The Drinking Den (6 page)

She seemed not to have heard; instead, she went on: ‘Anyway, with a bit of an effort we might still get out of here… Yesterday evening, I saw Madame Fauconnier, the washerwoman from the Rue Neuve;
she's going to take me on, Monday. If you get together with your friend from La Glacière, we'll be back on our feet in six months, then we can get some decent clothes and find ourselves a place that we can call home… But we'll have to work hard, real hard…'

Lantier turned towards the street, with a bored look on his face. At this Gervaise lost her temper.

‘Yeah, that's right, I know you're in no great hurry to get down to work. You want lots of things, you'd like to be dressed like a gent and show off your whores in silk skirts. That's it, isn't it? You think I'm not good enough for you, since you made me pawn all my dresses… Now, you listen to me, Auguste. I didn't want to say anything yet, I would have waited, but I know where you spent last night: I saw you going into the Grand Balcon with that slut Adèle. My God, you do choose them! She's a right one, she is! She can afford to show off like she does… She's slept with everyone in that restaurant.'

Lantier leaped off the bed. His eyes were as black as ink in his pale face. Though he was a small man, he had a temper like a hurricane.

‘Yeah, you hear me, with the whole lot of them!' Gervaise repeated. ‘Madame Boche is going to kick the both of them out, her and her great beanpole of a sister, because there's always a line of men queuing for them down the stairs.'

Lantier raised both fists; then, resisting the urge to beat her, grasped both her arms, shook her roughly and threw her back, on to the children's bed. They started to cry again. He went back to his own bed, muttering savagely, like a man who had just made up his mind to something: ‘You don't know what you've done there, Gervaise… You've made a big mistake, you wait and see.'

For a short time, the children kept on sobbing. Their mother, bending over the bed, held both of them in a single embrace and kept on repeating the same thing, twenty times over, in a monotonous voice:

‘Oh, if it wasn't for you, my poor little chicks! If it wasn't for you… if it wasn't for you…!'

Calmly stretched out on the bed and looking up at the piece of faded chintz, Lantier had stopped listening and was lost in thought. He stayed like that almost an hour, without giving way to sleep, though his eyelids were drooping with tiredness. When he sat up on his elbow,
his face hard and determined, Gervaise had almost finished tidying the room. She was making the children's bed, after getting them up and dressing them. He watched her taking the broom round and dusting the furniture, but the room remained black and dingy, with its smoke-stained ceiling, damp, peeling wallpaper, three rickety chairs and chest of drawers, to which the grime clung obstinately, so that the duster merely spread it around. Then, while she was splashing water over herself, after tying up her hair, in front of the little round mirror that hung on the window latch – and which he used for shaving – he appeared to be inspecting her bare arms and bare neck, all the nakedness that she displayed, as if mentally making comparisons. He curled his lip in distaste. Gervaise had a limp, in the right leg; but you could hardly notice it except on days when she was tired and gave in to it. That morning, exhausted after her sleepless night, she was dragging one foot and supporting herself against the wall.

Silence reigned: they had not exchanged a single word. He seemed to be waiting for something, while she, swallowing her misery and determined not to show her feelings, hurried about her work. When she started making up a parcel of dirty linen, which had been discarded in one corner of the room, behind the trunk, he finally asked: ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?'

At first, she did not answer. Then, when he angrily repeated the question, she changed her mind: ‘I should think you could see the answer to that… I'm going to wash all this lot… We can't have the children living in such filth.'

He let her pick up two or three handkerchiefs, then, after a further silence, he asked: ‘Got any money?'

At once, she got up and looked him straight in the face, without letting go of the children's shirt that she was holding.

‘Money! Where do you expect me to steal it from? You know I got three francs the day before yesterday on my black skirt. We've had two meals out of it: those cooked meats don't last long… Of course I don't have money. I've got four
sous
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for the wash… I don't earn it the way some women do.'

