Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  The journey took two hours thirty-five minutes. Between Amiens and Abbeville the track followed the asphalted highroad he had cycled along with Louise. He thought he could remember this or that farmhouse or corn mill, maybe also some lone lime tree or particularly pretty villa, and he kept a sharp eye open for the range of hills on which Louise and he, only a stone’s-throw apart, had lain in their respective shell-holes. The most noticeable traces of devastation had disappeared in the ten years since the war’s end. Roads had been repaired and houses rebuilt, and nature had filled in the trenches and clothed the shell-holes in merciful greenery.

  At Abbeville he changed to the little tourist tram, which lurched along to Le Tréport. He was the only passenger apart from some schoolchildren and a girl in clogs with a basketful of cabbages on her lap. It was clear from the state of the train that Parisian holidaymakers had stayed away because of the war, inflation and the Depression. The lilac-upholstered seats were worn and torn, the window panes cloudy, the leather straps cracked and the chrome-plated grab handles tarnished. The track was warped and weeds were growing up between the rails. Nobody got in or out on the way. It wasn’t until they got to the terminus on the Quai François Ier that the schoolchildren made a noisy exit and the girl in clogs shuffled after them.

  On the quayside Léon looked round as if there were the smallest chance that a girl with green eyes might appear from a side street, at a window, or on board a fishing boat. They had left their bicycles beside that lamp post and she had slipped her arm through his somewhere near that bollard. Here they had tossed the strips of white fat from their ham sandwiches into the harbour basin, there she had thrust her last morsel into his mouth with her fingertips, and there she had criticized the holidaymakers for putting on airs. That was the fountain she’d drunk from and those were the cobblestones, which now had grass and moss growing between them, on which she’d walked in her shabby black lace-up shoes.

  The tourist boats that had sailed in and out, belching steam and smoke, were now tied up against the harbour wall with weed-encrusted hulls and boarded-up hatches. There were no white lace parasols to be seen on the quayside, no pink bootees or gleaming spats, just scrawny seagulls, shaggy dogs and a horde of barefoot urchins playing football with an old tin can. The fishermen were still there, repairing their nets, puffing at their pipes and stroking their wrinkled necks with gnarled hands.

  Léon walked out to the lighthouse, sat down on the sea wall and shuffled around until he had a distinct feeling that he was sitting just where Louise had. Then he rested his hands on the wall and caressed it. It suddenly struck him that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast.

  The Café du Commerce, where Louise had explained the difference between rich bores and poor, was shut. The doors and windows were barred and wind-blown autumn leaves and faded sheets of newsprint were lying in front of the entrance. A yellow dog trotted past, cocked a hind leg and urinated against the wall, hobbling along on three legs as it did so.

  Léon overtook the dog and walked past a closed lacemaker’s shop, then a closed newsagent’s, a ramshackle private house and a brightly painted shop called Aux Quatre Vents, which used to sell beach toys. Beyond it was an ironmonger’s. The lights were on inside, so Léon pushed the door open and went in. He acquired a blue enamelled saucepan, then set off up the Rue de Paris, where he had once bought bread, wine and vegetables.

  An hour later he was sitting between the two boulders that lay at the southern end of the beach, massive, immovable and immutable. The tide was out, the waves were feebly, sullenly lapping the grey shingle, and seagulls were frolicking in the updraughts. Léon realized only now how much he had missed their harsh screams. He poked the embers of his campfire, put on more driftwood, and stirred his saucepan, which was filled to the brim with mussels, carrots, onions and sea water.

  The church clock struck five. Then came the distant bell of the tram. Having studied the timetable, Léon knew that it was the last incoming tram of the day, and that the last train back to Paris would be leaving in less than an hour.

  He scanned the shingle beach with its row of bathing huts, once white but now peeling and covered with algae. The smart seaside villas behind them had been freshly whitewashed and were bravely standing their ground, but their closed windows and rigidly motionless curtains made them look as if the course of world events had taken their breath away. If she wanted to eat some mussels today, Louise would have to appear at the other end of the esplanade in the next few minutes, in the gap between the Hôtel des Anglais and the casino.

  When the church clock struck five-fifteen, Léon took the saucepan from the fire and started eating, at first hesitantly and with many a sidelong glance at the esplanade, but then quickly and resolutely. He tossed the empty shells on to the beach. Then he went down to the water’s edge, rinsed out the saucepan and deposited it beside the ashes of his fire upside down.

  He didn’t return by way of the beach but took the direct route across the esplanade to the Rue de Paris, then up the hill to the Église Saint-Jacques. The Virgin Mary was still standing in her niche on the right of the entrance. Her cheeks were just as red and her boot button eyes just as black, but her blue and gold robe had faded a little and her figure was no longer studded with folded and rolled-up slips of paper. What was new was the money box at her feet, into which people could put donations for the widows of drowned seamen.

  Léon considered kneeling down in front of the Virgin and trying to murmur a prayer, but being unsure whether he could even recite the whole of the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end, he decided against it and dropped a coin into the money box instead. Then he took out his notebook, scribbled a few lines and tore out the page, rolled it up and stuck it in the Virgin’s right armpit, exactly as before.

