The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (7 page)

“The old cow!” muttered Paul. “She loathes crayfish. She loathes
anything peppery. It’s as much as she can do to get it down.”

The act went on until the moment came when Paul could stand it no longer and begged her
for a taste. Now she had him at her mercy; now his revolting greed could be
chastised.

“Gérard, fancy a boy of sixteen abjectly begging for a crayfish! Could
anything be lower? Honestly, you know, he’d lick them off the mat; he’d
grovel for them. No, don’t you take it to him; let him come and fetch it! The
great sissy, he’s simply too revolting—he’s dying of greed but he
can’t be bothered to budge. He shan’t have a crayfish. I’m too
ashamed of him.”

Then, if the spirit moved her, she would mount her tripod and give one of her famous
impersonations of the Sibyl.

Paul would block his ears, or seize a book and start to read aloud, preferably from
Saint-Simon or Charles Baudelaire. Deaf to the Oracle, he would say: “Listen,
Gérard,” and declaim:

J’aime son mauvais goût, sa jupe bigarrée,

Son grand châle boiteux, sa parole égarée,

Et son front rétréci

—little realizing how magically the stanza evoked the room, the
beauty of Elisabeth.

Meanwhile Elisabeth had seized a paper. In a voice intended as a parody of Paul’s,
she started to declaim the gossip column. The more Paul tried to shut her up, the louder
rose her chant behind the screen of newspaper. But she was blind as well as
barricaded.

Seizing his opportunity, Paul shot an arm out; before Gérard could stop him, he
hurled a glass of milk at her.

“The wretch! The beast!”

Rage choked her. The soaking paper stuck to her like an adhesive plaster; the milk
streamed over her in rivulets. But Paul should not have the satisfaction of reducing her
to tears.

“Here a minute, Gérard,” she went on. “Give me a hand, get a
cloth, help me mop it up, chuck this paper in the kitchen.” Then, lowering her
voice: “And I was just going to let him have some crayfish…. Want one?
Look out, the milk’s still dripping. Where’s the cloth? I’m much
obliged.”

The burden of the crayfish came muffled to Paul’s ears. Sleep was stealing over
him. Crayfish had become a matter of indifference. Already he had weighed anchor. He had
slipped the cable, cast overboard the ballast of his waking appetites; bound hand and
foot, was launched upon the Stygian tide.

Now for the climax, the crucial situation she had labored to maneuver into being, with
the sole purpose of disrupting it. Once sure of having worn him down beyond recovery,
she got up, came over to his bedside, and placed the salad bowl upon his knees.

“Go on, Horror. I’m not as mean as all that. You’re welcome to your
crayfish.”

Alack for him his head lay heavy on the tide of sleep; his swollen eyelids were fast
sealed; his lips were drawing breath now in another air than man’s.

“Go on, eat up. You said you wanted it, and now you don’t. Now’s
your last chance, I’m off.”

Then, like a severed head making a supreme last effort at communication, Paul opened his
mouth a fraction.

“Well, if this doesn’t take the cake! Hi! Paul! Here’s your precious
crayfish.” She peeled one, inserted it between his jaws.

“He’s chewing in his sleep! Do look, Gérard. It’s most
peculiar. The greedy pig! He really is the end.”

Her nostrils dilated, the tip of her tongue protruding, as if engrossed in scientific
experiment, she went on feeding him. Intent, preoccupied, and mad she looked—a
madwoman hunched over a dead child and cramming it with food.

Of this instructive session, Gérard retained one imprint and no more: namely, the
moment when Elisabeth had addressed him for the first time by the familiar
“tu.”

Next morning, in mortal fear of getting his face slapped, he brought himself to make the
self-same overture, feeling a pang of strangely sweet disturbance to find it tacitly
accepted.

T
HE ROOM prolonged
its rites into the small hours. This made for late awakenings. At eleven o’clock
Mariette brought in the morning coffee. They left it untouched and went to sleep again.
Next time she called them, cold coffee seemed an uninviting prospect. The third time,
they were past getting up. The coffee, skin and all, was finally rejected, and Mariette
bidden to pop downstairs to the newly opened Café Charles and bring back drinks
and sandwiches.

