The Conspiracy (12 page)

Bernard thought he was dreaming in that limestone fortress, that brittle confection of marble and whitewash, beneath that ceiling five metres above his head. He looked at crosses and dark portraits on the walls; the maidservant's bare feet slapped gently about them on the flags; from time to time she would look at Bernard, then lower her lids over her blue eyes. Marie-Anne said a few words to her and she went out blushing.

A great vertical landscape extended on the other side of the open window, whose starched muslin curtains stirred feebly. Gardens descended to the bottom of a valley which had that deep hue of green velvet which Bernard had seen on the Potamia road, and which is the hue of orange, lemon and pomegranate trees. Beyond a stream hidden by shrubs and trees, the ground sloped up between the olive trees, then terraced houses rose in tiers. Though they were quite far away in a blinding glitter, all the details of the village could be distinguished as though a storm were on the way: women in black chatted on their doorsteps; red-and-blue peasants drove donkeys before them. Above the village, olive trees in staggered rows climbed towards the heights, like motionless puffs of smoke and silver. Higher up, there was nothing but vertical sections, or sloping sections, of marble and scrub – and the sky, where birds of prey soared. It was already very warm on the heights, and the crests shimmered like white-and-blue flames.

Everything was entirely enclosed and distilled. It was one of those landscapes which possess in themselves all their reasons: where no vanishing line, no absence, no aspiration of the horizon reminds one of the terrible vastness of the earth. Nothing seemed to grow old, or change, within a world that was repeated from one second to the next, always identical to itself like a very great work perpetually invented. It was a sight to take your breath away, from surprise and happiness. You were put in your place, in that utterly self-sufficient world: you no longer had either past or future, time and death seemed suspended, you were caught up in the great imaginary adventure of repeating eternal moments.

— Wake up, Bernard, said Marie-Anne.

Bernard looked at his sister. As elsewhere in the world, time began to move again. Marie-Anne broke out laughing:

— It really hits you, doesn't it? she said. How do you like my fortress and my landscape?

— Marvellous, said Bernard. I was a bit doubtful.

— It's a place that's dreadfully hard to leave, said Marie-Anne. Do you want some more coffee?

— No, I'd just like to wash, said Bernard.

— Kal-lio-pi! shouted Marie-Anne.

The little maidservant came back.

It was really the first time that chance had brought Bernard and his sister so close together. Only at twenty did they come to know the childish complicities of which their childhood, cluttered with nannies, teachers and relatives, had scarcely had any suspicion twelve years before. They did not even have any books, saw only Greek newspapers: one would never have believed Europe existed. Games alone were left for them to share. They roamed the island: the marble tower with its battlements dominated Potamia in the centre of Naxos. Since the road from Naxia to Apiranthos was not yet built, it was almost always necessary to go on foot or by donkey.

It was then the season of festivals among the sad peasants of the Cyclades – at Aegares, at Tragaia, at Komiaki. At Apiranthos, the place of pilgrimage at the top of the island, the pigeon hunters told stories around tables in the open air, upon which the farmers ate dry cheese and drank the resinated wine of the mountains; girls in starched, white, scalloped dresses came to kiss the dirty hands of the drunken, long-haired pappas in greasy cassocks. On open spaces near the churches, above the terraced fields on the valley slopes, men danced gravely in the centre of a circle of grim-faced women, who spoke in low voices till the night turned cold, while the men danced; from time to time an onlooker would have a glass of wine or raki brought to a dancer, who would drink as he danced, saluting the giver with his eyes.

In Naxia, the doctor, the notary and a prince who was a typographer in Athens invited Marie-Anne and Bernard to banquets under the trees on the square near the sea; each male guest brought an oka of white Apiranthos wine; the serving-women arrived from the houses along the arched streets, laden with stuffed fishes, hares stewed in oil, vanilla preserves and crystallized mandarins. The doctor found these to be foodstuffs straight out of Aristophanes. There were also picnics and hunting parties organized in the mountains, from which they would return by moonlight walking along the dried-out beds of highland streams, between mastic bushes, oleanders and rushes: Marie-Anne, exhausted, would every now and then stretch out on the sand or on a patch of ice-cold marble and have to be woken before they set off again.

