The Tenant

by Roland Topor

  “Pierre said he was sure that you would be kind enough to go and look at these two shops and send me your estimate of the choice I should make.

  “I realize very clearly the inconvenience this may cause you, but I would be extremely grateful if you could do it for me, and let me know what you think, as quickly as possible. I am enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Thanking you in advance for this great kindness, etc. . . . etc. . . .”

  The letter was signed with a full name and address—a woman, or even more likely, a young girl. There was also the stamped envelope she had mentioned.

  “I’ll have to answer it,” Trelkovsky murmured. “That won’t be any trouble.”

  8

  Stella

  Trelkovsky was leaving a theater where he had seen a film about Louis XI. Ever since he had begun reading the historical novels left in the apartment by Simone Choule he was fascinated by everything having to do with history. On the street outside the theater, he saw Stella.

  She was surrounded by a group of friends—three young men and a girl. They had undoubtedly come out of the same theater. He hesitated to speak to her, but at the same time he felt a genuine need to do so; not so much because he wanted to see her again, but to find himself in the company of people he did not know. Since he had been avoiding Scope and Simon he had lived almost entirely alone, and he was tormented by the desire to see and talk with others of his own kind.

  He moved a trifle closer to the group, waiting for the moment when he might approach Stella. Unfortunately, she was standing with her back to him. From what little he could hear of the conversation, he gathered that she was talking about the film, and expressing her point of view with considerable vehemence. He waited patiently for a lull that would make it possible for him to break in. The group had just been standing in front of the theater at first, but now they had begun to walk slowly down the street, and Trelkovsky was forced to follow them. He felt for all the world like someone listening at a keyhole. No one had noticed him as yet, but they surely would in a moment or two. He had to do something, and promptly, before one of her friends realized that he was following them and jumped to some nasty conclusion. But what should he do? If he simply called out, “Stella,” wouldn’t she think him too familiar? And what would her friends think? He knew that some people detested being called by name in a public place—she might be one of those. He couldn’t say, “Hey!”, or “Hello, there!”—that was entirely too unceremonious. He thought about, “I beg your pardon,” but that didn’t seem much better. Snap his fingers, or gesture with his arms? Impolite—it was all right for calling a waiter in a café, but after all . . . He decided to cough.

  She didn’t hear him, of course. And then, quite suddenly, he knew what he should say:

  “I hope I’m not interrupting . . .”

  She seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

  “Why no, not at all.”

  She introduced him to her friends, very vaguely, and made a point of remarking to Trelkovsky that they were also friends of Simone Choule. At first, he didn’t know who she was talking about, but when he remembered he hastily assumed an expression of deep sorrow.

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t know her very well,” he sighed.

  Someone suggested that they go and have a drink in a nearby brasserie, and everyone agreed. A few minutes later they were all seated around a large table covered with some sort of oxblood-red plastic. Trelkovsky was seated next to Stella, and as she settled herself on the banquette he felt her thigh brush firmly against his trouser leg. He was tempted to look away, but forced himself to turn back to her. She smiled at him.

  He thought her smile was almost obscene. All of her little affectations, in fact, seemed filled with sensual undertones. She apparently thought of nothing but making love. The manner in which she flicked the point of her tongue into the foam on her glass of beer was significant in itself. A drop of the beer escaped her lips and rolled slowly down the length of her chin and onto her neck. She lifted her hand lazily and blotted it out just as it reached the depression above her collarbone. For an instant, the mark of her finger remained white in the flesh, and then the blood flowed back and it was again a delicate pink. It occurred to Trelkovsky, absurdly, that her flesh must still bear the traces of hundreds of fingerprints. As she leaned forward to replace her glass on the table, her coat slipped down behind her on the seat. She rid herself of it entirely by straightening up and throwing back her shoulders, causing her breasts to wiggle provocatively. Viewed from the side, where Trelkovsky sat, the contour of her bust stretched the material of her dress into a series of taut little folds just beneath the armpit. She seemed to be aware of it, because she reached across and tugged at it slightly, attempting to smooth it down. But the net result of this gesture was to reveal the outlines of her brassiere, even to the riblike lines that must be stays. Yes, he remembered now, her brassiere did have stays.

  And further down?

  The skirt was tight around her hips, so that when she sat down it was pulled into dozens of horizontal folds girdling her stomach and abdomen like silky ropes. The straps of her garters, and the garters themselves, were thrown into sharp relief. The skirt was so short it barely reached the rounded globes of her knees. She crossed her legs, and pulled the skirt down, then let her hand run the whole length of her leg, as though she were caressing it. Her fingernails produced a curious rustling sound as she drew them along the tinted nylon sheath. With the tip of her left foot, she was absent-mindedly massaging the calf of her right leg. She laughed.

  “What do you say we all go over to my place?” one of the young men suggested.

  She stood up and turned around to pick up her coat, bending down to straighten the rumpled sleeve on which she had been sitting. The upper part of her dress bloused out, and he could see the brassiere, not quite retaining the fullness of the breasts. They trembled slightly as she lifted the coat. Their flesh was very white around the thin red line marking the area where the upper edge of the brassiere normally pressed tight against them.

