Pedigree (21 page)

In the Rue Montmartre, which at this time of day still smelled of the market, Félix Marette went into a little bar where he ate some croissants, dipping them in his coffee while he glanced through a newspaper.

It was his parents' kitchen which he remembered with the greatest hatred. It was tiny but new-looking, with its walls painted with oil-paint, its calendar, its cheap newspaper-holder, the pipe-rack and the two copper saucepans which were never used. In the morning, it smelled of eggs and bacon. The soup started simmering. You could sense the monotonous passage of time, the ringing of the bell by the milkwoman.

Madame Marette, wearing slippers and with her hair in pins—hair so black that some people thought it was a wig—Madame Marette opened the door, without a word, and held out her enamel saucepan. She was tiny, thin and angular; her expressionless face looked as if it had been carved out of wood and painted black and white. Without saying either good morning or thank you, she handed over her money, glanced down the street and shut the door.

Just thinking about it made Félix suffer. That sloping street with its houses which were all too new, too small, too clean, those doors opening one after another as the greengrocer came along, stopping his cart to blow a trumpet…

And the other streets, on the left and right, already marked out, with unfinished pavements, puny trees which froze every winter, and big holes between the houses which looked as if they had been put there temporarily.

He remembered it all with nauseating accuracy, the colour of the blocks of freestone at every hour of the day—and the smell of the freestone in summer, in August, when you were playing marbles out in the sun—the mists in winter, and the gas-lamps which were alight when, in a hooded coat, you came home, kicking a pebble along the street. The light he could see through the keyhole, at the end of the narrow passage, before knocking on the letter-box. Even the characters of that word ‘Letters', engraved in copper, which he could have reproduced exactly.

The crush in the damp little bar in the Rue Montmartre did not bother him. The dark shop, with part of the window taken up with rubber stamps, did not strike him as ugly. He felt no revulsion on seeing solemn Monsieur Brois arrive.

Yet what if Monsieur Brois had been his father?

‘I hate them! I hate them all!' he used to say excitedly to Estévant and Doms, in the warmth of the Café de la Bourse.

Even the Jesuit Fathers of the Collège Saint-Servais where his parents had sent him at considerable sacrifice to themselves.

‘
The Superintendent said to me
…' old Marette used to begin, with gentle satisfaction, when he came home at night, with a little smoke hanging about his whiskers.

His son would glare at him, hating him for that docility, for that stupid, simple-minded pride, hating him for being himself, for being his father.

Why didn't he hate Monsieur Brois, who was so ugly, so flabby, always dressed in a dirty shirt and the same stained and baggy suit, ill-shaven, and flaunting in his buttonhole the ribbon of heaven knows what shameful decoration?

‘Would you be so kind, Monsieur Miette, as to fetch me two dozen Elephant rubbers, model
B
, from the stock-room?'

Even this affected politeness, which Monsieur Brois obviously considered the acme of scorn, failed to irritate him.

Back home, in Liège, everything had irritated him, down to the very streets, the way he went every day at fixed hours, and the shops, among others a big hosier's with three windows in the Rue Saint-Gilles, which he could smell a hundred yards away.

It was out of hate that he had left school after the fifth form, out of hate for his schoolmates, and also because he no longer had any interest in studying.

‘I want to work,' he had announced.

His mother had stood stock still, which was her way of showing her feelings, as at the news of a catastrophe. His father had thought fit to address a solemn speech to him, shaking his head, looking pleased with himself, and blowing smoke rings.

‘Son, you'll soon be seventeen, so it's a man I'm talking to, it's as a man I'm going to talk to you.'

Félix dug his fingernails into his flesh. Oh, to get away! Anywhere! For good! To see no more of them! To see no more of what he knew
ad nauseam
!

Instead of which he went from one job to another, full of hatred and bitterness, and one day, at the Café de la Bourse, he happened to meet two extraordinary men, Philippe Estévant, with his long hair, his dark eyes and his loosely tied cravat, and the impassive, terrifying Frédéric Doms who rarely opened his mouth.

