The Widow (6 page)

“It isn't funny.”

“What do you mean?”

“It isn't funny, he's my father.”

He shot it out lightly, as though for his own amusement, and in the same key she replied, “That's enough!”

“What's enough?”

“Look, son … I know Monsieur Passerat-Monnoyeur. And well I should know him, seeing my sister was in service there for years. He's far too proud a man to let his son go to prison. Besides, he's so rich that his son would have no need to…. ”

She stopped, looked him in the eye, asked, “Perhaps you don't like talking about it?”

“Well …”

“All right! Not that I care to. The gendarmes told me the whole story. They warned me I was keeping you at my own risk. So, now, it's my turn to warn you. Do you understand, my boy? … I'm not afraid of you, or anybody. Today is Sunday, and we can rest a bit…. ”

She noticed that her tone was less familiar, perhaps because they had been talking of the Passerat-Monnoyeurs.

“But you'd better toe the line, understand? And you'll have to get up earlier in the morning, because livestock won't wait to be fed until the sun's halfway up the sky. Go and get my glasses. On the mantelpiece, on the right …”

Toward three o'clock there were quite a few people strolling along the canal. Some came from the village, walking leisurely, in family groups, the children walking in front and kicking at the stones. Most of all, there were people on bicycles and a few tourists with packs on their backs. The grass was a dark green, the water almost black. In contrast, the newborn foliage of the chestnuts was tender and the sunshine splashed it with large daubs of gold.

“How long have you been out?”

“Five days.”

“René only did six months and I used to go and see him every week. Poor kid! And what for? A few lighters they couldn't have sold without getting themselves pinched, some receipt stamps and some pipes …”

“They broke into a tobacco shop?”

“There was a gang, four or five of them. They'd been drinking. It happened in St. Amand. The shop had no shutters and at night you could see all the things in the window. They smashed the glass. When he got home, I didn't suspect anything. I simply noticed he'd been sick. Next morning he went to work as usual. He was learning carpentry at St. Amand.

“The police and the gendarmes looked for six weeks and if that fool Chagot …

“Unhealthy young devil, and vicious like nobody's business … He started talking in his sleep, at night. His father works in a hardware store. The sort of people who think themselves more respectable than other folks.

“The idiot—Chagot's father, I mean—went off to the police, stiff as a ramrod, with tears in his voice, and his big hands shook. ‘My duty as a citizen and a father … ' he told them. And the whole story. The youngster was pulled in. They didn't have to question him for long. He still had a stolen lighter in his pocket. ‘It was Couderc's idea … ' Which just wasn't true: my son never could have such a notion.

“Now he's over there, in Africa. I send him money every week. He writes me long letters. One day I'll read them to you…. ”

Why was her tone still formal? Jean went on smoking cigarettes, his arms resting on the back of his chair, looking at nothing in particular. A whole family had settled down on the grass not far from them, and the mother was cutting up a pie she had just taken out of its newspaper wrapping.

“It must be long, five years, eh?”

The sun had just reached them. All at once, their skins had begun to take on their summer smell.

“And all that time, no women?”

He shrugged.

“And since?”

He smiled, shook his head. She sighed.

“It's probably time we went and put the eggs in the incubator. In the country Sunday never lasts all day.”

They set out the eggs one by one, after candling them. The lamp was refilled with kerosene, the wick cleaned, water poured into the container designed to keep the whole contrivance moist. All that time, it was clear that Tati was thinking of nothing else.

“There's a woman near Orléans who ships out three-day-old chicks, in specially made cardboard boxes, and sells them at five francs each. Sixty times five francs every month, allowing for breakage …”

And the next minute: “You'd better put on your jacket. It's going to get cooler. Next week, I'll buy you some things. That's no fit suit for country work. Tell me!”

“What?”

“Why did you lie just now, when I mentioned the distiller? Why did you tell me he was your father? Trying to be clever, eh?”

“I don't know.”

