Rodney Whitaker: The Summer of Katya

“No.” I laughed.

“Blind with lust, then?”

“No.”

“You must have been blind with something. Being blind is a characteristic of your generation. Ah! Blind drunk, I’ll wager. I’ve always mistrusted your addiction to strong waters, Montjean. Particularly as it is accompanied by an equally strong reticence to offer rounds. Very well, I see that you intend to be churlishly secretive about your conquest; so let us settle between ourselves the minor problems of the planet. The newspapers are full of talk of war. Germany is glowering, France is snarling, Britain is vacillating, and Bosnia—where in hell is Bosnia anyway? One of those half-mythical nations down at the lower right of the map, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve never trusted that lot. If they had honorable intentions they wouldn’t hide and cower down there. The whole business is as angry and gnarled as the probate of a peasant will. Clarify it for me, Montjean. Focus your fine, Parisian-trained mind on the matter and tell me for once and all: Are we to have war or not? Have I time to order supper before the bombardment begins?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“There you go again, being so cocksure of things. Overconfidence is an ugly characteristic of your generation—that and being blind. And refusing to offer rounds. Well, if you don’t know, I do! There will be no war! You have my word on it.” He drew a sigh and made a comic face. “But then, I must tell you that I am the fellow who assured everyone that the Prussians were only bluffing back in ‘70.”

“Dr. Gros, may I ask you something seriously?”

“You certainly have a gift for taking the brio out of a conversation. But, very well. Fire away.”

“What do you know of the Trevilles?”

“Ah-ha! Just as I thought! Curiosity. The Eighth Deadly Sin and notorious felinocide. It’s worse than lust. God only knows how many sordid affairs have been generated by sexual curiosity. There’s strong aphrodisiac in the question: I wonder how she’d be in bed? Nothing, of course, to the saltpeter of finding out. You ask what I know about the Trevilles? I know what the village knows. Nothing and everything. The Trevilles have been most unresponsive to the oblique questioning of the maids, merchants, and tradesmen they have dealt with during their year among us. Therefore, rustic logic feels free to confect—nay, obliged to confect a suitable biography in which to set the few thin facts known. There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips. What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Fine. I shall share with you the subtle mйlange of fact and fancy that passes for truth hereabouts. In imitation of Genesis, I shall begin ‘in the beginning’—a dangerously close relative of ‘once upon a time,’ as every conscientious theologian knows. Well, the Trevilles came here from Paris a year ago. Three of them. A father and two children who, as I suppose even you have observed, are twins—a thing vaguely suspect in itself. They took a lease on the decrepit mansion called Etcheverria at terms that so delighted its owner that he rushed into town and bought drinks all around—an excess of generosity he has regretted ever since, and doubtless confessed as a sin of profligacy. Ever since their arrival, the Trevilles have lived as virtual recluses—a thing for which the village gossips cannot forgive them. May I offer you another little glass? No? It’s not charitable to flaunt your abstemiousness in this way, you know. One of those careless cruelties of Youth. The father is rumored to be something of a scholar, with all of the stigma appropriately attached to that nefarious craft. The son is accounted a wastrel, a snob, and—as he has not been caught climbing out of a peasant girl’s window—there are hints that he may be a bit of a pйdй. After all, he comes from Paris, and we all know what that means. But it is the daughter—dare I call her your young lady?—who has attracted most of the old crones’ attention. She has been seen walking alone in the fields from time to time. Walking alone.” Doctor Gros pumped his thick eyebrows up and down to underline the salacious implications of that. “Furthermore, it is said that she rides a bicycle. A bicycle, no less! Stare hard enough at that fact and you’ll find double—nay triple!—entendre. Also, she constantly wears white dresses, and we all know what that means. As she has never been observed doing anything in the least compromising, the gossips reason that she must do these things in secret. All in all, I’m afraid I must tell you that the Trevilles are the scandal of the community. Our local pride is bruised by their having chosen this corner of France in which to hide from whatever their sins and indiscretions may be. It’s as much as saying that we’re a Godforsaken, out-of-the-way backwater! And the fact that this is an accurate description of our community adds to the sting of it. There it is, Montjean. In a capsule, this is what is known and rumored about the Trevilles. And in addition there is the matter of the mother—whom no one has met and who is therefore rumored to be a dwarf, a Protestant, and left-handed. But I have a feeling this description is based on rather sketchy evidence.”

“The mother is dead,” I said.

“A dwarf, Protestant, left-handed, and dead? My, my. There is food for gossip. She’s a handsome one, your young lady. I congratulate you. A bit healthy for my own taste. Men of our profession must always be alert to the possibility that healthy people are doing it on purpose to ruin us.”

“So there’s nothing really known about them at all.”

“Nothing at all, as I have just said at some length.” The cafй waiter having delivered yet another Berger, Gros measured into his glass just enough water to cloud the drink without weakening it, then he stared at me for a moment before asking, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well what? What the devil are we talking about? Have you and your young lady…?” He made a palm-up gesture cutting across his chest.

“I barely know her!”

“Shame on you! Engaging in such intimacies with a girl you barely know. There’s the youth of today for you! No sense of decorum. You do realize, I hope, that you’ve contracted the disease.”

“What disease?”

“Love, man! I spotted the symptoms as you crossed the square pushing that silly bicycle. The vague, purposeless smile, the eye gone dim with inward-directed vision, the—”

“Oh, really!”

“Smitten, by God! Ah well, it happens to the best of us. In proof of which, I confess that I was once infected by love in my youth. But alas,” he drew a fluttering sigh, “it developed that she was a shallow thing attracted only by my physical beauty and ignorant of the depths of sensitivity beneath.”

“I’d really rather not discuss—”

“You have been good enough to share with me your conviction that mine is a quackish branch of medicine. As I recall, you were appalled that the nation of Pasteur could also be the nation of medicinal spas and curative waters. Well, for my part, I am appalled that the culture capable of producing de Sade could also produce the billet-doux and the tender assignation. Love resides in the loin, my boy, not in the heart.”

“I should warn you that I take offense at this turn of talk.”

“Oh, my, my! Forgive me! Misericorde!”

“There is something further I would like to know.”

“Oh, really? I would have taken it from your attitude that you knew everything—everything worth knowing, that is.”