They were drinking their coffee when a boy came to tell them their luggage had come and been taken up into the bedroom. Julie, despite the previous night’s ordeal, did not seem to be sleepy. She was watching Jeanine Dor going out, through a side door, to the hotel staircase.
“They all stay here. In an hour there’ll be some more of them.…”
But an hour was too long and dreary a wait. She smoked one more cigarette, and then rose with a yawn.
It was not until the third day that they made love. A confused three days. Their room, which overlooked a narrow courtyard, was furnished only with drab old things, a grayish threadbare carpet on the floor, a tapestry-covered armchair, wallpaper that was more brown than yellow, and in one corner a screen hiding the washbasin and bidet.
The first night Julie had undressed behind the screen, emerging in blue-striped pajamas. But finding the trousers uncomfortable, she had discarded them during the night.
He slept badly, in the next bed, separated from hers by a bedside table and a narrow mat. His supper was giving him indigestion. Several times, hearing sounds from the brasserie below, he had been tempted to go downstairs to ask for bicarbonate of soda.
He got up at eight, dressed noiselessly, without awakening his companion, who had flung back her bedclothes, for the radiator was boiling hot, the room overheated and airless. Perhaps that was why he had felt so uncomfortable during the night.
He went downstairs, leaving his suitcase clearly visible lest Julie think he had gone for good. The coffee room was empty. There was nobody to serve him and he went to have breakfast in a bar full of workmen and clerks, then walked along the seashore without thinking of that other sea by the edge of which he had dreamed of lying weeping.
Perhaps he needed to get used to things? The sky was a very pale, babyish blue, the sea too, like the sea in a schoolchild’s watercolor, the gulls were chasing one another, white in the sunshine, and water carts were tracing wet patterns on the paving.
When he got back, at about eleven, he felt compelled to knock at the door.
“Come in.…”
She could not have known it was he. She was wearing only her panties and her brassière. She had plugged an electric iron into the socket of the lamp and was pressing her black silk dress.
She asked him: “Did you sleep all right?”
Her breakfast tray was on the bedside table.
“I’ll be ready in half an hour.… What time is it? Eleven? Would you wait for me downstairs?
He waited, reading a local paper. He was growing used to waiting. They lunched alone together again. Then they went out, and they had scarcely reached the Promenade des Anglais, up near the Casino de la Jetée, when she asked him to wait yet again and disappeared into the Casino.
Next she dragged him down a street in the town center. “Wait for me.…”
On an enamel plate there was a Greek name, followed by the word “Impresario.”
She came back in a fury.
“He’s a pig!” she announced, without further explanation. “If you’d rather go off and walk by yourself …”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got two more addresses.…”
Grim and tight-lipped, she strode along the unfamiliar city streets, questioned policemen, climbed flights of stairs, and kept pulling scraps of paper with new addresses out of her bag.
“I know the place we must go to for an apéritif.…”
This was the Cintra, the fashionable bar. She renewed her make-up before going in. She put on a jaunty air. He understood that she was wishing he were better dressed. She was even wondering whether he would know how to behave in a place like this, and it was she who gave the order with an air of authority, as she climbed onto a high stool and crossed her legs:
“Two pink gins, barman …”
She nibbled some olives, ostentatiously. She stared boldly at men and women. It infuriated her to know nobody, to be merely a newcomer rating only a supercilious glance because of her cheap little dress and her shabby coat.
“Let’s go and have dinner.…”
She knew where to go for dinner too. Afterward, with a certain embarrassment, she began: “Would you mind going back by yourself? … Oh, it’s not what you might think.… After what I’ve been through, I can tell you I’ve had enough of men and you won’t catch me at that again. But I don’t want to be a burden on you. You’ve got your own life to lead, haven’t you? You’ve been very kind.… I’m sure that backstage I shall meet people I know.… At Lille I used to meet all the artistes on tour.…”
He did not go to bed, but walked about the streets alone. Then, at one point, because he was tired of walking, he went into a movie house. And this was another familiar image, drawn from the remote mysterious depths of his memory: an aging man, all by himself, being guided by an attendant with a flashlight into a darkened room where a film has already begun, where voices boom and men larger than life gesticulate on the screen.
When he got back to Gerly’s—that was the name of his hotel and of the brasserie—he caught sight of Julie sitting at a table in the café with the group of acrobats. She saw him go past. He realized that she was talking about him. He went upstairs, and she came to join him a quarter of an hour later, and this time she undressed in front of him.
“He’s promised to put in a word for me.… He’s a decent sort. His father, who was Italian, was a bricklayer by trade, and he himself started off in the same way.…”
Another day passed, and then another, and Monsieur Monde was getting used to things; he had even stopped thinking about them. After lunch, that third day, Julie decided: “I’m going to have an hour’s sleep.… I got back late last night.… Aren’t you going to have a nap?”
He felt sleepy too, as a matter of fact. They went up one behind the other, and meanwhile he had a vision of other couples, hundreds of couples, going up flights of stairs in the same way. And a slight flush rose to his cheeks.
