Monsieur Monde Vanishes (13 page)

“Is it true that the Empress is dead?”

Désiré walked between the two of them. At one street corner they stopped automatically in front of a little bar that had just opened. A good smell rose from the percolator, which the proprietor, in a blue apron, was just polishing.

“Three coffees …”

They were blinking a little. They always had a peculiar aftertaste in their mouths. And the smell of the night club still hung about the two women, who were wearing their evening dresses under their street coats. Theirs was a special sort of weariness, in their heads rather than in their limbs.

They started off again. At Gerly's, the door was left unlocked all night. The blinds of the brasserie were still down.

They went upstairs slowly. Julie's room was on the second floor and Charlotte's on the fourth. Désiré still slept up in the attic.

They stopped on the landing to say good night to one another. Julie, wholly unembarrassed by her friend's presence, glanced up at him. “Coming?”

He did so occasionally; but now he said no. He didn't feel like it. He went on upstairs.

“She's a nice girl,” Charlotte said. “She's swell!”

He agreed.

“Good night …”

“Good night …”

He went on climbing, slowly. Once, at home on Rue Ballu, he had climbed the stairs to his bedroom, an evening when he had been out alone and his wife, the second wife, was waiting for him. And without knowing, under a sort of compulsion, he had stopped and sat down on a step, wearily, without a thought in his head; then because of some creaking sound, made perhaps by a mouse in the wall, he had got up, feeling ashamed, and made his way on upstairs.

Now he went up to the very top, opened the door with his key, and began to undress, looking out at the hundreds of red roofs spread out in tiers in the morning sunlight.

The bars of the iron bedstead were black, and the same shape as the backs of the chairs on the Champs-Elysées or the Bois de Boulogne. Désiré slept under a sloping attic roof. The skylight stood open. Birds were bickering along the ledge, and trucks from far afield were rattling past in the streets below, converging on the flower market; the sounds traveled so clearly through the thin air that one could almost smell the stacks of mimosa and carnations.

Désiré was almost immediately engulfed in sleep; he would first feel himself drop vertically, as though sucked down by an eddy, but it was not unpleasant, he felt no fear, he knew he would not touch bottom; like a cork, he rose up again, not quite surfacing but sinking and rising again, and almost always the same thing went on for hours, slow or sudden alternations between the glaucous emptiness of the depths and that invisible surface above which the world went on living.

The light was the same as that which pervades sheltered coves of the Mediterranean; it was sunlight, he realized, but sunlight diluted, diffused, sometimes broken as though in a prism, suddenly violet, for instance, or green, the intense green of the legendary, elusive green ray.

Noises reached him as they must reach fishes through water, noises perceived not with the ear but with the whole of one's being, absorbed and assimilated until their meaning may perhaps be completely altered.

The hotel remained silent for a long time, because all those who lived there were nocturnal people; but there was a vicious creature over the way, a car that was taken out of a garage at the same time every morning and washed at the edge of the sidewalk under a spattering hose, after which the engine would be started up. This always required several attempts. He would wait tensely until the hoarse roar became a normal tone, and then for several minutes, he never knew how many, there was a sustained hum with a reek of gasoline fumes that must be blue-tinged. And meanwhile, presumably, the chauffeur, in his peaked cap and dazzling white shirt sleeves, was calmly polishing the chromium while the creature warmed up.

There was a streetcar which always seemed to get out of hand and run into the curb at exactly the same place, probably at a bend in the street.

When he sank deeper down the sounds became different, the images lost their clarity, even their separate identity; for instance, probably when a woman was washing herself in the attic next to his, at about eleven o'clock, he heard the splash of a fountain in the garden of his parents' country place at Le Vésinet, where, as a child, he had slept with the windows open during the holidays. He could clearly see the fountain, the wet dark stone, but there was something else he could not recall, the smell of the air; he tried to remember what the air of that holiday home was like—honeysuckle, maybe?

