The Drinking Den (50 page)

‘Come on, Goody-Two-Shoes, don't make that face!' Coupeau shouted. ‘Away with killjoys! What do you want to drink?'

‘Nothing, of course,' the laundress answered. ‘I haven't had dinner yet.'

‘All the more reason. A drop of something will keep you going.'

She still hesitated, so Mes-Bottes put on a show of gallantry again. ‘I expect Madame likes something sweet,' he said softly.

‘What I like are men who don't get drunk,' she retorted, getting cross. ‘Yes, I like someone who brings home his pay and keeps his word when he makes a promise.'

‘Oh, so that's what's bugging you!' the roofer said, still smirking. ‘You want your share. So why are you refusing the offer of a drink, you great ninny? Take it, you've nothing to lose.'

She stared at him, very serious, wrinkling her forehead, a line crossing it like a dark bar. Then she replied slowly: ‘Well, now! You're right, that's a good idea. That way, we'll drink the money together.'

Bibi-la-Grillade got up to fetch her a glass of anisette. She drew her chair up to the table. As she was sipping her drink, she suddenly remembered something: she recalled the plum brandy she had taken, with Coupeau, sitting near the door, long ago, when he was courting her. In those days, she would eat the plum and leave the brandy; now,
here she was, drinking liqueurs. Oh, she knew herself, she didn't have an ounce of will-power! You would only have needed to slap her on the back to send her headlong into drink. She was even thinking that it tasted rather good, this anisette, a little too sweet perhaps, slightly sickly. And she sipped at her glass, listening to Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst) talking about his affair with big Eulalie, the one who sold fish in the street, a really artful piece who could sniff him out in any wine shop even while she was wheeling her barrow along the pavement; it was all very well for his friends to warn him and hide him, she would often catch him even so, and only the day before she had given him a slap round the face to teach him not to skip work. Now that was funny. Bibi-la-Grillade and Mes-Bottes, their ribs bursting with laughter, slapped Gervaise across the back until she finally began to laugh herself, reluctantly, as though someone was tickling her. And they advised her to follow the example of big Eulalie, to bring her flat-iron and run it over Coupeau's ears on the bar-room table.

‘Well, thank you very much!' said Coupeau as he turned the empty anisette glass upside-down. ‘You certainly made short work of that! Have a look, boys: she doesn't hang around!'

‘Another one for Madame?' said Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst).

No, she had had enough. Even so, she hesitated. The anisette made her feel a little nauseous; she would like to have had something stiffer to settle her stomach. She glanced back at the intoxicator behind her. That darned cooking-pot, bulging like the belly of a plump boiler-maker's wife, with its nose sticking out and twisted, sent shivers down her back, a sense of fear mingled with desire. Really, it was like the metal entrails of some old hag, a sorceress releasing the fire from her guts drop by drop. A fine well of poison, so dreadful and outrageous that its workings should have been hidden away in the bottom of a cellar. But, for all that, she would like to get close to it, sniff its odour and taste the filth from it, even if it burned her tongue until the skin peeled like an orange.

‘What's that you're drinking?' she asked the men, slyly, her eyes lit up by the lovely gold colour in their glasses.

‘That
, my girl,' Coupeau replied, ‘is Old Colombe's fire-water. Don't be daft, we'll let you try some.'

They brought her a glass of vitriol and at the first sip her mouth contracted; but the roofer slapped his thighs and exclaimed:

‘There you are! That strips your throat! Drink it down in one gulp. Each round takes six francs off the doctor's fee.'

