Branledore took up the whole front row of the box and blotted out the rest of us. He hid us almost completely with his bandages. He did it on purpose, the bastard.
But two of our comrades climbed up on chairs behind him so the crowd could admire them over his head and shoulders. They brought the house down.
I came close to crying out: “But it’s all about me! Me and nobody else!” I knew my Branledore, we’d have exchanged insults in front of all those people, we might even have used our fists. So in the end he was the winner, he triumphed. Just as he’d planned, he had the whole storm of applause to himself. Defeated, we took refuge backstage, where fortunately we were feted again. That was some comfort. But our actress and inspiration wasn’t alone in her dressing room. The poet, her poet, our poet was with her. He had the same weakness for young soldier boys as she did. They made it clear to me very artistically. A handsome offer. They repeated it, but I ignored their kind suggestions. I was the loser, because they had influence and things might have worked out very well. I left them abruptly, I was nettled. Silly of me, I was young.
To recapitulate: the aviators had snatched Lola away from me, the Argentines had taken Musyne, and now this harmonious invert had filched my magnificent actress. Sadly I left the Comédie as the last torches were being extinguished in the corridors and returned alone, without recourse to the streetcar, to our hospital, that mantrap plunked down in the tenacious mud of the rebellious suburbs.
The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I’ve never been really right in the head. But just then such fits of dizziness would come over me for no reason at all that I could easily have been run over. The war had given me the staggers. When it came to pocket money, all I could count on during my stay at the hospital was the few francs my mother managed to scrape up for me each week. So as soon as I could I went looking for little extras here and there, wherever I could find them. One of my old bosses looked like a likely prospect, and I went right over to see him.
I remembered opportunely that in a certain obscure period of my life shortly before the war I had worked as a helper for this Roger Puta* who owned a jewelry shop near the Madeleine. My work for that loathsome jeweler consisted of menial jobs, such as polishing the silverware in the shop. There was lots of it, every shape and size, and it was hard to take care of in the gift-giving holiday season because it was always being handled.
As soon as my classes were out at medical school where I was engaged in exacting and (because I kept flunking the exams) interminable studies, I hightailed it to the backroom of Monsieur Puta’s shop, where I labored for two or three hours, until dinnertime, applying whiting to his chocolatières.
In return for my work, I was fed, copiously I have to admit, in the kitchen. Then in the morning before school, I had to take the watchdogs out for a piss. All that for forty francs a month. Puta’s jewelry shop on the corner of the Rue Vignon sparkled with thousands of diamonds, each one of which cost several decades of my salary. They’re still sparkling in the exact same place, by the way. When everybody was mobilized, this Puta got himself assigned to the auxiliaries and put under the special orders of a certain cabinet minister, whose car he drove from time to time. But he also made himself useful, unofficially of course, by supplying the ministry with jewels. The higher officials speculated, with gratifying results, on present and future transactions, and the longer the war went on, the more jewels were needed. Monsieur Puta got so many orders that he sometimes had trouble filling them.
When he was overworked, Monsieur Puta managed to look slightly intelligent because of the fatigue that tormented him, but only then. When rested, his face, in spite of his undeniably fine features, became so harmonious in its idiotic placidity that it would be hard not to carry a despairing memory of it with one to the grave.
His. wife, Madame Puta, seldom left the cashier’s desk, in a manner of speaking she and the desk were one. She had been brought up to be a jeweler’s wife. That had been her parents’ ambition. She knew her duty inside and out. The prosperity of the cash drawer brought happiness to husband and wife. Not that Madame Puta was bad looking, not at all, she could even, like so many others, have been rather pretty, but she was so careful, so distrustful that she stopped short of beauty just as she stopped short of life—her hair was a little too well dressed, her smile a little too facile and sudden, and her gestures a bit too abrupt or too furtive. You racked your brains trying to figure out what was too calculated about her and why, you always felt uneasy when she came near you. This instinctive revulsion that shopkeepers inspire in anyone who goes near them and who knows what’s what is one of the few consolations for being as down at heel as people who don’t sell anything to anybody tend to be.
