Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  * * *

  It didn’t look very promising to me!… That deserted village… All those half-open doors… Those two old folks who didn’t like us… And the owls all over the place…

  Des Pereires, on the contrary, thought it was perfectly splendid!… He felt invigorated by the country air… The first thing he wanted to do was to dress the part… He’d lost his panama, so he had to borrow a hat from our old sweetie… An enormous soft-straw number with a chin strap… He kept on his frock coat, the beautiful grey one… plus a soft shirt and a pair of wooden shoes (that he never really got used to)!… When he took a long walk through the fields, he always came home barefoot… and so’s to look really like a tiller of the soil, he never forgot his spade… He carried it jauntily over his right shoulder. Spade at the ready, we went out every afternoon to inspect the fallow fields, looking for a suitable place to plant radishes.

  Mme des Pereires kept busy on her own hook… She did the errands and kept house… and most of all she went to the market in Persant twice a week. She did the cooking… She repaired things and made the place halfway liveable… Cooking in the hearth was an awful business, we wouldn’t have eaten if not for her!… Just to make an omelette you had to light the fire so many times… the logs, the embers!… You lost your appetite!…

  The two of us, Pereires and me, didn’t get up very early, I’ve got to admit!… Even that made her gripe!… She always wanted us to be getting a move on! To be doing something really useful!… But once we’d gone out, we didn’t feel like coming back… Then she got mad again, poor old thing, wondering what we were doing so long outside… Des Pereires enjoyed our big excursions… Every day he discovered new aspects of the countryside… and in the afternoon again, thanks to his map, he could be as instructive as hell… Now and then, at the edge of the woods… or on some slope… we’d make ourselves comfortable… as soon as a little heat came on… We always had a few beers… Pereires was free to meditate… I didn’t bother him much… He talked to himself… with his spade in the ground, dug in right beside us… The time passed pleasantly… It was a real change… the peace… the quiet of the woods!… But the dough was going out fast… She was getting worried… She went over the accounts every night.

  * * *

  In the matter of dress I wasn’t long in adapting myself… Little by little the soil gets you… You forget about the non-essentials… In the end I worked out a rugged little outfit consisting of bicycle pants and a spring overcoat with the tails cut to half-length that I tucked into my baggy trousers… kind of warm but comfortable… I could be recognized a mile away… The whole thing decorated with lengths of string… with ingenious props. The old cutie came around to our way of thinking, she wore pants too like a man… She didn’t have a skirt to her name anyway. She thought it was handier… She went to market that way too. The school kids waited for her on the way into town. They hooted at her, they bombarded her with dung and broken bottles and big stones… It ended in a fight!… She didn’t take it lying down!… The cops stepped in… They asked for her papers… She was very high and mighty: “I’m an honest woman, Messieurs!… You can follow me home!…” They weren’t in the mood.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful summer!… You really couldn’t imagine it would ever end!… The heat makes for idleness… Des Pereires and I, after his pousse-café, we’d head for the fields… and all afternoon we’d wander aimlessly over hill and furrow. If we ran into a yokel, we’d give him a polite “good day”… Our life was mighty pleasant!… It reminded us of the happy days with the balloon… But we had to be careful not to talk about our stratospheric setbacks in front of Mme des Pereires… or about the Enthusiast or the Archimedes!… Or she’d burst into tears… She couldn’t contain her grief… She treated us like dirt… We mostly talked about one thing and another… We couldn’t stir up the past!… And we had to watch our step with the future… We could only mention it with kid gloves… The future was ticklish too… Ours was vague… it didn’t stand out very clearly… Courtial was still hesitating… He preferred to wait a little longer, he didn’t want to dive in until he felt perfectly sure… Between meditations, in the course of our afternoon wanderings, he’d prospect around with his spade… He’d bend down to examine, weigh, scrutinize the fresh earth he’d stirred up… He’d crush it into a powder… He’d filter it between his fingers as if looking for gold… Finally he’d clap his hands and blow on them hard… It would all fly away!… He’d frown!… “Tst, tst… This soil isn’t so hot, Ferdinand! It’s not rich! Hm! Hm! I’m mighty scared about radishes! Hm! Maybe artichokes?… And even then I wouldn’t be too sure… My oh my! There’s an awful lot of magnesium in it!…” We’d start off again, undecided.