Those two understood him. Those two listened to all his excited speeches, and Estévant used to exclaim enthusiastically:

‘You ought to write all that down. Don't you agree, Doms? We'll publish it as soon as we've got our printing-works. It's absolutely in line with the spirit of the moment. Absolutely!'

Why had the two men picked the peaceful Café de la Bourse, so warm and calm, where the same local speculators came and sat at the same tables, and where Jules, the waiter, knew before-hand what to serve them?

They had their own special place, in the corner formed by the double doors and the wall. They sat there without talking, just smoking their pipes. Now and then they went through the papers which Estévant brought along in a bulging briefcase.

For Félix it had become a necessity. As the hour approached, he felt nervous, his fingers started trembling like a drug addict's, and nothing on earth could have stopped him from going there. He walked fast, keeping close to the wall. The streets lost their ugliness. A fear took hold of him, the fear that the two men might not be there, or else the much more horrible fear that they might grow tired of the boy that he was.

Didn't Doms regard him with a certain contempt? What could Doms, who had travelled all over the world, who was about forty, who had met so many people, what could Doms think of him?

He was fat and clean-shaven. With his thin, fair hair, he gave the impression of an unfrocked priest, and his eyes were deformed by a pair of strange spectacles, in which a thicker disc in the middle of each lens caught the light.

Estévant too went in dread of a remark by Doms, one of those remarks which he made in a cold voice, looking somewhere else, as if his companions did not deserve so much as a glance.

Was he Dutch? Or was he Flemish, as his accent suggested? He hinted that this was a fearful secret known to him alone; he claimed that there was not a police force in the world capable of solving the enigma of his personality.

Now and then he would disappear for a few days. Estévant would tell Marette:

‘He has gone to Berlin.'

Or else:

‘Geneva! A group of our Russian friends is preparing an operation.'

Estévant wrote poetry, and also tracts which were to be published when the printing-works was ready, in other words when they had enough money.

For this purpose, Marette had stolen small sums of money from his parents and his employers.

‘Thanks! Unfortunately it's only a drop in the ocean compared with what we need if we want to go into action.'

They had lent him some ill-printed booklets which bore no publisher's name. One of them, written in bad French, was about direct action and the importance of the gesture.

Every evening, Estévant went back to his parents' home, a comfortable house on the Boulevard d'Avroy, for he was the son of a professor at the University. To what den did Doms retire? Marette had never discovered where he slept. He had just been told that it was never twice in the same place.

What would his feelings be now if he learnt of his father's death? Would he think about it for as much as five minutes and wouldn't the piano, over his head, soon rouse him from his stupor?

It was the day for the Conservatoire. Isabelle would come downstairs just before ten. He was writing addresses on pale blue envelopes of rough paper which made his pen splutter. The chief clerk, Monsieur Brois, came and went around him and Monsieur Vétu bent over his rubber stamps, for he worked at a little table by the window.

Wasn't she unhappy too? Why was she always so pale? He had never seen her smile.

She would emerge from the entresol as from a bath of music with which she was still impregnated, stop in front of the cash-desk, and say in her expressionless voice:

‘Give me some money.'

Nothing else. Never anything else. She wore a pair of high patent-leather boots. She did not change her hat from one end of the year to the other.

He longed to follow her into the street, to walk beside her, to surprise her gaze somewhere else than in the dark shop.

He was in love with her. He had written to Léopold, that puzzling creature for whom he had conceived a greater admiration than that which Doms inspired in him.

To begin with, he had not taken much notice of him. He was just a stocky little man with a black beard and a drunkard's breath who staggered into the café, slumped heavily on to the bench, and gazed at his glass without paying attention to anybody else.

Why had Léopold looked at him with his dark eyes with their surprisingly piercing gaze?