“You're as stupid as René…. Here! Fill this bucket with oats. Every evening, at this time, it's your job to scatter barley for the chickens. Then you go and get grass for the rabbits against the next day. That way, you've got time for other things in the morning.”

The day had flowed away like water, and it was a surprise to see the patches of sunlight grow red while the sky turned purple.

“Is it true, what you told me just now? That since you came out you haven't…. ”

The fire had died out in the kitchen. Only a few logs would be lit to warm up the evening soup.

“This being the first Sunday, we can treat ourselves to a nip of something. Couderc is at the café, playing cards as usual. I often wonder how he manages to play, deaf as he is. To think that, till he turned fifty, he was a man like any other. It began with me, even while Marcel was still alive. Marcel was my husband. His health was poor. The old man was always after me…. Drink up! It's a five-year-old brandy, distilled here, from wine made with the grapes of the vine that's behind the house.”

Sunrays as sharp as the beams from a searchlight slanted in through the window with its small panes. Tati was still holding her glass and did not know which way to look.

“Maybe there's a suit upstairs that would fit you. Anyway, I must go and take off my good dress.”

She wondered whether to pour him another drink, decided it was not necessary. “Come and see.”

Her room was clean, with whitewashed walls, furnished with a great mahogany bed and an ancient cupboard. She opened it, releasing whiffs of mothball.

“Here. Try on this pair of trousers. They belong to Marcel. Meanwhile, I'll be changing…. ”

The blind was down, allowing only a golden light to filter through. The eider down on the bed was blood-red.

“Feeling shy? … Your skin's as white as a girl's.”

Then she laughed, a harsh little laugh, as she looked pointedly at a particular part of his body. “Have you forgotten how?”

What followed brought back to Jean old memories of his teens, of a night when he and a friend, the son of a building contractor, had pooled their pocket money and furtively made their way into a well-known establishment of Montluçon.

The same coarse words. The same crude gestures. And that very same domination by the woman who left him no initiative, for whom he was only an object. The same candid obscenity.

“Glad?”

He would have astonished her by revealing that the whole time he had looked at nothing but her hairy mole, had thought of nothing but that bit of fur adorning her face.

“Only, I give you fair warning: don't try to take advantage. I've got a mind of my own! It's all right to have our fun now and then…. ”

She was putting on her pink flannel slip, her old dress.

“But work is still work. What are you doing?”

He had raised the blind, and was looking through the window at the towpath where the local people came for a stroll.

“You'd better look for a pair of trousers to fit you. As for Couderc, he can just go and chase himself tonight. Aren't you ready yet?”

A little boy was fishing and once in a while pulled up a tiny fish from the water. A young man and a girl were walking side by side, heads down, not touching one another. Perhaps they had just had an argument? Or were they still only on the brink of whispering the words they hesitated to speak? Perhaps they were gambling their whole lives, there, in the sunset, while the shadows of the trees lengthened out of all proportion.

She had a yellow flower in her hand and was beating the air with it as with a whip. His arms were too long, and he did not know what to do with them.

A two-year-old nearly bumped into them, and his mother, who sat on the embankment beside her husband, called, “Henri! … Henri! … Come here this minute!”

The gendarmes rode by, slowly, gravely, for the third time that day, on bicycles as heavy as themselves.

“Time to go and lock up the chickens,” said Tati, opening the door. Then, looking at him suspiciously: “Anyone would say you hadn't liked it!”

He smiled—a nice, polite smile. “I did.”

“Well, then, hurry up. I'm going to put the soup on.”

Was she pleased with him? Displeased? She didn't know yet. As she left the room, she glanced once more at the bedroom and the cupboard in front of which he was trying on a pair of her late husband's trousers.

T
ATI, WHO
was never still the whole day long and, as she hurried to and fro, seemed to carry the entire household on her robust shoulders, had her hour of weakness.

