Pedigree (54 page)

‘Come along.'

He would never be able to say anything more on the subject. It was years since he had applied for a life-insurance policy, since he had had the necessary medical examination, conducted, ironically enough, by the doctor of his own company, Doctor Fischer, who was practically a friend of his.

‘You're a man, aren't you, Mamelin? …'

The heart. He had already understood.

‘If you take precautions, avoid fatigue and emotion, you can still…'

He stood there near the crucified tree, big and strong in appearance, but he had had to put one hand on his chest, to press an organ which was beating so fast that he needed to restrain it.

‘How can a man be so coldblooded as to say to his wife what you've just said to me? No, Désiré, you know, I …'

She went back to the house. She preferred to go back, walking unsteadily, and stepping over Frédéric who was still sitting in the doorway. He looked up at her and out of habit she stammered:

‘Excuse me.'

She ran. She had only a few seconds left to herself, and she threw herself on to the bed without lighting the lamp, sinking her teeth into the counterpane. She would have liked to die straight away, whereas Désiré, she felt sure, was calmly finishing his pipe outside under the starry sky.

Soon he would come and sit down, without a word, on one of the straw-bottomed chairs. And Roger would have to start talking in his sleep to rouse Élise from her prostration.

Feeling empty inside, with the taste of despair on her lips, she would be obliged to say:

‘Have you got the matches?'

She undressed. There she was in her baggy knickers and her camisole, in the reddish light of the unshaded lamp. The bed was like a big sick animal, the crimson eiderdown taking on the shape of a whale.

Désiré went to bed first and turned his face to the wall, so that he could see nothing but the stain made by a squashed fly; then the lamp was turned out and the mattress creaked.

A long time afterwards, he cautiously put out his hand, but the arm he touched drew away sharply.

‘Good night, Élise.'

Silence.

‘Good night, Élise.'

Never, even after their most violent quarrels, had they gone to sleep side by side without saying good night to one another. Death could take him in his sleep, as had happened to others, and he would go off without a last farewell from his wife.

He waited, chewing his moustache which still smelled of tobacco, while Élise, whose features had grown hard and pointed, thought coldly, furiously, of putting an end to it all.

N
EARLY
a whole year had gone by since Embourg and life went on; indeed you might have thought that nothing had changed in the Rue de la Loi. Élise cooked sugared dishes for Désiré when he came home at two o'clock and, in the fine spring evenings, in order to have a little peace in her kitchen, she sent him to chat with the lodgers outside on the pavement.

At the time, it had been thanks to Roger's mumps that life, to begin with at least, had not been more difficult. With Élise, impressions lasted. Like her sister Marthe's novenas or Léopold's plunges into the pubs in the back-streets. The slightest quarrel on a Sunday affected the whole week. To take only one example, although Roger was now eleven and in the sixth year at school, in Brother Médard's class, his mother still reproached him with the pain he had caused her at the time of his first private communion. Yet he had been seven years old at the time. He could remember the occasion too, for another reason, a particularly private reason. The day before that day, which was supposed to be the most wonderful day in his life, after a bath which had been even more meticulous than on other Saturdays, he had been walking along the newly washed pavements when he had met Lucile, the daughter of the greengrocer in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, a girl who had a slight squint and was always hiding in corners with boys.

Roger had practically just come out of the confessional; his soul, like his body, was clean for the next day; and yet off he went after Lucile, like a dog, a prey to a nagging curiosity, talking to her shamefacedly, devising a squatting game so as to see between her legs, and finally, unable to stand it any longer and as red as the comb of a young cock, begging her:

‘Let me touch.'

For several weeks, his mother had kept telling him:

‘Don't forget that on the day of their first communion children must beg their parents' forgiveness for all the pain they have caused them.'

In the morning, while getting dressed for Mass, she had waited. Several times she had said:

‘Roger.'

‘What is it?'

‘You haven't forgotten anything?'

‘No.'

He knew perfectly well what she was waiting for. Taking advantage of a moment when Désiré was on his own, he had gone to ask his forgiveness in a faltering voice, but he would not ask his mother's forgiveness, he could not, precisely because she was waiting for him to do so. It was not out of spite on his part. It was just impossible. The words would not come out of his mouth.

Élise had made a tragedy out of it. She had left the house with her eyes red and her head empty from crying, and, even now, after all these years, every time she was angry with her son, she took care to remind him:

‘When I think that you made me cry my eyes out the day you took your first communion.'

What would have happened if, after that evening at Embourg, Roger had not providentially fallen ill? His temperature had risen at an alarming speed. At midday, it had been 103.1°. Madame Laude had gone to fetch a doctor from Chênée. For a whole week, the bedroom walls around Roger had been made of a material at once soft and threatening, the same material as the crimson eiderdown which had swollen until it had touched the ceiling, while Roger had had the impression that his head was so monstrously big that he had felt it all over in terror.

When Désiré had come home, the first evening, Élise had said, as if nothing had happened between them:

‘You must go to have the prescription made up at Chênée.'

Then, later on, when her husband had wanted to stay up to watch over the child:

‘No! You have to go to work tomorrow morning. I've got nothing to do here.'

She had not forgotten, as he might have imagined. When he tried to kiss her as usual, she turned her head away and his lips touched nothing but hair.

Frédéric who, sitting on the doorstep, had practically been present at the scene on the main road, must have told Madame Laude about it. The latter glanced at Élise now and then, trying to guess what had happened, but thanks to Roger's illness, Élise had a good reason for crying when she felt like it and for showing the world the face of a
Mater Dolorosa
.

