The Fires of Autumn (12 page)

And this was how she appeared to Bernard Jacquelain: wearing a short, straight sleeveless dress that showed off her bare arms and beautiful legs, though her mouth was already marked with fine, bitter wrinkles. He had not seen her since the beginning of the war. After being demobilised, he had returned to live at his mother’s house in Paris. The elderly Monsieur Jacquelain had let himself get carried away by the mad, reckless spending of the time; other men bought cars, travelled, paid for mistresses: but Monsieur Jacquelain, after tense, secretive calculations, decided to have an operation. He had dreamt about it for ten years, only putting it off because of the cost. But the entire world was giving in to pleasure; even Madame Jacquelain had paid fifty-nine francs for a felt hat; small businessmen had houses in the country where they spent what they called their ‘veekends’. Why not me? thought Monsieur Jacquelain as he looked resentfully at a new pair of shoes that Bernard (without telling him) had ordered from a shoemaker. This was unprecedented in a family in which the women bought their clothes at Galeries Lafayette and the men at Belle Jardinière. Yes, why not me too? We save, we do without, we put money aside for our children who will only squander our money once we’re gone. I won’t refuse myself anything either, not me, he thought. And so he reserved a room in a private hospital in Neuilly without telling anyone. Sixty francs for the room. Ten thousand francs for the operation. They cut open his stomach and he died.

Bernard made applications to obtain a pension for his mother as the widow of a retired civil servant. All the applications ended up with Raymond Détang. Everyone in Paris who wanted something hovered around him: people looking for jobs, recommendations, favours, military honours, permission to open tobacco shops, or simply asking to have a speeding ticket withdrawn. Raymond
Détang replied to everyone, without exception, with unfailing cordiality: ‘You did the right thing by coming here. I’ll think about what the best thing is to do to sort this little matter out for you. Personally, I can’t do anything, but I have a friend …’

‘He knows absolutely everyone,’ people said when they left, ‘he’s amazing.’

His status as someone who had influence, connections, powerful friends was far more useful to him than a reputation for integrity, intelligence or even for having a great deal of money. It became quite common, in certain circles, to say of Raymond Détang:

‘Go to him first with your request before talking to anyone else about it. He has all the Ministers in his pocket …’

Or even:

‘Ask Détang for his tips on the Stock Market. He knows all the wheeler dealers.’

He was not yet a politician, or a financier, but he functioned as a kind of conduit between politics and finance. He was the person who knew everything before anyone else, the one who was ‘in the know’, the man about whom everyone said:

‘What exactly does he do? I couldn’t tell you, but he’s someone important.’

To the people he received in this way, to talk about business, people he felt might turn out to be useful to him, he never failed to say:

‘Look, let’s talk about this again. Where? Why not come to my house? Say on the 20th? My wife is entertaining some friends. There’ll be dancing. Good heavens, you’ve just made me think: I must remind someone about it …’

And he would nonchalantly name some famous person.

Bernard Jacquelain was not invited as one of the people who ‘might turn out to be useful’ some day, but as part of a smaller, though no less important group: the ‘gigolos’.

‘Find me as many gigolos as possible,’ Renée had told her
husband. ‘There are never enough of them,’ she added, sounding annoyed.

When she entertained, the ‘gigolos’ padded out the room, so to speak. They needed to be everywhere. In order for the reception to seem dazzling and luxurious, there had to be a crowd of young men with slicked-back hair and tireless legs standing in all the doorways, at the buffet table, in the smoking room. Every woman normally had three or four of them following her around; some women went as far as to have six, but they were the foreigners: where gigolos were concerned, as in all other things, it wasn’t done to go too far. These gigolos were nice young men who carried out their professional duties conscientiously. If Renée saw any of them standing still, she would tell them off:

‘Well, what do you think you’re doing?’ she would mutter angrily, ‘go and dance with the Baroness.’

In such social circles, gigolos weren’t paid but they were well fed. Stuffed with foie gras and caviar on toast, living in dusty furnished accommodation where they only spent a few hours each day in a deep sleep – between eight o’clock in the morning and noon – life for them was sweet.

