Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Our top room was above the glass roof of the Passage; the windows looked out on an open space, so they had bars to keep out burglars and cats. That was my room, and it was also the place where my father could draw and paint when he came home after his deliveries. He’d fuss over his watercolours, and when he was finished, he’d often make as if to come down and catch me playing with myself. He’d lurk in wait on the stairs. I was quicker than he was. He only caught me once. But he’d always find some excuse for giving me a licking. It was a battle between us. In the end I’d always apologize for my insolence… It was an act, I hadn’t done anything.

  He’d ask me questions and answer them for me. When he was through licking me, he’d stay there behind the bars, looking out at the stars, the atmosphere, the moon, the night high above us. That was his quarterdeck. I knew that. He’d be commanding the Atlantic.

  If my mother interrupted him, if she called him to come down, he’d start griping again. They’d collide in the darkness, in the narrow cage between the second and third floors. She’d be in for a good smack and a volley of insults. Tip… tap… plunk! Tip… tap… plunk! Whimpering under the onslaught, she’d run down to the basement and count her wares. “Why can’t you leave me alone! Goddamnit to hell! What have I done to deserve this?…” His bellowing shook the whole house. In the narrow kitchen he’d pour himself a glass of red wine. Nobody let out a peep. That was how he wanted it.

  In the daytime I had Grandma, she taught me to read a little. She herself wasn’t very good at it, she had learnt late, after her children were born. I can’t say she was tender or affectionate, but she didn’t talk much, which is a good deal, and she never hit me!… She hated my father’s guts. She couldn’t abide him with his education, his high principles, his idiotic rages and his catalogue of complaints. For her money her daughter was an ass to have married such a prick, making seventy francs a month in an insurance company. As for me, the kid, she hadn’t quite made up her mind what to think of me, she was keeping me under observation. She was a woman of character.

  At the Passage she helped us as long as she could with what junk she still had left from her stock. We only lit one window, that was as much as we could fill… It was a discouraging lot of bric-a-brac, decrepit with age, grey elephants, crap; if that was all we had to sell, we were sunk. We only kept going by scrimping… always noodles and pawning Mama’s earrings at the end of every month… It was a wonder we had anything to eat at all.

  We took in a little money doing repair jobs. We did them a lot cheaper than anybody else, we’d take them at any price. And we delivered day and night. For a profit of two francs we’d hike out to the Parc Saint-Maur and back.

  “It’s never too late for the brave,” said my mother cheerfully. Her speciality was optimism. But Mme Héronde was always holding things up, she went too far. Every time she kept us waiting there was a crisis, the whole lot of us damn near starved. By five in the afternoon my father would be back from the office, trembling with anxiety, looking at his watch the whole time.

  “Clémence, I repeat for the hundredth time… if that woman gets robbed, what’s going to become of us?… Her husband will sell it all!… He spends all his time in the whorehouse, I know it for a fact!… Everybody knows…”

  He dashed up to the top floor, bellowing the whole time. Then back down to the shop. Our house was like an accordion. The amplification was terrific.

  I’d go scouting for Mme Héronde as far as the Rue des Pyramides. If I didn’t see her coming with her bundle bigger than she was, I’d run back empty-handed. Then I’d go look again. Finally, when all hope was gone, when it was plain that she had been lost with all on board, I’d sight her off the Rue Thérèse, gasping in an eddy of the crowd, listing under her bundle. I’d tow her to the Passage. In the shop she’d collapse. My mother gave thanks to Heaven. My father couldn’t bear to witness these scenes. He’d climb up to his attic, looking at his watch at every step, refurbishing his obsession. He was building up to the next outburst, the deluge that wouldn’t be long in coming… Getting into trim…

  * * *

  The Pinaises screwed us. My mother and I go traipsing over to show them our selection of lace. For a wedding present.

