I went to see Robinson at least twice a day. He groaned under his bandages as soon as he heard me climbing the stairs. He was really in pain, but not as much as he wanted me to think. He’d have cause, I foresaw, for much worse distress when he realized exactly what had happened to his eyes … I was evasive about the future. He complained of stinging in his eyelids. He thought that was what prevented him from seeing anything.
The Henrouilles were taking good care of him, in accordance with my instructions. No trouble on that score.
Nobody mentioned the plot anymore. We didn’t speak of the future either. As I was leaving them in the evening, we all took turns looking at one another, so intensely I always had a feeling that we were about to do away with one another once and for all. When I thought it over, that culmination struck me as logical and expedient. I could scarcely imagine the nights in that house. But there they would be in the morning, and together we’d face the world together just where we left it together the night before. Madame Henrouille would help me renew the dressing with permanganate, and we’d open the blinds a bit as a test. The result was always the same. Robinson didn’t even notice that we had just opened the blinds …
So the earth makes its way through the vastly menacing, silent night.
Every morning the son would welcome me with a little peasant phrase: “Well, well, doctor … Looks like another late frost!” he would observe, glancing up at the sky from under the little peristyle. As if the weather mattered. His wife would go out and try again to parley with her mother-in-law, but only succeed in redoubling her fury.
While we kept Robinson’s eyes bandaged, he told me about his beginnings in life. When he was eleven, his parents had apprenticed him to a high-class shoemaker. One day he delivered a pair of shoes to a lady customer, and she invited him to share a pleasure which up until then he had known only in his imagination. He was so horrified by what he had done that he never went back to his boss. In those days fucking a customer was still an unforgivable crime. Especially the lady’s chemise, all of chiffon, had had a phenomenal effect on him. Thirty years later he remembered that chemise in every detail. The lady swishing through her apartment full of cushions and fringed portières, her pink and perfumed flesh, had given young Robinson food for interminable and despairing comparisons to last him the rest of his life.
Yet a good many things had happened since. He’d seen continents and been through whole wars, but he’d never recovered from that revelation. It gave him pleasure to think about it, to tell me about the minute of youth he had enjoyed with the lady customer. “Having my eyes closed like this makes me think,” he observed. “It’s like a parade … Like having a movie show in my bean …” I didn’t dare tell him that he’d have time to get awfully sick of his little movie show. Since all thought leads to death, a day would come when he’d see nothing else in his movie show.
Not far from the Henrouilles’ house there was a little factory with a big engine in it. It shook their house from morning to night. And there were other factories a little further away that thumped and pounded the whole time, even at night. “We’ll be gone when the roof caves in,” Henrouille would joke, but he was kind of worried all the same. “It’ll happen sooner or later!” It was true that bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling. An architect tried to reassure them, but whenever you stopped in that house to listen to what was going on, you felt as if you were on a ship, sailing from one fear to another. Passengers, shut up between decks, making plans even sadder than life, economizing and dreading the darkness as well as the light.
Henrouille would go up to the bedrooom after lunch to read a while to Robinson, as I’d asked him to. The days passed. He treated Henrouille, too, to the story about that marvelous lady customer he had laid in the days of his apprenticeship. After a while the story became a kind of collective joke for everyone in the house. That’s what happens to our secrets when we spread them abroad. There’s nothing terrible inside us or on earth or possibly in heaven itself except what hasn’t been said yet. We won’t be easy in our minds until everything has been said once and for all, then we’ll fall silent and we’ll no longer be afraid of keeping still. That will be the day.
In the weeks while his eyelids were suppurating, I was able to entertain him with fairy tales about his eyes and the future. Sometimes I’d pretend the window was closed when it was wide open and sometimes that it was very dark outside.
But one day when my back was turned he went to the window himself to see what was what, and before I could stop him he had slipped the bandage off his eyes. He hesitated for quite a while. He touched the window frame first on the right, then on the left. He couldn’t believe it, but in the end he had to. There was no getting around it.
“Bardamu!” he shouted. “Bardamu! It’s open! The window’s open, I tell you!”—I didn’t know what to say. I stood there like an idiot. He was holding both arms out of the window, in the fresh air. Naturally he couldn’t see a thing, but he felt the air. He stretched his arms out in his darkness as far as he could, as if he were trying to touch the end of it. He didn’t want to believe it. His own private darkness. I pushed him back into his bed and said things to comfort him, but he didn’t believe me anymore. He was crying. He, too, had come to the end. There was nothing more we could say to him. A time comes when you’re all alone, when you’ve come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It’s the end of the world. Even grief, your own grief, doesn’t answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who. You’re not choosy at times like that, because even to weep you have to go back where everything starts all over, back among people.
“What will you do with him when he’s better?” I asked the daughter-in-law at lunch after this scene. They had asked me to stay and eat with them in the kitchen. Neither of them had any serious idea of how to get out of the mess they were in. The cost of buying him a pension terrified them, especially her, because she knew more about the price of arrangements for invalids. She had even gone to the Public Welfare and “taken steps.” Steps they avoided mentioning to me.
