazed by a spear, an arrow, a stone, or, in hand-to-hand fighting, by the point of a sword, had to exclaim, “I am slain!” and fall to the ground. It was permissible, once the battle had been won, to cut the throats of the wounded and kill the women, but not, as big Peyssou did on one occasion, to hurl oneself upon one of the more sizable bundles of wood with the intention of raping it. We were hard and pure, like our ancestors. In public anyway. Lechery was a private matter.

  One afternoon, when fortune sat on my helm, I sent an arrow winging down from the ramparts straight into Meyssonnier’s chest. He fell. I pushed my head through my arrow slit, brandished my fist, and yelled in a voice of thunder, “Death to you, Catholic swine!”

  This terrible cry froze the assailants in their tracks. In their stupor they forgot to cover themselves, and our arrows laid them all low forthwith.

  At that I emerged with slow stride from the main gate, dispatched my lieutenants Colin and Giraud to finish off Dumont and Condat, then thrust my sword through Meyssonnier’s throat.

  As for Peyssou, first I cut off those organs of which he was so proud, then I thrust my sword into his breast and worked it in and out of the wound, asking him “in a voice like cold steel” if it gave him pleasure to be raped. I always kept Peyssou till last, his death throes were always magnificent.

  The heat of the day and its battle over, we were once more gathered around the table in our den inside the keep for a last cigarette and the piece of chewing gum that would remove its taint from our breath.

  And I could see immediately, just from the way he was chewing, that Meyssonnier was put out. Beneath the narrow forehead, topped by its austere fence of brushcut hair, his gray eyes were flickering nonstop.

  “What’s up, Meyssonnier?” I asked in a friendly tone. “Is something wrong? Are you mad about something?”

  The eyelids flickered even more rapidly. He was hesitant to criticize me, because he usually got the worst of it in the end. But the duty to do so was there all the same, pressing in on his narrow skull from all sides.

  “What’s wrong,” he burst out finally, “is that you shouldn’t have called me a Catholic swine!”

  There was a murmur of agreement from Dumont and Condat, and though Colin and Giraud kept silent out of loyalty, their very silence held a hint of disapproval that did not escape me. Only Peyssou, his great dumpling face split by a wide grin, remained wholly serene.

  “What?” I cried with a brazen show of surprise. “But that was part of the game! In the game I have to be the Protestant; you can’t expect me to start saying nice things about the Catholic who’s coming to murder me.”

  “The game doesn’t excuse everything,” Meyssonnier replied firmly. “There are limits, even in a game. For example, you pretend to cut off Peyssou’s you-know-what, but you don’t really cut them off.”

  Peyssou’s smile grew wider.

  “And besides, it was never in the rules to insult one another,” Meyssonnier added with his eyes glued on the tabletop.

  “And especially about religion,” Dumont put in.

  I looked across at Dumont. I knew him and his touchy spots only too well. “I didn’t insult you,” I said, hoping to drive a wedge between him and Meyssonnier. “I was talking to Meyssonnier.”

  “It comes to the same thing,” Dumont said, “since I’m a Catholic too.”

  I protested indignantly, “But so am I!”

  “Exactly,” Meyssonnier cut in. “You oughtn’t to speak ill of your own religion.”

  Whereupon Peyssou lumbered into the argument with the dismissive comment that “the whole thing is a fuss about nothing, because being a Catholic or a Protestant comes to the same thing really.”

  He was immediately jumped on from all sides. His specialities were brute strength and filthy-mindedness! Let him stick to them and keep out of religion, since he didn’t understand it!

  “I’ll bet you don’t even know your ten commandments,” Meyssonnier said scornfully.

  “I bet I do then,” Peyssou retorted.

  He stood up, as though he were at catechism class, and began reciting them full tilt, but he came to a dead stop after the fourth. He was hooted down and collapsed onto his stool again covered in shame.

  Peyssou’s diversion had given me time to think.

  “Right,” I said with a guileless straight-from-the-shoulder air. “I agree I was wrong. Because I’m not like some people; when I am in the wrong I admit it right away. So there you are, I was wrong. Does that make you feel better?”

  “It’s not enough just to say you were wrong,” Meyssonnier said peevishly.

  “What do you mean?” I exclaimed indignantly. “You don’t expect me to start getting down on my knees to you just because I called you a swine?”

