By a Slow River Read online

  Bréchut had ended his account. The judge consumed that too without difficulty. “Well, well, well,” he said, getting up and straightening his shirtfront. He searched the landscape as though looking for his next thought. His Kronstadt hadn’t budged.

  The morning poured forth its light and its hours. All the men were set out like lead figurines. Berfuche’s nose was red and his eyes weepy. Grosspeil took on the color of the water. Crusty held his notebook, in which he’d already taken some notes, and sometimes as he scratched his sickly cheek the cold marbled it with white streaks. The egg bearer looked waxen. The mayor had left, very happy to return to the warmth of the town hall. He’d done his little duty; the rest didn’t concern him.

  The judge, no longer in a hurry, deeply snuffed the blue air, hopping slightly with his hands behind his back. He was savoring the moment and the place as we waited for Victor Desharet, the doctor from V. He was trying to inscribe it in the deepest recesses of his memory, where there were already quite a few still lifes and murder landscapes. It was his own museum; when he walked through it, I’m sure the thrills must have equaled those of the murderers. There’s such a thin line between hunter and beast.

  The doctor arrives: He and the judge are quite a pair. They’ve known each other since secondary school. They address each other as tu, but in their mouths the word is so curiously formed you might take it for the formal vous. They have a meal together often, at the Rébillon and other inns. It takes hours; they eat everything, but above all pork products and innards: head cheese, creamed tripe, breaded pig’s feet, brains, fried kidneys. Knowing each other for so long and wolfing down the same things, they’ve ended up looking rather alike: same complexion, same lavish folds under the neck, same belly, same eyes that seem to skim the world. They see no mud in the streets, nothing that in other men might provoke pity.

  Desharet pronounces the corpse a textbook case. You can see he’s worried about getting his gloves wet. And yet he too had known the little girl quite well. He touches the lips, raises the eyelids, exposes Morning Glory’s neck, and there everyone catches a first sight of the purple blotches ringing it like a garland. “Strangulation!” he declares.

  The conclusion didn’t require a degree from the Polytechnique; all the same, on this frosty morning next to the small body, when the word was said we winced as if someone had slapped us.

  “Well, well, well.” The judge seconds the observation, trying to contain his satisfaction at having his suspicion confirmed: a real case to sink his teeth into, a child murder to boot—a little girl, even. As he turns on his heel, his moustache fringed with yolk, he says with coquettish affectation, “And this door, where does it go?”

  Everybody looks at it as though it has just appeared, like a vision of the Virgin Mary: a little door ajar on the frozen trampled grass, an opening in a wide enclosure of high walls; behind these walls a park, a stately park with stately trees; and behind all these trees that interweave their naked branches, the outline of an imposing residence, a manor house, a great complex edifice.

  Bréchut’s the one who answers, twisting his hands in the cold. “It’s the park of the château.”

  “The château,” the judge repeats, as though mocking him.

  “Well, yes. Mr. Prosecutor’s château.”

  “How about that? So that’s the place . . . ,” the judge said, more for himself than for us, who at that point may as well have been a scattering of chickenshit. He seemed rejuvenated to hear his rival invoked amid whiffs of a violent death—a powerful man like himself, whom he hated. Why, in fact, no one quite knew; but I was content to believe it simply the judge’s nature.

  He perked up, arranging his heft on that exotic butt rest, which he’d placed right across from the little door, at which he stared as if awaiting the start of a puppet show. He sat there a long time, while the rest of us tried to keep moving, stamping our feet and puffing into our gloves, until young Bréchut couldn’t feel his nose and Crusty’s cheek shaded over into grayish purple.

  III

  You have to admit that even for a château it’s impressive. With its brick walls and slate roofs, it’s the jewel of the ritzy part of town. Oh, yes, we do have one, as well as a hospital (that was always full in those years of worldwide slaughter); two schools, one for girls and one for boys; and the enormous factory, with its round stacks that pierce the sky, assailing it with plumes of smoke and clouds of soot, summer and winter, day and night. Since it was founded at the end of the 1880s, the factory has been the mainstay of the whole region. Few are the men who don’t work there. Almost all of them have left their vineyards and fields for factory work. And ever since, brush and brambles have raced along the great hillsides, devouring the orchards, the vine stocks, and the furrows of good earth.

