Monsieur Monde Vanishes (3 page)

He was nearly dressed when the ringing of an alarm clock overhead told him that his son Alain was now about to get up.

He finished dressing. He was meticulous about his appearance. He liked his clothes to be uncreased and spotless, his linen soft and smooth, and sometimes on the street or in his office he would look down with satisfaction at his gleaming shoes.

He was forty-eight years old today. Would his wife remember? His son? His daughter? Nobody, most likely. Perhaps Monsieur Lorisse, his old cashier, who had been his father's cashier, would say to him solemnly: “Best wishes, Monsieur Norbert.”

He had to go through the bedroom. He bent over his wife's forehead and brushed it with his lips.

“You won't be needing the car?”

“Not this morning. If I need it in the afternoon I'll call you at the office.”

His house was a very odd one; as far as he was concerned, there was not another one like it in the world. When his grandfather had bought it, it had already had a number of owners. And each of them had altered it in some way, so that there was no longer any recognizable plan. Some doors had been blocked up, others put in in different places. Two rooms had been thrown into one, a floor had been raised, and a passage introduced with unexpected twists and even more unexpected steps on which visitors were apt to stumble, and on which Madame Monde herself still stumbled.

Even on the sunniest days the light in the house was dim and soft as the dust of time, and as though imbued with a fragrance that might have been insipid but that seemed sweet to one who had always known it.

Gas pipes still ran along the walls, and there were some burners on the back staircase, while in the attic lay dozens of kerosene lamps of every sort of date.

Some of the rooms had become Madame Monde's province. Alien, characterless pieces of furniture mingled with the old things that belonged to the house, and she had sometimes driven them out into the storeroom, but the study had remained intact, just as Norbert Monde had always known it, with its red, yellow, and blue stained-glass windows which lit up one after the other as the sun ran its course, and awakened bright little colored flames in every corner.

It was not Rosalie but the cook who brought up Monsieur Monde's breakfast, because of a strict timetable decreed by Madame Monde which determined where every member of the household had to be at various times of day. This was all to the good, for Monsieur Monde disliked Rosalie, who, despite the image her name suggested, was a gaunt and sickly girl who vented her spite on everyone except her mistress.

That morning, January 13, he read his papers while dipping croissants in his coffee. He heard Joseph opening the main gate to take out the car. He waited a little, staring at the ceiling as though he hoped his son might be ready to set off at the same time as himself, but this practically never happened.

When he went out it was freezing, and a pale winter sun was rising over Paris.

No thought of escape had as yet crossed Monsieur Monde's mind.

“Morning, Joseph.”

“Morning, monsieur.”

As a matter of fact, it started like an attack of flu. In the car he felt a shiver. He was very susceptible to head colds. Some winters they would hang on for weeks, and his pockets would be stuffed with wet handkerchiefs, which mortified him. Moreover, that morning he ached all over, perhaps from having slept in an awkward position, or was it a touch of indigestion due to last night's supper?

“I'm getting flu,” he thought.

Then, just as they were crossing the Grands Boulevards, instead of automatically checking the time on the electric clock as he usually did, he raised his eyes and noticed the pink chimney pots outlined against a pale blue sky where a tiny white cloud was floating.

It reminded him of the sea. The harmony of blue and pink suddenly brought a breath of Mediterranean air to his mind, and he envied people who, at that time of year, lived in the South and wore white flannels.

The smell of Les Halles came to meet him. The car stopped in front of a porch over which was written in yellow letters: “Norbert Monde Corp., brokers and exporters, founded 1843.”

Beyond the porch lay a former courtyard which had been covered over with a glass roof and looked like the concourse of a railway station. It was surrounded by raised platforms on which trucks were being loaded with cases and bundles. Warehousemen in blue overalls were pushing trolleys and greeted him as he went by: “Morning, Monsieur Norbert.”

The offices stood in a row along one side, just as in a railway station, with glazed doors and a number over each of them.

“Morning, Monsieur Lorisse.”