She would have preferred to practice the arts of a good Breton cook, but she had learned
to subordinate her habits and wishes to their whims.

Occasionally, however, she got after them, chased them into the dining-room, and forced
them to sit down to a square meal.

Elisabeth would slip a coat on over her nightdress and sink down in a dream, one elbow on
the table, her hand propping her cheek, in a pose reminiscent of some allegorical female
figure symbolizing Science, or Agriculture, or the Seasons. Paul lolled beside her,
sketchily attired. They ate silently, like strolling players taking a rest between
performances. The empty hours of daylight weighed on them. They felt the tug of the
current carrying them towards night, towards renewal, life, the Room.

Mariette was adept at keeping a room clean without disturbing its essential chaos. From
four o’clock until five, she sewed. Lastly, having left them a cold supper, she
went home. This was Paul’s hour for roaming the deserted streets, for pursuing
any girl whose form or features might suggest her prototype in Baudelaire’s
sonnet.

Alone at home, Elisabeth went on leaning, standing, sitting in disdainful attitudes. She
never left the house except to buy surprises, hurrying home to hide them. She wandered
uneasily from room to room, sick with the horror of one room, one room where lay a body:
an anonymous dead woman, not the mother she remembered and who still lived on within
her.

At fall of night, her restlessness increasing, she advanced into the dead center of the
room and stood at attention, her arms along her sides, staring ahead of her through the
engulfing shadows. The room was sinking, about to be submerged; and she too was sinking,
motherless. She stood like a captain on the bridge and let herself go down.

B
EYOND the
boundaries of the ordinary world of lives and houses, unguessed, undreamed of in their
commonsense philosophy, lies the vast realm of the improbable: a world too disordered,
so it would seem, to hold together for a fortnight, let alone for several years. And yet
these lives, these houses continue to maintain a precarious equilibrium in defiance of
all laws of man and nature. All the same, persons who base their calculations on the
inexorable pressure of the force of circumstance assume, correctly, that such lives are
doomed.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies, but its
multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heart-rending in their
evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition. And yet, all started
harmlessly, in childish games and laughter….

Thus in the rue Montmartre, three years, monotonous and unremittingly intense, passed by.
Elisabeth and Paul, incapable of growing up, went on rocking their twin cradles.
Gérard loved Elisabeth. Elisabeth and Paul adored, devoured each other. Regularly
once a fortnight, after some nocturnal quarrel, Elisabeth packed a bag and was off to
live in a hotel.

Night after stormy night, followed by heavy-lidded mornings; then the long afternoons on
which they drifted, drowsy, blind as moles. Sometimes Elisabeth took Gérard for
her escort, while Paul went hunting on his own; but nothing that they saw or heard
belonged to them as individuals. They were inexorably compelled to carry back the sweets
they rifled, to feed the common store of honey.

They had no inkling, this orphaned penniless pair, that they were outlaws, living on
borrowed time, beyond the battle, on fate’s capricious bounty. It seemed to them
no more than natural that Gérard’s uncle and the doctor should continue to
provide for them.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may
flaunt his spoils but cannot wear them plausibly. These children had been born so rich
that nothing in the way of worldly riches could possibly have changed their lives. Had
they inherited a fortune overnight, they would have been immune from it.

Indolent, frivolous, they were the living refutation of the Puritan ideal, the living
exemplar of these words of the philosopher:
vital essences, volatile, indifferent,
drinkers at the sacred fount
.

They had as little instinct for planning, study, job-hunting, wire-pulling, as a pampered
lapdog has for guarding sheep. In the newspapers, they read the crime reports and
nothing else. Uncontainable in any social framework, they were of that tribe that New
York reforms at home and banishes for choice to Paris.

When, therefore, to the consternation of Paul and Gérard, Elisabeth suddenly
announced her intention of looking for a job, she was in no way moved by practical
considerations. She was sick, she declared, of being a drudge. Paul could look after
himself. In any case, she was nineteen; her health was going to pieces; she would not
stand it a day longer.

