“Taxi, messieurs-dames?”
The girl refused, while Monsieur Monde, without knowing why, avoided meeting the eyes of the reception clerk, although the latter did not know him. The fact was that Monsieur Monde was ill at ease in his skimpy clothes. He felt awkward. Perhaps he regretted the loss of his mustache?
Once on the sidewalk he walked on the left of his companion, who stepped out briskly, paying no attention to him yet showing no surprise at his presence. She turned left immediately, and they found themselves on the corner of La Canebière and the Old Port; she pushed open a glazed door and threaded her way between the tables of a restaurant with the ease of a regular customer.
Monsieur Monde followed. There were three floors of huge, wide-windowed rooms where people were eating, where hundreds of people were eating, packed close together, while between the tables, along the passages, up and down the stairs, ran waiters and waitresses bearing dishes of bouillabaisse or crayfish, plates of shellfish stacked in pyramids.
The sun poured in through the bay windows, which went right down to the floor like those in big stores, so that the whole room could be seen from outside. Everyone was eating. People stared at one another with blank or curious eyes. Sometimes someone would raise a hand, calling out impatiently: “Waiter!”
A strong odor of garlic, saffron, and shellfish assaulted one’s senses. The dominant note was the red of the crayfish gleaming on the waiters’ outstretched arms and on nearly every table, and whose slender empty shells lay piled on the plates of departing guests.
The young woman had found two places by a wall. Monsieur Monde sat down opposite her. He immediately wondered what she was looking at so intensely behind his back and, on turning around, discovered a mirror in which she could see herself.
“I’m looking pale,” she said. “Waiter!”
“Coming!” Running up, he thrust into their hands a huge mimeographed menu, scrawled over with red and violet ink. And she studied this menu with the utmost gravity.
“Waiter!”
“Madame?”
“Are the andouillettes good?”
Monsieur Monde raised his head. He had just made a discovery. If he had asked the same question, for instance, he was convinced that the waiter, any waiter on earth, would naturally have answered yes, thus doing his duty as waiter. Can one imagine a waiter telling his customers: “They’re horrible! Don’t!”?
The waiter was, in fact, saying “Yes” to the young woman, but not a meaningless “Yes.” You could feel that he was telling her the truth, that he regarded her differently from the hundreds of customers thronging the three floors of the vast eating mill.
With her he was both respectful and familiar. He recognized somebody of his own sort. He congratulated her on her success. He did not want to do her a disservice. It was therefore necessary to understand the situation, and he turned to Monsieur Monde, sizing him up.
“If you’ll allow me to advise you …”
He never lost contact with the girl. Between these two, imperceptible signs were enough. He seemed to be asking her: “Playing high?”
And as she remained impassive, he bent forward to point out certain dishes on the menu card.
“Shellfish, of course, to start with … It wouldn’t be worth coming to Marseilles and not eating shellfish.… D’you like sea urchins?”
He spoke with an exaggerated accent.
“And then some of our own bouillabaisse, with crayfish.”
“I’ll have crayfish by itself!” she interrupted. “Without mayonnaise. I’ll make my own dressing.”
“And an andouillette …”
“Do you have gherkins?”
“And what wine?”
Somewhere near Chaussée d’Antin, in Paris, there was a restaurant with some resemblance to this one, and there, from outside, you could see through the windows large numbers of people munching their food. Now, heaven knows why, Monsieur Monde had sometimes envied them, although he did not really know what for—perhaps for sitting there in a crowd, all more or less alike, side by side, feeling at ease in an atmosphere of facile glitter, of stimulating vulgarity.
The customers, for the most part, must be visitors from the country, or people of moderate means who had decided to treat themselves to a good meal. At the table next to theirs, in the full sunlight, there sat in state a huge middle-aged woman, whose fur coat made her look even vaster, wearing diamonds, real or fake, in her ears and on her fingers, giving her orders in a loud voice, drinking hard and laughing heartily, her companions being two youths who could hardly have been more than twenty.
