Guignol's Band

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “I suspected so… Young and ignorant!… That explains it!… One goes with the other! I, Monsieur, am Tibet!… Knowledge about Tibet? All knowledge about Tibet? Here! You understand!… It’s all here!”

  He taps his forehead.

  “Didn’t you follow the Bonvalot* Mission?… No?… Don’t you know anything?”

  He looks me up and down.

  “Bonvalot?… Strange!… Strange!…”

  He thinks it over.

  “All in all, so much the better!…” In my ear: “What a charlatan that Bonvalot!… What a scoundrel!… That’s all!… Just between us!… A clown!… He’s never seen Tibet! What a braggart… He, the Gaourisankar? Some joke!” He squeals with laughter just thinking about it! About Bonvalot! What a faker!… That damned Bonvalot!… An agent of England!… Of the Trusts!… The biggest international bandit in the world! Gaourisankar! 7,022 metres!… It’s all clear! Bonvalot, corrupt… What a traitor!…

  I take the same tone. I approve… I sneer…

  “Boy oh boy! What a phoney! Disgusting, that Bonvalot!…”

  Ah! He was hipped on the Bonvalot in question, he kept at it! It gave him the evil eye, the murderous eye, just talking about him!… About that awful Bonvalot!… And I know something about looks!…

  “Do I interest you? Or am I boring you?… Tell me frankly!… You probably need girls! You’re not disembodied? The spell of buttocks gets you?… Voluptuousness!… Sighs!”

  Ah! I make him sick! All of a sudden!… Bah! He spits!… He shoves me with Bonvalot! Ah! Into the same boat!… A foul pair! And it was all his idea! There was nothing lecherous about me!

  So as a result of walking and talking all around the square we were in front of the Consulate again… where we’d met… head-on!… the Consulate of the Tsar… The huge flag with the black eagle was floating high above the crowds… teeming, roaring… they were all waiting for visas. A real army now, scratching themselves, spitting, cursing! An enormous din…

  “You’ve never gone exploring?” he deigns to enquire.

  “No… not much…” I admit.

  “Are you really looking for work?…”

  “Ah! I sure am!”

  “Can you ride a horse?”

  What a question!

  “Hah! And how! Take it from me! I’ll say I can! When it comes to horses I can do anything! I can saddle ’em! Water ’em! Make ’em trot! Gallop! Leap! Pass! Waltz!… Whatever you like!… And references, eh! Five years!… I’ve slept with horses! Eaten with ’em! I’ve eaten their droppings! I’ve still got a mouthful! That shows you! That shows you! I’m still rearing! Kicking! I’m almost a horse myself! From me to you! Just between us! More than half!… I had to! Is that enough for you?”

  “Fine! Fine!”

  I whinny so he’ll understand me, so he won’t go thinking I’m lying.

  Ah! A deep impression!

  “I think that ought to do…”

  He concedes the point. And then he gets all worried again.

  “Ah! But you’re a commoner!”

  Another shift! Something else bothering him…

  “You’re not born! Obviously!” He stressed “born”… “No noble blood?”

  Commoner? I didn’t get it… It was about a job…

  “Your mother and father?… Common people?…”

  The nerve!

  “What about you, you big ape?…”

  “Sh! Sh! No insult!… You’re unaware of the full implication!”

  I listen to him.

  “Just consider the question of ancestors… for me it’s the cult!… The Myth!… The cult of blood!… The Cult of the Dead! Do you understand me?…”

  I’m ready to try… I try anything…

  “But watch out! Don’t be carried away! Beware! Beware! The Tragedy of China! Admitting everyone! Promiscuities! All the ancestors! Good Lord!… All at the same time! Anyone!… High and low!… Discriminate! Let’s discriminate!… Catastrophe!”

  Wild-eyed.

  “Don’t you know?”

  I don’t know anything…

  “They venerate any dead person in China! Any ancestor! What a mistake! How disgusting!…”

  Ah! The Chinese are preposterous! What morons!…

  “China’s washed up!… Washed up! Young man! And I know why!”

  He knows everything.

