The little girl who was suffering from toothache shouted angrily: ‘Hey, do ya’ think you’re dealing with animals here?’
Auguste noticed that Désirée said nothing and continued to work.
The young girl felt his gaze fall on her and no longer dared raise her eyes. He was nice and friendly, but that wasn’t saying a lot, maybe he was a bad sort, a drinker quick to argue; he was, in any case, a poor worker, a common labourer on forty centimes an hour since they were employing him only for unskilled manual work. And yet he didn’t have the air of a drunkard or an imbecile. As for looks, he’d make an acceptable lover, and what’s more he didn’t leer at her indecently, like so many others she’d had to put in their place. It was just a shame he didn’t look more confident and more cheerful.
Indeed, he was neither confident nor cheerful. Auguste could be classed among those that people call ‘namby-pamby’. Having left home as a soldier, he returned, after five years of military service, to live with his mother; he’d applied to the bindery on the off chance, after hearing that a man, if he was willing, could quickly learn the work and easily earn his living.
The firm of Débonnaire & Co. was well-known on the streets of the capital; it frequently hired casual labour and could furnish work even to those with little knowledge of the bookbinding trade. Auguste had turned up, he’d addressed himself to Désirée rather than to any other woman. Why? he couldn’t say; no doubt because she’d seemed to him like a nice girl who wouldn’t make fun of him. The other women, he thought, had a devilishly bitchy air about them, and this handsome lad was afraid of being ridiculed by them. If they’d been men he could have resorted, if necessary, to fists, but with women he felt hesitant and indecisive, was unskilled at witty ripostes, blushing to his ears at a quip that made them all laugh.
When he was a soldier he’d hardly ever run after women, whether cooks or camp followers; and on his way back to his mother’s, as luck would have it he never stayed in a house filled with whores or teeming with tarts ready to show him a good time. He certainly wasn’t unaware of how that agreeable thing which young women workers call ‘a quick bang’ was performed, but whether from stupidity, from shame or from bad luck, he’d never had what his buddies called a girlfriend. Once, he’d been in love with a woman for a week, but she was so indecent, so steeped in vice, that he’d been disgusted and ashamed of his depravity. The rest of the time he’d gone to drink
café longs
on the Boulevard de Montrouge, in those little bars with gilded ceilings where women wearing next to nothing dance polkas and bawl out songs, or doze half-asleep, tits out and chins between their fists. Ah, by God he hadn’t turned his nose up at those women; he had found some among them with knowing faces and pretty laughs. But all that wasn’t the kind of satisfaction he’d dreamed about. This grown boy, whose sensual appetites were lively enough, passionately desired a mistress. He wanted to spend his evenings and his Sundays with her. He never drank more than three glasses of wine after dinner, played billiards only rarely, never got blind drunk at the bar, and consequently he was very bored. He needed a woman at any price; he was hoping for a nice girl who’d be modest in front of his friends and wouldn’t lead him into expenses where he’d be the one left paying the bill.
In terms of niceness, Désirée pleased him greatly. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what she was like. Nevertheless, inexperienced though he was, he was certain she must be chaste. That revealed itself immediately in a workshop, in the way that people spoke to her, in the girl’s silence in the face of bawdy remarks, and in her indifference at hearing them. Women who get indignant about them have certainly had a lover or two, they’re more prudish than virgins. Moreover, it’s always the same story; fallen women have no more pitiless judges than those who have themselves once been duped by a man.
Did he please her, that was the question? He had a nice face, but he didn’t have that self-assurance, that cockiness that girls admire; she was in no doubt that he was enchanted by her, and naturally she was flattered.
Once, she had to get up to go and collect some work on a trestle table propped next to the press. Her cheeks blushed slightly when she brushed past him. Auguste froze like an idiot. From a distance, he’d been trying to take a look at her; up close, he no longer dared. As she returned to her place, her body leaning back slightly, carrying the pages she had to stitch in her arms, he found her decidedly attractive.
He was annoyed with himself for not being braver. Why didn’t he say something to her when she was next to him? But, in truth, what could he have said to her? In a workshop, everyone is watching and listening; he couldn’t have said a word, even in a whisper, without it being heard, and then she’d have certainly got angry. No matter, he should still have taken the chance. He mused about making up for his cowardice by following her home that evening; he asked himself what he’d say when he approached her: if she didn’t rebuff him he’d offer to buy her a drink at a bar, and there he’d feel more at ease. The main thing was that she didn’t give him the brush off at the first word.
