Just to say something, and despite the fact that the table was laid for supper, he asked the traditional question:
‘Supper ready?’
And for a few moments he felt the palpitations of an unsubstantial life which was that of the house, of that house and no other; he became conscious of something like the nibbling of time—and it was not simply the tick-tock of the alarm-clock on the mantelpiece: the stove had a breath all its own and so had the big white enamel kettle with the dent in its swan-necked spout. The air enveloped him, touched him; he felt it as if it were something with its own density, its own temperature, its own sweetness, perhaps its own intentions; it closed over him and gleams of light flickered like signals on the candlestick, on a cup decorated with flowers, on the red copper saucepan. To begin with, it was rather painful when you came from outside, but then Roger gently adjusted himself to this mysterious rhythm and regained his calm.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘AND for Monsieur Mamelin,’ said Raoul jokingly, ‘I suppose it will be a Titus cut?’
‘I wonder,’ Roger replied seriously, looking in the mirror, over the bottles of lotion, at his face stuck like a dummy head on top of the soft pyramid of the white wrapper.
Raoul, who had been the Mamelins’ barber ever since there had been Mamelins in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, had been cutting his hair now for twelve years. It was he who had sliced off with one slash of the scissors the baby’s forelock which Élise had piously preserved in tissue paper, and since then the perpetual joke had been repeated every fortnight.
‘A Titus cut?’
And now Roger, who for his part didn’t make jokes, who had never made jokes when his hair was concerned, and who had been known to fly into a temper in the barber’s chair when his hair had been left a fraction of an inch too long—now Roger looked as if he were hesitating, was really hesitating, and hid the top of his forehead for a moment with both hands as if to see how he would look once he had been shorn.
‘I wonder, Raoul, if it wouldn’t be the simplest thing to do.’
Raoul looked rather like Désiré; he had the same musketeer’s beard, but a fiery red, the same receding forehead, bald at the temples, and the same mischievous eyes in a face which remained imperturbable while he reeled off a string of jokes from morning till night. He was a more insipid Désiré, with the face stretched to make it a little longer.
From one of the countless little drawers whose secrets Roger had studied so many times as a child, he took a clipper which he tossed in his hand.
‘Then the answer’s yes?’
Roger thought it over, still hesitating, but feeling scarcely any excitement. If Raoul took him at his word and started the operation, he would let him finish it. The clipper was already brushing against the back of his neck, and he could feel the cold touch of the metal, but it was the barber who funked it.
‘You aren’t serious, are you?’
How could Raoul have failed to notice that Roger, who was always so particular about his appearance, had dirty finger-nails and was wearing an old suit, a carelessly knotted tie and filthy shoes. Instead of his fine briar pipe, he had taken to smoking one of those coarse imitation meerschaums with a long cherry-wood stem which you could see hanging down the chests of old men taking the air on the doorsteps of their shops. Like them, he pressed down the ashes by thrusting his forefinger into the bowl, and just now, on the way to Raoul’s, he had bought himself some snuff which he had ostentatiously stuffed into his nostrils in the open street.
It was the middle of March. The Easter holidays had just begun. The day before, in driving spring rain, Roger had gone in his clogs to queue at the food centre with a shopping-bag. Élise had not yet recovered from the shock.
‘No, Monsieur Mamelin. I’m not going to take the responsibility for shearing you. I’ve no desire to have my eyes scratched out or to see you burst out sobbing. Let’s be serious. What sort of a haircut do you want?’
Roger, with the smile of a misunderstood man, puffed at his pipe.
‘Just as you like, Raoul.’
‘The parting in the middle or on the side?’
‘No parting at all. So leave it long.’
‘Artist-style?’
He would have his hair cropped short later on, for he would do it one day, he had been thinking about it for over a week now. It was the radical method of putting himself once for all above all the petty trifles he despised.
Oughtn’t people to understand at a glance that he had changed completely? The proof of that was that he was happy in this shop which he used to hate before, and that instead of looking in the mirror for the reflection of a tense face with a contemptuous, distant expression, he gave his features all the kindliness of which they were capable, puffing his chest out and wishing that he were fat and round like a worthy bourgeois of the district.
This morning there was a pale sun shining. Once he had crossed the Pont d’Amercoeur, with his hands in his pockets and some books under his arm, Roger had the impression that he was living in a stage-set. His eyes smiled at everything they saw: a little earlier, he had taken pleasure in watching a fat girl washing down the white tiles of a fish-shop with pailfuls of clean water; then he had looked at the fish, the spiky gurnets, the pale rays, and the distinguished soles, and he had bent over the barrels of herrings lined up along the pavement to breathe in their powerful smell.
Raoul’s shop was even more of a stage-set than the rest. Besides, it already partook of the theatre whose portico could be seen a little further on in the Rue Surlet. Its narrow, lop-sided shop window contained nothing but wigs. It was hard to find the door at first, for it was in the next house; the hairdressing saloon itself was a sort of triangular nook, with an opening in one wall which contained a stove, and on the other side of this stove, in an even smaller nook which seemed to have no way out, you could see Raoul’s father pinning long tow-like hair on a wooden head.
