The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)

by André Couvreur

  He saw the administration services, the vestries, the refectories, the kitchens, the laundries, and the sterilization units, with their population of nurses who only expressed themselves by means of gestures...

  In sum, in a matter of minutes, he saw the palpitation of his gigantic, hyperbolic endeavor, the purveyor of a slice of eternity. And pride dilated him. He foraged in his fleece. What triumph! What harmony!

  But he was careful to declare to his superintendent: “Hobbling along. Limping. Oh, if only I’d been able to keep my little ones…to teach them. If only I still had the Lapastilles, instead of the incompetent that you are. That old Phraste, a Latin mind, who made me laugh. Laugh! You don’t laugh, you…a human prerogative!”

  Tornada still did not understand why old Phraste had renounced the superintendency. Lodged like a Grand Duke before Lenin, eating like Lucullus chez Lucullus, engendering like a Père Gigogne, even having the leisure to paint the nymph Mélanie when she was not in the hope of maternity, what had he lacked, to suddenly hand in his resignation?

  Lapastille had come to him one morning and said: “You know, old Nada, all things considered, I think I’ll take off.”

  “You’re not going to wait with me for your inheritance, which my cops are guarding for you out there?”

  “No, I’d rather not.”

  “All right, ingrate. Get out, you and yours.”

  But when the image returned of the art student with the cornflower blue eyes, and the sweet Mélanie, and the noisy nest, Tornada plunged momentarily into the void...

  Chapter VIII

  The cry of a child rose up: “Mama! Bread!”

  Immediately, from another corner of the studio, the even more plaintive plaint of an even weaker voice responded: “Milk, Mama! Milk!”

  Oh, the effect of that leitmotiv of hunger on a mother’s nerves! What pathetic music could ever equal it? Mélanie wrung her hands. She would have offered to her children, her brood, quite literally, her flesh to eat and her blood to drink—to the last drop in her veins—but she could not give them what no longer existed in the house, nor that which money no longer permitted them to procure in the street: bread and milk.

  She accumulated her distress on the mattress placed on the floor. Two by two, the youngest six were still lying there, while, constrained by the law of work, the oldest six had already gone to perform base tasks in the nationalized factories. Still, it was fortunate that they were lodged relatively comfortably and that the curtains from the windows, converted into blankets, protected them from the implacable November. So many others in vast, overpopulated Paris were etiolating in narrow hovels, and so many others had no shelter at all!

  When the Lapastilles, alarmed by Tornada’s role in the universal misery—a responsibility that they felt that they shared, by virtue of their functions—had decided to leave Biocolia, proudly, without even taking their material wealth, they had certainly known that their country had been exhausted by the new egalitarian regime, commonly known as the Eglantine regime after the flower that the revolutionaries had adopted as a badge, while the defeated reactionaries had adopted the fleur-de-lys, but they believed that it was still possible to live on works of art, to raise and maintain a family, no matter how numerous it might be. “I’ll take up my brushes,” Théophraste had said to himself, “Mélanie will supply my nymphs, and I’ll obtain commissions from the State as soon as they know who I am and that I’ve renounced the Renovator.”

  Alas, the métier of art was precisely the one least able to nourish its adherents. After the storm that had passed over Europe, over all the continents, destroying everything, smashing monuments and factories, and even ravaging the countryside, it was necessary now to restore and reconstruct, and favor was given to manual workers of both sexes. Then the birds of prey, initially driven away by an unprecedented catastrophe, had come back in force, attracted by the miasmas. Having hovered for some time they had plunged, and were now sucking the marrow from the bones of the eternal dupes of the egalitarian dream.

  Théophraste Lapastille could only be one of the latter. In a year, he had only sold two paintings, one to a Nicaraguan delegate engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the Eglantine Central Committee, who had paid five dollars—ten billion French francs, enough to live on for a week—the other to a people’s commissar, who had paid peanuts.

