The Man in a Hurry Page 2

  “Here, in three lines, is the inventory of your belongings:

  “A game of chess made of rock crystal, said to be from the time of Charlemagne (ninth-century), deposited in a bank in Buenos Aires. That’s the large piece.

  “A Byzantine vase (sixth-century) with a winged sparrow hawk mounting, in bond in New York.

  “An illustrated manuscript known as the Ratisbon Gospel (1025), on gold and violet parchment, on loan to the Bodleian exhibition.

  “A Greek paten (Mount Athos, sixth-century) in safe custody at Spink’s of London.

  “Six gold Théodebert sols, Merovingian coins (sixth-century).

  “A Carolingian comb in the shape of two confronting birds of prey, bought in Brussels three days ago.

  “A small golden bull on a pearl necklace, excavations from the valley of the Indus (fifth-century BC).

  “These latter two pieces are in Paris, on your bed, the bed on which you will fall asleep if this continues because inventories are the best soporifics. When one possesses such compact wealth in such a minimal amount, it’s pointless to encumber yourself with a house.”

  “Excuse me,” Pierre says to himself, “I also have four Frankish sarcophagi, three Syrian twisting capitals, a porphyry Lombard armchair. (A snore.) And a black-andwhite mosaic waiting for me in a garage in Antioch. These scattered pieces that risk being lost justify the purchase of a house. (Another snore.) Furthermore, a Roman cloister is not a house, it’s more a work of art than a house. No, it’s not a basilica, I’m exaggerating because I’m beginning to feel sleepy… It’s a cloister. Let’s think more slowly. But when you think slowly, you fall asleep. How boring it is to sleep!”

  Pierre switches on the light again.

  “I like counting the hours of the night: if I sleep I’m robbed of these precious hours. Sleep is unjustifiable.”

  Pierre falls asleep; not for long: the thought of his future acquisition wakes him up after ten minutes.

  “This cloister really does exist and I’m soon going to take possession of it, unless the owner asks me to pay too much. All I have are the banknotes I earned yesterday; I’ll take the whole wad just in case; perhaps it will be enough.”

  Pierre pictures himself three weeks ago on a flight from Marseille to Salonica, about to embark for Mount Athos and go to the cloister of Xeropotamos where the priests offered him the paten that is now part of his inventory. He had left Marignane at dawn and was flying over the Var. For a moment, the plane was hedge-hopping over the Maures hills. To his right, the Îles d’Hyères stretched out, to his left, the Alps. Beneath Pierre’s feet, less than fifty metres beneath him, amid the tangled mass of trees, far from any roads and surrounded by scrub, he remembered perfectly having spotted a clearing; in the middle of this clearing, like a reliquary lying on green velvet, he had noticed, buried amid the rosemary bushes, a most exquisite Romanesque chapel, every detail of which his hawk’s eyes immediately registered. “I have an excellent visual memory,” Pierre often used to say; “It’s the memory idiots have, but I have it; or rather: and I have it.”

  Primitive art is rarely exquisite; that is precisely what made him fall in love with his cloister. In the rising sunlight, this miniature chapel appeared brand new and as though it had barely left the donor’s pocket. A thousand years had passed over it without it getting at all grubby; on the contrary, the stone looked as though it had been washed by the dawn. Between the blades of the propeller that drew him onwards, Pierre could make out every detail of the small stone steeple; beneath the undercarriage, the bell-tower and its lantern, like a cow with its calf, the thick walls and the apse that was rounder than a crinoline, passed by. “A manure cart was coming out of the porch, from which I concluded, even before the wheels of the monoplane had robbed me of my discovery, that the chapel was deconsecrated, that farmers used it, and that they might possibly relinquish it were I to offer to buy it. At that decisive moment, the last object to register on my retina was an ancient basin, in the middle of the courtyard, which I thought might serve as a drinking trough.

