Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “That’s what you said, isn’t it?… You’re not going to deny it?… I heard you, didn’t I?… You told me ten times… a hundred times… that you were going to run your lousy electrical contraption? I wasn’t seeing things, was I?… That’s what we all came here for, isn’t it?… I’m not making it up?… That’s why we sold the house for a song!… And threw up your paper!… That’s why you dragged us all here like it or not by force into this swamp!… This pigsty… This muck! Am I right?”

  “Yes, my love!…”

  “Good!… Well, I want to see it, understand? I want to see it!… I want to see every bit of it!… I’ve sacrificed everything! My whole life!… My health… My future… Everything!… I have nothing left… I want to see them grow!… Understand?… Grow!”

  She planted herself there defiantly, she handed it to him full in the face!… Her hard labour had given her biceps that were no joke!… They looked like hams!… She chewed tobacco in the fields… She only smoked her pipe in the evening and when she went to market… Eusèbe, the postman, who hadn’t delivered in our neck of the woods for years, had to start again… He came around twice a day!… The news had spread around the country like wildfire that certain agriculturists were doing wonders, performing real miracles raising potatoes with magnetic waves…

  Our old crowd of inventors had picked up our track!… They all seemed mighty happy to hear that the three of us were safe and sound… They besieged us with new projects!… They bore us no grudge at all!… The postman was good and sick of it… Three times a week he had to tote whole sacks of manuscripts… His pouch was so heavy his frame had caved in… He’d been using a double chain… his bike had folded up… He’d asked the department for a new one…

  From the very start des Pereires had taken to meditating again… He really took advantage of his solitude and leisure… He finally felt equal to the hazards of fate… all of them!… He was deep in his meditations! Absolutely determined! The Great Decision!… He’d face up to his Destiny!… Not over-confident… not over-cautious… just forewarned!…

  “Ferdinand! See here and take note!… Events are shaping up pretty much as I predicted!… But they’ve got a little ahead of themselves!… The rhythm has been a little hasty!… Which wasn’t what I wanted!… Nevertheless, you’ll see… Observe!… Don’t lose a scrap! Not one luminous atom!… Behold, my child, how Courtial is going to crush, to tame, to chain, to subjugate rebellious Fortune!… Behold with wonderment! Open your ears! Try to be fearless, ready at a moment’s notice! The second I catch her, I’ll pass her on to you! And go to it! Clutch her! Strangle her! It will be your turn! Kiss her! Mangle the bitch! My strictly private needs are those of an ascetic! I shall soon be replete! Stuffed! Submerged in abundance! Yours to bleed her! Drain her to the gills!… You’re at an age for follies! Take advantage! Overdo it! Gods above! Shine! Do what you please with her! For me there’ll always be too much!… Hug me!… Lord, how lucky we are!”

  It wasn’t easy to do any hugging on account of my overcoat that was solidly moored with strings inside my trousers!… It curtailed my movements but kept me good and warm… It was necessary!… The winter was on us!… In spite of the fireplace and the caulking the main building was lousy with draughts… it kept in all the winds and very little heat… It was a strainer for the cold… It was really a very old house.

  * * *

  This inspiration that des Pereires had after all his meditations at the Big Ball and in the woods was really terrific… His ideas were even bolder and more far-sighted than usual!… He fathomed the needs of the world…

  “The individual is washed up!… You won’t get anything out of individuals!… It’s to the family, Ferdinand, that we’ll have to turn! Once and for all, to the family! Everything for and by the family!”

