Short Stories: Five Decades (113 page)

“The one I feel sorry for is the old man,” said the first concierge. “The father.”

“Don’t waste your pity,” said Madame Harrahs. “It’s probably all his fault. He is obviously lacking in authority. And if a man hasn’t authority, he has to expect the worst from his children. Besides, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t have a little thing on the side himself, a little
poupette
in the Sixteenth, like that disgusting lawyer in Geneva. I got a good look at him. I know the type.”

“Ah, the dirty old man,” the first voice said.

Now Tibbell heard footsteps approaching from the corner and he turned to see the dirty old man approaching. The shutters clicked tight again and the old ladies subsided after their choric irruption, leaving the street to the weary sound of the old man’s shoes on the uneven concrete and the asthmatic sighs he emitted with every other step. He stopped below Tibbell’s window, looking sorrowfully at the Vespa, shaking his head, then sat down uncomfortably on the curb, his feet in the gutter, his hands dangling loose and helpless between his knees. Tibbell would have liked to go down and comfort him, but was uncertain whether M. Banary-Cointal was in any condition that night to be consoled by foreigners.

Tibbell was on the verge of closing his own shutters, like the two concierges, and leaving the old man to his problems on the street below, when he saw Moumou appear at the corner, sobbing exhaustedly, walking unsteadily on her high heels, the bag with which she had so vigorously attacked Raoul now hanging like a dead weight from her hand. The father saw her too and stood up, with a rheumatic effort, to greet her. When she saw the old man, Moumou sobbed more loudly. The old man opened his arms and she plunged onto his shoulder, weeping and clutching him, while he patted her back clumsily.

“He got away,” Moumou wept. “I’ll never see him again.”

“Perhaps it is for the best,” the old man said. “He is far from dependable, that fellow.”

“I love him, I love him,” the girl said wetly. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Now, now, Moumou …” The father looked around him uneasily, conscious of witnesses behind the shuttered windows.

“I’ll show him,” the girl said wildly. She broke away from her father and stood accusingly in front of the parked Vespa, glaring at it. “He took me out to the Marne on this the first time we went out together,” she said in a throbbing voice, meant to carry the memory of ancient tenderness, betrayed promises, to unseen and guilty ears. “I’ll show him.” With a swift movement, before her father could do anything to stop her, she took off her right shoe. Violently, holding the shoe by the pointed toe, she smashed the sharp heel into the headlight of the scooter. There was the crash of breaking glass and a tinkling on the pavement, closely followed by a shriek of pain from Moumou.

“What is it? What is it?” The old man asked anxiously.

“I cut myself. I opened a vein.” Moumou held out her hands, like Lady Macbeth. Tibbell could see blood spurting from several cuts on her hand and wrist.

“Oh, my poor child,” the old man said distractedly. “Hold your hand still. Let me see.…”

But Moumou pulled her hand away and danced unevenly on her one shoe around the Vespa, waving her arm over the machine, spattering the wheels, the handle bars, the saddle, the black pillion, with the blood that sprayed from her wounds. “There!” she shouted. “You wanted my blood, take it! I hope it brings you good luck!”

“Moumou, don’t be so impetuous,” the old man implored her. “You will do yourself a permanent harm.” Finally he managed to grab his daughter’s arm and inspect the cuts. “Oh, oh,” he said. “This is dolorous. Stand still.” He took out a handkerchief and bound her wrist tight. “Now,” he said, “I will take you home and you will get a good night’s sleep and you will forget about that serpent.”

“No,” Moumou said. She backed against the wall of the building on the opposite side of the street and stood there stubbornly. “He will come back for his Vespa. Then I will kill him. And after that I will kill myself.”

“Moumou …” the old man wailed.

“Go home, Papa.”

“How can I go home and leave you like this?”

“I will wait for him if I have to stand here in this place all night.” Moumou said her words awash with tears. She gripped the wall behind her with her hands, as if to keep her father from taking her away by force. “He has to come here sometime before the church. He won’t get married without his scooter. You go home. I will handle him myself.”

“I can’t leave you here alone in this condition,” the old man said, sighing. Beaten, he sat down again on the curb to rest.

“I want to die,” Moumou said.

