Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

312 Pages • $12.95

EXCERPT

Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

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The man here depicted was the enemy of his own flesh and blood. His heart was eaten up by hatred and by avarice. Yet, I would have you, in spite of his baseness, feel pity and be moved by his predicament. All through his dreary life, squalid passions stood between him and that radiance that was so close that an occasional ray could still break through to touch and burn him: not only his own passions, but, primarily, those of the lukewarm Christians who spied upon his actions, and whom he himself tormented. Too many of us are similarly at fault, driving the sinner to despair and blinding his eyes to the light of truth.

It was not money that this miser really treasured, nor, in his blind fury, was it vengeance that he sought. What it was that he truly loved you may discover who have the strength of mind, and the courage, to follow his story to the end, to that ultimate moment of confession that death cut short.

When you find this letter lying on top of a bundle of securities in my safe you will be surprised. I might have been better advised to entrust it to my solicitor, with instructions to hand it to you after my death, or to leave it in that locked drawer of my desk that my children will almost certainly force before my body has grown cold. But for years I have written and rewritten it in my imagination and always, in my bouts of sleeplessness, have seen it staring at me from the shelf of a safe empty of everything except this single act of vengeance upon which I have been brooding for almost half a century.

You need not be afraid. As a matter of fact, any cause for fear that you might have had will have been dissipated before you read these lines. “The securities are there all right!” I can hear your raised voice in the hall as you announce the good news on your return from the bank. “The securities are there all right!” you’ll say to the children through the folds of your mourning veil.

But you’ve had a very narrow escape! I had taken all the necessary steps. Had I so willed it, you would stand today stripped of everything but the house and lands. You can thank your lucky stars that I have outlived my hatred. For years I believed that it was the most vital part of me. But now, quite suddenly, and for the time being, at least, it has ceased to mean anything to me. I find it difficult in my old age to recapture the vindictive mood of earlier years when I would lie in my sickbed, night after night, not so much planning the method of revenge (the delay-action bomb had already been “set” with an attention to detail that was a matter of considerable pride to me) as wondering how I might derive the maximum of satisfaction from its detonation. I wanted to live just long enough to see your faces when you got back from the bank. It was merely a matter of not giving you authority to open the safe too soon, of waiting just long enough to enjoy the sound of your despairing question—“but where are the securities?” I felt that no death pangs, however frightful, could spoil that pleasure for me. Of such calculating malice was I capable! And yet, by nature I am not a monster. How came it, then, that I was brought to such a pass?

It is four o’clock, and my luncheon tray is still standing on the table, with flies buzzing round the dirty plates. I have rung, but with no result. Bells never work in the country. I am lying quite patiently in this room where I slept as a child, and where, no doubt, I shall die. When that moment comes, the first thought of our dear daughter Geneviève will be to claim it for her children. It is the largest in the house and has the best outlook. It has been earmarked entirely for my own use. You will, I hope, do me the justice to admit that I did offer to move out in Geneviève’s favor and would have done so had not Dr. Lacaze expressed the opinion that the dampness of the ground floor might be bad for my bronchitis. I have no doubt that I should have been as good as my word: but I should have harbored such a sense of grievance that the doctor’s refusal to countenance the change was, perhaps, fortunate. All through my life I have made sacrifices, and the memory of them has poisoned my mind, nourishing and fattening the kind of rancorous resentment that grows worse with the passage of the years.

The love of quarreling is, with us, a family trait. I have often heard my mother say that my father quarreled with his parents, and that they themselves died without ever again setting eyes on the daughter whom they had driven from home thirty years earlier (she married and produced that brood of Marseilles cousins with whom we have never had anything to do). None of us ever knew the rights and wrongs of the squabble, but we took the hatreds of our forebears so wholeheartedly on trust that if I ran across one of those Marseilles cousins in the street today, I should turn my back on him. But, after all, one needn’t have anything to do with one’s distant relations. It is a very different matter with wives and children. No doubt united families do exist: but when I think of the number of households in which two individuals live a life of constant exasperation and mutual loathing, forever sitting at the same table, using the same washbasin, lying between the same sheets, it is really remarkable how few divorces there are! They live in a constant state of mutual detestation, yet can never escape an enforced proximity!

