Monsieur Monde Vanishes (16 page)

The quarter of an hour that he then spent, alone with the woman who had once had such innocent eyes and who had borne him two children, was something about which he never spoke afterward, and of which perhaps he managed to stop thinking.

The lodger, a jazz musician who had been confined to his room for a few days with pleurisy, had gone back to bed. Only the maid lingered on the landing. She was relieved when at last she heard the doctor's footsteps on the stairs.

When the latter opened the door, Thérèse was lying across the bed with her legs hanging down. Désiré was stretched half across her, pinning her down with his weight and holding her mouth shut with his hand, from which the blood was streaming.

He was in such a dazed condition that for a moment he could not understand what the doctor had come for, and stayed there in his strange position.

Then he got up, rubbed his hand over his eyes, and swayed. For fear of fainting, he went to lean against the wall, and the whitewash left marks all over one side of his suit.

The doctor had offered to take her to a hospital, but he had refused. The others could not understand why.

One injection had quieted her. She lay with her eyes wide open. But she was so calm, with such a vacant look, that she seemed to be sleeping.

On the landing he had had a whispered conversation with the doctor.

And now the two of them were alone together. He had sat down on a chair. Sometimes he felt a great hammering inside his head and at other times a dizziness, as though a sort of vacuum were sucking him down and preventing him from thinking. Now and then he would say mechanically, as though speaking were a relief to him: “Go to sleep.…”

He had switched off the electric lamp, but the moonbeams were streaming in through the open skylight and it was in that cold light that he saw her, transfigured; he tried to avert his eyes, because she looked like a dead woman, with the same pinched nostrils that the dead have, the same unsubstantial quality.

Once when he glanced toward the bed a shudder ran through him, because he seemed to see there not Thérèse but his son Alain, who had almost the same features, and in any case the same pale eyes and waxen complexion.

People were returning to the hotel. Their footsteps almost always stopped on the lower floors. He automatically counted the landings. Four … Five … This time they came on, up to the sixth floor. A woman's. There was a knock on the door.

He realized that it was Julie.

“Come in.…”

She was taken aback by the darkness, the strange look of these two creatures, the woman prostrate and open-eyed, the man sitting on a chair and holding his head in his hands. She began, in an undertone: “Is she …”

She dared not finish.

“Is she dead?”

He shook his head and rose wearily. Now he'd have to explain things. My God, how complicated it all was!

He drew her to the door and onto the landing.

“Who is she? Did you know her? I heard, at the Monico … The boss is furious.…”

He disregarded this.

“You knew her, didn't you?”

He nodded. And she promptly guessed something further.

“Your wife?”

“My first wife …”

She showed no surprise, rather the reverse. It looked as if she had always suspected something of the sort.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know.…”

“Tomorrow you'll have to start all over again … We know her sort.…”

“Yes.”

“Who gave you some?”

“The doctor …”

“When the time comes she'll want some more.…”

“I know.… He's left me an ampule.”

It was extraordinary. Words, phrases, even facts themselves—realities, in short—had lost all importance for him now. He was lucid and he was aware of it, he knew he was giving rational answers to all her questions, and behaving like a normal man. At the same time he felt very far away, or rather very high up; he could see Julie in her evening dress, on the landing, under the dusty electric-light bulb, he could see himself with ruffled hair and open-necked shirt.

“You're bleeding.…”

“It's nothing.…”

“She did it, didn't she?”

Yes, of course! All this was unimportant. In the last few hours, perhaps in the last few minutes, for he didn't know quite when it had happened, he had taken such a prodigious leap that he could look down with cold lucidity on the man and woman whispering, on a hotel landing, shortly before daybreak.

He was certainly not a disembodied spirit. He was still Monsieur Monde, or Désiré, more likely Désiré.… No! It didn't matter.… He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going.

And now, in the moonlight, he suddenly saw life differently, as though with the aid of some miraculous X-ray.

Everything that had counted previously, the whole integument and flesh and the outward appearance of it all, had ceased to exist, and what there was in their place …

But there! It wasn't worth talking about it to Julie or to anyone else. And in any case it wasn't possible. The thing was
incommunicable
.

“Is there anything you need?” she was asking. “Wouldn't you like me to have some coffee sent up?”

No … Yes … He did not care. On the whole, no, so that he could be left in peace.

“You'll let me know how things are going?”

He promised. She only half believed him. Perhaps she expected to discover, when she woke at midday, that he had gone away with the woman now lying on the iron bedstead?

“Well, cheer up!”

She went off, regretfully. She would have liked to communicate something to him herself, to tell him … what, exactly? That she had realized from the start that it wasn't for ever. That she was just a common girl but that she could guess how things were; that …

He saw her, at the bend in the staircase, looking up at him again. He went back into the bedroom and closed the door; he had a shock on hearing a voice mumble faintly: “Who was that?”

“A girl I know …”

“She's your …”

“No … just a friend.”

Thérèse reverted to staring at the sloping ceiling. He sat on his chair again. From time to time he raised his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his hand, which she had bitten deeply.

“Did he leave you any more?” she asked again without moving, speaking in the hollow voice of a sleepwalker.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“One.”

“Give it to me now.…”

“Not yet …”

She resigned herself, like a little girl. And in her present state she seemed far more childish and yet far older than when he had seen her in town the day before. His own face, too, when he lingered for a quarter of an hour in front of his mirror, shaving, often seemed to him like that of a child grown old. Is a man ever anything more than that? You talk of the years as though they existed. Then you notice that between the moment when you still went to school, even between the moment when your mother tucked you up in bed, and the moment you're living through now …

The moon was still shining faintly in the sky when the dark blue of night yielded to the light blue of morning, and the bedroom walls took on a less livid, less inhuman whiteness.