“Morning, Monsieur Norbert.”

Was he going to wish him a happy birthday? No. He hadn't remembered it. And yet yesterday's page in the calendar had already been torn off. Monsieur Lorisse, who was sixty-six, was sorting letters without opening them and setting them out in little heaps in front of his employer.

The glass roof over the courtyard was yellow this morning. It never let the sunlight through because of the layer of dust that covered it, but on fine days it was yellow, almost pale yellow, though sometimes, in April for instance when a cloud suddenly hid the sun, it turned so dark that the lights had to be switched on.

The question of sunlight proved to be an important one that day. And then there was a complicated business about a flagrantly untrustworthy client from Smyrna, with whom they had been in litigation for the past six months or more and who always found a way to evade his obligations, so that although he was in the wrong they would end, out of sheer weariness, by allowing him to be in the right.

“Is the consignment for the ‘Maison Bleue' of Bordeaux ready?”

“The truck will be leaving presently.”

About twenty minutes past nine, when all the employees were at their posts, Monsieur Monde saw Alain come in and make his way to the Foreign Trade Department. Alain, although his son, did not come in to say good morning to him. It was like that every day. And yet every day it made Monsieur Monde unhappy. Every day he felt like telling Alain: “You might at least look in at my office when you get here.”

A sort of diffidence, of which he was ashamed, prevented him from doing so. Besides that his son would have misinterpreted such a suggestion as an attempt to keep a check on his punctuality, for he was invariably late. Heaven knows why; five minutes earlier, he could have gone with his father in the car.

Was it from a spirit of independence that he traveled to the office alone, by bus or by métro? And yet a year ago, when in view of his patent inability to pass his
bachot
he had been asked what he would like to do, he had replied of his own accord, “I'd like to join the business.”

Not until ten or eleven o'clock would Monsieur Monde pay an apparently unpremeditated visit to the office of the Foreign Trade Department, and laying a casual hand on Alain's shoulder murmur: “Good morning, son.”

“Good morning, father.”

Alain was as delicate as a girl. He had a girl's long curling eyelashes, which fluttered like a butterfly's wings. His ties were always in pale pastel shades, and his father disliked the lace-edged handkerchiefs that adorned his jackets.

No, it wasn't flu. Monsieur Monde felt uncomfortable all over. At eleven his daughter called him up. There happened to be two important clients in his office.

“Excuse me, please.”

And his daughter, at the end of the line: “Is that you? … I'm in town.… Can I call in at your office? … Right away, yes …”

He could not see her right away. He would have to spend at least an hour longer with his clients.

“No, this afternoon I can't.… I'll look in tomorrow morning.… It can wait.”

Money, obviously! Again! Her husband was an architect. They had two children. They were always short of money. What on earth did they do with it?

“Tomorrow morning, right.”

Well! She hadn't remembered his birthday either.

He went to lunch all by himself in a restaurant where his place was always reserved and where the waiters called him Monsieur Norbert. The sun was shining on the tablecloth and the carafe.

He caught sight of himself in the glass as the cloakroom attendant was handing him his heavy overcoat, and thought he looked older. The mirror must have been a poor one, for he always saw himself with a crooked nose.

“See you tomorrow, Monsieur Norbert.”

Tomorrow … Why did the word remain so firmly fixed in his mind? The year before, at about this same date, he had felt tired, listless, ill at ease in his clothes, just as he was feeling now. He had mentioned it to his friend Boucard, who was a doctor and whom he frequently met at the Cintra.

“Are you sure there's no phosphate in your urine?”

He had taken a glass jar from the kitchen furtively, without saying a word; he remembered it had held mustard. Next morning he had urinated into it and had seen a sort of fine white powder dancing in the yellow liquid.

“You ought to take a holiday, have a change. In the meantime, take this at night and in the morning.…”

Boucard had scribbled out a prescription. Monsieur Monde had never dared urinate into the glass again; he had thrown it out into the street, after deliberately breaking it so that nobody could think of using it. He knew that wasn't what was the matter with him.

