Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  It was no use calling the cops to take the bum to a hospital, in case there might be internal bleeding. The gendarmes just laughed if a foreigner tried to get them to do something merciful about a clochard. That had happened to Dag, who found one slumped over the wheel of a car in the entrance to his building and thought it was somebody who had had a heart attack. And even if Peter were able, which he doubted, to haul the body home for first-aid, his concierge would probably hear him and bar the way; she had a complex about clochards. He started walking toward the carrefour, endeavoring not to quicken his steps. He felt furtive, like a motorist leaving the scene of an accident. Every few paces, he turned to look behind him. When he reached the intersection, the clochard, to his relief, was stirring. The shapeless hump rose with slow laborious movements like a dinosaur emerging from primeval slime and wove off in the other direction down the boulevard, holding the bottle and, for good measure, Peter’s new carryall, which he had used to transport the Bonfante presents and which he could not remember having dropped.

  What a reception committee! He felt so weak and sweaty that he could hardly make the stairs leading up to his street. Between the beggar and the drunk, he seemed to have run the gauntlet in some fiendish initiation rite. His heavy boots were slippery from the bum’s vomit, and he sat down, holding his breath, and cleaned them with his handkerchief, which he then threw away.

  After this, for a while, he encountered clochards everywhere, looming in his path, clutching at his sleeve, shuffling past him to a zinc or a pissoir. He wondered if they could be a form of DT’s and instead of snakes or pink elephants he was seeing bottle noses, red rheumy eyes, purple veins, laceless shoes stuffed with newspapers, torn flapping overcoats, and layers on layers of indeterminate clothing stained with wine, spew, mud, and snot. He saw these apparitions zigzagging out of bars, sitting and lying on public benches, fumbling in the morning garbage, staggering along sidewalks, leaning against lamp-posts, propped in doorways, collapsed on the Métro steps, occasionally panhandling, and always at night extended on the various grills, grids, and gratings through which the hot stale breath of the Paris underground lung system was exhaled into the atmosphere, as though Paris itself was a vast unhygienic Russian stove on top of which snored these muzhiks in their bast and rags.

  On his walks, he took to counting the grids in his neighborhood that might serve as their night-time couches; he would not have imagined there could be so many, square and rectangular, of diverse sizes and patterns—not just Métro ventilators, he came to realize, but ducts from bakery ovens, conduits from every kind of infernal furnace and combustion-unit sending up blasts of contaminated air. Unless you had a special interest like his or were walking with a girl wearing high heels, which were likely to get caught in the grillwork, you would never notice they were there.

  He became conscious, too, of the number of empty bottles lying around in the quartier, on sidewalks and in gutters—flotsam warning him of the vicinity of some human wreck. He could not rid his mind of the subject. In the Métro, he watched to see whether anybody but him was reading the anti-alcoholism propaganda and taking it to heart. Where he used to ask himself whether women he saw on street-corners might be prostitutes, his speculations now anxiously turned on whether young workmen tossing it back at a zinc might not metamorphose tomorrow into clochards. What made a heavy drinker turn into a derelict was a mystery, he guessed, and for a born hypochondriac like himself this rendered the sickness more scary, like multiple sclerosis; you never knew where it might strike. He did not quake on his own behalf (when he drank too much, he got sick, which his aunt said showed he could never become a drunkard) but altruistically, which was worse. He began to look with prophetic dread on crones in the épicerie with a pair of Postillon bottles tucked into the bottom of their shopping baskets, husbands of concierges, waiters with trembling hands, the oyster-opener across from the Deux Magots, the customers in Nicolas, even priests.

  At least he did not have to worry about his concierge. Though she occasionally lifted a medicinal glass with her aged copines, the bottle of nice wine he had given her for Christmas (acting on a bum steer from his father) was still standing on her buffet, like an altar ornament, next to a vase of yellowed “palms” from Palm Sunday and some framed tinted photographs of her relatives and Queen Fabiola. In fact, she had a horror of clochards, and if anything could cure him of his own obsession, it was listening to Madame Puel on the topic.

