Désiré ate his supper, snuffed out the lamp, smiled at Roger. He did not understand or did not want to understand. He was endowed with an exasperating force of inertia and in a few minutes, in spite of being in mourning, he would play the drummer-boy, marking time round the room with the child on his shoulders.
He did not know Madame Marette who was a widow and was going to take in lodgers. He was not in the least interested in all the local widows he kept hearing about.
Every morning he left the Rue Pasteur a quarter of an hour later, because he no longer dropped in to see his mother; he no longer took her his collars to be washed, and he ate bread from the baker’s.
Was Monsieur Marette dead? Monsieur and Madame Marette owned a house in the Rue du Laveu, a little way outside the town, on a hill, a house rather like the one Élise had dreamt of renting for a long time, Élise who was not a widow, who did not know if she would be one one day, but who was already tormented by the idea.
‘Thirty francs for a single room, Désiré! Think what you could make out of a house by letting only three rooms.’
He was not listening, did not believe what she was saying. There were some contingencies which he would always refuse to envisage.
‘Do you think he really committed suicide?’
Who? The policeman? Well, if he had committed suicide, it was because he had thought it was the best thing to do.
‘… And do you think it was because of his cancer?’
‘You have to die of something!’
One sorrow at a time. His own first of all, this gap in his life, this Rue Puits-en-Sock whose corner he no longer turned, this impression that he had suddenly lost an anchor, an impression which was making him work twice as hard at the office.
‘I can’t help thinking about the poor woman.’
‘You said just now that she had a pension.’
‘It isn’t enough to live on. And what if she hadn’t got a pension? What if she wasn’t a policeman’s wife and he hadn’t thought of buying a house?’
Didn’t she understand that this drummer-boy hour belonged to him, that it was an hour of profound joy? The child, on his shoulders, shouted:
‘Again!’
Did she want to force Désiré to reply yet again:
‘What are we short of?’
It was no use her trying, he did not want to think, he never would think that she might become a widow like Madame Marette. He sang, for the boy whom he had just put to bed, and whose eyes were still open in the semi-darkness:
‘There were two lovers
Who dreamed of distant loves.
There were two lovers
Who bade their parents farewell …’
He was moved. For no particular reason. Because of his mother. Because of himself. Because of his son. And Élise who seemed so sure that she would be a widow one day and would not have a pension!
‘They sailed away
In a fragile boat:
They sailed away
To the land of exiles …’
She had backache. She was anything but strong. She had complained to Doctor Matray.
And yet, what was she short of, in this two-room flat which a single fire was enough to heat, a single lamp enough to light?
‘The lover said: “Dear heart,
I laugh at the storm.”
The lover said: “My heart
Will have no fear near yours …”’
‘You’re getting tired, Désiré. Shut the door. Leave him.’
‘The lover said: “Dear heart,
I laugh at …”’
There were lots of widows, that autumn, in the district, lots of widows in the town. Madame Marette was a widow and had already taken in lodgers to make a living, but Félix Marette, at the back of his shop in the Rue Montmartre, did not know about this, did not know that his father was dead either.
Would it upset him to hear the news? Once, in a fit of irritation, he had told Philippe Estévant and Doms, when they had spent part of the night drinking in a corner of the Café de la Bourse, behind the theatre:
‘I hate them! I hate my district, my street, my home, I hate the school I went to …’
And yet he opened his eyes without any feeling of disgust or impatience, in his attic in the Rue Montmartre. He had no need of an alarm-clock. At seven o’clock, the partition started to vibrate. It was his neighbour, a sempstress, setting to work.
The rain streamed down the sloping windows of the skylight. He pulled on a pair of trousers, put on his slippers, took his pail and went along the corridor to get some water.
Here he did not have that impression of sordid, hallucinating mediocrity—there had been times when he could have screamed at it—which used to overwhelm him when he saw his father in his nightshirt, with his hairy legs, contentedly humming to himself while he trimmed his beard and his moustache in front of the wardrobe mirror.
The sempstress was a fat creature with freckles who had a child out to nurse. Once a week, a man came to see her, and Marette heard everything, without feeling either envy or disgust, he who used to suffer from the insipid smell of his mother’s room.
How he hated it, that wallpaper with its little pink flowers, the same flowers for fifteen years, with the same stains, and a dark patch on a level with the bed produced by the sleeper’s breaths.
He washed. In the Rue Montmartre, the whitewashed walls were anything but clean. He had just hung up a drawing to decorate them. He had no artistic pretensions, but patiently, starting over and over again, he had drawn a strange portrait of Isabelle, a long, regular oval like that of certain medieval wood-carvings of the Virgin, the two bandeaux, two concave lines, like an accent, which formed the big closed eyes, and the sinuous line of the mouth.
That was all. His gaze was enough to give life to this picture which he could now reproduce in three or four lines by dint of having traced it.
