The most simple thing would certainly be to put it back under the sink, but there Irma would discover it easily. Emile felt exceedingly embarrassed. He scratched his head, grunted, then not able to think of a better solution, he decided to empty it into theconcierge's dust bin downstairs, and bring it up again. He went down on tiptoe and arrived on the ground floor. The passage that lead to the street was obscure, and Emile peered cautiously before he risked entering it, then he decided to trust to luck and found himself outside. The street was deserted, the paving stones glistened under an icy drizzle. Emile went along close to the wall, reached the dust bin and emptied his box carefully. Then he felt reassured and told himself that nobody would now guess what had happened. He re-entered the house and had begun to climb up to his rooms, when a door which gave directly on to the narrow entrance passage opened, and Belle-Amour appeared. Emile was obliged to stand aside. The woman recognized him. She stopped and said “Tiens! Monsieur Emile.”
“Good evening,” answered Emile. “I came downstairs to empty my dust bin.”
“Yes,” murmured Belle-Amour. “Isn't this bad weather a nuisance?”
“It is a nuisance certainly,” said Emile.
He made as though to go on his way.
Belle-Amour asked: “How is it that you have to empty the dust bin?”
“There's no shame in doing it,” declared Emile, out of countenance.
“You're quite right.”
He repeated: “No shame at all.”
“Oh,” said Belle-Amour. “You are not the man to complain. People like you, who understand life, are never ashamed of anything. I know that you are above all that.”
Emile hung his head.
“But La Rouque?” asked the old woman, emboldened by the turn this incoherent conversation was taking. “She lets you do it?”
“My sister had forgotten.”
“Ah-well.”
“So you see...”
“It is nice of you,” said Belle-Amour, “to save her trouble... yes... it's really nice... So, although I've never spoken to you before, I don't want to hide from you... that people in this house think a lot of you, they esteem you.”
Emile did not know what to answer. He balanced his box at arm's length, smiled, lowered his head. “Ah,” he said stupidly, “I thank you—” He flushed scarlet and added: “What you say makes me feel very happy.”
Belle-Amour in her turn seemed confused. She was moved, perplexed, filled with a strange tenderness. Emile intimidated her. She did not know which way to look, standing there between the narrow walls of the passage which was swept by a cold draught. The umbrella hanging on her arm, the handbag in her hand, embarrassed her.
Moreover the presence of Emile so close to her in the shadow gave her a dream-like feeling, plunged her into a delicious stupor which prevented her from understanding anything of this happening.
“Well,” resumed Emile, “I must leave you; I've got to get upstairs.”
Belle-Amour was silent.
“D'you hear that?” he asked awkwardly.
He was listening attentively to the sounds of steps approaching from the street, and he longed to escape.
“Come into my room,” proposed Belle-Amour rapidly. “Just for a moment so that they won't see you. They'll gossip if they think we are talking. Quick, quick—in here.”
Emile felt utterly bewildered.
“In here,” repeated the old woman pulling at his sleeve.
She dragged him in, shut the door.
“Chut!” she whispered. “It's the Nenette going up to her room. What luck! If that one had seen us, there would have been a lot of talk tomorrow. She has an evil tongue; she is a gossip.”
Emile asked in a low voice: “Which is Nenette?”
“The one who wears a check coat and an oilcloth hat. You've never noticed her?”
“No,” said Emile, whose only idea was to get away. He felt his throat tighten with emotion, and his heart beat loudly, heavily—it hammered in his chest.
“A horrible nature,” explained Belle-Amour. “And as for being clean, well she isn't clean, she doesn't look after herself, she isn't tidy, her stockings are always full of holes.”
“Ah! Is that so?”
“We were taken up together once and brought to Saint-Lazar. I can tell you that I saw something when they stripped us.Ou-la-la!... The sisters were disgusted.”
Emile looked round him trying to think of something amiable to say before he took his leave. He remarked timidly: “It all looks very tidy in here.”
