Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  "She looked at me as if to say, 'Ah, you poor and innocent and spoiled boy, little do you understand what you have in store for you.' Well, she was right, of course. But I might as well have said the same to her, for little did she know during those affluent years of her and her husband's life that the economic ax would descend, and was she any better prepared to fend off its blow than I? Naturally not, but she imagined my future worse than hers by virtue of my utter lack of ambition or skill, for in those days, as I may have mentioned, I could not sew a button or fry an egg, nor did I ever wish to learn these arts ... and, as for ambition, well, I imagine I've described well enough what little desire I had to pursue all else but studied idleness — a busy enough occupation but hardly adequate to win remuneration in the trade-offs of the human marketplace.

  "Above all the question: What of myself could I sell? My good manners? My fine taste in gloves and custom-made shirts? What would that lead to but a clerkship in one of the various haberdashers where I formally had been a customer. Nonsense! No one there would have me. And imagine my having to serve an acquaintance: 'This way to the hat counter, sir.' No, that route was closed. What then else? Sell my body perhaps. Women, I must say at once, were never interested in me that way — not even in my youth, I mean. No, always I was the one who paid, who had to buy. Not my lot to become the lover of a woman who would sell her last diamond to keep her man cozy in bed and at large to enjoy all the enjoyable things of urbane society. And all the rich women I knew actually seemed content in the company of their handsome nephews or, let us say, those men who are the nephews of all women.

  "So there we were, this little transformed trio, worthless to the world and, except for a few kind, futile words and feeble pulls at the worn heartstrings of mutual affections, worthless to one another as well.

  "This was my first lesson in the ways of terminal family love, and I learned it well, for from that day forth I never wished to, nor did I ever again, set eyes on either of my progenitors. Brand me spoiled and selfish and cruel, yet I am not any of these regarding progenitors in the world at large. The lesson must be learned, the sooner the better for all involved: When love of any kind has outlived its feeling and usefulness and assumed the form of habit or obligation, it is time to move on, to cast off from the mooring, as the captain might say, and sail, sail away. Should I have stayed there in that rooming house to share their fate? Me? Drift out among the unkind streets of my city, trolling for little bits of things to carry home? 'Here! Mama and Papa, here! My ancient and strange dears, for the sake of the life you gave me and the goods and services you gladly provided me, I bring you this small change, the coins of my labor. And now let us set out the dish of porridge and open the skimpy tin of lean sardines, salted and oiled ... and here, a knot of stringy carrots, a slice or two of mulish salami.' Never mind. Let's end that, quite.

  "The idea for my salvation came to me just as my mother entered her third tear fest and my father his fifth hysteric grin. Actually the idea must have been inspired by their routine, for did not these physical manifestations of their misery speak for a translation from one idiom to another? My father's grimaces were the muscular and fleshly translation of what otherwise would have been sounds and words — and how many more of my parents' corporal signals of loss and grief need I witness before realizing the path of my own escape and survival? 'Translate.' The word, in its imperative form, rose up from my deep-most depths. Peeperkorn of the several tongues at service to the paying world.

  "So then I was gone; no kisses and good-byes, no wasting of time once I knew I was bound for deliverance. Off to find my livelihood, if not my fortune. I started right that day by walking into the offices of the Mondex, SA, and asking for a certain Herr Raiss (whom I knew only by name), the man recently selected to direct the largest of all consortia in Asia and Africa and South America. Consortium of what? you may ask. Of anything, I answer, of rubber and sisal and cocoa plantations, and mines of tin and bauxite, and all such items whose importance one never notices unless one trades or traffics in them, and yes, this very man whom I had asked to see, sending my card across the table of one of his front-office minions, was the director of all, and yes, you guessed it, after some minutes I am directly invited to Herr Raiss's chamber while others are still cooling their sturdy heels in the waiting room.