His suit was shabby and worn. When he had a bit of money, he would spend it on a new pair of shoes. He polished them himself. Going downstairs, he smoked his first cigarette. The apartment-house had four staircases A, B, C and D. His staircase, staircase D, which started under the second arch past the courtyard, was the narrowest and the dirtiest of them all; it led to countless cells in which, as you passed, you could catch sight of life being lived, precarious existences being eked out by creatures from all over the world, an Armenian, some Polish Jews, a furrier, a dealer in feathers for hats, an embroideress; and all this was summed up in a few words, black on white enamel, in the main passage near the lodge.
In the Rue Montmartre, which at this time of day still smelled of the market, Félix Marette went into a little bar where he ate some croissants, dipping them in his coffee while he glanced through a newspaper.
It was his parents’ kitchen which he remembered with the greatest hatred. It was tiny but new-looking, with its walls painted with oil-paint, its calendar, its cheap newspaper-holder, the pipe-rack and the two copper saucepans which were never used. In the morning, it smelled of eggs and bacon. The soup started simmering. You could sense the monotonous passage of time, the ringing of the bell by the milkwoman.
Madame Marette, wearing slippers and with her hair in pins—hair so black that some people thought it was a wig—Madame Marette opened the door, without a word, and held out her enamel saucepan. She was tiny, thin and angular; her expressionless face looked as if it had been carved out of wood and painted black and white. Without saying either good morning or thank you, she handed over her money, glanced down the street and shut the door.
Just thinking about it made Félix suffer. That sloping street with its houses which were all too new, too small, too clean, those doors opening one after another as the greengrocer came along, stopping his cart to blow a trumpet…
And the other streets, on the left and right, already marked out, with unfinished pavements, puny trees which froze every winter, and big holes between the houses which looked as if they had been put there temporarily.
>
He remembered it all with nauseating accuracy, the colour of the blocks of freestone at every hour of the day—and the smell of the freestone in summer, in August, when you were playing marbles out in the sun—the mists in winter, and the gas-lamps which were alight when, in a hooded coat, you came home, kicking a pebble along the street. The light he could see through the keyhole, at the end of the narrow passage, before knocking on the letter-box. Even the characters of that word ‘Letters’, engraved in copper, which he could have reproduced exactly.
The crush in the damp little bar in the Rue Montmartre did not bother him. The dark shop, with part of the window taken up with rubber stamps, did not strike him as ugly. He felt no revulsion on seeing solemn Monsieur Brois arrive.
Yet what if Monsieur Brois had been his father?
‘I hate them! I hate them all!’ he used to say excitedly to Estévant and Doms, in the warmth of the Café de la Bourse.
Even the Jesuit Fathers of the Collège Saint-Servais where his parents had sent him at considerable sacrifice to themselves.
‘The Superintendent said to me …’ old Marette used to begin, with gentle satisfaction, when he came home at night, with a little smoke hanging about his whiskers.
His son would glare at him, hating him for that docility, for that stupid, simple-minded pride, hating him for being himself, for being his father.
Why didn’t he hate Monsieur Brois, who was so ugly, so flabby, always dressed in a dirty shirt and the same stained and baggy suit, ill-shaven, and flaunting in his buttonhole the ribbon of heaven knows what shameful decoration?
‘Would you be so kind, Monsieur Miette, as to fetch me two dozen Elephant rubbers, model B, from the stock-room?’
Even this affected politeness, which Monsieur Brois obviously considered the acme of scorn, failed to irritate him.
Back home, in Liège, everything had irritated him, down to the very streets, the way he went every day at fixed hours, and the shops, among others a big hosier’s with three windows in the Rue Saint-Gilles, which he could smell a hundred yards away.
It was out of hate that he had left school after the fifth form, out of hate for his schoolmates, and also because he no longer had any interest in studying.
‘I want to work,’ he had announced.
His mother had stood stock still, which was her way of showing her feelings, as at the news of a catastrophe. His father had thought fit to address a solemn speech to him, shaking his head, looking pleased with himself, and blowing smoke rings.
‘Son, you’ll soon be seventeen, so it’s a man I’m talking to, it’s as a man I’m going to talk to you.’
Félix dug his fingernails into his flesh. Oh, to get away! Anywhere! For good! To see no more of them! To see no more of what he knew ad nauseam!
Instead of which he went from one job to another, full of hatred and bitterness, and one day, at the Café de la Bourse, he happened to meet two extraordinary men, Philippe Estévant, with his long hair, his dark eyes and his loosely tied cravat, and the impassive, terrifying Frédéric Doms who rarely opened his mouth.
Those two understood him. Those two listened to all his excited speeches, and Estévant used to exclaim enthusiastically:
‘You ought to write all that down. Don’t you agree, Doms? We’ll publish it as soon as we’ve got our printing-works. It’s absolutely in line with the spirit of the moment. Absolutely!’
Why had the two men picked the peaceful Café de la Bourse, so warm and calm, where the same local speculators came and sat at the same tables, and where Jules, the waiter, knew before-hand what to serve them?
They had their own special place, in the corner formed by the double doors and the wall. They sat there without talking, just smoking their pipes. Now and then they went through the papers which Estévant brought along in a bulging briefcase.