“I could not live in a dirty place,” answered Belle-Amour, who still stood near the door. “Everybody has their own character, haven't they? Isn't that so?”
Emile was silent.
“There is somebody else going upstairs,” announced the old woman. “This time it's la Marquise, and drunk, naturally. Do listen to the way she's rattling her key against the walls. Yes, she is with a man. Otherwise, she often comes to see me because I never let my stove out night or day. It is nice and warm in here, isn't it?”
“It is very nice and warm,” allowed Emile.
“Ben, you are not in a hurry, stay a little longer,” said Belle-Amour very quickly. “I can offer you some coffee. Will you? I'll get two glasses. Please sit down. No... I have coffee ready on the stove night and day. You can't refuse me. Why don't you wish to stay?”
“I have no reason,” replied Emile harshly.
And before she could stop him, he was in the passage. He looked at her, said good night quickly, and went off almost in a run.
***
Emile hurried up the steps, and pale, breathless, agitated, double-locked himself in his room. Then he was obliged to sit down, and for two or three minutes everything seemed to turn round him in a grotesque and rapid dance. He felt giddy. A strange emotion had taken possession of him and prevented him from steadying his thoughts. He had never in his life felt so strongly about anything. A novel emotion. Pleasure, discontent? He could not define it. Sometimes he thought of his delight when the old woman flattered him, then instantly he would feel anger and a subconscious irritation. He could not understand why she had wished him to stay longer with her. He felt suspicious. He wondered what her plan was. Why should she offer him coffee? He did not know her well enough to find the offer natural or to accept it. He never took coffee at night. It made him too nervous. Was that why she had insisted? Was she trying to make him talk about things which he did not wish anybody to know? Not again! Emile was not so stupid. And then what could he say? His difficulties with Bebert were nobody's business, interested nobody but himself. He was not going to confide in Belle-Amour. Not if he knew it!
“Ah, no! No!” he declared aloud, “no... no ...” The woman was extraordinary, but she was also cunning, like all women, thought Emile. Inquisitive. He pictured her with her hair ridiculously cut shorta la Ninon, her thick waist, her enormous hips. What did she want from him, after all? The innocent! She was running after him. Parbleu! That's what it was. Emile remembered having seen her that same evening gazing at his window from the street, and he laughed, he shouted with laughter, we wriggled with laughter, then stopped all at once, because a new and insupportable idea had occurred to him. The woman must love him to behave like that. Emile shook himself. The thought of love was too painful. He would have liked to thrust it aside, trample it down. But he could not. Then he got up and began to walk up and down the kitchen, not knowing how to escape from his memories. If he had dared, he would have gone downstairs to the old woman and begged her to leave him in peace. But what was the use? People in the house would hear of it and invent a hundred stories. And in this way the creature would be revenged... Emile know all about such vengeances. He had already experienced them... the ridicule, the shame, the daily and nightly despair. Alas! Although he tried to stop himself from doing it, he began to live again the dreadful moments he had known with his second wife. Had he loved her, that one? He could not tell. And the other, who constantly reproach
ed him for his bad temper, who constantly complained about everything. He thought he heard her piercing voice, her grumblings, her lamentations.
The poor woman had never been happy with him. But what a life he had led her! He remembered the pleasure he used to feel, when he could irritate the insipid creature and quarrel with her about nothing. What? Was that all love was? Emile closed his eyes. Yes he had loved her, perhaps cherished her, but in his fashion, with the diseased wish to torment and be odious to her. He could not love otherwise. That was his nature—a narrow, a selfish nature which caused him suffering because it forced him to always appear worried, sulky, discontented. Emile passed his hand heavily over his face; he was conscious of being the author of all his misery, he saw his fault everywhere and measured its extent, and an abrupt and painful change took place in him. He no longer wished to find excuses for himself, but he tried on the contrary to reach by secret roads the innermost depths of his heart, the better to tear himself to pieces.
