Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  All of a sudden you’ve become disgustingly old.

  All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn’t love it enough the way it was, that’s why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

  I tried to shout something into the foreman’s ear, he grunted like a pig in answer and made motions to show me, very patiently, the simple operation I was to perform forever and ever. My minutes, my hours, like those of the others, all my time, would go into passing linchpins to the blind man next to me, who had been calibrating these same linchpins for years. I did the work very badly from the start. Nobody reprimanded me, but after three days of that first job, I was transferred, already a failure, to pushing the little trolley full of washers that went jolting along from machine to machine. At one machine I left three, at another a dozen, at still another only five. Nobody spoke to me. Existence was reduced to a kind of hesitation between stupor and frenzy. Nothing mattered but the ear-splitting continuity of the machines that commanded all men.

  At six o’clock, when everything stops, you carry the noise away in your head. I had enough noise to last me all night, not to mention the smell of oil, as if I’d been given a new nose and a new brain for all time.

  By dint of renunciation I became, little by little, a different man … a new Ferdinand. It took several weeks. But then the desire to see people came back to me. Naturally not the factory hands, they were mere echoes and smells of machines like myself, lumps of flesh convulsed with vibrations. I wanted to touch a real body, a pink body made of soft, quiet life.

  I didn’t know a soul in that city, least of all any women. Finally, after a good deal of trouble, I obtained the vague address of a “house,” a clandestine brothel, at the north end of town. On several evenings in a row, after work, I strolled around the neighborhood on reconnaissance. The street was like any other, though maybe a little cleaner than the one where I lived.

  I located the house in question, it had a garden around it. To get in, you had to move quickly so the cop on duty nearby wouldn’t notice. That was the first place in America where I was received without brutality, amiably in fact, for my five dollars. And what beautiful young women, well rounded, bursting with health and graceful strength, almost as beautiful, come to think of it, as the ones at the Laugh Calvin.

  And these, at least, you could come right out and touch. I couldn’t help myself. I got to be a regular customer. It used up all my pay. When night came, I needed the erotic promiscuity of those splendid, welcoming creatures to restore my soul. The movies were no longer enough, that mild antidote was powerless to fight the physical horror of the factory. To survive, I needed lecherous tonics, drastic elixirs. In that house I didn’t have to pay much, they gave me friendly terms, because I brought the girls a few little refinements from France. Except on Saturday night, then there was no time for refinements, business boomed, and I had to make way for baseball teams on a spree, magnificently vigorous young bruisers, to whom happiness came as easily as breath.

  While the baseball teams were at it, I, likewise in high spirits, would sit alone in the kitchen, writing my short stories. I’m sure those athletes’ enthusiasm for the ladies of the establishment didn’t measure up to my own slightly impotent fervor. Confident in their own strength, those baseball players were blase about physical perfection. Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

  They visited the brothel mostly to make whoopee. Often they’d end up having terrible fights. The police would burst in and take them all away in little trucks.

  Toward Molly, one of the lovely girls there, I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love. I remember her kindness as if it were yesterday, and her long, blond, magnificently strong, lithe legs, noble legs. Say what you like, the mark of true aristocracy in humankind is the legs.

  We became intimate in body and mind, and took walks around town for a few hours every week. She was comfortably off, since she took in about a hundred dollars a day in the cathouse, while I made barely ten at Ford’s. The lovemaking she did for a living didn’t tire her in the least. Americans do it like birds.

  In the evening, when I’d finished pushing my little delivery wagon around, I’d meet her after dinner and force myself to put on a cheerful face. You’ve got to be cheerful with women, in the beginning at least. A vague desire came over me to suggest things we could do, but I hadn’t the strength. She understood the industrial blues, she was used to factory workers.

  One evening, just like that, a propos of nothing, she presented me with fifty dollars. First I looked at her. I didn’t dare. I thought about my mother and what she’d have said. And then it came to me that my mother, poor thing, had never given me that much. To please Molly, I went right out with her dollars and bought a lovely tan “four-piece” suit, which was what they were wearing that spring. They had never seen me arrive at the cathouse looking so natty. The madame played her big phonograph just to teach me how to dance.

  Later Molly and I went to the movies to break in my new suit. She asked me on the way if I was jealous, because the suit made me look sad and so did not wanting to go back to the factory. A new suit always throws you off. She gave my suit passionate little kisses when nobody was looking. I tried to think of something else.

  What a woman my Molly was! What generosity! What a body! What fullness of youth! A feast of desires! And then I was worried again. Was this pimping?

  To make matters worse, Molly pleaded: “Don’t go back to Ford’s. Get yourself a little job in an office … as a translator, for instance … That’s the thing for you …You like books …”

  Her advice was kindly given, she wanted me to be happy. For the first time somebody was taking an interest in me, looking at me from the inside so to speak, taking my egoism into account, putting herself in my place, not just judging me from her point of view like everyone else.