At the second glass, Gervaise no longer felt the hunger that had been ravaging her. Now, she was reconciled to Coupeau and no longer resented his failure to keep his word. They could go to the circus another day; it wasn't that amusing to see acrobats galloping around on horseback. It was not raining in Old Colombe's and even if the money was melting away in fire-water, at least they were getting the benefit, drinking it clear and shining like liquid gold. Oh, the rest of them could go hang! There was not much to enjoy in life; in any case, she felt somewhat consoled at doing her share of spending the money. Since she felt good, why not stay? They could bang away as much as they liked; she didn't like to budge once she was settled. She was simmering in the warmth, her blouse sticking to her back, bathing in a sense of well-being that made her limbs go numb. She was laughing to herself, leaning on the table and staring into space, very entertained by two customers at a nearby table, a great hulk of a man and a midget, who were so drunk that they were embracing wildly. Yes, she laughed at the drinking den, at Old Colombe's moon face, that huge sack of lard, at the customers smoking their pipes, yelling and spitting, and at the great gas flames shining on the mirrors and the bottles of drink. The smell no longer bothered her. On the contrary, it tickled her nose, she was enjoying it; her eyelids drooped and her breath grew shorter as she luxuriated in the drowsiness flowing over her. Then, after her third little glass, she let her chin rest on her hands, seeing nothing now except Coupeau and his friends. She was face to face with them, very close, her cheeks warmed by their breath, looking at their dirty beards as though counting the hairs on them. They were now very drunk. Mes-Bottes was dribbling, his pipe between his teeth, with the serious, silent look of a sleeping bull. Bibi-la-Grillade was telling a story about how he had emptied a litre bottle in a single gulp, bottoms up, without touching his lips.

Meanwhile, Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst) had gone to get the Wheel of Fortune off the counter and was playing Coupeau for the drinks.

‘Two hundred! Lucky bastard! You get the high numbers every time!'

The hand of the pointer grated and the picture of Fortune – a large red woman, under glass – whirled round until there was nothing in the middle except a round blur like a stain of spilled wine.

‘Three hundred and fifty! You put your foot on it, you rotter! That's it! I'm not playing any more!'

Gervaise was taking an interest in the spinning-wheel. She was tossing them back now, calling Mes-Bottes ‘my son'. Behind her, the intoxicator was still at work, murmuring like a subterranean river, and she despaired of stopping it, exhausted as she was, and consumed with dull anger against it, wanting to leap on top of the huge still as though on horseback, to kick her heels into it and burst its belly. Everything was confused; she could see the machine working and she felt as though she were clasped in its brass claws, with the stream now flowing through her body.

Then the room danced, the gaslights streaking like shooting stars. Gervaise was drunk. She could hear a furious debate between Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst) and that skinflint Old Colombe. What a thief the landlord was, always marking up the score. They weren't in Bondy,
⁵
after all. Then suddenly there was an uproar of shouting and a clatter of overturning tables. Old Colombe was throwing them all out, without too much ceremony, with a flick of the wrist. Outside, by the door, they were yelling at him, calling him a swindler. It was still raining and an icy little wind was blowing. Gervaise lost Coupeau, found him, then lost him again. She was trying to get home, feeling her way along the shop-fronts. She was amazed by the sudden darkness. At the corner of the Rue des Poissonniers, she sat down in the gutter, thinking she was at the wash-house. Her head was spinning with all that running water and she felt very ill. Finally, she got to the door and slipped quickly past the concierge's lodge, where she could clearly see the Lorilleux and the Poissons having dinner together and grimacing with disgust when they saw her in this state.

She never knew how she managed to get to the sixth floor. Upstairs, just as she was starting down the corridor, little Lalie, hearing her step, ran out, her arms wide open to embrace her, laughing and saying:

‘Madame Gervaise, Papa isn't back, why don't you come in and see the children sleeping… Oh, they're so sweet!'

Then confronted by the laundress's haggard face, she shrank back, shivering. She recognized that alcoholic breath, those pale eyes, those contorted lips. So Gervaise went by her unsteadily, without a word, while the little girl stood on the threshold of her door and looked after her with her dark eyes, silent and grave.

