Short Stories: Five Decades (112 page)

“I will leave it to the opinion of the most neutral observer,” M. Banary-Cointal was saying, “if that is not the action of a man who deserves to be termed a
salaud
.”

The young woman, standing stiffly upright, not yet looking pregnant, wept more loudly.

In the shadow of their doorway, the lovers shifted a little; a bare arm moved, a kiss was planted on an ear rather than on lips, a muscular arm took a new hold—but whether that was due to the commotion around the Vespa or to the natural fatigue and need for variation of prolonged
amour
Tibbell could not tell.

Farther down the street a car approached, with bright lights and an Italian roar of motor, but it stopped near the corner, swinging in to park in front of a closed laundry shop, and the lights were extinguished. The street was left to the disputants.

“If I’m getting married tomorrow,” the young man said, “it’s her fault.” He pointed accusingly at the girl.

“I forbid you to go on,” said M. Banary-Cointal with dignity.

“I tried,” the young man shouted. “I did everything I could. I lived with her for a year, didn’t I?” He said this righteously, with pride and self-pity, as if he expected congratulations all around for his sacrifice. “At the end of the year it became clear to me—if I ever wanted a worthy home for any children I might have, I would never get it from your daughter. It is time to speak frankly, Monsieur. Your daughter conducts herself in an impossible manner. Impossible. In addition, her character is abominable.”

“Be careful in your choice of words, young man,” the father said.

“Abominable,” the young man repeated. He waved his arms in emphasis and his long black hair fell over his forehead into his eyes, adding to the effect of blind and uncontrollable rage. “As her father, I will spare you the details, but I will permit myself to say that never has a man had to bear such treatment from a woman who in theory shared his home for twelve months. Even the phrase makes me laugh,” he said, without laughing. “When you say ‘share a home,’ you imagine that it means that a woman is occasionally physically present in the foyer—for example, when a man comes home to lunch or when he returns for an evening of peace and relaxation after a hard day’s work. But if you imagine that in the case of your daughter, M. Banary-Cointal, you are sadly mistaken. In the last year, M. Banary-Cointal, I assure you I have seen more of my mother, of my maiden aunt in Toulouse, of the woman who sells newspapers opposite the Madeleine, than I have seen of your daughter. Ask for her at any hour of the day or night—winter or summer—and where was she? Absent!”

“Raoul,” the girl sobbed, “how can you talk like that? I was faithful from the first day to the last.”

“Faithful!” Raoul snorted contemptuously. “What difference does that make? A woman says she is faithful and believes that excuses everything from arson to matricide. What good did your fidelity do me? You were never home. At the hairdresser, at the cinema, at the Galéries Lafayette, at the Zoo, at the tennis matches, at the swimming pool, at the dressmaker, at the Deux Magots, on the Champs-Elysées, at the home of a girl friend in St.-Cloud—but never home. Monsieur”—Raoul turned to the father—“I do not know what it was in her childhood that formed your daughter’s character, but I speak only of the results. Your daughter is a woman who has only the most lively detestation of a home.”

“A home is one thing, Monsieur,” the old man said, his voice trembling with parental emotion, “and a clandestine and illicit ménage is another. It is the difference between a church and a … a …” The old man hesitated, searching for the proper crushing comparison. “The difference between a church and a racecourse.” He permitted himself a wild smile at the brilliance of his rhetoric.

“I swear to you, Raoul,” the girl said, “if you marry me I will not
budge
from the kitchen.”

“A woman will promise anything,” Raoul said, “on the night before a man is due to marry somebody else.” He turned brutally to the father. “I will give you my final judgment on your daughter. I pity the man who marries her, and if I were a good citizen and a good Christian, I would send such a man an anonymous letter of warning before he took the fatal step.”

The young woman cried out as though she had been struck and threw herself against her father heartbrokenly, to sob against his shoulder. Her father patted her distractedly, saying, “There, there, Moumou,” while the girl brokenly repeated, “I love him, I love him, I can’t live without him. If he leaves me I’m going to throw myself in the river.”

“You see,” the father said accusingly, over his daughter’s bent, tragic head, “you serpent of ingratitude, she can’t live without you.”

