‘You left your house two years ago? What does your maman say?’
‘I haven’t got a maman any more.’
‘Show me your cane. Is it a swordstick? My father gave me one before he went away. If any thieves come, I’ll kill them.’
‘Now that sounds very brave to me!’ Blaise Pascal said.
Leaning his cane against the wall, he placed his Eden hat on the table and pulled off his gloves. He had washed his hands with their caked fingernails, but greyish traces remained in the places where his skin was cracked from chilblains. These details were at odds with his elegant appearance, or nearly elegant, since his wool suit was flapping around his emaciated body and his grey Eden had yellowed considerably. Somehow the man radiated kindness, perhaps because he was secretly revelling in his hosts’ astonishment or, better still, because after months of loneliness he felt a pleasure that amazed him to find himself among human beings again.
‘As you suspected,’ he said to Jean, ‘my name is not Blaise Pascal and I do not share his genius. The name was a homage to a product of the Port-Royal schools. As I told you this morning, I live very much with him inside me. The Pensées is one of the ten books I took with me when I went into my exile. You are familiar with the parlour game of which ten books you would take with you to a desert island? I actually did it. You know one of them. If we get to know one another a little more, I’ll tell you the others … But I have arrived at a bad moment … You were perhaps about to have dinner?’
‘Stay with us!’ Jesús said.
The man made an embarrassed gesture.
‘You know … I’ve lost the habit of eating meals … You can do without them very easily. There are blackberries, mushrooms and sweet chestnuts … and I’m forgetting watercress, watercress all year round. Very healthy, especially with a few potatoes that I grow. The human organism has no need of abundance.’
Claude got up and walked across the room to fetch some potatoes, which she put to bake in the embers. She had regained her calm, but her fine features still bore a trace of the violent emotion that had overtaken her. More and more, Jean thought, she was closing in on herself. She could be brought back to earth by squeezing her hand, or stroking her hair or cheek. Now, having overcome her fear of Blaise Pascal, she did not give him a second look. As she crossed the room, she brushed past him and he had been profuse in his apologies but Jean wondered if she had actually seen him. In any case the man saw her and could hardly take his eyes off her. He spoke for her benefit, caressingly, measuring his words’ pleasure.
‘For a man who lives alone you do a lot of talking,’ Jean said, mildly irritated.
Blaise Pascal’s eyes lit up.
‘You’re so right, Monsieur. I should have unlearnt the power of speech. It might even be fun to see me walking on all fours and barking. That was the pitfall. I foresaw it and I left this world with a mirror. I talk to my mirror and my mirror answers me. Alas, its answers do not satisfy me. As Cocteau puts it so nicely, a mirror should reflect before it offers a reflection.’
Jesús did not understand. Jean had to explain the play on words to him. Blaise Pascal was delighted.
‘Monsieur—’ he began.
‘My name is Rhésus Infante!’
‘Monsieur Jesús—’
‘There is no Monsieur Rhésus. The French, they say little Rhésus, I am the other, not the big, the Rhésus and that’s it …’
‘Shall I make an omelette?’ Claude asked.
‘Yes, Maman! Can I break the eggs?’
She let him break them into a bowl. He only missed two of them, which broke on the tiles in front of the oven.
‘What I wanted to say is that your time has come!’ the man said to Jesús, finally moving closer to the fire.
His clothes steamed, and a smell of disinfectant pervaded the room.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This suit was going to lie in mothballs until peace was declared.’
‘Who says it wasn’t declared long ago?’ Jean said.
Blaise Pascal smiled.
‘Monsieur—’
‘My name’s Jean Arnaud.’
‘Yes, without an “l”. Am I to call you “Jean”?’
‘It would be simpler, Blaise.’
‘Well, Jean, I’ve been drawing my own conclusions. I go as far as the road and I hide there. There are no cars, apart from one driven by a nice-looking woman, which has a German registration.’
‘That’s Laura,’ Jesús said.
‘Her brother was killed by the Russians,’ Cyrille said. ‘She’s gone to bury him. The Russians are killing lots of Germans.’
‘Be quiet,’ Claude said. ‘Go and wash your hands.’
She laid four places at the table. Jesús opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass and offered it to Blaise.
‘Thank you, no,’ Blaise said. ‘I don’t drink. Loneliness and alcohol don’t go together. There are no half-measures. Either you don’t drink or you drink like a fish. I chose abstinence, although, believe me, I wasn’t always that way disposed.’
Claude served the omelette.
‘Does your diet exclude eggs?’ Jean asked.
‘No. I even owned two hens and a cock. Two months ago they disappeared. I suspect a fox had them. You will object that eggs are not vegetable. You would be right.’
He raised his finger to ensure their attention.
‘But by eating an egg I am fighting in my own way against overpopulation. By the year 2000 there will be four billion earthlings. Malthus was right. Limit the number of births and you’ll have no more need of wars to mop up the consequences of an ocean of sperm.’
‘Of what?’ Cyrille said.
‘Forgive me, my boy, I forgot you. It’s a scientific word.’
‘Sit down,’ Claude said, seeming to pay no attention to the man or his chatter.
She served them in silence and sat with her own empty plate in front of her. For three weeks she had eaten almost nothing at all, making do with a glass of water here, a piece of bread there. Trousers and sweaters concealed her new slimness, but when Jean had hugged her to him in the bedroom that afternoon he had been surprised by how thin her body, once so moving in its shapeliness, its secret harmony between flesh and frame, had become. Her failure to eat had already blighted her face, making her eyes more protuberant and her cheekbones more prominent, the avatar of a beauty that had once been placid and simple and was now impenetrable. Her looks were changing as much as if she had put a mask over her face, and her fixed expression concealed, from anyone who did not know her, a sadly etched image of fear …
Jesús, whom the visitor had so surprised as to leave him speechless, regained his composure at dinner. He had been so carried away by the compliments about the only two canvases hanging on the wall that for a moment he had been unable to assert himself. But one did not condemn a man of Jaén to silence as easily as that. Nor, at Jaén, was there any shortage of hermits. His uncle, Antonio Infante, had shut himself up in a Saracen tower on the edge of the town, on the Bailén road, at the beginning of the civil war. It was an old tower with solid walls, but its upper platform had collapsed. Antonio had walled up the outer door and moved in with a guitar. Every morning he tossed a rope over the wall to which a box was tied, full of bread, water and some fruit. He sent the box back with some trifling ill-smelling objects that were buried elsewhere. Except at midday precisely, he was always in the shade. When it rained he opened his umbrella, and on icy winter nights he wrapped himself in a quilt. One day Jesús brought a ladder that reached the battlements. His uncle was dozing, his guitar beside him. He had grown a long black beard, like Tolstoy’s. He had become much thinner in his dust-covered clothes. Sometimes he was heard singing, accompanying himself on the guitar. At the end of the war he had emerged from his retreat to shave and get married. He had two children already, had announced his intention to have another one every year until 1950, and led a modest life running a haberdashery.