He had met Brossier for the first time at this same Café du Balcon, when he was killing time until midnight before going back to the barracks. That afternoon, he had walked along the ramparts, then followed the highway out toward the Haras National horse farm and wandered off into an area of shacks to the right. On his way back into the city, he had stopped at the Café du Balcon and sat down, and the mirror next to the bar reflected an image of himself in uniform, with short hair and crossed arms. Brossier was reading a newspaper at a nearby table, and his eyes came to rest on him.
“Bagger a while yet?”
He used slang words that Louis did not always understand.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty next July.”
They were the only customers in the café, and Brossier said with a shrug that the streets of Saint-Lô were deserted at this hour.
“If you can even call them streets.”
He suddenly gave a bitter smile.
“It must be no fun, ending up a bagger here, hmm?”
Brossier’s age? Forty, barely. When he smiled he looked younger. Blond hair, very pale eyes, flushed skin. He doubtless owed that coloring, and the chubbiness of his face, to a weakness for Belgian beers.
He lived in Paris, he explained, but was spending a few days with his family in Saint-Lô, where his elder brother owned a notary public office. He had not been back here for more than ten years and people had forgotten about him. Anyway, he was using his holiday to put his affairs in order. A guy from Cherbourg wanted to sell him a whole batch of American equipment: old jeeps, old army trucks. Brossier worked “in cars.” He even ran a garage in Paris.
That night, he had walked Louis back to his barracks. He was wearing a raincoat and an old Tyrolean hat with a reddish-yellow feather stuck in it. And as they walked down the street lined with new buildings, every one the same gray concrete, Brossier told him, as though sharing a secret, that he no longer recognized the city of his childhood. They had built a new city after the bombardments of the last war, and Saint-Lô wasn’t Saint-Lô anymore.
•
At the Café du Balcon, the cigarette smoke and the noise of the conversations made his head spin. Cocktail hour. He quickly caught sight of Brossier with his Tyrolean hat. He went over to him, slightly uncomfortably, put his bag down, and took a seat.
“So? Demobbed?” Brossier asked him, beaming.
“Yup, demobbed,” he said in an undertone, since using military slang had always embarrassed him.
“Any demob’s a party, old boy,” Brossier said. “Look, I’ve already gotten started.”
He pointed to his glass, half filled with a red liqueur.
“What’ll you have?”
The man’s patter was like a traveling salesman’s, but then his guttural voice would suddenly turn affected. When he brought up furniture and books. He would explain that he used to work for several antique dealers in Paris. One night, he sententiously listed for Louis the ways you could tell a Regency armchair from a Louis XV, and even showed him, pencil in hand, what to look for to judge the quality of the backs and arms. As for books, well, he liked first editions. At these moments, Brossier was no longer himself; he was wholly under someone else’s influence and doubtless repeating his words and gestures.
“Here’s to your demob!” Brossier said after the waiter brought their Camparis.
They clinked glasses and drank. He did not have the courage to tell Brossier that his shoes were soaked.
“What are you thinking about, Louis?”
He was thinking about just one thing: Taking off his sodden socks and shoes, throwing them in the garbage, and being absolutely certain that he would never have wet feet again, thanks to his new crepe-soled shoes.
“What a pain!” he blurted out.
“What, old boy?”
He had been obedient for two years, behaved well, put up with the barracks, the quarters, the uniform, the leaky shoes, and now that it was over he had no idea how he’d been able to stand it.
“I need new shoes.”
“All right . . .”
“Shoes with thick crepe soles.”
Brossier looked surprised. He gulped down what was left of his Campari.
“Sure,” he said, “let’s go find some.”
They left the Café du Balcon and walked back down to the commercial street to the right. A row of shops, one after another, under cement arcades. In the last window, they saw moccasins and women’s shoes on display. The shopkeeper was just lowering the metal grate.
In the shop’s little showroom, they sat down next to each other, Brossier still wearing his Tyrolean hat.
“They’re for the young man here,” he said.
“I’d like a pair of shoes with crepe soles.”
The shopkeeper explained that they didn’t have many of those left, but he could show him a “range” of Italian moccasins, the best quality.
“No. Crepe soles.”
He decided on the ankle boots with crepe soles more than an inch thick. To try them on, he took off his soaking wet socks.
“You don’t have a pair of socks, do you?” he asked.
“Yes, tennis socks.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He pulled them on and conscientiously tied the laces of the new shoes. Brossier took out his wallet and paid. The shopkeeper handed Louis a package containing his old shoes and wet socks in a plastic bag.
Outside, he threw the package in the gutter, and this ceremonious gesture marked the end of a phase of his life. He still needed a coat, of course, but that could wait.
“Let’s have dinner at Neuvotel,” Brossier said to him. “I’ve reserved a table. And two rooms.”
“With bath?”
“Yes. Why?”
A private bathroom—it was incredible, after the long sink in the barracks like a trough in a pigsty, with the drains always blocked. A bathroom, after two years of squat toilets with badly fitted doors banging in the icy wind of the courtyard . . .
“That means I can take a bath?”
“As many baths as you want, old boy.”
