But in her heart the feverish question persisted: ‘Who is she?’
It was like a wound that you want to rip from your flesh, and too bad if it kills you …
‘I’ll stay here all day long,’ she thought in blind rage, ‘and then I’ll know. He wouldn’t dare lie to me.’
Then she was overcome by wild hope.
‘Maybe I didn’t knock loudly enough. He might be fast asleep, who knows? But the phone ringing … I must have imagined that. Who would call him in the middle of the night? I must have been dreaming.’
She hurried over to the window again, grabbed hold of the shutters, shook them with her anxious, weak little hands and called out his name. Her only reply was the worried barking of a dog.
‘Jerry?’ she called softly. ‘Is that you, Jerry?’
The dog recognised her voice, barked again and whined.
‘Are you all alone, too?’ she whispered in despair. ‘Did he leave you all alone as well, my poor Jerry?’
Finally, she saw a taxi come down the empty street and stop in front of the house. She recognised Monti through the window; there was a woman sitting next to him whom he helped out of the cab. It was Jeannine Percier. She remembered that Jeannine’s husband was away for a week and wouldn’t get back until the following day. They had spent the evening together. He was wearing a dinner jacket and she could see that Jeannine wasn’t wearing a hat. They were going into Aldo’s house, as she had done so many times before, to finish the evening properly.
She wanted to rush over, but immediately stopped herself. ‘How I must look …’ she thought. How haggard her face must be after such a night. She had no right to cry, to let anyone see her pain. It was fine for young people to allow tears to run down their faces: it was like rain running down a flower. Jeannine could cry. Jeannine wasn’t even thirty. Her tears would make Monti feel tenderness towards her. But she, Gladys, couldn’t forget that tears made her make-up run down her cheeks.
She watched them go inside the house and close the door behind them. For a long time she sat on the bench, clasping her bare, frozen hands over her trembling mouth and watching the house. She saw the light come on through the slits in the shutters, then go out. She went home.
19
In the weeks that followed Gladys went back to see Bernard several times; she felt a strange sense of peace in his miserable room, the only place on earth where she had nothing left to fear, or to hide. It was only with him that she could finally allow herself to look like an old, tired woman, where she could let her body slump and relax her neck: she normally held her head up very straight to hide the crease in her neck beneath her pearl necklace. She had asked to meet Bernard’s mistress. She was a young woman with fine, angular features and brown hair cut in a fringe that fell forward over her forehead. Her deep, perceptive eyes did not laugh, even when she did; they remained dark and serious, but at other times, when she seemed sad or lost in a dream, they sparkled mockingly. She was called Laurette Pellegrain. She owned nothing in the world except a beige wool suit, a beret and a flowered cotton blouse that she wore even when it was bitterly cold, washing it in the evening and putting it back on the next day. She was one of those young women from Montparnasse whose background and real name were rarely known and who seemed to live on coffee and croissants, a girl whom no one found interesting and who disappeared one fine day as suddenly as she had arrived. Gladys quickly realised that it was for Laurette that Bernard had come to find her: to get Laurette some money.
That day, Gladys stayed with them for a long time, barely speaking, watching the rain run down the windows. Laurette was coughing; it was a deep, painful cough that seemed to rip through her chest.
‘Madame,’ Bernard said finally, ‘this young woman needs to go to Switzerland. Could you help us? I want to find a job,’ he added, lowering his head.
‘But why, Bernard? I’m here, and …’
‘I don’t want to ask you for money,’ he said angrily. ‘Don’t you understand? Not that. I want to earn my living.’
‘All right,’ she said with the naïvety of a rich woman. ‘That can’t be so difficult, can it?’
‘That’s what you think, is it?’ he scoffed. ‘What year do you think this is? What dream world are you living in? You’d think you’d fallen asleep before the war and still hadn’t woken up; it’s incredible!’
‘I’ll give you all the money you need, Bernard, but apart from that, what can I possibly do?’
‘You have friends, acquaintances … I know that you know Percier, the Minister.’
