“A lady in a white hat, wasn’t it?”
No such thing. It didn’t matter. Besides, did he really want to see her again?
He felt tired. He felt old.
Monsieur René was, as usual, propped up on one corner of the table eating something. The busboy pushed open the swinging door. He made no announcement, merely summoned the dance-floor superintendent with a jerk of his head.
Monsieur René drew himself up at once and darted, quite unruffled, into the hall. The busboy hurried him to the main entrance. Just as he reached it, the door opened; and Monsieur Monde saw Thérèse herself appear. And Thérèse was quite obviously no longer welcome at the Monico. Monsieur René, without appearing to do so, was blocking her way. She was talking to him. She looked humble. He was shaking his head. What could she be asking him?
Monsieur René was moving forward gradually to make her retrace her steps through the door, but she outwitted his maneuver. The hostesses, who had understood that something was happening and who perhaps guessed what it was, were all looking curiously in that direction.
Thérèse went on imploring; then she changed her tone, uttered threats, insisted on coming in, wanted to speak to somebody else.
This time the man from Martinique laid a hand on her shoulder. She shook him off, and Désiré pressed his face closer to the spy-hole.
What could she be shouting at him with such vehemence? And why did the waiters, of their own accord, move forward strategically in support of their boss? How could they have guessed what was going to happen?
Suddenly, in fact, just as Monsieur René was slowly pushing her away with both hands, Thérése drew herself up and began to scream, her body tense, her face unrecognizable, presumably hurling coarse insults or threats at him.
Désiré could not tell how it had happened, but there she was on the floor, literally writhing in a wild fit of hysterics; the others, the maître d’hôtel in black and the waiters in their white aprons, bent down quite unmoved, picked her up, and carried her out, while the music went on imperturbably.
Monsieur Monde looked at Julie and saw that she was unconcerned. A waiter, whom he had not heard come into the pantry, sighed philosophically:
“She may as well go and have her fit on the sidewalk. She’s bound to finish the night in the police station.…”
“What fit?”
“She’s run out of morphine.…”
Then he slid off his high stool, abandoned his so-called desk, and made his way to the squalid back stairs. Halfway down he began to hurry, for he had to go a roundabout way to reach the main entrance. From a distance, in the darkness, he could see two or three of the Monico staff in the doorway, watching a retreating figure that kept stopping and turning around to shake a fist at them and hurl fresh insults.
He took his former wife by the arm. She gave a start, not recognizing him at first, and tried to struggle. Then she saw his face and burst into dreadful laughter.
“What do you want? … So you followed me, did you? … You’re even more of a bastard than the rest!”
“Be quiet, Thérése!”
He could see figures at the corner of the street. People were coming toward them. They might be policemen.
“Of course, I’ve got to keep quiet.… You paid for my lunch! … I ought to be grateful to you! … And you gave me some money.… Say it, why don’t you? You gave me some money! … But you took care to leave me stranded in the street. For the rest, you couldn’t care less.”
He held on to her arm, and was surprised to find such strength in it. She kept on struggling, escaping from him, starting to run, and he would catch up with her, and she would turn on him and spit in his face.
“Leave me alone, I tell you! … I’ll find some.… I’ve got to find some.… Or else …”
“Thérèse!”
“You beast!”
“Thérèse!”
Her face was distorted, her eyes were wild. He saw her collapse on the sidewalk at his feet, scrabbling at the pavement with her nails.
“Listen, Thérèse, I know what you want. Come along.…”
She did not hear him. The people who had come around the corner passed close by them and stopped for a moment. A woman was muttering: “It’s shocking!”
Another, rather older woman was saying to the two men who were with them: “Come on.…” And they went, regretfully.
“Get up … Follow me … I promise you …”
“Have you got some?”
“I haven’t, but I’ll find some.…”
“You’re lying!”
“I swear to you …”
She was laughing hysterically and looking at him wide-eyed, torn between mistrust and hope.
“What’ll you give me?”
“Morphine.”
“Who told you?”
She struggled to her feet, unconsciously using her hands like a child. She was swaying and weeping.
“Where are you going to take me?”
“To my place.”
“Where’s that? Are you sure you’re not going to take me to the hospital? They did that to me once before.… I’d be capable of …”
“No, no … Come along.…”
“Is it far? … Let’s go and find some morphine together.”
“No. When you’re calmer … I give you my word of honor I’ll bring you some.…”
It was grotesque, tragic, and ugly: at times the scene would lose some of its intensity as Thérèse grew calmer, and they would walk a little way past the houses, like ordinary passers-by; then she would stop again as though she were drunk, forgetting what he had just told her and clinging to him. Once her weight nearly dragged him to the ground.
