Jean promised. One day … In the meantime he would arrange a meeting with La Garenne. Palfy wrote down Blanche’s name.
‘A Rocroy? That rings a bell. I’ll do some research. By the time I meet her I’ll know everything about her family. What a performance! You’ll see. Come on, come to lunch at Maxim’s, both of you. Madeleine will be so pleased.’
‘Will there be black pudding?’ Jean asked.
‘Black pudding at Maxim’s? You are joking, dear boy.’
Jesús felt as Jean did.
‘I am like ’im, I wan’ black puddin’. They ’ave it in a little restauran’ …’
Palfy shrugged.
‘You’re pathetic, the pair of you. I’ll leave you to it. See you soon.’
He was already halfway down the stairs.
Everything worked out. Very well. La Garenne, whom it cost nothing, suggested an address to Michel du Courseau. A gallery offered him hanging space. For a modest fee. Jesús was unsurprised. According to him, the ascetic nature of the paintings and their religious inspiration made them powerfully prophetic pictures in wartime. They would show the French how to suffer, now that they were without bread and butter, cheese and meat, and going through their own Passion. Their natural masochism would find an outlet in Michel’s display of suffering.
‘Your uncle ’e’s very talented,’ Jesús said approvingly. ‘You’re no’ nice to ’im. Et look like ’e bore you.’
It was true. Michel bored Jean enormously. Not a word he spoke rang true, despite his sincerity. The excessive self-confidence he had always felt spilt over into his art. All around him he saw skilful mediocrities trying to establish themselves in the general confusion. Once he had obtained what he desired, there was no question of his showing his contemporaries any indulgence. Jean who, in reality, barely knew him, so divided in enmity had they been in their childhood, discovered that behind his humble exterior Michel maintained a view of himself that was so superior that no one else actually existed — an idea intensely comforting to a young person aspiring to genius. Even the failure of his first exhibition in spring ’41 — a failure that was unjust because even though there was nothing new in his sombre, passionate approach to his subject, it was still a revelation of a painter brave enough to go against fashion — even that failure was a source of pride to Michel. In the essentially biographical idea he had of what counted as glory, a failure was one more ‘proof’, a necessary expiation that would help him make a name for himself.
But if we occasionally proceed too slowly as far as Jean is concerned, we ought not to go too quickly with the characters in his life. We have scarcely reached the end of 1940, and here we are already talking about Michel du Courseau’s exhibition of religious paintings from spring 1941, just before Hitler sets his Panzer divisions on the Soviet Union; about the death of the prince, also in ’41, in the course of that summer; and a year later about the death of Albert Arnaud. Our only excuse is that our real preoccupation is the unexpected and hasty departure of Claude Chaminadze, shortly before the first Christmas of the occupation. We therefore request that the reader return with us, for a moment, to the three days that followed this dreadful blow to Jean’s existence. He felt he had returned to the aftermath of the departure of Chantal de Malemort in that same building in Rue Lepic where they had lived together so carelessly and happily. With Chantal, however, the disaster had been definitive and complete at the instant of its discovery. With Claude, hope remained: an explanation might be forthcoming that would return their life to what it had been before. Jesús commented, perhaps shrewdly, that Michel du Courseau had the evil eye. Had it not been at the concert he had given in 1939 at the Pleyel that Chantal had run into Gontran Longuet again? Now Michel had reappeared and Claude had vanished. Jean did not believe in the evil eye, but he listened to the Andalusian’s grumbling ruminations and they distracted him from his anxiety and pain. It was Jesús’s belief, in any case, that women went up in smoke several days a month. They returned transparent, as immaterial beings. In reality they no longer existed: it was a proven way for them to rest and not get older, an old trick they had exploited ever since they arrived from that unknown planet to cause us anxieties that only a real, open friendship between men could attenuate … Jesús did not deny that these absences had something magical about them, but refused to explain them to himself in those terms because Spaniards and certainly not Andalusians did not believe in magic. Magic was a Lapp invention at best, or a Scandinavian one at worst, a migratory invention whose effects were most noticeable at the start of winter, when the days shorten and night closes in. Fairies do not exist in hot countries, where the sun wipes out imagination.
So there were three dreadful days when, like an automaton, Jean listened to La Garenne shouting for all he was worth and then mysteriously — La Garenne, most sceptical of men — allowing himself to be dazzled by Palfy, who simultaneously conquered Blanche with his extensive knowledge of her family tree and information about several new international branches of the family that she knew nothing about; when he listened to Michel who thought of nothing but his exhibition; and to Jesús who talked non-stop simply to make sure his friend was not left alone with his thoughts. At last, on the fourth day, the telephone rang at the back of the gallery and, picking up the receiver, without even having heard her voice, he knew it was her. And it was all over. She was waiting for him. He would be there as soon as he could after the gallery had closed. And when she opened the door Cyrille ran at him and threw his arms around his neck.
‘Why didn’t you come and see me at Grandma’s?’ he said. ‘I was really bored.’
And so he discovered, for the first time, that he had been deprived of the little boy as much as of his mother, who offered him her cool cheek and whose light eyes were unreadable with some unexpressed emotion. All Jean could take in at that moment was that she had left Cyrille, her little guardian, behind for three days and gone off, alone, heaven knew where. This realisation cast a shadow over the joy of the reunion. They had dinner together without being able to speak, because of Cyrille. Eventually she put him to bed and came back to where Jean was waiting for her. He put his arms around her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not tonight. You’ll understand when I explain it to you.’
‘Explain it then.’
She sighed.
‘If you love me, just a little, you’ll give me some time. One day it’ll all become clear. For now, I don’t know myself. All right … I wanted to get away, to breathe again, and then for us not to part any more.’
‘It wasn’t me who left you.’
‘No, it wasn’t you. And it wasn’t me who left you either. You have to believe me.’
She smiled through her tears and kissed him on the lips, very quickly. He wanted to take her in his arms again. She stopped him.
‘No. I told you: not today.’
‘Then I’m going.’
He thought: for good, and he honestly believed it. She misunderstood his words.
‘You’re a good man. There aren’t many good men. In fact I think you must be the only one and perhaps that’s the reason I love you.’
‘Do you love me?’
‘And you’re also very silly because you doubt it when I say so.’
‘I don’t know where I stand with you.’