Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  As we trooped along behind the enormous customer, there got to be more and more of us, we pushed and jostled in her wake… And the lady kept growing… If she hadn’t bent down, she’d have gone through the glass roof… As we were passing by, the visiting-cards printer popped out of his cellar, pushing a baby carriage with his two brats in it, and there wasn’t much life in them either… All bundled up in paper money… Nothing but hundred-franc notes… all counterfeit… so that was his racket… The music dealer from 34, who owned a phonograph, six mandolins, three sets of bagpipes and a piano, refused to leave anything behind… He wanted us to take the whole lot with us. We harnessed ourselves to his showcase, and the whole thing collapsed under the strain… There was a terrible crash!

  An orchestra of brilliant soloists pours from the stage door of the Plush Barn, the café-concert across from 96… They get together a long way from the giantess… they blare out three terrific chords… violins, bagpipes and harps… the trombones and double basses blow and scrape so loud and lovely that the whole mob howls with delight…

  Slender, trim usherettes with fragile little caps are bouncing all around us… They fly through the air and land in the tangerines… At 48 the three elderly sisters, who hadn’t set foot outside their shop in fifty-two years, who are always so courteous, so patient with their customers, suddenly start driving out the clientele with big sticks… Two old bags conk out on their pavement, disembowelled… The three old ladies tie foot-warmers on their arses to make them run faster… Objects rain in all directions from the gigantic customer… stolen knick-knacks. They drip from every fold in her clothing… Her accessories keep falling off and she keeps picking them up… Outside César’s jewellery shop she repairs her dress and wraps herself in chains and pearls, all phoney… Everybody laughs… She takes a whole salad bowl full of amethysts and throws them by the fistful through the skylight… We all turn violet. She bombards the glass roof with topazes from the next tray… We all turn yellow… We were almost at the end of the Passage. There’s an enormous crowd ahead of our procession and a howling mob behind us… The woman from the stationery store at 86 – I had swiped some pencils from her – fastened on to my pants… And the widow with the antique cupboards, in front of whose store I had pissed so often, went for my dick!… It was no fun… It was the umbrella man that saved me, he hid me under his parasol. If Aunt Armide had found me again, I’d have had to kiss her right in the headcheese…

  This time Uncle Édouard and his three-wheeler were chasing my father, he had his nose so close to the road that it almost bent his bicycle. A big pebble lodged in one of his nostrils. The engine cooed as softly as a lovesick pigeon, but Uncle Édouard had his eyes attached to two strings and was dragging them smack over the road for fear of missing something… On the front seat, Aunt Armide, wedged in among the cushions, was passing the time of day with a gentleman all in black. He was hugging a thermometer three times as big as me… That was the doctor from the Hespérides, who had come for a consultation… He was filled with consternation, thousands of luminous particles darted from his face… At the sight the neighbours took off their hats and bowed down to the ground. And then they showed their backsides. He spat on them… He didn’t have time to stop. We stormed the exit all together… We invaded the Boulevards…

  As we were crossing the Place Vendôme, a fierce gust of wind inflated the customer. At the Opéra she swelled up twice as big… a hundred times!… All the neighbours scurried under her skirts like mice… No sooner were they settled than they dashed out again in a panic… then they rushed back again to hide in the caverns… The confusion was awful.

  The little dogs from the Passage ran squirting in all directions, doing their business, going for people’s arses, nipping ferociously. Mme Juvienne, Number 72, toiletries, expired before our eyes, under a mountain of mauve flowers, jasmine… from suffocation… Three passing elephants trampled her slowly to death, a thousand little rivulets of perfume came pouring out…

  Four little baker’s apprentices who worked for Largenteuil, the pastry cook, came running up… carrying the enormous pipe from the Muslim tobacco shop’s sign that lit up at six o’clock… They smashed the bowl against the Marché Saint-Honoré, trying to move the buildings out of the way… First they bashed in the one on the right – poultry – and then the one on the left – fish.

