Pedigree (64 page)

‘Why don't you come and sit by the fire, Roger? What are you going up there again for? You'll get pleurisy, like my brother-in-law Hubert, staying in an icy room like that.'

He shut himself up in his room for all that, wrapping himself up in a dressing-gown which his mother had cut out of an old counterpane with a pink floral design. There was no gas on the first floor. He lit a candle. He felt cold, his fingers went numb, his chilblains hurt. He smoked, paced up and down, looked out of the window, with a strange emotion, at the dark, wet boulevard along which shadows were passing, and finally, with tears puffing out his eyelids, he suddenly began writing.

‘
Sadness of the tall spire, so tall, so lonely
…'

This was the cold, hard spire of Saint-Nicolas, which he used to see from the doorstep in the Rue de la Loi for days on end when he was a child. He would have liked to describe it, frozen in the cruel immensity of a moonlight night, that spire which people might consider stiff with pride, yet which gazed enviously, without ever being able to come down to their level, at the roofs of the little houses nestling below it, all those hunchbacked, ramshackle roofs, slate or tile, flat or pointed, planted with smoking chimneys or pierced with glowing skylights, standing fraternally shoulder to shoulder, trying to join each other across the narrow, teeming streets, and preventing one another from falling down.

Cécile's illness had grown worse. She sat motionless from morning till night with her feet in an enamel bucket, for water kept oozing all the time from her swollen legs.

Roger had got into the habit of going to see her. He went to the Rue Puits-en-Sock every day. It was he who took his aunt the books she read in her solitude, and little by little a new life had begun, Roger's walk had become slower and more solemn, and he had taken to wandering aimlessly and without any rancour in his heart through the back-streets, under the tangle of roofs dominated by the spire of Saint-Nicolas.

He had been almost sincere when Raoul had suggested giving his hair a Titus cut and he had replied:

‘Why not?'

The most he had felt had been a slight tremor of anxiety. He would have allowed Raoul to do it. But now he was satisfied with his artist style. He must let his hair grow a lot longer. All or nothing. The skull superbly shaven or an untidy mop which you shook with a jerk of the head and through which you passed your fingers like a comb.

‘A little brilliantine?'

‘No.'

‘Shall I wet your hair?'

‘No.'

He wanted his hair to look as bushy as possible. He felt sorry that he had not come in clogs, that he was not an apprentice in one of the medieval workshops in the district.

‘Thanks, Raoul.'

He was pleased with life. He enjoyed to the full the ray of sunshine playing in the mirrors, and all the images jostling together there in a chaos where you could scarcely find your bearings, where he had been unable to find his bearings at all when he was little; he stroked the big, smooth, warm bowl of his pipe and, giving a final glance at his reflection in the mirror, he tried to give himself the good-natured appearance of an old Outremeuse craftsman.

There was no transition between the shop and the street, but the same life, vulgar, noisy and colourful, a life with a strong savour of the lower classes. His nostrils dilated, his eyes opened wide, and he felt no repugnance whatever; even the smell of the bluish water flowing along the gutter seemed sweet to him.

He had only a few steps to take to reach the bookshop window and, at any other time, the mere sight of the window-display would have caused him positive pain, for it was practically the last word in the sordid and the ugly. Probably because of the proximity of the flea-market, the Rue Surlet had a higgledy-piggledy look with the most improbable things placed next to one another.

Witness this shop-window, where there was a row of popular novels at sixty-four centimes each, soiled, torn for the most part, as dirty as old pipes, and where next to these books you could see some electric batteries among some second-hand shoes, some celluloid combs and a fantastic dressmaker's dummy.

On the dirty floor of the shop there were always three or four brats, the youngest of them showing his bottom; once Roger had found him calmly ensconced on his chamber-pot next to the counter. A mousy-haired woman, her arms covered with soapsuds, appeared for a moment in the doorway.

‘Oh, it's you. I can leave you to help yourself, can't I?'

