Читать книгу The Catalans - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 5

At Carcassonne the carriage emptied, and until Narbonne Dr Roig had the compartment to himself. He was glad of it, for although his companions had been agreeable men and women he was feeling too stupid and bleary at this time of day – the hour of dawn, after a long night’s run – far too stupid to talk.

They wished him a good journey, he bade them farewell; and when the train pulled out he sank luxuriously into the corner seat: it was the first time since he had climbed into the train that he had been able to sit easy, spread out, uncramped, and he promised himself a quiet doze for an hour at least. On his right the great dark bulk of the Cité soared up, its fantastic battlements sharp against the pale sky: it revolved slowly, a half-turn, and slid away into the corner of the window as the train gathered speed. He leaned forward, straining his eyes to catch the last glimpse as it vanished, and then, easing himself back into his corner, cushioned against the rhythmic swing of the train, he closed his eyes.

In the corridor, a man, overburdened with parcels, a string-fastened suitcase and a basket with a duck peering from it, battled his way slowly down the train on some laborious errand: with every swing of the carriage he lurched against the outer window or an inner door, and as he banged against the doctor’s compartment he cried ‘Mare de Deu de Deu de Deu de Deu. Boun Deu, Senyor.’ At the sound of the Catalan Dr Roig opened his eyes: it was his mother tongue, and although he had not used it for so many years, still he dreamed in Catalan. The sound of it brought the end of his journey clearly into the immediate present; a long journey, from the confines of Prabang, weeks of traveling, half across the world: but now suddenly the end was in sight, so near that he could touch it. He looked up at his baggage in the rack, straightened himself in his seat and felt the inner pocket where his tickets lay.

He knew very well that he still had some hours of traveling – he had made this part of the journey so often as a young man that each stage from Carcassonne toward the south was sharp and distinct in his memory – but the thought of sleep had flown out of his mind, and he continued to sit upright as the train hurried down through the growing day.

He looked forward to his homecoming, of course: he had been thinking of it with increasing pleasure for the last six months. But it would be a formidable reunion after all these years, with the whole family gathered; and still it was very early in the morning to think of the welcome at the station, the embracing, the cries of enthusiasm, the feast, without a slight tinge of melancholy. How much more agreeable it would be if he could slowly materialize at Saint-Féliu without any fuss; if by some happy dislocation of time he could already have been there for a month.

And besides the new cousins whom he certainly would not recognize, the cousins by marriage and the men and women whom he had last seen as children, there would be the births, marriages, and deaths to applaud and to deplore: and there would be this sad business of Xavier’s folly to be gone into. This was the affair that most agitated the family: it had begun at least a year ago, and the storm that it had raised in Saint-Féliu had sent ripples as far as his quiet laboratory on the shores of the Luong river. He would hear it all over again, from many sources: and even those who had from the first kept him so well informed, Aunt Margot, Aunt Marinette, cousin Côme and the others, even those would certainly repeat all that they had said in their letters, would repeat it all within a very few hours of his arrival. It was inevitable; but still he would be glad to hear the latest developments, and he was willing to pay that price to hear them. A great deal could have happened during his voyage, for if Aunt Margot were right (and she was a shrewd old woman; he had a high opinion of her judgment) the whole affair was fast reaching a climax at the time he left Prabang.

There was her last letter, double-crossed in a thin, angular pattern of violet ink, most angular where it was most emphatic, and in some places illegible because of the writer’s anger: it was still in his pocket, and from time to time during his voyage he had tried to decipher it.

He looked at it again, unfolding the crackling pages to the place where indignation had spread a series of hard uprights, underscored with a force that had nearly torn the paper: he hoped to surprise the meaning unawares, to catch it this time without effort. ‘… and Xavier has … the wretched girl … influence … at once … children …’ Children? No. Perhaps it was ‘comfort’; though that made little difference: the whole paragraph remained obscure whatever the reading. It was frustrating to be on the edge of comprehension: but it did not matter essentially, the solution of the difficulty was at hand; and in any case, even if he could never know what the passage meant, the main lines of the affair were clear in his mind. Xavier, a middle-aged widower, the chief man of the family, the mayor and one of the most substantial inhabitants of Saint-Féliu dels Aspres, had formed a liaison with a girl young enough to be his daughter, and it appeared that there was a real danger of his marrying her.

