The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  Hedwige slipped her finger under the white crêpe band beneath her chin, which was strangling her laughter. This reminded her that she had come dressed for serious matters.

  “Monsieur, I hope that you won’t be offended if I take the liberty of asking you a few questions.”

  Pierre made a polite gesture.

  “To whom, please, did you pay the money for the Mas Vieux?”

  “To your father, naturally.”

  “And do you know what he has done with it? Whether he has paid it to the lawyer or to someone else?”

  Pierre was evasive:

  “Goodness me, how should I know?”

  She pursued the matter:

  “You were probably in my father’s bedroom, since he was very ill. Did you not notice anything?”

  “Is this a cross-examination?” said Pierre.

  These questions were becoming annoying.

  “This money…”

  Pierre could feel the pressure almost physically, as though he were being woken up; his nerves strained to resist; he remained motionless for a brief moment, then suddenly something clicked inside him and the whole machinery started up: time, which for an instant was suspended in mid-flight like a bird gliding, was set in motion; once again, Pierre had re-engaged the clutch. In a trice he glanced at his watch, tossed his cigarette away, rang the bell and without waiting opened the other window and both doors, shouting:

  “Chantepie! Chantepie, my watch has stopped yet again.” (He shook his arm as though he were drowning.) “What time is it on the kitchen clock?”

  “It says almost midday,” Chantepie replied.

  “A taxi, right away!”

  “Are you in a hurry?” asked Hedwige in astonishment.

  “I’ve only got time to dash… Don’t worry, I’ll be back… tomorrow or the day after… I’ll call you on the telephone… we’ll sort it all out,” yelled Pierre, who was already descending the stairs, one sentence on each landing. (Ever since he was at the lycée, he had held the record for descending the staircase.)

  Once he was downstairs, Pierre stamped around in the porter’s lodge, fulminated on the pavement, stood in the very middle of the road, complained about the concierge’s husband who didn’t know how to run, dispatched Chantepie to search for a second taxi, then eventually jumped into a cruising cab without waiting any longer. He set off just at the moment when both taxis arrived outside his door one after the other, one with the concierge on the back seat, the other with Chantepie perched on the running board, both of them waving madly, but ineffectively.

  “He’s a lunatic,” said the taxi driver.

  “He’s a butterfly,” said Chantepie poetically.

  “He’s a nincompoop,” said the concierge.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE EARLY AFTERNOON SUN beamed down on the snow with which a gust of slanting east wind had prematurely whitewashed Paris; the snow kept nothing to itself, it reflected the warm light, now grown cold, in every direction, emphasizing aspects of the houses, darkening the bare trees, transforming pigeons into crows, tinting blonde girls into Negresses and brushing the whitest dogs with a coat of saffron yellow. The cars were causing the ice to crackle and were tracing flourishes in the streets. Concierges were scraping the doorways with coal shovels while melting stalactites dropped on their heads from the tops of cornices.

  Meanwhile, at Saint-Germain, the minutes ticked by sluggishly. (The Boisrosé ladies, a curiously lethargic crew, pay no heed to passing time, nor to celestial trajectories; they could not care less whether it is the sun or moon that is reaching its zenith and, according to their whims, they can transform the brightest day into dusk by drawing the curtains, or the darkest night into a blaze of electric light.)

  Although the afternoon had scarcely begun, the only light in Madame de Boisrosé’s bedroom, where all the shutters were closed, came from the tiny flame of a silver night light; in this half-light, Angélique, seated on her mother’s bed, her huge dark eyes ringed like Saturn (and, anyway, she always looked as though she had just come back from some unheard of, if not undreamt of, saturnalian gathering), was gazing at herself in a looking-glass.

  “Be careful, Angélique, you’re going to drop it; a broken mirror brings seven years’ bad luck,’’ said Bonne.

