It was for her sake that he had discovered this shop in the Rue Surlet. The shopkeeper, who could scarcely read and recognized books chiefly by their covers, had shown him what to do. First of all, you had to pay the price of a new book as a sort of surety, then every time you came to change a book, pay twenty centimes.
One day, he had taken two books instead of one. One had been for his aunt and one for himself, because, as the result of seeing the whole series of the Rocambole stories, his curiosity had been aroused.
For fear of being laughed at, he had not dared to show that book to his father. Now he read them all, Désiré too. Unfortunately, they could never find the complete series.
‘Number sixteen hasn’t come back, has it, Madame Pissier?’
‘The one with the vampire on the cover? I’ve asked myself that question a dozen times this week. If I knew who the blighter was who’s taken it and kept it over a month … I only hope it isn’t somebody who’s died since then!’
For his aunt, going by the title and the picture on the cover, he picked a sad, sentimental story of the sort she liked.
‘I’ve left forty centimes on the counter. See you tomorrow, Madame Pissier.’
He read a book a day easily, sometimes two when he was not going to school. He started reading as soon as he was outside in the street, shutting the book only when he entered the passage leading to his grandfather’s house. He crossed the yard. He was no longer a visitor but almost at home here. He greeted Thérèse, Marcel’s sister, who had moved into the house to look after the children and who had a consumptive’s rosy cheekbones.
‘Is Aunt Cécile any better?’
‘Just the same. She’s already asked after you twice.’
Never, in the old days, had he gone any further than this kitchen, where people automatically tip-toed past the corner where Old Papa used to sit. Now he went through the door at the back and it was the very mystery of the Rue Puits-en-Sock which he discovered. He found himself to begin with in an airless, unlit passage along which he groped his way. He went down a couple of stone steps, his hand found a cord which worked a latch, and there he was in a bright kitchen filled with the sickly smell of sweets.
There were sweets on every piece of furniture, on the table covered with an oilcloth, on the sideboard, on a chest of drawers, and on the chairs, for Roger was no longer in the Mamelin house, but in Gruyelle-Marquant’s, the confectioners next door. Through the window he could see a little yard with the workshop where the sweets were made at the far end; and he knew that if he went round the blank wall he could get to the house of the Kreutz sisters, the old maids who ran the Dolls’ Hospital, and even, further on, the bakehouse of the cake-shop which was almost at the end of the street.
The fact was that these were the back-streets of old; the name of one of them was still carved in the stone. There had once been a whole network of alley-ways and culs-de-sac where the craftsmen had had their workshops and which no longer had any way out, so that the houses in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, with their separate façades, had kept up, as it were, clandestine connections behind.
It gave him pleasure too to enter into the familiarity of things, to be at home here, to call out, so that nobody should stop working because of him:
‘It’s me!’
He could have gone in by way of the shop where he was standing now, but he preferred this detour through the wings. His Uncle Marcel was sorting invoices behind one of the counters. The shop-assistant whom everybody called ‘Pipi’—he had never dared to ask why—was serving a customer, a country shopkeeper who had put a huge black straw basket down in front of her.
‘Is Aunt Cécile upstairs?’
As if poor Cécile were still capable of going out! They told him again:
‘She’s already asked after you twice.’
The two houses were now one. At the first rumour of war, back in 1914, the Gruyelle-Marquants had taken refuge in Holland, where they were waiting for the end of hostilities. The house had remained shut for several months, then, by a roundabout method, by means of a ferryman as they were called, Marcel Wasselin had received a letter asking him if he would run the shop until the owners came back.
Pipi, who had been employed in the shop before the war, had come back. She was a short, strapping girl with solid buttocks and flesh so firm that you could not pinch her. They got on well together, she and Marcel, for they belonged to the same type. In front of people, Wasselin gave her resounding slaps on her bottom, or else grabbed her breasts in both hands; and behind the shop, in the kitchen littered with pink sweets, between serving two customer, he calmly laid her out on a corner of the table. Roger had caught them in the act. They had scarcely even looked embarrassed, and his uncle, buttoning his trousers, had simply given him a conspiratorial wink.
It was this same, huge shop, with its two vast windows, which had been so awe-inspiring in the past, especially just before St. Nicholas’s Day, when there were so many customers you could only just squeeze in. Roger could still remember Monsieur Gruyelle, who always looked rather solemn, with white side-whiskers framing a face as pink as his fondants, and with his hands behind his back, keeping an eye on his shop-assistants; and he recalled the Gruyelle-Marquant sisters, plump, fresh-faced creatures who used to kiss him and slip two or three sugared almonds into his pocket or the hollow of his hand.
Now Marcel Wasselin reigned over the shop with Pipi, the shelves were overflowing once more with sweets and chocolates of every kind, the till was stuffed with banknotes which were pushed in anyhow, francs and marks together, and upstairs Cécile was alone, with her feet in her tub, in the middle of the Gruyelle-Marquants’ bedroom.
Élise had sighed when somebody had raised the subject:
‘Dear God, Désiré, don’t you think Marcel is a bit too free-and-easy? If Monsieur Gruyelle, who’s so strict, found out what was happening! And he’s bound to find out one day.’
