by Michel Déon
Faced with the difficulty of finding anything else, Jean eventually said yes. He earned double what La Garenne had once begrudged him. And in any case a catastrophe had befallen the gallery on Place du Tertre, to which Blanche had beseeched him in vain to return. One afternoon two inspectors had arrived and introduced themselves, asking politely, but brooking no refusal, for the director to open his flies and show them his member. Terrorised and struck dumb, La Garenne had complied. Faced with this graceless object, the inspectors had nodded and requested La Garenne to follow them. Blanche had been nonplussed. She had run to Palfy, and from him had an explanation. Since June they had been taking a census of Jews, and anonymous letters had been flooding in to the Préfecture and the Kommandantur. Apparently the former Léonard Twenty-Sous was not called La Garenne but something much less sonorous, despite its being one of the most celebrated tribes of Israel, to which the Virgin Mary had belonged. Several telephone calls established that Louis-Edmond was being held pending confirmation of his identity. Once he was released, he would no longer have the right to run a business. Blanche still could not understand what had aroused the suspicion of the inspectors. Palfy tactfully explained to her the mysteries of circumcision. Blanche, who had never known another organ besides La Garenne’s, discovered how far the parents of an otherwise worldly girl might neglect her education, in the name of outdated modesty. She burst into sobs.
‘He’s broken my heart! And he claimed to be the descendant of a crusader! Why did he lie to me? I would have put up with everything from him. He’s a man of quality.’
Palfy, uncomfortable at this paean of lyricism, took her out to lunch, where she drank more than she was used to, which had the unexpected merit of bringing her back to her senses.
‘With the gallery closed and Louis-Edmond in prison, I’ll be on the street.’
‘No, I think I may have just the job for you.’
‘I don’t know how to do anything. Without him, I’m nothing.’
‘The important thing, as I repeat endlessly to Jean, is not to know how to do anything. You’re the ideal person.’
So Blanche became Madeleine’s companion, warmly recommended by Palfy and Rudolf von Rocroy – but before finding her in that role, let us not forget in passing Mercedes del Loreto. It was three days after Louis-Edmond’s arrest that Jean remembered the investigation carried out by Marceline Michette. Louis-Edmond had not even been allowed to go to Rue de la Gaîté to collect a toothbrush, which in any case he did not possess. What had happened to the poor bedridden old lady, whose sea-lion shrieks regularly shook the building? He dashed to Montparnasse with Marceline. Madame Berthe, the dresser, was propping up the bar of the café-tabac where the waiter was pouring her third glass of lunchtime medium-dry Anjou. Madame Michette took matters in hand, displaying a sudden authority that months of Palfy’s petty ultra-secret missions had been stifling.
‘Madame Berthe? Do you recognise me?’
‘Ah, the journalist. How are you? You’ll have a glass with me, won’t you? Is this your son?’
‘No, a friend.’
Madame Berthe winked.
‘Perhaps you’re in the press too? Photographer?’
‘No,’ Jean said. ‘In films …’
‘Films! Pouah!’
‘We’d like to know if there’s any news of Mercedes del Loreto.’
‘It’s funny you should mention that: this morning I was just saying to myself that it’s been a good two days since I last heard the old lady’s “Arrh, arrh… oowowoowow …”’
*
The police station gave them the address of a locksmith, and a policeman went with them to the top floor of the building.
