As for sick people, patients, I had no illusions … In another neighborhood they’d be no less grasping or jugheaded or weak-kneed than the ones here. The same wine, the same movies, the same sports talk, the same enthusiastic submission to the natural needs of the gullet and the ass would produce the same crude, filthy horde, staggering from lie to lie, bragging, scheming, vicious … brutal between two fits of panic.
But just as a sick man changes sides in bed and in life, so we too are entitled to move from side to side, it’s the only thing we can do, the only defense that’s ever been found against Fate. No good hoping to drop off your misery somewhere on the way. Misery is like some horrible woman you’ve married. Maybe it’s better to end up loving her a little than to knock yourself out beating her all your life. Since obviously you won’t be able to bump her off.
Anyway, I slipped away from my mezzanine pad in Raney very quietly. At my concierge’s they were all sitting around the table over wine and chestnuts when I passed the lodge for the last time. They didn’t see a thing. She was scratching herself, and he, bent over the stove, befuddled by the heat, was so far gone in drink that he couldn’t keep his eyes open.
As far as those people were concerned, I was slipping into the unknown, a kind of endless tunnel. It feels good to have three less people knowing you, that is, spying on you and doing you dirt, three people without the faintest idea what’s become of you. It’s great. Three, because I’m counting their daughter, their little girl Therese, who scratched her fleas and bedbug bites so hard that she was all broken out and festering with boils. It’s true that you got so badly bitten at my concierge’s that going into their lodge was like crawling into a scrubbing brush.
Falling on the people who passed in the street, the long, naked, whistling finger of gas in the entrance turned them instantly into ghosts, gaunt or stout, framed in the black doorway. The same passers-by would then go and find themselves a bit of color here and there, in the light of windows or street lamps, and finally lose themselves, as black and shapeless as myself, in the night.
I was no longer under any obligation to recognize these passers-by. Still, I’d have liked to stop them for just one second in their aimless roaming, just long enough to tell them once and for all that I was clearing out, getting lost far far away, so far that I didn’t give a shit for any of them and they had no way of hurting me now, it was no use trying …
When I got to the Boulevard de la Liberte, the vegetable wagons were bumping along the road to Paris. I went the same way. I was almost out of Raney. It was kind of chilly, so to warm myself I made for Bébert’s aunt’s lodge, which was a little out of my way. Her lamp was a spot in the darkness at the end of the corridor. “I really have to say good-bye to his aunt,” I said to myself. “Then it’ll really be over.”
She was sitting as usual in her chair, among the smells of her lodge. A small stove warmed the room, and there was her old old face that always seemed about to burst into tears now that Bébert was gone. On the wall, over her sewing box, hung a big school photo of Bébert in his school smock, with his beret and his cross. It was an enlargement, she’d paid for it with coffee coupons. I woke her.
She started up. “Good morning, doctor.” I still remember her exact words. “You look sick,” she said first thing. “Sit down … I’m not very well myself …”
“I was taking a little walk,” I said, feeling silly to be turning up like that.
“It’s late for a little walk, especially being you’re headed for Place Clichy … There’s a cold wind on the avenue at this time of night …”
She stood up and, stumbling this way and that way, started making us a hot grog, at the same time talking about everything under the sun, but mostly the Henrouilles and Bébert.
There was nothing I could do to make her stop talking about Bébert, though it made her miserable and was bad for her and she knew it. I listened without interrupting, I was in a torpor. She wanted to remind me of all Bébert’s endearing qualities, she set them out in a kind of display, taking a great deal of trouble because she was determined not to forget a single one of Bébert’s qualities. She kept starting over, and when she had them all in order and had told me everything that could possibly be told about bottle feeding him as a baby, she’d remember some little quality that would have to be lined up beside the others. She’d start once again from the beginning, and even so she’d forget something, and when that happened she had no recourse but to burst into tears of frustration. She was so tired her mind wandered. She sobbed herself to sleep. She hadn’t strength enough to retrieve her little memories of little Bébert, whom she had loved so dearly, from the darkness for very long. Nothingness was always close to her now and to some extent upon her. A bit of grog and fatigue and there it was, she fell asleep and snored like a distant airplane being carried away by the clouds. She had no one left on earth.
While she sat crumpled among the smells, I thought I’d go away and probably never see Bébert’s aunt again. After all, Bébert had slipped away, quietly and for good, and his old aunt would be following him before long. Her heart was sick and very old. It pumped blood into her arteries as best it could, but then the blood had a hard time climbing back into the veins. She’d be going to the big cemetery nearby, where the crowds of dead are waiting. That’s where she took Bébert to play before his illness. And then it would really be over. They’d come and repaint her lodge, and then it would seem as if we had all retrieved ourselves like Japanese billiard balls on the brink of the hole, shilly-shallying before they end it all.
Billiard balls also start out with vigor and brio, but they never get anywhere in the end. Neither do we, and the whole earth is good for nothing else than to help us all get together. Bébert’s aunt no longer had far to go; there was practically no vigor left in her. We can’t get together while we’re alive. There are too many colors to distract us and too many people moving around us. We can only get together in silence, when it’s too late, like the dead. I knew all that, but it didn’t help. I too had to move and go somewhere else. … I couldn’t stay there with her.
