The Blue Room Page 5

That was true, even if he hadn’t used that particular word. At Les Sables-d’Olonne, sometimes he found himself thinking about the blue room against his will, gritting his teeth with desire. At other times he could be unreasonable, impatient, scolding Marianne for a trifle or withdrawing into himself, with a hard look in his eye. Gisèle and her daughter would look at each other, the mother seeming to tell her child, ‘Pay no attention, your father has things on his mind.’

  A moment later, were they not just as uneasy when he abruptly became exaggeratedly patient, gentle and affectionate?

  ‘Are you ambitious, Monsieur Falcone?’

  He had to think about that, since he never had before. Are there really people who spend their lives looking at themselves in a mirror and asking themselves questions – about themselves?

  ‘Depends on what you mean by that. At twelve I worked after school and during the holidays to buy myself a bicycle. Later I dreamed about having a motorbike. I went to Paris. When I married Gisèle, I started thinking about having my own business. In Poitiers, the firm I worked for assembled agricultural machinery shipped in pieces from America, and I was earning a good living.’

  ‘Your brother set up on his own, too, after trying out several trades.’

  What connection could there be between their two careers?

  It wasn’t Diem, but Professor Bigot speaking, slowly, as if musing aloud.

  ‘I wonder if the fact that your parents were Italian, so that you were both foreigners in a French village … I’ve been told your father was a bricklayer?’

  The magistrate had spent an entire afternoon questioning the elder Falcone, seeking him out in his cottage in La Boisselle.

  ‘What do you know about your father?’

  ‘He came from Larina, a very poor village in the Piedmont region, about thirty kilometres from Vercelli. Out there, where the mountains can’t support everyone, most boys emigrate, and my father did the same, when he was fourteen or fifteen. He came to France with a crew that dug a tunnel, I don’t know which one, somewhere near Limoges; then he travelled around, worked on other tunnels …’

  It was difficult to talk about Angelo Falcone, whom everyone in Saint-Justin called old Angelo, for he was different, somehow, from other men.

  ‘He travelled a lot in France – north, south, east, west – and finally settled down in La Boisselle.’

  Even now, Tony remembered it as an astonishing place. Two or three kilometres from Saint-Justin, La Boisselle had been a monastery built on the site of an ancient fortress and constructed from its very stones. One could still see sections of the old walls among the rampant weeds and remnants of the moat, filled with stagnant water, where he had fished for frogs.

  The monks had probably practised agriculture, for around the large courtyard there remained buildings of all kinds, stables, workshops and winepress sheds.

  The Coutant family occupied most of the area, with about a dozen cows, some sheep, two draught horses and an old billy goat that chewed tobacco. They rented out whatever buildings they didn’t need, if they were still habitable, and these formed a motley little colony comprising, aside from the Falcones, a Czech family and some people from Alsace with their eight children.

  ‘Your father wasn’t that young any more when you were born.’

  ‘He was forty-three, forty-four when he returned to his Piedmontese village and brought my mother back with him.’

  ‘In other words, he decided it was time for him to marry and he went home to find a wife?’

  ‘I believe that’s what happened.’

  His mother’s maiden name had been Maria Passaris, and when she arrived in France she was twenty-two years old.

  ‘Were they a happy couple?’

  ‘I never heard them argue.’

  ‘Did your father keep working as a bricklayer?’

  ‘That was all he knew, and it never occurred to him to do anything else.’

  ‘You were born first, and your brother Vincent came along three years later.’

  ‘Then my sister Angelina.’

  ‘Does she live in Saint-Justin?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘At an early age?’

  ‘At six months. My mother had gone to Triant, I don’t know why. Before she came to France, she had never left her village. Here, in a country where she didn’t speak the language, she rarely left the house. That day, in Triant, it’s thought that she opened the wrong door by mistake and got out of the train on the wrong side. She and the baby in her arms were run down by an express.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Seven. My brother was four.’

  ‘Was it your father who raised you?’

  ‘Yes. When he got home from his job, he did the cooking and housework. I didn’t know him well enough from before to know if the accident changed him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know perfectly well. Didn’t you speak with him?’

  There was an edge in Tony’s voice now.

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘And what do you think? Are the people around here right? Is my father simple?’

  In Saint-Justin, no one said ‘simple-minded’: just ‘simple’ was enough. Embarrassed, Bigot merely gestured vaguely in reply.

  ‘I don’t know if you got anything out of him. For years, we never heard him speak, my brother and I, unless it was absolutely necessary. At seventy-eight, he lives alone in the house where we were born and still does a little bricklaying here and there.

  ‘He refuses to come live with me or Vincent. His only distraction is building a miniature village in his tiny garden. He began working on it twenty years ago. The church is less than a metre high, but it’s complete to the last detail.

  ‘You can see the inn, the town hall, a bridge over a stream, a water mill, and every year he adds a house or two. Seems it’s a faithful reproduction of Larina, that village he and my mother came from.’

  He did not say what he really thought. His father was an uncouth man of limited intelligence who had been content to live alone until he was past forty. Tony could see pretty well why he had gone back to Larina to seek a wife.

