Dominique Fabre - The Waitress Was New

“Here, sit down. How are you getting along without him?”

“We’re managing. But it can’t go on like this. There’s a new girl to replace you, she’s already sick of the whole thing. You don’t know where he is?”

She looked me straight in the eyes.

“I have no idea, Pierre.”

We looked at each other like that, and then her pretty smile faded a little, and suddenly I got it, if you don’t mind my saying.

“I’ve had to wait for him too, you know.”

“You didn’t see him, he didn’t even call you?”

She pulled out her handkerchief.

“Excuse me.”

I looked around the room like an idiot, maybe there was something to see over by the ironing board. Sabrina had a lot of work to do. I recognized the little boy’s clothes, and the girl’s colorful dresses. The sky was brighter here, because of the height of the building. Sometimes the sky must even have been a little too bright. It made me think of before, long before, when I wasn’t a barman but a fireman, an explorer, a soldier, and a soccer player, a long way from Le Cercle, the bright sky I had inside me, and above me, before the apartment blocks where I grew up. She went into the next room, which must have been her bedroom, and when she came back she sat down on a chair facing me. We drank our tea without a word. Now and then we gave each other a smile. She talked about him a little. My beloved boss. They’d been seeing each other for two years, every chance they got. It was love at first sight, that’s what it was. He’d taken her to England once, and then at one point they’d run off to Saint-Malo. He loved Saint-Malo. “Oh really?” At first he was sincere, his marriage wasn’t what it used to be, but it hadn’t taken her long to figure it out. “Figure what out?” I understood too, she didn’t really have to answer.

“What are you going to do, Sabrina?”

She looked around, glanced toward the ironing board, and then she smiled at me, looking at her watch.

“Oh dear, I’ve got to go pick up the kids at school! I completely lost track of the time! My little girl gets out in ten minutes.”

I stood up with her, I put my raincoat back on.

“Don’t worry about me, Pierre, I’ve been around the block, you know. Will you get the elevator? I’ll be right there.”

We parted ways eight floors below. Sabrina had a laugh in her eyes.

“You’ll keep me posted, right, Pierre?”

“Yes, of course, Sabrina. Give the kids a kiss for me.”

“By the way, they call you Pierrounet, did you know that?”

She laughed as she was turning away, now she had tears in her eyes. I watched her walk off in her high heels, they’d been clattering around Le Cercle for more than two years now, and as she walked she put on her lipstick so she’d be beautiful like the women in the pictures on the walls. When she was finished she gave me a little wave, without turning around.

Pierrot my friend, I said to myself, and this time it must have been something very important, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything because there were some teenagers gathered around the boss’s wife’s Audi, so what can you do, I went over to see.

“What year is she, m’sieur?”

“You weren’t even born yet, my boy.”

“How ’bout a ride?”

“Some other time, I’m in a hurry.”

“Really? When? You live around here, m’sieur?”

“Yes, and where’s your school?”

“On Gabriel-Péri, we didn’t have school today, m’sieur. They threw us out for three days.”

They all had a good laugh and went on to the next car. I drove away wondering various things, it looked bad this time, was there anything else I could do? I wandered around till it got dark. There are a lot of cafés, and after a while I decided I’d had enough. I went back to Le Cercle, the boss’s wife was there waiting for me, looking like she’d never budged from the cash register. Madeleine gave me a dirty look and I raised my arms toward the sky, I told her I was sorry but, you know, what could I do?

“You could have called and let us know,” she answered. “Oh, I’ve had it with this place.”

She left right away, without even telling me who’d paid and who hadn’t at the bar, but she still gave me a goodbye peck on the cheek.

“Have a good evening, my beauty.”

“Not likely, I’m completely done in.”

She made a face, looking at the boss’s wife, who visibly didn’t give a damn about any of this just then. Madeleine crossed the street, the collar of her raincoat was turned up, she stopped at the newsstand to buy a magazine. She headed into the underpass. Too bad, I would have been very happy to chat with her a while longer. There was a big crowd in the café across the street. And then, not long after that, you could see tiny raindrops falling through the mist under the light by the newsstand, like little brushstrokes.

I told the boss’s wife he hadn’t been there, and he wasn’t in any of the cafés I thought likely. She pulled herself together and thanked the barman, which wasn’t really her style, as long as I’ve known her. We had a few customers, not many, it was almost like they’d all got together and decided to stay away. They must have thought something was missing without the boss around, or who knows what. But that was fine by me, at that point I wasn’t up to any more work. I went to the bathroom. Then I headed back to my post till seven o’clock. The boss’s wife was sitting at a table in back chatting with a friend of hers, Marianne Crège, who runs the hair salon on Maurice-Bokanovski. Now and then she smiled through her gloom, which goes to show, Pierrot my friend, but then I made a U-turn in my head, I just wanted to go home. I went over to see them.

“What about the orders, how are you going to handle that?”

“I’ll see to it, Pierre, Amédée wrote up the list for me.”

So I said OK, gave her back the keys to the Audi, and found myself outside. I crossed the pedestrian street and set off for the bus stop. I made myself some instant soup and didn’t touch Monsieur Primo Levi. If this is a man, I said to myself. If this is a life, Pierrot, yawning. We kept it up like that for another two days, the boss’s wife was doing better, I thought, but she wasn’t really there, still not a word from him. And then it was Sunday, an extra-beautiful Sunday in the suburbs of Paris.

I lazed around with Primo Levi’s book till nine in the morning, and then I saw to myself. I took a long hot shower, and I didn’t do any singing, but still it was nice. I went to buy groceries for my neighbor on the third floor, and I brought her her newspaper. For fifty years she’s read L’Humanité dimanche every week. She’s a railway-worker’s widow, beyond that I don’t know much. I rounded out the morning with some housekeeping, I was happy to be at home. I ran the vacuum cleaner and scrubbed my bathtub. I washed my windows, it was high time, what with all the rain we’d been having. After that I peeled the vegetables I’d bought at this morning’s market to make different soups, I used to eat soup every night back when I lived with my foster mother in Clichy. It was a beautiful afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, even if the temperature had fallen a little. But that didn’t stop me from going and twiddling my thumbs outside, I went for a walk along the banks of the Seine, just to make sure nothing had changed, in the end. I’m a lover of rivers, like my mother before me. No surprise there, I grew up by the Seine, in Clichy. Some evenings in springtime the two of us would go for a stroll on the banks, and she’d meet up with her friends. When did they take the benches away? And then I called Roger. He was in fine fettle, he told me. His new girlfriend had gone to Sens, she had family there, and he hadn’t gone along. Still a bit early for introductions, he thought. He’d spent the morning at work, he was stuck behind his bar at Le Voltigeur till almost two in the afternoon, a nap was the first thing on his agenda. We agreed to meet on the Place Voltaire, we showed up at the same time and spent an hour together, thirty years we’ve been seeing each other. We talk about whatever comes into our heads, we catch up on each other’s lives. Ever since he met Muriel he’s been seeing everything through rose-colored glasses, evidently she’d really got under his skin. I smiled in my head, because I’d seen Muriel and I had my doubts about her. It was nice sitting there on the Place Voltaire. I stopped myself from telling him there was always some Muriel getting under his skin ever since he began living alone, and things were picking up speed.