  But we had to keep going! Especially the giantess! Our giantess! With two planets for tits… I was being knocked around pretty bad… My father tried to hold me up but it was no use… He got caught in the spokes of his bike… He bit Tom’s tail. He trotted along ahead of us barking, but no sound came out…

  The caretaker put me back on my feet, all he had on was the top of his uniform… The lower end of him was thin air… We got a good laugh out of him with his long pole for lighting the gas with… He stuck it up his nose, every inch of it.

  As we were crossing the Rue de Rivoli, the customer missed her step, she tripped over a bus shelter and smashed a building… the lift squirted out and gored her eye… We passed over the ruins. On the Rue des Jeûneurs, my little friend Émile Orgeat, popped out of my school… a hunchback… that’s how I’d always known him… and green around the gills, with a big wine-coloured smudge running out of his ears… Now he didn’t look bad at all. He was handsome, pink and natty… I was glad for his sake.

  Now all those people we had known were running in the caverns underneath the Lady, in her drawers, through whole streets and neighbourhoods, compressed inside her petticoats… They went where she chose. We were squeezed tighter than ever. My mother held me by the hand… Faster and faster… At the Place de la Concorde I realized she was taking us to the World Fair… It was mighty kind of her… She wanted us to have fun…

  The Lady, our customer, had all the money, all the shopkeepers’ cash, stashed away on her… She was going to treat us… It was getting hotter and hotter, and we were still wedged against the lady… In among the drapery, next to the lining, I saw thousands of things hanging. All the stolen goods in the world… As we galloped, the little “Byzantine” looking glass, the one we’d been looking for for months on the Rue de Montorgueil, fell on my head… it left a bump… If I’d been able to, I’d have sung out that it was found, but we were already so penned in I’d never have been able to pick it up… The time had come, we all realized, to squeeze a little tighter. We were shoved into the gate, the monumental gate, the arrogant gate, that rose into the sky like the bun on a lady’s hair… Going in like that without paying, we were all scared shitless… Luckily we were swept in by the swish of petticoats… We’re crushed, suffocating, crawling on our bellies… Up above, our customer bends down when it’s time to go through. Was it all over? Were we under the Seine? Would the sharks be coming to ask us for a penny?… What do you think? When do you ever get admitted to anything for free?… I let out a yell so sharp, so piercing that the giantess lost her head. All of a sudden she picked up her skirts, every single frill and ruffle… and her drawers… and lifted them sky-high, way over her head… A tempest rushed in, a wind so glacial we screamed for pain… There we were on the quay, frozen stiff, abandoned, shivering, helpless. Down below, between the embankment and the three barges, the customer had flown away!… Our neighbours from the Passage turned so white I couldn’t recognize a single one of them… The giantess had fooled us all with her magnificent thefts… There wasn’t any more World Fair… it had been over long ago… Already we could hear the howling of the wolves on the Cours de la Reine…

  It was time to get going… But we couldn’t run right… A lot of feet were missing… Small as I was, I ran Mme Méhon over…

  My mother lifted her skirts… But she ran more and more slowly… on account of her calves… suddenly they were as thin as wire… and so hairy at the same time… they got tangled up in each other like spiders… The people up ahead wound her into a ball… and let her roll… But the buses were coming… at fiendish speed… The
y thundered down the Rue Royale… blue ones, green ones, lemon-coloured ones… The shafts broke, the harnesses gushed out across the Esplanade and fell against the trees in the Tuileries. I sized the situation up at a glance… I harangued… I exhorted… I rallied my troops… I laid down my plan of attack… We try to back up on the pavement outside the Orangerie… But it’s hopeless. Almost instantly poor Uncle Édouard and his motorcar are run over at the foot of the statue of Bordeaux*.… A few minutes later he comes out of the Solférino metro station with his three-wheeled tub welded onto his rear end like a snail… We lead him away… He has to hurry, to crawl faster and faster on account of the hundreds of motorcars… Reine-Serpollets from the automobile show. They bombard the Arc de Triomphe. Full speed ahead, they descend on our routed army…

