The Bachelors, page 13
Then, having unbuttoned his coat, he told himself with a feeling of gratification that it was time for dinner. All this had' made him ravenous.
But no sooner had he entered a ten-franc restaurant than he was captivated by a charming waitress. Without bothering to examine her in detail, he booked his table and went to wash his hands, which he had had no intention of doing on arrival. What natural grace! Blonde, with a slightly turned-up nose, a touch of powder, scarcely any lipstick, and serving all these frightful dwarfs with the same happy look as if she had been dancing a ballet, smiling at the slightest word, half opening her mouth each time she bent down towards a customer, as though it was the act of leaning forward that opened her mouth by inflating her a little. But perhaps the real secret of her charm lay in the tradition it represented, for it was a face from eighteenth-century France; through it one could see, with a thrill of emotion, the continuity of the race; she could not be called anything else but Manon. And with it all, with that exquisite face and body, these hands which she stretched towards you as she served you! Hands? No, paws, red, swollen, chapped, with black nails, hands that were used for scouring dishes, fingering sordid scraps, unravelling strings of intestines, terrifying hands. M. de Coantré never took his eyes off her. But, charming as she was to everyone, she was no more so to him than to anyone else. M. de Coantré left the restaurant without even having tried to enter into conversation with her. Sure of being able to find her whenever he wanted to, since he knew where she worked, he could surrender with a clear conscience to the luxury of abstinence.
He had even cut short his dinner, because the restaurant was so full that people stood waiting for tables. M. Élie would deliberately have ordered an extra course. M. de Coantré, partly out of good nature, partly out of annoyance, went without his coffee.
If M. de Coantré, instead of a light dinner, had eaten a more lavish meal than usual — we can discuss even the hypothesis of his having drunk more than usual — it is possible that everything that happened after dinner would have been different. Everyone knows that our life can be altered by an act committed in a state of intoxication. But few people realize that a man who is accustomed, say, to eat in six-franc restaurants is drunk after a twenty-franc meal.
How reluctantly the day was dying! It was after nine o'clock and night had not yet fallen; for three hours it had been dragging on. Shop-windows and street lamps were lit up in the dusk, touching lights which seemed to be telling the night to hurry, that everywhere there were dainty feet nervously tapping the floor or the ground, the feet of women waiting for the night to bring them happiness. Soon M. de Coantré emerged into the boulevard Rochechouart, and at once found it just as he had left it nineteen years before; the little, brackish pool of Parisian 'pleasure' was still stagnating there.
A leprous crust of dirt covered the houses, the absurd, out-of-date façades of the 'cabarets ', the stunted trees, the flabby, anaemic faces, the lifeless, wizened hands, dry as dead leaves, which must have smelt of obscurity and toil, the mouths with their discoloured teeth, 'blind mouths' assuredly. It was as if everything had been steeped in filth, or in the soot that fell from these skies. Radio this, that or the other poured out a sort of musical vomit, as though the diners in all the restaurants had started to throw up in 'concert', a sort of anonymous blancmange, sexless and ageless, the music of limbo, fit for a ghostly dance in slow motion in the fields beyond the grave. There was not a single vital impulse either towards good or evil in this crowd in which not even youth was young, nothing vigorous or instinctive or even natural in this crowd with girls' faces, where the malest of the males themselves wielded women's weapons against each other. This bloodless mass was like a nest of swarming maggots. Seeing the spectacle, any healthy man could have had only one reaction: either asceticism or wild indulgence, but not this! Balzac called Paris 'a great ulcer'. The impression here was rather of a great pustule. And the red neon lights reflected on the pavements might have been the blood of these people that had flowed from their bodies, leaving them pale as death. Crossing the Avenue Rachel, one was struck by a breath of tree-borne air from the cemetery of Montmartre, as though the only life among these living beings came to them from the dead.
And it was because of the ugliness and unhealthiness of these beings that pleasure and love itself here assumed the aspect of vice — if it can be said that vice resides not in any act in itself but in a desire of which we are ashamed because we think the object of it is unworthy — and this is the only acceptable definition of the word 'vice'.
