Sunday Read online

  Francesca did not mix with the other women, seldom left the house, which Pascali had eventually built between two jobs for his clients, and which looked unlike any other house.

  It was as if he had tried to put together examples of every kind of construction he knew, examples too of all types of stone and other building materials.

  People said he did not allow his wife to go out, that sometimes he shut her in and on various occasions beat her.

  Francesca's face was deformed by two scars across her cheeks, and these were attributed to the Italian's jealousy. Some claimed he had deliberately disfigured his wife, to discourage would-be lovers.

  Yet it was he who had taken his daughter, Ada, to La Bastide one day. Emile had already been married a certain time. His father-in-law was dead. His mother-in-law had gone back to Vendée where her family was.

  In his own dialect, which the Italians themselves could not understand, Pascali had discussed Ada's wages, her conditions of work, and it had all taken place in such a way that one might have thought he had come to sell her.

  He had not asked, on her behalf, for any days off, or annual holidays. She never took any. She seldom went, even for a visit, to her parents' house, which was a mere two kilometres away, and Pascali was content to appear after long intervals, covered in lime, and sit in the kitchen drinking a glass of wine and gazing at his daughter.

  Was this how it had started, or must it be still further back?

  On the beach, in front of the Carlton, the Majestic, the Miramar, people were already bathing, women were settling under sunshades, some of them surrounded by children, and rubbing oil into their bodies before exposing themselves to the sun.

  In the covered market Emile met colleagues who kept restaurants in town or in the vicinity. Cars were streaming in from the Esterel and others, from the direction of Nice, were arriving from Italy.

  It was all part of the preparations for a fine Sunday, which were taking place like the preparing of a restaurant, when the places are being laid and vases of flowers set in the middle of the tables. The flower market was in full swing as well. Emile needed to buy some. The van was filling up gradually and the hands of the clock moving slowly forward, bringing nearer the hour when he would have to act.

  There had been no single beginning, but several. And one of these, no doubt, was what had happened one afternoon in the attic.

  Ada had been working at La Bastide for nearly two years and must, therefore, have been eighteen. He was not yet thirty. He had never taken any interest in her, except, every now and then, to look at her with a frown and wonder what she was thinking.

  You could give her any job to do without her complaining. She didn't work fast and she was not thorough, but nobody had any control over her, for when one made a remark to her, or when Berthe got angry with her, she remained as blank as a wall.

  He remembered various scenes, with Berthe, exasperated, finally screaming at her, half hysterically:

  'Look at me when I am speaking to you!'

  Ada would gaze at her with dark, empty eyes.

  'Do you hear me?'

  She would not flinch.

  'Say "Yes, madam." '

  She would repeat, indifferently:

  'Yes, madam.'

  'Couldn't you be a little more polite?'

  Emile almost believed that if his wife lost her temper so easily, it was because she could not succeed in reducing Ada to tears.

  'Supposing I threw you out of the house?'

  Still the stone wall.

  'I shall speak to your father about it . . .'

  As for Emile, he had become accustomed to her, but rather in the way he would have become accustomed to the presence of a dog in the house. A dog does not speak either, does not always do what one would like to see it do.

  Then, one afternoon when Berthe was away, he had gone up to the attic, without ulterior motives, because he was looking for Ada and she did not answer, and when he had come down again he did not know whether to be pleased or frightened by what had just taken place.

  At any rate, he knew no more about her than before, and understood her perhaps less than ever.

  He remembered above all a look which he had never seen in a woman before, rather similar to the look of an animal at the approach of a man.

  That was three years ago now. Gould he claim to know her better, and was this called love?

  If a beginning is strictly necessary, then this was one among many others.

  But as far as Berthe was concerned, the beginning was not to be found till two years later, at siesta time, on June 15th; he recalled the date, the hour, the smallest details.

  Was it still important? Was it not all past and done with? He had had the time, in eleven months, to think about it, and yet he had been scarcely ever worried about it.

  Even today, it did not disturb him unreasonably. He was not excited. He regretted nothing. He was not scared either.

  A certain impatience, yes, which made him drink his coffee too hot at Justin's bar. A trembling of the fingers, as had happened this morning in the kitchen, and a floating sensation in the chest. But that could occur just as well when he was out fishing for boulantin and had a good catch at the end of his line.

  And the sensation of unreality was familiar to him. When you are at sea, early in the morning, aboard a pointu, alone on the water which shines and breathes with a monotonous rhythm, you are no longer completely yourself, and it may happen that all this blue and this inhuman peace inspire you with a kind of anguish.

  The Forville market was the same as on other Sundays, with its familiar faces, its noises, its smells. And yet was it not rather as if he had surveyed the scene through a mirror?

  For several hours now he had not formed part with the rest of the world. This evening, tomorrow, he would once again be a man like the others. Not quite like them.

  He must not think. One should never go over again what has been decided once and for all.

  He had told Ada, without giving her any details:

  'Next Sunday . . .'

