A staircase. Unfamiliar faces. Louisa shaking her head despairingly and whispering:
‘I’ve just been up there. You do what you like. Jesus-Mary! If anybody had told us something like this was going to happen!’
Everybody was waiting for something, but what? These people who did not know one another and who were standing squashed together in the narrow space avoided each other’s eyes.
Élise rushed upstairs. They could hear her stop and hesitate on the first-floor landing. Somebody came down, a man in a tailcoat who spoke in an undertone to Louisa.
His head, which went gravely from left to right, said:
‘There’s nothing to be done.’
Sobs upstairs. It was Élise, Roger was sure of that, and started crying in his turn. A market-woman bent down and wiped his face with her handkerchief, despite his protests.
Why didn’t his mother come down again? Who was that man standing with his back turned to them, at the end of the corridor, near the cellar door?
The market-woman spoke to Aunt Louisa, pointing to Roger.
‘This little boy shouldn’t be left here.’
Where could they put him? Perhaps they were going to take him into the café, but at that very moment a cab drew up in the street outside, the door opened, and the boy caught sight of the hood of the carriage, a lantern, a horse’s glistening cruppers.
Three men clattered into the house, as much at home as undertaker’s men coming to fetch a body.
But Aunt Félicie was not dead. When the men got to the first floor, she could be heard uttering piercing shrieks, struggling, shouting for help. It seemed that she was trying to bite. Élise came downstairs in a state of great distress.
‘Dear God, Louisa! It’s terrible. I don’t want to see it. Where’s Roger?’
She looked around for him. An indescribable group started coming downstairs, in which you could make out a woman, Aunt Félicie, whom two men were carrying by her shoulders and feet, and who was writhing about, her face convulsed, her hair hanging down on to the steps. Another man was following with a blanket.
Everybody had to stand back against the wall. Élise chewed her handkerchief, Louisa made the sign of the cross, and the market-woman tried to push Roger behind her so that he could not see anything.
Félicie screamed.
However what Roger was looking at, wide-eyed, his chest so tight that he could scarcely breathe, was the man at the end of the corridor. There had been a hoarse sound, a sob which must have torn the throat from which it had come, and suddenly that big, broad-shouldered man had hurled himself against the wall, his head between his arms, his body leaning forward, his shoulders shaking spasmodically.
Nobody took any notice of him, nobody gave him so much as a glance or a word, for it was Coucou, Félicie’s husband, who had beaten her so hard that she had gone out of her mind.
The open door let in a little fresh air. The cab-driver was waiting calmly beside his horse, with his whip sticking out of his box-coat. Some onlookers were standing in the dark. The most difficult problem was getting Félicie into the cab, for she was still struggling and bending backwards so far that you might have thought she was going to break in two.
‘They ought to put a handkerchief between her teeth.’
Somebody had said that, but Roger would never know who.
‘Come, Élise, be brave.’
Élise’s face was unrecognizable, at once a child’s face and an old woman’s, the features were so distorted by horror. It did not occur to her to hide her emotion. She made as if to rush towards her sister who was being taken away, whose body was already half inside the cab, and whom the male nurses were pushing as if she were a parcel.
‘Félicie … Félicie! …’
Aunt Louisa seized her round the waist. She resisted for a moment. Coucou’s shoulders were still heaving slowly. A waiter had opened the door of the café and was watching.
‘Shut the door.’
‘No, Louisa. I want to see it out to the very end. I want to go with her.’
‘Don’t be a fool. What good would that do? And what about your son?’
Then, in her confusion, Élise remembered Roger.
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s here, Madame,’ replied the market-woman.
The cab door slammed to.
‘Has she got everything she needs? Won’t she catch cold? Tell me, Doctor …’
The man in the tail-coat was the doctor. He put on his overcoat and looked around for his hat which somebody held out to him.
‘Have no fears, Madame. I’ll get there before she does. I’ve got my carriage at the corner of the street.’
