The Drinking Den (5 page)

When Gervaise woke up, at about five o'clock, with a backache, she burst into tears. Lantier had not come home. It was the first time he had stayed out all night. She sat there on the bed, under the scrap of faded chintz that hung from a rod tied to the ceiling with a piece of string and slowly, through her tears, looked round the dingy furnished room that they rented, its walnut chest with one drawer missing, its three wicker chairs and the little stained table, which had a cracked water jug standing on it. For the children, they had brought in an iron bedstead that blocked the chest and filled two thirds of the room. Gervaise and Lantier had a trunk, wide open in one corner to reveal its empty sides and, at the very bottom, a man's old hat buried under dirty shirts and socks; while around the walls or on the backs of the
chairs, hung a moth-eaten shawl and a pair of trousers thick with mud – the last remaining rags that even the old-clothes' men wouldn't touch. In the centre of the mantelpiece, between two cheap metal candlesticks (not a pair), lay a heap of slips from the pawnbroker's, soft pink in colour. Theirs was the best room in the lodging-house, the first-floor front, overlooking the main thoroughfare.

All this time, the two children were sleeping, their heads side by side on the same pillow. Claude, who was eight, was breathing slowly, with his hands on top of the blanket, while Etienne, still only four, had one arm round his brother and a smile on his face. When their mother's tearful eyes lighted on them, she was overcome by another fit of weeping and patted her mouth with a handkerchief to stifle her low sobs. Barefoot, without bothering to put on the slippers lying on the floor, she went back to the window-sill and leaned against it, as she had done the night before, waiting, looking up and down the distant pavements.

The boarding-house stood on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, to the left of the Barrière Poissonnière.
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It was a dump, three storeys high, painted reddish purple as far as the second floor, with wooden shutters rotted by the rain. Above a lantern with cracked panes, one could just make out the words:
HÔTEL BONCOEUR, OWNER MARSOULLIER,
between the two windows, in large yellow letters, though bits of this inscription had fallen away with the decaying plaster. The lantern got in Gervaise's way and she stood on tiptoe with her handkerchief to her lips, looking to the right, towards the Boulevard de Rochechouart, where the butchers stood in groups, in their blood-stained aprons, in front of the slaughterhouses, and, from time to time, the cold wind brought a foul odour, the crude smell of slaughtered animals. Then she looked to the left, her eyes threading along the ribbon of the avenue that came to a halt almost exactly in front of her in the white mass of the Lariboisière Hospital, at that time still being built. Slowly, her eyes traced the boundary wall as far as it could be seen in both directions; sometimes, at night, she could hear the screams of people being murdered behind it; and now she searched its far recesses and dark corners, stained with damp and filth, afraid that she might come across Lantier's body, his belly punctured with knife wounds. When she
looked up beyond the endless grey wall that circled the city with its strip of wasteland, she saw a great glow, a sprinkling of sunlight, already humming with the early-morning sounds of Paris. But her gaze always returned to the Barrière Poissonière and she craned her neck, bemused by the sight of the uninterrupted stream of men, animals and carts pouring down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle between the two squat tollbooths at the entrance to the city. It was like the tramping of a herd of animals, this crowd that would suddenly halt, then spill out in pools across the roadway, this endless procession of labourers on their way to work, carrying their tools on their backs and a loaf of bread under their arms, a throng that poured past, to be sucked into Paris, unceasingly. Whenever Gervaise thought that she could make out the figure of Lantier among all these people, she leaned further out, at the risk of falling; and afterwards pressed her handkerchief more firmly against her mouth, as though to drive back her pain.

A cheerful young voice called her away from the window:

‘The boss isn't in then, Madame Lantier?'

‘No, Monsieur Coupeau, he isn't,' she replied, forcing a smile.

Coupeau was a roofing-worker, who had a ten-franc room at the top of the house. Finding the key in the door, and being a friend, he came in with his bag slung over his shoulder.

‘I'm working over there, you know,' he went on. ‘At the hospital… Fine month of May we're having, I must say! It's a bit nippy this morning.'