My diploma in my pocket made a big bulge, much bigger than my money and my papers. Outside the police station the patrolman was on duty, waiting to be relieved at midnight. He kept spitting. We bade each other good evening.
After the on-and-off light over the gas pump on the corner of the boulevard came the toll station with its clerks, verdant in their glass cage. The streetcars had stopped running. This was a good time to drop in on the toll clerks and talk about life, which is getting harder and harder, more and more expensive. There were two of them, a young one and an old one, both with dandruff, bent over enormous ledgers. Through their window you could see the fortifications, enormous shadowy piers jutting far out into the night as they waited for ships from so far away, ships so noble that you’ll never see such ships. That’s for sure. But we can hope for them.
I chewed the fat for quite a while with those clerks, we even drank a bit of coffee that was warming on the cast-iron stove. They asked me as a joke if I was going on vacation, at night like that with my little bundle. “That’s right,” I said. No use talking to those clerks about anything too peculiar. They couldn’t have helped me to understand. Still, I was miffed at their little joke and felt the need of saying something striking, of impressing them sort of, so I started talking off the cuff, about the campaign of 1816,* the one that had brought the Cossacks to the exact spot where we were then, to the Barrier, on the heels of the great Napoleon.
All this, of course, as nonchalantly as you please. Having convinced those lugs of my superior culture and sprightly erudition, I felt reassured and started down the avenue to the Place Clichy.
You’ve doubtless noticed the two prostitutes waiting at the corner of the Rue des Dames. They fill in the few weary hours separating deep night and early dawn. Thanks to them, life perseveres through the darkness. With their handbags chock-full of prescriptions, all-purpose hand
kerchiefs, and photos of children in the country, they are the connecting link. Be careful when approaching them in the darkness, for those women are so specialized—barely alive enough to respond to the two or three sentences which sum up everything one can do with them —that they barely exist. They are insect ghosts in buttoned boots.
Don’t speak to them, don’t go too near them. They’re dangerous. I had plenty of room. I started running between the car tracks. The avenue is long.
At the end of it you’ll see the statue of Marshal Moncey. He has been defending the Place Clichy since 1816 against memories and oblivion, against everything and nothing, with a wreath of riot very expensive beads. I came running down the deserted avenue and got there one hundred and twelve years too late. No more Russians, no more battles, no more Cossacks, no more soldiers, nothing except a ledge of the pedestal that you could sit down on, just under the wreath. And the little brazier with three shivering derelicts around it, squinting into the acrid smoke. Not a very good place to be.
A few cars now and then raced desperately for the exits.
In times of crisis you remember the Grands Boulevards as a place that’s not as cold as other places. What with my fever, it cost me an effort of the will to make my brain function. Under the influence of Bébert’s aunt’s grog, I descended the slope in flight from the wind, which isn’t quite so cold when it comes at you from behind. Near the Saint-Georges Métro station an old woman in a little round hat was wailing about her granddaughter in the hospital, stricken with meningitis, so she said. With that as an excuse, she was taking up a collection. With me she was out of luck.
All I could give her was words. I told her about little Bébert and also about a little girl I’d taken care of in Paris, who had died of meningitis while I was in medical school. It had taken her three weeks to die, and her mother in the bed next to hers was so unhappy she couldn’t sleep, so she masturbated the whole three weeks, and even when it was all over there was no way of stopping her.
Which goes to show that we can’t do without our pleasures for so much as a second, and that it’s very hard to be really unhappy. Life is like that.
The grieving old woman and I parted outside the Galeries. She was on her way to Les Hailes to unload carrots. She’d been plodding the vegetable trail and so had I, the same.
But I was drawn to the Tarapout.* It’s plunked down on the boulevard like a big luminous cake. And people come to it from all directions, in a frantic hurry, like grubs. They emerge from the night with wide-open eyes, all ready to stock up on images. The ecstasy that never ends. It’s the same people as in the Métro. But here outside the Tarapout they’re happy, same as in New York they scratch their bellies at the box office, secrete a little change, and rush, happy and resolute, into the glaring apertures. There was so much light on the people, on their movements, globes, and garlands of light, that it practically undressed them. You couldn’t have talked about anything personal in that lobby, it was the exact opposite of night.
Rather dazed myself, I went to a café nearby. At the table next to mine, when I looked up, who should I see but Parapine, my onetime professor, having a beer with his dandruff and all. We get together. There have been big changes in his life. It takes him ten minutes to tell me about them. No laughing matter. Professor Jaunisset had been so mean to him, had so persecuted him that he, Parapine, had been obliged to leave, to resign, and give up his laboratory. And then the mothers of the little girls at the Lycee had waylaid him at the gates of the Institute and beaten him up. Scandal. Investigation. Trouble.