When Bernard walked over to her to say hello, Renée didn’t recognise him. He was young, good looking; she gave him a vague, friendly nod, indicating behind her to the back of the reception room where he should join the other actors with walk-on parts crammed between the crimson curtains, waiting for the first bars of jazz to start playing. Everything was exactly as it should be, and just as it was everywhere else at this time: an orchestra of black musicians wearing red jackets, smoke so thick you could cut it with a knife, a crush of people, endless chattering, ice cream melting in little Venetian glass bowls, cigarettes with gold tips, swizzle sticks for the champagne, flowers, lipsticks carelessly tossed into the ornamental vases, couples stretched out on low loveseats in the dark corners of the room, a bar set up in the long entrance
hall, old women with dyed hair on the dance floor, necklaces bouncing and clicking against their dried-up, sunken chests.

Renée was always dancing, sometimes without even knowing the name of the man who held her in his arms. When Bernard asked her to dance and asked how Madame Humbert was, she looked at him, confused:

‘My mother is fine, but how the devil do you know her?’

‘Well, very nice; that’s a fine thing to say! You really don’t know who I am?’

‘Do you actually believe that I know most of the people here?’

‘Well, then, it seems we’re at a masked ball. I’ll give you some clues. Let’s see, my lovely masked lady, do you remember a very modest little shop, painted sky blue, with a sign that said “
FASHIONS by GERMAINE
” in gold letters and, in the back room, a round table covered by a Turkish cloth; three children played at having a doll’s tea party around that table, you, a little girl who was the same age as you named Thérèse Brun, and a little boy …’

‘Bernard Jacquelain!’ she cut in. ‘Now I remember. That Bernard had lovely eyes.’

‘I think he still does,’ said Bernard, sounding smug, sensing that was the right tone to take in these surroundings.

She smiled at him and they twirled around for a moment in silence. He looked at the scene over her head. He breathed in the scent of her hair. What a learning experience for a young man! Four years of carnage and, finally, as if he were emerging from a dark, blood-filled tunnel, this reception room full of lights and women, all there for the taking, this light-hearted atmosphere, heady and intoxicating. Oh, good heavens, he had truly understood during his last leave before the Armistice that people who took anything seriously were nothing but … dupes. Nothing anyone did, or said, or thought meant a thing. It was all a sort of futile babbling, the kind that madmen and babies talk. Everything around
him merged into a golden cloud; all he heard was a mixture of laughter, black jazz singers and fragments of conversation:

‘Well, he should go and see Thingy, Whatshisname, you know who I mean? The Minister’s Secretary. He’ll see to it that he gets the Croix de Guerre.’

‘It’s difficult because of the scandal. He was found to be a deserter, after all.’

‘Oh, but that was all so long ago, my dear …’

‘She’s been with him for six months; didn’t you know? He started out as her mother’s lover …’

‘What’s making you smile?’ asked Renée.

‘Nothing. How different things are.’

‘Yes, I know. Everyone who fought in the war is flabbergasted, at first. What do you expect? It’s only natural. We have the right to laugh a little after the things we’ve seen. I mean it; don’t look at me so derisively. I was a nurse, you know. It wasn’t always very amusing …’

‘Bah! Women splash about in blood as if it were the most natural thing in the world.’

‘Do be quiet! You’re so bitter.’

‘Who, me? From now on, my motto is “Don’t worry about anything in life”. Since I did come back from
over there
, everything will work out. I will commit the worst foolishness, the greatest follies with an easy conscience, certain that nothing will affect anything and that everything will continue to go on as in the past, for better or for worse. I no longer believe in catastrophes, since the last one failed miserably. I no longer believe in misfortune, or in death. All of humanity now has the state of mind of a child who is not afraid of the bogeyman any more.’

‘But you have to believe in love,’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes.

‘That would be very nice.’

He gently pulled her closer to him. They broke away from the
crowd. She led him through a few rooms, some in half-darkness where they could hear whispers rising from the plush divans, others dazzlingly bright where well-fed, fat men discussed politics. They heard snippets as they passed:

‘Germany will be banned from any involvement in the League of Nations. Viviani said so. That will teach them.’

‘The people want …’

‘The people do not want …’

‘Leave the wine merchant alone.’

