The Conspiracy (20 page)

XXII

At eight o'clock Marguerite left for the office and Serge remained alone in the room. He decided he would first go to see Massart: he could speak to barely anyone now except the superintendent. He saw himself standing for this one last day upon a curious ridge-line or watershed from which he could survey his future and his life, the party and the police, anguish and hope. For this one last day.

Superintendent Massart was a man of fifty, who wore black suits and somewhat over-large detachable collars. He bit his nails, which was the only sign of nervousness this official had ever given. His shaven face, its cheeks scarcely grown fleshy at all, would have been admirably nondescript if he had not had pale blue eyes of a blind and unfathomable transparency. Pluvinage suddenly perceived that Massart had exactly the same eyes as François Régnier. As usual, the superintendent displayed the kind of oily affability some policemen possess. He had known Serge for twenty years and used the familiar mode of address with him. He launched into the chit-chat with which he used to overwhelm his friends and those he was interrogating: it was an even-toned chatter whose form Massart used to study with care. Serge postponed the moment of speaking. Through the superintendent's windows he could see the baroque roofs and the dormers of Quai Saint-Michel, the curve of the Seine's banks towards the Jardin des Plantes, and people wandering past the bouquinistes' stalls or beside the slow waters of the side stream. A procession of carriages, motor cars, buses and trucks flowed – and every now and again congealed – between the stalls of the booksellers and the stores devoted to occultism, Japanese curios and magic round Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche. Massart was saying:

— You see, Serge my boy, your father always used to say that only intellectuals can make good policemen. There's a great deal of truth in that.
Fouché
– an intellectual. That
Raoul Rigault
– an intellectual too, who deserved better than the Ex-Prefecture of the Paris Commune . . . It's a question of being nasty, I mean of knowing what men are like . . . I can't stand those idiots who mix up policemen with
police administrators
. Of course, there are simpletons who go into Administration just as they would into the Registry Office or the Customs bureaucracy: I was brought a new detective-sergeant yesterday, six months ago he was a corporal in the gendarmerie at Belle-Isle-en-Terre, I spoke to him in the proper fashion about Defending Society against Crime – and he believed in all those capital letters! What a laugh . . .

— I . . . began Pluvinage, who simply could not bear any longer the superintendent twiddling his pencil in just the same manner as Daniel the evening before.

— Perhaps you needed to talk to me about our little business? Massart asked. In a moment, there's no hurry . . . So a good policeman is not a bureaucrat, and the Defence of Society against Crime is a slogan for academic painters, or for the Prefect's speeches to the municipal council in honour of Officers now Departed. Thank God, Chiappe doesn't believe in it, because Chiappe, who's a scoundrel by the way, is a great policeman. Your true police is immune from all those suckers' tales. The fact is, the police has a secret . . .

Someone knocked at the glazed door to the corridor and a detective-sergeant came in; he was wearing black lutestring oversleeves and had inkspots on the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He placed a file on the table and said it needed signing; the superintendent replied that he would ring when he had finished and the detective went out.

— The police's secret, Massart resumed, is that
there is no history
. All the professors have lied, all of them! There are no forces working to make history. The academicians talk about spiritual forces, and the Marxists about the forces of the economy, there's no end to it, it's the battle between Bossuet and his opponents still going on. Others talk about Cleopatra and the role of chance: if her nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. Cleopatra's nose and the stone in Cromwell's bladder – that's much less stupid. Pascal was the first author who gave the outline of a police conception of the world . . . Little accidents and little men manufacture great events. The masses and the professors never see the true connections, because there's no visible relation between cause and effect and all tracks are muddied. Everybody's unaware of chance working away behind the scenes, and of the secret of little men . . .

The superintendent mused for an instant and Serge, who was wondering why Massart was making this long speech, did not yet stir.

— You can control chance. Not leave anything to nature. Operate in a carefully preserved silence, which no one can penetrate. Imagine faceless men, sitting in anonymous offices like mine, rather like spiders or calculators – and bearing no resemblance to the great detectives we dream up from time to time in order to be loved. They possess files which actually contain – allowing for a few exaggerations – more or less everything that needs to be known about our public figures: about their youth, their needs, their weaknesses, their rages, their erotic preferences, their ambitions. I know of no more powerful way of acting, or not acting, than this intense concentration of information and ammunition for political and private blackmail. That's when you hold true power, manufacture your historical events, shuffle the pack. A little push in the right direction changes everything, no one knows a thing about it. This great man, who presided over the affairs of France, presided over them only because we tolerated his power. This revolutionary leader was one of ours.
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
used to say the Church's secret was that there's no purgatory. Ours is that there's no history. One needs to have been around quite a bit, to appreciate the full value of this secret. You're still rather young . . .

