The dry rattle of aching iron. The groggy, waking city struggling to lift the heavy eyelids of its shutters.
Daybreak.
Jeannette hadn’t come home.
II
The following day was St. Catherine’s Day. Pierre didn’t go out to look for work. He made it to Place Vendôme in the early morning and, leaning on the gate next to the warehouse, waited for Jeannette to appear. A hollow anxiety filled his body. In his heavy, sleep-starved head, vague images of the most improbable accidents rose like drifting islands of tobacco smoke in an airless room. He stayed that way all day, glued to the iron grille. He had had nothing in his mouth for two days, but the sickly aftertaste of saliva remained a gustatory sensation that had yet to pierce his consciousness and become hunger.
Rain started to pour in the evening, and under the sluicing streams of water the hard contours of objects rippled gently, sinking into the depths, as if immersed in a swift, transparent current.
Dusk fell. The lanterns were lit and splattered colorless stains on the inky surface of the night, neither soaking into it nor illuminating it, an algae of shadows, the fantastical fauna of the bottomless depths populating the riverbed of the street.
The precipitous banks – full of the phosphorescent, magical grottoes of jeweler’s windows, where virgin pearls the size of peas, shucked from their shells, slumbered on suede rocks – stretched upward, their perpendicular walls vainly groping for the surface.
Down in the wide valley of the riverbed, a tightly-packed school of bizarre iron fish with fiery, bulging eyes flowed past, swishing their rubber-tire scales, lustily rubbing against one another in clouds of bluish gasoline spawn.
Along the steep banks, straining to move, divers in the limpid gelatin of water waded under heavy wetsuit umbrellas with feet of lead. It seemed as though at any moment someone would pull at a dangling handle and gently glide upward, their legs tracing zigzags in the air over the heads of the frozen crowd.
From afar, with the flow of the river, an odd, flat wetsuit with three pairs of female legs slowly drew near. The legs stumbled their way along the slick ground, reeled with laughter, giving a gurgle of physical joy in overcoming adversity.
As the legs approached the gateway, Pierre saw that they were carrying three laughing heads under the wetsuit, and that one of the heads belonged to Jeannette.
Seeing Pierre, Jeannette ran to him in little hops, sprinkling him with the multicolored confetti of her chirping (Devil’s Mountain). She was wearing her evening dress, an overcoat, and brand-new, sopping wet brocade slippers.
Why had she stayed out all night? She’d spent the night at a girlfriend’s, of course. She had been up late sewing her costume for tonight’s ball. Where had she gotten the new slippers? She’d been given an advance on her next paycheck from the warehouse. She still had a bit of time, so if Pierre wanted, they could go for dinner together.
A disgruntled Pierre snorted that he couldn’t afford dinner. She tossed him a glance that was surprised and baffled.
No? In that case she’d rather eat with her friends. She had to hurry, because she still needed to pick up a few odds and ends.
She stood on her toes, gave him a quick peck on the mouth, and disappeared through the gates.
Pierre trailed off home. His legs were weighing him down, and now the acrid aftertaste in his mouth crept past the door of his consciousness, where it had long been rapping with stubborn and patient hiccups. He understood, and smiled at his own obtuseness. It was hunger.
The boulevards were already swarming with flocks of frolicking midinettes, entrepreneurial youths, colorful caps and sashes. In the shadows of impassive lamps, festively attired Pierres kissed the mouths of their little Jeannettes, who stood nimbly on their toes.
Gray Ménilmontant was as dim and gloomy as ever.
It was hard for Pierre to drag his body home. He was tired, and a single thought preyed on his mind: to stretch himself out in bed.
For some time he’d been carefully avoiding coming face-to-face with his grumbling, pockmarked concierge. His recent expenditures (Jeannette’s fall wardrobe) meant that for the last three months he had fallen behind with the rent. Every evening he tried to slip unnoticed through the dark entrance hall and straight onto the stairs.
Yet this time his maneuver backfired. The shapeless profile of the concierge suddenly emerged from an alcove in the entrance hall, a phantom popping up to greet Pierre. He tried to slip past with a tip of his hat but was caught by the arm. He understood only one thing from the snide, phlegmy words: They weren’t letting him into his room. He hadn’t paid for three months, so his room had been rented out. He could collect his things when he paid what he owed.
Mechanically, without a word of protest, to the visible surprise of the concierge – who had stopped in mid-sentence – Pierre turned and went into the street.
It was drizzling. Pierre absently retraced his steps not really knowing where to, along damp walls of houses swollen from the warmth of the people falling asleep within. In cramped alcoves, in the embrasures of the houses black, huddled men and women fashioned themselves accommodations, wrapping their extremities in scraps of newspaper to ward off the cold.
Collapsing from exhaustion, a castaway heading for the nearest beckoning light, Pierre turned toward the red glimmer of the metro station and made it to the corner of the boulevard.
A clock struck one. Drowsy workers drove the last, straggling passengers to the surface, along with the tramps lured by the warmth of the underground’s tiled abyss. The gates clattered shut.
The stairs leading up to the sidewalk were packed, buzzing, stuffy. Unshaven, tattered people grabbed their place in a miserly rush, trying to huddle near the heated gate, carefully, solemnly, choosing their burrows. Nearer to the gate, dear God! The stifling, decayed warmth of Paris’s wheezing breath blew through the gate. Wrapped in rags, they slowly arranged themselves along the stairs, heads resting on the comfortless pillow of the stone steps, clumsily covering their convulsing bodies with the frayed fringes of their hands.
Shortly the whole stairway resembled a forest leveled by winds. Only the places on the highest steps remained for the foolhardy latecomers, who were left to the mercies of the rain and cold.
Pierre was too exhausted to wander further. Shyly, meekly, trying not to trod on anyone, he stretched out in a free spot at the top, between two gray crones wrapped in rags, who greeted every new arrival with a menacing grunt.
He couldn’t sleep. The damp paw of a fine, misty rain stroked his face, soaking his clothes with a sharp, slick wetness. The rain and sweat in his rags gave off a musty, acidic smell. The stone pillow of the spittle-covered stair jabbed his head. The sharp edges of the steps cut into his ribs, splitting his body into separate pieces that writhed in feverish insomnia like the segments of a severed worm. The lucky wretches at the bottom, fortunate to have reserved their places by the gate in advance, snored in a wide register of stifled breaths. Pierre, too, was gradually overcome by a heavy, delirious half-sleep.
He dreamed he was lying on no ordinary stairway, but on an escalator, which was ascending with a rattle (he had seen one like it at the Au Printemps store, or at the Place Pigalle metro station). From the yawning chasm of the Earth, the open maw of the metro, a never-ending iron accordion of moving stairs climbed upward in a hollow and rhythmic rumble. One after another, more and more steps clattered into sight, blocked by the row of ragged, helpless bodies. The summit of the stairs, where Pierre lay, was somewhere far in the clouds. Down below, many-eyed Paris shouted out into the soulless silence of the night with its billion lights. The stairs clanged in time as they rose higher. Pierre was overwhelmed by the cosmic vacuum of interplanetary infinity, the blinking of the stars, the limitless hush of space.