‘No,’ she murmured, ‘no, not that. It’s impossible. Be content with what I’m offering you.’
She sat up taller, nervous, anxious; the evening rejuvenated her, sent her running to Monti, covered her in the illusion of youth. She threw a cheque down on the table and left.
‘She’ll be back,’ said Laurette, smiling.
She went over to Bernard, looked at him with the perceptiveness that was her most outstanding feature and asked, ‘Is that woman your mother?’
‘Why? Does she look like me?’
‘You both have a murderous look in your eyes, did you know that?’ she said, gesturing as she spoke, as she normally did. ‘Those murderous eyes that Fragonard so cruelly gives his women …’
‘Oh, no, Laure, don’t talk like that,’ he said, looking at her affectionately. ‘You sound like an educated tart and there’s nothing worse.’
‘Yes, my darling,’ she murmured, smiling, but without listening to him.
He held her tightly in a fierce embrace. ‘You’ll go, Laurette, you’ll get well …’
‘Of course I will,’ she said softly, stroking his forehead gently with her thin fingers. ‘I’ll come back. I won’t die. You see, if I died now, my life would be like this,’ she said, tracing a circle in the air with the tip of her finger, ‘it would be perfect, logical destiny. But life is never like that, it’s like this,’ she said, tracing a broken line with ups and downs that vanished into space, ‘or even like this, a question mark …’
‘Just come back, come back and you’ll see, I’ll make that woman pay until she’s completely drained; she won’t have a single drop of blood left in her. Do you want to know her name? It’s Jezebel. You don’t understand, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t know anything about you either, but I love you. How I love you, Laure. When you come back, I’ll buy you beautiful clothes, jewellery, and all with Jezebel’s money. You’ll see, my love, you’ll see …’
Laurette left with her half-empty suitcase full of books, wearing no hat, as usual, holding her beret in her hand, shivering slightly from the cold in her beige wool suit. She set off for Switzerland, where so many before her had gone to be cured.
20
Bernard received two brief little letters from Switzerland made up of short sentences that seemed breathless, then nothing. He knew that Laurette was going to die; every day he expected to hear news of her death. His despair was like him: bitter, bleak and full of venom. He had terrible toothache; he stopped shaving; he didn’t open a book; he threw himself down on his bed fully dressed and slept until evening. He woke up when night fell, for he took painful pleasure in the terrible dawns of Paris. He didn’t have the strength to leave his shabby room. Where would he go? He found solitude everywhere, sadness, anxiety and cruel boredom lay in wait for him everywhere. He waited until the flame on the gaslight in the street cast the shadow of the shutters on to the dark wall. Then he would stare in silence at the light. Every now and again its soft greenish glow blocked out all his thoughts; it flowed like a soothing balm, deep into his heart. The rain fell, heavy and cold. Laure … He pictured her as if she were already dead. She was a private young woman, he thought, unassuming, fragile, with a beautiful body. She had a lively, melancholy spirit, a kind of disheartened grace. Strange despair took hold of Bernard, a bitter, silent, cold sadness that was like his own heart. At night he went from café to café. When he was drinking he forgot about his mistress, or,
at least, he didn’t think of her in such cruel detail. But even in the depths of his drunkenness he missed Laure’s presence; he felt a void, mournful hunger, bleak weariness.
Stretched out on his bed, his thin body shivering beneath the old cardigan that no one mended any more, a dish heaped with oranges at his side, watching the rain run down the windows until he became mesmerised, numbed by it, to stop himself worrying about death, to avoid sinking into despair, he forced himself to think about Gladys, to rekindle in his heart his hatred of Gladys.
‘She won’t come, not she, no chance of that. I could drop dead and she wouldn’t give me a thought. The only blood relative I have and yet …’
He gave a low moan.
‘Laure …’
He felt tears welling up in his eyes and was ashamed. He turned over in bed, furiously crumpling the sheets and burying his head deep into the yellowed pillow that smelled musty, like everything in his sordid lodgings.