M. de Coantré walked along the central promenade, still holding his gloves in one hand and clasping the files of his mother's estate in the other. He was intrigued by the barmen with their livid, ghostly faces, the giant commissionaires in their gleaming Ruritanian uniforms, the athletic-looking Germans in dinner jackets, and the Algerians with their umbrellas on the look-out for God knows what left-overs, like sharks around a ship. Street-walkers passed by, but M. de Coantré ruled out as hopeless all those who were too well dressed, with the proletarian phrase: 'Too grand for me.' He followed one who stopped at a shooting gallery. She took aim, and bang! bang! scored a bull with each shot. M. de Coantré retreated disconsolately. He followed another, who stopped in front of a strong man act. As he drew near her, he heard only one word she said to her companion, and this word was 'money'. M. de Coantré withdrew. In this he was wrong, for the group around the strong man was as good as the show itself. Instead of looking at the performer, half the men there were looking round to left and right and over their shoulders; for various reasons they were interested only in their neighbours.
Faced with these women, M. de Coantré thought: 'This is all very fine, but after five minutes I wouldn't know what to do with them.' He was conscious of his grotesque, misshappen body, at once heavy and weak; he had a physical perception of the weight of his belly, his puny legs, his skimpy shoulders, his bent back, his lack-lustre eyes, his enormous head, made even bigger by his thick felt hat. A whore overtaking him put some coins in a sleeping beggar's cap. He was so touched by this that he followed her, crossing the road behind her as she went up a side-street. Just then he noticed that one of his boot-laces was undone, and, stopping beside a vast inscription chalked right across the pavement, which read: Jesus Christ is your only friend (he had scruples about treading on it), he slowly retied it. When he raised his head, the woman had vanished — which was what he had wanted.
He was now so tired that every time he stepped on to a pavement he gave a sort of gasp, heaving himself up and then gathering himself together like a wheezy old horse taking a fence (one almost expected to hear the saddle creak). He sat down on a bench and removed his hat, but immediately a sparrow dropped some dung on his head. He did not wait to be told twice, but moved on. Since under-vitality induces thirst as much as over-vitality, he went into a bar opposite the Pigalle Métro station, and asked for a lemonade — which shows that he was becoming more resourceful, for he had not thought of lemonade in the café on the boulevards. He could easily have revived himself a little by buying an ice or some candy floss at one of the booths in the fun-fair. But his twenty years of retirement had turned him into the opposite of a child; he wanted nothing. Moreover, to order an ice would have caused him something of the same apprehension as he had at the thought of entering a night-club.
Inside the bar he saw a young woman alone at a table, and instantly felt that something new was happening inside him. Why had he given up the others so easily? Now he knew: it was because he hadn't been sufficiently moved by them. This one moved him deeply, with her beautiful black eyes, her slightly olive skin, like Simone de Bauret's, and a vein beating interminably in her temple: a Southern girl, for sure. He sat down at the only free table, two away from hers. Now he knew that something was really happening.
After a while, in order to keep himself in countenance, he opened his portfolio and pretended to read.
If only he could mean something to her! If only she could realize that he wished her well!
Now he understood how so many men and women could find sustenance in this deceptive neighbourhood: it was because they received from it what they brought to it, and every one of them had something in his heart. Through all these people, so much happiness could be obtained. These ill-favoured faces each had as much power to give pleasure as the face of a god. The Parisian shadows were ringed with soft light.
Behind the damsel, the leaves of the trees, lit up, were silhouetted in very pale green against the nocturnal sky, as blue and limpid as the skies of the East. This sky was striped with glowing lines — the electric wires of the tramway, reddened by the reflection from the neon signs. In the dark houses, a few windows were still lit up like honeycombs. Above a sordid tenement block a star appeared on the face of the night. Even in Montmartre there were stars!
He turned and looked at her again, and thought how worthy she was of love. (But in his case, this did not mean much.)