“You're not asleep?” she asked again.

“Not now.”

“I do so want to sleep!”

Her poor weary eyelids were fluttering, she was clearly on the verge of tears; she was far thinner than she used to be, an old woman with barely anything left of her body.

“Listen, Norbert.…”

He got up and went to splash his face with water, making a noise on purpose to prevent her from speaking. It was better so.

“Won't you listen to me?”

“What's the use?”

“Are you angry with me?”

“No. Try to sleep.…”

“If you'd give me the second ampule …”

“No. Not before nine o'clock.”

“What time is it now?”

He looked for his watch, which he had laid down somewhere, and was some time finding it.

“Half past five …”

“All right …”

She waited, resignedly. He did not know what to do or where to go. He tried to distract himself by listening to the familiar sounds of the hotel, where he knew nearly all the lodgers. He could tell who had come in, he recognized voices that reached him only as faint murmurs.

“It would be better to let me die.…”

The doctor had warned him. A short while ago—the doctor was still there—she had played the same trick on them, but then it had been on an impulse; at the height of her hysteria she had seized a pair of scissors that were lying about and tried to cut her wrists.

Now she was trying it again, deliberately, and he was unmoved. She persisted: “Why won't you let me die?”

“Go to sleep!”

“You know I can't sleep like this.”

There was nothing to be done about it. He went with a sigh to lean against the attic window, from which he could see his red roofs once again and hear the noises from the flower market starting up. This was the moment when his night watchman on Rue Montorgueil, in his little cubbyhole, would be warming up his morning coffee in a small blue enameled coffeepot and drinking it out of a peasant bowl with a pattern of big flowers. Les Halles would be in full swing now.

And for years, at a somewhat later hour, in a double bed on Rue Ballu, he had wakened of his own accord, invariably at the same time, and slipped noiselessly out of the bed, leaving a lean, hard-featured woman lying there. While he washed and dressed with meticulous care, as he did everything else, an alarm clock would sound over his head and the tall youth who was his son would yawn and get up, with his hair on end and a sour taste in his mouth.

Had his daughter made it up with her stepmother, now that he was no longer there? Probably not. And when she was short of money she had no one to turn to. It was strange. She had two children. Presumably she loved them, as all mothers do—or was that all a fairy tale?—and yet she lived without bothering about them, often staying out late at night with her husband.

It was the first time since his escape that he had thought about them so clearly. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have thought of them at all.

He felt no pity for them.… He was quite cool. He saw them one and all as they really were. He saw them far better than before, when he used to meet them almost every day.

He had ceased to feel indignant.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing …”

“I'm thirsty.…”

“Shall I get you some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

He went downstairs, in his slippers, with his shirt still unbuttoned over his chest. The brasserie was closed. He had to go outside. At the end of the street he caught a glimpse of the sea. He made his way to a small bar.

“Would you give me a small pot of coffee and a cup? I'll bring them back presently.”

“Is it for Gerly's?”

They were used to this in the neighborhood. People from Gerly's were always fetching things at the most unexpected time of day.

On the counter there were some hot croissants in a basket, and he ate one and drank a cup of coffee, gazing vaguely into the street, and finally carried off, for Thérése, the small pot, a cup, two pieces of sugar in his pocket, and some croissants.

Early-morning people met him and turned back to stare at one who was so obviously a nocturnal creature. A streetcar passed.

He climbed up to his attic again and guessed that Thérèse had been up. Perhaps she had hurriedly got back into bed on hearing his step on the stairs?

She was no longer quite the same. She had a fresher look, perhaps because she had powdered her face, touched up the delicate pink of her cheeks and painted her thin lips afresh. She was sitting up in bed with a pillow behind her back.

She gave him a wan, grateful smile and he promptly understood. He put the coffee and croissants on the chair, within her reach.

“How kind you are …” she said.

He was not kind. She followed him with her gaze. They were both thinking of the same thing. She was scared. He opened the drawer of the bedside table and, as he expected, the ampule was not to be seen. The syringe was there, fitted up and still wet.

With a pleading look, she stammered out: “Don't be cross with me.…”

He was not cross with her. He was not
even
cross with her. And a few minutes later, as she was drinking her coffee, he caught sight of the empty ampule gleaming on the sloping roof, just below the attic window.

Leaving Nice proved as simple as leaving Paris. There was no conflict, there was practically no decision to be made.

About ten o'clock Monsieur Monde closed his door quietly and went down four flights to knock gently on Julie's door. He had to knock several times. A sleepy voice asked sulkily: “Who's there?”

“It's me.”

He heard her coming, barefooted, to open the door. Then, without even a glance at him, her eyelids half glued together, she hurried back to the warmth of her bed. But though almost asleep again, she asked him (and her face reflected her effort to keep on the surface): “What did you want?”

“I'd have liked you to stay up there for a while. I have to go out.”

Julie, struggling against sleep, breathed goodnaturedly: “Wait a minute.…”

This was the last time, he knew, that he would be in her room, breathing its intimate atmosphere, its cheap pungent scents. The bed was warm. As usual, her underclothes lay in a heap on the rug.

“Hand me a glass of water.…”

The toothbrush glass would do. She sat up, asking as though in a dream: