She asked innocently, “Do you still remember what you learned when you were young?”
He took his time. “Why are you asking me that?”
“No reason. Just curious.”
What did she want from him, the little brat? He saw through her. Did she think she could manipulate him? “I went to lycée like everybody else. Then I got my certification. I don’t see what this has to do with anything—” He certainly couldn’t see why anyone would disturb his reading to ask such silly questions. His murky blue eye fixed Simone with a suspicious look. What had she gotten into . . .
“You didn’t learn English?”
Was she going to insist? He put the newspaper down on the table. Sometimes you had to seem like you were at least pretending. “No, when I was your age they didn’t think modern languages were as important. I think I remember having learned a bit of German, but as for English, nothing.”
A two-sentence reply! That was a record for the end of a meal.
“That’s too bad,” said Simone.
“Well, you can’t learn everything,” said the notary, who in fact had never learned much.
She played with the orange peel cut up on her plate. “It’s such a wonderful language, so marvelous!”
“And a very useful one—”
“I was going to say that—but also, it’s so musical, Father. Listen to this.”
And she put an elbow on the table and recited in English:
“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst . . .”
Simone’s eyes were shining with feverish malevolence. What had possessed her to say that? A curious sickness had come over her, like some kind of desperate love.
“What was that?”
“A riddle.”
“Huh?” Was she toying with him? He raised his eyebrows. She’d been behaving strangely for a while now. “Is this a joke?”
“Not at all, Father, come now! It’s by Kipling.”
He didn’t want to seem totally uncultured. “Ah? And what does it mean?”
“Untranslatable.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “This too, is untranslatable, and it’s a pity since it’s very beautiful”—she began speaking in English—“You bloody sinner, I’m leaving you and the old witch tonight forever, eloping, I mean, with my lover and I stole your quids just a little while ago—Yes, very very beautiful,” and she let out a burst of nervous laughter, pushing the table away, the nape of her neck resting on the chair’s back, her hands flat on the table.
Two little clinks of a fork on a glass—her mother. “That’s enough silliness!”
•
Rose entered, and bent fearfully toward the notary’s ear. “Monsieur Couturier is here. He would like a word with you, sir.”
“Again!”
The notary slammed a fist on the table. “I’ve said, repeated a thousand times, that I expect to lunch in peace. In peace! Do you understand, Rose? I’m talking to you.”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“You don’t seem to understand.”
“I do, Monsieur.”
“Well then, try not to forget it. It’s the last time I’ll tell you—I’m warning you, at mealtimes, I won’t receive anyone. Not anyone. And certainly not my employees, come on, that’s outrageous! Is that understood? If this ever happens again, you’re the one who will be sent packing.”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Tell Couturier that I’ll see him in a bit, in my study.”
“Very well, sir.” She went out.
“One moment!” said Simone. And turning to her father, “Surely you must find out what he wants in any case. Since he came to look for you now, even though he knows your habits—”
The notary choked in his stiff collar. “Why are you interfering?”
“His son goes back to the barracks tonight.”
“His son?”
“Étienne.”
“All right,” said Monsieur Point, raising his eyebrows, “have him come in, but make it quick—” He was still grumbling when Monsieur Couturier appeared. “What is it, Couturier?” he said without raising his eyes. He took an apple to slice and was peeling it, his elbows on the table.
Bird-like, little, thin-shouldered, Monsieur Couturier looked like an adolescent with a head of white hair. He fidgeted, looked at the ceiling. His hand wandered in front of his beard, as though he were chasing a fly. Finally he lowered his troubled, wino’s gaze, letting it fall on the notary as he mumbled something inaudible.
“What was that?” said the notary, still peeling his apple. “Monsieur—Boss, I beg your pardon,” said Couturier in a wheedling voice, “I came to ask a favor from you—in a word I would like—and be assured that if I’d been able to ask you this morning, I never would have come to bother you at this hour,” he continued in the tone of a student reciting his lesson, “but—”
“You’d like to take off early?”
Couturier stopped prancing. His hand fell to his side. You could say he’s trembling, thought Simone.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“And your excuse?” The notary still hadn’t raised his eyes. The apple.
“My son, Monsieur—Boss. In a word, I’d like to leave the office at five—instead of at seven. I—I’ll make it up—I’ll—”
He was fidgeting again, playing with his handkerchief.
“In principle, I don’t really like it when people leave early,” said the notary. “But I can’t stop you from seeing off your son. He has to go back to the barracks tonight?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Understood. You’ll leave at five.”
Couturier was speechless. The silence made the notary raise his eyes and their gazes met. A look of intense sorrow covered Monsieur Couturier’s face—once again he gave the impression of being a man who had endured a hardship, perhaps that of becoming a drunk.
“You may go.”
He went out on tiptoe, still prancing, after babbling a thank you they could barely hear.
The notary plunged back into his paper. As for the notaress, she was still counting. It seemed as though she hadn’t noticed Couturier’s arrival. Simone, once more, put a hand on her “book.”
The maid came back, bringing the coffee. The notaress drank hers in one swallow. Afterwards, she dabbed her beak, crossed herself, and mumbled prayers for herself alone.
Oh! It was still too early to meet Léo, but it wasn’t too early to leave.
Simone got up, took her “book” under her arm and went out. On the threshold she turned, curtseyed, and said:
“When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
THE HEAT, the smoke turned the windows of the café the color of milk. Cripure found himself seated in a chair before he’d decided to go in.
“Waiter!”
“Ready, aim?”
“A glass of Anjou.”
“Fire!”
That overused joke hadn’t made anyone smile in a long time.
Sitting at the Café Machin—he could say seeking asylum—nursing a glass of Anjou, or two, or three, without doing anything but drinking, without a thought in his head, forgetting, like the most ordinary fellow, that was maybe sensible. Maybe! In this world that they’d allowed to come to nothing, he didn’t have anything else to do. They being those “gentlemen scholars” as Babinot might have called them.
In any case, they could have made something of it without too much effort. In this world they were given only once—and they said it was God’s work!—they’d managed to make a situation that was probably worse than despair—why? Why?
As for the rest, it wasn’t a world that was given only once—but a life. What a difference!
“Oof.”
If you looked closely, the Café Machin was as good as any other, and better than any other, since it was ridiculous, and in Cripure’s eyes, ridicul
ousness was more valuable than anything else. My dear old bar! His old spot, with its busted barstools, dented tables, and dirty windowpanes, he loved it with all his heart—through the effects of long fidelity, by becoming one with that atmosphere, blackened like an old hearth where he’d come to rest so many times.
He looked around.
Who were those men playing manille?
Through the smoke from pipes and cigarettes they looked like shades—laughing, slapping each other on the shoulder, throwing down their cards with big whacks on the green felt. Sitting at the cash register as if it were a throne was a fat blond woman armed with a coin rake she wielded like a scepter, looking around the gathered company with the air of a laying hen. Now and then someone would get up and approach her. She held out a hand—a paw—as if from the height of a perch, perhaps expecting a kiss. The waiter, a napkin slung over his shoulder, went endlessly back and forth between the tables with the air of a nurse, which was complemented by his white uniform. Everything seemed in order. Everything basked in the light of an eternal—simplicity, for lack of a better word.
What bothered him about it was that the grocer always stayed the grocer, the lawyer was always the lawyer, Monsieur Poincaré always talked like Monsieur Poincaré and never like, for example, Apollinaire, or vice versa—
And Cripure was always Cripure.
•
He was monologuing:
I could see through the lie, but that’s as far as my courage went. I didn’t know how to act, didn’t know how to keep Toinette. And now, I’m old, ugly, sick, alone in spite of—the other one. Beaten hands down. Yet do I even have the right to say beaten if I never put up a fight? I don’t have a right to anything. I’m nothing. Nothing but one of them. He raised his eyes to the drinkers and murmured, “I’m one of them!”
His eyes half-closed, he recited a line from one of his favorite professors, “Amor fati: let that be henceforth my love. I refuse to go to war against ugliness. I don’t want to accuse, I don’t even want to blame the accusers. To look away will be my only fight.”
A sigh. He murmured, “God that’s beautiful.”
That was exactly it—he hadn’t looked away. And then what, embrace his fate? What a joke, what a load of garbage. What courage must he have then—
Did the Clopper have courage, with his chin to the ground and his iron feet, one shoulder higher than the other and his solemn cane like a shaman’s scepter? Yes, of course, o coward, kissing the hang-man’s ass!
“Waiter!”
“Ready, aim?”
“A glass of Anjou.”
“Fire!”
This is only the second glass, Cripure told himself with a bitter smile. Maybe I’ll think seriously about the Chrestomathy over the third—
This Chrestomathy would be much more serious than his little tales of the Medes from before. The Medes! He didn’t give a damn about the Medes. And to think that back then, they’d listened to him, they’d practically taken him for a great man! That told you something about them in any case. The Wisdom of the Medes, God they were gullible. It was better than the thinking of his colleagues, who never thought about more than declensions. If he succeeded in finishing his Chrestomathy, it would be something else. No longer their so-called opinions, but a whole philosophy of opposition and sorrow. He would say—
“Bah!” he murmured. Reading and writing, what silliness is this? When it comes down to it, their literature tortures me with its exaltation of suffering. To make suffering into a value! Fatal ridiculousness, carefully crafted by poor fellows all crazy with pride, all writing to prove they’re more intelligent than others, that they have more heart, that they’ve suffered better or more than the average man who croaks, as if that had any importance whatsoever! Ah! Since there have been those men who think, or pretend to think, it’s all the same—
He snickered softly into his handkerchief. This life, though! And he drank his glass in one gulp.
“Waiter!”
“Ready, aim?”
“A glass of Anjou.”
“Fire!”
“And—a newspaper.”
“Which one?”
“Oh it doesn’t matter. And something to write with.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, thanks, that’s it.”
“He wouldn’t notice,” said the waiter to the woman at the register, “if I brought him the phone book or the map. And sometimes maybe not even the chess board.” The cashier laughed softly on her throne.
The waiter brought the wine, the notepad, the ink, the paper. Cripure sipped the wine, opened the paper and looked at it vaguely. Ah, yes! Still news of the war, eh. Let’s see what’s on the inside—
The news inside was also about the war.
