Pedigree by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 978-1-59017-555-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-11-22T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE universe grew bigger, people and things altered in appearance, certainties were born at the same time as anxieties, the world became peopled with questions, and a ring of chiaroscuro made contours less reassuring, extended perspectives to infinity.

Monsieur Pain had been in prison, like Coucou. Armand’s father was a murderer, a real one: he had killed a woman with a revolver shot.

Sitting on the imitation-leather bench in the Café de la Renaissance, with his little legs dangling in space, Roger was looking through the stained-glass windows. On the marble-topped table, his glass of grenadine was as rich a red as the triangular panes of glass framing the diamond-shaped milky-white panes.

Désiré was playing cards. Every Sunday, starting that winter, after High Mass at Saint-Nicolas and a brief visit to the kitchen in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, the father took his son by the hand to this café in the middle of the town; the waiter knew what he had to serve; Monsieur Reculé and Émile Grisard were already there, while Joseph Velden, who was not free this Sunday, had been replaced by fat Monsieur Baudon.

Through the windows, Roger was looking at the stucco façade of the Théâtre de la Renaissance and that was why he was thinking about the commercial traveller in coffee who lived in the Rue Pasteur, for it was there that Monsieur Pain had killed an actress, in the days when he had been a cavalry officer.

Roger had heard his mother telling the story to Mademoiselle Pauline.

‘He was reduced to the ranks. They stripped off his epaulettes in front of the whole regiment.’

A colonel of the Lancers rode along the Rue de la Loi at noon every day, and every time Roger thought of the epaulettes which had been stripped off. Monsieur Pain, who was nearly as tall as Désiré, measured over six foot. Roger pictured to himself a minute bow-legged colonel standing on tip-toe and pulling with all his might at the gold bullions.

The world was becoming complicated. Not so long ago, things had existed only during the time they could be seen in the light and then had returned to nothingness or limbo. If Monsieur Pain turned the corner of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, or if the shadows invaded a corner of the bedroom, there was nothing left.

Now, even when he was sitting at his desk in Brother Mansuy’s classroom, Roger could follow people in imagination, and he did so in spite of himself: for instance, he saw Monsieur Pain who ‘travelled in coffee’ going into the grocers’ shops of Chênée, Tilleur and Seraing, and he imagined him pulling samples out of his pockets, without a word, his face always expressionless.

The woman he had killed looked like the one on the poster next to the door of the Renaissance, with a dress trimmed with feathers and a diadem on her head.

It was because Monsieur Pain was a murderer that he had such a white face, grey hair and stony features; it was on account of his crime that he was always alone, that Julie, his wife, was sickly and that Armand was slit-eyed.

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