  At table his wife asked us for the hundredth time if we’d picked our vegetable… if we’d finally made up our minds… if maybe it wasn’t high time… She suggested beans… she didn’t put it very tactfully, I’ve got to admit!… Hearing a thing like that made Courtial jump sky-high!…

  “Beans?… Beans?… Here?… In these rifts?… Did you hear that, Ferdinand?… Beans? In a soil without manganese! Why not peas?… Or aubergines while you’re at it!… Oh, this is too much!…” He was scandalized… “Vermicelli! That’s the thing!… Or truffles!… Say, what about truffles?…”

  He’d thump around the house for hours grumbling like a bear… The indignation aroused by an unwarranted suggestion was good for a long session… On that score he was uncompromising! Free deliberation! Scientific selection!… She’d go off to bed all alone in her windowless cubbyhole, a kind of alcove she’d fixed up for herself, far from the murderous draughts, between the threshing machine and the kneading trough… You could hear her sobbing through the partition… He was pretty rough on her…

  * * *

  You couldn’t say she was ever short on courage or perseverance!… Or self-abnegation… Not once! She did wonders reclaiming that old shack!… She never stopped fixing… Nothing worked… neither the pump nor the mill that was supposed to run the water… The hearth crumbled into the soup… She had to putty all the chinks in the walls, plug up all the holes… all the cracks in the fireplace… patch up the shutters, put on new tiles… She climbed up on the eaves… But at the first storm a lot of rain came into the rooms regardless… through the holes in the roof… We put glasses underneath… one for each stream… All those repairs and alterations were a rough job, no petty tinkering!… She changed the enormous hinges on the big barn door… Carpentry… locksmithing… nothing fazed her… She got to be real good at it… a regular mechanic… And in addition of course all the housekeeping and cooking were her department… She said so herself, no line of work bothered her except the laundry!… There got to be less and less of that… Our wardrobe was rock bottom… Hardly any shirts… and no shoes at all…

  Plugging the chinks in those thick walls she kind of fouled up… her plaster wasn’t right!… Des Pereires was critical, he thought we should do it over… but we had other worries!… Anyway we certainly had her to thank if that mangy den finally began to look like something more or less… It was a ruin even so… Whatever you did to patch it up, it kept falling apart…

  Our old lady was heroic all right, but that operation with her ovaries kept bothering her more and more… Maybe the overwork… She sweated like a waterfall… her moustache dripped… she was all flushed and congested… By the end of the day she was so het up, exasperated from waiting… that at the least misplaced word… bam!… The storm broke… She’d blow her top… She’d be waiting there all tensed up… She’d explode over nothing… The tirades were endless…

  What we mostly had to avoid was the slightest allusion to the good old days in Montretout!… She couldn’t handle that… It gnawed at her like a tumour… If a single word escaped us on the subject, she called us every name in the calendar, she said it was a plot!… She called us bloodsuckers, homos, vampires… We had to put her to bed
by force!…

  Des Pereires’s problem was still making up his mind about his precious vegetable… We had to think of something else… We were beginning to have our doubts about radishes… What vegetable would we try?… Which would be right for radiotellurism?… And grow to ten times its normal bulk?… And where to plant?… That was no small question… It would require minute investigation… We’d already spaded up samples of every field for ten miles around… We weren’t going into this thing with our eyes closed… We were thinking it over, that’s all…

