The Drinking Den (11 page)

‘Yes, it's you I want,' he repeated, thumping his hand over and over against his knee. ‘Do you understand, I want you… There's no answer to that, is there?'

Bit by bit, Gervaise softened. She felt as though she were enfolded in this brutal desire, and was overcome by a weakness of the will and the senses. Now, she was putting up only the feeblest resistance, her hands slumped on her lap, her face bathed in tenderness. From outside, through the half-open window, the lovely June night breathed gusts of warm air, which made the candle gutter and its long, reddish wick smoke. In the deep silence of the sleeping city, one could hear only the childlike sobs of a drunkard, lying on his back in the middle of the
boulevard, while, far, far away, from the depths of some restaurant or other, a violin was playing a popular quadrille for some still unfinished party, a clear, slender, crystalline piece like an air on a harmonica. Coupeau, seeing that the young woman, silent, smiling vaguely, had run out of arguments, grasped her and drew her to him. She had reached one of those yielding moments that she so mistrusted, overwhelmed with too deep a feeling for her to refuse and cause someone pain. But the roofer did not realize that she was giving herself to him. He merely held her wrists until it felt that he was crushing them, trying to take possession of her; and both of them gave a sign, at this slight pain, which expressed a little of their emotion.

‘You will say yes, won't you?' he asked.

‘How you are torturing me,' she murmured. ‘Do you really want it? Well, yes, then… Heaven knows, we may be making a dreadful mistake – '

He got up and grasped her waist, randomly planting a rough kiss on her face. Then, since the kiss was a noisy one, he was the first to show concern, looking at Claude and Etienne, tiptoeing, lowering his voice.

‘Hush! We must be sensible,' he said. ‘Mustn't wake up the kids. See you tomorrow.'

At that, he went back to his room. Gervaise, shaking, stayed for almost an hour sitting on the edge of her bed, not even thinking to get undressed. She was touched, she thought of Coupeau as a very decent sort, because at one moment she had imagined it was all over and he would sleep there. Below, in the street, the drunkard was making a harsher sound, like a lost animal. In the distance, the violin stopped playing its merry little air.

In the days that followed, Coupeau wanted to persuade Gervaise to come round one evening to see his sister, in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. But the young woman, who was quite shy, appeared terrified at the prospect of this visit to the Lorilleux. It had not escaped her that the workman was secretly in awe of the couple. Of course, he no longer depended on his sister, who was not even the eldest; and Mother Coupeau would willingly give her consent, because she would never go against her son's wishes. But, the fact was that, in the Coupeau
family, the Lorilleux were thought to be earning as much as ten francs a day, and this endowed them with real authority. Coupeau would not have dared to get married unless they were willing to accept his wife.

‘I've talked about you to them, so they know about our plans,' he told Gervaise. ‘Good Lord! What a child you are! Come round this evening. I've warned you, haven't I? You may find my sister a bit stiff, and Lorilleux isn't always too friendly, either. When it comes down to it, they are a bit put out because, if I get married, then I won't eat with them any more, and it will mean a little less money coming in. But that doesn't matter, they won't throw you out. Do it for me, it's absolutely essential.'

This speech scared Gervaise even more; but, one Saturday evening, she agreed. Coupeau came to fetch her at half-past eight. She was dressed up: a black dress, a shawl in printed cashmere with yellow palm fronds and a white bonnet trimmed with a narrow band of lace. She had been working for six weeks and had saved up the seven francs for the shawl and the two francs fifty for the hat; the dress was an old one, which she had cleaned and darned.

‘They're waiting for you,' Coupeau said, as they were walking round, through the Rue des Poissonniers. ‘Oh, they're starting to get used to the idea of my getting married. They seem very pleasant this evening. And, if you've never seen someone making gold chains, it will be amusing for you to watch. As it happens they have an urgent order for Monday.'

‘Do they have gold in their house?' Gervaise asked.

‘They certainly do: it's on the walls, on the floor, everywhere.'