  The waiter pocketed the coins they had put on the table and tore up the check, signifying that now they had paid and were dismissed.

  “Are you coming?” Stella asked.

  He hesitated, but the fear of finding himself alone again swept away his doubts.

  “If you want me to,” he murmured.

  The apartment was very close by. The young man to whom it belonged saw to it that they were all seated in the living room, and then went to get ice and bottles from the refrigerator. The instant they crossed the threshold he had taken on all the mannerisms of the thoughtful host, the lord of the manor offering hospitality to a group of weary pilgrims. He put a record on the phonograph, distributed glasses to everyone, and set out a tray containing the various bottles, a bucket of ice, and a bowl of little salted nuts. If anyone so much as looked at him he would leap to his feet and say, “Is something wrong? What can I get for you?” He was so obliging he was positively irritating. They all began talking at once.

  “Do you know where I saw Simone the last time? It was at a concert—the Lamoureux—I bumped into her completely by chance. We talked for a while and I asked her how things were going. She said everything was fine, but you could see that there was something wrong.”

  “I still have a book she loaned me. One of those historical novels of hers. I haven’t even read it.”

  “She didn’t like the styles this year at all. She said the Chanels were the only things she could possibly wear—the others all looked terrible on her.”

  “She told me she wanted to buy the Beethoven Fourth in that new recording for the Symphony Club.”

  “It’s odd the way she hated animals . . .”

  “It wasn’t really that she hated them; she was afraid of them.”

  “I remember, she couldn’t stand American movies.”

  “She had a good voice, you know, but she never really tried to develop it.”

  “She went somepl
ace on the Côte d’Azur for her vacation, but I never knew where.”

  “She was always afraid of getting fat.”

  “That’s why she never ate anything.”

  Trelkovsky had not joined in the conversation, but was listening intently to every word, periodically taking a little sip from the glass in his hand. Everything that was said, every new morsel of information about Simone Choule, was a revelation to him. So she had not liked this—and she did like that! How odd! Imagine dying when you had such positive ideas about things! There was something totally inconsistent about it. He leaned forward in his chair and began asking questions of the others, hoping to learn more details about the former tenant of his apartment. Then he made mental notes, comparing her taste in things with his own. When they coincided, he felt absurdly pleased. But this didn’t happen very often. She detested jazz, for instance, and he liked it. She adored Colette, and he had never managed to read a page of any one of her books. He had no appreciation whatever of Beethoven, and especially not of the symphonies. The Côte d’Azur was a part of France that held no interest for him at all. But he went on tenaciously, trying to learn everything he could, feeling rewarded whenever he came across the slightest similarity of taste.

  The young man who was their host asked one of the girls to dance. Then another one asked Stella. Trelkovsky poured himself a second drink. He was slightly drunk. The third young man, who was not dancing, attempted to strike up a conversation with him, but he answered only in monosyllables. After the first dance, Stella came and asked him if he wanted to dance with her. He accepted.

  He danced very seldom, and was not very good at it, but the alcohol he had consumed inspired him now. They danced several slow numbers very slowly indeed, holding each other very tight. Trelkovsky had arrived at the point where he cared nothing about what the others thought. He heard her whispering in his ear, asking if he wanted her to come home with him. He shook his head violently. What would she think if she knew his address! She didn’t say anything, but he knew that she was annoyed, so he put his head close to hers and whispered in her ear, “Can’t we go to your place?” She smiled at him, apparently mollified. “Yes, of course,” she murmured. She must have been pleased at the thought, because her hands pressed even more strongly against his shoulder. He didn’t understand her.

  Everything in her apartment bespoke her sex. There were reproductions of Marie Laurencin paintings on the walls, side by side with highly polished shells and illustrations clipped from women’s magazines. The floor was covered with a rug of woven straw. Empty bottles of differing colors decorated a sideboard. There was only one room; the bed was set in an alcove in the wall.

  She stretched out on it languidly, and he followed her example. He knew what was expected of him at such a moment. He began to unfasten her dress, but his fingers were awkward about it and she was forced to help him. Her face looked more vulgar than ever. She knew what was about to happen and she was unashamedly enjoying every minute of it. In spite of his natural desires, Trelkovsky could not succeed in working up any real sense of excitement. Perhaps because of the alcohol he had drunk, but also because, for some strange reason, this woman horrified him.

  Right now, she was far more excited than he. She even undid his belt and pulled off his trousers. And then she removed his shorts. His own voice came to him, saying stupidly, “Well, there we are.”

  He grasped her breasts firmly in his hands, as if they provided a much-needed point of support, and laboriously straddled her body. He closed his eyes. He was very sleepy.

  She trembled violently, uttered a strangled little cry, and bit him. The idea that she should go to so much trouble to create this illusion of passion amused him. Very methodically, he entered her, imagining, even as he did so, that she was really a famous movie star. Then the movie star faded from his thoughts and was replaced by a girl in the bakery where he had bought his bread when he lived in the little studio room. Stella’s body arched up against his.

