Soon he would come and sit down, without a word, on one of the straw-bottomed chairs. And Roger would have to start talking in his sleep to rouse Élise from her prostration.
Feeling empty inside, with the taste of despair on her lips, she would be obliged to say:
‘Have you got the matches?’
She undressed. There she was in her baggy knickers and her camisole, in the reddish light of the unshaded lamp. The bed was like a big sick animal, the crimson eiderdown taking on the shape of a whale.
Désiré went to bed first and turned his face to the wall, so that he could see nothing but the stain made by a squashed fly; then the lamp was turned out and the mattress creaked.
A long time afterwards, he cautiously put out his hand, but the arm he touched drew away sharply.
‘Good night, Élise.’
Silence.
‘Good night, Élise.’
Never, even after their most violent quarrels, had they gone to sleep side by side without saying good night to one another. Death could take him in his sleep, as had happened to others, and he would go off without a last farewell from his wife.
He waited, chewing his moustache which still smelled of tobacco, while Élise, whose features had grown hard and pointed, thought coldly, furiously, of putting an end to it all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NEARLY a whole year had gone by since Embourg and life went on; indeed you might have thought that nothing had changed in the Rue de la Loi. Élise cooked sugared dishes for Désiré when he came home at two o’clock and, in the fine spring evenings, in order to have a little peace in her kitchen, she sent him to chat with the lodgers outside on the pavement.
At the time, it had been thanks to Roger’s mumps that life, to begin with at least, had not been more difficult. With Élise, impressions lasted. Like her sister Marthe’s novenas or Léopold’s plunges into the pubs in the back-streets. The slightest quarrel on a Sunday affected the whole week. To take only one example, although Roger was now eleven and in the sixth year at school, in Brother Médard’s class, his mother still reproached him with the pain he had caused her at the time of his first private communion. Yet he had been seven years old at the time. He could remember the occasion too, for another reason, a particularly private reason. The day before that day, which was supposed to be the most wonderful day in his life, after a bath which had been even more meticulous than on other Saturdays, he had been walking along the newly washed pavements when he had met Lucile, the daughter of the greengrocer in the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, a girl who had a slight squint and was always hiding in corners with boys.
Roger had practically just come out of the confessional; his soul, like his body, was clean for the next day; and yet off he went after Lucile, like a dog, a prey to a nagging curiosity, talking to her shamefacedly, devising a squatting game so as to see between her legs, and finally, unable to stand it any longer and as red as the comb of a young cock, begging her:
‘Let me touch.’
For several weeks, his mother had kept telling him:
‘Don’t forget that on the day of their first communion children must beg their parents’ forgiveness for all the pain they have caused them.’
In the morning, while getting dressed for Mass, she had waited. Several times she had said:
‘Roger.’
‘What is it?’
‘You haven’t forgotten anything?’
‘No.’
He knew perfectly well what she was waiting for. Taking advantage of a moment when Désiré was on his own, he had gone to ask his forgiveness in a faltering voice, but he would not ask his mother’s forgiveness, he could not, precisely because she was waiting for him to do so. It was not out of spite on his part. It was just impossible. The words would not come out of his mouth.
Élise had made a tragedy out of it. She had left the house with her eyes red and her head empty from crying, and, even now, after all these years, every time she was angry with her son, she took care to remind him:
‘When I think that you made me cry my eyes out the day you took your first communion.’
What would have happened if, after that evening at Embourg, Roger had not providentially fallen ill? His temperature had risen at an alarming speed. At midday, it had been 103.1°. Madame Laude had gone to fetch a doctor from Chênée. For a whole week, the bedroom walls around Roger had been made of a material at once soft and threatening, the same material as the crimson eiderdown which had swollen until it had touched the ceiling, while Roger had had the impression that his head was so monstrously big that he had felt it all over in terror.
When Désiré had come home, the first evening, Élise had said, as if nothing had happened between them:
‘You must go to have the prescription made up at Chênée.’
Then, later on, when her husband had wanted to stay up to watch over the child:
‘No! You have to go to work tomorrow morning. I’ve got nothing to do here.’
She had not forgotten, as he might have imagined. When he tried to kiss her as usual, she turned her head away and his lips touched nothing but hair.
Frédéric who, sitting on the doorstep, had practically been present at the scene on the main road, must have told Madame Laude about it. The latter glanced at Élise now and then, trying to guess what had happened, but thanks to Roger’s illness, Élise had a good reason for crying when she felt like it and for showing the world the face of a Mater Dolorosa.
That was how things had happened. People cannot live all their lives in an atmosphere of drama. Human forces have their limits, and the most violent sorrows ebb away, however much energy you may expend on stopping them. Élise happened to smile at a joke of Madame Laude’s and then to speak to Désiré on other subjects than the child’s health. Thus Madame Laude was able to announce to Frédéric:
‘They’ve patched it up.’
Désiré had been taken in for a moment, for he had a habit of taking his desires for realities, and there was no malice or rancour in him.