  Then came a horrible Gehenna, the misery of progressively selling, in order to eat, everything that had any commercial value: furniture, clothes, kitchen equipment, even the painter’s materials and Mélanie’s shoes. She went about the apartment, looking after the children, in threadbare stockings. The studio was rapidly emptied in that fashion, cleared out. Soon, nothing remained but meager beds, a table and a few chairs.

  “We’re ridding ourselves of the superfluous,” Lapastille said, bitterly, as every object was exchanged for handfuls of bills representing enormous sums that were only worth four sous in real terms. “Here we are, billionaires in advance of Uncle Louis”—although he was no longer counting on the inheritance, which would be immediately absorbed by the communist state, unless the reactionary movement of the Fleur-de-lys, which had been rumbling for some time, triumphed in its enterprise of restoring the old order. But his humorous fashion of tightening his matador’s belt did not succeed in dissipating his wife’s distress.

  “Milk, Mama!” repeated Joconde, the youngest. She was four years old. One might have searched her features in vain for any similarity to Leonardo da Vinci’s original. Her eyes were only wide with the astonishment of renewed privations, and if she had dimples in her cheeks, it was because emaciation had hollowed them out.

  Mélanie certainly did not experience any preference for any of her children. She hugged them all equally to her heart, like flowers from the same bouquet of love, but the plaints of the most innocent gripped her entrails most keenly.

  She indicated Joconde to her husband and, her voice hardened by an unaccustomed revolt, said: “Do you hear? Do you hear? She’s claiming her milk.”

  “Well, give her what’s left.”

  “There isn’t any left, Phraste! Not a drop!”

  Mistrustful of Mélanie’s weakness, the painter reserved the division of foodstuffs to himself. It was necessary to keep a close watch on them; they were becoming rare. It was necessary to search for those that their resources still permitted.

  For milk, the distribution of which was parsimoniously regulated by ration-cards—two liters for the whole family, almost entirely absorbed by Joconde—he set out hunting at first light. Well before dawn, he mingled with housewives and men in rags. He listened to their plaints, their rancor against Tornada, their anger against speculators and against the government; their hope in a new man, the benevolent tyrant whom everyone would follow.

  He shared their opinions, but prudence made him keep quiet. The police were everywhere, and redoubtable. Often, two hands descended upon one of the complainers and took him away, without any other form of trial, to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where, because all the prisons spared by the revolutionary destruction were crammed with political prisoners, recalcitrants and madmen—social detritus identically treated—were now deposited. In order not to be dumped there with the mass, in order to be able to continue to look after his own, Théophraste was very careful not to raise his head. Muzzled by terror, he repressed his generosity, his impulses and his indignations.

  With the two liters in his jar, often even less, Théophraste ran back up to the sixth floor and busied himself boiling them. That was another problem, equally acute: coal was no longer anything but a myth. Initially, a provision of oil had replaced it, with the aid of an old stove scoured of its rust, but it had soon run out. Buying more was the privilege of profiteers. Then they heaped up in the kitchen, perched in the gallery, books, fragments of dried paint and bits of wood salvaged from the cellar. The milk ended up boiling nevertheless, constituting, along with scraps of meat and the faded vegetables, which were eaten raw, the only meal of the
day, when everyone returned home.

  But that day, there had been no milk. Posters blamed the Fleurs-de-lys, who had begun the counter-revolution, and were intercepting the trains, counting on forcing Paris to surrender by means of famine. To suffer for the sake of a new regime, Théophraste consented, but his children, and the Nymph?

  Mélanie slumped into a chair. No, it was too much; she had drunk the lees! After the illumination of her new youth, when she had been married to the master she loved, existence had never been more enchanted, the breath of spring never more delightfully breathed. Later, another sovereign bounty, another indestructible cement, they had created these dozen children, had seen them prosper in the abundance of the Norman domain. Then had come the reaction of their conscience, the abandonment of a privileged situation, poverty and hunger. Mélanie’s confessional soul could not allow her doubt. She still believed in a magnificent ulterior compensation. Even the suffering of her children could not shake her faith. But was the case it, then, that a share of joy had to be paid for on earth? Or did malevolent forces exist to counterbalance the power of the unique Sovereign: demons who, beneath masks furnished by long curly beards, grimaced curses?