The rain was falling again, but so fine it barely wet his hair. They followed the street’s gently curving slope along the ramparts.
“It’s funny,” Brossier said, pointing out to him a place on the ramparts. “One time, when I was kid, I climbed down from up there on a knotted rope . . . So how are your shoes?”
“Great.”
A few hundred meters to the Neuvotel. They passed the Drakkar cinema, at the end of the street, before crossing the bridge over the Vire. But Louis didn’t mind a long walk, and he felt a certain pleasure in putting his feet down right in the middle of all the puddles. There was nothing, and no one, to fear with these crepe soles.
•
Soft music was coming from a loudspeaker. The hotel dining room was deserted, except for him and Brossier at a table in the back. Brossier was just opening a bottle of Burgundy when the waiter offered them the cheese plate.
“And here’s to demob!” he shouted for the third time, filling Louis’s glass.
Louis, already annoyed by this word that kept reminding him of the barracks, ignored the toast. He let himself sink into a pleasant torpor.
“You have to have a ‘nègre blanc’ for dessert,” Brossier advised. “A nègre blanc.”
He’d had too much to drink. His face started to turn a scarlet color.
“Tell me, Louis. You wouldn’t be in the mood to . . .” He turned his head to look around him, then said, in a low voice, “I called for two Cherbourg girls to come, to celebrate your demob.”
Louis squinted in the too-bright light. He tried to remember the name of the song coming out of the loudspeaker, a tune you heard a lot of in those days, but he couldn’t. What was it called, what was it?
“Two nègres blancs!”
Brossier looked around again.
“You know, that’s what they’re like, Cherbourg girls . . .”
&n
bsp; They were waiting in the lobby. Two brunettes, one with her hair in a ponytail. The car they had come in was hers, a Citroën DS-19 that had almost broken down near Valognes. That would have been no fun in this weather.
“The main thing,” Brossier proclaimed, “is that you’re here, my dears.”
He stroked the cheek of one of the brunettes, who smiled at him. Then he walked over to the reception desk. Louis stayed where he was, his bag in his hand, with the two girls.
“So, it looks like you’ve finished your military service?” asked the one with the ponytail.
“Yes. It’s over.”
“Are you going to stay here, in Saint-Lô?”
“Yes.”
“I think it would be better to be in the navy. Get to travel . . .”
The other girl had taken a compact out of her handbag and was putting on lipstick. Brossier came back.
“Let’s go! Room 119! Forward march!”
On the narrow staircase, Brossier kissed the girl with the ponytail and started to grope her. She had taken his feathered green hat off his head and put it on her head, askew. Louis, pressed up against the other girl, could only carry his bag in his arms.
A room with deep blue wallpaper, furnished with twin beds and a light wood dresser. A radio built into each of the night tables. Brossier turned the knob.
“Let’s get champagne! But first, they’ll show you one of their numbers! They have a nightclub act in Cherbourg.”
“What’s your name?” asked the girl who was still wearing Brossier’s feathered hat.
“Louis.”
Brossier had turned off the overhead lights. The only light was from one of the bedside lamps. Louis watched the rain come down outside the window, harder than before.
“Three cheers for demob! Three cheers for demob! Three cheers for demob!” Brossier sang.
“Three cheers for demob,” one of the brunettes softly repeated.
There was a huge parking lot in front of the hotel, like an airport runway. Two rows of streetlights gave off a garish light. Why all those streetlights? Louis noticed, in the middle of the empty lot, the two brunettes’ DS-19.
•
On the stairs, the vibrations from the drums and electric guitars always overwhelmed Georges Bellune. He sat on the leather bench on the second floor, his back straight, trying to gather his strength before crossing the Palladium’s threshold.
Light from the milky white platform area in the back, on the left, where a group of musicians were rocking and rolling, pierced the semidarkness. The singer was belting out an American hit in a voice even more confident than the original singer’s. Boys and girls, most of them not yet twenty, crowded around the stage. The band’s drummer, with his curly blond hair and fat cheeks, looked to Bellune like a prematurely aged army brat.
Bellune beat a path to the bar and ordered a drink. After the third glass, he was less sensitive to the noise. Every time he came to the Palladium, it took an hour for the bands and the singers to perform onstage, one after the other—teenagers from the neighborhood, mostly, or young working people. Their dream was so strong, their desire to escape with the music in which they had a presentiment of their lives was so powerful, that Bellune often thought the shrieking guitars and hoarse screaming voices he heard were like cries for help.
He was over fifty and worked for a record company. They sent him to the Palladium two or three times a week to scout out various amateur bands. Bellune set up appointments for them at the record company’s office, where they would audition. In those moments, he was nothing but a customs officer picking two or three people out of a mass of emigrants crowding in front of a ship and shoving them up the gangway.
He looked at his watch and decided that he had shown his face long enough. This time, he didn’t have the strength to pay attention to one more band or singer. To elbow his way up to the stage felt like a superhuman effort. No. Not tonight.