The street was quiet again, but not for long. The door behind which the two lovers had taken refuge opened and the man in the sports jacket came out, his arm around his girl. They passed slowly beneath Tibbell’s window, ostentatiously ignoring Moumou and her father. The old man looked balefully up at the linked couple. “Young lady,” he said, “remember my warning. Profit by the events you have witnessed tonight. If it is not too late already. Reenter into your home, I speak as a friend.”

“See here, old man,” the man in the sports jacket pulled away from his companion and stood threateningly in front of Moumou’s father, “that’s enough out of you. I do not permit anybody to speak like that in front of …”

“Come on, Edouard,” the girl said, pulling the man in the sports jacket away. “It is too late at night to become enraged.”

“I ignore you, Monsieur,” Edouard said, then let the girl lead him away.

“Permit, permit.…” M. Banary-Cointal said loudly, getting in the last word, as the couple rounded the corner and disappeared.

Tibbell watched the old man and his daughter for another moment, wishing that the two of them would move away from their stations of affliction on his doorstep. It would be difficult to sleep, Tibbell felt, knowing that those two grieving, dissatisfied, vengeful figures were still outside his window, waiting for some horrid, violent last act of their drama.

He was just about to turn away when he heard a car door slam far down the street. He looked and saw a woman in a green dress striding swiftly toward him, away from the car that he had earlier noticed being parked near the far corner. Now the car lights switched on, very bright, and the car followed the woman as she half-walked, half-ran, in the direction of Moumou and her father. She was obviously in flight. Her dress shone a violent, electric lime color in the headlights of the pursuing car. The car, which was a bright red, new Alfa Romeo Giulietta, stopped abruptly just before it reached the old man, who was still sitting on the curb, but with his head turned suspiciously in the direction of the woman bearing swiftly down on him, as though he feared that she was bringing with her, stranger though she was, a new burden of trouble to load onto his bowed and tortured shoulders. The woman darted toward a doorway, but before she could press the button for entry, a man in a black suit leaped out of the car and seized her wrist.

Tibbell watched without surprise. By now he felt that the street below him was a preordained scene of conflict, like Agincourt or the pass of Thermopylae, and that clash would follow clash there continually, like the performances in a twentyfour-hour-a-day movie house.

“No, you don’t!” the man in the black suit was saying, pulling the woman away from the door. “You don’t get away that easily.”

“Let me go,” the woman said, trying to escape. She was breathless and she sounded frightened and Tibbell wondered if now, finally, was the time for him to run down the stairs and enter into the night life of the street in front of his window, a tardy Spartan, a belated recruit for Henry’s army.

“I’ll let you go when you give me my three hundred francs,” the man in the black suit said loudly. He was young and slender and Tibbell could see, by the light of the automobile headlights, that he had a small mustache and long, carefully brushed hair that fell over the back of his high, white collar. He reminded Tibbell of certain young men he had seen lounging in various bars in the neighborhood of Pigalle, and he had the kind of face which looks fitting in newspaper photographs that accompany the stories of the arrest of suspects after particularly well-planned jewel robberies and pay-roll thefts.

“I don’t owe you any three hundred francs,” the woman said. Now Tibbell heard that she had an accent in French, probably Spanish. She looked Spanish, too, with luxuriant black hair swooping down over her exposed shoulders, and a wide, shiny black leather belt around a very narrow waist. Her skirt was short and showed her knees every time she moved.

“Don’t lie to me,” the man in the dark suit said, still holding the woman’s wrist and shaking her arm angrily. “It was never my intention to buy them.”

“And it was never my intention to let you follow me to my home,” the woman snapped back at him, trying to pull away. “Let me go, you’ve annoyed me enough tonight!”

“Not until I get my three hundred francs,” the man said, gripping her more firmly.

“Unless you let me go,” the woman said, “I’ll call for the police.”

The man glared at her and dropped her wrist. Then he slapped her hard across the face.

“Here, here!” said Moumou’s father, who had been watching the affair with mournful interest. He stood up. Moumou, lost in the egotism of her own unhappiness, took no notice of what was happening.

