The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (6 page)

For Elisabeth beauty was nothing but a pretext for ointments, clothespins, distortions,
secret masquerades in a scarecrow assortment of bits and pieces. Far from being a heady
draft, her present success was merely a new kind of game, a change from the rigors of
the Game of yore; she was a white-collar worker on a fishing expedition. They were both
on holiday from the Room, from what they called the “convict settlement,”
for thus it had come to seem in their imaginations: a prison cell in which they were
condemned to live, dragging one heavy chain between them, that prison’s
fascination unremembered, its poetic atmosphere (to Mariette so much more precious than
to them) depreciated, the Game their only solace and release.

This new Game started in the dining-room. Elisabeth and Paul went at it, much to
Gérard’s horror, under his uncle’s very nose; but the good man saw
nothing but the features of twin seraphs.

The point of the Game was to scare the skinny little girls by sudden facial convulsions.
They would wait patiently for the auspicious moment, a moment of general slackening of
attention. Then was the moment to catch some tiny tot or other dislocated in her chair
and gaping at the table, to transfix her first with a smile, then with a hideous
grimace. She would look away in some alarm. They would repeat the treatment until,
utterly unnerved, she burst into tears and complained to her mother. The mother then
looked towards the table. Elisabeth beamed; the mother beamed responsively; the victim
was slapped, scolded, and reduced to silence. The conspirators kept the score by nudging
one another. The nudges provoked suppressed attacks of giggles, which included
Gérard and finally exploded in the bedroom.

One evening, as they were about to leave the table, a diminutive child who had been
chewing her way imperturbably through a dozen hideous faces, counterattacked by
surreptitiously sticking out her tongue. They were delighted with her; she had actually
given the Game a new dimension. They re-enacted their exploits as obsessively as any
hunting-and-shooting addict, praising the child, discussing the day’s play,
deciding to tighten up the rules. Their verbal duels took on a fresh, more sanguinary
lease of life.

Gérard implored them to go slow, to refrain from leaving the taps turned on, from
trying to breathe under water, from chasing one another and brandishing chairs and
emitting cries for help. Laughter and blows merged inextricably; for however conditioned
an onlooker might be to their emotional somersaults, no one could foresee the moment
when these two sundered portions of a single being would cease from strife and become
one again: a phenomenon which Gérard both dreaded and desired—desiring it
for the sake of his uncle and the neighbors, dreading it because it meant the common
front of Paul and Elisabeth against him.

Presently the Game expanded, invading lounge, street, beach, and esplanade. Elisabeth
dragged Gérard in their wake. Crouching, clambering, scuttling, diabolically
grinning and grimacing, the gang advanced in all directions. Panic spread. Wry-necked
children, agape, with bulging eyes, were towed along by parents, slapped, spanked,
incarcerated in their rooms, deprived of outings. Just when the scourge was at its peak,
it ceased. The gang had discovered a more diverting occupation: stealing.

After them reeled Gérard, by this time too unnerved even to formulate his secret
terrors. It was stealing not for profit, not out of craving for forbidden fruit, simply
for stealing’s sake. Mortal terror was the lure. They accompanied
Gérard’s uncle on shopping expeditions, returned with their pockets
stuffed full of useless junk. The rules prohibited the theft of useful objects. One day,
Elisabeth and Paul tried to make Gérard return a book because it was in French.
He won conditional reprieve by agreeing to steal something extremely difficult.
“A watering-can, for instance,” declared Elisabeth.

They dressed him for the occasion in a gigantic cape; and thus accoutred, with a heart of
lead, the luckless youth performed his task. What with his clumsiness and the curious
excrescence on his person of the watering-can, he made a profound impression on the
ironmonger, who stood gazing after the retreating trio in a trance of arrested suspicion
and of disbelief. “Hurry! Hurry! Idiot!” whispered Elisabeth,
“they’re watching us.” Once round the corner, out of danger, they
breathed again and took to their heels.

A crab appeared in Gérard’s dreams; its pincers had him by the
shoulder. It was the ironmonger. He was calling the police. They had come to arrest him.
He would be cut out of his uncle’s will, etc.…

The loot—curtain-rings, screwdrivers, electric switches, labels, outsize gym
shoes—went on piling up at the hotel into a sort of imitation treasure, as it were
those sham pearls that women wear on holiday, leaving their real pearls at home.

As far as Elisabeth was concerned, this behavior, as irresponsible as that of untrained
children, naïvely cheeky to the point of crime, this inability to distinguish good from
evil, this playing at pirates, stemmed from her instinct to save Paul from the
flabbiness she dreaded in him. As long as she could keep him harried, scared stiff,
grimacing, cursing, tearing up and down, he could not sink into inertia. We shall see
where intuition led her before she had done with him and his re-education.

Then they came home. The ozone they had so casually inhaled had so signally restored
them, mind and body, that Mariette found them changed almost beyond recognition. The
brooch they brought her as a present was not a stolen object.

A
ND NOW the Room,
like a great ship, put out to sea. Higher the waves, wider the horizons, rarer, more
perilous, the cargo.

In their strange world of childhood, of action in inaction, as in the waking dream of
opium eaters, to stay becalmed could be as dangerous as to advance at break-neck
speed.