Meanwhile, they had gone through the arched door and across the courtyard. The Lorilleux lived on the sixth floor, Staircase B. Coupeau laughed and called to her to take a firm hold on the banister and not to let it go. She looked up and blinked, seeing the high empty tower of the stairwell, lit by three gaslights, one every second floor. The last, right at the top, looked like a twinkling star in a black sky, while the other two cast long beams of light, oddly broken up where they fell across the endless spiral of stairs.

‘What's this?' the roofer said when he got to the first-floor landing.

He was right: Staircase B, grey, dirty, with its greasy steps and banisters, and plaster showing through the scratched paint on its walls, still reeked of an overpowering smell of cooking. From every landing, corridors led off echoing with noise, and yellow doors opened, blackened around the locks with marks from dirty hands; and the cistern, level with the window, gave off a fetid dampness, its stench mingling with the sharp odour of cooked onions. From the ground floor to the sixth, one could hear the sounds of washing-up, the rinsing of pots, the scraping of pans with spoons to clean them. On the first floor, Gervaise glanced through an open door, with the word Draughtsman on it in large letters, and saw two men sitting in front of an oiled tablecloth after the dishes had been cleared away, having a heated discussion amid the smoke from their pipes. The second and third floors were quieter: one could hear only the rocking of a cradle through the gaps in the woodwork, the stifled cries of a child's or a woman's thick accent pouring out like the dull murmur of running water, without any distinguishable words; and Gervaise could read placards nailed to the doors, giving the inhabitants' names: Madame Gaudron, carder;
⁵
and, further on, Monsieur Madinier, packing shop. There was a fight in progress on the fourth floor: such a stamping that the floor trembled, furniture overturned, and a dreadful racket of blows and curses – though it didn't stop the neighbours opposite from playing cards with the door open to let in the air. But when she reached the fifth floor, Gervaise had to pause for breath. She was not used to climbing; the constantly winding wall and the apartments, half glimpsed as they went by, made her head spin. In any case, there was a family blocking the way on the landing: the man was washing dishes on a little clay stove near the cistern while the mother, leaning back against the ramp, was cleaning the child before putting him to bed. All the time, Coupeau was urging her on: they were nearly there; and when at last they reached the sixth floor, he turned round to help her with a smile. She had her head lifted, trying to decide where a particular voice was coming from, shrill and clear, which she had been hearing above the other sounds right from the first step. It was a little old woman who lived under the
roof and sang as she dressed dolls costing thirteen
sous
. Also, as a tall girl was returning with a pail to one of the neighbouring rooms, Gervaise caught sight of an unmade bed, where a man was waiting in shirtsleeves, sprawling and looking towards the ceiling; when the door shut, a handwritten visiting card announced:
MADEMOISELLE CLÉMENCE, IRONING.
At that, reaching the very top, breathless, her legs aching, curiosity made her lean over the banisters: now, it was the ground-floor gaslight that looked like a star, at the bottom of the narrow well, six storeys deep; and the smell and vast rumbling life of the house was wafted up to her in a single breath, a hot blast breaking over her anxious face, making her feel as though she were perched on the edge of an abyss.

‘We're not there yet!' Coupeau said. ‘It's quite a journey!'

He had turned left, down a long corridor. He took two further turnings, the first again to the left, the next to the right. The corridor continued, branched, narrowed, cracked and crumbling, lit at long intervals by a slender tongue of gas; and the doors, each one like the next, lined up like the doors of a prison or a convent, but almost all wide open, continued to reveal scenes of poverty or labour, interiors that the warm June evening filled with a reddish mist. At last, they reached the end of a completely dark passage.

‘This is it,' the roofer said. ‘Look out! Keep to the wall: there are three steps to go down.'

Gervaise took a further ten paces, cautiously, in the dark. She stumbled, then counted the three steps; but Coupeau, at the end of the passage, had just pushed open a door, without knocking. A harsh light shone across the floor. They went in.

The room was constricted, a sort of funnel looking like nothing more than an extension of the corridor. A faded woollen curtain, held up for the time being by a piece of string, divided the funnel in two. The first compartment contained a bed, wedged under the sloping mansard roof, a cast-iron stove still warm from dinner, two chairs, a table and a cupboard with part of the beading sawn off so that it could fit between the bed and the door. The second compartment served as the workshop: at the far end, a small forge and bellows; on the right, a vice fixed to the wall, beneath a shelf covered in scraps of metal; and on the left, by
the window, a tiny workbench, littered with pliers, shears and minute saws, all greasy and very dirty.

