Pedigree (61 page)

He could have wept at the thought and Désiré, letting him go in front after opening the door, put his hand on his shoulder for a moment as if to remind him:

‘She thinks she's doing the right thing.'

The air was a bluish colour inside the house, as it used to be on Sundays before the war, and they could hear the fat singing in the heavy iron saucepan which they had not seen for such a long time. Élise, her cheeks burning hot, shouted:

‘Leave the door open for a minute, to let the smoke out!'

Then she went to the foot of the stairs to call out:

‘Mademoiselle Rinquet! You can come down now. It's ready.'

There had been no avoiding the usual wretched discussion.

‘What do you want to do, Désiré?'

‘You decide. We'll do whatever you like.'

‘You really want to go out?'

And Mademoiselle Rinquet was there, motionless, silent, her eyes popping out of her head, the head of a bird of ill-omen. She had eaten as many chips as she could swallow, looking as if she were defying Roger who could not take his eyes off her plate. While Élise was doing the washing-up, she was more in the way than ever; everything would have gone more smoothly if only she had moved back a few inches, and they tried discreetly to make her understand this; she obviously understood all right, but she would stay where she was just to annoy them, especially Désiré and Roger whom she could not stand.

‘Where should we go? To Louisa's at Coronmeuse?'

The truth was that Désiré wanted to stay and read beside the fire, in his usual place, in his armchair which the lodger had taken over, and he wondered, without daring to ask her, whether she intended to stay there the whole afternoon.

‘Are you going out, Roger?'

‘Yes, Mother.'

‘Would you come with us if we went to say hullo to Aunt Louisa?'

‘No.'

This would go on for an hour at least and he preferred to make his escape before he was utterly disgusted. He went up to his room and started washing all over again, in spite of the cold. That morning, looking at himself in a shop-window in the Rue Entre-deux-Ponts, he had had the impression that his collar did not suit him. He changed his tie three times, and tip-toed into his parents' bedroom to get the bottle of ‘Floramye', with which he drenched his handkerchief. He even passed his perfumed fingers over his cheeks and round his lips. He was ready. A cold sun had pierced the blanket of white clouds. Roger went downstairs and, on account of the scent, just opened the kitchen door a little way.

‘See you this evening.'

‘Roger, listen…'

He took care not to listen and slammed the street door behind him so that the noise echoed right through the house. He had caught a glimpse of his father in slippers, his pipe alight, an Eugène Sue in one hand, looking for somewhere to sit. Their eyes had met and Désiré, no doubt with a heavy heart, had murmured:

‘Enjoy yourself.'

Roger knew that he would not enjoy himself. How and why should he enjoy himself? With whom? He had already crossed the Pont d'Amercoeur and walked along the Rue Puits-en-Sock, and he was crossing the Meuse by the Passerelle when most people were still lingering at table. He was always too early, wherever he went, as if he were afraid of missing the tiniest morsel of a potential pleasure. For what pleasure could he find, with nothing in his pocket but his Sunday fifty centimes, plus his grandfather's ritual ten centimes?

Though he had eaten very little, the chips weighed heavily on his stomach, because they were no longer used to them and because he had been tense with irritation while eating them. He stopped in front of the shop-windows, not so much to look at the packets of cigarettes as to make sure there was nothing wrong with his appearance. He was obsessed by the idea of looking ridiculous. Often he eyed passers-by, trying to discover what effect he was producing on them.

Youths of his age, especially if they were at college, wore breeches which were tight at the knee and laced or buttoned down the side of the leg like riding-breeches. To look smart, your stockings had to be made of thick mottled wool and have a wide border with a coloured pattern. But his stockings, which Élise had made for him by the old Chaineux sisters because they would never wear out, were a dull grey with two stripes of a darker grey. His breeches were grey too, and his jacket black.

‘It's the loveliest cloth there is!' declared his mother.

Perhaps it was. He was dressed in remnants bought in the sales. Cortleven, Élise's cousin, who was a cutter in a dress-shop, had never managed to make him a suit which looked like other people's suits; there was always something skimpy and amateurish about his work.

