Death on the Installment Plan (11 page)

At the tollgate my uncle and Papa went into a bar for a beer. The ladies and myself collapsed wheezing and panting on a bench outside and waited for our pop. Everybody was in a foul temper. In the end I was the victim. Storm-clouds hung over the family. Auguste was aching for a tantrum. He was just looking for a pretext. He was pooped, he was sniffing like a bulldog. No one but me would do. the others would have told him where to get off … He took a stiff drink of pernod. He wasn’t used to it, it was a dumb thing to do … On the grounds that I’d torn my pants he gave me a royal thrashing. My uncle stuck up for me, kind of. That only added to his fury.

It was on the way back from the country that I got my worst lickings. There are always crowds of people at the city gates. I screeched as loud as I could just to get his goat. I stirred up mob sentiment, I rolled under the café tables. I heaped mountains of shame on him. He blushed from head to foot. He hated attracting attention. I hoped it would make him bust. We started off again with our tails between our legs, our backs bent over the infernal machine.

There were always such scenes on the way back from our trips that my uncle gave up the whole idea.

“Of course the air is good for the little fellow,” they said, “but the automobile gets him upset …”

Mademoiselle Méhon had the shop straight across from us. You can’t imagine what a dog she was. She was always trying to pick a fight with us, she never stopped plotting, she was jealous. And yet she was doing all right with her corsets. She was an old woman and she still had her faithful clientele, handed down from mother to daughter for the last forty years. Women that wouldn’t have let just anybody see their bosoms.

Things came to a head over Tom, who’d got into the habit of pissing against the shopwindows. Still, he wasn’t the only one. Every mutt in the neighborhood did worse. The Passage was their promenade.

The Méhon woman crossed the street for no other purpose than to provoke my mother, to make a scene. It was scandalous, she bellowed, the way our mangy cur befouled her window … Her words resounded on both sides of the shop and up to the glass roof. The passersby took sides. It was a bitter brawl. Grandma, ordinarily so careful about her language, gave her a good tongue-lashing.

When Papa came home from the office and heard about it, he flew into such a temper you couldn’t bear to look at him. He rolled his eyes so wildly in the direction of the old bag’s shop window we were afraid he was going to strangle her. We did our best to stop him, we clung to his overcoat … He had developed the strength of a legionnaire. He dragged us into the shop … He bellowed loud enough to be heard on the fourth floor that he was going to make hash out of that damn corsetmaker … “I shouldn’t have told you about it,” my mother wailed. The harm was done.

In the weeks that followed my life was a little more peaceful. My father was absorbed. Whenever he had a moment’s free time, he’d glare at the corset shop. She did the same. They’d spy on each other from behind the curtains, floor by floor. The moment he got home from the office, he’d begin to wonder what she might be up to. It was directly across the street … When she was in her kitchen on the second floor, he’d be standing in the corner of ours, muttering ferocious threats …

“Will you look at the rotten old bag! Isn’t she ever going to poison herself? … Couldn’t she take some mushrooms? Couldn’t she swallow her false teeth? Hell! She even examines her food for ground glass …” He couldn’t stop staring at her. He had no time for my propensities … It was better in a way.

The neighbors were afraid to commit themselves. Dogs urinated all over the place, on their windows too, not just on hers. It was no use sprinkling sulphur, the fact is that the Passage des Bérésinas was a kind of sewer. Piss brings company. Anybody who felt like it pissed on us, even grown-ups, especially if it was raining out in the street. They came in just for that. People even crapped in the little side alley, the Allée Primorgueil. What call had we to complain? Often a pisser, with or without a dog. gets to be a customer.

After a while my father wasn’t satisfied with bristling at the corsetmaker, he’d work himself up against Grandma. “The dirty old bag—huh!—with her stinking mutt, you want me to tell you what she’s been doing? … You don’t know? … She’s sly … she’s underhanded! She’s an accomplice. Well, there you have it. They’re in it together, cooking up some lousy trick … and it’s nothing new! Ah, those two bitches! … What for? You really want to know? To drive me raving mad. That’s all. That’s the long and the short of it.”

