Céline, guessing at the kind of advice Auguste was giving her sister, detested him. Besides, she was irritable and bad-tempered at the moment. She was beginning to think that her gentleman was too well-behaved. He would just sit next to her and talk, staring at the sky with a doleful air; in short, he exasperated her. Secretly, she looked down on him as a bit of an idiot, but every evening she returned home humiliated that he hadn’t tried to have his way with her.
Teston’s wife behaved admirably under these circumstances; moved by the afflictions of Céline, her favourite, she would come at nightfall and settle herself opposite the bed of the dropsical woman, and gravely recount all the gossip, as if talking to herself, in between darning her Alexandre’s socks and dozing off.
At ten o’clock she would get up, put her needles, thread, and thimble back into her wicker sewing basket, cover the half-extinguished embers of the fire with ashes, tuck in her friend, extinguish the schist lamp and go off to find her husband, who would invariably be smoking his pipe, his backside squeezed onto a carriage stone, his back leaning against one of the panels of the courtyard door.
And then, one after the other, the two girls would come back, taking the key from under the doormat, putting it back in its place if one of them hadn’t returned. Only once did Ma Teston, who turned a blind eye to their escapades, tell them they were being silly girls because, in their haste to get away, they ate nothing but cold slices of ham, and instead of thick soups made do with dipping old bread crusts in a bowl of broth from a restaurant nearby.
‘That’s not going to do your stomach much good!’ she would tell them, but the impatient girls replied that they didn’t see anything wrong with it. Their system was at least convenient. They could leave the ham or pork brawn in its paper, and that made one less dish to wash. A wipe of a dishcloth over the table and they were done; and besides, as Céline maintained with a devilish persistence, they didn’t just eat larded veal and Italian cheese, the hot-food stall run by the old Auvergnat round the corner provided them with pan-fried fish and mussels swimming in white sauce, all at a very reasonable price. At daggers drawn over everything else, the two sisters were in perfect agreement about avoiding the tedium of preparing meals and doing the washing up.
Céline insisted on being the first to leave; she always said she’d be back in a few minutes, but she’d return at all hours of the night, which annoyed the concierge and made her lose all respect for the girl. Désirée would stay in the house until eight o’clock, then she’d rush downstairs in her turn, leaving Ma Teston to sip her cassis, and she’d run off to join Auguste, who would be walking up and down the Rue du Cotentin.
Then they’d embark on great excursions around the quarter, and nearly always end up on the Avenue du Maine, going back down as far as the Rue de la Gaité. If the latter street does justice to its name, the Avenue du Maine is, on the contrary, lugubriously dreary. Its wide pavements are as dark as the inside of a coal cellar and all the shops close by eight o’clock. Here and there, lit by a gaslamp, a urinal gurgles softly, its entrance bubbling with a froth of chlorine; then the street lamps become more spaced out, planted between slender, dishevelled trees, and the refrain of some popular song, carried on a puff of wind, can be heard as the hubbub of a tipsy suburb ascends this boulevard of gleaming lamps flanked by two dark avenues of trees.
Here, at dusk, lamps light up at the level of the lower storeys, and four red lanterns – that of the police station and those of three tobacconists – tart up the peeling distemper of the walls with bright purple; sometimes another red light blazes over a bar sign depicting an enormous tankard held by a hand fixed into the plaster, a tankard full of blood whenever they turned it on.
The street was crowded that evening. Cries of delight issued from the open windows of dance halls and from half-opened doors of bars. Groups of people were clustered on the pavement, bands of children were swarming around playing hide-and-seek and were threatened with a slap whenever they grabbed the jackets of men passing by. Near Jamin’s café-concert hall, and especially near the old Grados dance hall, the crowd grew even thicker. At the door of this dance hall stood a uniformed doorman trying to look tough, and lads in baggy peaked caps and ruched shirts, with butterfly collars and no ties, took drags on their cigarettes, joking with girls trussed up from head to foot in long mackintoshes. On the pavement, couples strolled along amid the yellow and green light refracted from the jars in pharmacists’ windows; the Plaisance omnibus came along, cutting through this teeming crowd, its headlamps splashing cherry-red light across the white rumps of the horses, and then the groups reformed, pierced here and there by columns of people streaming out of the Montparnasse Theatre, spreading out in a large fan that wrapped itself around a cart pushed by a shouting orange-seller.