Then it occurred to him that this would certainly be a waste of effort; she would have to have neither a boyfriend nor a lover before she accepted his offer. It was odds on that someone would be waiting for her when she left work.
In the meantime, as old Chaudrut was lugging reams of octodecimo paper around and piling them behind the water machine he introduced himself. He seemed to Auguste like such a worthy man. The fact is that the old fart was always obliging and gracious to newcomers. This one looked young, and wouldn’t be too hard to con. Auguste turned the conversation round to the women at the bindery and tried to make it alight on the young girl.
The old fox let him dig himself into a hole asking what he thought were very deft enquiries; with his gaze flickering beneath his glasses, this swindler had guessed the direction of Auguste’s questions. He told him what he wanted to hear; he praised Désirée, informed his young colleague that she had a sister and pointed her out to him, he pretended to have a high regard for the younger girl who was chaste and belonged to a very honourable family, finally he extorted a ten sou piece from the young man and then hastened to get away, so he could go and spend it on drink.
All this time Désirée understood, without hearing any of the words exchanged between the two men, that they were talking about her. She ran her hand through the waves of her hair, adjusted the pink ribbon that quivered whenever she raised or lowered her head, and resolved, in the event that Auguste followed her in the street, to receive him as coldly as possible, in order to make him understand that she was an honest girl, attainable only by marriage.
He was a little disconcerted. The young girl was burying her nose in her work to provoke him, he looked at her sister and thought her terribly vulgar. She had a low-cut blouse, a raggedy hairnet, and she was yelling to the men at the trimming machines: ‘Hey, any of you drunken bums going to get a round in?’
That can’t be her sister, that or Désirée must be a sanctimonious prude, which in many ways wasn’t much better. He adopted this as an excuse, delighted at not having to think of himself as a loser if he didn’t ask her out…but it wasn’t possible. The supervisor, a sour virgin who was implacable when it came to berating sins she hadn’t had the fortune to commit herself, called her ‘my child’, chatted with her about her sick mother, and treated her with a respect she had for neither Céline nor any of the others.
And besides, when all was said and done wasn’t he free to take the same route home as her? Yes but then, if he didn’t speak to her, he’d be nothing but an idiot. He had to make up his mind, it was almost time to leave.
The men had already sneaked off, for the most part. The women were hurrying to finish their tasks. The din of the workshop was dying down to a vague murmur. The women took off their aprons and began to tease the cat, who was prowling around, defiant, claws at the ready. Puss-puss ran over the tables, whiskers and tail swaying; he made his rounds, letting himself be touched by some and staring at others with a cold look, then, having eaten all the leftovers from the emptied baskets, he jumped onto a chair, plunged his head beneath a raised leg and began furiously biting at his fleas.
The women left in a group. Désirée was stroking Puss-puss, waiting for her sister to get ready. She was really very alluring with her blue woollen hooded shawl and her corkscrew curls. So as not to feel self-conscious she was scratching the cat’s chin; it purred even more contentedly, opening gleaming topaz eyes, faintly barred with a black line.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Céline.
Désirée kept looking behind her on the way and she caught sight of the young man, who pretended to study the rooftops whenever she turned around. He followed behind them as far as Montparnasse station, but he didn’t seem to want to get any closer. The younger girl was vexed. She would have preferred to be accosted and play hard to get; she even stopped for a moment on the pretext of pulling up her stocking, which had rucked up in her boot. Auguste didn’t know how to, or didn’t dare, take advantage of the occasion. Désirée started walking again.
And yet, that night, when the lamp was extinguished and she began dreaming about the newcomer with the blond moustache, she almost forgave him. He wasn’t with it, that much was evident, but, all in all, at least he didn’t look like one of those worthless dogs who keep their women in line with kicks and slaps.
‘That’s something,’ she sighed, and burying her white face in the pillow she began to snore gently, her mouth half open and her nose wheezing.