  His grand appeal was addressed to the “Anguished Fathers of France”! To those whose sovereign preoccupation was the future of their dear little ones!… To those who were slowly being crucified by daily life in corrupt, putrid, unhealthy cities!… To those who were ready to attempt the impossible to save their poor little cherubs from the atrocious fate of slavery in a shop… from bookkeeper’s tuberculosis… To the mothers who dreamt of a wholesome spacious existence for their little darlings, absolutely in the open air!… Far from the city’s putrefaction… of a future fully secured by the fruits of wholesome labour… in the country… of great sunlit joys, peaceful and complete!… Des Pereires solemnly guaranteed all that and a good deal more… He and his wife would take complete care of those lucky little tykes, their primary education, their secondary “rationalistic” education too… and finally of their higher learning, “positivistic, zootechnic and horticultural…”

  In two shakes of a lamb’s tail our “radiotelluric” farm was transformed, with the help of our subscribers, into the “Renovated Familistery for the Creation of a New Race”… That’s what we called our farm in our prospectus… In a few days our appeals (all sent out by Taponier) had covered several Paris neighbourhoods… the most populous, the most congested… and for the hell of it a few of the slum districts out by Achères, where it stinks… We had only one worry… that the invasion would start too soon! We dreaded over-enthusiasm like the plague!… We knew all about it!

  With our radiotellurism plentiful fare would be no problem!… All in all, there was only one thing to worry about… The market would be glutted with our “undigenous” potatoes!… We’d think about that in due time!… We’d raise pigs!… Thousands of them!… We’d have plenty of poultry too!… The pioneers would eat chicken!… Courtial was all in favour of a mixed diet… Meat is good for growth!… Obviously we’d have no trouble clothing our little charges in the linen we raised on our farm!… Woven in choral cadence on long winter evenings!… Sounds pretty good… All very promising! A beehive of agricultural industry! But under the aegis of Intelligence! Not of mere instinct! Ah yes! That distinction meant a good deal to Courtial! He wanted his hive to be rhythmical!… Flowing!… Intuitive! That was how he summed up the situation. Playing all the while, learning on every hand, building their lungs, the children of the “New Race” would at the same time joyfully provide a spontaneous labour force… quickly trained and stable, absolutely free of charge!… Without constraint they would harness their youthful vigour to the needs of “neo-pluri-radiant” agriculture… This great reform was rooted in the depths, in the very sap of the countryside! It would flourish in the heart of nature! We’d all bask in its perfume! Courtial sniffed in advance!… We were especially counting on our charges, on their zeal and enthusiasm, to pull out weeds! To uproot them! To clear more ground!… A perfect pastime for kids!… The worst torture for adults… Relieved of the petty tasks of common farming by this industrious afflux, des Pereires would be free to devote himself entirely to the delicate regulation, the endless adjustments of his “polarizer complex”!… He’d rule the waves! He wouldn’t do anything else! He’d flood our subsoil, he’d overwhelm it with telluric torrents!…

  Our pamphlet looked good… We had ten thousand of them sent to various neighbourhoods… It must have responded to a good many secret desires, unspoken longings… Anyway, we almost immediately received a deluge of answers… with truculent comments… almost all of them extremely flattering… What seems to have struck most of our subscribers in particular was the extreme modesty of our terms… It’s true that we’d cut our prices to rock bottom… We could hardly have done better… To carry a pupil from early childhood (minimum age: seven) to the draft board, to provide him with board and lodging for thirteen consecutive years, to develop his character, his lungs, his mind and his arms, to inculcate the love of nature, to teach him a magnificent trade, and last but not least to give him, when he left the Phalanstery, the magnificent and valid diploma of a “Radiogrometric Engineer”, all we asked of the parents, everything included, was the lump, global, and definitive sum of four hundred francs!… This sum, these immediate receipts were
to enable us to buy our wire and set up our circuits… our underground currents… By expediting our cultivations the future belonged to us!… We weren’t expecting the impossible!… Four carloads of potatoes a month would do for starters.

  * * *

  The moment an undertaking begins to shape up, it becomes ipso facto the butt of a thousand hostile, treacherous, subtle and untiring intrigues… Nobody can say different!… A tragic fatality penetrates its very fibres… slowly lacerates its warp, so profoundly that, when you come right down to it, the shrewdest captains, the snootiest conquerors can only hope to escape disaster, to keep from cracking up, by some cock-eyed miracle… Such is the nature and the chorus, the true upshot of the most admirable ventures… It’s in the cards!… Human genius is out of luck… The Panama disaster… it’s the same old lesson… ought to bring the most outrageous blowhards to their senses!… Make them do some tall thinking about the perfidy of fate!… The murky harbingers of Hard Luck! Foo! The slings and arrows!… Destiny eats prayers like a toad eats flies… It jumps on them! Crushes them! Mangles them! Swallows them! It feasts on them and shoots them out in tiny little turds, ex-votive spitballs for the bride to be.

