They were taken aback by my aggrieved tone.
“Ah, yes. You’re that beggar,” Stretch said, finally working out who I was. He was the cleverer of the two. “And might I ask what you’re doing here?”
My intention was merely to needle them a little before I left, what with the mud and the fact that I never have been able to stand conceited little snots like them. But my insults were sufficiently choice as to make their faces drain of vim — and they piled right in to me!
There were two of them, but two’s not so many, and I kicked them in the shins and poked them in the eyes. Porky came up behind me and started strangling me, and we fell to the floor. I bit him on the arm and aimed a few defensive kicks at Stretch, who was raising a chair over his head, ready to crack mine open. I don’t know what would have happened if Vauban and his daughter hadn’t come in and interrupted us.
“Gentlemen!” she exclaimed, scandalized. “This is Bazoches castle, not a common tavern!”
We got to our feet and stood up straight, our clothes crumpled, Stretch with a bashed-in eye and Porky nursing his arm where I’d bitten it. The marquis’s glare was indescribably severe. And I’m not being rhetorical when I say the silence was such that you could have heard the woodworms eating the chairs.
“You have brought violence into my home,” declared the marquis. “Get out.”
There was nothing more to be said. The daughter addressed the other two boys. “You and you, come with me.” As she was leading them from the room, she turned her head and said to me: “You, wait here.”
I was alone with the marquis, who kept his probing eyes upon me. We could hear the protests of Porky and Stretch on the far side of the door. Then, these having diminished, the girl came back into the room.
I thought Vauban’s daughter was going to throw me out as well but was staggering our departure; after our punching, biting, and scratching spectacle, it was only logical to separate us to avoid a repeat.
But what the marquis said next, though unyielding in tone, did not fit with a goodbye: “Our first conversation takes place after an act of violence under my roof. Does that seem to you to augur well?”
Better not to answer. He paced around a little. Coming back over to me, he stopped and prodded me on the chest with two fingers. “I am now going to ask you a question,” he said, “and I want you to answer honestly. What happened with the Carmelites?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s complicated. The Carmelites are, how can I say it, they’re real disciplinarians.”
I could see Vauban wasn’t one to beat about the bush. I had no way of knowing what it said in the prior’s letter, so I simply decided to present the facts without twisting them too much.
“One day I got in a carriage to return to the college. I was in such a hurry, I failed to notice that, though indeed a carriage, it was meant for a funeral. The Carmelites took it very badly.”
“For a funeral?”
“The family was unhappy at the change of route,” I said, avoiding as best I could the most disagreeable parts.
I heard lively laughter start up behind me, growing louder; it was the daughter, sitting behind me. The most unexpected thing to me was that the marquis joined in the joke. His stony face suddenly crumpled, and there he was, guffawing. Father and daughter, laughing, exchanged looks.
“Now I understand why the prior sent you to me,” said the marquis, explaining: “I studied with them as a youngster, too, and committed a nearly identical error. They must never have forgotten it!” Still laughing, he turned back to his daughter. “Have I never told you about it, Jeanne, my dear? I took a seat next to the driver and said: ‘To the Carmelite college!’ ”
She was beset by laughter, louder and louder, as the marquis continued his tale: “And the driver said: ‘Young man, do not be in such a hurry to arrive at the place where this vehicle is destined.’ So I understood that it was going to the cemetery. My face must have been quite the picture!”
They broke down laughing. The marquis pulled out an enormous white handkerchief to dry his eyes. When he spoke again, laughter punctuated his words. “Dear Lord God. . And they got angry at a peccadillo like that?” More laughter. “When one finds oneself in a bit of a spot, lying under a carriage like a boob, that’s all there is to it. .” Laughter, ho, ho, ho. “But honestly. . I mean. .” Hee, hee, hee from Vauban, ho, ho, ho from Jeanne, “The Carmelites have many virtues, but a sense of humor has never been one!”
The private man seemed altogether different from his public persona. At that point I did not know that, for Vauban, the idea of “private” included only Jeanne, the youngest of his two daughters, in whom he had complete trust. As he looked at me, the marquis’s face turned stony again. “There’s still time for you,” he said. “Should you choose to remain in Bazoches, your life will undergo radical changes.”
Who’d have thought it? When Jeanne passed on our test answers, she must have told her beloved father that good old Zuvi, not Stretch, had hit the mark. She’d seen something in Martí Zuviría. .
“The Carmelites’ letter also makes reference to certain little defects of character: pride, disobedience, a dislike of authority. Want to know what I think? I think the prior has relieved himself of a difficult student.”
Almost a hundred years have passed and still, still I see Jeanne Vauban in that moment, seated beside me, head askance, chewing strands of red hair. In her eyes, a look that suggested everything — or nothing. If it had been just the two of us, I believe I would have pounced on her there and then.
Vauban again prodded my chest. “Think you’re here merely to become a simple ‘engineer’? Wrong. Bazoches is the fount of certain secrets known to very few. Know this: By the time we finish with you, you will no longer be any old commoner. True: You’ll touch the gates of glory with fingers of lead. But the rewards will be few. And for you to become an engineer, Bazoches will take everything you’ve got out of you before we put it all back in. You’ll feel as though you’ve swallowed your vomit a thousand times. And only then will you be worthy of le Mystère.” He paused to take breath into his old lungs and then asked: “Do you feel you’re up to such a task?”
Part of me was saying, Get out of here. Go whistling out and don’t stop till you hit the Pyrenees. Drop le Mystère, leave the Great Marquis-Engineer-Leanwit to cook in his own sauce, don’t get caught up in affairs not your own. .
Then again, I thought, why not? Though it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, I didn’t have much of an option. As I hesitated, my gaze turned away a little, toward Vauban’s daughter. My giddy goodness, that redhead.
I stood up tall to give my answer: “Ready and willing, Monsieur!”
He nodded lightly. But his blessing contained something slightly troubling, in that he turned to his daughter and said: “What are you waiting for?”
When it comes down to it, the most important decisions in our lives are not made by us, they happen to us. Was it le Mystère’s invisible aroma that did it? Possibly. Or it could have been my cock talking. Also quite possible.
3
What led the great Vauban to adopt me as a student? Even now, I cannot answer with any certainty.
His only male child had died at two months old, meaning that Vauban had to make do with two daughters. Was there some form of never exercised paternity that he needed to feel? Don’t believe for a moment I was that important. And, as I was later to learn, to a man with Vauban’s ideas about the world, he cared little whether his offspring were boys or girls. He sired a good many bastards with local peasant women. This was common knowledge, he never made any effort to hide it, and in his will went so far as to leave each a good stipend. But in life he never paid them the slightest bit of mind.