The Catalans - Patrick O’Brian

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a child – she had no age, neither young nor old for the first moment of that encounter) with ash-blond hair and a perfect, exquisite face and pale eyes. No. That girl’s name was Carmen, and she had died – meningitis – after he had left. This Madeleine would be her cousin. If she looked anything like her, no wonder Xavier behaved strangely. Though in all likelihood if Carmen had grown up she would have coarsened like the other girls: that strange remoteness would have come heavily to earth with adolescence; and the inevitable growth of body, atrophy of mind, the invasion of clothes, make-up, frizzled hair, would all have buried that lovely child deeper than ever the earth did now.

      Still he could not see any little girl called Madeleine Fajal, or rather Pou-naou – for although the family’s name was Fajal on letters and documents, nobody in Saint-Féliu called them anything but Pou-naou, from the circumstance of Jean Fajal’s father having owned the house by the new fountain, or pump. Jean Pou-naou, Thérèse Pou-naou, Mimi Pou-naou who married the son of René l’Empereur: but Jean’s uncle, old Pou-naou’s brother, was called Ferrand because he was a smith, and all his branch of the family were Ferrands too. And this diversity of names ran through the town, the interrelated, closely knit, cross-knit town of cousins and remoter kin, to the utter confusion of strangers, and to their exclusion. None but a native, born to it and growing up with it, could hold it all in his head: but Alain Roig had absorbed it in his youngest days, and although the years between had carried away so much, that remained, surprisingly complete and ready to his hand. Without searching at all he remembered that Mimi Pou-naou had married Louis l’Empereur, the son of René l’Empereur – the old soldier of Cochin-China who nominally owned the tobacco shop that Mimi ran while her husband went to sea after the sardines and anchovies – and that René l’Empereur, who was officially called René Prats, had received his name very early, when Napoleon III had dandled him for a moment, thus changing the family surname, which for generations had been Pitg-a-fangc, Wade-in-the-muck, from an origin too gross to record.

      So although he could not remember the child Madeleine as a person, he could fix her exactly in her place, surround her with her relations and her contemporaries. He could define her, like a geometrical locus, in relation to a number of determined entities, a very large number in this case. Still, it was irritating not to be able to manage his memory better: he had often heard about the girl, and that should have perpetuated a visual image. Heard about her, that is, before all this fuss; for she had been something of a protégée of his Aunt Margot. He had heard about her accompanying Aunt Margot to Perpignan to see a parade, helping with Aunt Margot’s orphans: ‘I made the rest of the silk you sent me into a collar and cuffs for Madeleine.’ But particularly he had heard about her when she married one Francisco Cortade: it was a marriage very much disapproved by Aunt Margot and by all the girl’s family – a most unequal match, by all that he heard. It had made Aunt Margot angry to see Madeleine, an educated girl, able to speak correct French and to present herself anywhere, capable of holding a serious position (she could type), throwing herself away in marriage to a young fisherman with nothing at all, a young man furthermore who was said to be idle and to have absurd pretensions. She had been angry, too, because she felt that Madeleine had been deceitful; she had never told Aunt Margot the full state of her feelings, and the marriage had come as a disagreeable surprise. She had been so angry, indeed, that she had not fully restored the girl to favor until the marriage ended in disaster. Dr Roig had heard about this: the young man had apparently run away with a film star – an event for Saint-Féliu – and Madeleine, having taken her desertion very hard, had been comforted and sustained by Aunt Margot.

      Now it cannot have been so very long after that, he reflected, arranging the chronology of events in his mind, that I had that letter from cousin Côme with the facetious reference to Xavier making his typist work overtime: that was the beginning. Though perhaps in fact it was not the true beginning, for cousin Côme had an obscene mind and he could not see a man and a woman together without being sure that they coupled furtively, that they had a guilty relationship – a state of affairs that was in itself intrinsically amusing, very funny indeed to Côme.

      Perpignan. In the fury of the arrival Dr Roig slipped back into his corner seat, where he could keep safely out of reach of the contending parties, the strong body of those who wished to get out, and the still stronger body of those who were going to get on at any cost at all. With each stop in its southward journey the train had met a more determined set of boarders (with each kilometer the fiery rudeness of the people grew) and here, almost at its last halt before the Spanish frontier, almost at the extremity of France, it was received by a horde so fierce that it might have been fleeing from the plague, or a devouring fire behind. By this alone he could have told that he was in his own country, but now all the voices were Catalan too, for further proof; and that familiar harshness stirred him as no harmonious tongue could ever have done. It was not a beautiful language, he was bound to admit, and the people who were speaking it were neither decorative nor well-mannered; but it was his own language, this was his native country, and these were his own people.

      The compartment was crowded, and he could distinguish the accents of Elne in the plain, of the mountain villages, and of his own Catalans of the sea: the man whose elbow was sticking so painfully into his side was certainly from Banyuls, by the way he had of speaking. He gathered that the grapes were doing quite well, and that if nothing went wrong for the next two or three weeks they would be beginning the vendanges in the plain; that the price of apricots and peaches had been so low that it had barely been worth picking them; that the price of everything was going up and up; and that the youth of today was worthless.

      The well-known phrases came out again with a predictability that was charming for a returning exile: the conversation was like a familiar childish tune on a musical box; it might prove maddening in time, but after a long interval it could be heard again with affection and delight.

      ‘They are all bandits. All of them, Communists, Socialists, Radical-Socialists, MRP and Gaullistes: all bandits. Every one is in it for what he can get out of it, and the country can go to the devil.’

      ‘They do nothing to protect their own people. It is not worth selling our wine at the market price; our early vegetables and fruit rot on the ground, and all the time ships are arriving at Sète and Port-Vendres loaded down with wine from North Africa and fruit from Italy. Someone says to a minister “Té, here is a million francs: I want a license to import a hundred tons of peaches” and it is done. It is as simple as that, and meanwhile we starve,’ said the fat man.

      ‘I never vote for any of them.’

      ‘They are all bandits.’

      ‘When I was young the father of a family had some authority. At dawn he showed his son a mattock and said “To the vineyard.” And to the vineyard the boy would go. He would take a loaf and a skin of wine and an onion and work there until dark. Now what does he do?’

      The train was running fast now, lickety-lick across the plain, the plain with its drilled armies of peach trees, almonds, and apricots stretching away in interminable files: a hundred times a minute a perspective opened, a straight lane of precise trees with a green stream of garden-stuff running down between; the perspective opened, slanting rapidly to the full, held there for an instant, slanted fast away and was gone as the next began to open; and between each pair there was a fragmentary hint of diagonals, opened and closed so quickly that nothing could be distinguished but a sense of ordered space. Most of the peaches were picked already, but still there were a few late orchards with the fruit glowing among the leaves, peaches that looked too big for the trees: they would be the big dorats, he thought, and the word brought the memory of that wonderful bitter-sweet prussic-acid taste and the smell of the downy skin.

      They passed Corneilla del Vercol, and he had hardly said to himself ‘Now we begin to turn’ when he felt the beginning of the centrifugal pressure, his weight pressing outward against the side, as the train ran fast on to the long curve down to the sea, and the Canigou came into sight, sharp and clear in the morning sky, still the morning sky, for it was hardly more than breakfast-time. There was a belt of cloud lying across the middle height, but the three tall peaks stabbed up hard and dominating. It was the mountain that ruled the plain; and the plain seen without the mountain was nothing but a dull stretch of intensely cultivated land instead of a preparation and the foreground for a

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