The room had not been done. The two beds, unmade, revealed the livid whiteness of sheets, and there were traces of lipstick on Julie’s pillow.
“Aren’t you going to undress?”
Usually, when he took a siesta—and in Paris, in the course of his former life, he had done so from time to time—he would lie down fully dressed, with a newspaper spread out under his feet. He took off his jacket, then his waistcoat. Julie, with that snakelike movement which he was beginning to recognize, drew her dress up along her body and slipped it over her head.
She showed no surprise when he came up to her, with a rather shamefaced look. She was obviously expecting it.
“Draw the curtains.”
And she lay down, making room for him beside her. She was thinking about something else. Every time he looked at her he saw that now familiar frown on her forehead.
On the whole, she was not sorry about it; things seemed more natural this way. But fresh problems occurred to her, and suddenly she lost all desire for sleep. Her head propped on her hand, her elbow on the pillow, she gazed at him with fresh interest as if from now on she had acquired the right to call him to account.
“What do you actually do?”
And as he failed to grasp the exact meaning of the question, she went on:
“You told me, the first day, that you had private means. People in your position don’t go gallivanting about all by themselves. Or else surely they live in a different style.… What did you do before?”
“Before what?”
“Before you went off?”
Thus she was making her way toward the truth as unfailingly as, landing in Nice in the middle of the night, she had made her way toward this hotel, where she was at home.
“You’ve got a wife.… You told me you had children.… How did you go off?”
“I just went!”
“Did you have a row with your wife?”
“No.”
“Is she young?”
“About my age.”
“I un
derstand.…”
“What d’you understand?”
“You just wanted to have a good time! … And when you’ve spent all your money, or when you’re tired …”
“No … It’s not that.”
“What happened, then?”
And he replied, with a sense of shame, chiefly because he felt he was spoiling everything by such stupid words, blurted out on that tumbled bed, in front of those bared breasts that no longer tempted him: “I’d had enough of it.”
“Have it your own way!” she sighed.
She took this opportunity to slip behind the screen to wash, which she had been too lazy to do immediately after making love; from here she went on:
“You’re a funny sort of fellow!”
He put on his clothes again. He no longer felt sleepy. He was not unhappy. This squalid drabness was all part of what he had been seeking.
“Would you like to stay on at Nice?” she asked, emerging naked with a towel in her hand.
“I don’t know.…”
“You’re not fed up with me too? … You know, you must tell me honestly. I keep wondering how we happen to have got hitched together.… It’s not really like me. Parsons has promised to look after me.… He’s in well with the man who runs the floor shows at the ‘Pingouin.’ … I shan’t be out of a job for long.…”
Why was she talking of leaving him? He did not want that. He tried to tell her so.
“It suits me all right like this.…”
She looked at him, as he tried to pull his braces over his shoulders, and she burst out laughing, the first time he had heard her laugh.
“You’re a scream! Well … When you feel like clearing off, you just say so.… If I may give you one piece of advice, it’s to buy yourself another outfit.… You’re not miserly, by any chance?”
“No …”
“Then you’d do better to dress decently. If you like, I’ll go with you. Didn’t your wife have any taste at all?”
She was lying down again, lighting a cigarette and sending the smoke up to the ceiling.
“Above all, if it’s a question of money, don’t be afraid to tell me.…”
“I’ve got money.…”
The bundle of notes, wrapped up in newspaper, was still in the suitcase, and he glanced at this instinctively. Since coming to Gerly’s he had given up locking it, for fear of offending his companion. Under pretext of looking for something in it, he made sure the bundle was still there.
“Are you going out? Will you come back and get me about five o’clock?”
That afternoon he spent sitting on a bench on the Promenade, his head bent, his eyes half closed in the sunshine, with the blue of the sea before him and the occasional flash of gulls’ wings as they crossed his horizon.
He never stirred. Children played around him, and sometimes a hoop came to rest between his legs, or a ball was thrown toward him. He seemed to be asleep. His face looked thicker and flabbier and his lips hung half open. Several times he gave a start, thinking he heard the voice of Monsieur Lorisse, his cashier. Not for one moment did he think of his wife or children, but it was the meticulous old clerk who appeared in his dream.
He remained heedless of time, and it was Julie who eventually came to look for him and remarked: “I was sure I’d find you flopping on a bench.”
Why? This question bothered him for some little while.
“Let’s go and buy you some clothes before the shops shut.… You see, I think of you and not of myself.…”
“I must go and get some money from the hotel.…”
“D’you leave your money in the bedroom? That’s a mistake. Especially if there’s a lot of it.…”
She waited for him below. He took a bundle of ten thousand francs, so as not to unfasten the pin. The maid was cleaning the hallway, but she could not see him, for he had closed the door. Julie’s words had made him anxious. He climbed onto a chair and pushed the parcel on top of the wardrobe.
She took him to an English firm where they sold smart ready-made clothes. She chose his outfit for him: gray flannel trousers and a navy blue double-breasted jacket.