Today, at three o'clock, feeling disinclined to work, he was standing in the courtyard on one of the platforms, vaguely watching the comings and goings of warehousemen and drivers. He heard the sound of voices in a tarpaulin-covered truck. Why did he listen? A man was saying:

“The boss's son is always after him, making propositions.… Yesterday he brought him flowers.…”

Monsieur Monde felt himself turn quite white and stiffen from head to foot, and yet he had really learned nothing new. He had suspected the truth for some time. They were talking about his son and a sixteen-year-old assistant warehouseman who had been taken on three weeks before.

So it was true!

He went back to his office.

“Madame Monde wants you on the phone.” She needed the car.

“Will you tell Joseph …”

From that moment on, he stopped thinking. There was no inner conflict, no decision to be reached, indeed nothing was ever decided at all. All that happened was that his face grew more expressionless. Monsieur Lorisse, who was working opposite him, glanced furtively at him several times and thought he was looking better than in the morning.

“Do you know, Monsieur Lorisse, that I'm forty-eight today?”

“Goodness, monsieur, I'm so sorry I forgot! I've had this Smyrna business on my mind.…”

“It doesn't matter, Monsieur Lorisse, it doesn't matter!”

He spoke more lightly than usual, as Monsieur Lorisse was later to remember, confiding to the chief warehouseman, who had been with the firm almost as long as himself: “It's funny. He seemed somehow detached from his worries.”

At six o'clock he visited the bank and went into the manager's office, where he was welcomed as usual.

“Will you find out what I have in my checking account?”

There were three hundred and forty thousand odd francs to his credit. He signed a check for three hundred thousand and received the money in five-thousand-franc notes. He divided these among his various pockets.

“I could have them sent to you …” commented the assistant manager.

He understood later, or rather he thought he understood, for as a matter of fact Monsieur Monde was, even then, on the point of leaving the money behind, taking away only a few thousand-franc notes. Nobody ever guessed this

He thought of the securities in his safe. They were worth over a million.

“With that,” he thought, “
they'll
be in the clear.”

For he knew that the key was in his desk, that his wife knew where to find it, and that she had power of attorney.

His first idea had been to go off without any money. It seemed to him an act of cowardice to take any. It spoiled the whole thing. As he left the bank he felt ashamed of it, and nearly retraced his steps.

Then he decided to think no more about it. He began to walk along the streets. Occasionally he looked at himself in shopwindows. Near Boulevard Sébastopol he noticed a third-rate barbershop and went in, took his place in the line behind other customers, and, when his turn came to sit in the hinged chair, told the barber to shave off his mustache.

He stared at himself in the glass, pouting like a child, and trying not to look at the other people but to concentrate on his own reflection. He felt that he was very different from the rest, that he had somehow betrayed them by coming among them. He almost wanted to apologize.

The barber's assistant, however, behaved toward him with indifference; he had merely given his colleague a wink as Monsieur Monde leaned back in the chair, but it had been a wink so brief, automatic, and unsmiling as to seem more like a sort of Masonic sign.

Was Monsieur Monde so very unlike the rest, with his sleek look, his expensive suit, his custom-made shoes? He thought so. He longed for the transformation to have taken place.

And meanwhile he was distressed because the assistant had a pink plaster on the nape of his neck, a bulging plaster which must conceal a horrid purplish boil. It distressed him, too, to see a tobacco-stained forefinger moving to and fro under his eyes, and to breathe the sickening smell of nicotine mingled with shaving soap. And yet there was something pleasurable about this slight pain!

He was still too new to it all. The transformation was not yet complete. He didn't want to look to the right or the left, in the chalk-scrawled mirror, at the row of men behind him, all reading sports papers and, from time to time, glancing unconcernedly at the occupants of the armchairs.

On the day of his First Communion, at the Lycée Stanislas, after he had walked gingerly back to his seat with downcast eyes, he had stayed motionless for a long time with his face buried in his hands, waiting for the promised transformation.