He was lost in thought.
•
“Dear God! What am I still doing here?” he mumbled after a moment. He was reading the local features. But he never would have admitted that he read the local news with the secret hope of learning of the death of the blond officer, his rival. A mania of his, for years now.
He sighed, turned over the page. I’m a bastard, aren’t I. And hunching over the table, he opened the notepad, dipped the pen in ink and wrote: “Note for the Chresto: To love T—and all she was destined for, including what I’ve referred to as her betray—I understand that.” (He underlined it twice.) “If only I could have been capable of such a love! I could have conquered her for all eternity.”
He underlined and all she was destined for another two times and put down the pen. He thought, it’s not true that I’ve never wished for the other one’s death. Each time he read the local news, he repeated this thought. Out of remorse, he wanted to like the blond officer. It lasted for as long as it lasted, usually not very long. The slightest chance, a surprise meeting, a word taken the wrong way, a dream—and he would fall as if from the top of a roof into an anguish of jealousy.
•
Ridicule had marked out his destiny with its snide, nasty smile. It was true that the great love of his life had been a petty bourgeois girl, Toinette nonetheless! And by some sort of inverse perfection, hadn’t the whole affair begun and taken its course in the most boring town in France—and perhaps in the whole world? Angers: a town with no mystery, under the most banal skies. They had told him a thousand times that it was a town full of music and flowers, and he, imbecile that he was, had daydreamed about it, only to find, in the end, military music and rosettes united on the promenade. Surely, France had no better examples of this sordid kind of town that had been so highly praised. If Bordeaux was where he’d seen the most top hats, Angers was where he’d seen the most fur-collared coats. Nowhere had he encountered a bourgeoisie that was more self-satisfied or more rigidly dull. No surprise that the counterrevolution was always alive and well there! And it was in such a place that he’d spent four years in the prime of life, eventually falling in love with Toinette like you fall into the sea.
Everything happened as though he’d had no other possibilities, as though he were filling a canvas that had been predetermined and given only once. He’d always known in advance how things would be, not only with his love for Toinette and his marriage, but also when he’d attempted to make the Sorbonne accept such an arrogant thesis, when, under the pretext of studying Turnier, he’d made such rebellious arguments and dragged so many people through the mud. And that thesis, he’d known they would fail it, they’d warned him in advance. He’d even been bold enough to visit the professor in charge of evaluating his creation, and the man told him they wouldn’t pass it, that he wouldn’t even be allowed to defend—his work was decidedly too incomplete and fantastical, however brilliant and worthy, like his Wisdom of the Medes, of the attention of the literary public.
Cripure had shown the professor an infinite courtesy, more than courtesy—he had been timid, maybe dull. That hadn’t stopped him from acting surprised and indignant when the thesis was officially rejected.
Those who knew him at the time rem
ember seeing his face disfigured with anger, waving his arms and shouting that he was “stronger than them,” and that he’d get his revenge. He’d played his role admirably, perhaps without knowing he was playing one, as a man who plays with fire only realizes when he gets burned that it wasn’t fun and games. And he was well aware, without admitting it, that he’d courted this blow to his pride, as in his marriage to Toinette, when he’d voluntarily courted the greatest sorrow he knew. But willing or not, the hurt pride and the sorrow were there for the rest of his life.
That all this was absurd didn’t offer any consolation, except through certain delicious thoughts of how indifferent he’d always been to having a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, and that even Toinette had never been more than a petty bourgeois, by now a lady, no doubt, the sort it was easier to hate than to love. At least, he liked to think so. But this hatred of the bourgeoisie that he thought was so natural in him and so well founded was perhaps nothing more than a way to deceive himself and to compensate for a certain love of things that were easy and low—in short, a pose.
He hadn’t, in fact, found it insurmountable to drag his love before the mayor and the priest, like all the rest of them, and in the living rooms he’d frequented, under the patronage of his father-in-law the magistrate, Cripure hadn’t felt too ill at ease. No, he’d even felt a certain flattery in being invited into that posh circle where his colleagues couldn’t follow. They’d received him with respect, like a man whom they would eventually come to count on, like a choice intellect, and everyone had set about forgetting his disability, which had caused so much gossip during the engagement. Toinette could have easily made a better match! It had been so painful for them to resign themselves to a marriage for love. Harder than accepting a death.
In the dizziness of the honeymoon, Cripure felt like everyone’s equal. Fleeting happiness. Too soon his suspicion had regained its tyranny over his life. From then on, the long torture which might never see an end had begun, well before he met the blond officer, one evening when, entering a parlor where he’d come to look for Toinette, the people there had smiled at him in a peculiar way when they saw him appear—at least it had seemed that way to him. Toinette was there—so young, so bright, so happy! But what a sickening happiness! What were they hiding from him? Who had they seen her with? Powdered, her lips rouged, she was sitting next to a man—a young man—she’d taken off her hat and her hair fell on her neck. Her arms were bare. When she leaned in to listen, she surely brushed against the young man, and he could surely see the tops of her breasts. But all that was nothing.
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