The Conspiracy (11 page)

PART TWO

Catherine

XI

Since he spends almost all his days in Rue d'Ulm, or at the Sorbonne, or on the streets and in cafés in the company of comrades whom he thinks he has chosen freely, and since he endeavours to organize a life that has little connection with Avenue Mozart, Bernard Rosenthal has the illusion of remaining entirely outside the concerns and pleasures for which his family live. How should a young man escape so agreeable an illusion, which so swiftly discharges him from resolving the difficult problems of class, complicity and blood?

But Bernard sees his family quite often for dinner, which he takes with them four or five times a week in Avenue Mozart; he spends part of his holidays with them; and the monthly allowance his father gives him allows him not to touch the money he inherited from his paternal grandmother – he would, in any case, have no need to seek ways of earning his studies or his daily bread. It is all very well for him to refuse his father the least gratitude, and conclude that this allowance is no more than what is owed him – and always that much recaptured from the bourgeoisie on behalf of the Revolution. In fact, these financial arrangements and these meetings maintain virtually all the links he believes he has broken internally: how easy it is, an internal break which no action certifies other than the heart's satisfaction! To his mind, he is alone: nobody giving him details about the time when he was a child, so serious and so much nicer than now; nobody furnishing him with an opportunity to love himself through touching images of his life's beginnings, lost and eroded by time.

M. Edouard Rosenthal was a heavy man, with flabby cheeks on which razor nicks bled lengthily, notwithstanding all styptic pencils. With a kind of anger Bernard sometimes thought he recognized himself in him. He had only to look at his father to imagine the future of his own body with unbearable accuracy. This kind of living prophecy or incarnation of time to come is hard enough, when it reveals through her mother's features the physical future of a young woman you are beginning to love; still harder when it is a question of yourself. It is dreadful to resemble your father or your mother and foresee yourself. A person can consent to live only if he knows nothing about the style of his death and the forms of his ageing.

Bernard was a young man with a lean body which three or four women had chanced to find quite handsome: he had a slender nose, high forehead, sinuous mouth, a dark expression and pale skin; but he saw himself thirty years on, bald, the muscles of his face slackened, with a heart-sufferer's bags beneath his eyes, a blood-suffused nose drooping over his lip and a bilious complexion. When he thought about the family poisons that his liver and kidneys would not always eliminate, he no longer knew whether it was his father he hated or himself in his future form. His father was like a portent of what time would reveal to him, after a terrible metamorphosis which would extract from the young man of Asia Minor a fat, stooping man of Volhynia or Galicia.

— The East's one thing, he would say to himself, but the East will degenerate: I shall look like an old Rumanian.

M. Rosenthal lived as though the Bourse, where he had a certain importance, sufficed more or less to sustain a man's passions and energy; as though those business relations based on the manipulation of a few abstract signs and fleshless ideas had nourished him well enough. He amused himself seldom, and briefly, with a few games of bridge, which he liked and at which he excelled; with a few spring afternoons at
Auteuil
, Chantilly and Longchamp; with visits to the theatre; and with Sunday hunting trips to the Sologne, in autumn. He travelled little. He nursed the ambitions of becoming a syndic of the
Company
, and being promoted to Commander of the Légion d'Honneur. Then he would die. Death did not seem in the least frightening to him: he did not have the imagination needed to rebel against the paradoxes of nothingness; he merely wished not to suffer greatly, to pass away – perhaps die of an embolism or burst blood vessel – in his sleep.

His son had never enjoyed very warm or definite relations with him: they do not arise easily, out of that vague mistrust which almost always prevails between fathers and sons; out of that rivalry, that ambition to outstrip and that temptation to despise defeats which are engendered in sons when the age of imitation is over and they begin to tell themselves that fathers are always beaten.

