Pedigree (7 page)

‘Wipe the table, Valérie.'

He read over what he had written, and added a couple of lines.

‘There you are, Madame. In a few days there won't be a sign of it left. Above all, don't get into a panic. I tell you it's nothing to worry about. Incidentally … Where's that milk he vomited after his last feed?'

‘Valérie!'

It was Valérie who came and went. Then Désiré followed the doctor out on to the stairs.

‘Doctor…'

‘Nothing to worry about. I should just like to have an analysis of the milk.'

He held out a little phial he had in his pocket.

‘If you can, without alarming her … Take it tomorrow morning to the Pierson laboratory…'

She would be the only one in the whole family whose milk wasn't good. Madame Mamelin had warned him: ‘
That girl
…'

‘Come, now! Come, now! Everything will be all right, you'll see. She's rather highly strung, you understand? Gets worried about the slightest thing.'

More mummers … He shut the door …

When Désiré got back, he found Valérie trying in vain to calm Élise, who was having a fit of crying which was degenerating into a fit of hysterics.

‘I knew it. I felt it.
She
said it would happen before she even knew me!'

The lamp started smoking. Désiré lowered the wick. At the same moment the stove gave its familiar ‘boom', as if the guardian spirit of the house had felt that the time had come to make his benevolent presence felt.

‘Hush!' whispered Valérie, when Désiré went towards the bed.

And she added in an undertone, while Élise was shaken by sob after sob:

‘It does her good.'

T
WO
o'clock. Two strokes which rang out sharply in the empty air, here first, then there, at Saint-Jean, at Saint-Jacques, at the Cathedral, at Saint-Denis, two strokes which sounded early or late over the sleeping town, in a sky in which the moon was swimming. The fried-fish shops were closed. The frosted-glass globe which served as the sign for a night-club no longer attracted anybody and the doorman was inside.

An opening appeared in a wall in the Rue Gérardrie, in a tiny café, a door between two shutters, and somebody gently pushed Léopold outside. In the yellow lamplight a fat blonde waitress could be seen counting the stitches in her crochet-work, the door shut again, footsteps faded into the distance.

God preserve him! And help him to find his way home through the maze of streets!

It was a relief not to see him there any more, staring at his glass, all alone, bearded, unsociable, and so still that when a traveller who was teasing the waitress stopped when he became aware of Léopold's presence, the girl motioned to him to take no notice.

He had gone. There was the noise of a shop shutter which he bumped into, then his footsteps zigzagging from pavement to pavement.

The town slept.

Élise, lying motionless, had her eyes open, and her gaze remained fixed upon the alarm-clock beside the little flame of the night-light.

Three minutes past two … Five minutes past two … The child did not move, Désiré was snoring, and she could feel him all warm beside her. She gave him a little push, and murmured, as if she were afraid of waking him:

‘Désiré …'

Why this humble voice, this apologetic expression, this air of being a poor bedridden woman who would have preferred to fend for herself? He opened his eyes, swung his long hairy legs out of the bed, scratched his feet, and put on the priest's elastic-sided shoes which he used as slippers. (This was an idea of Élise's. A priest had refused to buy the shoes he had ordered, and the cobbler had sold them off cheap. They were of such good quality!)

They did not use the big lamp at night. At the slightest movement the flame of the night-light flickered and the shadow of the corner of the wardrobe started dancing on the ceiling.

Désiré lit the spirit-stove to heat the feeding-bottle in a saucepan; then, feeling cold in his nightshirt, he put on his overcoat, the only one he possessed, a black one with a velvet collar. He remained standing by the window whose panes were covered with a thin film of frost which was still transparent, and Élise's gaze said helplessly, silently:

‘Dear God! Poor Désiré!'

Now Désiré was enjoying himself. He scratched at the frost-flowers, just as he used to do when he was a child—this gave his fingernails an extraordinary feeling which was quite unlike any other—and he threw a satisfied glance at the lighted window on the other side of the street, exactly opposite him.

