The Vatard Sisters (22 page)
They were jealous of these people’s good fortune, not doubting for a moment that they were happier than themselves. They began to lose heart, no longer replying to the hellos and hulloos yelled by travellers in train carriages, turning their heads away when pairs of lovers smiled, overjoyed at going off to blow all the money they’d earned during the week on a slap-up feast.
For lack of anything better to do, they would study the trains down to their last detail, the glistening of the brass handles on their carriages, the air-bubbles in the glass of their windows; they heard the telegraph-like click-clack, that gentle sound wagons make when they glide past pushed by workmen; they reflected on the different coloured smoke emitted by the engines, fumes that would vary from white to black, from blue to grey, and that was sometimes tinged with yellow, the thick, dirty yellow of the sulphur springs at Barèges; and they would recognise each locomotive, making out its nameplate, reading on its flank the factory where it had been made: at the workshops and yards of Océan, or of Cail and Co., or at the engineering factory in Graffenstaden, or at Koechlin’s at Mulhouse, or Schneider’s at Creusot, or Gouin’s at Batignolles, or the Claparède works in Saint-Denis, or the Fives-Lille group of Cail, Parent, and Schalken and Co.; and they would point out to each other the differences between all these beasts, the weak and the strong, the small ones without tenders for the suburban lines, the huge brutes for hauling freight.
Their attention settled on an engine that had come to a halt, and then they watched the monstrous machinery of its wheels, the movement of its pistons going into the cylinders, slow and silent at first, then with increased force, the rapid in-and-out strokes, the whole frightful confusion of cranks and rods; they watched the flashes coming from the firebox, the discharges of steam from pressure valves and blow-off pipes; they heard the jolt of the locomotive as it started to move, the staccato blasts of its whistle, its shrill cries, its raucous panting.
They would feel a childish joy whenever they noticed one, a very small one, reserved for moving merchandise in the station yard and working on the track, a dinky locomotive, smart and elegant, with its iron roof to shelter the stokers and its huge cab-windows at the back.
This one was their favourite. From having often seen it zigzagging and meandering round and whistling cheerfully at the signals, they had taken a fancy to it. In the mornings, when they got up and half-opened their curtains, the little locomotive would be there, alert and spruce, smoking away silently, and they would laughingly say hello to it.
But this particular Sunday, the ‘kid’ as they called it, had remained in its shed. There were only some enormous brutes near the roundhouse, their grilled bellies being picked clean with long rods. Céline and Désirée were bored to death. Moreover, the younger girl was furious. She’d scrutinised the bridge opposite to see if Auguste was there. No Auguste. She resented the fact that he couldn’t even be bothered, and, as she had a sudden fit of coughing just then, she decided it was his fault she was ill, and she told herself he had really been out of his senses to drag her round the streets like that, in all weathers.
Auguste was in a deep gloom. First his meetings with Désirée had been interrupted, and now he had another cause for concern. His mother was becoming increasingly ill. She needed a break, a respite from going to buy food, from cooking, from breathing fumes from the fire, from doing the laundry; above all she needed company. She had suddenly come to detest the Rue du Champ-d’Asile. The windows of her apartment overlooked Montparnasse cemetery, and the lushness of its trees and the stark whiteness of its tombs, which in the summer had given her so much pleasure with their nests of warbling birds and their dense tangle of plants, now cast an incurable melancholy over her spirit. Auguste was in a very difficult position. The good woman adored him as all mothers do their only son, and he loved her with the grateful affection of a man who dimly recalls the tremendous struggle against poverty endured by a woman widowed at a youthful age and left with a child to raise. He had to make a decision and be quick about it: a doctor was consulted. He finally decided to settle her with one of his aunts who owned a run-down cottage with a small garden near the Rue de Picpus. The neighbourhood was somewhat dismal, but the little house was sunny and flowery, and once there, no longer finding herself alone, she wouldn’t be in danger of lacking any care during the day if her illness unfortunately became more serious.