Bernard had been such a brilliant pupil at the lycées first of Janson-de-Sailly, then of Louis-le-Grand, that M. Rosenthal, who had enough good sense to assess a stockbroker's role at its true spiritual worth, had never imagined his second son would ever succeed him in the offices on Rue Vivienne. Since the presence of an elder son ensured the survival of the firm, Bernard had been free to become, if he liked, an intellectual – or, as people began to say not long after
nineteen hundred and twenty-seven
, a
clerc.
Perhaps M. Rosenthal had vaguely had the feeling that Bernard's vocation would one day justify his relatives: that the Spirit would absolve Money. In just this way, in provincial families, there is no angry reaction at all when one of the sons becomes a priest, or a daughter a Carmelite: people have so much for which they need to be forgiven that it is quite useful to have a mediator who can one day intercede for kith and kin.

Madame Rosenthal had never been beautiful, but people had always found her distinguished.

— Berthe isn't pretty, people would say in about eighteen hundred and ninety or nineteen hundred, but she has a certain style.

Whereas her husband was growing old in the way of collapse and sluggishness, she was growing old in the way of dessiccation: tall and bony, she boldly supported the dewlaps of her neck with ribbons of grey moiré; in an evening dress, she was not afraid to display yellow collar-bones, or shoulder-blades that quivered beneath her skin. She had the authority conferred by command over a great house, a cook, a chambermaid, a chauffeur and a couple in Normandy; by the raising of three children; and by the management of considerable benevolent works in which she collaborated with eminent doctors and lower-ranking members of governments well known in Parisian charitable circles.

Berthe Rosenthal would sometimes speak of a fourth child she had lost through meningitis when it was three years old: nothing in the world was unknown to her, not even tears, not even grief. One had better not venture to speak in her presence about illnesses! It is not that she had experienced them – she had an iron constitution – but she was familiar with them: she overwhelmed everyone with the dreadful cases of peritonitis, the generalized cancers, the miraculous operations of her uncles and her cousins, with the ills that bore down on her family and over which it always triumphed. She came of stock where nothing could have been mediocre.

Mme Rosenthal had never sought to know whether her husband had sometimes found idleness, tenderness or merely pleasure with other women. She did not think so. Moreover, she was quite right to be sure of her husband: M. Rosenthal had had only fleeting escapades in houses of easy virtue, or with those artless whores who, as they undress, tell you how Gentlemen are ever so fond of stockings and lace – and you are always fed up with being first a Gentleman, and not a man.

Claude Rosenthal had read Law and Business Studies at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. While at university he would assuredly have joined the ranks of the
Camelots du Roi
, if a certain sense of honour had not counselled him, all things considered, to reject a political organization inspired by the pamphlets of Drumont, and whose writers daily insulted the Jews. He had contented himself with the Jeunesses Patriotes, though they had struck him as far less exalted than Action Française, and M. Taittinger less important than Maurras, who had written poems and three newspaper columns every day. He consoled himself for this second-class membership after receiving some knocks in the Rue Damrémont clashes: he used to say he might have died, you never know. He was a reserve cavalry lieutenant, he went regularly on training, he had entered his father's practice, he would succeed him.

Claude was five years older than Bernard, but the Bourse ages its men: people never imagined that the two brothers both belonged essentially to the same generation of young men who had escaped the War; many people took Claude to be a war veteran, and he did nothing to dispel this error when it was made in his presence.

M. Rosenthal was sometimes frightened by the cold perfection of his elder son. He was a man who had a frivolous side to him, who liked wine, who was not afraid of the ribald stories the speculators used to tell the manicurists in the big barbers on Rue Réaumur. He read a few books, he thought he liked Marcel Proust because he had once met him in the company of Léon Brunschvicg under the trees in the Champs-Elysées, and because he remembered having once caught sight of the spitting image of Charles Swann: he used to calculate how old Gilberte de Saint-Loup would have been, and say how all this did not make him any younger. But Claude, who had been totally corrupted by
Rue Saint-Guillaume
, where he had heard people talking about the laws of the stock market and the Harvard economists' curves, believed only in the scientific theories of the Bourse. In M. Rosenthal's eyes, this was the very acme of credulity:

— Come on now, lad, he would exclaim, you know as well as I do the Bourse is purely a game. Rio moves because there's some great political operation under way, or because someone over dinner at Gallopin's or the Omnium has told a silly story about the rise in metals! Funds make themselves scarce because some idiot or other is full of secrets about the imminent fall of the government! The whole market is based on the tittle-tattle of concierges: how can you expect there to be a science of
Conciergerie
?

