by Michel D
‘Desert!’ he said in a choked voice. ‘I’ll help you.’
Monsieur Cliquet gave him the address of a former railway worker, a friend of his, retired for fifteen years but living on the top floor of a building that flanked the Gare de l’Est, from where he followed the movements of the trains. Jean could trust him: he was a man of great resource. Captain Duclou knew no one at the ministry but one of his cousins, a former navy carpenter, lived at Bezons, north-west of Paris. His advice was always good, and he had many connections in his locality.
Jean left first, quietly, carrying his suitcases. The butcher’s car dropped him off at Grangeville, where he waited for the bus at the stop outside the grocer’s. He was nearly knocked down as he stood there by a red Delahaye that swept out of La Sauveté like a whirlwind, driven by a young man in a white bandana. By the time he reached Dieppe station Chantal was already settled in a compartment in one of the front carriages. He found a seat in an adjacent compartment until the train pulled out.
By dinner time, the two of them were standing on a platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare, clutching their suitcases, deafened by the capital’s rumble and disconcerted, not knowing where to go. Their simplest plan was to cross Place du Havre and walk into the first hotel they came to. A station’s presence was reassuring, they realised: it stopped them feeling like prisoners in the labyrinth of the enormous city.
The author feels that he ought to be interested here, if only fleetingly, in Chantal’s parents, before he follows the young people in their first encounter with Paris. To do them justice he would have to describe at some length their reactions, their despair and fury, their dignity, and the lie in which they wrapped Chantal’s departure. The day after her flight, the marquis did indeed make a genuine effort to find his daughter. Dressed in his town clothes, he caught the train to Paris with no specific intention in mind, relying on some miraculous accident to lead him to her, a mad idea whose futility became all too clear to him as he in turn alighted at Saint-Lazare. A few steps led to the station exit. The crowd was surging into the mouth of the Métro station; a long line of travellers was queuing for taxis. As he stood there, an old woman was knocked down by a bus in front of him. A spreading pool of blood reddened the road, and a circle quickly formed around her. The absurdity of his undertaking suddenly became apparent to the marquis. He bought a ticket and left for Dieppe again fifteen minutes later. Yet had he simply crossed Place du Havre he would have glimpsed his daughter and Jean sitting there on a brasserie terrace, eating a breakfast of café au lait and croissants served by a waiter in a white apron. Back at Malemort, he sold the two mares, the colt and the filly, and bought himself a new tractor. From then on he was seen only in his fields, working from dawn till dusk. The summer of 1938 was fine and dry, the harvest far better than expected, but the state of alert that had settled on Europe was taking manpower away from the land. The army was on a war footing, retaining the younger age groups and calling for specialists. So when the prime minister, Édouard Daladier, returned from Munich after signing the agreement that would delay the conflict by a year, France breathed again. The marquis kept on working, not for his daughter’s future any longer, but out of a sense of honour. He faced up to the devastation of his life, renouncing alcohol, which made the pain that tormented him worse. Madame de Malemort descended into silence and her needlework. The abbé Le Couec visited her several times, then gave up; she answered in monosyllables. Albert refrained from publicly blaming his son, though once again he felt the folly of social mobility. The possible war – inevitable in his eyes – preoccupied him far more, yet he too trusted Daladier because he was a countryman, despite being a history teacher, and a veteran of the last war. He had been in the trenches and would not consign new generations to that experience with a light heart. It was a feeling that was general in France. Daladier, with his felt hat pulled low over his eyes, his southern accent, his gravelly voice, the way he pronounced the word ‘patrie’,17 reassured a population that was ready to entrust its fate to anyone. They called him ‘the bull of Vaucluse’ and failed to realise soon enough that he was a bull made of papier mâché, partial to his drink and society ladies. The English were also curious about him, and thought he possessed a rough charm that their prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with his stiff collar