Sunday (2 page)

For he had foreseen everything. It was not for nothing that he had spent eleven months preparing for what was going to happen today.

All that time had been spent not in hesitations, but in reflections and minute calculations.

As he looked back, it seemed short. He was surprised, all of a sudden, to have arrived so near to the end and, though he still had no temptation to shrink back, he was nonetheless seized with a certain giddiness.

With a basket in one hand he headed towards the harbour, not the yacht basin, where several white sails could be seen being unfurled, but the one with the fishing-boats, where the
pointus,
which had gone out at night, were coming in to tie up alongside one another.

As he advanced among the nets stretched out to dry, he could hear:

''Morning, Emile . . .'

For he was no longer a complete stranger.

He asked:

'Is Polyte back?'

'Half an hour ago. I think he's got something for you . . .'

He crossed on to another landing-stage and found Polyte, in his boat, busy sorting out fish.

'Have you got the calamaries?'

'Six pounds.'

They formed a viscous mass of porcelain whiteness in the bottom of the basket, and some of the calamaries had disgorged their ink.

'Do you want some
bouillabaisse
as well?'

'At how much?'

'Don't get excited. We'll fix a price.'

He took a certain amount because, with the fine weather, there was a good chance of there being about thirty lunches and most tourists asked for
bouillabaisse.

Doctor Guerini's boat was not at its mooring.

'Has the
Sainte-Therese
been gone long?'

'I saw her among the islands on my way in. He must have sailed in the dark.'

The cheese, the fish, the meat. There remained the grocer's to call at. Then he pushed open the door at Justin's, one of the small bars in the market.

''Morning, Emile . . .'

The men were drinking white wine, the women coffee, and it seemed that everybody was talking at once. They were market people, or shopkeepers from the square, who had been on their feet since three or four in the morning. The men all took their turn to go off towards the urinal.

'Nice day today!'

'Nice day!'

He was just a man like other men, a man like them. Nobody suspected. There was only Ada who knew, and Ada probably had a false notion of his motives.

Long before she began working at La Bastide, it was rumoured in the neighbourhood that she was not like other girls. If nobody actually claimed she was mad, she was considered at best as retarded.

Was this due to the fact that she seldom spoke and seemed to be afraid of people?

At any rate, she was not completely normal. She did not behave like girls of her age and she did not mix with them any more than she mixed with boys.

'She's a savage?'

Her parents, too, lived like savages, cut off from the rest of the neighbourhood.

When her father, Pascali, had set up house on the outskirts of Mouans-Sartoux, he already had grey hair, a face lined and baked by the sun, and he spoke only a half-intelligible mixture of Italian and French.

As he was a good mason, he found work all over the place, mostly repair jobs, for he worked alone.

He would disappear periodically for weeks at a stretch, then return and start work again.

On one of these reappearances he was accompanied by a woman of about forty, who looked like a gipsy, and a small girl of twelve who did not answer when she was spoken to.

Emile was barely twenty-five at the time and had just arrived at the Harnauds', who owned La Bastide and were to become his parents-in-law.

He could remember a skinny girl who in this sunny country was one of the few to be always dressed in black, a strange garb, moreover, half dress, half apron, which hung shapelessly upon her body.

People would come across her at a turning in a path, or in a wood, or beside the main road. They would say:

'It's the daughter of Pascali and that gipsy woman.'

But there was nothing to prove that the woman Pascali had brought back with him was a gipsy. In actual fact, nothing was known, and Pascali offered no explanation. Were the local police any the wiser? Probably not, for they would have talked of it sooner or later.

Francesca did not mix with the other women, seldom left the house, which Pascali had eventually built between two jobs for his clients, and which looked unlike any other house.

It was as if he had tried to put together examples of every kind of construction he knew, examples too of all types of stone and other building materials.

People said he did not allow his wife to go out, that sometimes he shut her in and on various occasions beat her.

Francesca's face was deformed by two scars across her cheeks, and these were attributed to the Italian's jealousy. Some claimed he had deliberately disfigured his wife, to discourage would-be lovers.

Yet it was he who had taken his daughter, Ada, to La Bastide one day. Emile had already been married a certain time. His father-in-law was dead. His mother-in-law had gone back to Vendée where her family was.

In his own dialect, which the Italians themselves could not understand, Pascali had discussed Ada's wages, her conditions of work, and it had all taken place in such a way that one might have thought he had come to sell her.

He had not asked, on her behalf, for any days off, or annual holidays. She never took any. She seldom went, even for a visit, to her parents' house, which was a mere two kilometres away, and Pascali was content to appear after long intervals, covered in lime, and sit in the kitchen drinking a glass of wine and gazing at his daughter.

Was this how it had started, or must it be still further back?

On the beach, in front of the Carlton, the Majestic, the Miramar, people were already bathing, women were settling under sunshades, some of them surrounded by children, and rubbing oil into their bodies before exposing themselves to the sun.

In the covered market Emile met colleagues who kept restaurants in town or in the vicinity. Cars were streaming in from the Esterel and others, from the direction of Nice, were arriving from Italy.

It was all part of the preparations for a fine Sunday, which were taking place like the preparing of a restaurant, when the places are being laid and vases of flowers set in the middle of the tables. The flower market was in full swing as well. Emile needed to buy some. The van was filling up gradually and the hands of the clock moving slowly forward, bringing nearer the hour when he would have to act.

There had been no single beginning, but several. And one of these, no doubt, was what had happened one afternoon in the attic.

Ada had been working at La Bastide for nearly two years and must, therefore, have been eighteen. He was not yet thirty. He had never taken any interest in her, except, every now and then, to look at her with a frown and wonder what she was thinking.

You could give her any job to do without her complaining. She didn't work fast and she was not thorough, but nobody had any control over her, for when one made a remark to her, or when Berthe got angry with her, she remained as blank as a wall.