“Come, come, Auguste. I assure you … You’re imagining things. You make a mountain out of the least word …”

“I’m imagining things? Why don’t you come right out and say I’m nuts! Go ahead! Imagining things! Ah, Clémence, you’re incorrigible. Life goes on and you don’t learn a thing … We’re being persecuted, that’s what! Stepped on! Ridiculed! They’re dishonoring me. And what have you to say? That I’m imagining things! No! Oh, it’s too much!”

And damned if he didn’t burst into tears. It was his turn.

We weren’t the only ones in the Passage with stands, kidney-shaped tables, little chairs, and fluted Louis XVI pieces. Our competitors, the junk dealers, sided with Méhon. That was to be expected. My father couldn’t sleep anymore. His nightmare was cleaning the sidewalk outside our shop. He’d wash down the flags every morning before going to work.

He’d come out with his pail, his broom, his rag, and the little trowel he’d slip under the turds, to pick them up and throw them in the sawdust. What a humiliation for a man with his education! The turds increased in number and there were many more in front of our shop, lengthwise and crosswise, than anywhere else. Obviously a plot.

Mademoiselle Méhon was at her second-floor window grinning from ear to car as she watched my father battling the shit. It gave her a kick that lasted all day. The neighbors collected to count the turds.

Bets were laid that he wouldn’t be able to clean it all up.

He’d make it fast, then he’d rush in to put on his collar and tie. He had to be at La Coccinelle before anyone else to open the mail.

Baron Méfaise, the director, counted on him implicitly.

This was when tragedy hit the Cortilènes. A drama of passion at Number 147 in the Passage. It was in the papers; for a whole week there was a dense crowd parading, grunting, pondering, and spitting outside their shop.

I’d seen Madame Cortilène lots of times, my mother made her blouses of fine Irish linen with lace insets. I remember well her long eyelashes, her eyes full of gentleness, and the looks she gave even a kid like me. I’d often jerk off thinking of her.

During fittings you get to see shoulders, skin … The moment she left, it never failed, I’d run up to the can on the fourth floor and masturbate strenuously. I’d come down with big rings under my eyes.

Those people had scenes too, but they were over jealousy. Her husband didn’t want her to go out. He did the going out. He was a former officer, small and dark-haired, with a terrible temper. They sold rubber goods at 147, drainage tubes, instruments, and “articles” …

Everyone in the Passage said she was too pretty to keep that kind of shop …

One day her jealous husband came home unexpectedly. He found her upstairs starting up with two men; it gave him such a shock that he pulled out his revolver and shot her first and then himself, straight in the mouth. They died in each other’s arms.

He hadn’t been out more than fifteen minutes.

My father’s revolver was a military model, he hid it in the bedside table. The caliber was something enormous. He had brought it home from the army.

The Cortilène tragedy might have given my father grounds for the worst tantrums, something to yell about. Actually it made him clam up. He hardly spoke at all.

There was no lack of turds on the sidewalk outside our door. With all the people who passed, there was so much spit it made the pavement sticky. He cleaned it all up. And not a peep out of him. That was such a revolution in his habits that my mother began to watch him when he locked himself up in his room. He’d stay there for hours. He neglected his deliveries, he gave up drawing. She’d look in through the keyhole. He’d pick up his gat, he’d turn the cylinder. You’d hear “click, click” … He seemed to be practicing up.

One day he went out alone and came back with cartridges, a whole box of them. He opened them up in front of us, to make sure we’d got a good look. He didn’t say a word, he just put the box down on the table beside the noodles. My mother was scared stiff; she flung herself on the floor, she clasped his knees and implored him to throw it all in the garbage. It was no use. He was as stubborn as a mule. He didn’t even answer. He shook her off roughly and swilled a quart of the red stuff all by himself. He refused to eat. When my mother kept after him, he pushed her against the cupboard. Then he beat it down to the cellar and closed the trap over his head.