Bars exhaled an odour of alcohol and wine; the click of billiard balls could be heard through an open window; men would run up to someone they knew and greet them with a playful punch; urchins of thirteen smoked cigarette butts and spat; the belly of a fat woman swayed beneath her greasy apron; whole families gathered excitedly around pastry shop windows.
Fingers foraged around in éclairs that were split and spilling their cream; others balanced soft almond tarts, barely held together by frail and flaccid crusts; mouths nibbled at foamy vanilla mousses; jaws closed over morsels of flan disembowelled on paper plates.
And the turnovers and cakes were replaced as fast as they were bought. Steaming tarts sweated profusely and their latticework of pastry sagged under the pressure of welling juices; brioches erupted in bubonic blisters; pastry horns filled with white goo burst; rum babas collapsed, seeping rum. Every blob of preserve, every drop of jam was leaking, catching each other up, stopping briefly when they ran into one another, then flowing more quickly when they’d mixed and merged.
Cheap wine, cassis, and marc formed rivulets on zinc counters. In the street, one could see nothing but men wiping their mouths and spitting purple spit on to the pavement.
So Auguste suggested to Désirée that he take her to the Folies-Bobino. The theatre was practically on its last legs, opening only once every two or three nights now. Désirée, fearing that it might close for good and wanting, at least once in her life, to savour the much-vaunted delights of this den of iniquity, accepted Auguste’s invitation.
She gazed in wonder at the entrance, which was an elaborate architectural mix of Siamese, of Japanese, of all sorts of styles, interbred with the imbecilic fantasies of an architect. Everything was stained chocolate-brown and slate-grey, and adorned with bas-reliefs from which protruded cupids, their buttocks three times too big, scraping on cellos. A yellow woman dancing on the inverted pagoda-like roof and holding a gaslamp shaped like a lyre in her hand, astounded her.
Then she entered a garden, laid out with thin columns, urns, and statues of women crowned with laurels and holding cornucopias in their arms, and all were dismembered, one-armed, one-eared or one-eyed. All had ugly ulcers on their noses, white plasters on their throats, green, leprous sores on their foreheads, and all were leaning to one side or the other, smiling through their filthy whiteness, inviting you with the rueful welcome of lips that had been defaced by yobs. The door opened and in front of her she could make out a spacious hall with a large stage, and, against the backdrop of a scenic forest, a woman waving her arms about and bellowing amid a furious blare of noise.
But the prices were very expensive, fifteen sous to enter and drinks were extra. Auguste’s first thought was that they wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing very often, and what’s more they didn’t even get very good seats. The servers crammed you into ordered rows and balanced cups and glasses on a fold-out tray attached to the back of the seat in front of you. Désirée cricked her neck trying to look upwards; unfortunately, the balcony was right over her head and the din of stamping boots rolled around above her. People were shouting: ‘Encore, encore! The jig, the jig!’ and a performer dressed as an Englishman, with peagreen trousers, ginger sideburns an
d a grey hat, began to dance, jumping straight up and banging his heels, then, bringing his knees together as if he was knock-kneed, he sprang up without warning and came back down, his thighs spread like an upsidedown V. He contorted himself, sweating, shouting pathetic ‘Ta-das’, performing entrechats, waltzing on tiptoe, shuffling backwards on his heels, prancing and jigging about, his arms whirling, his head flung back and forth like the clapper of a bell. There was a short intermission, then a placard appeared, on which the name Regina was written. The conductor raised his baton, the musicians puffed, a woman made her entrance, bowed stiffly like a puppet, and, standing in front of the prompter’s pit and from time to time kicking aside the train of her dress which was getting in her way, began to sing. She was encased in a pink frock with a very low neckline, and her bare arms were red, despite having been whitened with powder. Her chin cast a shadow over the base of her neck. She accompanied the grating sound coming from her throat with four gestures: one hand on her heart and the other stuck down by her thigh; her right arm stretched out in front, the left behind; then the same movement but in the opposite direction; and lastly, both hands held out toward the public. She would spout one couplet to the left of the stage, the next to the right. Her eyes would open or close depending on whether the tune she was grinding out was supposed to touch people’s souls or make them happy. From a distance, from where Désirée and Auguste were seated, her wide open mouth, when she was yelling the final line of the refrain, gaped like a black hole.
