The Drinking Den (24 page)

‘Madame!' she said. ‘Please tell him to stop doing that to me!'

‘Leave her alone and be sensible, won't you?' Gervaise said calmly. ‘Can't you see we're busy?'

So they were busy? What then? It wasn't his fault. He was doing no harm. He wasn't touching, just looking. Wasn't he allowed to look nowadays at the beautiful things that God had made? She certainly did have lovely tits, that saucy bitch Clémence! She could charge people two
sous
to have a look and a feel, and no one would consider the money wasted. As for the laundress, she had given up trying to argue and was now laughing at the crude compliments the drunken man was paying her. She even started to trade jokes with him. He was teasing about the men's shirts: so, she was still doing men's shirts, was she? Oh, yes, she lived in them. Oh, good God in heaven! Did she know them? Like the back of her hand! She had dealt with enough of them: hundreds and hundreds. Fair-haired or dark, all the men of the neighbourhood wore her work on their backs. Meanwhile, she went on with her task, her shoulders shaking with laughter. She had made five large folds in the back, by putting her iron in through the front; now she turned back the front panel and pleated it too with sweeping gestures.

‘This is the tail!' she said, laughing even louder.

Boss-eyed Augustine also burst out laughing, thinking the quip very funny. They told her off: just listen to the brat, laughing at words she shouldn't understand! Clémence handed her iron over to the apprentice, who used them up on her napkins and stockings when they were not
hot enough for starched items. But she picked this one up awkwardly and gave herself a ‘cuff' – a long burn on the wrist. At that she started to sob and accused Clémence of burning her on purpose. The other girl, who had gone to fetch a very hot iron for the front of the shirt, immediately consoled her by threatening to iron both her ears for her, if she went on. As she was talking, she slipped a woollen cloth under the shirt-front and was slowly pushing the iron over it, giving the starch time to come out and dry. The front of the shirt was becoming as stiff and shiny as glossy paper.

‘You cunning bitch!' Coupeau said, hopping from one foot to the other behind her with his drunkard's obstinacy.

He stood on tiptoe, laughing like a badly oiled pulley. Clémence, leaning heavily on the work-table, her wrists bent and her elbows apart, waving in the air, bent her head with the effort, and all her naked flesh seemed to swell, her shoulders rising with the slow movement of the muscles contracting under the delicate skin, her breasts, damp with sweat, swelling inside the pink shadows of her gaping blouse. So his hands reached out, wanting to touch.

‘Madame! Madame!' Clémence shouted. ‘Please tell him to keep quiet, would you? I'm off if this goes on. I don't want to be insulted.'

Gervaise had just put Mme Boche's bonnet on a stand covered in cloth and was folding the lace into funnels, minutely, with a small iron. She looked up just as the roofer was reaching out again, putting his hands inside the blouse.

‘Really, Coupeau, you're behaving very badly,' she said, in a tone of annoyance, as though scolding a child who insisted on eating the jam with no bread. ‘You'd better go to bed.'

‘Yes, you go to bed, Monsieur Coupeau, that would be the best thing,' said Mme Putois.

‘Well, I don't know,' he said, still giggling. ‘You're a nasty bunch. Can't someone have a joke, then? Women don't mind me, I've never hurt one of them. A man can pinch a lady, can't he? I wouldn't go further than that; one must respect the fair sex. And then, when you show off what you've got, it's so that a man can make his choice, isn't it? Why is the big blonde showing everything like that? No, it's not decent…'

And he turned towards Clémence, saying: ‘You know what, duck, you're wrong to be so stuck up. If it's because there are other people around –'

But he was unable to go on. Gervaise had seized him with one hand, without violence, and had put her other hand over his mouth. He made a show of resistance, just for fun, while she was pushing him to the back of the shop, towards the bedroom. He freed his mouth and said that he was quite happy to go to bed, but that the big blonde should come and keep his feet warm. Then they heard Gervaise taking off his shoes. She undressed him, pushing him about a bit, in a motherly way. When she pulled down his trousers, he roared with laughter, not struggling any more but lying back, arching his back in the very middle of the bed; and he kicked around, saying that she was deliberately tickling him. Finally, she wrapped him up well, like a child. Was he comfortable, at least? But he didn't answer, instead shouting to Clémence: ‘Come on, sweetie, I'm here, waiting for you.'