The liaison in itself was bad enough, so public in the little town, so much on his own doorstep: the liaison was bad enough, and the early letters that had sped across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and hastened across Asia to carry him the news, had been alarmed, uneasy. As cousin Côme had said, there was every opportunity for a man to have what women friends he liked in Perpignan – a separate establishment, even. It could so easily be done tactfully, and so long as the accepted gestures toward morality were made, very few people would blame him at all, even if it were quite widely known.

But in one’s own village … It showed a cynical contempt for public opinion that could be very wounding to a man’s reputation; and the family was deeply concerned with Xavier’s reputation. The publicity, the local sniggering had certainly hurt them, but it was the fear for Xavier’s reputation that had first sent the letters hurrying over the sea. Of course they were concerned with his good name: it was part of the general property; without it, they would all be lessened, and very much lessened; they had every right to be concerned with it. Furthermore, Xavier could never have been what he was, firmly based, solid, well connected, influential, without them, and for this reason, if for no other, he owed them consideration.

But this cause for agitation and unhappiness faded to insignificance when the far greater danger appeared: the letters redoubled in number and they grew shriller and more shrill in tone as it became more and more obvious that Xavier had lost his wits to the extent of contemplating marriage with the girl. For now it was not merely the question of property in reputation that was at stake (such reputation as Xavier could possibly retain, once it was known that he had really thought of such a crack-brained transgression): no; now the issue was that of real, tangible property, the family property, funds, land, houses. This was a common stock. It was true that it was not held communally, but it was certainly considered as a family possession: everything must be kept inside the family limits, and it was intolerable to think that Xavier, marrying, might dispose of his share like an imbecile. The letters followed hot one upon the other, and Dr Roig, although he was so far removed in time and space and spirit, whistled gently over them, pulling his chin with that gesture that was habitual in him when he wished to express doubt, thoughtfulness, and the appreciation of a difficult situation.

He was far removed from the family. His interests had lain for so many years in another country that he could not be touched by the same immediacy, nor, even if he had been there in Saint-Féliu, would he ever have been infected by the same indignation: but still, no physical removal and no spiritual removal that he could conceive would ever take him so far away that he would remain indifferent to this fundamental danger to the family’s property.

They had pressed him to come home earlier than the date he had fixed, and for a time he had been half inclined to agree: if he had thought his influence as great as Aunt Margot so flatteringly described it – ‘Xavier will certainly listen to you. He has always had a great respect for you and for your opinion’ – he might have done so. But thinking of Xavier and of their cool, superficial relationship, Dr Roig had neither written to his cousin nor hurried his departure. A letter, indeed, on so intimate a subject, would have been impossible, especially the tirade that Aunt Margot had outlined for him: ‘You should say, My dear Cousin Xavier – your conduct is unworthy of you and of our family. I blush for you, and my heart bleeds for little Dédé, whom you propose to disinherit, for the memory of Georgette, and for all our poor unjustly wounded family.’ It went on to cover two sheets of note paper. He did not suppose that Aunt Margot ever really thought that he would use this outline, although she had couched it in the shabby rhetoric that she evidently felt appropriate to a man in the act of delivering a high moral rebuke. Her own style was direct, trenchant, without literary adornment; and sometimes, when he recalled the phrases she had chosen for him, he wondered uneasily whether he had ever done anything to justify her choice; whether, unknown to himself, he had shown a tendency toward righteous pomp. He hoped not. No; it was merely a release for Aunt Margot: somebody ought to thunder at Xavier in the consecrated frock-coat and shirt-front phrases, and as she dared not do it herself she had launched her bolt in an oblique direction, with a very slight hope that it might perhaps rebound and strike the intended victim. For that matter, he doubted whether Xavier had received one tenth part of the harangues that had come to him – to Alain Roig – in the form of verbatim reports, ‘pieces of their mind.’

