The Drinking Den (30 page)

‘Well, goodbye then,' said Virginie. ‘I only came down to get a few ounces of gruyère. Poisson must think I've been frozen to the spot.'

However, after she had gone about three yards along the pavement, she returned and opened the door again, to say that she could see Augustine at the end of the street, sliding about on the ice with some kids. The little hussy had been gone for two hours at least. She ran in, red-faced, breathless, with her basket over her arm and her chignon stuck together with a snowball; and she let herself be scolded, with a sly look, saying that you couldn't walk because it was so slippery. Some good-for-nothing lad must have filled her pockets with ice, as a joke, because quarter of an hour later, her pockets began to spray the shop like watering-cans.

From now on, every afternoon was spent like that. The shop became
the best place to go in the neighbourhood if you felt the cold. The whole of the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or knew that it was warm there. There were always talkative women warming themselves in front of the stove, with their skirts pulled up to their knees, forming a little coterie. Gervaise was proud of her good warmth and invited people in – she played the hostess, as the Lorilleux and the Boches said maliciously. The truth was that she remained obliging and helpful, so much so that she would bring the poor inside when she saw them shivering in the street. In particular, she developed a liking for a former house-painter, an old man of seventy who lived in a cubby-hole in the building, where he was shivering and starving to death. He had lost his three sons in the Crimea
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and, for the last two years, unable to hold a brush, had been living as best he could. When Gervaise saw Old Bru stamping around in the cold to keep warm, she would call him in and find a place for him beside the stove; she would often force him to eat a crust of bread with some cheese. Old Bru's body was bent, his beard grey and his face lined like an old apple. He would stay there for hours, saying nothing and listening to the sizzling of the coke. Perhaps he was remembering his fifty years' work up a ladder: half a century spent painting doors and whitewashing ceilings in every corner of Paris.

‘Now, then, Bru,' the laundress would ask him sometimes, ‘what are you thinking about?'

‘Nothing, all sorts of things,' he would answer, as though dazed.

The girls joked, saying that he was lovesick. But he didn't hear them. He would slip back into his pose of silent melancholy and meditation.

From that time onwards, Virginie often raised the subject of Lantier with Gervaise. She seemed to enjoy making her think about her former lover, for the pleasure of embarrassing her by speculating about him. One day, she remarked that she had met him; and, when the laundress said nothing, she went no further, only giving her to understand the next day that he had spoken about her at some length and with a good deal of affection. Gervaise was very disturbed by these whispered conversations, which took place in a corner of the shop. Lantier's name still gave her a burning sensation in the pit of her stomach, as though the man had left something of himself there, under her skin. Naturally,
she thought she was quite secure: she wanted to live like a decent, respectable woman, because that is half of happiness. So she did not consider Coupeau in the matter, having nothing against her husband to reproach herself with, even in thought. She thought of the blacksmith, her heart trembling and sick. It seemed to her that the memory of Lantier, coming back to her and slowly taking possession of her in this way, made her unfaithful to Goujet, to their unavowed love, which had the sweetness of friendship. Her days were sad when she felt guilty towards her dear friend. She would have liked to have had affectionate feelings only for him, outside her marriage. All these thoughts took place in her on some high plane far above any base desires that Virginie was trying to see reflected in her face.

When spring came, Gervaise went to find solace with Goujet. She was unable now to sit down and think about nothing, without her thoughts immediately turning to her first lover; she saw him leaving Adèle, packing his clothes at the bottom of their old trunk and coming back to her, with the trunk on a carriage. On days when she went out, she was suddenly possessed by ridiculous terrors, there in the street: she thought she could hear Lantier's footsteps behind her and didn't dare turn round, trembling, imagining that she could feel his hands grasping her waist. Of course, he must be spying on her; one afternoon, he would pounce on her; the idea put her in a cold sweat, because he would surely kiss her on the ear, as he used to do, to tease her, in the old days. It was this kiss that terrified her: anticipating it made her deaf, it filled her with a humming noise, against which she could no longer make out the heavy beating of her heart. So, when these fears gripped her, the forge was her only shelter. There she became once more calm and smiling, under Goujet's protection, his sounding hammer driving away her bad dreams.

