‘Yes, I know.’
‘Are you going already?’
‘I promised Mother I’d go and get the bread at the food-centre.’
‘Do you still have to queue as long as you used to? I don’t know what things are like outside any more.’
‘You have to wait about an hour, sometimes more. I always take a book with me. Good-bye, Aunt. See you tomorrow. If you don’t like your novel, I’ll go and get you another one.’
He had a vague feeling that this was a morning which mattered, but as yet he did not know why. He paid greater attention to details, as if he had a presentiment that later on he would need to remember them.
The armchair Cécile was sitting in was Old Papa’s armchair which had been brought over from the Mamelins’. The wallpaper was a faded blue. In the middle of each curtain, a stork had been crocheted. The old floorboards had been given a coat of reddish paint which had then been polished and on which three little grey rugs had been placed. The baker on the other side of the street was standing on his doorstep, covered with flour, his hands on his hips and sunshine in his hair; and Roger waited for him to go back into his shop, for he had not forgotten the chocolates he wanted to take on the way out and he was afraid of being seen from across the street.
The shop bell had not rung for a long time, so there was a good chance that he would not meet anybody downstairs. It was the time when Marcel was usually busy in the kitchen.
‘Right. See you tomorrow, Aunt.’
‘See you tomorrow, Roger. Don’t come too late. If you only knew how bored I get, all alone! That reminds me, on your way out can you tell Thérèse to bring up my broth? And remind her, if she leaves the children alone in the kitchen, to make sure there’s nothing on the stove for them to knock over. I’m always so afraid of that!’
There. The door was shut. He went downstairs, making as little noise as possible, and little by little the whole shop became visible. The baker across the street had presumably gone back to his bakehouse, the passers-by took no notice of Roger, and he was just about to make for the trellis protecting the expensive chocolates when his eyes fell on the half-open till stuffed with banknotes.
It was too short a time since he had conjured up the picture of a certain window, of a hand drawing aside a curtain, of a woman waiting; this picture leapt to his mind, a wave of heat swept over him, he took a few quick steps, leant across the counter, and plunged into the banknotes a hand which he promptly thrust deep into his pocket.
Red-faced, his eyes shining, he made his way towards the kitchen and suddenly gave a start, for Pipi was there, silent and motionless. He stood there for a moment trying to recover his composure, not realizing at first that she had her back towards him and that, moistening a pencil with her saliva, she was too absorbed in searching for something to say in her letter to have noticed anything.
She was scarcely aware of his presence and looked at him un-seeingly, murmuring in a far-away voice:
‘Are you going?’
‘I have to go and get our bread at the food-centre.’
Why did he linger in the kitchen where there was nothing for him to do?
‘I’m going. Yes, it’s time for me to go.’
‘Your aunt doesn’t need anything?’
‘No. I mean yes. I’ve a message for Thérèse.’
He finally managed to tear himself away and went over to the Mamelin side, where the water was singing in the kettle and the children were crawling about on the floor. If Cécile could have seen them!
‘Aunt Cécile wants her broth taken up.’
He went off with the memory of the multicoloured patches which the sun scattered everywhere after passing through the fake stained glass, and of the figure of his grandfather whom he could see from the courtyard, bending over the felt blocks in the back-shop. He had not the heart to go to kiss him. Running along, he swerved suddenly to avoid a tram which he had not heard approaching, and bumped into Marcel Wasselin, who was coming out of the café on the corner, wiping his moustache. Without thinking, he said:
‘I’m late.’
He had the impression that his uncle had turned round to look at him, but he ran on, feeling quite giddy, and it was only after crossing the Pont d’Amercoeur, a hundred yards from the school where the bread ration was distributed, that he finally came to a stop, his legs trembling. Then he took out of his pocket the bank-notes which he had been clutching all the way from the Gruyelle-Marquants’ shop, and which had turned soggy with perspiration.