“You see, Gérard,” she declared, “Paul’s got no ties,
and besides, he’s useless, he’s no good, he’s a half-wit,
practically mad. I’ll have to fend for myself. Besides, what’s to become
of him if I don’t work? I must earn my living. I shall get a job. I
must.”

Gérard understood. It had just dawned on him that the stern opening bars of a new
theme were sounding in the room. All ready to be
gone
, Paul lay embalmed, the
passive victim of this unfamiliar onslaught.

“Poor kid,” she went on, “he does need help. You see he’s
really not much better. The doctor … (No, it’s all right, Giraffe,
he’s asleep) … the doctor’s awfully worried about him. He’ll
never be able to go back to school again. It’s not his fault; I’m not
blaming him; it’s just that I’ve got a chronic invalid on my hands. To
think that one snowball, one little snowball, could do him in like this.”

“Devil! Devil!” thought Paul. He went on feigning sleep; but a nervous
twitch betrayed his agitation.

Solicitously, finger on lip, Elisabeth bent over him, then presently began again, turning
the screws with expert fingers, stressing the pathos of his present state. When
Gérard protested, pointing out how well he looked, how much he had grown, how
strong he was, she countered with his greed, his spinelessness, his slackness.

Finally, unable to contain himself a moment longer, he stirred, as if beginning to wake
up. At once she changed the subject, in honeyed accents asked him what he wanted.

Paul was now seventeen years old. This many a month he could have passed for twenty. He
had outgrown sugar, outgrown crayfish. It was time, his sister thought, to raise the
stakes.

Sleep having placed him at a disadvantage, a change of tactics seemed to Paul advisable.
He made a sudden charge. At once she switched from plaintiveness to rank abuse. He was a
worm, a downright tramp. He’d be the death of her. She wouldn’t put it
past him to set up as a pimp and let her walk the streets.

She for her part was nothing but a windbag, a figure of fun, a useless fatuous old
donkey.

These epithets compelled her to abandon speech for action. She besought Gérard to
introduce her to a woman of his acquaintance, head of one of the great fashion houses.
She would be a salesgirl.

G
ÉRARD
introduced her to the dressmaker, who was staggered by her beauty. Unfortunately,
however, all salesgirls must know foreign languages. She could only be engaged as a
mannequin. She would be in good hands: there happened to be another orphan, Agatha, in
their employ; Agatha would keep an eye on her.

Salesgirl? Mannequin? Between the two Elisabeth could see no difference in status. On the
contrary, her début as a mannequin seemed to her tantamount to being launched, or
almost, as an actress. The agreement was concluded and had a further notable result. She
had expected Paul to be upset; and in fact, for a number of obscure reasons, he did
quite genuinely fall into transports of rage and indignation, waving his arms, shouting
that he didn’t fancy being the brother of a high-class tart, that he’d
sooner see her on the streets.

“I’d rather not,” retorted Elisabeth, “I might run into
you.”

“My poor girl,” sneered Paul, “take a look at yourself in the glass.
You’ll only make an exhibition of yourself. You’ll be out on your fanny
within an hour. Mannequin, indeed! Stick yourself up as a scarecrow. That’s more
your line.”

To be a mannequin requires a harsh apprenticeship; the first day is as terrifying, as
humiliating, as one’s first day at school. Emerging from a long dark tunnel,
Elisabeth stepped up on to the dais, under the glaring arc-lamps. Convinced that she was
hideous, fearing the worst, she flamed among the other sophisticated, jaded models in
all her untamed alien beauty. Enviously they stared, started to whisper among
themselves; but something about her gave her immunity from open persecution, and they
decided to ignore her. She found her isolation a sore trial. She watched the others and
tried to copy their way of bearing down on a prospective client, as if about to demand a
public apology, then at the last moment turning disdainfully away. But she was not the
fashionable type. She was depressed by the boring frocks they made her model. She became
Agatha’s stand-in.

A warm affection—for Elisabeth a hitherto unknown emotion—grew up gradually
between the two motherless girls, uniting them in a friendship that was to prove fatal
to them both. They were both social misfits. Whatever moments they could snatch from
modeling they spent together, curled up in their white smocks on divans strewn with
model furs, exchanging books and confidences, and generally acting as a mutual
tonic.