He would rise up, light as a bubble, and pause just before breaking the invisible surface; he knew nonetheless that the sunlight was cutting his hinged skylight in two, that it was just about to reach the foot of the bed, that he could dive down again, that the game was not up yet.…

That morning, as on other mornings, his eyes were smarting, he had the raw sensitive skin common to those who do not sleep at night, the lips particularly, which had the exquisite tenderness of a healing wound. He had gone to bed and let himself be caught up in the eddy, unresisting; he had sunk down, but had come up again immediately, he had surfaced, he had stared—so his eyes must have been open—at the whitewashed wall against which his overcoat, hanging from a yellow wooden knob, formed a black patch.

Why did he let this Empress business worry him? He closed his eyes, he dived, he did his best, but his impetus was feeble, he could not recover the wonderfully elastic fluidity of his morning slumbers, and unconsciously he stared at his overcoat, thinking of that Empress whom he could clearly recall, with her black eyes and hair; he was searching for a likeness; it bothered him, there was a likeness, he knew, it was in the eyes; he made a violent effort and discovered that, surprisingly and improbably, the Empress reminded him of his second wife, from whom he had run away. The one was as lean as an umbrella and the other huge and flabby, but that was unimportant. It was in the eyes. That fixed stare. That unconscious, immense, haughty contempt, that apparent obliviousness to anything outside herself, anything unconnected with herself.

He turned over heavily on his hard bed, which smelled of sweat. He had grown used to the smell of his own sweat again, just as when he had been a child. For too many years, for the greater part of his life, he had forgotten the smells of which people who go about their business are no longer conscious; and he wondered if that were not the reason why …

He was close to a truth, a discovery, he had begun to dive down again, then something brought him back to the surface and he thought: “I won't go.”

What was the good? What could he do?

He remembered her look of distress, her childish “Oh!” when he took her for the first time, clumsily, because he felt ashamed. And each time after that, each time they had sex together, though he tried to be as gentle as possible, he knew she was wearing the same expression, he avoided seeing her face, and thus it happened that instead of being a pleasure the sexual act became an ordeal.

He found himself sitting up in bed again. He said no, tried to lie down again, and a few minutes later he had thrust his bare legs out of bed and was hunting for his limp socks on the floor.

He was quite surprised to see that it was ten o'clock already. Because of this, the panorama of rooftops had an unfamiliar look. He started to shave. Then, as he let one of his shoes drop, somebody knocked against the wall: a call to order from his neighbor, a croupier at the Casino who had a big blue-black mustache.

He went downstairs. In the ground-floor passage he met the maid who had stolen his money and had looked at him with hostility ever since. He said good morning to her with exaggerated friendliness, to which she responded with a curt nod while she mopped the tiles with a damp cloth.

He walked on as far as the Plaza, but before going in, as his mouth felt dry, he went into a bar for a cup of coffee. The hotel was a creamy-white building with a great many windows surrounded with ornaments, like a cake. He wondered whether the porter would let him in. Actually, the people who called at this time of day were chiefly tradesmen and workmen. The lobby was vast and cool. He went up to the concierge's desk.

“I'm from the Monico,” he hurriedly said, as the other, who had a telephone receiver clamped to his ear, looked him up and down.

“Hello? … Yes … They're coming by car? … About two o'clock? … Good … Thank you …” Then, to Désiré: “What is it?”

“The boss would like to know what's become of the lady who was with the Empress.”

A childish, ridiculous, useless lie.

“Madame Thérèse?”

So she hadn't changed her Christian name! She had become Madame Thérèse, just as he had become Monsieur Désiré. But his name was one picked up at random from a shop front.

“Is she still here?”

“No … I don't even know where you'll find her.… They've been pretty tough with her.…”

“Who?”

“Not the police … The police realized that she was just someone who had to earn her living.… Poor woman. She seemed so gentle.… You must have seen her, at the Monico. I know the detective from Paris went there last night.… Nothing, I suppose?”