  Our town isn’t very big. It’s not V, far from it. All the same, you could get lost here. By that I mean it contains enough shady nooks and belvederes that a soul can always find a place to nurse his melancholy moods. To the factory we owe the hospital, the schools, and the small library—which won’t accept just any old book.

  The factory owner doesn’t have a name or a face; it’s a group or, as the show-offs like to say, a consortium. Rows of houses have grown up in what was formerly a field of grain. Whole little streets of them, built one exactly like the next. Housing rented for a pretty penny or for nothing—in exchange for silence, obedience, public order—to workers who’d never hoped for so much and who found it pretty funny to be pissing in a toilet instead of through a black hole punched in a fir plank. The ancient farms, the few that still resist, have clustered up against one another, tightly embracing the church as though by reflex—a hug of old walls and low windows—and exhaling from the cracked-open doors of their barns the sour smells of stables and curdled milk.

  The owners even dug us two canals, one large and one small. The big one is for the barges that bring in coal and limestone and carry off the soda ash. The little one feeds the big one whenever it happens to need water. The construction went on for ten years or more. Gentlemen in ties went around everywhere, their pockets full of cash, and bought up land hand over fist. In those days you could avoid being sober for a month, they were buying so many rounds of drinks. Then one day you didn’t see them anymore. They’d packed up and left. The town belonged to them. Everybody dried out. After that you had to work—for them.

  Getting back to the château, I’d honestly have to say it’s the most imposing residence in town. Old Destinat—I mean the father—had built it just after the disaster of Sedan. And he hadn’t cut corners. In our region, if you don’t talk much, you may like to impress by other means. The prosecutor always lived there. He was born there, and there he would die.

  The château is immense, beyond a human scale. Even more so since the family has never been a big one. Old Destinat, as soon as he had a son, halted production. His cup had overflowed— at least officially. The policy didn’t prevent him from ballooning local bellies with some very handsome bastards, to whom he would give a gold coin and, on the day they reached twenty-one, a beautiful letter of reference—as well as a symbolic kick in the ass encouraging them to go far, far away and verify that the earth was truly round. Around here that’s called generosity, but not everyone behaves that way.

  The prosecutor was the last of the Destinats. There won’t be any others. Not that he wasn’t married, but his wife died too soon, six months after their wedding, at which all the fame and fortune the region could muster had conspired to gather. The young lady was a de Vincey. Her ancestors had fought at Crécy. (Everybody else’s too, no doubt, but in most cases nobody knows and nobody cares.)

  I’ve seen a portrait of her, done just after her marriage, that hung in the entry hall of the château. The painter had come from Paris; he somehow captured her impending end in his depiction of her face. It was striking, the pallor of a woman soon to be dead, the resignation in her features. Her first name was Clélis, not common; it’s very prettily engraved on the pi
nk marble of her tomb.

  An entire regiment could set up camp in the park of the château without feeling cramped. It’s edged by water. At the far end there’s a little communal path that serves as a shortcut between the town square and the port of embarkation; then comes the little canal of which I’ve spoken, over which the old man had a Japanese bridge built and daubed with paint. People call it the Blood Sausage, since it’s the color of cooked blood. On the far bank you can see the big windows of a high building, the factory lab, where the engineers figure out how to make more money for their bosses. A narrow and sinuous creek meanders along the eastern side of the park; it’s called the Guérlante—Barely Slow—a name that aptly expresses its lackadaisical flow, all whirlpools and water lilies. Here water permeates everything. The grounds of the château are like a huge soggy cloth; the grasses drip incessantly: It’s a place to fall ill.

  That’s what happened to Clélis Destinat, and in just three weeks it was over, from the doctor’s first visit to Ostrane’s last shovelful of earth. He’s the sexton and gravedigger, and he always pours that one out very slowly. “Why that one and not the others?” I asked him one day. “Because that one,” he said, looking at me with his eyes like dark wells, “that one has to stick in people’s memories.” Ostrane is a bit of a talker; he likes to say things for effect. He missed his calling. I could easily imagine him on the stage.