Pluvinage was relating it all to himself, he looked at the superintendent and asked him:

— M. Massart, why does a person join the police?  . . .

— Don't you have any idea? asked Massart. You surprise me, for it must be said, between you and me . . . It's so simple, Serge my boy. Joining the police is like committing suicide. Our kind of power consoles a person for the visible power he doesn't have, and for the successes he's failed to achieve. A true policeman is a man who's failed in another life. One of my old bosses, the one who taught me the job, used to cry when he was drunk, which happened very frequently, because he'd like to have been a great criminal lawyer. What do you think of that! Defeats make people tough. Those who are not so tough drink . . . The public doesn't know that out of twenty district chiefs, twelve or fifteen drink – you'll be hearing about old Death-Dodger . . . You were one of ours from the outset. I've known you for so many years, you've always been a humiliated nobody. Tell me if I'm wrong . . .

— No, said Serge between his teeth.

— The hardest part's over, lad, said Massart . . . Speaking of which, you had something to tell me.

Pluvinage raised his head and looked at the superintendent. He told him he was sure they suspected him in the party of having informed on Carré.

— I'm well acquainted with the atmosphere in the party, he said, I'm sure they know. Neither Rosenthal nor Laforgue were deceived when they questioned me. I shouldn't have blushed, for the first time in my life perhaps – or I should have looked them in the eye.

He gave an account of the branch meeting the evening before, which had confirmed his feeling. The superintendent rose to his feet and walked over to the window, then came back towards Pluvinage:

— And you let me carry on talking, you little fool, he said.

— I made a mistake, said Serge. I don't have enough self-control.

— Really! said Massart. You made a mistake! The young gentleman thought he was already the
Duke of Otranto
, and he was just an informer, a tiny little informer. And not very bright. You gave me some hope and I wanted to do something for Pluvinage's boy. And right away, you're rumbled. What on earth am I supposed to do with you? Drop dead!

— Anyone can be unlucky, breathed Serge.

— No philosophy, said Massart. And this is the simpleton I was already talking to like an equal! The Special Intelligence Branch has no use for clumsy fools. I'll think it over. For the time being, get out of here, I've seen enough of you. You can come back the day after tomorrow, in the morning . . .

Pluvinage left, white with anger, and went and hung about on the Marché aux Oiseaux and along the Quai aux Fleurs, looking at the fir-trees packed in straw, the plant cuttings, the animals, the hyacinths with their stench of death, and thinking less about his own fate than about Massart's words. Now that the break had come, he suddenly saw once more the faces of Laforgue, Rosenthal and Daniel with intense surges of hatred: he was already revenging himself upon them for having betrayed them. The superintendent had employed the words most calculated to strike home. A young man like Pluvinage, who has decided he is already a failure, is too fearful of the public encounters with men that all forms of activity involve not to be excited by the depiction of a world governed by secret motivations. What had attracted him about communism was less the future than its illegal existence, the hidden game. Impossible to doubt so intense a vocation for mystery! He suddenly saw himself destined for the religion of police work.

— The discipline of the Special Branch, he told himself, is quite as good as that of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. And
Hérault de Séchelles
 . . . If they'd recognized what I was worth, I wouldn't be where I am. They'll all pay.

Carried away by a spirit of defiance, Pluvinage went off to tell Marguerite everything and break with her, as with all the rest of his life. He hastened to Rue Cujas. Marguerite had not arrived. She came home for lunch an hour after his return. As she was taking her hat off, he said to her:

— Margot, I've got something to say to you.

He began to tell her everything, without justifying himself, with an overwhelming desire to break off and destroy: the meetings with Massart, the arrest at Mesnil-le-Roi, the role he had played, the suspicions of his comrades, the interview that morning. It was a recital as dry as a report containing only deeds and dates and interpreting nothing. Marguerite heard him out and when Serge had finished she rose to her feet from the couch where she had been sitting and took a step towards him. She was pale: Serge saw in close-up the grain of her skin and the somewhat dilated pores on the flare of her nostrils, the lipstick that had smudged onto the down on her upper lip:

— You've put your lipstick on crooked, he said, as if everything was just continuing, as if the world had not been transformed by the terrible revelation of his falsehood.