  They lived in a palace across from the Pont Solférino. I remember what struck me first… the vases, some were so big and fat you could have hidden inside. They’d stuck them all over the place. Those people were very rich. We were shown into the salon. The beautiful Mme Pinaise and her husband were there… they were expecting us. They give us a friendly reception. My mother spreads her stuff out in front of them… on the carpet. She gets down on her knees, it’s handier. She talks herself blue in the face, she really knocks herself out. They stall, they can’t make up their minds, they simper, they put on the dog.

  Mme Pinaise reclines on the sofa in a dressing gown with a lot of ribbons. He takes me around the back, gives me a few friendly little pats, cuddles me a little… My mother on the floor is doing her damnedest, ploughing through the pile, brandishing the merchandise… Her bun comes undone, her face is dripping wet. She’s awful to look at. She gasps for breath, she loses her head, she clutches at her stockings, her bun topples… falls in her eyes.

  Mme Pinaise comes over to me. They both start tickling me. My mother is still at it. Her spiel isn’t getting her anywhere. I’m about to come in my pants… A flash! I see her… Mme Pinaise… She’s swiped a handkerchief. It’s disappeared between her tits. “My compliments, Madame. You have such a nice little boy!…” That was to throw the dust in her eyes. They’d seen all they wanted. We quickly did up our bundles. My mother was sweating big drops, but smiling just the same. She didn’t wish to offend anyone… “Another time perhaps,” she excused herself ever so politely. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t tempt you!…”

  In the street, outside the doorway, she asked me in a whisper if I hadn’t seen her slip the handkerchief into her corset. I said no.

  “Your father will be sick! We had that handkerchief on consignment! Valenciennes openwork! It belonged to the Grégués! It wasn’t ours! But imagine! If I had taken it away from her, we’d have lost her as a customer!… And all her friends too!… There would have been a scandal!”

  “Clémence, look at your hair. It’s undone. It’s all over your eyes! You’re green around the gills, poor thing! You’re falling apart! You’re running yourself ragged!…” Those were his first words when we came home.

  So as not to lose sight of his watch, he hung it up in the kitchen above the noodles. He gave my mother another look. “You’re positively green, Clémence.” The watch was so we’d get through with the eggs, the stew, the noodles… with our tiredness and the future. He was fed up.

  “I’ll go and get dinner,” she suggested. He didn’t want her to touch anything… He couldn’t stand the thought of her handling the grub… “Your hands are dirty! Hell, you’re played out!” She went to set the table. She dropped a plate. Infuriated, he rushed to help her. The place was so small we were always bumping into things. There was never room enough for a wild man like him. The table rocked, the chairs began to waltz. It was a terrible mess. They collided. They got up full of black-and-blue marks. We went back to our leek salad. It was confession time…

  “So you didn’t sell anything?… All your trouble was for beans?… You poor dear…”

  He began to sigh something awful. He was feeling sorry for her. He envisaged a future full of shit, we’d never get out of it.

  Then she gave it to him straight… a handkerchief had been stolen… and the circumstances…

  “What’s that?” He couldn’t take it in. “You didn’t say anything? You let them get away with it? The fruits of our toil!” He was in such a rage that he cracked at the seams… His jacket burst… “It’s abominable!” he roared. In spite of the uproar my mother kept yelping some kind of excuses… He has stopped listening. He seizes his knife and brings it down in
the middle of his plate, it splits, the noodle juice runs all over the place. “No, no! I can’t stand it!” He rushes around, waving his arms. He takes hold of the little sideboard, the Henry III. He shakes it like a plum tree. There’s an avalanche of dishes.

  Mme Méhon, the corset-maker who had the shop across from us, comes to the window to enjoy the fun. She’s an indefatigable enemy, she’s detested us from the start. The Pérouquières, who have a bookshop two shops further down, make no bones about opening their window. Why should they stand on ceremony? They prop their elbows on the window sill… My mother’s going to catch it, that’s a safe bet. As far as I’m concerned, I have no preferences. For yelling and boneheadedness, there’s nothing to choose between them… She doesn’t hit so hard, but more often. Which of the two I’d rather somebody killed? Well, all in all, my father, I suppose.