“Were you following us?”
He gave a start. His companion, whose name he did not know, was looking sternly at him, with a stubborn frown, and there was such cold lucidity in her gaze that he reddened.
“You’d better tell me the truth. Do you belong to the police?”
“Me? I give you my word of honor …”
She believed him readily; she probably knew a policeman when she saw one. But she went on, nonetheless: “How did you happen to be there last night?”
And he explained volubly, as though to justify himself: “I’d just arrived from Paris.… I wasn’t asleep.… I’d only just dozed off.… I heard …”
“What did you hear?”
He was too honest to lie. “Everything you said.”
The waiter was covering their table with overlapping dishes of hors d’oeuvres and shellfish and bringing them white wine in a champagne bucket. So his unimpressive appearance had not discouraged the waiter; perhaps this was the sort of place where unpretentious people came to enjoy themselves.
“I’ve asked the chef to take special care with your andouillette,” the waiter whispered, leaning over toward the young woman.
She remarked, as she spooned out the pale pink granular flesh of a sea urchin: “You’re married.…”
She was staring at his wedding ring, which it had not occurred to him to remove.
“That’s all over,” he said.
“Have you left your wife?”
“Yesterday.…”
She pursed her lips contemptuously. “For how long?”
“For ever.”
“That’s what they always say.…”
“I assure you …”
And he blushed, realizing that he must be giving a misleading impression of boasting of his liberty, as though he intended to take advantage of it.
“It’s not what you think.… It’s more complicated.…”
“Yes … I know.…”
What did she know? She looked at him, then she looked at herself in the glass just as ruthlessly, then she turned to glance at the bejeweled woman and the two young men.
“You’d have done better perhaps to leave me alone,” she sighed. “It’d all be over by now.”
Nonetheless she went on meticulously shelling her crayfish with her lacquered fingernails.
“Are you from these parts?” he asked her.
She shrugged her shoulders. No woman would have asked such a stupid question.
“I’m from the North, from Lille. And you’re from Paris yourself, aren’t you? What’s your line?”
She was examining his suit, his shirt, his tie. As he hesitated in some embarrassment before replying, she went on in an altered, almost threatening voice:
“You didn’t run off with the cashbox, I hope?”
Before he had taken in the meaning of this challenge, she went on as though she was quite prepared to drop him flat: “Because I’ve had more than enough of that.…”
“I’m not an office worker.”
“What are you?”
“I have private means.”
She looked him up and down again. What did she find reassuring about her companion’s appearance?
“Good …”
“Moderate private means.”
She must have interpreted this as miserly, for she cast a peculiar glance at the table loaded with food and the bottle of e
xpensive wine.
Monsieur Monde felt his head in a whirl. He had had nothing to drink, had barely touched his lips to his misted glass, and yet he felt drunk with all the dazzling light and the bustling crowds, with the red of the crayfish and the dizzy speed of the waiters rushing to and fro, and the din of all those conversations, of those possibly confidential remarks that people had to yell out to be heard above the noise of other voices and the clatter of plates and cutlery.
“I wonder where he’s got to now.…”
And as, with naïve thoughtlessness, he asked who, she shrugged her shoulders; she had him sized up now.
“It’ll be his loss more than mine.…”
She seemed to feel the need to talk about it. Not necessarily to him, but to anyone. She was mixing herself a vinaigrette on her plate, carefully proportioning the ingredients.
“Mayonnaise doesn’t agree with me. I don’t know why I shouldn’t tell you the whole story, seeing what he’s done. I crawled at his feet, which I’ve never done to any other man, and he kicked me here.… Look, you can still see the mark.…”
It was true. At close quarters, a slight swelling on the left side of her upper lip was visible under her make-up.
“Real trash, he was.… His mother sold vegetables in the street; she was still pushing her barrow, only a few years ago.… It wasn’t as if I’d run after him! But I was quite happy as I was.… D’you know Lille?”