  It seemed to him now that there were two women on the bed beneath him, then, quite suddenly, three. He remembered an erotic photograph Scope had shown him once. It showed three masked women, naked except for long black stockings, swarming over the figure of a very hairy man. Then he tried repeating the word “thigh” to himself. This had no particular effect, so he gave it up and recalled an episode in his childhood when he had first touched a young girl’s breasts. And that in turn called to mind the other women with whom he had done what he was doing now. Stella let out a low, throaty murmuring.

  The film he had seen earlier that night suddenly came back to him. There was a scene in it that showed an attempted rape. The hero’s fiancée would have been the beautiful victim, but of course she escaped at the last moment. The following sequence showed Cardinal Balue’s mistress in the cage in which the king had imprisoned her. Louis XI was laughing as he forced her to sing for him. Trelkovsky thought it would be wonderfully amusing if all old maids kept beautiful girls in cages, instead of canaries. Stella moaned softly.

  When it was all over, he retained enough presence of mind to kiss her very gently. He didn’t want to do anything that might hurt her feelings. Then they both went to sleep.

  Trelkovsky woke up very shortly afterward. His forehead was bathed in sweat, and the bed was pitching back and forth beneath him. He knew the feeling very well, and experience had taught him that he must get to the bathroom as quickly as possible. Stella had turned out the light before going to sleep, so he fumbled in the darkness for the switch, trying to remember where it had been. He found it at last, and got up, staggering slightly. The door to the bathroom was just next to the kitchen. He knelt down in front of the bowl of the toilet, put his forearm across its rim, and rested his forehead on his arm. His head was just above the circular well of the bowl and he could hear the continuous gurgling of the water. His stomach turned inside out, like a glove, and he vomited.

  It wasn’t disagreeable at all. Almost like a liberation, in fact. A kind of suicide, in a way. These particles of matter that showered from his mouth, after he had thought them consumed and digested, did not disgust him. No, he was completely indifferent to them; and to everything else, for that matter. It was only when he vomited that he could be indifferent even to life itself. He forced himself to make as little noise as possible, and experienced a curious sense of comfort in his awkward position.

  He felt better now. He thought back to what had happened earlier and a slight shiver ran through his body. He was suddenly much more receptive to Stella’s charms than he had been just a little while ago. His feeling grew so intense that he was forced to relieve himself.

  He pulled the chain on the toilet, then waited until the tank refilled and pulled it a second time. There was no longer the slightest trace of his illness. He was glad of that.

  His body seemed filled with a whole new store of energy, and he burst out laughing to himself, for no reason. He was certainly not going back to sleep now! If he woke up here in the morning, he would just be depressed again. He found his clothes, dressed silently, went over to the bed and kissed Stella lightly on the forehead, and then left. The hard, dry cold in the street outside made him feel even better. He walked back to his apartment. Once there, he sponged himself off thoroughly, shaved, and dressed again. Seated on the edge of the bed, he waited for the proper moment to leave for his office.

  He could hear the birds. There was always one that began the concert, and then all the others joined in. Truthfully speaking, it was not really a concert. If you listened to it carefully, it was impossible not to notice the resemblance between this sound and that of a saw. A saw whose teeth were tearing painfully into wood. Trelkovsky had never understood why people insisted on comparing the noise of birds to music. Birds don’t sing, they scream. And in the morning they scream in chorus. Trelkovsky laughed aloud. The mere idea of likening a raucous cry like this to a song must surely be the height of something or other—futility, no doubt. He wondered what would happen if
men should suddenly adopt this practice of greeting the new day with a chorus of despairing screams. Even if only those with good reason for screaming were to take it up, it would still result in an unholy racket.

  He heard a disturbance in the courtyard, unidentifiable at first, and then, very clearly, the sound of hammering. He went over to the window and looked down, but it was hard to see what was going on in the murky light of early morning. Then he knew what it was: they were repairing the glass roof.

  9

  The Petition

  The concierge must have been watching for him to come in, because as soon as she saw him she signaled to him from behind the window of her room. Then she lifted a movable pane of the glass and called out, louder than was really necessary, “Monsieur Trelkovsky!”

  She never managed to pronounce the s between the v and the k, so the name always sound like “Trelkovky.” He walked over to the window, smiling pleasantly.

  “Have you seen Madame Dioz?” she demanded.

  “No, why?” Trelkovsky didn’t even know who Madame Dioz was.

  “Never mind; I’ll tell her that you’re back. She wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  She slammed down the pane of glass, effectively cutting short the conversation, and bobbed her head up and down, just once, in a gesture that was more like a dismissal than a farewell. Then she turned back to the meal she was cooking on the stove, and paid no further attention to him.

  Trelkovsky walked up the steps to his apartment, wondering vaguely what it was all about. He dropped his topcoat on the bed, pulled up a chair in front of the window, and sat down. He remained sitting there for a good half hour. He did nothing, and he thought of nothing specific, but simply passed in review the few unimportant episodes of the day which he still remembered. Snatches of conversation, actions of no real significance, faces glimpsed in the Métro or on the street.