Renée touched up her lipstick in front of a large, three-panelled mirror.

‘What have you been doing since you were demobilised?’ she asked him. ‘You don’t have a lot of money, do you?’

‘No, not a penny. I’m looking for a way to earn a living.’

‘It’s not difficult these days. You can do interior decorating for foreigners, sell old masters on the black market; you don’t even have to know much about anything. Then there’s the Stock Market, of course. Prices are skyrocketing. My husband could help you out, you know. I’ll talk to him about you and …’

He had moved closer to her and was watching her in the mirror. She turned her head slightly towards him and their lips met. After a moment, she slipped out of his arms, rather breathless, and finished her sentence:

‘… and he’ll find a way for you to earn a living. Doing the least possible and earning the most possible. Ideal, don’t you agree?’

When Bernard became Renée’s lover – the day after their first encounter – he felt a strange sensation: the pleasure of his conquest was somewhat tainted by a feeling of resentment, not only because she had given herself to him so quickly, but because she had not even deigned to hide the fact that she would have slept with any other man like him, as long as he was young and attractive …

‘Really,’ he thought to himself as he made love to her, ‘these women are such sluts.’ She opened her eyes; he had fallen back beside her, his face expressionless, his eyes staring blankly into space.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘About you, my love,’ he replied.

She looked at her watch:

‘It was good, wasn’t it? Pass me my stockings; I have to get out of here now.’

They parted on the damp street. Behind them was the hotel where they had just spent the past two hours; in front of them, the Parisian pavement shimmered like a black mirror beneath the rain and lights. In the darkness, the arc lamps formed a bright mesh of sparkling facets, like halos, plays of light that made Bernard feel dizzy, dazed as he already was by the warm, stifling, perfumed darkness of the hotel room.

‘A good body … Nice curves,’ he thought as he left Renée. ‘She knows how to use it too … It would be very stupid to get attached to a little beast like her.’

He had enjoyed their lovemaking, but a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction lingered within him, a feeling that came less from his body than his soul.

He went home. It was the time of day when the schoolboys were coming out of the ‘Institution Etienne-Marcel’ where Bernard had been a student before moving up to the lycée. Chubby-cheeked young boys ran after the bus. He watched these adolescents who walked along swinging their briefcases by their sides. It wasn’t so long ago that he himself …

‘I was a good little boy,’ he thought, ‘I swallowed everything I was told. Now … The war took me when I was too young. It’s a funny thing, war. The men who are in at the start and those who come out at the end are different people. First they send in the mature men, people who know what they want, whose characters won’t change; they get killed, and then they take the youngsters; and afterwards, everyone is surprised when they come back changed. Whatever happens, I know that I, personally, will no longer put myself out for anything, or anyone. This Renée … I could have truly loved her. But none of these women gives a damn about love. What they need is …’

He didn’t finish his thought. He was standing at the courtyard entrance in front of his home. He looked at it – a building where rent was inexpensive, the place where he was born, where his mother still lived. My God, how shabby and ugly everything was! In his mind, he could picture the sitting room with the heavy green curtains decorated with silver palm leaves, the folding bed set up for him in the dining room, the narrow, dingy kitchen … How different it all was from Détang’s private house, full of noise, joy and light; how strikingly different!

‘He’s clever, he is, I’ll give him that! I’m just a sucker. Naturally,
I’ll go to his house, get recommendations from him, take advantage of my relationship with his wife,’ he thought. But at the same time, something deep inside him protested, felt indignant, something, someone, who was like him, like the real Bernard, and yet was no longer him, just a shadow of what he had once been, a troublesome memory.

He climbed up the staircase where the stench of herring reigned supreme. Through the closed doors, you could hear children crying, dishes rattling. A little old man with a very pale, wrinkled face was walking up ahead of him, carrying a loaf of bread under his arm, a long, golden baguette. He thought about his father and remembered how he used to go downstairs every evening at the same time to buy bread and the newspaper (
L’Intransigeant
), then he would come back upstairs, eat dinner and scold his son: ‘We haven’t been put here on earth to have fun … It’s when you’re still young that you should put some money aside for your old age,’ and Bernard was horrified by that way of life.