She was off on her hobby-horse. Was this what she had come for? Had she already forgotten Félicie?
She knew that she was pleasing Louisa, that anything she said against big Désiré would be well received by her sister.
‘“What are we short of?” That’s all he says. He doesn’t have to do the shopping. When he comes home, the dinner’s ready. But I know what things cost … If only he had a bit of initiative! There’s a clerk who started at Monsieur Monnoyeur’s at the same time as him, who earns twice as much already and sends his daughters to the Ursulines’ boarding-school. But Désiré would think it beneath him to ask for a rise.’
‘Poor Élise.’
She could whine and whimper without annoying her sister, now that it was no longer a question of Félicie, but of Désiré. Every now and then, Louisa was called away by the shop-bell and you could hear gin being poured into glasses, the timid voices of the bargees’ wives who had their money in their hands, the exact amount, and the noise of the coins falling into the till.
‘A little dairy-shop, for instance. I’d have opened a dairy-shop like the one in the Rue de la Province…’
In the wide, quiet streets of Outremeuse, away from the Rue Puits-en-Sock and the Rue Entre-deux-Ponts, there were some shops which were not real shops. They were middle-class houses where the front room on the ground floor had simply been fitted out with a counter and a few shelves. The result was that the shop windows—which were not real shop windows either—were too high up. They were lit by a solitary gas-jet, and from a distance all that you could see was a yellowish halo in the dark line of the houses. The street door was open. There were two or three steps and there was no light in the corridor.
When you opened the inside door, a bell rang, or else some brass tubes knocked against one another to make a tune. Even so, you had to call out several times:
‘Is there anybody there?’
There was some black pudding on a plate, two or three Hervé cheeses under a glass cover, half-a-dozen tins of sardines, and some biscuits. Something was cut. Something was weighed. Then the brass tubes knocked against one another again and the street resumed its absolute calm.
That was what Désiré had not wanted.
To reward her sister for her complaints, Louisa went to get a box of cakes, a box she would never be able to sell because the mice had nibbled a corner of it.
‘Eat that, my girl.’
‘Thank you, Louisa. But I didn’t come here to eat. It’s been preying on my mind for a long time…’
Was it true? Was it a lie? She didn’t know. She could no longer find her bearings among her anxieties and complaints, among all the complicated misfortunes on which she gorged herself.
‘Dear God! Five o’clock already! And Désiré’ll come home and find nobody there…’
‘Why don’t you come and see us one Sunday afternoon? What do you do on Sunday afternoon? We’re always here, because of the shop.’
What did they do? She didn’t know. And this reminded her that they never stopped at a café for a glass of beer.
‘The bare necessities …’
She wiped her eyes and smiled.
‘Ah, well! Good-bye, Louisa. And thank you.’
Thank you for what? For the cakes? For the cup of coffee? For the tears?
On the pavement, while her sister was seeing her off, Élise thought to herself:
‘You cat!’
For she had noticed that the box of cakes had been nibbled at. She had even refused to let the child have a cake, on the pretext that he was a little out of sorts. She turned round.
‘Thank you, Louisa.’
And she blushed for shame: she had been disloyal to Désiré, for no real reason, to change the subject, because Louisa had not wanted to hear anything about Félicie and she had had to find another explanation for her tears.
She had half an hour’s walk in front of her, with the push-chair, and the approach-ramp of the Pont-Maghin to climb.
She only hoped that the jam had set. Had she put enough sugar with the little gooseberries?
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN THE Rue Montmartre, in Paris, a girl called Isabelle was playing the piano next to the window of a low-ceilinged entresol which had been built into the top of the ground-floor rooms. It was the upper part of the shop front which served as the entresol window, so that when the stationer leaned out into the window, the girl seemed to be walking on him.
In Liége, in the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, Élise stopped propelling the push-chair along for a moment, picked up something white and darted a furtive glance around her. The black-bearded painter on his ladder had not noticed anything. It was Léopold: Élise had just recognized him. Taking a red handkerchief out of his smock, he had pulled the letter out with it.
‘Monsieur …’
Élise had read just that one word and seen the delicate, passionate handwriting, but she was a long way from suspecting the grandeur of that simple ‘Monsieur’ addressed to a man whom the police picked up every week in the gutter.
Because of Monsieur Pain, who happened to be passing just then and had noticed her action, Élise came back to the bottom of the ladder.
‘Léopold.’
If she had not spoken to him, he would have pretended not to recognize her, so as not to shame her. He just blinked his eyes, without saying thank-you, and went on rinsing his big sponge in a bucket which had some acid in it, for the water dripping on to the pavement was a greenish colour.
‘Monsieur …’
Élise walked on. She walked fast, as usual. Where was she going? Oh, yes, to Schuttringer’s the pork-butcher’s, to buy a couple of chops. In a few days’ time, when the festivities were over, she would speak to Désiré.