  “All the dead! They worship them all! It’s very simple! All! It’s a fact! I’m telling you! Their heaven? A brothel! That’s the result!…”

  Naturally.

  “A catastrophe! It’s inevitable! Just imagine!… They adore their housemaids, their ancient priestesses, their queens, their goddesses, their whores, all of them, a hotchpotch! Their cowards! Their heroes, their bloated commoners as well as their generals! All of them jumbled up together! Their forgers with the police, their bankers along with their judges! Their scholars with their rickshaw men! Nullity, my friend! Nullity! That’s what happens!”

  Ah! The awful promiscuity drove him wild! He was making broad gestures, people were looking at us…

  He didn’t give a damn! Nothing stopped him! He was off!

  “No, my friend! You must choose! Believe me!… The lowly die and stay dead! Such is the will of justice!… It must be so!… Otherwise foulness triumphs!… Do you understand me?… Your grandmother, for example! Certainly an insignificant commoner, dead! She remains dead!… Quite dead!… She stops congesting! She no longer befouls the City! The High City of Memory!… Whereas take my grandfather! Whom I venerate and most rightly! He relives within me! An entire existence of glory! Of royal services!… I give him new life with my blood!… Splendid! He survives within me… You understand me?… I cultify him!… Pious and practical!… Good blood will tell!… Worship!… All the devotions… He serves me… I serve him!… I extend his being!… He makes mine illustrious!… I idolize him!… I carry him with me everywhere!… The cult of the dead!… I’ll show him to you very soon!… In his mystic person! He’s at home with my wife!… He’s been around the world with us three times! in his travelling cenotaph!…”

  He looks around, right and left… Ah! He’s suspicious of the passers-by!

  “He’s flawlessly mummified! Consecrated! You’ll see him with your own eyes!…”

  That looks promising.

  He’s summing up:

  “I take from China what’s necessary!… Not everything.”

  That’s luck!…

  “Ah! Let’s get back to you, my child!… Here’s your chance!… You fall from the sky!”

  It’s working out…

  “A real horseman!… A Centaur!… The two of us! Low-born, to be sure! But what difference? You will mould yourself into nobility! That’s all! No valid ancestors? We’ll attend to that! You’ll cultify mine! I’ll transmute him towards you! A little! Just what’s necessary!… I’ll lend you a few arms!… the coat’s big enough!… Achille Norbert! Twenty-six quarters!… A fibre of my lineage! I’ll lend you a fibre!… That’s it! A fibre!… I’ll dub you knight! You’ll wave my standard!… But not with that face!… Oh! What a scowl!… All for the Faith! Young man! The Faith!…”

  He yells it out loud… “All for the Faith!”

  “Our motto! ‘All for the Faith! Rodiencourt!’ Council of Poitou! 1114!… That’s not yesterday!”

  I’m pleased for his sake!…

  “It’s up to the two of us!” he grabs me by the arm… “All for the Faith!… I want to use you! My next mission! My great work!… But listen!… I want a whole cavalry!… Pay close attention! Thirty porters! A hundred and fifty horses! The cost of it!… A matter of 200,000 piastres! At the very least!… What’s the difference!… We won’t haggle!… The goal is worth any sacrifice!… To be sure!… When you know!… What an expedition!…”

  Ah! There’s an idea for you!


  “Oh! You can count on me!… Day and night!… I’ve got cavalry in my blood!… I can boast about it!… Saddle horses!… Draft horses!… Escort horses!”

  I’m showing off.

  “Light horses!… Bridle horses and remounts!… Mizzen horses! Parade horses!… Equal to all occasions!… They won’t be able to teach me anything in China about horses, horsemanship, its ceremonies, its gear, its problems! I’ve got it in my bones, I’ve fallen off horses thousands of times!…”

  “Young man! I appoint you Master of the Horse! Gonfalon of my caravan! Ah! We haven’t finished!… There’s a god for barbarians! Your folly has most definitely thrown you into the heart of fortune! Into my arms, young man! Into my arms!”

  He stood back a bit to contemplate me more leisurely…

  “Your head is covered!…”

  I didn’t have a hat.

  “Covered! Covered with Destiny! Perfectly! There! The aura! There! I see it!… What a fine surprise! Stop moving!”