Sitting up in bed, supported by cushions on either side and resting with a pillow behind her head, her hands clasped on the sheet, her stiff hair dyed with henna and held in place at her temples by a pink ribbon, and her eyes, a viscid blue, wide open, she was waiting for them. One might have thought that her relaxed lower jaw, laying bare a few last teeth, the yellow colour of old ivory, that poked up out of shrunken, rotten gums, was that way because she was about to complain bitterly, with sea-lion cries, of their neglect. But she was still. The wrinkles on her face covered thickly with foundation, her bituminous eyelids, the crazed, bright-red lipstick, were frozen for ever. The room’s sour-sweet stench – a nauseating mixture of things left to rot, face creams and dead flesh – left no doubt. Mercedes had risen to the occasion of death with her sense of theatre undiminished. Her pot of foundation sat open on her bedside table, and on the floor – it must have slipped from her hands after a final inspection – lay a cheval glass, on which was written in greasepaint, ‘Down with the Jews!’ Yes, unintentionally she was berating her unknown visitors, the chance witnesses of her death – Marceline Michette, Madame Berthe, Jean Arnaud, an anonymous locksmith and a policeman (no. 2857) – for the mirror’s message was meant for the person she had waited for in vain, her whipping boy, the deplorable Louis-Edmond upon whom she had heaped infamy since the day he was born. At that moment Jean felt sorry for him, however odious and ignoble he might be. What an ordeal his life must have been, caring for this mother he had loved, admired, cosseted, washed and spoon-fed, whose chamber pot he had guiltily tiptoed out to empty daily in the WC on the landing, and whose reward, as the ineluctable proof of her brief affair with a banker, had been to be showered with insults. The banker must have acknowledged the child, then abandoned it after one tantrum too many from Señora del Loreto. The story did not seem hard to reconstruct, and one could picture the hell of these three rooms, with Mercedes hating Louis-Edmond for being the symbol of an ultimately failed career. What horror, and what a stench! The smell was unbearable, yet no one dared move, as if, pinned down by embarrassment, not one of the five witnesses could take another step. Agent no. 2857, who had already come across plenty of horrors and whose strong spirit was ready to confront more in this long, dark period, was the first to come back down to earth. He opened an attic window that no one had touched for centuries. The catch came away in his hand and a rod clattered down, freeing two panes thick with grime that smashed on the parquet floor. For the first time fresh air blew in with the sounds of Rue de la Gaîté: a newsboy selling Paris-Soir, a horse neighing. Madame Berthe stifled a theatrical sob.
‘Madame del Loreto! Madame del Loreto!’
The policeman felt he should pick up the broken glass but rapidly gave up. Potato peelings, cigarette butts and newspaper cuttings were scattered thickly over the floor. Instead he moved to the bed to touch the scraggy arm that emerged from a lace nightdress that was grey with dirt.
‘She’s cold!’ He nodded. ‘And stiff!’
A doctor was summoned, who confirmed the death and signed the death certificate.
‘It’ll be difficult to straighten her out,’ he said. ‘But that’s the undertaker’s problem.’
Madame Berthe took things in hand.
‘I’m a friend. Her son has been arrested.’
The policeman feigned mild interest.
‘Has he committed a crime?’
‘No. They say he’s a Jew.’
‘Everything’s possible.’
She began searching through the three rooms. A wooden leg fell out of a tottering wardrobe.
‘Just like Sarah Bernhardt!’ Madame Berthe exclaimed. The theatre was in her blood.
A chest of drawers released a cascade of lace underwear.
‘That’s worth something!’ Madame Michette said, acquainted with both the tastes of men and the lace of Le Puy.
The second room was a sort of kitchen with a stone sink overflowing with dirty plates and empty tins. The third was clearly Louis-Edmond’s, if you could call a cupboard lit by a lead skylight a room. The dim light fell on a child’s iron bedstead where he could only have slept curled up. Straw poked out of the torn mattress. La Garenne slept under a horse blanket that was full of holes. On a table there was a spare wig and some sketchbooks filled with pitiful caricatures, rel
ics of the impecunious years of Léonard Twenty-Sous around La Coupole and the other cafés of Montparnasse. His cape hung on a hanger, and in a cardboard suitcase open on the floor there lay black ascots, celluloid collars and long johns of grey jersey.
At the sight Jean felt as if he was intruding so odiously into a man’s privacy that he turned and left, taking Marceline Michette with him.
‘We’ll have seen a few things by the time this war’s over!’ she said. ‘People sitting dead in their beds! Mercedes del Loreto! What a woman she must have been! And him? What a chap! Devoted and all … And that old bag of bones, mustering the energy to insult him one last time before she snuffed it. There’s no thanks for the charitable!’