For Félix it had become a necessity. As the hour approached, he felt nervous, his fingers started trembling like a drug addict’s, and nothing on earth could have stopped him from going there. He walked fast, keeping close to the wall. The streets lost their ugliness. A fear took hold of him, the fear that the two men might not be there, or else the much more horrible fear that they might grow tired of the boy that he was.
Didn’t Doms regard him with a certain contempt? What could Doms, who had travelled all over the world, who was about forty, who had met so many people, what could Doms think of him?
He was fat and clean-shaven. With his thin, fair hair, he gave the impression of an unfrocked priest, and his eyes were deformed by a pair of strange spectacles, in which a thicker disc in the middle of each lens caught the light.
Estévant too went in dread of a remark by Doms, one of those remarks which he made in a cold voice, looking somewhere else, as if his companions did not deserve so much as a glance.
Was he Dutch? Or was he Flemish, as his accent suggested? He hinted that this was a fearful secret known to him alone; he claimed that there was not a police force in the world capable of solving the enigma of his personality.
Now and then he would disappear for a few days. Estévant would tell Marette:
‘He has gone to Berlin.’
Or else:
‘Geneva! A group of our Russian friends is preparing an operation.’
Estévant wrote poetry, and also tracts which were to be published when the printing-works was ready, in other words when they had enough money.
For this purpose, Marette had stolen small sums of money from his parents and his employers.
‘Thanks! Unfortunately it’s only a drop in the ocean compared with what we need if we want to go into action.’
They had lent him some ill-printed booklets which bore no publisher’s name. One of them, written in bad French, was about direct action and the importance of the gesture.
Every evening, Estévant went back to his parents’ home, a comfortable house on the Boulevard d’Avroy, for he was the son of a professor at the University. To what den did Doms retire? Marette had never discovered where he slept. He had just been told that it was never twice in the same place.
What would his feelings be now if he learnt of his father’s death? Would he think about it for as much as five minutes and wouldn’t the piano, over his head, soon rouse him from his stupor?
It was the day for the Conservatoire. Isabelle would come downstairs just before ten. He was writing addresses on pale blue envelopes of rough paper which made his pen splutter. The chief clerk, Monsieur Brois, came and went around him and Monsieur Vétu bent over his rubber stamps, for he worked at a little table by the window.
Wasn’t she unhappy too? Why was she always so pale? He had never seen her smile.
She would emerge from the entresol as from a bath of music with which she was still impregnated, stop in front of the cash-desk, and say in her expressionless voice:
‘Give me some money.’
Nothing else. Never anything else. She wore a pair of high patent-leather boots. She did not change her hat from one end of the year to the other.
He longed to follow her into the street, to walk beside her, to surprise her gaze somewhere else than in the dark shop.
He was in love with her. He had written to Léopold, that puzzling creature for whom he had conceived a greater admiration than that which Doms inspired in him.
To begin with, he had not taken much notice of him. He was just a stocky little man with a black beard and a drunkard’s breath who staggered into the café, slumped heavily on to the bench, and gazed at his glass without paying attention to anybody else.
Why had Léopold looked at him with his dark eyes with their surprisingly piercing gaze?
Was he listening to their conversation? Once Félix Marette had had the odd idea that he was an agent of the secret police in disguise and he had ventured to say so to Doms.
‘Do you think he’s following you?’
Doms had examined Léopold through his double lenses, then had shrugged his shoulders without saying anyt
hing.
Well, Marette had not been as mistaken as all that. Léopold was certainly not the man he seemed. He knew things of which Doms was ignorant. The proof of this was that he had followed Marette one evening, zigzagging along. He had bumped into him and had growled—possibly just because the boy was in his way:
‘You ought to be more careful!’
Weeks went by without his putting in an appearance. Marette did not know that these were the weeks he spent on a house-painter’s ladder.
Once, it was late in the evening. Doms and Estévant had not come. Marette was moping in his corner and drinking more than usual when Léopold, sitting at the next table, had started talking, as if to himself:
‘It’s disgusting, working on a kid’s feelings like that.’
‘Are you talking to me, Monsieur?’
‘If those people have got some dirty work to do, why don’t they do it themselves?’
The time had come. The piano had fallen silent. Footsteps. Isabelle was walking right across the entresol. She obviously did not bother to look in the mirror while putting on her coat. In winter—and winter was beginning—she put a narrow marten tie round her neck.
At the cash-desk, her mother was already getting the money ready and finally Isabelle’s boots appeared on the spiral staircase, the hem of her coat, the music-case.
One day, without a word, with just a look, a single look, the last, he would hand her the story of his life, and then go away.
He already suffered at the thought, living that final minute, the steps he would take to leave the shop. He would not look back.
Madame Vétu could think of nothing else to say to her daughter but:
‘You’ve got your gloves? There’s a cold wind.’
She knew this, although she never went out, because the customers were blue when they came in and automatically warmed their hands at the stove.
Félix followed Isabelle with his eyes, and went across to the window to see her as long as he could, without realizing that he looked utterly moonstruck and that any other woman but this imbecile mother would have guessed the truth straight away.
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