Название: The Catalans
Автор: Patrick O’Brian
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007466474
isbn:
It was a hint, no more: nothing could be more inaccurate than to show him as a softy, or as anything like a softy, a young man who could be made game of with impunity by his fellows. He did not look like that at all. In any country he would have been reckoned a tall man, and here he towered over the little dark Catalans: and there was enough of his father – the old Camairerrou with a proved and shocking reputation – in his face to make it clear that you could not play with him.
As a son-in-law he had improved in his connections, by no effort of his own. Camairerrou had distinguished himself during the Occupation by drowning one of the occupying German soldiers and by taking to the mountains when the evacuation of Saint-Féliu was ordered: there, continuing his trade of smuggling over the border, he had fallen in with an organization that passed refugees down into Spain, and knowing every path and cave in that wild neighborhood, knowing them even in the dark, he had been able to pass over several Allied airmen, secret agents, and Frenchmen bound for Algiers. Whenever it had been possible he had exacted a thumping great fee for his services, but when it had been clear that no money was to be had he had taken the men over for nothing. This, and the fact that when he had been paid he had invariably performed his bargain, redounded very much to his credit after the Liberation: so did the knowledge that somewhere in his house he had all the fees surrendered by his paying customers. He was still a lamentable father-in-law for Madeleine, but no longer an unmitigated disaster.
So they were married. They were married cheerfully, but with a background of gloomy muttering. They were married in the mairie with the tricolor, and in the temple with orange blossom, legally and sacramentally, and they were married in the Café de Gênes with dried sausage and anchovies, cakes and sweet wine, popularly.
Throughout the day, with the increasing effect of the wine and jollity, the forebodings of the elders had died down; but in the morning, with the wine quite gone and a general deflated sense of anticlimax abroad, they began again. They were ill-timed forebodings, intrusive and sometimes ill-natured; they were founded less on logic than on emotion, but they soon began to prove themselves to be true.
In the circumstances it would have been strange if they had not been true. The young couple lived in the upper part of a house belonging to the Fajals at the back of the town: it was a dank, narrow house stuffed into an interior angle of the fortifications, and the sun could not reach it at any time. The lower part of the house was a store, and the upper part had been arranged with the idea of letting it to summer visitors: but the scheme had been quite unsuccessful and for years the stiff, bright-yellow varnished wood furniture had stood rigidly on the shining linoleum, cold even in the flood of August. It was an unhappy arrangement: in the first generous flush the intention had been to give it unconditionally to Madeleine and Francisco as a home; but very soon the flush receded and as there had been no exact terms – nothing specified on either side – the elders began to withdraw the implied gift, until by the end of the year the place was little more than a set of furnished rooms where the young people were allowed to live.
It had begun simply enough: the women of the family had been naturally fascinated at running in and out of ‘Madeleine’s apartment’ as it was called at first, and naturally they came without invitation. They came to help her clean, sweep, and cook: her mother (an excellent cook) had taught her none of these things, but they were all very much surprised that she did not know how to do them by intuition. And they came, with the liveliest curiosity, to stare: there was little enough to see or know, but what little there was they wanted to see and know and talk about.
Then, when the disapproval of Francisco began to revive, they began to come into the house even more as by right; and her father, who surprised Madeleine by showing a greater jealousy of Francisco than the others, silently rearranged the furniture to his liking – replaced it in the positions it had occupied before the marriage.
It was a fairly slow process, this dispossession: it went on little by little, but it was nearly complete in twelve months. It was hardly a conscious process on either side; but on the side of the elders it was as efficient and unhesitating as if it had been carefully planned and concerted: more efficient.
However, the novelty, the romantic glow, the conventional happiness carried Francisco and Madeleine through the first year. It was the second that brought so much conscious unhappiness. During the first year the sea, unfished for so long, yielded such quantities of fish that the oldest man had never seen the like, and the market, starved of fish for so long, was insatiable. There was plenty of money in Saint-Féliu, summer and winter, and even the Amphitrite earned enough to install an engine and to buy a lamparo, a little boat with a pair of huge lights to attract the fish by night, in the Spanish fashion.
But the next year was different. The summer was cold and unnatural and the anchovies stayed away from the coast altogether; even the sardines were very scarce, and somebody – the men of La Nouvelle, it was said – began dynamiting them. Soon everybody was doing it, scooping up the shattered little fish from the surface and hurrying furtively back to port: it could not last; not only did the preventive officers come, but the fish went clean away, and not all the motors or lamparos in Saint-Féliu would bring them back.
Madeleine and Francisco had, very early in their marriage, fallen into the habit of going to the family shop for meals. It had begun with Madeleine’s complete incapacity – she really could not boil an egg at first – and had continued because it was so much easier and because Dominique loved to have a talking crowd around the table. In the first year it had been convenient; it had not been necessary. Now it was essential, and now Francisco and Madeleine arrived with a hang-dog air, and now any quip or jibe about their extravagance in the first year’s prosperity went home and rankled. The quips and jibes, the ‘remarks passed’ were rarely meant to be as unkind as they sounded sometimes, but it was remarkable how accurately those rather stupid women and that dull, heavy-witted man managed to say just the thing that would hurt most afterward, upon reflection.
They had been a little extravagant, it is true: Madeleine had bought clothes; they had often gone to Perpignan for the day, and still more often to Collioure, where Francisco’s clever friends were to be found on the beach or in the cafés; he had bought canvases, colors, and a better easel. But it had seemed at the time that no one thing was more than a very little treat; there had been no single example of unjustifiable expense, and after all, as they had said to one another, a few hundred francs more or less would not make a great difference by the end of the year.
It was not an agreeable situation, and it was less so for Francisco than it might have been for another, for his bad conscience made him vulnerable. He had not found casual work at the end of the fishing: he had not found it for the plain reason that he had not wanted to find it. He said to the family that it was not to be found (with a regretful shake of his head) and he had said to Madeleine that it was not to be found (with a grin of relief) and that he would have to pass the winter at home. They agreed that out of the evil came the blessing that he would have an uninterrupted stretch of time for his painting. He did: but it costs money to paint, and although the family could always be relied upon for help in kind, they would never part with cash.
Now Madeleine was glad that she had learned to type: she had never ceased seeing Mme. Roig in spite of the widow’s disapproval of her marriage, and now she went and asked for her good offices with her nephew, Maître Roig, the lawyer, who sent most of his typing to a bureau in Perpignan. She, who had disliked the marriage too much to countenance it with a present, yet felt too much engaged by her use of Madeleine and by her interior promise, as well as by her affection for her, to feel at all easy, was very happy to do what Madeleine asked: she went at once, without stopping to put on her hat, and in ten minutes the thing was done. It proved an invaluable source of supply: it not only bought Francisco’s materials and many of their meals, but it enabled him to spend a good part of his time with his friends at Collioure.
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