“I’ve been through it.…”
“You didn’t go to the Boule Rouge? It’s a little dive in a basement near the theater … The boss used to run a night club on Place Pigalle.… Fred, his name was.… They only have regulars there, a good class of people, who wouldn’t want to be seen just anywhere.… Businessmen from Roubaix and Tourcoing, you know the kind of thing.… There’s dancing in the evenings, and floor shows. I started off there as a dancer three years ago.…”
He would have liked to know her age, but dared not ask her.
“Waiter. Will you bring me a clean glass? I’ve let some crayfish drop in it.”
While never losing the thread of her thoughts, she kept glancing at herself in the mirror, and she even seemed to be listening at the same time to the conversation between the lady in diamonds and her two companions.
“What d’you suppose they are?” she suddenly demanded.
“I don’t know. They surely can’t be her sons.”
She burst out laughing. “Gigolos, I’d say! And she hasn’t known them long. Maybe nothing’s happened yet, for they’re glaring at one another and they don’t know which of them is going to win.… Her, I mean.… Well, I bet she owns a food store, a fish market or a delicatessen, in some smart district where business is good.… She’s treating herself to a fortnight in the South.”
The waiter brought Monsieur Monde his steak. “The andouillette’ll be ready in a minute.… It’s coming along nicely.…”
And the young woman went on: “My real name is Julie. I called myself Daisy when I danced. The gentlemen used to drop in for apéritifs too, and that was the nicest time, because there weren’t any tarts. We were all pals together. You may not believe me, but most of them behaved ever so properly with me. They just came there to get a change from their offices and homes, don’t you see?
“One of them, the nicest of the lot, a big fattish fellow, rather like you, was running after me for at least three months.… I knew what he was after but I wasn’t in any hurry.… He came from Roubaix.… A well-known family, very wealthy … He was scared stiff of being seen going into or out of the club, and he always sent the busboy to make sure nobody was passing in the street.…
“He wanted me to give up dancing. He rented a nice apartment for me on a quiet street with nothing but new houses.… And it’d all be going on still if it hadn’t been for Jean.… When he came to see me he brought things to eat, the best he could find, crayfish ten times the size of these, pineapples, early strawberries in little boxes lined with cotton wool, champagne.… We had little supper parties together.…”
And suddenly, in an altered tone: “What did I tell you?”
He failed to understand. She glanced meaningly at the neighboring table and, leaning forward, whispered:
“Talking to the waiter about fish, she’s just told him that if she had the face to sell it at such a price … I was right! She’s a fishmonger! … As for the two kids, chances are they’ll be scratching one another’s faces like a couple of cats before the day’s out.…
“Where had I got to? Just to make you understand that I’m not indebted to that Jean for anything … On the contrary! From time to time I used to go back to the Boule Rouge, as a guest … because I had good friends there.… But I was respectable.… If I say so, you can believe me.…
“That was where I met Jean.… He was just a clerk in a hardware store, but at first he tried to make believe he was something high-class.… Everything he earned went on his clothes and on drink.… You couldn’t even call him good-looking.
“All the same I fell for him, and that was my bad luck.… I don’t know how it happened.… In the beginning he used to threaten to kill himself if I didn’t do what he wanted, and he was always making scenes.
“He was so jealous that I never dared go out.… He even got jealous of my gentleman friend, and then life became impossible … . ‘Never mind, we’ll go away and I’ll have you all to myself,’ he kept saying. But I knew that he only earned two thousand francs a month and had to give part of that to his mother.
“Well, he did what he’d said he’d do.… One evening he turned up, looking white as a sheet.… I was with my gentleman friend.… He sent the ground-floor tenant up to fetch me.…
“ ‘Mademoiselle Julie,’ she told me, ‘will you come down for a moment?’ She’d realized, from the way he looked, that it was something serious.… He was standing there in the hall.… I can still picture him, beside the coatrack, under the colored light of the hall lamp.
