Now that sleep was forbidden him, of course he got sleepy. But just as he was slipping into oblivion, a massive depression laid him low. It was the clocharde. A sort of swampy miasma was coming from her that he could sense, like something physical. She was poisoning his good deed.
He sought to analyze the bitter melancholy rising in his soul like heartburn. OK, you were not meant to do good actions for enjoyment exactly, but they ought not to be so positively repugnant that you had to hold your nose morally while performing them. And that was just how he felt. Instead of being glad that he had helped somebody out, inexplicably he stank to himself. The only moment, he could honestly say, that had given him any pleasure was when he got her to eat the bread and cheese. Yet that was when he was teaching her, with a primitive little reward system, not to be a clocharde at least while she was in his apartment but to obey his house rules and drink her wine with food. Act like a fellow-creature. In short, she was only bearable for the few false minutes when he kidded himself that he was reforming her. But he had failed with the clean towel.
It had been a hideous mistake to share his four walls with misery and indigence even for one night. In fact he had no business bringing her here, unless he meant to keep her, which of course he did not. The sole ray of hope was that this cruel and unusual punishment could not last long. In the morning she would scram. She had stopped snoring. Maybe she too was counting the minutes till dawn. She would be no more eager than he was to repeat this experience. On that he would take a bet.
Yet the worst was that, even furnished with hindsight, he did not see what else one Peter Levi could have done than exactly what he did, which made the mistake in some crazy way irreparable. He could walk away from the problem in the street but not in his own building. The problem, as they said, had come home to him. He supposed he might have given her some money for a hotel—bribery.
Madame Puel had hit the nail on the head. “C’est pas un asile, notre immeuble.” In the Great Scheme of Things, the building had not been intended to be a clochards’ dormitory. But what could you do when some clochards were insensible to the Great Scheme of Things and refused to know their place?
There was no solution. Silly’s advice, to look on them as animals, did not meet the problem at all. Tossing in his sheets, Peter was feeling a nauseous repulsion which he would certainly not feel toward an animal. Between himself and this woman was an immeasurable distance that proximity of breathing accentuated. A sense of solidarity which alone could have justified his action was simply not there. If there had ever been any doubt, now he knew for sure that whatever happened to him in the way of degradation, he could never be a clochard. In fact it was much easier to picture himself, if ostracized by his fellow-men, in the form of a stray cat running from Madame Puel’s broom.
As a stray cat, all bones and fur, he would be sympathetic to himself, whereas for himself as a clochard he would feel an ungovernable antipathy. Yet where was the difference? If a clochard had fleas, a cat had fleas. The stink of human urine was not any worse than the stink of cat pee. And as for a clochard becoming a permanent charge if you gave them money or fed them (which some of the kids at the American Center alleged), the same could be said with more probability of an animal, which, once you fed it, was fairly certain to return. Finally, the nervous fear that human presence was inspiring in him had no rational basis: the danger of bodily attack was infinitely less than the danger of being scratched or bitten by a crazed beast.
Yet somehow she had him on the defensive, as if being himself was a form of hypocrisy. He was bracing himself against a latent aggression he sensed in her wild dirty hair and general foulness. He sorted out his thoughts. The menace was not to his person but to his sovereignty in the little kingdom he had constructed—his nest of Borromini angels, plants, books, espesso pot, student lamp, the drawing he was making, from nature, of a leaf. It was not these things, as things, these bits of organic and inorganic materials, toward which he felt protective. If a kitten or a puppy destroyed them, he would be reconciled to the havoc, since the animal was part of Mother Nature—his and Kant’s respected friend. However a puppy in your room acted, you could brush your teeth and put on your pajamas.
If this clocharde seemed more alien to him than any brute creature, it was just because she shared with him, supposedly, a moral faculty that animals did not have, and this moral faculty in man was a regulatory instinct that kept him in balance with the natural things of the world, which were good without putting out any effort. But it was hard to believe that there was any such universal moral faculty when you had a proof to the contrary a few feet away from you. If it was not the clocharde’s choice that she had got into this grisly state, then there was no freedom of will, and if it was her choice, of which tonight he felt convinced, then the will’s objects were not the same for everybody. Either way, everything he cared about fell to pieces. As for the great “Know yourself,” after tonight, he would rather not. It was no use pretending that there was common humanity in him when all he could think of in the midst of his philosophizing was how many minutes still had to pass before dawn would come to his rescue.
