The Catalans. Patrick O’Brian
had begun simply enough: the women of the family had been naturally fascinated at running in and out of ‘Madeleine’s apartment’ as it was called at first, and naturally they came without invitation. They came to help her clean, sweep, and cook: her mother (an excellent cook) had taught her none of these things, but they were all very much surprised that she did not know how to do them by intuition. And they came, with the liveliest curiosity, to stare: there was little enough to see or know, but what little there was they wanted to see and know and talk about.
Then, when the disapproval of Francisco began to revive, they began to come into the house even more as by right; and her father, who surprised Madeleine by showing a greater jealousy of Francisco than the others, silently rearranged the furniture to his liking – replaced it in the positions it had occupied before the marriage.
It was a fairly slow process, this dispossession: it went on little by little, but it was nearly complete in twelve months. It was hardly a conscious process on either side; but on the side of the elders it was as efficient and unhesitating as if it had been carefully planned and concerted: more efficient.
However, the novelty, the romantic glow, the conventional happiness carried Francisco and Madeleine through the first year. It was the second that brought so much conscious unhappiness. During the first year the sea, unfished for so long, yielded such quantities of fish that the oldest man had never seen the like, and the market, starved of fish for so long, was insatiable. There was plenty of money in Saint-Féliu, summer and winter, and even the Amphitrite earned enough to install an engine and to buy a lamparo, a little boat with a pair of huge lights to attract the fish by night, in the Spanish fashion.
But the next year was different. The summer was cold and unnatural and the anchovies stayed away from the coast altogether; even the sardines were very scarce, and somebody – the men of La Nouvelle, it was said – began dynamiting them. Soon everybody was doing it, scooping up the shattered little fish from the surface and hurrying furtively back to port: it could not last; not only did the preventive officers come, but the fish went clean away, and not all the motors or lamparos in Saint-Féliu would bring them back.
Madeleine and Francisco had, very early in their marriage, fallen into the habit of going to the family shop for meals. It had begun with Madeleine’s complete incapacity – she really could not boil an egg at first – and had continued because it was so much easier and because Dominique loved to have a talking crowd around the table. In the first year it had been convenient; it had not been necessary. Now it was essential, and now Francisco and Madeleine arrived with a hang-dog air, and now any quip or jibe about their extravagance in the first year’s prosperity went home and rankled. The quips and jibes, the ‘remarks passed’ were rarely meant to be as unkind as they sounded sometimes, but it was remarkable how accurately those rather stupid women and that dull, heavy-witted man managed to say just the thing that would hurt most afterward, upon reflection.
They had been a little extravagant, it is true: Madeleine had bought clothes; they had often gone to Perpignan for the day, and still more often to Collioure, where Francisco’s clever friends were to be found on the beach or in the cafés; he had bought canvases, colors, and a better easel. But it had seemed at the time that no one thing was more than a very little treat; there had been no single example of unjustifiable expense, and after all, as they had said to one another, a few hundred francs more or less would not make a great difference by the end of the year.
It was not an agreeable situation, and it was less so for Francisco than it might have been for another, for his bad conscience made him vulnerable. He had not found casual work at the end of the fishing: he had not found it for the plain reason that he had not wanted to find it. He said to the family that it was not to be found (with a regretful shake of his head) and he had said to Madeleine that it was not to be found (with a grin of relief) and that he would have to pass the winter at home. They agreed that out of the evil came the blessing that he would have an uninterrupted stretch of time for his painting. He did: but it costs money to paint, and although the family could always be relied upon for help in kind, they would never part with cash.
Now Madeleine was glad that she had learned to type: she had never ceased seeing Mme. Roig in spite of the widow’s disapproval of her marriage, and now she went and asked for her good offices with her nephew, Maître Roig, the lawyer, who sent most of his typing to a bureau in Perpignan. She, who had disliked the marriage too much to countenance it with a present, yet felt too much engaged by her use of Madeleine and by her interior promise, as well as by her affection for her, to feel at all easy, was very happy to do what Madeleine asked: she went at once, without stopping to put on her hat, and in ten minutes the thing was done. It proved an invaluable source of supply: it not only bought Francisco’s materials and many of their meals, but it enabled him to spend a good part of his time with his friends at Collioure.
Painting is a messy business: it cannot be carried out in a shining little parlor where the position of each object is sacred. A room that is to be kept immaculate for wakes and marriages, the polished morgue of a self-respecting house, is not suitable; and there arose a great bitterness over the drops of paint, the smell in the room, and the wrongful displacement of the central table; for now Madeleine, typing at Mme. Roig’s, could not always be there to clean and to replace before one of her aunts or her mother got in.
Francisco took his easel to Collioure. His particular friends of the time had a very large attic where there was room for all to work, and there he took up his stand.
This was lonely for Madeleine, and when he took to sleeping there, it was more so. She did not tell her mother or anyone else – she would never have done so at any time, but now that she was so withdrawn from them it would have been even less possible: for she was withdrawn from them, although Francisco blamed her for being entirely on their side, not with him at all: that was the root of all their quarreling.
She said as she lay there alone, watching the light of the street lamp swinging madly on the ceiling as the gale of the equinox took it, she said that it was better to watch it and know that he was on dry land than to watch it and think of him at sea. She said this, but she was saying it against her knowledge – a knowledge that she would not formulate or allow to appear whole, but which grew so substantial and familiar in those last weeks that she was not surprised, not fundamentally surprised, however cruelly shocked she was, when she came home one day from Mme. Roig’s house and found Francisco pale and strange in the middle of his possessions, packing them – his only. He spoke as if he were drunk, but he was not drunk. He had meant to get out alone, unseen; he had not thought he would be disturbed, and when he saw her he was uncertain what attitude to take. He had not prepared one. There was a terrible embarrassment between them, as if they were naked in front of strangers.
He saw that she did not intend to scream or fight and asked her to find his blue suit.
She said ‘Have you got your best shirts?’
He said ‘I took them last week,’ and after a second he flushed an ugly dark color, because he had lain with her since then.
She said ‘Do you want this?’ It was her portrait that he had painted in the autumn. It was his best piece of work: it was framed. He said Yes, to put it by the other paintings stacked by the door; but he did not look and his voice was hardly recognizable.
They did not say anything more, and she went out of the room: she did not watch him pick up the load of things, the too-many parcels, bundles; go awkwardly out, down the stairs, put the things down, open the door, pick them up, and bolt out. His feet went sounding up the street, for he had shoes on; and in a minute the hollow wind slammed the door after him.
At the crossroads he jerked into the car, into the back seat, and the woman in front, after a glance at his face, started the engine and drove rapidly away on the white road of the coast.
He sat there in the back, abandoned to the movement of the car: he had never felt anything like this in his life. It was as if his whole being, the whole of the inside of his body, were bleeding, bleeding. The pain was something utterly beyond his experience.
It did not surprise him that his face was wet with tears: he leaned forward and let one roll on to the back of his