‘Laurette … my poor girl … You’re done for. And to think that with Jezebel’s money I could have bought you dresses, chocolates … You could have had at least some good times, my poor darling. Well, you won’t even have that … not even that …’
He was ashamed to be so weak and so in love; he tried to think, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do. Someone else will come along …’
But then immediately: ‘Just let her get better, let her come back, I’ll suck the life out of Jezebel, I’ll take everything she has. I’ll make her suffer, I’ll make her curse the day she was born.’
In his mind he had created a strange link between his mistress and the woman he called Jezebel.
‘A twenty-year-old girl who is going to die without ever having had even five minutes of happiness on this earth, and that mad old woman with her diamonds who still allows herself to be in love, to be jealous! Hell, it’s grotesque. I’d like to murder her,’ he sometimes thought. ‘What could they do to me? Nothing! Gentlemen of the jury! She was my grandmother. She abandoned me, rejected me, robbed me of what was rightfully mine. I avenged myself. “But she gave you money, my boy!”
‘Ah, I have a fever,’ he murmured. ‘What wouldn’t she give for me to catch a good dose of typhoid or Laure’s tuberculosis so I might join my mother in a better place! I must really make her worry,’ he thought, cheering up. ‘All the same, what rotten luck. Everything was against me! I could have died a thousand times! But no, I’m still here. That’s certainly some consolation, but it’s not enough! No, by God, it’s not enough!’
On Christmas Eve he learned that Laurette had died. He decided to go and tell his mistress’s parents. He had discovered their address while sorting through some old letters Laure had left in a drawer.
He arrived at a quiet, wealthy apartment; an old dried-up woman with white hair and wearing mourning clothes and a jet necklace asked him to come in. She was Laure’s mother; he first told her that Laure had been ill and was receiving treatment in Leysin.
‘It had to end like that,’ she replied, crying. ‘You say she’s in Leysin? But that must be terribly expensive. Children are ungrateful things. She left me. She brought me disgrace. What can I do?’ she said, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief with black edging, as her jet beads quivered against her chest. ‘I lost my husband six months ago. He left me with no money. Tell Laure she must be very frugal. I know my daughter: perfume, make-up, silk stockings. She must be considerate to me. I could send her five hundred francs a month, if I deprive myself of everything. Not a single letter, not a word to her mother in five years, but naturally, as soon as anyone needs something, they turn to their family. I’ll send her five hundred francs a month, Monsieur.’
‘There’s no point,’ said Bernard harshly. ‘One payment will be enough to bury her. She died yesterday.’
He walked out. It was raining. The night was thick with icy fog. He walked straight ahead, almost without thinking. He went into one bistro, then another. First to the Frégate, opposite the quayside, where you could see shadows reflected in the dark water. Then to a little café on the Ile Saint Louis, where the antique carved beams were lit up by hissing gaslight, then to the Ludo, thick with dust, grime and chalk …
Then he went back to Montparnasse. He had another drink, and ran into a friend. ‘Laure’s dead,’ he told him.
‘Poor girl. She was barely twenty. Do you want another drink?’
He drank it and left almost immediately to escape into the dark streets; the red lights of the bistro turned the mud the colour of blood. He went to the Dôme and sat on the terrace. He felt a need to tell the world that his mistress had died.
‘It’s not possible!’ they all exclaimed, immediately adding, ‘She didn’t look very strong …’
‘How old was she? Twenty, right?’ someone asked.
And when they heard her age, so similar to their own, they all fell silent. Bernard kept drinking, looking at the familiar faces through the smoke and feeling dark anger rise within his heart.
For a long time he dragged himself from one café to another.
He headed in the direction of the Seine. He was drunk; his head was hot and his mind blank. He listened to the sound of the rain on the pavement. He walked towards the Bois, towards Gladys’s house; he felt a desperate, heinous need to see Gladys.
‘I’m going home. I’ve got to go home,’ he said over and over again. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
But in spite of himself his legs dragged him towards Gladys.
He thought about Laure’s mother, that old, half-dead woman with her spectacles, her jet necklace, her straw bag, her embroidered cushions, who hoarded her money so it would last a few more miserable years.