  He saw it on me! He described it to me in the air! a little circle around my head!

  “What a destiny!… What a symbol!… Oh! You can’t understand! Obviously! Opaque! Opaque but radiant!…”

  Ah, I disappoint him again! Ah, it made him lose all patience to see such fine gifts lost, wasted on such a silly head!…

  “Splendidly endowed! That’s a fact!…”

  He insisted… He saw it all!… I kept amazing him!…

  I cut it short… time to get started!

  “Well? So it’s definite, Monsieur? Agreed? Decided? What day! What time!”

  I was impatient… that was enough monkey business! Down to action! Off to life, death! With my halo or not!…

  “Oh! How nervous you are, young man! Easy does it! It’ll come!… Keep your head! Sh! Stop where you are! It seems to me someone’s listening to us that we’re being spied upon all around!… There are paid traitors everywhere!…”

  “Paid by who?”

  “Child! Child!”

  He was taking pity on me.

  “Are you aware that things happen of which you haven’t the slightest suspicion?…”

  “Oh! I believe you all right!… Oh! I believe you!…”

  He signals to me to keep still.

  We were caught in the crowd again… the whole mob from the consulates… squashed against the railings… the raging throng around us… the waiting for visas!… Holding their ground, shoved into one another!… They were trying to find some possible idiom the better to scream at one another in their delirium, their rage at being kneaded, torn apart… But it was no go!… They came from too far away in the universe! From countries too strange, too distant… They didn’t have a shit in common… a good shitty insult, nice and drippy, fat, enormous, reeking. They were quibbling, jabbering, shrivelled up, gasping and struggling!… They weren’t getting anywhere! All the same the two of us there were approaching the door saying nothing… borne up by the surge!… Our turn was really going to come… maybe we’d get knocked around a few more times…

  “I wonder what your name is?”

  The question occurs to him all of a sudden.

  “Ferdinand! You may call me by my first name!”

  “Well, Ferdinand, my friend, we’ll come back another time!”

  “But we’re getting inside, Monsieur! We’ll lose our turn!”

  “Lose it? Lose it? Listen to him! A fine story!… You young scapegrace, do you have any idea what the visa may cost? Our visa?”

  “How do I know!…”

  The lunatic!

  “Madrapore via Kiev? Taranrog? Kabul? Mongolia?…”

  “Not at all!”

  “Twenty-seven pounds! At least! Do you have that sum?”

  “No, Monsieur!”

  “Neither do I!”

  Ah! It all collapses! About-face!

  We work our way out of the crowd! With a lot of trouble!

  What a disappointment!

  Oh! But it doesn’t bother him at all!… Not the least bit put out!

  “Young man, we’ve made contact! Ah! Making contact! That’s the main thing!”

  He goes into ecstasies.

  “In touch with the Waves, Ferdinand! The approach! The approach! It’s the approach that counts!… Don’t you feel right here the exhalations summoning from Tibet? A kind of caress? Starting at the Consulate railing?… From behind all these people?… They’re emanating, I assure you! They’re emanating! Turn away from that side!…”

  He makes me pivot about… he pivots too… I didn’t feel a thing!…

  “You’re opaque!… Still opaque!… You’ll get over it!…”

  He sighs… Still and all I do disappoint him a little.

  “Can’t be helped! Can’t be helped!… Let’s leave! We’ll come back in a better frame of mind! I’ll initiate you a little, later on! Come over here!… Off to the side!… So that you know where we are!… So that I can explain to you!… You don’t know anything!… You must!”

  We got away from the crowd, we were going towards Tottenham… He was mincing along in his fake Chinese costume. He opens his umbrella, he closes it a couple of minutes later…

  “The sidereal shower!” he points out… “It was time! Exactly thirty-seven minutes after sunset!”

  At Selfridge’s there was the row of shop windows… he turned round rather often… not very well-behaved in the street… little glances at young women…

  “Nice child!… Nice child!… Smile of the earth! And of the sky!… If only I were your age!…”

  Kidding around all of a sudden.

