On Leave (8 page)

She laughs nervously. “I'm just a poor foreigner. Not even a ‘privileged resident.' Not even that, Officer … My papers have to be renewed every three months … They say: ‘Mademoiselle Praymanjay [that's how they pronounce it], Mademoiselle Praymanjay, what are your means of existence?' The first time I thought the cop was an intellectual. So I answered phi-lo-so-phi-cally. ‘Means of existence?… How can you do without them?'”

She gives another laugh and lights another cigarette, protecting the flame of the match with her hand, which is shaking.

“Lena!…” he mutters. “If you abandon me as well…”

“Ach, Laachaume, my brother,” she answers with a smile … “That Westphalian look of yours is going to make me cry!”

She walked him back to his hotel in Rue Saint-Jacques. Luckily his room was only on the first floor. He slumped onto the bed, which immediately began to pitch and toss like a boat on the Sea of Japan …

 

CHAPTER SIX

“There's a letter for you!” the landlady shouted.

Lachaume swung around on his heels in the narrow corridor and walked back with a frozen smile on his face to the dark cubbyhole that was used as reception. The pudgy-fingered old woman clumsily shuffled through the muddle of paper on the desk. You could hear something sizzling in the pan in the kitchen next door; something was close to catching fire, but the letter still hadn't been found.

Lachaume was revolted by those scrabbling plump hands and by the ring that wobbled on top. It was one of those ghastly modern things that look like miniature cakes; he'd seen them on the fingers of shopkeepers' wives in Algiers. The whole room stank of greasy tiffin. It was not an unfamiliar smell.

“Take the letter up to my room,” he said. “
Bon appétit
, madame!”

But as he went up Rue Saint-Jacques against the flow of noisy students sauntering down it arm-in-arm, the sight of the shapes of young women in the half-light of streetlamps reflected in the shiny wet macadam made his heart thump. He shrugged it off angrily.

But he was powerless to silence the quiet voice inside him that kept on repeating: “It's a letter from Françoise.” Each stride up the gradient of Rue Saint-Jacques took more effort than the last. It was like an old wound reopening ever wider with each step. By the time he got to Place du Panthéon, he was drenched in sweat.

What now? He had a long and empty evening ahead of him. He needed something to do. Anything to distract his mind from the letter awaiting him back at the hotel. For a while he paced up and down in front of a cinema, reading the film title at each pass and forgetting it instantly. The line for the box office trailed back onto the pavement. People were all dressed up, the men had shaved their necks with as much care as the women had made up their lips, the whole crowd was smiling and panting with excitement and wafting with perfume. Say what you like, Lachaume thought, but such good humor is certainly very odd. For a moment he wondered whether some piece of good news had spread through Paris while he'd been asleep. He went looking for a newspaper. The crowd was just as dense outside the brightly lit cinemas on Boulevard Saint-Michel, and pedestrians and motorcars shared the roadway in feigned courtesy. Although he knew already that there wasn't any good news to be had, Lachaume persisted in hunting for a newspaper, coldly and harshly, as if he wanted to prove just how base Paris was. But the vendors had vanished, presumably out of politeness; all you could get on the street were flowers and roasted chestnuts.

All of a sudden a woman's voice called his name. A blond girl ran up to him with her large breasts wobbling. She was holding a portable radio and had a group of raucous youngsters in tow.

“M. Lachaume!… M. Lachaume!… Don't you recognize me?” she said as she got her breath back, putting on the nasal whine of a demanding child. “Huguette Bataille, from the Musset Crammers' … You used to try to inculcate me with … the basics of English grammar! Ah! You had a hard time…” she added with a complacent smile.

He did indeed recall a girl who looked like this one.

“He was everybody's heartthrob at school,” she explained brazenly to her smirking friends. “Aren't you in the army anymore?”

“No, I'm still a soldier.”

“In the parachute regiment?” she asked with a blush.

“No, footslogger.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, footslogger. The infantry. The guys who wear out boot leather.”

She didn't hide her disappointment.

“That must be tiring,” she said politely.

