Death on the Installment Plan (10 page)

Then she gave it to him straight … a handkerchief had been stolen … and the circumstances …

“What’s that?” He couldn’t take it in. “You didn’t say anything? You let them get away with it? The fruits of our toil!” He was in such a rage that he cracked at the seams. His jacket burst. “It’s abominable!” he roared. In spite of the uproar my mother kept yelping some kind of excuses … He had stopped listening. He seized his knife and brought it down in the middle of his plate … it split, the noodle juice ran all over the place. “No, no! I can’t stand it.” He rushed around, waving his arms. He took hold of the little sideboard, the Henri III. He shook it like a plum tree. There was an avalanche of dishes.

Madame Méhon, the corsetmaker who had the shop across from us, came to the window to enjoy the fun. She was an indefatigable enemy, she had detested us from the start. The Pérouquières, who had a bookstore two shops further down, make no bones about opening their window. Why should they stand on ceremony? They prop their elbows on the windowsill … My mother’s going to catch it, that’s a safe bet. As far as I’m concerned, I have no preferences. For yelling and boneheadedness, there’s nothing to choose between them … She doesn’t hit so hard, but more often. Which of the two I’d rather somebody killed? Well, all in all, my father, I guess.

They don’t want me to see. “Get up to your room, you little pig … Go to bed! Say your prayers …”

He bellows, he rushes, he explodes, he bombards the kitchen. There’s nothing left on the nails … Pots, pans, dishes, crash, bang, everything goes … My mother on her knees implores heaven for mercy … He overturns the table with one big kick … It lands on top of her …

“Run, Ferdinand,” she still has time to shout. I run, passing through an avalanche of glass and debris … He charges into the piano that a customer had left us as security … he’s beside himself. He bashes his heel into it, the keyboard clangs … Then it’s my mother’s turn, now she’s getting hers … From my room I can hear her howling …

“Auguste! Auguste! Stop!” And then short stifled gasps …

I come part of the way down to look … He’s dragging her along the banister. She hangs on. She clutches his neck. That’s what saves her. It’s he who pulls loose … He pushes her over. She somersaults … She bounces down the stairs … I can hear the dull thuds … At the bottom she picks herself up … Then he takes a powder … He leaves through the shop … He goes out in the street. She struggles to her feet … She goes back up to the kitchen. She has blood in her hair. She washes at the sink … She’s sobbing … She gags … She sweeps up the breakage … He comes home very late on these occasions … Everything is very quiet again.

Grandma realized that I needed a little fun, that it wasn’t good for me to be in the shop all the time. It made me sick to my stomach to listen to my lunatic father shouting his inanities. She bought a little dog for me to play with while waiting for the customers. I wanted to treat him like my father treated me. When we were alone, I’d give him wicked kicks. He’d slink away to whimper under the furniture. He’d lie down to beg pardon. He acted exactly like me.

It didn’t give me any pleasure to beat him, I’d much rather have kissed him. In the end I’d fondle him and he’d get a hard-on. He went everywhere with us, even to the movies, to the Thursday matinee at the Robert Houdin.
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Grandma treated me to that too. We’d sit through all three shows. It was the same price, all the seats were one franc, one hundred percent silent, without words, without music, without titles, just the purring of the machine. People will come back to that, you get sick of everything except sleeping and daydreaming.
The Trip to the Moon
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will be back again … I still know it by heart.

Sometimes in the summer there were only the two of us, Caroline and myself, in the big hall up one flight of stairs. In the end the usher would motion us to leave. I’d have to wake up Grandma and the dog. Then we’d hurry through the crowd and the bustle of the Boulevards. We were always late in getting home. We’d come in panting.

“Did you like it?” Caroline would ask me. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like personal questions. “The child is secretive …” That’s what the neighbors said.

