Mamoune! Do you think I should go into the history, about the Greek public debt and the crisis in Ireland? Maybe even go all the way back to the Treaty of Lisbon?” asked Juliette, slipping onto the sofa next to her grandmother.
“Later, sweetie, let me finish watching my soap. We’ll have a look right after. Will you sit here with me for a while?”
Marité, known as Mamoune, put her arm around her granddaughter where she was sitting on the armrest, and swung her down onto her lap, kissing her on the neck with a little trumpeting sound. Juliette pulled away from her grandmother’s embrace with a groan.
“No, Mamoune, stop, this is really important! It’s about the austerity plan in Spain; the fiscal deficit won’t go below three percent before 2016, the Spanish prime minister just announced the figures . . . All right, I’ll start by listing the fiscal measures in detail, you know they’re going to introduce special taxes, and after that I’ll give a little rundown on the unemployment rate.”
The girl wriggled out of her grandmother’s arms and trotted off to her bedroom. Sandrine Cordier, who was preparing her succulent chicken with olives and cumin, peered around the door into the living room and gave her mother-in-law a suspicious look.
“What are you talking about now? Yet another one of those pathetic presentations? Public debt, housing crisis, pension reform, tax loopholes . . . isn’t it a bit much? The other day it was tax exemption for working overtime, then the unemployment rate in the United States . . . I didn’t even know these things were on the curriculum!”
“The curriculum has changed a lot since our days, you know . . . ” said Mamoune, flipping the cap off a bottle of Corona with an indifferent air.
“Yes, well, maybe, we didn’t exactly take our baccalaureate together, Mamoune, don’t exaggerate.”
“But you’re right about the rest, Sandrine, these kids are swamped with work,” continued Mamoune, ignoring Sandrine’s remark. “At the same time, you know Juliette: when she’s passionate about something she’s a perfectionist, she likes things that are perfectly packaged, as Raymond would have said, may he rest in peace.”
“Still, I’m going to look into this curriculum; as it happens I’ve got this jobseeker at the moment who has a teaching degree in history and geography. Then I’ll make an appointment with Juliette’s teacher; I’m convinced—and don’t tell me otherwise—that he’s gone off target. Yet another guy who wants to suck up to someone, I’m sure of it. I’ll inform the principal, can’t hurt.”
“Don’t be a fool, don’t do that,” said Mamoune, suddenly worried. “She’d be mortified if everyone found out about all the extra work she’s putting in, and she’s so brilliant, for sure the teacher wouldn’t keep it quiet! Juliette’s already top of her class, two years ahead of all the others, it would be enough to make her lose all her girlfriends, you know what girls are like at this age, real little bitches . . . No, I’ll take care of it, don’t you worry about it, you have enough on your plate with those good-for-nothing unemployed,” she added in a syrupy tone. “I’m sure my little kitten will soon get over her obsession with the European economy. I’ll have a word with her, I’ll tell her she has to start going out and having fun, like other girls her age, do things with her friends, go to the movies, go for walks. You know she listens to me. Hey, why don’t I take her shopping on Saturday afternoon?”
“Okay, thanks. I do have a fair number of cases at the moment, ever since my dear colleague got it in her head to get pregnant. But if the teacher goes on burdening them with his pathetic subjects, I’ll go and see him.”
“Oh, don’t mention it, it’s only normal, Sandrine. If I couldn’t do at least that much, what good would I be, in the end . . . Just another useless mouth for you and Guillaume to feed . . . ”
“If it were only just feeding . . . It’s the drinking I’m worried about,” grumbled Sandrine to herself.
“What did you say, dear? I don’t hear very well anymore, you know,” said her mother-in-law, pretending to sound indifferent, as she opened the fridge to reach for another Corona.
“No, nothing.”
“It’s hot, don’t you think? It’s so nice to drink something cold, after all.”
Mamoune shot her daughter-in-law a winning smile and headed for Juliette’s room. She closed the door soundlessly behind her and leaned against it before knocking back a lengthy swig of beer. Then she went into a fit of laughter, which she tried in vain to restrain, hiccupping for several minutes. Her granddaughter was giggling uncontrollably too, one hand over her mouth to keep from alerting her mother.
