“Why did you say you’d call back?”
“I don’t know . . . I thought you’d want to know.”
He grunted:
“You aren’t here to think!”
It was all too idiotic. Here he was, worrying about the fate of a man who meant nothing to him, who ought to be shut up in a lunatic asylum, for no earthly reason except that the fellow had been assuring him for forty years:
“I’ll be at your funeral.”
Now it was Malate who was on the operating table, at the age of eighty-three—for he was a year older than his former schoolfellow—with a cancer of the throat that two previous operations had done nothing to cure. Whether he died or whether he didn’t, what difference would it make? What did it matter?
“Tell Emile to take the car and go to Etretat for the papers.”
“I think the barber’s arriving,” she announced, looking out of the window and seeing a man on a bicycle, distorted by the fog to an apocalyptic monster.
“Let him come in, then.”
The barber, Fernand Bavet, who was also a saddler, came every morning to shave him, for the Premier was among the survivors of a period when men did not shave themselves, and he had always refused to do it, just as he had refused to learn to drive a car.
Bavet was a florid, full-blooded man with a throaty voice.
“Well, sir, what do you think of this pea souper? One can’t see three yards in front of one’s nose, and I nearly ran into one of your guardian angels . . . ”
Most barbers’ hands smell of cigarette smoke, which is unpleasant enough. Bavet’s smelled of fresh leather as well, of newly slaughtered animals, and his breath stank of calvados.
As the Premier grew older he became more sensitive to smells, and was disgusted by things he never noticed in the old days, as though his body, as it dried up, was being purified by a kind of disincarnation.
“Now tell me, you who’re in the know, are we going to have a government, after all?”
Bavet’s good humor met with no response and he lapsed into resigned silence, a little vexed, all the same, for he was fond of telling his cafe cronies:
“The old man? I shave him every day and with me he’s just like anybody else, I speak as straight to him as I would to one of you. . . . ”
Still, everybody has good days and bad ones, haven’t they? His job finished, the barber put away his instruments, bowed to his customer, and went off to the kitchen, where Gabrielle always gave him a drink. The engine of the car was running; Emile was warming it up before starting out to fetch the papers from Etretat, since the grocer’s at Bénouville only took one local daily, printed at Le Havre, and two or three Paris papers which arrived very late.
A three-minute news bulletin was being broadcast every hour, and at nine o’clock the Premier listened again, but only to hear a repetition of what he knew already.
Thereupon, turning to Milleran, who was opening the letters, he inquired, so impatiently that she jumped:
“Well? Aren’t you going to call up Evreux?”
“I’m very sorry. . . . ”
She hadn’t dared, not quite knowing, as things were, what she should do and what she shouldn’t.
“Get me Evreux, mademoiselle. . . . Yes, the same number as before. . . . A priority call, yes. . . . ”
For each successive government had had the courtesy to leave him the right to priority over the telephone, as though he were still in office. Would that favor continue under a Chalamont government?
Why did the day still seem so empty? It was no different from any other, and yet he felt as though he were going round and round in space, like a fish in a bowl, opening and shutting his mouth soundlessly, just like one.
On other days the hours were never too long. In a few minutes, when she had finished opening the envelopes and setting aside bills, prospectuses, and the invitations some people persisted in sending him, Milleran would bring him the letters to read, and usually he enjoyed this; there was an element of surprise that he appreciated, and it didn’t bore him to say what answers should be sent, or to dictate a few letters when he thought it worth while.
In the last few days he hadn’t cursed the storm, which ought to have annoyed him, but now he was glowering at the foggy scene outside as though suspecting that nature was perfidiously scheming to smother him.
He felt some difficulty in breathing. In a quarter of an hour Madame Blanche would arrive to give him his injection, and because of yesterday’s outing, which she had tried to prevent, and his two sneezes, which she hadn’t failed to notice, she would watch him distrustfully, suspecting that he was concealing something from her.
He couldn’t stand women who looked at one as though one were a child caught telling a fib. Madame Blanche had threatened him with a cold, and she’d be watching for the symptoms of a cold. Wasn’t it often from a cold that old people died when they had no other illness?
“Hello? Yes . . . What did you say? . . . No, don’t disturb him. . . . Thank you, mademoiselle.”
“Disturb whom?”
“The surgeon.”
“Why?”
“I was talking to the matron and she thought you might want to hear details. . . . ”
“Details of what?”
Before she had time to reply, he went on sharply:
“He’s dead, isn’t that it?”
“Yes . . . During the operation . . . ”
With a rudeness in which he seldom indulged, he exclaimed:
“What the hell do you suppose I care about that? Wait! Send a line to the director of the hospital to say they’re not to chuck him into a pauper’s grave. He’s to have a decent funeral, but no more. Ask what it will cost and make out a check for me to sign.”
