criminal minds

It was years since he had been here, but it was impossible for his feet not to follow in his old footsteps. The watchmaker Vilmos and his watches, and his famous garden, these were perhaps his most vivid childhood memories.
Even before reaching the door, he seemed to recognize the smell of the house, which had always had old people in it, since as far as he was concerned the watchmaker Vilmos and his sister had never been young.
Frank took a dark handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it around his face below his eyes. Stan was about to protest.
"You don't need one. They don't know you. But if you like . . ."
He handed him a similar handkerchief; he had thought of everything.
He still remembered Mademoiselle Vilmos's cakes, like nothing else that he had ever eaten, tasteless, thick, decorated with pink-and-blue sugar.  She always kept them in a box with pictures from the adventures of Robinson Crusoe on it.
And she insisted on calling him "my little angel."
Vilmos must be over eighty now, his sister around seventy-five. It was hard to tell exactly, since children have a different way of judging age. For him they had always been old, and Vilmos had been the first person he had ever seen who could remove all his teeth at once, since he wore dentures.
They were misers, brother and sister, each as bad as the other.
"Should I ring the bell?" asked Stan, who was uneasy standing there in the deserted square under the moonlight.
Frank rang, surprised to find the bell rope so low, when once he had had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. He held his automatic in his right hand. His foot was ready to keep the door from closing, like the first time he had gone to Sissy's.  Footsteps could be heard inside, a sound like in a church.  He remembered that, too.  The hall, long and wide, with dark walls and mysterious doors like those of a sacristy, was paved with gray tiles, and two or three were always loose.

 Dirty snow - Georges Simenon

silencio en punto final

 "En cuanto la chuleta estuvo hecha y las endibias recalentadas, Bouin lo colocó todo en un plato y se instaló a un extremo de la mesa, delante de su botella, su pan, su ensalada, su queso y su mantequilla.

Con una aparente indiferencia hacia lo que él comía, ella dispuso su cena al otro extremo de la mesa: una loncha de jamón, dos patatas frías que había envuelto en papel de estaño antes de meterlas en la nevera y dos finas rebanadas de pan.

Llevaba cierto retraso con respecto a su marido. En ocasiones uno de ellos se sentaba a la mesa cuando el otro ya había terminado: Pero eso carecía de importancia, pues de todas formas se menospreciaban.

Igual que hacían en silencio todo lo demás, también comían sin dirigirse la palabra.”

El gato  - Georges Simenon

situaciones extraordinarias

"Ocurre que, en su casa, un hombre va y viene, hace los gestos familiares, los gestos de todos los días, distendiendo los rasgos para sí mismo, y que, alzando de pronto la vista, percibe que las cortinas no están corridas y que desde afuera lo observa la gente.
Algo de eso le ocurrió a Spencer Ashby. No del todo, porque en realidad aquella noche nadie le prestó atención.  Tuvo su soledad como le gustaba, muy espesa, sin ruido exterior algono, incluso con nieve, que había empezado a caer a grandes copos y que en cierto modo materializaba el silencio.
¿Podía preverse, alguien en el mundo podía prever que, luego, esa noche sería examinada con lupa, que la harían revivir casi literalmente bajo la lupa como si se tratara de un insecto?"

La muerte de Belle - Georges Simenon

wonderful rituals and traditions

"Last night I almost forgot the lions´s socks D, reminded of them when we went to kiss the children before going to bed ourselves.  That´s the first time this has happened to me.
It made me think of the importance of traditions, of habits, of rituals. We live in a period when nomadism reigns anew. In Russia, entire populations are dumped to Siberia. In the United States, factories, offices, and all who work in them are shipped from New England to the South.  In France, heads of businesses that leave the Paris area for the provinces are given a bonus.  Few people still know where they will be in ten, even five years. Families separate.
(It is curious to note that it is just at this moment when furniture and objects of daily use are intercheangable, mass produced, that the purchase of an apartment is indirectly imposed, of a cell in a huge co-operative where the man who occupies it it has nothing to say, where he will have nothing to say, where he will not really be the owner. To my mind, it´s a cynical swindle)
I have always thought that the human being needs the landmarks which traditions are. As a child, I was impatient to leave my family. I pretended to be a rebel. Our way of life was a burden to me.
But I am still grateful to my mother for having, for example, taken me to the market with her from the time I was three years old. I´ve kept a taste for markets, for baskets filled with fruit and vegetables, for odors. Later I took each of my own children to market in turn. One or another of them will probably continue this custom.
These habits are a need so natural to children, even very young ones, demand them, each according to his temperament. Perhaps to reassure themselves? Probably, for the first ones have to do with bedtime, always an anguish for them.
One evening when Marc was two years old I told him a story of a little Chinese named Li. For years after, each evening I had to invent new adventures for Li. When I met D. I asked her for a story too, so that for a long time one or the other of us gave him a daily installment every evening.
For Johnny, the ceremony was just as complicated, but different. He was the most watchful, the most jealous of these little traditions, and he is very unhappy if one is forgotten. I understand him all the better since I am rather like him.
Putting him to bed one evening, I put the socks he had just taken off on the ears of his plush lion. This amused him. That was at least three years ago. He is eleven. Every evening I have to cover the lion´s ears the same way.
And I must leave his door open just enough so that the nurse can come in without touching it if he needs her, for he likes to think I am the last to touch that door before he goes to sleep.

When  I was old - Georges Simenon

the whims of style

"I would like to note here only items of a few lines. And things as badly written as possible so as to stay away from literature. As I sometimes write my friends; the style of my letters is in inverse proportion to my friendship. With strangers, I am careful. With acquaintances, a little less so. With those whom I really love, not at all. Watching one´s language, whatever one may say, distorts thought. I prefer the approximate word, the ordinary, the first at hand to the precise word which has slowed down thought for even a few seconds and by that fact has robbed it of spontaneity. I have some of the same feelings about my novels. That´s why it is so laborious for me to correct them. One of the reasons. The principal reason being that once written they are alien to me."

When I was old - Georges Simenon