‘That’s his look-out, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know how he could entrust a business like his, such a solid concern, which has been in existence for over a hundred years, to somebody like Marcel. You know, I can’t get rid of the idea that he’s making money out of it, that he isn’t over-scrupulous. And Pipi isn’t likely to put a curb on him. All that money going through her hands without any check on it!’
Roger darted a glance at the last counter, the one at the back, which was protected up to a certain height by a trellis, for it was there that the more expensive sweets and chocolates were displayed in glass dishes.
If, when he came down again, there was nobody in the shop, as was often the case, he would put his arm quickly over the trellis. He had already chosen the exact spot, for he had a weakness for the big chocolates wrapped in gold paper which cost fifty centimes each.
Did the others ever miss an opportunity of doing the same? Hadn’t his mother herself said that Marcel and Pipi weren’t over-scrupulous people? With what he earned as manager and with the hat-shop where Grandfather Mamelin did all the work, could his uncle have given his children the St. Nicholas’s Day he had given them this last year, with among other things a life-size doll such as you never saw in the shops and which had been adorned—this had shocked Élise to the core—with Aunt Madeleine’s hair, the hair which had been ceremoniously cut off her head when she had taken her vows.
It was not for the chocolates that Roger came. It really was for his aunt’s sake. He enjoyed climbing the spiral staircase which started right in the middle of the shop and disappeared into the ceiling. He gaily pushed open the door which had become familiar to him.
‘Hullo, Aunt! Here I am!’
It was another joy for him to see the Rue Puits-en-Sock from a first-floor window, especially on a sunny morning. He made sure that his aunt had hidden her legs under the blanket spread over her knees, for the sight of them made him feel rather sick; she did not seem to realize this, and she showed them to everybody at the slightest opportunity.
‘You promised to
come early.’
‘Yes, but I’ve been to the barber’s. Just imagine, Aunt, I wanted to have my hair close-cropped and Raoul wouldn’t do it.’
‘What a silly you are, Roger. When you’re lucky enough to have such lovely hair! Sit down.’
With her, he did not feel that he was with an aunt. She was a woman. She had three children. She knew life. And yet they behaved together as if they were of the same age; indeed, since she had fallen ill, she had been the more childlike of the two. She looked like a little girl, and occasionally Roger had inadvertently used the familiar tu with her.
‘How do you feel today?’
‘Just the same. The doctor says that I’ll feel better when summer comes, but I wonder if he knows anything about it. At night, it’s in the heart that it affects me. I’ve told him so, but he says that I’m just imagining things. As if Mother didn’t die of heart disease—and she never complained of anything!’
‘The doctor’s right, Aunt. You think about it too much.’
‘What have you brought me to read? Is Thérèse at home? The children aren’t being naughty? How tiring she must find them, and she isn’t any too healthy to begin with! Quite apart from the fact that she doesn’t know how to handle them. I don’t dare to say anything to her, because she’s Marcel’s sister and she does what she can. As for me, when they come to see me and they’ve been here ten minutes, I feel tired out. Why, now, just talking…’
‘Don’t talk, Aunt. You know perfectly well that you don’t need to stand on ceremony with me.’
‘Is it true that you can hear gunfire again from the heights?’
‘So they say. It depends on the wind.’
‘If only the war could come to an end! I feel that if it did, I’d be able to get up. You wouldn’t like a grape? Go on. Do me the pleasure of eating a few. Everybody brings me grapes and I don’t know what to do with them. It’s Pipi who eats them every time she comes up here.’
Roger was afraid of showing his repugnance for these fat hothouse grapes which had spent some time in the sick woman’s bedroom and which Cécile had touched with her moist hands, possibly after stroking her legs as she often did with a mechanical movement. The portraits of Monsieur and Madame Gruyelle-Marquant looked down at them. On the other side of the street, in the narrow houses, you could see people moving to and fro behind the windows. Cécile knew the life which unfolded hour by hour in each household. She had only to stretch out her thin arm to push aside the curtains, and the others presumably studied her from their side of the street as she studied them. Hadn’t this promiscuity something reassuring about it? Faces became familiar, life was prolonged.
‘What are you looking at, Roger?’
He gave a start. Noticing this, she in her turn looked at one of the windows and smiled a smile devoid of irony. Over the grocer’s shop, to the left of the baker’s, a dressmaker lived who had just finished her housework, as she did every morning at this time, and who was calmly making up. She was in her underskirt. Her blouse, which was a crude white, decorated with tiny scallops, left her buxom shoulders bare; her muscular arms, which she held up in the air while she was arranging her bun, pushed out her bosom, and her lips, which were obviously holding her hairpins, were pursed in a fleshy pout.
‘Have you got a sweetheart yet?’
He did not reply straight away, but waited to be pressed.
‘You know, you can tell me everything. I’m not the sort to tell your mother.’
‘Especially seeing that my mother keeps offering up novenas that I may remain pure, as she calls it, until I get married. She tells everybody about it. The other day, she told that old cat Mademoiselle Rinquet who hates me and hates Father almost as much as me.’