Marguerite still said nothing, but she raised her hand. A little taller than Pluvinage, she appeared to him a very tall woman.

‘How could I have loved such a tall woman?' he thought, ‘She's built like a horse.'

Marguerite struck him twice across the face with all her strength and ran towards the door. The door closed behind her. On the table she had left her hat and her handbag. Serge went to the window and waited until Marguerite emerged onto the pavement. Rue Cujas was almost empty. There were just two passers-by, walking towards each other from opposite ends of the street – a woman and a Chinaman.

— You forgot your bag, Serge shouted, and he threw it down to her.

The bag emptied over the pavement and Marguerite knelt down to collect her money, her comb and her lipstick.

The hard thing then for Pluvinage was no longer the feeling of his treachery: that had been consummated, his decision had been made, Marguerite had fled as though she had discovered she had been sleeping for months with a sick man – Serge had the transparent ecstasy of fever, of irrevocable departures.

No, what was suffocating him was the feeling that henceforward he would be condemned to silence; that in speaking to Margot he had spoken for the last time; that no one would ever again hear the truth about his life; that nothing would define him any longer except the solitude he had just entered, where he would never again have anyone but accomplices. He remembered Massart.

‘I must cling on', he told himself. ‘I've only them left!'

It was one o'clock, but he had no thought of going down for lunch. He stretched out on the couch and almost at once fell asleep, worn out by his metamorphosis. Marguerite's hat had fallen to the floor.

XXIII

Pluvinage's Story

In the middle of December, Laforgue, who was feeling none too cheerful and getting ready to go off to Alsace, received at Rue d'Ulm a bundle of typed sheets without any accompanying letter. The last sheet simply bore Serge's signature. This is what Pluvinage had written:

Basically, if my father had not had the job he did, perhaps nothing at all would have happened . . .

My father was a civil servant in the
Seine Prefecture
: that seems insignificant enough, he had visiting-cards engraved with his title as head of section, but he was not responsible for such acceptable things as street-lighting, or transport, or public thoroughfares, or quarries; he did not have one of those rustic and celestial functions, like the upkeep of footpaths, or the special sub-division of clocks and lightning conductors; he was not even in charge of the department that maintains stoves, in Rue d'Ulm opposite the Ecole Normale – no, when I was twelve years old he became head of the Interment Section, under the auspices of Municipal Affairs and the Legal Department. In his office beneath the rafters of the Prefecture, in the Rue Lobau annexe, sedate water-colours were hung against the yellowish-green wallpaper with its dark-green stripes: they were views of cemeteries and chapels, generally depicted beneath an autumn sky with dead leaves in every corner. Like those sons of industrialists or engineers who make their first cut-outs from machine-tool brochures, in my early childhood I cut out models of catafalques, hearses and funerary vaults.

I think my father was fond of me. He used sometimes to take me for walks, which is a good sign – because men are ashamed to go out with a child who makes childish remarks, who talks loudly on buses, and who, in the eyes of the women you meet, is the visible evidence of your growing old. But he had odd destinations. I can still remember the Sunday morning when he took me to visit the Rue d'Aubervilliers depot. The Rue d'Aubervilliers is a strange street: it contains haulage firms and freight companies, the State Railways, the Customs Head Office and the City of Paris Funerals Department – in short, it is almost entirely given over to transportation of the living and the dead. Along with the Gas Company and the Bonded Warehouses, that meant an enormous quantity of cartage all day long, a shifting of straw and boxes and a great stamping of horses: there were not yet many cars in those days just before the War – or rather in its first year, since my father left in '15. The weather was perfect, it was spring I expect. The courtyard of the depot was full of sunlight, with great echoing spaces which, since that time, I have rediscovered only on the parade grounds of barracks. A man in his shirt-sleeves was watering the cobbles, and I can still see the falling mist of droplets which traced a little, shimmering rainbow. There were plumed hearses, which had just been washed and were drying in front of the sheds, their shafts pointing skywards like fine country wagons. Black horses straight out of Hades were stamping their hoofs on the cobbles. My father's profession, I said to myself, was truly a remarkable profession.