In a field at Komiaki, and at the far end of a little bay at Apollon, they went to see colossal recumbent statues of Phoebus, their backs still attached to the marble quarry: the face of one had been split in distant times by a thunderbolt. Bernard mused over these statues, abandoned before their solemn departure on ships bound for Delos, and he imagined great religious and wartime cataclysms which had dispersed both sculptors and priests. He felt himself veering towards a poetical enthusiasm for history: fortunately Marie-Anne stopped him. She preferred visiting her husband's female cousins at Tragaia, to hear the girls recounting over coffee, outside the little white castle dating from the time of
King Otto
, how people lived on the island – the stories of failed marriages, of great and violent love affairs, of disputes between the Orthodox believers of the lower town and the descendants of Venetian Catholics in the upper town – and talking about Athens, where they were waiting to go, as a girl in the French provinces will talk about Paris.

The rest of the time Bernard and his sister remained at Potamia, where a great terraced orchard of pomegranate, lemon and orange trees extended around the Venetian tower, with troughs of warm, green water to irrigate the gardens and rows of aloes and prickly pears on the dry stones of the little walls.

— What a pity it is, said Bernard, that I didn't get to know you earlier. All through our childhood, I was convinced you sided with the others against me.

— All I wanted was to be a nice sister, said Marie-Anne, I was fond of you, but you've always been about as approachable as a hedgehog or a cat . . . I used to call you the cat who walks by himself . . .

Bernard spoke of his friends, of their plans, of their dreams, of himself, as if in front of a mirror. Marie-Anne listened to him very patiently, although these stories and concerns appeared to her dreadfully exotic. She described the people of Cairo to him, the big red hotels at Heliopolis, holidays at the bathing resort of Helwan, walks in the ruins of the
Hecatonpylus
, the ibises, the boats on the Nile, the evenings under the trees of Mena House at the foot of the Pyramids when the fat Egyptian ladies laugh their cooing laughter, the dinners at the Gezira Club with the English from Asiatic Petroleum. She told him, for example:

— You'd find Cairo University extraordinarily amusing. You go there by car along the electric railway to Heliopolis, it's a new neighbourhood full of almond-paste villas, I always think of the marzipan from
Hédiard's
, with masses of gratings, streetlamps, rockeries and glass spheres. The University looks just like a casino; on the lawns and stairways, there are students wearing the tarboosh, all terribly elegant, perfumed and gazelle-eyed. And all of a sudden you see M. Lalande turn up. The French are marvellous, with their boaters and the frock-coats they trail around to all corners of the earth. M. Lalande has a frock-coat, he rushes up to you with his splendid beard like a king's from the Iliad, his pince-nez and his good manners, he tells you he remembers you very well from the Sorbonne, he clutches his briefcase to his heart and swings his umbrella, it's thirty-eight degrees in the shade . . .

Marie-Anne used to deliver these accounts with a great deal of frivolity, as she would have delivered accounts of Limoges and Bourg-en-Bresse if she had married in the French provinces. Bernard told her:

— You're utterly lacking in seriousness. I ought to abominate you . . .

But in fact, for all that Marie-Anne lived on another planet and understood nothing of what he used to explain to her about Revolution, she viewed him with affection, she laughed with him, he felt her very sympathetic and well equipped with passwords on families. Bernard was at last discovering that he was capable of relaxing: he had never been so much loved.

Marie-Anne received a letter from Cairo, and informed Bernard that her husband was unable to join her and she must return to Egypt. She told him he could remain on Naxos for as long as he pleased. Bernard dreamed for a while about the solitude, and thought about Marie-Anne's little maidservant, but eventually he told his sister that Naxos would seem empty without her and that he preferred to go home: they took ship together on the
Adriaticos.