  She read about their misdeeds in a concierges’ newspaper and exchanged atrocity stories with her pals along the street. To judge by her accounts, her broom and mop got more exercise driving out the poor wretches she found asleep in her hallway than in their normal functions. As the nights got colder, she tightened the rules of the building. The big front door was locked at six o’clock, and when Peter came home after ten, it was not enough now to ring six times; he had to announce himself, which he hated, as he passed the loge. “Levi.” If the tenants expected a guest after that hour, they had to come down themselves and open, by pre-arrangement. Yet despite these new security measures, the clochards somehow slipped in, almost, Peter felt, to Madame Puel’s satisfaction, as though their breaching her defenses sharpened her relish for battle. Just as she seemed to enjoy telling him, by way of a morning greeting, “Votre camarade a laissé la porte ouverte,” meaning, usually, Makowski, who often failed to close the front door when he left, though not as often as she pretended.

  Sometimes when Peter got home she was lying in wait for him in her bathrobe and bigoudis. “Levi.” To break the monotony of hearing his name issue from his own lips, he now and then used a falsetto or a sepulchral bass. He loathed it when her door unlocked before he could get past. “Ah, bon soir, Monsieur Levi. J’en ai chassé un déjà, vous savez. Une femme.” Like his mother with a mousetrap, she kept score. One triumphal night, when the people on the fourth floor left were having a party, she caught three in a row.

  He wondered if Madame Puel guessed how miserable it made him to hear about these things and often he suspected she did. She thought he was “soft” on clochards because he had dared ask her one icy day what harm it would do to let them sleep in the hall or in the service stairway. “Ah, monsieur, vous parlez. C’est pas un asile, notre immeuble.” Who was to clean up their filth after them? “Vous, Monsieur l’Américain, ou moi, l’employée?” Fresh from his matins in the Re Magi toilet, Peter allowed that he could do it. The beldame laughed. He would not get the opportunity. It was easy for him to talk. Up there in the mansard, what did a strong young man have to fear from those salauds, while she, an old woman, on the ground floor in her loge, a widow, could be murdered in her bed?

  Peter begged her to try to make distinctions. A voyou was one thing, but had a clochard ever knocked off anybody that she knew of? In his observation, they were too far gone to hold a bottle, let alone a weapon. “Vous dites,” she replied. About a week after this chat, he was surprised, at breakfast, by her rapping at his door. He could tell something important had happened; it was the first time she had been to his room—she used the elevator to reach the other tenants and left the back stairs to be swept by a slave on Saturdays. She was breathless, having made the rounds of the house. But she would not take a cup of coffee or even, at first, sit down. He had asked her, had he not, what harm a clochard could do? Could he guess what she had found last night on her third-floor landing when she had chased one of them out of the elevator? Peter could not guess. “Deux mégots, Monsieur Levi! Vous vous rendez compte?” In her withered palm, she held out two cigarette butts. “Voilà!”

  Peter nodded. He could see her point. The whole old fire-trap building could have gone up in smoke. But how could she be sure that the butts had been left there by the man she chased? “C’était une femme,” she corrected. “Toujours la même.” Earlier, Madame Puel had smelled cigarette smoke and crept up the front stairs to investigate. But seemingly there had been nobody, and she had gone back to bed. The way she reconstructed it, the woman, hearing a
noise, had hidden in the elevator. Then she had fallen asleep, and her body had slumped against the elevator door. That was how Madame Puel had found her, at 2:00 A.M., when a nurse on the fourth who worked nights had walked up, because the elevator was stuck, and seen what she thought was a cadaver inside.

  It was lucky, said Peter, with a compassionate shudder, that the clocharde had not set fire to her clothes and burned up, trapped, in the elevator. Unlucky for her, thought the concierge; a creature like that was better off dead. Then at least she could not be a threat to others. For herself, Madame Puel did not care. “Mais vous, qui êtes jeune, qui avez la vie devant vous … Et tous les autres, avec leurs familles, leurs distractions. Griller dans un incendie, c’est pas gai.” She stared at the cigarette butts in her hand and let them drop on Peter’s table. “Eh bien, voilà. Je suis venue vous le dire. C’est tout.” QED.

  Looking into her parched ancient face, Peter had no recommendations to offer. It was pointless to argue that the old run-down building ought to install individual buzzer systems, like in the United States (the skinflint owner would rather collect the fire insurance and retire to the Côte d’Azur), and the joke he considered making (“I suppose you could put up ‘No Smoking’ signs”) seemed inopportune. To his surprise, poor old Madame Puel, now that her point was proved, had become nicer.

