by Paul Morand
“My engagement present,” she said.
With a violent gesture, she hurled it out of the window. Pierre stared at her in astonishment for a moment, then he leapt up onto the window casement which he closed, fearful no doubt for his black, nickel-plated perpetual-motion pendulum.
“My beautiful chronometer!” he said sorrowfully, standing in the midst of his clutter.
Hedwige looked at him with disapproval, but, having calmed down, she then said nothing.
Pierre was lost in thought; a long silence ensued. She looked at him, secretly anxious; Pierre’s silences always culminated in some dreaded new initiative. She could feel the baby moving, she closed her eyes and relished the symphony that was playing inside her; flooded with happiness, she had completely forgotten Pierre’s presence; all at once she felt him by her feet, leaning against her knees.
“Listen to me, Hedwige,” he said in a low voice, “this child…”
“This child?”
She braced herself.
“I can’t go on like this,” he continued. “It’s making me ill. Yes, I know what you’re going to say; don’t make fun of me; you’re the one who’s not well, but I swear to you that I am just as much and even, from a certain point of view, more so… I’ve thought a great deal… Just now, you were furious, but now you’re calmer… and I know that you love me; don’t you want to help me and release me from this torment?”
“I don’t understand,” said Hedwige.
“I have an idea… I’ve found something that can solve everything.”
“But what, solve what?”
“Very well… what I mean… is that you can equally well give birth at seven months as at nine.”
Hedwige drew away from him; she stared at him, speechless, her face pale.
“Yes. The child will thrive wonderfully. Keeping it two months more than necessary is absurd when one can do otherwise… Don’t look at me like that… what I’m suggesting to you is, if not normal, totally reasonable at least… Hedwige, don’t make that face… You haven’t understood me,” he concluded more slowly.
Hedwige pushed him away and stood up.
“You’re the one who hasn’t understood, unfortunately, how inhuman what you’re suggesting is! Waiting for this baby is my supreme delight, it’s what I live for! And I’m not even waiting for it; this little creature exists, just as alive as if he or she were already living with us. I could never be happier than I am bearing him snugly inside me; everything I feel, any discomfort I experience, is sweet to me. Can’t you see that I’m desperate for it to last and for the child to be perfect, and you, with your cruelty, want to take it away from me! If you were a human being instead of a locomotive, I would try to make you understand how I feel, but what’s the point?”
“I beseech you, Hedwige… Please agree… It would be wonderful if you were to agree…”
She rose to her feet, firmly balanced on her large, heavy belly, and looked him straight in the eyes, no longer with anger, but with hatred.
“You’re a lunatic.”
“I have the address of a doctor who is willing.”
“Shut up.”
“Hedwige, darling…”
“Get out! Get out! I don’t want to see you again.”
Hedwige had become so distant, so fearsome, so Boisrosé that Pierre left, slowly for once.
CHAPTER XXII
THE “YEAR 1000 EXHIBITION”, brought from Paris to Chicago, was due to open in a fortnight’s time under the auspices of the Field Museum.
Pierre set off for America like a cannon shot.
He took with him some precious pieces that he hoped to sell in the United States once the exhibition was over, European booty that exacerbated the stripping bare of the Old World without embellishing the New. But antique dealers care little about such concerns: they practise their profession with the same insensitivity as the castrator who deprives the young thoroughbred of its illustrious offspring.
Pierre spent the four-day sea crossing stretched out on deck, in a state of total inertia, watching the horizon rising and falling, because for men like him there can be no half-measure: they must either be moving about at breakneck speed or else lethargic, like all those who can only find their equilibrium in movement, in aeroplanes, or in racing dinghies that depend on their own forward motion and sail on supported by something harder than a keel, by the sea that solidifies speed.
Pierre had forbidden himself to think of Hedwige: we know how little these prohibitions mean. It only required her image, kept strictly at a distance, to take advantage of a thousandth of a second’s lack of concentration and creep into his visual range; and Pierre would relive Hedwige’s departure for Saint-Germain, that frenzied haste when, in a flash, her suitcases were packed, filled and spirited away with a speed that Pierre himself could not have matched. He had watched all this without lifting a finger to detain his wife, almost comforted by the notion that he would not see her any more. The separation would not be long, six weeks at the most, which, by affording him a change of surroundings and keeping him busy with work, would bring him, without his noticing, to the delivery date so eagerly awaited. Thanks to this journey, Hedwige would live, Pierre would live. He admitted to himself honestly that he exhausted her more than any great sorrow could, more than any long illness. When she cried out “You’re killing me!” she was not speaking figuratively; she felt that she was in danger of dying, and the child with her. Each day he crucified them a little more.
Could he have restrained himself?
“No, I can’t. I can’t get my breath back, I can’t slow down, I can’t stop; the entire drama of my being is contained in those two words: I cannot.”
The crossing of the Atlantic by steamship, New York and its feverishness, the energy Pierre had to expend as soon as he arrived in Chicago and the rapid success of the business dealings he had been involved in, made him feel much better. The very day before the opening, the Western museums had acquired everything he had brought from Europe, including the Mas Vieux cloister, which the city of Chicago had bought and paid for cash on the nail, having long been jealous of the little French cloister of the same period that overlooked New York, from the top of Washington Heights.