  One day in the course of our explorations we came across a really sweet little village in the opposite direction from Persant, on the way south… Saligons-en-Mesloir… It was pretty far on foot… at least two good hours from Blême-le-Petit… That was one hideout where our old lady wouldn’t ever think of tracking us down… The soil around Mesloir, Courtial discovered right away, was much richer than ours in “radio-metallic” content and consequently, he figured, infinitely more fertile… it would yield quicker results… We came back to study it almost every afternoon!… The remarkable thing about that soil was its “cadmio-potassic” properties and its special calcium!… You could tell by the feel and even more by the smell… Its composition seems to have been simply amazing… des Pereires sniffed it out right away… Thinking it over, he even began to wonder if it mightn’t be too rich in telluric catalyst!… If we mightn’t get concentrations so powerful as to make our vegetables burst… to make their pulp explode!… That was the danger, the one questionable point… He had a hunch… In that case we’d have to give up the idea of growing small early vegetables in this ground that was really too rich… choose something coarse, something vulgar and resistant… Pumpkins for instance… But who’d buy them?… A single pumpkin for a whole city?… A monumental pumpkin?… The market wouldn’t absorb them all!… It was time we put our heads together! New problems to face! It’s always like that with action.

  In this burgh of Saligons they served mostly cider in the cafés… and it didn’t taste like piss, which, you’ve got to admit, is very unusual way out in the sticks!… It went to your head kind of, especially the sparkling kind… We got to drinking quite a lot of it on our prospecting tours!… That was in the Big Ball… the only tavern in the place… We got to going there more and more… it was conveniently located right near the cattle market… We learnt about local customs from listening to the hicks…

  Des Pereires made a beeline for the Paris-Sport… He’d been deprived of it for a long time… He talked to everybody… In exchange for advice about farming… little lessons about livestock… he was able to give them tips, some really ingenious pointers about placing bets in Vincennes… even from miles away… He made some fine connections… This was a hangout for cattlemen… I let him talk… The maid suited me fine… Her arse was so muscular it was almost square. Her tits too, you can’t imagine how hard they were… The more you shook them, the harder they got… They were solid rock… Nobody’d ever licked her crack… I showed her the whole business… all I knew… It was magnetic! She wanted to throw up her job at the bar and come back to the farm with us! That wouldn’t have gone down with old lady des Pereires… especially as she was beginning to smell something fishy… It seemed to her that we were spending a lot of time around this Mesloir… It didn’t look kosher… She asked us some tough questions… We were stumped… She set less and less store by our prospecting for vegetables… She was getting persnickety… The summer was getting ahead fast… it would be harvest time pretty soon… Shit!

  At the Big Ball a sudden change came over the peasants, they got mighty weird… Between drinks they read the Paris Racing News… Des Pereires was kept busy… He sent their little bets, never more than five francs each, to his old pal in an envelope… Fifty francs was the limit!… He wouldn’t take more!… Tuesday, Friday, Saturday… always through Formerly at the Insurrection!… We kept twenty-five centimes a bet!… That was our little rake-off. I taught the maid, the iron-clad Agathe, how to keep from having babies… I showed her that it’s even more terrific from behind… After that she was really crazy about me… She wanted to do everything for me… I passed her on a bit to Courtial to show him how well I’d trained her! She was willing… She’d have moved in if I’d only said the word… It couldn’t have been my clothes that sent her, we’d have scared sparrows away!… Nor my dough!… We never gave her a cent!… It was the prestige of Paris!… That’s the long and the short of it.

  But when we got back at night, the hullabaloo was worse and worse!… Irène was no joke!… We got in later and later!… We were in for some wild tantrums… horrible sessions!… She tore out her hair to the blood… by the handful, by the bucket!… Because he couldn’t make up his mind about the “right” vegetable… and his maximum soil!… The old girl had started working in the fields all by herself… She spaded up the ground pretty good!… She still couldn’t make a furrow quite straight… but for application she was tops… She’d get there!… She was mighty good at clearing brush!… If she wanted to build up her muscles, there was plenty of room… just about anywhere… In Blême-le-Petit there was nothing to stand in your way… the whole region was fallow… to the right, to the north, south or left… There were no neighbours on the west either… The whole place was a desert… parched… perfectly arid…

  “You’re wearing yourself out, angel pie!” Courtial would sing out in the middle of the night when we’d find her on the job, still spading up the ground… “You’re wearing yourself out! It’s no use!… This soil is hopeless! I keep trying to tell you!… Even the peasants have gradually given up!… My feeling is that they’ll shift to cattle!… But even there… I don’t know… Cattle on these plains!… With the marly subsoil… the calcico-potassic seams!… I can’t see them getting anywhere!… It’s a perilous undertaking… beset with enormous hazards… abominable difficulties!… I can see it all!… Irrigate such goo?… My oh my…”

  “What about you, you big lug?… Who’s going to irrigate you? Will you tell me that? Go on… I’m listening!…” He refused to say another word… He dashed into the house… I still had work to do. Every night when we got in I had to classify the day’s samples… on separate boards… strewn around the kitchen in little bags… They dried all over the place… samples of the whole country for twenty kilometres around!… There’d be plenty to choose from when the time came… but our richest selection was certainly from Saligons.

