Life Embitters (18 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked sheepishly, slightly surprised and disconcerted.

That heated moment passed and I restrained myself. What could I do? He clearly wanted to annoy me. I found his affable, polite manner and sardonic
tone bewildering. I felt deeply distressed. What kind of man was he? I’d used every means to suggest that his words were hurtful. I’d insulted him. He’d ignored me. I opted for the only solution: to get dressed and go into the corridor.

“I don’t think it’s such a big deal!” he exclaimed knowingly. “Does it upset you to think that I went out with your mother? What’s wrong with that? How can I ever think it was unnatural, if I was there? I personally
was
there; understand? Don’t doubt it for one moment. You’d rather not believe I was in a relationship with her? Well, you’re wrong. The Ricards will tell you. You must know them, of course. Ask them. I almost married her. I’ll repeat that. It is really true that … And, to return to what we were saying: she kissed me too that evening. What were we expected to do? It was a noisy kiss. It was all quite innocent. Then she laughed and said she thought she had sinned and that she’d have to confess. You see what young things we were. I became very serious and she put her finger back on her lips. Perhaps it was her first kiss. Some people don’t think these things are important: I’m the more emotional, sentimental kind. It depends on character. I’ve always remembered those moments. And do you know how all that ended? I saw her keep looking up at the lighted window, and suddenly her eyes bulged out of their sockets and she seemed to freeze. A shadow was moving behind her bedroom curtain. The curtain seemed to rip and a bright light shone out from her room. Someone screamed and a silhouette appeared in the square of light.

“
Maria!
shouted a voice that slowly faded into the night.

“She stared at me for a moment, then jumped up and ran off. I watched her like a white wraith wandering beneath the moon. She opened the garden gate among the cypresses and disappeared. I sat on the rock for a few seconds. Then someone closed her bedroom window and lowered the shutter.
We met the day after that at the Ricards. As ever, she was at the piano. I am fond of music and turned the pages of her score. As she was playing, she told me – without looking at me – that it was her first kiss. I blushed when I heard that, like a young child, and someone asked if I was feeling well.”

I left him mid-flow. I hurriedly opened our compartment door. I finished dressing in the corridor. I knotted my tie while gazing through the window at a village. Then I went back inside to retrieve my luggage. I saw him lying there on his couchette, his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling.

I don’t know how long I stayed in the corridor. Maybe three or four hours. The train seemed as if it would never reach Paris. The hours seemed endless in the state I was in. At one point I even almost alighted at the first stop and continued on the next train. I think that from the corridor I once heard snoring in the compartment …

I even bumped into him again in the exit from Orsay station. When he saw me, he doffed his hat pleasantly my way.

Years ago I lived for a while at number 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel, in Paris, right at the end, where it meets the L’Observatoire, Montparnasse and Port-Royal boulevards. This crossroads is an ugly part of the city, bleak and sprawling in winter, though it has the advantage of being close to wonderful places, like the horse-chestnut-lined avenue of L’Observatoire, in my view one of the most beautiful in Paris, and Le Jardin du Luxembourg, which is uniquely delightful, despite its drawbacks, and slightly further afield, Le Jardin des Plantes.

There is a famous café at this crossroads, La Closerie des Lilas, opposite which stands a statue of Maréschal Ney flourishing his sword. Opposite is the famous Bal Bullier, where so many carnivals were held, renowned in
the era when students lived on fresh air and young ladies of limited means loved them for free. L’Observatoire, the scientific establishment that gives the avenue its name, stands at the far end, crowned by domes as round as white turtle eggs. Near the Bal Bullier, at 145 Boulevard Saint-Michel, there once was a restaurant by the name of Chez Émile, with a small front terrace fenced off by a few plants, and it was a fine restaurant in my day. It no longer exists. It’s all gone downhill.

