“Pierre le Bref,” said Hedwige sweetly, “I can see you’re bored, you’ve still got your hands clenched in your pockets. Why don’t you go out? Go and do your shopping.”
And Pierre went out to stretch his legs.
He talked to himself as he strode through the streets.
“Ah! If it were me in that baby’s place, I’d soon be bursting through the hoop and marching head first into the future!”
CHAPTER XX
PIERRE WAS PACING up and down the drawing room. Hedwige’s face had turned a magnificent golden-green colour.
“Listen, Hedwige, be reasonable. You need some fresh air. Ten days by the sea will do us both good. We’re leaving tomorrow. The tickets are bought, the rooms are booked…”
Hedwige closed her eyes; when Pierre had gone past she opened them again, but there was a moment when he was briefly silhouetted against the light, when he glided between her and the window, that was so painful to her that she shut her eyelids tightly so that she would not see him. It was tiresome, this striding up and down, as if he were riding on a swing after lunch. Hedwige glanced at her husband out of the corner of her eye, ready to avoid his trajectory. In contrast, all this commotion drove her back towards her mother as if to a lost paradise, making her nostalgic for the solid Boisrosé bed.
“You don’t want to? But why, for goodness’ sake, why?”
Her feeling of giddiness only grew. With his comings and goings, Pierre was dragging her into a waltz without music. It was a choppy passage that made her stomach feel empty and gave her a headache and an intensification of the feelings of nausea due to pregnancy.
“Oh, I know very well why. I’ve known for a long time that you’d prefer to die and make me pine away here than to be without your mother for ten days.”
Pierre’s pacing to and fro was becoming unbearable. The furniture now seemed to be rolling about, the piano was shaking and the pictures were shuttling back and forth on the walls, which were also swirling. Even though she was sitting down, Hedwige could not understand why the rug under her feet appeared to be rising upwards while the paintings were obeying some invisible gyratory impulse.
“What’s the matter? You’re very pale,” Pierre exclaimed all of a sudden, seeing Hedwige’s cheeks lose their colour and turn a shade of banana. “Have I upset you? Have I displeased you?”
Hedwige was unable to reply.
She waved her hand in a wide gesture and ran to the bathroom.
She returned a few moments later, her hair back in place, her face re-powdered, her eyes shining. She sat down next to Pierre and put her arm through his.
“My Pierre,” she said gently, “don’t criticize me for loving my family. Does it prevent me from loving you? Would you prefer it if I spent my time running around dressmakers’ shops and going to tea parties instead of frolicking innocently in that warm tropical bath that is my family? A poor little family adrift in France, which goes largely unnoticed, which lives on its own and which does no harm to anyone. But if you wanted to drag them away, you would find you could not shift them. When I think of us Boisrosés, I’m always reminded of our mangrove trees. Have you ever seen any? No? A mangrove looks like a bundle of dead wood drifting from the shore into the sea. When we were children, paddling around at Anse à Banane, we used to try and take these bits of wood home, but our hands would immediately start bleeding and we couldn’t pick anything up. Mangroves are the most resistant things in the world; they have claw-like fingers that for millions of years have clung to the earth, driven up by the tides. We were taught that we owed the fact that we were walking on firm ground to the mangrove trees. Ever since then, I’ve always thought that nations should be grateful to mangrove families rather like ours, to women who collectively, without any other strength apart from their fingers, endured wars, flooding, bankruptcy, revolutions, men’s failures, and all the calamities.”
“You don’t have to behave like a mangrove tree with me,” said Pierre, “I’ll never let you go. Think of me as an extra root.”
Hedwige pressed her warm cheek to her husband’s.
“Very well, but you must do one little favour for me: buy a trinket from Uncle Rocheflamme.”
“Ah, no! That would be a dangerous precedent! I don’t like antiques, I only like antiquities. On the other hand, you can go and buy all his stuff if you’d like, on condition that I don’t see it… The cloister is going to be sold; all that remains is to exchange signatures; the money is yours.”
“Mine!” Hedwige repeated in amazement. “But Pierre, it’s your only capital. You know very well that apart from the Mas Vieux and the cloister, all you have is what you earn.”
“Yes,” Pierre said simply, “it’s my only capital and that’s why it must belong to you.”
Pierre threw his coat on a chair, removed his collar and flopped down on the bed, his legs spread wide; he had just returned from his morning shopping and was sweating profusely; this exceptionally warm June weather made him feel on edge and the “Year 1000 Exhibition” that he had agreed to organize was causing him problems, meetings, discussions and a great deal of work he could have done without.
“Would I not do better,” he thought, “to devote my days to Hedwige? She must still be there waiting for me as she is every morning. It’s at least two weeks since I last had my coffee with her.”
He stood up, ready to run round to see his wife, he imagined her bustling calmly around the small breakfast table; he knew in advance that he wanted to experience that peace that only she could provide him with. To his surprise, he was overcome with a drab and lethargic sense of aversion. No, he did not wish to go and call on Hedwige: why? Ideas flitted around his head and he watched them developing without trying to marshal them; he enjoyed this shifting monologue in which absurd images — cruel, tender and bitter — jostled with one another.
Clearly, this fulfilment, this restfulness that he enjoyed when he was with Hedwige, was something he no longer required as much. Why? Was it because he knew from experience that it would be followed by a frenzy of excitement immediately afterwards? Just as the sea, momentarily calmed when drenched with oil, draws itself back all the more ferociously, scarcely had he relaxed for a few minutes in Hedwige’s presence, scarcely had he fondled her soothing hands, than a sudden reaction made him stand upright. The calm that her Creole beauty gave him was nothing but a West Indian lull. “You’re marvellous, my beloved,” he would say, but he walked straight to the front door and, once past the door, he broke into a fit of irrational agitation.
Furthermore, he could no longer bear to see the belly from which the child would not emerge, could not emerge for four months at least. These four months weighed upon Pierre, paralysed his feelings towards Hedwige and prevented him from enjoying this woman whom he loved dearly. So he staved off his hunger by visiting museum curators and by writing lots of letters, scribbling daily with an increasingly leaky pen in halting words that were rather like sparks, in which the crosses preceded the t by a mile and the dots shot off well in advance of the i; sometimes the weary thought preceded him and he was obliged to correct the inconsistency and fill in the spaces with additions in the margin that made everything illegible. The thoughts also outstripped the words and made him reel off the end of sentences without altering the beginning. And when he shook hands he did so with a series of jolting and emotional squeezes.
The instinct that keeps the male close to his crippled female partner, however, that obliges the most fickle of animals to remain with their pregnant companions until they have given birth, drove Pierre back to Hedwige, made him stand guard beside her for entire evenings, as though summoned by an invisible force, and he would fall into a soothing slumber alongside this woman who did not sleep. But the following day, his impatience took hold of him again — his spinning like a top, his whirlwind departures, his pacing up and down the street, his sudden arrival back home making Hedwige jump, his unusual way of wandering off when he was lying beside her, interspersed with his zigzagging about and crushing insects against the window and sudden rushes to the front door.