  “Je suis bonne catholique, Monsieur Levi. Je sais bien que ces salauds sont des êtres humains en quelque sorte. Mais j’ suis pas le Christ.” It was no pleasure, she assured him, to have to drive them out night after night, but that was her job. “J’ suis payée pour ça.” When her little dog had been alive, it had been a different story. He barked fearlessly at all intruders. In his day, the building was a fortress; no clochards, peddlers, or other unauthorized persons dared set foot in it. But then he nipped at the mailman, and they made her put “Chien méchant” on a placard hanging on the loge door. “Chien méchant! Figurez-vous. Quelle honte.” For her, Peter assented sympathetically. But the dog, after all, could not read. Madame Puel tossed her head; her nostrils flared. Boy had sensed the shame of it, and, shortly after, he had died. Of mortification. “Mon vieux compagnon.” Her eyes filled with tears. Boy had been the building’s protector for nearly fifteen years, poor fellow, and all the thanks he got were objections to his barking—not even a marker in the dog cemetery. And now she had taken his place. “Un chien de garde!”

  She was nothing but a watchdog. And everyone held it against her. “Vous aussi, Monsieur Levi.” “Mais non!” protested Peter, though of course she was right. He had held it against her, but he would not any more. “Je comprends,” he added. “C’est une grande responsabilité.” He went to the hot plate and put on water to make her a fresh cup of coffee. “Ah, comme vous êtes bon! Toujours si gentil avec moi et courtois. Vous, un étranger!” She wiped her eyes. He tried to think how to say in correct French that he would like to have known her dog.

  It was human nature, he supposed, that as soon as she recovered she would start attacking clochards again. They threw up; they were incontinent; they had vermin; they stole. And if you let one stay, the next night there would be four. They were clever and tightly organized. “Comme les juifs,” murmured Peter. And yet maybe it was true. It might even be true what anti-Semites said about Jews sticking together and if-you-knew-one-you-had-to-know-their-friends. Making exceptions was usually a poor idea, he found; it was the same principle as “Just one won’t hurt you.”

  You had to be willing to let the exception be the rule. And for that you would need to be Jesus Christ, as Madame Puel said, or a “Parfait,” like the Cathars in Languedoc he had been reading about, who thought the whole temporal world was a creation of Satan.

  The worst, Peter decided, was the casuistry people practiced in going along with the temporal status quo. Even if, like the concierge, they had no choice—the way the world operated—but to give some unfortunate the bum’s rush, they could not leave it at that. They had to talk. She had convinced herself, for instance, that drink made clochards insensible to the cold. “Ils ne sentent rien, Monsieur Levi. Ils ne sont pas comme vous et moi.” She really seemed to think that was a proved scientific fact. But if they did not feel the cold, why did they hole up in her elevator and in her entry hall? It never occurred to her to put the two things together.

  Most of the American kids here had the same attitude. Some were actually obscene enough to give them the hotfoot, in a spirit of scientific experiment, to see if they would react. Among the guys and girls who sat around at the American Center, there was a lot of shocked discussion and comparison of notes. The clochards, they decided, were a wholly different species from Bowery bums, tramps, hobos, or any other kind of floater or hopeless drunkard they knew. Like Peter, they could not get over finding them underfoot at night. “Aren’t there shelters or anything, for Christ’s sake?” It bothered them that the clochards would not behave normally, like American bums, who sidled up with a hard-luck story and asked for a handout. Instead of begging for dough to make a phone call to their sick old mother in Metz, the clochards just glared at them from wild inflamed eyes, like filthy prophets. And when, infrequently, they asked for money, it was more of a brusque demand than an appeal.

  Some of those American nuts were avid to draw them out, get their life stories—no doubt to pad out their boring letters home. “They won’t talk to me,” a girl mourned. “I’ve tried and tried.” “They’re French,” said Peter. He would never have dared venture more than a “Bonjour” to a clochard himself. To him it was unthinkable to want to ferret out the history of a down-and-outer: “What brought you to this, my good man?” He occasionally dropped a franc on some comatose form and then fled, as if he had committed a trespass. Like most of the other kids, he guessed, and like Madame Puel, he was afraid of clochards, the way people were afraid of snakes, even though they knew they were harmless. The pain these bums gave him was moral.

