The Solitude of Compassion (12 page)

“No, it's not that. You understand, Monsieur Jean, all the happiness that it gave me? They were not mean. One fine day, one of them came all alone. She said to me: ‘It is evening,' then ‘you cannot see anymore, but they broke the lamp at the end of the road,' then ‘I was the one who broke the lamp with rocks, last night.' I said ‘I heard you.' ‘Touch,' she said to me. She took my hand and placed it open on her face. ‘Touch my eyes,' she told me, ‘touch my nose, touch my mouth, touch my chin; you feel how fine my skin is? You feel how it makes a stream there between the cheek and the nose? You feel how round my cheek is, perfectly round, and then there, between my nose and my mouth, this little border with two slopes, and then pass your fingers there, over my lips, you feel how soft they are? And also the design, follow it, and then, you see, I'll kiss your fingers, touch my hair…'—‘Yes,' I said, ‘you are beautiful. '—‘My name is Antonia,' she told me: ‘I love you, and you?'”

He stopped speaking. After a moment, he shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I have to say something to keep myself amused, don't I, Monsieur Jean?”

“You must understand,” Justin told me, “tomorrow the woman is going to Chausserignes, then…”

“Just that, on a weekday? Isn't it the market day?”

“No, it is for a family affair.”

Right away he took on a slightly distant expression which was just enough to leave a corner of his eye watching me. As for me, I know, I had to pretend to have something else on my mind; I watched the clock.

“Well I am leaving, you must have things to get ready.”

“Ah! No,” said Justin, “stay a little longer; it is barely two o'clock, and besides, it's raining. And besides, sit down. Mélanie, bring us another liter.”

We filled our pipes; Justin filled his over the brim so that it would last a long time, then he wet his thumb with saliva and packed down the tobacco by turning his thumb. He lit the very middle and sucked gently.

“Look, I will tell you about this affair… You remember my wife's sister, Rosine? No? You don't remember? A lady, a real little tart, a
little bitch, with allthe trimmings, defrosted, there you go… They found her once with Barnabus, you don't recall? That's strange!”

“Tell me, Justin: Barnabus, is that the one you were speaking about, he is at least eighty, well…”

“This is true, this is, look; I thought that you were older. This is true, this is, but it does not mean anything, listen: this Rosine, she had a daughter by her first husband, then this daughter married…”

“Wait a minute, Justin; how do you expect me to remember? That was at least fifty years ago.”

He thinks for a moment.

“Ah! Fifty years, at least that; at least, you said it right, but still it is strange, I remember it myself. Maybe it is because we talked about it in the family, and then, I must have seen Rosine's photograph. Yes, that's right, I must have seen her photograph.

So, Bertha, Rosine's daughter marries and she has a daughter.”

“Ah! Well, Justin, she has daughters, that she does!”

“Yes she had three, but that does not mean anything, it begins here. They called their daughter Annette. She was one, she was two, two and a half, perhaps even three years old, but at that point my Bertha dies. She wore herself out sewing linens for others, going to the washhouse in the middle of winter, doing praiseworthy house-work. She dies. Good. Her husband was one of those, you know, who was a weakling. On top of that, he liked absinthe. Six months later he died too, all burned up inside by drink. Good. So the little girl is all alone. I remember that at that time my wife told me every evening: ‘Also, Justin, that little girl is all alone,' and I told her ‘Ah! Yes,' and then we would go to sleep. Rosine wrote to her brother, Eugène, who was a locksmith in the village: ‘If you could take the little girl in with you…you who have a workshop, you could keep her; as for myself I am remarried and my husband, you know…'

Eugène did not look right or left, he went to fetch the little girl and took her. This Eugène is not a bad sort, he has heart, but he is without strength of character. He kept the young girl for two years. And his wife was always around to whine: ‘And she is here and she is there, and it's all because of Rosine, and she wets the bed.' They had a little boy, who, on seeing Annette climb up on Eugène's knees and call him papa, wore himself out crying: ‘He is not your father. He is mine.' Finally there were scenes. In the end, after two years he brought the young girl back to her grandmother. She in turn acted as if he were bringing her a dirty handkerchief. She put her in an orphanage.