  Making due allowances, we in Blême-le-Petit got it liberally in the neck from the very beginning of our operation… First the notary in Persant… He descended on us pretty near every afternoon… in the most menacing terms… to make us pay his balance!… He’d read a sensational story in the paper about our magnificent experiments… He thought we had secret funds… He thought we were loaded!… He demanded immediate payment for his beat-up farm and his swampy acreage!… And our creditors from the Palais-Royal were all bursting with impatience!… Taponier too!… He’d been so nice at first, now he was getting to be the crummiest of the lot!… He read the papers too!… The jerk thought we were getting subsidized!… Drawing gravy from the Ministry of Education!…

  In addition to quantities of manuscripts relating to the “research” that would surely be required, we were riddled with court orders!… Of all kinds!… We were practically attached before we’d even seen the colour of our first potato! The constabulary jumped on the pretext for a little jaunt out our way, to get an eyeful of our astonishing mugs, to give us the once-over… Our clever prospectus on behalf of the “Race” had kind of upset the legal authorities… The Inspector of Schools, another envious character, naturally, had expressed certain doubts about our right to open an educational institution!… Doubting was his business!… In the end they were only moderately mean. They merely took the opportunity, which was to be expected, to give us a not unfriendly warning that all things considered we’d better content ourselves with something of the nursery, summer camp… or sanatorium type… that if we carried the educational aspect too far we’d inevitably fall foul of the authorities… the whole lot of them!…

  A delicate dilemma if ever there was one!… To perish or to teach?… We thought it over… We hadn’t really made up our minds… when a bunch of snoopy parents came hiking out one Sunday afternoon around four o’clock to see for themselves… They carefully examined the farm, all the outbuildings, the general look of the place… We never saw them again!…

  Nuts! We were beginning to lose hope!… So many adverse winds!… Such rotten incomprehension!… Such deep-seated malevolence!… It was really too much!… And then one fine day, the sky finally cleared!… Almost all at once we received eighteen enthusiastic registrations!… Ah, these were really conscientious parents, who in frank terms cursed the city and its pestilential air! They fully agreed with us!… They subscribed immediately to our “New Race” reform… They sent us their kids with an advance on the fee, to be incorporated immediately into the agricultural phalanx!… A hundred francs here, two hundred there… the rest to follow!… All we got was advances, never the full sum!… They promised to send the rest later on… Plenty of goodwill in any case!… Their enthusiasm was genuine… but kind of obscure… Economy, foresight… and a big helping of suspicion!…

  Anyway the kids came!… Fifteen in all… nine boys and six girls… Three didn’t show up. It seemed best to pay a little attention to the judge’s advice… a word to the wise!… We’d play it cagey to begin with! A little caution wouldn’t hurt us… Later on, when the experiment had proved a success, things would take care of themselves!… They’d come begging!… We’d unfurl our banner: “The New Race, Flower of the Furrows”.

  With the dough that first batch of kids brought us, we couldn’t buy much!… Not even all the beds we needed! Not even mattresses!… We all slept in straw… in perfect equality!… The girls on one side, the boys on the other… After all we couldn’t send them back to their parents!… That chicken feed didn’t last a week… It was already speculated in all directions… It was gone in no time!… The notary alone claimed three quarters of it!… The rest went for wire… Maybe about five spools… but the large size!… Mounted on a trestle, ready to unroll.

