Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [46]
The novelty store was also closed, of course. I used to buy surprise bombs for Christmas and New Year’s Eve there, and fake mustaches that Lola found hilarious. On those evenings, I would be reminded that I was a single father, and once she was in bed, I would get plastered on whiskey and cry in my glass. The Chirac and Spider-Man masks flashed morose smiles at me.
The café of the tattooed couple, on the other hand, was still open. Because of the festive occasion, she was displaying, instead of her usual biker T-shirt, a low-cut one that enhanced her fake pearls and her Jane Mansfield breasts, as unappetizing as a soft block of butter. Not that it made her any more pleasant. She was grumbling at a short Asian man who insisted on paying for a cigarette lighter with a two hundred–euro bill; I thought I heard her call him a “Chink,” as in Tintin in Tibet, and that made me laugh. Coward as I am, I answered her mumbles with a fake, knowing smile. I’m one of her old regulars but I’m always afraid she might put me down.
Her husband, thin mustache, all dressed up too—black leather pants and orange tie—refused to serve a beer to a lonely old lady adrift in the neighborhood. He was bullying the waiter. “Come on, Marcel, move it! You know we’re invited to Mimine’s sister’s for Christmas dinner. That asshole told us they’ll start the oysters without us if we’re not there by 10.” He calls all the waiters Marcel—I’ve seen many pass through here, all sickly looking and underpaid—like in the old aristocratic families where all the maids were rebaptized as Marie. I hate those old aristocratic families.
Rue Richer, devoid of street lights, was dark—its pizza places were closed, its kosher butchers (Chez Berbèche, served better) had their shutters drawn, its travel agencies (also kosher) offered dream vacations sprawling all over faded posters at bargain prices to the rather scarce customers.
I heard the screams of the crazy woman across from number 46 (I learned from an erudite client of mine—another one—that Alexandre Dumas had briefly lived at that address). She’s famous in the neighborhood; some people complain and want to have her committed. She apparently lives in a hovel at the top of the stairs of the building where the Goldenberg grocery store used to be. (It closed down a few months ago and its front is now blinded with cinder blocks.) You can see her stroll about, dirty as a pig, always wearing the same thick woolly petticoats that she doesn’t pull down to take a piss (she doesn’t squat either, does everything standing up, like an animal), the same heavy, filthy sweater, with her old wino face. The supers of the nearby apartment buildings give her a little money to do chores for them, scrub staircases or take out the garbage in the middle of the night. Sometimes one of them, Maria, an old friend of mine who takes care of the 46 building, pulls her inside her home and forces her to shower. I know the woman through her. She must have been very beautiful once. When she leaves Maria’s place, when her gray hair has just been washed and isn’t greasy or all tangled, you notice how beautiful it still is and what a sweet, rugged face she has. Her name is Elena, she came from Italy (Ferrara) before the war to flee Mussolini, and later, her whole family, with the exception of one son, died in Auschwitz. Maria knows all this because she was already here twenty years ago and because Elena, who lived in a studio apartment belonging to Goldenberg, was still talking at that time. Then her son died, she became a bag lady, and she stopped communicating. Well, she didn’t exactly stop: She still expresses herself: She lets out terrifying howls at night, from the window at the top of the stairs in her building; that’s where she took her rags after she stopped paying her rent.
She bays at the moon, like a dog, like an animal, as if