“Nothing …”

“If I'd been here, I'd have called you up to warn you, just in case … When I heard about it I blasted the night porter, who hadn't thought of doing so.… You never know.…”

“Thank you very much. I'll tell the boss.… And what about Madame Thérèse?”

“They questioned her for three hours at least.… Then they had some food sent up for her, because she was exhausted. I don't know what the detective decided to do about her.… He informed the family—the Empress's family, I mean, for she's got a brother who's in the car business in Paris.… He's the French representative of an American make.…”

The concierge greeted a slim Englishwoman in a tailor-made suit, who was walking briskly past behind Désiré.

“A letter for you, Miss …”

He watched her move away. The revolving door sent a patch of sunlight sliding down the wall.

“As I was saying, they let the brother know.… He immediately telephoned instructions to a local lawyer … Less than an hour later, some legal people turned up and insisted on having seals put on everything.… The senior floor waiter, who'd been in the apartment several times to serve them drinks, told me it was a queer sight. They were terrified of the least thing disappearing.… They'd pick up every little thing, stockings, handkerchiefs, an odd slipper, and put them all away in cupboards and seal them up.…

“Apparently these people insisted on the police searching Madame Thérèse and they'd have sealed her up too if they could. It was all on account of the jewels, you see! … Seems they're all real … There were such a lot of them I'd have sworn they were glass beads.… It'd have been a major disaster if Madame Thérèse had taken any little thing!

“Why, that telephone call, just as you came in, was to tell me the brother is coming here by car presently, with a lawyer. They're on the road now, driving hell for leather.…

“Hello? … No, she's not here yet.… What's that? … Yes, she's still got her apartment, but she hasn't come in yet.…”

Since he looked on Désirè as a colleague, he explained, though without specifying to whom he was referring: “There's another queer customer for you! She never comes in before eleven in the morning and she stays in bed till ten at night.… You wanted to know what's become of Madame Thérèse? … I don't know.… When they were through with their formalities they turned her out, there's no other word for it, without letting her take away anything, not even her personal possessions, which are all sealed up with the rest.… She had only her little handbag. She'd been crying.… I can still picture her on the sidewalk.… You could see she didn't know where to go, and she was like a stray animal.… In the end she went off toward Place Masséna.… If you're not anxious to meet the detective you'd better not hang around, because he's due here at eleven o'clock.… I don't know where they took the body.… It was taken away last night, but by the back entrance.… Apparently it's to be sent to America.…”

Désirè, too, lingered outside for a moment like a stray animal, and as his first wife had done, he made his way toward Place Masséna. He cast his eyes mechanically over the café terraces where, as yet, only a few people sat under the awnings, but he had little hope of seeing Thérèse there.

She must have taken refuge in a cheap lodging-house, in one of those squalid hotels in the old part of town where the washing hangs across the street and where small girls with bare bottoms sit on the doorsteps.

He crossed the flower market, where they were already sweeping up armfuls of flower stalks and buds, withered petals whose scent reminded him of All Saints' Day.

Had he any chance of finding her again? He scarcely hoped to do so, and he didn't know if he wanted to. And yet one does meet people one has not expected to see, since on a narrow sidewalk he brushed up against the Inspector, who was hurrying along, presumably to keep his eleven o'clock appointment at the Plaza, and who looked back, trying to remember, then went on his way.

Had he, too, gone in search of Thérése? Probably not. He must know where she was.

Désiré went on walking. Then at midday he found himself back on Place Masséna, and he sat on the terrace of a large café where most of the tables were crowded with people drinking apéritifs. News vendors were calling out the names of foreign papers. Buses full of tourists in summer dresses stopped, then started off again, with rows of heads all turned the same way and all wearing the same smug expression of satisfied curiosity.

It was then that suddenly, amid the crowd, he caught sight of Thérèse. He almost lost her again, such was his astonishment. She was standing at the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for the policeman to halt the flow of traffic. He had to pay for his drink. The waiter, busy inside, was slow in coming. Monsieur Désiré knocked on the window with a coin. He was overcome with anguish, and yet he was incapable of leaving without paying.