That was when he noticed her. He hadn’t seen her before, his back was turned. Chestnut-brown hair, unusually pale skin, pale eyes. Barely twenty. She was sitting at the bar but looking toward the stage in back, hypnotized. A stir went through the room, there was a rush, applause, screams. Someone climbed onstage: Vince Taylor. Why wasn’t she up there with the others? Her gaze, fixed on the only zone of light in the Palladium, called up in Bellune’s mind the image of a hesitant moth drawn to a lamp. On the platform, Vince Taylor was waiting for the applause and screams to die down. He adjusted the mic and started singing.
“And you, do you sing too?”
She jumped as though he had suddenly yanked her out of her dream, and turned to face him.
“Are you here because you’re interested in music?” Bellune asked again.
His gentle voice and serious air always inspired confidence. She nodded yes.
“That’s good timing,” Bellune said. “I work for a record company. I’d like to help you, if you want.”
She looked at him, taken aback. The people Bellune had always chosen for auditions, at random, had at least gotten up onstage and made some kind of noises with their drums and guitars; their faces had appeared in bright light for a moment. But tonight, Bellune chose someone who didn’t say anything, didn’t move, and seemed drowned in the sea of noise. A face barely different from the shadows.
•
He took her home in a taxi. Before leaving her there, he wrote his office’s address and phone number on a scrap of paper.
“You can call and come see me whenever you want. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Odile.”
“Odile, good. See you soon, I hope.”
She crossed the courtyard of her red brick apartment building at Porte Champerret. In the elevator, she pressed the button for the sixth floor, the highest it went, and when she got there she climbed another little flight of stairs and walked down a hallway.
It was an attic room with a sloping roof. You could just barely stand between the sink and the bed. Photographs of singers—a black woman, an American man—were stuck to the beige wall. The radiator, its size disproportionate to the cramped dimensions of the room, gave off too much heat.
She opened the window, from which you could see, at the horizon, the top of the Arc de Triomphe. She dropped onto the bed and took out of her raincoat pocket the piece of paper where he had scribbled:
Georges Bellune
21, rue de Berri, 3rd floor
ÉLYsées-0015
She would call him tomorrow. If she waited too long, she would lose courage.
The guy seemed serious. Maybe he would help her. She didn’t take her eyes off the scrap of paper; she wanted to convince herself that the name and address were really written there.
She had forgotten to buy anything to eat, but there was almost nothing left from her last paycheck anyway. Now that she no longer worked at the perfumery on rue Vignon, she spent almost all her time at the Palladium, like someone lingering in the bath.
She put on a record she found on the floor at the foot of the bed. Then she turned off the bedside lamp. She listened to the music, stretched out in the darkness, with the square of the window in front of her a little bit lighter. Since the crank for adjusting the radiator was missing, it was impossible to lower the heat, and she always left both sides of the double window wide open.
•
At Gare Saint-Lazare, it was night and Brossier had fallen asleep. Louis tapped him on the shoulder. They waited in their compartment for all the other travelers to leave. Then Brossier put on his old Tyrolean hat, standing in front of the mirror, while Louis took the bags down from the overhead racks: his little tin suitcase and Brossier’s garnet-colored leather bag.
There was a long line of people at the taxi stand, and Brossier suggested that they have a glass of something. They went back up rue d’Amsterdam. Louis carried the bags and let Brossier lead the way. He decided on a café whose glass surfaces, at the intersection of two streets, jutted out like the prow of a ship. Harsh li
ght inside. Someone playing a game of pinball. They sat down at the counter.
“Two beers,” Brossier ordered, without asking Louis. “Belgian, if you have any.”
He took off his Tyrolean hat and put it on a stool next to him. Louis watched the people sliding past the windows like underwater shadows along the surfaces of a bathyscaphe, and looked at the gridlocked traffic at the intersection.
“To your health, Louis!” Brossier said, raising his glass. “Are you glad to be in Paris?”
•
She would walk down the hall, followed by the sounds of conversations and ringing telephones. People came and went, slamming the doors. A deep calm reigned in Bellune’s office, and if you stopped outside the door for a few seconds, you might think that no one was inside. There was not the least sound of a voice. Not even the clicking of a typewriter.
Bellune, standing in front of the sash window, would be smoking a cigarette. Or else sitting on the arm of one of the leather armchairs, listening to a song on a tape player. He would ask her what she thought of it, but the music and the voice would be almost too soft for her to hear a thing. One afternoon, she even surprised him pensively watching the tape unroll without finding it necessary to turn the sound on.
He had worked for the same record company for a long time and, since his role was to “discover”—in his words—“new and exceptional talents,” he promised to help her cut a record. But he seemed bored in his office. Every time she came to see him he said, in the same impatient tone of voice, “What do you say we go downstairs, Odile?”
He would take the telephone that never rang off its hook and, in the corridor, turn the key in his office door. Taking her by the arm, he would lead her to the elevator.
They would walk back up the rue de Berri toward the Champs-Élysées, he never saying a word, she not daring to disturb his reverie. Then, in a very soft voice, he would tell her the time had come for her to make a tape they could present to the record company. He had to find some good songs and he would ask a few songwriters he knew. Some “classic things,” going against the tide of what “the young people” were singing nowadays.
Young Once Page 2
