The Infatuations (15 page)

He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress, as I have noticed to be the case with many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren’t enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories, which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic. But Díaz-Varela wasn’t a writer, and I didn’t mind his digressions, in fact, my response was exactly the same as it had been the second time I met him, in the café next to the museum, namely, that, while he continued to expatiate, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and delighted in his grave, somehow inward-turned voice and the often arbitrary syntactic leaps he made, the whole effect seeming sometimes not to emanate from a human being, but from a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings, perhaps a piano played with great agility. On this occasion, however, I wanted to find out more about Colonel Chabert and Madame Ferraud, and, more especially, how, according to him, the novella proved him to be right about Luisa, although I could easily imagine his reasoning.

‘Yes, but what happened to the Colonel?’ I said, interrupting his flow, and I saw that he didn’t mind my interruption, for he was aware of his own discursive tendencies and was perhaps glad when someone stopped him. ‘Was he accepted by the world of the living to which he wanted to return? Did his wife accept him? Did he manage to resume his existence?’

‘What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention. Besides, you can find out what happened to the Colonel on your own, it would do you good to read a few non-contemporary authors now and then. I can lend you the book, if you like, or don’t you read French? There’s a Spanish translation available, but it’s not much good. And so few people know French these days.’ – He had studied at the Lycée; we had talked little about our respective histories, but that much he had told me. – ‘What’s important here is that Chabert’s reappearance is, of course, an absolute disaster for his wife, who has recovered and made another life in which there is no room for him, or only as a figure from the past, as he had once been, as an ever-fainter memory, well and truly dead, buried in a distant, unknown grave alongside others who fell in that Battle of Eylau, which, ten years on, almost no one remembers or wants to remember, because, among other things, the person who led that battle has been sent into lonely exile on St Helena, and Louis XVIII now sits on the throne, and the first thing any new regime does is to forget and minimize and erase the previous regime, and to convert those who served it into putrefying nostalgics, who are left with nothing to do but slowly burn out and die. The Colonel realizes this from the very first moment and knows that his inexplicable survival is a curse for the Countess, who doesn’t answer his first letters and has no wish to see him, for fear that she might recognize him, preferring to believe that he will turn out to be a madman or a fraud, or, if not, that he will simply give up eventually out of exhaustion, bitterness and desolation. Or that when he can no longer maintain his
stubborn refusal to leave, he will return to the snowy fields and die again – once and for all. When they do finally meet and talk, the Colonel, who has had no reason to cease loving her during his long exile from earth, during which he suffered all the infinite hardships of being dead, asks her …’ And here Díaz-Varela looked for another quote in the small book, although this one was so short that he must have known it by heart: ‘“Are the dead quite wrong, then, to come back?” Or perhaps: “Is it a mistake for the dead to return?” In French it says: “
Les morts ont donc bien tort de revenir?
”’ – And it seemed to me that his accent in French was as good as it was in English. – ‘The Countess’s hypocritical answer is: “No, no, Monsieur! Don’t think me ungrateful,” and adds: “It is no longer in my power to love you, but I know how much I owe you and I can still offer you the affection of a daughter.” And Balzac says that, after hearing the Colonel’s sympathetic and generous response to these words’ – and Díaz-Varela again read from the book (with his fleshy, kissable mouth) – ‘“The Countess shot him a look of such intense gratitude that poor Chabert would gladly have returned to Eylau and climbed back into his grave.” Meaning that he wishes to cause her no further problems or anxieties or to intrude upon a world that is no longer his, to cease being her nightmare or ghost or torment, and to remove himself and disappear.’

‘And is that what he did? Did he just abandon the field and accept defeat? Did he return to his grave, did he retreat?’ I asked, taking advantage of a pause.

