She liked Taneran in this way, just as one becomes attached to certain inanimate objects because they remind one of certain things and prevent the past from entirely disappearing. The terror she used to feel in the hallways of Uderan was reflected in Taneran’s bleary, lost eyes, when she thought back on it. Her first dislike of someone went back to those evenings; it had the smell of lime-blossom tea blended with the sound of his breathing. The words that she alone knew him to say—“What are they up to in the kitchen? Tell them they disgust me”—contained a rare poison: the cowardliness of a man and his misery.
When by chance Jacques came home earlier than usual, before the three accomplices had gone to bed, he was indignant. Jacques Grant had no idea, in fact, that his mother chatted in the evening with her husband and daughter. Because he came home earlier since the death of his wife, he became exasperated, and even more so because he suspected they spoke more freely in that small circle than with him.
He cracked open the door into the sitting room, wearing a bitter smile. Nevertheless, he said calmly to Taneran, “So, you’re there, are you?” Maud didn’t move. A newspaper his stepson carelessly threw in landed at Taneran’s feet. “Here, if you want it, it’s the latest copy of Paris-Soir; it’ll keep you busy if you’re bored.”
The door closed again. In the next room, you could hear someone whistling a popular tune on key. Standing up, Taneran looked at the newspaper at his feet. Before going out, he doled out an idiocy to his wife, taking advantage of the fact that she couldn’t answer him back, for fear of being heard by her son. “My dear, I feel sorry for you. The impropriety of your son toward me leaves me indifferent, but for you it’s a beginning; you have created your own misfortune, and you’re still doing it.”
Then he went into his room, haughtily and miserably. Maud, in turn, snuck into her bedroom without saying a word. She undressed in the dark, quickly and without making a sound, so that no one would recall her forgotten existence, as insignificant as a shipwreck in the middle of the sea. A kind of blind rage threw her onto the small bed, which she grabbed with both arms. But it soon passed, melting like the fear that she felt at Uderan, a fear that seemed inconceivable to her with the coming of the new day.
PART II
CHAPTER 4
THE UDERAN DOMAIN WAS LOCATED IN SOUTHWEST LOT, IN the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy, on the edge of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne.[1]
The two villages of Semoic and The Pardal shared administrative and religious functions; they were both wine-growing and fruit-producing villages, one perched in the pine forests of the plateau, the other down by the water, on the Dior River. Although the domain was under the jurisdiction of the town of Semoic, at the Feast of Corpus Christi it was the priest from The Pardal who came to bless it.
Uderan occupied one of the best-situated slopes of this rugged region, and one of the highest, after the slope of Ostel. The castle of Ostel dated back to the thirteenth century. It dominated a region stretching for fifty kilometers in all directions and remained one of the most powerful seigneuries of Upper Quercy.
Few city dwellers traveled that far for their holidays, but there were some who owned family estates in the region. It was because of the low cost of land that Taneran had been able to move there.
The vines, cultivated for centuries in this region, no longer possessed their former reputation, except in the eyes of those who proudly considered their wines to be better than all those, nonetheless famous, of neighboring regions.
The Tanerans were not able to lodge in their home, which had been abandoned for ten years and had become uninhabitable. The ceilings leaked and grass grew in between the tiles in the bedrooms. Only the wine cellar and the plum dehydrator were in good shape, being for the common use of the farmers leasing the land and the owners.
The positive observations Mrs. Taneran made were limited to the fact that the grounds themselves had not suffered too much from abandonment. The dwelling, which had had most of its furniture carried off to Paris, seemed practically beyond use.
The day of their arrival was gloomy. They had to find temporary lodging. Thus, they did not anticipate what happened next: the Tanerans were obliged to board at the Pecresse home.
The Pecresses were the neighbors closest to Uderan. Their great-grandparents had been tenant farmers on the estate and had bought the tenant farm on which they were working when one of the property owners had been obliged to leave. Since then, the property had regularly become enlarged with each property transfer the owners undertook, one by one, in order to cope with the upkeep of the large dwelling on the second tenant farm.
A beautiful landowner’s home and a big garden now flanked the former tenant farm. The Pecresses, having become wealthy farmers, had not curtailed their ambitions. Unfortunately, they had only one son, and it was around him that they built their ambitions.
People had referred to him, at a certain point, as the most eligible bachelor of the region, as much for the size of the inheritance that awaited him as for his attractive bearing. On top of that, he had completed some studies, which conferred on him a certain intellectual prestige in the village.
However, John turned twenty-five without having made up his mind about marriage. He never put in an appearance anywhere, and his mother saw to it that he did not go out with anyone. He became shy and withdrawn. The young women got discouraged. In his golden solitude, John appeared inaccessible. People thought about him less. Or rather, they began to shudder at the thought of what life must be like for him and his overbearing, redheaded mother, Mrs. Pecresse, at the Old Tenant Farm, as it was called.
When his paternal grandmother died, one September evening, after a glorious day of grape harvesting, tenderness disappeared from John’s life for good. He no longer had anyone but his mother for company, and he suspected that she loved him too much. With no outlet, the passion this mother felt for her son expressed itself as aggressively as if she detested him. The violent feelings of the one and the meek passivity of the other never stopped growing, although in the course of the monotonous life they lived, their sentiments never found any opportunity to manifest themselves. The atmosphere of the Old Tenant Farm became as strange as the somber classical setting of an intimate drama, whose art consists of never bringing together the only two characters representing the very substance of the drama, and whose confrontation would empty it in a single stroke of its psychological interest.
The father of the Pecresse family found happiness in his work. In relation to the other family members, he was the picture of discretion, which consisted of indifference, concern for his own peace, and inexpressible cowardice. This weakness gave the Pecresse father a certain charm, which made him the only inhabitant of the Old Tenant Farm whom people liked to meet. But at home, it expressed itself as treacherously as the worst spirit of intrigue and ended up making him flee the family. Moreover, he did not count in the eyes of his wife and son any more than if he had been feebleminded.
The Old Tenant Farm was as far from Semoic and The Pardal as Uderan itself. But unlike Uderan, no road went by, except for the main road, which turned fifty meters from there toward the village of Rayvre. There were shortcuts to get there from The Pardal, so few farmers took the Old Tenant Farm road to the village.
John must have waited for years for someone to pass by their farm. Their only neighbors, those from Uderan, had not come for a long time, and the silhouette of the pinewood rose before him, untamed. However, his mother still hoped to marry him off according to her own ideas.
1
Lot, Dordogne, and Lot-et-Garonne are departments in southwest France, that is, administrative districts similar to counties.—Trans.