On the way home she’d stop at the corner of our Passage and buy me a copy of
Illustrated Adventure Stories
from the newspaper woman with the charcoal footwarmer. She’d hide it for me in her panties, under her three thick petticoats. My father didn’t like me to read such hogwash. He claimed it corrupted you, that it didn’t prepare you for life, that I’d do better to learn the alphabet out of something serious.

I was going on seven, I’d soon be going to school, I shouldn’t be given any wrong ideas … the other shopkeepers’ children would also be going to school soon. The time for tomfoolery was past. On our way home from deliveries he’d make me little sermons about the seriousness of existence.

Whacks alone won’t do it.

Foreseeing that I’d be a thief, my father blared like a trombone. One afternoon Tom and I had emptied the sugar bowl. It was never forgotten. But that wasn’t my only fault. In addition my behind was always dirty, I didn’t wipe myself, I didn’t have time, that was my justification, we were always in too much of a hurry … I never wiped myself properly, I always had a sock coming to me … and hurried to avoid it … I left the can door open so as to hear them coming … I shat like a bird between two storms …

I bounded upstairs and they couldn’t find me … I’d go around for weeks with shit on my ass. I was conscious of the smell, I’d be careful not to get too close to people.

“He’s as filthy as thirty-six pigs! He has no self-respect! He’ll never make a living. Every boss in the world will fire him! …” He saw a shitty future in store for me.

“He stinks! … We’ll always have him on our hands …”

My father looked far ahead and all he saw was gloom. He put it in Latin for emphasis:  ”
Sana … corpore sano.
” My mother didn’t know what to say.

A little further down the Passage there was a family of bookbinders. Their children never went out.

The mother was a baroness. De Caravals was her name. She didn’t want her children to learn bad language at any cost.

They played together all year long behind the window-panes, putting their noses in each other’s mouths and both hands at the same time. Their complexions were like celery.

Once a year Madame de Caravals took a vacation all by herself. She’d go visiting her cousins in Périgord. She told everybody how her cousins came to meet her at the station in their “break” drawn by four prize-winning horses. They would drive together through endless estates … The peasants would troop out to kneel on the castle drive as they passed … that was the kind of stuff she dished out.

One year she took the two kids with her. She came back alone in the wintertime, much later than usual. She had on deep mourning. You couldn’t see her face behind all the veils. She offered no explanation. She went straight up to bed. She never spoke to anybody after that.

The change had been too much for those children who never went out. The fresh air had killed them … That disaster gave everyone pause. From the rue Thérèse to the Place Gaillon all you heard about was oxygen … for more than a month.

As for us, we often had the chance to go to the country. Uncle Édouard, my mother’s brother, was only too delighted when he could do something for us. He’d suggest excursions. My father never accepted. He always found some pretext for getting out of them. He didn’t want to be beholden to anybody, that was his motto.

Uncle Édouard was up-to-date, he had a way with machinery. He was mighty clever with his hands. He wasn’t extravagant, he wasn’t the kind to involve us in a spending spree, but even so the slightest outing is bound to be rather costly … “A hundred francs,” my mother would say, “don’t last long when you go out.”

Nevertheless the sad story of the Caravals had got the whole Passage so upset that something had to be done. It was suddenly discovered that everybody looked “peaked.” Advice was passed from shop to shop. No one could think of anything but microbes and the perils of infection. The kids came in for a wave of parental solicitude. They were made to take whole jugfuls, whole barrelfuls of cod-liver oil, reinforced, in double doses. Frankly, it didn’t do much good … it made them belch. It made them greener than ever; they could hardly stand up to begin with, now the oil killed their appetite.

I have to admit that the Passage was an unbelievable pesthole. It was made to kill you off, slowly but surely, what with the little mongrels’ urine, the shit, the sputum, the leaky gas pipes. The stink was worse than the inside of a prison. Down under the glass roof the sun is so dim you can eclipse it with a candle. Everybody began to gasp for breath. The Passage took cognizance of its asphyxiating stench … We talked of nothing but the country, hills and valleys, the wonders of nature …

Édouard offered once more to take us out one Sunday, all the way to Fontainebleau. Papa finally gave in. He got our clothes ready and the provisions.