I know today that it is dangerous to live a life that unfolds behind the scenes of life. Ordinary people grow old without knowing those obscure margins, but what has struck me most is the family of clandestine worlds that gravitate around the obvious world where one spends one's life. In Paris there is a district which brings together in an extraordinary way and with style some of their monuments: it begins at the Place Dauphine and ends at the Ile Saint-Louis; in it you will find the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel-Dieu, the Conciergerie, the Prefecture of Police, the Seine Prefecture, the Hôtel de Ville and, to cap it all, the flower market and the
Noyau de Poissy
store; it imposes its glacial atmosphere upon Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle; in my teenage years a few curious people still used to visit, as Hector Berlioz had, the unidentified bodies in the Morgue, on whose site of an evening I now encounter couples kissing, and reduced by the public nature of their amours to sighing on benches. I know no other grouping of the same quality as this, although the 14th arrondissement too has some formidable locations around Sainte-Anne and the Santé prison, while the 20th near the Père-Lachaise is not bad either. These islands of death are reserved for the poor neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants will always have particular acquaintanceship with visions of misfortune and fate. Consideration is shown for wealthy people, who pay too much in taxes not to be protected against even the slightest allusion to prosecution, denouncement and death.

Close correspondences may be established among these various domains, which are namely those of sickness, policing and death: these terrible places where the mysteries of birth, marriage and death are played out. I would add to them the incinerator plants for household waste, if I did not yield to the prejudice that still solidly maintains the prestige of the dead – and if I were not thinking above all of places where it is essentially the ruin of the
soul
that is accomplished. I should like to make it clear, however, that I grew up in the world dedicated to the elimination of urban waste and the registration of personal catastrophes. Men are unaware of its byways. They enter it, in fact, only by accident: to ask for a passport, or to report a death, or to see a patient – for irremediable events. As for us, we lived there. All the time. My father's friends and colleagues lived there like us. I always tell myself that embalmers, makers of mummies, must have lived in this same way, among themselves; and that this is the destiny of those who work among impure things – of spies, policemen, the functionaries of death and dying. I felt this at fifteen, and I was quite right to believe I should not recover from it. There is nothing more shameful than death, and men are wise to hide it from themselves, like Noah's sons their father's nakedness. I have never met anyone except doctors who were capable of passing continually from the world of the scrap-heap to the world where existence has some pride. And even then, there are forensic doctors, medical registrars and those vile experts in mental health . . .

One of my father's best friends was a little old man who had the post of chief surveyor for cemeteries. I suppose he is dead now: the man I knew cannot have survived the disappearance of undertakers' horses and the motorization of hearses. He must have been pretty crazy – indeed, you have to be crazy to get so passionately excited about the cleaning of tombs and the alignment of the dead – but in our house we used to see such bizarre individuals that no one round me ever dreamed of finding him peculiar. Another friend of my father's was a police superintendent in charge of the Special Intelligence Branch: he was called Eugène Massart, and we used to read his name quite often in the newspapers. My parents must have been quite proud of him, because when he came to dinner there would always be a bottle of Moulin-à-Vent on the table. But I shall have occasion to speak again of Massart . . .

My mother was one of those women who overwhelm their husband and their sons with tearful, demanding, flabby affection. She poisoned my childhood. I noticed only very belatedly how ugly she was, at the same time as I found out that she had probably become, two or three years after being widowed, the mistress of Superintendent Massart.

My sister Cécile, who is fifteen years older than me, when she was thirty or so was a fat woman who would overrun us almost every Sunday with her husband and her two children, and who would talk in a high plaintive voice about her servant problems and about cooking recipes. My brother-in-law ran quite a large garage in the 12th, near Boulevard Diderot. He was as fat as his wife and I used to wonder how this couple, who represented so powerful a volume of muscle and blubber, so ample a circulation of lymph and blood, had been able to create offspring as thin and ill-favoured as my nephew and niece. Despite the kind of horror they inspired in me, I felt a certain pity for those nervous, slapped children; but I never think of Cécile's large breasts without a thrill of revulsion, and have always been unable to kiss the woman without holding my breath and closing my eyes.

We had peasant kinsfolk in the Massif Central, with whom, like many migrants to Paris, we no longer maintained any relations. My grandfather was in fact a sheep-farmer somewhere near Nasbinals. Two years ago, on my way back from the Midi, I crossed those black-and-yellow plateaux where, in autumn, contemptuous eagles can be seen perching on the stones in the grazing grounds. I love that region, but I do not know much about my Auvergne kinsfolk or my father's arrival in Paris.