That was how things had happened. People cannot live all their lives in an atmosphere of drama. Human forces have their limits, and the most violent sorrows ebb away, however much energy you may expend on stopping them. Élise happened to smile at a joke of Madame Laude's and then to speak to Désiré on other subjects than the child's health. Thus Madame Laude was able to announce to Frédéric:

‘They've patched it up.'

Désiré had been taken in for a moment, for he had a habit of taking his desires for realities, and there was no malice or rancour in him.

A glance, every now and then, as sharp as an invisible needle of ice shooting out of Élise's transparent pupils, was enough to proclaim:

‘Don't have any illusions. True, I'm not dead. I come and go, and I look after the lodgers as I did before, but I shall never be the same again. There's a broken spring in me now which nobody will ever be able to repair.'

He pretended not to notice, and was merry and gay. A little spot of sunshine on his cheek, when he was shaving, was enough to set him humming to himself; every morning he awoke his son by tweaking his nose.

When a quarrel started now, Élise darted her icy glance at him and it was enough for her to murmur with pursed lips:

‘Be quiet. You know very well that you're utterly selfish.'

He said nothing, made no attempt to defend himself. ‘Selfish' had become the key-word. Utterly abashed, he turned away or hurriedly changed the subject, so that people might almost have imagined that there was some dreadful secret between them.

Even Roger, who on bad days, when his mother brought up the matter of his first communion, was told:

‘You're no better than your father.'

And yet she had a vague feeling that this masculine selfishness which had hurt her so badly was involuntary, that it was probably a law of Nature. Désiré did not see what he did not want to see. He imagined almost sincerely that things were as he would have liked them to be. He had arranged his days so that they were a harmonious succession of little joys, and the absence of the least of these joys threatened the whole edifice. A cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter, a dish of bright-green peas, reading the paper beside the fire, a maidservant standing on a pair of steps and washing a window, a thousand quiet pleasures which were waiting for him at every turning of life, which he had foreseen and looked forward to, were as necessary to him as the air he breathed, and it was thanks to them that he was incapable of feeling any real suffering.

‘If you knew what men are like, poor Valérie!'

Since Embourg, Élise had stopped uttering these words in a resigned tone. She had broken free. There was an aggressive force in her which sometimes bordered on frenzy.

‘They're not going to make a fool of me any more, oh no! I'm going to
clip
them, I'm going to
clip
them all, whoever they are.'

That simple little word was more revealing than anything else about the change which had taken place in her. She had always loathed the local dialect for its vulgarity. That was what used to irritate her most of all in the house in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, where a Lucien, a Catherine, an Arthur, often tended to talk in Walloon.

To clip, in that dialect, was to steal, but not to steal openly: it was to take something in little doses, surreptitiously, to cheat, to watch for an opportunity to appropriate things. Henceforth Élise clipped unceasingly and unscrupulously, she clipped Désiré, she clipped her lodgers, she clipped Mademoiselle Frida. The house in the Rue de la Loi had never been so full of life, with people coming in, going out, drinking, eating and shouting, and Élise spent her energies freely, without counting the cost, without sparing her strength, without worrying about her back or her stomach, because every minute of the day she was clipping, every minute of the day she was taking money from one or another and slipping it into her petticoat pocket or into the soup tureen with the pink flowers, before going to the Savings Bank on Thursday afternoon, to put it into Roger's account.

Thanks to this untiring activity, this passion which she satisfied with furious determination, she was scarcely ever to be seen looking sad or melancholy as she used to; it was as if she had a fever which made her livelier and prettier, like consumptive people with their bright eyes and red cheeks.

Only she had to take care not to stop, not to relax for a single moment, for if she did, a fit of dizziness might come over her.

Madame Corbion had been right. Élise had been wrong not to believe her. You hadn't to have too many scruples. Did other people have any about you?

Few people noticed the transformation which had occurred in her. She was still as neat as ever, still as busy as ever. She had kept her humble smile, and her head still bent a little to one side, as if to avoid the blows of fate; but what people failed to see was that she had an aim in life which she admitted only to herself; she had a passion, just as Léopold and Marthe had theirs; she clipped, calculated, collected sou after sou, franc after franc, always complaining that she had only just enough to live on, and determined never to touch her nest-egg for anything.

Externally, that year marked the zenith of the house in the Rue de la Loi. Monsieur Bernard's two friends, Monsieur Jacques and Monsieur Dollent, took all their meals there, Monsieur Bogdanowski and Mademoiselle Lola had ended up by joining them, and, since the kitchen had become too small for them all, especially as they often brought along friends for dinner or supper, the dining-room had been reclaimed from Monsieur Schascher who had had to find a room somewhere else. Considering what he paid, this was fair enough.

There was no end to the frying of chips and the grilling of chops, and the charwoman came three times a week for the whole day. Élise would have liked the house to be bigger; she would willingly have served twenty, thirty meals; nothing deterred her, and she no longer had time even to drop in on her sisters.

Old Madame Smet no longer came to spend Friday with her. Out of tact, she explained that her legs were too old to come so far, but the tram was a stone's throw away, and the truth was she was frightened by the frantic activity around Élise, and by those men from all over the world who spoke all sorts of languages and behaved as if they were in their own homes.

Élise was well aware that she could not always go on living at this pace and that a time would probably come when she would grow sick of clipping. Well, she copied Désiré; she avoided thinking about it, she refused to stay talking to herself, and for some time now, it had been in a cross voice that she had called out from the first floor, on hearing certain heavy, clumsy footsteps in the hall:

‘Come in, Léopold. I'll be down in a minute.'

Had Léopold felt that he was in the way? Probably. But he was mistaken if he thought that it was because he was badly dressed and looked like a poor old beggar, or because he went afterwards to the pub next door for a drink. Élise did not care. She did not care about anything. What worried her was that in front of Léopold she became herself again. She tried in vain to deceive herself.