The man in the dark suit and the Spanish woman stood close to each other, breathing heavily, looking curiously undecided, as though the slap had brought some new and unexpected problem into their relationship which for the moment confused them and made them uncertain about further action. Then the young man, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache, slowly raised his hand again.

“Once is enough,” the woman said and ran over to Moumou’s father for protection. “Monsieur,” she said, “you have seen him strike me.”

“The light is bad,” the old man said, even in his sorrow instinctively extricating himself from possible formal involvement with the police. “And at the moment, I happened to be looking the other way. Still,” he said to the young man, who was advancing menacingly on the Spanish woman, “let me remind you that striking a woman is considered in certain quarters to be a most serious offense.”

“I throw myself on your protection, Monsieur,” the woman said, stepping behind M. Banary-Cointal.

“Don’t worry,” the man with the mustache said contemptuously. “I won’t hit her again. She is not worth the emotion. All I want is my three hundred francs.”

“What do you think of a man,” the woman said, from the shelter of the old man’s bulk, “who buys a lady flowers and then demands to be reimbursed?”

“To keep the record clear,” the man with the mustache said, “let me say once and for all that I never bought her any flowers. When I went to the toilet she took the violets from the basket and when I came back the woman asked me for three hundred francs and rather than make a scene I …”

“Please,” the old man said, interested now despite himself, “this is all very confusing. If you would be good enough to start from the beginning, perhaps I can be of service.”

Tibbell was grateful to the old man for this request for clarification, since without it he was sure he would be kept awake most of the night trying to figure out just what the sequence of events had been which had resulted in this midnight chase and punishment. Tibbell had never hit a woman in his life and could not imagine ever doing so, and certainly never for three hundred francs, which was, after all, worth just about sixty cents.

“Let me reconstruct,” the man in the dark suit said immediately, presenting his side quickly, before the Spanish woman could roil the crystal waters of truth. “I saw her sitting at a bar, waiting to be picked up.”

“I was not waiting to be picked up,” the woman said hotly. “I was on my way home from the cinema and I stopped in to have a glass of beer, before going to bed.”

“
Enfin
,” the man in the dark suit said impatiently, “you allowed yourself to be picked up. If we are going to quibble about terms, we will be here all night.”

“I allowed you to pay for one glass of beer,” the woman said. “I am not responsible for any sordid interpretation you choose to put on it.”

“You also allowed me to pay for three hundred francs’ worth of violets,” the man in the dark suit said.

“I allowed it as a small gesture of gallantry,” the woman said haughtily. “In Spain one is used to gentlemen.”

“You also allowed yourself to get into my car,” the man in the dark suit said, “and you furthermore allowed yourself to inflame the emotions by kissing on the lips.”

“That, now,” the woman said dramatically to Moumou’s father, “is a superb lie.”

“If it’s a lie,” said the man in the dark suit, “what about this?” Violently, he seized the point of his white collar and pulled it away from his neck to show M. Banary-Cointal.

The old man peered at it nearsightedly, bending close to the man in the dark suit. “What is it?” the old man asked. “It’s awfully dark here. I can’t see anything.”

“Lipstick,” said the man in the dark suit. “Look.” He took the old man’s arm and pulled him over in front of the headlights. Both men leaned over low so that the old man could inspect the collar. M. Banary-Cointal stood up. “There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Lipstick.”

“Aha,” said the man in the dark suit, casting a look of angry triumph at the Spanish woman.

“It is not mine,” she said coldly. “Who knows where this gentleman has been spending his time and who knows how many times a week he changes his shirt?”

“I warn you,” said the man in the dark suit, his voice thick with rage, “I regard that as insulting.”

“What difference does it make whose lipstick it is?” the woman said. “You do not please me. All I want is to be allowed to go home alone.”

“Ah,” said Moumou, her attention finally caught, “if that were only possible—to go home alone.”

Everybody, including Moumou’s father, looked puzzledly for a moment at the somber figure against the wall, as though it had been a statue that had given cryptic utterance.

“My dear man,” said M. Banary-Cointal reasonably, addressing the man in the dark suit, “certainly this lady has made herself very clear.” He made a slight bow in the direction of the Spanish woman, who nodded politely in answer. “She doesn’t demand very much. Just to go to her own home in peace. Surely, this is not too much to ask.”