At Athens, since it was the end of September, all the Egyptian Greeks were taking passages home. One evening Bernard accompanied his sister to the Piraeus jetty and was left feeling lonely. However, he remained for a few days in Athens, which he at last took in the proper way, accepting that he definitely had no liking for all that barren purity and those ruins stripped to the bone, those whitened skeletons. He no longer forced himself: he consented to like only the extravagant National Museum, with its wax
Palikars
with horsehair moustaches, its tattered flags, its hazy prints of assaults and naval battles, its long rifles, its Turkish scenes and the romantic mementoes of Byron, Miaoulis, Botzaris and Colocotronis; the most oriental streets of the city, round the Tower of the Winds; the Asiatic bad taste of the Erechtheum ceiling, with its hydras, its painted crabs and its blue-bearded storm god, sparks and birds in his hands, wings and snakes at his shoulders; and the Acropolis in the evening, at the hour when young recruits led by their sergeants make obligatory visits to glory, to Antiquity, and when the Acropolis becomes once more – just for these conscripts; just for the lovers kissing, turned towards the darkness rising behind Lycabettus and Hymettus, and attempting to recognize their street and their house in the forest of stone and lights – a tufa cliff sprinkled with marble aeroliths, a promenade, a sentimental, shrub-filled garden from which you can look towards the sea.

Had Marie-Anne, with her air of levity, taught him to yield only to himself? He told himself that this was perhaps true, and that in any case he liked only the Orient and arabesques; that he abominated reason, and that he was very happy finally to have found the climate of his race.

Yet Bernard was not entirely at peace. He still had that bad conscience which followed him everywhere, which he had barely lulled to sleep in the sloth of Potamia. He felt it was impossible for him to ignore the insolence of the cadets and police; the corrugated-iron and cardboard shacks along the road to the Stadium; the political prisoners; the pink-eyed children; and the excessively beautiful bourgeois ladies from Smyrna, emigrées from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish war, who would walk of an evening on Constitution Square and under the nightingale-filled trees of the Zappeion, their cheeks powdered, their arms bare, their bosoms insolent, and who would drive off, sprawling in the rear of big American cars, to dance under the Venetian lanterns of the seaside dance halls of Glyphada.

XII

They still did not know Claude's wife, Catherine, very well, since prior to her marriage, which had taken place in January '28, she had belonged to none of the little clans who made up the Rosenthals' milieu. Her father was a hospital surgeon: she had lived among the kind of doctors who concern themselves with fine arts or literature and look after the grippes and liver attacks of writers, seeming only as an afterthought to consent to heal the generality of patients. The fortunes of nautical Sundays in spring on the Meulan basin, where many marriages are made, had brought together this girl and Claude Rosenthal, who was out sailing on the Seine with some young speculators. It was a still outmoded world, where no one imagined girls had any other vocation than marriage: they would almost always seize the first opportunity that presented itself to become women. This stupefying obedience to the conventions of morality and money used to beget many subsequent catastrophes.

For a long while, perhaps four or five months, Bernard thought of his sister-in-law only as a chattel his family had acquired in the course of a ceremonial sale with flowers, a big lunch at Rebattet's in Avenue Mozart, a religious orchestra which played wedding marches and fragments of Rossini's
Moses
, children in brown velvet, cars all the way to the bottom of Rue de Villejust, and an amazing speech from the rabbi, seated behind the little stone dais of the Rue Copernic synagogue, on the virtues of the Rosenthals and the dignity of surgery.

It scarcely crossed Bernard's mind to look at Catherine as a woman.

Had she been a stranger, he would perhaps at once have desired that tall, blonde, rather bored young woman, not unlike the long-limbed girls on the Champs-Elysées who made his heart thump at fifteen when he saw them going into Fouquet's or Le Claridge. But the spell, the kind of aura, which protects women of the family from natural incest had fallen upon Catherine. When Bernard saw her cross her legs, he would automatically avert his gaze: Catherine was for him still only a woman of wax, whose hand or cheek he could kiss absent-mindedly but whose body inspired in him only a vague, holy revulsion.

He should, of course, from an early point have been surprised to be enjoying his sister-in-law's company. He would agree to escort her to the theatre or a concert, when Claude said he was overburdened by the imaginary tasks that made him appear important. The whole family wondered at his seeming to yield to what they termed Catherine's smile.

— Kate's taming our savage, Mme Rosenthal would say. I've never got that much out of him . . .

