Chapter 1 The Arrival The train, running north under its hammerhead of smoke and steam, had prematurely entered the land of winter, as if through a great, pure, silent door. How cold, how changed, the world was in the white morning, as the still, white light began to come. A world of wet woods, vague hills. And on the horizon’s edge, the pines, blocking in the land with ink. An empty region, apparently. Nothing by the track or visible between the branches, none of those piled towns, sloping villages, none of those shacks, sheds, cottages, farms, that had been interminably visible all yesterday, as the locomotive unfurled itself from the city. Nothing now, till the station appeared, swirling up about the train as if tediously and pointlessly to detain it. There was a remnant of the fall huddled around the station; on a bush, the occasional sodden yellow leaf, on a bough a cherry-red one: refugees. The air, as he stepped down, was keen as a knife. It immediately pierced to his lungs, and he coughed desultorily, not really noticing he did so. His box and bags were placed around him. He stood with them, a little island of dark in the albino morning, as the train drew away. Half a mile along the track, it gave a lonely cry, calling farewell to him, heartlessly, over its shoulder. The station was ramshackle and looked deserted. When the train was gone, it seemed he had been marooned, shipwrecked in the midst of a wilderness. Christian looked at his baggage hopelessly. There was too much to carry. He did not want to carry it. He had been promised a meeting here, and a conveyance. He did not want to make any decisions. The thought of doing so, of planning what should happen next, made him feel depressed, bored and exhausted. He sat down on the box. He had not been able to sleep in the train. Something about its eternity of motion, which had drugged him, had also kept him awake. Bareheaded, yet swathed otherwise in the dark astrakhan greatcoat, he imagined himself blending, dissolving into the landscape. Black and white like the winter morning, and the woods. Black hair, black coat; the white face. A young face, except for two fissures carved out under the eyes. The eyes . . . what color were they? Black and white mixed; a gray, luminous but leaden. Curious. (He was picturing himself, now.) Not even the little crimson touches of autumn about him. Till he thought of blood, and all the leaves left clinging on the bushes around the station wall pulsed and burned as if alive, and he felt the terrible mindless disbelieving fear, and then— And then a man came out of the station building. He was tall and cloaked, a funereal top hat rising like a chimney from his head. He was all clothes, and did not seem to have a face. “Monsieur?” he asked. “Monsieur Dorse?” Christian rose, acknowledging his name. “Yes.” “The car is below on the road, monsieur. Peton is coming for your luggage.” “Yes.” They stood indecisively, the young man, the newcomer in his top hat, like actors smitten with amnesia. What came next? “I am Sarrette, monsieur.” The driver. There was nothing else to be done but walk away from his luggage, abandon it, move forward empty-handed into the void. Sarrette held open two doors for him and then a gate. Steps went down between earth banks. Trees clouded on the far side of a narrow gravel road, where the big car rested like a jet-black, strangely elongated and roofed bath chair. “It’s very cold, monsieur,” said Sarrette, as he opened the door of the car. Another man had emerged from somewhere, gone into the station, and was now returning with the box. Peton. He was strong, bareheaded as was Christian, but without the young man’s wealth of hair. Thin strands were combed over Peton’s scalp like pencil drawings. He loaded the box at the rear of the car. Sarrette made gestures with a traveling rug, as Peton loped back up the steps and presently returned with the other bags. Peton did not glance, at any point, at Christian. His task accomplished, an incoherent altercation broke out between Peton and Sarrette, conducted in the local dialect—virtually incomprehensible. The incomprehensibility removed it from Christian’s sphere of concerns, and he was relieved. The freezing air had begun to intrude under his skin, hurting him. Then Peton was suddenly making away. Sarrette started the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. The car shuddered and slid forward. “I am afraid, monsieur . . .” said Sarrette. There was a pause. “There are only the four of us at the chateau. As I believe Monsieur Hamel wrote you.” “Yes.” “It’s a bad state of affairs. But to take on service at this time of year is impossible. Until the spring—” “I understand.” “Out here, monsieur. The Styx. The desert.” The road curved away from the railway tracks, and now the pine forest flowed toward it. It was the forest of a childhood story. Nothing needed to be said or thought about it. Sometime or other, some romancer had thought and said it all. . . . The feeling of a claw scratching in his throat increased, and Christian coughed again, lightly, not indulging the cough. Let it wait. The driver said, “Wonderful country for the health, monsieur.” Christian watched the dark green and black pagodas of the trees. He was twenty-eight. Before the spring came, he might be dead. There was a thought, now. He felt rather ill, drained, but it was not unpleasant while he could lie back in the plush of the seat. He wondered if Sarrette thought him handsome and wished, on a merely paternalistic level, to take care of him. This had happened quite often. Was Sarrette a local product? Christian was not really used to a tradition of retainers, the notion of serfs, which, however much blurred and euphemized by the epoch, would still be present here in this wild winter country. The servants of his childhood, and at the house of his cousin in the city, had been affectionate, unproud and insulting. He wondered how long it would be before he saw the chateau, and how he would react to it. His mother had lived in this place, but only until her seventh or eighth year. His grandfather’s debts had then lost them almost everything, and the house had been sold. The family had become city dwellers, and at eighteen, a good marriage to a provincial hotelier of foreign extraction had snared his mother, and brought Christian. It was a freak of fortune and ancestral connivance which had returned the chateau, forty years after its sale, into Christian’s possession. He had not thought to have it, nor ever thought to want it. Life had systematically taken away from him the things he had wished for most. The chateau was a kind of bright bauble flung to him as he lay stranded and crying with despair. Childishly distracted from pain and ruin, he had picked it up. The landscape looked its age. The Romans had built their forts on it once. The road ascended steeply between