The petty cares of business were everything to Madame Puta; in this she resembled Madame Herote, but with a difference; in her case, they possessed her body and soul, just as God possesses his nuns.
And yet from time to time, she would give a thought to the world around her. For instance, she might indulge in some little expression of sympathy for parents with sons at the front. “How dreadful this war must be for people with grown-up children!”
“Think before you shoot your mouth off!” her husband responded without delay. Such mawkishness found him ready and resolute. “I suppose there’s no need of defending France?”
Good as gold, but first and foremost good patriots, stoics in short, they went to sleep every night of the war directly above their shop with its millions, a French fortune.
In the brothels that he visited now and then, Monsieur Puta, though demanding, refused to be taken for a spendthrift. He’d set them straight at the outset. “I’m no Englishman, dearie, and I know the score. I’m just a little French soldier, and I’m not in a hurry.” That was his opening statement. The girls respected him for his well-regulated way of taking his pleasure. He liked to enjoy himself, but couldn’t be taken in, a real man. He knew human nature and took advantage of his knowledge to sell a few jewels to the assistant madame, who had no faith in stocks and bonds. As for his military career, Monsieur Puta was making impressive progress, from temporary discharges to permanent deferments. After God knows how many providential medical examinations, he was finally exempted for good. One of the highest joys of his existence was to contemplate and if possible to handle a shapely thigh. In this one pleasure at least he got the better of his wife, who took no interest in anything but the business. Take a man and woman with otherwise equal qualities, you always seem to find a little more uneasiness in a man, however stagnant and narrow-minded. This Puta had just a dash of the artist in him. Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs. Madame Puta was glad she had no children. She voiced her pleasure in being sterile so often that one day Monsieur Puta spoke of their satisfaction to the assistant madame. “Yes,” said the assistant madame. “But after all somebody’s children have to go. It’s a duty.” That was true, the war involved duties.
The cabinet minister whose car Puta drove had no children either. Cabinet ministers never have children.
Around 1913, at the same time as me, there was another helper doing menial jobs in the shop; his name was Jean Voireuse.* At night he was some kind of super in the little theaters, and in the afternoon he delivered parcels for Puta. The pay was small, but he didn’t mind. He managed to make ends meet thanks to the Métro. He delivered his parcels on foot almost as quickly as if he’d taken the Métro, and kept the price of the ticket. All velvet. True, his feet smelled a little, quite a lot in fact, but he knew it and asked me to let him know when there were no customers in the shop so he could safely go in and settle his accounts with Madame Puta. As soon as she had the money, she’d send him out to the backroom with me. During the war again his feet stood him in good stead. He was reputed to be the fastest courier in his regiment. While on convalescent leave, he came to see me at the Bicêtre fort, in fact it was then we decided to get in touch with our old b
oss. We didn’t let the grass grow under our feet. When we got to the Boulevard de la Madeleine they had just finished dressing the shop window …
“Well, well! Who’d have expected …!” Monsieur Puta was rather surprised to see us. “But I’m glad to see you all the same. Come right in! You’re looking well, Voireuse! Fine and dandy. But you, Bardamu, you look sick, my boy! Oh well, you’re young! You’ll recover! You youngsters are in luck when all’s said and done! Great days, great experience for you! Up there! And out in the open too! This is history, my boys. Make no mistake! And what history!”
We didn’t answer, we thought we’d let Monsieur Puta go on a while before touching him … And on he went:
“It’s rough in the trenches, I won’t deny that … But it’s no bed of roses here either, you know! … You boys have been wounded? All right, but I’m absolutely bushed. For two years now I’ve been on night duty! Do you know what that means? Exhausted! Worn to a frazzle! Oh my God! The streets of Paris at night! No lights … Driving a car, as often as not with the Minister in it! In a hurry! You simply can’t imagine! … I could get killed a dozen times every night! …”
“Oh yes,” Madame Puta put in, “and sometimes he drives the Minister’s wife too …”
“Oh yes, and it’s not over yet …”
“Dreadful!” we said in unison.