They rarely saw Marie-Anne, since her marriage to an industrialist who lived in Cairo. This marriage had really been quite an adventure – the family had not yet recovered from it, and did not know whether it was ultimately a pleasing, or merely a remarkable, event. Demetrios was Greek. Luckily, he was descended from one of those old French families which have not budged from the Cyclades since the great Mediterranean blendings of the Empire and the romantic wars for the independence of Greece; and he was related to those barons of Lastic whose last heirs still dwell, clad in eternal robes of black wool, beneath the cypresses and olive trees of Ariadne's island, waiting for their daughters, who learn French from the Ursuline sisters in Naxia, to complete their outmoded studies. Marie-Anne, who had married her husband because she loved him, came to Paris for two months in winter and spent the summer in the house Demetrios had bought on Naxos. This oriental escapade fired the imagination of the entire family.

Of all his family, Bernard really liked only his sister: no doubt she was the only one he sometimes had the impression of having chosen. His happiest memory was of the summer of '25, when he had travelled for the first time and spent his holidays on Naxos.

He had just discovered (as people on cruises say) Naples, with its baroque quarters, its stone rosettes, its brass-collared horses, the erotic lamps of Pompeii, the sugar-and-nougat façades, the deep waters at the foot of Capri; and Athens, where like all well-brought-up young people he had taken a great deal of trouble – between the white bull of the Ceramicus and the Virgins of the Acropolis, whose smile and the tunic folds over whose breasts no one ever forgets – to imbue Athene's columns with a private meaning. He set sail for the Cyclades.

A little before dusk the boat left the Piraeus jetty, from which one weighs anchor for the most mythological destinations in the world, laden with travellers who vomited the minute they were on the open sea, uttering dreadful cries of agony.

As they emerged from Piraeus, the day ended in a brief firework display; the ships' riding lights, side lamps and lanterns came on; Salamis disappeared, then Aegina, then the last sounds from land – a dog's bark on the coast, a call, a motor horn. The captain began to pace the bridge; the bulb went out in the chartroom; sleepers turned over on their deck chairs or talked in their sleep; a voice said:

— There's Cape Sunium . . .

They put in to Syra in darkness, at an hour when all the island's young women were still promenading on marble flagstones level with the black-and-green waves, between the tables of the restaurants, and past shops selling Turkish delight packaged in the style of steam roundabouts, pianola rolls or date boxes. He would have liked to lose himself in the lights scaling the Catholic hill and the Orthodox hill, but the siren blared and they set off again for the mills of Paros and the little cafés of Naxia. A feeling of great excitement engulfed Bernard; he told himself that Syra was a spot to which he would return; he was intoxicated by this blind commitment to the sea.

In the morning he disembarked, boatmen took possession of his cases and of his person. He let himself be guided, a driver who spoke English in the accents of New York, where he had lived, took him towards Potamia. Bernard already had no further thought of formulating ideas of his own on Greece, and he yielded himself up to the pure wind that blew in from the Aegean Sea at every turn in the road, and to the spun-glass light wreathing the marble mountains and the villages like thrown dice on the velvety slopes of valleys. After an hour the driver, who was called Dionysos, pointed towards a square crenellated tower rising above an olive grove divided by rows of cypresses: it was Marie-Anne's house, one of those ancient Venetian castles that could be bought twelve years ago for thirty thousand drachmas.

Marie-Anne heard the car's engine and came down the first steps of the stairway; she was expecting her brother only on the next day's packet and cried out before kissing him. She was alone on Naxos, Demetrios's business affairs had kept him in Cairo. Children with shaven heads ran up and watched them enter the house. Marie-Anne clapped her hands and a little maidservant arrived: Marie-Anne gave her orders in faltering Greek and the girl returned with a tray of lemons, grapes, apples, cups of coffee and glasses of water. In the window recesses there were stone benches cut into the thickness of the walls, and they sat down.