A glance, every now and then, as sharp as an invisible needle of ice shooting out of Élise’s transparent pupils, was enough to proclaim:
‘Don’t have any illusions. True, I’m not dead. I come and go, and I look after the lodgers as I did before, but I shall never be the same again. There’s a broken spring in me now which nobody will ever be able to repair.’
He pretended not to notice, and was merry and gay. A little spot of sunshine on his cheek, when he was shaving, was enough to set him humming to himself; every morning he awoke his son by tweaking his nose.
When a quarrel started now, Élise darted her icy glance at him and it was enough for her to murmur with pursed lips:
‘Be quiet. You know very well that you’re utterly selfish.’
He said nothing, made no attempt to defend himself. ‘Selfish’ had become the key-word. Utterly abashed, he turned away or hurriedly changed the subject, so that people might almost have imagined that there was some dreadful secret between them.
Even Roger, who on bad days, when his mother brought up the matter of his first communion, was told:
‘You’re no better than your father.’
And yet she had a vague feeling that this masculine selfishness which had hurt her so badly was involuntary, that it was probably a law of Nature. Désiré did not see what he did not want to see. He imagined almost sincerely that things were as he would have liked them to be. He had arranged his days so that they were a harmonious succession of little joys, and the absence of the least of these joys threatened the whole edifice. A cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter, a dish of bright-green peas, reading the paper beside the fire, a maidservant standing on a pair of steps and washing a window, a thousand quiet pleasures which were waiting for him at every turning of life, which he had foreseen and looked forward to, were as necessary to him as the air he breathed, and it was thanks to them that he was incapable of feeling any real suffering.
�
�If you knew what men are like, poor Valérie!’
Since Embourg, Élise had stopped uttering these words in a resigned tone. She had broken free. There was an aggressive force in her which sometimes bordered on frenzy.
‘They’re not going to make a fool of me any more, oh no! I’m going to clip them, I’m going to clip them all, whoever they are.’
That simple little word was more revealing than anything else about the change which had taken place in her. She had always loathed the local dialect for its vulgarity. That was what used to irritate her most of all in the house in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, where a Lucien, a Catherine, an Arthur, often tended to talk in Walloon.
To clip, in that dialect, was to steal, but not to steal openly: it was to take something in little doses, surreptitiously, to cheat, to watch for an opportunity to appropriate things. Henceforth Élise clipped unceasingly and unscrupulously, she clipped Désiré, she clipped her lodgers, she clipped Mademoiselle Frida. The house in the Rue de la Loi had never been so full of life, with people coming in, going out, drinking, eating and shouting, and Élise spent her energies freely, without counting the cost, without sparing her strength, without worrying about her back or her stomach, because every minute of the day she was clipping, every minute of the day she was taking money from one or another and slipping it into her petticoat pocket or into the soup tureen with the pink flowers, before going to the Savings Bank on Thursday afternoon, to put it into Roger’s account.
Thanks to this untiring activity, this passion which she satisfied with furious determination, she was scarcely ever to be seen looking sad or melancholy as she used to; it was as if she had a fever which made her livelier and prettier, like consumptive people with their bright eyes and red cheeks.
Only she had to take care not to stop, not to relax for a single moment, for if she did, a fit of dizziness might come over her.
Madame Corbion had been right. Élise had been wrong not to believe her. You hadn’t to have too many scruples. Did other people have any about you?
Few people noticed the transformation which had occurred in her. She was still as neat as ever, still as busy as ever. She had kept her humble smile, and her head still bent a little to one side, as if to avoid the blows of fate; but what people failed to see was that she had an aim in life which she admitted only to herself; she had a passion, just as Léopold and Marthe had theirs; she clipped, calculated, collected sou after sou, franc after franc, always complaining that she had only just enough to live on, and determined never to touch her nest-egg for anything.
Externally, that year marked the zenith of the house in the Rue de la Loi. Monsieur Bernard’s two friends, Monsieur Jacques and Monsieur Dollent, took all their meals there, Monsieur Bogdanowski and Mademoiselle Lola had ended up by joining them, and, since the kitchen had become too small for them all, especially as they often brought along friends for dinner or supper, the dining-room had been reclaimed from Monsieur Schascher who had had to find a room somewhere else. Considering what he paid, this was fair enough.
There was no end to the frying of chips and the grilling of chops, and the charwoman came three times a week for the whole day. Élise would have liked the house to be bigger; she would willingly have served twenty, thirty meals; nothing deterred her, and she no longer had time even to drop in on her sisters.
Old Madame Smet no longer came to spend Friday with her. Out of tact, she explained that her legs were too old to come so far, but the tram was a stone’s throw away, and the truth was she was frightened by the frantic activity around Élise, and by those men from all over the world who spoke all sorts of languages and behaved as if they were in their own homes.
Élise was well aware that she could not always go on living at this pace and that a time would probably come when she would grow sick of clipping. Well, she copied Désiré; she avoided thinking about it, she refused to stay talking to herself, and for some time now, it had been in a cross voice that she had called out from the first floor, on hearing certain heavy, clumsy footsteps in the hall:
‘Come in, Léopold. I’ll be down in a minute.’
