Dimanche and Other Stories (6 page)

Happiness and pride shone in her face; yet it had a harsh, sardonic expression only partly disguised by her smooth skin and youth. Her cold, mocking eyes, her stiffly held head, the slightly contemptuous pursing of her thin lips, all hinted at the woman she would become in the 1940s, the woman who would say, “The president has sounded out my husband, but I believe …” and “It all depends on England,” and “Now is the time to forget one’s personal preoccupations and think only of the party!” and “Gérard, you must talk to the minister …”

It was late, almost midnight, when a group of young women in ball gowns, holding party streamers, arrived at the little bar on the Rue du Mont Thabor. One of them was waving a stick decorated with ribbons and tiny bells, laughing as she said in her shrill and childish voice, “So this is where you’ve been meeting for the last two years, Cri-Cri and Jerry, and no one knew about it? Where did you find such a wonderful place? You’re amazing, you know. Listen, I’m going to take it over, I
shall inherit it!” Some young men came in, Gérard among them.

Ginette was sitting in her usual place. The morning’s lightheartedness had long since gone, and her face and shoulders sagged. Nobody looked at her. Nobody said a word to her. The bar had the sordid, grimy look of the morning after; the little flags decorating the bottles of whiskey drooped sadly, and some of the mistletoe berries had fallen on the floor, where they were crushed under people’s heels. The bartender had taken Ginette to one side. He was a kind if weak man, but he believed the first of January to be an important date in the calendar for its potential moral uplift. It was the day when you could write off the previous year’s mistakes, get rid of bad payers, reclaim what was owed to you, and feel the stronger and better for it. He had therefore made it clear to Ginette that she would need to settle her debts. As he thought about his wife and children, who could end up on the streets because of his generosity, he steeled himself with an interior monologue of self-evident truth: “It’s all well and good, but I mustn’t be an easy touch; if I fall ill tomorrow I’d like to know who’d give me credit?” Aloud he said, “And another thing, after tonight it’s over, my girl, okay? You’ll have to find somewhere else. The customers feel the same way as I do; they’ve had enough of being cadged off.”

Ginette did not move but went on waiting, hoping fervently that Christiane would arrive.

When she saw her come in, she stood up with a smile. Christiane frowned. “Oh no, I do hope she’s not going to come and annoy us!”

Just for a second, however, she hesitated, wondering if it might not be rather good fun and very “modern” to introduce her friends to the woman and invite her to join them for a drink.

“No, I don’t think so. She’s too obvious, she’s not amusing, and those stories about her and her Maurice are a bore …” she thought.

At the age of fifteen, when she had found out how much she would be worth, she had learned how to look at people she did not want to acknowledge, how to look straight through them as if they were made of glass, with a cold, fixed stare as if she were looking for something just behind them; how to raise her eyebrows and allow a small, thin, icy smile to play on her lips.

She looked intently at an increasingly pale Ginette, conveying by her attitude, her silence, and her condescension that she was trying really hard to think of this unknown woman’s name, that she remembered having seen her somewhere before and exchanging a few meaningless words with her, but that she could not say exactly when or where that might have been; then she turned away.

Ginette remained quite still and alone with her drink, her shoulders hunched. A world that was blissfully lighthearted and happy glittered right next to her
but was inaccessible, as if it were enclosed in a transparent bubble. It shone and sparkled, gleaming before her very eyes, but it was not for her. Nothing would be, for her, ever again … She listened to the happy young voices ringing out, “Hey, Marie-Claude, Marie-Solange, Dominique, over here!” With a fresh and insolent laugh, a childish voice declared, “They’re as ugly as anything, those tarts! And you pay for them! That’s what you prefer to us, you idiots!”

A pink-skinned, blonde girl, with clear, sparkling eyes, exclaimed rapturously, “What a night! The amount we’ve drunk! Look, I bet I’ve got circles under my eyes, haven’t I?”