He smiled, too, at the old lady’s heart bleeding for little Dédé. This was Xavier’s son, whom he had met but recently in Haiphong, where the young man was reluctantly performing his military service. An unlikable fellow, spineless and selfish, cold; he did not think it at all probable that Aunt Margot, a clear-sighted, unsentimental woman, liked him in the least, or deceived herself into believing that she did. And as for Georgette, Xavier’s wife, she had been dead these fifteen years and more. Dr Roig could not recall any precise impression of her now: the pale, thin little personality had faded without leaving any strong trace. He remembered, with an effort, her slight, anemic form and her rather pathetic dependence on Xavier: she was not the kind of woman Aunt Margot would have liked; and now that he thought about it he brought up a distinct image of Aunt Margot speaking impatiently to her – a controlled impatience with a fund of irritation behind. It was something very simple, the preservation of greengages in brandy, some trifling household operation with which Georgette could not succeed: nothing in itself, but symptomatic.

The train was running slower; its rhythm changed. The revolution of his mind slowed with that of the wheels, slower and slower, trying to keep the same rhythm, but then it was no longer possible, and he looked briskly out of the window. Here were the sidings of Narbonne, here the platform, and his face was gliding before a sea of other faces, the same height as his, and removed from his by a pane of glass and four feet of air.

The rush of people into the carriage, the anxious shouting, handing of baggage, the unscrupulous jockeying for seats, kept him tense and distracted until the train jerked on again.

The carriage settled down gradually; the passengers stared at one another, animosity died away, conversation started, and by the time they had reached the sea and had swung right-handed along the coast Dr Roig had made out that the man and wife opposite to him were peasants, returning from a visit to their married daughter. They were describing the illness of their grandchild to the other group. ‘They were having the doctor, three hundred francs a visit, but the fever went on. We gave the medicines, naturally – they were paid for – but in the evening we brought the healer. He did not much care to come: he does not like to trouble himself with journeys. And then, you know, there is the jealousy with the doctors. But finally he said that as it was for us he would come, and when he came he held a little ball of clay over Fifine’s body.’

‘A little ball of clay on a string.’

‘Special clay.’

‘And it showed that the blood had collected in the veins. You see? And the medicine that the doctor had been giving was to work on the nerves of the stomach. He recognized it at once by the color and the smell.’

‘He said that the blood must be drawn away, and he made a cataplasm with herbs from the mountain.’

‘Natural products. Not drugs from the pharmacy.’

‘And he said that it would draw the blood through four thicknesses of cloth.’

‘I was skeptical. But as it was only an external application – external, you understand? – I said “Let us try it, at all events.” And I saw it with my own eyes: the blood came through four thicknesses of cloth. Evidently, one must believe what one sees.’

‘Four thicknesses. He said that four was the number for that child, as she was born in July. In the morning she was perfectly well; she had a little breakfast, just a little black coffee and some pork soup. And when the doctor came he was very pleased with her – he put it all down to his aureomycin. They say that this healer could easily be a doctor if he chose. He …’ But the others cut her short with their own healer, a woman who trod the rheumatism out of her patients; and Dr Roig, now that so many were shouting all at once, moved out into the corridor and stood leaning against the window.

It was very picturesque, no doubt; it was certainly a stronger and more genuine survival of folklore than local dress, songs, dances, or anything decorative; but it depressed him. He had known it all his life, of course, and when he was a child they had hung a string of garlic round his neck under his shirt. Was it connected with the general lack of religious faith? The necessity for something magic? Some day he would ask a colleague whether these pests were as frequent in the believing parts – Brittany, for example, or in the north where the Catholic trades unions were strong.

They were passing along the edge of one of the great salt lagoons now: a flight of avocets, black and white against the pale water, distracted him from his thoughts on popular medicine, and his mind went back to Saint-Féliu and cousin Xavier.

The girl was the daughter of the grocer in the rue Joffre. Madeleine. He knew the parents, Jean Fajal and Dominique, and he knew the shop, a little cavern under the arcades with a grove of dried sausage and stockfish and candles hanging from its ceiling, and dark butts of wine disappearing into the shadows on either hand; not very prosperous, but always full of black old women gossiping, and with Fajal’s two vineyards and the market garden it would be enough to keep them comfortably. But he could not remember any daughter. Obviously, she would have been a child when last he was home; and there were so many children, all alike except to their parents.