We heard him shooting: Ping! Ping! Ping! … He took his time, the shot rang out, followed by a tremendous echo. He must have been shooting at the empty barrels. My mother called down to him, screaming through the cracks …

“Auguste! Auguste! I implore you! Think of the child! Think of me! Call your father, Ferdinand!”

“Papa! Papa!” I bellowed …

I wondered whom he was going to kill. Mademoiselle Méhon? Grandma Caroline? Both of them like at the Cortilènes? He’d have to find them together.

Ping! Ping! Ping! … He went right on shooting. The neighbors came running. A bloodbath, they thought …

He ran out of ammunition. In the end he came upstairs … When he raised the trap, he was as pale as a corpse. We clustered around him, we held him up, we settled him in the Louis XIV armchair in the middle of the store. We spoke to him ever so gently. His revolver, still smoking, dangled from his wrist.

When she heard the shooting, Madame Méhon shat in her skirts … She came over to see what was going on. Then right in front of all the people my mother told her good and loud what she thought of her. And my mother wasn’t the bold kind.

“Come right in! Take a good look! Look at the state you’ve driven him to. A good man! A family man! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Oh! You’re a wicked woman!”

Madame Méhon hadn’t much to say for herself. She went back home in a hurry. The neighbors gave her hard looks. They comforted my father. “My conscience is clear,” he kept mumbling under his breath. M. Visios, the pipe dealer who had been in the navy for five years, tried to placate him.

My mother wrapped the weapon in several layers of newspaper and then in a cashmere shawl.

My father went up to bed. She cupped him. He went on trembling for a couple of hours at least.

“Come, child … come!” she said when we were alone.

It was late. We ran down to Pont Royal by way of the rue des Pyramides … We kept looking to left and right to see if anybody was coming. We threw the package in the drink.

We returned home even faster than we’d come. We told my father we’d been taking Caroline home.

The next day he had terrible aches and pains … it killed him to stand up. For the next week at least, it was Mama that had to scrub the sidewalk.

Grandma had her doubts about the forthcoming Exposition. The last one in ‘82 hadn’t done anything but screw up small business by making a lot of damn fools spend their money in the wrong way. After all that ballyhoo, all that fuss and bother, there was nothing left but two or three empty lots and a pile of rubbish so disgusting looking that even twenty years later nobody was willing to take it away … not to mention the two epidemics that the Iroquois, the blue, the yellow, and the brown savages had brought over.

The new exposition was bound to be even worse. There was sure to be cholera. Grandma was positive.

The customers were already beginning to save up, they were putting pocket money aside, finding a thousand pretexts for not buying anything … they were waiting for the “opening.” A rotten bunch of griping blackguards. My mama’s earrings never left the pawnshop.

“If the idea was to get the peasants to come in from the country, why couldn’t they arrange dances for them at the Trocadéro? … It’s big enough for everybody. They didn’t have to rip the whole city open and plug up the Seine … Should we throw money out the window because we’ve forgotten how to have fun by ourselves? No!”

That was how my Grandmother Caroline saw it. The moment she left, my father began racking his brains, trying to figure out what she had meant by her bitter words …

He discovered a hidden meaning … personal insinuations … threats … He was on his guard.

“At least I forbid you to discuss my private affairs with her! … Exposition hell! You want me to tell you, Clémence? It’s a pretext. What she’s getting at? You want to know? Well, I had a hunch the moment she opened her mouth. Divorce! … That’s what she wants!”

Then he pointed across the room at me in my corner. Ungrateful wretch! Sneaky little profiteer … getting fat on other people’s sacrifices … Me … with my shitass … my boils … my insatiable consumption of shoes … There I was! All this was about me, the scapegoat for all their misfortunes …

“Oh! Godammit! Godammit to hell! If it weren’t for him! Oh! What’s that? I’d clear out so fast. Bah! I can promise you that. I’d have done it long ago … long ago. Not tomorrow, see! This minute! Godammit! If we didn’t have this little hunk of shit on our hands! She wouldn’t keep harping, believe you me. Divorce! Oh! DIVORCE! …”