Monsieur Monde Vanishes (4 page)

What was happening now was so much more essential! He could not possibly have explained it, or even thought about it in a logical way.

When, a short while before, he had decided … But he hadn't decided anything! He had had nothing to decide. What he was living through was not even a completely new experience. He must have dreamed about it often, or have thought about it so much that he felt he had done it all before.

He looked at himself, as the barber's fingers held his cheek taut, and he said to himself: ‘That's that! The die is cast!”

He felt no surprise. He had been expecting this for a long time, all his life long. But his nostrils were still unaccustomed to the cheap scents that he was now inhaling deeply; hitherto he had only caught a whiff of them as some workman in his Sunday best passed by. He was offended by the tobacco-stained finger, and the plaster, and the towel of dubious cleanliness around his neck.

He was the odd man out, the one who felt surprised, for instance, to see ten people deep in the same sports papers; it was he who must seem strange, whom others would maybe point at?

If he had not yet experienced the ecstasy of release, it was because the transformation had barely begun. He was still too new to it, of course.

Once before he had got rid of that toothbrush mustache which had just been shaved off. It was a long time ago, two or three years after his second marriage. He had gone home, to Rue Ballu, in high spirits, feeling rejuvenated. His wife had looked at him with those little black eyes—they were hard eyes already—and had said: “What's come over you? You look indecent.”

He did not look indecent, but he looked a different man. There was suddenly something ingenuous about his expression, owing to the pouting upper lip and the alternately pleading or sulky look of his whole mouth.

He paid and went out awkwardly, apologizing as he brushed against the crossed legs of those who were waiting.

Initiations are always painful, and this was an initiation. He dived into the street and began walking through districts he hardly knew. He was haunted by the feeling that everybody was watching him and he felt guilty; guilty, for instance, of having shaved off his mustache, like a criminal who's afraid of being recognized, and guilty, too, because of the three hundred thousand francs with which his pockets were bulging.

Suppose that policeman at the corner of the boulevard were to stop him and ask him …

He sought out the darkest, most mysterious streets, those where the lights reminded him somewhat of those of his youth.

Wasn't it extraordinary to be doing at the age of forty-eight, exactly forty-eight, what he had nearly done thirty years earlier, when he was eighteen? And to be feeling almost the same man, to such an extent that he never gave a thought to his wife or to his children, or to everything that had happened in between?

He remembered that first temptation very clearly. It had been a winter's evening, too. He was living on Rue Ballu—he had never lived anywhere else; but he'd had a room on the second floor then, over his father's study, the room that was now Alain's. The house was still lit by gas.

It must have been eleven at night. He had dined alone with his mother. She was an extremely gentle woman, with delicate features, a smooth skin, a melancholy smile. That evening she was paler than usual, with eyes reddened by tears, and around them the huge house seemed deserted. The servants trod noiselessly, and spoke in low voices, as people do in a house of mourning.

His father had not come home. That often happened. But why, at about five o'clock, had he sent the coachman to collect his suitcase and his fur-lined coat?

He had always had mistresses. For some time lately there had been one, a little actress whose picture was on all the walls of Paris, who seemed more dangerous than the rest.

He was an invariably good-humored man, always impeccably groomed; the barber called to shave him every morning, and afterward he would go off to fence at his club, and in the afternoons he was to be seen at the races, in a gray top hat and morning coat.

Had he gone for ever?

Norbert would have liked to comfort his mother.

“Go to bed,” she told him with a somewhat mournful smile. “It's all right.”

That evening he had stayed for a long while with his face pressed against the windowpane in his bedroom. He had turned off the gas. He was looking out. A fine drizzle was falling. Rue Ballu was deserted, and there were only two lights to be seen: a gas lamp fifty yards from the house, and the glowing rectangle of a blind in front of a window, a sort of luminous screen behind which a shadow passed from time to time.

Over by Rue Clichy life was flowing by; and Norbert Monde, his burning forehead pressed against the pane, felt a shiver run through him. Behind him there reigned a calm so deep, so absolute, that it frightened him. This house that was his home, these rooms that he knew so well, these things that he had always seen about him, seemed to be alive, with a menacing and terribly still life. The air itself was coming to life, becoming a threat.

It was a dark world, peopled with ghosts, that enclosed him, seeking to hold him back at all costs, to prevent him from going elsewhere, from discovering another life.

Then a woman passed by. He could see only her black silhouette, with an umbrella. She was walking fast, holding up her skirt with one hand, over the wet gleaming sidewalk, she was about to turn the corner of the street, she had turned it, and he felt a longing to run, to get out of the house; it seemed to him that he could still do it, that one great effort would be enough, that once outside he would be saved.

He would rush forward, would plunge head foremost into that stream of life that was flowing all around the petrified house.

He gave a start because the door was opening noiselessly in the darkness. He was terrified, and he opened his mouth to scream, but a gentle voice said softly: “Are you asleep?”

That day, the choice had still been open to him. He had missed his opportunity.

He was to miss another, later, during his first marriage.

It was with a strange sense of pleasure mingled with dread that he thought about it, now that he had at last achieved what had been ordained from the beginning.

He had been thirty-two; in appearance, much like today, as stout or even stouter. At school his companions had nicknamed him Podge; and yet there was nothing flabby about him.

It was a Sunday. A winter Sunday once again, but as far as he could remember it was at the beginning of winter, which always seems gloomier because it suggests lingering autumn rather than approaching spring.

Why, on this occasion, was the house on Rue Ballu empty? The servants had gone out; obviously, because it was Sunday. But his wife, Thérèse, who looked so fragile and so innocent? Thérésè … well! …

The two children were ill. No; just the girl, who was five and had whooping cough. As for Alain, who was only one, he was going through a phase of bringing up whatever he drank.