  In his way, Angelo Falcone had loved Maria Passaris, who was young enough to be his daughter. Not with words, or grand shows of affection, because he was a man who kept things to himself.

  When she had died along with his daughter, Angelo Falcone had withdrawn into himself for good and had soon begun building his strange toy village in the garden.

  ‘He isn’t crazy!’ exclaimed Tony fiercely.

  He could guess what some people must think, including, perhaps, this Professor Bigot.

  ‘And I’m not crazy either!’

  ‘There has never been any question of that.’

  ‘Then why are you still grilling me for the sixth or seventh time? Because the newspapers are calling me a monster?’

  But this still lay in the future …

  At Les Roches Noires people lived on the beach, with the taste of sand in their mouths and sand in their beds and pockets.

  It rained only twice in two weeks. The sun dazzled everyone’s eyes and skin to the point of vertigo, especially if they stared a long time at the white-crested waves rolling slowly in from the open sea, one after another, until they crashed into a spray of a myriad sparkling drops.

  Marianne got a touch of sunburn. After a few days, Tony was brown enough that when he undressed at night, his pale skin sh0wed the shape of his bathing suit. Only Gisèle, who stayed under the beach umbrella, still looked the same as always.

  What was happening in Saint-Justin, in the Despierres’ gloomy shop? And in the evening, in the bedroom where Andrée and Nicolas undressed in front of each other?

  The pink-edged towel: wasn’t it draped over the guard rail as a signal of alarm? And Nicolas’ stony-faced mother: had she not crossed the garden to take the situation in hand – and take revenge, at last, on her daughter-in-law?

  They thought, all these people in Poitie
rs, policemen, magistrates, doctors, even that unnerving lady psychologist, that they were going to establish the truth, when they knew almost nothing about the Despierres, the Formiers and so many others who were important in their own ways.

  And Tony: what did they know about him? Less than he did, right?

  Madame Despierre was certainly the most important and imposing personage in Saint-Justin, eclipsing even the mayor, a wealthy cattle merchant in his own right. In a village where men and women of the same generation had all gone to the same school together, few dared call her Germaine, much less address her familiarly. To everyone, she was Madame Despierre.

  Tony must have been mistaken, for she was barely thirty when he had begun purchasing things for his parents at the grocery store, but he remembered her hair being just as grey then as it was now. Behind her counter, she wore a grey smock, leaving her chalk-white face as the only pale spot.

  He had known her husband, a puny man with a hesitant manner and a timorous expression, wearing a pince-nez and a smock that was too long for him.

  Sometimes he would start swaying, and his wife would hustle him into the room behind the store, closing the door on the customers glancing knowingly at one another and shaking their heads.

  Tony had been hearing talk about the falling sickness well before he understood that Despierre suffered from epilepsy and that, behind the closed door, he was thrashing convulsively, lying on the floor with his jaws clenched and drool streaking his chin.

  He could recall the man’s funeral and following his procession with all the other schoolchildren in little rows, save for Nicolas, who was with his mother at the front of the mourners.

  They were said to be very rich and very stingy. Not only did they own several houses in town, but two large farms as well, worked by tenant farmers, plus the hamlet of La Guipotte.

  ‘Monsieur Falcone: why did you choose to settle in Saint-Justin, which you had left more than ten years earlier?’

  Hadn’t he already answered that question? They repeated the same things to him so often that he just didn’t know any more. He must be contradicting himself at times, for he himself did not have the answers to these ‘whys’ and ‘hows’.

  ‘Maybe it was because of my father.’

  ‘You hardly saw him.’

  About once a week. Old Angelo had come to his house two or three times but had seemed ill at ease. Gisèle was a stranger to him, and he was uncomfortable around her. Tony preferred to go to La Boissière every Saturday evening.

  The door would stay open. They did not light the lamp. They listened to the frogs croaking in the marsh, and the two men, sitting on straw-bottomed chairs, let the time pass without a word.

  ‘Don’t forget that my brother was already established in Triant.’

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t come back for Andrée?’

  ‘That again!’

  ‘You were aware of her marriage to your former classmate Nicolas?’

  No! That had come as a surprise. There was a vast gulf between the Despierres and the Formiers, and the two mothers, although close in age, came from different worlds.

  While Madame Despierre was the very model of a nouveau riche peasant, the wife of Dr Formier was typical of a certain provincial bourgeoisie fallen on hard times and refusing to lose face.

  Her father had been a notary at Villiers-le-Haut, and the Bardave family men, from father to son, had been socializing with the local gentry for so long, hunting and playing bridge with them, that they’d come to think of themselves as gentry too.

  Andrée’s grandfather had bequeathed nothing to his children, and neither had her father. Dr Formier had left his wife and daughter an annuity so modest that, although they still lived in the chateau and dressed like townspeople, they did not always have enough to eat.

  Which of them, Madame Despierre or Madame Formier, had proposed this marriage to the other one? Was it the proud, spiteful widow with her grocery store? Or the bourgeoise anxious to see her daughter safe from want, knowing that she would be rich one day – and probably before long, at that?