He remembered various scenes, with Berthe, exasperated, finally screaming at her, half hysterically:

'Look at me when I am speaking to you!'

Ada would gaze at her with dark, empty eyes.

'Do you hear me?'

She would not flinch.

'Say "Yes, madam." '

She would repeat, indifferently:

'Yes, madam.'

'Couldn't you be a little more polite?'

Emile almost believed that if his wife lost her temper so easily, it was because she could not succeed in reducing Ada to tears.

'Supposing I threw you out of the house?'

Still the stone wall.

'I shall speak to your father about it . . .'

As for Emile, he had become accustomed to her, but rather in the way he would have become accustomed to the presence of a dog in the house. A dog does not speak either, does not always do what one would like to see it do.

Then, one afternoon when Berthe was away, he had gone up to the attic, without ulterior motives, because he was looking for Ada and she did not answer, and when he had come down again he did not know whether to be pleased or frightened by what had just taken place.

At any rate, he knew no more about her than before, and understood her perhaps less than ever.

He remembered above all a look which he had never seen in a woman before, rather similar to the look of an animal at the approach of a man.

That was three years ago now. Gould he claim to know her better, and was this called love?

If a beginning is strictly necessary, then this was one among many others.

But as far as Berthe was concerned, the beginning was not to be found till two years later, at siesta time, on June 15th; he recalled the date, the hour, the smallest details.

Was it still important? Was it not all past and done with? He had had the time, in eleven months, to think about it, and yet he had been scarcely ever worried about it.

Even today, it did not disturb him unreasonably. He was not excited. He regretted nothing. He was not scared either.

A certain impatience, yes, which made him drink his coffee too hot at Justin's bar. A trembling of the fingers, as had happened this morning in the kitchen, and a floating sensation in the chest. But that could occur just as well when he was out fishing for
boulantin
and had a good catch at the end of his line.

And the sensation of unreality was familiar to him. When you are at sea, early in the morning, aboard a
pointu,
alone on the water which shines and breathes with a monotonous rhythm, you are no longer completely yourself, and it may happen that all this blue and this inhuman peace inspire you with a kind of anguish.

The Forville market was the same as on other Sundays, with its familiar faces, its noises, its smells. And yet was it not rather as if he had surveyed the scene through a mirror?

For several hours now he had not formed part with the rest of the world. This evening, tomorrow, he would once again be a man like the others. Not quite like them.

He must not think. One should never go over again what has been decided once and for all.

He had told Ada, without giving her any details:

'Next Sunday . . .'

It was now that Sunday. Everything was waiting. It was too late to stop events.

'I'll have a packet of Gauloises.'

He lit one, slowly expelled the smoke. All he had to do was to collect the package from the butcher's where he had left his order as he passed.

At this hour Berthe would be busy with her toilet, in the bedroom, where she would have opened the shutters. The two boarders, Mademoiselle Baes and Madame Delcour, both of them blonde and fat, with thick, red arms, would be strolling one behind the other along a pathway, picking wild flowers, of which in due course they would come and ask him the names.

Occasionally they could be heard giggling like little girls. Mademoiselle Baes had inherited a biscuit business and her friend was the widow of a pork butcher.

On the Riviera it was as if they had returned to their childhood, and when the weather did not permit them to take walks, they would spend hours writing postcards.

He tossed the butcher's package into the van, closed the back door, climbed in at the wheel and looked behind him to ensure there was room to reverse.

Another three hours to go before everything was settled.

II

H
E
was just over fifteen, for it was the year he took his certificate, when any thought of the Riviera first entered his universe, in a still sketchy form, but nonetheless more real than the tourist poster he used to see at the station when he went to La Roche-sur-Yon.

On that day he was far from guessing that, in a more or less indirect fashion, it was his destiny that was at stake.

Why he had accompanied his father to Luçon he was unable to recall. At all events this meant that it was a Thursday, since on other days, when he went there to school, he rode his bicycle.

Had he wanted to see a school friend and asked for a lift on the cart? That was possible, for it was raining hard and a strong sea-wind made the hood flap. He could see again the large patches of damp on the flanks of the mare, her back covered with a strip of canvas.

They never talked much together, his father and he. They must have covered the five miles separating Champagne and Luçon in silence; a flat road, like the rest of the marshland, with every so often a one-storey house, a
cabane
as it was called locally, in the meadows lapped by the sea.

The real landscape, there, was the sky, more vast than elsewhere, scarcely broken by the indentation of a church spire on the horizon, a sky so vast that houses, roads, cars and, all the more, human beings appeared minute.

It was the sky which was alive, filling itself with heavy black clouds which would burst, or else with huge white ones, luminous and still, or again with fleecy wisps which would cluster together in reddish strips at sunset.

It had probably been raining all day, as so often happened. When there was no fair and no market at Champagne or in the neighbouring parishes, the inn, except in the season, was to all intents and purposes empty.

It was his great-grandfather, a butcher by trade, who had started it and given it the name of the Ox and Crown, which was still written up on the sign in gold letters dating back a century. The ceiling was low, yellowed, almost brown, like the walls, the panelling, the tables on which the locals propped their elbows on Sundays, to drink their carafes of
muscadet
and play cards or dominoes.

They would still be wearing the black suits they had put on to go to Mass. During the week, as well, they were nearly always in black, because they were using up old Sunday suits.

And throughout the house there reigned a smell of wine dregs, alcohol, stale tobacco, with a not unpleasant mustiness in the bedrooms which remained for Emile the smell of the real countryside. It must have come from the beds, perpetually damp, with their vegetable horsehair mattresses. Or did the smell come from the haystack at the back, in the meadow, for his father had a plot of land and two cows?