  * * *

  Right at the beginning our old cutie, foreseeing trouble, had planted some kind of super-potato that grew even in the winter time… There’s no hardier spud in existence… If the worst came to the worst and Courtial’s waves didn’t yield all we expected… we’d still have a crop… He couldn’t very well prevent them from growing!… That would be mighty weird, in fact unheard-of! We all got down to work… We strung wire wherever he told us… With a little extra encouragement, to be on the safe side, we’d have wound three or four copper garlands around the roots of every plant!… It was a memorable job!… Especially the way we were situated on the hillside… full in the north wind!… Even in the most biting gale our kids were happy! All they cared about was being outdoors the whole time! Never a minute in the house! Most of them came from the suburbs… They weren’t obedient. Especially a skinny little character, Dudule, who wanted to feel up all the girls… We had to sleep him between us… They began to cough… Luckily our old honeybun knew a little something about medicine, she covered them with poultices from head to toe!… They wouldn’t even have minded having their skin ripped off… as long as they weren’t shut in!… They wanted to be outside come hell and high water!… We ate out of the big kettle!… Enormous quantities of soup!…

  After three weeks of toil the immense potato field was one network of wire, strung just below the surface with a thousand joints in dotted lines… It was real needle-prick work… Turn her on!… Des Pereires had only to shoot the juice through the fibres!… He started his contraption… Right away he gave those spuds a series of terrible shocks… of powerful, intensely telluric discharges… with a few little “alternative” bursts in between… He even got up in the middle of the night to give them a little extra, to stimulate them more completely, to stir them up to the maximum. It worried the old sugarbun to have him going out in the cold like that… She woke with a start… She yelled at him to put something on.

  * * *

  We’d been worrying along for about a month when all of a sudden our Courtial began casting about for excuses… That was a very bad sign!…

  “I’d have preferred,” he said “to try leeks!…” He kept saying that more and more often in front of the old lady… He wanted to see her reaction… “What would you say to radishes?…” His wife scowled at him, she pushed up her hat in front… she didn’t care for his insinuations… Hell, he’d made his bed, he shouldn’t try to wriggle out of it!…

  Our pioneers were thriving, they made the most of their freedom!… We didn’t hem them in, they did what they pleased!… They even attended to their own discipline!… Terrible thrashings they gave each other… The littlest was the worst, the same old Dudule, he was seven and a half!… The oldest of the flock was practically a young lady: Mésange Rimbot, the blonde with the green eyes, she had a nice billowy arse and her tits stuck out sharp… Mme des Pereires wasn’t exactly a simple soul, she didn’t trust our little wench around the corner, especially when she had her period!… She’d fixed
her up a special bunk in a corner of the barn, so she could sleep all by herself when she fell off the roof! That didn’t keep her from monkeying around with the brats… nature, nature. That ornery postman caught her one night behind the chapel at the end of the village, doing it with Tatave, Jules and Julien!… All four of them were together!…

  This Eusèbe, the postman, had it in for us on account of the distances we made him travel… The department hadn’t given him his bike… It would take two years… He wasn’t entitled to it… He couldn’t stand our guts… He wanted us to supply him with shoes, we didn’t have any for ourselves!… Naturally, moseying along on foot, he saw everything that went on. The day he caught the kids having fun, he doubled back extra, just to tell us what he thought of us!… After he’d seen it all!… As if it was our fault! Peeping toms are always like that… first they get a good eyeful… they don’t miss an atom… And then when the party’s over, they’re all indignation!… We told him off!… We had more serious things to worry about!

  In our beat-up hamlet there hadn’t been any traffic for going on twenty years… Once this potato jazz got around, it was an invasion… a parade of sightseers from morning to night. The whole department was full of false rumours… The people from Persant and Saligons took the front row, they wanted all kinds of specimens and explanations. You couldn’t put them off… They wanted to know if it was dangerous… if our system mightn’t blow up and “start the earth vibrating”… As the experiment went ahead, as time passed, des Pereires was getting more and more cautious… He dropped “ifs” and “maybes” that sounded really ominous… lots of them… more and more… It was worrisome… He’d hardly ever said “if” and “maybe” at the Palais-Royal… About a week later he had to stop the dynamo and the motor… It was getting a little risky, he told us at that point, to pour on more waves and current… we’d better stop awhile… we could start up again later… after a breathing spell. Waves of the telluric variety were perfectly capable of engendering certain individual disorders… you never could tell… absolutely unforeseeable repercussions detrimental to the physiology… Personally des Pereires was feeling the effects of saturation… He was having dizzy spells…