Our dread, maybe even worse than the wind, was showers … All our finery turned to pancakes … The ochre ran out in rivers … the sidewalk was all sticky with it … The stuff felt like a lot of sponges … The trip home was awful. We never complained in my father’s hearing.
The following week it was Enghien and certain Thursdays Clignancourt … the Porte … We were right next to the Flea Market … I liked the markets all right … they made me miss school. The fresh air pepped me up … When we saw my father in the evening, he gave me a pain in the neck … He was never satisfied … He met us at the station … I felt like dropping the little cupboard on his dogs to make him jump.
At Clignancourt it was an entirely different clientele … We’d only lay out our junk, our worst crap, the stuff that had been in the cellar for years. We let it go for beans …
It was at the Flea Market that I met little Paulo. He worked for a woman two rows behind us. He sold buttons up and down the avenue, near the Porte, or he’d stroll around the market with his tray on his belly, held up by a string around his neck. “Thirteen for two sous, ladies …” He was younger than me but awfully smart … We made friends right away … What I admired about Popaul was that he didn’t wear shoes, just boards tied on with tapes … They didn’t hurt his feet … So I took off mine too when we went out on expeditions together on the fortifications.
He sold his buttons quick, in baker’s dozens, bone and mother-of-pearl, you didn’t have time to look … After that we were free.
In addition he had a little racket. “It’s easy,” he explained as soon as we had no secrets from each other. In Bastion 18 or in the streetcar shelters near La Villette, he’d make little dates with soldiers and butchers and soften them up. He asked me to come and meet them. I couldn’t, because it was too late when he did those things … You could make five francs, sometimes more.
Behind the weighing house he showed me, I didn’t ask him to, the way grown-ups sucked him off. Popaul was lucky, he had juice, I didn’t have any yet. One time he made fifteen francs in a single evening.
I had to lie to get away, I said I was going for French fries. My mother knew Popaul well, she couldn’t abide him even at a distance and she forbade me to go with him. We went just the same, we’d go wandering around as far as Gonesse. I found him irresistible … Every time he got a little scared, he had a tick, he’d suck in his tongue, and suck and suck, it made him look awful. In the end, from seeing so much of him, I began to do it too.
Popaul’s boss, the one that sold the drygoods, had a funny little jacket she put on him; it was very special, like a blazer, all covered with buttons, big ones and little ones, thousands of them, in front, in back, a whole sample case, mother-of-pearl, steel, and bone …
Popaul’s idea of heaven was absinthe; his boss poured him a little aperitif whenever he came back sold out. It made him spunky. He smoked army tobacco, we made our own cigarettes out of newspaper … he didn’t mind sucking people, he had a dirty mind. Every man we passed, we’d bet how big it was. My mother couldn’t leave her stand, especially in that kind of neighborhood. I’d slip away more and more … And then here’s what happened:
I’d thought Popaul was a regular guy, loyal and faithful. I was mistaken. He behaved like a queer. Why not face it? He was always talking about an arquebus. I didn’t know exactly what he meant. So one day he brings it over. It was a big rubber band on a forked stick, a kind of slingshot, for shooting sparrows. “Let’s practice,” he says. “Then we’ll smash a window! … There’s an easy one on the avenue … After that we’ll try a cop! …” OK, it seemed like a good idea. We go off by the school … “We’ll start here,” he says. School was just out and it was handy for a getaway. He passes me his beanshooter … I put in a big stone. I pull it way back … as far as the rubber will go … “Take a gander up there!” I say to Popaul. And ping! … crash! … right square in the clock! … the whole thing flies into smithereens … I stand there frozen like an asshole The racket and the dial going to pieces like that … I’m flabbergasted. People come running … I’m screwed … cornered like a rat … They all start tugging at my ears. “Popaul!” I holler … He’s melted into thin air … He’s gone! … They drag me off to my mother. They raise hell with her. She’d better pay for the breakage … or they’ll take me off to jail. She gives her name, her address … I try to explain: “Popaul!”… The slaps rain down so thick and fast I can’t see straight …
At home it starts up all over again, a tempest … My father beats the hell out of me, kicks me in the ribs, steps on me, takes my pants down. In addition he keeps bellowing that I’m killing him! … that I ought to be in jail! that I should have been there from the start! … My mother pleads, clings to him, falls at his feet, and screams that in prison “they get even worse.” I was the lowest of the low. I was a gallowsbird. That’s what I’d come to! … Popaul had a good deal to do with it, but there was the fresh air too and the freedom … I won’t try to justify myself.