  For a split second I caught sight of Rodolphe, leaning against the pedestal of the statue of Joan of Arc, smiling happily… He’s auctioning off his troubadour costume… He wants to be a general… This is no time to disturb him… The asphalt is all ripped up… A chasm opens… Everything falls in… I skirt the precipice… I catch Armide’s pocketbook just as it’s about to disappear… There’s an inscription on it in beads: “In fond remembrance”… Her glass eye is inside… We’re so surprised we all laugh like hell… But the avalanche of punks is coming on from all sides… This time there are so many of them the Rue Thérèse is full up to the fourth floor… a hill of packed meat… we start climbing… It buzzes like a manure pile all the way up to the stars…

  But to get back home we have to bend back four thoroughly padlocked iron gates… We push by the hundreds and thousands… We try to get in through the transom… Nothing doing… the bars bend but jump right back into place, they snap in our faces like rubber bands… A ghost has hidden our key!… He wants a prick and won’t settle for anything else!… We tell him to go to hell!… “Fuck you!” he says… We call him back. There are ten thousand of us trying to argue with him…

  Echoing down the Rue Gomboust, a hundred thousand cries of disaster come to us in bursts… That’s the crowds that are being massacred off the Place Gaillon… The buses are still raging… the apocalypse goes on… the Clichy-Odéon ploughs through the desperate mob… the Panthéon-Courcelles storms in from the rear, sending the pieces sky-high… They rain down on our shop windows. My father beside me moans: “If only I had a trumpet!”… In despair he sheds his clothes, in a second he’s mother-naked, climbing up the Bank of France… he’s perched on top of the clock… He rips off the minute hand and brings it down with him… he dandles it on his knees… It fascinates him… it gives him a kick… We’re all feeling pretty gay… But a detachment of Guards bursts in through the Rue Méhul… the Madeleine-Bastille goes into a spin, tips, and crashes into our gate… Luckily the whole thing collapses! The axle catches fire, the van bursts into crackling flames… the conductor is whipping the driver… They’re coming faster and faster… They take the Rue des Moulins, they climb the grade, they take the fire with them… a hurricane… The cyclone strikes, weakens, rises up again, and breaks against the Comédie Française… The whole building bursts into flame… the roof comes loose, rises, flies away in flames… In her dressing room La Screwball, the beautiful actress, is frantically poring over her lines… Her soul has to be saturated with poetry before she can appear on the stage. She rinses her cunt so hard that she stumbles… she falls plunk into the fire… She lets out a terrible scream… The volcano has swallowed up everything…

  Nothing is left in the world but our fire… A ghastly redness rumbles through my brain with a crowbar that dislodges everything… blinding me with terror… It gobbles up the inside of my bean like fiery soup… using the bar for a spoon… It will never go away…

  * * *

  It took me a long time to recover. My convalescence dragged on for another two months. I had been very sick… it ended with a rash… The doctor came often. In the end he insisted they send me to the country… That was easy to say, but we hadn’t the cash… They took me out in the fresh air whenever possible.

  When the January quarter came due, Grandma Caroline went out to Asnières to collect the rent. She took me with her. She owned two brick-and-stucco houses out there on the Rue de Plaisance, a little one and a medium-size one, she rented them out to working-class people. They were her property, her income, her savings…

  We started off. We had to go slow on my account. I was weak for a long time, I’d get nosebleeds for no reason at all, and I peeled all over. After the station it’s straight ahead… Avenue Faidherbe… Place Carnot… At the Town Hall you turn left and then you cross the park.

