Fermina Marquez (1911) Read Free

in Montmartre that they used to perform their feats; we had had proof of that: supper bills on the headed paper of well-known restaurants of the Butte had gone round from hand to hand in the philosophy class, bills at the bottom of which the total in francs sometimes came to three figures.
We never knew how they slipped out of the grounds, nor what they had organized so as to return to the dormitory in the middle of the night, barely a few hours before the call to wake up. Had they bought the silence of the night porter, of the night watchmen? Did they have secret dealings with someone in the village? It is more than likely. It was said that the riding master, whose home was outside Saint Augustine's, hired out horses to them. So they rode to the nearest station and in twenty-five minutes or half an hour, the two companions found themselves in Paris. On the return journey, they recovered the horses, left in an inn stable, and did not break a gallop until they reached the school. Fermina Marquez was not wrong: there was enough here to get them expelled and some of the staff sacked at the same time. Anyway, all this only became known to the school authorities much later on, when the culprits and their accomplices had left Saint Augustine's several years before.
Initially, Santos went out by himself at night. He began by frequenting the Quartier Latin, because the train which he used to catch in the suburbs dropped him at place Denfert and he did not yet have the nerve to map out more involved itineraries on the network of orbital trains. But he quickly wearied of the Quartier. He did not feel comfortable in the student brasseries: the milieu was too sophisticated for him; he heard his fellow diners discuss philosophy and literature with astonishment. He felt he was just a schoolboy out of his depth here. Moreover, his immoderate spending, the unconscious flaunting of his money, provoked the spiteful jealousy of the majority and the scorn of one or two of those precisely whom he felt daunted by and whose liking he would have wished to attract. And finally, once he had sampled the costly pleasures of the Butte, he spurned the more modest diversions of the Quartier.
In Montmartre, Santos Iturria could move more freely. Gradually, as he was coming about twice a week, he was numbered in some establishments among the regulars and several of us, after our school careers were over, have met people in the cafes of the boulevard Clichy and place Blanche, who had known M. Iturria and could remember him well.
As soon as Santos had so to speak discovered Montmartre, Demoisel never missed a single spree. Santos had permitted the Negro to accompany him, because, requiring a companion and shrinking from dragging his brother Pablo into these perils, he had found in Demoisel an audacity as great as his own. The two friends became popular in a certain world of revellers, head waiters, gypsies and alluring girls. The Negro, tall, too lanky, with his short nose curiously snubbed at the tip: the irregular but not unattractive nose of a Parisian dressmaker's assistant, but truly remarkable in his African features — an inheritance perhaps from his mother, the 'Pahisian' of Port-au-Prince? - Demoisel, I repeat, nature's oversight, did not have any success with these girls if the truth be known. Moreover he was violent, brutal and malicious, and
so strong that nobody dared to contradict him, particularly when he was drunk. At moments such as these, Santos alone was able to restrain him and bring him back to school in time. The other Negroes we had at Saint Augustine's were model pupils; hardworking and highly intelligent, these boys were inoffensive and sparing of words and they had an occasional glimmer of melancholy in their eyes. Demoisel was therefore an exception and a terrible one at that. In certain groups, there were stories told of his deplorable exploits in hushed voices. It seems that, despite Santos, he would enter heaven only knows what