Raoul and his father were the accredited wigmakers and make-up men of the Pavillon de Flore, where operettas alternated with melodramas. The walls were covered with autographed photographs, the talk was all of baritones, singing basses and tenorinos, and everything evoked a world which was invisible yet present, a world dressed in costumes of olden times. The air seemed to smell of scenery and tours, of gas-jets and Bengal lights, the glass-fronted cupboards were full of greasepaint, and the years did not count here as they did elsewhere.
‘It was the season Mercoeur put on The Merry Widow for the first time at the Pavillon de Flore. What a voice! What a presence! What a brilliant performance in the duet! I maintain that nobody has ever played Danilo properly since.’
The door was left open in all weathers, for otherwise there would have been neither enough air nor enough space. You were in the street. The life of the street entered the shop freely, the noises, the voices, the smells, the sunshine. And the neighbours came in to sit down for a little while as they would in a public place.
‘Well, Raoul, what’s new?’
‘Everything’s old, especially us, alas!’
‘You couldn’t do my beard in a minute, could you? I’m going to the funeral.’
‘Narquet’s?’
‘I can’t understand how that chap could go off so quickly. Why, only a fortnight ago, he was fishing next to me at the Grosses-Battes dam. Incidentally, this morning I saw big Henry going fishing. He won’t catch anything. The river’s too swollen.’
Roger listened to them, drawing gently on his pipe. It struck him that here he was breathing in the life of the whole district, and this district of the Rue Puits-en-Sock, of which the Rue Surlet, which went off at an acute angle, was just a sort of extension, was something which he had suddenly started to love.
He too would have liked to know everybody by his Christian name, to be able to say like Raoul and his customers:
‘Wasn’t it his sister-in-law—you remember, the little thing who limped a bit and was such a hot piece—who went off with the singer with the bad
teeth one night they were playing La Tour de Nesle? I can still see her in this chair when she came to have her hair curled for her first communion.’
Roger would have liked the houses to be even narrower and more lop-sided, with sharp corners, twisting passages, mysterious nooks and corners, and smells which varied with every step. He liked people who wore the costume of their trade and spoke to each other from doorstep to doorstep, people who had been born in the house in which they lived and had always known each other, who, when they were old men and grandfathers, still tussled with one another as they used to do when they were at school together or when they served Mass in the parish church.
Camille was dead. She had died in January, about dawn one Monday morning. A few hours before, in a box at the Mondain cinema, behind Gouin and his girl friend, Roger had been fumbling about under her skirts.
That Monday evening, when he had been thinking about nothing but the rendezvous on Thursday and the signal Camille was going to give him with her torch to tell him what Sidonie had decided, Élise, talking to the inevitable Mademoiselle Rinquet, had suddenly said in a mournful voice:
‘As if we hadn’t enough with our own troubles, we’ve got epidemics starting now.’
It had been right in the middle of the black period, the period of the Carré and the endless walks in the dark, in search of heaven knows what ambiguous pleasures, a period when, for Roger, everything had been dismal and frightening. Élise had talked while peeling turnips and Mademoiselle Rinquet had listened, as dark as the darkest of streets.
‘Why, only today, there have been three cases of cholerine, including a girl who went home last night, healthy and happy, and who had to be buried this afternoon, she was decomposing so fast. They say her mother followed the coffin screaming. She’s a poor woman who does people’s washing.’
Roger, looking down at his book, had felt his blood run cold.
‘I’ve been told that if the doctors talk about cholerine, so as not to alarm the population, it’s really cholera for all that. It appears that it happens in every war. Think of the thousands and thousands of corpses that lie on the battlefields day after day, sometimes for weeks on end, without being buried!’
He had managed to ask in a toneless voice:
‘You don’t know what she’s called, do you?’
‘They told me her name when I was getting the rations, but I’ve forgotten it. Her mother worked most of the time at the home of one of your old schoolmates at Saint-André, the pork-butcher in the Rue Dorchain. That’s a chap who can’t complain about the war, but I hope that one of these days people like that will be made to pay. When you think of all the poor little children there are with nothing to eat!’
Roger had lived for a week in fear, a subdued fear, so to speak, a hidden fear. He had not gone to the Carré. He had not been there once. He had not seen Sidonie again. He had lived on his own, not knowing where to settle down, curling up with a book in any corner he could find, for evening after evening and whole Sundays. If necessary, when his mother and Mademoiselle Rinquet were murmuring their laments, he dug his fingers into his ears and fiercely went on reading, only going out, except for school, to change his books in the Rue Saint-Paul and at the Chiroux library.
He had started neglecting his appearance, had taken a fancy to casual clothes, and had seriously considered having his hair cut short.
‘Why don’t you come and sit by the fire, Roger? What are you going up there again for? You’ll get pleurisy, like my brother-in-law Hubert, staying in an icy room like that.’
He shut himself up in his room for all that, wrapping himself up in a dressing-gown which his mother had cut out of an old counterpane with a pink floral design. There was no gas on the first floor. He lit a candle. He felt cold, his fingers went numb, his chilblains hurt. He smoked, paced up and down, looked out of the window, with a strange emotion, at the dark, wet boulevard along which shadows were passing, and finally, with tears puffing out his eyelids, he suddenly began writing.