There were three of them, two one-mark notes as he had intended, but also a fifty-mark note which he looked at in horror, not knowing where to put it, where to hide it, and the thought of which haunted him all the time he was queuing among the housewives and trying in vain to work up an interest in Rocambole.
For a long time, that day, he went to and fro in the house as if he were searching for something which could not be found. Finally, at four o’clock, Élise went out to buy some vegetables, the inevitable Mademoiselle Rinquet remained like an evil black spider in the kitchen, while he locked himself in his room, climbed on to a chair, and removed one of the wooden balls adorning the corners of his wardrobe.
These balls were fixed on dowel-pins, and it was round one of these that Roger carefully wrapped his banknote before thrusting it into its hole.
It was all over. He gave a sigh of relief. He swore to himself that he would never touch the note again. Perhaps he would not even use the two marks which he had hidden, folded very small, at the bottom of his tobacco-pouch. Yes, he promised himself not to use them, but to give them to a poor man, for instance, although he was not yet sure that that was what he would do.
He went downstairs, put on his clogs and, without going into the kitchen where the old cat was ensconced, he went off with his hands in his pockets. He did not know where he was going. He set off in the direction of Bressoux through a humble district, passing rows of poor houses. Children were playing on the door-steps and pavements, dust-carts went by looking as if they were trying to grind the cobblestones with their iron wheels, and everything was dirty and dreary. The sun was already going down, and big white clouds were drifting slowly past which would end up by covering the sky. The grass alongside the patches of waste ground was a dull green colour; a goat was browsing on it, tied to a fence, and breaking off now and then to bleat; a woman shouted for her son; there were sheds, stables, and workshops where there was hammering going on; hens and cocks were pecking away in the poultry-yards; it was a district half-way between town and country. Roger walked slowly along with his hands in his pockets, thinking that he would go to attend the evening service in the crypt at Le Bouhay, where some monks had built a grotto in imitation of Lourdes.
He pressed down the ashes in his pipe with one finger, spat as the workers did, dragged his clogs along like them, and beneath a sky which was growing ever paler, he looked disgustedly at the cheerless world which surrounded him and which he felt was in his own image.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE was only half a minute left before the bell, ringing for half past nine, would give the signal for the change of classes. The bricks, that morning, in the huge yard, were a soft pink in the sunshine; the usher, with one arm raised, was already swinging the chain which he was going to pull jerkily. Roger saw him and shut his German grammar so sharply, without meaning to do so, that it made a noise like a clapper in the classroom.
Without a moment’s hesitation, as if he had been waiting for this opportunity for a long time, the German master broke off the sentence he had begun to say:
‘Monsieur Mamelin, you will write out twice for me the list of separable and inseparable verbs.’
The other boys turned round to look at Roger, who smiled in a ray of sunshine. Like that everybody saw his new suit, and Neef-the-peasant tried to express his admiration with some big, clumsy gestures which could have cost him dear.
‘What do you say to that, Monsieur Mamelin?’
‘I don’t
say anything, sir.’
‘In that case, you…’
The bell rang out, setting off a familiar din in all the classrooms, doors opened, the masters went from one classroom to another. The air smelled of spring. Everybody was saturated with spring. You carried the smell of spring about with you, in you. And it was in that heady atmosphere that the German master, going on talking, as if with the impetus he had gained, picked up his books with an automaton’s gestures and furiously rolling eyes, and took down his bowler hat which—Roger was waiting for this ritual gesture—he would wipe with the back of one sleeve before putting it on.
‘… will write it out four times.’
He was not a Jesuit father. He was a layman. He was a poor man too, so poor that he felt it necessary to play the bogy-man to delude himself. Mamelin was the only one who had understood him. He had never met him out of school, but he was certain that he lived in a poky house like the one in the Rue de la Loi, and that he had a wife who complained about her back on washdays and was tormented by the fear of being left a widow without either money or a pension.
As he had a complicated name, Roger had christened him J.P.G., for those were the initials he put on his pupils’ exercises. He corrected these in red ink, except for Mamelin’s, which he did not even take the trouble to read, simply scrawling a vengeful cross over every page.