For they called Catherine Kate – it was a custom of the Rosenthals to Anglicize names. The mothers and elder sisters of the family, not all of whom knew English particularly well, would utter simple sentences to their sons and younger brothers:

—
Shut the window. Ring the bell. Go to bed. Eat your eggs
 . . .

Every least dinner to which the children were admitted resembled an elementary lesson replete with textbook examples and commands, as though those children had still had only the intelligence of puppies.

For it was a family which, like every other, liked to compose reassuring images of its cohesion and permanence: stock-exchange prices that went up, brothers and sisters who got on well, patients who recovered, evenings by lamplight, children's schoolwork, marriages, births, engagements, funerals when the living assembled at the gates to the Montmartre or the Père-Lachaise cemetery, journeys, the furniture they changed round, the dinners they ate, the birthdays for which they gave greetings – everything seemed to protect the Rosenthals from misfortune, from fear and from death.

So they were not displeased to see the ungracious Bernard show himself less hard towards the latest arrival than towards his first cousins or his mother, telling one another that they had endured his worst years and the effects of the awkward age, but that he was fortunately going to change with maturity and become sociable.

Bernard was a bit cross with himself for agreeing to these expeditions, which in his eyes were the actions of a worldly dissipation of the kind he and his friends called complacency. They struck him as truly unworthy of himself; he would have blushed to have to describe them to his comrades and could just imagine how crudely they would scoff. But he ceased to feel guilty as soon as he saw Catherine appear, in readiness for their outing; or as soon as he heard her say, through the half-open door of her room in Avenue de Villiers:

— I hope I'm not taking up too much of your time?

When, on leaving a theatre and still immersed in that enchanted world of lights, music, red glints, warmth and perfume, he used to drape Catherine's coat over her shoulders again after the show, he would not know if for the first time he was yielding to the pleasures imparted by the company of women concerned only with their charm – their pearly lustre – or whether he was already wishing to be compared by Catherine with his brother, and to emerge victorious from that comparison.

One evening in June, Laforgue came to dine in Avenue Mozart. Laforgue was the only one of his comrades from Rue d'Ulm whom Rosenthal invited to his parents' house. He attempted to convince himself that all the others would have been embarrassed by the table and conversational customs of a world more devoted than their own to courtesy. He would never have admitted to himself that he was afraid of being laughed at by his father, by Catherine or by Claude – a vile jibe of whose he had never forgotten, one day when his brother had come to pick him up at the Rue d'Ulm gates after a lecture by
Emile Bréhier
:

— Your eminent fellow students really are ill dressed! I'm beginning to understand why, in the provinces, the more decent Prefects daren't receive teachers . . .

Perhaps Rosenthal was no less fearful of his friends (from whom he required constant approval) discovering contradictions between the ideas which he defended more intransigently than they did themselves and the family setting in which he was still lazy enough to live.

At the end of the evening, as Rosenthal was accompanying Laforgue to the terminus of the AX, Philippe told him:

— You and your lot are quite a family, I must say . . .

— Explain yourself, said Bernard, who could feel himself blushing.

— Another day, answered Laforgue. A day when you aren't so prickly . . . It's not so easy for people like us to do without Families – oh! you know, that kind of complicit warmth of
nursery
, drawing-room and stables . . . I feel it too . . . Do you remember that character from
The Power of a Lie
, the son who can't bring himself to testify against his father – who's done some rotten thing or other – simply because it's so warm in his parents' house in winter and everyone's so nice to him when his tonsils play up? We'll talk about it again. That said, you mustn't, for whatever obscure reason, drop everything else. It's been ten days since you set foot in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. I had to put through the last issue with Bloyé. I'm quite willing to be decent and handle things, but since we have to take up a position on lots of things in the next issue – on the strikes, on the American debts, on
Marty's
conviction – I'd very much like to see you at the next editorial meeting.

— I'll come, said Bernard, I've had things to do.

— I'm not asking you what they were, said Philippe. Speaking of which, as usual I didn't catch the names very well when you were introducing me to the Family. So who was that ravishing girl sitting to the left of the Father, who had eyes for you alone and for whom, if you'll forgive my saying so, you spent your time showing off about Greece, Italy and everything in general?