“Right, Juliet, we’re going to have to be a bit more careful, your mother is beginning to wonder. She mustn’t find out about our little secret, otherwise I think all hell will break loose where I’m concerned. I promised her I’d take you shopping on Saturday, we’ll buy you those boots, how’s that. Now let’s get down to business: how far have you gotten?”
Juliette’s grandmother leaned closer to the computer screen. She gave a quick look then used the mouse to scroll down the page, nodding her head with satisfaction.
“Well, hey, looks like you’re doing really well here. Only ten more minutes. Are you okay, sweetie? Can you finish up or do you need me?”
“Yeah, it’s okay, the audience keeps getting bigger. But the questions are so simple that I had to post some myself with fake usernames to raise the level . . . That way I was even able to get some stuff in there about the Treaty of Lisbon.”
“Oh, good. You know who would have been really proud of you, sweetie?”
“Papoune-may-he-rest-in-peace?”
“Yes, treasure.”
As she leaned down to kiss her adolescent granddaughter affectionately, Mamoune let out a little burp that had them both instantly in stitches.
“Mom says you drink too much, but I like it when you’re like this, you know. And besides, everybody should have a grandmother like you. Emma’s grandma stinks of old wardrobes and undigested medicine. She has hair on her chin, too; I won’t let her near me.”
“You’re so sweet, my little dear . . . You know, Josy was never much to look at even when she was young, so I’m not surprised. Hey, you deserve a drop. Hang on.”
Marité carefully tilted the neck of the bottle toward her index finger, then applied her finger just behind the girl’s ears with a little wink.
“When we’re all done with our project and it’s a success, we’ll get out the champagne, the way movie stars do, what do you say, honey?”
Juliette nodded, looking at her grandmother solemnly, before turning to immerse herself again in the computer screen: a blinking icon together with a little bleep had just informed her of an incoming message.
* * *
Marité Cordier had been living with her son and his family ever since she had been evicted, six months earlier, from the apartment on the rue du Poteau where she’d lived for over twenty years. Two years earlier the former owner, an insurance company, had sold the entire building, along with part of the city block, to a financial investor, who had set about getting rid of the tenants more or less legally, at the end of their leases or, most often, by means of some rather muscular negotiation. The aim was to renovate the property and put it back on the market to make an obscene profit. With a handful of neighbors—people like herself who’d lived in the quartier forever and would not have the means to move there nowadays—Marité had held out as long as possible while the building gradually emptied out. At the end, the final occupants had to climb over scaffolding to go in and out of the house. The sounds of sledgehammer and drill resonated relentlessly in the stairway; plaster dust had gradually invaded the space; and water cuts were more and more frequent and lengthy. At the end of a lawsuit, which received a great deal of coverage in the press, and mobilized aging hippies and old Montmartre residents who were completely on the same wavelength, the last hard-core stragglers had managed to win a small compensation to cover the cost of moving: thirty to forty thousand euros. A tidy little sum for most of them—modest retired people, former civil servants or craftsmen—but a laughable jackpot when it came to trying to find new housing in the quartier.
Marité had no retirement. And yet she had worked for more than thirty-five years, doing the books under the table for a major sex shop in Pigalle, the Pique-à-Boobs. But globalization had not spared small sex shops. When Maurice sold it, the new owner, a Chinese man, entrusted the books to a woman from Beijing who was formidably quick on the abacus. A tireless worker, in the evening she deployed her talents on-stage in an entertaining number involving geisha balls. Malicious gossips said that Marité hadn’t done too badly from her years at the Pique-à-Boobs, but in fact she had always been a good girl, in spite of a figure that could easily have lured people through a heavy door on the Boulevard de Clichy or into a little striptease cabin. Tall, big-breasted, she had something of the singer Dalida about her—the same thick mane of hair and a slight squint in her eye, which the old magpies in the quartier suspected she cultivated deliberately—which she did.