and umbrella, lacked. Madame du Courseau refrained from commenting in public about Chantal’s escapade, fearing the talk might turn to Geneviève and to Antoinette’s past misconduct. She voiced her feelings to her son alone, whose clear-sightedness in having refused a planned marriage with the Malemort girl she admired all the more. What instinct! Jean was blamed, though mutedly, for at the slightest allusion Antoinette defended him like a fury. And what did Palfy think? Be patient. He is not far away. We shall see him reappear, very soon, in one of those reincarnations he is so lavish with. Let us instead resume our pursuit of Chantal and Jean after their breakfast on the brasserie terrace on Place du Havre. They saw the accident, the woman knocked down, the crowd gathering. Chantal felt sick, and the feeling stayed with her all day. Jean mistakenly thought that she regretted having run away. He told her she was free to go back if she wanted to; she refused. With Antoinette’s money they had enough to live on for two months, but urgently needed to find work and somewhere to live. Since neither of them had any experience of Paris, they began by exploring it by bus, discovering its districts one by one. Chantal thought Neuilly was charming. At least you could still see pretty detached houses there, with gardens around them. She wondered how anyone could live in the other places they saw, full of dark apartments in big buildings blackened by smoke. Jean, wiser as a result of his stay in London, noticed that the Île Saint-Louis, in the sixth and seventh arrondissements, offered reasonable accommodation. Their resources unfortunately allowed them no such quality. Eventually they had to be content with an old building in Rue Lepic and two ill-furnished rooms in which you washed at the kitchen sink, although the bedroom window looked out spectacularly over Paris. They spent a week cleaning, polishing, and expelling blood-sucking insects left behind by the previous tenant. With an aluminium tub and the rose of a watering can purchased at the flea market, they felt they had made a bathroom. Chantal bought blue and white gingham at the Saint-Pierre market, ran up some curtains, and sewed a bedspread. On the same landing there lived a Spanish painter, Jesús Infante, who survived on nothing but red wine and peanuts, a handsome man in his thirties who wore his shirt unbuttoned on his hairy chest and had a constant five o’clock shadow and a dazzling smile. They heard him humming and yelling at his models, two or three girls of no great prettiness but sharp as tacks, who laughed back at him in their high treble voices. Jesús painted ‘Montmartre nudes’ for a tourists’ shop on Place du Tertre: five pictures a month. They were absolutely horrible, but they were popular and he made a living from them, despite being exploited by the gallery. His daily labours done with, he closed his shutters, and by the light of a bare bulb worked on great collages of cut-outs that no dealer could be persuaded to show an interest in. It did not matter, he was happy, happier than he had been at Jaén in Andalusia, where his parents, ruined by the civil war, lived on a cup of chocolate a day.
Nor should we be sad at these frugal Parisian beginnings for Chantal and Jean: they had never been happier either. They loved each other and were at liberty. Jean sometimes thought of Geneviève and told himself that she would have approved of him. In any case it would have been impossible with her. Frankly impossible, for a reason that remained obscure but that Palfy had somehow detected. He forgot the awful disappointment of his first night with Chantal, and his euphoria swept away the terrible thoughts he had committed to his notebook: who had come before him? Perhaps it had only been a bad dream. He remembered their walks in the forest, their conversations with each other that had avoided all innuendo, their drawing closer with an agonising slowness that had so abruptly changed on his first night at Malemort. They made love often and with the passion of novices, especially during the day becau