Had Léopold felt that he was in the way? Probably. But he was mistaken if he thought that it was because he was badly dressed and looked like a poor old beggar, or because he went afterwards to the pub next door for a drink. Élise did not care. She did not care about anything. What worried her was that in front of Léopold she became herself again. She tried in vain to deceive herself.
‘In life, you know, Léopold, it’s a mistake to expect people to give you anything, even if it’s only the consideration you wouldn’t refuse to a dog.’
Léopold’s gaze was disapproving. Perhaps he had never expected to be given anything? He was tempted to push away the ritual cup of coffee, it was so obvious that Élise’s life was no longer anything but a passionate calculation.
Once Désiré made the mistake of murmuring:
‘You don’t think you’re working too hard?’
She had darted her familiar look at him.
‘You dare to say that to me—you! Must I remind you of what you said to me a certain evening?’
They lived in the same house and slept in the same bed, as in the past. She looked after him to the best of her ability. Often she was gay, even when they were alone together. She dressed smartly. They all three went out together on Sundays. Thanks to Roger’s scholarship—or so she said, for she was answerable to nobody—they would be able to send him to grammar school.
And yet sometimes she had the impression that she was living in a void, making gestures which meant nothing, moving her lips to produce sounds without any significance. On Sundays especially. Élise had taken a dislike to Sundays, those empty streets in which the three of them walked along as if they did not know where to put themselves, the long insipid progress towards Coronmeuse, the Ursuline convent, or some other objective. She used to come home with a heavy head, and nothing more urgent to do than to revive her fire, take off her Sunday dress and make sure that the lodgers were back.
She had two thousand francs in the Savings Bank and Désiré knew nothing about it. She wanted much more, she wanted so much that it seemed to her that she would have to slave away all her life to fill that little book whose pages were slowly being covered with pink and blue stamps representing money.
Like Madame Marette, like so many widows whom she knew, whom she collected so to speak, she wanted to have her own house; she would never feel secure until she had a house all to herself…Like that, when something happened to Désiré …
Why did she suddenly feel an urge to burst out sobbing, all by herself in her kitchen, as if the thing which was eating away at her inside had already destroyed her equilibrium, as if a big bubble of air, trying to force its way through her constricted throat, were lifting her up bodily?
Her features had just begun wrinkling up in preparation for tears when the street door opened: like a flash she pinned on her smile and straightened her bun.
‘Come in, Monsieur Jacques. Monsieur Bernard had to go out. He asked if you would wait for him in his room. He’ll be back soon.’
She just had time to lay the table. She would cry another time, later on. Sometimes she wished that the time would come quickly when she would be able to cry to her heart’s content and give way to her fatigue.
This was something nobody knew, nobody suspected. She lived very few hours by herself; the moments of crisis were brief, interspersed, so that she could stand them, with long periods of everyday life. When the lodgers were finally gathered together in the dining-room, Élise, fresher than ever, her complexion coloured by the heat of the stove, and wearing a pretty flared apron over her skirt, came in to put the soup-tureen in the middle of the tablecloth and to make sure that there was nothing missing from the table, neither a glass nor a fork, nor the salt-cellar nor the jar of pickled onions.
Never had Roger known a more radiant summer, lived such a long succession of grave and delicious hours, of a full
ness which recalled the perfect fullness of an egg, of a depth which was equalled only by certain night skies peopled with stars to the very bounds of infinity.
Everything partook of everything else, things were transfigured, gestures were transposed, and the pink room which Mademoiselle Lola had left two days before to go on her holidays was so hot and colourful, so palpitating in every nook and cranny, that the child found himself being lulled to sleep by it, suspended between dream and reality, and filtering what he absorbed of the outside world through the grating of his lowered eyelashes.
Noises reached him, the smallest familiar sounds, the secret whispering of things, but for the past fortnight he had escaped from the ordinary rules of life; alone among the members of the household he was not obliged to submit to the discipline of the passing hours; he was living on the fringe of everyday life, which slipped around him with the fluidity of water.
The day before, the Institut Saint-André had had its solemn prize-giving, an event all the more memorable in that Roger had finished his sixth year and that in the autumn he would be going to the Jesuit college. He was first. He had been first in his class every year, except in the fifth, when he had been beaten by Van Hamme, a pale boy with a stubborn forehead, the son of a Bressoux wood-carver, who spent his life studying, with his head in his hands, and whom nobody had ever seen at play.
Perhaps, this year, Brother Médard had cheated a little so that Madame Mamelin’s son should be first in spite of Van Hamme? In any case the headmaster had certainly cheated.
Roger was in the hall, among the parents, on account of the leg he had in plaster. He had had to be carried in.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, my dear children,’ the headmaster had said, ‘I must now pay a well-deserved tribute to the exceptional conduct of one of our pupils …’
A shiver. Roger waited, and an eternity went by before his name was finally uttered, before the other heads turned in the direction of his blushing face.
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