During a brief interlude, while the orchestra played an instrumental refrain, she cleared her throat, revealing a profile one wouldn’t have expected looking at her face straight on, winked at the chief violinist, glanced at her eight-button gloves the fingertips of which were stiff from the starch of her sweat, then leaned over the orchestra and, bawling at the top of her voice, threw out her arms, revealing a kind of black smoke floating in the half-glimpsed hollow of her armpits.
The whole theatre went mad, frenzied cheers echoed around, and, bowing, smiling and blowing kisses, she wiggled her hips, sending ripples down her silk dress, the lower part of which, struck more garishly by the footlights, shone brilliantly as if newer than the corsage.
She reprised her last note. Beer mugs beat time against the wood of the trays; her final, enthusiastic bow saw her two udders squash together, restrained by the dike of her corsage, separated only by a crack in which beads of sweat gleamed; and then, gathering up her skirts in her fists and gurning like a child, she trotted off the stage, deafened by a machine-gun fire of bravos and encores.
Désirée went quite pale with admiration. First of all, those couplets were so poignant: here was a woman weeping for her dead child and cursing war, and you couldn’t hear things as moving as that without tears springing to your eyes, on top of which the singer seemed to her as elegant as a queen with her bracelets, her dangling earrings, and the sweeping train of her skirt; she was well aware that her cheeks were stuccoed with make-up and she’d overdone the eyeliner, but even so, under the lights, amid the dazzling décor of the stage, this was a captivating woman, with her luxuriously repointed flesh and her painted silks. Auguste, too, was enthusiastically drifting off into fantasy. That dream, impossible for a poor, honest man to realise, of possessing all to himself for a quarter of an hour a girl so striking, a girl bursting with such studied youthfulness and grace, unsettled his mind and he contemplated the empty stage wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Désirée found this admiration a little unseemly and she pinched him. He gave a start, like a man who’s just been woken up, then, faced with the smile of the young girl who was amused at seeing him in so unguarded a moment, he too began to laugh and squeezed her hand.
The brass section of the orchestra blared again and a young man, dressed in tails, a low-cut waistcoat, a ruffled shirt and badly-cut black trousers, came forward, and, after having bowed, gently bleated out this plaintive song:
When we sing in cherry blossom time,
Larks and mockingbirds
Will have their fuu…uun!
Girls will think of foolish thoughts,
And lovers hearts be full of suu…uun!
When we sing in cherry blossom time, etc.
This crooner was the darling of all the Montrouge tarts. Pasty-faced, skinny and short, he looked like a youth, even though he was at least thirty. He was a countertenor who wrung out every last salty tear from his lachrymose voice. At the end of each couplet he’d rise up on the tips of his boots, and spin out long, tender notes, which women found thrilling.
Now it was Auguste’s turn to think that Désirée was ogling him too much, and, not daring to risk pinching her in return, he prodded her, as if by accident, with his elbow. The young girl looked at him sideways, and thought he was being a bit too demanding, so she took pleasure in shouting ‘encore’ when this whining Céladon left the stage.
