Pedigree (63 page)

No.

‘I have to go home. They really are expecting me.'

‘You don't mind if I go with you as far as your house, do you? It's on my way.'

In the Rue Puits-en-Sock, they went past his grandfather's shop, but the shutters were up and everything was dark.

‘Anyone can see straight away that you aren't the same sort as your friend. I bet you haven't been out very often with him.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh, nothing. They must have gone to an hotel. Jeanne felt embarrassed, I could see that, even though it wouldn't have been the first time she'd done that in front of me. It was you that was embarrassing her.'

He pretended to laugh. He felt flattered.

‘Am I as terrifying as all that?'

‘No. But if anybody had told me yesterday that the two of us would be getting together, I wouldn't have believed them. Neither would Sidonie.'

‘Are you going to tell her?'

‘Not if you ask me not to.'

‘Then don't tell her.'

‘You're in love with her, aren't you?'

He did not answer.

‘Go on, admit that you're in love with her. All the men are in love with Sidonie. I'm not jealous. I can tell the difference, you know, and if you wanted …'

‘You think so?'

‘I'm sure you'd get on well together. Do you want me to speak to her?'

This time, he clasped her to him without needing to make any effort, bent down and kissed her on her cheek.

‘You think I've got a chance?'

‘You realize that that's the first time you've kissed me?'

‘Ah!'

‘Just because I spoke to you about Sidonie. Come to the Carré on Thursday.'

‘What time?'

‘Between five and six, as usual. I'll signal to you. If I flash my torch at you several times when you come near us, then it's yes …'

‘And what if it's no?'

‘I tell you it's sure to be yes.'

Had he even said good night to her? He could not remember how he had left her, but now he was back home again. Here, in the few cubic feet of warmth and light of the kitchen, he had found each person in his place, frozen and set in the immobility of the atmosphere like the inhabitants of Pompeii in the lava, his father sitting reading with his chair tilted back, Mademoiselle Rinquet knitting and counting the stitches with soundlessly moving lips, and his mother doing her mending, her head bent forward.

Just to say something, and despite the fact that the table was laid for supper, he asked the traditional question:

‘Supper ready?'

And for a few moments he felt the palpitations of an unsubstantial life which was that of the house, of that house and no other; he became conscious of something like the nibbling of time—and it was not simply the tick-tock of the alarm-clock on the mantelpiece: the stove had a breath all its own and so had the big white enamel kettle with the dent in its swan-necked spout. The air enveloped him, touched him; he felt it as if it were something with its own density, its own temperature, its own sweetness, perhaps its own intentions; it closed over him and gleams of light flickered like signals on the candlestick, on a cup decorated with flowers, on the red copper saucepan. To begin with, it was rather painful when you came from outside, but then Roger gently adjusted himself to this mysterious rhythm and regained his calm.

‘A
ND
for Monsieur Mamelin,' said Raoul jokingly, ‘I suppose it will be a Titus cut?'

‘I wonder,' Roger replied seriously, looking in the mirror, over the bottles of lotion, at his face stuck like a dummy head on top of the soft pyramid of the white wrapper.

Raoul, who had been the Mamelins' barber ever since there had been Mamelins in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, had been cutting his hair now for twelve years. It was he who had sliced off with one slash of the scissors the baby's forelock which Élise had piously preserved in tissue paper, and since then the perpetual joke had been repeated every fortnight.

‘A Titus cut?'

And now Roger, who for his part didn't make jokes, who had never made jokes when his hair was concerned, and who had been known to fly into a temper in the barber's chair when his hair had been left a fraction of an inch too long—now Roger looked as if he were hesitating, was really hesitating, and hid the top of his forehead for a moment with both hands as if to see how he would look once he had been shorn.

‘I wonder, Raoul, if it wouldn't be the simplest thing to do.'