  “Very well, I did what Lindbergh did when prospecting the Mayan temples that overlook the Guatemalan rainforest: I jotted down a rough sketch on my knees, with reference points and information provided by the pilot. The trees beneath us were the Dom forest; the beach to our right was Le Lavandou; the Provençal villas on the hillside, Bormes.” On arriving at Brindisi two hours later, during a miserable wait (journeys by plane are spent waiting!) Pierre had dispatched a telegram to Placide. The reply reached him in Athens:

  “Chartreuse du Mas Vieux, eleventh-century. Stop. Not for sale. Sorry.” And now, here was the Mas Vieux for sale!

  Pierre goes to sleep so as to prepare himself the better for his next raid. It’s not so much a rest as a gathering of momentum. This man who is unable to keep still is not even grateful to the little cloister lost in the depths of the Var for having waited 1,000 years for him.

  Placide has one cardinal virtue: punctuality. Here he is now with Pierre on the RN6, at six o’clock in the morning, sitting in a convertible which Pierre is driving at breakneck speed. Orly airport tilts back, Ris-Orangis rears up, Melun subsides, Fontainebleau throws open its forest to allow them to pass through; the mileposts flash past them, the advertising hoardings make them offers, the bends hug them, the downhill slopes prepare an easy incline for them, the uphill ones flatten out gently beneath their wheels, Sens cathedral proffers its two towers to them, Joigny calls to them on their way: “Lots to see in Auxerre!” and Auxerre, which they stride through like Gargantuas, sends them off to Saulieu; they swallow up Dijon and they bolt through Lyon on their flying jaunt.

  Placide chats away like a cantankerous magpie. Whereas Pierre has spent his thirty-five years getting steamed up, his colleague, rival and friend has spent twenty-eight doing very little. Pierre’s dark hair blows in the wind, whereas Placide is bald. Pierre thinks straight, sees straight, walks straight; Placide, who has become short-sighted and stooped through reading, moves in zigzags: he has small, shaky feet, puzzled hands and a mischievous face. Pierre has an instinct for things and Placide is highly erudite. Pierre became involved in Roman art at the age that Placide was leaving the École des Chartes.1 Pierre drives and Placide is driven.

  “I’m looking forward with much impatience to our meeting this evening,” says Placide. “The owner of the chapel, Monsieur de Boisrosé (armorial bearing of Santo Domingo), is an elderly Creole preoccupied with his health and self-preservation; he’s so slow he’s unable to complete his sentences; neither are you, you’re so quick. It will be a treat for me to see you together.”

  “So convey to me still further what you know of this matter, my dear.”

  Placide speaks as Madame de Sévigné writes, and Pierre, who is a tease, replies in the same vein, when he is in a good mood.

  “We were disinclined to sell, but the local maidservant appears to have had her say.”

  “I should be extremely happy to cast my eyes over her, this girl, however fearful she may be.”

  Placide shrugs his shoulders:

  “She is. It will teach you to make fun of me.”

  With his little finger in the air, Pierre, out of pique, pretends to take a pinch from an imaginary snuffbox.

  “Well, no actually. The maidservant is extremely pretty and you will be delighted to make her acquaintance,” Placide retorts. “But I am fearfully anxious that M. de Boisrosé may change his mind,” he adds treacherously, thinking solely of spoiling his friend’s pleasure.

  “The main basis upon which I build my hopes is the care they have taken to call us by telegram, even though the word telegram sounds offensive here!”

  And Pierre laughs, pressing his foot flat on the accelerator.

  “Can we not stop soon? I’m so hungry,” Placide sighs.

  “It’s impossible if we want to be in the Var by this evening. I fully intend to become the owner before dinner! When I do something foolish, I like to plunge in head first.”


  Placide sighs in desperation:

  “You think of yourself as punctual,” he says, “but you’re missing what’s important, which is the punctuality of the stomach.”

  “It’s because I need you to be light, so that we can refuel en route.”

  Placide adopts a tight-lipped expression:

  “I had thought, dear friend, that you were taking me along as an expert in Roman art and not as the speedster’s mechanic. What a mad obsession not to stop at a petrol station!”