  Théophraste had reached that limit of desperation at which struggle no longer seems possible, at which one conceives, as the only normal denouement, dying and taking those who are suffering with you. But how could one disappear, and cause thirteen others to disappear at the same stroke, when the pullutating police, lured by large premiums, took all suicides to Tornada? Alerted by a special wireless, a green airplane arrived within ten minutes, which took away men who were not completely dead, and also fresh cadavers, the latter to serve for the biologist’s further experiments. So Lapastille searched for a subterfuge in order to avoid that last annexation by the surgeon of his remains and those of his family.

  Others had found ways that had succeeded. Yes, others had succeeded in dying. And he imagined simulating departure with his family for a foreign land, so skillfully that the concierge, attached as he was to Tornada’s inquisitive organization, would not be able to inform the transport services. Tranquil, once they were believed to be far away, they could surrender themselves to the stove and not be discovered until they were completely unusable. Then, oblivion…or something else…but anything rather than the present distress.

  It was an artist’s dream, which took on substance, however, under the pressure of circumstances, sufficiently for him to have mentioned it already to Mélanie. She had been horrified! This time again, she guessed—but she had no need to protest; he had repented of it already. He put his head on her shoulder,

  “You’re right. I’m not making enough effort. I persist in sterile art—it’s idiotic. Positively idiotic. Let’s put our talents to more practical employment. One doesn’t give up when it’s a matter of eating and feeding others. I’ve heard that they’re looking for painters to paint the walls the Hôtel de Ville. I’ll go see. Perhaps they’ll hire me. At any rate, I’ll bring something back, even if I have to steal it...”

  He put the one threadbare jacket he still had over his shirt, put on his shoes, worn but still waterproof, and went out.

  The staircase, once waxed and shiny, was left to the dust and the mud by a concierge no longer stimulated by any wage. On the landings, there was not a sound, no symptoms of the busy housework that reveals, even in the humblest dwellings, the existence of family life. Buckets of ordure were abandoned there, expanding odors of decomposition.

  When the painter went past the lodge the concierge muttered a few insulting words. He was pure, like all his colleagues, and he had suspicions regarding his tenant. Théophraste did not reply, and hastened outside.

  In order to go from his street to the Hôtel de Ville, which had become the seat of the Eglantine municipality, he had to take the Rue Vavin, go around the inaccessible Jardin du Luxembourg, reach the beginning of the Boulevard Saint-Michel via the Rue Racine, and from there traverse the Cité. It was a walk he had once sought out for its enchantment, taking him through the heart of the picturesque Latin quarter and ending up before the magic of a sunset over the Seine. What dazzling memories! Alas, they had sunk in the drama of a society led to ruination by a handful of fanatics, some certainly of good faith, led astray by a social utopia, but the majority merely obedient to a unique opportunity, determined by Tornada, to unleash their instincts.

  As soon as he had taken his first steps under a harsh and low sky, tumultuously stirred by the wind, the lamentable spectacle of the street gripped him. An entire population of pale and emaciated people was quitting their hovels for the hypothetical conquest of labor and pasture. They were young in appearance, for they had mostly been renovated by Tornada, but their gaze was old and old age was also indicated by their disillusioned, suspicious expressions and their gait, weighed down by the burden of two lives.

  Lapastille felt that he was too similar to them, too much a pariah, like them, to complain overmuch. He was saturated by the same errors, the same futile struggle for subsistence. He went past defrocked individuals, clad in tattered rags of different colors, so improbable that on might have thought it a voluntary camouflage, within which vermin flourished. Children held out hands blue with clod to implore alms of a scrap of food; others, older, spat insults; others blasphemed. There were women stamping their feet to warm them and cripples baked up against walls, exhibiting the after-effects of the Great War, their stumps and their ulcers. It was as if they were encrusted in their corners. No police moved them on.