It was strange that she had not spoken to him sooner and that she could not even say what had prevented her. She had been pregnant for two months now. Only this time she had the impression of an illness rather than a natural condition. She was suffering much more than she had with Roger. She had backache, like most of the women she knew, from going up and down two flights of stairs with a child who was getting heavy, from carrying buckets, from wringing the washing. At night, she felt a sharper pain between her shoulder-blades, as if the little bone there were going to pierce the skin.
Who could be writing to Léopold when she, his own sister, didn’t know his address?
‘Monsieur,
I keep worrying about what you are going to think of me. I am so afraid of losing your esteem, the only thing left to me in the world, and yet I do not want to go on lying to you any more, and hiding from you the terrible drama I am living through hour after hour. Will you understand me, you who understand everything? Forgive me if I doubt it! It is all so extraordinary!
I am in love! Yes, me! Oh, how sorry I am now that I did not listen to you that evening. You said things to me that made me want to cry, you looked at me like somebody who could see into the future, but you did not know that it was too late, that the parcel I had in my hand could bring our conversation to an end at any moment, you did not know that everything was already nearly over, that I was waiting for you to go, with my forehead beaded with sweat, to go and do what I could not postpone any longer.
Today, I am in love as nobody has ever been in love before. I am so much in love that I roll about in despair on the floor of my bedroom. I am not worthy to raise my eyes to look at her, to touch the hem of her dress, and it is monstrous that I, who cannot bear my own name any more, should live under the same roof as she does and that I should listen to her from morning to night. For I can hear her now, practically over my head. A thin floor separates us and that floor is vibrant with her music. At the moment she is practising one of Chopin’s “Polonaises”, the most stirring of them all …’
Élise was in a hurry and turned the corner of the Rue de la Liberté to take a short cut. She was always taking short cuts. Her life was a constant struggle against time. She did her utmost to save a few seconds here and the
re, just as she did her utmost to scrounge a few centimes of the housekeeping money to put them in the Savings Bank.
She thought that the street was empty, all sunshine and shadow. It was a hot day. At the beginning of the week, the schools had closed for a couple of days on account of the heat. You could feel a storm in the air. She jumped as a voice hailed her.
‘Élise!’
Unable to beat a retreat, she tried to summon up a smile.
‘Good morning, Catherine.’
It was Catherine, the carpenter Lucien’s wife, who had installed herself in the blue shadows of the wide pavement, opposite the girls’ school, behind a trestle table covered with sweets. Léopold at least had pretended not to see his sister.
‘Good morning, Élise. Good morning, little Roger. My, how nice he looks! And how he’s grown! Just imagine, Élise …’
Catherine kissed the boy, and slipped into his hand a bright red acid drop which Élise looked at in alarm.
Catherine’s mother sold chips in a back-street where she was buying the houses one after another, one of those streets which smelled bad, where the gutter ran along the middle of the roadway, bluish and nauseating, a street where, when a woman went past who was too well dressed, too obviously respectable, a voice would shout at her from the dark hole of some passage:
‘Look at her, with her posh hat!’
‘I must hurry, Catherine. Don’t be cross with me. I’m going to Schuttringer’s to buy some chops.’
As soon as she had turned the corner, she would take the red sweet away from the child, but she would not dare to throw it away for fear that Catherine would notice it on her way home.
Félix Marette had changed his name. Though not very radically. Used to his own name, all he had been able to think up was Félicien Miette. He was right at the back of the shop, listening to the music over his head, waiting for the moment when Isabelle would come downstairs with her music-case in her hand.
She resembled nobody, neither her father with his sad moustache, nor her mother who remained at the cash-desk all day without moving, so still that customers sometimes started when she happened to make a slight gesture.
Isabelle would come downstairs, always pale, her face angular, without any trinkets or anything feminine about her dress, her blue serge blouse buttoned high under her chin, and her hair in tight plaits forming a bun behind her neck. She would not look at anybody, would not see anybody.
‘Give me some money.’
For the Métro, to go to the Conservatoire or to see her teacher, a red-haired, middle-aged man of whom Marette was bitterly jealous.
The next day, Sunday, he would not see her, he would not leave his room; he would write, for her, with a heat-hazy skylight as a horizon, the story of his life, which he would never give her to read.
The Vétus had a little country house over Corbeil way, and set off for it early every Sunday morning. Marette was left alone with his portable stove, his unmade bed, and some bread and cheese which he had bought the day before.
‘Tell me, I beg you, that you don’t despise me, write whatever you like to me, but write, so that I may at least know that there is somebody in this world who takes a little interest in my fate.’
Élise had very nearly kept this letter which she had picked up at the bottom of the ladder.
The next day, it was the feast-day of the parish of Saint-Nicolas, and everywhere floors were being scrubbed and you could breathe the smell of cleaning right out in the middle of the streets. In the Place Delcour, and again at the end of the Rue Méan, fairground people were hammering nails in, putting the finishing touches to shooting-galleries and roundabouts.
Why was it that feast-days, all feast-days, made Élise feel sad? Was it because, on those days, she felt even less at home than usual?