She spoke to the waiter, and the way she moved her shoulders when she said 'no' reminded him of Simone de Bauret.
One of the pleasures of the truly rich is to pretend that they are poor. Those silly little things who make eyes at you in a restaurant because you are wearing an expensive shirt — if they only knew! ... But M. de Coantré, at this moment, was suffering because of his poverty. He did not feel it through a process of reasoning which could have told him that he had no money. He felt it through a number of little details which were not in fact proofs of poverty: his ill-kept fingernails, the smell of his grubby flannel vest which came to him via his collar, the sickly, acrid smell which his fingers retained from the towel in the restaurant wash-room (the smell of towels that have been wet for too long), the dried stain on his lapel, and the long hair covering the nape of his neck (though at least it concealed the rolls of middle-aged fat).
The crowd in the street was growing. He saw from the clock that it was midnight. Without the slightest hesitation he decided to stay. What would he say at Arago tomorrow? Bah! he would think of something.
It struck him that if the table between them became free, he would never dare to move to it. The same defeat as the place d'Anvers. His only hope was for her to leave. Outside, he could approach her quite happily.
Young men who were probable if not obvious catamites came and drank at the bar, their faces swollen from alcohol and only the nape of the neck betraying their youth. They ordered sandwiches which they ate with two hands, tearing at them like young dogs. M. de Coantré did his best to make the revulsion he felt for them clear to everyone; he flourished it proudly like a banner. If one of them had stepped on to a tram in front of the noble count, he would have waited for the nest tram.
Two little pimps with rodents' eyes and avid, tubercular mouths began to exchange insults at the bar. Or rather, one of them insulted the other, who said nothing, pretending to take it all as a joke. M. de Coantré was glad when they went. This man who in the past few hours had shown ad nauseam that 'he was not a man' (in Mediterranean and Arab parlance — and the phrase is rather a splendid one) could summon up enough pride to suffer at the sight of a human being, even of this stamp, allowing himself to be insulted with impunity.
The slow, silent processions of police squads on bicycles could be interpreted in two different ways: they might be taken as a threat, recalling, perhaps, the nocturnal processions of aircraft over Paris, or they might be taken to show, by their tutelary presence, that all is well with a world in which people are peddling drugs, trips to Buenos Aires are being arranged, little girls are selling themselves, everyone carries a prohibited weapon in his pocket, and so on.
A woman of the lowest type came in. Her hideous, rasping voice seemed to come from the most degraded part of her being, and so did what she said, which was without exception vile. One could see that the men who spoke to her despised her, but that she did not disgust them. One could lust after this creature, and yet remain a 'normal' man — a normal, respectable man, a paterfamilias who sits on a jury and whom everybody shakes hands with.
After having wandered round the bar for some time, the creature spotted M. de Coantré, gave him a long stare, then came up to his table and leaned her forearms on it. He saw her black fingernails, and her lips, dual-coloured like a water-ice (natural pink towards the inside, lipstick-red on the outside), and smelt on her breath a whiff of fried potatoes (all she had had for dinner?).
'Won't you buy me a drink, dearie?'
'No,' said M. de Coantré, shaking his head, scowling, and keeping his eyes lowered on one of the papers from his file.
'Why?' she asked, not without a certain alertness.
'Because I have work to do,' he said, pointing to his papers. He had taken out his pencil and, to strengthen his point, began scribbling away in the margin. His eyes, as they alighted on the document, must have been struck by the word 'renunciation', for this word kept on recurring in what he wrote: 'Renunciation .. . renunciation ...' We know how much renunciation went on in the affairs of Mme de Coantré (the worst of it being that every time she renounced something she had to pay for the right to do so).
'Working, eh?' she said with an air of profundity. 'What are you working at?'
'I'm a journalist, and I have to submit my article tonight,' he said in a loud voice, by no means loath to let the bar-owner have this explanation of his prolonged presence. 'Come now, leave me alone.'