Why should I have felt the itch to scribble on my birthday? I am entering on my sixty-eighth year, but no one else knows it. There are always cakes and flowers and little candles for Geneviève and Hubert and their children when birthdays come round. . . . If I have never, for years past, given you anything on yours, that is not because I have overlooked it. No, it is my form of revenge, and I get a certain satisfaction from it. . . . The last bunch of birthday flowers that ever came my way was picked by the crippled fingers of my poor mother. In order to get them, she had, in spite of her weak heart, paid one last, painful visit to the rose garden.

Where was I? Oh, yes, you will doubtless be wondering why I have been suddenly seized by this mania for writing. “Mania” is the right word. You can judge of its strength from the way all the letters lean the same way, like pine trees under the impact of a westerly wind. Listen: I began this letter by referring to a vengeance on which I had long brooded but now renounce. There is, however, something in you, some part of you, that I long to overcome—your silence. Don’t mistake my meaning. You have a ready enough tongue and can talk about poultry and vegetables for hours on end with Cazau. With the children, even with the youngest of them, you can jabber, day after day, until I can scarcely hear myself think. Many’s the time I have got up from the table with my head feeling as empty as a rotten nut, obsessed by business cares and worries of every kind, which I could not share with a soul . . . especially after the Villenave case, which led to my being recognized (to quote the newspapers) as a “great Criminal Pleader.” The more tempted I was to believe in my own importance, the more determined did you seem to make me feel my insignificance. . . . But it’s not that I am referring to now. The silence I want to get my own back on is of quite a different kind. It comes of your determined refusal ever to discuss our own affairs, our own utter failure to understand one another. Many and many a time, watching a play or reading a novel, I find myself wondering whether, in actual fact, there ever are lovers or married couples who have “scenes,” who lay all their cards on the table and find relief in unburdening their hearts.

For forty years we have suffered side by side. In the whole of that time you have always managed to avoid saying anything that went below the surface, have always avoided committing yourself.

I believed at one time that this attitude of yours was deliberate, the expression of some fixed determination the reason for which escaped me. And then, quite suddenly, I realized the truth—which was that discussions of the kind I longed for just didn’t interest you. So utterly alien was I from all your concerns, that you shied away, not because you were frightened but because you were bored. You became an expert at scenting danger and could see me coming a mile off. If, sometimes, I managed to take you by surprise, either you succeeded, without difficulty, in avoiding the issue, or you patted my cheek, gave me a kiss, and made for the door.

I might have some reason to fear that, having read thus far, you will tear this letter up and read no farther. But somehow I don’t think that is likely to happen. For some time now I have caught you looking at me with a certain amount of surprise and curiosity. You may not be very observant where I am concerned, but even you can hardly fail to have noticed a change in my mood. I feel pretty well assured that, this time, you will not avoid the issue. I want you to know, you and the rest of your brood, your son, your daughter, your son-in-law, and your grandchildren, what manner of man it is who has lived out his solitary existence in your midst and against whom you have closed your ranks; the overworked lawyer who has had to be handled with tact because he held the purse strings but whose sufferings might have been those of somebody living on a different planet. What planet? It has never occurred to you to try to find out. Don’t be alarmed. I am no more concerned here to compose an advance obituary of myself than to draw up a brief for the prosecution in the case of me versus you. The one outstanding quality of my mind—which would have impressed itself on any other woman—is a terrifying lucidity.

I have never possessed the power of self-deception that is most men’s standby in the struggle for existence. When I have acted basely, I have always known precisely what I was doing. . . .

At this point I had to break off . . . no one brought me a lamp or came to close the shutters. . . . I sat here looking out at the roof of the bottling shed, the tiles of which are as vivid in color as flowers or the breasts of birds. I could hear the thrushes in the ivy on the Carolina poplar and the noise made by somebody rolling a cask. I am fortunate in being able to wait for death in the one spot of all the world where everything is as I remember it, the sole difference being that the stutter of a motor engine has replaced the creaking of the old bucket-and-chain well worked by a donkey. (And of course, there’s the loathsome mail plane that announces teatime and leaves its horrible smear across the sky.)

