‘You’re not feeling too lonely?’ she added.
‘Lonely? Oh no. I’m thinking about other things besides work. I’m dreaming.’
She must have seen in me some sort of high-flown creature, a poet lost among the pans, one of those social injustices the Front Populaire has forgotten to put right. She ruffled my hair with her hand and she said, as enthusiastically as if she’d stroked my flies: ‘There’s a lot going on in there!’
Enough! I’ll keep it brief. She talked about herself: her hard life, her depressed father, horribly disfigured by his injuries, the restaurant going downhill, her useless mother, how she’d brought it back from the brink by sheer hard work, alone, admirable, one of those orphans you see crowned with a garland of roses for her virtue. Stefano? A friend. Just a friend. He looks after her, her, the weak woman. Nothing like what mean and vulgar gossips might make it out to be (or hear from the bedroom above). Was I likely to be able to do better? I asked myself that question.
‘How hot it is!’ she said.
And she opened her black shawl a little to fan herself. She was naked underneath. Dear old thing, there’s no scene of that sort in Stendhal, nothing in Byron, nothing in Maeterlinck. Where is its equivalent in literature? To cut a long story short … We go to her bedroom. The bed was ready. She makes me have a shower. Did I shine afterwards? She’ll tell you better than I can if you happen to be passing this way. In a word: I didn’t close my eyes all night. At eight in the morning she sent me to the kitchen. All day she cold-shouldered me, ignoring me. In the evening it starts all over again. Fitness comes with training. Sadly, with one dreadful consequence: when I woke up, I couldn’t manage more than 150 press-ups. Yet I can swear to our dear coach, hand on heart: there’s no emotion lurking down there …
That’s about where I am. Your absence weighs on me. I’m badly in need of help. In a fortnight I’ll have earned the money I need to go home. But will I go home?
The same evening Stefano’s truck stopped outside the restaurant door. The Italian jumped down, grinning, unshaven, exhausted. He had come from Venice non-stop with a load for Marseille. He swept his Mireille off her feet; she must have weighed as much as a wisp of straw in his arms. He asked for news of Jean and came to find him in the kitchen.
‘Hey, my frienda, you are still scrubbin’ de pans. Leave it! Eeza time to enjoy ou’selves!’
Mireille frowned.
‘There’s work to do!’ she said.
‘No’ for friends! Andiamo, Gino!’
Jean sat at their table, on Mireille’s left. They had dinner in the main restaurant, which was already full. Jean admired Stefano’s poise, so superior to his own, an adult and an Italian poise that did not feel out of place anywhere. This warm, powerful man longed to share his happiness. He drove like a bull for whole days and nights to be able to allow himself his stops at Roquebrune, where he opened his arms and his heart to friendship, to love. What beast would he have been transformed into if anyone had revealed to him that Jean and Mireille … But graces of state exist, if not states of grace. What was so obvious to the eyes of everyone, what made the waitresses almost unable to conceal their giggles, passed him by. He ate, drank and slid his hand under the tablecloth to stroke Mireille’s skinny thigh; she shivered as nervously as if he had crept much higher. Jean was astonished to find that he was not jealous and could quite calmly face the noisy night in his narrow bed in the pantry while Mireille and Stefano made love on the floor below. It even occurred to him, not without pleasure, that he would get a night of rest and the opportunity to resume the rhythm of his 200 press-ups, without which he could not hope to be worthy of taking up his old place at Dieppe Rowing Club. Stefano was picking his teeth with wholly Italian assiduity, leaning back in his chair and flexing his powerful wrestler’s torso. At this time of night he was friends with all the world. Mireille was still trembling. Something awaited her that she had sampled before with savage joy, but which had changed its taste over time and with Jean’s appearance. She enjoyed fresh meat, and at the same time felt panic-stricken at abandoning Jean for more violent pleasures. She laughed, embarrassed, stood up to give instructions, telephoned to make sure that the prefect would not be passing this evening, ticked off a waitress and went down to her bedroom where, tearing off her dress, she threw herself naked onto the bed to wait for her man.
Stefano had had a carafe of grappa brought. He filled two glasses to the brim. The spirit unleashed friendly and protective feelings, and he set about demonstrating to Jean that Fascism was rejuvenating nations and would save an exhausted Europe from its decadence. Even so, it was important to make a distinction: only the Mediterranean revolutions would bear fruit. Everything being cooked up north of a line from the Brenner Pass to the Loire could be left to the Teutons. The Italians had shown the way with the march on Rome. The Portuguese had rallied to the banner of Salazar. The Greeks were marching behind Metaxás, the Turks behind Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And at last the Spaniards were waking from a nightmare: last 18 July, their generals had crossed the Rubicon. What was holding France back from adding its voice to history?
Jean did not know how to answer this question. He nevertheless possessed enough common sense not to want to be shot down for parroting his father’s solution. Having encountered authoritarian ideas in troubled times, he had also been impressed, without being able to see very clearly where the flaw in the argument lay. It was obvious that Ernst’s Nazism and Stefano’s Fascism had little in common, except that both appealed to an instinct for revenge among populations that had been bled white by the last war. People’s thinking would evolve in time.
Stefano was getting carried away. He was now speaking only Italian, and Jean was surprised to understand him so well, trying to remember who Joseph had quoted when he said, ‘The Italians are the French in a good mood.’ Oh yes, Cocteau. He smiled to himself, and Stefano, seeing his expression, stopped talking and said, ‘You makin’ fun of me?’
‘No, I was just thinking about something a French writer once said.’
‘Oh? What was dat?’
‘That the Italians are the French in a good mood.’
‘Yes, dere eez a lot of truth in what Cocteau sez.’
Jean raised an enquiring eyebrow. It was clear that driving was not a profession of ignoramuses. First Salah, and now an Italian trucker quoting a French writer whom Jean himself scarcely knew.
‘How do you know Cocteau?’
‘Oh, you know.’
Trying to look modest Stefano poured himself a second large glass of grappa with a steady hand, grasping the the neck of the carafe with calm strength. Jean had discreetly emptied his glass into a flowerpot in preparation for his morning training session. He felt ashamed not to be as fit as he had been. What you lost in a few days took weeks, even months, to catch up, if you weren’t a force of nature as Stefano was. Sitting opposite, his shirt open on his hairy chest, his powerful forearms resting on the table, with his enormously thick neck, he was a man who had been brought into the world to stop charging bulls. Yet Jean was allowed a secret smile because Mireille was cheating on that man. In the strongest among us there is always some pitiful weakness, an Achilles heel. An interesting lesson, Jean said to himself as Stefano, finishing his panegyric to Mediterranean Fascism as the sole bulwark against Teutonic heaviness and Slavic lifelessness, stood up without showing a sign of drunkenness, even though he had drunk, on his own, a full half-bottle of grappa. Truckers were the lion-hearted knights of modern times. At the wheel of their trucks they thundered across nations, imposed their own laws of the road, aided the poor (Jean), mocked the rich in their sports cars, flouted customs inspections and, when they stopped, jumped into bed with creatures they whipped into such a state of passion that at dawn they left them panting on unmade beds in rooms that reeked of the heavy smells of diesel and axle grease. Signs indicated their secret trysts, little restaurants where waitresses tucked these weary giants up in their beds; and when they woke, day or night, they set off again across the highways of Europe, passing each other with deafening greetings. Occasionally one of them, imprisoned in his cab like a paladin in his armour, would send up a flare, lighting the nocturnal landscape with a glow that could be seen for many leagues around, summoning other wandering knights to him. What a magnificent life!