Pedigree (41 page)

He was red in the face. The others looked at him enviously. His mother, whom he could not see, murmured in the rain:

‘Thank you, Brother Mansuy. He wouldn't have found anybody at home at four o'clock, because all the lodgers are at the University, you understand? Excuse me for bothering you.'

Roger joined her, and she put up the hood of his coat.

‘Come along.'

His mother's hand was quivering with impatience. She had left the door ajar, across the road; she went into the hall to put his satchel on the hallstand, then ran to the kitchen to make sure that nothing could burn on the stove.

She went off with her son, taking short cuts through the back-streets.

‘A message came for me that Aunt Félicie is ill, very ill. We mustn't make any noise, Roger. You will be good, won't you?'

The rain was blurring the lights of the gas-lamps and the shop-windows. They brushed past a tram. The trees on the boulevard were dripping with rain and the planks of Passerelle spat out a little dirty water with every step you took. The town was nothing but trembling lights and wet figures. Over on the Quai de la Goffe, the big bay-windows of the Café du Marché were lit up and you could see the waiters coming and going, carrying their trays, but it was into the alley-way that Roger's mother pulled him, and she knocked on a door which opened immediately as if somebody had been waiting behind on purpose.

They promptly plunged into a chaotic world in which Roger, who only a few minutes before had been sitting snugly in the cosy warmth of the classroom, felt completely lost.

Nobody took any notice of him, not even Élise who had fallen into Louisa's arms and was crying.

There was a corridor, which the child had never seen before, lit by a skylight which opened into the café. He could hear billiards balls colliding and smell the stench of beer. The door of a cellar stood wide open and now and then a waiter rushed through it saying:

‘Excuse me … Excuse me … Excuse me …'

A staircase. Unfamiliar faces. Louisa shaking her head despairingly and whispering:

‘I've just been up there. You do what you like. Jesus-Mary! If anybody had told us something like this was going to happen!'

Everybody was waiting for something, but what? These people who did not know one another and who were standing squashed together in the narrow space avoided each other's eyes.

Élise rushed upstairs. They could hear her stop and hesitate on the first-floor landing. Somebody came down, a man in a tailcoat who spoke in an undertone to Louisa.

His head, which went gravely from left to right, said:

‘There's nothing to be done.'

Sobs upstairs. It was Élise, Roger was sure of that, and started crying in his turn. A market-woman bent down and wiped his face with her handkerchief, despite his protests.

Why didn't his mother come down again? Who was that man standing with his back turned to them, at the end of the corridor, near the cellar door?

The market-woman spoke to Aunt Louisa, pointing to Roger.

‘This little boy shouldn't be left here.'

Where could they put him? Perhaps they were going to take him into the café, but at that very moment a cab drew up in the street outside, the door opened, and the boy caught sight of the hood of the carriage, a lantern, a horse's glistening cruppers.

Three men clattered into the house, as much at home as undertaker's men coming to fetch a body.

But Aunt Félicie was not dead. When the men got to the first floor, she could be heard uttering piercing shrieks, struggling, shouting for help. It seemed that she was trying to bite. Élise came downstairs in a state of great distress.

‘Dear God, Louisa! It's terrible. I don't want to see it. Where's Roger?'

She looked around for him. An indescribable group started coming downstairs, in which you could make out a woman, Aunt Félicie, whom two men were carrying by her shoulders and feet, and who was writhing about, her face convulsed, her hair hanging down on to the steps. Another man was following with a blanket.

Everybody had to stand back against the wall. Élise chewed her handkerchief, Louisa made the sign of the cross, and the market-woman tried to push Roger behind her so that he could not see anything.

Félicie screamed.

However what Roger was looking at, wide-eyed, his chest so tight that he could scarcely breathe, was the man at the end of the corridor. There had been a hoarse sound, a sob which must have torn the throat from which it had come, and suddenly that big, broad-shouldered man had hurled himself against the wall, his head between his arms, his body leaning forward, his shoulders shaking spasmodically.