At the last moment, thanks to an ambiguous advertisement in a medical journal, he had managed in the nick of time to secure another paltry means of support. Nothing much, of course, but down his alley and not fatiguing. The job was based on an ingenious application of Professor Baryton’s recent theories concerning the role of the cinema in the education of cretin children. A significant step forward in the exploration of the unconscious. The latest thing. The talk of the town.
Parapine took his special patients to the Tarapout, because it was so modern. He picked them up at Baryton’s rest home in the suburbs, and after the show took them back again—dazed, glutted with visions, safe, happy, sound, and wonderfully modernized. That was all he had to do. Once they were seated in front of the screen they needed no supervision. A perfect audience. Everybody was happy. The same film ten times in a row would have delighted them. They were without memory. Continuous surprise—what a joy! Their families were delighted. So was Parapine. So was I. We chortled with well-being and drank beer after beer to celebrate the material reinstatement of Parapine in the modern world. We’d stay there, we decided, until two in the morning, until after the last show at the Tarapout, then we’d pick them up and hurry them back to Dr. Baryton’s establishment at Vigny-sur-Seine by cab. A good deal.
Delighted to see each other, we started talking just for the pleasure of exchanging fantasies, first about our travels and then about Napoleon, who cropped up in connection with Moncey on the Place Clichy. Everything becomes a pleasure when two people want nothing more than to get on together, because then you finally feel free. You forget your life, that is, you forget all about money.
One thing leading to another, we even thought up some funny things to say about Napoleon. Parapine knew the history of Napoleon well. It had fascinated him in secondary school back in Poland, he told me. Parapine had been properly educated, not like me.
So Parapine told me that during the retreat from Russia Napoleon’s generals had a hell of a time stopping him from going to Warsaw to get himself sucked off just once more by the Polonaise of his heart. That was Napoleon all over, even in the midst of the worst reverses and calamities. Absolutely irresponsible! Think of his Josephine! He was her eagle, but it made no difference! Ants in his pants, come hell and high water! If you’ve got a taste for wine and women, nothing can stop you. And we all have it, that’s the sad part. That’s all we think about! In the cradle, at the café, on the throne, in the toilet. Everywhere! Everywhere! Our peckers! Napoleon or not! Cuckold or not! Pleasure first! To hell, says the Great Defeated One, with those four hundred thousand fanatics, emberesina’d* to the gills … as long as old ’Polion gets one last squirt! What a swine! Never mind! Life is like that! That’s how everything ends. In absurdity. Long before the audience, the tyrant is bored with the play he’s acting. When he’s good and sick of secreting delirium for the benefit of the public, he goes and gets laid. When that happens, he’s washed up. Destiny drops him in two seconds flat! His fans have no objection to his massacring them with might and main! None whatever! That’s nothing! They forgive him a hundred percent! What they won’t forgive is when he starts boring them all of a sudden. Good work is tolerated only when hammed up! Epidemics stop only when the microbes get disgusted with their toxins. Robespierre was guillotined because he kept saying the same thing, and what did for Napoleon was over two years of Legion-of-Honor inflation. That lunatic’s headache was having to supply half of sedentary Europe with a longing for adventure. An impossible job. It killed him.
Whereas the cinema, that new little factotum of our dreams, can be bought, hired for an hour or two like a prostitute.
Nowadays people are so bored that artists have been posted everywhere as a precaution. People are bored even in the houses where artists have been installed, with their overflow of emotion, their sincerities tumbling from floor to floor till the doors rattle. Each one of them is out to throb more outrageously and passionately, to abandon himself more intensely than his neighbor. Nowadays they decorate the crappers and slaughterhouses and pawnshops, and all that to entertain you, to cheer you up, to distract you from your Fate.
Just plain living, what a drag! Life is a classroom, and boredom is the monitor, always keeping an eye on you, you have to look busy at all costs, busy with something fascinating, otherwise he comes and corrodes your brain. A day that’s nothing more than a lapse of twenty-four hours is intolerable. Like
it or not, a day should be one long, almost unbearable pleasure, one long coitus.
Disgusting thoughts of this kind come to you when you’re crazed by necessity, when a desire for a thousand other things and places is squeezed into each one of your seconds.
Robinson, too, in his way, was harried by the infinite before his accident, but now he was through, or so I thought.
Seeing we were quietly settled at the café, I talked, I told Parapine everything that had happened since our last meeting. He understood things, even my kind, and I confessed to him that I had broken my medical career by leaving Raney so cavalierly. That was the only way to put it. It was no joke. Under the circumstances I couldn’t dream of going back to Raney. Parapine agreed.
While we were talking thus pleasantly, confessing as it were, the Tarapout had an intermission, and all in a heap the movie house musicians came over to the bistrot. So we all had a drink together. Parapine was well known to the musicians.
In the course of the conversation, it came out that a pasha was needed for the stage show. A silent part. The guy who’d played it before had left without notice. Yet it was a good part, and well paid. Not at all strenuous. And in addition, let’s not forget, charmingly surrounded by a sumptuous flock of English dancing girls, thousands of precise and agile muscles. Just my line and just what I needed.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 36