blushing with the odd wink or shrug.
“No. Why?”
“It’s their antisocial impulse to defecate constantly. Horsey sorts will babble on about the noble beasts until your eyelids are leaden, but they never seem to mention this little flaw in their character. Someday I shall own a motorcar.” He started to leave, but stopped at the stable door. “But then, with my luck, the damned motorcar will probably be forever dropping iron filings out of its back end.”
“Do go help Katya with the wine.”
By the time I brought the trap around to the front of the house, everything was in readiness. But Monsieur Treville was nowhere to be found. After calling up and down stairs for him and out in the garden, Katya discovered him in his study, sitting at his desk scribbling notes, still wearing the broad-brimmed panama he had chosen for the outing. He explained to us that he had just stepped into his study to fetch something—he couldn’t recall just what —and his eye had fallen on a little phrase in one of the open books on his desk, so naturally he read it over; then a corresponding reference occurred to him that demanded checking for accuracy; and the next thing he knew an hour had passed, and everyone in the South of France was running about bellowing his name. Most disconcerting.
The old gentleman insisted on taking the reins, as he doubted that he would be able to share his duties in the return trip later that night. Katya sat beside him, and Paul and I in back. As we went along the dirt road towards Alos, I looked for signs of dismay in Monsieur Treville at the thought that he would have to uproot his library once again, but as best I could tell, he was in good spirits. His longish silences had more the texture of musing than of brooding. Perhaps he had put it out of his mind for the moment. Or perhaps he had simply forgotten about it.
As though to demonstrate his unique capacity for forgetfulness, he twice allowed the horse to slow almost to a stop; then he looked around with a puzzled frown before, recalling with a start that it was
As we progressed farther up towards the mountains, Katya lifted her face to the sun and breathed deeply and slowly, her eyes half-closed. Paul, on the other hand, seemed to sit tensely on the seat beside me, as though unwilling to relax, as he looked out on the countryside with distaste and mistrust at all this raw nature that was being inflicted on him.
“May I inquire as to our destination?” he asked.
“Alos?” I responded. “Oh, it’s just a little agricultural village. Quite humble. Typically Basque.”
“I hadn’t noticed that humility was typical of the Basque,” he said, letting his eyes settle lazily on me. “Not that they lack every justification for being humble. And how far away is this humble little Basque agricultural village?”
“Nine or ten kilometers as the crow flies.”
“And how far, if the crow has chosen to ride in the back seat of a cart lurching over an uneven dirt road?”
“Oh, about twice that, I should estimate.”
“I see. Twenty kilometers of unrelieved natural beauty attacking us from all sides. How wonderful.”
Katya laughed and turned to us. “Don’t despair, Paul. We’ll break our journey with a lovely picnic.”
“Oh, Good Lord, yes, the picnic! How could I have forgotten the picnic? Is there no end to these pastoral delights? I shall have to protect myself from this glut of pleasure, lest my senses be irremediably cloyed. And have you chosen a suitable site for our jolly picnic?”
“Of course not! It’s an adventure, Paul. One cannot organize an adventure any more than one can rehearse spontaneity. We shall simply go along until we find the perfect spot, and there we shall stop.”
“I see. And how shall we recognize this perfect spot?”
“It will be where we stop.”
Paul turned to me and blinked several times in accurate imitation of his father’s expression when bewildered.
I shrugged. “It makes perfect sense to me.”
“Hm-m. I sense a conspiracy. Very well, sister dear, I accept your notion of an adventure. But I do hope your perfect spot comes along soon. The sooner this feast begins, the sooner it will be done. And it’s always been my philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing quickly and shoddily. A man must have some rules to live by.”
I laughed. “Oh come now, Paul. Sit back and let all this nature and beauty seep into your soul. Become one with the universe.”
Paul shuddered at the very thought. “It was God’s design to keep Man and Nature apart. It is for this reason that, on the Eighth Day, He said: Let there be windows, doors, shutters, and curtains. And it was so. And He pronounced it good.”
In re-creating this conversation, I seek to make concrete an ineffable tone that permeated the whole afternoon, a tone of hollow humor and impotent camaraderie. Our words had the energy and inflections of entertainment, but the jokes were feeble, maladroit, forced. Each of us sought to keep the outing light and amusing for the sake of the others while, just beneath the surface, our attentions were on troublesome and saddening things. Generous though our motives were, there was something pitifully inept in our execution.
The road followed the Gave de Salies that wended, now close beside our wheels and sparkling in the sunlight, now a field away and calm, now hidden in a curve of trees; and it was when we had rounded a turning that revealed two graceful bows of the river beyond and below us that Katya decided we had arrived at the perfect picnic site.
Monsieur Treville assumed his responsibilities as paterfamilias and supervised the unloading and setting out of our meal, giving instructions and assignments always a moment after the task had been already undertaken, and making suggestions that were light-heartedly ignored. When satisfied that everything had been done as he had directed, he rubbed his hands together and announced that he was famished and that those who were unwilling to dig in with conviction and a certain sense of territorial aggression would doubtless go hungry.
As it happened, he ate quite lightly, often drifting off into his private thoughts as he sat rather uncomfortably on the sheet that was our ground cloth and stared, unseeing, out over the vista. In organizing everything with such superfluous energy, he, too, had been playing his part in confecting a tone of fun and animation.
To our general amusement, Paul pursued his role of the comic complainer, grousing about everything bitterly and assuring us that the basic raison d’кtre for landscape painting was to offer mankind the beauties of nature without requiring one to come into actual physical contact with its obscene reality. Furthermore, and more to the point, Katya had forgotten the salt!
The sheet was littered with the flotsam of the picnic and we had passed a quarter of an hour in relative silence, Katya leaning back on her elbows, her eyes closed, allowing the sunlight and breeze to touch her uplifted face, Monsieur Treville off somewhere in the maze of his thoughts, Paul flat on his back, his hat over his face as protection against the one fly that had attended the repast and had, of course, selected him as its host, and me lost in rehearsal of what I wanted to say to Paul. Katya rose and suggested we go down to the riverbank to collect wildflowers. Paul muttered sleepily that he would rather be struck by lightning, and I claimed to be too contented and lazy; so it was Monsieur Treville who grunted to his feet and trudged along after Katya, explaining to her that many wildflowers—golden-seal, henbane, foxglove, mayflower, among others—that are considered poisonous today, were used medicinally in the Middle Ages. Indeed, there was some reason to believe that….
And they departed, Katya moving gracefully through the tall grasses, the wind billowing her white dress; and her father following along behind, continuing his unheeded monologue. I watched them until they were lost among the trees bordering the Gave.
“She loves nature so,” I said quietly to Paul. “I admire—perhaps I envy—the way she embraces life and draws pleasure from simple things.”
“Hm-m-m,” he grunted noncommittally from beneath his hat.
“It seems a great pity, when happiness for her is compounded of such simple things as freedom and love, that she should be denied it… surrounded by such darkness and fear.”
He pointedly kept silent.