  It was now that Sunday. Everything was waiting. It was too late to stop events.

  'I'll have a packet of Gauloises.'

  He lit one, slowly expelled the smoke. All he had to do was to collect the package from the butcher's where he had left his order as he passed.

  At this hour Berthe would be busy with her toilet, in the bedroom, where she would have opened the shutters. The two boarders, Mademoiselle Baes and Madame Delcour, both of them blonde and fat, with thick, red arms, would be strolling one behind the other along a pathway, picking wild flowers, of which in due course they would come and ask him the names.

  Occasionally they could be heard giggling like little girls. Mademoiselle Baes had inherited a biscuit business and her friend was the widow of a pork butcher.

  On the Riviera it was as if they had returned to their childhood, and when the weather did not permit them to take walks, they would spend hours writing postcards.

  He tossed the butcher's package into the van, closed the back door, climbed in at the wheel and looked behind him to ensure there was room to reverse.

  Another three hours to go before everything was settled.

  II

  HE was just over fifteen, for it was the year he took his certificate, when any thought of the Riviera first entered his universe, in a still sketchy form, but nonetheless more real than the tourist poster he used to see at the station when he went to La Roche-sur-Yon.

  On that day he was far from guessing that, in a more or less indirect fashion, it was his destiny that was at stake.

  Why he had accompanied his father to Luçon he was unable to recall. At all events this meant that it was a Thursday, since on other days, when he went there to school, he rode his bicycle.

  Had he wanted to see a school friend and asked for a lift on the cart? That was possible, for it was raining hard and a strong sea-wind made the hood flap. He could see again the large patches of damp o
n the flanks of the mare, her back covered with a strip of canvas.

  They never talked much together, his father and he. They must have covered the five miles separating Champagne and Luçon in silence; a flat road, like the rest of the marshland, with every so often a one-storey house, a cabane as it was called locally, in the meadows lapped by the sea.

  The real landscape, there, was the sky, more vast than elsewhere, scarcely broken by the indentation of a church spire on the horizon, a sky so vast that houses, roads, cars and, all the more, human beings appeared minute.

  It was the sky which was alive, filling itself with heavy black clouds which would burst, or else with huge white ones, luminous and still, or again with fleecy wisps which would cluster together in reddish strips at sunset.

  It had probably been raining all day, as so often happened. When there was no fair and no market at Champagne or in the neighbouring parishes, the inn, except in the season, was to all intents and purposes empty.

  It was his great-grandfather, a butcher by trade, who had started it and given it the name of the Ox and Crown, which was still written up on the sign in gold letters dating back a century. The ceiling was low, yellowed, almost brown, like the walls, the panelling, the tables on which the locals propped their elbows on Sundays, to drink their carafes of muscadet and play cards or dominoes.

  They would still be wearing the black suits they had put on to go to Mass. During the week, as well, they were nearly always in black, because they were using up old Sunday suits.

  And throughout the house there reigned a smell of wine dregs, alcohol, stale tobacco, with a not unpleasant mustiness in the bedrooms which remained for Emile the smell of the real countryside. It must have come from the beds, perpetually damp, with their vegetable horsehair mattresses. Or did the smell come from the haystack at the back, in the meadow, for his father had a plot of land and two cows?

  He had never been further than La Roche-sur-Yon and Les Sables-d'Olonne to the north, La Rochelle to the south, Niort to the east.

  He saw only local country folk, a few commercial travellers, pedlars, the occasional lawyer lunching at the hotel and, in summer, tourists merely passing through.

  He could not remember any real conversation with his father. As for his mother, she seemed to bear a grudge against him for being born six years after her two other children, when she was counting on not having any more.

  Even as a small child he had not dared tell her, for example, that he had a tummy ache, as she would then look at him with the eye of somebody who knows better, somebody who is not to be deceived.

  'You're just pretending to have a tummy ache because you haven't done your homework and you're afraid of going to school.'

  This had struck him forcibly. She used to reason in this way about everything. And as there was some truth in it since indeed he did not know his lesson, it had bothered him for a long time.

  He had ended by finding out that he really did have a tummy ache— so he was not pretending—because he did not know his lesson and therefore because he was afraid.

  As for his father, he did not trouble about such matters. He lived in a world of big personalities, men who talked about meadows, hay, heads of cattle or local politics, over carafes of wine or glasses of liqueur.

  Perhaps Emile had only accompanied him that day because it had been raining since morning, and he was bored in the house where he had never had any place to himself. His sister, Odile, who was twenty-two, had her own room. He slept in his brother Henri's room, an attic like Ada's, and he had nothing in common with Henri who, at twenty, was already the replica of his father.

  Henri worked with a cattle-dealer and would become a cattle-dealer in his turn, which would not prevent him from taking over the Ox and Crown. It all went together.

  It was not long before Odile married a tall fair-haired clerk from Luçon.

  As for Emile, he would have to look after himself as best as he could.