They were safely on those happy shores, never buffeted by storms, where only a light, perfumed breeze would blow. Ginette looked at them, as, from an old boat being tossed on the waves, one might watch the elegant, proud shapes of palm trees and hills disappearing on the horizon. These were islands in paradise where she could never set foot. A bitter mist of tears rose into her eyes. She tightened her hands so fiercely around her glass that it broke; dazed, she looked numbly at the splinters of glass and the blood on her dress.

One of the girls laughed loudly; another started the gramophone, which covered up their cruel, high-pitched voices.

Reproachfully, the bartender said, “Out of it already?”

Ginette slowly got to her feet, then slowly wound the faded old blue scarf around her neck and tied it under her chin; the scarf had replaced the fur collar, long since sold. She opened the door, silently slipped out, and disappeared into the cold night.

Liens du sang

[  FLESH AND BLOOD  ]

[ I ]

ANNA DEMESTRE STOOD ON TIPTOE TO KISS HER
sons: she was an old woman, short and thickset. She tried hard to look lighthearted and happy, but her tired eyes barely lit up under their pale, round lids; only the corners of her mouth lifted in a smile, then her plump face, now creased by old age, relapsed into its usual sullen expression.

“I was beginning to worry,” she said to her sons nervously, timidly. When her daughters-in-law came in, she said in a sharp, plaintive tone, especially for their benefit, “I was worried. It’s eight o’clock …”

She led the way into the cold, cramped parlor, where the uncomfortable armchairs waited in a circle facing
the empty fireplace. Albert and Augustin shrank back imperceptibly from the arms she held out to them.

The brothers were not at all alike, yet oddly similar. Albert was a heavy-jowled, bald, pink-skinned man in his fifties, with unhappy eyes. Augustin was shorter and thinner, graying at the temples; his pleasant features were beginning to coarsen, and his sensitive, faraway expression at times made him look like a sleeping cat.

Their mother asked both of them in turn, “How are you? Is everything all right, my son?”

They responded, loudly and heartily, in the falsely animated voices they used only for talking to her.

“Of course, Mama!” replied Albert. “I’m very well! What about you? Filthy weather, isn’t it?”

Augustin, trying to wipe the thin, cold, abstracted smile off his face, rubbed his hands together cheerfully. “Am I well? I should think so! Never better!”

Then they fell silent, looking at her affectionately, although without seeing her, without noticing that her face was yellower this evening than on recent evenings. They were good sons. For a long time now they had only told her pieces of good news, but these were rare: usually they could not think of anything very much to say to her.

“Here’s Alain,” said Mme. Demestre, recognizing the sound of her youngest son’s footsteps outside the door.

Alain came into the room. He and Augustin were alike, although Alain was taller and thinner. His hard, sharp face wore a taciturn, ironic expression, but it still
showed some sort of spark, something long since extinguished in Augustin.

The brothers shook hands, muttering a halfhearted “How are things?”

They stood for a moment in front of the fireplace, silently avoiding one another’s eyes. Then they drew up the armchairs, sighing as they sat down. Their wives were still tidying their hair in the hall. As soon as they came in, all three men stood up as one and went to join them.

When they spoke to their wives, their voices immediately took on their usual low, muffled, irritable tone, and their faces, undisguised, lost their mask of cheerfulness and calm. A sort of complicity isolated each couple. When Alain, who was not a good husband, said to his wife, “Couldn’t you have explained to that idiot Angèle that the letter was urgent?” he revealed a glimpse into a part of his life about which his mother knew nothing, full of worries and hopes she did not understand and never would.

As she sat in their midst, the mother glanced from one to the other. Her eyes were piercing, but pale with age, gleaming mistily like water in a pond. Nothing irritated her daughters-in-law more than those greenish eyes examining their faces and following their every movement, while her expression remained sullen and lifeless and her heavy, pale eyelids, finely creased like those of some night bird, scarcely flickered.

During these Sunday gatherings the daughters-in-law
always sat together on the same sofa. Two of them, Claire and Alix—the wives of the two younger brothers—were sisters. With Alix were her two daughters, Martine and Bernadette: perfect china dolls, blonde, pale-skinned, and with straight hair; two bare little necks rose above identical collars, embroidered by Alix.

Anna Demestre noticed the little girls’ collars. She beckoned them toward her and sighed as she felt the gathered cotton linen.