But for him, however, life was going to be hard. The distance between Picpus and the Saint-Sulpice quarter was long, though the additional fatigue of having to travel further mattered little to him. The big difficulty to resolve was that of his meetings with Désirée. They were already too short, even though both of them lived in the same quarter. Now they would only last a few minutes, the little time they had to spend together must necessarily be taken up in coming and going. Not to dine at his mother’s and have to sit in some dive until Désirée was free was too much to bear; besides, the poor woman was so unhappy when she didn’t see him sitting next to her with his soup in front of him, that he couldn’t really imagine depriving her, suffering as she was, of this little pleasure. His mother was moreover like all old women who have lost their appetite and are disgusted by the sight of food; she felt sick when supper was placed before her, and, in spite of the doctor’s advice, she wouldn’t have touched her meat at all if Auguste hadn’t gently coerced her into sucking the blood from a rare cutlet, even if it meant spitting out the piece she had in her mouth when she couldn’t swallow it.
Auguste was like all people who, after having prevaricated for a long time, suddenly come to a decision. He wanted the move to be completed without delay. He put a notice on the door saying the apartment was available to sublet for six months, borrowed a small cart, and, with the help of his friends, loaded it up with furniture; he harnessed himself to the straps and with the others pushing and stopping at every corner for a drink he trundled his furnishings and his goods, step by step, that very morning.
Besides, he’d easily obtained permission to come to the workshop two hours late. The foreman thought highly of him. Despite his lack of knowledge of bookbinding practices, he possessed at least one good quality: that of only rarely failing to show up for work on a Monday morning and being neither insubordinate nor rude; moreover, his affair with Désirée had made him more interesting. Everyone knew of Vatard’s refusal to let him marry his daughter and everyone thought he was in the wrong: not only those who were less scrupulous, but also upright individuals such as Ma Teston and the supervisor. If they’d had a daughter to marry off themselves they probably wouldn’t have given her to Auguste, but not being directly concerned in the matter it amazed them that a father could be so hard-hearted as to let two lovers languish like that. A folk-memory of novels and songs lamenting the misfortunes of couples in love surged up within them, without them even being conscious of it. The snivelling sentimentality of the common people revealed itself; Vatard became a monster to them and they would all have helped Auguste deceive him if need be.
No one was surprised, therefore, that Auguste chatted for hours with Céline, who served as an intermediary; in the morning giving the young man news about Désirée, explaining that they’d put a mustard poultice on her chest, that she was doing fine, and that she’d be able to go out soon; and in the evening, recounting what she’d learned about Auguste to her sister, that he was unhappy not to see her, that he was more in love with her than ever.
Céline also informed her about Auguste’s change of address. Désirée was somewhat irritated that he’d acted in this way without telling her first. She couldn’t understand the old woman’s aversion for her apartment and became alarmed, unjustly fearing that her lover was seeking an excuse to see her less often, struck by the terrible thought that, having been unable to seduce her, he was gradually trying to break with her. But all her suspicions vanished when she saw him again. He seemed so happy and kissed her with such feeling that she felt guilty for having suspected him and was more charming and sweet to him than usual. The intimacy that had existed between them and which, despite all their efforts, had never been the same since he’d tried to touch her up in the hotel, resumed again as if nothing had come between them.
Then began a long series of convoluted arrangements, ingenious schemes in order to get from one end of Paris to the other, cheaply and in as little time as possible. Auguste applied himself to tram routes, bought a timetable at the bus office, but this mysterious tome, with its bold letters in brackets and rows of dots, told them nothing. They strained their eyes over it but were unable to unravel the complicated skein of connections and correspondences. Tired of squinting her eyes and following the lines with her finger, Désirée said to her lover, not without reason, that once installed in his new quarter he could see which buses ran there and then tell her the colours of the ones she needed to take. Auguste provided her with all the necessary information, but as buses and trams were invariably full whenever it rained, they decided not to use these modes of transport which, with all their detours and their stops, would leave them barely enough time to kiss before they had to part again. They came to an understanding that each would go halfway on foot: she’d try, for her part, to go as far as the Halle aux Vins on the Quai Saint-Bernard, and he’d wait for her there by the parapet or by the iron railings.