VI
This unforeseen change made Emile still more suspicious and difficult to live with. When he came back from his office he would shut himself in his room and go to bed without taking any notice of Irma or of Bebert. He tried to sleep, and one night out of three he would succeed in doing so. On that night, Bebert could talk at the top of his voice, or sing if he were drunk. Emile heard nothing. He had fallen on his bed in a heavy mass, utterly exhausted by fatigue and nervousness.
Bebert was astounded.
“What about him?” he asked Irma. “Is he cracked?”
And when the girl approved: “I've never known a man like that,” said he seriously. “It's extraordinary. His way of going on is like nothing on earth. No, really, nothing whatever.”
For Bebert the simple life of bars, balls and cinemas sufficed. His pleasures came to him through women. He worked at an electrician's shop when he had nothing better to do, and all the street girls and the women in the brothels of the quarter knew him. He betrayed the one with the other and made his living out of them. They called him “Go to bed Bebert” or mockingly “Only you,” this being one of his favorite expressions when he was trying to seduce them by tender talk.
But none of them really cared for him. He was too fickle and spent too much money. As soon as he entered a dance hall, or regularly every afternoon in the brothels of the Military School quarter, he would hurry up to the newcomers and dazzle them with his eloquence and his offers of drinks. When he sang his success was great. This sturdy little man with frizzled hair, a rascal's eye and a warm voice was magnificent as he stood in the midst of the women and sang, for instance, the chorus of the Battaillionnaires, the African battalion, where he had served as a soldier. It borrows the tune of the old:Pan! Pan! l'Arbil!
There was silence in the room, and Bebert, his cap over his eyes, would begin:
Pan, rataplan
Au revoir a tous les parents
Aux frangins, aux gosses affranchies
A la mom Chocot qui fait des chichis
A la Louise, a la grand Clara
A la Rouquine et ceatera
Mais toi la bell 'goss quest-c' que tu prendas
Quand on r'viendra.
“Go on, Bebert!” the girls said encouragingly.
And they cried bravo, applauded, and would pass him money under the table—the “ladies turn.”
Bebert lived this enviable life for some time, but it could not last. One evening, precisely because of his success, a man stabbed him in the ribs. Bebert recovered, but once out of hospital he hunted for his cowardly aggressor, met him on the Place St. Charles, and shot him like a dog, three revolver bullets in the back.
“Not seen, not known and that's all right,” Bebert would say when anyone spoke to him about the affair.
The joyous life began again, but his conquests now considered him dangerous. They mistrusted him, and to subsist, he was reduced to the most precarious expedients. Nobody in the quarter would employ him, and in the street, he terrorized those women whom he knew to be without a protector.
Bebert took money away from these feeble creatures, wasted it, hunted for a new victim. He wandered into the bars of Crenelle in search of adventures, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of an enormous and red-faced individual who was known as Bouboule, or Red Face, or again The Tripe. Bouboule, a former boxer, was now a bookmaker. He wore a Cronstadt hat, leggings, colored shirts and he attracted clients by his good humor. Politeness was one of his charms, nevertheless, when he went along the boulevard with Bebert, all the women drew aside.
However, the partners had quite a good time. Sometimes they would watch the procession of men who were hunting for a woman, Chinese, Arabs, Negroes. Sometimes they observed the comings and goings of the women and passed judgment on them. By the method they knew whom to deal with, and could often calculate up to twenty francs their share of the profit.
It was in this way that Bebert noticed Irma and told himself that she would suit him. He elbowed Bouboule.
“The red-haired girl over there?” he inquired.
“Bedame!”
The friends separated. Bebert followed Irma, discovered the bar in the Rue de 1'Avre, the house where she lived and, after a few days of minute and patient inquiry, accosted the girl politely...