“Are these the collars you embroidered, Alix? They’re beautiful,” she said with an effort, although one could see from her intent expression that she was eagerly looking for a fault in the workmanship. “They’re too tight, you poor little things,” she said with ill-disguised triumph as she slipped a finger underneath the collars. “You’re suffocating …”

She was happy now, and looked for her glasses so that she could admire the delicate embroidery. “It’s wonderful, Alix. Your work is as delicate as a fairy’s.”

Claire and Alix exchanged looks. It was always like this: when their mother-in-law was invited to dine at one of their houses, when they had carefully cooked one of her favorite dishes, she would immediately look suspicious and disappointed. Even if she thought it was excellent, and said so, she recovered her serenity and her appetite only after declaring, “There’s too much cream, my dear,” or “It’s very good pastry, but too heavy.”

She made less of an effort to be kind to Albert’s wife Sabine, a chubby, faded blonde, in spite of the fact that she was the most placid of creatures, and the easiest to live with. The granddaughter of a famous surgeon, she was rich as well: Albert had inherited a substantial fortune from his wife’s family, while Claire and Alix had been married without a dowry.

The three daughters-in-law huddled together on the old sofa; the effort they made not to yawn was making their eyes water. They contemplated with distaste the furniture and the walls of the icy little parlor. The front rooms overlooked the Rue Victorien Sardou, the quietest, grayest, and ugliest street in the area, while the windows at the back opened on to the grounds of the Sainte Perrine home for the elderly, at this time of day and this time of year a desolate chasm of wind, rain, and shadows.

Occasionally the three brothers punctuated the silence with cold, terse comments. It was always like this. They met every Sunday at their mother’s house, but for the rest of the time each led his own life, with his own worries and his own circle of friends, utterly different from the lives, the concerns, and the relationships of his brothers. Prosperous Albert; Augustin, who had a reputation for seeing things only through his wife’s eyes; Alain, permanently withdrawn in his gloomy thoughts. They sometimes looked at one another as if astonished to be in the same room together, speaking so
familiarly. Sometimes (this evening especially, thought Anna Demestre) they seemed barely able to tolerate one another. Were they enemies? Certainly not: it was more that they were strangers who had nothing left in common, apart from their names and a few physical characteristics. When they spoke to one another, or even to their mother, about one of the others, saying “that oaf Albert,” or “that pig Alain,” their tone of voice was the same, not because of any ill feeling but because of their long-standing brotherly habit of complaining about one another!

“Mama, he did that to me … he’s taken my things, Mama …”

“Mariette is late,” said Claire.

Mariette was the sister of Albert, Augustin, and Alain. Still a pretty woman, she was beginning to show her age: she was one of those delicate blondes who, on reaching forty, appear to wither overnight, like a corsage of flowers worn to a party. She had led a chaotic and unhappy life. Once, to her brothers, she had been “our Mariette, our little Mariette,” but now she was “good old Mariette, poor Mariette.” She had stupidly married a much older man, and even more stupidly divorced him. She had been ravishing; wherever she went, love followed. Her life had been too dazzling, begun too early, and although she had apparently been destined for happiness, everything had ended disastrously, nobody quite knew why. Now, alone and childless,
she was getting old and was dependent on her brothers, who passed her from one to the other like an awkward parcel.

She arrived just as they were sitting down in the dining room. The mother looked at her with unusual perception. “Poor Mariette, she used to be so pretty …”

She didn’t see her sons getting older and plumper, losing their hair, their looks, and their youth; whereas, perhaps as a result of some sort of feminine insight, only in Mariette did she see the devastating effects of age.

They began to eat.

The old white porcelain lamp had been converted to electricity and its circle of lightbulbs shed a harsh glow over the tablecloth. The velvet chairs, the thick carpets, the soft, padded place mats, the maid who silently came in to put the dishes on the sideboard without making the slightest noise or without even clinking the cutlery, at first all this seemed very agreeable to the Demestre family. It made them feel calmer. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and, as they tasted the soup, exclaimed cordially, “Oh, Mama, what a delicious consommé!”