The Catalans. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ about with a calking-iron and a pot of paint, preparing for the spring: somebody had brought them bad luck, and it was certainly Francisco. Not only was he unhandy and awkward, the sort of person who smelt of bad luck, but once he had hurried on board, hot from the firemen’s ball, still prinked out in collar and tie, and wearing shoes. In a gloomy silence they had thrown them into the sea: but what was that feeble act against such an omen? How much could a pair of shoes propitiate? Very little: and bad was all their fishing, very bad.

      The autumns, then, took Francisco away; but they did not take him far, only along the coast to Port-Vendres one year, and to Collioure another. There he made friends with a Swedish painter and came home with a box of colors and a parcel of brushes, filled with enthusiasm for the new way of painting. He had never given up drawing or painting little water colors since he left school, and now that he showed himself in Saint-Féliu with easel and canvas in the grand manner the people took it very calmly. They did not think much of his new way of painting; they had never thought much of his former manner – painstaking representation – for he had never had the trick of taking likenesses, which alone they admired; but they tolerated him. There are countries where it would not be permissible for a young fisherman to take up his stand and paint a street in public; the youths of his own age would not allow it for a moment, the little boys would stone him and even the dogs would be outraged; but France is not one of them. Saint-Féliu was quite prepared to watch Francisco paint, so long as he did not give himself airs.

      What little stir it did create tended to put Francisco into a slightly romantic rather than a ridiculous position, and this vexed Dominique, vexed and worried her. But if she had been able to hear the conversation of the two young people in the fragrant dusk of the orange grove beyond the tunnel she would have worried less. The conversation now took the form of a lecture upon aesthetics, very earnest, and very long: listening, Dominique would have heard nothing but Francisco’s voice going on and on, grave and expositive, sometimes deriding and sometimes indignant, but never pausing, except for the moments when Madeleine said yes. Dominique would have heard some strange things indeed, that a picture should never tell a story, that it need not even show a known form; that the cave men painted finer things than Ingres, and that it was very wicked to be an academic. She would have heard the words impressionist, primitive, futurist, expressionist, and abstract recurring again and again; and again and again the litany of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, Maillol, Dufy, and Vlaminck. She would have heard all that and much more, if she had had the patience; but she would have heard nothing to cause her alarm. Dominique need not have worried, but she did, and the more she did so, the more eagerly she looked forward to Francisco’s calling-up: all safety seemed to lie in that blessed event. In her own short bloom she had been a flighty piece, widely affectionate, and she was sure that it would be the same with Madeleine: a few months’ absence and the young man would be lost.

      But still the years passed slowly, and still he did not go. She did have one respite, for Carmen died, and at the tail of her noisy grief the recollection came to her that now Madeleine was to be secluded and dressed in black. This dried her tears, and the event that she had sincerely mourned seemed now a positive relief.

      Yet even in Saint-Féliu mourning for a cousin cannot last for ever: it can take up a great deal of energy, black cloth, and time, but it has an end, and the day came when Dominique and her two sisters sat working out the date again, the time of the young man’s removal, reckoning up the months with an angry impatience.

      As it came nearer Dominique looked forward to it with pleasure and relief: but when it came she was not in Saint-Féliu, nor was Madeleine, nor was her husband, nor any one of her uncounted relatives and friends and customers. Grass, knee-high, was growing against her shuttered door, and between the cobbles of the street grass and long-drawn weeds strained up toward the narrow slit of sky: the fishing boats, dragged up to the Place and chained there, lay sunk in a green haze of grass, and in the grass the trodden lanes showed the track of the German sentry’s round.

      The inhabitants of Saint-Féliu were dispersed about the interior, and the Fajals were far inland, right under the mountains of Andorra, where some remote cousins had a farm. Francisco, with many others, was in Germany, working at forced labor in a factory; a great many more were in camps as prisoners of war; a few were in North Africa, having escaped through Spain; and six from Saint-Féliu were dead, killed in the early fighting.

      It was a strange, slow nightmare, all that period, impossible to relate to real life. That only began again with the return to Saint-Féliu, with the opening of the long-shut familiar doors, with the re-creation of something like the known old life, going to the same pump with the same crazy, shrieking handle, going up the same number of stairs to bed, waking in the dark to hear the same cry of the fishermen waking the laggards, ‘Xica-té, es l’alba.’

      Real life appeared to begin again as soon as the Germans had gone, but in fact a long interval of excess came between that time and the new normality – excess of happiness, excess of relief, excess in eating. It would be wrong to add excess in welcoming the return of the men from captivity; excess is not the word at all, but rather unbounded rejoicing and a tendency in the free and overflowing generosity of that time to attribute equal worth to all who returned from that gray and brutish land. Thus Francisco and the others who had gone with him were received with almost as much joy as the soldiers whose glory was reflected on them. It was not that they did not deserve a hearty welcome from their friends, but these young men who had been taken for forced labor had done nothing heroic: they had not volunteered to go, it is true, but they had let themselves be seized, while others had taken to the mountains rather than work for the enemy, and some had gone over the seas to fight again. At the time Madeleine had wondered; even in the middle of her sorrow and wretchedness, she had wondered that Francisco had been taken: they had certainly swooped down unexpectedly; but still she had wondered.

      But that was all forgotten now in this great rush of feeling. There was no room in the whole town for anything but joyful ebullience, an almost frantic merriment; and when Francisco burst through the shop in the evening a few days after his return, plunged into the back room where all the Fajals were sitting, and told them that he was going to marry Madeleine at once, they made little more than a general, formal objection.

      There was a scene, of course. Nothing of that sort could possibly have passed without a scene of kinds: there was a fair amount of screaming, a very great deal of shouting all together, and some tears. But the elders did not really have their hearts in it, the strong-minded sister Mimi was away, and in the end tears were dried all round, and Francisco, late though it was, went off to see the mayor.

      In the interval between this emotional evening and the marriage Dominique’s objections were held in abeyance to a fair degree. She uttered some gloomy prophecies, but at the same time helped to prepare the clothes for the occasion with a lively pleasure. She defended the wedding against Mimi’s protests with so many arguments that she nearly convinced herself, and she dismissed Mme. Roig’s disapproval with a short and dry ‘If she does not like it, let her remain in her own house: that is all I say; let her remain in her own house.’

      She could not but admit that she had a handsome prospective son-in-law: he was well over six feet tall now, loose-limbed and gangling still with the contradictory grace of youth; his hair curled in black waves all over his head as it had done when he was a boy, but now there was an appearance of open, frank virility in his lean face. He had not come back from Germany so thin as some, nor nearly, but he was lean, and he had a continual appreciative appetite. It had been a little piping boy that Dominique had fed with caramels not so many years before, but now his big, deep barrel of a chest was filled with a thundering baritone, and when he sang the glasses hummed on the table. And yet, for all the virility in his face and for all the depth of his voice one would not have said that there was anything very manly there – the impression was certainly not that overwhelming masculine, beer-and-skittles, hairy impression that some men give. There was an admixture of sweetness, gentleness, or docility, something very unlike the desperate male carapace of toughness that the young men of Saint-Féliu put on with their СКАЧАТЬ