The next day’s festivities would begin with a morning concert. The men had got the Bouquet ready. This was a huge machine, a pole several yards high, a mast rather, with yard-arms attached to it, and the whole contraption, which it took several men to hold upright, was adorned with thousands of paper flowers.
The band marched along in front and the children behind, each child holding a Chinese lantern at the end of a stick.
The procession set off from the sacristan’s house, next to the church, and stopped straight away outside the café on the corner of the Rue Saint-Nicolas. After that, it would stop outside every café, every shop, wherever there was a drop to drink, so that soon it would be trailing behind it an increasingly pungent smell of gin.
Léopold, as soon as he heard the band, would seize the opportunity to leave the district, crossing the bridges to start a new novena in the first quiet pub he came to in another parish.
The streets, the pavements, the stones of the houses were so clean that day that you could eat off the cobbles, and the children still smelled of the bath they had been given in the washtub and of the cosmetic used to set their unruly hair.
In the bluish calm of the crossroads, men and women were getting the altars of repose ready for the procession: every window of every house was turning into an altar, with brass candlesticks and bunches of roses and carnations.
The next morning, everybody was dressed in his Sunday best, even Élise, who was wearing a dress in thick blue material, with a lace collar and a high wimple stiffened with whalebone. Thus her head, with its bun which was always coming undone, looked bigger than it was. Her smile was more morose than ever. She had roasted a joint larded with cloves, as she did every Sunday, and she basted it every now and then and put some fat on the stove for the chips. The air started turning blue in the kitchen, in the bedroom and even on the staircase.
It was in the Place Ernest-de-Bavière, where the civic guards drilled on other Sundays, that the real spectacle began. The artificer had arranged hundreds of iron pots in a line. At the end of the high Mass, a man came running up, waving his arms. That was the signal. The children were kept on one side. At the wheel-wright’s on the corner, a rod of red-hot iron was waiting in the forge.
The sun had never failed to shine for the feast-day. The skies were clear. It was summer.
The iron pots were filled to overflowing with black powder, and along came the artificer, dragging his red-hot rod, and leaping from one pot to the next while the whole district echoed with a sound like that of gunfire.
Before the din had finished the procession came out of the church, and in front of it, in every street, little boys and little girls in starched, embroidered dresses scattered rose petals and coloured paper lozenges which they had spent weeks cutting out.
Nothing remained of what had been the day before. The world had been transfigured. The town was no longer a town, the streets were no longer streets, and the very trams stopped respectfully at the crossroads.
The smell of the procession preceded and followed it. It would linger until the evening, and even until the following day, in the streets: the smell of the big red roses, of the leaves being trampled underfoot, and above all else of the incense, as well as the smell of the cakes and tarts being cooked in every house and that of the fair which would be opening very soon.
A sound as characteristic as, for instance, the humming of a swarm of bees, a symphony to be more precise, filled the streets: the tramping and shuffling of the thousands of people who were following the procession as it moved along, the hymns which were constantly changing in tune and tone: the little girls from the schools or from the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin had scarcely gone by before you could hear the drone of the men in black, the men of St. Roch who had no eyes for anything but their hymn-books; the band was at the end of the street; it turned the corner; but even so you could suddenly hear the shrill voices of the deacons and sub-deacons heralding the arrival of the Dean, stiff and erect in his golden vestments, and carrying the Blessed Sacrament under a canopy held by the local notabilities.
Just as at the fair you would hear at one and the same time the music of ten or fifteen roundabouts, the explosi
ons of the shooting-galleries and the shouts of the women selling chips, this procession, which was nearly two miles long and did not miss a single street or alley-way, would occasionally overlap or catch up with its own tail.
The saints had all come out, the Black Virgin of the parish, St. Roch and St. Joseph, on flags which kept tilting dangerously, and they were preceded by banners, little boys, little girls, men, women, old people, all grouped together in brotherhoods and sisterhoods.
Désiré was carrying a taper at the end of a stick painted red and white. Old Mamelin, for his part, gloved in white, was holding the canopy over the Blessed Sacrament.
At eleven o’clock there could be heard the high-pitched notes of the barrel-organ of a tiny roundabout for children, a round-about at two centimes a ride, and after that the first rifle shots.
The next day, or the day after that, Élise would speak to Désiré about her condition. He would be pleased without thinking of what it would involve. When he came home for dinner, she could tell from his breath that he had drunk an apéritif. He was in a merry mood. It was the parish feast-day.
Very soon now, on the stroke of two o’clock, all the Mamelin children and grandchildren would gather together, dressed in their Sunday best, in the courtyard in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Élise’s head was already buzzing at the thought. When dinner was over, standing in front of the mirror, with pins between her lips, she pinned up her bun three times, four times, growing increasingly impatient as it kept falling to one side. Désiré was there behind her, doing nothing.
‘Take the push-chair down, will you?’
He took it down, and then the child, for he could foresee the moment when, as so often happened on a Sunday, she would burst into tears, her nerves frayed out, or else suddenly tear something up.
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