He ignored the jibe. He had got up off the bed and was looking over the few rags hanging around the room. In the end, he took down the
trousers and the scarf, opened the chest of drawers and added a woman's shift and two blouses to the heap; then, piling all of them on to Gervaise's arm, said: ‘Right, take this lot to the pawnshop.'

‘Perhaps you'd like me take the children too?' she replied. ‘Huh? if they lent money on kids, there'd be a real clear-out!'

She did go to the pawnbroker's, even so. When she came back, half an hour later, she put down a five-franc piece on the mantelpiece, adding the pawn ticket to the others, between the two candlesticks.

‘There's what they gave me,' she said. ‘I asked for six, but no way… No! They won't starve to death, that's for sure. You always see plenty of people in there.'

Lantier did not take the five-franc coin straight away. He would have liked her to have got some change, so that he could leave her something, but when he looked at the chest and saw some leftover ham, wrapped in a piece of paper, as well as a scrap of bread, he decided to slip the coin into his waistcoat pocket.

‘I didn't go to the dairy because we owe them for a week already,' Gervaise added. ‘But I'll come back early, so while I'm out, you go down and get a loaf, and some chops cooked in egg and breadcrumbs, and we can have a meal together… Fetch up a litre of wine, as well.'

He did not say no. The quarrel seemed to be over. The young woman finished wrapping up the dirty clothes, but when she started to take Lantier's shirts and socks from the bottom of the trunk, he shouted at her to leave them alone.

‘You leave my washing, do you hear? I won't have it!'

‘What won't you have?' she asked, straightening herself. ‘I don't suppose you intend to put these grubby things on again, do you? They've got to be washed.'

All the time she was anxiously watching him, seeing the same hard expression on the young man's handsome face, as though nothing now would ever soften it again. He lost his temper and grabbed the washing, which he threw back into the trunk.

‘God in heaven, why don't you do what I tell you for once! I told you I wouldn't have it.'

‘Why on earth not?' she stammered, going pale as a dreadful suspicion
entered her head. ‘You don't need your shirts right now, you're not going out anywhere… What does it matter to you if I take them?'

He hesitated for a moment, slightly put out by the burning look in her eyes.

‘Why? Why?' he blurted out. ‘God, woman, you'll be telling everybody that you're keeping me, taking in washing and sewing. Well, I don't like it, see? You do your things, I'll do mine… Washerwomen expect to be paid for their work.'

She begged him, saying that she had never complained, but he slammed the trunk shut and sat down on top of it, shouting: ‘No!' in her face. He was the boss of his own things. Then, to escape her look, which followed him around, he went back to the bed and lay down, saying that he was tired and telling her to stop bothering him. And this time he really did seem to go to sleep…

Gervaise hesitated for a moment. She was tempted to put the bundle of washing down and to sit there, sewing. In the end, Lantier's regular breathing reassured her. She picked up the ball of blueing and the piece of soap that she had left from the last wash, and went over to the children who were quietly playing with some old corks, by the window. She kissed them and whispered: ‘Mind you be good now and don't make a noise. Dad's asleep.'

When she left, Claude and Etienne's hushed laughter was the only sound to be heard under the dark ceiling in the deep silence of the room. It was ten o'clock. A ray of sunlight was streaming through the half-open window.

On the main road, Gervaise turned left and went down the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or.
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As she went past Mme Fauconnier's small shop, she greeted her with a little nod. The wash-house was halfway down the street, at the point where it started to go uphill. Above a flat-roofed building, you could see the round grey bulk of three huge water tanks, cylinders of galvanized metal studded with rivets, while behind them loomed the drying-room, a tall second–storey area enclosed on all sides by shutters with narrow slats, for the air to blow through, behind which items of washing could be seen drying on lines of brass wire. The narrow pipe from the engine, to the right of the tanks, puffed out whiffs of white steam in rough, regular breaths. Without holding
up her skirts Gervaise, who was used to puddles, went in through a doorway cluttered with tubs of bleach. She was already acquainted with the manageress, a delicate little woman with unhealthy eyes, who sat behind a window, with the registers in front of her, in a little room where there were cakes of soap on shelves, balls of blueing in jars and pounds of bicarbonate of soda weighed out into packets. As she went past, Gervaise asked for the beetle
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and brush that she had left for the manageress to look after, after her last wash. Then, taking her number, she went in.

