The Vatard Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

butcher’s; others, draped around the pillars of the press, leaned backwards, tickling each other to keep awake, their hiked-up skirts revealing dirty, saggy stockings and hobnail boots. Alone, in her corner, the supervisor was huffing, calculating figures, adding them up with a pencil moistened with saliva, staring, stupefied, at this heap of girls on the floor.
    The workshop looked like a scene from a morgue. A cart-load of petticoats seemed to have been emptied there in a pile, and arms and legs teemed beneath this bundle of old clothes. The paying of wages was going slowly. The workers who still remained began undoing their protective oversleeves and smoothing their hair with spit, laughing at the sight of a little girl who was dozing, oblivious, sprawled amid the offcuts of paper, her little finger dangling in the sticky mess of a tub of glue.
    The day broke. The supervisor extinguished the gaslights, and through the grilled windowpanes streaked by streams of rain, a pale winter sun, a dawn of a sinister whiteness, spread over the various clusters of women, illuminating pallid cheeks and the tips of tongues that from time to time brushed the grimy corners of their mouths. In dribs and drabs, the bindery women disappeared; soon only two remained, a little girl suffering from an incurable toothache, and a large woman with swaying hips who was checking herself for fleas and sucking at a drop of blood flecking her chapped lips.
    The fanlight was opened to let in some fresh air.
    A heavy fug was hanging over the room: an unbearable odour of oil and gas, of the sweat of females with dirty underwear, a strong smell like that of goats that had gambolled in the sun, mingled with the putrid emanations of cold meat and wine, acrid cat’s piss, the nauseous stench of the toilets, and the sickly smell of damp paper and buckets of glue.
    The supervisor arranged the chairs thrown haphazardly on their sides or on their backs, their legs in the air, their intestines of pale straw sticking up in corkscrews or fleeing in strands through the holes in their bellies. She piled up the riot of stools on the trestles.
    It struck nine.
    The sun made up its mind to come out. It emerged, getting redder the higher it rose. The dance of dust in the rays of sunlight began, revolving in spirals from floor to windows. The light leaped, gushed, splashing the floor and tables with large spots, ignited with a trembling spark the neck of a carafe and the belly of a bucket, set fire with its glowing red embers to the heart of a peony which was wilting, quivering, in its jar of turbid water, before finally breaking in a large golden wave over the piles of paper which blazed out in raw whiteness against the sooty walls.

II
    Of the four women who, apart from the odd escapade, regularly worked in the book binding and pressing workshop of the firm Débonnaire & Co. – ‘the sieve’, as the supervisor called it – three were wise virgins: the first, because she was too old; the second, because she wasn’t very enticing; the third, because she was young and wasn’t stupid. The fourth wasn’t quite so wise, changing her lover every month, though never having more than one or two at the same time. The first was Madame Teston, a married woman, an old nanny-goat of fifty, tall and skinny, who would bleat away, perched on her thin legs, with her craggy face and her ears like pot handles; the second was Madame Voblat, a wicker-hamper of fat, a feast of flesh barely restrained by the stays of her corset, a stupid, self-satisfied lass who would laugh and clutch her sides over the least thing, the mewing of a cat or the buzzing of a fly; the last pair were the two Vatard sisters: Desirée, a scamp of fifteen, a brunette with large, weak eyes and a slight squint, plump but not excessively so, a pleasant, comely girl; and Céline, the dirty stop-out, a big girl with bright eyes and hair the colour of straw, a solid, good-time girl whose blood seethed and danced in