  ‘At school, Nicolas seems to have been bullied by his classmates …’

  True and false, like all the rest of it. Sickly, often plagued by stomach aches, unable to join his classmates’ games, Nicolas had been fated to become a laughing stock for the other boys. They called him a sissy, a fraidy-cat, accused him of clinging to his mother’s skirts. Even worse, unable to defend himself, he reported to the principal all the tricks the kids played on him.

  Tony hadn’t belonged to the gang that harassed him. He wasn’t any better than they were, perhaps, but as a foreigner he was a bit of an outsider himself. Once during their break time, and once more, when school was letting out, he had come to the defence of Nicolas, whom he did not yet know was ill.

  The boy had had his first fit at the age of twelve and a half, out of nowhere, in the middle of a class. There had been the sound of a body falling to the floor, and as his classmates began turning around, the teacher had slapped his desk with a ruler.

  ‘Nobody move!’

  It was spring. The chestnut trees in the playground were in flower. There had been swarms of maybugs that year, and all eyes had been on them as they flew clumsily around the classroom, bumping into windows and walls.

  In spite of the teacher’s order, the children stared at Nicolas, their faces blanching, and some were so frightened they began to feel sick.

  ‘Everybody go to the playground!’

  There had been a general stampede outside, but the bravest kids soon crept up to the windows to watch the teacher force his handkerchief into Nicolas’ mouth.

  One of them had raced to the grocery store, and it wasn’t long before Madame Despierre arrived in her eternal grey smock.

  The children outside pestered those at the window.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. They’re leaving him on the floor. He must be dying.’

  There were a lot of guilty consciences that day.

  ‘You think he ate something bad for him?’

  ‘No. Seems his father had the same fits.’

  ‘Are they catching?’

  Fifteen or thirty minutes later – they had lost track of time – Madame Despierre left through the playground, holding the hand of her son, who looked bewildered but otherwise the same as usual.

  He had never had another fit at school. As far as Tony knew, he could almost always sense one coming, sometimes several days in advance, and his mother would keep him home.

  No one ever spoke of this in front of Madame Despierre, and certainly not in her store. Without knowing why, everyone considered the malady something to be ashamed of. Nicolas had not gone to upper school in Triant, nor had he done any military service or even gone to any dances. He had never had a bicycle or a motorbike and he did not drive the Citroën.

  Sometimes he wouldn’t speak for a week. Sullen, suspicious, he would look at people as if they wished him harm. He drank neither liquor nor wine, and his stomach could tolerate only bland food.

  Hadn’t Tony been disturbed by the thought of him that September evening, there with Andrée half-naked by the roadside?

  ‘Weren’t you more or less aware of resenting him, because he was rich?’

  He shrugged. Naturally, before he had learned that Nicolas was ill, before that first fit in school, he had envied him in a childish way: he had dreamed of jars of rainbow-coloured sweets and the biscuits in the glass-topped tins that Nicolas, he imagined, could simply raid at will, whereas he could afford just the cheapest sweets, and only now and then.

  ‘When you learned of his marriage, didn’t you think that he had in some way bought Andrée, or that his mother had bought her for him?’

  Perhaps. He had felt a little contemptuous of ‘the statue’, because he refused to believe that she had married for love.

  After thinking about it, he had felt sorry for her. As a child, he had sometimes gone hungry, too, but he hadn’t
lived in the chateau or felt obliged to keep up a front.

  He had no idea how the marriage had been arranged. From what he knew of the two mothers, each must have imposed her own conditions. They lived almost across from each other: the chateau was to the right of the church, near the presbytery; across the square, on the corner of Rue Neuve, the Despierre grocery store was backed by the town hall and the school.

  Although people still talked about the elaborate white wedding and the banquet at the inn, the newlyweds had not gone on a honeymoon but spent that night, and every night thereafter, in the bedroom over the shop.

  As for Madame Despierre, she had moved into a small cottage next to the garden, about twenty metres from the couple’s home.

  At first the two women worked behind the counter, and the mother continued to do the cooking. An elderly local woman, wearing men’s shoes, came every day to clean.

  The whole town was watching Madame Despierre and Andrée, and soon it was obvious that they spoke to each other only about business matters.

  Later, the mother began eating her meals in the cottage. Finally, after a few months, she ceased to appear in the store or the house, and her son began going through the garden two or three times a day to see her.

  Did this mean that Andrée had won the battle? Had she resolved, when she got married, to gradually supplant her mother-in-law?

  Tony had been with Andrée in the blue room eight times, and he had never thought of asking her about it, preferring not to know, not to think too much about this other life of the naked and wanton woman he knew so well.

  He vaguely sensed a vital truth he could not manage to express. It informed, he felt, what was said on 2 August, that fatal August day he had experienced so simply, never suspecting how much would later be made of it, including fodder for front-page news.

  A reporter from a major Parisian paper would even launch a phrase adopted by all his colleagues: ‘The Frenzied Lovers’.

  ‘Would you like to spend your whole life with me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He had said that, he did not deny it. He was the one who had reported that conversation to the magistrate. But the important thing was his tone of voice. He was just talking, without meaning anything by it. It wasn’t real. In the blue room, nothing was real. Or rather, its reality was of a different nature, incomprehensible anywhere else.