It was probably the only lighted window in the whole district. It was at Torset et Mitouron's, the wholesale ironmongers, dealers in stoves, pottery, rope and linoleum. Three floors of shops stuffed with merchandise and, on the second floor, in a little room where the buckets and brooms were stored, the night watchman. His window, like all the rest, was fitted with corrugated frosted glass bearing the inscription: ‘Torset et Mitouron', and now and then Désiré caught sight of a stocky silhouette, a thick moustache, hair cut in a stubble.

‘Come to bed, Désiré. I can give him the bottle.'

Why? It was always he who fed the baby, without the slightest sign of impatience. Didn't she understand that he liked it, that he liked everything about it, getting up, standing in the cold kitchen, seeing the milk go down in the bottle, carefully counting the drops of medicine, going back to bed, and dropping off to sleep straight away?

At six o'clock, when the alarm-clock went off, the light was still on across the street and his gaze greeted it. He knew that the man was making his coffee in a vessel whose shape Désiré knew only in silhouette.

He lit the fire, swept the room, went down to the entresol to empty the slops and brought up some fresh water. Even if he did not hum himself, the music was in him, a harmonious ebb and flow of thoughts similar to the flux of a calm sea, the gentle movement of a woman's breasts.

Would he see the night watchman at last? The man came downstairs at eight o'clock: Désiré knew that from seeing the light go out at that time, on the shortest days of the year. He came downstairs just as the employees arrived and threw open the ground-floor shutters. Désiré went downstairs too. But he had never met the night watchman, whom he knew only as a silhouette. Did he go out through the main door? Or before plunging into the town did he slip through a little back door which opened on to another street?

‘Leave it, Désiré. Madame Smet will do it.'

That wasn't true. Madame Smet would do nothing. It was good of her to keep Élise company. It had been good of Valérie too to suggest her. It had been impossible to refuse. But old Mother Smet, who never took off either her black spangled bonnet or her mittens, and who always remained perched on the edge of her chair, as if she were paying a call, was incapable of doing anything, and she would probably have been found dead of hunger if her two daughters had not looked after her like a child.

She smiled beatifically at her daydreams while Élise fretted, blushed, coughed, and hesitated for a long time before plucking up courage to say in an imploring, apologetic voice:

‘Madame Smet, could you possibly put a little coal on the fire?'

Désiré thought of everything, peeled the potatoes, got the day's bottles ready, and did everything to the best of his ability, with a sense of satisfaction, even if it was only a matter of wringing out a dishcloth.

‘Don't you think the baby's looking pale, Désiré?'

‘You're just imagining things again.'

But he was a man! Only the day before, Élise had said again to Valérie:

‘You know, poor little Valérie, a man doesn't feel things as we do. Even if the baby brings up all his milk, he doesn't worry.'

Because he did what he could, all that he could, and considered that the rest would be given to him into the bargain.

Just now the night watchman on the other side of the street must be getting ready to go downstairs and would already have filled his big meerschaum pipe with the cherrywood stem. In the cold morning air, Valérie and her mother were trotting along, and in a few moments Valérie would leave Madame Smet, like a child being taken to school, outside Cession's. She had not time to come upstairs, for she had to be at L'Innovation at eight o'clock.

Désiré was ready, his hat on his head. He stood looking vaguely at the trams full of workers and clerks who had got up early in the country or the outlying suburbs and who were wearing the resigned expression of people who have been awakened too early. On Sunday they would dawdle in bed.

‘Do you think they'll arrest him?'

He was astonished to discover the thought which had been occupying Élise's mind. How ridiculous to worry about that boy!

‘It's dreadful for the parents…'

She felt sorry for them. She fretted over everybody's troubles, suffered for everybody.

‘They had bled themselves white to have him educated …'

And she looked at the cradle, as if there were a connection between what she was thinking and the sleeping baby, between the latter and the lanky adolescent of the Place Saint-Lambert.

