The Vatard Sisters (11 page)

They were standing, tightly pressed against one another. Auguste asked Désirée why her sister wasn’t coming back with her. ‘Oh, she wants to have a bit of fun,’ the younger girl replied simply. ‘Well what about you, don’t you want to have some fun too?’ She made a little pout, which didn’t tell him much. Auguste persisted: ‘Colombel’s nice, isn’t he?’ She made the same gesture with her lips, only this time more emphatically, as if to say: ‘I couldn’t care less about Colombel!’

Once again, Auguste changed the subject: ‘I’ve heard it said,’ he began, ‘that you’re one of the best workers in the company.’ This time he struck a responsive chord. Désirée proudly admitted that she and her sister were, in fact, skilled binders, and, as he seemed attentive and interested, she smiled happily. He returned to the theme of his first question and asked her if she didn’t find it boring having to go home; didn’t she want to have a lover, like Céline, to take her out for walks?

She replied, without any embarrassment, that of course she’d be happy to have a boyfriend, but she added in a very firm tone: ‘If he had honourable intentions.’

Auguste felt a bit uncomfortable and he was even more perturbed when, looking straight at him, she added: ‘But what about you, you came to the fair alone, don’t you have a girlfriend?’

He wanted to make himself look good, and began to say that he could only love a nice, decent girl, not one of those scrubbers that working men often go for. Unfortunately, their conversation was interrupted. A seat was free inside the tram. Désirée went and sat down. He was left alone.

He thought to himself that she was very frank and didn’t seem like a girl who would let herself be led astray by the first comer; then a man made him lose his thread by asking him for a light, and he contemplated the streets that were flying past him. The tram was running along the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. A woman seated on the stairs jumped with fright at every blast of the horn; inside, everyone was holding cakes and packets of gingerbread, and kids sitting next to each other showed off their toys. A little girl had won a glass, as big as quart-pot, another had won some blue egg cups, a third had won a porcelain chicken laying an egg. A man claimed that it was all a scam, that you never won enough for your money; others were more even-handed, claiming that street vendors had to earn their living too. When the tram arrived at the Boulevard de Port-Royal, near the old Capuchin monastery, there were mishaps: children, stuffed full of sweets, were crying and being sick. Women shifted their dresses out of the way, a girl suggested they should put keys down their backs, the same as for a nose bleed; mothers were saying, ‘Don’t cry, darling, it’s nothing’, and all the kids looked miserable or upset, wags were making jokes, shouting: ‘Pass ’em a cup!’ An awful short-arsed bloke wearing a velvet cap, his hands in his pockets and a pipe between his teeth, was humming:

‘On the way back from Montparnasse,

With her cousin the fireman…’

The people in the tram were greatly amused. The conductor, in the process of collecting tickets, was holding his sides, and his satchel, jolted by the ebb and flow of his belly, danced with a clinking of coins; a man slapped his knees, then wiped his eyes; a woman doubled up, stamping her boots on the floor, and the noise of all this gaiety, with its sniggers, its chortles, and its guffaws, was underscored, as if by a double-bass, by the rumbling of the tramcar, and interspersed by honks of the horn and pings of the bell, by the lamentations of mothers and the stifled tears of children. One well-dressed lady got off in disgust, others followed and Auguste managed to get an empty seat next to Désirée. They became the best of friends. He declared he’d had an excellent day, and as he told her that he rarely had any fun on Sundays, not wanting to play cards and drink for hours on end, she looked at him kindly and said that she too couldn’t understand how men could drink wine and play piquet from morning to night, indeed, she was now even more amazed he didn’t have a girlfriend; he, too, maintained he was surprised that a pretty girl like her wasn’t being courted by some young man, but she again replied very deliberately: ‘Oh, but it’s not the same thing at all. For a man, there are no consequences for him if he has a little fun, but for a girl, it prevents her marrying a decent boy. I’m not like Céline in that respect; me, I don’t like the idea of changing partners and above all I don’t want a man who beats me because he’s jealous or because he’s drunk.’

Auguste blurted out that men who beat women were cowards.

‘Yes, that’s very true,’ she replied, smoothing her dress, ‘but I’ve got to run because I’m late,’ and she jumped from the tram as it made its next stop and took off down the street.