Their mother had gone out, nonetheless. She had invented some excuse or other. In those days she seemed the picture of innocence, and nobody suspected.

In short, he was all alone. It wasn't quite dark yet. It was freezing. Not only the house but the whole of Paris seemed empty, with the occasional rumble of a car along the paved streets. The little girl was coughing. Sometimes he gave her a spoonful of cough syrup from a bottle that stood on the mantelpiece; he could still point out the exact spot.

The day before, that morning, just an hour previously, he had adored his wife and children.

Dusk was spreading through the house, ash-gray, and he forgot to put on the lights. He walked to and fro, always returning to the window with its floral patterned lace curtains. That was still another sensation that he recalled with obsessive accuracy: the mesh of the lace between his forehead and the cold pane.

Suddenly, as he looked down into the street at the man in a greenish overcoat who was lighting the only gas lamp within his field of vision, he was seized by a sense of detachment from everything: his daughter had coughed and he had not turned around, the baby might have been vomiting in his cradle; he stared at the figure of the man going off, and felt himself as it were impelled forward, he had an irresistible longing to go off too, to go straight ahead.

To go somewhere!

He had even been downstairs into his study, for no apparent reason, perhaps with some thought of going away? He had stayed there motionless for a long while, as though dazed, in the same place, and he had given a start when the cook—the one who had been there before he was born, and who had since died—had exclaimed, with her hat still on her head and mittens on her frozen hands:

“Have you gone deaf? Don't you hear the child screaming his head off?”

And now he was in the street. He walked along, gazing with something akin to terror at the shadowy figures that brushed against him and at the endless tangle of dark streets, crammed with invisible life.

He had a meal somewhere near the Bastille—he remembered crossing Place des Vosges diagonally—in a little restaurant where there were paper napkins on the marble-top tables.

“Tomorrow!”

Then he went for a walk along the Seine. In this, again, he was involuntarily performing an old-established rite.

He still felt diffident and awkward. He was really too new to it. To do the thing properly, to carry it through, he ought to have gone down one of the flights of stone steps leading to the water's edge. Whenever he crossed the Seine in the morning he used to glance under the bridges, in order to revive another very ancient memory, dating from the days when he went to the Lycée Stanislas and would sometimes make his way there leisurely on foot: under the Pont Neuf he had caught sight of two old, or ageless, men, gray and shaggy as neglected statues; they were sitting on a heap of stones, and while one of them ate a sausage the other bandaged his feet with strips of cotton.

He did not know what time it was. He had not thought about it once since leaving the bank. The streets were emptying. Buses were becoming fewer. Then groups of people passed him talking very loudly, presumably on their way back from theaters or the movies.

His plan was to choose a third-rate hotel like the one he had noticed a short while before in a little street close to Place des Vosges. He still felt reluctant to do so, because of the way he was dressed and because of the three hundred thousand francs.

He found a modest but decent place near Boulevard Saint-Michel and went in. There was a smell of cooking. A night porter in slippers fiddled for a long time with the keys before handing him one.

“Fourth floor … the second door … Try not to make a noise.”

For the first time, at forty-eight—as though he had made himself a present of it, on that birthday that everyone had forgotten!—he was a man all alone, but he was not yet a man in the street.

He was still concerned about giving offense, of seeming out of place. For it was not shyness. He was not embarrassed for his own sake, but he was afraid of embarrassing other people.

For ten minutes, at least, he had been prowling around the narrow house, which he had found without too much difficulty. The sun was shining; the butchers' and dairymen's shops were full of provisions which, exuding their mingled smells, overflowed onto the sidewalk, and it was difficult to make one's way through the bustling crowd of housewives and vendors in the street market of Rue de Buci.

From time to time, with an instinctive gesture of which he was ashamed, Monsieur Monde felt his pockets to make sure nobody had stolen his bank notes. In fact, how was he going to manage when he had to change clothes in front of someone?

The problem worried him for some time. Then he found a solution, but he needed paper and string. Paper was easy enough. He merely had to buy a newspaper from the first newsstand he saw. Wasn't it rather odd to buy a whole ball of string in order to use only a scrap of it?

That was what he did. He walked about for a long time, through a district selling food exclusively, before he discovered a stationer's shop.

And he couldn't do it in public. He went into a bistro, ordered a coffee, and went down to the washroom; this was in the cellar, next to the bottles, and the door did not shut. There was only a gray concrete hole in the ground and the space was so narrow that his shoulders touched the walls.

He made a parcel of the bank notes, tied it up securely, and threw the rest of the paper and string down the hole; when he pulled the chain the water spurted over his shoes and splashed his trousers.

He forgot to drink his cup of coffee. He was conscious of looking like a criminal, and turned back to make sure that the proprietor was not staring after him.

He had to go into the narrow house with its blue-painted façcade, on which was inscribed in large black letters:
Clothing for sale and hire
.

“Do you know what Joseph does with the clothes you give him?” his wife had remarked one day, in an aggressive tone. “He sells them in a shop on Rue de Buci. Since they're almost new when you give them to him …”

She was exaggerating. She always exaggerated. She hated seeing money spent.

“I don't see why, considering we pay him, and pay him well, far better than he deserves, we should give him this bonus.…”

He went in. A little man who must have been an Armenian received him without a trace of the surprise he had anticipated. And he said hesitantly:

“I would like a suit … something very simple, not showy.… I don't know if you see what I mean? …”

“Good quality, just the same?”

If he'd dared, he would have said: “A suit like everybody else's.”

There were clothes hanging everywhere throughout the house, in every room, town suits, evening dress clothes particularly, riding habits, and even two policemen's uniforms.

“A darkish cloth, please … Not too new …”