—LUC SANTE
PREFACE
NOT so long ago, it was still fashionable for an author to introduce each of his works with a preface, a foreword or a brief note which put him so to speak in direct contact with the reader, to such an extent that the formula: ‘Dear Reader’ was almost as common as the pulpit introduction: ‘Dear Brethren’.
Is it because nowadays the newspapers, with their interviews, their gossip columns and their literary inquiries, keep the public fully informed of both the intentions and the activities of the writing fraternity that this fashion has fallen into disuse?
On the occasion of this new edition of Pedigree, I am giving in to the temptation to follow the old custom, for various reasons which are probably not very conclusive. I have been asked, and I am still asked, a great many questions about this book; a great deal has been written about it, not all of it accurate. I know too that André Parinaud has done me the honour of devoting an important study in three volumes to me, under the crushing title of The Truth about Simenon, a study which is in the Press and which I have not yet read, and that he seeks in Pedigree the explanation, if not of all my writings, at least of certain of their aspects and certain tendencies.
Shall I be accused of presumptuousness if I provide here and now, very simply, a few first-hand details?
Pedigree was written neither in the same way, nor in the same circumstances, nor with the same intentions as my other novels, and that is doubtless why it forms a sort of islet in my writings.
In 1941, when I was living at Fontenay-le-Comte, a doctor, on the basis of an inaccurate X-ray, informed me that I had at the most two years to live and condemned me to almost total inactivity.
At that time I had only one son, aged two, and it occurred to me that when he grew up he would know practically nothing of his father or of his father’s family.
In order to do something to fill this gap, I bought three notebooks with mottled cardboard covers and, abandoning my usual typewriter, I started recounting in the first person, in the form of a letter to the big boy who would read it one day, anecdotes about my childhood.
I was engaged at that time in regular correspondence with André Gide. His curiosity was aroused. About a hundred pages had been written when he expressed a desire to read them.
The letter Gide sent me shortly afterwards was in fact the starting-point of Pedigree. In it he advised me, even if I still intended to address myself only to my son, to start my story again, not in the first person this time, but, in order to give it more life, in the third, and to type it as I did my novels.
It was the original hundred pages or so from the notebooks which were published in 1945, in a limited edition, by the Presses de la Cité, under the title, chosen by the publisher in my absence, of I Remember. Even so this text had been altered so as to omit anything which might have been taken for a portrait.
As for the new text, composed after I had received Gide’s letter, if it resembles the original text in its first part, it should none the less be regarded as a novel, and I would not even wish the label of autobiographical novel to be attached to it.
Parinaud questioned me at some length on this point in the course of our conversations on the radio in 1955, trying at all costs to identify me with the central character, Roger Mamelin.
I answered him with a formula which may not be my own invention, but which I shall none the less use again, to wit that, in my novel, everything is true while nothing is accurate.
I admit too that, when I had finished the book, I searched for a long time for the equivalent of the wonderful title Goethe gave to his childhood memories: Dichtung und Wahrheit, a title which has been translated more or less accurately as: Poetry and Truth.
Roger Mamelin’s childhood, his environment, the settings in which he develops, are very close to reality, as are the people he observes.
The events, for the most part, are not invented.
However, particularly with regard to the characters, I used the writer’s privilege to re-create reality from composite materials, keeping closer to poetic truth than to truth pure and simple.
People so completely failed to understand this that because of a facial feature, a mannerism, a similarity in name or profession, a good many insisted on recognizing themselves in my characters, and some had writs issued against me.
I am not, alas, the only one in this position: many of my colleagues have had the same experience. It is difficult nowadays to give a name, a profession, an address, even a telephone number to a character in a novel without incurring the risk of a lawsuit.
The first edition of Pedigree concluded with the words: ‘End of Volume One’, and I still get letters asking me when the following volumes are going to appear.
I left Roger Mamelin at the age of sixteen. The second volume was to recount his adolescence, the third his arrival in Paris and his apprenticeship in what I have called elsewhere the business of being a man.
They have not been and never will be written, for, among the hundreds of minor characters which I should have to bring on to the scene, how many would result in my being condemned all over again to pay heavy damages? I dare not imagine.
When Pedigree was reprinted in 1952, in a new type, I cautiously, and perhaps somewhat ironically, left the incriminated passages blank, keeping nothing but innocent punctuation marks, and attributing these gaps, in a brief prefatory note, to the judgment of the courts.
In the present edition, the reader will find no blanks. Not without a certain melancholy, I have renounced even irony and pruned my book of everything which could appear suspicious or offensive.
I none the less reiterate, not out of prudence but out of a concern for accuracy, that Pedigree is a novel, hence a work in which imagination and re-creation play the most important part, although this does not prevent me from agreeing that Roger Mamelin has a great deal in common with the child that I once was.