  But because his slip of paper was the only one, it resembled a thermometer inserted in her armpit and made her look as if she had a temperature, so he pulled it out and stuck it behind her ear instead. There it looked like a carpenter’s pencil, in the folds of her blue robe like a dagger, between her lips like a cigarette, and at her feet like a bone left there by some dog. So he replaced it in her right armpit, left the church and made his way down to the harbour. He would have to hurry if he wanted to catch the last tram.

  Three days later, Léon was sitting on the terrace of the Café de Flore far too early. It was Saturday afternoon, and the Boulevard Saint-Germain was thronged with strollers and tourists. He had already drunk three cups of coffee and skimmed five newspapers twice over, and he still had twenty minutes to kill before five o’clock finally came. He buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket, stretched his legs and withdrew them under his chair again, asked the man at the next table for the exact time and set his pocket watch three minutes slow. Then he folded the newspapers into a neat pile, never taking his eyes off the stream of passers-by.

  If the truth be told, he was sitting there against his will. It was Yvonne who had compelled him to keep this assignation, not that he was even sure it was one. When he had returned to the Rue des Écoles late at night two days ago, he had managed, contrary to his expectations, to sneak unnoticed past the concierge’s door. However, Yvonne had been waiting for him on the landing, ready to leave in her hat and coat with a suitcase at her feet. Clutched in her hand was a crumpled handkerchief, which she was pressing to her lips.

  Léon was taken aback yet again. This wasn’t the tipsy demimondaine in pink sunglasses whom he had left behind in the park that lunchtime, nor the blithely singing young girl, nor the tormented housewife. This time Yvonne was the self-sacrificing heroine of a Greek tragedy.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied, taking the suitcase from her. ‘I’m an idiot. Forgive me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I went to the church at Le Tréport. Like that time, you know. It was just a hunch. Please let’s go in.’

  After he had told her everything she wiped her eyes on her handkerchief and said, ‘Five
o’clock at the Café de Flore the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘No buts. You’re going, Léon, you hear me? Just to make sure. You must, I insist.’

  It was ten minutes past five when he sensed Louise’s presence. He couldn’t see or hear her, just sensed her like a current of air wafting down the street or a ray of sunlight falling on a building when the clouds overhead disperse. He looked around enquiringly at the café’s other customers and scanned the windows on the other side of the street, simultaneously keeping an eye on the passers-by.

  Then he noticed a pretty but rather battered sports car standing on the other side of the boulevard in the Place du Québec with its engine running. It was a lime-green Peugeot Torpedo 172, easily identifiable by the sharply tapering back to which it owed its name. Léon had fallen in love with the smart, speedy little two-seater when it was all the rage in the streets of Paris a few years earlier, and for a while he had secretly calculated for how many months he would have to set aside a quarter, a third or a fifth of his salary in order to afford the down payment.

  Being a sensible soul, however, he had never lost sight of the fact that a family man like himself had no legitimate reason for spending a quarter, a third or even a fifth of his salary on a two-seater. When Yvonne poked fun at the yearning looks he cast at passing Torpedoes, as she sometimes did, he always claimed that he was looking, not at the car, but at some pretty woman on the other side of the street.

  He hadn’t seen the Torpedo arrive, so it must have been standing there for a while. The hood was up, the exhaust smoking, and a vague figure could be glimpsed behind the windscreen. It was as if the little round headlights above the battered wings were winking at him, the dark, round hole in the dented radiator grille calling to him, and the whole of the little car trembling with impatience for him to get up at last, cross the street, and get in.

  He rose hesitantly, put some coins on the table with one hand and raised the other in a tentative wave. At that, the battered passenger door sprang open and a woman’s arm on the driver’s side beckoned him over.

  Léon had one foot inside the car and the other still on the running board when the Torpedo took off and threaded its way neatly into the stream of traffic in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Meantime, he flopped down on the seat and opened his mouth to greet Louise but couldn’t get a word out because he felt that a commonplace ‘Bonjour’ or ‘Salut’ would seem too banal in such an exceptional situation.

  So it was Louise who got in first. ‘We won’t kiss,’ she said. ‘We won’t fling our arms around each other’s neck, all right? We won’t burst into tears and dry them for each other, and we won’t carve hearts in age-old lime trees and swear eternal love.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Léon.

  Louise was wearing a leather helmet and goggles with green lenses. She vigorously double-declutched, changed up from second to third, and turned sharp right into the Rue Bonaparte.

  While the Torpedo was slithering over cobblestones wet with rain, Léon wedged himself between the dashboard and the passenger door with his arms and legs. Lying at his feet, slightly soot-stained, was a blue enamel saucepan. Louise drove the car with swift, unerring movements. Her face was flushed.

  ‘Don’t gawp. Keep your eyes on the road.’

  ‘I’m not gawping, just looking. A snappy little roadster, you’ve got.’