The owner, Monsieur Émile Hasenbolher, was a striking presence: fair-haired, pale complexion, small blue eyes, and little in the way of hair. He was so astonishingly voluminous that when he donned his chef’s apron and hat and stood in the doorway, people stopped and stared at the spectacle. Day in, day out one sees signs of anxiety or pain on almost anyone’s face. In his case it was impossible. His face was so compacted with flab the state of his soul could never surface: it was solid, motionless, impermeable flab. He was good-hearted, with a cheery gift of the gab, and driven by one costly vice: he bet obsessively on races at Auteuil and Longchamps. Like so many people mad about horses, he liked to say he’d had a tip, that it was a sure bet, that his sources were firsthand. The truth was his finances were rocky. His cold, cunning, ambitious wife was constantly annoyed by her husband’s mania. This meant her interests were rarely in harmony with those of the restaurant’s customers or humanity in general. However, that didn’t stop Chez Émile always having stupendous foie gras from Strasbourg on the menu, or a kirsch difficult to find elsewhere in the neighborhood.

A courtyard behind the restaurant led to a rather gloomy stairway up to the building’s interior apartments. Monsieur Émile rented a first-floor apartment and sublet individual rooms in order to have a pot of money that, added to his earnings from the restaurant, helped him withstand the savage inroads the horses made into his finances. It was a picturesque courtyard,
and rest home to all the items the restaurant spewed out: bottles, demijohns, boxes and cardboard packaging. At night it wasn’t unusual to stumble over one thing or another.

One of the rooms was let to Mademoiselle Ivonne Dubreil, who devoted her time to amorous passions in a gray, unassuming, oblique manner. Another was the residence of a mustachioed citizen, Henri Gide, who was an employee in the Porte d’Orléans toll house, the
octroi
, namely, a dues collector at the said Paris gate. This kind of employment still existed at the time. The dues collector was married to Marianne Monnanteil, who was very courteous and always bowed deferentially. I lived in the room in between these two. Monsieur Émile had himself suggested I did so at a very reasonable price, presumably because I had praised his restaurant’s kirsch and Alsatian cuisine to the skies.

It was a small apartment. Apart from the three bedrooms there was a pleasantly grimy, somber inactive kitchen with a tap that worked and three boxes of coal. I must mention these boxes of coal because, as we were extremely poor, they led to conflicts generated by our way of life that was in turn occasioned by our breadline existence. The first belonged to Mlle Dubreil, the second to citizen Gide, and the third was mine –
per modo di dire
– to phrase it Italian style. The dues collector always thought I was pinching his coal, I always thought Mademoiselle Ivonne was pinching mine, and Mlle Ivonne had no doubts as to the pinching proclivities of the dues collector. If it had gone to court there would have been a nil outcome in terms of compensation for the parties in dispute. The fact is I always had very little coal, so my room was freezing cold throughout that winter. Mlle Ivonne lit a “Petit Parisien” in her stove when she had a male visitor, no doubt to create an impression of well-being based on pure illusion. It was dues collector Gide who burnt the most, because like all good state employees
he was accustomed to living in the warm at everyone else’s expense. Considering that Mlle Dubreil and I very occasionally had a minute amount of coal, reality genuinely afforded us the objective proof to deduce that the dues collector was the thief. Those arguments meant we got to know each other. They brought us together. It turned out that all in all we were paid-up members of the bourgeoisie committed to the defense of private property.

The walls separating our rooms were on the thin side. We could hear but not see each other. Moreover, I was positioned centrally. In the usual conventional language one could not claim in this case that the center was a
responsible
place to be. One can say, however, that I did need a degree of discretion and patience to survive there.

Mademoiselle Ivonne was a specter: she was a mystic soul driven by the wondrous, the magical and the mysterious. If she was walking along a street and met a street-seller manipulating some strange device – for example, making a doll dance above the sidewalk – she simply had to stop and gape in awe at the performance. I had bumped into her several times doing just this on the Rue Gay-Lussac. She was even more transported when at a fair – like the one at the beginning of summer on the Rue du Maine – she watched a stern-faced, hieratically posed artisan making mysterious gestures with one hand, as if wanting to conjure up some magic. Ivonne’s spirit felt riveted by the strange gestures and she looked entranced. Sometimes, he’d roll a cigarette in front of her and drop the leftover paper on the ground. Her hypnotized eyes followed the paper as it fell and stared at the small white blotch on the ground. After a while when she looked up, we felt she was struggling to cast off the dense haze enveloping her.