‘When can I go and see her?’
‘Tomorrow if she quietens down.’
Élise felt annoyed with Louisa who stood there ‘like a tower’.
‘You don’t understand, Louisa. You didn’t know her like I did. If you only knew how unhappy she was! Come along, Roger. Désiré will be coming home …’
The hall emptied, until nobody was left but Uncle Coucou still groaning against the wall; and a few days later, when they passed the black ramparts of the Saint-Léonard prison, Élise would be unable to refrain from saying to her son:
‘Coucou is in there. He used to beat your poor Aunt Félicie. It was him who killed her. But he isn’t your uncle any more. You must never say that he’s your uncle. Do you hear, Roger?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Aunt Félicie would die in the lunatic asylum, without recognizing anybody, and Élise would put on her mourning veil again. She had been right to say, the other day, at Sainte-Walburge cemetery, that in big families you came out of mourning for one person only to put it on again for another.
They would go to Coronmeuse, after four o’clock, taking the tram to save time, and go through Aunt Louisa’s shop.
‘Have your heard anything about the post-mortem?’
‘What’s a post-mortem, Mother?’
They both promptly started talking Flemish, standing, Louisa with her hands folded as usual on the blue apron which her stomach pushed out. The police doctor had found traces of blows. Two plain-clothes policemen had come for Coucou one evening, and had taken him to Saint-Léonard.
There had been a funeral, but Roger could not remember it, for only his father had gone, the women and children had not joined the procession, and Élise had remained on her knees beside a confessional in the asylum chapel.
‘Six months in prison is too good for a monster like that.’
Why did Désiré avoid the subject? Sometimes, when Élise started talking indignantly or plaintively, he opened his mouth as if to say something, but prudence got the better of him and he kept quiet.
Léopold’s attitude resembled his.
‘She was so good, Léopold. You can’t imagine. She had nothing she could call her own. She wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’
Léopold kept quiet, sitting by the fire, drawing on his old pipe.
‘She was the best of us all, and she’s the one who’s gone, so young too!’
For a long time Élise would be unable to talk about her without starting to cry. You would have thought sometimes that she felt a sort of remorse, that something was weighing on her heart.
Was it because she remembered the night when her sister, when they were girls and living in the Rue Féronstrée, had come home at three o’clock in the morning with the smell of a man clinging to her clothes?
And the little packet which Félicie had brought her in the Rue Léopold, over Cession’s, begging Élise to hide it for a few days?
It had been money, she knew that, a great deal of money; without telling anybody, she had opened the packet. To whom had her sister intended giving it?
‘You see, Léopold, Félicie wasn’t responsible for her actions.’
Only then did he raise his head and look at her for a long time, without a word. What was he thinking about? Did he know himself? Had he guessed?
Was it because he wasn’t respon
sible for his actions either?
Félicie was dead and, the next All Souls’ Day, there would be another grave to visit in the Sainte-Walburge cemetery, in the new section where you could not distinguish between the paths whose freshly turned clay stuck in big lumps to the soles of your shoes.
Sometimes they would have to wait a little while at a distance.
‘What are we waiting for, Mother? Why are we staying here?’
‘Hush. Pretend you’re not looking. It’s Coucou.’
For Roger the latter would never be anything more than a silhouette; he would always see just his back, a back which struck him as bigger and broader than others, the dark back of a man who had been to prison and was not his uncle any more.
Was it because he was ashamed that he did not dare to bring any flowers?
‘Come along now. He’s gone. Say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for Aunt Félicie who was so fond of you.’
Élise could not talk any more. She could not help it. It was only at Félicie’s grave that her heart became so full, that she felt so insignificant, that the world struck her as so wretched.
‘Don’t take any notice, Désiré. Take the boy away.’
She needed to remain alone, to cry until she could see nothing but dim patches, and to stammer out, her eyes fixed on the bunch of white flowers she had brought along:
‘Poor Félicie!’
