One is striking, bearing her head with a furious insolence; her rebelliously skinny but charming figure is completely distinct under her tight sheath of pink printed cotton, bought from an old-clothes dealer.
On this freezing February night, she’s covered by a cloak, a sort of light cape, also of cotton, but blue and embroidered with faded silver . . . She’s frozen, demented with the cold, but her desperate gray eyes reject all pity; she’s ready to insult or claw the first person who’ll look distressed and say,
“Poor kid!”
In this Montmartre neighborhood they’re not an unusual species, these hookers dying of poverty and pride, beautiful in their glaring destitution. I come across them here and there, hauling their lightweight duds from table to table in the eateries on the Mount, cheerful, tipsy, savage, prepared to bite, never gentle, never tender, hating their job but working at it all the same.
Men call them “damn little tramps” with a self-satisfied, scornful laugh, because they’re of a breed that never gives in, that will never admit to being hungry, cold, or in love, that dies saying,
“I’m not sick,” that bleeds when struck but returns the blows . . .
Yes, I know something about those women, and it’s them that I think of when I look at the little tart, frozen and proud, who has just come into Olympe’s place.
A starved half-silence reigns in the bar.
Two rouged young men exchange shrill remarks from opposite ends of the room, without conviction.
A hoyden with stumpy legs, who’s dining on a creme de menthe and water while waiting for a meal that may possibly turn up, feebly retorts to their comments.
A bulldog bitch, pregnant to the point of bursting, is panting painfully on the worn carpet, her ballooning belly studded with prominent teats . . .
Brague and I chat, made sleepy by the gas heat.
I think about all the mediocre restaurants in all the cities where we’ve sat at a table like this, weary, indifferent, and curious, with unfamiliar dishes in front of us . . . Brague has a cast-iron stomach for dealing with the swill in hotels and railroad-station refreshment rooms; as for me, if I can’t manage the tough “home-style” veal or leg of lamb, I make up for it on the cheese and the omelet . . .
“Say, Brague! Isn’t that man there with his back to us Dancing Stephane?”
“Where? . . .
Yes, it’s him . . . with a prostitute.”
In fact, with such a prostitute! I’m astounded at that fifty-year-old brunette with hair on her upper lip . . . And as if he felt our eyes on him, Dancing Stephane turns halfway around and sends us one of those knowing winks which in a stage play signify
“Sh! A secret!” and are performed so discreetly that they’re seen by the entire audience.
“Poor bastard! He really earns his money!” Brague whispers . . . “Our coffee, miss,” he calls, “so we can hightail it out of here!”
The coffee is an ink of an olive-black color which leaves a sticky dye on the sides of the cups.
But because I no longer drink good coffee, I’ve developed a taste for these hot, bitter brews which smell like licorice and quinine . . . You can do without meat in our line of work, but not without coffee . . .
Though we’re served ours very quickly, Dancing Stephane has bolted ahead of us—he’s skating in the revue at the Emp’-Clich’—behind his mature companion. Shamelessly he imitates, behind her, for our benefit, the gesture of an athlete lifting a four-hundred-pound weight, and we’re vile enough to laugh at it . . . Then we leave this gloomy place, called “a place of amusement,” where at this hour everyone is drowsing beneath the rosy-pink lightbulbs: the pregnant bitch, the exhausted hoydens, the waitress from the country, and the manager with the waxed mustache . . .
Outdoors, the perimeter boulevards and the Place Blanche, where a glacial wind is swirling, enliven us again, and I feel joyfully infected with the fever of activity, the need to work . . . a mysterious, indefinable energy which I’d expend by dancing just as I would by writing, running, acting, or pulling a handcart . . .
As if gripped by the same desire, Brague suddenly says to me:
“You know, I got a note from Salomon the booking agent . . . The tour I mentioned to you is shaping up.
He’s finding us a day here, two days there, a week in Marseilles, one in Bordeaux . . . Can you still go?”
“Me?
Right away!
Why not?”
He shoots me a keen sidelong glance.
“I don’t know . . . No special reason . . . Sometimes . . . I know what life is like . . .”
Now I’ve understood!
My partner remembers Dufferein-Chautel and thinks that . . . My burst of laughter, instead of undeceiving him, confuses him more, but tonight I feel like such a tease, so cheerful and unburdened, practically en route already . . . Oh yes, to be on the go, to leave again, to forget who I am and the name of the city that sheltered me yesterday, to think as little as possible, to reflect and retain nothing but the beautiful landscape turning and changing alongside the train, the murky pond in which the blue sky is mirrored in green, the openwork spire of a bell tower encircled by swallows . . .
One day, I recall . . . when leaving Rennes on a May morning . . . The train was going very slowly down a track under repair between hawthorn copses, pink apple trees with blue shadows, and young willows with jade leaves . . . Standing at the edge of the woods, a young girl was watching us go by, a twelve-year-old girl with a striking resemblance to me.
Serious, her brows knitted, with round, tanned cheeks—such as I had—her hair slightly bleached by the sun, she was holding a leafy shoot in her sunburned, scratched hands—such as I had.
And that unsociable air, those ageless, almost sexless eyes which seemed to take everything seriously—like mine, really like mine! . . .
Yes, standing at the edge of the thicket, my savage childhood was watching me go by, dazzled by the rising sun . . .
“Whenever you want, you know!”
My partner’s curt call awakens me in front of the Emp’-Clich’, which is lit up by purple lights, the glare of which, Brague says, hurt “the back of his eyes,” and we reach the basement where the familiar odor of plaster, ammonia, ointment, and rice powder hits me with a disgust that’s almost pleasurable . . . We have come to see our pals in the revue, not the revue itself!
I find that my old dressing room is now occupied by Bouty, and Brague’s is filled with the dazzling presence of Jadin, who is playing three parts in the Emp’-Clich’ Revue.
“Make it snappy,” she yells to us. “You’re just in time for my song in ‘Paris at Night.’” Too bad!
They’ve dressed Jadin as a streetwalker! . . .
A black skirt, a black bodice with a deep V-neck, wide-mesh stockings, a red ribbon around her neck, and on her head the traditional helmet-like wig, with a blood-red camellia stuck in it!
Truly, there’s nothing left of the contagious plebeian charm of this little girl with the crooked shoulder . . .
I should have expected it: swiftly and surely they’re turning my sulky, youthful apache into a vaudeville-show hooker!
Amid the “Things okay? Anything new?
Getting along?” I watch Jadin pacing through her dressing room, chagrined to see that she has acquired the same hooker’s walk that’s universally used—belly pulled in and bosom thrust out—that, when she speaks, she “places” her voice, and that ever since we arrived she hasn’t once said “Shit!”
Bouty, who’s going to dance the indispensable “wild waltz” with her, is silently radiant beneath his silk peaked cap.
He all but says
“What do you think?,” showing us the little creature with a proprietary gesture . . .