Some time before dawn came, in fact, he fell asleep. When he woke, it was already light out; the improvised couch across the room was empty. There was a trail of urine going toward the door, which was partly open. She had stolen his outside brass doorknob, of all things, and he wondered how she had managed it. Did she carry tools? Otherwise his possessions were intact.
Fate had more in store for him. There was the news in the morning papers awaiting him in the kiosk at the Madeleine, as he slogged to it, drenched from a downpour. All across the front page of the Herald Tribune in giant black letters: U.S. PLANES BOMB NORTH VIETNAM BASE. So it had happened, but he refused to believe it yet; he had to see it in the New York Times. But the Times international edition was sold out, and he took the Figaro. 49 AVIONS U.S. (ayant décollés de trois porte-avions) BOMBARDENT DES INSTALLATIONS AU NORD DU 17e PARALLELE. JOHNSON AUX FAMILLES AMERICAINES: “ORDRE DE REGAGNER LES ETATS-UNIS.” It was in the Times of London too. There was no escaping it, any more than he could have eluded the clocharde once he found her in his path.
On top of everything, the dentist found a cavity. “Blue Monday,” he said waggishly in his Berlitz English. When Peter got out of the chair, Silly was waiting for him. He had been reading the papers Peter had left and he looked pale. “It’s bad,” he agreed. “But maybe it’s just a one-shot thing. They say it’s a reprisal.” Peter shook his head. “Why would Johnson order American families home then? Your ‘poker game’!” “Well, yes. Johnson betrayed us.” “Our country! And we’re part of it. I’d said I’d kill myself if we did this and I’m still alive.”
“Let’s go to the zoo,” urged Silly, “It helps usually.” “OK.” They decided to visit the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes. “We’ll see my bear,” said Silly. “That will cheer you up. He’s such a nice neat bear. He rakes the leaves in his den.”
In preference to the Métro, they took a bus. After last night, Peter could not stand any more confinement. He sat with his chin slumped on his chest while Silly tried to make conversation. “That poor guy Benjy, remember? He willed me his PX card.” “You mean he’s dead?” “No, no. That was only the expression he used. But now probably he’s had it. We’ll send regular troops; what do you think?” “Yes.” “But you and I don’t have too much to worry about.” “Why?” “On account of our French, don’t you see? Because we can speak French, they won’t send us into combat. Even if they draft students like in World War II. They’ll keep us back of the front lines, in Saigon, doing liaison with the high-up Vietnamese. I added that up last summer, when Goldwater was making his pitch.” “I won’t go,” said Peter. “But how? Unless you’re a Quaker or join the Peace Corps or something?” “I don’t know but I won’t, that’s all.”
They watched Silly’s brown bear for a while, but he was not raking any leaves. “ ‘Ursus arctos Linné,’ ” read Peter.
“Aristotle talks about him.” For a moment this made him feel better; at least a few of the things of the world were indestructible. The bear acted sad and somnolent; his fur was a dirty tawny brown like an old worn coat. “Probably he wants to hibernate. But the zoo-keepers won’t let him. He has to entertain the public.” “I’ll pep him up,” said Silly. He started aiming peanuts at his nose. The animal’s red lower lip came out like a shoe-horn, and they saw his teeth and small tongue. Silly thought of a new sport. He aimed the peanuts just outside the bars, so that the bear had to put his paw out to pull them in. “Hey, quit that! Don’t you see that sign?” DANGER in yellow capitals was posted on the bear cage. “He can’t reach me.” “Anyway, it’s cruel,” objected Peter. “No, it isn’t. It’s a game. I always play with him. He loves it.”
