The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (5 page)

Suddenly their mother died—a shock that stunned them. Thinking her immortal, they
had treated her with scant consideration; but nevertheless they loved her. To make
matters worse, they felt they were to blame; for she had died all unbeknown to them,
while they were quarreling in her room, the very evening when Paul got up for the first
time.

The nurse was in the kitchen. The row degenerated into an exchange of blows; with cheeks
aflame, Elisabeth had fled to seek sanctuary beside her mother’s chair. She found
herself confronted by an unknown woman staring at her with wide open tragic eyes and
mouth.

She had been surprised by death, perpetuated in such a pose as death alone conceives of:
hands clenched, arms rigid along the chair arms. The doctor had foreseen that the end
would come without warning; but the children, alone, transfixed by this sudden
counterfeit, this puppet in place of a live person, this stranger with the mask of a
sculptured sage, gazed on it livid, stone-still before its petrified stare, its cry of
stone.

The haunting image was not soon to fade. A time of bewilderment ensued, of tears and
mourning, of Paul’s relapse, of words of comfort spoken by the doctor and by
Gérard’s uncle; a time also of practical support in the shape of a trained
nurse. These crises having been surmounted, the children found themselves once more
alone together.

Far from bequeathing them a distressful legacy, their mother did much, by her fabulous
death, to raise her credit in her children’s estimation. It was as if a
thunderbolt had forged an image of her, acceptably macabre, entirely unrelated to the
person whom they missed. Moreover, in matters of bereavement, creatures so primitive, so
uncorrupted, are unaware of social usage. Their reactions are animal, instinctive; and
orphaned animals are notoriously cynical in their approach to death. The vanished mother
is not mourned for long: once gone, never to return, from her accustomed place, her
absence is accepted. And yet, by virtue of her one last freakish stroke, she was to
manage, after all, to impress herself upon the memory of her children. Besides, the Room
craved marvels. This death of hers, indubitably a marvel, forged her a sarcophagus, a
Gothic monument, enshrined her in the Room; was duly to translate her into the eternity
of dreams, into their magic heaven, with pride of place.

P
AUL’S
RELAPSE was dangerous, prolonged. Mariette, the nurse, a dedicated character, took
charge. The doctor had become a martinet. He insisted upon plenty of rest, plenty of
nourishment, no excitement. He made himself financially responsible, visited them
regularly with strict injunctions, came back again to see that these were carried
out.

At first Elisabeth had been recalcitrant, aggressive, but before long she found herself
unable to resist Mariette’s plump rosy face, her silver curls, and her
unshakable, if sorely tried, devotion. She was an unlettered peasant, whose inmost heart
was given to a grandson in her native Brittany. Thus, love had taught her to decipher
the mysteries of childhood.

The average upright citizen would have found Paul and Elisabeth preposterous, would
doubtless have invoked their tainted heredity—one aunt insane, an alcoholic
father—to help explain them. Preposterous they were, indeed; so is a rose; so are
the solemn arguments of average, upright citizens. But in her perfect simplicity
Mariette grasped the inapprehensible. The climate of innocence was one in which she felt
herself at home. She had no wish to analyze it. She discerned in the Room a transparency
of atmosphere too pure, too vital to harbor any germ of what was base or vile, a
spiritual altitude beyond contamination. She sheltered them beneath her wing with an
instinctive maternal response to the demands of genius, and with an artless wisdom that
enabled her to respect, as if by divination, the creative genius at work within the
room. For it was indubitably a masterpiece these children were creating; a masterpiece
devoid of intellectual content, devoid—this was the miracle—of any worldly
aim; the masterpiece of their own being.

Paul, one need scarcely add, wasted no opportunity of manipulating the thermometer and
generally exploiting his ill-health. Abuse from Elisabeth produced no reaction
whatsoever; he remained impassive, mute.

