The Hatter's Ghosts, page 11
‘Léon!’
She wasn’t thirsty. She didn’t need the chamber pot. She was pretending, a treacherous little gleam in her eyes.
He was hers! He was all she possessed in the world, but she really did possess him, and she needed to constantly make sure of it. That was why she didn’t want a nurse or a maid in her room, why she refused to see anyone at all. This way she possessed him even more. He had no excuse to go and breathe another air than hers, even for a moment.
‘Léon!’
In fifteen years, he hadn’t read a single book in peace, even though reading was his last refuge.
He had only got halfway through the story of Madame Lafarge, reaching the testimony of the pharmacist who had sold the poison.
‘Léon!’
The story was grey, without a ray of sunlight. It all took place between stifling walls, and it was hard to imagine a single character smiling even once like everyone else.
‘Léon!’
So, one evening, he had stood up in earnest and shut his book. Had she realized that something had changed in him? Had she sensed that he had finally come to a decision?
‘You see, Paul, I was very calm, terribly calm. I had known for a long time that it had to happen.’
How would the doctor have reacted?
The hatter had just won a little slam, mechanically, by force of habit. Chantreau was again watching him insistently.
No, he wouldn’t understand! It wouldn’t be worth the bother. Besides, there was nothing medical about his case. He wasn’t ill. He wasn’t mad. There was nothing wrong with him.
‘Gabriel!’
Too bad! He was thinking less about Louise, who reminded him of a big peasant-style eiderdown. In his mind she was huge, like when you have a fever and you feel your fingers, your hands, your whole body, and you have the impression you’re filling the room.
He laughed nervously, because young Jeantet was in his usual place. He hadn’t seen him come in. There he was, solemnly scribbling away on the marble table, presumably thinking of himself as a figure of some importance.
7
It was that evening, Tuesday 14 December, that he started writing. He hadn’t waited for Chantreau before leaving the Café des Colonnes. He remembered thinking as he opened the door:
‘Now that my back is turned, what are they going to say?’
There was one thing he knew, and it was something he didn’t like, though he had never brought it up. Not that it mattered all that much. When they talked about him in his absence – he had heard them once when they hadn’t known he was there – they didn’t call him Labbé, or Léon, but the hatter.
Of course, it wasn’t even worth thinking about. They could have pointed out that they also said the doctor, the senator, but that was different, those words sounded more like honorary titles. After all, nobody ever thought of saying the insurance man or the printer.
It had been years, at least, since he had made this little discovery, quite by chance. The fact that he had never mentioned it to anyone and didn’t resent them for it indicated that it hadn’t affected him.
Rue du Minage was horribly empty and totally silent, with no footsteps either behind him or ahead of him. There was something desolate about the harsh light in the little tailor’s window.
He did what he had to do, but for the first time he did it disdainfully, with supreme contempt, uttering the words without believing in them, the way some people say their prayers.
‘Has madame called down?’
There was no need for the horrible girl to be scared: he wouldn’t touch her. He was sure of himself now. Whatever happened, it wasn’t her he would attack.
He went upstairs. However reluctantly, he talked a bit. He didn’t forget any of the rituals. He moved the wheelchair, but when he glanced out of the window he had a shock on seeing Madame Kachoudas in conversation with Dr Martens in the workshop opposite. Kachoudas wasn’t in the room. They must have put him to bed. For those people to have called the doctor, it had to be serious. He remembered when the last baby was born, four years earlier. The midwife hadn’t arrived until it was all over.
It was obvious she was talking in a low voice, that she was asking questions and that Martens – one of the forty-year-old generation – was replying in an embarrassed manner.
Was Kachoudas going to die? Monsieur Labbé was so terrified of that, he very nearly went downstairs to wait for the doctor in the street and question him too.
Once Martens had left, Esther was again sent to the pharmacy, this time with a prescription. When he saw the girl hesitate, he realized suddenly that she was afraid of the strangler. It was absurd. He would have liked to shout out to her that she was in no danger.
He ate, then took the tray upstairs. He threw Mathilde’s food in the toilet and flushed several times. He was worried. All the time, the expression on his face was that of a man with an overwhelming task to perform, a man who bears a heavy responsibility.
Had Louise noticed that he smelled of alcohol? Hadn’t she told him that her father got drunk every Sunday and that most of the time they had to lay him on the bed fully dressed, taking off only his big shoes?
He mustn’t forget anything. He didn’t forget anything. He went down into the cellar to look for another bottle of cognac. He was less than two metres from Mathilde but didn’t even think about her. More precisely, he thought about her as he was on his way upstairs again. He observed that he felt nothing, going down to the cellar, any more than he felt recalling what had happened on 2 November, the day after All Saints.
If he had followed the rituals scrupulously, he would, once the logs were on the fire and he had put on his dressing gown, have sat down and started cutting out printed letters in order to reply to the article in the newspaper. But it was all so pointless! He could hardly say anything that way.