  "Those waiting others are no less than high dignitaries and ministers and the like, for to get even as far as his main office antechamber required you be of considerable substance, but I march through and am escorted courteously into his office — entirely Second Empire furniture and ornaments and desks, a little museum of Second Empire, come to think of it. Before I could utter a word, a young man of about my age rose from his desk and greeted me with such effusiveness that I was certain he had the wrong person in mind. 'My dear, dear Peeperkorn, at last I have the pleasure of meeting you again.' My mind raced. Who but who was this man who could possibly make life easier for me? Where, in heaven's name, where did we meet, if ever we met?

  "'Heard that you have quit Paris. Are you to stay here with us now for a while?'

  "'No. Just traveling through.'

  "'Naturally this is none of my affair, but I've always been so curious about you and ... well, since you've popped into my office just like that, I thought you might not be too affronted by my directness. On the way to where, may I ask, my dear Peeperkorn? Now that you are flattened — if I hear correctly — where shall you go?'

  "So the news of my bad fortune had preceded my own arrival home. So much for my hopes of posing as a man for whom employment was the whimsical aspiration of a rich eccentric. Who the devil was this man? So overriding was this question that I gladly would have forgone my job application, so to speak, in order to resolve it. This man, this stranger of immense power had, for some reason, decided to toy with me, so thought I, while he, with the greatest show of solicitude, continued to play out his game.

  "'Where shall I go? Herr Raiss, let me tell you: to the edges of the world on foot so long as I learn exactly how you know me since I, I'm afraid, haven't a notion of who you may be.'

  "'Peeperkorn, Peeperkorn, I'm not offended, positively not, for why should you have recalled our meeting when I was only one among a group of our countrymen whom Herr Bruckner introduced to you in the Café Voltaire one late winter afternoon when you were discoursing on the virtues of the art of the Second Empire — this some three years ago, when nothing would have distinguished me to merit your attention, because three years ago, when we met, I was even less an entity, a personage, so to say, than now, when my position, not my personality, I must confess, brings me into social and human dimension?'

  "'How you efface yourself, Herr Raiss.'

  "'I allow myself this self-denigration, but I know you are aware that I do this to charm you and set you at ease, for most others who come before me tremble with servile anxiety and all manner of obsequious sycophancy, which, needless to say, as a wise administrator, I encourage. I have cut off most all the acquaintances of my youth and university days for fear they may perpetrate some act or word of some familiarity that my current position cannot sustain or tolerate, but you, Peeperkorn, you who have in some measure changed my life, deserve better treatment.'

  "'How fortunate for me, Herr Raiss,' I said. 'Now would you allay my intense curiosity and tell of our meeting and how it changed your life, as you claim?'

  "Herr Raiss and I settled ourselves back in great leather chairs before a huge fireplace; lunch was brought, and consumed, and over the Davidoff's and vintage brandy I heard the following story:

  "'I descend from a line of professional people,' began Herr Raiss. 'My father was a renowned gynecologist, the queen's in fact; my mother, a curator in our museum of natural history, her specialty, the termites of Peru and Chile. So engrossed in their careers and scientific interests were these parents of mine that when, on occasion, they surfaced from their labors to find me in their lap, so to speak, incapable of parenthood as they were, they brushed me
from said lap and called for this or that servant or household minion to deliver me to the appropriate chamber — the bedroom mostly — where I was, with the aid of some books and educational toys, expected to ripen, unseen, into full maturity, at which point I would join the ranks of some respectable profession and engage my life on terms resembling their own. Steadiness is all! The most exotic thing my father ever did was to get drunk at a party in honor of the queen's birthday and en route home tell my mother — in a delirium of giggles and high glee — that termites, in his estimation, were the silliest creatures invented by God. My mother did not speak to him for a week, but the transgression was forgiven, and they went along their steady ways soon after. I was destined, in short, for such high-flung paths of passion. But as you shall see, I rebelled and became a rebel.

  "'And now I shall skip an amount of years and bring myself to the doorsteps of the university, which steps I neither trod to ascend nor trod to descend. In short, I skipped this opportunity to advance myself and to satisfy my parents. Perhaps this new Viennese science would explain my shirking of a higher education as a revenge against my hypereducated parents, whom by this stage in my life I presumably would have or should have detested, and the proponents of this science would be in some part correct, for detest them I did, but not for their negligence of me when a child or for their benign and distinctly algid treatment of me during my adolescence, but for reasons I shall not enter into here, and as for education and learning, why, I reveredthese, in spite of their being the trademarks, so to speak, of my parents' whole being, so I would not likely have denied myself the education open to me merely to do these parents spiritual injury.

