Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 14

In the collective imagination, the couple formed by married concierges – a close-knit pair consisting of two entities so insignificant that only their union can make them apparent – will in all likelihood be the owners of a poodle. As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by retired petty bourgeois reactionaries, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection to their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy lodges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, but in particular when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all.

Thus the concierge couple, as served by the metaphor of their totemic poodle, seems to be utterly devoid of such passions as love and desire and, like their totem, destined to remain ugly, stupid, submissive and boastful. If, in certain novels, princes fall in love with working-class lasses, and princesses with galley slaves, between two concierges, even of the opposite sex, there is never any romance of the type that others experience and that might some day make a worthy story.

Not only were we never the owners of a poodle, but I believe I can fairly assert that our marriage was a success. With my husband, I was myself. I think back to our little Sunday mornings with nostalgia, mornings blessed with restfulness where, in the silent kitchen, he would drink his coffee while I read.

I married him at the age of seventeen following a swift but proper courtship. He worked at the factory, as did my older brothers, and stopped off on many evenings on his way home to drink a coffee and a drop of something stronger. Alas, I was ugly. And yet that would not have played the slightest role had I been ugly the way others are ugly. But I bore the cruelty of my affliction alone: this ugliness that deprived me of any freshness, although I was not yet a woman, and caused me at the age of fifteen to resemble the woman I would be at the age of fifty. My stooped back, thick waist, short legs, widespread feet, abundant hair, and lumpy features – well, features lacking any shapeliness or grace – might have been overlooked for the sake of the youthful charm granted to even the most unprepossessing amongst us – but no, at the age of twenty I already qualified as an old biddy.

Thus, when the intentions of my future husband became clear and it was no longer possible for me to ignore them, I opened my heart to him, speaking frankly for the first time to someone other than my own self, and I confessed to him how astonished I was that he might conceive of wanting to marry me.

I was sincere. I had for many years accustomed myself to the prospect of a solitary life. To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things – some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favoured among her children – no, it is a superfluous plaything to enhance the value of the jewel. As for ugliness, it is guilty from the start, and I was doomed by my tragic destiny to suffer all the more, for I was hardly stupid.

‘Renée,’ he replied, with as much gravity as he could muster, showing himself to be more loquacious during the long disquisition to come than he would ever be again, ‘Renée, I don’t want my wife to be one of those giddy young things who run wild and have no more brain than a sparrow beneath their pretty face. I want a woman who’s loyal, a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper. I want a calm and steady companion who’ll stay by my side and support me. In exchange, you can expect me to be a serious worker, a calm man at home and a tender husband at the right moment. I’m not a bad sort, and I’ll do my best.’

And he did.

Small and dry like the stump of an elm tree, he had nevertheless a pleasant face and usually wore a smile. He did not drink, smoke, chew tobacco or gamble. At home, when work was over, he’d watch television, browse through fishing magazines or play cards with his friends from the factory. He was very sociable and often invited people over. On Sundays he went fishing. As for me, I looked after the house, because he didn’t like the idea of me doing it for other people.

He was not lacking in intelligence, although his particular intelligence was not of the sort that an industrious society values. While his skills were confined to manual work, he displayed a talent that did not stem solely from mere mechanical aptitude and, however uneducated he might have been, he approached everything with a spirit of ingeniousness, something which, where small tasks are concerned, distinguishes the artists from the mere labourers and, in conversation, shows that knowledge is not everything. Having been resigned from an early age to the prospect of the life of a nun, I felt therefore that it was benign indeed of the heavens to have placed between my young bride’s hands a companion with such agreeable manners and who, while not an intellectual, was no less clever for it.

I might have ended up with someone like Grelier.

Bernard Grelier is one of the rare souls at 7, Rue de Grenelle in whose presence I have no fear of betraying myself. Whether I say to him: ‘War and Peace is the staging of a determinist vision of history’ or ‘You’d do well to oil the hinges in the rubbish store,’ he will not find that one is any more significant than the other. It even seems miraculous that the latter phrase manages to fire him into action. How can one do something one does not understand? No doubt this type of proposition does not require any rational processing and, like those stimuli that move in a loop through our bone marrow and set off a reflex without calling on the brain, perhaps the summons to apply oil is merely of a mechanical nature and sets in motion a reaction in one’s limbs without inviting the mind to participate.

Bernard Grelier is the husband of Violette Grelier, who is the ‘housekeeper’ for the Arthens. She began working for them thirty years ago as a simple maid, and she rose through the ranks as they in turn became wealthier, and once she was a housekeeper she found herself reigning over a laughable kingdom whose subjects were the cleaning lady (Manuela), the part-time butler (an Englishman) and the factotum (her husband); she is as scornful of the lower classes as are her high and mighty upper-class employers. All day long she jabbers like a magpie, busily rushing here and there, acting important, reprimanding her menial subalterns as if this were Versailles in better days, and exhausting Manuela with pontificating speeches about the love of a job well done and the decline of good manners.

‘She hasn’t read Marx,’ said Manuela to me one day.

The pertinence of this remark uttered by a Portuguese woman who is in no way well versed in the study of philosophy is striking. No, Violette Grelier has certainly not read any Marx, for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of cleaning products for rich people’s silverware. She has paid the price for this oversight by inheriting a daily routine punctuated with endless catalogues vaunting the qualities of starch and linen dusters.

I, therefore, had married well.

To my husband, moreover, I had very quickly confessed my great sin.