  * * *

  Little by little we’d got popular at the Big Ball… Our friendly drunks had developed a keen taste for the races… We even had to preach moderation… They didn’t care how they risked their dough… They’d put fifteen francs on a single pony!… Those kind of bets we turned down flat!… We didn’t want to get any more people too down on us… We played it safe and cautious… Agathe, the maid, was having a fine time… She was really enjoying herself!… Turning into a whore right there on the premises… What bothered us more was our battleaxe’s spells!… Her fits and ultimatums were more than we could take… She was getting on our nerves… On one little point, though, des Pereires had changed his tactics… He stopped ragging her when he found her toiling… He encouraged her to dig!… He egged her on!… And actually, patch by patch, week by week, she spaded up enormous areas!… Sure she was a holy terror… but if ever she stopped working, it was a damn sight worse… She was fed up with our shilly-shallying, she did the deciding: potatoes! We couldn’t stop her… In the long run, she decided, that was the ideal vegetable… She got to work right away. She didn’t ask for our opinion… Once her tubers were planted, huge fields of them, she went telling everybody in Persant… on her way in, on the way back… that we were experimenting with “giant potatoes”, obtained with electrical waves… The news travelled like gunpowder…

  At the Big Ball in the afternoon they bombarded us with questions… up to that point they’d liked us fine, we’d minded our own business at the other end of the county
… the local hicks had welcomed us and treated us all right… they’d even expected us every afternoon… And now they began to give us the cold stare… This farming of ours looked fishy to them… They were jealous right away… “Spuds! Spuds!” they started calling us.

  * * *

  We couldn’t goof around any more! The old cutie had gradually turned into a real terror!… Now that she’d spaded up several acres of land all by herself, she was really leading us a life!… We were afraid to say a word to her… She threatened to follow us if we went out bumming, if we didn’t get to work within twenty-four hours!… Our holiday was over!… We had to get started, to haul the motor and the dynamo out from under the tarp… We cleaned the rust off the big flywheel… We started her up a little… We drew up a nifty-looking “table of resistances”… We let it go at that!… Anyway we saw we wouldn’t have wire enough… We needed a hell of a lot of it, spools and spools to zigzag back and forth between the rows of potatoes all over the plantation… Five hundred metres wouldn’t be enough!… We needed kilometres!… Otherwise it would never work… Without wire no radiotellurism… no intensive cultivation! No cathode rays… Wire was absolutely indispensable… Actually it wasn’t so bad… At first we thought that lousy wire would be the perfect excuse, the airtight alibi, that the price of the stuff would scare our old lady out of this vital purchase… that she’d stop to think and leave us alone a while… But nothing doing, on the contrary!… If anything it made her angrier… She threatened that if we farted around any more… if we kept letting things ride, she’d go to Saligons on her own and set up as a midwife… no later than next week… love had flown out the window! She was bluffing… But even with the best of intentions, we hadn’t enough money left for such expensive purchases… Great God, they’d ruin us!… And who’d give us credit?… It was no use trying…

  On the other hand, we couldn’t very well let the old girl in on our exact situation… Especially we couldn’t tell her we’d just blown our last little reserves, what was left from the priest, playing the races by post… Well, anyway we’d lost it… It was certainly a terrible blow… the end of our scheme!… An intolerable cataclysm… We were really in a jam. Now that she was sold on potatoes, she was getting absolutely fanatical and intolerant… It was getting to be exactly the same as the balloon… or her cottage in Montretout… She couldn’t be budged!… Once she threw herself into something, she latched onto it like a rivet, you had to tear the whole house down!… It was very painful!…