  "'Why I did not enter the university I shall no longer speak of, and I wish that you, Herr Peeperkorn, would not now or for that matter ever in the future, should you know me in that tense, raise that issue. And thus I drifted, cast off by my own hand, my heart grimly set against the world, my shoulders loaded with big chips, as the Americans say, oh! angry I was for reasons I refuse to divulge at the present time, and thus I wandered through Europe only to find myself in Paris, eking out a living as a bottle washer and all-around slave of the French, whom I detested and who in turn detested me and were only too glad to heap on me all the truly filthy and shitty work that they themselves would have had to do had they not had me, their garçon, to perform. "Hey, you there, Hun, mop up the toilet and lick out the bowls while you're at it." The fools.

  "'As for my brothers in misery, solidarity among the oppressed — there is none, or very little, and only among those who wish to make political capital of it. Your true, unselfish solidarity, the consideration of one oppressed person for another, that is the stuff of books penned by guilt-ridden children of the bourgeoisie. And so what was my route, do you then surmise? There in the cellars of the basement of the lowest caves beneath the hotel kitchen proper, where even the busboys spit on you, there I met one even lower than myself, a Chinaman who had passed himself off for a Vietnamese, one of the colonials of the empire, and thus been given the privilege to wash the bottles and dishes and pots and pans alongside me. And didn't I get my revenge! "Slant eyes! You yellow midget, give me a cigarette and light it for me quick before I twist your little coolie chicken neck."

  "'"You needn't go through all that. It really won't help you feel less a slave," this Chinaman said to me with splendid calm and dignity, and in flawless French, I may add. And in truth I was suddenly ashamed of myself for the imbecile and bully I had momentarily allowed myself to become. I had fallen low, just like those who tormented me, my comrades of the steel-counter brushes and the bristling brooms. I sulked and brooded about a long while before getting up the courage to apologize to him. "Yes, of course, think nothing of it," he said, offering me a cigarette. Then we returned to our work, and that was that. Well, to get along with my story, I went on this way for several months, but one day it grew worse, for I was alone. The Chinaman had left for who knows where, South America, I believe he said, and though we never had become friends, we did get along, and he seemed, without his doing anything to make it happen, to calm and reassure me just when I would grow most desperate and miserable. Well, he was gone, and there I was without a girl friend, a companion of any sort, alone in the loneliest city of the world, that's Paris, you know, when you are a foreigner and poor to boot.'

  "Well," Peeperkorn said, "having lived in Paris as a man of means, well respected and well treated, though a foreigner, I remained silent; I left him the integrity of his lament, for that was and would forever remain the Paris of his memories and his recitations, and then again, there I was in his hands, c'est à dire, waiting to ask him for employment, a position in some branch of his vast enterprise.

  "'Not that you would understand, having lived in Paris as you did, and shall again live,' Herr Raiss continued, with a slight coloring of his cheeks — flushed there by embarrassment or resentment, I did not yet know.

  "'At any rate, I was at the end of the line. I could not return home, nothing there. And here, I mean, there in Paris, I was being pulverized day by day. When you work like that, twelve or fourteen hours a day, you begin to forget you had a childhood, that you once had parents or friends or a cat named Nicolina you once loved. You get off work and go to a café where you know no one, even though you've sat there week after week; oh, yes, the barman may nod hello, but that's for his tip — there is not one person you can speak to about your toothache, say. Every day you start your life anew since no one knows you from the past; you are simply a man who comes to take a drink, a coffee. You are no one.