There it is! Well, the day before yesterday, now that you know, Amélie came back from Chausserignes and she rushed into the house, and went to chat with my wife: hush hush, under wraps. And my wife said, ‘That, after all!' So I asked: ‘What is it?' She told me: ‘The little girl, Annette, is out of the orphanage she has been placed in Chausserignes!'—‘Annette? And why did she come out?'—‘She's free,' Amélie said to me, ‘She is twenty-one.'

So that's it! You see that, why, she is free!

I said to my wife: ‘You are going to put on your hat, and then tomorrow you will go down there to see her boss, and you might even bring him a dozen eggs, not the freshest ones, but the ones from the jar. You will go see him, and you will tell him ‘This is our niece, well, this is true, we cannot deny it, but with children like that, one never knows what will become of them after they have been brought up in those houses. Well, you are warned. We are not responsible for anything.'

You won't see her doing anything bad and then their coming around and making a claim against us!”

I went to the inn on the side of the road, my friend Baptiste Gaudemar, called “Gonzales.” “Sit down,” he said and he sat down next to me by the only table. I drew out my pipe, I smoked; I did not say a word. When I go there it is to listen, to learn. And “called Gonzales” goes for a long time without talking. He has a big cocoa-colored hat that is all stretched out, all washed by the year's rains, all powdered with dusts and summer grains. He has a beautiful handkerchief of red silk with green and blue flowers, this handkerchief which he spreads out in front of the sun at times to peer through and to make others look through as well. “Look,” he said “look at this thing that you can only see through my handkerchief.” You look and you do not see anything. Then he says: “Look at the sun dance: look there, through the battling sky.” You look again. Then, this time you see it.

In the open doorway the entire hillside of “Saint-Mère and Saint-André” is sketched and a good bit of the junipered land all gone wild, despite a high pigeon roost which spits out in silence white pigeons pointed like quince seeds.

The eldest daughter “Mia des Roches” passes by with her basket filled with onions and pears. And there, on the tile floor, her last child—the one she had with a carriageman or a woodsman from Saint-Sylvestre—plays with empty spools. Jeanton, this little one is named.

He looks at me. He passes his tongue along his lip.

“Do you want me to pull out your belly?”

He tells me:

“No.”

I say:

“You want me to tear off your arm?”

“No.”

“You want me to take off your leg?”

“No.”

“You want me to cut off your head?”

“No.”

“Well then we can't have any fun.”

I look at “called Gonzales.” He is smoking and caressing his nice handkerchief.

“During the time when I was in Mexico,” he begins…because he went to Mexico when he was quite young. He made his trip in his first communion vest. There they were supposed to have him work in a candy shop. But that is another story.

“At that time…”

That is what gave him the nickname Gonzalès. When we saw him return, dry like a carob bean and so thin that we could count all the joints of his bones on him, so that at first we nicknamed him “thirty joints” for that reason. He was in a vest of old, blackened thread; you would not give more than ten cents for the man and the vest, even with a guarantee. But little by little we learned that
underneath, what we took for a big clump of bone was, without a doubt, a small purse, and then we called him Gonzalès, for his money.

“As I was getting off a horse, I saw her behind the gate with her hair parted and her big cherry of a mouth. I said to myself: ‘You will give her a dab of your handkerchief.'”

Which made us think that besides the purse he also had a box; because he had a nice way of yawning open-mouthed, of unsticking his teeth and he knew how to look bored and get all the attention in the “Café Glacier” just by sitting sideways on one of the benches. Girls began to hover around him. He yawned, then he had a little, sharp gaze under his eyelashes, and he folded up the entire circle of his mouth, “like a tiger” the apothecary said.