Then the joyous life for which he felt he was made began again, and all Irma's savings melted, for Bebert was determined not to deprive himself of anything. He conducted the girl to all the dance halls of the neighborhood, took her to concerts in the cafes, to theatres, and very often to a bar in the Rue Fremicourt kept by a man named Titin. This bar was open until two o'clock in the morning. Irma was proud of Bebert. He was charming to her. He always knew how to arrange things, he spoke to everybody, and was really very presentable. Besides, he was able to give her pleasure. His good humor was contagious, irresistible. He displayed it on every occasion and when sometimes, a little intoxicated by this happiness to which she was not accustomed, the girl begged he companion to sing her an old song no longer heard at theCafe Cone', she did not have to ask twice. The languorous and sentimental air gave her a comforting sensation of rapture. She never got tired of it. As for the words, they were an enchantment.
Apres de longs jours de chomage
Comm 'la mom' trouvait pas d'ouvrage
A s'laissa tomber un tantot
Sur I'Sebasto.
Ah! What a beautiful song it was! It swayed, as it were to a slow and mournful rhythm. Bebert continued:
Pourtant mane de ses vacheries
Ainsi que d'ses paillassonn'ries
La mom scia son gars pour Patuad
Du Sebasto.
Toto n'pardonna pas son vanne
Pour s'venger un soir de tisane
Dans l'rape il lui mit son couteau
Sur l'Sebasto.
The end especially, Irma knew by heart, so bitter she thought it, so heavy with an obscure and nostalgic poetry.
La mom' chromit de sa blessure
Au travers Toto s'fit la l'vure
Ainsi finissent leurs zigotos
Au Sebasto.
The last verse was always sung in chorus and she repeated it seized by a strange emotion, savage and tender. She shivered and abandoned herself: “Oh, Bebert,” she sighed, “my man... my dear... mapetite gueule...”
“Put it there,” he would say.
They kissed. Irma felt herself near to fainting. From the innermost depths of her nature rose a bitter and delicious sensation which lit her heart up, like those colored skyrockets that explode high in the night long after one has thought them dead. Could anything be compared with that? Was there anything else so sweet on earth? She would have sworn not, for in one moment, as if by a miracle, everything that the unfortunate girl had suffered was wiped out, her deceptions, her weariness, her endured humiliations. She was full of an immense fervor. In these moments she would have done anything to make sure of this happiness, she would have given all she possessed. But Bebert did not exact so much as all tha
t. He simply deducted from Irma's earnings, the percentage to which he had a right, and he directed her, tried to give her a taste for her work. With Bouboule, who also had settled down, he sat in a bar not far from the Rue de 1'Avre and the Boulevard de Crenelle, the low ceilinged bar Tango. From this bar one could see the street. The friends playedbelotte, smoked, drank innumerable little glasses of alcohol, and their women joined them about midnight.
In the night full of haggardly red lights, under the flaming, cloud swept sky, the two couples departed, taking small steps, to eat at Tintin's. Then they went back to their respective homes after the last glass drunk at the counter.
“Au revoir—“ would say fat Bouboule. “Good night, Madame Irma.”
“Salut,” Bebert would answer.
And holding his Irma's arm, Bebert walked soberly along under an old umbrella.
It was then that he thought of Emile, and wondered at the stupidity of his existence.
“Bah! don't worry about it,” proposed Irma. Bebert frowned.
“He's cracked,” he affirmed. “Idiotic.”
On certain evenings, the desire came to him to wake Emile up and ask him why he was sulking, and he would knock little knocks against the wall and call out. Emile did not answer. He let Bebert knock, and with wide open eyes, waited for him to get tired.
“All right, all right,” said Bebert. “Wait a bit.” Emile's silence and reserve irritated Bebert. He thought that there must be some reason for them, and by degrees he began to believe that the tall stupid fellow was preparing some trick. But what trick? He was not afraid of Emile. But he reflected daily about the situation, which he felt was not quite clear.... For a whole week Bebert watched Emile, observing him as he observed a woman before he undertook her conquest, then finally he made up his mind.
“Come in here for a bit,” he ordered one evening just when Emile was about to enter his room.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
Emile asked if Bebert wanted to speak to him.
Perversity Page 3