The supervisor repeated for the hundredth time in two weeks that she’d rather not eat at all than to be deprived of coffee after her meals. The woman next to her nodded her head in agreement, and a long discussion commenced on the best way to make water drip through the coffee filter.

The little girl suffering from toothache was folding sheets of paper, her head pressed in a painful manner against her smock. She was thinking about the last visit she’d made to the dentist on the Avenue du Maine. All her stumps were rotten; he’d have to rip them all out, or fill them all. She’d chosen a middle course; she had eight teeth pulled and was trying to treat the others herself. For over a month her jaw had stunk of creosote. Now and then one of her upper molars gave her a sharp twinge that she was just about able to bear by squeezing her cheek between her fingers. She was thinking that the next day she’d have to go back again to that toothpuller, to open her mouth wide, to let him prod all her teeth with the tip of his probe, to let him dig around in the holes, and she began to cry in advance at the idea that once more he’d be stuffing damp cotton into the roots. Moreover, her mother was upsetting her every evening, declaring that she wouldn’t pay for these treatments, so the unfortunate girl was working herself to the bone with the sole aim of getting the decay scrubbed off her gums.

As for Puss-puss, he didn’t suffer with his teeth. He was perched on a bundle of paper and there, rolled into a ball, ears flat, he dozed, half asleep, opening an eye from time to time, keeping watch on the supervisor who, that very morning because of a filched pork chop, had ruffled his fur and called him wicked.

Fat Eugénie, that bulwark of over-ripe flesh, was engrossed in trimming endpapers. She was thinking about how to prepare a slice of veal in sauce without spending more than fifteen sous. Her neighbours, Sidonie and Blanche, were lamenting the fact that bookbinding work broke their fingernails and that they were obliged, on account of the dust, to wear only grey or black dresses.

As for Chaudrut, he was glueing covers and cooking up a new scheme. A bar owner to whom he owed eighteen francs had said to him: ‘If you don’t pay me back I’ll give you a black eye and kick your arse into the bargain.’All his other creditors moreover had decided to deal with him in an equally undignified manner. Fortunately his furniture couldn’t be seized, as it consisted exclusively of an iron bed and a mattress, but given that all the bars were closed to him, as were the cafés, he was being forced to find refuge in a new neighbourhood. But where? That was food for thought. Montrouge, Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Grenelle, he was already barred from. He was considering an assault on the Gros-Caillou quarter.

All this couldn’t help but make him feel uneasy. To add to his problems his mistress was becoming very importunate. She’d invented an abominable system for cadging off him. She’d demand slap-up meals and new dresses, then she’d tousle Chaudrut’s hair and show him her fingers, taunting him with mocking laughter: ‘Hey look, here’s four more deserters,’ adding that a girl would have to be gagging for it to stay with a man who was going bald. The clouts he gave her were losing their effect, his fists had become flabby. In their brawls, he was now getting as much back as he handed out.

As for Ma Teston, she was working without thinking of anything. She was like a well-oiled machine, a mechanical paper-folder paid so much per day. She was happy and what’s more nothing bothered her. Her husband was a childish, simple-minded man, who obeyed her every order without the least complaint. Until dusk fell she’d slave away on sheets of paper with her wooden knife, then return home at seven, prepare the supper, reel off all the workshop gossip to Alexandre, make him read aloud all the accidents and all the crimes recorded in the
Petit Journal
, wash the dishes, scour the cat’s bowl, mend woollen socks with a darning egg, and then at ten o’clock, without so much as a
Hail Mary
or an
Our Father
, get into bed, the sheets of which were worn thin by her sharp bones.

Her husband, who was flatulent, would fart here, there and everywhere, by the chimney, by the chest of drawers…but after twenty years of living together everything is permitted, is it not? Ma Teston no longer even heard the noise; as for him, he found it amusing whenever he trumped so loud it scared the cat, which would run under the furniture, then, laughing to himself, he’d go to bed in his turn, his head enveloped in a nightcap that brandished a pair of peaked horns.