The wash–house was a vast shed with a flat roof, supported by visible beams on cast-iron pillars and enclosed by wide clear-glass windows, which admitted the pale daylight so that it could pass freely through the hot steam that hung like a milky mist. Here and there, wisps of smoke were rising, spreading out to cover the back of the shed with a blueish veil. A heavy dampness rained down, laden with the smell of soap – a moist, insipid, persistent smell, in which, from time to time, stronger whiffs of bleach would dominate. Along the washing-boards that lined both sides of the central aisle were rows of women, their arms naked to the shoulders, their necks bare and their skirts tucked in to reveal coloured stockings and heavy, laced-up shoes. They were beating fiercely, laughing, throwing their heads back to shout something through the din or leaning forward into their tubs, foul-mouthed, brutish, ungainly, soaked through, their flesh reddened and steaming. Around and underneath them, a great stream coursed by, coming from buckets of hot water carried along and tipped out in a single movement, or else from open taps of cold water pissing down, the splashes off the beetles, the drips from rinsed garments, all running off in rivulets across the sloping stone floor from the ponds in which their feet paddled. And, in the midst of the cries, the rhythmical beating noises and the murmurous sound of rain – this tempestuous clamour deadened by the damp roof – the steam-engine, over to the right, completely whitened by a fine dew, panted and snored away unceasingly, its flywheel shivering and dancing, seeming to regulate this monstrous din.

Gervaise, meanwhile, was looking to right and left as she advanced with short steps down the aisle. She had her parcel of washing under
her arm, one hip raised, her limp more pronounced than ever in the throng of women who jostled her as they went past.

‘Over here, sweetie!' thundered Mme Boche.

Then, when the young woman came over to join her, on the left, at the end of the line, the concierge, who was rubbing away ferociously at a sock, began to speak, in short phrases, without pausing in her work.

‘You slip in here, I've kept you a place… Oh, I shan't be long! Boche keeps his clothes pretty clean… What about you? It won't take you long, either, by the look of it. You haven't got too much in there. We'll be done with this lot before twelve, so we can go and get a bite to eat… I used to give mine to a laundress in the Rue Poulet, but she was destroying it all for me with that chlorine and brushes of hers. So now I wash it myself. It's pure gain. It only costs me the price of the soap… Well I never! You should have put those shirts to soak! Those wretched kids! They've got soot on their bottoms!'

Gervaise was undoing her parcel, spreading out the children's shirts; and when Mme Boche advised her to take a bucket of soda, she answered: ‘No, no! Hot water'll do… I know what I'm at.'

She had sorted the washing, putting aside the few coloured garments; and then, after filling her tub with four buckets of cold water from the tap behind her, she threw in the pile of white clothes and, hitching up her skirt and tucking it between her thighs, she got into an upright box which came up to her waist.

‘You do know what you're at, don't you,' Mme Boche echoed. ‘Is it right: you were a laundress back home, sweetie?'

With her sleeves rolled back to display a blonde's fine arms, still young and only slightly reddened at the elbows, Gervaise started to clean her washing. She had just spread a shirt out on the narrow washboard, worn away and whitened by the constant effect of water; she was rubbing the soap in, turning the shirt over and rubbing it on the other side. Before answering, she grasped her beetle and began to strike the shirt, shouting over the noise and punctuating her remarks with steady, hard blows.

‘Yes, yes, laundress… When I was ten… Twelve years ago… We went down to the river… It used to smell better than here…
You should have seen it… There was a spot under the trees… with clear running water… You know, in Plassans
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… I doubt if you know it… It's near Marseille…'

‘You don't half go it!'

Mme Boche exclaimed, amazed by the force Gervaise was putting behind each stroke. ‘What a wench! Those little lady's arms of hers: she could flatten an iron with them!'