The old woman was different. She worried about other things. Not about her husband, not about her son, but about the fortune. She was worried about every detail of it. She regarded the family, the factory, the palatial home, the entire miraculous edifice of it, as a kind of rare antique of which there could only be this one unique example. It was like a Chinese jar to her, one that was worth — how should I know? — millions, perhaps. Once broken, it could never be replaced. She watched over everything, over their whole lives … who they were and how they lived. It was her masterpiece, so she worried about it. I sometimes think this worry of hers wasn’t entirely groundless — something did break there, and it won’t be replaced.
What’s that? Are you asking me if she was mad? Well, of course, they were all mad, the lot of them. Only the old man was not mad. And we, the rest of us who lived in the house, the staff — I almost said “the nurses”—were slowly infected by their lunacy. You know, the way the nursing staff in the madhouse, the assistant medics, the head doctor, the director, all are slowly infected by the refined, invisible, concentrated poison of madness. It’s what spreads and germinates in the wards where the lunatics are kept … you can’t detect it under a microscope, but it remains infectious. Anyone healthy who finds himself surrounded by mad people slowly goes as mad as they are. We ourselves were far from normal, we who served, fed, and cleaned them. The manservant, the cook, the chauffeur, and myself: we were the inner circle, the first to catch the madness bug. We aped their manners, partly to mock them, but at the same time we took them seriously and fell under their spell. We tried to live, to dress, to behave like them. We too made a show of offering the food round at the table and talked pretty, making fancy gestures, the way we saw them doing in the grand dining room. When we broke a plate we would say the kind of things they said, like “It’s my nerves. I have a terrible migraine!” My poor mother gave birth to six children in a ditch, but I never once heard her complain of a terrible migraine. That’s probably because she had never heard of migraine, and as far as she knew it might be some kind of food or drink. But I was soon suffering from migraine myself, simply because I was quick at picking things up. Whenever I broke a dish in the kitchen I put my hand on my brow, put on a pained expression, and complained to Cook, “Wind’s in the south, I feel a migraine coming on.” And we didn’t grin at each other, Cook and I; we didn’t stand there splitting our sides laughing, because by now we had both permitted ourselves the luxury of migraines. I was always a quick learner. It wasn’t simply that my hands grew pale, like theirs: I was growing pale within. When my mother saw me one day — after three years in service — she burst into tears. Not tears of joy. She wept out of fear. It was as if I’d grown an extra nose.
They were all barking mad, but mad in a way that meant they could talk to each other politely during the day, to fulfill their official obligations in the time allowed, to smile charmingly and do everything that was required of them according to the best fashion. At the same time I felt they might just as easily, at any moment, say something rude or stab the doctor in the chest with the nearest pair of scissors.
Do you know what betrayed the fact that they were mad? I think it might have been their stiffness. The way they moved, their very language, was stiff. There was no sign of flexibility, softness, nothing natural or healthy in their movement. They laughed and smiled the way actors do after much practice: they adjusted their smiles to fit the occasion. They spoke quietly, particularly when they were most furious. Sometimes they spoke so quietly they hardly moved their mouths, merely whispered. I never once heard a voice raised; never once witnessed an argument in that house. The old man grumbled and rumbled sometimes, but he was infected too, because straight after he would practically bite his own tongue off. He hated any spontaneous fit of cursing or rage.
They performed to each other all the time, even when simply sitting, as if they were trapeze artists in a circus, hanging off the bar, acknowledging applause.
At dinner they’d make such a show of offering each other food you’d think they were guests in their own house. “Here you are, my dear,” “Do have a taste of this, darling” … so it went on. It took some time to get used to it, but eventually I did.
The knocking. That was another thing to get used to. You know, they never stepped into each other’s rooms without first knocking. They all lived under the one roof, but they lived their lives a long way from each other: it was as if there were great tracts of land between them with invisible borders that they had to cross to get from one bedroom to another … The old woman slept on the ground floor. The old man on the first. The young gentleman, my husband-to-be, slept on the second under the mansard. They even had a special set of stairs built for him so that he might have privacy in his own domain — just as he had his own car and, later, his own servant. They took enormous pains not to disturb each other. That was one of the reasons I first thought they were mad. But when we copied their manners in the kitchen, it was by no means mockery. There was a moment, in the first year or two, when I seemed to wake from the trance and suddenly started to laugh. But when I saw how cross the older servants were — the manservant and the cook, I mean — I regretted it. I had broken some sacred rule and ridiculed all that was most holy. I quickly snapped to and felt ashamed of myself. I understood that there was nothing here to be laughed at. Madness is never a thing to be laughed at.
But it was more than madness pure and simple. It took me some time to realize what it was, what it was they were so desperately trying to preserve; what this never-ending round of frantic cleaning, these hospital rules, and all these manners, with their “if you please” and “May I offer you this or that” was about. It wasn’t their money they were protecting, or not simply their money. Because, when it came to money, they were — once again — different from normal people, people not born into money. It wasn’t money but something else they were protecting: it was that they were determined to guard, not just the money. It took me some time to cotton on. I might never have if I hadn’t met the man whose photograph you were looking at just now. Yes, the one that looked like an artist. He explained it to me.
What did he say? Well, one day he told me that the lives of people like that were dedicated not to preserving, but to resisting. That’s all he said. I see you don’t understand. But I do — now.
Perhaps if I tell you the whole story, you might understand it too. But I won’t mind if you fall asleep in the meantime.
I was just saying that everything in the house smelled of hospitals, the hospital where they treated me for rabies, the one that was the greatest, most marvelous experience of my childhood. What can I say about the cleanliness there? It was unnaturally clean. I mean, all that wax we rubbed into everything — the floorboards, the furniture, the parquet — and then the various creams and liquids we applied to windows, to carpets, to the silver and the copper, the stuff we cleaned and polished until it shone … it was all unnatural. Whoever stepped into the house, and especially someone coming from a place like mine, immediately started sniffing the air and choking in the artificial atmosphere. The hospital was drowning in the smell of carbolic and disinfectant: here it was detergents, the creams and liquids. And then there were the cigars, the foreign cigars, the lingering smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, the expensive liqueurs, the perfumes and scents worn by the guests. All these had long soaked into the furniture, the bed linen, and the curtains; they had eaten and wormed their way into everything.