‘We're here!' Coupeau shouted, advancing through the room as far as the woollen curtain.

But at first there was no reply. Gervaise, quite overcome, especially disturbed by the idea that she was entering a place full of gold, kept behind the workman, stammering, trying out some nods by way of greeting. Her anxiety was increased by the bright light from a lamp burning on the work-table and a brazier of flaming coals in the forge. Eventually she did manage to see Mme Lorilleux, a short, rather heavily built redhead who, with all the strength of her stubby arms, was using a large pair of pincers to pull out a thread of black metal, which she had passed through the holes of a draw die
⁶
fixed to the vice. In front of the workbench, Lorilleux, who was no taller but more lanky, was working with the sprightliness of a monkey, using the tips of his pincers on such fine material that it disappeared in his gnarled fingers. The husband was the first to look up, raising a head that was nearly bald and the pale yellow of old wax, with a long, unhealthy-looking face.

‘Oh, it's you, good, good!' he muttered. ‘We're pushed for time, you know. Don't come into the workroom, you'd get in our way. Stay in the bedroom.'

And he resumed his fine work, bending his face once more into the greenish light of a water globe,
⁷
through which the lamp cast a circle of bright light on his work.

‘Sit Down!' Mme Lorilleux shouted in her turn. ‘This is the lady, is it? Fine, fine!'

She had rolled up the wire that she now took to the forge and there, rousing the fire to life with a large wooden fan, she softened the wire preparatory to drawing it through the smallest holes in the die.

Coupeau brought up the chairs and sat Gervaise down next to the curtain. The room was so narrow that he could not find a place for himself next to her: he sat behind her, leaning across her shoulder to explain the work. The young woman, stunned into silence by the Lorilleux's strange manner of greeting and uneasy beneath their sideways glances, had a buzzing in her ears that made it hard for her to hear. She thought the woman looked very old for thirty, surly in
manner, and not quite clean, with her hair hanging in a pigtail across her unbuttoned blouse. The husband, who was only a year older, seemed to her an old man, with his nasty thin lips, his shirtsleeves, and his bare feet in worn slippers. But most of all she was shocked by the size of the cramped workshop, its stained walls, the rusty metal tools and the black grime everywhere in this clutter like a rag-and-bone merchant's. It was dreadfully hot. Drops of sweat had gathered on Lorilleux's pallid face, while Mme Lorilleux chose to remove her blouse, leaving her arms naked and her undershirt sticking to her sagging breasts.

‘What about the gold?' Gervaise said, in a half-whisper.

She looked anxiously in every corner, hunting through all the mess and grime for the splendour she had dreamed about.

Coupeau had started to laugh.

‘The gold?' he said. ‘Look, there it is, and there, and here's some at your feet!'

He had pointed in turn to the slender thread that his sister was working; then to another bundle of wire hanging on the wall, near the vice, just like a coil of iron wire; and then at last, getting down on all fours and reaching under the wooden boards that covered the workshop floor, he picked up a piece of scrap, a fragment like the end of a rusty needle. Gervaise protested. Surely this could not be gold, this blackish metal, as ugly as iron! He had to bite the piece for her and show the shining scar left by his teeth. And he continued with his explanation: the bosses supplied the gold wire, in the right alloy, and the workers started by pulling it through the wire die to get it to the correct thickness, taking care to soften it five or six times during the process, to make sure that it did not break. Oh, you needed strength and practice! His sister would not allow her husband to touch the dies because of his cough. She had strong arms: he had seen her draw gold as thin as a hair.

Meanwhile, Lorilleux was doubled over on his stool, seized by a fit of coughing. In between spasms he spoke, still without looking at Gervaise, as if he mentioned the fact solely for his own benefit, saying in a strangled voice:

‘I'm doing column chain.'