Was he listening to their conversation? Once Félix Marette had had the odd idea that he was an agent of the secret police in disguise and he had ventured to say so to Doms.

‘Do you think he's following you?'

Doms had examined Léopold through his double lenses, then had shrugged his shoulders without saying anything.

Well, Marette had not been as mistaken as all that. Léopold was certainly not the man he seemed. He knew things of which Doms was ignorant. The proof of this was that he had followed Marette one evening, zigzagging along. He had bumped into him and had growled—possibly just because the boy was in his way:

‘
You ought to be more careful!
'

Weeks went by without his putting in an appearance. Marette did not know that these were the weeks he spent on a house-painter's ladder.

Once, it was late in the evening. Doms and Estévant had not come. Marette was moping in his corner and drinking more than usual when Léopold, sitting at the next table, had started talking, as if to himself:

‘It's disgusting, working on a kid's feelings like that.'

‘Are you talking to me, Monsieur?'

‘If those people have got some dirty work to do, why don't they do it themselves?'

The time had come. The piano had fallen silent. Footsteps. Isabelle was walking right across the entresol. She obviously did not bother to look in the mirror while putting on her coat. In winter—and winter was beginning—she put a narrow marten tie round her neck.

At the cash-desk, her mother was already getting the money ready and finally Isabelle's boots appeared on the spiral staircase, the hem of her coat, the music-case.

One day, without a word, with just a look, a single look, the last, he would hand her the story of his life, and then go away.

He already suffered at the thought, living that final minute, the steps he would take to leave the shop. He would not look back.

Madame Vétu could think of nothing else to say to her daughter but:

‘You've got your gloves? There's a cold wind.'

She knew this, although she never went out, because the customers were blue when they came in and automatically warmed their hands at the stove.

Félix followed Isabelle with his eyes, and went across to the window to see her as long as he could, without realizing that he looked utterly moonstruck and that any other woman but this imbecile mother would have guessed the truth straight away.

In the street, which was an ugly November grey, Isabelle's pale face passed the window and it had scarcely disappeared before Félix Marette had a shock. On the other side of the street, on the opposite pavement, next to a draper's shop, a man in a thick overcoat was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at him.

It was Doms. The latter did not signal to him, did not attempt to make contact with him in any other way than by his glance which scorned to express anything.

‘
I am here
.'

That was all. Félix might plunge into the semi-darkness of the shop, but he knew that he remained tied as by a thread to those eyes enlarged by their double lenses.

He was so agitated that Monsieur Brois looked at him in astonishment and coughed. What could dusty Monsieur Brois do, where could he go, when he left the shop in the Rue Montmartre? It was inconceivable that a wife, children, even a sister, could be waiting for him somewhere. Nobody could ever have kissed that colourless, ageless face which smelled of paste. Monsieur Brois did not smoke, but ate cachous which he took every quarter of an hour out of a little metal box.

Marette found something to put away near the window and did not see Doms in his place; for a moment he almost felt relieved, but then he realized that he had not got rid of him.

What was he to do? He had to leave the shop. Even if it was only to go back to his attic, he had to go by way of the street.

Léopold was right. By what chance had Léopold happened to cross his path less than half an hour before the incident of the bomb? Unfortunately he knew nothing about it. He guessed the truth, but he obviously thought that it was for some other day. If only he had known, if only he had glanced at the parcel Marette was holding in one hand, how many things would have been different!

That evening, Marette had prowled in vain around the Café de la Bourse: neither Doms nor Estévant had been there. Oughtn't they to have been there to help him? Wasn't it up to them to play that part?

‘Come along.'

That hairy bear Léopold was lurching along in the shadows.

‘Come along, now.'

And he had led him as if by the hand. Marette would never forget that trap-door in the ceiling, the dubious-looking packet of meat which his companion had taken out of his pocket, the bed which he had given him, the fit of sobbing which had left him hot and empty with burning cheek-bones.