He looked at Gervaise, her face red from crying. When he saw that the bed had not been slept in, he gently shook his head; then he went over to the children, still sleeping, with their pink cherubs' cheeks, and said, in a whisper:

‘What about that! The old man's been misbehaving, has he? Don't you fret, Madame Lantier. He's been taking a lot of interest in politics. He was acting quite crazy the other day, when they were voting for Eugène Sue,
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who's meant to be a decent sort. Perhaps he spent the night with some friends saying what he thought of that rotter Bonaparte.'
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She forced herself to say: ‘No, no, it's not what you think. I know
where Lantier is… We've got problems, like everyone else, heaven knows!'

Coupeau winked, to show that he was not taken in by the lie, and then left, offering to fetch the milk for her if she didn't want to go out: she was a fine, plucky woman, who could count on him if she was ever in trouble. As soon as he had gone, Gervaise went back to the window.

The herd was still pouring through the city gate in the cold of early morning. You could pick out the locksmiths in their blue dungarees, the bricklayers in their white jerkins and the painters by their short jackets with long smocks underneath. From the distance, the crowd had a muddy uniformity, a neutral colour in which the dominant tones were washed-out blue and dirty grey. From time to time, a workman would stop in his tracks to relight his pipe, while the others went on walking around him, without a smile, not exchanging a single word with a friend, their pasty faces fixed on Paris, which sucked them in, one by one, through the gaping mouth of the Faubourg-Poissonnière. However, at both corners of the Rue des Poissonniers, by the doors of the two wine merchants who were just putting up their shutters, some men slowed down and, before they entered, paused outside in the street, glancing sideways towards Paris, their arms dangling loosely, already deciding to take the day off work. Inside, standing at the counters, groups of men were buying drinks for one another, hanging around, filling the rooms, spitting, coughing, rinsing out their gullets with tots of brandy.

Gervaise was watching the door of Père Colombe's, on the left of the street, where she thought she had seen Lantier, when a fat woman, bareheaded, shouted up to her from the middle of the road:

‘Hey there, Madame Lantier! You're an early riser!'

Gervaise leaned forward.

‘Why, hallo, Madame Boche… Yes, I've got heaps of work today!'

‘Don't I know about it! And it doesn't get done by itself!'

So a conversation was struck up, from window to pavement. Madame Boche was the concierge in the house where the restaurant, the Veau à Deux Têtes, occupied the ground floor. Gervaise had often waited in her office for Lantier to come, to avoid sitting down on her own among all those men, eating at nearby tables. The concierge said she
was going a few doors away to the Rue de la Charbonnière to wake up a tailor whom her husband had been trying to persuade to mend a coat for him. Then she talked about one of her tenants who had come back the night before with a woman and kept everybody awake until three in the morning. But even as she chatted away, she kept a keen eye on the young woman, apparently devoured by curiosity and only standing there under the window so that she could satisfy it.

‘Is Monsieur Lantier still in bed, then?' she asked, suddenly.

‘Yes, he's asleep,' Gervaise answered, though she could not help blushing.

Madame Boche saw the tears welling up again in Gervaise's eyes and, doubtless having got what she came for, was going on her way, with a remark about what lazy beasts men were, when she came back and shouted:

‘It's this morning you go to the wash-house, isn't it? I've got some to do myself, so I'll keep you a place by me and we can have a chat.' Then, as though suddenly feeling sorry for her, she added: ‘My poor girl, you really didn't ought to stay there, you'll catch your death… You're all blue with cold.'