‘You’ll find out when you read it for yourself. The great misfortune of remaining alive having once died and been assumed dead even according to the army records (“an historical fact”), doesn’t affect only his wife, but him as well. You cannot pass from one state to the other, or, rather, of course, from the second to the first, and he
is fully aware of being a corpse, an official and, to a large extent, real corpse, because he himself had thought he was dead and had heard the moans of his fellow corpses, which no living person could hear. When, at the beginning of the novel, he turns up at the lawyer’s office, one of the clerks or messengers asks him his name. He answers: “Chabert,” and the other man says: “The Colonel who died at Eylau?” And the ghost, far from protesting or rebelling and growing angry and immediately contradicting him, merely nods and says meekly: “The very same, sir.” And a little later, he makes this definition his own. When, at last, he manages to see the lawyer, Derville, and the latter asks him: “To whom do I have the honour of speaking?” he responds: “Colonel Chabert.” “Which one?” insists the lawyer, and the answer is an absurdity, but absolutely true for all that: “The one who died at Eylau.” Later, Balzac himself refers to Chabert in the same terms, albeit ironically: “Sir,” said the dead man …”, that’s what he writes. The Colonel cannot escape from his vile condition as a man who did not die when he should have died or, indeed, when he did die, as Napoleon himself had regretfully ordered two doctors to verify. When he sets out his case to Derville, he says the following’ – and Díaz-Varela searched through the pages to find the quotation – ‘“To be frank, during that period, and even now sometimes, my name is distasteful to me. I would prefer not to be me. My sense of what should be mine by rights is killing me. If my illness had taken from me all memory of my past existence, I would have been happy.” That’s what he says: “My name is distasteful to me. I would prefer not to be me.”’ – Díaz-Varela repeated the words to me, underlined them. – ‘The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others do, is to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it’s
too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all. For the person who returns, there is no greater misfortune than to discover that he is surplus to requirements, that his presence isn’t wanted, that he is disturbing the universe, that he constitutes a hindrance to his loved ones, who don’t know what to do with him.’

‘“The worst thing that can happen to anyone”? Oh, come on. You’re talking as if the story were real, but things like that never happen, or only in fiction.’

‘Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen,’ he retorted, ‘and in this case, it allows us to imagine the feelings of a dead man who finds himself obliged to come back, and shows us why the dead shouldn’t come back. With the exception of mad people or the very old, everyone, sooner or later, tries to forget the dead. They avoid thinking about them, and when, for some reason or other, they can’t avoid it, they grow sad and gloomy, they stop whatever they’re doing, their eyes fill with tears, and they find themselves unable to go on until they have shaken off the dark thought or suppressed the memory. Believe me, in the long term, and in the medium term too, everyone ends up shaking off the dead, because that is their final fate, as they would doubtless agree, and, once they have tried and experienced their new condition, they wouldn’t be prepared to come back anyway. No one who has departed this life and washed his hands of it, even if his death occurred against his will and much to his regret, as the victim, say, of a murder, no one would choose to be reinstated and thus resume the terrible fatigue of existing. Think about it, Colonel Chabert endured unspeakable suffering and saw what we all believe to be the worst of horrors, namely war; you would think that no one could give lessons in horror to
someone who had taken part in pitiless battles fought in sub-zero temperatures, as happened in Eylau, and that was not his first battle, but the last; there, two armies of seventy-five thousand men confronted each other; we don’t know exactly how many died, but they say there were at least forty thousand, and that they fought for fourteen hours or more to achieve very little: the French took possession of the field, a field that was nothing but a vast snowy waste piled with corpses, and although the Russian army was badly battered when it retreated, it was not destroyed. The French were so debilitated and exhausted and so stiff with cold, that it was four hours, when night had already fallen, before they realized that the enemy was silently slipping away. Not they would have been in any condition to pursue them. It’s said that the following morning, Marshal Ney rode round the battlefield and that his only comment reflected a mixture of horror, disgust and disapproval: “What slaughter! And for what?” And yet, despite all this, it is not the soldier, it is not Chabert, but the lawyer, Derville, who has never seen a cavalry charge or a bayonet wound or the havoc caused by cannon fire, who has spent his life either in his chambers or in court, safe from physical violence, barely leaving Paris, he is the one who, at the end of the novel, is allowed to speak and enlighten us about the horrors he has seen during his entirely non-military career, not at war but at peace, not at the front line but in the rearguard. He says to his former clerk, Godeschal, who is about to take his first case as a lawyer: “You know, my dear friend, there are three men in modern society who can never think well of the world: the Priest, the Doctor, and the Man of Law. They all wear black robes, worn perhaps in mourning for lost virtues and lost hopes. The unhappiest of these three is the lawyer.” He explains that when a man goes to a priest, he does so prompted by feelings of remorse and repentance, by beliefs that make him more interesting,
which elevate him, and that, in a way, are a comfort to the soul of his intercessor. “But we lawyers”’ – and here Díaz-Varela read in Spanish from the final page of the book, presumably translating as he went, because he was hardly likely to have made a version beforehand – ‘“we see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession! I have seen a father left to die in a garret, without a penny to his name, abandoned by two daughters to whom he had given forty thousand pounds a year! I’ve seen wills burned; I’ve seen mothers rob their children, husbands rob their wives, wives kill their husbands or else use their husbands’ love to drive them into madness or imbecility, in order that they might live contentedly with their lover. I have seen women administer lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child. I can’t tell you everything I’ve seen, because I have been privy to crimes against which justice is impotent. All the horrors that novelists think they invent are as nothing compared to the truth. You will come to know all these delightful things. I bequeath them to you. Meanwhile, I am going to live in the countryside with my wife. Paris disgusts me.”’