Nowadays, Nana no longer stuffed balls of paper down her front. She had grown breasts, a pair of brand-new white satin tits. Not that they embarrassed her in the slightest; she would like to have had a proper handful of them and dreamed, with the unconsidered greed of youth, about the great udders of a wet-nurse. The thing that made her most alluring was her wicked habit of poking a little bit of tongue out between her teeth; she must have seen herself in the glass and thought she looked pretty that way; and, since then, all day long, to show off, she poked out her tongue.

‘Put it in!' her mother shouted.

And Coupeau frequently had to interfere, punching her and shouting oaths:

‘Stop sticking that red rag out!'

She was very concerned about her appearance. She didn't always wash her feet, but she wore boots so tight that they made her go through agonies; and if you questioned her, because she was going
purple with it, she would say that she had the colic, to avoid confessing her vanity. When there was no bread in the house, it was hard for her to dress herself up, but at such times she achieved miracles, bringing ribbons home from the shop and running up a dress out of a dirty old piece of material, frayed and full of knots. The summer was when she came into her own. Every Sunday, in an organdie dress costing six francs, she would fill the neighbourhood of the Goutte-d'Or with her blonde beauty. In fact, she was well known from the outer boulevards to the fortifications and from the Chaussée de Clignancourt to the great Rue de la Chapelle. They called her the ‘little hen', because she really did have the tender flesh and sprightly manner of a young chicken.

One dress, in particular, suited her to perfection. It was a white dress with pink spots, very simple, with no trimmings. The skirt, a little short, showed her ankles, while the sleeves, wide and hanging, left her arms uncovered up to the elbows. The upper part of the bodice, which she would not pin back until she was on the staircase – to avoid a slap from Coupeau – opened in a heart shape that revealed her snow-white neck and the golden shadow of her bosom. And nothing more, nothing except a pink ribbon tied around her blonde hair, a ribbon the ends of which fluttered around the back of her neck. Done up like this, she was as fresh as a bunch of flowers. She exhaled a scent of youth, of the nakedness of both child and woman.

Sundays at that time were her days for meeting with the crowd, with all the men who strolled past and eyed her up. She looked forward to them all week, pricked by little desires, stifled, and feeling a need for the open air and a walk under the sun in the bustle of the Sunday streets. As soon as she got up, she started to dress, spending hours in her shift in front of the scrap of mirror hanging above the chest of drawers; and since the whole house could see her through the window, her mother would get annoyed and ask if she was going to spend much longer walking around with nothing on below. But she would be calmly sticking the curls on her forehead with sugar-water, sewing the buttons back on her boots or putting a stitch in her dress, her legs bare, her shift slipping off her shoulders, while she tossed back her tousled hair. Oh, she was cute like that, Coupeau would say, sniggering and teasing her; a real Mary Magdalene. She could have played the wild woman
at two
sous
a peek. He would shout at her: ‘Hide your meat while I'm eating my bread!' She was lovely, white and delicate under her mass of blonde hair, and so enraged that her skin would go pink, though she did not dare answer her father back, but bit off the thread with a furious snap of her teeth, which sent a shudder through her young girl's nakedness.

Then, immediately after lunch, she would leave. She went down into the yard. The house slept in the warm peace of Sunday afternoon; the downstairs workshops were closed and the flats yawned through their open windows, showing tables already laid for the evening meal and waiting for the family, which was working up an appetite with a walk along the fortifications. A woman, on the third floor, was spending the time washing out her room, rolling up her bed, moving the furniture around and singing the same song, hour after hour, in a sweet, melancholy voice. As they were not at work, Nana, Pauline and some other big girls played shuttlecock in the midst of the empty, echoing courtyard. There were five or six of them who had grown up together to become the queens of the house and now shared the men's stares between them. When a man crossed the yard, there was a burst of high-pitched laughter and their starched skirts swished past like a gust of wind. Above them, the holiday air flamed, burning and heavy, as though softened by idleness and whitened by the dust of strolling feet.