It irritated Roger. Twice that day he had polished his shiny-toed shoes and rearranged the parting in his hair; and in front of every shop-window he changed the slant of his hat slightly, put a glove on, then took it off, and asked himself whether they were not too yellow for the season. They were glacé kid gloves which he had found in one of his father's drawers and which the latter had worn before his marriage.

It was half past one and naturally there was nobody yet at the Carré. That was what people called the Rue de la Cathédrale, the busiest and smartest shopping-street in the town, or rather one end of it, between the Rue de l'Université and the Boulevard d'Avroy, where, in the evening and on Sunday afternoons, the crowd moved slowly backwards and forwards like a procession.

Everything was ugly in his eyes; for things as much as for people he had a hard, hostile look which held a threat in it; and sometimes he formulated that threat in an undertone, while looking at himself in a shop window to judge the expression on his face.

‘I shall run away.'

Whom was he going to punish by setting off for heaven knows what fate? Was it the shop-window in which he was studying his reflection, probably the ugliest and most depressing shop-window in the town, that of a photographer who specialized in identity-card photographs? In the acid-yellow frame of the shop, you could see hundreds of strips of proofs in grey and black, and on every strip the same face was repeated a dozen times, the same lopsided noses, the same weak or stubborn chins, the same frightened eyes, a horrifying world, a nightmarish race which you never saw in the street and which seemed unbelievable.

‘People are ugly, life is stupid. Lord, how stupid it is!'

It was fantastic to think, for instance, that at home his father and mother would still be discussing what they would do with their afternoon, under Mademoiselle Rinquet's poisonous gaze. They knew perfectly well what they would do. They would do precisely nothing. They would go on talking about if for another hour. Élise would start becoming irritable. At a certain moment, Désiré, deep in his book, would fail to answer her, she would reproach him with having no consideration for her feelings, with being nothing but a man, and, if it was one of her bad days, there would be a scene, tears, nervous spasms, Élise would go up to her icy room and throw herself on the bed, and Désiré would go to fetch her.

‘No, leave me alone, will you? And all that in front of other people! Somebody who's only just arrived and who has to be treated to scenes like that…'

She would end up by rinsing her eyes, and going downstairs, and making an effort to smile at Mademoiselle Rinquet.

‘You don't feel cold, Mademoiselle? You wouldn't like a cup of malt to warm you up? I can make you some in a few minutes…'

The three of them would stay there, each one encrusted in his little parcel of space, with every now and then a ‘proof' from the stove, the rustle of a page of Désiré's book, the clatter of a knitting needle falling on the floor.

‘Leave it, Mademoiselle, I'll pick it up for you.'

And they called that living! Roger was living too. He walked along between the rows of shops, most of which had their shutters up, glaring angrily at the shop-signs, at certain all-too-familiar names in big black and brown letters, and looking at the shivering figures disappearing into the theatres. Since he had noticed a fortnight before that his thick overcoat fitted him badly, he had worn it open, with one hand in his trousers pocket, for he was proud of his riding-breeches which nobody would see otherwise.

It did not matter greatly that there was nobody there to see him. He needed to make an impression on himself. He didn't succeed. He knew that there were a hundred little details wrong; he had stuck in his tie-pin too high up; he changed its position, but now it was askew, and the street was still empty, with the waiters standing dreaming behind the steamy panes of the cafés and taverns.

He would run away and never, never would he live like his father and mother, he promised himself that; nothing would be allowed into his existence which might remind him of his childhood.

He hated that childhood. He hated the Rue de la Loi, the Rue Pasteur, the Institut Saint-André and the Collegè Saint-Servais; he hated Brother Médard and Madame Laude, and all the ugly, petty little things in everyday life which hurt him. He was determined to get his revenge, he did not know how as yet, but he would get it, he was certain of that; and he was thinking about it while his hand, in his pocket, was turning over the dozen sous whose destination he knew in advance.