How much could the Jesuits pay him? Probably not much more than Monsieur Monnoyeur gave Désiré. He never felt at ease in the huge Rue Saint-Gilles school—that was why he had adopted such a stiff bearing—and as he walked along he must have had the impression of hearing a contemptuous murmur:
‘That’s J.P.G., a poor fool of a German master who was starving to death before the Fathers got hold of him.’
He dressed all in black, without a single touch of colour, and with a collar so high that it prevented him from turning his head. He always looked as if he had just been to a wedding or a funeral, more probably a funeral. He waxed his black moustache, turning it up in two rigid spikes, and rolled his dark, bulbous eyes ferociously in his waxlike face.
All the boys were afraid of him except Roger, who did not take him seriously, found his jerky automaton gestures amusing, and, indifferent to the lesson, smiled at his own thoughts.
Everybody thought that they hated one another, he and the master. A good pupil on the whole, and first in certain subjects, such as French composition, Roger was bottom of the class in German, so far behind the others that he no longer took the trouble to study any more. He gave the whole of his attention to J.P.G.’s doings, watching him as he would watch a beetle.
The master had noticed this and suffered, as he pushed the classroom door open, from the awareness of this curiosity which he believed to be ironic. He did not blush, because he had no blood under his skin, but he got flustered and treated his pupils to a stern glare which did not dare to linger on Mamelin.
‘It is understood as usual,’ he often said just for his benefit, ‘that those whom the lesson doesn’t interest don’t interest me either. I would merely ask them to preserve a decent attitude, that being the least I can demand from them.’
Was it possible that he felt that Roger had discovered everything, the thin cracks in his shoes which he blackened with ink, the ragged edges of his sleeves, all those shameful trifles which the boy knew so well, and also the terror with which the master was filled by those smartly dressed, well-fed youths whose parents were influential people who could have him dismissed?
They were the only two in the classroom, the master and the pupil, who belonged to the same social class and suffered from it, yet instead of feeling sorry for one another they bristled up, as if each were furious at seeing his own reflection in the other, they had taken a dislike to one another at sight, and they waged a merciless war on each other.
Who knows? Perhaps it was partly on account of J.P.G. that Roger was showing less and less interest in his studies? Bottom of the class in German, he had become familiar with that type of humiliation, the stigma of the bad pupil no longer impressed him, he had made no attempt in the last few months to master trigonometry, and he simply copied a neighbour’s homework in algebra.
What did he care about that list of verbs which he had to write out four times? He had some money in his pocket. All he needed to do, when he left school at midday, was to go into the stationer’s shop in the Rue Saint-Gilles, and a seedy little paterfamilias would do his imposition for him for five or six francs.
Father Renchon had come into the classroom in his turn, thin and gentle, red-haired, his face pitted with smallpox. His eyes, a purple-blue colour, would soon come to rest on Roger; the latter knew this and was filled with impatience; he was afraid of that first glance of the Jesuit, as J.P.G. was afraid of his, and he wished that the contact had already taken place so as to have done with it.
This first Thursday after the Easter holidays was not an ordinary day. Term had begun for everybody on the Monday, for Roger too to all appearances, but for him it had not been the real beginning of term, and he had tried to go unnoticed. The intervening days did not count, and he would have liked to remain invisible until this Thursday morning when, at long last, he had walked into the school with his head held high, trying in vain to restrain the proud quivering of his lips.
Some of the boys had pretended not to notice the transformation which had taken place in him, had looked at him on the sly, and then had buried their noses in their books; but Neef (Neef-the-peasant, of course) had made no mistake about it and, all the way through the German lesson, had endeavoured to make Mamelin understand his enthusiastic gestures.
J.P.G. had given a start too. He could not have understood anything about the miracle, for it was not just the suit which had changed. From one day to the next, Mamelin had been transfigured, had become like the others down to the smallest details of his appearance; or rather he was slightly superior to the others, with a more emphatic elegance, so that it was impossible not to notice him.