Did he feel relieved that Xavier Malate should have been the first to go, in spite of his bragging? His old schoolfellow had been mistaken. He’d clung to life for no purpose. His last chance now was for their two funerals to take place on the same day, and the Premier was determined that shouldn’t happen.
There was only one person left now who had known the Rue Saint-Louis in his time, the little redheaded girl of those days. Was she going to die too, and leave him to be the last?
For quite a long time, on his way to the lycée, he used to gaze with an agreeable agitation at the chalky-white sign with its black letters, including an N written backwards, which composed the words: “Ernest Archambault, Ironmonger.” There was no actual shop. From the front the house looked just like others in the district, with lace-curtained windows and ferns in copper pots. At the end of a dank alleyway one could see the yard and a glass-roofed workshop from which the clang of hammers emerged, audible as far as the lycée.
In the classroom Xavier Malate had sat two rows away from him, near the stove, which it was his privilege to stoke up. Between them sat a boy who was taller than the others, better dressed, with a rather affected manner, who lived in a château outside the town and sometimes came to school on horseback, wearing riding boots, carrying a crop, and followed by a servant mounted on a heavier animal. He was a Count, whose name he had forgotten like so many others.
Who was the present occupant of the house where he had been born and lived until he was seventeen? Had it been pulled down? In his time the bricks had been almost black, there had been a green-painted door and a brass plate announcing his father’s surgery hours.
He still had, put away somewhere, a box full of old photos he’d always meant to sort out. There was one of his father, who’d had a sandy mustache and a little pointed beard like Henri III, and he could still remember how he had smelled of sour wine.
He had scarcely known his mother, for she had died when he was five and was still, apparently, a chubby little boy as fat as butter. An aunt had arrived from the country to look after him and his elder sister, and later on his sister, still almos
t a child, with short skirts and pigtails, had run the house with the help of one maid, who for some mysterious reason was always changing.
In actual fact nobody had brought him up. He had brought himself up. He could still recall the names of certain streets which had perhaps influenced his career.
The Rue Dupont-de-l’Eure, for instance. He even remembered the dates, for he had always had a memory for figures, including, later on, telephone numbers. 1767–1855. Patriot. Politician renowned for his integrity.
Rue Bayet (1760–1794).
A patriot, too, and a Girondist Deputy during the Revolution.
But it was not on the scaffold that he had died at the age of thirty-four. He had committed suicide at Bordeaux, which he had chosen as his exile after being deserted by his party.
Rue Jules-Janin. Writer and critic, Member of the Académie Française . . .
At the age of fifteen, because of Janin, he had dreamed of the Académie Française, and had almost chosen literature as his career.
Rue Gambetta (1838–1882) . . .
Come to think of it, he might have met Gambetta if he’d lived in Paris instead of at Evreux.
Rue Jean-Jaurès (1859–1914) . . .
As a schoolboy he hadn’t known that one day he would sit in the Chamber as Jaurès’ colleague and would witness his assassination.
He didn’t admit it in his memoirs, not even in the secret ones: but right from boyhood he had known he, too, would one day have his street, even his statue in public places.
In those days he had felt nothing more than pitying condescension for his father, who spent his time, day and night, in all weathers, hastening from one patient to another, carrying his heavy, shapeless bag of instruments, or in his office, with its frosted glass windows, seeing an endless stream of poor patients who filled the waiting room to overflowing and were often to be found sitting on the stairs.
He resented, as a piece of humbug, the way his father carried on in practice although he didn’t believe in medicine, and it was not until much later, after his father’s death, that he began to reflect on something he’d been fond of saying:
“I do my patients as much good as other doctors, who believe in their vocation, and I run less risk of doing them harm.”
So his father had not been the uncouth, slightly bohemian, rather drunken fellow that he had imagined, in whom, as a child, he had refused to take any interest.
At the age of twenty he had returned to Evreux for his sister’s marriage to one of the clerks at the Town Hall. Had he seen her three times after that, before she died of peritonitis when she was getting on toward seventy? He hadn’t gone to her funeral, and he seemed to remember that he’d been on an official visit to South America at the time. He had nephews and nieces with children of their own, but he’d never felt any desire to get to know them.
Why had Milleran rushed off to the kitchen as soon as she had seen Madame Blanche approaching the house? To tell her he didn’t seem quite himself, or that Xavier Malate’s death had upset him?
In the first place, it wasn’t true. And in the second place, as he always said, he loathed the sidelong glances they gave him, as though they were constantly expecting . . .
Expecting what?
When the nurse came in, carrying the little bowl with the syringe, he looked her straight in the eye and forestalled her inquiries by declaring:
“I feel perfectly fit and I haven’t a cold. Give me my injection quickly and leave me in peace.”
It cost him an effort every morning, in his bedroom, the door of which she always closed behind her, to let down his trousers in front of her eyes and expose his livid thigh.
“The left side today . . . ”
Left and right, on alternate days.
“Have you taken your temperature?”
