This little square tower does have a certain elegance, though in my opinion this was not intentional on the English builders’ part. As far as they were concerned they simply needed to build a housing for the drawbridge machinery. And luck was on their side. The requisite proportions also happened to be good ones aesthetically.
As soon as you have crossed the lowered drawbridge—also restored now—you are menaced on your left by the vast mass of a formidable square keep, a hundred and thirty feet high, flanked in its turn by a smaller square tower. This smaller tower is not merely defensive in intention. It also serves as a water tower, since it receives the water from a spring emerging from the cliff face, whose overflow—nothing is wasted—also keeps the moats topped up.
To the right, you find a flight of steps leading down to the immense cellar that had so attracted my uncle, and facing you, in the center, at right angles to the keep, a shock to the eye after so much austerity, stands a very handsome two-story house, its staircase housed in a charming little round tower at one corner. This house had not existed in the Black Prince’s time. It was built much later on, during more peaceful Renaissance times, by a French nobleman. But its beams and its heavy stone-tiled roof had stood up to the passage of time much less well than the keep’s stone vaulting, and I was obliged to restore them entirely.
Such is Malevil, Anglo-Saxon and angular. And I love it just the way it is. For my uncle, and for me too in the days of our Club, it possessed the additional charm of having been the refuge during the religious wars of a Protestant captain who successfully held at bay the powerful armies of the Catholic League, with the help of a small band of comrades, until the day he died. This captain, so determined a champion of his principles and his independence against the powers of his day, was the first hero with whom I identified myself.
I said earlier that there was nothing left of the village in the outer enclosure but heaps of stones. But those stones—of which I still have vast piles left—were extremely useful to me. Thanks to them I was able to build two sets of lean-to stalls for my horses, one against the southern rampart—defending the top of a bluff that was already defending itself very well without any help—and one against the cliff to the north.
Roughly in the middle of the cliff face that forms one side of the outer enclosure there is a wide and deep natural cleft. There are a few traces of prehistoric occupation to be found inside it—not enough to justify calling it a cave dwelling but enough to prove that many thousands of years before the castle was built Malevil was already being used as a refuge by men.
I decided to make use of this cave. First I installed a wooden floor halfway up it, which I used for storing the bulk of my hay supply. Beneath that I constructed a series of stalls for any animals I needed to house separately: a biting horse, a troublesome bull calf, a sow about to farrow, a cow about to calve, or a mare in foal. Since the majority of these cave stalls—which were cool, airy, and fly-free—were usually occupied by various mothers-to-be, Birgitta—to whom I shall return in a moment and whom I had never believed capable of any kind of humor—christened the whole area the “Maternity Ward.”
The keep, a masterpiece of English stolidity, cost me no more than the price of its floorboards and replacement leaded window glass for the mullioned windows, inserted fairly late on by some French owner. The floor plan of all three stories—first or ground, second, and third—is identical: a large landing about ten yards by ten opening onto two rooms, each five yards by five. On the ground floor I turned the two “small” rooms into a storeroom and a boilerhouse, on the second floor I built a bathroom and a bedroom, and on the third floor two bedrooms.
Because of the wonderful view to the east over the Rhunes valley, I took one of the third-floor rooms as my own office-cum-bedroom, despite the slight inconvenience of having the bathroom on the second. Colin had assured me that the water collected by the square tower could never be got up to the third floor by gravity alone, and I wanted to spare Malevil the unpleasant racket of a motor pump.
It was in the bedroom next to mine, on the third story of the keep, that I lodged Birgitta during the summer of 1976, a period that constitutes my last milestone but one, and to which I now often return in my sleepless nights.
Birgitta had worked for my uncle at Les Sept Fayards several years earlier, and round about Easter 1976 I received a pressing letter from her offering her services during the following July and August.
I would like to put it on record here, as a preliminary to what follows, that my true inclination, as I see it, was to be a stable husband with an affectionate partner. My attempts in that direction all failed. It is of course possible that the two unhappy marriages I witnessed as a child—my father’s and my uncle’s—contributed to this failure. But whatever the truth in that respect, three times at least things seemed to be well on the way to marriage with me, then were broken off. On the first two occasions on my initiative, on the third, in 1974, on the initiative of the bride-to-be.
The year 1974, that too was a milestone, but I have deliberately effaced it. For a while that appalling woman even put me off women in general, and I don’t wish to remember that time.
In short, I had been living for two years in the desert when Birgitta reappeared at Malevil. Not that I fell in love with her. Oh, no, very far from it! I was forty by then, and too experienced and too emotionally fragile to lay myself open to those kinds of feelings. But it was precisely because this affair with Birgitta was confined to a humbler level that it did me so much good. I can’t remember who said that the soul can be cured by means of the senses, but I believe it to be true, having experienced such a cure myself.
But that sort of therapy couldn’t have been further from my mind when I accepted Birgitta’s offer. During her first stay at Les Sept Fayards I had indeed made one or two advances, which she had rebuffed. But I had never followed up the attack after those preliminary skirmishes, having realized in the meantime that I was poaching on my uncle’s territory. However, when she wrote me her letter, just before Easter 1976, I wrote back to say we would be expecting her. Professionally she would be invaluable to me. She was a natural horsewoman, gifted with a certain instinct for the equine mind, and richly endowed with the patience and orderliness that are vital for breaking and training horses.