CHAPTER SIX
THE universe grew bigger, people and things altered in appearance, certainties were born at the same time as anxieties, the world became peopled with questions, and a ring of chiaroscuro made contours less reassuring, extended perspectives to infinity.
Monsieur Pain had been in prison, like Coucou. Armand’s father was a murderer, a real one: he had killed a woman with a revolver shot.
Sitting on the imitation-leather bench in the Café de la Renaissance, with his little legs dangling in space, Roger was looking through the stained-glass windows. On the marble-topped table, his glass of grenadine was as rich a red as the triangular panes of glass framing the diamond-shaped milky-white panes.
Désiré was playing cards. Every Sunday, starting that winter, after High Mass at Saint-Nicolas and a brief visit to the kitchen in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, the father took his son by the hand to this café in the middle of the town; the waiter knew what he had to serve; Monsieur Reculé and Émile Grisard were already there, while Joseph Velden, who was not free this Sunday, had been replaced by fat Monsieur Baudon.
Through the windows, Roger was looking at the stucco façade of the Théâtre de la Renaissance and that was why he was thinking about the commercial traveller in coffee who lived in the Rue Pasteur, for it was there that Monsieur Pain had killed an actress, in the days when he had been a cavalry officer.
Roger had heard his mother telling the story to Mademoiselle Pauline.
‘He was reduced to the ranks. They stripped off his epaulettes in front of the whole regiment.’
A colonel of the Lancers rode along the Rue de la Loi at noon every day, and every time Roger thought of the epaulettes which had been stripped off. Monsieur Pain, who was nearly as tall as Désiré, measured over six foot. Roger pictured to himself a minute bow-legged colonel standing on tip-toe and pulling with all his might at the gold bullions.
The world was becoming complicated. Not so long ago, things had existed only during the time they could be seen in the light and then had returned to nothingness or limbo. If Monsieur Pain turned the corner of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, or if the shadows invaded a corner of the bedroom, there was nothing left.
Now, even when he was sitting at his desk in Brother Mansuy’s classroom, Roger could follow people in imagination, and he did so in spite of himself: for instance, he saw Monsieur Pain who ‘travelled in coffee’ going into the grocers’ shops of Chênée, Tilleur and Seraing, and he imagined him pulling samples out of his pockets, without a word, his face always expressionless.
The woman he had killed looked like the one on the poster next to the door of the Renaissance, with a dress trimmed with feathers and a diadem on her head.
It was because Monsieur Pain was a murderer that he had such a white face, grey hair and stony features; it was on account of his crime that he was always alone, that Julie, his wife, was sickly and that Armand was slit-eyed. Wasn’t it extraordinary that a man who had killed somebody and who had been in prison should live in the Rue Pasteur, practically opposite the magistrate’s house, and that Roger should play with his son on the pavement?
Monsieur Reculé, who worked for North Belgian Railways, travelled first class, as Élise was always saying, and would have a pension when he retired. Roger tried to picture this pension, to give it a form and consistency, and he turned a gaze heavy with questions on the thin face of the head clerk whom he saw, in slippers and straw hat, ending his life in the garden of a country house.
In the days when the world had been simpler, Roger had questioned his mother unceasingly.
Nowadays, he kept quiet. When he was found with his thoughts far away, he pretended to be playing. He listened to what the grown-ups said among themselves; certain phrases, certain words haunted him for weeks, while others translated themselves as pictures which imposed themselves on him willy-nilly and which he later tried in vain to dispel.
If he heard his mother undressing in the next room or washing in the morning, the word organs came to his mind, the ugliest and most frightening of all words.
‘It’s my organs, you see, Valérie. Doctor Matray wanted me to have them removed. I refused, for Roger’s sake, because you can never tell what may happen after an operation.’
And he saw some bleeding objects like the things which hung in butchers’ shops, coming out of a pale body that had been slit open from the neck to the legs.
