The Man in a Hurry Read online

  “Pleurisy, his heart must have given out on him,” says Pierre.

  “His heart was thumping away last night! It sounded like the old motor in the well. Monsieur was having too much fun working!”

  Pierre and Placide glance at one another: “Have we arrived too late?” Cow-like, the woman reads their minds easily. Naively, she forgets herself and replies aloud:

  “He’s already lost his mind four times in two days, the poor fellow. But he won’t pass away without having chatted with you.”

  “Is he on his own?”

  “Do you think I’d leave him! The lawyer, Maître Caressa, is keeping him company. Come in. I’ll go and warn him.”

  She is no longer speaking like a maid, but as the mistress of the Mas Vieux, with the authority of a proprietor. One can sense that for years this scrupulous spider has spun her web here. She loses no time, certain that death will promptly reward her patience. Her future as a careful, prudent girl is at stake at this moment. She has worked long and hard preparing for this and the machine is set and running.

  The two Parisians walk into the main room while she rushes to the bedroom. They look down and smell the tiled floor, brightly polished with linseed oil, and they look up at the old rafters of the house laid bare by the plasterwork; the rotten beams and planks of wood, the corner posts, as well as the crossbars and struts, the whole framework of the room consists of ancient joists riddled with woodworm in which cheese-mites dwell, those grubs that inhabit olive trees and that cause sawdust to fall on you when you step too heavily. The room has two shades: milky, whitewashed walls and tables blackened by smoke and the stain of oil used at meals. The soberness of an orthodox cloister; and the railway timetable for Sud-Provence for an icon.

  Pierre nudges Placide’s elbow and points to a fireplace with a rounded hood and small columns supported by cushions filled with leaves.

  “To think that I’ll be able to make a fire in a real Roman fireplace! A Roman fire!”

  And, indicating a heap of heather roots, pine needles and cones:

  “Here, you won’t be able to criticize me any more for pouring petrol on the wood to make it burn quicker! The fire will catch alight all on its own with these olive twigs. Have you ever seen olive wood burn, Placide? It’s full of blue and green glimmers, like rum punch.”

  The beaded bamboo curtain quivered: a man appeared.

  “Gentlemen, I have the great honour. I am the lawyer, Maître Caressa,” he said solemnly. “My client has come to his senses.”

  “Ah, is he better?” said Pierre.

  “No. He won’t see the sunrise, unfortunately.” The doctor was quite clear. “Monsieur de Boisrosé”, he affirmed, “will pass away during the night.”

  The lawyer made as though he were tapping his heart, indicating how difficult his client’s breathing was, then, squeezing his throat, he pretended he was suffocating.

  “Yet Monsieur de Boisrosé seemed to be in very good health?” Placide interrupted, very politely. “Might we know what it is that is sending him to the grave?”

  “Chronic pleurisy that has become acute; he has had four attacks in a few days. And to think that this fine man of ancient lineage, gentlemen, and courtesy itself, wanted—and it was his own expression—‘to die without causing any fuss’!”

  “May we still take our leave of him?” asked Placide as a matter of form. He was beginning to amuse himself at the sight of Pierre in convulsions.

  The maid heard them as she came back into the room:

  “Ah, monsieur, it’s as if he were losing his wits. Come and see him as quickly as possible.”

  “Right away,” said Pierre, “let’s not waste any time.”

  Maître Caius Caressa cast a lengthy glance at the maid and said nothing. He bore the ugliness of several generations with assurance. His height, his heavy black shoes, unique in a region that wore espadrilles, his black suit, his civil service hat that lay on the table, his sclerotic mulatto’s eyes that were a brighter amber than the glue of the fly-paper that hung from the ceiling—everything about him revealed a man who was wily and powerful. He looked like one of those effigies of princes dubbed “the Bad” by their subjects that can be seen on the back of disused coins.

  Pierre and Placide, who were only familiar with a few roguish crooks from business consultancies on the Côte d’Azur who tossed words around, remained silent in the presence of this witness to a secret deed that smelt of conspiracy.

  “Mademoiselle Hortense informed me. She told me that you would like to buy the Mas Vieux.”

  “The sooner the better,” said Pierre.

  “When your colleague came to see Monsieur de Boisrosé a month ago, the farm was not for sale. But as soon as my client became aware of the warnings from heaven, he wished to put his affairs in order. The Mas Vieux is a lovely piece of countryside.”

  “The price?”

  “A very reasonable and moderate price. It’s not on the road, of course, and there’s no pergola, but you will produce ten tons of cork oak a year, enough to supply the whole coastline as far as Bormes with corks, floats and soles. And two earthenware jars of oil a year.”

  “And there’s water,” added the maid. “All the frogs throughout the summer are proof of that.”

  “The price?” Pierre repeated.