This primitive soul, when in her normal state – that is when she was hungry – had a refreshing, pleasant side. She had often confessed to me that voluptuous sensuality was frankly what least interested her. She brought
everything back to family life, to the austere nature of family life. She merely aspired to a small farmstead on the outskirts of Paris and marriage to a man who could repair bicycles. That young woman sought no more from life. She was a sincere, discreet, positive individual.

She felt so indifferent towards her profession – that, by the way, was perfectly legal – she could only refer to it in jest. She deeply regretted that the activity of her trade, as projected into the room I occupied, might lead me to waste time I should be dedicating to work. We reached an agreement: whenever a noisy, affectionate, thrusting gentleman came up to her room –
un monsieur tapageur
– she’d tap on the wall to indicate the nature of her situation so I could act accordingly. One tactic might be, for example, to leave my room. If her customer was quieter and more considerate, she’d tap twice to suggest that the outcome would be less disruptive. If love climbed those stairs – something that rarely happened – she said nothing. Then tolerance was in order.

When I was busy working, I sometimes heard a tap on the wall.

“Well, well! The show’s on its way …!” I’d say, gathering up my papers and preparing to join the flow on the street for a short or long time. The interruptions that sabotage the consolidation of culture, the hazards confronting serious study, are permanent and systematic.

If love was coursing, I’d hear innocent words being whispered.

“Oh, Marcel, buy me a canary!” Ivonne would say, alternating whimpers with a ray of hope.

“I’ll buy you a canary later. Of course, it will be a chirpy canary. Now I must buy you a hot-water bottle, because it is freezing and coughs are not a good idea at our age.”

Nevertheless, I never saw Ivonne become the owner of a canary, whether it was chirpy or apathetic.

“Are you all happy at home?” asked the young woman.

“Very happy, thank you.”

One day a gentleman fond of poetry visited, who turned out to be a poet, as I later discovered. I expect he was a poet from the provinces.

“Do you like Victor Hugo?” asked the visitor meaningfully

“Who is Victor Hugo? His name’s buzzing round the back of my head …”

“Of course … 
the
Victor Hugo!”

“Yes, yes,
the
Victor Hugo! Of course …”

“Who else could it be … I mentioned him because I’ve written some verse.”

“The long sort?”

“Oh … on the long side …”

“I’ll be frank. Don’t be angry. You know how much I love you. Long verse …”

“No! They’re not as long as you imagine. Long verse isn’t the thing nowadays. They’re old-fashioned.”

And the good gentleman began to declaim …

It was at 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel that I started to become aware of the significance and boundless range of human vanity.

Henri Gide’s mind was more devious, distorted as it was by conventional social attitudes. He was a typical product of his times. He got up at five o’clock. He caught the first bus. He started work punctually at six at the Porte d’Orléans
octroi
. It amounted to giving a green ticket to all owners of carriages, of whatever type, who came through that gate up to three
P.M.
Another man – his worst enemy – collected the money the people in the carriages handed over when they surrendered their green tickets. Both officials believed they were indispensable and were convinced the
octroi
ticketing
system was a pillar of civilization. A matter of hierarchy separated them. Gide thought he had a higher status than his colleague because he held the tickets. The other fellow, as he was the one collecting the money, thought he was above him in the pecking order.

“I love you …” Madame Gide said early at night between the matrimonial sheets (they didn’t go to bed late).

“Meaning what?” asked her husband unpleasantly.

“Why do you say ‘meaning what’…?”

“It’s a mystery to me …”

“You’ll always be a worrier.”

Generally General Cambronne’s
mot
abruptly curtailed this cordial family exchange.

Monsieur Henri was an orderly man like most men with his temperament, and unbearably grumpy. On the outside he was a good-natured, easy-going, well-balanced, and reasonable man. In reality he was violent. A frightened Marianne told me as much one day.

“My poor small upstanding hubby is intolerable … He has it in him to kill me if he was to get up and not find his small cup of coffee waiting for him, just as he likes it.”