Monsieur Monde Vanishes (7 page)

The water was simmering already. The man looked through his tins, and eventually found some lime flowers for a tisane.

“If you'd like I'll take it up to her.”

“I'll do it myself.…”

“Some sugar?”

“Perhaps … yes … Thank you.”

“Nothing very high-class there, you know …”

He meant the girl, obviously. Why did he say that? Did he suspect Monsieur Monde of some ulterior motive?

“If you need anything else, don't hesitate to ask. I'm here until six in the morning.”

And he went back to lean on his elbows on the mahogany counter, pulled out an open book from under it, and started reading again.

When Monsieur Monde returned to the bedroom with a teapot in his hand, the woman had fallen asleep, or was pretending to sleep. He felt embarrassed, because her dress was hitched up very high, showing part of her thigh above her stocking. He felt no desire, he had no secret thoughts.

“Mademoiselle …”

She barely raised her listless lids.

“You've got to drink this.… I'd even advise you, if you feel up to it, to bring some of it up again, for safety's sake, so as to clear out your stomach.…”

It worried him to see the misty, faraway look in her eyes. She did not stir. He raised her body and held the cup to her lips.

“Drink …”

“It's hot.…”

The syllables were blurred and indistinct, as if her tongue were too thick.

“Drink it anyway.…”

He forced her to, made her vomit once more, but this time she shook with painful hiccups for a long time and seemed to bear him a grudge for this additional suffering.

“We'll feel safer now.…”

Probably because she was choking, she passed one hand over her shoulder, slipped it under her dress, unfastened her brassière, and, in a gesture that was unfamiliar to him and that shocked him, managed to pull it off and throw it onto the floor.

“Lie down.… If you want to undress I'll go out for a moment.”

She did not give him the chance, but with an air of complete indifference pulled her dress over her head, peeling it off her body like some superfluous skin. He had turned his face to the wall, but he caught sight of her nonetheless in the wardrobe mirror. Under her dress she wore nothing but narrow pink briefs and an even narrower garter belt. When she bent forward to remove her stockings, her little pointed breasts seemed to hang in space.

Next she removed the briefs; the elastic band had left a reddish mark on her skin. When she stood there naked (only a faint shadow darkened her belly between the thighs) she tiptoed, after a moment's hesitation, into the bathroom, where she behaved as if there had not been a man in the next room.

She came back wrapped in a faded blue dressing gown, and her eyes were still misty, her lips pursed with nausea.

“I feel ill …” she sighed as she lay down.

Then, as he tucked the bedclothes around her: “I'm fagged.”

She fell asleep directly, curled up in a ball, her head right at the bottom of the pillow so that only her bleached hair could be seen. A few minutes later she was snoring, and Monsieur Monde crept noiselessly back to his room to put on his jacket and overcoat, for he had felt cold.

Not long after he had settled down in the armchair beside the bed he noticed light shining through the cracks in the Venetian blinds. Noises began, some in the hotel, others outside. Particularly outside, the sound of engines trying to start up, motorboat engines as he realized, for he heard the splash of oars in the water, and the boats in the Old Port knocking together; a factory whistle blew; sirens, in the distance, in the harbor where steamships and cargo boats lay, were moaning interminably.

He switched off the electric lamp that he had left burning, and the bright streaks of the Venetian blinds patterned the floor.

The sun was shining. He wanted to look. Standing at the window, he tried to peer between the slats of the shutters, but could make out only thin slivers of things, part of the trolley pole of a passing streetcar for instance, some pink and purple shells on a little cart.

The girl had stopped snoring. She had flung off the covers and now her cheeks were crimson, her lips puffed, her whole face distorted with suffering. The gleam of her skin counteracted the effect of her makeup, so that she no longer seemed the same woman; this was a far more human face, very youthful, very poor, and rather common. She must have been born in some shanty in the outskirts of the city; as a small child she probably sat, with bare bottom and running nose, on some stone doorstep, and later ran about the streets on her way back from the elementary school.

