“That’s the first time you’ve used my Christian name,” he said and I could see he thought my question silly. He was never going to be poor, let alone old. Other people perhaps, that was their affair, but not he, Jason, for whom so many girls sighed.
“Well, I know no other name for you,” I said. But I did, from his mailbox downstairs, and it was Perin. He grinned.
“I’m not complaining, ma petite Rose,” he said and we were right in front of my table. Then before he left me he gave me a sort of friendly slap on the rump.
“So Madame gets cheap thrills when her husband is away,” said Simon, his whole face twitching.
I didn’t answer and for some reason I looked up carefully at the waiter who was collecting his money from our table. His beardless wrinkles contrasted with his fixed expression. Something frustrate to the point of perversion made his mouth bend cruelly. I thought it must be filled with angry spit.
As we left, the music started up again and the accordion seemed to sear my heart, to stroke it with heavy, hot strokes. The sound of it was like one of those repulsive human caresses, given furtively by furtive men to make young girls cry.
FOURTEEN
Sometimes, when La Cigale awoke in the morning, she thought she must be dead already. She felt no blood flowing in her body, no juices from organ or gland, and her face was a wooden mask pressed to her skull and fitting ill. Even her waking sighs came out of her lungs like tissue paper. And it was summer, early summer, barely June. A time when the body must relax in the heat and drink in warmth against the future winter.
The sun lit La Cigale’s room early and penetrated even the two layers of burlap over the top glass of her door. She never opened this door at night and there was a rank stench in the room; a smell of stale make-up, old, little-washed flesh and incipient disease. The room, smallest of the three attic partitions, was so cramped as to be almost a closet and it contained nothing but a bed, some boxes and a folding chair. On the wall, stained with damp, hooks held her clothing. These garments were of varied shades but the effect of them together was a dull brown. They were like those strips of clay that children get as gifts; in the box they are multicolored, yet when mixed—and just when one had decided to create a rainbow—the whole is miraculously transformed into dung.
Aside from the clothing there was a small mirror of irregular shape, the broken piece of a larger glass and found no doubt in a heap of rubbish. There was also a calendar from many years past, showing a fat girl stepping into a stream and looking over her shoulder with unbearable coyness. One would swear she was inviting a kick.
On all these things and on La Cigale as she slept, the sun poured in through the burlap. But after a little while it receded to the balcony outside and then, slowly, the old woman awoke. It took her a long time to gather her forces and with each morning doubt came into her heart; a feeling of futility and despair. Then, always and suddenly, a long groan broke from her throat. She was awake. She lived.
After that she got up and went about the lengthy process of her toilet. There was no water up on the top floor and La Cigale had to bring it up in a jug from the yard fountain. Thus she was as sparing of it as possible and actually, when she had dipped her old fingers into the basin and dried them on a rag, she was through for ordinary days. On Sunday she washed more thoroughly, but never, on holy or ordinary day, did she touch water to her face. Everybody knew that water increased wrinkles, and as for soap! But in any case she seldom could afford soap. So, having no cold cream, no soft paper or cotton with which luckier women remove their fard, she left her skin to fight as it could beneath its load of paint and grime.
On this morning in early June it was very warm; the first real heat wave of summer. The day had sprung on Paris without warning, up from the Seine whose sultry mists obscured the air. A red sun had climbed haltingly and as though with gaping wounds to pant over the roof-tops. Its hot breath had seared La Cigale’s room. At length she gave her waking groan and sat up. Sleep or bitter dreams had pulled her mouth awry and her eyes, between their penciled lids, were glossed with rheum. Yet beneath, inside, her undominated heart still beat; stern, forceful and eager for life.
Dressed at last, her false switch coiled above her brows and her own sparse hair concealed in its turban, she opened the door and went out onto the balcony. Bernice was hanging sheets over the upper railing to dry and to bleach.
“Good morning, La Cigale,” she said cheerfully, wiping her bare arm over her face. As she spoke the sound of Jason’s accordion broke from the end room; small, shrunken noises like yawns and then, softly and still uneven, a tango. The notes crawled out into the hot morning like serpents, shining and impure, who come to warm their blood on sunlit stones.