Gérard stayed with them whenever his uncle went away on business. They bedded him
down on a heap of cushions and covered him with old coats. Opposite him towered the
theater of their two beds. Each night, it was the lighting system that set the play in
motion. The electric bulb happened to be over Paul’s bed. Each night he covered
it with a piece of bunting and plunged the Room in reddish shadow. Each night Elisabeth
objected to this partial black-out, jumped out of bed in a fury and removed the bunting.
Paul put it back. Then ensued a tug-of-war which ended regularly with Paul triumphant,
Elisabeth crushed, the bunting once more hoisted on the lamp. For since their return he
had had the upper hand. What she had feared when she had first seen him rise from his
bed of sickness, half a head taller than herself, had come to pass: he was no longer
content to play the invalid. Her recent efforts to promote his moral welfare were paying
dividends far beyond her calculations. In vain she mocked him, saying:
“Isn’t it
delicious
? Remember,
Giraffe—
everything’s
delicious now. Films are
delicious
, books are
delicious
, what a
delicious
armchair, ginger pop and raspberry sodas are simply
delicious
. I say, Giraffe,
isn’t he revolting? Look at him! Look! Preening himself like a peacock!”
It was no use; she knew her nursling was a child no longer. He had outstripped her in
the race by almost a clear length. The very Room proclaimed it, seeming now to be
constructed on two different levels. He was on the top floor, with all his magic
properties within effortless reach; but she was consigned to the basement, obliged to
dive or grovel ignominiously when she wanted to find hers.

But presently she hit on new ways of getting even with him. Laying down the weapons of a
tomboy, she started to exploit her untried feminine resources, with Gérard for
her stooge. She felt she could torment Paul more effectively before an audience; since
Gérard came in handy for this purpose, she welcomed and made much of him.

The curtain rose at eleven o’clock at night. There were no matinées except on
Sundays.

At seventeen, Elisabeth looked her age, no more, no less; Paul, on the other hand, looked
four years older than his fifteen years. He was beginning to be seen around the town, to
frequent
delicious
cinemas and music-halls, to pick up
delicious
girls. To be solicited by a real tart was the most
delicious
thing of all.

When he came back he would recount his exploits. He described them with a candor
well-nigh insensate, primitive; with a frankness so patently devoid of cynicism or vice
that it seemed innocence itself. Elisabeth would tease, cross-question him, then
suddenly, unpredictably, take exception to some comparatively harmless detail, and
forthwith bridle, grab a paper and retire behind it with a great show of icy
concentration.

Gérard and Paul were wont to meet between eleven o’clock and midnight in one
of the big Montmartre cafés, before coming home together. Meanwhile Elisabeth
would stalk up and down the corridor in a frenzy of impatience.

At the sound of the hollow clang of the front door, she would quit her post and scurry
back to the Room, to be discovered sitting with a hair net on her head, sticking her
tongue out slightly, polishing her nails.

Paul flung his clothes off; Gérard put on his dressing-gown and was assisted into
bed. The genius of the room knocked thrice. The play began. But not one of the
protagonists, it must be remembered, not even he who played the sole spectator, was
consciously concerned with make-believe. In their archaic unawareness their play became
the legend of eternal youth. Without their knowing it, the play—the
Room—swung on the edge of myth.

The strip of bunting cast a ruddy glow upon the set. Naked, Paul wandered up and down,
making his bed, smoothing the sheets, plumping the nest of pillows, setting out his
stock-in-trade beside him on a chair. Propped on her left elbow, with the stern mask of
a Byzantine empress, Elisabeth lay staring at her brother. With her right hand, she
scratched her head. Having scratched it raw, she rubbed in ointment from a pot kept for
this purpose by the pillow.

“Idiot!” declared Paul, adding: “If ever there was a sickening
sight, it’s that idiot and her grease-pot. She thinks it’s good for the
scalp. It’s a tip she got from some Hollywood film mag….”

“Gérard!”

“What?”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Gérard, you’re too patient. Go to sleep, don’t let him be a
nuisance.”

Silence ensued. Paul bit his lips; his eye flashed fire. Wide, dewy, sublime, her gaze
enfolded him, until at last he got into bed, tucked himself in, tried out a pose or two
against the pillows—not seldom rejecting the whole arrangement and starting again
from scratch until he had it absolutely to his liking.

The ideal state at last achieved, no power could have dislodged him from it. It was less
a preparation for sleep than an embalming; in funeral bands, his food and drink and
sacred
bric-à-brac
beside him, he set forth on his journey to the
shades.

Night after night Elisabeth awaited this supreme moment of departure; through four long
years, her cue had never altered. Incredible as it might seem, apart from a few trifling
variations, the essence of the play had been preserved. It may be that elemental beings
such as these follow some law of nature as mysteriously imperative as the law of flowers
that close their petals up at night.

It was Elisabeth who introduced the variations. She thought up any number of surprises.
One night, omitting the ritual of the ointment, she dived under the bed and produced a
cut-glass salad bowl full of crayfish. Hugging it to her chest with both beautiful bare
arms, she gloatingly surveyed the contents, then her brother.

“Gérard, have a crayfish? You simply must; this dressing’s
perfect.” She knew Paul’s passion for dressed crayfish sandwiches. Not
daring to refuse, Gérard got out of bed.