GEORGES SIMENON
Noland, 16 April 1957
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
SHE opened her eyes and for a few moments, several seconds, a silent eternity, there was nothing changed in her, or in the kitchen around her; besides, it was no longer a kitchen, it was a mixture of shadows and pale gleams of light, without any consistency or significance, Limbo perhaps?
Was there a specific moment when the sleeping woman’s eyelids parted? Or did the pupils remain fixed on the void like the lens over which a photographer has forgotten to lower the shutter of black velvet?
Somewhere outside—it was just in the Rue Léopold—a strange life was flowing by, dark because night had fallen, noisy and hurried because it was five o’clock in the afternoon, wet and slimy because it had been raining for several days; and the pale globes of the arc lamps were flickering in front of the dummies in the dress shops, and the trams were passing by, extracting blue sparks, as sudden as flashes of lightning, from the ends of their trollies.
Élise, her eyes open now, was still far away, nowhere in particular; only those fantastic lights from outside came through the window and passed through the lace curtains with the white flowers whose arabesques they projected on to the walls and on to the objects in the room.
The familiar purring of the stove was the first thing to reappear, together with the little reddish disc of the opening through which tiny burning coals could sometimes be seen falling; the water began singing in the white enamel kettle which had been dented near the spout; the alarm-clock, on the black mantelpiece, resumed its gentle tick-tock.
Only then did Élise feel a vague movement in her belly, and come to, and realize that she had fallen asleep, balanced unsteadily on a chair, still holding the dishcloth in her hand. She knew where she was, on the second floor of Cession’s, right in the middle of a thriving town, not far from the Pont des Arches which separated the town from the suburbs; and she was frightened. She stood up, trembling, holding her breath, and then, to reassure herself with an everyday gesture, she put some coal
on the fire.
‘Dear God,’ she muttered.
Désiré was far away, on the other side of the town, in his office in the Rue des Guillemins, and now perhaps she was going to give birth, all by herself, while hundreds and thousands of passers-by went by, bumping their umbrellas against one another in the glistening streets.
Her hand went out to pick up the matchbox next to the alarm-clock, but she had not the patience to remove the milky globe of the oil-lamp and the glass, and then to raise the wick; she was too frightened. She lacked the courage to put away in the cupboard the odd plates that were lying around, and without looking in the mirror she put on her black crape hat, the one she had worn in mourning for her mother. Then she put on her black cheviot coat which was also a mourning coat and no longer buttoned up, so that she had to hold it folded across her swollen belly.
She was thirsty. She was hungry. There was something missing within her, an empty feeling, but she did not know what to do about it and rushed out of the room, putting the key in her handbag.
It was 12 February 1903. A bat’s-wing burner hissed and spat out its incandescent gas on the staircase, for there was gas laid on in the house, though not on the second floor.
On the first floor, Élise saw some light under a door; she did not dare to knock; the idea did not even occur to her. Some people of independent means lived there, the Delobels, people who speculated on the Stock Exchange, a selfish couple who coddled themselves and spent several months every year at Ostend or Nice.
There was a draught in the narrow corridor, which passed between two shops. In the windows of Cession’s, there were dozens of dark hats, and inside, people looking hesitantly at themselves in mirrors and not daring to say whether they were pleased with their reflections, and Madame Cession, Élise’s landlady, in black silk, with a black tucker, a cameo, and a watch on a chain round her neck.
Trams went by every minute or so, green ones going to Trooz, Chênée and Fléron, red and yellow ones going unendingly round the town.
Hawkers were calling out the winning numbers of the latest lottery, and others were shouting:
‘The Baronne de Vaughan, ten centimes! Ask for the picture of the Baronne de Vaughan!’
She was Léopold II’s mistress. There was supposed to be an underground passage connecting her house with the Château de Laeken.
‘Ask for the Baronne de Vaughan …’
All her life, as far back as she could remember, Élise had had the same feeling of smallness; yes, she was terribly small, weak and defenceless, in a big, indifferent world, and all she could do was mutter:
‘Dear God …’
She had forgotten her umbrella. She had not the heart to go back for it, and tiny drops of rain settled on her round little Nordic face, on her fair, curly Flemish hair.
Everybody struck her as impressive, even the man in a frock-coat, stiff as a ramrod, with waxed moustaches and a collar as broad as a cuff, who was tramping up and down under the lamp outside a dress-shop. He was dying of cold in the feet, cold in the nose, cold in the fingers. In the crowd moving along the pavement, he was on the look-out for mothers dragging children along by the hand. His pockets were full of little colour-prints, illustrated puzzles such as: ‘Find the Bulgarian’.
It was cold. It was raining. It was slushy.
She caught a whiff of hot chocolate as she passed the latticed basement windows of Hosay’s from which good smells were always escaping. She walked quickly. She was not in pain, and yet she was sure that her labour had begun and that she had not much time left. Her suspender had come undone and her stocking started slipping down. Just before the Place Saint-Lambert there was a narrow passage between two shops where it was always dark, and she darted into it and put her foot on a stone.