“Come along.…”
They made a little headway. And they both ended by uttering incoherent words.
“I went everywhere.… I went to the doctor that she got it from.…”
“Yes, of course. Come along.…”
“They gave her as much as she wanted, because of her money.…”
“Yes, yes …”
Twice he was on the point of leaving her there and walking off. The journey seemed interminable. At last they saw the lights of Gerly’s Hotel, and then there was a fresh scene when he tried to make her go in.
“I want to wait for you in the café.…”
“No … Come up to my room.”
He managed it, by dint of patience. He had never imagined life could be so tedious. He went up behind her, pushing her. She was in his room at last, but her suspicions revived, and he realized that she would try to escape; he went out swiftly and locked the door behind him.
Pressing his ear to it, he spoke to her under his breath.
“Stay quiet. Don’t make a noise. In less than a quarter of an hour I’ll be back and I’ll bring you some.…”
Was she exhausted? He heard her collapse onto the bed, where she lay moaning like an animal.
Then he went down. In the brasserie he went straight to the manager and spoke to him in low tones. But the manager shook his head. No. He didn’t have any. They didn’t go in for that sort of thing. It was dangerous. You had to be very careful.
“Where, then?”
He didn’t know that either. Cocaine and heroin were easier to get. He had heard of a doctor, but he didn’t know his name or address.
Monsieur Monde was determined to leave no stone unturned. He didn’t care what people might think of him. There was one doctor who came to the Monico almost every evening, played for high stakes, and often left again looking pale and distraught. He, perhaps, might understand.
The hardest part, for one who was only a member of the staff, would be to make his way into the “workshop” and get close to the gaming table. Still, it couldn’t be helped; he would go.
Then the manager of the brasserie raised his head. “Listen!”
In spite of the six floors that separated them from the attic, they could hear a noise. It came from the stairs. The two men hurried up. The h
igher they went, the more clearly they could hear someone banging on a door, screams, the voices of a maid and of a lodger who happened to be at home and who was questioning the frantic woman.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” the manager sighed.
What could Monsieur Monde do? He was at his wits’ end.
“Call a doctor, will you? … Any doctor will do. We can’t let this go on.…”
“Do you really want it?”
He nodded, thrust aside the maid and the lodger, and fitted his key into the lock. They wanted to come in with him, but he disliked the thought of anyone else witnessing the scene, and slipped into his attic, closing the door behind him.
The quarter of an hour that he then spent, alone with the woman who had once had such innocent eyes and who had borne him two children, was something about which he never spoke afterward, and of which perhaps he managed to stop thinking.
The lodger, a jazz musician who had been confined to his room for a few days with pleurisy, had gone back to bed. Only the maid lingered on the landing. She was relieved when at last she heard the doctor’s footsteps on the stairs.
When the latter opened the door, Thérèse was lying across the bed with her legs hanging down. Désiré was stretched half across her, pinning her down with his weight and holding her mouth shut with his hand, from which the blood was streaming.
He was in such a dazed condition that for a moment he could not understand what the doctor had come for, and stayed there in his strange position.
Then he got up, rubbed his hand over his eyes, and swayed. For fear of fainting, he went to lean against the wall, and the whitewash left marks all over one side of his suit.
The doctor had offered to take her to a hospital, but he had refused. The others could not understand why.
One injection had quieted her. She lay with her eyes wide open. But she was so calm, with such a vacant look, that she seemed to be sleeping.
On the landing he had had a whispered conversation with the doctor.
And now the two of them were alone together. He had sat down on a chair. Sometimes he felt a great hammering inside his head and at other times a dizziness, as though a sort of vacuum were sucking him down and preventing him from thinking. Now and then he would say mechanically, as though speaking were a relief to him: “Go to sleep.…”
He had switched off the electric lamp, but the moonbeams were streaming in through the open skylight and it was in that cold light that he saw her, transfigured; he tried to avert his eyes, because she looked like a dead woman, with the same pinched nostrils that the dead have, the same unsubstantial quality.
Once when he glanced toward the bed a shudder ran through him, because he seemed to see there not Thérèse but his son Alain, who had almost the same features, and in any case the same pale eyes and waxen complexion.
People were returning to the hotel. Their footsteps almost always stopped on the lower floors. He automatically counted the landings. Four … Five … This time they came on, up to the sixth floor. A woman’s. There was a knock on the door.
He realized that it was Julie.
“Come in.…”
She was taken aback by the darkness, the strange look of these two creatures, the woman prostrate and open-eyed, the man sitting on a chair and holding his head in his hands. She began, in an undertone: “Is she …”
She dared not finish.
“Is she dead?”
He shook his head and rose wearily. Now he’d have to explain things. My God, how complicated it all was!
