Free The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon Page B

dishonest symbolism, but the thought of judging their beauty or ugliness would never have occurred to him without the two artists’ sarcastic commentary. He felt ashamed of his ignorance, and left them to go to his room. Here, a little later, Marie-Dévote followed him.
    ‘Would you like it again?’
    ‘Of course, it’s all I’ve got. I don’t give a damn about all the rest.’
    And it was true: about all the rest he didn’t give a damn, and there was no pain, no sorrow, but when he pressed Marie-Dévote against him or, daydreaming, stroked her pretty breasts and their brown tips, something else existed: his pleasure. He stayed at Saint-Tropez for three days, his limit, which he never exceeded, so that he could be sure of leaving with a trace of animal regret on his lips that provided him with the certainty that he existed. The route des Maures, then the high corniche road to Nice, took him down to Roquebrune, where he stopped. Léon Cece, recognising the note of the Bugatti’s engine, appeared at his door in linen trousers and torn white singlet. Far from fading, his facial scars had deepened, splitting the soft tissue of his cheek, twisting his mouth, and attacking one eye, its bloodshot white beginning to bulge out of its orbit. His restaurant was doing badly. In the egotism of peacetime, diners were not willing to put up with the sight of his smashed face, a reminder of a time everyone was doing their best to forget and an awful reproach to those who had got through it without too much hardship; a mute and unacceptable pang of conscience from which most fled like cowards.
    ‘All right, Antoine?’ Léon called. ‘It’s been an age since we saw you.’
    ‘Three months. I had an accident. My knee in plaster. This is my first long trip.’
    ‘Well, that’s good anyway. You’re not like the others.’
    They dined together on the balcony, wreathed by clouds of moths that whirled around the hurricane lamp and singed their wings. Léonwas a man of truth. Unlike Charles Ventadour, the war he kept going back to was a squalid conflict, but it was his conflict, his alone, revolving around that attack when his head had been blown apart. He needed to talk about it, to go over it ceaselessly as though it were still possible, six years later, to take that one sideways step that would have saved him when the German 77 burst. And so great was his desire for that step that he seemed, at odd moments, almost able to erase the tragedy and recover his face as it had been, and his morale and cheerfulness, only to fall back again, harder than before, into the depths of a despair so bitter it had the taste of death about it. More than anything, he could not forgive the involuntary aversion of those who saw him for the first time. A curse had fallen upon him, and his uncomplicated and still sound spirit could not overcome the vast injustice that separated him from the rest of the living.
    ‘You don’t know what goes on,’ he said to Antoine. ‘My daughter and her mother do their best not to look at me. I don’t make love any more. It would be unsightly, and everything around me is so beautiful. Roquebrune is the prettiest place on Earth. The people who come to the Côte are happy, they’re beautiful, I turn away so that I don’t make them sad. Sometimes I say to myself: Léon, you’re not a man, you’re not a man any more, you’re like a dog, you’re a pest, you’ve got to hide away.’
    ‘You’re a very unhappy man,’ Antoine said.
    ‘Maybe that’s it. You’re the only friend I have. We talk to each other. We drink grappa and the hours go by. Then you leave, and I wait for months for you to come by again. It’s not your fault. I know you have a family and friends and, judging by your car, plenty of loose change. Maybe you’re unhappy too. But you get around. I’m stuck here. That’s my life. It’s all I’ve got.’
     
    Antoine stayed the night. Léon put up a camp bed for him in a bareroom behind the