  "'You are nothing, while it gets later and later, and you stay in that café and have more of what you are drinking, or you leave for the street and nowhere, or you walk back to the hotel, to the windowless box of your room. And then, once there in your room, at eleven o'clock at night when you are weary and lonely and sick with self-pity, too tired to masturbate and unable even to think of a thing to excite yourself, because nothing erotic can penetrate the deadweight of exhaustion and sadness, what, then, is there to do but rumple your sheets, clout your pillow, and curse the mother who made you, until you fall into bitter sleep?

  "'One day I emerged from this routine, this habit of staying alive for no reason that I could give myself or anyone else, certain that this day I would resolve once and for all my future course. But as you know, Herr Peeperkorn, such resolutions usually resolve exactly nothing, and somehow I knew that this would be the case even on this day of resolve and hope. It was my day off, a Wednesday, in April, three years ago. I brushed up my old suit and shaved with extra care; my shoes took on a last dying gleam with the aid of my polishings and brushing and rag whacks ... almost respectable, but not really, for when you've sunk low, you can never surface again the way you once were; nothing short of a radical alteration will bring you back to your class, nothing less than new suits and fresh ties and gleaming shoes and a brand-new job to cap your manner.

  "'Yet I could pass for a distracted student of philosophy out for a stroll, one of those aging, perennial students with small but tidy incomes to keep them anchored to their books and tethered to their scholarly dreams — whom were we reading then? Bergson? Sorel? Fitche? Never mind, I strolled with my heart in my mouth, which is another way of saying you are trying not to look as if you have a prickly spike up your rear. And walking down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde, I argued with myself this way: Why should I die when others less worthy live without care, eating at splendid restaurants with impeccably smart women by their elbows, foot to foot under the draped table, drinking bottle after bottle of champagne just for the ordering? Others more swinish than I, more stupid than I live, live to parade little red threads of merit on their dishonest lapels, live to estivate by the edges of great oceans and breezy seas, my God! They live who have the wits of sheep and the charm of slugs while here I am rushing to suicide myself in this disgusting and overpraised river — the Seine, naturally. The French! How they can make whatever little the
y have appear so marvelous; they believe their own mythomaniac fabrications, and by some virtue of their belief, they make the entire world believe them, too. Oh! How I resented dying in that Seine of theirs, which they venerate as more mysterious than the Nile, more virile than the Amazon, more romantic than the Rhine, and yet there, in that whorish, overtrafficked river of theirs I was about to drown myself because while I loathed others, I also thought I had no right to live, believing that the lowest, most disgusting thing on this earth deserved more solace and joy in one moment than I did in a lifetime, for none was as base and vile and stupid and wicked and filthy and smelly as I.

  "'Let me decompose, let me be fish's meat, or let this unasked-for self serve the world in some wholesome manner or, short of serving it, let me, who feel more abject than a flake from a waiter's comb, let this hopeless animal, me, simply cease. This was the ambivalent state of mind when I had crossed the Pont Royal and stood or leaned, rather, against the stonework of the Quai Voltaire. In a moment the Seine would have me, another name added to its roster of the self-abandoned, another meaty meal for eels and river rats. I started to slide myself over the stoneworks, slowly sliding as if a sack of grain inching down a balustrade.

  "'Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turning about, I was saluted with immense warmth by a man I at once recognized as a former classmate, one who had gone on to the university, as was expected of him, while I had gone on to the very life I was now faintheartedly preparing to leave. We spoke. He tried not to make the disparity of our situations appear more poignant than in fact it was, while I took great and perverse pains to tell him every detail of my miserable situation — all this over lunch, which my friend most delicately assured me was his treat. How he put up with me I can't imagine. When I asked how he had been spending the years I had not seen him, he attempted to minimize his achievements and successes, while I pressed on him every sordid detail of my subterranean life in Paris. Why he persevered with me I have no idea — Christian charity, masochism, stupidity, boredom — but so consistent was he in attempting to maintain my self-respect that after some while I grew contrite and let down my pose and confessed that at twenty-five I was a failure, that I was truly miserable, and that the malignant fruits of rebellion were now growing from out my ears. And in this penitent and vulnerable mood we went, my friend and I, for a long, silent walk to digest this lunch and to absorb, each in his way, the meaning and the future of this encounter of unequals.