You could see she was cross. Footsloggers are merely a kind of pedestrian. They don't even have scooters!

“Women!” a seventeen-year-old psychologist sighed, raising his eyes, while another one of the boys switched on the radio for fun when Huguette wasn't watching. The encounter ended with a burst of music and laughter, but Lachaume had barely turned his back when one of the girls said aloud: “As dark and mysterious types go, your footslogger isn't too hard on the eyes.”

And yet it's true, Lachaume thought as he wandered back to Rue Saint-Jacques, I'm just a footslogger—at your service, ladies and gentlemen! And he saluted people passing in the street with a brief nod of his head.

The entire hotel hallway now reeked of cooking.

“Where's my letter?” Lachaume shouted from the office entrance.

The manageress reappeared, wearing a tight black skirt and a yellow rippled nylon top with such a narrow neck that it barely allowed her face, all puffy and white with fury, to peep through.

“My letter!” he shouted.

He thought she was going to let fly at him. Her short fat arms flapped about like chicken wings, and there were daggers in her idiotic eyes.

“You've lost it!” he yelled.

He wanted to twist her neck, and she obviously felt like scratching his eyes out. Dropping all pretense, they faced each other as if they were hereditary enemies.

“My letter!”

“When I feel like it!” she shouted back. “Mail is delivered in the mornings. I am not under orders!”

“Nor am I! Give me my letter!”

“You're just a brute!” she barked, hunting feverishly for the letter in the pile of correspondence on the desk. “Go to another hotel! We don't want your type here. This is a respectable establishment!”

“Where mail gets stolen!”

“Are you calling me a thief?” she screamed. “He called me a thief!”

Another pudgy woman, maybe a sister, wearing an identical tight black skirt, appeared in the frame of the door at the back, then a fat man in a capacious check suit buttoned below his protruding paunch, then another man so similar he must be a brother, except he was even larger; the apartment, as narrow and deep as a foxhole, must have contained many more of them, and they were going to come out one by one, so they could be slaughtered all together, in one burst. Lachaume shouted even louder in murderous joy, and another pair of fatties did indeed emerge, blinking idiotically, in a white rage.

“Ah! What a sight you are!” he screamed at them.

The males came to the front, with their bellies leading the way, waving their arms and hunching their shoulders. Lachaume was familiar with the posture of such toe crushers: he knew what they were going to say, and how they would say it, and the short-breathed, sniffle-nosed, and rough-throated noises they would make.

“Fuck you!”

“Go screw in your grave!”

“Settlers!” Lachaume shouted out, raising his index finger. “You are
pieds-noirs
!… Got that right, didn't I! I've flushed you out!” He laughed and touched his nose with his finger. “The smell! Just by the smell!… You are Algerian
colons
!”

The shouting match got louder. You could hear: “Sure we are … And proud of it … Drop dead! Try to get me in Tataouine!… Trash!…” Males and females milled about in the tiny space, making obscene gestures and raising their fists, but the desk in front of the door, where it made a kind of reception, and the landlady standing behind it blocked their path toward Lachaume, who stood there with his arms crossed, laughing maniacally.

Meanwhile, the letter had been found. He snatched it from the landlady's hand, and on seeing that it was not from Françoise, and was even worse, he stuffed it in his pocket. Another burst of rage rose to his head.

“So what are you tough guys up to, then? Hunkering down in Paris? Making a discreet retreat?” he said, with his sarcasm all but suffocated by fury. “A discreet retreat … Stuffing your gut, dressing up nice, putting on aftershave—it's the good life, right? The good life!”

In a dramatic gesture the fattest of the males knocked the table to the side and tried to get his hands on Lachaume; the landlady grabbed his arm and shouted: “Stop it … Stop it … He's a drunk! Can't you see he's plastered?”

Lachaume stood his ground, cold-eyed, with clenched fists ready to hit back.

“We know who you are!” the fat man said. “We will file a report.”