Anxious and ashamed, he was conscious of moving towards discoveries which ought not to be mentioned to anybody, and he promised himself not to join Ledoux again in a corner of the yard, next to the tap, during playtime.
Monsieur Pain’s crime was linked with this discovery he was in the process of making, and generally speaking everything grown-ups talked about in whispers, including Aunt Félicie’s death.
How had Ledoux managed to find out? Roger turned away from the card-players to try to imitate his gesture, even though it was certainly a mortal sin.
Talking about his Aunt Cécile, Roger had said to Ledoux:
‘She’s going to buy me a new little cousin.’
Ledoux, who was in the second year, had a long, pasty, clownlike face, a mouth which he stretched and twisted as if it were made of indiarubber, and stiff hair which came forward as if it had been brushed the wrong way.
‘You still think people buy babies or find them in cabbages?’
It was then that he had made the gesture. He had made a ring with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and then, with a peculiar gleam in his eyes, he had pushed his right forefinger into this opening.
‘What does that mean?’
‘If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.’
A dozen times Roger had returned to the attack, following Ledoux around at playtime and turning round in class to address mute appeals to him. The other hedged, promised, took back his promise.
‘I bet you don’t even know who St. Nicholas is!’
‘He’s the patron saint of schoolchildren.’
‘He’s your father and mother!’
Now, on that point Ledoux had been right. Roger had thought about it for a long time, and he had recalled St. Nicholas’s Day in previous years. A few weeks before the great day, St. Nicholas looked into houses when the children were doing their homework to make sure that they were being good, and, if he was satisfied, he threw a handful of almonds or walnuts through a fanlight or a half-open door.
Roger had watched his parents. He had noticed that every time St. Nicholas had manifested his presence in that way, his father had been in the yard and had come in afterwards making a show of surpris
e.
St. Nicholas was Father and Mother. But he mustn’t say so. Roger pretended not to know and, as in previous years, he would write the traditional letter listing the presents he would like to be given. He turned round and looked at Ledoux when, in class, Brother Mansuy made them sing:
‘Oh, great St. Nicholas,
Please come down to us,
Fill our baskets …’
Seeing that Ledoux had told the truth about St. Nicholas, he must know about babies too.
‘Tell me and I’ll give you my top.’
‘I can’t. You’re too little.’
‘I’m as big as you.’
‘You know you aren’t, because you’re in the first year and I’m in the second. If you want to know, look at a couple of dogs. It’s practically the same thing.’
Roger blushed as he recalled the dogs he had met on summer days, joined to one another and looking so unhappy. No! It couldn’t be true that Aunt Félicie and Coucou … It would be too awful. He would not think about it any more. He would not talk about it any more to Ledoux, who lived at Bressoux and whose mother was a charwoman. He was practically a slum child.
Élise was right:
‘The friars ought not to admit certain children to the Institut Saint-André. The state school is there for them. In Roger’s class, there’s a boy whose mother sells vegetables from a barrow in the street. Those people think that provided they pay, they can go where they like.’
It was Thioux she was referring to, a big, rugged, red-haired boy with innocent blue eyes, whose clothes were impregnated with the smell peculiar to the back-streets. His pockets were always full of food, and he chewed away from morning till night, giving a start whenever Brother Mansuy called out his name and looking around for help, for he never knew his lessons.
Roger gave a start too as he met his father’s gaze, and he looked to make sure that his fingers were no longer making the gesture.
‘What is it, son?’
‘Nothing, Father.’
‘You aren’t bored?’
‘No.’
The men too, like Élise when she was with her sisters or with Valérie, sometimes spoke in an undertone, making sure that Roger was not listening. But they did not speak in the same tone of complaint or anxiety. They smiled. They were merry. Every year, the whist-players at Velden’s went on a trip for three or four days with the kitty. This summer they had been to Paris. In a night-club in Montmartre, when big Désiré had gone in flanked by the tiny Grisard brothers, the singer had shouted:
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