“With a cap, you’d pass for a yachtsman!”
She insisted on his buying summer shoes of brown and white leather.
“You look quite different.… I sometimes wonder …”
She said no more, but merely cast a furtive glance at him.
She must already have been to the Cintra on her own, for when they went in the barman made some imperceptible sign to her and a young man winked at her.
“You don’t look exactly cheerful.…”
They drank. They ate. They went to the Casino, where Julie stayed for a couple of hours and after winning two or three thousand francs ended by losing all that was left in her purse.
Vexed, she motioned to him: “Let’s go back.”
They had already formed the habit of walking side by side; when she was tired she clung to his arm. They slowed down automatically a few yards before their hotel, like people who are going home.
She did not want to go through the brasserie.
They closed their door. She bolted it, for it was always she who took this precaution.
“Where d’you hide your money?”
He pointed to the wardrobe.
“I’d take care if I were you.…”
He climbed onto the same chair as that afternoon, passed his hand across the top of the wardrobe, but felt nothing but a thick layer of dust.
“Well, what’s up?”
He stood there, aghast. She grew impatient.
“Have you turned into a statue?”
“The parcel’s gone.”
“The money?”
Suspicious by nature, she refused to believe him.
“Let’s see.…”
She was not tall enough, even when she stood on the chair. She cleared the table and climbed up on that.
“How much was there?”
“About three hundred thousand francs, or a little less …”
“What did you say?”
He felt ashamed, now, of the vastness of the sum. “Three hundred thousand …”
“We must tell the proprietor at once and send for the police. Wait.…”
He held her back. “No. It’s not possible.”
“Why not? Are you crazy?”
“We mustn’t. I’ll explain why.… And in any case it doesn’t matter, I’ll manage somehow.… I’ll send for some more money.…”
“Are you as rich as all that?”
She seemed resentful now, as though she were annoyed with him for having deceived her, and she lay down without a word, turning her back on him, and answered his good night with a mere grunt.
6
It was bitter and yet sweet, like the sort of pain that one cherishes and tends solicitously for fear of seeing it disappear. Monsieur Monde felt no anger, no resentment, no regret. About his fourteenth or fifteenth year, while he was at the Lycée, he had gone through a period of acute mysticism following a Lenten fast. He had devoted his days and part of his nights to spiritual exercises in search of perfection, and he had happened to keep a photograph of himself at that time—in a group, for he would have scorned to have his own likeness taken. He looked thinner and rather mournful, with a smile whose sweetness infuriated him later, when the reaction had set in.
Another time, much later, after his second marriage, his wife had given him to understand that she found a smoker’s breath offensive. He had given up not only tobacco but any sort of spirits and even wine. He derived a savage satisfaction from this mortification of the flesh. This time again he had lost weight, so much so that after three weeks he’d had to go to the tailor’s to have his suits altered.
It mattered little, now, whether they fitted him well or badly; but in the last two months he had lost weight far more drastically. He felt all the livelier for it. And although his once rosy complexion was now sallow, he would look with some complacency, when the occasion arose,
at the reflection of a face that spoke not only of serenity but of a secret joy, an almost morbid delectation.
The hardest struggle was to keep awake. He had always been a big eater. Now, for instance, at four in the morning, he had to resort to various devices to stop himself from falling asleep.
This was the moment, moreover, when general weariness pervaded the Monico like drifting dust. For the second time Monsieur René, who called himself Artistic Director, had come into the pantry, impeccably dressed in dinner jacket and immaculate white waistcoat, with his teeth gleaming aggressively.
Monsieur Monde could watch him coming through the room, for close to him at eye level there was a minute round spy-hole that enabled him to keep watch, not so much on the guests as on the staff.
Monsieur René could not help smiling to right and left as he walked, like a prince distributing favors. He moved along in this fashion in the glowing light of the dance hall, reached the folding doors, which were hung with red velvet on one side but shabby and squalid on the other, and at the precise moment when he pushed them open with a practiced hand his smile disappeared, and there was no more sign of his splendid teeth; he was a quadroon from Martinique, whose hair was almost sleek, but whose bluish nails betrayed his mixed blood.
“What’s the time, Désiré?”
For the time is never publicly displayed in a place where so much art is used to make people forget time.
Désiré was Monsieur Monde, who had chosen the name himself. Désiré Clouet. It had first occurred to him at Marseilles, when he was sitting with Julie in a brasserie on La Canebière and the girl had asked his name. Caught off his guard, he had been incapable of inventing one. Across the street, over a cobbler’s shop, he had read a name in yellow letters: “Désiré Clouet, shoemaker.”
Now he was Désiré to some people, and Monsieur Désiré to the rank and file of the staff. The pantry was a long, narrow room that had once been the kitchen of a private house. The green-painted walls were turning yellowish and, here and there, the color of tobacco juice. A door at the far end gave onto the back stairs. As this made it possible to leave the place by a street different from that in which the main entrance was situated, guests occasionally came through Monsieur Désiré’s domain.
Monsieur Monde Vanishes Page 8