The rest of the story belongs to the undertaker and to Louis-Edmond, who was released for a reason as obscure as the one that had got him arrested. The only people present at the funeral were him, Jean, Madame Berthe, Marceline and, in the background and so discreet his shyness was almost touching, an old gentleman in a hound’s-tooth suit and white spats, his grey bowler hat at an angle, and in his buttonhole a red carnation that he threw on top of the coffin. Who was he? No one ever knew. He disappeared as he had come, between the graves of Montparnasse Cemetery, on a muggy morning at the end of August beneath a sky heavy with clouds that burst that afternoon, drenching Paris. Only Madame Berthe cried, out of theatrical habit, while Louis-Edmond remained dry-eyed, his face frozen, pasty from the days he had spent in custody, in the shadow of the Dépôt.19 On the same day the Wehrmacht entered Dnepropetrovsk.
Anna Petrovna crammed a sugar cube into her mouth, drank her cup of tea and declared, ‘The Germans will never take St Petersburg. The Russian people will force them back into the sea.’
Jean looked at her uneasily. He had said nothing which could have provoked this declaration of faith. In fact he had said barely a word after having arrived without warning at Quai Saint-Michel and found himself face to face with Claude’s mother. Cyrille had thrown his arms around Jean’s neck.
‘Why don’t you come every night any more? I’ll tell you a secret when we’re on our own, just us.’
Anna Petrovna had pretended not to hear, although her pale-blue eyes were scrutinising Jean with enough intensity to make him feel genuinely embarrassed. Claude had done her best to dispel the awkwardness.
‘Maman has brought us some real tea. Do you want a cup?’
‘Yes, but I shouldn’t, it’s so precious.’
Claude had poured him a cup and Anna Petrovna had launched her attack, as if what Jean had said somehow cast doubt upon the fighting qualities of her Russian compatriots.
‘Muzhik or tovarishch, it’s one and the same. When he’s roused he’ll defeat the world.’
Thinking of Palfy’s theories, Jean almost smiled. Palfy foresaw a similar outcome, for more Gallic reasons. Deep down Anna Petrovna was suffering at the thought of the Russians’ defeat, Russians she had so hated when they had driven her from her country.
‘They’ll allow them to reach Moscow, and Moscow will burn. They’ll only have ashes left. Stalin doesn’t care. He’s Georgian. To him the Muscovites are yellows.’
‘What’s yellows?’ Cyrille asked.
Anna Petrovna shrugged. She spoke with a strong Russian accent, and even though Claude herself had no accent, their intonations were similar. Like many people at this time she had grown thinner and her face, a year ago still attractive, full and smooth, had sagged suddenly. New lines dragged at the corners of her mouth and eyes, destroying the remains of a beauty that had certainly been great, greater than Claude’s with her regular features, her calm and reflective face. Anna Petrovna stood up.
‘I must go. Good evening, Monsieur.’
Jean hoped that she had guessed everything and loathed him, not because of the way he looked, but because he was upsetting Claude’s life. Cyrille hardly paid attention to his grandmother’s departure and ran to fetch a building set Jean had brought him. Anna Petrovna swung a sealskin coat across her shoulders that looked tired, very tired despite suiting her very well. She drew Claude out onto the landing and Cyrille whispered, ‘Jean, Maman cried when you didn’t come three days in a row.’
‘You mustn’t let her cry. You have to make her laugh.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was working.’
The lie instantly weighed on him. You didn’t lie to a child. Claude came back.
‘We missed you,’ she said.
‘Spare me your reproaches.’
‘I have no right to reproach you.’
‘No. None at all.’
‘Are you talking or playing?’ Cyrille asked.
‘I’m playing.’
Claude crossed the room.
‘Are you eating with us?’ she asked. ‘I’m afraid it won’t be much of a dinner.’
‘I’m taking you both out to dinner.’
‘Everything’s so stale in restaurants these days. Let’s stay here.’
‘No, I insist.’
Cyrille clapped his hands.
‘Let’s go to the restaurant, I really want to!’
‘You see!’ Jean said.
