The Bark Tree (23 page)

In the billiard room, all that can be heard is the toc-toc of the balls in the midst of a great silence; the local champion has had a run of twelve caroms, among the general admiration. There are many onlookers; people are standing up to have a look. Mme. Belhôtel is beginning to get impatient, something will get burnt. A customer comes in, lugging an enormous beige canvas suitcase; a young woman follows in his footsteps. He is wearing knickerbockers, a thick sweater and a stableboy’s cap; he is smoking a pipe with one of those enigmatic airs that it takes years to learn. Who is he, this citizen? He asks for a green menthe; so does his wife. No one takes much notice of him, for everyone’s attention is directed to the billiard room where the toc-toc is continuing; in the midst of the general emotion, the champion has just pulled off his fourteenth carom. Mme. Belhôtel gets up to see to her cooking; Camélia serves the green menthes, sniffing with a disgusted air; it isn’t that the menthe nauseates her, but it’s a habit. The customer calmly draws her attention to the fact that she’s given him a picon; she can’t get over it; she distinctly remembers picking up the bottle of peppermint; how extraordinary. She goes back to change the drinks. Mme. Belhôtel returns to her cash register and starts working out the cost price of Ernestine’s wedding breakfast.

In the billiard room, people have stopped breathing. With a dry throat, the champion is preparing his twenty-fourth carom; he screws the balls to the cloth with a confident look, lines up his cue; no doubt about it, till his dying day he’ll be able to describe and redescribe this twenty-five point break. His ball is off, exactly following the path he has mapped out for it; it hits the red according to the anticipated angle and continues on its course; but a bit farther on it stops, flabbergasted, not encountering the object of its trajectory, for the third ball is no longer there. The champion, overcome with astonishment drops his cue on his toes, without feeling any pain, and yet he’s got corns; the onlookers lean their foreheads over the deserted green cloth; no doubt about it, one ball is missing. Who has dared steal it? The champion goes red with fury and green with despair; there is chaos and confusion. The onlookers search, go through each other’s pockets, suspect each other. Mme. Belhôtel is worried about all this havoc. Camélia stops drying up glasses to find out what’s going on. The players are yelling with fury; one asserts that if he knew who was responsible for this idiotic joke he’d give him something to remember, wouldn’t he now! The other, from the depths of his envious heart, is laughing derisively at the misfortune of his opponent. Which opponent declares that he’ll never set foot in such a lousy dump again. And then they discover that the three balls are once again on the table, just as they were at the twenty-fourth carom. Everyone exclaims, everyone is amazed; you could knock them down with a feather, they can’t believe their eyes. It’s overwhelming. Camélia starts drying up her glasses and sniffing again, the customer and his wife calmly drink their menthes.

“In six months at the most,” thinks Belhôtel, “we’ll have our little house, our little whorehouse. I’d like it in a nice quiet safe neighborhood; regular, bourgeois customers, seven or eight girls, no more; but well chosen. It’ll be all gold and red velvet, and we’ll live in peace and plenty and Clovis will become an engineer and he’ll marry the daughter of a rich industrialist and the little children will have an English governess with big teeth and blue ribbons hanging down over her bony bottom. Later on, we’ll buy a little house in the country where Dominique comes from; maybe he’ll be elected mayor and Clovis will come and see us in his car with his little children.” A tear begins to well up in the flabby eye of the proprietress of the Café des Habitants. She gathers it up with her finger and smears it on her blotting paper and gets on with her accounts. That’s a funny one, she says to herself, looking at the man with the big suitcase.

All of a sudden she thinks: “But it’s Ernestine’s brother! The one who was coming from Brussels!”

It was, it was Peter Tom the Anchorite, real name Pierre Troc, and the timid person with him was none other than his wife, the girl who, during his act, presented to the public the doves that came out of the top hat, curtsying like a convent schoolgirl. Peter Tom knocked his pipe out against the heel of his left shoe and opened his mouth twice, the first time to spit and the second to speak.

“Well, Ernestine? eh! marriage! Who to? A man, of course. An old man. Eh? What am I supposed to think about it? What do you? Doesn’t matter much, eh? Taupe, he’s called, eh?”

“Yes, that’s right, zcalled Taupe,” volubilized Mme. Belhôtel, who had been afraid she wasn’t going to be able to get a word in edgewise. “And he’s a junk dealer.”