Lachaume went up to his room. He suddenly felt worn out. The whole scene, the shouting, his own anger, now seemed pointless and absurd. What's wrong with me? he wondered. What has come over me? Why did I start ranting and raving? Was it drink?… His mind cleared and went over Thévenin's stern warnings. Lachaume reproached himself, listing his unending faults, yet whatever he told himself could not reach the bitter resentment underneath. As he lay on the bed in the half-light pursuing this logical train of thought, he also, without admitting it to himself, fought back the tears welling up in his eyes. The fact was that he had in his pocket a letter that was not from Françoise: he'd recognized his own handwriting on the address panel. So what? he thought. She's forwarding my mail. That's nice of her … But it was no use putting a brave face on it; he had to admit, after all, that ever since he'd taken refuge in this squalid room, all through the days he turned upside down, for all the hours he'd spent dreaming on this bed with the bad taste of tobacco in his mouth, he'd not stopped waiting for a sign from Françoise. And now the sign had come. It was all over.

He gathered up his things, packed his suitcase, and left the room where he'd done so much waiting. A heap of insults that had piled up meanwhile greeted him at reception when he paid his bill at the desk. But he just shrugged and said nothing, and pocketed the change in a kind of frozen astonishment.

“Go back to you-know-who!” the landlady yelled and, for the benefit of her audience: “He brings hotel girls up to his room all the time! They're not welcome here … This man has lost his dignity as a Frenchman.”

Where did she get that idea? he wondered as he stepped outside the hotel. He'd no recall at all of the previous night, except of losing at some game of dice. He was sure of that: he had lost at dice, and the strangest thing, when you thought about it, was that he remembered having lost. Since when do I keep track of wins and losses at dice? Must be all that drinking … But as he walked on, he was bothered by what the landlady had said. How did she know about Lena? It was obvious that “hotel girl” meant her. His puzzlement made him feel almost queasy: it was like being trapped in a vast fishing net stretching out to the edges of darkness; he shook his shoulders, trying to understand the hidden connections between one thing and another, and felt well aware that whatever movement he made in the part of the net that fell on him would ripple outward to areas beyond his understanding. Lena, Françoise, the landlady, Thévenin, the ex-pupil he'd bumped into on Boulevard Saint-Michel, his mother at home in Arras, who didn't even know he was in Paris—they were all linked by the threads of this invisible web, and their attempts to get out from under it could only result in risible failure. Perhaps this was a nightmare version of the sense of fatality, and of his own impotence in the face of it. And as he was having feverish spasms, and he had a migraine, and his legs felt like lead, he promised himself he would take some flu medicine and get to bed early—but a second, inner voice just repeated it all with a sardonic cackle.

He took a room in Lena's hotel.

“What's the date?” he asked as he filled in the registration form.

The black receptionist burst out laughing in a baritone and rolled his eyes theatrically. “Ha! Ha! Ha!… Sir must be joking!”

Lachaume looked up. A large wall calendar showed it was December 31.

Why did he feel embarrassed by the laughing African? Why did he suddenly feel like telling him it wasn't a joke, why did he want to justify his own confusion?

“No, I'm not joking,” he said, with a shake of his head. “I wasn't pulling your leg.”

But how could he make an anonymous black understand that his being quite possibly the only person in the whole of Paris not to know that it was the last day of the year didn't seem comical to him, nor did it have any harsh meaning; that there was nothing comical or surprising about it; that his not knowing the date was natural, logical, and unimportant? But how can you express such delicate truths about a non-joke, about a trivial misunderstanding? It was beyond words. He shook his head one more time and went up to his room, feeling feverish shivers down his back.

But just as he was about to shut the door on the black, who'd shown him the way, he felt tempted once again to try to express the inexpressible about the joke that wasn't one and which connected the two of them, he thought, like prisoners tied together back to back; and about the envelope which lay in his pocket like a death sentence; and about Lena, and his mother in Arras; he struggled to find the words, which even before they were uttered sank into the empty silence which surrounded them equally; he glanced one last time at the African and then slipped him a thousand-franc note with a crazy smile.

(As for the letter, it was from Jean Valette, inviting him to lunch at his parents' place the next day, January 1.)