The Penguin Book of French Short Stories by Patrick McGuinness

Author:Patrick McGuinness [McGuinness, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141993898
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

DANIEL BOULANGER

The Hunters’ Café

Montfavert had transformed his kitchen into a carpenter’s workshop and lived in his war invalid’s tricycle. He moved only around the ground floor of his house, which looked on to Jules-Taupin Walk. The first floor and the attic were his paradise. He was always thinking about them and could not get up there. When he had turned the wood to make doll’s-house furniture, the proceeds from which supplemented his invalidity pension, and when he had fed the spiders that he was breeding in a sideboard with glass doors, the inside of which he lit with a neon strip light, he changed seats and set off to go round the town in a motorized wheelchair. His horn could be heard everywhere and people were glad that he never went about at night; he would have woken even the dead. This almost daily noise scarcely made him liked, although talking to him was a most enriching experience. He knew all the battles in history, and you merely had to call out to him for him to stop the din made by his machine and tell you the date of a counter-offensive in Jutland or in Cyrenaica, troop numbers and the names of the leaders. He lived the feat of arms to the point where he could be seen changing colour, and it even came about that you learned the true source of this pain, which you begged him to forgive you for having caused.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘On the contrary, it’s a pleasure. You see me shaking because of Angèle. She died last night.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She would have been two. A spider which answered whenever I called, which ran up to greet me, which danced, I’ll say. Solid and supple on her star-shaped feet, she let herself be bounced like a ball.’

‘You’ve got others!’ people said to console him.

‘What creature can replace another? Please!’

He was allowed to turn his engine back on and drive to the Hunters’ Café, where he had his quarters for relaxation. There, without getting out of his wheelchair, he settled down at the regulars’ table to play games of chance that would give way to conversations about the army, his memories, his transformations, his future, his reading of old combatants’ newsletters or war magazines. Montfavert had subscriptions to various publications, not including brochures and encyclopaedias of which he had received the specimen copy and the accompanying subscription letter. Moreover, not a week went by without him giving in to a mail order, and his memory was comforted by those rows of stories of every sort which bled his finances dry. One day he arrived at the Hunters’ in a state of utter confusion.

‘Montfavert! You look in a real state!’

‘I’m jealous,’ he merely said, ‘and annoyed. I’ve often talked to you about an old comrade: Agricole Palaneuve! We were in the same hospitals! But he’s a Parisian through and through! Only Paris counts! Always Paris! Ange did not even give me a hint! As if

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