  ‘Four-cylinder, does sixty k.p.h. with ease.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘A Torpedo won the Coupe des Alpes a few years back.’

  ‘Two years running. It was a present to myself to celebrate the anniversary of my employment by the Banque de France. I got it cheap – it already had a few dents.’

  ‘The name doesn’t really suit it, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A torpedo’s pointed at the front, not the back.’

  ‘I’ll drive around in reverse if you like.’

  ‘You work for the Banque de France?’

  ‘Have done for five years.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Congratulations aren’t appropriate. They treat me like a serf.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s what I am. I spend the whole day typing out tabular computations, and I have to produce five copies of each.’

  ‘Hence the Torpedo?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You don’t ride a bike any more?’

  ‘If I have to go somewhere I take the car. And if I don’t have to go somewhere I also take the car.’

  ‘And if you go to the seaside?’

  ‘Then I certainly take the car.’

  ‘So why did I see you in the Métro?’

  ‘The car was in for repair.’

  ‘You work at head office?’

  ‘Yes, Place de la Victoire.’

  ‘I’ve been working at the Quai des Orfèvres for the last ten years. That’s only a few hundred metres away.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Louise, ‘so we’ve been polishing the seats of our chairs in pretty close proximity for quite a while. Some people would call that bad luck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk now. We’ll drive out of town for bit, if that’s all right with you. We’ll talk later.’

  Louise changed up from third to fourth and drove past the Luxembourg Gardens with her foot hard down, then further south past the Observatory and into the Avenue d’Orléans. She let her left arm dangle over the door and steered the car with her right hand. She overtook horse-drawn vehicles and buses on the left or right, wherever a gap presented itself, and when the street came to an intersection she shimmied between pedestrians, bicycles and cars at breakneck speed. Whenever a bus or a lorry refused to give way she thumbed her horn and cursed and swore until the startled driver pulled over, and when she shot through the gap she thrust her arm out of the window and made a gesture that would normally, if directed by one man at another, have resulted in a punch-up.

  Léon stared with delighted horror at the lethal obstacles flashing past the Torpedo on either side. He also stole sidelong glances at Louise, who, now that the traffic had thinned and the road was flanked by fields, was leaning back and looking ahead with her eyes half shut.

  She had removed her leather helmet and goggles. The corners of her mouth conveyed a suspicion of a smile, her chin was tilted expectantly, and her neck made a softer impression than it used to. A little furrow ran from the dip below her ear to her throat, and this, combined with the silver strands above her temple, lent her still girlish appearance a hint of womanly dignity. Léon would dearly have liked to know if the ironical twinkle in her eyes related to the other drivers on the road or her sudden togetherness with him in the cramped confines of the little sports car. Both her hands were now resting on the steering wheel, and he noted she wasn’t wearing a ring.

  ‘Now stop staring,’ she said, putting a cigarette between her lips. ‘We’ll stop in half an hour, then we can talk.’

  11

  The nearby forest of Fontainebleau was a dark ribbon below the night sky. Cowering on the plain were little hamlets in which only a scattering of lights still burned late that evening. In the Relais du Midi, which stood beside the road between two nameless villages, long-distance lorry drivers and travelling salesmen were drinking beer in the stifling heat given out by the stove in the middle of the taproom.

  Léon and Louise were sitting close together beside the window in the corner. He had his right arm round her waist. She was leaning against his shoulder with his right hand in her left. A cold draught coming through the cracks in the window was blowing the smoke of her cigarette horizontally towards the stove.

  ‘We still haven’t talked,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to talk?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘We have talked a bit.’

  ‘But not about that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only about cars.’

  ‘And Metropolis.�
��

  ‘And Kellogg and Fitzmaurice.’

  ‘And Chanel dresses and stupid cloche hats. And about your concierge and your mangled tartes aux fraises.’

  ‘And about inflation and the Banque de France.’

  ‘And elephants. How did that joke about elephants go again?’

  ‘Do you still read Colette’s novels?’

  ‘Oh, that silly cow. I’ve never been so disappointed by anyone. I’m out of cigarettes.’

  ‘Are there some left upstairs?’

  ‘In the car.’

  ‘I’ll get them for you.’

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘Don’t leave me. Not yet.’

  He drew her closer and kissed her.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s order before the kitchen shuts.’

  ‘I’ll have steak and frites,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  Léon beckoned the landlord over and ordered, then told Louise a story to make her laugh.

  It was the story of the tramp who sat outside the Musée Cluny day in day out, year after year. Léon used to drop a coin in his hat every morning on the way to work. The man smelt of red wine but was usually clean-shaven, and one could tell that he tried to keep his shabby clothes clean. They always said a friendly good morning and sometimes exchanged a few words, wishing each other a nice day before Léon walked on.

  Every few months, the museum gateway would be deserted when Léon went to work. When that happened he would anxiously wonder whether something had happened to the tramp overnight and wave to him in relief when he saw him sitting in his usual place at lunchtime. Having grown attached to the man over the years, he worried about him as he would have worried about a distant uncle – one with whom he wasn’t on very intimate terms but who was somehow ‘family’.