  They don’t want me to see. “Get up to your room, you little pig… Go to bed! Say your prayers!…”

  He bellows, he rushes, he explodes, he bombards the kitchen. There’s nothing left on the nails… Pots, pans, dishes, crash, bang, everything goes… My mother on her knees implores Heaven for mercy… He overturns the table with one big kick… It lands on top of her…

  “Run, Ferdinand!” she still has time to shout. I run, passing through an avalanche of glass and debris… He charges into the piano that a customer had left us as security… he’s beside himself. He bashes his heel into it, the keyboard clangs… Then it’s my mother’s turn, now she’s getting hers… From my room I can hear her howling…

  “Auguste! Auguste! Stop!” And then short stifled gasps…

  I come part of the way down to look… He’s dragging her along the banister. She hangs on. She clutches his neck. That’s what saves her. It’s he who pulls loose… He pushes her over. She somersaults… She bounces down the stairs… I can hear the dull thuds… At the bottom she picks herself up… Then he takes a powder… He leaves through the shop… He goes out in the street. She struggles to her feet… She goes back up to the kitchen. She has blood in her hair. She washes at the sink… She’s sobbing… She gags… She sweeps up the breakage… He comes home very late on these occasions… Everything is very quiet again…

  * * *

  Grandma realized that I needed a little fun, that it wasn’t good for me to be in the shop all the time. It made me sick to my stomach to listen to my lunatic father shouting his inanities. She bought a little dog for me to play with while waiting for the customers. I wanted to treat him like my father treated me. When we were alone, I’d give him wicked kicks. He’d slink away to whimper under the furniture. He’d lie down to beg pardon. He acted exactly like me.

  It didn’t give me any pleasure to beat him, I’d much rather have kissed him. In the end I’d fondle him and he’d get a hard-on. He went everywhere with us, even to the movies, to the Thursday matinee at the Robert Houdin.* Grandma treated me to that too. We’d sit through all three shows. It was the same price, all the seats were one franc, one hundred per cent silent, without words, without music, without titles, just the purring of the machine. People will come back to that, you get sick of everything except sleeping and daydreaming. The Trip to the Moon* will be back again… I still know it by heart.

  Sometimes in the summer there were only the two of us, Caroline and myself, in the big hall up one flight of stairs. In the end the usher would motion us to leave. I’d have to wake up Grandma and the dog. Then we’d hurry through the crowd and the bustle of the boulevards. We were always late in getting home. We’d come in panting.

  “Did you like it?” Caroline would ask me. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like personal questions. “The child is secretive.” That’s what the neighbours said…

  On the way home she’d stop at the corner of our Passage and buy me a copy of Illustrated Adventure Stories from the newspaper woman with the charcoal foot-warmer. She’d hide it for me in her panties, under her three thick petticoats. My father didn’t like me to read such hogwash. He claimed it corrupted you, that it didn’t prepare you for life, that I’d do better to learn the alphabet out of something serious.

  I was going on seven, I’d soon be going to school, I shouldn’t be given any wrong ideas… the other shopkeepers’ children would also be going to school soon. The time for tomfoolery was past. On our way home from deliveries he’d make me little sermons about the seriousness of existence.

  Whacks alone won’t do it.

  * * *

  Foreseeing that I’d be a thief, my father blared like a trombone. One afternoon Tom and I had emptied the sugar bowl. It was never forgotten. But that wasn’t my only fault. In addition my behind was always dirty, I didn’t wipe myself, I didn’t have time, that was my justification, we were always in too much of a hurry… I never wiped myself properly, I always had a sock coming to me… and hurried to avoid it… I left the can door open so as to hear them coming… I shat like a bird between two storms…

  I bounded upstairs and they couldn’t find me… I’d go around for weeks with shit on my arse. I was conscious of the smell, I’d be careful not to get too close to people.