  “I don’t give a damn about you calling me a swine,” Meyssonnier said. “I’m quite prepared to call you the same thing. But what you actually called me was a Catholic swine.”

  “Exactly,” I came back. “It wasn’t you I was insulting, it was the Catholic religion.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Dumont said.

  I glanced across at him. Meyssonnier had just lost his strongest ally.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” little Colin burst out suddenly, turning to Meyssonnier, “this whole thing’s getting to be a big bore. Comte has admitted he’s in the wrong. What more do you want?”

  Meyssonnier was about to open his mouth when Peyssou, delighted at a chance for revenge, threw out both arms in a wild gesture and exclaimed, “The whole thing is a load of manure!”

  “Listen, Meyssonnier,” I said with the air of a person being scrupulously fair. “I’ve called you a swine, you’ve called me a swine, so there you are. We’re quits.”

  Meyssonnier went red. “I didn’t call you a swine,” he said indignantly.

  I looked around at the other members of the Club, shook my head sadly, and said nothing.

  “You said, ‘I’m quite prepared to call you the same thing,’ though,” Giraud reminded him.

  “But that’s not the same thing at all,” Meyssonnier protested, fully aware of the vast difference between a contingent insult and an insult that has actually been delivered, but powerless to express it.

  “You’re quibbling, Meyssonnier,” I said sadly.

  “I don’t care,” Meyssonnier cried in a last desperate bid at defiance. “You insulted the Catholic religion, and you can’t say you didn’t!”

  “But I haven’t said I didn’t!” I replied, spreading my hands in a gesture of wounded sincerity. “In fact I explicitly admitted that I did, only a moment ago. Didn’t I?”

  “Yes, yes, you did,” the other Club members cried.

  “Very well,” I continued in intrepid tones, “since I have insulted the Catholic religion, I shall go and make a clean breast of it to the proper authority.” (“The proper authority” was a phrase I’d picked up from my uncle.)

  The Club members gazed at me in consternation.

  “You don’t mean you’re going to drag the curé into our private quarrels!” Dumont cried.

  Because it was a generally held opinion in the Club that the Abbé Lebas had a twisted mind. At confession he had what was for us a very humiliating way of treating all our sins as the merest trifles—with one exception.

  The dialogue always went as follows: “Father, I confess to committing the sin of pride.”

  “Yes, yes. What else?”

  “Father, I confess to having spoken ill of my neighbor.”
br />   “Yes, yes. What else?”

  “Father, I confess to having lied to my teacher.”

  “Yes, yes. What else?”

  “Father, I confess to having stolen ten francs from my mother’s purse.”

  “Yes, yes. What else?”

  “Father, I confess to having done dirty things.”

  “Ah ha!” the Abbé Lebas would cry. “Now we come to it!”

  And the interrogation began: “With a girl? With a boy? With an animal? Alone? Naked or with your clothes on? Standing up or lying down? On your bed? In the privy? In the woods? In the classroom? How many times? And what did you think about while you were doing it?” (“Well, I just think that I’m doing it” is Peyssou’s stock answer.) “Whom do you think about? A girl? Another boy? A grown-up woman? A female relative?”

  When the Club was founded, one of the first things we swore was to keep the curé in total ignorance of our activities, since it was clearly impossible for him ever to believe in the innocence of a secret society that held clandestine meetings in a place whose existence was unknown to any adult. And yet, in the sense the abbé gave that word, “innocent” the Club most certainly was.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Of course I’m not going running to tell the curé about it. And let him in on the whole thing? What do you think? I said I’m going to make a clean breast of it to the proper authority. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

  I got up and said in a curt, lofty tone, “Are you coming, Colin?”

  “Yes,” Colin answered, proud at having been singled out.

  And taking his cue from me, he strode out with a purposeful air while the Club members gazed after us in amazement.

  Our bikes were hidden in the undergrowth down the hill from Malevil.

  “Malejac, pronto,” I ordered laconically.

  We rode two abreast, but without speaking, even on the flat. I was very fond of little Colin, still am, and during his first term or so at school I stood up for him a lot, because among all those great tough lads, already driving their family tractors at twelve years old, he was so slender and slight, like a dragonfly, with his bright, mischievous eyes, his sharply peaked eyebrows, and a sly mouth with corners tilted up toward his temples.