‘What?’
‘Was it a man you killed?’
‘Yes, a man.’
‘Was he old?’
‘About fifty, I think.’
‘You shot him?’
He shook his head and stared down at his hands.
‘Does it bother you if I ask about it?’
No! It didn’t bother him. He knew he’d have to talk about it one day or another. But it was so long ago! And so different from what people might imagine.
‘You don’t want to tell me? I tell you everything.’
Then Jean, as if reciting a lesson:
‘It all began on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in a bar called Le Mandarin … I don’t know if it’s still there.’
‘You were a student?’
Of course! And his father, since he had been widowed … but what was the point of telling her all that?
‘And you had a mistress?’
Poor Tati, jealous of Zézette! A mistress, yes, because that was what people would call her. She was being kept by a well-off engineer from Le Creusot. Did it do Tati any good to know that?
‘And you loved her?’
He didn’t know now whether he loved her, but she had made him jealous.
‘Swear that you won’t see your engineer again …’
‘Oh, you are silly, Jean!’
That was the way she talked. She was younger than him and felt she had to be protective towards him, kissing his eyelids and repeating ‘Oh, you are silly!’
Or at moments of passion, ‘Oh, you great beast!’
She tried to give him motherly advice:
‘You shouldn’t get mixed up with a woman like me … What’s it matter to you if I see Victor now and then, if he pays the rent and buys my dresses?’
That was enough to infuriate him. He would write to his father or his sister. He invented a whole string of excuses for asking for money.
‘You’re spending too much! Why did you order more champagne?’
Because people were staring at them, that was all. And why did she always manage to present a bill when he was there?
It was a long time ago and confused in his mind. He could scarcely remember now the Luxembourg Gardens, the benches where he would wait hours for her, paying no attention to the lecture notes on his knees. Then the long evenings when they didn’t know what to do with themselves. The games of backgammon in a corner of Le Mandarin, in the basement room where a poker session was going on.
Tati knew all this had happened in a world quite alien to her and was struggling to understand.
‘So it was over money that you killed someone?’
‘I owed three months’ rent, plus there was a squirrel-fur coat I’d bought her and hadn’t paid for. I was afraid she’d go back to her engineer. I knew she still wrote to him in secret. I wonder now whether she wasn’t seeing him on the sly. She told lie after lie. She’d say to me:
‘“You’d do better to work for your exams. If I was your father …”
‘I begged my father to send me money. He spent much more than that on his own mistresses. I had a right to some of my mother’s estate, but he’d sworn he’d disinherit me if I claimed it.
‘One evening, when I had just pawned my watch again, I saw some people start a big poker game in the downstairs room of the bar.
‘Actually, it wasn’t my own watch, it was a gold stopwatch I’d stolen from my father the last time I’d been home. I got three thousand francs for it. It was worth three times that.
‘Three thousand francs wasn’t enough for what I needed.
‘One of the poker players was this big fat businessman up from the provinces, Le Mans he was from. He was losing. And losing his temper too. My friends, who were playing with him, were winking at me.’
Tati gave a sigh, as you do in the cinema, realizing the end is coming.
‘I was with Zézette. She was wearing the fur coat. She said to me:
‘“I bet your pals are cheating. They’re going to fleece him and then he’ll be done for, a man who must have a wife and children.”