  “He’s as filthy as thirty-six pigs! He has no self-respect! He’ll never make a living! Every boss in the world will fire him!…” He saw a shitty future in store for me…

  “He stinks!… We’ll always have him on our hands!…”

  My father looked far ahead and all he saw was gloom. He put it in Latin for emphasis: “Sana… corpore sano.” My mother didn’t know what to say.

  * * *

  A little further down the Passage there was a family of bookbinders. Their children never went out.

  The mother was a baroness. De Caravals was her name. She didn’t want her children to learn bad language at any cost.

  They played together all year long behind the window panes, putting their noses in each other’s mouths and both hands at the same time. Their complexions were like celery.

  Once a year Mme de Caravals took a vacation all by herself. She’d go visiting her cousins in the Périgord. She told everybody how her cousins came to meet her at the station in their “break” drawn by four prize-winning horses. They would drive together through endless estates… The peasants would troop out to kneel on the castle drive as they passed… that was the kind of stuff she dished out.

  One year she took the two kids with her. She came back alone in the winter, much later than usual. She had on deep mourning. You couldn’t see her face behind all the veils. She offered no explanation. She went straight up to bed. She never spoke to anybody after that.

  The change had been too much for those children who never went out. The fresh air had killed them!… That disaster gave everyone pause. From the Rue Thérèse to the Place Gaillon all you heard about was oxygen… for more than a month.

  * * *

  As for us, we often had the chance to go to the country. Uncle Édouard, my mother’s brother, was only too delighted when he could do something for us. He’d suggest excursions. My father never accepted. He always found some pretext for getting out of them. He didn’t want to be indebted to anybody, that was his motto.

  Uncle Édouard was up-to-date, he had a way with machinery. He was mighty clever with his hands. He wasn’t extravagant, he wasn’t the kind to involve us in a spending spree, but even so the slightest outing is bound to be rather costly… “A hundred sous,” my mother would say, “don’t last long when you go out.”

  Nevertheless the sad story of the Caravals had got the whole Passage so upset that something had to be done. It was suddenly discovered that everybody looked “peaked”. Advice was passed from shop to shop. No one could think of anything but bacteria and the perils of infection. The kids came in for a wave of parental solicitude. They were made to take whole jugfuls, whole barrelfuls of cod-liver oil, reinforced, in double doses. Frankly, it didn’t do much good… it made them belch. It made them greener than ev
er; they could hardly stand up to begin with, now the oil killed their appetite.

  I have to admit that the Passage was an unbelievable pest hole. It was made to kill you off, slowly but surely, what with the little mongrels’ urine, the shit, the sputum, the leaky gas pipes. The stink was worse than the inside of a prison. Down under the glass roof the sun is so dim you can eclipse it with a candle. Everybody began to gasp for breath. The Passage began to acknowledge its asphyxiating stench… We talked of nothing but the country, hills and valleys, the wonders of nature…

  Édouard offered once more to take us out one Sunday, all the way to Fontainebleau. Papa finally gave in. He got our clothes ready and the provisions.

  Édouard’s first three-wheeler was a one-cylinder job, as massive as a field howitzer, with half a coachman’s seat in front.

  We got up that Sunday much earlier than usual. My arse was given a thorough wiping. We waited a whole hour at the meeting place on the Rue Gaillon before the contraption got there. Our departure was quite something. It had taken at least six men to push the thing from the Pont Bineau. The tanks were filled. The carburettor spewed in all directions, the steering wheel quaked… There was a series of terrible explosions. They tried it with the crank, they tried it with a strap… They harnessed themselves to it in threes or sixes… Finally a tremendous explosion!… The engine began to turn. Twice fire broke out… and was quickly extinguished. My uncle said: “Pile in, ladies and gentlemen, I think she’s warm now. Now we can get started!…” It took nerve to stay put. The crowd pressed in on us. Caroline, my mother and I wedged ourselves in. We were tied so tightly to the seat, so squeezed in among the clothes and gear that only my tongue protruded. But I came in for a good little whack before we moved off, just to keep me from getting any ideas.