When she arrived, I must confess I was taken aback. We had no sooner sat down to our first meal than she began making an all-out play for me. Her advances were so flagrant that even Momo noticed them. So much so that he even forgot to open the window and give his usual whinny to call over his favorite mare, Bel Amour. And when La Menou, as she removed the soup tureen, muttered in patois, “After the uncle the nephew,” he burst out with a great laugh. “Hookhout, Ehanooel!” (Look out, Emmanuel!)
Birgitta was from Bavaria. Her golden hair was gathered up into a gleaming helmet above her head, her eyes were small and pale, her face on the homely side with a rather heavy jaw. But her body was beautiful, solid, radiant with health. Sitting facing me, not in the slightest tired after her long journey, she was as pink and fresh as though she had just leapt out of bed. And while she devoured a seemingly endless quantity of sliced ham, so at the same time she devoured me with her eyes. Everything she did was a provocation: her glances, her smiles, her sighs, the way she rolled little pellets of bread between her fingers, the way she stretched her back to the great advantage of her bosom.
Remembering her former rebuffs, I didn’t know what to think, or rather I was wary of thinking some exceedingly simple things. But La Menou had no such scruples, and at the end of the meal, without moving a single muscle in that fleshless face of hers, she said in local dialect as she slid a vast slice of tart onto Birgitta’s plate, “The cage isn’t enough for her, now she wants the bird.”
The following day I encountered Birgitta in the Maternity Ward. She was busily pitchforking bales of hay through a trapdoor. I went up to her without a word, took her in my arms (she was as tall as I was), and set about kneadi
ng the curves of that monument to Aryan Health and Strength. She responded to my caresses with a fervor that surprised me, since I had assumed that she was motivated solely by self-interest.
Which indeed she was, but in two directions. I intensified my attacks, but they were interrupted by Momo. Surprised to find the bales no longer coming through the trapdoor, he climbed up the ladder, pushed his shaggy head through the opening, and began laughing and shouting “Hookhout, Ehanooel!” Then he vanished, and I heard him running over toward the gate tower, presumably to inform his mother of this latest turn of events.
Birgitta, her golden helmet scarcely touched by her tumble among the hay bales, pushed herself into a sitting position, fixed her cold little eyes on mine, and said in her laboriously grammatical French, “I shall never give myself to a man who entertains ideas such as yours on marriage.”
“My uncle’s ideas were the same,” I said when I had recovered from my surprise.
“That is not the same thing at all,” Birgitta said, modestly turning away her face. “Your uncle was elderly.”
So I was the right age to marry her. I looked at Birgitta and silently chortled at her simplicity. “I have no intention of marrying,” I said firmly.
“Nor I any intention of giving myself to you,” she rejoined.
I didn’t respond to her challenge. But in order to demonstrate what small weight I attached to such abstract speculations I set about caressing her again. Her face immediately softened and she lay back.
During the days that followed I continued to desist from any attempt at persuasion. But every time I was able to lay my hands on her I proceeded to caress her, and I noticed that this procedure must have been to her liking, since such opportunities began to occur more and more frequently. Nevertheless, it took her a further three whole weeks to abandon her plan number one and fall back on plan number two. And even then it was by no means a rout, a collapse into anarchy, but a methodically executed retreat, carried out to a strict timetable, wholly according to plan.
One evening when I had gone to visit her in her room (we had reached that stage) she said to me, “Emmanuel, I shall give myself to you tomorrow.”
I immediately asked her, “Why not right away?”
She had not foreseen this request and appeared surprised, even tempted. But fidelity to her plan carried the day. “Tomorrow,” she said firmly.
“At what time?” I inquired ironically.
But the irony was lost on Birgitta, and she answered with great seriousness, “During the midday siesta.”
It was after that siesta (it was during July 1976, and the weather was extremely hot) that I moved Birgitta into the keep bedroom next to mine.
Birgitta was delighted at this cohabitation. She used to come into my bed every morning at dawn, at two in the afternoon during the siesta, and from bedtime till late into the night. I was glad to have her there, but quite glad also when she was indisposed. I was at last able to sleep my fill on those nights.
It was this simplicity that I found so restful in Birgitta. She demanded pleasure like a child demanding cake. And once she had been given her treat she very nicely thanked me. She was particularly enthusiastic about the pleasure I gave her with my caresses. “Ach! Emmanuel, your hands!” I was somewhat astonished by this gratitude, since there was nothing so extraordinary about what I did with her, and I was unable to see what great merit there could be in my kneading her curves either.
What I found most refreshing of all, however, was that apart from my hands, my sex, and my wallet, I had no existence for her at all. I add wallet to the list because whenever we went into town she would linger in front of store windows displaying “fal-lals,” as my uncle used to call them, and with her small, slightly porcine eyes dilated by desire, she would indicate her preferences.
Even simple folk have their complexities. Birgitta was not intelligent, but she understood my character well enough, and though uncultured she did have taste. So she knew exactly when to rein in her demands, and what she bought was never trash.