“That’s just too bad,” Raoul said, his voice high with exasperation. “Because I can’t live
with
her.”

“I warn you,” the father said, speaking loudly, to be heard above the thunder of his daughter’s sobs, “I hold you personally responsible if she throws herself in the river. I, her father, am saying this. Solemnly.”

“The river!” Raoul laughed in harsh disbelief. “Call me when it happens. I will personally accompany her. Anyway, she swims like a fish. I’m surprised that a man your age can be innocent enough to be taken in by female guff like that.”

Somehow, this last statement enraged Moumou more than anything else Raoul had said. With a sound that was a kind of mixture of growl and air-raid siren, Moumou leapt from the shelter of her father’s arms and flung herself on Raoul, hurling him out into the middle of the street, whacking him ferociously with the huge leather bag, holding it by the handle, swinging it again and again like an Olympic hammer-thrower. From the noise it made as it smashed against Raoul’s head and shoulders Tibbell calculated that it weighed about ten pounds and was filled with glass and metalware. Raoul raised his arms to protect himself, shouting, dancing backwards, “Moumou, Moumou, you’re losing control of yourself!”

To halt the brutal, arching blows of the bag, which were coming in at all angles, he lunged forward and grappled with Moumou, but she continued her attack with her sharply pointed shoes, kicking him pitilessly in the shins and grinding her high, needle-sharp heels into the soft suede of his moccasins. To Tibbell, watching bemused from his window, the couple seemed to be performing some eccentric tribal dance, with their shadows, thrown by the nearby lamppost, whirling around them and up and down the face of the buildings opposite in an elongated African pattern.

“Moumou, Moumou,” Raoul shouted hoarsely, as he clutched her and at the same time kept up his painful, jigging dance, to try to avoid the cruel pert heels that dug into his toes. “What good does this do? It solves none of our problems. Moumou, stop it!”

But Moumou, now that she had started, had no mind to stop it. All the indignities, deceptions, and false hopes of her life were welling up in her, finding ecstatic expression in the blows and kicks with which she was belaboring her defaulting partner. The grunts and muffled growls that accompanied her efforts had a note of triumph and wild, orgiastic release in them, hardly fitting, Tibbell thought, for a public performance on a public street. Foreign and American as he was, he was uneasy at the thought of intervention. In New York City, if he had been the witness of a fight between a man and a woman, he would have rushed to part the combatants. But here, in the strange land of France, where the code of behavior between the sexes was at best a titillating mystery to him, he could only wait and hope for the best. Besides, by any system of scoring, the woman was clearly winning by a large margin, delivering all the blows, gaining many points for what is approvingly called aggressiveness in the prize ring and only suffering such incidental damage as came her way when Raoul’s head bumped her forehead as she tried to bite him.

The father, who might have been expected to be disturbed by the spectacle of his pregnant daughter locked in hand-to-hand combat with her faithless lover at this odd hour of the morning, never made a move to stop the action. He merely moved along the street with the struggle, circling it warily, keeping a keen eye on the principals, like a referee who is loath to interfere in a good fight so long as the clinching is not too obvious and the low blows unintentional.

The noise, however, had awakened sleepers, and here and there along the street, shutters opened a crack on dark windows and heads appeared briefly, with that French combination of impartiality, curiosity and caution which would lock the shutters fast on the scene of violence with the approach of the first gendarme.

By this time, Moumou had stamped and hammered Raoul some fifteen yards away from the point of the original attack and they were swaying and panting in front of the lovers who had been tranquilly kissing all this time in the shadow of the doorway on the other side of the street. But now, with the noise of battle on their very doorstep, as it were, and the contestants threatening invasion at any moment, the lovers separated, and the man stepped out protectively in front of the figure of the girl he had been crushing so cosily and for so long against the stone doorway. Tibbell saw that the man was short and burly and dressed in a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. “Here, here,” the man in the sports jacket said authoritatively, seizing Raoul by the shoulders and pulling at him, “that’s enough of that. Go home and go to sleep.”