  Old Destinat rose straight out of the dirt, but in fifty years he’d succeeded very well in cleaning himself off, thanks to many banknotes and sacks of gold. He had come up in the world. He employed six hundred people, owned five tenant farms, eight hundred hectares of forest—all of it oak—pasturelands without end, ten residential buildings in V, and a fine mattress of stocks—and no fly-by-nights, no Panama Canals!—on which ten men could have comfortably slept without elbowing one another.

  He received and was received everywhere. Equally well at the bishop’s and at the prefect’s. He had become somebody.

  I haven’t spoken of Destinat’s mother; she was something else again. She came from the best society—that of the land, but not from those who work it, rather those who have always owned it. As a dowry she had brought her enterprising husband more than half of what he would own and some good manners besides. Then she withdrew into books and needlework. She had the right to choose a first name for her son: it was Ange—Angel. The old man added Pierre; he found that Ange lacked gumption and manliness. After he was born she didn’t much see her son anymore. From the English nannies of his early years to the Jesuit boarding school, time passed quicker than the bat of an eyelash. The mother had surrendered a whiner with pink skin and swollen eyes; one day she found before her a rather stiff young man, on whose chin three hairs grew between two pimples, and who like a true little gentleman—steeped in Latin, Greek, self-importance, and Casanova dreams—looked down his nose at her.

  She died as she had lived, in the background. Few took note. The son was in Paris studying law. He came back for the burial even more of a young prig, now polished by the capital and its conversations, his walking stick of pale wood, his collar spotless and his lip surmounted by a thin moustache oiled à la Jaubert, the latest style! The old man ordered a gorgeous coffin from the cabinetmaker, who for the only time in his life got to work with rose-wood and mahogany, before screwing on handles of real gold. A vault was built on which a bronze figure reaches toward the sky while another, kneeling, weeps in silence; it doesn’t mean all that much, but it has quite a lovely effect.

  After the period of mourning the old man hardly changed his habits, except for ordering from the tailor three suits made of black cloth, along with some crêpe armbands.

  The day after the ceremony, the son returned to Paris. He would stay there for many years more.

  Then one day he reappeared, now quite solemn, a prosecutor. He was no longer the young asshole who’d thrown three roses onto his mother’s casket with a self-satisfied pout before dashing off, dry-eyed, for fear of missing his train. It seemed that something had broken him from inside, bowed him down a bit. But we never knew what.

  Later, being widowed broke him for good. It distanced him too: from the world, from us, no doubt from himself. I think he loved her, his young hothouse flower.

  Old Destinat followed his wife after eight years, felled by a stroke on a footpath on his way to scold one of his tenant farmers, maybe even to throw him out. They found him with his mouth open and his nose smashed in the dense mud of early April. We owe this seasonal rite to the rains that lash the sky and mix the earth into a sticky paste. In the end he’d gone back to his origins; he’d come full circle. His money hadn’t done that much for him. He’d died like a farmhand.

  And now the son was truly alone. Alone in the great house.

  Though he’d kept the habit of looking down his nose at the world, he made do with little. After his youth as a popinjay who wore fancy clothes and a mischievous smirk, there was nothing left but an aging man. His work consumed him entirely. In the father’s time the château had employed six gardeners, a caretaker, a cook, three footmen, four chambermaids, and a chauffeur. This entire tribe, ruled with an iron rod, huddled in narrow common rooms and bedrooms under the eaves, where in winter the water froze in the jugs.

  The prosecutor thanked one and all. He wasn’t tight-fisted. He gave a lovely letter and a handsome sum to each of them but kept only the cook, Barbe, who through force of circumstance became a chambermaid as well, and her husband, called Solemn because nobody had ever seen him smile—not even his wife, who for her part always wore a joyous puckered face. Solemn busied himself as best he could with the upkeep of the estate, in addition to all manner of minor tasks. The couple went out rarely. You could hardly hear them—the prosecutor either, in fact. The house seemed to be asleep. The roof of a turret leaked. A big wisteria, allowed to spread, smothered several shutters with its branches. Some quoins burst under the frost. The château aged just as human beings do.

