dog who thinks at last, at last, he hears the familiar step again.
“Mouse! Mouse! Where are you? Are you near? Is that you leaning from the high window and stretching out your arms for the wings of the shutters? Are you this soft bundle moving towards me through the feathery snow? Are you this little girl pressing through the swing-doors of the restaurant? Is that your dark shadow bending forward in the cab? Where are you? Where are you? Which way must I turn? Which way shall I run? And every moment I stand here hesitating you are farther away again. Mouse! Mouse!”
Now the poor dog has come back into the café, his tail between his legs, quite exhausted.
“It was a . . . false . . . alarm. She’s nowhere . . . to . . . be seen.”
“Lie down then! Lie down! Lie down!”
My name is Raoul Duquette. I am twenty-six years old and a Parisian, a true Parisian. About my family—it really doesn’t matter. I have no family; I don’t want any. I never think about my childhood. I’ve forgotten it.
In fact, there’s only one memory that stands out at all. That is rather interesting because it seems to me now so very significant as regards myself from the literary point of view. It is this.
When I was about ten our laundress was an African woman, very big, very dark, with a check handkerchief over her frizzy hair. When she came to our house she always took particular notice of me, and after the clothes had been taken out of the basket she would lift me up into it and give me a rock while I held tight to the handles and screamed for joy and fright. I was tiny for my age, and pale, with a lovely little half-open mouth—I feel sure of that.
One day when I was standing at the door, watching her go, she turned round and beckoned to me, nodding and smiling in a strange secret way. I never thought of not following. She took me into a little outhouse at the end of the passage, caught me up in her arms and began kissing me. Ah, those kisses! Especially those kisses inside my ears that nearly deafened me.
When she set me down she took from her pocket a little round fried cake covered with sugar, and I reeled along the passage back to our door.
As this performance was repeated once a week it is no wonder that I remember it so vividly. Besides, from that very first afternoon, my childhood was, to put it prettily, “kissed away.” I became very languid, very caressing, and greedy beyond measure. And so quickened, so sharpened, I seemed to understand everybody and be able to do what I liked with everybody.
I suppose I was in a state of more or less physical excitement, and that was what appealed to them. For all Parisians are more than half—oh, well, enough of that. And enough of my childhood, too. Bury it under a laundry basket instead of a shower of roses and passons oultre.
I date myself from the moment that I became the tenant of a small bachelor flat on the fifth floor of a tall, not too shabby house, in a street that might or might not be discreet. Very useful, that. . . . There I emerged, came out into the light and put out my two horns with a study and a bedroom and a kitchen on my back. And real furniture planted in the rooms. In the bedroom a wardrobe with a long glass, a big bed covered with a yellow puffed-up quilt, a bed table with a marbled top and a toilet set sprinkled with tiny apples. In my study—English writing table with drawers, writing chair with leather cushions, books, arm-chair, side table with paper-knife and lamp on it and some nude studies on the walls. I didn’t use the kitchen except to throw old papers into.
Ah, I can see myself that first evening, after the furniture men had gone and I’d managed to get rid of my atrocious old concierge—walking about on tip-toe, arranging and standing in front of the glass with my hands in my pockets and saying to that radiant vision: “I am a young man who has his own flat. I write for two newspapers. I am going in for serious literature. I am starting a career. The book that I shall bring out will simply stagger the critics. I am going to write about things that have never been touched before. I am going to make a name for myself as a writer about the submerged world. But not as others have done before me. Oh, no! Very naively, with a sort of tender humour and from the inside, as though it were all quite simple, quite natural. I see my way quite perfectly. Nobody has ever done it as I shall do it because none of the others have lived my experiences. I’m rich—I’m rich.”
All the same I had no more money than I have now. It’s extraordinary how one can live without money. . . . I have quantities of good clothes, silk underwear, two evening suits, four pairs of patent leather boots with light uppers, all sorts of little things, like gloves and powder boxes and a manicure set, perfumes, very good soap, and nothing is paid for. If I find myself in need of right-down cash—well, there’s always an African laundress and an outhouse, and I am very frank and bon enfant about plenty of sugar on the little fried cake afterwards. . . .
And here I should like to put something on record. Not from any strutting conceit, but rather with a mild sense of wonder. I’ve never yet made the first advances to any woman. It isn’t as though I’ve known only one class of woman—not by any means. But from little prostitutes and kept women and elderly widows and shop girls and wives of respectable men, and even advanced modern literary ladies at the most select dinners and soirées (I’ve been there), I’ve met invariably with not only the same readiness, but with the same positive invitation. It surprised me at first. I used to look across the table and think “Is that very distinguished young lady, discussing le Kipling with the gentleman with the brown beard, really pressing my foot?” And I was never really certain until I had pressed hers.
Curious, isn’t it? I don’t look at all like a maiden’s dream. . . .
I am little and light with an olive skin, black eyes with long lashes, black silky hair cut short, tiny square teeth that show when I smile. My hands are supple and small. A woman in a bread shop once said to me: “You have the hands for making fine little pastries.” I confess, without any clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow.
But, wait! Isn’t it strange I should have written all that about my body and so on? It’s the result of my bad life, my submerged life. I am like a little woman in a café who has to introduce herself with a handful of photographs. “Me in my chemise, coming out of an eggshell. . . . Me upside down in a swing, with a frilly behind like a cauliflower. . . .” You know the things.
If you think what I’ve written is merely superficial and impudent and cheap you’re wrong. I’ll admit it does sound so, but then it is not all. If it were, how could I have experienced what I did when I read that stale little phrase written in green ink, in the writing-pad? That proves there’s more in me and that I really am important, doesn’t it? Anything a fraction less than that moment of anguish I might have put on. But no! That was real.
“Waiter, a whisky.”
I hate whisky. Every time I take it into my mouth my stomach rises against it, and the stuff they keep here is sure to be particularly vile. I only ordered it because I am going to write about an Englishman. We French are incredibly old-fashioned and out of date still in some ways. I wonder I didn’t ask him at the same time for a pair of tweed knickerbockers, a pipe, some long teeth and a set of ginger whiskers.
“Thanks, mon vieux. You haven’t got perhaps a set of ginger whiskers?”
“No, monsieur,” he answers sadly. “We don’t sell American drinks.”
And having smeared a corner of the table he goes back to have another couple of dozen taken by artificial light.
Ugh! The smell of it! And the sickly sensation when one’s throat contracts.
“It’s