His appearance distracted Moumou for an instant. “Go back to your doorway fornication, Monsieur!” she said. “We don’t need your advice.” At that moment, Raoul slid away from her and pounded up the street. “Coward,” Moumou shouted, and took off after him, swinging her bag menacingly, running with surprising speed and agility in her high-heeled, pointed shoes. She seemed actually to be gaining on Raoul when he came to the corner and ducked around it, closely followed by Moumou.

The street seemed strangely quiet now and Tibbell could hear the discreet clicking of shutters being closed, now that the principals had departed the scene.

But the father was still there, staring with melancholy, weary eyes at the corner around which he had last seen his daughter disappear, brandishing the patent-leather handbag. He turned his glance on the young man in the sports jacket, who was saying to his girl, “Well, there’s a pair for you. Barbarians.”

“Monsieur,” the father said gravely, “Who asked you to meddle in other peoples’ affairs? It is the same all over this poor country. Nobody minds his own business any more. Privacy is a thing of the past. No wonder we are on the edge of anarchy. They were on the point of agreement when you destroyed everything.”

“Listen, Monsieur,” the man in the sports jacket said belligerently, “I am by nature a simple, honorable man. I do not stand by idly while a man and a woman beat each other in my presence. It was my duty to separate them and, if you were not old enough to be my grandfather, I would say that you should be ashamed of yourself for not having separated them sooner.”

M. Banary-Cointal examined the simple, honorable man with scientific detachment, as though he were weighing the last statement judiciously, without prejudice. But instead of answering, he turned to the girl, still discreetly in shadow and arranging her ruffled hair with little pats of her hand. “Young woman,” the old man said loudly, “you see what’s ahead of you? The same thing will happen to you as happened to my daughter. Mark my words, you’ll find yourself pregnant and that one”—the old man pointed like a prosecuting attorney at the sports coat—“that one will disappear like a hare in a cornfield.”

“Simone,” the man in the sports coat said, before the girl had a chance to reply, “we have better ways of spending our time than listening to this old windbag.” He pushed a button on the wall next to him and the door against which he and the girl had been leaning opened with an electric buzzing. With dignity, he took the girl’s arm and escorted her into the deeper shadow of the inner court. The old man shrugged, his duty done, his warning to a careless generation delivered, as the huge wooden door clicked shut behind the interrupted lovers. Now the old man seemed to be looking around for another audience for his views on life, but the street was deserted, and Tibbell pulled back a bit from the window, fearful of being harangued.

Deprived of further targets for his wisdom, M. Banary-Cointal sighed, then walked slowly toward the corner around which his daughter had vanished in pursuit of Raoul. Tibbell could see him standing there, caught in the dark stone geometry of the city crossroads, a solitary and baffled figure, peering off in the distance, searching the lonely street for survivors.

Now there was the click of shutters again below Tibbell and old women’s voices, seeming to rise from some underground of the night, made themselves heard, from window to window.

“Ah,” one voice said, “this city is becoming unbearable. People will do anything on the street at any hour. Did you hear what I heard, Madame Harrahs?”

“Every word,” a second old voice spoke in a loud, hoarse, accusing, concierge’s whisper. “He was a thief. He tried to snatch her purse. Since de Gaulle a woman isn’t safe after dark any more in Paris. And the police have the nerve to demand a rise in pay.”

“Not at all, Madame,” the first voice said irritably. “I saw with my own eyes. She hit him. With her bag. Thirty or forty of the best. He was bleeding like a pig. He’s lucky to be alive. Though he only got what’s coming to him. She’s pregnant.”

“Ah,” said Madame Harrahs, “the
salaud.
”

“Though to tell the truth,” said the first voice, “she didn’t seem any better than she should be. Never at home, flitting around, only thinking about marriage when it was too late, after the rabbit test.”

“Young girls these days,” said Madame Harrahs. “They deserve what they get.”

“You can say that again,” said the first concierge. “If I told you some of the things that go on in this very house.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Madame Harrahs. “It’s the same on both sides of the street. When I think of some of the people I have to open the door to and say Monsieur Blanchard lives on the third, to the right, it’s a wonder I still have the courage to go to Mass at Easter.”