But the shuttlecock was only a pretext to escape. Suddenly a great silence fell over the house. The girls had just slipped out into the street, heading for the outer boulevards. Then, all six of them, arms linked across the whole width of the pavement, would set off, brightly dressed, their ribbons knotted around the hair on their bare heads. Casting sly looks out of the corners of their sharp eyes, they saw everything, throwing back their heads as they laughed, to show the plump whiteness of their chins. Amid these outbursts of merriment, when a hunchback went by or they met an old woman waiting for her dog by a milestone, their line broke, some hanging back while the others dragged them forward furiously; and they would swing their hips, fall about each other and let themselves go limp, in order to attract attention and allow their swelling forms to thrust against their bodices. The street belonged to them; they had grown up there, lifting
their skirts against the shop-fronts; and they were still lifting them up to their thighs to do up their garters. In the midst of the slow-moving, pallid crowd, between the sparse trees of the boulevards, they sped along from the Barrière Rochechouart to the Barrière Saint-Denis, pushing people aside, zigzagging their way through groups, and turning round to shout something through their exploding bursts of laughter. And, their dresses flying out behind them, they left the insolence of youth in their wake. They displayed themselves openly in the harsh light of day, with the crude vulgarity of street urchins, as alluring and tender as virgins returning from the baths, their damp hair hanging about their shoulders.

Nana took the middle, with her pink dress lit up by the sun. She would give her arm to Pauline, whose dress, yellow flowers on a white background, also shone, pricked with little flames. And since they were the plumpest, the most womanly and the most cheeky, they led the gang, luxuriating in looks and compliments. The others, mere kids, were strung out to the right and left, trying to puff out their chests and be taken seriously. Underneath, Nana and Pauline had very complicated plans for coquettish tricks. If they ran until they were out of breath, this was a tactic for showing off their white stockings and making the ribbons on their chignons flutter. Then, when they stopped, pretending to be gasping for breath, their heads thrown back, their chests heaving, you could look around and be sure to find someone they knew, a boy from the neighbourhood; so they would walk along, in a languid manner, whispering and laughing between themselves, watching with lowered eyes. They would exert themselves particularly for these chance meetings, in the bustle of the passing throng. Tall boys in their Sunday best, wearing jackets and round hats, would keep them on the edge of the pavement, joking and trying to pinch their waists. Twenty-year-old workmen, at ease in their grey smocks, chatted slowly with them, arms crossed, breathing the smoke from their pipes over them. It was of no consequence, these lads had grown up on the streets at the same time as they had. But among them they were already making their choices. Pauline always met one of the sons of Mme Gaudron, a cabinet-maker of seventeen, who bought her apples. From one end of the avenue to the other, Nana could recognize Victor Fauconnier, the laundress's
son, whom she used to kiss in dark corners. It never went further than that; they were too knowledgeable to do anything silly by accident; but hair-raising stories were told about them.

Then, when night fell, the thing these young tearaways loved best was to hang around where the showmen were. Escape artists and strongmen arrived and spread out a worn carpet on the soil of the avenue. At this, a crowd of onlookers assembled and formed a circle while the performer, in the middle, was flexing his muscles in a faded costume. Nana and Pauline would stay standing for hours, at the heart of the crowd, the lovely, bright dresses crushed between dirty jackets and overalls. Their naked arms, bare necks and uncovered hair were warmed by foul breath, in an atmosphere of sweat and wine fumes. And they would laugh, amused, feeling no disgust, pinker than ever as though flowering on their natural dunghill. Around them, people flung swear words and other crude expressions, the remarks of drunken men. This was their language, they knew everything, they would turn round with a smile, calmly shameless, preserving the delicate pallor of their satin-like skin.

The only thing that upset them was running across their fathers, especially when the men had been drinking. They kept an eye open and warned one another.

‘Hey, Nana,' Pauline suddenly exclaimed. ‘It's old Coupeau!'

‘So it is! And I don't suppose he's tipsy, is he? Not half, he isn't,' said Nana, in irritation. ‘I'm off. You know, I don't want him clipping me round the ear. Oh, look! He's tripped up! For God's sake! If only he'd break his bleeding neck!'

