The High-Life Read Free Page A

together that wasn't so important. When Madame C. looked lovingly down at me from her height of six and a half feet (in the morning, when there was still a bit of fog, I couldn't always see her beaming face), I really felt that what joined us was stronger than what separated us. We certainly didn't see eye to eye on everything. But so what?
    At that time I was living on rue Froidevaux, across from the Montparnasse cemetery, on the sixth floor of a building in danger of falling down. From where I was I had an unrestricted view of the graves. For over fifteen years, rue Froidevaux had been my prison. I was a model prisoner. If I often bemoaned my station, I never rebelled. I didn't try to escape. To tell the truth, I didn't want much. My rule of conduct was simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible. Maybe not very exhilarating as far as precepts go, but very effective. Try it, you'll see. What I liked most was to go unnoticed. I'd have gladly given everything I had to be an invisible man or a ghost. By dint of hugging the cemetery walls, I had ended up taking on their color. My father, Rene Marlaud (1902-1953), was buried on the other side of the street. Fourth Division West. Allee Raffet. I could see his grave from my window. It was tiny, crushed between two baroque chapels. My mother, Anne Marlaud, née Jacob (1920-1943), was gassed at Auschwitz. I was about a year old when she went up in smoke. Rue Froidevaux was ugly, like a second-class waiting room in some lost suburban station where the trains come so infrequently that people go there to sleep, just to sleep, amidst the litter and the scraps of ham sandwiches and beer bottles lying so miserably, so lonely, in the urine, confetti, glitter, and vomit, and the sadness of dogs looking for death along walls soiled by so many filthy fingers. It was always freezing cold on that street, even in August. Passersby looked like late chrysanthemums, and November dragged on forever. Ivy clung desperately to the cemetery walls, but it looked like it didn't really believe in what it was doing, as if some depressive set designer had taken the trouble to place it there. In the summer, the graves grew green again, and the wall moved forward, imperceptibly. At times I heard something cracking at night, and that gave me terrible panic attacks. Pathetic imitation of life. You felt so alone in that desert. Rue Froide. Cold Street, with all that the name evoked: cold room, morgue, abandoned corpses, partially decomposed young girls, mauve and green and white, calves murdered with the blows of a cleaver, at dawn, under a drizzling sky. How is it possible to have such a horrible name? Froidevaux! Oh, how cold your streets are, messieurs, and how slowly one dies there, over a low flame, a little at a time, from boredom and grief! How heavy one's heart grows in your deserts! You could spend a lifetime wandering there in exile. Strange winter journey.
    I met Madame C. as I was making my way, as I do every afternoon, to the funerary shop where I worked part time, at Monsieur Rameau fils, at the corner of rue Froidevaux and rue Boulard. I didn't go on duty until two o'clock. I greeted customers, I would briefly praise, in a dry, professional tone of voice, the magnificence of our ceramic flowers, tulips, violets, roses, dahlias, the charms of our wreaths, the grandeur of our marble statues. I liked my job. It suited my secretive nature, me being a lover of shadow and silence. The afflicted lot who crossed the doorway of the shop were so calm, so resigned. They spoke so low, they almost whispered, as if in a dream. Their gestures were stereotyped, operatic. Almost dead already. On the other hand, as soon I saw a young woman in mourning, I'd emerge from my torpor. Her pale complexion, her reddened eyes, her funereal makeup did things to me. I felt very peculiar with the twenty-year-old widows. I felt this urge to drink their tears. If they were burying their husband, I