Raoul looked rather like Désiré; he had the same musketeer's beard, but a fiery red, the same receding forehead, bald at the temples, and the same mischievous eyes in a face which remained imperturbable while he reeled off a string of jokes from morning till night. He was a more insipid Désiré, with the face stretched to make it a little longer.

From one of the countless little drawers whose secrets Roger had studied so many times as a child, he took a clipper which he tossed in his hand.

‘Then the answer's yes?'

Roger thought it over, still hesitating, but feeling scarcely any excitement. If Raoul took him at his word and started the operation, he would let him finish it. The clipper was already brushing against the back of his neck, and he could feel the cold touch of the metal, but it was the barber who funked it.

‘You aren't serious, are you?'

How could Raoul have failed to notice that Roger, who was always so particular about his appearance, had dirty finger-nails and was wearing an old suit, a carelessly knotted tie and filthy shoes. Instead of his fine briar pipe, he had taken to smoking one of those coarse imitation meerschaums with a long cherry-wood stem which you could see hanging down the chests of old men taking the air on the doorsteps of their shops. Like them, he pressed down the ashes by thrusting his forefinger into the bowl, and just now, on the way to Raoul's, he had bought himself some snuff which he had ostentatiously stuffed into his nostrils in the open street.

It was the middle of March. The Easter holidays had just begun. The day before, in driving spring rain, Roger had gone in his clogs to queue at the food centre with a shopping-bag. Élise had not yet recovered from the shock.

‘No, Monsieur Mamelin. I'm not going to take the responsibility for shearing you. I've no desire to have my eyes scratched out or to see you burst out sobbing. Let's be serious. What sort of a haircut do you want?'

Roger, with the smile of a misunderstood man, puffed at his pipe.

‘Just as you like, Raoul.'

‘The parting in the middle or on the side?'

‘No parting at all. So leave it long.'

‘Artist-style?'

He would have his hair cropped short later on, for he would do it one day, he had been thinking about it for over a week now. It was the radical method of putting himself once for all above all the petty trifles he despised.

Oughtn't people to understand at a glance that he had changed completely? The proof of that was that he was happy in this shop which he used to hate before, and that instead of looking in the mirror for the reflection of a tense face with a contemptuous, distant expression, he gave his features all the kindliness of which they were capable, puffing his chest out and wishing that he were fat and round like a worthy bourgeois of the district.

This morning there was a pale sun shining. Once he had crossed the Pont d'Amercoeur, with his hands in his pockets and some books under his arm, Roger had the impression that he was living in a stage-set. His eyes smiled at everything they saw: a little earlier, he had taken pleasure in watching a fat girl washing down the white tiles of a fish-shop with pailfuls of clean water; then he had looked at the fish, the spiky gurnets, the pale rays, and the distinguished soles, and he had bent over the barrels of herrings lined up along the pavement to breathe in their powerful smell.

Raoul's shop was even more of a stage-set than the rest. Besides, it already partook of the theatre whose portico could be seen a little further on in the Rue Surlet. Its narrow, lop-sided shop window contained nothing but wigs. It was hard to find the door at first, for it was in the next house; the hairdressing saloon itself was a sort of triangular nook, with an opening in one wall which contained a stove, and on the other side of this stove, in an even smaller nook which seemed to have no way out, you could see Raoul's father pinning long tow-like hair on a wooden head.

Raoul and his father were the accredited wigmakers and make-up men of the Pavillon de Flore, where operettas alternated with melodramas. The walls were covered with autographed photographs, the talk was all of baritones, singing basses and tenorinos, and everything evoked a world which was invisible yet present, a world dressed in costumes of olden times. The air seemed to smell of scenery and tours, of gas-jets and Bengal lights, the glass-fronted cupboards were full of greasepaint, and the years did not count here as they did elsewhere.

‘It was the season Mercoeur put on
The Merry Widow
for the first time at the Pavillon de Flore. What a voice! What a presence! What a brilliant performance in the duet! I maintain that nobody has ever played Danilo properly since.'