Auguste was just about to drink a mouthful of coffee, which by dint of having been doused with water had neither colour nor taste, when a woman on his left, wanting to wipe her kid’s nose, knocked his elbow and made him pour half a cupful on his trousers; Désirée giggled. The woman maintained that coffee was good for the skin; Auguste was furious, but held his tongue, mopping himself with his handkerchief. His face was red with embarrassment and anger. Désirée cracked up. It was stupid, but she was one of those who burst out laughing whenever a passerby trips over in the street. Eventually, she took a carafe of water and started cleaning his trousers herself, then she leaned against Auguste and he started to forget his bad luck; besides, his lap was drying now, and the disagreeable sensation he felt when the cold water initially filtered through the material had disappeared.
A short comedy sketch was to conclude the performance, that inevitable sketch with three characters: a young society girl who disguises herself as a maid in order to test her fiancé, flirts with someone else to provoke his jealousy, and then ends up marrying her man in a musical finale bawled out in chorus by actors and audience.
The action always unfolded in the same way, jollied along by the maid’s flirting, by the man taking liberties and being slapped in the face, by the fiancé’s impatient bewilderment when his bell-ringing summoning the maid goes unheeded, and by the drinking song finale delivered in front of a bottle of red water and a chicken made from gold-coloured cardboard; then everyone got up and rushed off, jostling to get to the door. It was eleven o’clock. All the theatres and music halls were emptying into the street at the same time. The street flocked with people; men were gathering noisily at a tobacconist’s to smoke their cigarettes and pipes. Next door to a pastry shop, in the dirty window of which sat a stuffed white rabbit, the bar of ‘The Little Jug’ was filling up with drunks downing cheap wine; the Hôtel-de-Ville omnibus rolled slowly by with its greeny-brown carriage and its coachman cracking his whip and crying ‘Giddy-up!’ every few minutes. Auguste took Désirée to a waffle-house, and there, settled on a long banquette, they could have had two glasses of beer and two waffles for ten sous, but the young girl wanted to go home; she was suffocating in this room in which the smoky smell of a café combined with the odour of hot fried dough. They left and he escorted her back, listening to her hum the refrains of songs she’d picked up that evening.
One of them kept dancing round in her head and eventually various fragments found their way onto her lips, and once set on the trail of this tune by the words she’d remembered, she began to murmur:
Have you seen her under the elm?
Or with the village girls by the stream,
Looking at her reflection in the water?
You’d know her if you saw her,
Alas, my Rosinette,
I’ve lost her, I’ve lost he…eeer!
Auguste found that even though Désirée had a beautiful voice, he’d have preferred it if she was more attentive to the sweet nothings he was whispering to her. Finally, she lost her patience trying to figure out the tune on her own and exclaimed: ‘Oh fiddlesticks! I’ll try to remember
the rest of it tomorrow morning when I wake up,’ and she began to skip along on her lover’s arm. They were going down a dark little street, full of couples in the shadows. Auguste suddenly remembered a nice little line he’d heard used by an officer when he was in the army; he stopped short and said to Désirée:
‘Do you know the Maltese Cross?’
She didn’t know what that meant.
So he told her to close her eyes and, with zigzags that formed the points of the cross, he kissed her first on the forehead, then on both eyelids, then on the tip of her tiny nose, on her cheeks, on her lips, and finally on the chin.
She protested, shuddering when the young man’s mouth touched her own, but she liked it all the same.
Nevertheless, she made him stop. She felt altogether too agitated. ‘No, look,’ she said to him, ‘if you want to kiss me, give me a simple peck, here, like this,’ and she kissed him quickly and firmly on the cheek.
He would have preferred longer, more delicate kisses, but the sound of sneering laughter disturbed them; women on the game standing behind latticed doors were taking aim at men and luring them over with the filthy suggestions that flowed from their lips. Désirée became embarrassed. Boozed up drunks were fooling around with these tarts, one of whom, leaning against a window, was making come-hither signs to a down-and-out carpenter on the street corner. Désirée fled, dragging Auguste with her. These sordid caresses were spoiling her happy mood; they walked without speaking as far as the Rue Vandamme, and then, after the young man had waited for the door to open and, as it was closing, for Désirée to give him a parting smile through the bars of the grill before disappearing into the darkness, he walked slowly back to his lodgings.
The Vatard Sisters Page 11