Death on the Installment Plan (16 page)

My mother took me back to school, giving me lots of advice on the way. She was in a terrible state when we got to the rue des Jeûneurs. Everybody had warned her they wouldn’t keep me a week … But I played it safe, they didn’t throw me out. But I have to admit that I didn’t learn anything. School made me miserable, the teacher with his goatee, always bleating his problems. It gave me the creeps just to look at him. After all the fun I’d had with Popaul it made me sick to sit still for hours on end listening to a lot of tripe.

The kids tried to have a little fun in the yard, but it was pitiful, the wall in front was so high it crushed you, it killed their desire to play. They went back in to struggle for good conduct tokens … Hell!

In the yard there was only one tree with one branch and one bird. The kids got it with a slingshot. The cat spent a whole recreation period eating it. My marks were average. I was afraid of being put back. I was even commended for good behavior. We all had shitty asses. I taught them how to keep their pee in little bottles.

In the shop the jeremiads got worse and worse. My mother kept mulling over her sorrow. She thought of her mother on every possible occasion, she remembered the slightest details … If somebody came in at closing time to sell some knickknack, she’d burst into tears … “If only my mother were here,” she’d blubber, “she knew just what to buy …” Those remarks were disastrous …

We had an old friend who knew exactly how to take advantage of Mama’s melancholy … Her name was Madame Divonne, she was almost as ancient as Aunt Armide. After the war of 1870 she and her husband had made a fortune selling lambskin gloves in the Passage des Panoramas. The shop was famous and they had another one in the Passage du Saumon. At one time they had eighteen people working for them. “All day long there are customers pouring in and out,” Grandma used to say. Handling so much dough had gone to her husband’s head. One fine day he lost everything and then some in the Panama Canal. Men have no guts … instead of fighting it out, he ran off with a skirt. They’d sold everything at a loss. After that she was down and out. Madame Divonne lived on this one and that one. Her only solace was music. She had a little something left, but so little that she barely got enough to eat and not every day at that. She sponged on her friends. She had married her glove man for love. She wasn’t a tradeswoman by birth, her father had been a prefect under the Empire. She played the piano beautifully. She never took off her fingerless gloves because her hands were so delicate, and in the winter she wore thick mittens, but of openwork and decorated with pink pompons. She was always careful about her appearance.

She turned up at the shop … she hadn’t been to see us in a long time. Grandma’s death had moved her deeply. She couldn’t get over it. “So young!” she’d say at the end of every sentence. She spoke with delicacy of Caroline, of their past, their husbands, of the Passage du Saumon and the Boulevards … with fine shadings and exquisite tact … She really had nice manners, I could see that … As she reminisced, everything turned into a fragile dream. She didn’t take off her veil or her hat … on account of her complexion, she said. The real reason was her wig. We never had much on hand for dinner … We’d invite her all the same … But when she’d finished her soup, she’d take off her veil and her hat and the whole works … she’d pick up her soup plate and drink it down … That seemed the handiest way … on account of her false teeth, I guess. You could hear her wiggling them … She distrusted spoons. She was crazy about leeks but we had to cut them up for her, that was a bore. When we were through eating, she still didn’t want to go home. She’d get gay. She’d turn to the piano, a pledge one of our customers had forgotten to redeem. It was never tuned, but it worked pretty well.

Everything got on my father’s nerves and so did the old lady with her playful ways. But he softened when she struck up certain arias from
Lucia di Lammermoor
, and especially the Moonlight Aria.

She took to coming all the time. She didn’t wait to be invited … She was perfectly aware of the havoc. While we put the shop in order, she’d race upstairs, she’d settle herself on the piano stool and toss off two or three waltzes and then
Lucia
and then
Werther
. She had quite a repertory, the whole
Châlet
and Fortunio’s song. We had to go up sometime. She’d never have stopped if we hadn’t sat down to table. “Peekaboo,” she’d call out when she saw us. During dinner she’d do a good job of crying in unison with Mama. It didn’t spoil her appetite. She didn’t mind noodles. I was always aghast at the way she kept asking for more. She pulled the same game all over town, sharing memories with bereaved shopkeepers … She had vaguely known the dear departed of any number of neighborhoods. That was her way of keeping body and soul together.