A child of about twelve or thirteen she must have been: he tried to picture the shop with a child in it, but that brought him nothing, and he ran the closer relations of the Fajals through his mind to see if he could fix the child in another surrounding. There was Fajal’s sister almost next door, in the mercery, and lower down on the corner there was the other sister at the tobacco shop. Was it that extraordinary, ethereal child, the one he had seen at the tobacconist’s? He remembered how he had stared; a slim child (though at first he had not known she was a child – she had no age, neither young nor old for the first moment of that encounter) with ash-blond hair and a perfect, exquisite face and pale eyes. No. That girl’s name was Carmen, and she had died – meningitis – after he had left. This Madeleine would be her cousin. If she looked anything like her, no wonder Xavier behaved strangely. Though in all likelihood if Carmen had grown up she would have coarsened like the other girls: that strange remoteness would have come heavily to earth with adolescence; and the inevitable growth of body, atrophy of mind, the invasion of clothes, make-up, frizzled hair, would all have buried that lovely child deeper than ever the earth did now.

Still he could not see any little girl called Madeleine Fajal, or rather Pou-naou – for although the family’s name was Fajal on letters and documents, nobody in Saint-Féliu called them anything but Pou-naou, from the circumstance of Jean Fajal’s father having owned the house by the new fountain, or pump. Jean Pou-naou, Thérèse Pou-naou, Mimi Pou-naou who married the son of René l’Empereur: but Jean’s uncle, old Pou-naou’s brother, was called Ferrand because he was a smith, and all his branch of the family were Ferrands too. And this diversity of names ran through the town, the interrelated, closely knit, cross-knit town of cousins and remoter kin, to the utter confusion of strangers, and to their exclusion. None but a native, born to it and growing up with it, could hold it all in his head: but Alain Roig had absorbed it in his youngest days, and although the years between had carried away so much, that remained, surprisingly complete and ready to his hand. Without searching at all he remembered that Mimi Pou-naou had married Louis l’Empereur, the son of René l’Empereur – the old soldier of Cochin-China who nominally owned the tobacco shop that Mimi ran while her husband went to sea after the sardines and anchovies – and that René l’Empereur, who was officially called René Prats, had received his name very early, when Napoleon III had dandled him for a moment, thus changing the family surname, which for generations had been Pitg-a-fangc, Wade-in-the-muck, from an origin too gross to record.

So although he could not remember the child Madeleine as a person, he could fix her exactly in her place, surround her with her relations and her contemporaries. He could define her, like a geometrical locus, in relation to a number of determined entities, a very large number in this case. Still, it was irritating not to be able to manage his memory better: he had often heard about the girl, and that should have perpetuated a visual image. Heard about her, that is, before all this fuss; for she had been something of a protégée of his Aunt Margot. He had heard about her accompanying Aunt Margot to Perpignan to see a parade, helping with Aunt Margot’s orphans: ‘I made the rest of the silk you sent me into a collar and cuffs for Madeleine.’ But particularly he had heard about her when she married one Francisco Cortade: it was a marriage very much disapproved by Aunt Margot and by all the girl’s family – a most unequal match, by all that he heard. It had made Aunt Margot angry to see Madeleine, an educated girl, able to speak correct French and to present herself anywhere, capable of holding a serious position (she could type), throwing herself away in marriage to a young fisherman with nothing at all, a young man furthermore who was said to be idle and to have absurd pretensions. She had been angry, too, because she felt that Madeleine had been deceitful; she had never told Aunt Margot the full state of her feelings, and the marriage had come as a disagreeable surprise. She had been so angry, indeed, that she had not fully restored the girl to favor until the marriage ended in disaster. Dr Roig had heard about this: the young man had apparently run away with a film star – an event for Saint-Féliu – and Madeleine, having taken her desertion very hard, had been comforted and sustained by Aunt Margot.