  The roadway lost nothing in horror to the sidewalk. The municipal services no longer intervening, excrements streamed in the gutters. Rubbish piled up in heaps which scavengers explored, in the insensate hope of discovering scraps of food therein. Starving dogs disputed the privilege with them, but prudently, without getting too close, warned by their instinct that they could only be man’s best friend now by allowing themselves to be captured and devoured. Everyone, everywhere, was suffering the tortures of acute hunger.

  Lapastille heard laughter behind him, however—which was so unusual that he looked round. Two men were coming along the sidewalk, more sinister in their gaiety than the others in their silence. One was strutting, his head beneath a newspaper folded into a little hat, his fingers clutching the lapels of an imaginary frock-coat. The other, draped in a chasuble, was bestowing benedictions upon the crowd and prophesying abundantly. Two lunatics, alas—two lunatics at liberty.

  They stopped in front of a child in swaddling-clothes, abandoned on a dung-heap, asleep.

  “The king of Rome!” Napoléon recognized.

  “The baby Jesus,” discerned the apostle.

  They leaned over the poor body and, in order to awaken the child, initially employed caresses. But when it whimpered, a sudden fury, transmitted from one to the other by mysterious affinities, succeeded their adoration. They shook it forcefully, and then began to batter it. A circle had formed, but no one stepped forward to protect the innocent.

  Stirred in all his charitable fibers, Lapastille was about to intervene when revolver shots put the crowd to flight. The weapon was not directed at them, however; it was two citizens fighting over an old hat fund in a dustbin.

  Further on, outside a bakery whose shutters were closed, an eternal queue extended, rags and furbelows mingled, each as lamentable as one another. Even further along, the owner of a tripe-shop, similarly surrounded, put up a notice: nothing left to sell. The wretches who had been stamping their feet there for hours, in the cold wind, to buy a hundred grams of bacon, immediately headed for an open air percolator, vomiting a saline decoction sweetened with saccharin, but which at least put some warmth into the stomach.

  Around the apparatus a hundred arms were extended, holding out improbable receptacles: chipped porcelain cups, ancient saucepans and jam-pots. An atrocious and banal beggary!

  Théophraste, solicited like them, but withdrawn in his egotism, no longer felt the sadness of it. He took out a cup that he carried for any
eventuality and jostled with his elbows.

  Oh, Uncle Louis’ inheritance, bags full on nuggets and chests full of jewels, guarded out there in the fortress in Brow City by a cordon of policemen, riches once scorned, how frantically he would have welcomed them now! Oh, no—every man for himself and God for no one! he blasphemed, in spite of the Nymph. No longer would he spread them around to dry up the bile of his fellows. But would the Fleur-de-lys reaction triumph? Would he ever be the possessor of that fabulous hoard? He shook off that hope, as the stupidity of a dream.

  Cheered up by the warmth of the beverage, he continued on his way. Uncertain, no longer hoping in this time of troubles to find work at the Hôtel de Ville, he nevertheless went along the Rue Vavin, which ended at the Jardin du Luxembourg. There, he was surprised to observe that the gate was open. Curiosity urged him to go through the famous park, evocative of so many pleasant strolls in his youth. All things considered, the prospect of returning to the house empty-handed scarcely provided any incentive for the moment. He therefore obeyed the hope of encountering Fortune, in the form of some aliment for which he could exchange a miniature that he had in his pocket.

  Before going into the Jardin, however, he had to wait. A regiment of artillery, deviating from its route, going forth in order to pepper enemy aircraft that had been droning overhead momentarily, deployed its long procession of well-equipped and well-nourished servants, with flourishing horses and artfully-camouflaged cannons and ammunition-trucks.

  Théophraste cursed the army, the sole luxury of the new regime, while envying its members their satisfied appearance. Those men, conscripted by force, slaves to a ferocious discipline, were materially the most fortunate of the day. A twenty-five-year-old colonel, belted, booted and affected, was commanding them. He saluted a beautiful girl at a window with his sword, and then jabbed its point into the back of a tatterdemalion who was obstinate in passing through the file.