She sulked; she withdrew into scornful silence. When this palled, she gave it up and
presented herself in the brand-new rôle of shrew turned ministering angel.
Tiptoeing about, speaking just above a whisper, opening and closing doors with infinite
discretion, prodigal of self-giving, she ministered to Paul in the spirit of one
compassionately dedicated to the care of feeble-minded paupers.

She decided to become a hospital nurse, to take lessons in nursing from Mariette. She
shut herself up for hours on end with the mustachioed plaster bust; also some torn
shirts, cotton-wool, gauze, and safety-pins. Coming into the unlit room, Mariette would
see the bust staring at her in the darkness from some unexpected angle, ghastly,
haggard, its head swathed in bandages. Each time she saw it she nearly died of
fright.

The doctor congratulated Elisabeth upon a transformation which seemed to him miraculous,
no less.

And she continued to sustain it; gradually, stubbornly, to make a substance of her
seeming. For nothing in our hero and our heroine was conscious; no notion crossed them,
even faintly, of the external impression they produced. They lived their dream, their
Room, fancying they loathed what they adored. They went on planning to have separate
rooms, but it occurred to neither of them to move into the empty one. To be more
accurate, Elisabeth had given the project one hour’s consideration; but the
memory of the dead woman, now sublimated in the Room itself, was more frightening in
that bedroom. She told herself she could not leave the patient and remained with
him.

On top of everything else, Paul now had growing pains. Penned in the sentry-box he had
constructed out of pillows, he complained of cramps. Elisabeth would take no notice,
would steal away, finger on lip, with the gait and tread of a young man creeping home
stealthily in the small hours, shoes in hand; whereupon, with a shrug, Paul would resume
the Game.

In April he got up. He could no longer stand. His new-born legs collapsed beneath him. To
Elisabeth’s extreme annoyance, he was now half a head taller than herself: she
retaliated by adopting the demeanor of a saint, rushing to support him, to lower him
into his chair, covering him with wraps—in short, reducing him to the status of a
gouty old dotard.

Although disconcerted by this new thrust of hers, he controlled an overwhelming impulse
to fight back, and took no notice. Matched against her in a perpetual duel from birth,
he had acquired tactical sagacity. Besides, he was too lazy to be otherwise than
passive. Elisabeth seethed inwardly. Once more the fight was on; the balance was
redressed; the stakes were equal.

By imperceptible stages, Elisabeth began to take the place in Gérard’s
heart once occupied by Paul. Not to be with her was almost unendurable. Strictly
speaking, it had been the house in the rue Montmartre, it had been Paul and Elisabeth
that he had adored in Paul. But now, inevitably, the spotlight had swung away from Paul
to illumine a figure putting off childhood and slipping into its young girlhood, leaving
the time of boys’ derision for the time of boys’ desire.

Cut off by doctor’s orders from the sickroom, he racked his brains for other means
of access and finally managed to persuade his uncle to take Lise and the invalid away to
the seaside. This uncle was a wealthy, genial bachelor, overwhelmed with executive
meetings and business responsibilities. He had adopted Gérard—son of a
widowed sister who had died in giving him birth—and had assured his future by a
generous provision in his will. The idea of a holiday appealed to him; he needed a
little rest.

Instead of the scathing reception he had expected, Gérard found himself welcomed
by a Saint and a Simpleton and showered with thanks and blessings. What could they be up
to? Were they preparing to launch a fresh attack? While pondering these matters, he
intercepted an exchange of signals—one flash through a lowered saintly lid, one
quiver of the nostril from the Simpleton—and realized the Game was on. These
manifestations were not aimed at him: he had merely dropped in upon a performance
already in full swing. Another cycle had begun: he had only to adapt himself to an
unfamiliar rhythm and thank his stars for granting propitious omens for their journey.
Such courteous well-bred guests could hardly fail to please their host-to-be.

They did not fail. In fact, his uncle was quite bowled over by the beautiful dispositions
of these ill-reputed friends.

Elisabeth set herself to charm him.

“You know,” she simpered, “my little brother’s rather
shy….”