She knew the history of every family in the Passages. And when there was a piano, she couldn’t be beat … At past seventy she could still sing
Faust
, but she took precautions. She stuffed herself full of gumdrops to keep from going hoarse … She sang the choruses all by herself, making a megaphone with her hands. “Glory and fame to the men of old!”… Without taking her hands off the keys, she managed to pound it out with her feet.

In the end it was so funny we couldn’t control ourselves, we’d die laughing. But once she was started, a little thing like that couldn’t faze Madame Divonne. She was a born artist. Mama felt ashamed, but she laughed too … It did her good.

For all her faults and kittenishness, my mother couldn’t do without her. She took her along wherever she went. At night, we’d take her as far as the Porte de Bicêtre. She’d walk the rest of the way, to Kremlin, not far from the Old People’s Home.

On Sunday morning she’d call for us and we’d all go to the cemetery together. Ours was Père Lachaise, 43rd Division. My father never went in. He couldn’t stand graves. He’d never go any farther than the square outside La Roquette prison. He’d read his paper and wait for us to come back.

Grandma’s vault was very well kept. Sometimes we’d empty out lilacs, sometimes it was jasmine. We always brought roses. That was the family’s only luxury. We’d change the vases, we’d polish the windows. Inside it was like a Punch and Judy show with colored statues and real lace altar cloths. My mother kept bringing new ones, that was her consolation. She was always putting the house in order.

While we were cleaning up, she sobbed the whole time … Caroline was down there, not very far away … I always thought of Asnières … The way we’d knocked ourselves out for those tenants. I could see her, so to speak … The place was spic and span, we washed it out every Sunday, but there was a funny little smell from down below … pungent, subtle, kind of sour, insinuating … once you’d caught it, you smelled it all over … in spite of the flowers … mixed in with the scent … clinging to you … It makes your head spin … it comes from the tomb … you think you must have been mistaken. And there it is again! … It was I who went down to the end of the lane to fill the pitchers for the vases … When we’d finished, I didn’t say a word … And then that little smell came back at me … We’d close the door … We’d say a prayer … And we’d start down the hill to Paris …

Madame Divonne never stopped chattering the whole way … Getting up so early, working on the flowers, and all that crying whetted her appetite … Besides there was her diabetes … In any case she was hungry … The moment we left the cemetery, she wanted to have a snack. She couldn’t stop talking about it, it got to be an obsession with her. ‘“You know what I feel like, Clémence? Not meaning to be greedy … A little slice of galantine on a nice fresh roll … How does it strike you?”

My mother didn’t answer. She was embarrassed. I felt like throwing up on the spot … I couldn’t think of anything else but vomiting … I thought of the galantine … of what Caroline must be looking like now down there … of all the worms … the big ones … the fat ones with feet … gnawing, swarming about in there … All that decay … millions of them in all that swollen pus, the stinking wind …

Papa was there … He had barely time to take me behind a tree … I threw it all up … everything … on the grating … My father jumped fast … but he didn’t dodge it all …

“You damn pig!” he yelled. He had it all over his pants … The people were looking at us. He was mortified. He went off by himself in the other direction, toward the Bastille. He didn’t want to have anything to do with us after that. We went to a little café for a cup of verbena to settle my stomach. It was a tiny little café just across from the prison.

I’ve often gone by there since. I always look inside. And I never see a soul.

Uncle Arthur was up to his ears in debt. From the rue Cambronne to Grenelle he had borrowed so much without ever returning it that his life was impossible. He was shiftless. One night he moved on the q.t. A friend helped him. They tied his stuff on a donkey cart. They were going out to the suburbs. We were already in bed when they came to notify us.

Arthur took advantage of the occasion to ditch his housemaid … She’d been talking about vitriol … Anyway, it was time he took a powder.