Peter felt quite relieved when they finally left the bears’ den. Though he had been wishing to die all morning, he did not want a bear to get him. In the avalanche of events descending on him, that would be excessive. He proposed that they go explore the labyrinth at the other end of the park. But it was not a real maze, which he had been hoping for; they climbed up a little hill and saw an old armillary sphere and a weather vane. It was easy to find their way out. Going back to the menagerie, they passed a curious exhibit: a cross-section of a giant sequoia, donated by the State of California, through the American Legion, to the Anciens Combattants de France, 1927. Standing on its side, the sequoia slice looked like a ringed target, with shiny copper markers stuck into the widening rings like metal flags, noting mammoth occurrences in world history corresponding with the tree’s age at the time they happened: the Birth of Christ, the Destruction of Pompeii, Charlemagne, the Landing of the Pilgrims. Peter laughed bitterly. “They should bring this up to date. ‘February 7, 1965. Uncle Sam bombs small helpless nation.’ ” “Maybe the start of World War III,” suggested Silly. “You saw: Kosygin is in Hanoi.” “I don’t care if it’s World War III,” said Peter. He did, but that was not the point.
Silly wanted to visit the monkey house. Peter objected. “Let’s look at some of the trees and plants instead.” It struck him that the closer Nature got to the human, the uglier it could be. You could hardly find a plant that was not beautiful, even if in a strange mottled way, but there were plenty of hideous simians. He wondered if it could happen that one morning he might wake up and find that trees, plants, and flowers did not seem beautiful to him any more. That would have to be the end of ethics. It might be starting to happen now. To his horror, the botanical garden had a derelict, desolate appearance, and the rows on rows of denuded plants with their pale-green identifying markers reminded him of a cemetery. “Did you know that Linnaeus tried to get a job as a gardener?” “Oh?” “Nobody would hire him,” said Peter.
Silly was still pleading for the monkeys. They compromised. Peter would look at exotic birds, and he would look at gorillas and baboons. At an entrance gate, they were stopped. Without realizing it, they had left the paying section when they went to see the labyrinth. So if they wanted to come back in, they would have to pay again. Silly put up an argument. If the attendant did not let them in free, they would crawl under the fence. To Peter’s astonishment, the gatekeeper let them pass.
They walked by a pond of aquatic birds. Peter recognized some Common European Cormorants drying their wings on the rocks. It was cold and dismal. Scattered about the run-down grounds were strange neglected little wooden huts trimmed with stars and circles and looking as if some crazy Russian or Finn had made them up out of a fairy tale—witch housing, with a renard famélique pacing the dooryard. They came to the swans, which were floating down a dirty stream or canal. Some were waddling on their flipper feet across the grass. “Hey, a black swan!” said Silly. “Let’s feed him.” Leaning over the wire fence, he coaxed the swan to approach. They both put peanuts on the iron fence-bar and watched him crack them in his coral-red bill. A white swan with a banded leg came up. Silly tried to engage it in a staring match, but the swan after a minute turned its head away and flapped its wings rather crossly. He tossed peanuts between the two birds to get them to compete.
Wearied of playing witness to this, Peter ate a few peanuts himself. In his pocket, wrapped in a Kleenex, was a brioche he had bought for breakfast and been unable to eat. He consumed part of that. He did not know much about swans, but it seemed to him that they were becoming quarrelsome, and he grew irritated with Silly for stirring up needless strife among these captive creatures now noisily bristling their feathers. “Leave them alone. Let’s go.” But Silly was having fun. As a counter-move, Peter tore up his brioche and whistled to the black swan to come to him. Diverted, the bird drew near. It slithered its neck along the ground like an uncoiling garden hose, causing some sparrows to scatter. Instead of throwing the crumbs, Peter held them out, to see if it would eat from his hand. “ ‘Qu’ils mangent la brioche,’ ” he said. Then he felt a sharp pain in the fleshy part of his palm, the part bounded by his life line. The bird had struck at him savagely. Before he could pull back, he felt another gash, in his forearm, and a third. He heard his voice screaming “No!”
Reeling away from the low iron fence, he flung up his other hand to protect his face. It faintly surprised him that the swan did not take wing and continue the attack. Silly supported him to a bench. Blood was trickling from his hand and staining his shirt-cuff, but when he nerved himself to examine them, the gashes did not seem as deep as he expected. Silly had thought it was an artery. “Or a vein anyway. Should I try to make a tourniquet?” “No. It’ll be OK. But I think I’d like to go home now.” He accepted Silly’s offer to take him in a taxi. They wrapped his hand and wrist up in their handkerchiefs, which were clean, thanks to the dental appointment.
