“It’s as though there were a fog over my eyes…”
“Do you see the cross… Read and approved. Sign over the cross.”
“What a word to end on!” sighed Pierre, who felt nauseated.
“Wait. I have to leave the room before it is signed,” said Maître Caressa, wearing a grim expression. “I am here as a friend, for you are conducting a private agreement and not a notarized deed.”
“What should I do with the money?” asked Pierre.
“Give it to me,” said Monsieur de Boisrosé hastily. “You can ask Maître Caressa for the receipt and the title deeds.”
The lawyer left the room.
“Love the Mas Vieux as I have loved it,” said Monsieur de Boisrosé as though he were showing someone round his den. “Monsieur, nothing could give me greater pleasure than to see you there. I have, however, one favour to ask you…”
He was breathing with difficulty. His death rattle could be heard rising and falling, like a pea in a pea-shooter.
“I shall not be long in taking my leave of you. Therefore, do me the kindness of allowing me to die here in peace. Don’t worry. I can see you are speedy, but I shall be no less so. It is just that it would make me unhappy, feeble though I am, to have to leave this bed and this house now.”
Monsieur de Boisrosé’s chest made a sound like a reed-pipe; he gazed at the pearly landscape that was rapidly fading, the tall pine trees, the moist eyes of his maid. In thanking Pierre, who had agreed to this final wish, he added:
“You see, monsieur, she and I, we have spent our best days here.”
CHAPTER IV
THE FOREST WAS DARK, but the road plotted a clear-cut course through it like chalk upon a slate. A silky moon, forecasting the mistral for the following day, appeared over the vines and lit up the path. Pierre and Placide found their way to the car in the darkness. When the headlights were switched on, the nocturnal crypt was suddenly transformed into a marvellous white palace.
“And now,” Placide said, “we shall have a good dinner, take a filtered coffee beneath the plane trees of Aix with its beautiful fountains, and sleep at last for as long as we wish.”
“We’ll be in Paris — Porte d’Italie — by dawn,” Pierre replied laconically.
Placide felt crushed and did not utter a word; his mouth open, revealing a spaniel’s pink tongue, he was dreaming of revenge that deep down he knew to be impossible: at La Londe, he would call for help and Pierre would be forced to stop; at Grimaud, he would find the means of puncturing a tyre; at Ollioules, he would stun him with a punch; at Orange, he would murder him. Finally, he said:
“Allow me to light a pipe, at least!”
“A cigar,” said Pierre. “That will make you feel as though you had had dinner. No? Do you really want your pipe? Then squat down beneath the dashboard to shield it from the wind.”
“Slow down, for heaven’s sake, slow down,” Pierre yelled despairingly. “I’ve bumped my forehead!”
“Get yourself a tinder lighter that won’t go out, you idiot; whoever heard of carrying a petrol lighter in a car.”
“Not everyone has time to waste like you, inventing things that save seconds,” said Placide sourly.
The green dials on the dashboard lit up the lower parts of their faces: Placide’s bearded chin, looking like that of a Swiss mercenary grown plump from licking Charles V’s saucepans, and the neat, chiselled chin of Pierre Niox.
“My curiosity never stops being aroused,” said Placide, now back in the Grand Siècle. “What do you do with the seconds that you save?”
“I create minutes from them,” moaned Pierre.
He was beginning to have had enough of Placide, who was continuing with his critical reflections:
“How on earth is it possible to buy a property in less than two hours!”
“A great deal of time lost, actually,” muttered Pierre.
“Poseur!” said Placide, furious at having to shout, which rather cramped his style.
His own particular talent was for conversation, with its innuendos, allusions, insinuations and subtle, treacherous remarks. A master at fencing and needling, and dropping stink bombs, he was prevented by the car from hitting the mark, but he was too irritated to remain silent.
“No sooner have you bought the Mas Vieux than you’re running away from it,” said Placide, going on the attack straight away. “You’re tying a weight around your neck, my friend! To say nothing of what it’s going to cost you. It’s money thrown away.”
“That’s why I’m going back to Paris,” said Pierre. “I’m going back to get some funding…”
“… as well as a trustworthy gamekeeper, to keep away poachers; and a supposedly honest tenant farmer; and a household of caretakers with fewer than eight children. I envy you, dear Pierre. You’ll enjoy your property in a comfortable, respectable way; you’ll sip your Chartreuse like a good Carthusian monk; you’ll draw up your specification, cultivate your memory and reap the benefits.”
“Bloody hell!” cried Pierre, stubbing out his cigar, which would not draw, on the windscreen and putting it back, unlit, between his quivering lips.
“You don’t know, you’ll never know, how to smoke,” said Placide disdainfully. “A cigar burns through its ash; at a hundred kilometres an hour, it’s a heresy. A Havana comes from the land of indolence and nonchalance; yours is horrible to behold, full of little red holes, and it’s making your lips black. Ugh! In circumstances like these you’d do better to take up the pipe.”
“I inhale too much; I’d char the wood in one day.”
Placide let out a long, affected sigh:
“My friendship for you, which no one can doubt, permits me to ask you an indiscreet question. May I? I should like to get to the heart of the Pierre Niox problem.”
“There is no Pierre Niox problem,” Pierre said tartly.
“But there is, there is! There is the unknown x that drives you. It can’t be feelings, you don’t love anyone; nor self-interest, no sooner have you earned money than you throw it away; nor sensual pleasure, you take no notice of anyone; nor vanity, you only have to look at yourself.
Could it be Certainty, one of those abstract principles upon which people base their lives when they are young and foolish? No, you spent your philosophy classes playing football. Could it be carpe diem?”
“Your Horace drives me mad at least as much as you yourself drive me mad,” Pierre interrupted. “He is the father of every Latin aphorism quoted by those who don’t know Latin. No, I’m not a pleasure-seeker, still less one who experiments.”
“Would you be bothered by the notion that our days are numbered? For it’s true: they are, from our birth. Come now, respond!”
“Respond to what? I’ve never asked myself all these absurd questions.”
“Tell me why nothing ever connects or holds together when you’re around? It’s constant confusion, with every minute sweeping the previous one away with an enormous broom; with you, dear fellow,” Placide went on, intoxicated by his florid style, “moments overlap one another like waves, each forcing its crest into the other’s foam; the present tumbles instantly into the future; I even doubt whether the present exists for you. A fearsome demon is pursuing you. And the name of this demon?”
“The wind.”
“Pierre, I’m talking to you seriously.”
“Very seriously: the wind, or, if you prefer, my creative energy. As a child, I was taught to jump. ‘Use your creative energy!’ my father would cry. ‘Where is my creative energy?’ That produced laughter and I felt ashamed; ever since, I’ve known that my creative energy was within me, in me alone, and that it was a marvellous potential source of power, always available to me, which grown-ups had probably forgotten how to use since they never seemed to run or jump. As I grew older, I could feel this expendable force beneath my feet; other people expend it in goodness, in the will-to-power, in concentration, in spiteful behaviour or in foul language. I expend it in speed. I am a man of prompt expedition, as your Madame de Sévigné would say. In a word, a precursor: ‘I run ahead’, it’s etymology.”