It was after the midday meal, which they called dinner. The later in the season, the more striking was the contrast between the out of doors white with sun and the cool shade of the kitchen. In particular, deep in a recess that looked like a niche and had probably been made by removing the doors of a closet, there always stood two buckets of water drawn from the well, a big mug beside them, and never, not even at a spring deep in the woods, had Jean had so strong an impression of limpidity, so keen a desire to feel the cold water run down his throat.

The door from the yard was kept shut, because of the flies, and also to stop the poultry from invading the kitchen. But underneath there was still a broad gap, a band of molten gold in which the chicken's feet could be seen in restless movement.

His last mouthful swallowed, Couderc would wipe his knife on the table, which was deeply notched at the place where he sat. Then, like a beast placing itself between the shafts, he would unwind his long, thin body and lumber off to some corner of the yard, where he was soon to be heard shifting boxes or barrels around.

He would putter about, mending fences, trimming gate-posts, splitting logs for the fire, or again sorting out pea sticks or props for tomatoes, his eye glassy, a drop on the end of his nose always, winter or summer.

Then, with a shove of her stomach against the still-uncleared table, Tati would push back her chair, its straw bottom groaning as she did so. A sigh would issue from her vast bosom, and her breasts at this hour always seemed to nestle cozily on her swollen belly; her skin was shiny, her eye moist.

Jean had already fallen into the habit of getting the coffee from the fire, and the blue coffeepot had its place right in a sunbeam falling from the window.

Tati would contemplate her glass—she always had her coffee in a glass. The two lumps of sugar would dissolve. She would watch them almost sentimentally, then sip a drop or two of the brown liquid.

It was as though, for miles around, life hung suspended. The bargees on the canal were napping, while the donkeys or mules rested in a patch of shade. There was not a sound to be heard except the cooing of the pigeons, drowned now and then by the crowing of a cock or the banging of the old man's hammer.

“To think that, when I first came to this house, at fourteen, I came as a servant girl.”

Tati's gaze caressed the walls: they had not changed, they had just had a fresh coat of whitewash each year. The combined calendar and newspaper holder, with its oleograph picture of reapers, must be the one that had been there all that time ago. On either side of the ancient kneading trough, used now for keeping odds and ends, two portraits in oval frames had not changed either.

“That's Couderc as he was then.”

The same elongated head, with its wiry hair cropped short. A pointed mustache slashing the face. The hard look of someone well aware of his own importance.

“He was thirty-five then! He owned the brickyard, inherited it from his father. He was born in this house. The land reached as far as the village, and there were ten cows in the cowshed.”

She stirred the spoon around in her glass, and lapped another sip of coffee, with all the luxurious greed of a cat.

“His wife had just died, and he was left alone with three children. When I came, they had just buried her, and the house still smelled of candles and chrysanthemums.”

The other portrait, which made a pair with Couderc's, had faded more quickly, as if realizing it was no more than the shade of a dead woman. The features were hazy, indistinct. A sad smile. A high chignon. A cameo, the one Tati wore on Sundays.

“I don't know how my mother had heard they were looking for someone to care for the children. We lived far from here, near Bourges. A neighbor drove me over in his gig. For fear they might think I was too young, my mother had put my hair up and made me wear a long dress.”

Sometimes there were harsh notes in her voice, like pebbles.

“The boy was eleven and nearly as tall as I was. The two sisters were called Françoise and Amélie. They were stupid and dirty, especially Françoise. You've seen her. She's Félicie's mother. She married Tordeux, who's barely fit to be watchman at a brickyard.”

Jean was relaxing too, still astride a chair, his elbows on its back, a slender thread of smoke rising from his cigarette.

And Tati sighed: “That's the whole story!”

She knew how she meant it. For her the walls, everything in the room, became alive. She could see them again at different periods—when, for instance, just fourteen years old, she was the first of the household to get up and, in the depth of winter, light the fire in the cold kitchen, before going to break the ice in the horse trough.