“A junk dealer? Not rich then, eh? What’s she thinking of, then? Good old Ernestine. Little girl—already a half-wit. Now —no change. So she used to work for you?”

“She did an all; she’s a good girl, not fraid of a biv hard work.”

“Can believe it, can believe it. No idea how to make life easy for herself. She’ll never find out. By the way, what about my brother, the military gent?”

“He arrived this morning. The whole wedding party has been spending the afternoon in the country. Be back soon.”

“So Totocle is here! Good old Totocle! Haven’t seen him for three years! must have a lot of hardware on, eh? And Titine, haven’t seen her for two years, either. Time passes, eh, Madame Bitôtel.”

“Belhôtel, Belhôtel.”

“Belhôtel. One day in Carcassonne, th’next in Angers, after that in Swisserland and Spain and Italy. Certainly see some countries in our perfession, Madame Belhôtel. Even as far as Brittany, I’ve been. Now there’s a nice bit of country for you. Vjust now been in Brussels, and after that I’ve got an engagement in Lyons.”

“You’re a
...
?”

“Magician. Even better: professor of white magic. I can make ten-franc pieces come out of the noses of babes in their cradles, and even babes not in their cradles. And plenty of other things besides. My act, well, it’s one of the best of its kind, Madame Belhôtel. I invented the dancing scissors trick and the one with the little bit of string made of thin steel. I did them to a gathering of more than fifty colleagues and not a single one discovered how they worked. Eh, Madame Belhôtel.”

“Oh yes.”

Peter Tom the Anchorite is making a great impression on Mme. Belhôtel; the woman with him starts murmuring:

“Oh, Pierre, he’s very intelligent, but he never has any luck; he can’t seem to make a name for himself; he always has to go on one of the first.”

“Stupid creature,” mutters Peter Tom.

Mme. Belhôtel nearly falls off her chair in surprise.

“Me; never had any luck? Me? No luck? Here, you’ll see!”

He goes over to an automatic machine, stakes on the red, and it’s the green that comes up.

“See that, eh, Madame Belhôtel? No luck!”

And, with a casual gesture, he takes a guinea pig out of this honorable tradeswoman’s blouse.

This feat focuses everyone’s attention on him, amid many exclamations; Mme Belhôtel shivers, and rubs her breast in stupefaction; the cavy is charming. Peter Tom the Anchorite picks up a
Paris-Midi
that happens to be on a table, screws it into a cone, puts the animal into it, puts the ensemble down on the counter, takes a pistol out of his pocket, fires at the paper, and unfolds it: the guinea pig has disappeared, and
Paris-Midi
has turned into
Paris-Soir,
fourth (sports) edition. Applause crepitates, the magician bows, and the wedding party has still not arrived.

—oooooo—oooooo—

It won’t be much longer now; the car transporting it cleaves the air; its bodywork is trembling with impatience; like unto a high-spirited steed bearing on its back the chief of police who is afraid of arriving at night school when the poetry class is over, so the powerful quadricycle carries the joyous wedding party toward its destiny, eating up the kilometers and shitting dust, roaring like a lion and snoring like a sleeper with a cold. It tells, one by one, the beads of the intermediary villages, it jumps the ditches, the gutters and gullies; bicyclists cannot make it flinch, hens are flattened by its unpuncturable tires, fascinated corners allow themselves to be cut; it ravages the countryside and subjugates the towns, the intelligent and the imbecile admire it alike. As it goes by, people cordially cry: Long live the bride! Long live cuckolds! The car, scorning these facile, yet benevolent, witticisms, continues on its way with the speed of a running champion and the obstination of a six-day-man. Its goal has been fixed, this goal it will attain; it is the Café des Habitants where, in the kitchen, the cauliflower au gratin is simmering; but it must make haste, if it doesn’t want its occupants to find the roast burned. And therefore does its bodywork tremble with impatience, therefore does it flit over pothole and quagmire with more facility than a skater over a frozen lake. Now it is moving over the territory of the commune of Blagny; it leaves on its left the building development hight The Desert, where the roads are ravines, where neither water, nor gas, nor electricity are known, thanks to the artful skill of some honorable traders in square meters; it leaves on its right the papier-mâché factory where they manufacture indiscriminately cheap bricks or army bread; it rushes through the district called Venice the Beautiful, thus named because it is flooded every winter; it jumps over the main road and plunges into the Rue Pasteur, which leads it straight to the Place Victor Hugo. Snorting, it stops outside its terminus; carried away by its store of speed, was it not about to pass it?

