The Catalans: A Novel Read Free

and he ran the closer relations of the Fajals through his mind to see if he could fix the child in another surrounding. There was Fajal’s sister almost next door, in the mercery, and lower down on the corner there was the other sister at the tobacco shop. Was it that extraordinary, ethereal child, the one he had seen at the tobacconist’s? He remembered how he had stared; a slim child (though at first he had not known she was a child—she had no age, neither young nor old for the first moment of that encounter) with ash-blond hair and a perfect, exquisite face and pale eyes. No. That girl’s name was Carmen, and she had died—meningitis—after he had left. This Madeleine would be her cousin. If she looked anything like her, no wonder Xavier behaved strangely. Though in all likelihood if Carmen had grown up she would have coarsened like the other girls: that strange remoteness would have come heavily to earth with adolescence; and the inevitable growth of body, atrophy of mind, the invasion of clothes, make-up, frizzled hair, would all have buried that lovely child deeper than ever the earth did now.
    Still he could not see any little girl called Madeleine Fajal, or rather Pou-naou—for although the family’s name was Fajal on letters and documents, nobody in Saint-Féliu called them anything but Pou-naou, from the circumstance of Jean Fajal’s father having owned the house by the new fountain, or pump. Jean Pou-naou, Thérèse Pou-naou, Mimi Pou-naou who married the son of René l’Empereur: but Jean’s uncle, old Pou-naou’s brother, was called Ferrand because he was a smith, and all his branch of the family were Ferrands too. And this diversity of names ran through the town, the interrelated, closely knit, cross-knit town of cousins and remoter kin, to the utter confusion of strangers, and to their exclusion. None but a native, born to it and growing up with it, could hold it all in his head: but Alain Roig had absorbed it in his youngest days, and although the years between had carried away so much, that remained, surprisingly complete and ready to his hand. Without searching at all he remembered that Mimi Pou-naou had married Louis l’Empereur, the son of René l’Empereur—the old soldier of Cochin-China who nominally owned the tobacco shop that Mimi ran while her husband went to sea after the sardines and anchovies—and that René l’Empereur, who was officially called René Prats, had received his name very early, when Napoleon III had dandled him for a moment, thus changing the family surname, which for generations had been Pitg-a-fangc, Wade in the muck, from an origin too gross to record.
    So although he could not remember the child Madeleine as a person, he could fix her exactly in her place, surround her with her relations and her contemporaries. He could define her, like a geometrical locus, in relation to a number of determined entities, a very large number in this case. Still, it was irritating not to be able to manage his memory better: he had often heard about the girl, and that should have perpetuated a visual image. Heard about her, that is, before all this fuss; for she had been something of a protégée of his Aunt Margot. He had heard about her accompanying Aunt Margot to Perpignan to see a parade, helping with Aunt Margot’s orphans: “I made the rest of the silk you sent me into a collar and cuffs for Madeleine.” But particularly he had heard about her when she married one Francisco Cortade: it was a marriage very much disapproved by Aunt Margot and by all the girl’s family—a most unequal match, by all that he heard. It had made Aunt Margot angry to see Madeleine, an educated girl, able to speak correct French and to present herself anywhere, capable of holding a serious position (she could type), throwing herself away in marriage to a young fisherman with nothing at all, a young man furthermore who was said to be idle and to have absurd pretensions. She had been angry, too,