palisades and hanging curtains of trees. Periodic breaks revealed distant depths showering away, pine on pine, the occasional fir, bluish and smoldering, the attenuated counterpoint of larches. Above, slabs of hillside sometimes leaned like balconies from the forest. Once, a blush of smoke indicated some isolated dwelling, or charcoal burners, perhaps. The smell of the smoke, and dank, crushed, fallen leaves, permeated the car, chocolaty and immemorial. Such scents, like those of cooking meat, sap in a bud, a woman’s hair, had existed since the beginnings—primeval, timeless, permanent. (Of course, he would inevitably think in such a way.) The village appeared almost without warning. A stone marker at the wayside, next a farm, piercing through the trees with its raw carpet of stubbled fields and long fence. Abruptly a church hung above them, angled almost horizontally as it perched sideways on the incline. Houses burgeoned. They looked very old. Iron crosses, hammered into the plaster, had lapsed drunkenly sideways, pots of brown soil cluttered windows and stairs. Roofs fell toward each other. Kept falling. Walls leaned. A situation du Moyen Age. Women in black moved about, and tainted air rose from the forge. A child ran down the street toward the car, a dog barking at its heels, but Sarrette was driving very slowly. Christian expected faces to open like flowers, staring at him, and he held himself together, braced. But these people barely glanced at the car. There was some kind of monument in the square, and there was a well, still in use, naturally. They drove around the square, by the memorial and the well, past the church, and slowly back into more forest beyond. Five minutes later, two stone animals manifested on either side of the road, heraldic dogs, rampant, with shields. Another minute and the wall reared up, the wall of the chateau, a huge rampart, partly crumbling. Two more stone dogs watched them through the open gates. This ground had been cleared, partly landscaped at one time, probably. To Christian, the view had no format. It belonged to him, and some dim stirring in him tried briefly to assimilate, to recognize: an avenue of leafless limes, a cypress tree commanding a hillock, a cluster of stones that might have been part of some former building. . . . But no, the land about the chateau remained elusive and as indeterminate as anything he had witnessed from the windows of the train. The road ran right over the estate, finally crossing a bridge, that looked as if it were constructed of gray marzipan, above a moat. If any water remained in the moat, Christian could not see. The chateau loomed on the other side. It was large. Like the cleared land, it defied acceptance. He gazed at it wearily, let it have its way, too tired to fight with it. The little town houses and flats of his past, with their reassuring claustrophobia, the suite of rooms in his father’s stucco hotel, facing forever out to sea as if from a becalmed liner—these homes and dwellings had nothing to do with the chateau. It did not seem inhabitable. Rock-like bastions, stained plastered walls, shutters, battlements, balustrades, all glued and grown together, an enormous petrified vegetable. The road, and therefore the car, stopped under a tall gray terrace, by a staircase flanked with cement urns. Sarrette sounded the horn. They sat still in the quietly popping car, waiting. A boy ran from the chateau suddenly, along the terrace, down the stair. He was about nineteen, red-cheeked. Christian experienced a terrible apathetic contempt for the boy’s health and vigor. Christian opened the car door, not waiting to be released. He got out and looked at the staircase, at the boy running down it. The boy nodded anxiously to him, a bob of the head, a paragon of obsequiousness. He moved at once and began to unload Christian’s box and the bags. Sarrette emerged from the car. “Renzo,” said Sarrette, indicating the boy. “Madame Tienne will be in charge of the domestic arrangements, and of course there is the woman from the village, who will cook. And there’s the girl who’ll live in, to attend to the cleaning of the rooms. This is unsatisfactory, naturally, but until the spring—” “Yes,” said Christian. He observed the stairs, trying to count them. Forty, or was it forty-two? “Much of the chateau is still shut up. Madame Tienne has opened the master suite on the first floor for your convenience, and the grande hall and salon are in good order. But if any other apartment—I believe the music room interested you, monsieur?” “Not until the advent of a piano tuner.” “Oh yes, indeed. Monsieur Hamel engaged someone from the city. It was seen to last week. Didn’t you receive the letter?” Christian recalled the lawyer Hamel’s unmistakable last envelope arriving at the house of his cousin just as Christian was leaving for the station. His cousin had been in tears, a taxicab stood at the door. Christian had thrust the letter into his coat, and, convinced of its pedantic unimportance, forgotten it. He went on looking at the staircase. The boy, single-handed, like Peton, was lugging the box toward the terrace. “Presumably I go up,” said Christian. “Yes, monsieur. Madame Tienne is waiting in the salon for your orders.” Christian negotiated the stairs slowly. On the twentieth, he paused. He looked back, as if taking in the vista, steadying himself casually against the pedestal of an urn. Sarrette, who had not offered to help him at all, was leaning against the shiny car, watching. From the first, Christian received the impression of—what? Not exactly unfriendliness, more indifference. I am an interloper, Christian thought. They instinctively expect that I shall come and go, just like the nuisance of the impending winter. Arrival, and inevitable departure. And how right they are. Beyond the man and the car, the curve of road and bridge, the land rose modestly. A crippled lime tree looked for a moment impossibly familiar. There were forty-five stairs. Renzo, the boy, passed him twice, returning for and then carrying the bags. Renzo was cheerful. He ignored Christian’s slow ascent. Christian actually felt the dry pallor of his face, as if it had been painted over, like the peeling facade of the chateau. He paused on the terrace, breathing. His legs were water, but he had Madame to deal with. He visualized a doll-like figure in a provincial white apron, knowing the image would be false. He still heard his cousin’s voice—“Don’t go, don’t leave us, my dear. You’re not well, not fit—” Mummified by frost, husks of flowers still lurked in the urns beside the door, which stood wide to receive the new master. He heard the car driving away around the side of the house toward the antique stables, now reduced to a sprawling garage. He coughed, and went through the door into his absurd ancestral home.
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