He and his pal had found a shanty where nobody would come around, in the hills around Athis-Mons. The very next day his creditors descended on us. The bastards, they never budged out of the Passage … They even went after my father at the insurance company. It was disgraceful. My father was in a terrible state … We were in for it again …

“What scum! What a family! What a crummy lot they all are. Never a minute’s peace! They even come and hound me on the job! … My brothers act like a bunch of jailbirds! My sister sells her ass in Russia! My son has every known vice! It’s a fine how-do-you-do! Christ almighty! …” My mother couldn’t think of anything to say … She’d given up trying to argue with him. He could go on to his heart’s content.

The creditors realized that Papa set store by his honor … They wouldn’t give an inch. They never left our shop … As if things weren’t rough enough already … If we’d paid his debts, we’d have really starved …

“We’ll go and see him next Sunday,” my father decided. “I’ll give him a piece of my mind … as man to man!”

We left at daybreak to make sure of finding him before he started on his rounds … First we got lost … Then we picked up the trail again … Finally we located him … I expected to find Uncle Arthur all shriveled up, repentant, scared out of his wits, hiding in some cave, hunted by three hundred cops … eating stewed rats … That was what happened to escaped convicts in
Illustrated Adventure Stories
… It was a little different with Uncle Arthur … Early as it was, we found him at a table outside a bistro—La Belle Adèle. He gave us a royal welcome in the arbor … He was drinking hard on credit, and no vinegar either … A nice little
muscadet rosé
… first class … he was in the best of health … He’d never felt better … He had the whole neighborhood in stitches … they were crazy about him … they ran over to listen to him … La Belle Adèle had never had so many customers … Every single seat was taken, the overflow was sitting on the steps … Small homeowners from as far as Juvisy … in phony Panama hats … And all the fishermen from the canal, in wooden shoes, would come out to La Belle Adèle just to meet Uncle Arthur. They’d never had so much fun in all their lives.

He had something up his sleeve for everybody! Every imaginable game from quoits to pitching pennies … Speeches … riddles … under the trees … for the ladies. Uncle Arthur was the life of the party, the ladies’ delight … He knocked himself out, he spared no effort … But he never took his hat off, his artist’s sombrero, though it was midsummer … the sweat ran down his face in rivers … He was always dressed the same … pointed shoes, corduroy pants … and that tie, an enormous bow like a lettuce leaf.

With his taste for domestic help he had floored all three waitresses … Happy to wait on him and love him … He didn’t want to hear one word about his troubles in Vaugirard … Let bygones be bygones … He was going to start a new life … My father was all set to chew his car off … he wouldn’t even let him get started … He kissed us each in turn … He was mighty glad to see us …

“Arthur! Will you listen to me for one moment! … Your creditors are blockading our doorway … from morning to night! … They’re driving us crazy … Do you hear me?” Arthur disposed of all those sordid memories with a sweeping gesture. And the way he looked at my father! Like he was a poor obstinate crackpot … The truth is he felt sorry for him! “Come along now, the whole lot of you! … Come on, Auguste. You’ll talk later. I’m going to show you the most beautiful view in the whole region … Saint-Germain is nothing … Just another little hill … The path on the left and then down the covered lane … My studio’s at the end.”

That’s what he called his shanty. He wasn’t lying, the situation was all right … A view of the whole valley … The Seine as far as Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and on the other side the forest of Sénart. You couldn’t conceive of anything better. He was lucky. He didn’t pay rent, not a sou. Supposedly he was the caretaker, looking after the landlord’s pond …

The pond only had water in it in the winter, in the summer it was dry. He was popular with the fair sex. He helped the local servant girls to wise up. His place was full of food …
muscadet
like down below, sausage, artichokes, and mountains of the little cream cheeses my mother was so fond of. He wasn’t badly off … He told us about the orders he was getting … signs for every bar, grocery store, and bakery for miles around … “They do the useful things, I supply the charm!” That was his philosophy … There were sketches all over the walls: “At the Sign of the Stuffed Pike” with an enormous fish in blue, red, and vermilion … “The Fair Sailor Lass” for a laundress friend, with luminous nipples, a mighty ingenious idea … His future was assured. We could all be pleased.