One after the other, the guests were leaving the hotel; cars were passing in the street, and all the bars must be open by now, while in the still-empty brasseries the waiters were sprinkling sawdust on the gray floors and polishing the windows.

He had time to wash and dress. He went into his own room, after making sure that his companion was still asleep. He drew up the blinds and flung the windows wide open, in spite of the tingling cold of the morning air, and he felt life come pouring in; he could see the blue water, white rocks in the distance, a boat with a red-ringed funnel putting out to sea, leaving a wake of incredible whiteness.

He had forgotten the immense sea, and the sand, and the sun, and the secrets he had whispered to them, and if a faint aftertaste of tears still lingered, he was ashamed of it.

Why had they given him a room without a bathroom, when he longed for clean water to stream over his body and purify it? Probably because of his clothes, those drab, badly cut clothes in which he now felt so ill at ease.

He had brought no razor, no soap, no toothbrush. He rang. A page knocked at his door. He felt reluctant to entrust this errand to him, to give up the imminent realization of his dream.

“Will you go and buy me …” And while he waited for the return of the uniformed messenger, whom he could see hopping along the sidewalk, he looked at the sea, which was no longer last night's sea, which had become a harbor furrowed by motorboats and where fishermen were sinking their nets.

For a long time, dazzled by the morning light, he stared at the drawbridge, whose gigantic metal carcass blocked out the horizon and on which, from a distance, he could just make out minute human figures.

Monsieur Monde had waited, because it seemed to him impossible to do otherwise. From time to time he put his ear against the communicating door and then went back to his place beside the window; because of the biting cold, he had put on his overcoat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets.

At about ten o'clock it struck him that the noise from the town and the harbor would prevent him from hearing a call from the next room, and he regretfully closed the window. His heart was heavy then; he ruefully smiled as he looked at himself in the glass, wearing his overcoat, beside an unmade bed in a hotel bedroom where he didn't know what to do.

He ended by sitting on a chair as though in a waiting room, beside the communicating door, and (again as though in a waiting room) he indulged in speculations and forebodings, he counted to a hundred, then to a thousand, tossed coins to decide whether to stay there or not, until at last he gave a start, like a man suddenly awakened, for he must have dozed off. Somebody was walking, not with soft barefoot steps, but on high heels that made a sharp tapping sound.

He hurried around and knocked.

“Come in!”

She was fully dressed already, with a little red hat on her head, her handbag in her hands, and she was just about to go out. A few minutes later and he'd have missed her. She had spruced herself up as if nothing had happened, her make-up was spick and span with a strange mouth painted on, smaller than the real one, so that the pale pink of her own lips showed below it like an undergarment.

He stood awkwardly in the doorway, while after glancing sharply at him—as though to make sure he really was last night's visitor, whose face she could hardly remember—she hunted for her gloves.

“Are you feeling better?”

“I'm hungry,” she said.

She found her gloves at last—they were red, like her hat—left the room, and showed no surprise at his following her down the stairs.

The hotel looked quite different. By daylight the lobby, which was also the entrance hall, seemed more luxurious. The reception clerk behind the mahogany counter was wearing a morning coat, the walls were covered with laminated wood paneling, there were green plants in the corners and a green-uniformed doorman outside the door.

“Taxi,
messieurs-dames?
”

The girl refused, while Monsieur Monde, without knowing why, avoided meeting the eyes of the reception clerk, although the latter did not know him. The fact was that Monsieur Monde was ill at ease in his skimpy clothes. He felt awkward. Perhaps he regretted the loss of his mustache?

Once on the sidewalk he walked on the left of his companion, who stepped out briskly, paying no attention to him yet showing no surprise at his presence. She turned left immediately, and they found themselves on the corner of La Canebière and the Old Port; she pushed open a glazed door and threaded her way between the tables of a restaurant with the ease of a regular customer.