  Angélique nodded vaguely. Nothing can be more misleading than a woman’s looks: Angélique, the reasonable one, the good housekeeper, always seemed to look distraught, dishevelled and absent-minded, more like a character in a play than a woman. Yet she led the most ordinary of lives and there was nothing unusual about her apart from this amalgam of mother and husband, of free love and conjugal duty. For the Boisrosés, marriage was a necessary but transitional rite and procreation was a sort of impregnation, however contrived, prior to which the male was unnecessary, and after which he was abandoned. Scarcely had the wedding photographer snapped for all eternity Angélique’s white satin dress alongside the morning coat and gaiters of the Polytechnique graduate who had thought naively that he was entering the Boisrosé family (one doesn’t enter this family, one is born into it), than Angélique had returned to the roost and gone back to her mother’s house, a step that so many women threaten and so few carry out. Angélique spent the required regulatory time lying alongside her husband, a period that was further reduced by the telephone which, though it has no power over the body, liberates the soul, allowing the married daughter to maintain nightly contact with her family through the intermediary of obliging neighbours (the Boisrosés had no phone) who didn’t even mind being woken up occasionally, such was the Boisrosés’ gift for having things done for them by everyone. In the morning, barely had the husband selected as the lesser evil had his breakfast, than Angélique went back to her old pattern of life until it was time to go to bed again. This brief nightly absence, a sort of gaseous migration of a body, which did not undermine the family’s integrity or the abiding maternal authority, had no effect on conjugal relations. Angélique had no children.

  According to the Boisrosé doctrine, as received from heaven by Bonne and revealed on some unknown mountain in Sinaï, love was the sole betrayal. Angélique had never been guilty of it. Neither would Hedwige ever sink into this quagmire. Never would she, like an unhooded falcon, set off for the open sea with some young male creature without coming back at the set time to sit at her mother’s knee. But they were less sure of Fromentine. The fact that she was eighteen, had a prying and inquisitive temperament, a certain exploratory boldness, and a pride that prompted her to advertise her dangerous beauty to other people, suggested tendencies to cut herself off from her roots and to be drawn to the outside world. She was crazy about dresses, and wealth would have pierced her with its arrows had she ever experienced it; but she knew of it only through a sort of unconscious nostalgia and through that natural inclination that impels beautiful girls in the direction of rue de la Paix and avenue Matignon. The Boisrosé family, it goes without saying, watched over her, each of them taking turns to supervise Fromentine; and it was the suitors who were the losers, as were the matchmaking ladies, to their brief shame, and the jewellers who lost income. Just in case, in the unlikely event that the danger should become real, Bonne de Boisrosé kept a secret and dependable weapon in reserve: fainting and death which, if resorted to, immediately brought about remorse from the sinner, and resurrection. She was unparalleled in her ability to use her weakness in an intimidating manner. Pupils at the Conservatoire working on excerpts from La Dame aux camélias for their exams would have benefited from taking lessons in dying from her. Let us add that she rarely needed to pull out all the stops; the threatening remark, the last paragraph of the Rule, always sufficed: “I shall die”. This graveyard blackmail, with its indulgent description of funerals to come, deciding upon the ceremony, the announcement of the death, the burial, the Mass and the liturgical hymns, not forgetting the invitation cards, the shroud, the procession… had the lugubrious ability to upset the three daughters. Far from familiarizing them with an even
tuality that, when all is said and done, is completely natural and even inevitable, this far too frequently evoked prospect had transformed what for normal people is a sad and quickly repressed thought into anguished neurosis.

  A ring at the doorbell, hurried footsteps, a cheerful passing remark aimed at the cleaning lady—it’s Hedwige; she enters the room, her body radiating the pure, icy air she has absorbed.

  “There you are!” said Angélique lazily. “What time is it? Oh, you’ve brought the cold weather with you; have you had lunch?”

  “Yes, I’ve eaten some pistachio nuts. There are a few left over, here, take them,” she says as she empties her bag on the bed. “Quick, Fromentine, relight the stove, I’m frozen. I’ve been dashing around all morning.”

  “Tell us, tell us!” Fromentine (on her knees) cried. She is blowing on the embers to revive them. “Have you seen the new perfumes? Where are the samples?”