‘Don't worry your head about that.'

Besides, it was time for him to go; he could hear the door downstairs opening, Madame Smet climbing the stairs. He brushed his moustache against his wife's forehead, then against his son's, and frowned again.

Why the devil was she thinking about that boy?

As for himself, he went into life, into this fine new day, as fresh as if he were acting in a play, immaculate from head to foot, without a speck of dust on him, alert in heart and limbs.

‘I wonder, Madame Smet…'

A word was trembling on the tip of Élise's tongue, and though she held it back now she would end up by uttering it one day, by speaking of Léopold, of the two men lurking in the dark alley-way where she had wanted to adjust her suspender.

While Désiré, with his regular stride, was crossing the Pont des Arches, in the pink and blue light of the morning, Léopold, huddled, fully dressed, in an armchair, opened a sad pair of eyes and gazed straight in front of him at the bed on which a young man was lying curled up under a grey blanket.

It was on the Quai de la Dérivation, in a new district full of little red-brick houses: an extraordinary building, an old farmhouse, dating from the time when the town did not extend that far. There remained a cock and a few hens, and some manure in the farmyard, for a cab-driver kept his horse and cab there. The building had been converted into a number of little warehouses and workshops and, as there was a fine square patch of turf left, it was hired out by the day to the women of the district who came and spread out their washing on it.

To get to the flat where Léopold and Eugénie lived, you had to go up through a ceiling by means of a miller's ladder, and there was a pulley outside the window.

Eugénie was not there. She came and went. At the moment she was probably working as a cook in some middle-class house, but she would certainly not stay there, for she loved changing.

‘Get up, my boy.'

Léopold's chin was covered with stubble. His whole body was redolent with the previous night, heavy with drunkenness, heavier still with the thoughts he was turning over in his big head, and he was breathing with difficulty, groaning with every movement, as clumsy and awkward as a fairground bear.

‘Get dressed!'

No affection. Not a glance for the young man who pulled his clothes on, shivering with cold and fear.

In another part of the town, Désiré was walking along, sweeping his hat off to the people he knew.

‘He has such a stylish way of raising his hat!'

His neighbours could tell what time it was without looking at their alarm-clocks. Shopkeepers taking down their shutters knew whether they were early or late; big Désiré went by, swinging his legs along at such a regular pace that you might have thought they had been given the task of measuring the passage of time. He scarcely ever stopped on the way. People and things did not seem to interest him and yet he smiled beatifically. He was sensitive to the quality of the air, to slight changes in temperature, to distant sounds, to moving patches of sunlight. The taste of his morning cigarette varied from day to day and yet they were all cigarettes of the same brand, cork-tipped ‘Louxors'.

He was wearing a jacket with four buttons, closed very high up and reaching a long way down, with no sign of the waist-line, and made of a black or very dark grey material. He had handsome, sparkling brown eyes, a big Cyrano-de-Bergerac nose, and a turned-up moustache; his hair, which was brushed back, and his bald temples gave him a high forehead.

‘A poet's forehead,' Élise used to say.

It was she who chose his ties. She was afraid of colours, because they were a sign of vulgarity. What she considered distinguished were mauves, violets, purplish reds and mouse greys, with tiny designs, practically invisible arabesques.

Once the tie had been bought—one every festive occasion—it was hung on a celluloid holder and after that it did not change any more than if it had been cut out of zinc or painted on the starched shirt-front.

Crossing the Pont des Arches, Désiré spotted his cloud, a funny little pink cloud which, for the past three days, had been floating at the same time every morning a little to the left of the spire of Saint-Pholien, as if it had been tied to the weathercock. It was not the same cloud of course, but Désiré pretended that it was the same, his own special cloud, put there just to bid him good day.

It was the hour when, in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, the shopkeepers arranged their window-displays and emptied bucketfuls of water over the pavement to clean it. The alley-way that ran into the street gave out the smell of poverty as you passed, but it was not an unpleasant smell when you had known it since childhood.