  He was ashamed of being so ignorant of a subject that was so much on his mind. But the data gathered by his peer group came chiefly from café waiters and added up to the fact, if it was one, that the clochard community was a microcosm of France: you could meet all kinds among them, agrégés, doctors, actresses from the Comédie-Française; the distinguished toper with the baby carriage who went around the quartier collecting rubbish was a former banker. … But that was what the census-taker would note in any hell, e.g., Dante’s. That they lived by selling the rubbish they collected and on sponging—mainly off each other—was somewhat more informative, though it left you wondering why, if they were capable of organizing, they did not go a step farther and arrange some minimal housing—even discarded pup tents or sleeping-bags.

  According to Silly Platt, who was an authority on clochards, Peter’s question showed he had not grasped their psychology. “They don’t feel the cold the way we do.” “That’s what my concierge says.” “She’s so right. They feel it up to a point but not enough to do anything constructive about it. In fact they’d rather mess up the hall of a building that somebody has just swept or wallow in their puke on the sidewalk. Have you ever seen a bear’s wallow? Guck they like to roll in. That’s what these bums go for. They’re animals. I gave one half a franc the other day (‘Donnez-moi; j’ai faim’), and when he leaned over to thank me, sort of bowing, he threw up on my shoes. It’s really crazy. He must have thought he was showering me with gratitude. And I watched another one on the Boul Mich. He was shitting down his pants leg. Right in broad daylight. And he just staggered on with this smile on his face, as if the oily stuff slithering down his leg and leaking on the sidewalk was perfume. Guerlain Number Two.” “Basta,” said Peter, gagging.

  He was only half persuaded that Silly knew whereof he spoke. “You don’t think they do it more as a revenge on society?” “You make it too complicated. If you just look on them as animals, they won’t bother you any more. Actually I get sort of a kick out of them.” Silly was an authority on several aspects of French life, high and low. He had figured al
l the angles and liked to live dangerously. A few days after classes started, Peter had run into him on the Métro platform, preparing to ride first class on a second-class ticket. He had some old punched first-class tickets in his pocket, in case the contrôleur passed through the car, checking up. “Come on!” Reluctantly, Peter boarded. He had never been in first class before.

  “Watch this!” said Silly. “I’m going to have some fun.” Obediently, Peter watched a middle-aged Frenchman in a beret who was sitting on a strapontin opposite them. Silly’s penetrating gray eyes were drilling holes in him, compelling him to look up from his newspaper and meet that transfixing gaze. The man gave a wondering glance sidewise at Peter, turned back to his paper, then peered out again. Meanwhile Silly’s orbs did not waver. To Peter’s astonishment, the man accepted the challenge. Their eyes crossed swords. It was a staring match. Finally the Frenchman’s eyes dropped. At the next station, muttering, he got off. “I make them get them down,” announced Silly. “Get what down?” “Their eyes, don’t you see?”

  He selected another victim and went through the same performance. “I always win. The guy that starts has the advantage.” “But why do you do it?” “To test my will power. Watch!” This time it was a youth about their own age, sitting with his mother. He was harder. Silly leaned slightly forward. “Get them down, get them down,” he was mumuring, like an incantation. Then the mother caught on. She nudged her son. “Jean! Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?” That did it. “Watch now. They’ll move.” Sure enough, the woman, with an angry look backward, led the boy to another part of the car. “It’s more amusing when they retreat right off the train. Like that first guy in the beret. You could tell it wasn’t his stop.”

  On the Champs-Elysées, after Silly had turned in an airplane ticket, they went to a café. Peter was curious about the expression “Get them down.” It was a sort of code, Silly guessed, for getting the French down. “If you don’t practice all the time, they have the upper hand, don’t you see? They’re one up on us, knowing French. You have to stay in training.” This eyeball-to-eyeball exercise, he explained, was just one of the power games he made a point of playing with the French, especially shopkeepers. “They always expect the foreigner to yield first. When you don’t, they’re at a total loss. Completely off base. It’s crazy.” The thing was never to accept their rules; invent your own.