All in all, this woman lived like a pig in clover, and from time to time, when she wasn’t heaping a load of insults over Chaudrut, her
bête noire
, or when she wasn’t complaining to the supervisor about the price of haricot beans, those vegetables that are so delicious with butter, she’d make a fuss of Céline, her favourite, whose mop of chromium yellow hair captivated her.

This latter was a bit undecided at the moment. Anatole was really a nasty individual! Céline was recalling his admiration for the fat lady at the fair and was starting to find him distinctly unfunny. What’s more, he was running through her savings and she no longer had a dress to put on her back or a scarf to wrap round her frizzy hair. She reflected on the miseries love caused, repeating to herself: ‘I’d prefer not to be loved at all, that wouldn’t cost me a thing!’

She was, in addition, tortured by envy. She happened to meet one of her former workmates at the bindery, Rosine, nicknamed ‘the cow’, a big gawk of a girl with protruding shoulderblades and gap teeth. Hunchbacked and, what’s more, as red as a tomato, she’d nonetheless managed to land a well-off gentleman, and she now had a gold watch and a charm bracelet! They’d chatted in a doorway and Céline had found the slattern’s opulence upsetting. ‘Yes, dear,’ the other girl had said to her, ‘I knock around with men of means now; no slaps
and
more dosh; there’s nothing to it, you know, you can get as many rich suckers as you want when you know how to bag ’em!’

So that’s the way it was then. After all, hadn’t she been followed by a black-hatted gentleman, and hadn’t that Gamel girl taken as her lover a man who strolled around in snazzy calf-leather boots? It’s true that she was no better than she ought to be, that she was also holding onto Alfred at the same time, a slob of the worst kind, and that she had her gentleman pay for their fine dinners under the pretext that he was her brother. All things considered, perhaps it wasn’t very nice to take a lover for his money, but at the end of the day it was worth it because she really needed fitting out from head to toe, she needed some handkerchiefs and stockings.

She felt a sudden covetous desire for that ideal state where she could drink a glass of wine whenever she felt thirsty, or buy herself some knitted mittens if she fancied them.

She didn’t hide the fact that these love affairs would be tedious at first. Fashionable gents would most certainly cramp her style; she’d often have to hold her tongue, and the good times that she counted on having would definitely be less amusing than the spontaneous drunken bouts she gave herself up to with Anatole, but in any case they couldn’t go on. These binges, it was she who was paying for them, it was only fair that someone else should pay for them now.

Désirée was calmer. She was recalling the previous evening and feeling kindly towards Auguste. He’d been very proper and hadn’t even asked her to let him kiss her. It was even a little naïve on his part. Oh, she’d have refused straightaway, but nevertheless this reserve indicated he was a boy who understood that he was dealing with a decent girl and that he respected her. Besides, what was she risking? Whenever she went out with her sister, Anatole always dragged Colombel along with him, which was tiresome. They’d stand there, facing each other, like two china dogs on a mantelpiece; certainly, she couldn’t ask for anything more than to have a young man who wouldn’t go too far, who’d put up with her caprices and accede to her whims.

Deep down, however, all these reasons she was putting forward counted for nothing. She liked Auguste and that was that. He was friendly, well-mannered with women, and when he came up close to you didn’t have that hot wine breath that other men had; he was clean-shaven and there were neither stains nor holes in his shirt: all in all, he was a charming young man.

Auguste, too, was recalling, while applying a satin finish to sheets of paper with the press, every last detail of the previous evening: the moments when her skirt brushed against him, the dance of her earrings when she started to laugh, the beautiful curve of her neck which he followed with his eyes till it disappeared into her corset. He’d never find a better girl than Dêsirée, only he understood that he wouldn’t be able to indulge in any liberties with her until authorised by the mayor. So he was in love, but without any chance of success…at least until he could earn enough to put food in the pot and bring babies into the world! But for him, too, all this reasoning was a waste
of time. Désirée seemed to him to be more ravishing and more captivating than any other girl. It was no use him saying: ‘I don’t need this, be reasonable my good man, this is stupid.’ He was attached to the girl’s petticoats. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to follow her wherever she went.

He ended up, like all indecisive men, exclaiming: ‘Oh, I give up, for good or ill, come what may!’ Putting on his coat, he followed the crowd of workers who were all leaving in a group; he caught up with Désirée at the doorway and suggested they walk back together.