Sunday of Life

Raymond Queneau

Description

When shop-owner Julia Segovia decides that she's going to marry the handsome if exceedingly young and naive soldier Valentin Bru, he willingly goes along with her scheme. Little does he know that he will have to contend with disgruntled in-laws, eccentric locals, a vulgar and cunning wife, a shifty career in fortune-telling, the approaching threat of war with Germany and the mysteries of Parisian public transport.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546506
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Sunday of Life
Raymond Queneau
Translated by Barbara Wright

ALMA CLASSICS




alma classics ltd
London House
243-253 Lower Mortlake Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 2LL
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
The Sunday of Life first published in French as Le Dimanche de la vie in 1951
This translation first published byJohn Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1976
This revised edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd (previously Oneworld Classics Ltd) in 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013
© Éditions Gallimard 1951
Translation © John Calder (Publishers) Ltd 1976, 2011
Cover image © Getty Images
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-280-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
The Sunday of Life
Notes


The Sunday of Life



…it is the Sunday of life, which levels everything, and rejects everything bad; men gifted with such good humour cannot be fundamentally bad or base.
– Hegel


The characters of this novel being real, any resemblance they may bear to imaginary individuals must be purely fortuitous.


1
L ittle did he guess , Private Brû, that every time he passed her shop its owner noticed him. He walked very naturally, joyfully clad in khaki, his hair, what you could see of it, under his kepi, his hair neatly cut and as you might say glazed, his hands along the seam of his trousers, his hands, one of which, the right one, kept rising at irregular intervals to show respect to someone of superior rank or to answer the greeting of some demilitarized personage. Never suspecting that an admiring eye was piercing him every day on the route that led him from the barracks to the office, Private Brû, who in general thought of nothing but, when he did, had a preference for the Battle of Jena, Private Brû moved with unconscious ease. With his unconsciously grey-blue eyes, his puttees gallantly and unconsciously wound, Private Brû naively carried with him everything necessary to please a maiden lady who was neither altogether young nor altogether a maiden.
Julia pinched her sister Chantal’s arm and said:
“There he is.”
Lurking behind an amorphous clutter of cotton reels and buttons, they watched him go by, without a word. Their silence was caused by the intensity of their examination. Had they spoken, he would not have heard them.
As is his wont, Private Brû goes round the corner into the Rue Jules Ferry and disappears for a little while. Until it’s time for grub.
“Well?” asks Julia.
“Well?” replies Chantal.
She goes and sits by the cash desk.
“Him?”
“There’s thousands like that,” says Chantal.
“And aren’t there thousands like yours too?”
“That’s no argument.”
“Well then, you see.”
Julia continued to look languidly at the corner of the Rue Jules Ferry.
“What do I see?” asked Chantal.
Julia turned to her sister:
“It’ll be him and no one else.”
“Do what you like.”
Chantal shrugged her shoulders and said, thus confirming her previous remark:
“Do what you like.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”
If she gets married they’ll have to whistle for her inheritance, the Bolucras, not for themselves, but for their daughter Marinette who might have gone into the trade, you know, when her aunt began to, you know, decrepitate. They’d find something else for Marinette. The Bulocras didn’t need the auntly bazaar. They weren’t chasing it. Let old Julia get spliced.
“You don’t think he might be just a wee bit youngish for you?”
“How old would you say he was?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-three.”
“You’re seeing him in short pants.”
“Twenty-five at the most.”
She wasn’t saying that, Chantal wasn’t, to make her, Julia, back out. But she found the soldier a bit green for her sister, who was so much less so.
“He’s a good-looking man,” said Julia. “He isn’t a little boy.”
“How wrong you are. He was born yesterday, your soldier. Squeeze his nose, and cream’ll come out. I say cream because I do admit he’s handsome.”
Julia cackled.
“You’ll always make me laugh.”
“Not so much as you,” said Chantal. “At this moment, you make me laugh, because you’re going to make a hell of a mistake.”
“How so?”
“Because you’re going to marry a boy twenty or twenty-five years younger than yourself. Where’s that going to lead you, eh? Just tell me: where’s that going to lead you?”