‘Come on, shut yer gobs, you can pick your nose if you want, but shut up! No more messing around, the contest is about to begin, it’s me, Marseille, the one and only Marseille, it’s me who fought against the most famous wrestlers in Europe during the Great Exhibition of 1867, in the ring on the Rue Le Peletier, and none of those who came within reach of my hands can boast they stayed upright.’ And his cronies, scattered among the crowd, began shouting: ‘I’ll take you on, pass me some gloves!’
‘Who to? To you, you little squirt?’
‘Yes! Yes!’
And the crowd began to applaud, to stamp their feet, to rush into the wrestling booth.
‘Come on in! Come on in!’ cried the athlete through a megaphone, and the trombones blared as if their brass was about to burst, bells clanged at full tilt, cymbals crashed desperately, high-pitched fifes whined piercingly, and amid this hellish tumult, calm and chewing tobacco, huge musclemen stood erect on the podium, flexing their hairy torsos and making their bulging biceps leap. Around them, everyone was pushing, shoving, cheering and whistling.
‘Hey, kids!’
‘Come on, Paul!’
‘Eh, Louis!’
‘Over here, old man!’
And like a wave of dirty water, the crowd beat against the booth where, breathless, red-faced, sweating, wild, Marseille was yelling without respite: ‘Come on in! Come on in!’
Désirée had her arm through Céline’s and was enjoying herself. Anatole and Colombel were smoking cigarette stubs and blowing smoke rings; both of them wanted to go and see the fight. Céline and Désirée didn’t, especially the younger, who was listening to the patter of a clown whose job it was to keep the crowd excited, reciting his monologue with extravagant gestures.
The tent was already full because you could hear the stamping of boots, roars of laughter, and every now and then the canvas bulged from the backsides of the too tightly-packed crowd. A carny in sulphur-coloured trousers and a yellow waistcoat embellished with red braid, a Robespierre-style waistcoat with lapels sticking up over his bottle-green suit, was making the ponytail of his old-fashioned perruque jiggle up and down as he shouted: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have the honour of offering you a second performance! For this time, and this time only, tickets will be reduced: fifty centimes for front row seats, twenty-five centimes for the stalls, and fifteen centimes for military gentlemen!’ And the music, carried away by its own din, hacked out its tunes even more furiously; the carny blew on the mouthpiece of his tin whistle, which lofted its bitter screech over the explosion of brass and the thundering of the bass drum, and then he broke off to fool around on his instrument, sticking it in his eyes, up his nose, in his mouth, holding out three fingers in front of his bald pate, repeating over and over again: ‘Fifteen centimes, three sous, for military gentlemen.’
Colombel fidgeted, carried away by a mad desire. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go in. I’ll pay for the ladies.’ But the ladies preferred to wander round the fair, rather than have to sit for quarter of an hour through a performance. The men were forced to follow them.
A dense crowd was streaming between the booths; clutches of children boistered about, blowing on toy trumpets, faces smeared with gingerbread, snotty-nosed and full of life. Others were being carried in the arms of their parents, waving mitts sticky with barley sugar as they danced up and down in their swaddling. People stepped on each other’s toes, they shoved each other, young layabouts played kazoos and pranced around, stopping in front of shooting galleries, attempting to break eggs held aloft by jets of water. These booths, scattered here and there, were heaving with people standing on tip-toe, leaning on the shoulders of those in front of them, trying to look through gaps between heads at the massacre of innocents, the dolls dressed up as peasants, as newlyweds, as princes, that were being shot at by air rifles.
The best shot was to knock over the bride. Whenever the virgin fell arse over tit, the crowd would let fly with the most impertinent remarks, the most unambiguous allusions; Anatole was desperate to shoot her down. As for Colombel, he said he was thirsty and Céline that she was hungry. Anatole slaughtered a well-dressed gentleman, but, after having missed the others, he went off, vexed at having been called a bad shot by his mistress.
Colombel declared yet again that he needed to ‘lubricate the larynx’ before going any further. The girls demanded that they stop at a tent where they were making waffles. There, they could eat and drink. The seats were bad, of course, and the dust, swirling around them, covered the tables and glasses with gritty ash, but it was still better than the back room of a bar. The establishment wasn’t very grand: ten tables, thirty stools, a waffle iron, a bowl full of white batter; at the back there were some barrels on a rack and, hanging outside, a French flag; that was all, but it had the advantage that its clients could see everyone passing by and win macaroons playing on the wheel-of-fortune.