If they now had less time to be together, on the other hand they had an extra day on which to meet: Sunday. For a long time workers had been doing a half day on Sunday mornings, but the boss had noticed that their eagerness to come and work boiled down simply to this: that having exhausted all their credit in the quarter where they lived and having still managed to preserve some in the area around the workshop, they came only to drink without having to pay a sou, doing no useful work while they were there, just gossiping out in the courtyard or snoozing behind bundles of paper, and so he’d decided not to open his premises on Sundays anymore. Spared from having to set up the press on these mornings, Auguste could now meet Désirée at about nine o’clock.
Their meetings continued. The weather remained cold, but it no longer rained. At first, Désirée didn’t mind passing beyond the limits of the Montrouge district. It was a change for her, the Rue du Cotentin was beginning to get on her nerves with its perpetually dreary air of a deserted street; she experienced, at least for the first few days, the pleasure of crossing boulevards and streets she normally only went down once or twice a year.
Having reached the Boulevard Saint-Michel she would walk down it slowly, if she wasn’t late, window-shopping in front of shoe shops, going into raptures over shiny green and puce coloured ankle-boots, over small low-cut shoes with high heels and rosettes, over boots of coarse-grained leather, dyed bright green, blue or red, with gold-coloured trimmings and laces, looking to see what sort of women were actually buying them, thinking that no one would dare wear them openly in the street; then she would gaze at the sparkling facades of the cafés, at the women in heavy make-up fidgeting at their tables, at the seafood stalls and the flower vendors, at the fat woman vaunting her wares, at the idiotic groups of braying students, at beggar-women carting orphans about and staring in bewilderment at the gilded mirrors.
All this movement, all this noise, distracted her; she would dawdle along, eyes open wide, not really walking seriously again until she reached the iron railings of the Cluny gardens, where she always felt sorry for the guard on sentry duty beneath the dark vault of the old Roman baths.
One evening she was followed by some young men who, probably not having enough money to go drinking, fell in step behind her and started to make suggestive comments. She quickened her pace and refrained from responding to them; as soon as they caught sight of Auguste, standing forlornly at the corner of the embankment, they withdrew, but Désirée, who deep down, like all girls, wasn’t really angry at being followed, was even less so this time. Auguste would at least see that other young men thought she was pretty enough to want to seduce. But Auguste, grumbling under his breath, saw it differently, feeling that she should have told them where to go, that she wasn’t annoyed enough by their advances.
But she just laughed, giving him a little slap on the wrist and murmuring: ‘How silly you are, I obviously couldn’t care less about them since I’m here!’ And, pleased that he seemed jealous, she told him off, then hung caressingly on his arm, leaning forward with her face tilted up towards his, so as to look into his eyes.
But the time passed quickly, so they slowly walked back as far as the Boulevard du Montparnasse. One day, they noticed a nice little tavern standing on its own, and they drank some cider. This seemed to them to be the tavern of their dreams: a small room garlanded with roses, wooden tables, a jolly fat lady snoring at the counter, her arms crossed, a waiter yawning in the doorway, a garrulous landlord smoking behind his newspaper. ‘Well here’s a place that’s useful to know about,’ said Auguste, ‘instead of going all the way down to the embankment, you can stop here when it’s raining. I’m not afraid of getting wet. I’ll lose out on the time it takes us to walk here, since you won’t be with me, but it’s better than letting you get soaked to the skin and falling ill again.’
It was just as well they discovered this quiet spot because a succession of evenings followed, uninterrupted by any bright spells, in which the streets and skies turned the colour of sludge, windows were covered in drizzle, and shoes were caked in greasy muck. When the time came to go out, Désirée, snuggled up by the grate of the coal fire, feeling sluggish, her eyelids growing heavy, would say to herself: ‘I’ve got to go.’ And then gave herself five minutes more and stayed where she was. She would reproach herself for her laziness, telling herself she was weak, feeling sorry for Auguste who didn’t hesitate to splash through the rain for her, and eventually she would jump to her feet, shake herself, put on her hood, and make her way hurriedly to the tavern.