Below them Rose appeared on the terrace and glanced up languidly at the sky. Pierre, who left for work around ten, had just gone by way of the front door. The two women looked down on Rose, on her sallow skin, on her cheekbones which gleamed with sweat, and on the blue-black sheen of her hair. There was something touching in the sight of this young woman extenuated by the heat and by the secret roil of her own blood. She was wearing her husband’s dressing gown and had folded back the sleeves. Thus her frail wrists were left bare as were the slender joints where neck and shoulder met. Only her calves and ankles appeared vigorous, protruding from the skirts of the gown and turning finely on their arched muscles. They were like the powerful roots of a delicate flower. In turn she looked up at the two women and lifted her hand slightly in greeting. Then without moving her head she turned her eyes to the end room where the tango, now fuller in volume, cleft the hot morning. She dropped her head.
“Poor Madame Flamand,” said Bernice, “she’s a pianist, a real musician. It’s hard for her to hear that type of thing every time she pokes her nose outdoors.”
“I’ve seen her when it wasn’t so hard,” said La Cigale.
Bernice gave the old woman a startled blue look. La Cigale was growing so eccentric that it made communication difficult. “Oh, Madame Rose is very polite, even to a silly boy like that,” she said.
A short laugh came up out of La Cigale’s belly, rather more like a belch than a laugh. Without knowing why, the servant looked embarrassed and awkward. She put her fists on her hips and moved them up and down there until she found the bones on which they could rest.
“As an ex-singer, Madame La Cigale, you should understand,” she said reproachfully, but her only answer was the rigidity of the old woman’s jaw, her half-open mouth through which the teeth real and false could be seen locked together. Giving a last, straightening twitch to the sheets, Bernice hurried off down the stairs and into the Flamand apartment.
La Cigale, equipped with a basket and an empty bottle, now went out to do her marketing, choosing those stalls that sold yesterday’s produce at a cheaper rate. She bought three peaches whose rotten spots could be cut out, a small piece of horse meat and some wilted lettuce. Just in front of her house she had her wine bottle refilled from the cheapest barrel.
Once home, and having washed the lettuce in the faucet, she took some potatoes out from under the bed and prepared her one meal of the day on an alcohol burner. She drank deeply of the cheap wine whose acidity roughened the inside of her mouth. The room was a furnace, but she did not sweat. And perhaps the outer heat was as nothing to the fire of curiosity and dread that burned inside of her. La Cigale was waiting. She had come to live for it lately: this silent secret waiting for something her instinct told her would come to pass.
She sat in her room now on the bed with the door open just the least crack. She had finished her meal and her scrapbook was spread on her knees. From its page a robust young woman in tights and a top hat smiled up at her. The solid thighs sprang directly from a corseted waist and the bosom rolled up gloriously toward husky shoulders. The face, solid and fleshy like the figure, shone with impudence, confidence and good will. Many curls completed it on top. Taken as a whole the photograph was an example of music-hall beauty in the nineteen hundreds. She had been sixteen at the time when it was made.
The afternoon wore on. Jason went out for an hour or so and then returned. Bernice came up to her room beside La Cigale’s and changed her dress. She was going out no doubt, as she usually did every afternoon, to market or to do errands, certainly to flirt with the widowed hardware-store man who wanted to marry her. The piano had been sounding from the Flamands’ but the young woman down there must have been put off by the heat for after a bare hour there came the crash of petulant discord and then silence. Bernice went out humming, her basket jaunty on her arm, her face a rich cyclamen. La Cigale could not see her but she imagined her well enough; cotton sweater, flowered cotton skirt and that cyclamen face beneath the pink straw hair. Bernice was neither pretty nor young, yet her girlish exuberance was so definite that it obscured all other facts about her.
La Cigale heard the steps going down the stairs and, as they receded, she felt something approaching faintness. It might have been the heat or the red wine or her own pulse hammering in the pit of her stomach. She counted its beat and now that beat was keeping time to another sound outside her body. She tensed. Her hands clasped each other above the smiling girl in tights. Then, through the crack in the door, she saw a figure pass. The polished black hair caught the light and gave out a dense, sapphire flash. There was a fluttering of summer skirts. Then Rose was gone from La Cigale’s line of vision.