Édouard’s first three-wheeler was a one-cylinder job, as massive as a field howitzer, with half a coachman’s seat in front.

We got up that Sunday much earlier than usual. My ass was given a thorough wiping. We waited a whole hour at the meeting place on the rue Gaillon before the contraption got there. Our departure was something. It had taken at least six men to push the thing from the Pont Bineau. The tanks were filled. The carburetor spewed in all directions, the steering wheel quaked … There was a series of terrible explosions. They tried it with the crank, they tried it with a strap … They harnessed themselves to it by three and sixes … Finally a tremendous explosion … the engine began to turn. Twice fire broke out … and was quickly extinguished. My uncle said: “Pile in, ladies and gentlemen, I think she’s warm now. Now we can get started …” It took nerve to stay put. The crowd pressed in on us. Caroline, my mother, and I wedged ourselves in. We were tied so tightly to the seat, so squeezed in among the clothes and gear that only my tongue protruded. But I came in for a good little whack before we moved off, just to keep me from getting any ideas.

The three-wheeler bucked and settled back … It gave two, three big jolts … A terrible crashing and belching were heard … The crowd shrank back in terror … They thought we were goners … But the monster was climbing the rue Reaumur in frantic fits and starts … My father had rented a bike … Since he couldn’t pedal up the hill, he pushed us from behind … The slightest stop would have been the end … he had to push with all his might … At the Square du Temple we stopped a while. We started off again with a crash. In full flight my uncle poured grease, straight out of the bottle, into the connecting rods, the chain, and the whole works. It always had to be swimming in grease, like the engine of an ocean liner. There’s trouble in the front seat. My mother has a bellyache. Jf she takes time out, if we stop, the engine is perfectly capable of conking out … if it stalls, our goose is cooked … My mother bears up heroically. My uncle, perched on his infernal machine, looking like a shaggy deep-sea diver surrounded by a thousand tongues of flame, adjures us over the handlebars to hold tight … My father is tagging after us. He pedals to the rescue. He picks up the parts as they fall off, pieces of levers and pedals, nuts, cotter pins—and some bigger things. We hear him cursing and swearing louder than the clatter of the machine.

The cobblestones were the cause of our disaster … At Clignancourt they snapped all three chains … At the Vanves tollgate they demolished the front springs … We lost all our lamps and the big horn shaped like a dragon’s maw in the rills where the road was being repaired at La Villette … Near Picpus and on the highway we lost so much stuff that my father missed some of it …

I could hear him cursing behind us: that it was the end of the world and night would catch us on the road.

Tom ambled along ahead of our expedition, we took our bearings by his asshole. He had time to piss wherever he pleased. Uncle Édouard was more than clever, he had real genius for repairs of all sorts. Toward the end of our outings he had everything in his hands, his fingers were doing all the work, between jolts he juggled with splinters and wrist pins, he played the leaks and pistons like a trumpet. His acrobatics were marvelous to watch. But at a certain moment everything came tumbling out on the road all the same … We’d go into a drift, the steering gear would founder, we’d run plunk into the ditch. Crashing, gushing, snorting, the thing would run us all into the mud.

My father came up bellowing … The tin can let out one last BWAAH … And that was all. The bastard passed out on us.

We stank up the countryside with crankcase oil. We disentangled ourselves from the catafalque … and then we pushed the whole thing back to Asnières. That’s where the garage was. My father was magnificent in action, his calves bulged in his ribbed woolen stockings … The ladies along the road couldn’t take their eyes off him. My mama was proud of him … The engine had to be cooled off, we had a small collapsible canvas bucket for the purpose. We’d take water from fountains. Our three-wheeler looked like a factory mounted on a pushcart. There were so many hooks and pointed gadgets sticking out on all sides that we ripped our clothes to tatters pushing …