Silly left him at his door and sped on to a pharmacy for Mercurochrome and Band-Aids. Fortunately, Madame Puel’s door-curtains were drawn. Peter could not face her now. He did not want to answer any questions that might arise about the doorknob. When Silly appeared with supplies, they laved his wounds with a whole bottle of Mercurochrome and applied the Band-Aids. Silly wondered whether they should call Roberta. “No.” He fixed Peter some coffee and went to a café and brought back sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which he insisted on paying for. He was still blaming himself. Then he remade Peter’s tousled bed. “You’d better try to sleep now.”
Peter was in a bed, which he suspected was in the American Hospital. He could not remember anything clearly about the last few days. The last he could recall was the swellings in his armpits which had convinced him, when he studied them in his mirror, that he had bubonic plague. They were just like the buboes Boccaccio described with pungent detail in the Decameron. Now he asked himself whether he was in a private room or in an isolation ward. He could not guess how he had got here or when. Had he turned himself in or had somebody brought him? He had a faint recollection of leaving class some morning in the middle of a lecture. He thought he would remember riding in an ambulance.
His bed was cranked down flat. There was nobody around now. But there had been a great many people in his room quite recently, he believed. Doctors and nurses and, if he was not mistaken, the Bonfantes, who had looked rather awed. But if the Bonfantes had been here, he could not have the plague. He felt that Silly Boy had been around too and maybe Roberta but he was not sure. Some of his visitors must have been imaginary. He assumed he had been delirious and even now he could tell he had a fever. He drank some water through a glass straw from a glass on his bedside table.
He tried to think back carefully. It seemed as if he had fallen down on a tiled floor that might have been in a hospital bathroom. After that, a total blackout. Reaching under the hospital nightshirt, he explored his armpits; the buboes appeared to be gone. Then his lucidity faded; he lost the order of his thoughts. Somebody was taking his temperature and feeling his pulse. But before he could ask her anything, she went away. When he opened his eyes again, he was pleasantly surprised to see the Delphic Sibyl. He recognized her immediately; she wa
s wearing that green peaked bonnet. She must have come to tell him something, and he had the feeling that she had tried to before, some other day. But while he waited eagerly for her to unroll the prophetic scroll she was holding, she began smiling on him with extreme tenderness and was replaced by his mother, who also had a roll of paper in her hand, which opened up into a valentine.
She bent down and kissed him. “Well, Peter,” she said fondly, pulling at his forelock. “You’ve had quite an adventure.” That insanely cheerful sentence proved she was real—the fair Rosamund coming out of her bower to interrupt the Delphic Sibyl. Now he would never know what was in the message. But at least she could tell him where he was. He was right: it was the American Hospital. He had come in with a bad infection; the Platt boy had brought him. It actually was Valentine’s Day; he had been here since Friday. “But what happened?” “They gave you penicillin, and you went into shock. Somebody should have realized you were allergic to penicillin.” “Who?” Peter began to feel suspicious. He was not aware of having any such allergy. She was covering up something. Maybe he was dying. He reflected. He must be wrong. If he were dying, Bob would have come too. And his father would be stalking up and down, wearing a black frown and a black suit, looking for somebody to blame, preferably his mother. Sitting up, he imitated his voice: “ ‘Didn’t you know the boy was allergic to penicillin?’ ”
“You must be feeling better, Peter. In fact that’s what babbo said. But I don’t think you ever had it. Just Aureomycin and those things. They don’t give penicillin to children usually.” “But what was the matter, that they gave it to me now? I thought I had the Black Death.” His mother gave her gay laugh. “Swan bite, dearest. Don’t you remember? You were bitten by a black swan. Just like a person in a myth.” “Swans don’t bite, Mother. They strike with their bill.” “I prefer swan bite.” This insistence made Peter feel tired. “They’re extremely dangerous,” his mother went on. “The doctor told me they can break an arm with one blow of their bill. You might have had a fracture too. The Platt boy says it was his fault.” “It was. But never mind. What did I have—rabies?” “I don’t think swans are rabid, Peter. The doctor didn’t mention that. A heavy infection, he said.” Peter nodded. “Polluted water. But I washed the wounds out well with Mercurochrome. Every day.” “So the doctor told me. You looked like a fire-engine. But you could have used a gallon of Mercurochrome, and it wouldn’t have helped, he said. Mercurochrome is only good for superficial cuts, Peter.” “Did you know that?” “Not really.”
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