Few men are lucky enough to be able to find again in their actual physical surroundings, and within their range of vision, the world that most discover only if they have the courage and the patience to search their memories. . . . I lay my hand on my chest and feel the beating of my heart. I look at the glass-fronted medicine cupboard containing the hypodermic syringe, the little bottle of nitrite of amyl, and such other odds and ends as might be needed should I have one of my attacks. Would anybody hear me if I called? You’re all so insistent that it’s only a false angina, not so much because you want to convince me, but because you’d like to believe it yourselves and so feel justified in sleeping soundly at night. I am breathing more easily now. It is exactly as though a hand were gripping my left shoulder and keeping it rigid in a strained position so that I may never be allowed to forget, for a moment, what’s lying in wait for me. In my case, death certainly won’t come by stealth. It has been snuffing round me for years. I can hear it and feel its breath. It treats me with patience because I make no effort to resist, because I submit to the discipline that its approach imposes. I am ending my life in a dressing gown, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of incurable disease, sunk in the great winged chair where my mother sat waiting for her end. There is a table beside me, as there was beside her, laden with medicine bottles. I am ill shaven and evil smelling, a slave to all sorts of disgusting little habits. But don’t be too sure. In the intervals between attacks I am my old self. Bourru, the solicitor, who thought me as good as gone, has got used to seeing me turn up as hale and hearty as ever, and I can still spend hours in the safe-deposit vault, snipping off dividend coupons unaided.

I must manage to live long enough to complete this confession, to make you listen. During all the years in which I shared your bed, you never failed, each time I got in beside you, to say—“I’m simply dropping, I’m half-asleep already. . . .”

It was less my endearments than my words that you were trying to avoid.

True, our unhappiness began with the sort of interminable discussions that are the delight of young married couples. We were little more than children. I was twenty-three, you eighteen, and perhaps love was less of a pleasure to us than the confidences, the talks, in which we gave free play to all our thoughts. Like young children in their earliest friendships, we had sworn to tell one another everything. So little had I to confess that I was driven to elaborate and embellish such squalid little adventures as had come my way, nor did it ever occur to me that your experience had been any fuller than my own. I never dreamed that, before I came into your life, you might have murmured another man’s name to yourself, and in this belief I continued, until . . .

It was in this very room where I sit writing now. The wallpaper has been changed, but the mahogany furniture still stands precisely where it did then. There was then, as now, a tumbler of iridescent glass upon the table, along with a tea set that had been won in a raffle. Moonlight flooded the matting, and the south wind, blowing across the Landes, brought the smell of heath fires to our very bedside.

That night you spoke once more of Rodolphe—the old friend whom you had often mentioned, and always in the dusk of our room, as though you wanted to make sure that his ghost should be between us in the moments of our closest union. Have you forgotten? It was not enough for you now merely to mention his name.

“There are things, darling, I ought to have told you before we got engaged. I feel rather guilty about having kept them back—not that there was ever anything the least bit serious—so please don’t start worrying. . . .”

I was quite easy in my mind and did nothing to provoke a confession. But you forced it on me. So eager were you to tell me the whole story that, at first, I felt rather embarrassed. It wasn’t that you wanted to ease your conscience: it wasn’t that you felt you owed it me to make a clean breast of this particular chapter in your past—though that was the reason you gave, and that was what I think you really believed.

No, the truth of the matter was that you were reveling in a delicious memory. You could no longer resist the sweet temptation. Perhaps you suspected that the incident might constitute a possible threat to our happiness. However that may be, the whole thing was, as they say, beyond your power to control. The shadow of this Rodolphe hung over our marriage bed, and there was nothing you could do about it.

But I don’t want you to run away with the idea that our unhappiness started in jealousy. Later, it is true, I was to become furiously jealous, but I certainly felt nothing remotely resembling that passion on the summer night of ’85 that I am now recalling, the night on which you confessed that, while on holiday at Aix, you had become engaged to this unknown young man.

How odd to think that I should have had to wait forty-five years before explaining what I felt about it all! I am not even sure that you will read this letter. The whole thing is of so little interest to you. My concerns are, to you, sheer boredom. Very early on, the children began to come between us, so that you neither saw nor heard me, and now there are the grandchildren. . . . Well, it can’t be helped. I am going to make this one last effort. It may be that I shall exert greater power over you when I am dead than I ever did while living . . . anyhow, at first. For a few weeks I shall once again occupy a place in your life. If only as a matter of duty you will read these pages to the end. That I must believe. I do.

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