CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Berger, 1
THE BERGERS’ dining room. An almost square room, with a woodblock floor. In the centre, a round table on which two places have been set, alongside a metal lozenge-shaped dishstand, a soup pot, with the handle of a silver-plated ladle protruding from under its chipped lid, a white plate with a garlic sausage cut in two, garnished with mustard-flavoured sauce, and a Camembert with a label depicting a veteran of the Old Guard. Against the rear wall, a sideboard of indeterminate style bearing a lamp with a cube of opaline for a pedestal, and a bottle of Pastis 51, a single red apple on a pewter plate, and an evening paper with its banner headline clearly visible: PONIA CALLS FOR EXEMPLARY PUNISHMENT. Above the sideboard a painting has been hung, depicting an oriental landscape with weirdly twisted trees, a group of natives wearing tall conical hats, and junks on the horizon. It was supposed to have been painted by Charles Berger’s great-grandfather, a professional NCO who was thought to have fought in the Tonkin campaign.
Lise Berger is alone in the dining room. She is a woman of about forty whose chubbiness verges quite distinctly on corpulence, not to say obesity. She is finishing laying the table for herself and her son – whom she’d sent down to empty the dustbin and buy the bread – and is putting a bottle of orange juice and a can of Munich Spatenbräu beer on the table.
Her husband, Charles, is a restaurant waiter. He is a jovial and rotund fellow, and the two of them make a plump pair of schmeckers with a taste for sausages, sauerkraut, a glass of white wine, and a nice cold can, the kind of couple you are more or less bound to come upon in your compartment whenever you catch a train.
For several years Charles worked in a nightclub portentously called Igitur, a kind of “poetic” restaurant where a performer, pretending to be some kind of spiritual son of Antonin Artaud, presented in a laborious drone a depressing anthology in which he included quite shamelessly all his own works, enlisting, in order to make them less unpalatable, the inadequate assistance of Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, René Descartes, Marco Polo, Gérard de Nerval, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Jules Verne. But it didn’t stop the restaurant from eventually going bankrupt.
Charles Berger is now at the Villa d’Ouest, a nightclub-restaurant near Porte Maillot on the west side of the city (whence its name), which presents a drag show and belongs to a man who formerly ran a team of door-to-door salesmen, going by the name of Désiré or, even more cosily, Didi. He’s an ageless, unlined man who sports a toupee, has a fondness for beauty spots, chunky rings, bangles, and chain bracelets, and a penchant for spotless white flannel three-piece suits, with check breast-pocket handkerchiefs, crêpe-de-Chine cravats, and suede shoes in mauve or violet hues.
Didi goes in for the “artistic” pose, that is to say he justifies his stinginess and pettiness with remarks of the sort: “You can’t get anything done without bending the rules”, or “If you want to be up to achieving your ambitions you have to be prepared to behave like a shit, expose yourself to risks, compromise yourself, go back on your word, behave like any artist taking the housekeeping money to buy paints”.
Didi doesn’t expose himself to risk that much, except on stage, and compromises himself as little as possible, but he is without doubt a shit, detested both by his performers and his staff. The waiters have nicknamed him “French veg” since the day, long past, when he ordered them, if a customer asked for an extra portion or serving of French fries – or any other garnish – to put it on the bill as a separate vegetable.
The food he serves is execrable. Under highfalutin names – Clear Vegetable Julienne with Vintage Sherry, Shrimp Pancake Rolls in Aspic, Chaud-froid of Bunting Souvaroff, Crayfish in Caraway Sigalas-Rabaud, Sweetbread Soufflé Excellence, Isard Vol-au-Vent in Amontillado, Prawns in Balaton Paprika, Exeter Ediles Dessert, Fresh Figs Fregoli, etc. – he serves pre-cooked, precut portions delivered every morning by a wholesale delicatessen and which a pseudo-chef in a toque pretends to prepare, for instance heating in little copper pots gravy made of hot water, Oxo, and a dash of ketchup.
Fortunately customers don’t flock to the Villa d’Ouest for its food. Meals are served at a gallop before the two shows at eleven and two in the morning, and people who can’t get to sleep after it do not put their discomfort down to the suspicious, wobbling gelatin coating that they ingested but to the intense excitement experienced during the show. For the Villa d’Ouest is packed out from the first of January to the thirty-first of December, and diplomats, businessmen, political celebrities, and stars of stage and screen crush into the place to see shows of outstanding quality and in particular to see the two great stars who play with the company, “Domino” and “Belle de May”: the unmatchable “Domino” who, in front of a set made of sparkling aluminium panels, does a stunning impression of Marilyn Monroe in that unforgettable sequence from How to Marry a Millionaire where her reflection is reflected in a thousand mirrors, itself in fact a remake of the most celebrated shot in The Lady from Shanghai; and the fabulous “Belle de May”, who metamorphoses in three flutters of her eyelids into Charles Trenet.
For Charles Berger, the work is much the same as what he did in his previous restaurant or what he would do in virtually any other establishment; it is probably rather easier, since all the meals are pretty well identical, all are served at the same time, and the job is markedly better paid. The only thing that is really different is that at the end of the second service, just before two A.M., after serving the coffee, the champagne, and the liqueurs, after moving tables and chairs so that as many people as possible can see, the four waiters, in their short waistcoats, their long aprons, carrying their white napkins and silver trays, have to get up on stage, line up in front of the red curtain, and, at a sign from the pianist, kick up their legs and sing as loud and as flat as possible, but all together:
Now you’ve had your di, di, di-dinner
You have to say thanks, yes you have-ter
To your friend and mine, to the mister
Who’s gonna show, yes he is sir,
Oh yes sir! oh yes sir!
The best show in town, yes no less, sir!
upon which three showgirls spring from the tiny wings and open the show.
The waiters come on at seven P.M., when they dine together, then get the tables ready, put on the tablecloths and lay out the cutlery, get out the ice-buckets, arrange the glassware, the ashtrays, paper napkins, saltcellars, peppermills, toothpicks, and the samples of Désiré toilet water which are presented on the house as a welcome gift to customers. At four A.M., at the end of the second show, when the last of the audience is leaving after a final drink, they have supper with the performers, then clear and tidy the tables, fold the tablecloths, and leave, just as the cleaning lady arrives to empty the ashtrays, air the room, and do the Hoovering.
Charles gets home around six thirty. He makes coffee for Lise, wakes her by switching on the radio, and goes to bed as she gets up, gets washed and dressed, wakes Gilbert, smartens him up, and drives him to school on her way to work.
Charles, for his part, sleeps until two thirty, reheats a cup of coffee, lies in for a bit before shaving and dressing. Then he goes to fetch Gilbert from school. On his way back he shops at the market and buys a newspaper. He only just has time to skim through it. At six thirty he sets off on foot for the Villa d’Ouest, and on his way downstairs usually passes Lise on her way up.
Lise works in a health centre near Porte d’Orléans. She is a speech therapist and gives remedial help to children with stammers. She has Mondays off, and since the Villa d’Ouest is closed on Sunday nights, Lise and Charles manage to have some time together each week from Sunday morning to Monday evening.