— On my father's left? said Bernard. That was my sister-in-law Catherine.

— Have I put my foot in it? asked Laforgue. With respect to the Incest Prohibition?

— Of course not, you fool, said Rosenthal. You saw wrong. Look, there's your bus, have a safe journey home. I'll drop in to the editorial office tomorrow afternoon.

Bernard went back along Avenue Mozart. He hardly gave a moment's thought to Philippe's reproaches: he was carried away by a surprising surge of happiness. He could not care less at that moment about the Revolution, he was in the state when a person says: ‘To hell with people!' He walked for ten minutes in the deserted Rue de l'Assomption, then went home. In the drawing-room, he looked round for Catherine; she was playing bridge and, since she did not like to risk her partner's reproaches, she did not raise her head when Bernard closed the door again.

A short while later, the game ended.

— I owe you twelve francs fifty, M. Rosenthal said to his daughter-in-law. A ruinous evening.

Claude and his wife left.

Bernard, who could not get to sleep, was turning over in bed and wondering agonizingly if Laforgue had seen right.

Catherine, however, was not a woman whom a boy like Bernard would have thought he could ever love. There is a wide gap between desire, the pleasures of vanity afforded by familiarity with a woman, and love – a wide gap and a grand scenario that Bernard had not yet composed. He had always hated those women with flowers in their cheeks, of the dahlia or camellia variety, whom he had been accustomed to meet for the past ten years in his family and whom his sister-in-law resembled: with her perpetual presence of mind; that careless guard whose weaknesses were impossible to envisage; her hardness of decision; her sureness of judgement; that perfect knowledge of rituals, gestures and phrases; her voice and her laughter, as studied as a song; her adorned, prepared body which appeared exempt from illness or old age; her flesh invulnerable to fever; her incorruptible skin.

‘Couldn't she just once have a migraine, then?' Bernard wondered. ‘Or a liver attack? Won't I ever catch her off guard, then, saying: Don't look at me! I feel a fright today.'

Some of his friends might have looked upon Catherine as an admirable opportunity to slake repressed desires for vengeance, domination or revenge – resentment rather than the hope of pleasure. But for him, to be enjoying the company and the small talk of one of those unbearable, hard heroines of the world of ostentation for whose end he so passionately longed! He could not get over it.

‘We won't go any further,' he said to himself. ‘I'm wasting my time playing the beau.'

The oldest magic spells – even those which shackle savages and stockbrokers' sons with the same iron – never last more than a season.

Though regarding himself as a coward, Bernard continued to go out with Catherine. It was, in any case, a time of year to go out with a young woman: the end of spring – which passed. In April and May they had been to explore it far from Paris, in those peaceful
départements
environing the city where the seasons wax and wane unrestrainedly. The first wasps were buzzing, the first swallows uttering their cries: there were months of relief from the earth's silence. In village lanes, they encountered mother cats which had given birth in a field and were carrying their young in their jaws towards the farms. Swarms of midges or winged ants struck you in the face, and there were days when the surface of a road would be covered in a pollen of dead insects lifted by the wind. The clouds vanished. Steeples and castle towers pierced the earth like shoots. Every ear of corn emerged from its furrow, every snake, every dormouse from its sleep, and last perhaps among creatures that hibernate – the hearts of men.

It was really no time for prudence or calculation. Bernard shut his eyes to his pleasure and its consequences, telling himself that nothing would happen: these outings, this ambiguous companionship, would not last for ever.

‘I really needed', he thought, ‘to relax in the company of a young woman. A person is hardened by such indulgences.'

When summer came, Bernard agreed to follow his parents to La Vicomté. It was the first time for two years that he had not insisted on spending his holidays alone.

Catherine, too, was leaving for Normandy with her parents-in-law: he could no longer do without her – the sound of her dresses, her even voice, her look of boredom.

— You can't imagine how pleased I am, said Mme Rosenthal, who had the impression she was in the process of regaining the most fugitive of her children.

Claude was to stay in Paris until M. Rosenthal returned to Rue Vivienne towards the middle of September.