The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre

Author:Dominique Fabre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 2010-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

II

In this building things are better. There’s that squeaking staircase to remind me of my childhood, and also we all know each other a little. We have a few ordinary couples living quiet lives, and there are also two families with very young children, and on the top floor some students from Mali and poor folks of various nationalities, as well as a student who must be in her thirties and gets a lot of afternoon callers, if you don’t mind my saying. For the past year she’s been wearing a single red lock in the middle of her hair. I always want to pull it whenever I see her. I make her laugh by asking how much she’d charge me just for that? One time she wasn’t in a laughing mood, she explained that all the men who came to her room asked her that very same question. “Is that right?” Yes, or at least they wanted to, even if they didn’t ask. It was even worse when she was a little girl and her mother made her wear pigtails. There’s a lesson in that. I would never have imagined such a thing, to tell the truth. Sometimes she comes by my place to ask for some salt or borrow a cigarette, or just to have a little chat.

“I’m not disturbing you, Pierrounet?”

“Not at all. On the contrary. You’re well?”

“I won’t stay long.”

I don’t even know her real first name, the mailbox only has her family name. She calls herself Jessica. She told me she’d had so many different first names these last few years that she’d ended up forgetting her own. What would she do if she wound up with a psycho on her hands? I’d immediately regretted that question, because a minute after I’d asked it she went on her way. I like hearing her talk. And then the things she tells me make a change from Le Cercle. I gave her a copy of my keys one day when they were coming to read the meters. I’ve never been up to the sixth floor, I suppose that must be why. We all get on well together, it seems to me. The old woman on the second floor’s mind is starting to go, but when she leaves her keys in the lock someone always watches for her and lets her back into the building. I do her shopping on Sundays, she gives me chocolates at Christmas, and on her good days I take her to the market, arm in arm. I lost my mother when I was 42, she was my adoptive mother, that was far too young for my liking, and it still is today.

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