The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
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like Claudette Colbert. Jean, who was shaving, was so nervous that he cut himself. He was thinking of Lise’s smile and how he would soon be seeing it.
Old man Pitou was fidgeting. “When are you going to open your shop?”
Féda shook him. “Be quiet, Grandpa,” she said. “I don’t want to be late for the bingo game.”
She was hurrying as fast as she could, for the chance of winning something always excited her.
Gaston Boucher was supporting his head like a globe in his right hand, his forehead pressed to the windowpane, between the curtains. He was watching Germaine and Féda as they left for the party at the parish house. Denis came out shortly afterward, having been detained by a recalcitrant lock of hair which would not stay in place. The invalid sighed and gazed sadly at the pile of illustrated stories he had taken from the drawer in the belief that Denis was going to read to him.
“Come along with the rest of us, Gaston,” his mother begged of him; for she too was anxious to be there in time for the bingo game.
“I don’t want to, Mama. I don’t understand what they say; they talk too fast.”
But he was thinking especially of the curious glances of the girls as he made his way to his seat. He went upstairs, to the hiding place where he kept his savings beneath the hollow image of the Sacred Heart. Slowly and thoughtfully he ran his hand over the banknotes and the silver coins, as one might smooth a fur in thinking of the weather to come. “In a car it won’t show, sitting down.” He thought of Germaine’s smile, of the girls who with their beaux went up to the monument of an evening. He could imagine how the couples conversed, with tender murmurings. Those young fellows walked straight and were not short of breath.
The sick lad stared at the plaster Christ, fancying that it heard what he said. Faith surged up in him like a jet of flame. Was he to belie the impossible? Dropping to his knees, he took his rosary and began saying his beads in an exaggerated whisper as he had seen old women do in church. His voice was hoarse with exaltation. “Don’t be mean, dear God; I want a good body; I want to breathe easy. I want to be straight, I do.” He stopped short in desperation and stared at a pencil drawing that he had made of his brother André. He had given him a harsh face with coarse features, rugged as a bit of jagged rock. And the strange part of it was that the portrait resembled André. His mother assured people that she would have sent it to Beaux-Arts if Gaston had been willing; but then, Flora Boucher was not hard to please and, to hear her tell it, her children were exceptional beings.
Gaston gave an anxious glance through the window to make certain that his hens were in the chicken house. Then, rummaging in a drawer, he took out Denis’s last-year’s suit. Slipping into the coat, he climbed upon a chair in front of a mirror to see how he would look if he were big like his brother. He found that the coat was too long and there were hollow places on the right side, under his sunken shoulder. That was on account of the hump. Realizing this, he made a wry face. The cuffs came down almost over his fingertips, but there was an air of distinction about that, he thought. He made an effort to straighten up and only succeeded in making his heart beat more rapidly. Gazing at his hair, straight as stubble, he wondered if some day it would be curly like Denis’s. He had large and beautiful eyes, but it seemed to him that they were too big and the lashes too long for one as small as he; the effect was ugly.
Suddenly, he turned pale. His hands and feet were becoming cold, and then a clammy flush came over him; his nails were blue.
He gave a raucous, choking cry: “Papa, Papa, hot, cold, hot, cold.” He had not had time to take off the coat.
His father came running, throwing his pipe from him on the way. “My God, what’s the matter with you now? What a life!”
Gaston was flapping his arms like a scarecrow, for the bird of death was hovering near. “I’m going to die, Papa, I’m going to die — I’m afraid.”
“Come, Flora, come quick!”
Gaston was suffocating. Joseph chewed the hairs of his moustache, feeling faint and at a loss what to do. Putting on her hat and scolding the invalid at the same time, Flora hastened up the stairs. She acted as if this attack were no more than a child’s whim. But while she made light of it, these chills and fevers that her son suffered were nevertheless beginning to alarm her. “Don’t be playing thermometer, silly boy,” she said. And pinching his cheek, she made him lie down. Joseph suggested calling a doctor.
“And throw a dollar out the window? I have my medicine book here. And anyway, you can see it’s only a nervous spell. I had the same thing when Denis was born.”
“But look, his hands are blue!”
“His veins are clogged; his blood doesn’t circulate well. What he needs is a physic.” She became angry. “Are you trying to find ways of keeping me from going to the bingo party? You’re hateful, that’s what you are; you’re jealous. What do you want me to do, slave my life away? You know very well, if it was anything serious, I’d be the first one to send for the doctor.”
Gaston was recovering now. Greatly disappointed, he took off the coat that was too big for him. Joseph thought that he had put it on to keep warm. With a sob, the hunchback turned his face to the wall. “I’ve had all I can stand, all I can stand!”
“Don’t be getting ideas in your head, my child. Go to sleep, will you? Mama’s going to win a dollar for you at bingo. Lucky boy, he’s going to have a business of his own, and here he’s crying!”
Gaston had his own vague thoughts concerning this state of infancy in which his parents kept him swaddled.
Denis stiffened his muscles and assured himself that his suit fitted him well. Catching sight of Jean and the two Langevins, he imagined they were talking about the way he was dressed. That was all they were good for: to concern themselves with such trifles. Impatient to realize his ambitions, Denis already, by way of showing his superiority, had clothed himself in the prestige of his future success. It was not that he saw any grandeur in being a stenographer and having gone to a private school! His vanity in this regard was a thing of the past. But his eagerness to live gloriously led him to glean from the future all the most likely sprouts and transplant them into his as yet untilled present; he would enjoy for a day their promising verdure and then on the morrow would despair at seeing them wither so quickly. In his imagination he upset all the rules and achieved the impossible; he conquered the world and claimed his destiny like a god. As for his true successes, which were those of the ordinary youth, he found them disillusioning, and would lament the mediocrity of others, whom he held responsible for the fact that the flood of light he knew his own bosom contained was only manifested by the tiniest of gleams.
If other men were so small of stature, it was because they could not come to know what it was by which they lived. It was Denis who, at Saint-Joseph, kept the shop of truth, and he would dispense his wares from time to time in return for a little admiration. As for women, they belonged to another world, and he was contemptuous of the weapons they wielded. He who demanded intelligence despised the only intellectual ones he knew among them. They crammed themselves with Delly and Bourget and would discuss a work like Divorce as one does theology after the sermon at nine o’clock mass. He found such discussions vain and empty. He would break in upon them saying: “I know some books that are really fine!” And he would stalk away.
This kept him in a manner shut in upon himself, and he would assume a haughty air to cover his inability to put into words the things that he felt so deeply. Most of the girls, like the Mulots in general, read only the cheap popular fiction, the romans-feuilletons, and were interested solely in discovering the means of snaring a suitor — “and they were married not long afterward.” He did not propose to let himself be hooked. They had become his enemies, a threat to his undefined goal. Convinced that marriage would be the prison house of his destiny, that high destiny that he had envisaged, he looked upon a woman’s face as an epitaph, displayed in the course of chance meetings with the sex. He preached freedom and, seeking to identify himself with the masterpieces that he read, ignored the fertile and spontaneous resources of his own being. It revolted him to see Jean so occupied with his toilet this evening.