se they liked the daylight and because at night they still slept like babies, worn out by their domestic activities and Jean’s lengthy journeys across Paris in his efforts to find work. No one, apparently, wanted anything to do with him before he had completed his military service. His baccalauréat did not improve his prospects. He was offered door-to-door selling. For three days he tried to sell a book of herbal remedies to the housewives of the twentieth arrondissement. Insults and threats made him stop. A single copy sold in three days was not enough to pay his travel costs. In the space of a month he gauged the immensity of Paris, how one could get lost there in an atmosphere that, when it was not hostile, was the soul of indifference. It was Jesús who found him a job. When the painter had first arrived in France he had been a doorman and bouncer at a nightclub in Pigalle. The situation was once again vacant. Jean’s build got him taken on. He spent an afternoon being taught how to restrain a difficult customer and eject him. As for opening car doors, any fool could do that. And holding out his hand – it was a question of habit. He put on the uniform belonging to his predecessor, reminding himself of the horrible doorman at the Adler in Rome, although his dislike of servants had been tempered slightly by the punctual, snobbish Price at Eaton Square. Satisifed on his first evening at having chucked out a drunken provincial quietly and without fuss, he was taken on full time by the manager. The nightclub was called Match and had become fashionable, particularly with a foreign clientele. At six in the morning Jean walked back up Rue Lepic – enlivened by concierges in slippers wheeling out their bins overflowing with rubbish, motorised street sweepers hosing down the cobblestones, and delivery vans tossing out packets of newspapers at still-closed kiosks – climbed up four floors, and let himself in to contemplate Chantal’s exquisite face lying on the pillow, her black hair spread around it, the fine outline of her nose, her angel’s eyelids fringed with long lashes, her slow breathing like that of a child, and her bare shoulders. When he lay down next to her she hardly moved. When he woke up around midday, lunch was ready, and they sat down together, talking as they had before, but at the same height this time, without him being on foot and her on horseback.
‘You don’t miss the forest of Arques too much, do you?’
‘No. Apart from the days when you came with me, I thought it was a lonely place. I saw stags and hinds but no human beings. In Paris there are human beings.’
Jean was beginning to doubt that the beings of Paris were human. But they were beings, at least, and you approached them with curiosity. At Match he earned a decent wage, especially if he counted the obnoxious business of gratuities, and it enabled them to eat out in the evenings at restaurants that made Chantal’s eyes shine with pleasure. One evening a drunken Italian, whose car he had been to fetch from its parking place at Pigalle, slipped a thousand-franc note into his hand to thank him. With it Jean bought Chantal a gold chain and a new coat that was very welcome at the end of autumn. She owned nothing, having left Malemort with what she stood up in and a practically empty suitcase. He was dressing her, piece by piece.
‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘I don’t need it. I only go out to go to the market. In the morning, when you’re asleep, I look out of the window and I say to myself: there is Paris, and there are millions of people who live the way we do, who don’t know us, and whom we will never know. It’s infinite, like space.’
Slowly he forgot that in his absence she had known another man, and not any other man but a decisive and demanding man. On the occasions when he allowed his thoughts to dwell on that fact, his fists clenched and he took out his anger on the first ill-mannered or drunken customer he was asked to eject from the club. In December he was cold, and kept warm by stamping his feet on the pavement under the illuminated sign. The bar girls came outside in their plunging necklines to bring him scalding hot toddies. There were three or four of them with their interchangeable assumed names, Suzy, Dolly, Fanny, pretty enough in the dark but already haggard and ravaged, despite their frequent nose-powderings and other restorations, by the time they left with an unsteady client. He could have slept with any of them, without consequences, but it did not occur to him. Chantal filled up his life. They were playing at husband and wife in a real world, where no one stood in their way to overwhelm them with sound advice or predict stormy days ahead as a result of their insouciance. They asked Jesús to lunch or dinner and he brought his peanuts with him, accepting only as an extra, with a startled tentativeness, a sardine in oil or an apple. He was dependably happy until the first of each month, which was the day he was due to deliver his five pictures to the gallery. Every time he returned humiliated. The owner, who knew about his collages and liked to mock him coarsely about them, greeted him with a ‘Hello, Papiécasso’. Jesús would willingly have knocked him down, but he needed the monthly payments. To lose them would mean misery all over again, the way life had been when he first arrived in the city.