  That was more or less his situation at this period. He was smaller than the rest of the family, and while the others were tough and gnarled he was ashamed of the chubbiness of his body.

  The cart had stopped first at the Goods Station, where his father loaded up with some sacks, probably of fertiliser. Then, not far from the Cathedral, while the rain was still falling in buckets, they had made a halt at the Three Bells.

  'Out you get,' his father had said.

  The Three Bells deserved to be called a hotel because of its big white façade, its two dining-rooms, the bathroom on each floor and the coat of arms displayed at either side of the door, but it was also an inn where, on market days, the stables were full of horses, there were waggons in the yard, and more or less drunken peasants in the dining-rooms and kitchen.

  Louis Harnaud, called Big Louis, was a friend of his father's and passed for a rich man. His complexion was highly coloured, almost violet, for he drank from morning to night, in his white uniform and chef's cap, with customers whom, had it been necessary, he would have gone out to find in the street.

  'Good to see you, Honore . . . Have you brought the lad along? . . . Sit down, while I just go and fetch a bottle . . .'

  There was, as well, a cash-desk in the hall, at which, on days when there was a crowd, the worthy Madame Harnaud would take her place with as much gravity as if she were ascending a throne.

  Their daughter, Berthe, had gone to the same school as Emile, but being two years older, she had already passed her certificate. He had not seen her that day. Perhaps she had gone to her piano lesson?

  The three of them were ensconced in a corner of the room where the set meal was served, and through the lace curtains Emile could see the rain falling, passers-by holding their umbrellas like shields.

  'I was saying to my wife only yesterday that I wanted to talk to you . . .'

  Emile was used to these conversations, slow to get started, as if each mistrusted the other, and one might still have thought they were discussing the sale of a meadow or a cow.

  'Do you like it at Champagne?'

  His father, who did not know what was coming next, prudently said nothing.

  'What about your elder boy?'

  'He's doing all right . . .'

  'I gather your daughter's getting married?'

  Everybody in the neighbourhood knew about it. These then were just preliminary manoeuvres, yet despite the apparent futility of the words, each one of them counted.

  'If I thought of you straight away it was because I had the impression —though I may be wrong—that you were ambitious for your sons . . .'

  As he said this he was looking at Emile as if to enlist him as his accomplice.

  'It never occurred to you to set yourself up in a more important place than Champagne?'

  'It was good enough for my parents and grandparents. I suppose it's good enough for my children.

  'Listen, Honore . . .'

  They had been at school together and both of them were innkeeper's sons.

  'Anyway, here's to you!'

  Just then Madame Harnaud had pushed open the door and, seeing the two men talking, had withdrawn without a sound.

  'Mind you, I don't want to influence you. I'm going to say what I have in mind because I like you, and I know your worth . . .'

  He was taking a long, roundabout route before coming to the point.

  'You must have heard that Madame Harnaud and I finally treated ourselves to a holiday . . .'

  He was not the only person to call his wife by her surname. Most of the local businessmen did the same.

  'For years she's wanted to see the Riviera, and we went and spent three weeks in Nice . . .'

  He was tipping his chair back, his glass in his hand, a more sly look in his eye.

  'You've never been there, have you?'

  'Never.'

  'Perhaps it would be just as well if you never did.'

  That made him laugh.

  'Do you know that in November, down there, you can go about without an
overcoat and there are still enough tourists to fill half the hotels?'

  When he finally got to the matter in hand, the bottle was empty and he went off to fetch another.

  'I'm fifty-eight years of age, seven months younger than you are. See how well I remember? For some time now I've been thinking about retiring, as my liver and my kidneys are giving me trouble and the doctor says my way of life doesn't help matters. Wait a second . . .'

  He went out, came back with some postcards and photographs.

  'First, just have a glance at those . . .'

  There was a panorama of Nice, with the Baie des Anges in deep blue, other views of the town, of Antibes, Cannes, women in picturesque costume, their arms loaded with flowers, a little fishing port, probably Golfe-Juan, with nets drying along the jetty.

  'Do you know what sort of people you meet mostly in Nice and around those parts? People like us, like you and me, who have drudged all their lives to put a bit of money aside and finally made up their minds to have a good time. That's what it is! I must say I began by wondering whether I wouldn't follow their example, buy a flat or a bungalow and retire there with my wife and daughter.

  'Then I started looking at the advertisements. The place is full of agencies, as they call them, which rent and sell villas and businesses.

  'Just look at that

  He spread out on the table some photographs ranging from those showing Provencal farmsteads to some of five-storey blocks on the Promenade des Anglais.

  'It took a chance visit to a little restaurant I had been recommended for me to catch on. The owner is a man of our age. I realized, from his accent, that he wasn't from those parts and he told me he came from the Dunkirk area. A fellow like us, in fact! One fine day he got fed up with working in a place where it rained half the year round. As he hadn't enough money to live off his investments, he took this small restaurant I was telling you about. He doesn't have to worry. Half the year he is to all intents and purposes on holiday, and in the morning he goes out fishing . . .'