Dominique Fabre: The Waitress Was New

I even saw the young man in black. He read my sign and shrugged, saying something out loud to himself, and heading for the café across the street, obviously. I hung around till twelve-thirty, I was about to leave for my appointment to find out how many trimesters I have left when I spotted Amédée. He was wearing a yellow boubou, with a sort of Afro bonnet on his head, and a pretty cousin I’d never seen before on his arm. He chuckled when he saw me, and he was still chuckling when I knelt down to open the lock.

“Hey, Amédée, how are you doing?”

“You taking over for the boss, Pierrot?”

He introduced his friend, she gave me a peck on both cheeks, and they stayed for a while to drink a beer. “What a mess,” Amédée said, “I never thought I’d see such a thing.” H is only question was:

“What’ll you do if he doesn’t come back, Pierrot?”

“They said next week, Amédée.”

“You think it’s true?”

He didn’t look a bit like the Banania man when he said that.

“Nothing to worry about, Amédée. They can’t very well just let it all go, can they?”

And in any case he was a very good cook, certainly much better than the one in Le Rapide, at Quatre-Routes, where I went for lunch once those two had gone on their way. The daily special set me back ten euros, I wanted someplace not too close to Le Cercle, for discretion’s sake. I was a fool, I told myself, I would have been better off eating at home, but as a matter of fact no. I took a Paris train and got off at Saint-Lazare, then waited in line to see about this trimester business. Social Security had a whole big building by the Place de l’Europe, the land of offices, the easy life. The secretary explained the new laws that had gone into effect, they’d probably be changing before long, I had a little trouble following it all. I just wanted to know where I stood, and if I was going to end up in the soup line anytime soon. She punched some keys on her computer, pushing her glasses up on top of her head. I wasn’t far from a full pension, but I wasn’t quite there yet. And then the most important thing was that I was missing all sorts of important papers I’d be needing for my work history, my pay stubs were all out of order, my retirement account statements, I’d gone through some hard patches, and I’d left them scattered around here and there. I haven’t always been the most conscientious person around, but all in all, when I left, it seemed like things were going to work out OK. Still, it was a real relief to get away from there, to take the train back in the other direction with the office workers, the saleswomen, and the students. Night was falling by five-thirty now, and across the Seine I could see headlights all the way to the skyscrapers at La Défense, everything was nicely lit up, and in the water the sky looked brighter than it actually was.

In the train people were reading their newspapers, staring at nothing at all through the windows, fingering their cellphones right up to the very last minute of a very hard day, or who knows what. I walked by Le Cercle, it was turning cold now, and I wondered if there was anything more I could do. Probably not. I ended up going inside anyway. I sat on the corner barstool for a while, and then I went home, still on foot, in hopes of wearing myself out a little.

Two days later I went to the dentist’s, which hurt like hell, then in the afternoon I went to let the delivery men in. So now everything was ready to go, we could start up again. I left a message on the boss’s wife’s cellphone. I said “The deliveries came, everything’s in good shape, also Amédée’s getting worried. Incidentally, I haven’t heard a thing from the new girl.” I hung up, that was that.

I realized people were starting to talk in the neighborhood. The folks across the street were making up stories, the guy in the newsstand where I went for my paper was asking me “Is it true?” Rumors were flying around the Asnières station.

“What’s going on in that café of yours?”

“Nothing at all, as you see.”

“They’re not having work done?”

“No, they’re not doing a thing.”

It was already Thursday, and for two nights I’d slept straight through, like a fifty-six-year-old baby who’s been paying into Social Security for thirty-eight years, give or take. Funny-looking pay stubs we used to have. I’d worked in places I could hardly even remember. I’d spent six months in the café across the street, for example, twenty-two years ago, and I had absolutely no memory of it. Or was I just too drunk that year? I’d run around with a lot of women when I was younger, before and after my divorce, and I’d worked in Paris bars a week at a time. I’d even done a season at a vacation club in Agadir because of a love affair that hadn’t worked out, a woman from Bois-Colombes, I wanted to marry her. I spread out my whole life on two tables in the back of the dining room. I was making seventy francs a month when I started out. Sorting through all that brought back a good chunk of my life, people’s faces, customers I got on with, and some I didn’t, and women too, bars and addresses that left big blank spots in my head. Where did all the time go? You don’t know, Pierrot? Le Cercle would probably be my last bar, to tell the truth. Jacqueline Serradura will have been my last girlfriend. A few weeks after I ran out on her I realized I could never replace her. And then after that I wasn’t so sure. But anyway. Strange feeling, having all that laid out in front of you, and not seeing anything more to come. Still, I wasn’t dead yet. Two or three times I nodded off over my pile of papers, and when I woke up I went right back to it. From some years my pay stubs were clean and orderly, other years they were one hell of a mess, wine stains, smudges, little blots of whatever. I aged a lot, watching over that empty café.

Now and then the phone rang, I kept hoping it would be them, this whole thing had dirty trick written all over it now that I thought of it. I got one wrong number, then somebody who wanted to reserve a table for ten, and twice there was no one on the other end, not quite what I had in mind. Once I was done sorting through my trimesters, I did a few crossword puzzles. I also had a chance to finish that Primo Levi book, he’d ended up throwing himself down the stairwell in his apartment building, he’d seen too much. Would he have been interested in other guys of no particular interest, would he have deigned to talk to someone like me? I missed having the young man in black around, it would have been nice to talk all this over with him, maybe he knew more about it than I did? I wiped down the counter one last time before I left that evening, then I lowered the shutter. I still had thirteen and a half trimesters to go before I was eligible for the full pension and my supplemental retirement. I’d managed pretty well in my life, really.

One night I called Sabrina, she was feeling better now. I told her they’d both ended up disappearing, but she was only half listening. It was obvious she didn’t know much about any of this. What she did know she must have preferred to keep to herself.

“Don’t worry, Pierrounet, you can always come eat at my place!”

She laughed, I heard her children in the background, for them everything was fine, in a way, everything was just fine in her suburban housing project. I was smiling like an idiot when I hung up. In the end I hadn’t managed that well, actually. It’d take me another whole lifetime to make it right.

On Friday I came to Le Cercle later than usual. I didn’t set off first thing because I was busy giving my two-room apartment in Les Grésillons a good clean. I stopped by the newsstand on my way in, I’ve always got on well with Monsieur Akilami, that’s the guy’s name, he’s done a lot of traveling compared to most people around here, they have their few weeks’ paid vacation and that’s it, usually.