‘You un’erstan’,’ he would say to his friends, ‘I pu’ up with it for my love of art. For my work! But I will smash him in his crooked face if he ask me to put a few mo’ hairs in the bums of the girls if I wan’ to sell them. Hairs in the bums, I say to him, hairs in the bums, Monsieur, my models don’ have them! They are too poor to pay for some with the money zat I give them, an’ you know wha’ he say to me. “My boy, you only have to give them yours” …’
He opened his shirt to expose his well-muscled chest bristling with its thick, black curly growth. Chantal wept with laughter, and Jean loved to watch her listening to Jesús’s obscenities without blushing.
Where was the future in all of this? A long way off, and the time to worry about it was when it came over the horizon. Sufficient unto the day were the pleasures of love and Paris which opened up to them when in the afternoons they came down from the Butte Montmartre to go to the cinema or the theatre, to walk in the Cité or on the Île Saint-Louis, to buy books from the booksellers along the quais and then go home and read them, lying together on the bed until it was time for Jean to leave for Match.
Apart from Jesús Infante, the building housed only shuffling, bad-tempered pensioners, two tarts who worked Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and a dirty old man constantly on the lookout for skirts walking up the steep staircase. They were a long way from the Parisian society of which Balzac had made himself the chronicler. Chantal spoke to no one, except at the market from which she returned with their shopping twice a week. She waited for Jean, without impatience, because everything seemed new to her, putting up with the crudity of Jesús’s conversations and the whiff of stewed meat that permeated the building, and had not even seen him dressed in his hireling’s uniform because he changed when he got to the club. One day, when she was feeling particularly happy, she sent her mother the cruellest card imaginable in the circumstances. ‘Am very happy. Warmest wishes.’ To her father she sent nothing, not a word. The days passed, distancing her from Malemort and the massive boredom that seeped from its walls. She also thought about the one who had come before Jean and had rehearsed her so well in the drama of love. From that point of view she had no remorse, no regret. She had discovered the pleasure of living life in the instant, and there was no one there to reproach her for her failure to behave properly or her breaches of respectability. To tell the truth, she did not really care in the slightest what people had thought of her after she left.
And so she and Jean came through the dark and freezing winter that preceded, like an omen, the even darker and more freezing winters of the war and occupation. Jesús, frantically filling his coal-fired stove to keep his models warm as they posed in the mornings, nearly set fire to the building. Waking with a start, Jean refused to comply with the fire brigade’s evacuation instruction and went back to sleep, watched over by an amazed and impressed Chantal. She feared nothing as long as he was there. A girl who had scampered from Jesús’s apartment when the alarm was raised sat with them until it was over. She was naked underneath her robe. At Pigalle they called her Miranda. In private, far from her clients,
she liked to be called by her real name, Madeleine. She began to come over after lunch to have coffee with them and tell the story of her night. Jean marvelled at the indulgent warmth Chantal displayed in listening to her. How could the Malemorts’ daughter entertain such a friendship? No two women could be more disparate. Jean pricked up his ears when he heard Miranda-Madeleine say a few words of English. She had spent two years in London around 1932, which put her there at the time of his first visit. He recounted the story of his meeting with Madame Germaine.
‘Did I know Madame Germaine?’ she said. ‘Course I did! She taught “French” to masos; she was a funny old girl, needed no encouragement to get her whips out. She ended up with her throat cut but her stash wasn’t touched, a nice little nest egg she left to her nephew, an invalid who went around in a little car. Her pimps found the bloke who did her in, a French waiter, a casual, jealous and nasty. He turned up a week later on a pavement in Soho, bleeding like a pig, his femoral artery cut, nice bit of specialist work. How old were you then?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘You’re not telling me that at thirteen you were going round looking for tarts!’
‘No, I was looking for my friend Salah.’
‘Salah! You know Salah! The Negro with the Hispano.’
‘What do you know about him?’
Madeleine’s expression turned stony. She pulled her peignoir close across her drooping breasts and made her excuses to leave. It was impossible to get another word out of her, however circumspectly on subsequent occasions Jean brought up the subject of London and Salah. Only once did she talk to Chantal, one morning at the market when it was just the two of them.