“ ‘Is he there?’ he growled between his teeth.
“ ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you gone crazy?’
“ ‘You’ve got to come at once.… We’re going to bolt.’
“ ‘What?’
“ ‘Bring whatever you can.… We’re taking the midnight train.… ’ And then he whispered—and his breath smelled of liquor: ‘I’ve taken the cashbox!’
“That was how it happened. What could I do? I told him to wait for me on the sidewalk. I went upstairs and told my friend that I’d just heard that my sister was having a baby and wanted me to come right away.…
“He suspected nothing, poor man.… He just looked disappointed, because of course, he hadn’t had anything yet that evening.…
“ ‘Well, I’ll try to come tomorrow.’
“ ‘That’s right. You come tomorrow.’
“He went off. I lifted the blind and saw Jean waiting for me under the gas lamp at the corner of the street.… I stuffed some things into my suitcase … I had only one.… I had to leave some perfectly good dresses behind, and three pairs of shoes.… We took the night train.… He was very frightened.… He saw policemen everywhere.… When we got to Paris he didn’t feel safe there, he wouldn’t even stay at a hotel, for fear of being asked for his identity card, and we took the next train to Marseilles.…
“What could I have said to him? What’s done is done.…
“We got here at night.… We wandered about the streets with our luggage for at least an hour before he could bring himself to go into a hotel.”
She was devouring her andouillette, smeared with mustard, and from time to time nibbling a sour gherkin.
“He fell sick right away.… I looked after him. At night he had nightmares and kept talking to himself, trying to get up; I had to hold him down, he struggled so.…
“It went on for a whole week. And d’you know how much he’d taken? Twenty-five thousand francs … With that, he was going to take a boat to South America … only there weren’t any in the port; all the ones on
the list were sailing from Bordeaux.…
“Last night I felt stifled. I’d had enough of it, I needed air, and I told him I was going out for an hour.… I ought to have guessed that, jealous as he was, he’d follow me.… I may even have guessed it.… But I couldn’t help myself.… Once outside I didn’t even turn back. Two streets beyond this—I don’t know the names of the streets—I saw a light like that of the Boule Rouge and I heard some music.… I had such a longing to dance that nothing could have stopped me. I went in.…”
She turned around sharply, as though at that very moment she had felt behind her the presence of the man she was thinking about, but it was only a young couple, so spruce and smiling that one could tell, at a glance, that they were on their honeymoon.
“I wonder where he can have gone. I know him, he’s quite capable of having given himself up to the police.… Otherwise, if he’s still prowling around Marseilles, he’s quite capable of playing some dirty trick on me.
“I went dancing.… A real gentleman, who was in the orange trade, offered to see me home.… Just as I was leaving the dance hall with him I saw Jean standing on the edge of the sidewalk.…
“He didn’t say a word to me. He started walking. I dropped the other fellow, whom I’d hardly recognize if I saw him again, and I rushed after him, calling ‘Jean! Listen to me!’
“He went back to the hotel; his teeth were clenched and he was as white as this napkin. He began to pack his suitcase. He called me all sorts of names.…
“And yet I give you my word I loved him.… I even believe that if I were to see him again now …”
The crowds were thinning out around the tables. Cigarette smoke began to fill the room, with the smell of spirits and liqueurs.
“Coffee, messieurs-dames?”
There was another scene that had often struck Monsieur Monde, a scene one can glimpse in the streets of Paris when one peers into a restaurant through the window: facing one another across a table from which the meal has been cleared, with a soiled tablecloth, coffee cups, glasses of brandy or liqueur, a middle-aged stoutish man with a florid complexion and a happy though somewhat anxious look in his eyes, and a young woman holding her handbag up to her face and repainting the bow of her lips with the help of the mirror.
Monsieur Monde Vanishes Page 6