He went around in circles like a dog looking for somewhere to flop down, smoked almost a whole pipe without settling on anything, then once again went and looked through the window. He saw the two women, Madame Kachoudas and Esther, sitting at the tailor’s table, conversing in low voices, glancing anxiously every now and again towards the door at the back.
Then, all at once, he sat down at the little desk and took paper from the drawer: paper with the shop’s letterhead, which proved that he didn’t care about precautions any more. He poured himself a glass of cognac and took a sip before writing:
It doesn’t really matter what people will say or think …
It wasn’t true – if it were, he wouldn’t be bothering to take up his pen. But nor was it false. His message wasn’t intended for anyone in particular. But he certainly wouldn’t have liked the little tailor, for example, to go without knowing.
It was extremely complicated, and he had a headache. He had had a headache all day. He was disturbed to see his own handwriting. It was because of the alcohol, most likely, and the way his fingers were shaking, but the letters were irregular and some overlapped.
It was very hot in the room, as always. Nevertheless, he felt something like a cold breath on his left cheek because it was one metre from the window, and the panes were ice-cold.
What he needed to demonstrate clearly was that up until now, he had acted with a clear head, knowing exactly what he was doing. He had hit on the right phrase, he thought:
I have taken, and continue to take, full responsibility.
That wasn’t quite accurate either. He had taken responsibility, it was true. But was he sure he would take it in the future? Wasn’t that the very thing that scared him?
All his life, whatever anyone said, he had accepted responsibility, calmly. It wasn’t completely true that he had become a hatter because of Madame Binet, whom he hated almost as much as Louise.
He was going to explain all about that. No, that meant going back too far. He would never get to the end. It didn’t really concern many people. As long as he himself knew, and it was very clear in his mind.
How had things worked out, for example, for the girls in the photograph, the fifteen who had left the convent of the Immaculate Conception the same year? Some had gone away, and others had stayed. Some had married, some had remained unwed.
One of them, right away, of her own free will, without any outside force to compel her, had opted out. That was the one who was in the convent under the name Mother Sainte-Ursule.
Well, for the men, the same phenomenon had occurred, one that was repeated with each generation. It was a pity he didn’t have a photograph of the group of those who were now in their sixties.
On the one hand, Chantreau, Caillé, Julien Lambert, Senator Laude, Lucien Arnould and a few others who didn’t frequent the Café des Colonnes, or only seldom, but who had remained loyal to the town.
On the other hand, those who had left to try their luck in Bordeaux, Paris or elsewhere. Among them, there was even one who had become a bigwig in the colonial administration in Indochina.
Some came back from time to time, on the occasion of a wedding or a funeral, to see their families who had stayed behind. They generally dropped into the Colonnes. And they gave the impression they wanted to surround themselves with a halo. Their manner was friendly and at the same time a little distant – in a word, condescending.
‘So how are things in our dear old town?’
Especially those who had been successful, the ones you occasionally read about in the newspapers.
‘You have a good life here!’ they would sigh, taking care to imply that they didn’t really believe it.
Among them was a lawyer who had become a famous barrister and was talked of as a future president of the Bar Association.
Monsieur Labbé had had the choice too, and he had chosen the hat shop in Rue du Minage.
Incidentally, some people imagined that it was the house where he had been born. That wasn’t correct. He had indeed been born in Rue du Minage, in a building quite similar to the one he lived in now, but that one was fifty metres along the street, and his parents had moved when he was eight.
Madame Binet had disgusted him, just as, forty years later, Louise disgusted him. All the same, he could have stayed in Poitiers despite her, or even gone to Paris.
He had chosen La Rochelle. Not out of fear of the struggle. He wasn’t afraid, wasn’t afraid of anything.
Who had chosen to do his military service in the dragoons, even though he had never been near a horse when he was a child? He had. He had even enlisted before being called up, in order to choose which service he wanted to go into.
And, during the Great War, who had asked to be attached to the air force?
That was also him, Léon Labbé. Thanks to some mysterious transfers, he had been assigned to an infantry regiment when the war had broken out. He had known the trenches. He had suffered there, in the mud, in the crowd, the nameless mass being manipulated like matter.
But once he was an airman, he had never been afraid. He might occasionally deign to have a glass of brandy before a mission alone on board his fighter plane.
He had lived in a world apart, an elite. An orderly took care of him, his clothes, his laced boots.
He hadn’t even been wounded. They were the two most harmonious years of his life.
But he would never get to the end of it if he went that far back, even though he felt vaguely that it was indispensable to his dossier.
Hearing Louise climb the stairs on her way up to bed, he wrote on the headed paper:
I have consciously chosen, always, and I continue, I will continue to choose.
What he had done couldn’t be called abandoning the struggle, beating a retreat, giving up.
On the contrary, as the years went by, it was he who had an ever more pitying smile when he saw those who had gone to Paris come home for a few days and think they were obliged to show off.
He knew perfectly well that he had been right, that he had taken the right path.