Sometimes she was as dark-haired as a gypsy, sometimes as blonde as a Valkyrie, but she always had the same devilish air about her. In short, she was what they used to call a beautiful doll back in Raymond’s day—may he rest in peace. By virtue of climbing up and down all the stairs in Montmartre on eight-centimeter heels, she’d acquired the gait of an African princess, and this had not changed as she aged. She did not go unnoticed when she went to pick Aurélien or Juliette up at day care or primary school. Even today, at the age of sixty-two, she still got wolf whistles in the street. She was a regular at the Négociants on the rue Lambert, the last real wine bar in the quartier, where every evening Rosa poured her a thimble of white wine. When she climbed down from her barstool to go home, there were men who sighed, a spark in their eyes and a stick of dynamite in their trousers.
She had been living alone for over ten years, and her eviction from the rue du Poteau posed a real problem: where was she going to live, now? Private rentals in the quartier were exorbitant, and even if she could qualify for public housing, it was all elsewhere, in the outskirts. And even then, who knew when she’d get a place, given the length of the waiting list. Her only income was Raymond’s pension; he was a former railroad man who’d died of an aneurysmal rupture a few days after he’d hung up his cap, only fifty-six years old—may he rest in peace. But even with the little nest egg of thirty thousand euros she’d received, and her paltry savings, the prospect of being a homeowner was not something she could envisage, unless she were willing to go into exile and live in some dump in Seine-et-Marne or the Essonne.
But Marité didn’t want to leave Paris, let alone Montmartre. She’d grown up there, gotten married there, worked and raised her son there. Even if the quartier no longer resembled the one she’d grown up in, when you still saw the greengrocers towing their handcarts. Even if the majority of hustlers and transsexuals she used to know back in the Pique-à-Boobs days were pathetic old scarecrows now, if they hadn’t already kicked the bucket. The quartier’s pulse went on beating inside her, every morning. This is where I’ll die, she was in the habit of saying. If one night I don’t come home, just check around the stairways, I’ll be bound to have missed a step on the rue du Mont-Cenis or the rue Lamarck.
Her girlfriends had urged her to remarry an affluent widower (preferably), or to shack up with one (if all else failed), but Marité just laughed in their faces. A kept woman—no thank you; and yet, there would have been no lack of offers. The most eager was Roger, who used to sell paintings, and whom she’d known for forty-five years already, at least. He’d been courting her even before she got married; he’d buried two wives and had no children. He was the finest match in the quartier, in the over-seventy-five category. Mamoune was willing enough to be invited to lunch once a month at the Brasserie Wepler, but she spurned the aging beau’s advances with a laugh, although she never stopped acting coquettish.
Contrary to all expectation, Sandrine had surprised everyone when she offered to take Mamoune in, at least until she found a more lasting solution. Not that they had room to spare in their seventy-three square meters at the top of the rue de Clignancourt—a long corridor, three narrow bedrooms, a living room full to overflowing, a kitchen where you could barely squeeze two stools, a lopsided bathroom, and a separate WC that was way too roomy in comparison. But a few months earlier they’d had the opportunity to put in a bid for a maid’s room which was empty on the eighth floor of the building: perfect timing.
This real estate deal had kept Sandrine busy for months. She’d begun by harassing the tenant—a dark young man, dishwasher in a brasserie—to find out the terms of his lease, and she was not surprised to learn that they were purely verbal, and cash only. He got out of there in no time, afraid he’d be taken to court or have all sorts of bureaucratic hassles, the nature of which she had described to him in great detail—not the least of which was that she herself would make his life hell. For several weeks she had methodically removed all the notice of auction posters the notary in charge of the sale had put up. She’d confounded the property manager and the other co-owners in the building with questions about utility fees, percentages, and shares. Finally, she’d orchestrated a persistent rumor about a stench of urine and dead rat (supposedly stuck in the ceiling of the room).
The day before the notary had his planned open house for the room, she sequestered the neighbors’ alley cat by feasting him on milk and kibble. Then at around midnight she placed him in a cat carrier and took him up to the eighth floor. There she managed to get him to piss on all the doors and doormats on the landing, which she had sprayed with bleach beforehand. Their mission was crowned with a certain success: potential buyers hurried through the room holding their noses; some even turned and left again the moment they arrived. It had been a hell of a job, but worth every moment: she was able to buy the twelve-square-meter room for a mere seventy thousand euros, transfer fees included.