‘Dirty old hags,’ he thought, clenching his fists.
His feeling of hatred encompassed Gladys, Laure’s mother and everyone who clung on to their status, their money, their happiness, leaving their children nothing but despair, poverty and death.
As he got closer to Auteuil, the cafés became fewer and poorer. Some men were playing cards. In one of them he listened for a long time to an old player piano that had some of its keys missing.
He thought of the first time he’d met Laure; she was sitting in front of a brazier that cast her in a reddish light; she wore no hat and had a red woollen cravat round her neck; he could picture her pale, delicate features and the look in her eyes.
‘There was something about her … something I never managed to reach in her, something she never managed to reach in herself … a kind of poetry …’
He tried to picture his own mother but couldn’t imagine what she’d looked like. He forgot that she would have been forty had she lived. He saw her as if she were a sister, as young as he and Laure.
‘You poor things, you’re dead. You’re down there, in the darkness, and they all laugh, dance, pamper themselves. I want to grab Jezebel by the shoulders and shake her, shake her, shake her,’ he thought in a rage, ‘shake her until her painted mask drops off. Oh, how I hate her. It’s all her fault! And it’s not just the fact that she’s alive. What’s going to happen to me? I have a thousand acquaintances and not one friend, not one relative. I want to work. Not study. I’m sick of it. My hands hurt from doing nothing but open books. Work … In the métro, in the food market at Les Halles, anywhere. And do you think it’s easy in these times of financial crisis, my boy? I should have been a manual worker. Mama Berthe shouldn’t have tried to make me into a gentleman. Some days I feel I have a grudge against everything on this earth, God forgive me,’ he thought with tenderness and remorse. ‘Ah, I’m thirsty …’
He went into a café that was open, on the corner of the quayside; he drank outside, in the rain, barely sheltered beneath a canvas awning that flapped in the wind. He was shivering from the cold.
‘Any lowly job would save me. Banging in a nail or fitting planks, then falling asleep at night. One year of such a life, getting drunk every Sunday, and I’d forget Laure. After all, I’m twenty. I don’t want to die of a broken heart. I do
n’t want to,’ he said again with an echo of defiance at an invisible god. ‘Yes, but … Jezebel’s money … Money that came to her so easily. Women like her corrupt everything they touch.’
He walked all night. Rain ran down his face and fell with a murmur, a whisper, a patter on to a city that seemed deserted. Mist rose from the street. He half closed his eyes as he walked, tripped over the edge of the pavement like a blind man.
‘I’ll tell Jezebel …’ he thought. ‘Oh, she’ll remember this night. It feels so good to make someone else suffer. What is she doing now? Has she forgotten me? Well, I’ll soon make her remember who I am! Where is she?’
He looked at the windows of her house, dark and closed. ‘On Christmas Eve, Jezebel is surely out dancing somewhere, if she’s not making love at home. She’s dancing and having fun. That old woman, that ghoul, that monster! But no, why say such things? She looks young. But she’s old, old, old, an old witch,’ he said over and over again in bleak delirium. ‘I’ll make her remember tonight! I want to see tears streaming down her face …’
He leaned against the carriage entrance of a house and stood there, watching the rain fall.
21
Meanwhile, Gladys, the Perciers and Monti were dancing at Chez Florence. The evening was a kind of ‘fight to the bitter end’ between Jeannine and herself: she sensed intangible warning signs that made her feel she was losing the war, that Monti preferred Jeannine to her. Jeannine was like a delicate little vulture; she had a narrow, hooked nose, wide, anxious, bright eyes that continually blinked beneath her pale round eyelids, and dark hair that was as straight and shiny as feathers. That night, she wore her hair in that season’s fashionable style: swept into two wings that met at the top of her head to form a kind of turban. She never got tired; she was one of those women who have muscles of steel beneath a delicate frame. She had guessed Gladys’s secret weakness: her age. She loved Monti, but more importantly, she loved the glory of having stolen Gladys Eysenach’s lover.