“What about the dogs?” Voireuse asked to be polite. “What’s become of them? Does somebody still take them out in the Tuileries?”
“I’ve had them put away! They were bad for business … German shepherds … the customers, you see …”
“A pity!” said his wife. “But the new dogs we have now are very nice, they’re Scotch … they smell a little … not like our German shepherds, do you remember, Voireuse? … They hardly smelled at all. We could shut them up in the shop even after the rain …”
“That’s right!” said Monsieur Puta. “Not like old Voireuse here with his feet! Do your feet still smell, Jean? You young scamp!”
“They still smell a little, I think,” said Voireuse.
At that moment some customers came in.
“I won’t keep you any longer, my boys,” said Monsieur Puta, intent on getting Jean out of the shop as quickly as possible. “Keep well, that’s the main thing! I won’t ask you where you’ve come from! Certainly not! Security first is my motto!”
At the word “security” Puta made a very serious face, like when giving back change … So that was the end of our visit. As we were leaving, Madame Puta gave us each twenty francs. The shop was polished as spick-and-span as a yacht, we were afraid to walk through because of our boots, which looked monstrous on the fine carpet.
“Oh, Roger! Look at them!” Madame Puta cried out. “Aren’t they comical! … They’re not in the habit anymore! They walk as if they’d stepped in something!”
“The habit will come back!” said Monsier Puta amiably, glad to be rid of us so quickly and cheaply.
Out in the street we realized we wouldn’t go far with our twenty francs each, but Voireuse had another idea.
“Come on,” he says, “we’ll go and see a lady I know, her son was a buddy of mine, killed on the Marne. I go and see his parents every week and tell them how their son was killed … They’re rich … The mother gives me a hundred francs or so every time … They say it makes them happy … So …”
“But what’ll I do? What’ll I say to this lady?”
“Well, you’ll tell her that you were there too … She’ll give you another hundred francs … They’re the right kind of rich … Take it from me … Not like that stinking Puta … They don’t count their pennies …”
“All right,” I said. “But are you sure she won’t ask me for details? … Because I didn’t know her son, see? … I’ll be flummoxed if she asks for …”
“No, no … don’t worry … Say the same as me … Just nod your head and say yes … Nothing to worry about! The woman is brokenhearted, so if someone comes and talks about her son it makes her happy … That’s all she wants … Anything at all … It’s easy …”
I wasn’t very enthusiastic, but I badly wanted the hundred francs, which struck me as providential and unusually easy to come by.
“All right,” I said finally. “But don’t expect me to make anything up, I’m warning you! Promise? I’ll say the same as you, not a word more … How did he get killed anyway?”
“A shell hit him smack in the face, a pretty big one, at Garance the place was called, on the Meuse front, on the bank of some river … Boy, they didn’t find ‘this much’ of him! Absolutely nothing left … a memory. And you know, he was a big man, strong and husky and athletic, but what would you expect? Nobody can stand up against a shell!”
“That’s a fact!”
“Wiped off the face of the earth! … His mother still finds it hard to believe! I’ve told her over and over again … She insists that he’s just missing … Crazy idea! … Missing! … It’s not her fault, she never saw a shell, she doesn’t see how a man can vanish into thin air … like a fart, and that it’s all over, especially when the man is her son …”
“It’s only natural.”
“By the way, I haven’t been to see her for two weeks … But you’ll see how it is when I go in … The mother receives me right away in the drawing room … It’s a beautiful house … You’ll see … so many curtains and carpets and mirrors you’d think you were in a theater … A hundred francs is nothing to them, they’ll hardly miss it … About like five francs to me … Today she’ll be good for two hundred … because she hasn’t seen me for two weeks … You’ll see, the servants with gilded buttons …”
At the Avenue Henri-Martin we turned left and went on a little way, then we came to a gate surrounded by trees in a little private road.