She shook her hair coquettishly and answered her own question:
“Your marriage won’t have a leg to stand on.”
Julius faced her sister, then breasted her, and finally legged her. She asked her:
“D’you reckon I’m ugly?”
“No no, you’ve worn well. But a difference of twenty or twenty-five years, that’s quite something. You’ re old enough to have seen the French soldier boys in their red pants marching past President Fallières. * He probably doesn’t even know who President Fallières was.”
“In the first place, thanks for the allusion.”
“Have to say what is.”
“And next, it isn’t twenty years. And furthernext, I don’t give a bugger. Answer me: d’you reckon I’m dilapidated?”
“Not at all.”
“My mug?”
“All right.”
“My titties?”
“Bearing up.”
“My stumps?”
“Oak, eh.”
“Well, then?”
“It isn’t only people’s physique that counts,” said Chantal, it’s their morale.”
“Oh, oh,” said Julia, “where do you fish up such wisecraps?”
“Don’t bother, I thought that one up myself.”
“Come on, say what you mean, then.”
Chantal then made allusion to men’s habits, married men’s, and in particular to those of her own, Paul Boulingra: obdurate alcoholism, autistic nicotinism, sexual sluggishness, financial mediocrity, sentimental obtuseness. Yes but the thing was, Julia considered that her sister had been singularly ill served in the person of her Popol. She mentioned some fellows who drank nothing but water, like Trendelino’s husband, who didn’t smoke, like Foucolle’s, who never stopped sweeping their chimney out for them, like Panigère’s, who earned a handsome living, like Parpillon’s, and who were capable of showing their wives the most delicate attentions, like the husband of the aforementioned M’ame Foucolle. Without counting the ones who could mend fuses, carry parcels, drive the car, lower their eyes when they pass a scrubber. Julia was fairly sure that her soldier would fall into the latter category, and this made her smile with pleasure. Which irritated Chantal.
“Yes,” she conceded, “but when you’re sixty, he’ll be thirty-five. You won’t keep him.”
“We’ll see.”
“Then you’re pretty clever.”
“I shall manage.”
“Do you think every man can be kept in the same way, stupid girl?”
“With him, I’ll manage.”
“You don’t even know his name.”
“So what?”
“You don’t know his age, or his trade, or his past, or even if he’s got his elementary-school leaving certificate.”
“And what of it?”
“All right, my girl. All right.”
Chantal tossed her hair femininely. She added once more:
“All right.”
Then she concluded:
“Carry on, then. Just carry on.”
Julia finally sat down at the cash desk. There weren’t any customers; she could, otherwise it isn’t a good principle: the purchaser immediately thinks of the monetary consequences of her action and doesn’t buy anything. Better not to. So there she is behind the spring-actuated currency-harvester, a beautiful modern machine like they have in chemists’ and in big cafés with orchestras and which, the machine, gave to Julia Julie Antoinette Segovia’s modest commerce in haberdashery a serious and menacing appearance calculated to overcome the hesitations and indecisions of the buyers of petroleum-green ribbon or reddish-brown braid.
Julie took out a file, one for the bills, and started poring over the dates when they would fall due. She’d already done so seventy-seven times since the first, but once too often never does any harm. What was more, she wasn’t even thinking about what she was doing. While her fingers were following with illiterate industry the signs that the West owes to the inventors of gum arabic, Julie was preparing a little speech destined for her sister with a view to some practical results. But Ganière came in.
Sent on various errands so as to leave the sisters to chew the fat in peace, the slave had got back to the shop far sooner than was expected.
“They’re all the same,” said Julie to Chantal. “When you want them they’re never there, and when you don’t want them they come rushing back as fast as their legs’ll carry them.”
Ganière’s zeal distressed Julie, who measured, in the space of a few milliseconds, the distance that separates masters from servants, and especially the intelligence of the ones from the obtuseness of the others. Silly sodess, she muttered, and then, in a curt voice, she pronounced these words:
“You certainly took your time!”
“But Madame,” the girl began.
“That’s enough,” said Julie. You’ve been hanging around street corners again.”
“But Madame,” bleat bleat.
“Yes, hanging around. Hanging around with hooligans. Or even with soldiers.”
And yet she’d been quick, had Ganière. She would never understand.
“But Madame.”
“That’s enough. So you’ve been tumbled again, eh, you little slut? I shall tell your mother, and your poor grandmother. So young, and such a whore!”
Julie sighed:
“A v