Gérard’s attentive ear caught a muttered “Bitch!” from little
brother, but nothing else escaped his lips.

In the train they had to make heroic efforts to preserve an appearance of composure.
Totally unsophisticated as they were, a
wagon-lit
seemed to them the very peak
of luxury; but their natural good breeding and sense of style enabled them to seem
perfectly at ease.

Inevitably, the sleeper conjured up the Room, and the same thought flashed into the minds
of both: “We shall be having two rooms and two beds at the hotel.”

Paul lay motionless. Between lowered lids, Elisabeth traced the outline of his profile,
faintly luminous under the blue night-light. In the course of many a deep and stealthy
vigil she had become aware of an endemic sloth in him and of the fact that since his
recent therapeutic isolation he was gradually succumbing to it. His rather receding chin
annoyed her; her own chin was pronounced. She was apt to say: “Paul, your
chin!” in the manner of a maternal “Stand up straight!” or
“Elbows off the table!” He would crack back at her with some obscenity,
but all the same she had caught him more than once before the mirror, busy manipulating
the angle of his jaw.

The year before, she had gone through a phase of sleeping with a clothespin on her nose,
with the notion of cultivating a Greek profile. Paul had taken to sleeping
half-strangled by a tight elastic band; but discouraged by the red mark it left, he
renounced self-martyrdom and settled for a full face or three-quarter presentation.

They were not concerned with any impression they might make on others. Their experiments
were purely for their private satisfaction.

Removed from the influence of Dargelos, thrown back upon himself by Elisabeth’s
withdrawal into silence, deprived of the stimulus of constant squabbling, Paul followed
his own bent. Flabbiness set in, a tendency to sag. He started to go soft. She had
guessed right. Nothing escaped her; she pounced on every symptom. Loathing everything
that smacked of petty indulgences, lip-lickings, fireside coziness, herself all fire and
ice, she could not tolerate a lukewarm diet. As in the epistle to the angel of Laodicea:
“She spewed it forth from her mouth.” Thoroughbred she was, and Paul too
must be a thoroughbred.

On rushed the train, its human freight asleep beneath a flying tent of vapors rent
intermittently by piercing screams; but on this first real journey of her life, deaf to
the beat-beat of the turning wheels, to the demented shrieking of the engine, blind to
the smoke’s wild mane that flew above them, she sat, this girl, intent upon her
brother, searching his face with avid eyes.

A
DISAPPOINTMENT was
in store for the young people. They arrived to find all hotels crammed to capacity.
Apart from the room reserved for Gérard’s uncle, there remained but one,
at the far end of the corridor. It was suggested that the boys should share it, and that
Elisabeth should have a camp bed in the adjoining bathroom. What in fact happened was
that Elisabeth and Paul took possession of the bedroom, leaving the bathroom to
Gérard.

By nightfall, the situation had deteriorated; Elisabeth wanted a bath and so did Paul.
They sulked, raged, turned on one another, flung doors open, slammed them again at
random, and ended finally at opposite ends of the same boiling bath, with Paul in fits
of laughter. The sight of his seaweed limbs afloat in steam exasperated Elisabeth. An
exchange of kicks ensued. Next day, at table, they were still kicking one another. Above
the tablecloth their host saw smiling faces; a silent war went on below.

This subliminal struggle was not the only means by which, unconsciously, they managed to
attract attention. The charm was working. Their table was rapidly becoming the focal
point of a delighted curiosity. The get-together spirit was, to Elisabeth, anathema. She
scorned “the others,” or else fell madly in love with some total stranger.
Hitherto the objects of her passion had been selected from the ranks of those
matinée idols and Hollywood film stars whose garish outsize masks adorned her
walls. The hotel afforded her no scope. The family parties were one and all hideous,
gluttonous, and squalid. Their audience consisted of skinny little girls impervious to
parental raps, craning their necks from afar to watch the marvelous table, the battle of
limbs below, the peaceful countenances above.