Was she talking to herself? Her lips were moving.
‘Dear God, please give me enough time!’
But then, just as she was lifting up her skirts to reach the suspender, she froze: there were two men in the shadows into which a little light from the Rue Léopold penetrated. Two men whose conversation she must have interrupted. Were they hiding? She could not say for certain, but she had a vague feeling that there was something suspicious about their tête-à-tête. No doubt they were waiting in silence for the departure of this scatter-brained woman who had rushed headlong to within a few feet of them to adjust her stocking.
She scarcely looked at them; already she was beating a retreat, and yet a name sprang to her lips:
‘Léopold …’
She must have muttered this name in a whisper. She was sure, or almost sure, that she had recognized one of her brothers, Léopold, whom she had not seen for years: a back already bent at the age of forty-five, a dark beard, and eyes shining beneath thick brows. His companion was very young, a beardless child, freezing, this February evening, in the draught blowing down the passage. He was not wearing an overcoat. His face was tense, as if he were holding back his tears….
Élise plunged once more into the crowd without daring to look back. Her suspender was still undone and this gave her the impression of walking sideways.
‘Dear God, please… And what is my brother Léopold …?’
In the Place Saint-Lambert there were more lamps and brighter ones: the lamps of the Grand Bazaar, which was constantly growing and had already eaten up two blocks of houses. The splendid shop windows, the brass doors which opened silently and that special hot breath of air which reached you right out on the pavement.
‘Ask for the winning numbers of the Brussels lottery.’
Finally she caught sight of some shop windows of a more discreet luxury, those of L’Innovation, full of silks and woollen goods. She went in. It seemed to her that she ought to hurry. She smiled, for she always smiled when she returned to L’Innovation, and, as in a dream, scarcely able to distinguish one from the other, she greeted the shop assistants in black standing behind the counters.
‘Valérie!’
Valérie was there, behind the needlework counter, serving an elderly customer and trying to match some silk, and Valérie’s eyes, as they fell upon Élise’s frightened face, said in their turn:
‘Dear God!’
For both women were of the same sort, the sort who are afraid of everything and who always feel too small. Valérie did not dare hurry her customer. She had understood. Already she was looking in the direction of the central cash-desk, trying to catch sight of the boss, Monsieur Wilhems, with his squeaky patent-leather shoes and his carefully manicured hands.
Three or four counters further on, in the layette department, Maria Debeurre was looking at Élise and wishing she could talk to her, while the latter, standing stiff and erect in her mourning dress, was gripping the counter with the tips of her fingers. The moist heat of the shop was stifling her. The insipid smell of the linens, madapollams and serges, the subtler smell of all these reels and bobbins, and these silky rolls in pale colours, made her feel sick, as did the oppressive silence in the alley-ways.
She felt as if hollows were forming in the sides of her nose, as if her legs were giving way, but a sad smile remained fixed to her lips and she managed to nod discreetly to some shop-girls who were very far away and of whom all she could see through a luminous fog was their black dresses and lacquered belts.
For three years she had lived behind one of these counters. When she had applied for the job…
But you had to go further back than that. Her life as a frightened, unhappy little mouse had begun when she was five, when her father had died and the family had left the huge house by the canal at Herstal, where timber from the north filled sheds as big as churches.
She did not understand. She scarcely knew that father of hers with the long inky moustaches who had made a mess of his affairs, signed some accommodation bills, and died as a result.
Her brothers and sisters were married or had already left home, for Élise was the thirteenth child, born when nobody expected any more.
Two little rooms, in
an old house near the Rue Féronstrée. She lived alone with her mother, a dignified woman, always trim and dapper, who used to put empty saucepans on the stove when somebody came, to give the impression that they were short of nothing.
One day the tousle-headed little girl went into a shop, pointed to something on display, opened her mouth, but could not find the right words.
‘Some…some…’
Her father was German, her mother Dutch. Élise did not know yet that she did not speak the same language as other people. She was determined to express herself, and, in front of the amused shopkeeper, she blurted out at random:
‘Some…fricadelles…’
Why fricadelles? It was a word which had sprung to her lips because she had heard it at home and which, here, provoked roars of laughter. It was the first humiliation of her life. She had run home without buying anything, and she had burst into tears.
At fifteen, to make life at home a little less wretched, she had put her hair up, let her dress down, and presented herself to the polite and well-groomed Monsieur Wilhems.
‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen.’
It was almost her real family that she had come to see today: Valérie Smet, Maria Debeurre, and the others who were looking at her from a distance and even from the galleries, the furniture, linoleum and toy departments.
She put a brave face on it. She smiled. She looked at little Valérie who was weighed down under an enormous mass of brown hair and whose patent-leather belt cut her figure in two like a diabolo.
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