This familiarity pleased him. He felt almost proud of being at home here, of going behind the counter, rummaging along the shelves and leaning out into the shop-window. You could hear footsteps, shouts and volleys of oaths on the next floor, for the house was full of children and low women who joked with one another through the windows or across the neutral zone of the staircase. There was no private entrance and all these people went through the shop. Roger had once seen a girl there with a heavily made-up face and flashy clothes, and it had been a revelation to him to hear her call down the staircase well:

‘Don't forget my chemises, Mum!'

So these women, whom he used to follow hopelessly at the Carré, lived in houses like this; they had a mother and perhaps little brothers and sisters too; and nobody was embarrassed by them, everybody considered it perfectly natural that they should go out on the streets when the time came, just as the men went to their workshops.

He looked through the books before making his choice. In the early days, he had taken Cécile the books he usually read himself, those he borrowed from the municipal library or the lending library, bound in black cloth and smelling musty. But Cécile never finished them.

‘I don't enjoy them, Roger. I may be a fool, but I can't see what pleasure anybody can get out of reading that sort of thing.'

‘What would you prefer, Aunt?'

She had, so to speak, never read anything. She had not had the time.

‘I don't know. I remember one book I was lent a long time ago that was fascinating. I think it was called:
Chaste and Sullied
. That's the sort of novel I'd like.'

This had moved him. It was strange to see what a little girl Cécile had become since she had fallen ill. She spoke in a faint, monotonous voice. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. She felt no embarrassment in his presence, and once her blouse had opened and he had caught sight of a poor withered breast.

‘I'm thin, aren't I?' she had said, without any false modesty, intercepting his glance.

It was for her sake that he had discovered this shop in the Rue Surlet. The shopkeeper, who could scarcely read and recognized books chiefly by their covers, had shown him what to do. First of all, you had to pay the price of a new book as a sort of surety, then every time you came to change a book, pay twenty centimes.

One day, he had taken two books instead of one. One had been for his aunt and one for himself, because, as the result of seeing the whole series of the Rocambole stories, his curiosity had been aroused.

For fear of being laughed at, he had not dared to show that book to his father. Now he read them all, Désiré too. Unfortunately, they could never find the complete series.

‘Number sixteen hasn't come back, has it, Madame Pissier?'

‘The one with the vampire on the cover? I've asked myself that question a dozen times this week. If I knew who the blighter was who's taken it and kept it over a month … I only hope it isn't somebody who's died since then!'

For his aunt, going by the title and the picture on the cover, he picked a sad, sentimental story of the sort she liked.

‘I've left forty centimes on the counter. See you tomorrow, Madame Pissier.'

He read a book a day easily, sometimes two when he was not going to school. He started reading as soon as he was outside in the street, shutting the book only when he entered the passage leading to his grandfather's house. He crossed the yard. He was no longer a visitor but almost at home here. He greeted Thérèse, Marcel's sister, who had moved into the house to look after the children and who had a consumptive's rosy cheekbones.

‘Is Aunt Cécile any better?'

‘Just the same. She's already asked after you twice.'

Never, in the old days, had he gone any further than this kitchen, where people automatically tip-toed past the corner where Old Papa used to sit. Now he went through the door at the back and it was the very mystery of the Rue Puits-en-Sock which he discovered. He found himself to begin with in an airless, unlit passage along which he groped his way. He went down a couple of stone steps, his hand found a cord which worked a latch, and there he was in a bright kitchen filled with the sickly smell of sweets.

There were sweets on every piece of furniture, on the table covered with an oilcloth, on the sideboard, on a chest of drawers, and on the chairs, for Roger was no longer in the Mamelin house, but in Gruyelle-Marquant's, the confectioners next door. Through the window he could see a little yard with the workshop where the sweets were made at the far end; and he knew that if he went round the blank wall he could get to the house of the Kreutz sisters, the old maids who ran the Dolls' Hospital, and even, further on, the bakehouse of the cake-shop which was almost at the end of the street.