He drew her to the door and onto the landing.
“Who is she? Did you know her? I heard, at the Monico … The boss is furious.…”
He disregarded this.
“You knew her, didn’t you?”
He nodded. And she promptly guessed something further.
“Your wife?”
“My first wife …”
She showed no surprise, rather the reverse. It looked as if she had always suspected something of the sort.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.…”
“Tomorrow you’ll have to start all over again … We know her sort.…”
“Yes.”
“Who gave you some?”
“The doctor …”
“When the time comes she’ll want some more.…”
“I know.… He’s left me an ampule.”
It was extraordinary. Words, phrases, even facts themselves—realities, in short—had lost all importance for him now. He was lucid and he was aware of it, he knew he was giving rational answers to all her questions, and behaving like a normal man. At the same time he felt very far away, or rather very high up; he could see Julie in her evening dress, on the landing, under the dusty electric-light bulb, he could see himself with ruffled hair and open-necked shirt.
“You’re bleeding.…”
“It’s nothing.…”
“She did it, didn’t she?”
Yes, of course! All this was unimportant. In the last few hours, perhaps in the last few minutes, for he didn’t know quite when it had happened, he had taken such a prodigious leap that he could look down with cold lucidity on the man and woman whispering, on a hotel landing, shortly before daybreak.
He was certainly not a disembodied spirit. He was still Monsieur Monde, or Désiré, more likely Désiré.… No! It didn’t matter.… He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going.
And now, in the moonlight, he suddenly saw life differently, as though with the aid of some miraculous X-ray.
Everything that had counted previously, the whole integument and flesh and the outward appearance of it all, had ceased to exist, and what there was in their place …
But there! It wasn’t worth talking about it to Julie or to anyone else. And in any case it wasn’t possible. The thing was incommunicable.
“Is there anything you need?” she was asking. “Wouldn’t you like me to have some coffee sent up?”
No … Yes … He did not care. On the whole, no, so that he could be left in peace.
“You’ll let me know how things are going?”
He promised. She only half believed him. Perhaps she expected to discover, when she woke at midday, that he had gone away with the woman now lying on the iron bedstead?
“Well, cheer up!”
She went off, regretfully. She would have liked to communicate something to him herself, to tell him … what, exactly? That she had realized from the start that it wasn’t for ever. That she was just a common girl but that she could guess how things were; that …
He saw her, at the bend in the staircase, looking up at him again. He went back into the bedroom and closed the door; he had a shock on hearing a voice mumble faintly: “Who was that?”
“A girl I know …”
“She’s your …”
“No … just a friend.”
Thérèse reverted to staring at the sloping ceiling. He sat on his chair again. From time to time he raised his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his hand, which she had bitten deeply.
“Did he leave you any more?” she asked again without moving, speaking in the hollow voice of a sleepwalker.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“One.”
“Give it to me now.…”
“Not yet …”
She resigned herself, like a little girl. And in her present state she seemed far more childish and yet far older than when he had seen her in town the day before. His own face, too, when he lingered for a quarter of an hour in front of his mirror, shaving, often seemed to him like that of a child grown old. Is a man ever anything more than that? You talk of the years as though they existed. Then you notice that be
tween the moment when you still went to school, even between the moment when your mother tucked you up in bed, and the moment you’re living through now …
The moon was still shining faintly in the sky when the dark blue of night yielded to the light blue of morning, and the bedroom walls took on a less livid, less inhuman whiteness.
“You’re not asleep?” she asked again.
“Not now.”
“I do so want to sleep!”
Her poor weary eyelids were fluttering, she was clearly on the verge of tears; she was far thinner than she used to be, an old woman with barely anything left of her body.
“Listen, Norbert.…”
He got up and went to splash his face with water, making a noise on purpose to prevent her from speaking. It was better so.
“Won’t you listen to me?”
“What’s the use?”
“Are you angry with me?”
“No. Try to sleep.…”
“If you’d give me the second ampule …”
“No. Not before nine o’clock.”
“What time is it now?”
He looked for his watch, which he had laid down somewhere, and was some time finding it.
“Half past five …”
“All right …”
She waited, resignedly. He did not know what to do or where to go. He tried to distract himself by listening to the familiar sounds of the hotel, where he knew nearly all the lodgers. He could tell who had come in, he recognized voices that reached him only as faint murmurs.
“It would be better to let me die.…”
The doctor had warned him. A short while ago—the doctor was still there—she had played the same trick on them, but then it had been on an impulse; at the height of her hysteria she had seized a pair of scissors that were lying about and tried to cut her wrists.
Now she was trying it again, deliberately, and he was unmoved. She persisted: “Why won’t you let me die?”
Monsieur Monde Vanishes Page 12