At first I used to ponder the question of her morality a little. But I quickly realized that the object of that mental effort did not in fact exist. Birgitta was neither good nor bad. She just was. And when all was said and done, that was quite enough. She brought me twofold pleasure—when I held her in my arms, and also when she left them, because I was able to forget her immediately.
The end of August came, and I asked Birgitta to stay on for an extra week. To my surprise she refused. “I must think of my parents,” she said.
“You don’t give a damn about your parents.”
“Oh!” Birgitta exclaimed, very shocked.
“You never write to them.”
“That’s because I’m so bad about writing letters.”
She wasn’t in the slightest, as events were to show. But a date is a date. And plans are made to be kept to. Her departure remained fixed for August thirty-first.
During the last days of her stay Birgitta sank into melancholy. She was well looked upon at Malevil. My other helper, no more than a lad, was always making eyes at her. The two permanent hands, Germain especially, admired her build. Momo, hands in pockets, dribbled as he stared at her. And even La Menou, setting aside her not particularly deep hostility to sexual looseness, nursed a definite esteem for her. “A strong lass, that she is,” La Menou would admit, “and she’s never backward when it comes to work.”
And Birgitta, on her side, enjoyed being with us. She liked our sun, our cooking, our wines, our fal-lals, and my caresses. I place myself last on the list. I have no idea what place I really occupied in her hierarchy of delights. Not that it mattered, since none of them had the power to sap her sense of values. Everything in its place: on the one hand her French Eden, on the other her German future. And somewhere or other a Doktor of something who would make an offer of marriage.
August twenty-eighth was a Sunday, and Birgitta, who was not one to do her packing at the last moment, began collecting her things together. Then came a moment of panic when she realized that there wasn’t going to be enough room in her suitcases to accommodate all my presents. Sunday, Monday—the stores would be closed both days. She would have to wait till Tuesday, which was to say “the very last minute”—an appalling notion—to buy another suitcase.
I rescued her from her torments by giving her one of mine. And at her urgent insistence I produced in written form on a sheet of yellow office paper, the first that came to hand, the description I had given her the previous evening in a restaurant of the caresses I would lavish upon her when she came back to Malevil again. This task accomplished, I took it in to her. Although the literary value of the result was not of the highest, her eyes were bright and her cheeks scarlet as she read it through. She promised me that after her return to Germany she would reread it once a week, in bed. I had not asked her for any such promise. She made it completely on her own, while shedding a tear and tucking my yellow sheet of paper carefully away with her other gifts among the booty she was taking with her.
Birgitta was unable to come to us at Christmas, and I was much more disappointed than I would have expected. But Christmas in general was never a very good time for me. Peyssou, Colin, and Meyssonnier always celebrated it at home with their families. I was always left alone with my horses. And Malevil in winter, despite the comforts I had introduced, was scarcely a cozy place. Except perhaps for some young couple who could have kept each other warm inside its great walls and regarded them as an aid to romance.
I didn’t mention my gloom in so many words, but La Menou sensed it, and one cold snowy morning over the breakfast table my unmarried state was made the subject of one of those long grumbling soliloquies of which, since my uncle’s death, I had become the beneficiary.
All the chances I had missed! And most of all Agnès. Only this morning she’d met her, Agnès, in Adelaide’s, because, of course, she’s spending the holiday here in Malejac with her parents, and, of course, she’d asked after
me, as you can imagine, Agnès had, married though she may be to her newsagent in La Roque. Agnès now, there was a girl made of the right stuff. She’d have been just what I needed. Ah, well. But we must never say die. There would be other opportunities. In Malejac alone, all those young girls, just think, from among whom I could just take my pick whenever I chose, never mind my age, because now I was rich, and still a fine-looking man. And while I was about it, much better to marry a girl from your own country instead of some German. Oh, it was true that Birgitta was not backward when it came to work, but the Germans, you can’t say they’re the kind of people who know where they belong. Otherwise would they have kept invading us all the time? And even if my French girl wasn’t a match for my Boche, after all, marriage isn’t there for the enjoyment so much as the children, and I was going to be left looking a real old fool, wasn’t I, if after all my work on Malevil I had no one to leave it to.
In the months that followed I still did not take a wife, but I did at least find a friend. He was twenty-five, and his name was Thomas le Coultre. I met him in one of Les Sept Fayards’ copses, wearing jeans, a huge Honda motorbike beside him, his knees stained with mud. He was tapping a stone with a little hammer. It turned out that he was doing a third-year thesis on pebbles. I invited him to Malevil, loaned him Uncle Samuel’s Geiger counter on two or three occasions, and finally, when I discovered he wasn’t happy with the family who were giving him bed and board at La Roque, I offered him a room in the castle. He accepted. And he’s been with me ever since.
What attracts me in Thomas is the rigor of his mind, and although his passion for pebbles remains as opaque to me as ever, I love the transparency of his character. I also like his looks. Thomas is beautiful, and better still, he doesn’t know it. He has not just the features but also the serene and serious physiognomy of a Greek statue. And almost the same immobility.