We spent a whole week like that, absolutely frantic. Papa was so mad, he got so red in the face, we were afraid he’d have an attack. Uncle Édouard came in from Romainville just to reason with him. Uncle Arthur didn’t have enough influence, he was too frivolous. Rodolphe was far away, touring the provinces with the Capitol Circus.
Our neighbors and relations, everybody in the Passage, thought the best thing would be to give me a good physic and my father too, it would be good for both of us. They racked their brains and finally decided it was worms that made me so wicked … They gave me some substance … I shat yellow, I shat brown. It sort of calmed me down. It affected my father too … he was struck dumb for at least three weeks. All he did was give me a long suspicious look now and then … from a distance. I was still his bane, his cross. We took another physic, each of us had his own. He took Rochelle Salts, me castor oil, she took rhubarb. Then they decided that we wouldn’t do the markets anymore, that gadding about would be my downfall. I made everything impossible with my criminal instincts.
My mother took me back to school, giving me lots of advice on the way. She was in a terrible state when we got to the rue des Jeûneurs. Everybody had warned her they wouldn’t keep me a week … But I played it safe, they didn’t throw me out. But I have to admit that I didn’t learn anything. School made me miserable, the teacher with his goatee, always bleating his problems. It gave me the creeps just to look at him. After all the fun I’d had with Popaul it made me sick to sit still for hours on end listening to a lot of tripe.
The kids tried to have a little fun in the yard, but it was pitiful, the wall in front was so high it crushed you, it killed their desire to play. They went back in to struggle for good conduct tokens … Hell!
In the yard there was only one tree with one branch and one bird. The kids got it with a slingshot. The cat spent a whole recreation period eating it. My marks were average. I was afraid of being put back. I was even commended for good behavior. We all had shitty asses. I taught them how to keep their pee in little bottles.
In the shop the jeremiads got worse and worse. My mother kept mulling over her sorrow. She thought of her mother on every possible occasion, she remembered the slightest details … If somebody came in at closing time to sell some knickknack, she’d burst into tears … “If only my mother were here,” she’d blubber, “she knew just what to buy …” Those remarks were disastrous …
We had an old friend who knew exactly how to take advantage of Mama’s melancholy … Her name was Madame Divonne, she was almost as ancient as Aunt Armide. After the war of 1870 she and her husband had made a fortune selling lambskin gloves in the Passage des Panoramas. The shop was famous and they had another one in the Passage du Saumon. At one time they had eighteen people working for them. “All day long there are customers pouring in and out,” Grandma used to say. Handling so much dough had gone to her husband’s head. One fine day he lost everything and then some in the Panama Canal. Men have no guts … instead of fighting it out, he
ran off with a skirt. They’d sold everything at a loss. After that she was down and out. Madame Divonne lived on this one and that one. Her only solace was music. She had a little something left, but so little that she barely got enough to eat and not every day at that. She sponged on her friends. She had married her glove man for love. She wasn’t a tradeswoman by birth, her father had been a prefect under the Empire. She played the piano beautifully. She never took off her fingerless gloves because her hands were so delicate, and in the winter she wore thick mittens, but of openwork and decorated with pink pompons. She was always careful about her appearance.