One evening after my second visit Robinson did everything he could think of to keep me with him, he wanted me to stay a bit later than usual. He went on rehashing all the memories he could muster about the things we had done and the places we had been together, even things we had never tried to remember before. He remembered things we had never had time to bring up. In his seclusion the world we had explored seemed to pour back on him with all the moans, the kindnesses, the old clothes, the friends we had left behind us; in his eyeless head he had opened a shop full of outworn emotions.
“I’ll kill myself!” he notified me when his misery seemed too great to bear. And yet he managed to bear his misery a little longer, like a weight that was much too heavy and infinitely useless, misery on a road where he met no one to whom he could speak of it, it was just too big and complicated. He couldn’t have explained this misery of his, it exceeded his education.
He was a natural-born coward, I knew it and so did he; he kept hoping we’d save him from the truth, but on the other hand I was beginning to wonder if there was anywhere such a thing as a real coward … It looks like any man has things he is willing to die for, quickly and gladly. Except that a chance to die pleasantly, the chance he’s looking for, doesn’t always materialize. So he goes off somewhere to die as best he can … He sticks around on earth and everybody takes him for a jerk and a coward, but the truth is that he simply lacks conviction. He only seems to be a coward.
Robinson was not prepared to die under the conditions offered. Under different conditions he might have been delighted.
All in all, death is something like marriage.
This particular death didn’t appeal to him, that was the long and the short of it.
Then he’d have to resign himself and accept his helplessness and distress. But for the moment he was frantically busy splotching his soul
with misery and distress. Later he’d put order into his misery and then a real new life would begin. He’d have to.
“You may not believe me,” he said to me that evening after dinner, piecing bits of memories together. “I’ve never had much of a gift for languages, but do you know, toward the end in Detroit I managed to carry on a bit of a conversation in English … I’ve forgotten it now, all except one little phrase … Two words … They’ve been coming back to me ever since this thing happened to my eyes … ‘Gentlemen first!’ That’s just about all I can say in English now, I don’t know why … of course, it’s an easy thing to remember … ‘Gentlemen first!” To take his mind off his troubles, we tried talking English together. We kept repeating “Gentlemen first” over and over again like idiots & propos of everything and nothing. A private joke. In the end we even taught it to Henrouille, who’d come up for a while to keep tabs on us.
While stirring up memories, we started wondering what might be left of all that … of all the things we’d known together … We wondered what could have become of Molly, our sweet Molly … As for Lola, I’d just as soon have forgotten her, but come to think of it I’d have welcomed news of them all, even little Musyne while I was at it … who was probably living in Paris, nearby … practically next door, in fact … Still, I’d have had to bestir myself to find out about her … There were so many people whose names, mannerisms, and addresses I had lost, whose friendliness and even their smiles, after so many years and years of trouble and worrying about the next meal, must have turned into pathetic grimaces, like old cheeses … Even memories have their youth … When you let them grow old, they turn into revolting phantoms dripping with selfishness, vanity, and lies … They rot like apples … So we talked about our youth, mulling it over. We didn’t trust it … Which reminded me, I hadn’t been to see my mother in a long time … And those visits had never done my nervous system any good … When it came to sadness, my mother was worse than me … Still in her little shop, she seemed after all those years and years to make a point of piling up disappointments around her … When I went to see her, she’d say: “You know, Aunt Hortense died two months ago in Coutances … Maybe you should have gone … And Clementin, you remember Clementin? … The floor polisher who played with you when you were little … Well, they picked him up the day before yesterday on the Rue d’Aboukir … He hadn’t eaten in three days …”
Robinson’s childhood had been so dismal he didn’t know what to say when he thought of it. Except for the episode with the lady customer, he couldn’t find anything, even in the far corners, that didn’t make him sick with despair; it was like a house full of repugnant, foul-smelling objects: brooms, slop jars, housewives, and smacks in the face … Monsieur Henrouille had nothing to say of his own youth including his military service, except that he’d had his picture taken with a pompom, and that picture was still hanging over the wardrobe.
When he’d gone back down, Robinson told me how worried he was that he’d never get the promised ten thousand francs now … “Don’t count on them!” was my advice. I thought it best to prepare him for that new disappointment.
Some bits of shot left over from the explosion kept surfacing at the edges of his wound. I removed them in several installments, a few each day. The pain was bad when I probed just above the conjunctiva.
We had taken every possible precaution, but the neighborhood people gossiped right and left all the same. Luckily Robinson suspected nothing, it would have made him a lot sicker than he was. No doubt about it, there was suspicion all around us. Moving about the house in her slippers, Madam Henrouille was quieter and quieter. You weren’t expecting her and then she’d be right on top of you.