Nobody took any notice of him, nobody gave him so much as a glance or a word, for it was Coucou, Félicie's husband, who had beaten her so hard that she had gone out of her mind.

The open door let in a little fresh air. The cab-driver was waiting calmly beside his horse, with his whip sticking out of his box-coat. Some onlookers were standing in the dark. The most difficult problem was getting Félicie into the cab, for she was still struggling and bending backwards so far that you might have thought she was going to break in two.

‘They ought to put a handkerchief between her teeth.'

Somebody had said that, but Roger would never know who.

‘Come, Élise, be brave.'

Élise's face was unrecognizable, at once a child's face and an old woman's, the features were so distorted by horror. It did not occur to her to hide her emotion. She made as if to rush towards her sister who was being taken away, whose body was already half inside the cab, and whom the male nurses were pushing as if she were a parcel.

‘Félicie … Félicie! …'

Aunt Louisa seized her round the waist. She resisted for a moment. Coucou's shoulders were still heaving slowly. A waiter had opened the door of the café and was watching.

‘Shut the door.'

‘No, Louisa. I want to see it out to the very end. I want to go with her.'

‘Don't be a fool. What good would that do? And what about your son?'

Then, in her confusion, Élise remembered Roger.

‘Where is he?'

‘He's here, Madame,' replied the market-woman.

The cab door slammed to.

‘Has she got everything she needs? Won't she catch cold? Tell me, Doctor …'

The man in the tail-coat was the doctor. He put on his overcoat and looked around for his hat which somebody held out to him.

‘Have no fears, Madame. I'll get there before she does. I've got my carriage at the corner of the street.'

‘When can I go and see her?'

‘Tomorrow if she quietens down.'

Élise felt annoyed with Louisa who stood there ‘like a tower'.

‘You don't understand, Louisa. You didn't know her like I did. If you only knew how unhappy she was! Come along, Roger. Désiré will be coming home …'

The hall emptied, until nobody was left but Uncle Coucou still groaning against the wall; and a few days later, when they passed the black ramparts of the Saint-Léonard prison, Élise would be unable to refrain from saying to her son:

‘Coucou is in there. He used to beat your poor Aunt Félicie. It was him who killed her. But he isn't your uncle any more. You must never say that he's your uncle. Do you hear, Roger?'

‘Yes, Mother.'

Aunt Félicie would die in the lunatic asylum, without recognizing anybody, and Élise would put on her mourning veil again. She had been right to say, the other day, at Sainte-Walburge cemetery, that in big families you came out of mourning for one person only to put it on again for another.

They would go to Coronmeuse, after four o'clock, taking the tram to save time, and go through Aunt Louisa's shop.

‘Have your heard anything about the post-mortem?'

‘What's a post-mortem, Mother?'

They both promptly started talking Flemish, standing, Louisa with her hands folded as usual on the blue apron which her stomach pushed out. The police doctor had found traces of blows. Two plain-clothes policemen had come for Coucou one evening, and had taken him to Saint-Léonard.

There had been a funeral, but Roger could not remember it, for only his father had gone, the women and children had not joined the procession, and Élise had remained on her knees beside a confessional in the asylum chapel.

‘Six months in prison is too good for a monster like that.'

Why did Désiré avoid the subject? Sometimes, when Élise started talking indignantly or plaintively, he opened his mouth as if to say something, but prudence got the better of him and he kept quiet.

Léopold's attitude resembled his.

‘She was so good, Léopold. You can't imagine. She had nothing she could call her own. She wouldn't have hurt a fly.'

Léopold kept quiet, sitting by the fire, drawing on his old pipe.

‘She was the best of us all, and she's the one who's gone, so young too!'

For a long time Élise would be unable to talk about her without starting to cry. You would have thought sometimes that she felt a sort of remorse, that something was weighing on her heart.

Was it because she remembered the night when her sister, when they were girls and living in the Rue Féronstrée, had come home at three o'clock in the morning with the smell of a man clinging to her clothes?