Now it cannot have been so very long after that, he reflected, arranging the chronology of events in his mind, that I had that letter from cousin Côme with the facetious reference to Xavier making his typist work overtime: that was the beginning. Though perhaps in fact it was not the true beginning, for cousin Côme had an obscene mind and he could not see a man and a woman together without being sure that they coupled furtively, that they had a guilty relationship – a state of affairs that was in itself intrinsically amusing, very funny indeed to Côme.

Perpignan. In the fury of the arrival Dr Roig slipped back into his corner seat, where he could keep safely out of reach of the contending parties, the strong body of those who wished to get out, and the still stronger body of those who were going to get on at any cost at all. With each stop in its southward journey the train had met a more determined set of boarders (with each kilometer the fiery rudeness of the people grew) and here, almost at its last halt before the Spanish frontier, almost at the extremity of France, it was received by a horde so fierce that it might have been fleeing from the plague, or a devouring fire behind. By this alone he could have told that he was in his own country, but now all the voices were Catalan too, for further proof; and that familiar harshness stirred him as no harmonious tongue could ever have done. It was not a beautiful language, he was bound to admit, and the people who were speaking it were neither decorative nor well-mannered; but it was his own language, this was his native country, and these were his own people.

The compartment was crowded, and he could distinguish the accents of Elne in the plain, of the mountain villages, and of his own Catalans of the sea: the man whose elbow was sticking so painfully into his side was certainly from Banyuls, by the way he had of speaking. He gathered that the grapes were doing quite well, and that if nothing went wrong for the next two or three weeks they would be beginning the vendanges in the plain; that the price of apricots and peaches had been so low that it had barely been worth picking them; that the price of everything was going up and up; and that the youth of today was worthless.

The well-known phrases came out again with a predictability that was charming for a returning exile: the conversation was like a familiar childish tune on a musical box; it might prove maddening in time, but after a long interval it could be heard again with affection and delight.

‘They are all bandits. All of them, Communists, Socialists, Radical-Socialists, MRP and Gaullistes: all bandits. Every one is in it for what he can get out of it, and the country can go to the devil.’

‘They do nothing to protect their own people. It is not worth selling our wine at the market price; our early vegetables and fruit rot on the ground, and all the time ships are arriving at Sète and Port-Vendres loaded down with wine from North Africa and fruit from Italy. Someone says to a minister “Té, here is a million francs: I want a license to import a hundred tons of peaches” and it is done. It is as simple as that, and meanwhile we starve,’ said the fat man.

‘I never vote for any of them.’

‘They are all bandits.’

‘When I was young the father of a family had some authority. At dawn he showed his son a mattock and said “To the vineyard.” And to the vineyard the boy would go. He would take a loaf and a skin of wine and an onion and work there until dark. Now what does he do?’

The train was running fast now, lickety-lick across the plain, the plain with its drilled armies of peach trees, almonds, and apricots stretching away in interminable files: a hundred times a minute a perspective opened, a straight lane of precise trees with a green stream of garden-stuff running down between; the perspective opened, slanting rapidly to the full, held there for an instant, slanted fast away and was gone as the next began to open; and between each pair there was a fragmentary hint of diagonals, opened and closed so quickly that nothing could be distinguished but a sense of ordered space. Most of the peaches were picked already, but still there were a few late orchards with the fruit glowing among the leaves, peaches that looked too big for the trees: they would be the big dorats, he thought, and the word brought the memory of that wonderful bitter-sweet prussic-acid taste and the smell of the downy skin.

They passed Corneilla del Vercol, and he had hardly said to himself ‘Now we begin to turn’ when he felt the beginning of the centrifugal pressure, his weight pressing outward against the side, as the train ran fast on to the long curve down to the sea, and the Canigou came into sight, sharp and clear in the morning sky, still the morning sky, for it was hardly more than breakfast-time. There was a belt of cloud lying across the middle height, but the three tall peaks stabbed up hard and dominating. It was the mountain that ruled the plain; and the plain seen without the mountain was nothing but a dull stretch of intensely cultivated land instead of a preparation and the foreground for a magnificent piece of set scenery: a little obvious and romantic, perhaps, but superb in its kind, composed on the very grandest scale, and instantly, overwhelmingly effective.

