‘Wha’ do you think?’ Jesús asked, anxious at his friend’s silence.
‘Very beautiful.’
‘Then don’ say me anythin’ else.’
Laura appeared before nightfall. She brought a suitcase of food and a present for Cyrille, a model car made of painted wood. Jean would not have recognised her if he had met her in the street. Physically small, a brassy blonde, she was as insignificant as a woman can be. Despite her strong accent and timid voice, she spoke excellent French. This nondescript person had had the wit to keep Jesús, to isolate him so he could work, feed him properly and divert him enough at night so that he didn’t go looking elsewhere. Under her spell, he had forgotten his theories on love. He had spent far more than two nights in a row with Laura — six months of nights — and settled into the well-considered comfort she had organised around him. Every evening she brought back from Paris food she was able to obtain as a result of her post in the Department of Supply for the occupying army. Jesús, with the help of a carpenter and a stonemason, had refurbished and installed the big kitchen, his studio and two bedrooms. Each morning he pushed down the pump handle three hundred times and the pump, connected to the well, pumped water into a tank in the attic. He strongly recommended Jean to have a go himself: the exercise would transform him from a weakling into a bodybuilder. Sawing wood for the farm’s fires and stove also helped Jesús stay fit, because the rest of the time he was in his studio, working without a fire, in shirtsleeves. An Andalusian is never cold. It was only people in the north who complained of the cold and people in the south who complained of the heat. A world government endowed with a modicum of common sense ought to organise, in the near future, when the war was over, massive migrations to make people happy once and for all. Jesús was convinced that if ever he returned to live in Spain one day, he would paint nothing but the landscapes of the Île-de-France, or Rue Norvins in the snow.
Cyrille was playing with his car, crawling across the flagstones of the kitchen. Laura was lighting the stove and getting dinner ready. Claude was setting the table. The two men had their feet up in front of the fire, glasses in hand. Outside the wind whistled. A passing hailstorm pattered on the windows. Jesús said carelessly that, despite being not the slightest bit bothered by the cold, he would rather be inside a house with walls a metre thick than outside in the open countryside.
‘Not everybody has your good fortune,’ Laura said gently.
She was thinking about her brother, an infantry lieutenant in von Bock’s army. The previous day in a letter he had begged her for socks and sweaters. The Russian winter was starting and the Wehrmacht had still not taken Moscow. A thousand leagues from that turmoil Jesús painted and gave La Garenne the boot, and tonight was welcoming his friend Jean. An unknown small boy was playing on the kitchen floor. Laura and Claude seemed to be getting on, busy around the stove. Apart from the hail that came to beat on the windows for several minutes, the rest of the world might not have existed. Jesús was not even aware that Laura was closing her eyes and, far from her office where she spent her day balancing figures, doing her best to forget the war. It was enough for her to know that he was working enthusiastically on a picture of which she understood little but which could only be beautiful. The future? Was there one? She didn’t believe it any more. Death struck swiftly and often. Those she spent her day with and the man she spent her nights with belonged to two different universes. She didn’t confuse them or forget them. Jesús was beginning to tell himself he no longer needed anything, that he had had enough of other women and Laura was what he wanted now, and he had seen enough of other artists’ paintings not to feel curious any longer. The moment had come to create a vacuum and only exist for himself, to discard all theories and send all the professors home, in order simply to be himself. If he went exclusively in his own direction, he would go further. Money? He would not have less than if he were working to fatten Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. In any case Laura had money. She was ready for anything. For an artist it was not a right but a duty to be a pimp. Pimp for a woman, for a society, for the wealthy. It was the greatest honour you could pay them.
After dinner Claude put Cyrille to bed and Laura started to clear away. Her voice had scarcely been heard during dinner. If she spoke, it must have been to Jesús when he was alone with her, or when Jean was not present. The two men resumed their conversation before the fire.
‘So,’ Jesús said, ‘is this the one? I thought she would be more of a bomb. But not at all. She is perfec’. Round. Without angles. You wan’ to marry ’er?’
‘She’s married already.’
Jesús remarked that Jean had a taste for complications. He was in love with a married woman and sleeping with an actress who was all over the place. He was heading for endless problems if Nelly, by some accident, were to fall in love with him.
‘I judge that possibility to be extremely unlikely,’ Jean said.
Jesús suggested to his friend that he settle in the countryside with him if he did not want to be consumed by the capital. He described an idyllic life, divided between everyday activities — they would raise rabbits and hens, plant a kitchen garden — and the art for which both of them had been put in the world.
‘You want me to be like you, dear old Jesús, but I don’t have a gift for anything. Everything is easy for you, now that you’ve discovered you can live outside society. This is your vocation. Mine is to live inside it, and if it suffocates me, tough luck. I’m rather less brilliant at the role than Palfy is. Just think: the bloke that I met on a road in Provence, disguised as a priest and stealing cars and collection boxes to pay for the trip, must be about to pass his first hundred million. I don’t know what his racket is exactly, but he’s found an opening and he’s amassing a fortune. He’ll lose it in the end, with his usual elegance, the way he lost the others. Really and truly it’s the risk he enjoys. He’s got Kapermeister and Rocroy in his pocket …’
Jean turned round, conscious of having uttered two names he should have kept to himself. Laura was putting the glasses away. He was sure she had heard everything. Claude appeared. They clustered around the fire together, until there were only embers left. At ten o’clock Jesús yawned and stretched.
‘In the country you ’ave to rest,’ he said in an exhausted voice. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk again about that …’
Cyrille slept in a sleeping bag on a sagging couch next to the double bed that nearly filled the room, apart from a wardrobe and a shelf for the chamber pot. Outside the wind whistled in the trees and wrapped itself around the groaning roof.
‘Take Cyrille,’ Jean said. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch.’
‘No, I want to sleep with you.’
‘Do you realise what you’re asking me?’
‘Yes. And I am asking you.’
He switched the light off and they undressed in the dark and lay down in the icy bed.
‘I’m cold,’ Claude said.
He hugged her and stroked the small of her back through her nightdress.
She shivered. The timbers creaked at a gust more violent than the others. Jean felt Claude’s warm breath on his neck.
‘You don’t love me as much as before,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
He did not feel he loved her less. He even thought he loved her more, but in the darkness of the bedroom he could just as easily have been stroking Nelly, who in bed suddenly became as tender and modest as Claude.
‘I don’t know why you carry on seeing me. You should leave me alone, let me go, and then I’d keep on hoping I’d see you again when I was free.’
‘You really think you’ll be free one day?’