Coupeau made Gervaise get up: why didn't she go closer so that she could see? The chain-maker grumbled his assent. He was rolling the wire that his wife had prepared around a ‘mandrel', a very slender steel rod. Then he would give a light touch with the saw, which cut the wire along the whole length of the mandrel so that each turn formed a link. Then he soldered them. The links of the chain were placed on a large block of charcoal, he moistened each one with a drop of borax
⁸
from the bottom of a broken glass at his side, and after that heated them until they were red-hot in the horizontal flame of a burner. Then, when he had around a hundred links, he went back to his intricate work, leaning on the edge of the ‘peg', a piece of board rubbed smooth by the action of his hands. He bent the link with pincers, flattened it on one side, slipped it into the link already in place above and reopened it with a pin: all this was done so smoothly, one link following the other, and so fast, that the chain got longer as Gervaise watched, without her being able to follow or grasp exactly what was going on.

‘This is column chain,' Coupeau said. ‘There are small links, heavy links, bracelet chains and ropes, but this is column chain. Lorillcux only makes column chain.'

The man gave a snigger of satisfaction. Still pinching the links of the chain, which were invisible as they passed between his black fingernails, he shouted:

‘I'll tell you a thing, Cadet-Cassis! I was doing some sums this morning. I started when I was twelve, didn't I? Well, do you know what length of column chain I must have made up to this day now?'

He raised his pale face and his red eyelids winked.

‘Eight thousand metres, d'you hear! Two leagues! What about it: a column two leagues long! You could put it round the necks of all the females in the neighbourhood. And it's getting longer all the time, you know. I hope one day I'll get from Paris to Versailles.'

Gervaise had gone to sit down again, disillusioned, finding everything here very ugly. She smiled, so as not to offend the Lorilleux. What bothered her most was the fact that there was no mention of her marriage, something that was so important to her and without which she would certainly not have come. The Lorilleux continued to treat her as an inquisitive intruder brought by Coupeau. When a conversation
was at last struck up, it revolved only around the other tenants of the building. Mme Lorilleux asked her brother whether, while he was coming upstairs, he had chanced to hear the people on the fourth floor having a fight. Those Bénards were constantly knocking each other about: the husband would come home, drunk as a pig, and the wife was not perfect, either: she would yell out the most disgusting things. Then they spoke of the draughtsman on the first floor, that great beanpole Baudequin, who gave himself airs, but was always in debt, always smoking, and always shouting with his friends. M. Madinier's cardboard-box factory was on its last legs: he had sacked another two girls the day before, and it would be no bad thing if he did go bust because he wasted all his money and let his kids go around without a stitch to wear. Mme Gaudron had a funny way of carding the wool for her mattresses because she was knocked up yet again, which was starting to be hardly decent at her age. The proprietor had just turned out the Coquets, on the fifth, because they owed three lots of rent – in addition to which they insisted on lighting their stove on the landing, even though, only the Saturday before, Mlle Remanjou, the old lady from the floor above them, had been taking back some of her dolls and come by just in time to save the Linguerlot child from getting burned all over. As for Mlle Clémence, the one who did ironing, what she got up to was her own business, but it had to be admitted, she loved animals and had a heart of gold. There now! What a shame for a lovely girl like that to sleep with any man who asked! One evening, they'd see her walking the streets, that's for sure.

‘There you are: another one,' Lorilleux said to his wife, giving her the piece of chain that he had been working on since lunch-time. ‘You can finish it off.' And he added, with the obstinacy of a man who refuses to let go of a joke: ‘Another four and a half feet… We're getting nearer to Versailles.'

Meanwhile, Mme Lorilleux heated the chain once more, ran it through the gauge and then dropped it into a little copper pot with a long handle, full of caustic soda,
⁹
before putting it to descale on the forge. Gervaise was once more pushed forward by Coupeau so that she could watch this final process. When the gold had been descaled, it turned a dark-red colour. It was finished, ready to deliver.

‘It's delivered as it is,' the roofer explained. ‘There are polishers who rub it with cloths.'

But Gervaise felt that she couldn't stand any more. The temperature was rising constantly and the heat stifled her. They left the door shut, because the slightest draught would go to Lorilleux's chest. And, since no one was talking, still, about their marriage, she wanted to leave, so she lightly tugged at Coupeau's jacket. He read her meaning. In fact, he too was starting to become slightly embarrassed and irritated by the pointed way in which the subject was being ignored.