The door was left open in all weathers, for otherwise there would have been neither enough air nor enough space. You were in the street. The life of the street entered the shop freely, the noises, the voices, the smells, the sunshine. And the neighbours came in to sit down for a little while as they would in a public place.

‘Well, Raoul, what's new?'

‘Everything's old, especially us, alas!'

‘You couldn't do my beard in a minute, could you? I'm going to the funeral.'

‘Narquet's?'

‘I can't understand how that chap could go off so quickly. Why, only a fortnight ago, he was fishing next to me at the Grosses-Battes dam. Incidentally, this morning I saw big Henry going fishing. He won't catch anything. The river's too swollen.'

Roger listened to them, drawing gently on his pipe. It struck him that here he was breathing in the life of the whole district, and this district of the Rue Puits-en-Sock, of which the Rue Surlet, which went off at an acute angle, was just a sort of extension, was something which he had suddenly started to love.

He too would have liked to know everybody by his Christian name, to be able to say like Raoul and his customers:

‘Wasn't it his sister-in-law—you remember, the little thing who limped a bit and was such a hot piece—who went off with the singer with the bad teeth one night they were playing
La Tour de Nesle
? I can still see her in this chair when she came to have her hair curled for her first communion.'

Roger would have liked the houses to be even narrower and more lop-sided, with sharp corners, twisting passages, mysterious nooks and corners, and smells which varied with every step. He liked people who wore the costume of their trade and spoke to each other from doorstep to doorstep, people who had been born in the house in which they lived and had always known each other, who, when they were old men and grandfathers, still tussled with one another as they used to do when they were at school together or when they served Mass in the parish church.

Camille was dead. She had died in January, about dawn one Monday morning. A few hours before, in a box at the Mondain cinema, behind Gouin and his girl friend, Roger had been fumbling about under her skirts.

That Monday evening, when he had been thinking about nothing but the rendezvous on Thursday and the signal Camille was going to give him with her torch to tell him what Sidonie had decided, Élise, talking to the inevitable Mademoiselle Rinquet, had suddenly said in a mournful voice:

‘As if we hadn't enough with our own troubles, we've got epidemics starting now.'

It had been right in the middle of the black period, the period of the Carré and the endless walks in the dark, in search of heaven knows what ambiguous pleasures, a period when, for Roger, everything had been dismal and frightening. Élise had talked while peeling turnips and Mademoiselle Rinquet had listened, as dark as the darkest of streets.

‘Why, only today, there have been three cases of cholerine, including a girl who went home last night, healthy and happy, and who had to be buried this afternoon, she was decomposing so fast. They say her mother followed the coffin screaming. She's a poor woman who does people's washing.'

Roger, looking down at his book, had felt his blood run cold.

‘I've been told that if the doctors talk about cholerine, so as not to alarm the population, it's really cholera for all that. It appears that it happens in every war. Think of the thousands and thousands of corpses that lie on the battlefields day after day, sometimes for weeks on end, without being buried!'

He had managed to ask in a toneless voice:

‘You don't know what she's called, do you?'

‘They told me her name when I was getting the rations, but I've forgotten it. Her mother worked most of the time at the home of one of your old schoolmates at Saint-André, the pork-butcher in the Rue Dorchain. That's a chap who can't complain about the war, but I hope that one of these days people like that will be made to pay. When you think of all the poor little children there are with nothing to eat!'

Roger had lived for a week in fear, a subdued fear, so to speak, a hidden fear. He had not gone to the Carré. He had not been there once. He had not seen Sidonie again. He had lived on his own, not knowing where to settle down, curling up with a book in any corner he could find, for evening after evening and whole Sundays. If necessary, when his mother and Mademoiselle Rinquet were murmuring their laments, he dug his fingers into his ears and fiercely went on reading, only going out, except for school, to change his books in the Rue Saint-Paul and at the Chiroux library.

He had started neglecting his appearance, had taken a fancy to casual clothes, and had seriously considered having his hair cut short.