by Marcel Ayme
“I would really like the end of the world to come before noon, said a boy. I’ve just lost all our bread ration cards. My mother doesn’t know yet.”
“I’m sick of it,” said a girl of low reputation. “You know what I am, but I wouldn’t recommend joining me. Lots of people, they think that the game is a good way to get fat. Of course, you’ll find some women who clean up during the day, but that kind of punter isn’t my bag. My set are the standard clients, the average clients who fiddle their monthly salary for a bit of fun. Before, I used to make my hundred francs in the end, perhaps a little over, scarcely though. We lived sparingly, my gentleman and I, and we managed to make ends meet and even put a little away in the savings bank. Fernando, his idea was that one day we would buy a little café beside the River Marne. Remember, before the war, these things were by no means impossible. And then, the war could have been good for us, if only the country had been ready for it. But at every level there’s been too much complacency, we French are too devoted to pleasure. Mistakes were made. Top to bottom, it’s a total blackout. Still, we didn’t suffer too much during the Phoney Fight, on the contrary. There were people about, men weren’t scarce, they still wanted a bit of skirt. Even after, when the Germans came charging into Paris, we had a good time. They sent all their military men to visit Paris. Now, the military has wised up. Quite finished, it is, that tourism stage. On top of that, you’ve hardly the time to get any work in. In this season it’s already dark at six. You have to work in the cafés. The drinks are dear and we do add up to a lot of single women and, for the client, atmosphere-wise, it’s really not the same as the streets. And it doesn’t do me any favours either. You know some women have that wicked eye or come-hither cleavage. My best feature, don’t know if you saw already, is from my feet up to my waist, but I can hardly sit on the table. And some of the women can speak German, that helps quite a bit with the military. Fernando, he wanted me to learn it, he used to send me to a school for it every morning. But I didn’t understand a thing, I dropped out. See my problem is, even our slang, I’ve never managed to get the hang of it. My education’s a problem too. We never spoke slang at home. My old folks, they’d never put up with it. For them it came down to work, work, work. A day of work for an evening out. In a way, they weren’t wrong. Today, for whatever it brings in, it’s evenings out every time. Prices really have gone up a bit, but with what everything costs these days, it doesn’t mean anything. You keep a roof and feed a man, you realise that. Besides which, I need underwear, silk stockings, and Fernando has to wear something too. He’s a bit of a dandy, you ought to see him. At least he has to be if he wants work. I know some women, their men work things out fixing up deals on the black market. But Fernando, well he’s much too frightened and anyway, he has no idea. Sometimes, when I’m feeling low, he makes me angry, I clobber him proper with my boots, but I regret it after, I think that’s his weedy nature, what can you do, poor bugger. Perhaps you know him. Yes! A skinny fellow in a beige overcoat, one shoulder higher than the other, with a face like a slice out of the moon. In our trade, before the war, the fashion was to shack up with crooks, runts, moron types. You remember what we used to sing: He’s a real little midget, no taller than a basset. With that type of thinking, there’s no chance of us winning the war. Because, make no mistake, morality is about how you’re brought up. In any case, now I have my scruffy rascal to myself. With that one I can sleep sound, they won’t be sending him to Germany.”
“As for me, said an old lady, it’s now a fortnight since I’ve had anything over to feed my cat. His name is Kiki.”
“And me,” said a man, “in the name of God and all his billion holy hosts. Won’t they give us some wine? I can’t go on. I can’t! I can’t! Their rations are no better than a kick in the backside. I’m used to drinking six litres of wine a day, four aperitifs and a glass of brandy after the Camembert. I was as strong as the Pont Neuf, never a day off sick and always ready for work in the morning. Now look at me, I’m fifty-four and no good to anyone any longer, of course. I’ve left my plumbing work, I shake all over, see my hands, you’d put me at ninety, my legs are shivery, they feel like lead and I keep losing my thread all the time. How would you explain it? I tell you, strong as the Pont Neuf. Like the Pont Neuf, as solid as that. Good God, the Pont Neuf! But no wine. What can you do without wine? Take away the wine and you’ll destroy the man. I can feel a fire inside me. I can’t take it any more, I tell you. I can’t take it! A litre of wine per week. Murderers. My wife, she gets her litre too, but would you believe it, she drinks it all, leaves me none. Yesterday morning, we’d got our ration. In the evening, my wife kept a glassful at the bottom of her bottle. I couldn’t hold back, I wanted to take it from her. In actual fact, I couldn’t help myself. We were like lunatics, both of us, she threw a plate at my head. The Pont Neuf. Ah! They never suspected what evil they would do with their rationing. My little boy who’s nearly thirteen, he gets nothing. But he has needs too. A boy well cared for, he’s never lacked for wine. At the age of three, he was already glugging down his glass of red with all his meals. We were getting him used to it little by little. Had to watch not to overdo it. Enough is enough, but this is too much, too much. The Pont Neuf. At nine he was drinking his litre a day and often a litre and a half. How is a child meant to get on when he has nothing left in him? And my son particularly, he lacks my strong disposition. He’s always been scrawny, weak nerves, festering boils. All he had to keep him going was his little daily litre to drink. Now he has to drink water. If that isn’t vile. The Pont Neuf. And he’s still young, he’ll be able to catch up. But I, a man of fifty-plus, keep it up on a litre a week? A litre. No, one litre. And to have to wait for it for days. I can’t go on!”
