Silk (7 page)

H
ERVÉ
Joncour in the years that followed chose for himself the serene life of a man with no more needs. He spent his days in the safety of a guarded emotion. In Lavilledieu the people admired him again, because it seemed to them that they saw in him a
precise
way of being in the world. They said that he had been like that even as a young man, before Japan.

With his wife, Hélène, he got into the habit of making, every year, a short journey. They saw Naples, Rome, Madrid, Munich, London. One year they went as far as Prague, where everything seemed: theatre. They travelled without a schedule and without plans. Everything amazed them: secretly, even their happiness. When they felt homesick for silence, they returned to Lavilledieu.

If anyone had asked, Hervé Joncour would have said that they would live like that forever. He had the unassailable peacefulness of men who feel they are in their place. Every so often, on a windy day, he went through the park to the lake, and stayed there for hours, on the shore, watching the surface of the water ripple, creating unpredictable shapes that sparkled randomly, in all directions. The wind was one alone: but on that mirror of water it seemed thousands, blowing. On every side. A spectacle. Light and inexplicable.

Every so often, on a windy day, Hervé Joncour went to the lake and spent hours watching it, because, drawn on the water, he seemed to see the inexplicable spectacle, light, that had been his life.

O
N
June 16, 1871, in the back of Verdun’s café, before noon, the one-armed player made an irrational four- cushion draw shot. Baldabiou remained leaning over the table, one hand behind his back, the other grasping the cue, incredulous.

‘Come on.’

He straightened, put down the cue, and went out without saying anything. Three days later he left. He gave his two silk mills to Hervé Joncour.

‘I don’t want anything more to do with silk, Baldabiou.’

‘Sell them, you fool.’

No one could get out of him where the hell he intended to go. And what he would do there. All he said was something about St Agnes that no one understood very well.

The morning he left, Hervé Joncour, along with Hélène, accompanied him to the train station at Avignon. He had with him a single suitcase, and this, too, was rather inexplicable. When he saw the train, halted on the track, he put the suitcase down.

‘Once I knew someone who had a railroad built all for himself.’

He said.

‘And the point of it is that he had it made completely straight, hundreds of miles without a curve. There was also a reason, but I don’t remember it. One never remembers the reasons. Anyway: goodbye.’

He wasn’t much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation.

They saw him growing distant, him and his suitcase, forever.

Then Hélène did something strange. She separated from Hervé Joncour and ran after him, until she reached him, and hugged him, hard, and as she embraced him she burst into tears.

She never wept, Hélène.

Hervé Joncour sold the two silk mills at a ridiculous price to Michel Lariot, a good fellow who had played dominoes, every Saturday evening, with Baldabiou, always losing, with granite-like consistency. He had three daughters. The first two were called Florence and Sylvie. But the third: Agnes.

T
HREE
years later, in the winter of 1874, Hélène became ill with a brain fever that no doctor could understand, or cure. She died in early March, on a rainy day.

Accompanying her, in silence, on the road to the cemetery, was all Lavilledieu: because she was a happy woman, who had not spread sorrow.

Hervé Joncour had a single word carved on her tombstone:

Hélas
.

He thanked everyone, said a thousand times that he needed nothing, and returned to his house. Never had it seemed so large: and never so illogical his fate.

Because despair was an excess that did not belong to him, he submitted to what was left of his life, and began again to look after it, with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm.

T
WO
months and eleven days after Hélène’s death, it happened that Hervé Joncour went to the cemetery and found, beside the roses that he laid on his wife’s grave every week, a little wreath of tiny blue flowers. He bent down to observe them, and remained in that position for a long time, which from a distance would certainly have appeared, to the eyes of possible witnesses, singular if not ridiculous. Returning home, he didn’t go out to work in the park, as he usually did, but stayed in his study, and thought. He did nothing else, for days. Thought.

A
T
12
Rue Moscat he found a tailor’s shop. He was told that Madame Blanche hadn’t lived there for years. He managed to find out that she had moved to Paris, where she had become the kept woman of a very important man, perhaps a politician.

Hervé Joncour went to Paris.

It took him six days to find out where she lived. He sent her a note, asking to be received. She answered that she would expect him at four o’clock the next day. Punctually he went up to the second floor of a handsome building on the Boulevard des Capucines. A servant opened the door. She led him to the drawing room and asked him to sit down. Madame Blanche came in wearing a dress that was very stylish and very French. Her hair came down over her shoulders, in the Parisian fashion. She didn’t have rings of blue flowers on her fingers. She sat down opposite Hervé Joncour, without a word. And waited.

He looked her in the eyes. But the way a child would have.

‘You wrote that letter, right?’

He said.

‘Hélène asked you to write it and you did.’

Madame Blanche didn’t move; she didn’t lower her gaze or betray the least astonishment.

Then what she said was

‘It wasn’t I who wrote it.’

Silence.

‘Hélène wrote that letter.’

Silence.

‘She had already written it when she came to me. She asked me to copy it, in Japanese. And I did. That is the truth.’

Hervé Joncour realised at that moment that he would continue to hear those words all his life. He rose, but stood still, as if he had suddenly forgotten where he was going. The voice of Madame Blanche reached him as if from far away.

‘She also wanted to read me that letter. She had a beautiful voice. And she read the words with an emotion that I have never been able to forget. It was as if they were, truly, hers.’

Hervé Joncour was crossing the room, with very slow steps.

‘You know,
monsieur
, I think that she wished, more than any other thing,
to be that woman
. You can’t understand it. But I heard her read that letter. I know that it is so.’

Hervé Joncour had reached the door. He placed his hand on the doorknob. Without turning, he said softly

‘Farewell,
madame
.’

They never saw each other again.

H
ERVÉ
Joncour lived for twenty-three more years, most of them in serenity and good health. He never went away from Lavilledieu again, nor did he ever abandon his house. He managed his goods wisely, and that protected him forever from any work that was not the care of his own park. In time he began to yield to a pleasure that in the past he had always denied himself: to those who came to see him, he recounted his travels. Listening to him, the people of Lavilledieu learned about the world, and the children discovered what marvel was. He spoke softly, staring into the air, at things the others couldn’t see.

On Sundays he went to town, for High Mass. Once a year he made a tour of the silk mills, to touch the newborn silk. When the solitude wrung his heart, he went to the cemetery, to talk to Hélène. The rest of his time he spent in a liturgy of habits that protected him from unhappiness. Every so often, on a windy day, he went to the lake and spent hours looking at it, because, drawn on the water, he seemed to see the inexplicable spectacle, light, that had been his life.