“In the wool shed, with the sound of all those windy sluts with mouths as smutty as bishops', a bed, Monsieur Jean, which has its hundred comings and goings on one side and a full eighty on the other, a mattress as thick as a house, and upon it…”

Upon it—I mean to say after having been well-surrounded by the girls around here, in his story, which I know, since he has told it to me twenty times, he loves it, he sucks it, he chews it like baked honey, and so I do not listen any more from the moment he says: “I saw her behind the gate.” I know what he is going to say—one perhaps could imagine that he got some money from it, but, in any case, he does not let on a whit because Jean and Anaïs, and Adelinde are involved, he does not move more than a conclusion. And yet, they were pretty girls, and good for keeping one busy.

To the one who had pulled him closer he said:

“As for me, I am at the side of the road, who knows if tomorrow everything will change? Then, I will get up, I will walk on my road without anything holding me back.”

He stayed thus yawning, drinking, and saying: “Look through my handkerchief at the whole sky fighting.” From time to time, he came into the middle of the square with his compass, he found north, then he turned towards a patch of sky, and he looked at it as if he wanted to move onward with his glance to that place where the sky meets the earth.

He was at the side of the road. As for me, I understand. Do you understand?

You will understand.

In the evening, his wallet flat, he bought with his last pesos this inn on the side of the road. He married that fat, mustached woman who is there by the stove frying pig tripe. He had two children with her: this “Mia des Roches” who is all wild around his body like a colt, and a son, gone off to who knows where?

“Look,” he said to me.

I know the end of the story, I do not listen to it, but each time I look and each time it gives me a great blow in my heart because of all that I am wasting by remaining on the side of the road; I look.

 

He gently takes his left hand out of his vest, he stretches it out before me… He is like some old, very feeble beast, and there on the middle finger he wears a young lady's ring, even more, a young-lady-ring, all gilded with gold like hair, red-stoned, with a grey blue reflection like an eye.

I saw Fonse coming; he was utterly overwhelmed at having his mouth without a chew, at having forgotten to turn up his pants, and with his wool belt below his belly. He was getting ahead!

“If you are going far like that…” I told him in passing.

He did not see me, stretching out his old straw limbs in the air. He turns his head. He looks at me. He climbs the slope, he comes to lie down beside me and remains puffing to get his breath. As for me, who knows his malady… Do I? He speaks about it everywhere: in the café, in the fields, at wakes, on every occasion, ever since Monsieur de Digne spoke to him about it. I tell him:

“That is not good for your heart, you know?”

“Ah! With the heart that I have, if it were only that, but something just happened to me…”

It must actually be something… He, who ordinarily looks at events without haste for a good hour before deciding, he is here, utterly lost, flapping his eyelids, as if amazed by his own speed.

“Did you know that I bought Maussan's big orchard? This winter Jofroi came to my house; I brought him into the kitchen; I told
him: ‘Warm yourself up.' He drank a small glass and then he decided. He told me ‘Fonse, I am getting old; my wife is sick, I am too; we don't have any children, it's a big problem. I went to see the notary of Riez and it was almost understood. He showed me the account, I went to see the tax collector and… I tell you it was almost understood. If I put so much in life annuity, it will give me so much income.' Then I told him that it was a good idea, and, after one or two things, we agreed, and I bought Maussan's big orchard. Not the house; he told me: ‘Leave me the house, I am used to it, besides it would hurt me, but take all the land, knock down the walls if you want.' Finally I left him a good part so that he could get his sun and a tree or two for his pleasure. You see that I was agreeable and that I paid straight up. He made use of his money, he had his income. We were very happy. Right.

“Have you seen Maussan's orchard? It is all old peach trees; they should have been taken up ten years ago already. Jofroi, for him, a little more or a little less, it still works, but for me, peach trees are not my forte, and then our land is not a land for that; in the end, see it as you will, me, my intention is to sow wheat there, to pull out the trees and grow wheat. It is as good an idea as any, and anyhow, it is nobody's business; I paid, it is my choice, I'll do what I want.