  The lawyer was not accustomed to these sudden stops and starts. His eyes flashed and then dimmed.

  “You must understand the situation. Monsieur de Boisrosé is sixty-five years old. A former judge in Martinique, for twenty years he has been separated from his wife who lives in Saint-Germain with their three daughters. On the death of their father, they will inherit. However, Monsieur de Boisrosé would like to recognize the loyal service given to him over several years by Mademoiselle Hortense Pastorino. Not being able to bequeath the Mas Vieux to her, he wishes to sell it during his lifetime; as long as he goes on living. He is an indecisive man and it took the arrival of the priest for him to make up his mind.”

  “I will pay in cash.”

  “The woods are full of amanita, bolete, parasols. Do you eat mushrooms?”

  “I only like ceps.”

  “There are some here that are as fine as those at Sospel. But they need rain…”

  “When are we going to sign?” said Pierre impatiently.

  “… can you tell the difference between the poisonous and the edible amanita?”

  “And you, Maître Caressa, can you tell the difference between a man who is in a hurry and a local village buyer?”

  Pierre turned towards the maid, took her by the arm and led her over to the window.

  Maître Caressa smiled at Placide and shrugged his shoulder.

  “He’s a lively fellow, your friend.”

  If the lawyer, who normally watched his words as carefully as one would watch over someone who was dying, had struck up a new conversation, it was because he wished to do so. He, too, was in a hurry to sign, but for selfish reasons he bided his time, exerting his renowned patience upon others. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched Pierre peering intently at the maid, while she was frowning and looked as though she were about to burst into tears from irritation and emotion. Her gaze was lowered and she was wringing her wrists like a bookbinder shuffling pages. She was actually crying. Then her face lit up.

  “Do you like hunting?” the lawyer asked Placide. “There are hares here as big as mastiffs. And foxes. And squirrels. Squirrel is good to eat.”

  “I only shoot with a bow,” Placide replied modestly.

  Pierre and the maid rejoined them.

  “It’s done. We’re in agreement.”

  And in the way one says: “Sit down, the soufflé is ready now!” the lawyer added:

  “Pleurisy doesn’t wait.”

  Here they are now in Monsieur de Boisrosé’s bedroom. He had regained consciousness. His bony face, with its lined features, was sunk into the pillow. Spluttering, the sick man raised himself up as they entered and his head did its best to lift
itself above the eiderdown, rather like the head of a Chinese torture victim trying to free himself from the cangue. Short of breath, his nose pinched, his hands wringing the sheet—everything pointed to a human being on his last legs. He recognized Placide, greeted him with old-world courtesy, said hello to Pierre and bid them sit down.

  “Monsieur, all that remains is to sign,” said the lawyer.

  “I am happy to sell the Mas Vieux while I live to whomsoever would like it,” the sick man, short of breath, whispered with difficulty. “I should nonetheless like to be sure…”

  The lawyer, dry as a for sale notice, cut him short.

  “To wit,” he began: “a personal property, seven rooms over a cellar, fifteen hectares planted with one hundred and twenty olive trees, one hundred and fifty almond trees and vines, two water tanks…”

  “… sure that the money will be immediately…” continued M. de Boisrosé in a feeble voice.

  “… sheepfold, chicken run…”

  “… It’s very important…”

  “… pine grove…”

  “… paid to…”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Monsieur de Boisrosé… Workshop, wash-house…’’

  “My only demand, payment in cash…”

  “Agreed,” replied Pierre.

  “It’s because I want to recognize above all…”

  “You’re talking too much, you’re exhausting yourself, and you’re preventing us from completing.”

  “One more wish,” the dying man went on in a suddenly steady voice: “I put in the electricity myself; I need to explain to you, monsieur, how it works.”

  “Ah, this electricity! He wore himself out installing it,” the maid groaned.

  “We shall never get through everything. It’s getting dark. You oblige me to request that you keep silent, Monsieur de Boisrosé.”

  “It’s horrible,” Pierre muttered to Placide.

  Then the thought occurred to him that the lawyer must know what he was doing and that this brutality towards the dying was necessary. As the end approaches, one’s thinking must grow confused; instead of becoming simpler, everything probably becomes complicated, and there must be doubts, qualms and alterations that affect everything. Lawyers are used to dramatic situations. This old grafter knows his job, but it’s appalling nonetheless.

  “Come on now, sign.”

  And Maître Caressa took out his pen.

  Pierre admired the waxen hands of the dying man with their slender fingers that seemed to be busy undoing life’s last threaded knot. A gold signet ring bearing a coat of arms slipped down his bony finger and stopped at the last phalanx. Monsieur de Boisrosé traced his name without raising his pen, allowing it to drop on the line three times, not having the strength to lift it up.

  “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.”