Mavis Gallant - Montreal Stories

“Who does this whole place actually belong to?” said Carlotta. We stood in the last thin patch of shade at the end of the road. Before us, in white sunlight, a drawbridge stretched over the dry bed of a moat. “Does it belong to France? I mean, the state?” She edged a dented Pepsi can aside with her shoe, and shifted her light weight to the other foot — Lily’s old sign of concentration.

“Some part of the state,” I said. “Some ministry or other. It used to be owned by a family who had a sardine-canning monopoly.” I was not making fun of her; it was so.

She took this for a fair answer, remarking only that her mother would not let them eat tinned fish.

“So you do eat some fish at home? Meat, too?”

“Ben got poisoning in Hong Kong,” she said. “So now we’re careful.”

Refuse littered the ditch: crumpled bags, bent straws, stubs of entry tickets. There was a child’s toy monkey and a toothbrush. I wondered if the sardine connection had anything to do with a large fish someone had drawn on the planks of the bridge. Perhaps there was a more subtle reason for it, a revival of early Christian symbolism, a devious way of saying, “Pagans, go home.” But as we drew nearer I saw that it was the approximate representation of a phallus. In the north of Europe, a graffito of that sort would indicate defiance and unrest; in the south, it probably signified the hope of a steady birth rate. Or just somebody boasting, I decided, noticing a chalked telephone number.

“They ought to arrest all those people,” said Carlotta, looking where I looked.

“The sardine canners bought the castle from the de Stentor family,” I said, glad to have a ready topic. “Victor is a connection of theirs, much removed. A junior branch. I’ve often wondered if he has any real claim on the name. You met him at dinner last night.”

“He’s fat,” said Carlotta. “Victor. He wanted to take me to a casino, but you have to be eighteen to get in. They ask to see your passport. I wouldn’t have gone with him anyway. He’s a very old man. He shouldn’t be running round to casinos. He might have a stroke, or something.”

“He had no business inviting you anywhere.”

“I know. I was still tired after the movies in Nice, and then Irma gave me an art lesson.” I was silent. “So?” she said. “Victor lived up here?”

“Some of his relatives. Before them, there was a Cuban. He gave extravagant masked balls and parties. There are people still living down here who can remember the music, the dancers, the thousands of candles.”

“Where does a Cuban get that kind of money?” She answered her own question: “Vice.”

I started to say, “Long, long before Fidel Castro,” but to Carlotta no such time existed. The repeated collapse and inflation of events continued to perplex me, even though I had once written a thesis on Talleyrand and published a number of afterthoughts. Since the arrival of Carlotta, the flattened present, the engorged past had scarcely quit my mind. They were like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has swallowed history whole. I said, “Before the Cuban, an American couple named Primage paid for extensive repairs. They didn’t own the place and never lived here. One wonders how they got up the hill. Mules and a guide, I suppose.”

“Why did they bother?” said Carlotta. “It came off their taxes?”

“Income tax barely existed. Americans were like that. They loved France and wanted the French to love them. They hadn’t yet worked out that France and the French are entirely different.”

“The state wouldn’t get a cent out of me,” said Carlotta. “You saw those trees?”

The cost of admittance was seven times greater than in Lily’s day. “You could get in cheaper,” said Carlotta. “Have you got a senior card?”

“I am not sixty-five.”

“I’m sorry. I thought Mummy said you’d retired.”

I wondered where Lily picked up her information. For years I had been turning my back on anyone likely to say, “I’ve met your ex-wife.” Sometimes I still came across a couple by the name of Lapwing, Harry and Edith, who had been young and hard up in France with Lily and me. Edie and Lily had gone to the same Catholic school; that was the connection. It was a wives’ story, with the women (“the girls,” we had said then) whispering and laughing and trading stories about the men. The Lapwings now lived out West and were entirely taken up by their own affairs — university machinations, mostly.

Carlotta stopped to consider four rusted cannons in the flagged courtyard. She said, “They ought to be boiled down, or whatever it is you do with weapons. My mother’s a committed pacifist. She won’t even let Ben keep a gun in the house.”

“They were brought here during the French Revolution,” I said. “Never used. They can’t hurt anyone.” She still seemed troubled. Revolution? Soviet walkabout? Will miles, gallons, Fahrenheit temperature hold the line? “Long before that time,” I said — thinking, The vaguer the better; less alarming for the child—“the castle belonged to the tax collector for a powerful local count. There was an ancient line of counts in the region, older than the French royal family. They spoke a dialect you can still hear in one or two villages.”

“I guess it’s a pretty old place,” said Carlotta neutrally.

Guides and touring groups packed the stone entrance hall, which was brighter and cleaner than I remembered. The guides wore badges—“English,” “Français,” “Deutsch,” “Italiano”—and looked, to me, too young to know about anything. As for the visitors, they resembled nothing so much as migrant labor waiting to board one of those long trains with dirty windows. Like migrants, they hung on to radios, cameras, extra clothes for a change of weather, plastic bags of fruit and chocolate, newspapers. Most of these articles had to be left at a cloakroom, after fierce argument. A “No Tipping” sign stood propped behind a saucer set out for tips. Tourists responded by unloading small change from foreign countries. Carlotta’s shoulder-strap bag held only Kleenex and her passport. During the drive, she had got out her passport and examined it, frowning over the facts of her birth date and height. She was dressed in white shorts, a blue shirt, running shoes, and wore around her neck a gold heart on a chain.

In Lily’s day, women tourists had dressed in flowered nylon blouses, pleated white skirts, white nylon cardigans with pearl buttons. I recalled a man in a gleaming white shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal a tattoo of peacock blue — a long number, like the number of a freight car. Outside, he and his wife took pictures of each other, then asked me to take pictures of them. They sat down on the dry grass, after searching in vain for a sign saying they mustn’t. They put their heads close together and smiled up at me. The moat was fed by a shallow stream. Some people sat along the edge, which was high and straight, like the bank of a canal, and let their legs dangle. The legs and thighs even of young people looked veined and pale. Everyone over here had seemed like that, to me — bruised, pallid, glancing around to look for rules and prohibitions.

Carlotta said, “Let’s stay with the French group. We’ll learn more.” I wondered if it would be interesting or instructive to describe my tour with Lily, and the man in the white shirt, and how it had been thought bad taste to flaunt that kind of tattoo. The sight affected people; some young men and women had had their tattoo effaced by means of plastic surgery, out of regard for the feelings of strangers.

“Steve,” said Carlotta. “I want to ask you something. Why wasn’t Irma at that dinner last night?”

“Miss Baes doesn’t know many people. This is her first summer down here.”