People run up from all sides, they form a circle and line the path; Mme. Belhôtel comes out of her tavern, followed by Peter Tom the Anchorite, by Mme. Troc, his spouse, by Camélia, the new waitress, and by all the delighted customers. The car door is opened and the wedding party trickles, drop by drop, down onto the pavement.

In the first place comes Dominique Belhôtel, larger than life, twice as handsome and freshly hatted; he is wearing spats and has stuck an artificial pearl in his tie; when he moves, his muscles burst the seams of his jacket. His nose has taken on the fiery color of campari and his eyes are sparkling like lemonade. Powerful and Olympian, he holds out his arms to the bride and deposits her on the ground with the elegance of a Hercules who thinks he is lifting a couple of pounds of lead but who is in fact shifting a couple of pounds of feathers, which thus flutter from the car onto terra firma.

Ernestine astonishes the crowd by her grace and elegance; her elegance is costing her dear, it is true, and her savings have evaporated; but is she not rich now? The café habitués rush up to congratulate her, some claim a kiss. They’re having a good time today, all right!

Then follow the pageboy and the bridesmaid: to wit, Clovis Belhôtel, who is christening—lucky coincidence—a new suit, and Florette Pic, who is thirteen, and depraved. Ivoine is certain to be jealous; Clovis will have to put up with her tantrums the next day. For the moment, he allows himself to be tickled without demur, and exchanges looks full of pride and mystery, and some slight anxiety, with his aunt.

Then Themistocles Troc gets down onto the pavement;

Ernestine’s brother is sporting a superb Zouave uniform, studded with four decorations, its sleeve adorned with silver ribbon, a token of his rank. His appearance provokes various kinds of appreciation among the spectators, some of the women admiring his colonial splendor, but most of the men mistrusting his stripes. Imitating Dominique’s gallant example, he tries to get out with Suzy, Ernestine’s friend, on his arm; but he goes about it in such an awkward fashion that she twists her foot.

“Blessed idiot,” says she, massaging her ankle.

Suzy is a blonde, and she goes to the movies three times a week.

Next appears Meussieu Gérard Taupe; an astonished murmur accompanies his descent. How could anyone recognize old Taupe in this elegant, closely shaved old gentleman, his grey hair plastered down on his skull, wearing a morning coat, a bit greenish, it’s true, and a pair of trousers whose impeccable crease seems to have been cast in reinforced concrete? Patent leather shoes and white spats complete his getup. Taupe looks twenty years younger, such is the common opinion. To raise to its apogee the stupefaction of the population, he covers his hoary head with a genuine top hat, from which the grease has been carefully removed.

After which, it’s a real free-for-all. Mme. Saturnin Belhôtel, Meussieu Saturnin Belhôtel, Meussieu Jérôme Pic, Mme. Jérôme Pic, appear one by one, without anyone paying much attention to them. Finally, the car expels its last occupant, Mme. Sidonie Cloche. Her hat, embellished with parrot feathers, her billiard-green dress, her tartan cape, her gigantic carpetbag, subject her to the mocking homage of the youth of Blagny. But what does she care about her appearance? She has plenty of other things to worry about. She is accomplishing her purpose; Ernestine’s marriage brings fortune in its wake, and it won’t be long now; in a few days she’ll know exactly how much the treasure, as she calls it, is worth, and in a month, two months at the most, she’ll start cashing her bundles of bank notes. It’s perfect; but there are the
Others,
and the
Others
worry her all the more in that for the last two weeks she hasn’t known what has happened to them.

As a consequence of his abortive abduction, Clovis took fright, and wanted to come back to Blagny at once; according to Saturnin, his tenant’s absence continues, and, five days before, in the course of an excursion to Obonne, she was able to ascertain that the Marcel house was still unoccupied. What are They going to do? The easiest thing for Them would be to burgle the shack. To guard against this eventuality, Mme. Cloche has not hesitated to grease the palms of the security men at the Company’s workshops, to get them to keep a close eye on the old man’s fortified castle. But she considers this precaution superfluous; for she calculates that the
Others,
knowing her to be aware of their dishonest projects, have abandoned all hope of appropriating the Taupic treasure to themselves. Perhaps they’ll want to take their revenge? They wouldn’t dare, she consoles herself; and thus repeating these historic words, she holds her head high and defies destiny, while the whole wedding party is getting ready for the ultimate aperitifs.