She turned up at the shop … she hadn’t been to see us in a long time. Grandma’s death had moved her deeply. She couldn’t get over it. “So young!” she’d say at the end of every sentence. She spoke with delicacy of Caroline, of their past, their husbands, of the Passage du Saumon and the Boulevards … with fine shadings and exquisite tact … She really had nice manners, I could see that … As she reminisced, everything turned into a fragile dream. She didn’t take off her veil or her hat … on account of her complexion, she said. The real reason was her wig. We never had much on hand for dinner … We’d invite her all the same … But when she’d finished her soup, she’d take off her veil and her hat and the whole works … she’d pick up her soup plate and drink it down … That seemed the handiest way … on account of her false teeth, I guess. You could hear her wiggling them … She distrusted spoons. She was crazy about leeks but we had to cut them up for her, that was a bore. When we were through eating, she still didn’t want to go home. She’d get gay. She’d turn to the piano, a pledge one of our customers had forgotten to redeem. It was never tuned, but it worked pretty well.
Everything got on my father’s nerves and so did the old lady with her playful ways. But he softened when she struck up certain arias from Lucia di Lammermoor, and especially the Moonlight Aria.
She took to coming all the time. She didn’t wait to be invited … She was perfectly aware of the havoc. While we put the shop in order, she’d race upstairs, she’d settle herself on the piano stool and toss off two or three waltzes and then Lucia and then Werther. She had quite a repertory, the whole Châlet and Fortunio’s song. We had to go up sometime. She’d never have stopped if we hadn’t sat down to table. “Peekaboo,” she’d call out when she saw us. During dinner she’d do a good job of crying in unison with Mama. It didn’t spoil her appetite. She didn’t mind noodles. I was always aghast at the way she kept asking for more. She pulled the same game all over town, sharing memories with bereaved shopkeepers … She had vaguely known the dear departed of any number of neighborhoods. That was her way of keeping body and soul together.
She knew the history of every family in the Passages. And when there was a piano, she couldn’t be beat … At past seventy she could still sing Faust, but she took precautions. She stuffed herself full of gumdrops to keep from going hoarse … She sang the choruses all by herself, making a megaphone with her hands. “Glory and fame to the men of old!”… Without taking her hands off the keys, she managed to pound it out with her feet.
In the end it was so funny we couldn’t control ourselves, we’d die laughing. But once she was started, a little thing like that couldn’t faze Madame Divonne. She was a born artist. Mama felt ashamed, but she laughed too … It did her good.
For all her faults and kittenishness, my mother couldn’t do without her. She took her along wherever she went. At night, we’d take her as far as the Porte de Bicêtre. She’d walk the rest of the way, to Kremlin, not far from the Old People’s Home.
On Sunday morning she’d call for us and we’d all go to the cemetery together. Ours was Père Lachaise, 43rd Division. My father never went in. He couldn’t stand graves. He’d never go any farther than the square outside La Roquette prison. He’d read his paper and wait for us to come back.
Grandma’s vault was very well kept. Sometimes we’d empty out lilacs, sometimes it was jasmine. We always brought roses. That was the family’s only luxury. We’d change the vases, we’d polish the windows. Inside it was like a Punch and Judy show with colored statues and real lace altar cloths. My mother kept bringing new ones, that was her consolation. She was always putting the house in order.
While we were cleaning up, she sobbed the whole time … Caroline was down there, not very far away … I always thought of Asnières … The way we’d knocked ourselves out for those tenants. I could see her, so to speak … The place was spic and span, we washed it out every Sunday, but there was a funny little smell from down below … pungent, subtle, kind of sour, insinuating … once you’d caught it, you smelled it all over … in spite of the flowers … mixed in with the scent … clinging to you … It makes your head spin … it comes from the tomb … you think you must have been mistaken. And there it is again! … It was I who went down to the end of the lane to fill the pitchers for the vases … When we’d finished, I didn’t say a word … And then that little smell came back at me … We’d close the door … We’d say a prayer … And we’d start down the hill to Paris …
Madame Divonne never stopped chattering the whole way … Getting up so early, working on the flowers, and all that crying whetted her appetite … Besides there was her diabetes … In any case she was hungry … The moment we left the cemetery, she wanted to have a snack. She couldn’t stop talking about it, it got to be an obsession with her. ‘“You know what I feel like, Clémence? Not meaning to be greedy … A little slice of galantine on a nice fresh roll … How does it strike you?”