  Destinat never received anyone at home. He had turned his back on everything. Every Sunday he went to mass. He had his pew, with the initials of the family carved into the oaken plank. He never missed a service. The priest gazed at him fondly during sermons as though he were a cardinal or other manner of accomplice. And then at the end of mass, once the flock with caps and embroidered shawls had left his lair, the priest escorted him outside to the square. Below the pealing bells, as Destinat pulled on his kid gloves—his hands were delicate like a lady’s, with fingers as slender as cigarette holders—they spoke of trivial things, but in the tones of those who know, one owing to the service of souls, the other to sizing them up. The ballet was performed. Then Destinat and the priest parted, and it was up to each man to comprehend his solitude and furnish it a gloss.

  One day, one of the factory directors came to request the honor of being received at the château: protocol, exchange of cards, bowing and scraping, hat doffed, and, at last, admission. This director was a fat jolly Belgian, with curly red sideburns and stubby legs; he was dressed like a gentleman from a novel, in a short jacket and checkered trousers, with braid trim and polished jodhpur boots. In short: Barbe arrives with a large tray and all the paraphernalia for tea. She serves them. She disappears. The director chatters on. Destinat hardly speaks, scarcely drinks, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t laugh, listens politely. The other one beats around the bush, talks about billiards for ten long minutes, then partridge-hunting, bridge, Havana cigars, and finally French gastronomy. This makes three quarters of an hour already that he’s been there. He’s getting ready to broach the weather, but Destinat suddenly glances at his watch, sidelong yet lingering, to grant his guest the leisure of observing him.

  The director understands, coughs, sets his cup down, coughs again, picks it up, and finally tests the water: He has a favor to ask but is not sure if he should dare; he hesitates; in fact, he fears being troublesome, even rude. All the same he ends up taking the plunge: The château is big, very big, and there are the outbuildings,
particularly that little house in the park, uninhabited but charming, off on its own. The director’s problem is that the factory is doing well—too well—and consequently needs more and more personnel: above all, engineers, managers. But there’s nowhere to accommodate these managers, because, you understand, we can’t put them in the settlements, in the workers’ houses; no, can’t make them rub elbows with people who sometimes sleep four to a bed, who drink plonk, who swear every tenth word, who breed like animals, never! And so an idea has occurred to the director, just an idea. If the prosecutor would agree—but nothing obliges him to, of course; everyone is master of his own home—but after all, if he would agree to rent the little house in the park, the factory and the director would be so grateful to him, they would obviously pay a premium, and they wouldn’t place just anyone there, only top-notch people, polite, discreet, quiet, assistant managers if not managers, and without children—he the director gives his word—as he sweats profusely in his false collar and jodhpur boots. He stops talking and waits; he doesn’t even dare to go on looking at Destinat, who has risen to contemplate the park and the fog that wraps around itself.

  There’s a silence that won’t break. The director is already regretting his initiative when, abruptly, Destinat turns around and tells him all right. Just like that. With a blank voice. The other man can’t get over it. He bows, stammers, mumbles, thanks him with polite flourishes, retreats walking backward, then leaves before his host changes his mind.

  Why did the prosecutor agree? Perhaps simply so the director would be on his way that day, leaving Destinat to his silence once again. Or perhaps he’d taken pleasure in the fact that someone had asked him for something, for once in his life—something other than a sentence of death or mercy.

  IV

  It was in 1897 or 1898—thereabouts. A long time ago. The factory paid for the renovation of the little house in the park, nibbled on by humidity like the hold of an old ship. Up till now whatever was unneeded had been stored there, a hodgepodge of this and that: dislodged armoires and rat traps, rusty scythes thin as crescent moons, stones, slates, a tilbury-style carriage, broken toys, skeins of twine, garden tools, tattered clothes. Also a bunch of stags’ antlers and wild boars’ heads, all quite dead and stuffed. The old man had been a fanatical hunter; the son, who also made heads roll, detested seeing them and so had had these trophies tossed there in a heap. Spiders had woven many a web over them, giving the whole collection an antique patina, redolent of sarcophagi and Egyptian mysteries. To spruce the place up after the exterior was redone, a decorator came specially from Brussels.