‘You don’t want her novena to be effective?’
He bent his head and blushed, a prey to complicated feelings. After all, she was his aunt; he derived more pleasure from talking to her about these things than to a schoolmate, for instance. She was a woman. And he trusted her. He was convinced that she would keep his secret.
‘You don’t reply?’
He just gave a mysterious smile.
‘Does that mean it’s already happened? Tell me, Roger.’
He fluttered his eyelids by way of an affirmative.
‘A long time ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘Last year?’
‘No.’
‘Further back than that?’
‘Three years ago, at Embourg.’
‘Oh, come now, Roger, you were only twelve and a half! It isn’t possible.’
‘I swear I’m telling the truth.’
‘Dear God! And your mother keeps on praying for you …’
He was already sorry he had spoken, for Cécile had turned thoughtful. When she mentioned Élise you had the impression that she pitied her.
‘And now?’
‘It depends.’
He could not tell her the truth. The truth on this subject was something he could not admit to anybody, even to those who did the same.
‘I hope at least that you take precautions, Roger?’
‘Yes, of course, Aunt.’
That was not true. He had not taken any precautions. He did not even know exactly what was meant by taking precautions. After the Sunday at the Mondain cinema, a longing had haunted him like an obsession, and if, on his way home from school, he had continued to sneak along the back-streets, it had not been in order to save time; on the contrary, he went a long way out of his way so as to pass, his heart beating wildly, along the narrow streets where, behind the curtains of each house, you could see a woman in a chemise knitting or crocheting.
He knew that these women, who took him for a man in the darkness, tapped on the window-pane as he went by, giving him a smile or making an obscene gesture. But he was incapable of turning round to look at them, and the stench of these streets clung to his body, accompanying him for a long time as he fled home without succeeding in calming his fever.
One evening he had found a less repulsive street near the Passerelle, a street which looked almost as respectable as the Rue de la Loi or the Rue Pasteur, with clean, well-built houses, and women who had struck him as more middle class, even though they lay in wait like the others behind their lace curtains.
He had not dared to ask anybody how much he would have to pay. One evening when he had a couple of marks in his pocket, he had stumbled into one of the houses, his legs aching from having gone round the block at least a dozen times. He could hear the nearby Meuse flowing along between its stone embankments, and the planks of the Passerelle echoing with the sound of footsteps.
A hand had locked the door behind him, and a thick curtain had been drawn across the transparent curtain.
‘Do you want something to drink?’
He had shaken his head. Making a tremendous effort, with his ears buzzing so loudly that he had been unable to recognize his own voice, he had managed to say:
‘I’ve only got two marks. Is that enough?’
‘Show me.’
She had slipped the two marks into her black stocking, pushed open a door, and poured some water into a china bowl, next to a double bed covered with a counterpane like those in the lodgers’ bedrooms, exactly the same in fact as the one that used to be in Monsieur Saft’s room.
‘Come and wash. What’s the matter? Come along.’
Then she had looked at him and understood.
‘Oh, so that’s it …’
She had thought that it was the first time and she had not been far wrong.
‘Don’t be frightened. Come along.’
He had left the house five minutes later and rushed towards the embankment, where he had started to stride along, trying to curb his longing to run as fast as he could. All the same, he meant to go back there. Already, two or three times since then, he had gone roaming along the street and the woman had beckoned to him; perhaps she had even recognized him; but he had never happened to have two marks in his pocket again, and
one evening—a Monday, he remembered it had been—his desire had been so keen that he had nearly gone in, held out his watch and stammered:
‘I haven’t any money on me, but I’ll leave you my watch.’
He had not dared.
‘Boys are funny,’ murmured Cécile, who was watching him closely.
And she confessed, as to a grown-up, as if Roger had not been her nephew:
‘I’ve never had any pleasure out of it. And yet I’ve had three children. Poor Élise! When I think about her novenas … Incidentally, I nearly forgot to pay you for my book. Hand me my purse from the table, will you?’
She gave him the twenty centimes lending fee. Then she held out a fifty-centime piece.
‘Here, buy yourself some tobacco with this.’
‘No, Aunt, no thank you.’
‘Come along, take it! I know that tobacco is dear. Papa scarcely dares to smoke his pipe and he keeps on letting it go out to make it last longer.’
He regretfully accepted, so as not to hurt her, for he did not like money matters to come between himself and Cécile.
‘What’s the sweetheart you’ve got now like? Because I suppose you’ve got another one? But tell me, how do you get to know them? You meet them in the street?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you speak to them, just like that, straight out?’
Although he had never dared to do that, he said yes.
‘And they listen to you? That’s what I’ve never been able to understand. How girls can let a man accost them when they don’t know him from Adam …’
She had said ‘a man’ and he felt it incumbent on him to declare:
‘They even like it.’
‘And they let you …?’
‘Not all of them. Most of them.’
‘The same day?’
‘It all depends.’
‘When I think that I’ve lived all this time without knowing anything about all this! Your mother too, I bet, if I know her. Take care all the same, Roger.’
‘Yes, Aunt.’
‘You know what I mean?’
She was referring to the diseases you risked catching.
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