My parents used to see a lot of a sister of my mother's, who was called Antoinette. My aunt, who seemed old to me, although she can hardly have been more than fifty, was paralysed and almost totally blind. As in all petty-bourgeois families, her disability was spoken of only with considerable circumspection that failed to conceal a kind of sly pride. When I was with Rosenthal and you at Sainte-Anne, working on a neuro-psychiatric ward, I realized that my aunt was simply suffering from Parkinson's disease and there was nothing to be so conceited about. As she lived on the western outskirts of Paris, at Le Vésinet – have I told you that we had a little bungalow at Neuilly? – we used to go and visit her every once in a while. My mother used to say she only had her sister left, so she must make haste to visit her, take advantage of her presence on earth, before she died. But Aunt Antoinette was taking a long time to die.

She had the honed malice of the seriously ill. She spent her interminable final struggle against paralysis and death preying on the existence of her daughter Jeanne, who looked after her and would not leave her. She had two other daughters, who were married and lived in the provinces; they came rarely to Paris and shut their eyes to the appalling life their sister was leading. Jeanne, who five years ago was fifteen and by now must have grown very beautiful – if her mother, before dying, has not succeeded in driving her mad – was totally uneducated, since she had left school at twelve to take care of her mother and now scarcely ever left the gloomy precincts of the Le Vésinet villa. She grew up simply in the company of my aunt, who all day long would look straight ahead with her blind eyes and tell interminable stories about the days of her youth: tales full of resentment and questions of precedence and respect. As Jeanne grew into a woman, her mother became increasingly fearful lest one day, like her ‘two sisters, she fall in love with someone and go away. Little by little, with a patient, predatory skill, she inspired her with an unconquerable fear of the world. Jeanne had never come into contact with anything but works of piety: she believed in Saint Theresa of Lisieux and her miraculous rose-leaves; religious renunciation of the world seemed to her the one true happiness. I suppose my aunt – with that deep, calculating instinct of the dying who manage to hang on – thought that in this way she would shackle her at least until her death; and Jeanne used indeed to say that once her mother was no longer there she would go into a convent. I cannot really see how a girl as defenceless, frightened and ignorant as a country orphan could escape religion by any other means than what my mother calls ‘going to the bad' – which is nothing but a passion for freedom and leisure.

Our visits to Le Vésinet were perhaps Jeanne's only holidays, since I would be allowed to take her for walks; and her mother used to say, raising the lids over her unmoving eyes, that it was quite right that the poor little girl, who didn't have much fun forever closeted with a sick woman, should at least get a breath of fresh air when the opportunity came her way. We would take the bus that goes up from Rueil to the station at Saint-Germain, and would go walking along the terrace as far as the last roundabout, where there are some old and rather weird houses. I was not ashamed to go out with this little girl, who was still virtually in short skirts, because people found her beautiful and men used to turn their heads after her.

She was too splendid for the idea of seeing her shut herself up some day in a cloister not to strike me as repugnant: I used to tell her she was, like all women, made to live. I was eighteen – it was the same year that I met you at Louis-le-Grand – how should I not have dreamed of playing the role of a tempter and a saviour? But at that time I had not known any woman: they filled me with a terrible dread. When I told myself it was necessary to save this child, I cannot have been thinking of anything but sleeping with her. She was the only woman to whom I was able to feel superior.

On one of those Sundays at Saint-Germain, we had gone quite a long way into the forest, in order to feel totally alone there: there were far fewer cars then than now, and the woods round Paris were not invaded by revolting groups of weekend trippers – those men in shirt-sleeves and those women sitting beside them with no shoes on, their ankles swollen by the heat and their toes cramped inside their stockings. We had sat down on a pile of dry bracken. That whole ceremonial army of trees about us hummed in the dry air. It was a time for forgetting everything, and I did forget everything – as though I had been stretched out beside a real woman who loved me, and not beside a little girl who said her rosary and wore a silver-gilt medallion from Lourdes between her breasts. I leaned towards Jeanne and I kissed her: she was half asleep, half dreaming, she scarcely put up any more resistance than a bird being choked. All my life I shall remember those moist, fumbling, cool lips. I was not much more skilled than she, but I felt as intoxicated as if I had carried off a great victory. Jeanne, with a shiver, told me we must leave and asked me whether what we had just done was very bad; but we stayed on for a long while in that warm place and she let me caress her breasts through the silk of her bodice. I did not go further, but I was still naive enough for this adventure to strike me as wonderfully sacrilegious.

I did not go back to Le Vésinet until three weeks later. I think we must have been studying for one of our degree examinations, and I must have been working on Sundays. That day Jeanne refused to go out, so we spent the afternoon in my aunt's little sitting-room. Shortly before we left, she signalled to me to leave the room with her and led me to the corridor where she kissed me: both of us had imagined a great deal in three weeks.