The long curve went on: the Canigou moved imperceptibly into the middle of the window, and now by leaning against the glass and peering forward he could see the long curtain of the Pyrenees, dark, with the sun behind them. That was the limit of the plain, the wall of dark mountains that ran headlong to the sea, and that was his own piece of the world, there where the sea and the mountains joined.

It was very near now. On the skyline he could see the towers, high up, remote against the sky, the ancient solitary towers against the Algerine rovers, the Moors who had sacked the coast for so many hundred years; they stood one behind the other, far spaced, to carry the alarm like beacons: they were his final landmarks. The train bore away and away to the left, running directly now for the edge of the sea, for there was no way through the mountains, and even at the very rim of the land it was tunnel and cutting, cutting and tunnel all the way, to get along at all.

The round towers, remote and deserted on the high bare peaks, had always been the symbols of homecoming for him, for he had been able to see them from his bedroom window as a boy, and for ever after, when he came back from school or from the university or (as he did now) from foreign parts, it always appeared to him that this was the last of the last steps, for looking up to those far towers his line of sight could be reflected down, through his own window, back into his bedroom.

They had crossed the river, and the richest of the plain was left behind: there were trees and rectangles of market-garden still, but they were islands in the blue-green sea of vines. An ocean of vines, that would make your heart ache to think of the picking of all the grapes. He got up, worked through the legs and the crossing lines of talk and stood in the corridor to watch for the first arrival of the sea on the other side.

Already the plain was finished. They were running through the first hills, the hills that started with such abrupt determination, instantly changing the very nature of the countryside. Now the sandy cuttings were crowned with agaves, some with their flower-spikes thrust twenty feet above, and the sides of the railway were covered with prickly pear, starting out of an acid, bitter-looking soil. And here the round sides of the hills were cut and cut with terraces, terraces everywhere, and on the terraces vineyards, olives, vineyards, cork oaks, pines and more vineyards, vineyards on slopes where a man could hardly stand to work them. Then suddenly there it was, the sea blue and faintly lapping in a little deep-cut bay. A tunnel cut off all light, and he stood in the eddying smoke, suspended: through the tunnel, and there it was again; the same bay, one would have said – it had the same reddish cliffs dropping down to the bright shingle and the waveless sea; but it was not the same, for here on the right was a grove of cork oaks with crimson trunks. Tunnel again, and the bay repeated. Here the difference was a boat drawn up, a bright blue boat with the strange crucifix of a lateen mast and yard.

They passed by Collioure, with its ghastly new hotels and its seething mass of tourists: it had been such a charming little town, he thought sadly, as he peered round the bulk of the latest hotel at the tiny beach where men and women lay tight-packed on the dirty stones and overlapping into the water where a thousand stewed together in the tideless wash. Sad, sad: he thanked God that Saint-Féliu had no clock tower to be painted, no beach for bathing, no drains, no hotel, and hardly a bath at all in the whole town. And no Beaux-Arts to protect it, he added, catching the trite cynicism of the people in his compartment. Collioure, Port-Vendres, Banyuls, Puig del Mas. Now the line was a little farther from the sea, and higher up. The road ran with it, and there was a green bus, racing along to keep up with the train, passengers waving madly, and a faint shrieking audible above the thunder of the rails. At the turn he would catch a glimpse of Saint-Féliu: he opened the window and leaned out, screwing his eyes tight against the wind: there, exactly where his mind had placed it, there it was, a tight, rose-pink swarm of roofs, packed tight within the round gray walls, pressed in by the hills, a full, broad crescent that rose in steep tiers from the pure curve of the bay; and between the seaward wall and the sea, the arc of fishing boats drawn up.

He had just that moment to receive it all, and then the wall of the cutting whipped between. Here was old Bisau’s orange grove; green bronze the oranges. Next would come the brake of tall bamboos, and then the tunnel. He was back in the carriage, standing at his seat to lower his baggage. The train screamed for the tunnel, roared in, and the light was gone. He stood there, swaying in the darkness. When the light came back he would be home.