Like his father, the magistrate, he will offer neutrality before launching into dissent. “I’m ready to admit,” he will begin, or “I don’t want to take over the whole conversation …” Sometimes the sentence comes to nothing. Like his father, he lets his eyelids droop, tries to speak lightly and slowly. The magistrate is famous for fading out of a discussion by slow degrees. At one time he was said to be the youngest magistrate ever to fall asleep in court: he would black out when he thought he wasn’t needed and snap to just as the case turned around. Apparently, he never missed a turning. He has described his own mind to Pascaclass="underline" it is like a superlatively smooth car with an invisible driver in control. The driver is the magistrate’s unconscious will.
To Pascal a mind is a door, ajar or shut. His grades are good, but this side of brilliant. He has a natural gift — a precise, perfectly etched memory. How will he use it? He thinks he could as easily become an actor as a lawyer. When he tells his parents so, they seem not to mind. He could turn into an actor-manager, with a private theatre of his own, or the director of one of the great national theatres, commissioning new work, refurbishing the classics, settling questions at issue with a word or two.
The Brouets are tolerant parents, ready for anything. They met for the first time in May of 1968, a few yards away from a barricade of burning cars. She had a stone in her hand; when she saw him looking at her, she put it down. They walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel together, and he told her his plan for reforming the judiciary. He was a bit older, about twenty-six. Answering his question, she said she was from Alsace. He reminded her how the poet Paul Éluard had picked up his future wife in the street, on a rainy evening. She was from Alsace, too, and starving, and in a desperate, muddled, amateurish way pretending to be a prostitute.
Well, this was not quite the same story. In 1968 the future Mme. Brouet was studying to be an analyst of handwriting, with employment to follow — so she had been promised — in the personnel section of a large department store. In the meantime, she was staying with a Protestant Reformed Church pastor and his family in Rue Fustel-de-Coulanges. She had been on her way home to dinner when she stopped to pick up the stone. She had a mother in Alsace, and a little brother, Amedée — “Dédé.”
“Sylvie and I have known both sides of the barricades,” the magistrate likes to say, now. What he means is that they cannot be crowded into a political corner. The stone in the hand has made her a rebel, at least in his recollections. She never looks at a newspaper, because of her reputation for being against absolutely everything. So he says, but perhaps it isn’t exact: she looks at the pages marked “Culture,” to see what is on at the galleries. He reads three morning papers at breakfast and, if he has time, last evening’s Le Monde. Reading, he narrows his eyes. Sometimes he looks as though everything he thinks and believes had been translated into a foreign language and, suddenly, back again.
When Pascal was about nine, his father said, “What do you suppose you will do, one day?”
They were at breakfast. Pascal’s Uncle Amedée was there. Like everyone else, Pascal called him Dédé. Pascal looked across at him and said, “I want to be a bachelor, like Dédé.”
His mother moaned, “Oh, no!” and covered her face. The magistrate waited until she had recovered before speaking. She looked up, smiling, a bit embarrassed. Then he explained, slowly and carefully, that Dédé was too young to be considered a bachelor. He was a student, a youth. “A student, a student,” he repeated, thinking perhaps that if he kept saying it Dédé would study hard.
Dédé had a button of a nose that looked ridiculous on someone so tall, and a mass of curly fair hair. Because of the hair, the magistrate could not take him seriously; his private name for Dédé was “Harpo.”
That period of Pascal’s life, nine rounding to ten, was also the autumn before an important election year. The elections were five months off, but already people argued over dinner and Sunday lunch. One Sunday in October, the table was attacked by wasps, drawn in from the garden by a dish of sliced melon — the last of the season, particularly fragrant and sweet. The French doors to the garden stood open. Sunlight entered and struck through the wine decanters and dissolved in the waxed tabletop in pale red and gold. From his place, Pascal could see the enclosed garden, the apartment blocks behind it, a golden poplar tree, and the wicker chairs where the guests, earlier, had sat with their drinks.
There were two couples: the Turbins, older than Pascal’s parents, and the Chevallier-Crochets, who had not been married long. Mme. Chevallier-Crochet attended an art-history course with Pascal’s mother, on Thursday afternoons. They had never been here before, and were astonished to discover a secret garden in Paris with chairs, grass, a garden rake, a tree. Just as their expression of amazement was starting to run thin and patches of silence appeared, Abelarda, newly come from Cádiz, appeared at the door and called them to lunch. She said, “It’s ready,” though that was not what Mme. Brouet had asked her to say; at least, not that way. The guests got up, without haste. They were probably as hungry as Pascal but didn’t want it to show. Abelarda went on standing, staring at the topmost leaves of the poplar, trying to remember what she ought to have said.
A few minutes later, just as they were starting to eat their melon, wasps came thudding against the table, like pebbles thrown. The adults froze, as though someone had drawn a gun. Pascal knew that sitting still was a good way to be stung. If you waved your napkin, shouted orders, the wasps might fly away. But he was not expected to give instructions; he was here, with adults, to discover how conversation is put together, how to sound interesting without being forward, amusing without seeming familiar. At that moment, Dédé did an unprecedented and courageous thing: he picked up the platter of melon, crawling with wasps, and took it outside, as far as the foot of the tree. And came back to applause: at least, his sister clapped, and young Mme. Chevallier-Crochet cried, “Bravo! Bravo!”
Dédé smiled, but, then, he was always smiling. His sister wished he wouldn’t; the smile gave his brother-in-law another reason for calling him Harpo. Sitting down, he seemed to become entwined with his chair. He was too tall ever to be comfortable. He needed larger chairs, tables that were both higher and wider, so that he would not bump his knees, or put his feet on the shoes of the lady sitting opposite.
Pascal’s father just said, “So, no more melon.” It was something he particularly liked, and there might be none now until next summer. If Dédé had asked his opinion instead of jumping up so impulsively, he might have said, “Just leave it,” and taken a chance on getting stung.
Well; no more for anyone. The guests sat a little straighter, waiting for the next course: beef, veal, or mutton, or the possibility of duck. Pascal’s mother asked him to shut the French doors. She did not expect another wasp invasion, but there might be strays. Mme. Chevallier-Crochet remarked that Pascal was tall for his age, then asked what his age was. “He is almost ten,” said Mme. Brouet, looking at her son with some wonder. “I can hardly believe it. I don’t understand time.”
Mme. Turbin said she did not have to consult a watch to know the exact time. It must be a quarter to two now. If it was, her daughter Brigitte had just landed in Salonika. Whenever her daughter boarded a plane, Mme. Turbin accompanied her in her mind, minute by minute.
“Thessalonika,” M. Turbin explained.
The Chevallier-Crochets had spent their honeymoon in Sicily. If they had it to do over again, they said, they would change their minds and go to Greece.
Mme. Brouet said they would find it very different from Sicily. Her mind was on something else entirely: Abelarda. Probably Abelarda had expected them to linger over a second helping of melon. Perhaps she was sitting in the kitchen with nothing to do, listening to a program of Spanish music on the radio. Mme. Brouet caught a wide-awake glance from her husband, interpreted it correctly, and went out to the kitchen to see.