Later, I chose to get married.
That was almost true, too, because every house needs a woman, and it’s disgusting always having to seek satisfaction wherever you could. At that time, there wasn’t yet a Mademoiselle Berthe in Rue Gargoulleau. You had to go very low, down in the gutter.
He hadn’t chosen Mathilde. That wasn’t quite accurate either. He had chosen not to fight with his mother, chosen to please her, because she was ill, because to his mind the difference between one girl and another wasn’t worth wasting time or upsetting people over.
After founding the civil aviation club – yes, it was he who had founded it – he had then chosen to withdraw because they had appointed the ship owner Borin as chairman – of course, they had apologized to him, explaining that Borin, being rich and arrogant, was more likely to fill their coffers.
He could have stayed as secretary or deputy chairman. He had preferred not to stay at all.
It wasn’t pique, or a lack of fighting spirit. If he had taken the trouble to stand against Borin, he would have been elected. It was he, and he alone, who had judged that it wasn’t worth it.
That feeling, so clear deep down inside him, was almost impossible to explain. He felt that there was a kind of straight line in his life, a line he could have traced with his pen. Only, words confused everything, they said either too much or not enough.
And that filthy beast Louise was beginning her repulsive daily commotion in her room. She made as much noise all alone, in a space of eight square metres, as all the soldiers in a barrack room. He could hear her shoes fall one after the other on the floor, sense the dress being pulled over her head with a lot of puffing, her face emerging all red, he even thought he could see her rubbing her breasts once the brassiere was removed, then the red line the elastic of her knickers left on her waist.
That was another choice, not to have slept with her. He could have. Maybe it was what she had always expected. She would have lain down meekly. It was likely she couldn’t understand why he didn’t come to her room.
Had she sensed that he had almost done so at the beginning, and that he was even angrier with himself for being tempted?
They called him the hatter, as if it were an insult, at least a ridiculous word, something amusing.
But he had chosen, he had always chosen. That meant he was the strongest of them all, didn’t it?
He had also chosen to get rid of Mathilde, and he had felt nothing when faced with her corpse, hadn’t felt any remorse. Not for a moment, as he squeezed and she looked at him with more astonishment than terror, had he felt any pity.
Perhaps the fact was, it had long been decided, without his realizing it. He had always said to himself:
‘If she oversteps the mark …’
He had placed that mark a long way away, to give her a chance. He had waited patiently for fifteen years. He had given her so much rope, she had assumed she could do anything she liked.
He hadn’t killed her because of Madame Lafarge, but because she had overdone it.
Louise, who was new in the house then, was still sleeping in a room he had rented for her in town, a garret above a draper’s shop on Place du Marché.
Afterwards, he had had all night ahead of him and he had taken his time, not wanting to leave anything to chance.
The floor of the cellar wasn’t cemented over. A good third of the surface, below the window, was covered in coal.
It had been no easy task to partly clear this space and dig a hole nearly a metre deep. He had taken Mathilde’s body down on his back, which hadn’t been easy either on the spiral staircase, then, out of a sense of propriety, had gone back up to fetch a sheet from the bedroom.
He hadn’t even forgotten to block the window as he was working – someone outside might have been surprised to see a light on in the cellar all night.
By five in the morning, it was all over, the coal was back in place, the window unblocked. He had washed the steps of the staircase, one by one, then cleaned his clothes in the bathtub.
At that moment, he had assumed that his task was over. He had decided on the precautions to be taken, which was easy, since Mathilde had never wanted to see anyone, and for years he had been the only person allowed in the bedroom.
Some will say that I wanted to be free. That’s stupid.
He had known, before doing it, that he wouldn’t be much freer than he had been before, since he had to behave as if his wife was alive, which meant doing the same things every day, staying at home at the same hours.
She had overstepped the mark, there was nothing else to say.
The first day, he had been almost cheerful. It was amusing to take the meal up and throw the food in the toilet, to continue not to eat fish because Mathilde couldn’t stand the smell, to pull on the string in order to imitate the noise of her cane on the floor, to push the wooden head in front of the window and to walk up and down the room talking to himself.
‘Has madame called down?’
Valentin hadn’t suspected a thing. Nor had Louise. Or, if she had, she hadn’t let on.
It was on the fifth day that he had been pulled up short by the group photograph, which at that point was still hanging on the wall. For a fraction of a second, his composure had left him, he had turned pale and had genuinely felt afraid.
Because it wasn’t completely true that nobody ever entered the room. It had been a tradition, even since she had become bedridden, that every year on her birthday, 24 December, her school friends who still lived in the town would bring her their wishes and their gifts.
They were all old women now, old maids, and yet that day they chattered away like schoolgirls.
He had had to coolly review the situation. He could have gone to see them one after the other, a few days before Christmas, and tell them that Mathilde wasn’t feeling well and preferred not to see anyone.
But he would have had to do it again the following year, then every year after that, until they were all dead, and that might well have ended up arousing suspicion.