And the little packet which Félicie had brought her in the Rue Léopold, over Cession's, begging Élise to hide it for a few days?

It had been money, she knew that, a great deal of money; without telling anybody, she had opened the packet. To whom had her sister intended giving it?

‘You see, Léopold, Félicie wasn't responsible for her actions.'

Only then did he raise his head and look at her for a long time, without a word. What was he thinking about? Did he know himself? Had he guessed?

Was it because he wasn't responsible for his actions either?

Félicie was dead and, the next All Souls' Day, there would be another grave to visit in the Sainte-Walburge cemetery, in the new section where you could not distinguish between the paths whose freshly turned clay stuck in big lumps to the soles of your shoes.

Sometimes they would have to wait a little while at a distance.

‘What are we waiting for, Mother? Why are we staying here?'

‘Hush. Pretend you're not looking. It's Coucou.'

For Roger the latter would never be anything more than a silhouette; he would always see just his back, a back which struck him as bigger and broader than others, the dark back of a man who had been to prison and was not his uncle any more.

Was it because he was ashamed that he did not dare to bring any flowers?

‘Come along now. He's gone. Say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for Aunt Félicie who was so fond of you.'

Élise could not talk any more. She could not help it. It was only at Félicie's grave that her heart became so full, that she felt so insignificant, that the world struck her as so wretched.

‘Don't take any notice, Désiré. Take the boy away.'

She needed to remain alone, to cry until she could see nothing but dim patches, and to stammer out, her eyes fixed on the bunch of white flowers she had brought along:

‘Poor Félicie!'

T
HE
universe grew bigger, people and things altered in appearance, certainties were born at the same time as anxieties, the world became peopled with questions, and a ring of chiaroscuro made contours less reassuring, extended perspectives to infinity.

Monsieur Pain had been in prison, like Coucou. Armand's father was a murderer, a real one: he had killed a woman with a revolver shot.

Sitting on the imitation-leather bench in the Café de la Renaissance, with his little legs dangling in space, Roger was looking through the stained-glass windows. On the marble-topped table, his glass of grenadine was as rich a red as the triangular panes of glass framing the diamond-shaped milky-white panes.

Désiré was playing cards. Every Sunday, starting that winter, after High Mass at Saint-Nicolas and a brief visit to the kitchen in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, the father took his son by the hand to this café in the middle of the town; the waiter knew what he had to serve; Monsieur Reculé and Émile Grisard were already there, while Joseph Velden, who was not free this Sunday, had been replaced by fat Monsieur Baudon.

Through the windows, Roger was looking at the stucco façade of the Théâtre de la Renaissance and that was why he was thinking about the commercial traveller in coffee who lived in the Rue Pasteur, for it was there that Monsieur Pain had killed an actress, in the days when he had been a cavalry officer.

Roger had heard his mother telling the story to Mademoiselle Pauline.

‘He was reduced to the ranks. They stripped off his epaulettes in front of the whole regiment.'

A colonel of the Lancers rode along the Rue de la Loi at noon every day, and every time Roger thought of the epaulettes which had been stripped off. Monsieur Pain, who was nearly as tall as Désiré, measured over six foot. Roger pictured to himself a minute bow-legged colonel standing on tip-toe and pulling with all his might at the gold bullions.

The world was becoming complicated. Not so long ago, things had existed only during the time they could be seen in the light and then had returned to nothingness or limbo. If Monsieur Pain turned the corner of the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, or if the shadows invaded a corner of the bedroom, there was nothing left.

Now, even when he was sitting at his desk in Brother Mansuy's classroom, Roger could follow people in imagination, and he did so in spite of himself: for instance, he saw Monsieur Pain who ‘travelled in coffee' going into the grocers' shops of Chênée, Tilleur and Seraing, and he imagined him pulling samples out of his pockets, without a word, his face always expressionless.

The woman he had killed looked like the one on the poster next to the door of the Renaissance, with a dress trimmed with feathers and a diadem on her head.