What with the reefs all around us, the least doubt could wreck us all. Then the whole ship would crack, split, crash, come apart at the seams, and wash up on the shore. Robinson, the grandmother, the fireworks, the rabbit, his eyes, the unlikely son, the murdering daughter-in-law—we’d all end up with our garbage and our rotten secrets in the office of some furibund examining magistrate. I wasn’t very pleased with myself. Not that I’d done anything positively criminal. I hadn’t. But I felt guilty all the same. I was especially guilty of wishing deep down that this whole business would go on. In fact I couldn’t see any objection to all of us together drifting deeper and deeper into the night.
To tell the truth, there was no need of wishing, things were moving all by themselves, and moving fast.
The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They “employ” people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy. They have beautiful women, the poor have ugly ones. Clothing aside, they’re the product of centuries. Easy to look at, well fed, well washed. After all these years, life can boast no greater accomplishment.
It’s no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It’s been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals coming into the world, laboring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something … We’re not even capable of thinking death through.
The women of the rich, well fed, well lied to, well rested, tend to be good looking. That’s a fact. And maybe, after all, it’s enough. How do I know? Maybe that’s a reason for living.
“Don’t you think the women in America were prettier than the ones here?”—Robinson had been asking me things like that ever since he’d started chewing on his travels. He was getting curious, he even started talking about women.
I wasn’t going to see him quite so often now, because about that time I was put in charge of a small neighborhood dispensary for tuberculosis. I may as well call a spade a spade, it brought in eight hundred francs a month. My patients were mostly people from the zone, that village of sorts, which never succeeds in picking itself entirely out of the mud and garbage, bordered by paths where precocious snotnosed little girls play hookey under the fences to garner a franc, a handful of French fries, and a dose of gonorrhea from some sex fiend. A setting for avant-garde films where the trees are poisoned with laundry and lettuces drip with urine on Saturday night. In those few months of specialized practice I performed no miracles. Miracles were sorely needed. But my patients weren’t at all eager for me to perform miracles, they were banking on their tuberculosis to move them from the state of absolute misery in which they’d been moldering ever since they could remember to the state of relative misery conferred by microscopic government pensions. Their more or less positive sputum had been getting them periodically rejected for military service ever since the war. They got thinner and thinner, thanks to fever maintained by eating little, vomiting a lot, drinking enormous quantities of wine, and working in spite of it all, one day out of three, to tell the truth.
The hope of a pension possessed them body and soul. One day a pension would come to them like grace if only they had the strength to wait a little while before snuffing out completely. You can’t know what it is to come back and wait for something if you haven’t seen all the coming back and waiting poor people expecting a pension can do.
While the rain came down outside, they’d spend whole afternoons and evenings hoping in the corridor and doorway of my rundown dispensary, stirring up their hopes of percentages, their longing for definitely positive sputum, genuine hundred-percent tubercular sputum. Their hope of getting cured came far behind their hope for a pension … Of course they also thought about getting cured, but very little, they were much too dazzled by their dreams of an income, however infinitesimal. This ultimate, uncompromising desire left room only for negligible wishes, and even their death became by comparison a side issue, a sporting risk. Death after all is only
a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can’t understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget.
Little by little I’d broken my bad habit of promising my patients good health. The prospect of getting well didn’t thrill them. Good health can’t be anything but second best. Getting well means you can work. Isn’t that lovely? While a government pension, however negligible, is purely and simply divine.
When you have no money to offer the poor, you’d better keep your trap shut. If you talk to them about anything but money, you’ll almost always be deceiving them, lying. It’s easy to amuse the rich, all you need, for instance, is mirrors for them to see themselves in, because in the whole world there’s nothing better to look at than the rich. To keep the rich cheerful all you’ve got to do is move them up a notch in the Legion of Honor every ten years, like a sagging tit, that’ll keep them busy for another ten years. And that’s the truth. My patients were poor and selfish; they were materialists, shrunk to the measure of their sordid hope that positive sputum streaked with blood would get them a pension. Nothing else meant a thing to them. Not even the seasons meant a thing. They were aware of the seasons only insofar as the seasons affected their cough and the state of their health; in the winter, for instance, you’re a good deal more likely to catch cold than in the summer, but on the other hand you’re more likely to spit blood in the springtime, and during the summer heat it’s not difficult to lose as much as five pounds a week … Sometimes I heard them talking among themselves when they were waiting for their turn, and they thought I wasn’t there … They told endless horror stories about me and lies that would make you blow your imagination out. Running me down like that probably picked them up, gave them some sort of mysterious courage that they needed to be more and more ruthless, hard and vicious, to stick it out, to last. Having someone they could slander, despise, and threaten seems to have made them feel better. And yet I did all I could to please them, I went to bat for them, I tried to help them, I gave them plenty of iodine to make them spit up their filthy bacilli, but I never succeeded in neutralizing their cussedness …
Journey to the End of the Night Page 34