When Gervaise came back into the shop, boss-eyed Augustine was getting a slap from Clémence, who really meant it. It was to do with a dirty iron that Mme Putois had found on the stove: she, quite unsuspecting, had blackened a whole bodice with it. And since Clémence, trying to avoid blame for not cleaning her iron, had accused Augustine, swearing to high heaven that the iron was not hers, despite the cake of burned starch on the bottom, the apprentice had spat on her dress, quite openly, on the front, outraged at the injustice of it. The result was a well-aimed blow. The girl held back her tears and cleaned the iron with a candle-end. But, every time she had to pass behind Clémence, she gathered some saliva and spat, laughing to herself when it dribbled down her skirt.

Gervaise went back to curling the lace on the bonnet. In the sudden quiet that followed, they could hear Coupeau's thick voice from the back of the shop. He was no trouble, just laughing to himself and muttering a few disconnected phrases:

‘What a silly one, my wife is! The silly, putting me to bed! I ask you! In the middle of the day! How silly, when I'm not tired!'

Then, quite suddenly, he was snoring. Gervaise gave a sigh of relief, content to know that he was at rest finally, sleeping off his bibulousness
on two good mattresses. And she began to speak in the silence, not pausing, in a slow voice, keeping her eyes on the brisk movements of the little goffering-iron.

‘What do you expect? He's not quite himself, you can't get cross with him. And even if I did give him a hard time, it wouldn't get us anywhere. I prefer to go along with what he says and get him to bed; at least, that way, it's all over at once and he leaves me alone… And then, there's no harm to him; he's fond of me. You saw him just now, he would have gone through fire and water to give me a kiss. That's another nice thing about him, because there are plenty of men, when they're drunk, who go off to the brothel… He comes straight back here. He has a bit of a joke with the girls, but nothing more than that. You know what I mean, Clémence: you mustn't get upset. You know what men are like when they're drunk: they could kill their fathers and mothers and not remember a thing about it… Oh, I forgive him with all my heart! He's no different from the rest, God knows.'

She said all this in a weak, dispassionate tone, having already become accustomed to Coupeau's bingeing, still justifying her own indulgence of him, but already unable to see any harm in him pinching the girls' bottoms in her own house. When she stopped speaking, silence returned and was not broken. Every time she took a new piece, Mme Putois would pull out the basket from under the cretonne cloth spread over the work-top; then, when the item had been ironed, she reached up with her little arms and placed it on a shelf. Clémence had just pressed her thirty-fifth man's shirt. There were still piles of work: they had calculated that even if they hurried they would have to stay up until eleven o'clock. Now that there was nothing more to distract them everyone was working hard and fast. The naked arms flew backwards and forwards, patches of pink that brought out the whiteness of the linen. The boiler had been filled up again with coke and as the sun, finding its way between the sheets, was shining directly on the stove, the heat could be seen rising in the beam of sunlight, an invisible flame making the air quiver. It was so stifling under the skirts and cloths hanging from the ceiling to dry that boss-eyed Augustine's saliva failed her and she had her tongue poking out between her lips. There was a smell of overheated stove and of sour starch-water, a scorched smell
of flat-irons, an insipid bath-house smell to which the four women, baring their shoulders, added the rougher odour of their hair and necks drenched in sweat, while the bouquet of lilies faded in the greenish water of its jar, giving out a scent that was very pure and strong. And, from time to time, in the midst of the noise of the irons and the poker scraping in the stove, one of Coupeau's snores rumbled with the regularity of a huge clock ticking, regulating the labour of the shop.