  At the bowling alley between the fence and the waterfall, there’s always a crowd of funny old codgers… lively old grandpas full of spunk, always good for a joke, and some that grouse the whole time, retired shopkeepers… Every time they knock the ninepins over, the jokes fly thick and fast… I understood all their gags… better and better as time went on… The funniest thing was when they had to pee… they’d trot behind a tree, one at a time… They had an awful hard time of it… “Hey, Toto, watch out you don’t lose it…” That’s the kind of thing they said. The others took up the refrain… To me they were irresistible. I laughed so loud my grandmother was embarrassed… Standing around in that wintry blast listening to their cracks… it was a good way to catch your death…

  Grandma didn’t laugh much but she wanted me to enjoy myself… It was no joke at home… she realized that… and this was cheap entertainment… We stayed a little while longer… When the game was over and we finally left the little old-timers, it was almost dark…

  Caroline’s houses were beyond Les Bourguignons… after the market gardens, which in those days extended all the way to the dykes at Achères.

  So as not to sink into the muck and manure, we had to walk single file on a line of planks… You had to be careful not to bump into the frames… whole rows of them full of seedlings… I went behind her, still laughing but careful to keep my balance, remembering all those cracks… “Did you enjoy it all that much?” she asked… “Tell me, Ferdinand. Did you really?”

  I didn’t care for questions. I shut up like a clam… To own up brings bad luck.

  We got to the Rue de la Plaisance. That’s where the work began. Collecting the rent was a headache… the tenants were in full revolt. They fought every inch of the way and they never paid in full… never… they tried every slimy trick… The pump was always out of order. The discussions were interminable… They started griping about everything under the sun before Grandma even opened her mouth… The shithouse was stuffed up… They were very dissatisfied… they shouted their complaints from every window in the place… they wanted it fixed… and right away!… They were afraid we’d put one over on them… They hollered to prevent us from mentioning the rent… They wouldn’t even look at the bills… Their shithouse was really stopped up, it was overflowing into the street… In winter it froze and the bowl cracked under the slightest pressure… Every time it cost eighty francs… The bastards wrecked everything in sight!… That was the tenants’ way of getting even… And making children… Every time we came back there were new ones… with fewer and fewer clothes on… Some of them were stark naked… Lying in the bottom of a cupboard…

  The worst drunks and slovens treated us like dirt… They watched every move we made as we unplugged the drain. They followed us to the cellar when we went down for the bamboo pole to clean out the siphon… Grandma pinned up her skirts with safety pins and stripped to her shift on top. Then we went to work… We needed lots of hot water. We had to get it from the shoemaker across the street and bring it over in a pitcher. The tenants wouldn’t give us a drop. Then Caroline started poking down into the drain. She worked her pole back and forth and dislodged the muck. The pole alone wouldn’t do it. She plunged in with both arms, the tenants all came out with their brats to watch us cleaning out their shit… and the papers… and the rags… They’d wad
them up on purpose… Caroline was undaunted… what a woman! Nothing could get her down…

  She fought her way through, the tenants saw the drain was working again… They couldn’t help admiring her energy… not to be outdone, they began to help us… They brought out wine… Grandma clinked glasses with them… she wasn’t one to bear grudges… We wished each other Happy New Year… it was all very cordial and friendly… That didn’t bring in any dough… They were unscrupulous… If she’d given them notice, they’d have had time for vengeance before moving out… They’d have wrecked the whole joint… Both houses were already full of holes… Every time we went out there we tried to fill them in… it was a waste of time… they kept making more… We took putty with us… Pipes, attics, walls and floors were all shreds and patches… But what they attacked most viciously was the toilet bowl… The whole thing was full of cracks… It made Grandma cry to look at it… Same with the garden gate… They’d bent it double… it looked like liquorice… For a while we’d given them a concierge, a friendly, obliging old woman… she hadn’t lasted a week… She was so horrified she cleared out. In less than a week two of the tenants had gone up to strangle her… in her bed… some nonsense about doormats.

  Those houses are still there. Only the name of the street has changed… from “Plaisance” to “Marne”… That was the fashion for a while…