Since people were surprised that he had not waited for the opening of an exhibition at which he would doubtless have found collectors whose private offers might have been higher than those of the museums, Pierre replied: “I have never made money except by selling too early.”
“I was wise to come,” he told himself. “America agrees with me. This dry, golden autumn stimulates me.
“I like the rhythm of these great urban ganglions, the excitement of the traffic and the bouncing of the elevators at the top of buildings as straight as avenues; the conductivity of all this American material puts me in a state of healthy intensity.
“Life is easy here; there is so much good humour at every level of this cosmopolitan overexcitement! After all! Here is a country where everything lives at the pace of the Stock Exchange. I can escape from the continuous crucifixion of the old continent which used to get me down. In this way I can prove what I have always maintained, that frenzy can espouse order, and that firmness cannot stand in the way of passion.”
Two weeks went by, then a month. Pierre was no longer having fun.
“It seems to me that my admiration for quick-start police motorcycles with their sirens that give them the right of way, and my enthusiasm for the easy attraction of avenues that are straight and uncluttered with cars, is exhausted.
“I’m beginning to become blasé about the pleasure of signing bills everywhere instead of wasting precious time handing over and receiving money. Is it rather sad to see the appeal of new things fade like this? I am scarcely aware any more of how satisfying it is to find telephones in every room instead of ‘having a phone’ as one does in Paris… and I no longer go into raptures about the convenience, very relative furthermore, of being pursued by long-distance calls as I move arou
nd each day.
“Nor do I take any pleasure in seeing a boy from the Western Union appearing as if out of a box the moment I ring, to take my telegram that I can no longer reconsider, which I regret immediately afterwards.
“Yes, all this is convenient… but not essential. A simplification of the daily task, that’s all. It’s the work of Slav and German immigrants; they have organized their new nation according to ultra-fast methods, the former out of laziness and the latter by being practical. But they have not succeeded in endowing Americans with the tragic meaning of life, by which I mean its brevity. They are actually idlers; in this, they have remained Anglo-Saxons.”
The man in a hurry soon realized that not only did he not care for all this comfortable transatlantic galloping around, but he even took pity on it.
In reality, there was no galloping at all.
And the day even came when American apathy infuriated him even more than French disorganization.
“Before the Americans, who ever thought about relaxing? Everything here is an excuse for parties and dawdling…
“The United States is the largest unemployment workshop in the world.
“It’s Sunday twenty hours a day.
“To say nothing of standardization, which has reached such perfection that everything stops all the time.
“A New Yorker is always free for meals.
“All American women are dying of boredom.”
Pierre visited Wall Street on a day following a wave of panic: the slump in business appalled him.
“How could I have thought at the beginning of my stay that America lived at a Stock Exchange pace!” he wondered.
He walked through the Chinese district: they were letting off firecrackers in honour of Lao Tzu. In Harlem, the centre of the darkest idleness, the Negros slept all day long. In Chicago, crowds lounged around for hours on end, beneath the first of the spring rainfalls, just to watch gangsters being buried or film stars getting married. Only the Italians from Cicero, once the importers of farniente, toiled.
“From the moment of my arrival at the wharf, from the moment the immigration officer with preposterous slowness checked the questionnaire containing the seventy-two queries asked of immigrants, up until my departure when crowds of friends will come and laze around on deck, not because they like me, but because they have nothing better to do—it was, it is and always will be like this. With every voyage, the steamship brings back from Europe Yankee idlers who are half asleep, drunk or who out of carelessness have remained on the wrong side of a gangway that has actually been drawn up and lowered again ten times over. America, a land discovered by people who had zest in them, consists of nothing more than hold-ups, vacations, strikes and gaping onlookers.
“If I had to stay here,” he sighed when he saw New York again on his return from Chicago, “I’d die of ankylosis and paralysis. I must leave without waiting for the end of the Exhibition.
“Leave for where…
“For the lethargic Orient?
“For languorous Rio?
“For indolent Oceania?
“For the stillness of Tibet?
“A little organization, for heaven’s sake! A little concentration. I must know where I want to go; let’s close our eyes, let’s imagine these journeys. Where do I feel drawn to out of a deep-seated need…? Obviously, to a railway station first of all; a train, no matter which one! The circle line? Going round and round New York endlessly? Come on now, I am in full possession of my mind, after all… What I need is something to do immediately, this very day. I can’t remain in this room, it would drive one to suicide!”
All of a sudden, he remembered having accepted an invitation from an important daily newspaper to fly over New York at sunset this same evening. He was saved.
“Let’s go,” he exclaimed joyfully, “let’s go to this very American occasion.”
Pierre arrived at the elevated railway. Four parallel lines ran south-east to north-west, the two outer ones for the stopping trains, and in the middle, four tracks reserved for the express trains. He took the stopping train.
The time? Shortly after the ebb tide that had already emptied the business district.