'Naughty!' she said, tapping him on the arm after the fashion of schoolgirls, provincial maidens, or girl-cousins.
She went out, and M. de Coantré turned towards the girl. Then — but which of the two began it? — they smiled at one another.
It was half past one. M. de Coantré, having become a journalist, had some writing-paper brought to him and began copying out page after page at random from his dossier. The couple at the next table, who had been separating him from the girl, left the bar. Of course he did not move. But he wondered if the girl understood that he was waiting for her to go outside, and despaired of ever making her understand....
The harridan returned. Whenever she looked at M. de Coantré she began to hum, as though it was from him that she drew this thread of music. He sensed that she was about to accost him again, and he went on copying, copying (he had now got to the undertaker's invoice).
'To the burial of the body of the late Madame la Comtesse de Coantré, opening the family vault, cleaning the interior, waiting for and receiving the body, sup ...'
He was aware of her standing in front of his table. Lowering his head and screwing up his eyes, he wrote feverishly, waiting for the blow to fall:
. . . 'plying, measuring, transporting, placing, sealing, etc., of a slab of Chassignelles stone, thickness 005 at 2 cuttings . . .'
'Haven't you finished writing that b . ..?' He did not answer, but clenched his teeth. Suddenly she picked one of the sheets of paper and read with an air of Etruscan stupidity: 'Estate . . .'
He got up and tore the paper away from her. 'Estate! So you're not a journalist, you're a bailiff! You're the man who screws money out of people!'
We know M. de Coantré's 'geysers'. Not since the day before, at six o'clock in the evening, had he been 'a man'. Suddenly he was a man once more. Perhaps this woman had her ponce somewhere nearby, who would come and attack him. The thought crossed his mind, but he paid no attention to it. People are sometimes surprised to find respectable middle-aged gentlemen, as timid as can be, lying on the threshold of some low dive with their throat slit. The explanation is that, at a certain moment, like M. de Coantré, they threw caution to the wind; they clung to their wrath like metal to a magnet. Rising to his feet, M. de Coantré called to the bar-owner.
'I say, look here, can't I be left in peace? I've got work to do, I've got to earn my living.'
(As soon as M. de Coantré began to lie, all his self-confidence returned.)
'Come along, Coquinette,' said the barman, 'leave the customers in peace. Do you want me to throw you out?'
M. de Coantré sat down again. He turned towards the Southern damsel and their eyes met, and once more they smiled at one another, and he said to her with his eyes, 'Look what I'm putting up with for you! Do go outside, you little fool, and I'll follow close on your heels!' Then he bent down over his papers again and continued copying:
'To closing and resealing of vault. ... 380 frs.' He went on copying for a long time, glued to this table, telling himself that he would hold out to the end, that this girl would eventually want to go home to bed. Moreover, he was neither tired nor sleepy — galvanized by his desire. Only a few customers came in now, standing at the bar and shaking dice. Outside, the policemen-cyclists still glided slowly round on their silent patrols. Had he had an ounce of wit, M. de Coantré would have gone out and said to them: 'Officers of the watch, bring out this little Provençale, because I haven't the courage to accost her in this café, whereas outside I can take care of her.' But that was another thing he did not think of doing.
The harridan was back again. She was now haggling in a corner with two night workers, one of whom said, 'Ten francs for the two of us ...' to which she replied, 'No, no, fifteen francs . . .' Then came the sound of noisy tart's kisses (much ado about nothing), and the men drank in the seven deadly sins from the distended, rubbery mouth. M. de Coantré went on copying. At half past two the proprietor and the waiter sat down to supper. It was done in a casual way, the boss serving the waiter, evoking sentimental thoughts about the people in M. de Coantré's mind. At this moment a man came in, went straight to the girl's table and sat down. He was a night-club attendant, or perhaps a musician, wearing black trousers and waistcoat, starched shirt-front, black bow tie and a mauve jacket out at the elbows. They spoke to each other in low voices. M. de Coantré subsided in his seat, all hunched up and now quite small, like a fly that shrivels when it dies.