“I,” said a Jew, “I’m a Jew.”
A girl said: “I was sixteen when the war started. I remember how Paris was when I was sixteen. So many people in the streets, and noise, and shops, endless cars with horns that sang out in jazz and all the men were only twenty. Me and my friends, when we used to leave school, we had to find our way through the crowd and to hear yourself talk you had to speak loudly, laugh and shout. Youthful policemen would be waiting for us at all the crossroads. They would give us their arm, like at a dance, the cars lined up to see us go by and when we said goodbye to the policemen, if I remember right, they would give us roses, jasmine and forget-me-nots. I would go home by Rue Francoeur, a pretty street. At Place de Clichy we would go slowly, because of the crowd. And also because we had to respond nicely to all those smiles. There were always at least a thousand boys and they all wore brightly coloured shoes, had silken pockets and faces like angels. How they used to look at us, sometimes blue eyes, sometimes black, with golden lashes. We didn’t understand everything they said, only some words: love, heart, tomorrow, or it was names and they were always our names. They came by for us, they knew that one day such things would happen as might never end. They used to gather on the café terraces and follow us with their eyes for a long time, throw us flowers, birds and words which would make our hearts leap. On reaching the Caulaincourt bridge I would already be a little tipsy, the boys singing in my head. I recall one June, on the bridge, the sun was bright, the dead in the cemetery below smelt of meadow flowers like never before, the boys bathed in sunshine as they walked and life was so sweet that I gave a cry of joy and my feet lifted clear off the ground. It was my friend Janette Couturier who held on to my legs. I was cross with her for a good while afterwards. The loveliest moment of those walks home was that climb up the Rue Caulaincourt. In those days, it wound in a spiral all around the hill of Montmartre. The cars parked along the pavements formed a double line of blue that twisted upwards like smoke, and there were ribbons of pink in the sky. If I’m wrong do tell me, but I remember that the trees used to keep their leaves all year round. Rue Caulaincourt was less busy than the bridge, but the boys were at the windows, looking out of cars and most of all in the trees. They showered us with sighs, billets doux and such sweet
songs that they always brought tears to our eyes. On coming home, I would always find five or six cousins had come to see my brother, or so they said. We would play together laughing and even kissing a little. Now I can admit it—at night I would dream that I had my baccalaureate and as a reward the headmistress would allow me to choose my lifelong love from among the hundred handsomest boys in Montmartre. Today my sixteenth year is long gone. My brother has been killed in the war, my cousins have been taken prisoner, my friends all took the train from the Gare du Nord. The young people who have stayed, you do see them sometimes, they don’t think of us. They don’t see us. The streets are empty, the policemen are all old. Rue Caulaincourt hardly curves at all. In winter, the trees are bare. Do you think the war will go on long?”
The fourteenth person said nothing, for she had just died all of a sudden, among her brand-new friends. She was a young woman, her husband imprisoned, with three children, stricken by poverty, fear and exhaustion. Her new friends made their way to the town hall to complete the formalities. One of them had an official there tell him that there were in fact no more coffins for people from Montmartre. He objected that this was for the wife of an imprisoned soldier. “What do you want me to do about it? I can’t turn myself into a coffin,” observed the official. They searched throughout the neighbourhood. There was nothing left on the shelves in Borniol. A confectioner offered to procure a pine coffin for the sum of fifteen thousand francs, but the orphans didn’t have a penny between them and the other friends were not wealthy. An honest carpenter offered to make an imitation wooden coffin out of plywood. In the meanwhile, the town hall had received some proper coffins and the young woman could be decently buried.
Her companions joined her funeral procession and, on leaving the cemetery, sat down together in a café where, on receipt of a hundred-gram bread coupon, each was served a Jerusalem-artichoke sandwich. They had not finished eating when one of the friends observed that they were thirteen around the table and should therefore expect further misfortunes.
TRANSLATOR’S THANKS
I would like to thank my long-standing readers Harold Lewis and Pauline Le Goff for their essential comments. Also David Hermann and Kathleen McCaul for their fine reading and encouragement. Carla MacKinnon, Leah Motherway and Georgia Challis, thank you for your help with the wolf-man. Clémence Sebag, Sophie Langlais and Cécile Menon, thanks as ever for being on call. Jean-Dominique Langlais, thank you for pointing out a few things that were invisible to me.
Copyright
Original text © Éditions Gallimard 1943
English translation © Sophie Lewis 2012
The Man Who Walked through Walls first published in French as Le Passe-muraille in 1943
This edition first published in 2012 by
Pushkin Press
71-75 Shelton Street,
London WC2H 9JQ
ISBN 978 1 908968 20 3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Cover Illustration Composition 1926 Giorgio de Chirico
© DACS 2011
Frontispiece Marcel Aymé
© Rex Features Roger Viollet
Set in 10.5 on 13 Monotype Baskerville by Tetragon and printed on Munken Premium White 90gsm in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
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