Narrow, with a steep sloping roof, the room faced due west and had an incredible view on the Sacré-Coeur. It had two dormer windows, like doll’s-house balconies, and a large built-in wardrobe. The oak floorboards, preserved for over sixty years by two layers of grotesque linoleum, had been restored. Guillaume repainted all the walls white. Marité moved in her bed, a dresser, a little desk, and a squat velvet armchair. She put the rest of her belongings in a storage depot—furniture, dishes, knickknacks, fashion magazines she’d collected for decades—and most of her wardrobe ended up at her son’s place. She took the opportunity to donate the rest of Raymond’s clothes to the Salvation Army—may he rest in peace.
She kept her most precious treasures close by, carefully wrapped and stored at the back of the wardrobe: a collection of watercolors, pencil or charcoal sketches, and little oil paintings by artists from Montmartre. She’d known a lot of them during her youth, when she used to pose in studios on the rue Hégésippe-Moreau or at the Cité Montmartre-aux-artistes. Moreover, she’d made some fairly sound acquisitions over the years, with Roger’s help and thanks to her own good taste, which she’d nurtured over time. You can sell it to buy me a padded mahogany coffin, with flowers and a plot in the cemetery, she’d said, a bit tipsy, in front of Sandrine’s parents at the most recent Christmas dinner, while brandishing a nude portrait signed Bernard Buffet. She was hardly recognizable on the painting, even though the foreground was taken up with an intimate part of her anatomy which none of the guests had ever seen.
* * *
Living under the same roof as her daughter-in-law—even if it was on a different floor—was no picnic. The only real compensation was the young woman’s cooking, always delicious. As far as all the rest went—Sandrine stuck her nose in everything, bossed everyone around, and kept a tight hold on the purse strings. She thought that Marité, who no longer had to pay any rent, ought to be saving almost every centime of Raymond’s retirement. But her capricious mother-in-law had her little secrets: white wine at Les Négociants, cigarillos, theater matinees, a few restaurants with girlfriends, Chanel No. 5, and the costume jewelry she dug up at the flea market and accumulated like a magpie. Above all, she loved to spoil her grandchildren, when she could, and without the parents knowing, which enhanced her pleasure: video games, books, trinkets, clothes—Juliette didn’t care what she wore, and wasn’t all that pretty, but Aurélien, very early on, had found himself a look that his grandmother delighted in and encouraged. To avoid having to explain anything to Sandrine, and also because it was a source of entertainment to her (and visibly, a means to keep young), Mamoune had found an additional source of income besides Raymond’s little retirement—may he rest in peace.
Any other grandmother might have gone in for babysitting, ironing, or home knitting and crocheting. That was not Mamoune’s style: the only knitting needle she’d ever held in her life was at the age of seventeen for a clandestine abortion, but at the last minute she’d decided against it, and she got her period again, miraculously, no doubt in part due to her extreme terror. No, there would be none of the typical granny stuff for Marité—volunteering at the parish, baking cakes for the school fair, or sorting clothes for the needy. Marité lived with the times, she worked in the digital economy, in the cloud. She’d started a bit by chance, answering an ad: a website for retired dog handlers was looking for an underpaid temp to supervise their forums a few hours a week. She’d had a great time there among the German Shepherds and their owners—as a rule they were former cops or gendarmes who posted hilarious videos of training sessions and swapped their best tricks. One thing leading to another, she’d found other little jobs on commercial websites or portals: community management, content moderation, viral marketing.
She worked mainly on weekends or at night, typing laudatory reviews by the kilometer for online shopping websites, or inserting tendentious commentaries on the forums of rival brands. One of her contacts put her in touch with an information site that was urgently seeking a replacement to moderate political and economic debates. She really got into it, and after four months had gone by she launched her own blog: economic policy as viewed by a blonde, crisiswhatcrisis.com, which earned itself a friendly little buzz. A way to combine work and retirement, Marité-style, and Guillaume and Sandrine knew nothing about it; she just quietly got on with it, up there in her little maid’s room. And at her disposal she had the zealous assistance of the formidable Juliette, with her IQ of 172 and the talent of a hacker; her fresh twelve-year-old outlook on life was thrown in as a bonus.