“Coffee-black,” the man says.
“No coffee this early,” the manager says.
Definitely a good victim, a sad little spider’s face, perpetually reconstituting the tatters of his frayed intelligence. Besides, how could he know that this Wallas came last night to this obscure bar in the Rue des Arpenteurs? It’s unnatural.
Having played all his cards for the moment, the manager is no longer interested in his visitor. He dries his bottles with an absent-minded expression and, since the other man is not drinking anything, he turns off the two lamps, one after the other. There’s plenty of daylight now.
The man has gone, mumbling something incomprehensible. The manager finds himself back among his wreckage, the spots on the marble, the varnish of the chairs which the dirt makes sticky in places, the mutilated sign on the glass. But he is the victim of more insistent specters, spots darker than those of the wine disturb his vision. He tries to brush them away, but it is no use; at every step he bumps into another The movement of an arm, the music of idle words, Pauline, sweet Pauline.
Sweet Pauline, who died so strangely, so long ago. Strangely? The manager leans toward the mirror. What’s so strange about it? A spiteful contraction gradually distorts his face. Isn’t death always strange? The grimace grows worse, freezes in a gargoyle mask that stares at itself for a moment more. Then an eye closes, the mouth twists, one side of the face contracts, a still more hideous monster appears and dissolves immediately too, giving way to a calm and almost smiling image. Pauline’s eyes.
Strange? Isn’t it the most natural thing of all? Take this Dupont, how much stranger it is that he is not dead. The manager begins laughing softly, a kind of voiceless laughter without gaiety, like a sleepwalker’s laugh. Around him the familiar specters imitate him; each has its own grin. They even strain a point somewhat, guffaw, nudging one another with their elbows and slapping one another on the back. How can he make them shut up now? There are a lot of them. And they are quite at home.
Motionless in front of the mirror, the manager watches himself laughing; he tries as hard as he can not to see the others that are swarming across the room, the jubilant troupe, the wild legion of minor heartaches, the refuse of fifty years of badly digested existence. Their racket has become intolerable, the horrible concert of brays and yelps and all at once, in the silence that has suddenly fallen again, a young woman’s clear laugh.
“Go to hell!”
The manager has turned around, wrenched from the nightmare by his own cry. No one is there, of course, neither Pauline nor the others. He glances with weary eyes around the room that calmly awaits the people who will come, the chairs where the murderers and their victims will sit, the tables where the communion will be served to them.
Here is Antoine; it’s starting well.
“Have you heard the news yet?”
Not even a nod in answer. He is not an easy customer this morning, the manager. Let’s give him a try, anyway.
“A man named Albert Dupont, murdered last night, here, right at the end of the street!”
“Daniel.”
“Daniel what?”
“Daniel Dupont.”
“No, I said it was Albert. Right here…”
“First of all, no one was murdered.”
“That’s what you say. How do you know anyway, without ever leaving your bar?”
“She telephoned from here. The old housekeeper who works for them. Their line was out of order. Flesh wound in the arm.”
(Poor fool who always knows everything.)
“Well, he’s dead anyway! Look at the paper: he’s dead, I tell you.”
“You have a paper?”
Antoine looks through his overcoat pockets, then he remembers:
“No, I left it for my wife.”
“All right, never mind, it doesn’t matter anyway: his name’s Daniel and he isn’t dead at all.”
Antoine does not look happy. He stands there wondering what he might do that would be more convincing than an ironic sneer, but the bartender does not give him time.
“Are you drinking something, or getting the hell out?”
The dispute is likely to grow nastier, when the door opens again and lets in a cheerful, plump, and gesticulating person, almost in rags.
“Good morning, boys. Say, I have a riddle for you.”
“All right, we know that one,” Antoine says.
“No, boy,” the cheerful man says, undiscouraged, “you don’t know this one. No one does. No one, you hear? Bartender, a glass of white wine I”
Judging from the man’s face, his riddle must be a really good one. So no one will miss a word of it, he enunciates it as if he were giving dictation:
“What is the animal that in the morning…”
But no one is listening to him. He has already had one too many. He’s funny, of course, but the other two don’t have the heart for jokes: what concerns them is a man’s life!
2
The Rue des Arpenteurs is a long straight street, bordered on each side by houses that are already old, whose inadequately tended two- or three-storied facades suggest the modest circumstances of the tenants they shelter: laborers, office workers, or merely fishermen. The shops are not very prosperous looking and even the cafes are few and far between-not that these people are particularly sober, but they choose to do their drinking elsewhere.
The Cafe des Allies (Wines amp; Liquors. Furnished Rooms) is located at the end of the street, number 10, only a few houses from the Boulevard Circulaire and the city proper, so that the proletarian character of the buildings in its vicinity is somewhat tempered by bourgeois features. At the corner of the parkway stands a big stone apartment building, well kept up, and opposite, at number 2, a small two-story private house with a narrow strip of garden around it. The structure does not have much style but gives an impression of comfort, even of a certain luxury; a fence and behind it a spindle-tree hedge clipped to a man’s height complete its isolation.
The Rue des Arpenteurs extends eastward, interminable and less and less prepossessing, to quite out-of- the-way neighborhoods that are obviously those of the poor: a checkerboard of muddy paths between the shacks, rusty corrugated iron, old planks, and tarpaper.
To the west, on the other side of the parkway and its canal, stretches the city proper, the streets somewhat cramped between the high brick houses, the public buildings without unnecessary ornament, the churches stiff, the shopwindows somber. The whole effect is solid, occasionally substantial, but austere; the cafes close early, the windows are narrow, the people are serious.
Yet this mournful town is not monotonous: a complicated network of canals and ponds brings in from the sea, which is only six kilometers north, the smell of kelp, the gulls, and even a few boats of low tonnage, coasters, barges, small tugs, for which a whole series of drawbridges and locks opens. This water, this movement keep people’s minds open. The freighter whistles reach them from the harbor, over the tow docks and depots, and at high tide bring the space, the temptation, the consolation of possibility.
Since their heads are on their shoulders, temptation is enough: possibility remains simply possible, the whistles have long blown without hope.
The crews are recruited elsewhere; men around here prefer to go into business, on land, the most daring