“See?” said Voireuse, when we were standing in front of it, “it’s practically a château … What did I tell you? The father’s supposed to be high up in the railroads … a big shot …”
“You sure he’s not a stationmaster?” I said, making a joke.
“Don’t be stupid! … There he is now … he’s coming to meet us …”
But the old man didn’t come out right away. He was walking around the lawn, stooped over, talking to a soldier. We went nearer. I recognized the soldier, it was the reservist I had met that night at Noirceur-sur-la-Lys, when I was on reconnaissance. I even remembered the name he’d given me: Robinson.
“Do you know that footslogger?” Voireuse asked me.
“Yes, I know him.”
“Maybe he’s a friend of theirs … They must be talking about the mother. I hope they don’t prevent us from going to see her … Because she’s the one mostly that forks over the money …”
The old gentleman came over to us.
“My dear friend,” he said to Voireuse in a quavering voice. “It grieves me to tell you that since your last visit my poor wife has succumbed to our great sorrow … Last Thursday we left her alone for a moment, she had asked us to … She was in tears …”
He couldn’t finish his sentence. Suddenly he turned away and left us.
“I know you,” I said to Robinson, as soon as the old gentleman was far enough away.
“And I know you …”
“What happened to the old lady?” I asked him.
“Well,” he informed us, “she hanged herself the day before yesterday, that’s all.” He added: “Of all the lousy luck! … She was my army godmother! … Such things only happen to me; A calamity! My first leave! … For six months I’d been looking forward to this day …”
Voireuse and I couldn’t help laughing at Robinson’s discomfiture. A nasty surprise if there ever was one, but her being dead didn’t give us our two hundred smackers, and we’d made up a new story special for the occasion. So none of us was very happy.
“You and your big mealy mouth!” We were ragging Robinson, trying to get a rise out of him. “You thought you had a good thing, didn
’t you? A sweet little feed with the old folks? Or maybe you thought you’d screw your fairy godmother? … serves you goddam right!”
We couldn’t stay there all day looking at the grass and laughing, so we all three together started off in the direction of Grenelle. We all counted our money, it didn’t come to much. Seeing we had to get back to our respective hospitals and barracks that same evening, there was just enough for dinner at a bistro, and maybe there’d be a little something left over, but not enough to go upstairs at the cathouse. We went in anyway, but we only had a drink at the bar.
“Say,” said Robinson, “it’s good to see you again. But what do you think of that kid’s mother? The bitch, hanging herself just when I’m due to arrive! … I won’t forget her in a hurry! … Do you see me hanging myself? … Unhappy, you say? … I’d hang myself every day! … What about you?”
“Rich people are more sensitive,” said Voireuse.
Voireuse had a good heart. “If I had six francs,” he went on, “I’d go upstairs with the brunette over there by the slot machine …”
“Go ahead,” we told him, “you’ll tell us if she knows how to suck …”
We rummaged in our pockets, but counting the tip there wasn’t enough to give him his piece. Just enough for another coffee each and a cassis. When we’d finished, we went out and roamed around some more.
We broke up on the Place Vendome and went our separate ways. Saying good-bye, we couldn’t see one another, and we spoke softly because of the echoes. No light, it wasn’t allowed.
I never saw Voireuse again. I’ve often run into Robinson. As for Jean Voireuse, it was the gas that got him on the Somme. He died two years later by the sea, in Brittany, in a navy sanatorium. He wrote to me twice when he first got there, but no more after that. He’d never seen the ocean. “You can’t imagine how beautiful it is,” he wrote me. “I bathe a little, it’s good for my feet, but I think my voice is gone for good.” That made him unhappy, because his big ambition was to get into a theater chorus some day.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 11