  If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. But it was too late to start being young again. I didn’t believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what’s more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we’re never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it’s too late to change. You’re a hundred-percent restless, and it’s set that way for good.

  Very lovingly Molly tried to keep me with her, to dissuade me … “Life can be just as pleasant here as in Europe,. Ferdinand. We won’t be unhappy together.” And in a sense she was right. “We’ll invest our savings … We’ll buy a little business … We’ll be like other people …” She said that to quiet my scruples. Plans for the future. I agreed with her. I was even rather ashamed of all the trouble she was taking to hold me. I was very fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vice, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority.

  I was afraid of hurting her. She understood and anticipated my concern. She was so nice that I finally told her about the mania that drove me to clear out of wherever I happened to be. She listened to me for days and days while I held forth, laying myself disgustingly bare, fighting with phantasms and points of pride, and she never lost patience, far from it. She only tried to help me get over my foolish and futile anxiety. She didn’t quite get the point of my ravings, but she always took my part against my phantoms or with them, whichever I preferred. She was so gentle and persuasive that I grew accustomed to her kindness and took it almost personally. But I felt that I was beginning to cheat on my so-called destiny, my raison d’être as I calle
d it, and stopped telling her everything that passed through my mind. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

  All that is commonplace. But Molly was gifted with angelic patience and had an unshakable belief in “vocations.” For instance, her younger sister at the University of Arizona had been smitten with a craze for photographing birds in their nests and wild animals in their dens. So to enable her to study that astonishing specialty, Molly regularly sent this photographer sister of hers fifty dollars a month.

  A really unbounded heart, containing something sublime, convertible into cash and not phony like mine and so many others. Molly would have liked nothing better than to take a financial interest in my dotty career. Though at times I struck her as pretty well off the beam, she thought my convictions real and not to be discouraged. She offered me an allowance and only asked me to draw up a little budget. I couldn’t make up my mind to accept. A last vestige of delicacy prevented me from banking any further, from speculating, on her really too noble and kindly nature. And that’s how I deliberately got myself in bad with Providence.

  I was so ashamed of myself that I even made a feeble attempt to go back to Ford’s. Nothing came of my heroic little gesture. I got as far as the factory gate but at that liminal point I froze. The thought of all those machines whirring as they lay in wait for me demolished my feeble work impulse once and for all.

  I stationed myself outside the glass front of the main power plant, that multiform giant which roars as it pumps something or other God knows where and brings it back again through a thousand gleaming pipes as intricate and menacing as lianas. One morning as I stood there in drooling contemplation, my Russian taxi driver came by. “Hey, you old rascal,” he says to me. “You’ve been fired! … It’s been three weeks since you showed up … They’ve already put a machine in your place … I warned you …”

  “At least,” I said to myself, “that finishes it … No need to come back …” And I beat it back to town. On the way home I dropped in at the Consulate to ask if by any chance they’d had news of a Frenchman by the name of Robinson.

  “Oh yes!” said the consuls. “Yes indeed! He’s been in here to see us twice, with false papers what’s more … Actually he’s wanted by the police! Do you know him? …” I let it go at that.

  After that I expected to meet Robinson any minute. I felt it in my bones. Molly was as kind and affectionate as ever. Once she felt sure I was planning to go away for good, she was even nicer than before. There was no point in being nice to me. Often on Molly’s free afternoons we took trips to the outskirts.

  Bare little hills, clumps of birches around tiny little lakes, people here and there reading dingy magazines under a sky heavy with leaden clouds. Molly and I avoided elaborate confessions. She knew the score. She was too sincere to say much about her grief. She knew what went on inside, in her heart, and that was enough for her. We kissed. But I didn’t kiss her properly as I should have, on my knees if the truth be known. I was always partly thinking about something else at the same time, about not wasting time and tenderness, as if I wanted to keep them for something magnificent, something sublime, for later, but not for Molly and not for this particular kiss. As if life would carry away everything I longed to know about it, about life in the thick of the night, and hide it from me, while I was expending my passion in kissing Molly, and then I wouldn’t have enough left, I’d have lost everything for want of strength, and life—Life, the true mistress of all real men—would have tricked me as it tricks everyone else.

  We went back to the crowds, and then I’d leave her outside her house, because the customers would keep her busy all night until early morning. While she was taking care of them, I can’t deny I was sad, and my sadness spoke to me so plainly of her that I felt she was with me even more than when she really was. I went to the movies to kill time. After the show, I’d board a streetcar going this way or that way and tour around in the night. After two o’clock flocks of timid passengers would get on, a type you seldom see before or after that hour, always pale and sleepy, in docile groups, bound for the suburbs.