For the first time, just like the older boys, he was wearing long trousers. His suit was beige, a delicate beige; and was obviously made of soft English wool. His yellow shoes were dazzling, slender and pointed, with heels which tapped sharply on the pavement. He was wearing a thick knitted tie of red silk, and an immaculate handkerchief bearing his monogram protruded from his pocket. His hair, divided by a parting, shone with brilliantine, and anybody would have sworn—correctly, as it happened—that he had applied pink varnish to his fingernails.
Why, when the sun itself smiled on the transfigured Mamelin, had J.P.G. assumed an expression into which he had tried to infuse disgust? To take his revenge for that grimace, Roger, all the way through his lesson, had fixed a provocative gaze on the master which had dwelt insistently on the celluloid cuffs, on the worn edges of the sleeves, on the old shoes.
He waited for the riposte, knowing that it would come. He would have been disappointed if, missing the opportunity offered by the shutting of a grammar a few seconds before the ringing of the bell, J.P.G. had not finally allowed his rancour to explode.
‘Monsieur Mamelin, you will write out twice for me the list of separable and inseparable verbs.’
The very way in which he said ‘Monsieur’, pronouncing the word with heavy sarcasm, reeked of vengeance!
Father Renchon, for his part, would show no contempt, for he liked Roger. If the one had not been a Jesuit of thirty-two and the other a pupil of fifteen-and-a-half, they would probably have been friends. Yes, Father Renchon could have been the friend whom Roger had never had, whom he would probably never have. In the classroom their gazes sometimes sought each other out and stayed for a moment in suspense as if each were attempting some impossible exchange.
‘We shall now continue our study of the influence of Lamartine and Victor Hugo on the Romantic movement.’
Father Renchon was going to turn towards him, that was certain. For the literature classes were more often than not a sort of controversy between the master and
Mamelin. Lamartine and Hugo had already served as a pretext for a fierce discussion, the Father standing up for the elegance and purity of the former, Mamelin for the power and passion of the latter. The day before the lesson, each prepared the weapons he would brandish in battle.
But now Roger waited fearfully for that gaze which finally reached him across the classroom. He longed to turn away, but he could not, and he raised his head. He would have given a great deal, perhaps even his yellow shoes which he had had so much trouble obtaining, for what he feared not to happen.
It happened, almost exactly as he had foreseen it. First of all there was an amused smile, or rather a furtive merriment which appeared in the Jesuit’s pale eyes at the sight of the new Mamelin. Had the latter really plastered his hair down too flat, as his mother had maintained? Could it be seen, at that distance, that he had put a little rice-powder on his cheeks? A shadow followed the smile, and Father Renchon looked thoughtful, sad, no, rather discouraged. It was already over. Nobody except Roger had noticed, but when the Jesuit opened the book in front of him, it was as if he knew that his voice, today, would find no echo.
‘Tell us, Monsieur Chabot, what you think of the Battle of Hernani.’
It was not an insult, it was not an opinion, it was worse than that. Chabot-the-diplomat, as Roger called him, a tall aristocratic boy with delicate features and exquisite manners, was the only boy in the third year who could be compared with Mamelin in literature. He was in any case the most brilliant pupil in the class and he played that part with well-bred discretion; a shy boy, he seemed to be forever apologizing for his success which he accepted unconcernedly.
Why, when it was up to Roger to talk about Victor Hugo, and particularly about the stormy Battle of Hernani, had Father Renchon turned to his rival? Chabot, who had not been expecting this to happen, turned towards Mamelin as if in apology, and started hunting for his ideas and words.
Well, it was better that way. In any case, Roger had not prepared anything: instead of spending his Easter holidays studying the Romantics, he had read the whole series of the Rocambole adventure-stories. He did not listen to what his friend was saying. With a defiant smile on his lips, he thought ostentatiously of other things, looking out of the window, which was open for the first time that year, at a woman ironing nappies in a distant room.
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