  “Just a moment,” said Hedwige, who was fumbling in her pockets, in her handbag, in her blouse and finally in her brassiere, from which she extracted them. “They’re marvellous, smell how sweet they are. I’ve also brought white nail varnish. You have to put it on first before the red, it stays on better. It’s American.”

  A huge sigh from Bonne interrupted this information.

  “Mamicha, at least you’re not feeling ill, are you?” Hedwige called out anxiously. “I’m going to make you feel better straight away, my darling. I’ve got some good news for you. Monsieur Pierre Niox is going to sort everything out.”

  “Is he going to get us the money?”

  “I don’t know, but as he was leaving he said: ‘We’ll sort that out.’’’

  “He’ll pay for the Mas Vieux twice to please Hedwige,” said Fromentine straight away.

  “I hope, my child, that you didn’t give this stranger the impression that we are arguing over your father’s legacy with a servant. We do not come from such a grand background that we can do such things without any shame.”

  “But, Mamicha, I had to talk to him about the sale. We’re not interested in it ourselves, but we need money. He certainly understood…”

  “What makes you think that he understood? What did he say to you? Tell us everything.”

  Hedwige opened her mouth, searched for the words and realized she had nothing to say. Fortunately for her, Fromentine cut in:

  “First, tell us what he looks like. Describe him. Is he handsome?”

  “He’s ugly,” Hedwige said slowly. “He’s ugly and he makes one feel dizzy.”

  “Dizziness, that’s light-headedness. Did you find him attractive, Hedwige?”

  “Be quiet, child,” said Bonne, immediately concerned. “Come now, Hedwige, let’s start again. Repeat to me word for word your conversation with this gentleman, Monsieur Niox.”

  “He’s not exactly a gentleman,” said Hedwige (she was groping around trying to find the right description). “He’s a young man. He dresses oddly. His windows were wide open and it was very cold.”

  “So he offered you a chair and you said…”

  “He didn’t offer me anything; there were no chairs in the room.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Madame de Boisrosé, genuinely amazed. “How can a room not have any chairs?”

  “It was his office. I didn’t like it,” said Hedwige in the same slow, reticent tone of voice. “A totally bare room in which there was nothing to hold on to: neither furniture, nor mouldings, nor cornice, nor door handles. Everything was white, too, as if it was made up of six ceilings.”

  “You must have felt like a fly in there,” Fromentine burst out laughing, “and wondered whether you were upside down. I can see why it must have made you feel dizzy!”

  Hedwige glared at her in annoyance and turned to her mother, who asked her to begin at the beginning, from the moment he greeted her.

  “He didn’t greet me,” said Hedwige, “at least not that I remember. For a long time he didn’t say a word to me, then we spoke about various things… things of no interest…”

  “What, you didn’t explain the situation to him?”

  “Yes, of course. I told him everything. There’s no point in my repeating this story, which you know by heart,” said Hedwige, who was feeling unusually irritated.

  “There is a point in our knowing what he replied to you,” said Angélique ironically.

  She fixed her gaze on her sister. It had not escaped her that something was missing here.

  “You shall know very shortly, my dear,” said Hedwige, “because he intends to ask us to meet him. For the time being, I’m tired and I don’t feel like talking. I’m going to have a rest.”

  And she slipped into the maternal bed, fully dressed, having kicked off her shoes with the heel of her foot and sent them to join her sisters’ shoes in the middle of the room. (The Boisrosés were constantly removing their shoes everywhere, in the car, under the tables, in church and, rather more reasonably, at home; this dissoluteness was part of the Rule. What with these pairs of shoes scattered over the carpet, the place looked more like a Christmas hearth, a flea market or the entrance to a mosque; and there was no more characteristic sound made by this colonial family than the noise of large bodies causing the floorboards to bend beneath their bare heels.)