“I have not, and I don’t intend to.”
The telephone rang. Milleran knocked on the door; nothing in the world would have induced her to open it, for she knew the reception she would get.
“What is it?”
“A journalist who insists on speaking to you. . . . ”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
“He says you’ll remember his name. . . . ”
“What is his name?”
“Loubat.”
It was the squeaky-voiced reporter who had thrown Chalamont off his stride the previous evening, in the courtyard of the Elysée, by asking whether he meant to spend the night on the road.
“What am I to tell him?”
“That I have nothing to say.”
Madame Blanche was asking:
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
It was no business of hers. Having pulled up his trousers he opened the door, to hear his secretary saying into the telephone:
“I assure you I did tell him. . . . No . . . I can’t . . . You don’t know him . . . What?”
Feeling his presence behind her, she started.
“What does he want?”
“Just a minute, please,” she said again into the telephone.
Then, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she explained:
“He insists on my asking you a question.”
“What question?”
“Whether it’s true that you and Chalamont are reconciled.”
She spoke again into the mouthpiece:
“Just a moment. . . . No. . . . I asked you to hold on. . . . ”
The Premier stood motionless, as though wondering what line to take, and all at once he grabbed the receiver and rapped out, before hanging up with a jerk:
“Go and ask him yourself. I wish you good day.”
Then, turning to Milleran, he inquired, in a voice almost as disagreeable as the journalist’s:
“Do you know why he rang up this morning?”
“No.”
“To make sure I was still alive.”
She tried to laugh, as though he were joking.
“I mean it!”
“But . . . ”
“I know what I am taking about, Mademoiselle Milleran.”
It was only on particular occasions that he addressed her in that way, with sarcastic emphasis. He went on, enunciating each syllable separately:
“For him, this morning, I ought logically to be dead. And he has expert knowledge!”
What did it matter whether she understood or not! He was not talking to her but to himself, or perhaps to History, and what he said was the literal truth.
If he were alive, really alive, it would be unthinkable for Chalamont . . .
“Turn on the radio, please. It’s ten o’clock. The President will be beginning his audiences at the Elysée. You’ll see!”
She didn’t know what she was to see. Bewildered, she was looking anxiously at Madame Blanche, who was going off to the kitchen with her battered bowl.
“At the fourth pip it will be . . . ”
He had picked up the little clock and was putting it exactly right.
“And here is the latest news. We have just been informed that Monsieur Philippe Chalamont, who was called to the Elysée yesterday afternoon, has paid a second visit to the President of the Republic. He has officially undertaken to form a Cabinet on a wide coalition basis, whose main lines are already known, and it is hoped, in well-informed circles, that the list of Ministers will be announced before the end of the afternoon. . . . ”
She didn’t know whether to switch off or not.
“Leave it, for heaven’s sake. Don’t you understand it’s not finished yet?”
He was right. After a pause, a crackling of paper, the announcer began again:
“A few names have already been mentioned . . . ”
She was watching him as, pale and tense, with angry eyes, he glared at her and at the radio set, as thoug
h ready to burst into rage at any moment.
“ . . . Monsieur Etienne Blanche, Radical Socialist, is expected to be the Keeper of the Seals . . . ”
An old hand who’d been in two of the Premier’s Cabinets, once at the Board of Trade and once, already, at the Ministry of Justice.
“ . . . Monsieur Jean-Louis Lajoux, Secretary of the Socialist Party, Minister of State . . . ”
He had been starting his career when the Premier left the scene, and though he vaguely remembered him, it was only as a background figure.
“ . . . Ferdinand Jusset, another Socialist . . . ”
Another old hand, about whom there was a note, slipped into a volume of La Bruyère.
“And then Monsieur Vabre, Monsieur Montois, and . . . ”
“That’ll do!” he said curtly.
He very nearly added:
“Get me Paris on the telephone. . . . ”
There were at least ten numbers on the tip of his tongue, he knew them by heart, and he need only ring one of them in order to sink the Ministry that was being formed.
He was on the point of doing it, and the effort to contain himself, remain worthy of himself, was so great that he felt an attack coming on. His fingers, his knees began to shake, and as usual at such moments his nerves refused to obey him; the mechanism suddenly began to race at increasing speed.
Without a word he went hastily into his bedroom, hoping Milleran had not noticed anything and wouldn’t go and fetch Madame Blanche. With feverish haste he snatched out of a drawer two sedative pills, prescribed for him to take at such moments.
In ten minutes, at most, the drug would take effect and he would relax, gradually becoming languid and a little vague, as though after a sleepless night.
Meanwhile he stood leaning against the wall, near the square window with its small panes, watching young Marie as, in her red jersey, she stood in the fog, more translucent now, but still thick, hanging out washing on a line slung between two apple trees.
He was tempted to open the window and call to her, say no matter what, for it was too stupid to expect washing to dry in this sodden atmosphere.
The President Page 10