My mother didn’t answer. She was embarrassed. I felt like throwing up on the spot … I couldn’t think of anything else but vomiting … I thought of the galantine … of what Caroline must be looking like now down there … of all the worms … the big ones … the fat ones with feet … gnawing, swarming about in there … All that decay … millions of them in all that swollen pus, the stinking wind …
Papa was there … He had barely time to take me behind a tree … I threw it all up … everything … on the grating … My father jumped fast … but he didn’t dodge it all …
“You damn pig!” he yelled. He had it all over his pants … The people were looking at us. He was mortified. He went off by himself in the other direction, toward the Bastille. He didn’t want to have anything to do with us after that. We went to a little café for a cup of verbena to settle my stomach. It was a tiny little café just across from the prison.
I’ve often gone by there since. I always look inside. And I never see a soul.
Uncle Arthur was up to his ears in debt. From the rue Cambronne to Grenelle he had borrowed so much without ever returning it that his life was impossible. He was shiftless. One night he moved on the q.t. A friend helped him. They tied his stuff on a donkey cart. They were going out to the suburbs. We were already in bed when they came to notify us.
Arthur took advantage of the occasion to ditch his housemaid … She’d been talking about vitriol … Anyway, it was time he took a powder.
He and his pal had found a shanty where nobody would come around, in the hills around Athis-Mons. The very next day his creditors descended on us. The bastards, they never budged out of the Passage … They even went after my father at the insurance company. It was disgraceful. My father was in a terrible state … We were in for it again …
“What scum! What a family! What a crummy lot they all are. Never a minute’s peace! They even come and hound me on the job! … My brothers act like a bunch of jailbirds! My sister sells her ass in Russia! My son has every known vice! It’s a fine how-do-you-do! Christ almighty! …” My mother couldn’t think of anything to say … She’d given up trying to argue with him. He could go on to his heart’s content.
The creditors realized that Papa set store by his honor … They wouldn’t give an inch. They never left our shop … As if things weren’t rough enough already … If we’d paid his debts, we’d have really starved …
“We’ll go and see him next Sunday,” my father de
cided. “I’ll give him a piece of my mind … as man to man!”
We left at daybreak to make sure of finding him before he started on his rounds … First we got lost … Then we picked up the trail again … Finally we located him … I expected to find Uncle Arthur all shriveled up, repentant, scared out of his wits, hiding in some cave, hunted by three hundred cops … eating stewed rats … That was what happened to escaped convicts in Illustrated Adventure Stories … It was a little different with Uncle Arthur … Early as it was, we found him at a table outside a bistro—La Belle Adèle. He gave us a royal welcome in the arbor … He was drinking hard on credit, and no vinegar either … A nice little muscadet rosé … first class … he was in the best of health … He’d never felt better … He had the whole neighborhood in stitches … they were crazy about him … they ran over to listen to him … La Belle Adèle had never had so many customers … Every single seat was taken, the overflow was sitting on the steps … Small homeowners from as far as Juvisy … in phony Panama hats … And all the fishermen from the canal, in wooden shoes, would come out to La Belle Adèle just to meet Uncle Arthur. They’d never had so much fun in all their lives.
He had something up his sleeve for everybody! Every imaginable game from quoits to pitching pennies … Speeches … riddles … under the trees … for the ladies. Uncle Arthur was the life of the party, the ladies’ delight … He knocked himself out, he spared no effort … But he never took his hat off, his artist’s sombrero, though it was midsummer … the sweat ran down his face in rivers … He was always dressed the same … pointed shoes, corduroy pants … and that tie, an enormous bow like a lettuce leaf.
With his taste for domestic help he had floored all three waitresses … Happy to wait on him and love him … He didn’t want to hear one word about his troubles in Vaugirard … Let bygones be bygones … He was going to start a new life … My father was all set to chew his car off … he wouldn’t even let him get started … He kissed us each in turn … He was mighty glad to see us …
Death on the Installment Plan Page 12