  “Ah no! That’s not all. The woman in a nurse’s blouse, with her big red stick, irritates me; she’s a chatterbox and never has any change. The petrol pipe she brandishes is always too long or too short; it’s also ridiculously narrow; the air goes into the tank while the petrol spills on the ground. It’s stupid! The pipes are always too narrow, whether it’s a pipe that drains out, a pipe that pumps in water or the neck of a bottle, a human larynx, or an oesophagus tube. Come on, get a move on, there’s not a drop left in the tank.”

  “You’re going to make me reach out over the hood at a hundred kilometres an hour and risk breaking my neck… It’s cruel and dangerous. Slow down, for goodness’ sake, slow down!” yells Placide.

  “Me! Slow down!”

  “My cap!”

  “So, are you sitting in the dickey-seat? Fine. Now, listen to what you have to do: the fifty-litre can is under the back seat. Found it? Fine. I’m watching you in the rear-view mirror: take the funnel. Have you got it? That’s perfect! So, third step: lean out over the right-hand side of the car. You’re right’s not on your left! Don’t fall out! Unscrew the cap. No, of course there’s no danger! Just hold on with your foot and cling on with your left hand while you’re in space… Well done! You see, Placide, saving ten minutes is child’s play!”

  Placide crawled back to his seat with some difficulty and sat down again beside Pierre, his face white from fear and the wind, his ears as red as a clown’s.

  CHAPTER III

  “FROM HERE ON, the road is no longer suitable for cars,” said Placide. “The gravel crumbles beneath the wheels and if we go any further we’ll risk thousands of punctures.”

  They step down and stride over the roots of a carob tree laid bare by the rain. The pitted track has become a stream. Pierre runs, followed by Placide who, in the woods, with his large head framed by a blond beard, looks like one of Snow White’s dwarfs, though without their lightness of foot.

  “I feel as though I’m in a Turkish bath. I’m sweating like an alcarraza.”

  “Onwards!” yells Pierre.

  “Let me stop for a second.”

  “Must one stop over so minor a matter, Marquise? Onwards!”

  The cork oaks, stripped to a man’s height of their outer layers, display the red innards of their robust bark. Their cracked crusts, with their spongy slabs rounded like tiles, are piled up at crossroads.

  “A forest that’s ripe for a fire. All you need is a match,” hints Placide, annoyed at having to do up his buttons again as he runs.

  “If my house burns down, so much the better! It’s unusual for a landlord to have a Wagnerian death.”

  The harbour at Hyères rises up to meet them through the pine grove. Lizards rush out, stopping right in front of them, on slabs of pink sandstone. A flock of red partridges, the same colour as the sandstone and the cork, cross over the stream and retreat into the oleander bushes that have reverted to the wild. Lizards and partridges are the only recognizable creatures encountered during the first thirty minutes of their climb, spent stepping over heather, laburnum and clumps of rosemary.

  “Let’s keep Gratteloup hill to our right. We’re on the right track, assuming there is a track,” said Placide. “I remember noticing those veins of white marble in the sandstone.”

  Small clouds scurry above them, floating over the lighthouse and dissolving far away in the sea mist. The woods scramble across the hilltops, those fiery, twisted, miserable woods of the Midi, those small forests that never grow to their full height, but repay their sparse nourishment with balsam and perfume. Far below, between the trunks of the trees, the golden curve of a beach can be seen: it is Le Lavandou, and behind it lies Cap Bénat with its scrubland; in the background are the Îles d’Hyères, which the setting sun is lulling to sleep in a crimson light fringed with violet.

  “Oh! How beautiful it is!” Pierre cries out. “My God, it’s beautiful. Here’s my hermitage, I recognize it. Here are the two cypress trees marking the entrance, on either side of the cart track. My plane flew over this precise point!” he exclaims in his enthusiasm.