From that moment La Cigale changed her attitude. She tried to breathe as softly as possible and her face had the strained look of one who is listening intensely. Never fear, not a sound escaped her; not the light tap on the door next to hers, nor the answering murmur scarcely audible from within. Nor those other sounds so well known to her, far away yet never dim; brutal and tender, terminating in sighs.
La Cigale’s own breath was wrung in her body. She opened her dark mouth to gasp softly and the tears she could no longer shed cut into the passages of her eyes like crystal stones.
Later, long after silence had once more descended, after the figure had once again passed her door, after Bernice had returned and Jason gone out for the evening, she herself rose. A heavy old woman, bulky yet juiceless, she went down into the street.
“I feel weak in this dirty weather,” she muttered aloud. La Cigale always spoke aloud when in the street. Perhaps other people talking together made her do this. “I need a small drink,” she concluded and looked hopefully into the depths of her shabby purse. It was empty of all but a few francs, not even enough for a glass of wine. She grimaced. “They can keep their foul money,” she said, but what she meant was that she would have to raise some.
And La Cigale could make money. It was her secret and her shame and she did it almost every evening. Thus tonight too she started on her trip across Paris. She took the Metro and, coming up in a distant quarter, walked to the nearest café. In this season many people sat outside and La Cigale sang to them. She sang the songs of her youth and others that she had learned since, and although her voice had left all but a vestige of its volume behind, it was still surprisingly true: a small soprano like that of a bird lost at dusk.
On this night La Cigale was preceded in her act by a man playing a violin. He must have got hold of the instrument by mistake and it was with the greatest difficulty that one could recognize what tune he had in mind. La Cigale was outraged.
“Why don’t they simply beg like honest men?” she demanded loudly. “Why insult people like that?” And she was furious at the few grudging francs given him.
Waiting a few moments to let his impression fade away, La Cigale then stood square in front of the tables and sang one of the roguish numbers that had once made her famous. Her dark and angry face combined unpleasantly with the words and her listeners were unconsciously embarrassed and talked louder than ever. Next she sang a more modern song. “Long, long after the poets have disappeared,” she sang, “their songs will wander abroad in the streets.” But this too, coming from an old woman soon to disappear herself, made the clients uneasy. They paused in their talking and laughing to peer anxiously, first at her and then out onto the wide street from whence approached the inevitable night.
To a habitual performer it was impossible not to see the effect she was having, so La Cigale pulled herself up. In her third song she turned herself into a clown. This song was about a lame man and she too walked up and down limping comically as she sang. Her face with its angry expression fitted the cruel humor of the ballad. Her wide mouth mimicked that horrified and permanent yaw of the mutilated and the disgraced. Ah, here was something anyone could enjoy! The people at the tables relaxed and began to smile. And why should they not when God had given the example, when, out of a handsome, lusty young woman, He had fashioned (presumably for his own amusement) this dirty and evil-smelling hag?
Afterwards La Cigale passed the plate.
FIFTEEN
Journal:
I suppose you know what’s coming now and that I went up one afternoon to Jason’s room. Oh, the clue passes by there all right! I’ve tried to give the important things leading up to that afternoon, but there’s always a gap. How could I, Rose, despite the bugler, the gypsies, La Cigale, despite even the little boy who juggled in the bar—how could I have done such a thing? And it’s much worse, you know, because I didn’t go up there like those worldly-type women (only I’ve never known any) who coolly and wantonly seek adventure. No, I was driven up there and once in his room—when I saw him stretched half-naked on the bed, when I saw his breast gleam . . . He sat up when I came in and put out his hand to me in the most natural way, as though he had been expecting me and I was on time.
Well, when I saw all that a dark web crossed my eyes. Would “caul” be the right word? It comes to mind. I could hardly move a step forward before falling on my knees. Yes, there it is, I threw myself at his feet. It was as though I had carried a heavy burden for a long time and had cast it down at last. I don’t remember how he drew me up beside him on the bed, but he must have.