‘Sadness of the tall spire, so tall, so lonely …’
This was the cold, hard spire of Saint-Nicolas, which he used to see from the doorstep in the Rue de la Loi for days on end when he was a child. He would have liked to describe it, frozen in the cruel immensity of a moonlight night, that spire which people might consider stiff with pride, yet which gazed enviously, without ever being able to come down to their level, at the roofs of the little houses nestling below it, all those hunchbacked, ramshackle roofs, slate or tile, flat or pointed, planted with smoking chimneys or pierced with glowing skylights, standing fraternally shoulder to shoulder, trying to join each other across the narrow, teeming streets, and preventing one another from falling down.
Cécile’s illness had grown worse. She sat motionless from morning till night with her feet in an enamel bucket, for water kept oozing all the time from her swollen legs.
Roger had got into the habit of going to see her. He went to the Rue Puits-en-Sock every day. It was he who took his aunt the books she read in her solitude, and little by little a new life had begun, Roger’s walk had become slower and more solemn, and he had taken to wandering aimlessly and without any rancour in his heart through the back-streets, under the tangle of roofs dominated by the spire of Saint-Nicolas.
He had been almost sincere when Raoul had suggested giving his hair a Titus cut and he had replied:
‘Why not?’
The most he had felt had been a slight tremor of anxiety. He would have allowed Raoul to do it. But now he was satisfied with his artist style. He must let his hair grow a lot longer. All or nothing. The skull superbly shaven or an untidy mop which you shook with a jerk of the head and through which you passed your fingers like a comb.
‘A little brilliantine?’
‘No.’
‘Shall I wet your hair?’
‘No.’
He wanted his hair to look as bushy as possible. He felt sorry that he had not come in clogs, that he was not an apprentice in one of the medieval workshops in the district.
‘Thanks, Raoul.’
He was pleased with life. He enjoyed to the full the ray of sunshine playing in the mirrors, and all the images jostling together there in a chaos where you could scarcely find your bearings, where he had been unable to find his bearings at all when he was little; he stroked the big, smooth, warm bowl of his pipe and, giving a final glance at his reflection in the mirror, he tried to give himself the good-natured appearance of an old Outremeuse craftsman.
There was no transition between the shop and the street, but the same life, vulgar, noisy and colourful, a life with a strong savour of the lower classes. His nostrils dilated, his eyes opened wide, and he felt no repugnance whatever; even the smell of the bluish water flowing along the gutter seemed sweet to him.
He had only a few steps to take to reach the bookshop window and, at any other time, the mere sight of the window-display would have caused him positive pain, for it was practically the last word in the sordid and the ugly. Probably because of the proximity of the flea-market, the Rue Surlet had a higgledy-piggledy look with the most improbable things placed next to one another.
Witness this shop-window, where there was a row of popular novels at sixty-four centimes each, soiled, torn for the most part, as dirty as old pipes, and where next to these books you could see some electric batteries among some second-hand shoes, some celluloid combs and a fantastic dressmaker’s dummy.
On the dirty floor of the shop there were always three or four brats, the youngest of them showing his bottom; once Roger had found him calmly ensconced on his chamber-pot next to the counter. A mousy-haired woman, her arms covered with soapsuds, appeared for a moment in the doorway.
‘Oh, it’s you. I can leave you to help yourself, can’t I?’
This familiarity pleased him. He felt almost proud of being at home here, of going behind the counter, rummaging along the shelves and leaning out into the shop-window. You could hear footsteps, shouts and voll
eys of oaths on the next floor, for the house was full of children and low women who joked with one another through the windows or across the neutral zone of the staircase. There was no private entrance and all these people went through the shop. Roger had once seen a girl there with a heavily made-up face and flashy clothes, and it had been a revelation to him to hear her call down the staircase well:
‘Don’t forget my chemises, Mum!’
So these women, whom he used to follow hopelessly at the Carré, lived in houses like this; they had a mother and perhaps little brothers and sisters too; and nobody was embarrassed by them, everybody considered it perfectly natural that they should go out on the streets when the time came, just as the men went to their workshops.
He looked through the books before making his choice. In the early days, he had taken Cécile the books he usually read himself, those he borrowed from the municipal library or the lending library, bound in black cloth and smelling musty. But Cécile never finished them.
‘I don’t enjoy them, Roger. I may be a fool, but I can’t see what pleasure anybody can get out of reading that sort of thing.’
‘What would you prefer, Aunt?’
She had, so to speak, never read anything. She had not had the time.
‘I don’t know. I remember one book I was lent a long time ago that was fascinating. I think it was called: Chaste and Sullied. That’s the sort of novel I’d like.’
This had moved him. It was strange to see what a little girl Cécile had become since she had fallen ill. She spoke in a faint, monotonous voice. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. She felt no embarrassment in his presence, and once her blouse had opened and he had caught sight of a poor withered breast.
‘I’m thin, aren’t I?’ she had said, without any false modesty, intercepting his glance.
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