The place? Downtown, where the first streets start, in the direction of the Bronx, that is to say New York’s back of beyond; along one of those parrot ladders, vertical avenues, crossed by side roads, that lead to the north.
The setting? A suspended iron bridge with a plunging view over dirty windows, low roofs and, further on, over offices and clean windows, brilliantly lit hotels, apartments that were initially simple, then more and more luxurious, and then, once more, humble ones.
Pierre is almost the only person in his carriage: a few office cleaning ladies, some delivery drivers hanging by one arm from the straps—all these people immersed in their evening newspaper as though in a printer’s bath. A toothpaste advertisement provides travellers with a mirror in which Pierre inspects himself.
“I look very well.”
Even though he is only in his early thirties, it is hardly credible, so drawn are his features, so greying is his hair at the top of his skull, beneath his black hat. His nose has become a bird’s beak. Not only has his face lost the youthful and charming glow it once had, but his physiognomy, that is to say the unchanging part of our face on which doctors or gypsy women base their diagnoses or prognoses, had much altered during the trip. His forehead has become wrinkled like a beach at low tide, the wrinkles have merged with his flesh, leaving blue gaps at the temples, and the bags beneath his eyes are those of a man who is worn out.
“This train stops at all the stations, yet it appears to be moving really quickly. One is so close to the houses that the sight of all the windows right in front of you is like so many punches in the face.”
Pierre is sitting down and not doing anything, but he has the feeling that he is being active. These windows that flash by strike him as moments from a life that will never return. The electric rails draw him onwards with the same imperious invitation as the logic that hurls him into the future. Restrain himself? Never! Let others get bogged down in their individual labyrinth, become entangled and lulled into this and that course; he knows he is gripped by a power vindicated by supreme necessity.
Having arrived at a main station, he changed trains and caught the express.
“I’m inexhaustible; no sooner do I move onto this line than I’m already thinking about being in the car that is waiting for me. How I love this noise of the wind whistling in my ears! What I’m doing excites me and urges me on; I forget about anything that delays me; I’m quite content to live in the following moment in this way. I don’t exist, I pre-exist; I’m a predated man; no, I’m not a man, I’m a moment!”
And so his troubles do not leave him! He is building his mental constructions in that vast wasteland, the future. The closer he gets to them, the land shrinks back. Pierre will end up by building on a wild ass’s skin, on a diminishing asset, as narrow as the rock upon which New York stands. In any case, the city and he have no foundation, they are rootless: weak and unsteady like the present moment.
The express went at a faster speed than the stopping train, but because it no longer skimmed the houses, one didn’t notice them. Pierre was amused by this illusion of appearing to go more slowly by going faster.
“The train still sings its own song, a sort of popular refrain from the axle, an opera chorus tune from the rails: ‘On we go! On we go…!’ Perhaps the aeroplane in which I shall be sitting in a few moments’ time will make me feel nostalgic for this train? It may even explode in the air, lose a wing, catch fire? ‘Monsieur rushes about too much,’ Chantepie said to me when, in my haste, I banged my head against the breakfast tray. I’d already like this plane to crash.
“I can’t keep still any more… I’m missing all the stations, these stations my train passes through without warning, without crying ‘watch out’ or ‘gare’ (what a strange expression!)”
Pierre burst out laughing
at this ridiculous thought. A rather dreadful laugh.
His face was pale. His fingers were shaking. He was becoming an exaggerated version of the person he was. This caricature of himself at this moment, in this hit-and-run train suspended above buildings that were gigantic and had no authenticity, was nevertheless the most accurate expression of the truth. He who believed so firmly in the straight line was spinning around dead ends, his exuberant soul, his scatterbrained imagination and his bogus mentality lost in mazes. Like everybody else, this emancipated man carried his master on his shoulders.
*
The cars were waiting on 155th Street.
Pierre, together with the guests, climbed into a superb promotional vehicle which sped off. The speedometer touched 150 kilometres an hour without one noticing, with the nonchalance of a child’s scooter.
Cemeteries. Tombstones. Golf courses. Mausoleums. The last trolleybuses. Summer restaurants. Not one tree. A stiff breeze. A copper-coloured sunset.
Woodlawn Cemetery… Pelham Park… Casanova…
A nasal voice in his ears announced the names of places, of beauty spots along the way, but Pierre was not listening or looking round. An inner chill froze his limbs.
“I don’t feel well,” he said to himself. “No matter… Let’s be in a good mood… This excursion is delightful, only somewhat long… Let’s be alive… After all, my tragedy is a comic drama, not a cosmic one.”
Having made this effort to pull himself together, he began to feel anxious again.
“I feel more out of breath than if I’d done a five-hundred-metre sprint… When I get back to Paris I must see a doctor.”
They arrived at the aerodrome. The wind had dropped. The windsock was pointing towards the lawn. A fine aeroplane, as platinum-coloured as a film star, the Lockheed Superbus 999, was waiting for them, surrounded by photographers.
They took off.
Powered by four engines, the plane rose into the sky as straight as Jacob’s ladder while the stewardess placed in front of them, on plywood tables, some drinks that were tilted by the perpendicular ascent, tilted as when one drinks.