Claude stood in front of him. He was tempted to jump up, take her in his arms and wipe everything out in an embrace.
‘Are you playing then?’ Cyrille repeated in an exasperated voice.
They played, then had dinner in an oriental restaurant at La Huchette. Cyrille was asleep in Jean’s arms by the time they climbed the stairs at Quai Saint-Michel and Claude put him straight to bed. Jean tidied the building set away.
‘You’re too nice to him!’ she said. ‘By the time you’ve finished spoiling him there’ll be nothing left for me to do.’
He stopped and took her hands.
‘If we have to talk as if we don’t mean anything to each other, it’s better we never see each other again.’
‘Never?’
‘At least let me cure myself.’
‘Cure’s not the word you’re looking for. Actually it’s a ridiculous word, all right for an injury or for a bout of flu, but not for love. Love’s not a sickness, love’s a very healthy thing, despite what you say in its name or the qualities you give it. It’s our own anaemia that makes it dangerous: I mean that when we feel defenceless or depressed and lonely, we’re more vulnerable. Truly, cure is not a word for a man of twenty-one …’
‘Twenty-two!’
She smiled, losing her seriousness.
‘I do beg your pardon … yes, you’re very young, you’ve got luck on your side, and Paris is a city where you can happily lose yourself. Where I can change my address tonight and you won’t ever find me again.’
‘I’ll post Madame Michette’s girls at every crossroads. They’ll track you down.’
‘At Clermont-Ferrand, perhaps, not here …’
He took her in his arms and kissed her without letting her finish. Was that Nelly’s fault? Was it she who had got him used to such an easy manner so quickly? He was being more direct than he had ever been. Claude gave a little moan and slipped to the floor.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no. You promised me.’
‘I didn’t promise anything.’
‘You know that I promised.’
‘Who to?’
She shook her head and he took it between his hands to draw towards him her open, confused, almost innocent face … almost, because if Nelly’s innocence was powerful in its attraction, he found Claude’s paralysing.
‘You’re my only friend,’ she murmured.
He crouched next to her and they sank to the carpet together, hand in hand, mute, so filled by a desire that was rising in both of them in waves that they found themselves in each other’s arms, their faces damp with tears.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too. I’d like you so much to take me far away from here, with Cyrille, the way you did to Saint-Tropez.’
‘Let’s go back there.’
‘No. Marie-Dévote and Toinette don’
t like me.’
‘You’re talking nonsense.’
‘It’s something men don’t see. They think I make you unhappy.’
‘It’s true.’
Claude sighed.
‘It’s true and it’s false. They want you for themselves.’
‘I’ve never been as happy as I was there. You used to walk round our bedroom with no clothes on.’
‘I shouldn’t have.’
‘When we came back I was unkind. I lost interest for a while. I was annoyed.’
‘I know …’
Jean would have liked to admit everything, but could not find the words. If he had been able to, perhaps he could have freed himself from Nelly that evening. Concealed, she continued to exist, and her power was great. Named, she would have been diminished, reduced to what she was: someone who had seduced a still weak young man who does not know how to say no. But the happiness that Claude represented had returned, with her anxiety, her demands, her moments of euphoria and the immense burning unhappiness he felt at not possessing this beautiful, luscious body that had no secrets for him. He spent the night at Quai Saint-Michel and returned to Rue de Presbourg at dawn. Palfy was furious.
‘Your bitch of a girlfriend phoned ten times in the night to check whether you’d come home. Call her.’
Jean did not have to dial the number. Nelly rang for the eleventh time.
‘Is that you, Jules-who? Where were you, you pig? I was worried sick. I phoned all the hospitals to find out if you’d been run over. I even called the Gestapo. They weren’t very nice … Where were you?’
‘With some friends.’
‘Listen, Jules-who … You’re a sweet boy and I like you a lot, but you’re not allowed not to be there when I need you …’
‘And when you don’t need me?’
‘You can do what you like. Come now.’
‘I can’t, I have meetings at the office.’
‘Then when you’ve finished, come and pick me up at the studio. Tonight you’re mine. Big kiss.’