Díaz-Varela closed the slender volume and kept the brief silence appropriate to any ending. He didn’t look at me, but remained with his eyes fixed on the cover, as if unable to decide whether to reopen the book and resume his reading. I couldn’t resist asking about the Colonel again.

‘And what happened to Chabert? Nothing good, I imagine, given such a pessimistic conclusion. But it offers a very partial view of things, as the character himself admits: the view of one of the three kinds of men who cannot think well of the world; the view, according
to him, of the unhappiest of the three. Fortunately, there are plenty of other viewpoints, most of which are quite different from that of priests, doctors and lawyers.’

But he didn’t respond. In fact, my initial impression was that he hadn’t even heard me.

‘And that’s how the story ends,’ he said. ‘Well, almost. Balzac has Godeschal give an entirely irrelevant response, which very nearly cancels out the force of that vision; but it’s a minor defect. The novel was written in 1832, one hundred and eighty years ago, although, strangely enough, Balzac places the conversation between the veteran and the novice lawyer in 1840, that is, at a point in the future, a date when he couldn’t even be sure he would still be alive, as if he knew, absolutely, that nothing would change, not just in the next eight years, but ever. If that was his intention, then he was quite right. It’s not just that things are exactly the same now as they were when he was describing them – well, the same, if not worse, ask any lawyer. It’s always been like that. Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded. It’s only natural really that Balzac should leave it to Derville rather than to Chabert to speak of the horrors of the world. After all, a soldier tends to play relatively fair, it’s clear what he’s there to do, he doesn’t betray or deceive and he acts not just in obedience to orders, but out of necessity: it’s either his life or that of the enemy who is equally intent on taking his or, rather, who finds himself in exactly the same dilemma. The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motivating force is a vague, rhetorical, empty patriotism, for those soldiers, that is, who are
moved by such feelings or allow themselves to be convinced: that happened in Napoleon’s day, but not so much now, because that kind of man no longer exists, at least not in countries like ours with our armies of mercenaries. The carnage of wars is horrific, of course, but those who take part in them are only following orders, they don’t plan the wars, the wars aren’t even entirely planned by the generals or the politicians, who have an increasingly abstract and unreal vision of those bloodbaths and, needless to say, are never present, now less than ever; it’s as if they were dispatching toy soldiers to the front or on a bombing mission, toys whose faces they never see, as though they were simply immersed in some video game. Crimes committed in ordinary life, however, send shudders down the spine, fill you with fear, not so much the crimes in themselves, which are less striking and more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest however incessantly they occur. No, it’s what the crimes themselves mean that’s frightening. They always involve an individual will and a personal motive, each crime is conceived and planned by a single mind, or a few minds if it’s some kind of conspiracy; and given all the crimes that have been and still are being committed, those many different crimes, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, could not, therefore, have been the product of mutual contagion; and that, in a sense, is more discouraging than a massive act of carnage ordered by a single man, a single mind, which we will always consider to be an unfortunate and inhuman exception: the kind of mind that declares an unjust, all-out war or sets in motion a cruel persecution or institutes a programme of extermination or unleashes a
jihad
. But however atrocious, that isn’t the worst thing, or only in quantitative terms. The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every
age and every country – each on his own account and at his own risk, each with his own thoughts and particular, untransferable aims – should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives, or lovers of whom they now wish to dispose, and who were doubtless the very people whom they once loved most, for whom, at another time, they would have given their life or killed anyone who threatened them, indeed, it’s possible that they would have confronted themselves had they been able to see themselves in the future as they prepare, without remorse or hesitation, to unleash upon their former loved one the fatal blow. That’s what Derville was talking about: “We see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession … ”’ – This time, Díaz-Varela quoted from memory and stopped, perhaps because he couldn’t remember any more, perhaps because there was no point in going on. He looked again at the cover, which featured a portrait, possibly by Géricault, of a hussar with a long, curled moustache and a helmet; and he added, as if finally tearing himself away from that abstracted gaze and emerging from a daydream: ‘Apparently, it’s a very famous novel, although I’d never heard of it before. They’ve even made three films of it, imagine that.’