On the mornings after these sprees, the roofer had a hangover; a dreadful hangover that meant he was off colour all day, with a foul taste in his mouth and his jaw swollen and out of shape. He would get up late, not showing a leg until eight o'clock; then he would spit and mooch around the shop, unable to make up his mind whether to leave for work. Another day lost. In the morning, he complained of having legs like cotton wool, and said it was crazy to paint the town the way he did, since it messed up one's whole system. What's more, you'd meet a lot of layabouts who didn't want to let you go; you'd get yourself dragged from one bar to another, against your better judgement, and end up in every kind of scrape until, eventually, you were properly caught. Damn it, no! Never again! He had no intention of leaving his boots behind at the wine merchant's, not when he was still in his prime. But after lunch he would perk up a little and go ‘hum, hum' a few times, to show that his voice was in good working order. By now he was starting to deny that he had been really drunk the night before; a bit lit up, perhaps. They didn't make them like him any more: sound as a bell, wrists like iron, able to drink as much as he liked without batting an eyelid. So he would spend the whole afternoon mooching around the neighbourhood. When he had really irritated the women in the shop, Gervaise gave him twenty
sous
to get him out of the way. Off he went, to buy his tobacco at the Petite Civette in the Rue des Poissonniers, where he usually had a plum brandy when he met a friend. Then he would finish off the twenty
sous
at Chez François, on the corner of the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, where there was a nice little wine, quite young, to wet your whistle with. This was an old-fashioned drinking-house, a black shop with a low ceiling and a smoke-filled room at the side where they sold soup. And there he would stay until evening, playing cards for glasses of wine; he had credit with François,
who solemnly promised never to give the bill to his old lady. Well, what do you expect? You had to wash your throat out a bit, to get rid of the muck from last night. One glass of wine leads to another. In any case, he was always a good fellow, didn't chase after women, though of course he liked a bit of fun, and was no more averse to a drink than the next man, but within reason: he had nothing but contempt for those disgusting types who got drunk all the time, so that you never saw them sober! He would come home as fresh and as merry as a lark.

‘Has your boyfriend been round?' he would sometimes ask Gervaise, to tease her. ‘We never see him nowadays; I'll have to go and fetch him.'

The boyfriend was Goujet. In fact, he avoided visiting too often, for fear of getting in the way and causing gossip. He did, however, seize upon any opportunity, brought the washing, or walked back and forth twenty times along the pavement. There was one corner in the shop, at the back, where he liked to stay for hours, sitting motionless, smoking his short pipe. Once every ten days, in the evening when he had had dinner, he would dare to come there and settle in; and he hardly said a word, keeping his lip buttoned and his eyes fixed on Gervaise, taking his pipe out of his mouth only to laugh at everything she said. When they were working late on a Saturday, he would lose himself in thought, apparently better entertained there than if he had been at the theatre. Sometimes, they would be ironing until three o'clock in the morning. A lamp hung from the ceiling, on a wire; the shade cast a great circle of bright light, in which the clothes took on the soft whiteness of snow. The apprentice would put up the shutters on the shop, but as the July nights were blazing hot, they would leave the door open on to the street. And, as it got later and later, the girls would loosen their clothes, to be more comfortable. Their skin was delicate, made gold by the light from the lamp, especially Gervaise's skin. She had become plump, her shoulders fair, shining like silk, with a dimple like a baby's on the neck: he knew it so well that he could have drawn the little crease from memory. At such times, he was overcome by the great heat of the stove, and the smell of the linen steaming under the irons; and he drifted into a gentle reverie, his thoughts wandering and his eyes captivated by these women as they
hurried about, swinging their naked arms, sacrificing their night so that the neighbourhood could wear its Sunday best. All around the shop, the nearby houses dozed, the heavy silence of sleep slowly falling. The clocks sounded midnight, then one o'clock, then two. The carriages and passers-by had gone. Now, in the dark deserted street, only the door cast a ray of light, like a bolt of yellow material spread out across the ground. Occasionally, footsteps could be heard in the distance. Someone was coming; and, when he crossed the stream of light, he turned towards it, surprised by the noises of the irons and taking away with him a brief glimpse of half-dressed women in a pinkish haze.

Seeing that Etienne was in Gervaise's way, and wanting to save him from Coupeau's kicks up the backside, Goujet had him taken on to work the bellows at his forge. The job of nail-maker was not attractive in itself, because of the dirt in the forge and the boredom of constantly hammering on the same pieces of iron, but it was well paid: you could earn ten or twelve francs a day. The boy was now twelve years old and could soon start at it, if he liked the work. So Etienne had become a further link between the washerwoman and the blacksmith, who would bring the boy home and tell her how well he was doing. Everyone laughed and told Gervaise that Goujet had a crush on her. She was well aware of it, and reddened like a young girl, with a maidenly blush that put a bright spot on her cheeks like a little crab-apple. Oh, the poor sweet boy! There was no harm in him! He had never spoken about it to her, never made a crude remark or gesture. There were not many such decent men. And, though she wouldn't admit it, she felt a great joy at being loved in this way, like a holy virgin. Whenever she had anything that seriously worried her, she thought of the blacksmith, and felt better. If they were on their own together, they were not at all embarrassed; they looked straight in each other's faces, smiling, not saying what they felt. It was a sensible kind of affection, not thinking about any kind of misbehaviour, because it is better to have a quiet life, when you can manage to be happy and be calm.