In a narrow side-street, the Rue Lulay, he could hear the bell of a cinema, the first cinema which had been opened in the town a few years before. Roger had been to look at the coloured posters showing pictures of cowboys, but it was not to that cinema that he intended to go a little later, for it too brought back humiliating memories.

When he was smaller, he used to go there on Thursday afternoons. He had not enough money to pay for a seat, but the lessee, in return for a couple of sous, and sometimes just one, used to let a few little boys in to fill up the front row, where nobody wanted to sit and which, if it was left empty, made a bad impression. If too many people came along, then of course he turned the boys out!

He was going to go to the Mondain in the Rue de la Régence, where a wave of hot air met you at the door and there were armchairs upholstered in pearl-grey and boxes as well. There again he would suffer; all he could afford would be a seat in the front rows. The last time he had been there, his cousin Germaine Schroefs, who had her father's thick features, had gone past him in a grey coat; he had recognized her in the light of the usherette's torch as she was being shown to the reserved seats.

The atmosphere of the cinema, the darkness crossed by a pencil of white light, the pictures jumping about on the screen, the strumming of the piano accompaniment, and the warm, invisible crowd which you could feel around you, always produced a sort of fever in him. All his desires and ambitions were exacerbated and multiplied tenfold or a hundredfold; he longed to experience everything at once; and this immense appetite finally took the form of anxious, furtive glances at the boxes. He knew what happened inside them, because some of the boys at school had told him; in any case, you only had to walk past them as if you were looking for a seat to catch a glimpse of curiously contorted couples, to make out skirts hitched up and hands feeling around. He could have sworn that the boxes in which these furtive embraces took place gave off a special smell which reminded him of the smell of the Carré at a certain stage of the evening.

For soon the Carré would be living its real life, or at least the life for which Roger was there hours in advance. When the last shutters had been put up, when night had fallen, when the street-lamps were nothing but vague landmarks, the shadows would gradually come to life, peopled with loud or furtive footsteps, with half-glimpsed silhouettes, with laughs and whispers.

Groups of girls came along on purpose, to walk arm-in-arm in the propitious darkness, and bands of students teased them, pursued them and sometimes went off with them.

Other women walked by themselves, very slowly, close to the walls, stopping frequently; as they passed, you could catch a whiff of scent, and in their wake there was nearly always a man with his coat-collar turned up.

Roger brushed past them, heavy hearted. He did not know exactly what he wanted. It was not always the same thing. He felt hot all over just at the sight of the milky globes which, in the back-streets, served as signs for certain hotels into which couples slipped furtively. The door, more often than not, opened into a stinking corridor, but this very vulgarity made him giddy; he pictured to himself the grubby beds, the tattered wallpaper, and a broken-down, stained divan; he saw, he wanted to see a woman with ringed eyes, tired lips, and a frail body gradually undressing, sadly and disgustedly, in the ambiguous light.

How happy he would be to weep with her, to writhe in despair, flesh against flesh, before plunging into pleasure!

But no! What he would really like would be to push open the well-oiled revolving doors of one of those cafés from which you could always hear music coming, an elegant, nonchalant figure with a woman on his arm, to look around disdainfully for a free table, and to summon the waiter with a blasé gesture.

‘What would you like, Monsieur?'

Then to hold out to his companion, who would be busy slipping her fur coat off her shoulders, a cigarette-case, a handsome cigarette-case in gold or silver, to look at people from a great distance, from a great height, as if he could not see them, to smile imperceptibly, to place his hand casually on his mistress's knee, to behave towards her in such a manner—lovers had a special way of smiling at each other which was at once tender, grateful and affectionate—to behave towards her in such a manner that everybody could tell by looking at them that they had just left the damp sheets where they had exhausted all the joys which the flesh could give.

Why, to put it bluntly, wasn't it he who was standing in that dark doorway, mouth to mouth with a woman of whom all he could see as he passed was a vague profile, a fixed gaze.