  Apart from a ring of agaves and prickly pears, the building, constructed of such a brightly coloured stone that it looks as though it were new, stops beside a drop. It clings to the slope; it cleaves to some splendid thick rows of Aleppo pines in one of those luminous landscapes that rarely experience the splatter of rainfall. The olive trees have taken it upon themselves to settle around the oil mill; they display their greying leaves crowned with tender green shoots at a time of the year when the young, bitter olive has not yet turned a shade of violet. The cicadas can be heard… A Galilean peace.

  Pierre and Placide enter a courtyard that has the stench of that quiet, silent existence of those farms where the labour takes place in the fields. An alcove bereaved of its saint. A black and white cat, paws folded, sleeps on the sill of one of the small columned arches that pierce the walls of the ancient chapel. For the old mas has its own very primitive Romanesque chapel, and also its leper house, which has been turned into a stable. Farmers have clumsily hacked out doors and windows from these thick eleventh-century walls that are so sparing of light and access. The mistral has torn off the shutters that have fallen onto the dry grass and which nobody has picked up. Nothing that the later centuries have added to the original building, which was designed to be low, compact and smooth as a pebble, has withstood the elements. On the contrary, everything that is ten centuries old appears new, not least the layout of the stones that are greenish-grey and flecked with silvery mica like those piedras de plata in the Andes that the conquistadors mention. The drinking trough is a sarcophagus in which the profile of the abbot can still be seen, an African abbot perhaps, thick-lipped, with negroid features. The bell-tower has lost its bell; it stands above a roof bereft of all its colour due to the sun, with the ribs of the tiles eaten away by yellow lichen: tiles that have been fired and refired and which sound hollow when pecked at by the beaks of the white doves, turned pink in the setting sun.

  “It’s the lair of the owl and the nanny goat’s palace!”

  They mop their brows with their ties and rest on a bench which gets so hot at midday that no one can sit on it, a bench that retains its heat all night long.

  In the darkness, through the open door of the former leper house, the stable can be seen, and in the shade, a cow swinging her tail as though it were a fly-swatter. At their feet lie a demijohn corseted in rust and an old saucepan full of holes, once used for the chickens. Along the wall, close to the door of the chapel, beneath a thick-shaped, squat arcature with a full tympanum, stands one of those carts that are used in poor countries. It is tiny, like all those ploughing tools in the South of France which, compared to the equipment used in the North, would look like toys were it not for the fact that, worn, scratched and chipped by flint stones as they are, they reveal how much hardship and effort was involved.

  “I’m madly happy!”

  Pierre is already laying an owner’s hand over the sandstone that copper sulphate has turned green in places. There’s a surprising silence in this courtyard, where the only sound comes from the water of the fountain.

  “And what a fountain! Porphyry from Egypt. Look at the Greek Cross.”

  Their voices echo. An invisible dog barks. From a low door a woman comes out to meet them. She’s a stocky peasant with hair made frizzy in places by a perm several months old, accentuating her Phoenician features. Joints made of steel, bare legs, a working woman’s hips, a po
werful neck leading down to firm, gypsy breasts. No thighs, but-tocks that begin at the back of her knees, and feet that are planted firmly on the ground and attached to her legs by large, rustic limbs, in pure Mediterranean style.

  She had been expecting them, for she had dressed up: a very clean yellow shawl and some lipstick.

  They shake hands.

  “Did you receive my reply to your telegram?” asked Placide.

  “Yes, yes indeed.”

  “Is Monsieur de Boisrosé in?”

  “He’s in, of course, but… he’s tired.”

  “Well, he must rest, good God,” said Placide in placatory manner; “we shall see him later.”

  “I repeat, he’s very tired. Don’t you follow me?”

  “Not very well. Is he asleep?”

  “He’s doing more than sleeping, the poor fellow, he’s fainted.”

  It’s not easy to extract much from this Provençal woman who is on her guard. She sizes Pierre up, she sits in judgement. She has been waiting for these visitors too intently to divulge matters all at once.

  “A fainting fit?” says Pierre anxiously.

  “He’s been coughing now for some days, and he has a stitch in his side that makes him double up.”