‘Jean,’ she said, ‘we have to clear up some misunderstandings. After Christmas, when I came back from Germany, you left Claude with us for a few days …’
‘Yes, I shouldn’t have. She was already going off the rails. I knew she needed to go to a clinic, but I was looking, I didn’t realise …’
He would have liked to see Laura’s expression, but she stared straight ahead as if fascinated by an image emerging from the shadows of the forest, which sloped down gently down towards the Yvette. Golden splashes exposed the undergrowth. He listened to her, wondering why she hadn’t spoken earlier, but it was in the character of this unusual woman to reveal herself only after a long personal struggle. So he learnt that Blaise Pascal — forgive me for not yet revealing his real name and possibly for not revealing it at all — that after the awkward dinner to which he had invited himself, Blaise Pascal, the lice-ridden and apparently mad dandy, had reappeared several times and it required no great perspicacity to realise that it was Claude’s presence that had drawn him out of his retreat. Of course he had acted circumspectly, delousing the ‘man in the woods’, reappearing in much more attractive guise and deploying all his charm before disappearing again. He had even succeeded in making her smile and she had ceased to consider him with dread. Laura was no longer in any doubt that the hermit had re-entered the world as a result of falling for Claude, an emotional change that had fully revealed to him the cowardice and inanity of his withdrawal from the world. He had already decided to give up his hunting lodge before Claude was admitted to the nursing home. Laura surmised that, having assumed his other identity — of a youngish man of independent means, simple, modest and good-natured — he had set himself up in the village next to the nursing home in order to be able to visit her more easily. But things had not stopped there: a fortnight earlier she had seen him with Anna Petrovna and Cyrille.
‘So now we know who the uncle is,’ Jean said.
He did not want to know any more. They drove back to Gif and the farmhouse, where Jesús was working in his studio. Laura vanished as only she knew how, and the two men remained in the room, which was already growing darker in the fading light. Grey shadows filtered through the trees and spread stealthily, murmuring over the house in the calm of the evening. On a long canvas Jesús was painting flashes of light, a luminous composition of muted gold and silver in the green sunlight of Chevreuse.
‘Is no good at all!’ he said, despairing, sitting down on a stool. ‘I am a useless idiot who ’as no talent.’
He was sincere, believing it fully. Inside his tall, solid frame there lurked a childlike soul that was prone to sudden despairs as magnified as they were fleeting. Jean, who knew him very well, refrained from reassuring him and occasionally even expressed himself in complete agreement, just to incite his friend to react in a spirit of contradiction. To him the painting on the easel looked to be of such dazzling beauty that he no longer doubted Jesús’s great talent. He had purged himself of everything, of his false daring, of the old-fashioned academicism to which his skill had long bound him, of the influences that had held him back, and now his painting radiated the force and ardour that a great original artist brought to it. Jean was sure of it: Jesús would be counted among the few masters of his generation when, matured by his retreat, he finally made his way back to the galleries.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Jean said to him. ‘That you’ve got no talent, you’re a dauber and you’d do better as a house-painter, or that you’re the artist I like better than all the others, in fact the only one? You won’t believe me either way, and you’ll spend the next hour boring me stiff with your doubts. Stop it, you’re talking rubbish. You’re a happy man and it upsets you, and that’s entirely normal, because you’ve always heard that great artists live in a state of permanent torture …’
‘Michel du Courseau suffers!’
‘He suffers, but not because of his art, which he’s totally happy with, to a degree you and I can’t imagine. His suffering is about something rather different: how can he reconcile his very real and very sincere faith with his taste for little boys? He hasn’t found an answer yet. The day he does, he’ll suddenly stop being so repressed.’
Jesús rapidly forgot his own anxieties. He had worked all afternoon with passion and pleasure. The release of tension explained his pessimism and fears.
‘’Ow is Claude?’ he asked.
‘The same. It’s me who’s not well …’
They talked about Blaise Pascal. He sometimes came to the house in the afternoons. He had even bought two canvases, but had not taken them with him. Jesús occasionally found him interesting, and at other times thought him irritatingly pedantic and self-assured. They still did not know who he was, nor whether he had really possessed a collection of paintings before he buried himself in the forest. Jesús was nevertheless aware that he had conceived a sudden, violent passion for Claude. Fulfilled himself and therefore feeling that his own love affair was the only real one, the only one worthy of interest, Jesús assured Jean that what had happened was a stroke of luck for him and would provide him with an honourable means of extracting himself from an impasse. Jean did not reply. How could he explain what he still felt for Claude, and which would never be extinguished, even if she failed to regain her sanity? In short, that he owed her his love.
Shadows filled the studio. Jesús, sitting on a high stool, his feet resting on a bar with his chin on his knees, seemed immense and invincible. He belonged to a world-view that left no room for doubt at a moment when Jean was discovering the depths of human misery, loneliness and the looming approach of a despair that, fortunately, still repelled him. He felt an intense need to see Nelly and rushed his leave-taking.
Laura drove him to Gif station and as they were saying goodbye told him, ‘I’ll help you, but it’s not so easy. We’re all being watched and we’re all watching each other. You’ll have to take her away somewhere. Anywhere. Otherwise … you’ll have to give her up.’
She had touched the nerve of a passion that, in the saddest way, was starting to fade just because it did not know how to change. In the train taking him back to Paris Jean realised that the distance, small as it was, and his return to Nelly were beginning to erase Claude from his emotions. Life could not be this love that had no way out.
Night was already falling over the Luxembourg Gardens. He reached the Comédie Française, where the matinée had just finished. Nelly was taking off her make-up in her dressing room, replacing a stage face for one shining with cream that looked tired and drawn.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t come in time, I was never ever going to see you again. I wasn’t very good this afternoon and I’m depressed. I wanted to be a genius and it turns out I’ve just got some talent. That’s mediocrity for you. There are evenings when I’m just a sad and unhappy little girl who wants to cry her eyes out. Absolutely the worst thing of all, you horrible Jules-who, is that I’m starting to ask myself whether I’m not in love with you. Undo me, will you?’
He unhooked her heavy, starched seventeenth-century dress, which held her graceful bust in a straitjacket. She emerged, naked from the waist up and cream-skinned, staring at her mirror. She held her pretty, pointed breasts in her hands.
‘Maybe these really are my best bits,’ she said, letting them go. ‘And people are wrong. I have no talent. I just have nice tits. Kiss me.’
Her dresser came in.
‘Do you need me, Mademoiselle?’
‘No thank you. I’ve got my undresser. See you tomorrow, Mauricette. I hope I’ll be less terrible than today.’