  He admitted being fifty-seven… He was older than that… his hair ink-black, and he wore it long like an artist… but keen-eyed and confident… His beautiful robe cramped him! He hopped along! It was a nuisance in the gutter… he had to tuck it up! We went down Oxford and Shaftesbury… all along the shop windows… He chattering about one thing and another… I didn’t understand it all… I felt like getting rid of him, he was annoying me with his rigmarole… People were turning round to stare at us… But I held on all the same… Maybe there was a small chance that his leaving for China wasn’t all hokum!… That he might take me along!… That it might happen!

  My heart was in my mouth at the big crossings… Because of the newsboys… They were still hawking the same “special”, the morning’s… the “Tragedy” in Greenwich!… They were behind the times!… I’d done better since that! Hell!… They were four days behind!… they were so excited about the “Greenwich Tragedy” that they’d stopped talking about the war… Boy, that was some mess! It was all rolling around in my head… Finally it started rolling too fast! All I could understand was the headache… More than I needed, and well! I just stopped bothering about my anxiety…

  Old Foxy kept on talking!… He was attracting attention in the crowd!… Nobody asked to see his papers… That was the amazing thing!… The kids, the tarts, the soldier boys ran after him, pulled at him, played tricks on him!… They came touching his dragon, pinching his robe, his behind… He defended himself with his umbrella, jokingly, he wasn’t annoyed… We’d taken quite a stroll… all of Regent, all Totten… almost the whole theatre district… Finally, it was inevitable, we got caught among the hustlers!… First Nini in front of the Twist, whose beat was between Wardour and Marble Arch… She sees me… she winks at me. Peg-leg Berthe, who worked the theatres, spots me in front of the Daisy…

  “Ah!” she starts razzing… “Are you in the circus?… Hurray for Punch and Judy! Ferdine!… Hey! Ferdine!”

  I don’t answer.

  She tags after us… and clop! Clop! Her peg leg!… I didn’t want to answer!… She yells at me…

  “Hey! Stinker!… Stinker!”

  A lunatic.

  It was starting to create a scene.

  “Where are you taking hi
m?” she shouts…

  She’s hysterical.

  I hurry along, I quicken my pace, we turn into a by-street… we give her the slip… He wasn’t bothered by such trifles… He was probably used to being pestered like that, like some freak… He kept right on smiling… Besides his get-up, he misbehaved in public… ogling young girls, as I’ve said. He was insolent, almost provocative, he talked too loudly.

  “How badly people dress, Ferdinand!…” That’s what struck him… “Undertakers’ assistants!… A lot of undertakers’ assistants!… Look at the way they walk! How sinister-looking!… Do you mean to tell me that these people are going to win the war?… Ah! Tell me another! You’re joking! No! Crying! But they won’t win anything at all! They’re already burying themselves!… They’re through!… They’re already dressed in black! They’re done for! Funerals! But they’ll have to be burnt!… Have to be incinerated! I’m telling you!… Bombs! They stink! All of them! Fit for the charnel house!”

  A look of disgust!

  “Worthless people!… Clouds of cockroaches!”

  And I who don’t like anyone talking to me about bombs, fire, burning! Ah! Take it easy! I cut him short…

  “You talk too much, Monsieur Sosthène!… It seems to me you don’t listen to anything! Come over here, dear Master!”

  I drag him into a doorway, he’s got to listen to me, by God! The damned windbag!… He’s not the only one who’s interesting!

  “They’re looking for me!… You hear me?… They’re looking for me!… Monsieur Sosthène!…”

  I let him have it straight!

  “I’m wanted, you understand?… They’re after me, dear Master!… Monsieur China! You understand me now? I’m a murderer!… A murderer! I’ve got to get away!… They’re searching for me!”

  “You?… Oh! Searching for you?”

  Ah! He bursts out laughing! Ah! It’s just too funny! Ah! That’s a good one!… A real good one! He’s choking with laughter.

  “But you’re drunk, young man! That’s the word! Raving drunk!… A poet! A poet! You’re drunk!… That’s your lookout! Your lookout!”

  That’s all he has to say.

  “But I haven’t drunk anything!… Haven’t eaten everything!”

  I protest! He’s the one who’s raving!