Gervaise insisted on staying at the window another two interminable hours, until eight o'clock. The shops had opened, the stream of workmen's overalls flowing down from the heights dried up, and only a few latecomers were striding quickly past the gates, while in the wine shops the same men still stood, drinking, coughing and spitting. Working girls had taken the place of the men: polishers, stylists, florists, huddled in their flimsy dresses as they trotted along the outer boulevards; they came in clusters of three or four, with lively chatter and little laughs, their shining eyes glancing around them; but occasionally, one, thin, all alone, pale and serious-looking, would hug the perimeter wall, skirting the streams of filth… Then, the office-workers went past, blowing on their fingers or eating their penny rolls as they walked along; lanky young men, in coats one size too small, their eyes bleary and glazed with sleep, and little old men who waddled along, ashen-faced and worn out by long hours at their desks, looking at their watches so as to time their arrival to the second. And the boulevards had resumed their morning calm: those men of more considerable means in the
neighbourhood took their walk in the sun; mothers in dirty dresses, wearing no hats, rocked their babies in their arms or changed their nappies on the benches; and a bunch of snotty, scruffy kids scrapped and rolled about on the ground in a welter of whimpering, laughter and tears. At once, Gervaise felt she was suffocating, losing hope, spiralling into a pit of anxiety. It seemed as though everything were over, time had ended, Lantier would never come home. Her eyes wandered distractedly from the old abattoirs, black with their killing and their stench, to the pale new hospital where, through the rows of still gaping holes waiting for window-panes, one could see the naked wards where death would come for its victims. Opposite, beyond the perimeter wall, she was dazzled by the blazing sky in which the rising sun had started to cast its rays over the mighty awakening of the city.

The young woman was sitting on a chair, her hands dangling at her side, past weeping, when Lantier calmly walked through the door.

‘You're back, you're back!' she shouted, trying to throw her arms round him.

‘Yes, I'm back. So what?' he replied. ‘You're not going to start your nonsense again, I hope!'

He thrust her aside, then, in a gesture of annoyance, threw his black felt hat across the room on to the chest of drawers. Lantier was a young man of twenty-six, short, good-looking, with a dark complexion and a thin moustache, which he twirled constantly with a mechanical gesture. He had on a workman's overall and an old, stained coat, taken in at the waist. He spoke with a marked southern accent.

Gervaise had slumped back into the chair and was complaining softly, in short bursts: ‘I didn't sleep a wink… I thought you must have come to some harm… Where did you go? Where did you spend the night? For God's sake, don't ever do it again, I'll go out of my mind… Tell me, Auguste, where did you go?'

‘I was busy, right?' he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Damn it all! I went to La Glacière at eight, to see that friend of ours who is meant to be setting up a milliner's. It was late, so I thought I might as well stop over… In any case, I don't like being spied on, so get off my back!'

The young woman began to sob again. Lantier had raised his voice
and made brusque gestures, knocking aside the chairs, which woke up the children. They sat up in bed, half naked, ruffling their hair with their little hands; and, when they heard their mother crying, howled dreadfully, themselves weeping from half-opened eyes.

‘Ah, now the music's started!' Lantier yelled, in fury. ‘I warn the lot of you, I'll be off again! And this time it will be for good… Won't you shut up? OK, that's it. I'm going back where I came from.'

He was already picking up his hat from the chest of drawers. But Gervaise rushed forward, stammering: ‘No, no!' She stifled the children's tears with hugs, kissing them on the head and muttering endearments as she put them back to bed. Quickly appeased, they started to laugh and pinch one another. Meanwhile, the father, without even taking his boots off, had slumped down on to the bed, looking exhausted, his face blotchy after a sleepless night. He didn't fall asleep, but stayed there with his eyes open, looking around the room.

‘A fine state this place is in,' he muttered. Then, after staring at Gervaise for a moment, he added unkindly: ‘Have you given up washing yourself then?'

Gervaise was only twenty-two, tall, rather thin, with fine features, though already drawn: she had had a hard life. Now, in her slippers, her hair unbrushed, shivering beneath a white shift that was stained with dust and grease from the furniture, she seemed to have aged ten years because of the hours of anxiety and tears that she had just suffered. Lantier's remark stirred her out of her fear and apathy.

‘That's not fair,' she said, with some spirit. ‘You know darned well I do as best I can. It's not my fault we ended up here… I'd like to see you managing, with the two kids, in a single room where there's not even a stove to get some hot water… If you hadn't spent all your money when you first came to Paris, you could have set us up somewhere, like you promised.'

‘I like that!' he yelled. ‘You did your bit in spending our money, just as much as me. You're a fine one, to start blaming me now for the good times we had!'