  With them you could go a long way. Much further than the factories, to vague housing developments, little streets of shapeless bungalows. On pavements sticky with the small rain of dawn the daylight glistened blue. My streetcar companions vanished along with their shadows. They closed their eyes on the day. It was hard to make those specters talk. Too tired. They didn’t complain, not at all, they were the men who cleaned stores and more stores during the night, and all the offices in the city, after closing time. They didn’t seem as anxious as we day people. Maybe because they’d sunk to the very bottom of things.

  One of those nights when I’d taken still another streetcar and we’d got to the last stop and everybody was quietly getting off, I thought I heard someone calling me by name: “Ferdinand! Hey, Ferdinand!” Naturally it sounded outrageous in that dim light, I didn’t like it. Above the rooftops the sky was coming back in cold little patches, cut out by the eaves. Sure enough, someone was calling me. I turned around and instantly recognized Léon. He came over to me, speaking in a whisper, and we filled each other in.

  He’d been cleaning an office like the rest of them. That was as much of a gimmick as he’d managed to find. He walked heavily, with a certain true majesty, as if he had been doing dangerous and in a way sacred things in the city. Actually I’d noticed that all those night cleaners had that look. In fatigue and solitude men emanate the divine. His eyes were also full of it when, in the bluish half-light where we were standing, he opened them wider than eyes usually open. He, too, had cleaned endless rows of toilets and made whole mountains of silent offices sparkle.

  “Ferdinand,” he said. “I recognized you right away. By the way you got into the car … By the sad look on your face when you saw there were no women on board. Am I right? Isn’t that your style?” He was right, it was my style. Unquestionably, my soul was as obscene as an open fly. So his observation was apt and nothing to be surprised at. What I hadn’t expected was that he too was a failure in America. That came as a surprise.

  I told him about the galley at San Tapeta. But he didn’t know what I was talking about. “You’re delirious!” he said simply. He’d come over on a freighter. He’d have tried for a job at Ford’s, but his papers were just too phony, he wouldn’t have dared show them. “They’re barely good enough to keep in my pocket,” he said. For cleaning offices they didn’t much care who you were. They didn’t pay much either, but they looked the other way … This night work was a kind of Foreign Legion.

  “What about you?” he asked me then. “What are you doing? You still cracked? Still chasing rainbows? Still got the travel bug?”

  “I want to go back to France,” I said. “I’ve seen enough, you’re right …”

  “Best thing you can do,” he said. “For us the jig is up … We’ve aged without noticing it, I know … I’d like to go home too, but there’s still this trouble with my papers … I’ll wait a while and try and get hold of some good ones … I can’t complain about the work I’m doing … There’s worse. But I’m not learning English … Some of the guys have been at it for thirty years and all they’ve learned is ‘Exit,’ because it’s written on the doors they polish, and ‘Lavatory.’ You get the drift?”

  I got the drift. If Molly should ever fail me, I’d have to go into night work myself.

  No reason why that should ever stop.

  The fact is that when you’re at war you say peace will be better, you bite into that hope as if it were a chocolate bar, but it’s only shit after all. You don’t dare say so at first for fear of making people mad. You try to be nice. When you’re good and sick of wallowing in muck you speak up. Then everybody thinks you were raised in a barn. And there you have it.

  I met Robinson two or three times after tha
t. He wasn’t looking at all well. A French deserter, who made bootleg liquor for the gangsters of Detroit, let him occupy a corner of his shop. The business tempted Robinson. “I’d make a little rotgut for those bastards to pour down their throats,” he confided, “but you know, I’ve lost my nerve … The first going-over a cop gave me, I know I’d fold up … I’ve been through too much … Besides, I’m sleepy all the time … Not to mention the dust in those offices, my lungs are full of it … See what I mean? It wears you down …”

  We arranged to meet another night. I went back to Molly and told her the whole story. She tried not to show how bad I was making her feel, but it wasn’t hard to see she was miserable. I kissed her more often now, but her unhappiness was deep, more real than in other people, because most of us tend to talk as if things were worse than they are. American women are different. We’re afraid to understand, to admit it. It’s rather humiliating, but this is real unhappiness, not pride, not jealousy, there are no scenes, it’s genuine heartbreak. We may as well admit that we haven’t got it in us and that when it comes to the pleasure of being really unhappy we’re bone dry. We’re ashamed of not being richer in heart and everything else, and also of having judged humanity worse than it really is.

  Now and then Molly would let go and say something mildly reproachful, but it was always said gently and kindly.

  “You’re sweet, Ferdinand,” she’d say. “I know you try hard not to be as beastly as other people, but sometimes I wonder if you really know what you want. Think it over. You’ll have to find a way of earning your living when you get back there, Ferdinand … You won’t be able to roam around all night dreaming the way you do here … the way you enjoy so much … while I’m working … Have you thought of that, Ferdinand?”