The fact was that these were the back-streets of old; the name of one of them was still carved in the stone. There had once been a whole network of alley-ways and culs-de-sac where the craftsmen had had their workshops and which no longer had any way out, so that the houses in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, with their separate façades, had kept up, as it were, clandestine connections behind.

It gave him pleasure too to enter into the familiarity of things, to be at home here, to call out, so that nobody should stop working because of him:

‘It's me!'

He could have gone in by way of the shop where he was standing now, but he preferred this detour through the wings. His Uncle Marcel was sorting invoices behind one of the counters. The shop-assistant whom everybody called ‘Pipi'—he had never dared to ask why—was serving a customer, a country shopkeeper who had put a huge black straw basket down in front of her.

‘Is Aunt Cécile upstairs?'

As if poor Cécile were still capable of going out! They told him again:

‘She's already asked after you twice.'

The two houses were now one. At the first rumour of war, back in 1914, the Gruyelle-Marquants had taken refuge in Holland, where they were waiting for the end of hostilities. The house had remained shut for several months, then, by a roundabout method, by means of a ferryman as they were called, Marcel Wasselin had received a letter asking him if he would run the shop until the owners came back.

Pipi, who had been employed in the shop before the war, had come back. She was a short, strapping girl with solid buttocks and flesh so firm that you could not pinch her. They got on well together, she and Marcel, for they belonged to the same type. In front of people, Wasselin gave her resounding slaps on her bottom, or else grabbed her breasts in both hands; and behind the shop, in the kitchen littered with pink sweets, between serving two customer, he calmly laid her out on a corner of the table. Roger had caught them in the act. They had scarcely even looked embarrassed, and his uncle, buttoning his trousers, had simply given him a conspiratorial wink.

It was this same, huge shop, with its two vast windows, which had been so awe-inspiring in the past, especially just before St. Nicholas's Day, when there were so many customers you could only just squeeze in. Roger could still remember Monsieur Gruyelle, who always looked rather solemn, with white side-whiskers framing a face as pink as his fondants, and with his hands behind his back, keeping an eye on his shop-assistants; and he recalled the Gruyelle-Marquant sisters, plump, fresh-faced creatures who used to kiss him and slip two or three sugared almonds into his pocket or the hollow of his hand.

Now Marcel Wasselin reigned over the shop with Pipi, the shelves were overflowing once more with sweets and chocolates of every kind, the till was stuffed with banknotes which were pushed in anyhow, francs and marks together, and upstairs Cécile was alone, with her feet in her tub, in the middle of the Gruyelle-Marquants' bedroom.

Élise had sighed when somebody had raised the subject:

‘Dear God, Désiré, don't you think Marcel is a bit too free-and-easy? If Monsieur Gruyelle, who's so strict, found out what was happening! And he's bound to find out one day.'

‘That's his look-out, isn't it?'

‘I don't know how he could entrust a business like his, such a solid concern, which has been in existence for over a hundred years, to somebody like Marcel. You know, I can't get rid of the idea that he's making money out of it, that he isn't over-scrupulous. And Pipi isn't likely to put a curb on him. All that money going through her hands without any check on it!'

Roger darted a glance at the last counter, the one at the back, which was protected up to a certain height by a trellis, for it was there that the more expensive sweets and chocolates were displayed in glass dishes.

If, when he came down again, there was nobody in the shop, as was often the case, he would put his arm quickly over the trellis. He had already chosen the exact spot, for he had a weakness for the big chocolates wrapped in gold paper which cost fifty centimes each.

Did the others ever miss an opportunity of doing the same? Hadn't his mother herself said that Marcel and Pipi weren't over-scrupulous people? With what he earned as manager and with the hat-shop where Grandfather Mamelin did all the work, could his uncle have given his children the St. Nicholas's Day he had given them this last year, with among other things a life-size doll such as you never saw in the shops and which had been adorned—this had shocked Élise to the core—with Aunt Madeleine's hair, the hair which had been ceremoniously cut off her head when she had taken her vows.