Other times, when Coupeau came straight at her, without giving her time to escape, she crouched down, muttering:

‘Hide me, you lot! He's after me; he promised to kick my arse if he caught me wandering around again.'

Then, when the drunkard had walked passed them, she got up and they all followed him, bursting with laughter. Now you see her, now you don't! A real game of hide-and-seek. But one day Boche came to drag Pauline home by the ear and Coupeau kicked Nana up the backside in the same direction.

As night fell, they took one final turn, coming back in the pale dusk
with the weary crowd. The air was thick with dust, turning the heavy sky pale. The Rue de la Goutte-d'Or was like a corner of some provincial town, with women gossiping on the doorsteps and bursts of chatter breaking through the silence of a district that was empty of carriages. The girls would pause for a moment in the courtyard, picking up their rackets, trying to give the impression that they had not budged from the spot. Then they went home, working up some tale, which they often did not need to use, if they found their parents exchanging blows over a soup that was undercooked or had too little salt in it.

Now that Nana was working, she earned forty
sous
at Titreville's, the establishment in the Rue du Caire where she had been apprenticed. The Coupeaus didn't want to move her, so as to keep her under the supervision of Mme Lerat, who had been in charge of the workshop for the previous ten years. In the morning, while the mother was looking at the time on the cuckoo clock, the girl set out by herself, looking sweet in her old black dress, which was tight across the shoulders, too small and too short. Mme Lerat was responsible for noting the time she arrived and would afterwards inform Gervaise. They allowed her twenty minutes to get from the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to the Rue du Caire, which was long enough, given that those skinny young girls have legs like young deer. Sometimes she would arrive dead on time, but so flushed and out of breath that she had certainly covered the distance from the barrier in ten minutes, after dilly-dallying on the way. More frequently, she was seven or eight minutes late; then she would be all sweetness and light with her aunt, with wide, imploring eyes, hoping to get on the right side of her and stop her telling Mme Lerat, who understood young people, would lie to the Coupeaus, while lecturing Nana interminably in tedious speeches about her responsibilities and the dangers lying in wait for a girl on the streets of Paris. Heavens above! There were enough men after her, herself! She would keep watch over her niece, her eyes constantly lit up with indecent thoughts, excited by the idea of preserving and curbing the innocence of this poor little kitten.

‘Now look,' she would say over and again, ‘you must tell me everything. I am too kind to you; there'd be nothing for me except to jump in the river if anything happened to you. You understand, my little
kitten, if any men should talk to you, you must tell me all about it. Everything, without leaving out a single word. Huh? No one's said anything to you yet, have they? Do you swear?'

At this, Nana would laugh with a laugh that pulled up the corners of her mouth in a peculiar manner. No, no, men didn't speak to her. She walked too quickly. Then, what would they have to tell her? Did she have any business with them? Huh? And she explained why she was late, looking as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth: she'd stopped to look at some pictures; or else she'd been walking with Pauline who knew lots of stories. If they didn't believe it, they could follow her: she never even quitted the left-hand pavement; and she went at a fair pace, passing all the other young girls, like a horse and carriage. One day, indeed, Mme Lerat had surprised her in the Rue du Petit-Carreau, with three other flower-makers no better than she was, looking up at a man shaving by his window; but Nana got angry, swearing that she had just been to the baker's on the corner to buy a penny loaf.

‘Oh, don't you worry, I'm watching her,' the tall widow told the Coupeaus. ‘I'll answer for her, as for myself. If some foul beast even tried to pinch her, I'd get between them.'

The workshop at Titreville's was a large room on the mezzanine with a wide table on trestles running right down the middle. Along all four empty walls, their mangy grey paper torn to reveal the plaster underneath, were shelves laden with old cardboard boxes, parcels and discarded models, abandoned there to gather a deep layer of dust. The gas had left a sort of wash of soot on the ceiling. The two windows opened so wide that the girls did not need to get up from the table to watch the people going past on the opposite pavement.