  At about six o’clock in the evening, Fromentine was the first to wake up and she went to light the fire. She threw balls of paper which she moistened and put out to dry in the sun before stuffing them into her oven. The stove was an ugly little barrack-room model in which all the Boisrosé family’s refuse was burnt. For, to the great astonishment of the dustbin collectors and the rag-and-bone men, this family never put their rubbish out on the street, not even the bones of a leg of lamb. In this slow combustion oven they burned the remains of what they consumed, which is to say almost nothing. Coffee was their principal gastronomic treat and even then it was Uncle Rocheflamme who almost always brought it, obtaining it from the Trou Dauphin by way of a former slave of the Boisrosé family who had become First Secretary at a Caribbean legation in Paris. Bills, which were anyway quite rare, made no impression on these single women, and the taxman himself, a person of devilish ingenuity, had a hard time making sense of their cloistered existence, which displayed no outward signs of wealth and was far more deprived than that of the Carmelites from the nearby convent whose chanting they could hear.

  “Fromentine, the Figaro,” Bonne commanded.

  Fromentine read page two of the Figaro aloud. They loved the lists of wedding presents. Her sisters listened, seated on the floor, polishing their nails; this ceremony, which began at the four corners of the room, ended with a gathering of the Boisrosé girls on the maternal throne, and towards evening, since they were cold, with them all lying in a row beneath the old, moth-eaten squirrel-skin blanket that served as a bedcover. For, incapable of standing up to their mother’s “What, you’re going to leave me here!”, they had one by one given up whatever they were doing. One hour later, there could still be heard:

  “Marquis and Marquise de Z… a fan, Baronne W… a gilt dressing case, Vicomte B… a hunting print.”

  Since this breed of tendrils cling to one another, and these magnets magnetize themselves and magnetize each other, they had reverted to their blissful easygoing Creole life, which they had scarcely abandoned for a moment on their arrival in Paris. Four heads on the pillow: one grey, one brown, one blonde, one red, lying beneath a box-wood Christ, who looked astonished at the sight of these human beings who had reverted to nature. Next to the crucifix was an almanac from which not a single page had been torn out for eight months, which indicated the total contempt of the Boisrosés for the divisions of the calendar. Reconstituted as it was in this way, the mother cell borne on this motionless palanquin was now shut off from the world; it was a return to the embryo, to silence and the solitude of foetal life, to love in its most elementary form.

  Shortly before dinner, Uncle Rocheflamme came in dragging his feet, like someone whose life was at an en
d, but no one paid much attention. With his pumice-stone complexion, his Gallic moustache, his blue Viking eyes and his inside-out clothes, Monsieur de Rocheflamme had only had to cross the road to be with his family: he lived opposite in a flat from which he carried on, without a licence, the occupation of man of the world, earning outrageous commissions for small pieces of marquetry furniture which colleagues left with him “as a minder”, to use the jargon of the Salle Drouot.4 His name, which brought to mind the Palaeozoic age and fermenting flint stones, scarcely accorded with his chilly, Swiss Guard-without-the-feathers personality. Nothing else was colourful about him apart from his knowledge of eighteenth-century furniture. Having no one with whom to converse about the engraving of Gouthière’s bronzes, Monsieur de Rocheflamme allowed his sister to make decisions on every subject except on the roasting of coffee beans, about which he had ideas that, for once, were not fully formed. Apart from this, he was one of that vast herd of idiots who, in a coagulated voice, hand back their newspaper once they have read it. Nobody asked him anything. His presence was an absence. He spent hours standing behind his sister’s back watching her play patience, reprimanding himself whenever he gave bad advice and groaning when it was good. He entered quite naturally into this Boisrosé nirvana, a sort of suspension of any future, of permanent peace and quiet in which Time resembled a reel of film that has come to a sudden stop due to a power cut.

  That evening, Bonne de Boisrosé, with her milky-coffee wig perched on her receding hairline, her Bourbon nose, her perch-in-a-court-bouillon lips, emerged earlier and more actively than usual from her somnolent state to play her part in this barbaric and childish campsite that was the Boisrosés’ family life.