Monsieur Monde followed. There were three floors of huge, wide-windowed rooms where people were eating, where hundreds of people were eating, packed close together, while between the tables, along the passages, up and down the stairs, ran waiters and waitresses bearing dishes of bouillabaisse or crayfish, plates of shellfish stacked in pyramids.

The sun poured in through the bay windows, which went right down to the floor like those in big stores, so that the whole room could be seen from outside. Everyone was eating. People stared at one another with blank or curious eyes. Sometimes someone would raise a hand, calling out impatiently: “Waiter!”

A strong odor of garlic, saffron, and shellfish assaulted one's senses. The dominant note was the red of the crayfish gleaming on the waiters' outstretched arms and on nearly every table, and whose slender empty shells lay piled on the plates of departing guests.

The young woman had found two places by a wall. Monsieur Monde sat down opposite her. He immediately wondered what she was looking at so intensely behind his back and, on turning around, discovered a mirror in which she could see herself.

“I'm looking pale,” she said. “Waiter!”

“Coming!” Running up, he thrust into their hands a huge mimeographed menu, scrawled over with red and violet ink. And she studied this menu with the utmost gravity.

“Waiter!”

“Madame?”

“Are the andouillettes good?”

Monsieur Monde raised his head. He had just made a discovery. If he had asked the same question, for instance, he was convinced that the waiter, any waiter on earth, would naturally have answered yes, thus doing his duty as waiter. Can one imagine a waiter telling his customers: “They're horrible! Don't!”?

The waiter was, in fact, saying “Yes” to the young woman, but not a meaningless “Yes.” You could feel that he was telling her the truth, that he regarded her differently from the hundreds of customers thronging the three floors of the vast eating mill.

With her he was both respectful and familiar. He recognized somebody of his own sort. He congratulated her on her success. He did not want to do her a disservice. It was therefore necessary to understand the situation, and he turned to Monsieur Monde, sizing him up.

“If you'll allow me to advise you …”

He never lost contact with the girl. Between these two, imperceptible signs were enough. He seemed to be asking her: “Playing high?”

And as she remained impassive, he bent forward to point out certain dishes on the menu card.

“Shellfish, of course, to start with … It wouldn't be worth coming to Marseilles and not eating shellfish.… D'you like sea urchins?”

He spoke with an exaggerated accent.

“And then some of our own bouillabaisse, with crayfish.”

“I'll have crayfish by itself!” she interrupted. “Without mayonnaise. I'll make my own dressing.”

“And an andouillette …”

“Do you have gherkins?”

“And what wine?”

Somewhere near Chaussée d'Antin, in Paris, there was a restaurant with some resemblance to this one, and there, from outside, you could see through the windows large numbers of people munching their food. Now, heaven knows why, Monsieur Monde had sometimes envied them, although he did not really know what for—perhaps for sitting there in a crowd, all more or less alike, side by side, feeling at ease in an atmosphere of facile glitter, of stimulating vulgarity.

The customers, for the most part, must be visitors from the country, or people of moderate means who had decided to treat themselves to a good meal. At the table next to theirs, in the full sunlight, there sat in state a huge middle-aged woman, whose fur coat made her look even vaster, wearing diamonds, real or fake, in her ears and on her fingers, giving her orders in a loud voice, drinking hard and laughing heartily, her companions being two youths who could hardly have been more than twenty.

“Were you following us?”

He gave a start. His companion, whose name he did not know, was looking sternly at him, with a stubborn frown, and there was such cold lucidity in her gaze that he reddened.

“You'd better tell me the truth. Do you belong to the police?”

“Me? I give you my word of honor …”

She believed him readily; she probably knew a policeman when she saw one. But she went on, nonetheless: “How did you happen to be there last night?”

And he explained volubly, as though to justify himself: “I'd just arrived from Paris.… I wasn't asleep.… I'd only just dozed off.… I heard …”

“What did you hear?”

He was too honest to lie. “Everything you said.”