What a happy time it was! The laundress took particular care of her customer in the Rue des Portes-Blanches, always taking the washing back to her herself, because the trip, every Friday, was an ideal excuse for going down the Rue Marcadet and going into the forge. As soon as she came round the corner of the street, she felt light and merry, as if she were going for a picnic in the midst of this waste ground, surrounded by grey factories. The highway, black with coal-dust, and
the tufts of steam above the roofs, pleased her as much as a mossy lane through a wood on the outskirts of town, hedged on both sides by great clumps of greenery. And she liked the pale horizon, with the stripes of tall factory chimneys standing up against it, and the Butte Montmartre,
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which cut off the sky, with its houses, white, dotted with regular lines of windows. Then, as she reached the forge, she would slow down, jumping over the puddles, taking pleasure in crossing the cluttered, unpeopled corners of the building site. At the far end, the forge glowed, even in the middle of the day, its heart thumping to the rhythm of the hammers. When she went in, she was quite red, the little blonde hairs on the nape of her neck floating loose like those of a woman arriving for an assignation. Goujet was waiting for her, his arms bare, his chest bare, hammering harder on the anvil on those days so as to be heard from further away. He felt her presence, greeting her with a hearty, silent laugh from behind his golden beard. But she didn't want to distract him from his work and begged him to pick up his hammer, because she liked him more when he was swinging it in his great arms, bulging with muscles. She would go and tap Etienne lightly on the cheek as he hung on the bellows, and stay there for an hour, watching the bolts. They didn't say ten words to one another. They could not have expressed their affection better had they been all alone in a room together behind a double-locked door. The sniggering of Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst) bothered them not one jot, because they didn't hear it. After a quarter of an hour, she started to feel stifled: the heat, the strong smells and the rising smoke made her feel dizzy, while the dull blows shook her from heel to head. At these moments, she wanted nothing more: this was her pleasure. If Goujet had seized her in his arms, it would not have given her such a powerful feeling. She went closer to him to feel the wind of his hammer on her cheeks, to be part of the blow that he was striking. When the sparks pricked her soft hands, she did not move them away but, on the contrary, took pleasure in this rain of fire that stung her skin. Naturally, he sensed the happiness that she enjoyed there, and kept back the hardest pieces for Fridays, so that he might court her with his full strength and all his skill; he did not spare himself, but risked splitting the anvil in two, panting, his back shuddering with the joy
he was giving her. So, for the length of one whole spring, their love filled the forge with a stormy rumbling. It was an idyll in a giant's smithy, in the midst of the blazing coals and the echoing shock of the shed, with its sooty black frame cracking under the strain. All that crushed iron, kneaded like red wax, preserved the rough impress of their loving. On Fridays, when the laundress left the Rue de la Gueule-d'Or, she would go slowly back up the Rue des Poissonniers, contented, weary, but calm in flesh and in spirit.

Little by little, her fear of Lantier faded and she became reasonable again. At that time, she might have lived very happily, were it not for Coupeau, who was definitely taking a turn for the worse. One day – when she was coming back from the forge, as it happened –she thought she saw Coupeau in Old Colombe's drinking den, ordering rounds of fire-water, with Mes-Bottes, Bibi-la-Grillade and Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst). She walked quickly past, not wanting it to seem as though she were spying on them. But she turned back: yes, it really was Coupeau who was tossing back his little glass of schnapps with a practised gesture. So he had been lying: he really had got on to the hard stuff now. She went home in despair, gripped by her deep horror of hard liquor. She could forgive him wine, because wine nourishes a workman; but liquor, on the other hand, was filth, a poison that took away his appetite for bread. Oh, the government really ought to prevent them from making that foul muck!

When she got to the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or she found the whole house at sixes and sevens. Her workers had left the laundry and were standing in the courtyard, looking upwards. She questioned Clémence.

‘It's old Bijard, giving his wife a good hiding,' said the girl. ‘He was in the doorway, drunk as a Pole, waiting for her to come back from the wash-house. He drove her all the way up the stairs with his fists and now he's thumping her up there in their room… Listen, can't you hear the screams?'

Gervaise went quickly upstairs. She was fond of Mme Bijard, her washerwoman, who was as brave as they come. She was hoping to put a stop to it. Upstairs, on the sixth, the door of the room was open and a few of the tenants were fussing around on the landing, while Mme
Boche was standing in front of the door and shouting: ‘Stop that, will you! We'll call the constabulary, do you hear?'

No one dared go inside, because they knew Bijard, a real brute of a man when he was drunk. Not that he was ever sober, as it happens. On the rare days when he worked, he would put down a litre of brandy beside his locksmith's bench and take a swig straight from the bottle every half-hour. He couldn't keep going otherwise. If you'd have put a lighted match near his mouth, he would have gone up like a torch.

‘But we can't let him murder her!' Gervaise said, shaking all over.

And she went in. The room, right under the roof, was bare and cold, emptied out by the man's drunkenness: he would take the clothes off the bed to sell for drink. In the struggle, the table had rolled over to the window, the two chairs had toppled over with their legs in the air. Mme Bijard was lying in the middle of the floor, her skirts, still wet from the wash-house, clinging to her thighs, her hair pulled out, bleeding and groaning heavily, with long drawn-out ‘ohs' ‘ahs' whenever Bijard kicked her. To start with, he had struck her down with his two fists, now he was stamping on her.

‘Oh, the bitch! Oh, the bitch! Oh, the bitch!' he was growling, in a husky voice, landing a new blow each time he said the word, repeating it obsessively, striking harder the more hoarse his voice became.

Then he lost his voice entirely, but he went on kicking silently, madly, standing stiff in his tattered blouse and overalls, his face purple beneath his dirty beard, his bald forehead covered in great red blotches. Outside, the neighbours were saying that he was beating her because she had refused to give him twenty
sous
that morning. They could hear Boche's voice at the bottom of the stairs. He was calling for Mme Boche, shouting up to her: ‘Come back down, let them kill each other, it will be that much less trash!'

While this was happening, Old Bru had followed Gervaise into the room. Between the two of them they tried to reason with the locksmith and push him towards the door. But he turned round, saying nothing, foaming at the mouth; and, in his pale eyes, the alcohol blazed up, lighting a murderous fire. Gervaise's wrist was scratched and bruised, and the old workman fell against the table. On the ground, Mme Bijard was panting harder than ever, her mouth wide open, her eyes closed.