“This is a friend of Alfred’s, we’re supposed to put him in room 12,” said Charlotte in her flat voice.
“Does he have a suitcase?” asked the mother. “Alfred’s friends are always welcome.”
And her little eyes narrowed with a simper whose meaning was lost on Herman. She abruptly held out a limp, warm hand.
“Not at the moment,” said Herman, embarrassed.
She gave a little bow, humble, welcoming. She was wearing jeans like her daughter, and grimy-toed espadrilles.
“Full meal plan for him too.”
“How much will this be?” asked Herman, making no attempt to hide his concern.
“A hundred and fifty for the room, two hundred for the three meals, plus twenty francs tax, which makes a grand total of three hundred and seventy.”
The mother’s tone was even warmer than before, courtly and deferential, and she stood bent slightly forward, her hands clasped over her belly, not looking Herman in the eye.
“That’s far too much for me,” he said briskly.
Annoyed, he let his gaze wander around the room and saw nothing that could justify such a price. Everything was plain and dull gray. Nonetheless, he resigned himself, since neither Charlotte nor her mother was answering him, and the mother was still frozen in mid-bow. Thinking he’d been rude, he blushed faintly. In any case, the president having decreed that Herman would take the full meal plan for the duration of his stay, Herman had to admit that at the moment he didn’t have the courage, or a clear enough understanding of his situation, to make other arrangements. He sighed, then consented. The mother asked Charlotte to show him to his room, holding her bow until Herman was a few meters away.
“Charlotte doesn’t make such a big production,” he thought in relief.
More than anything, he was struck—unpleasantly—by those dirty espadrilles, so ill-matched to these elaborate displays of gentility.
3 – The room was tiny and looked onto the courtyard. Patting the wall, Charlotte confirmed that the president, Alfred, lived next door in room eleven, as if, Herman told himself, she were trying to reassure him, to certify that everything was just as he’d been promised. Then she went on her way, but he thought he heard her next door, in the president’s room. She must have dropped onto the bed, which creaked and squeaked, informing him that sounds could clearly be heard from one room to the next, and even that they immediately identified their source. He thought he heard Charlotte mumbling, then humming. Her foot gently tapped the floor, keeping time. Herman listened blankly for a long moment, standing in the middle of the room, torn between the irritation of finding the lodgings so deficient and an amorphous, tender pleasure he couldn’t help feeling, knowing Charlotte was so nearby.
“Because she’s going to help me,” he mechanically repeated to himself. “The closer she is, the better for me. Given who she is, just think of all the things she must know!”
“Lunch is at one,” Charlotte called to him, giving three little raps on her side of the wall.
Then she left, closing the door to room eleven, but, he noticed, not locking it. He went to the tiny window, dimmed by a thick grate. He managed to pull it open, and the rain came spraying in. What he saw below him hardly counted as a courtyard, more an uncovered storage area with a row of trashcans. But the room was on the top floor, and Herman had a view over the slate roofs studded with satellite dishes, to the hills beyond, now lost in the gloom. Directly facing him, the back side of the charcuterie only had one window as high as Herman’s. He spotted a face, seemingly an old woman’s face, watching him through the glass. Seeing him look back at her, she nodded several times in greeting, smiling insistently. Troubled, he closed the window, and through the bars he saw the woman still gazing toward his room.
He sat down on his bed and tried to consider his next move. Although he did his best to think of Rose and the child with a compassion befitting their plight, his mind wandered, disoriented, and when it lingered on some thought it more often concerned the president or Charlotte or the receptionist than it did Rose and the boy, about whom he couldn’t think of what to say to himself, except, with a little impatience, “How terrible!” He accused the abundantly flowered paper on the walls and ceiling of distracting him. Everything in this room irritated and repelled him: the chenille bedspread, the little armoire, the Formica table, the shag carpet. He wasn’t used to this kind of world; he’d always lived in an atmosphere of refinement. Feeling oppressed, losing his spirit, and since the old woman was still spying on him, he got up to leave in spite of his fatigue, locking his door and going down to the dining room. It wasn’t yet one o’clock, but the three big tables were already full. He had the disagreeable feeling that they’d been waiting for him, and when, from the end of the central table, the president approvingly waved him over and hailed him by his name, Herman hurried in, chiding himself even though he wasn’t technically late. They’d saved him a place on the president’s right, facing Charlotte. And the receptionist was there too, next to her.
“You eat lunch here?” Herman couldn’t help but ask, surprised.
“Every day.”
Smiling, she gestured toward the two other tables.
“Everyone who works at the town hall eats lunch at the Relais. Actually, we’re required to.”
“Even the mayor?”
“Oh no, not the mayor.”
She laughed out loud, joined by all her colleagues who’d heard Herman’s question.
“Why do you have to eat at the Relais?” he asked, hoping to put the moment behind him.
She paused and thought, slightly uncertain, then shrugged. All the others stayed silent, visibly not knowing how to answer. Suddenly sorry he’d asked, Herman sensed she was cross, not because she’d been exposed in her ignorance but because, for courtesy’s sake, she felt forced to come up with an answer that would satisfy him.
“Maybe,” she said, brightening, “maybe they want to be sure we’re not late when work starts again at two.” A murmur of agreement ran through the room. The colleagues, mostly women, kept their jackets on for lunch, the dark blue jackets Herman had seen them all wearing at the town hall, and some still had their pens in their hair, making them look as if they were still at work there in the dining room of the Relais, which Herman found slightly intimidating. The older woman beside him had some ten pens sticking out of her breast pocket, and two more in her hair. When Herman sat down, she pushed back her chair, leaned toward him, and wished him bon appétit. The president lay his hand on Herman’s.
“So nice to see you again! We’ll be side by side from now on, down here and upstairs. What do you think of your room?”
“There’s someone looking at me through my window,” Herman said quietly, pulling his hand away.
“Yes, that must be the charcutière’s mother. Don’t trouble yourself over her, she’s perfectly fine. To tell you the truth, she sits at her window all day long, so…”
“But I don’t like that, I don’t like that at all, being watched,” Herman whispered, put out.
“Well, that’s how it is here, there’s nothing you can do. When you’re out, when you’re home, someone’s always watching you, what does it matter? Like I told you, you mustn’t hide, quite the opposite, you have to let yourself be seen, you have to appear…absorbed, melded with the life of this place, just as I said. Be exemplary, show yourself, you have to lose every last bit of yourself, all right? Yes, let people see you, talk to you, invite you into their homes! You didn’t lock the door to your room, did you?”