At seven o'clock, seeing that I was not preparing to leave my office, and probably afraid of being obliged to pay me overtime, my boss grabbed me by the back of my jacket and unceremoniously threw me out. I came back to the shop to say goodbye to him, but he closed the metal shutter on me. I withdrew my hand just in time. I didn't hold it against him. He was a bit of a brute, but really very nice, deep down. There I was, exiled, once again. I was condemned to pass by number 47.1 crossed rue Froidevaux, I pressed up against the cemetery wall, I would have liked to have melted into it, the ivy lashed my face, my gray overcoat blended in with the saltpeter, I scraped my fingernails, but it wasn't night yet, alas, the dead were so peaceful on the other side, it wasn't night yet, August again, the music of time, hot and humid, on the other side lay my father, Rene Marlaud, 1902-1953, and no trace of my mother, gone up in smoke somewhere in Germany, August, again, but when would night fall, and Madame C., on the other side, watching me with her hippopotamus eye. I couldn't help looking away from the gray wall. The concierge's head emerged from the marsh. It must have been terribly hot, and yet I was cold. I lifted up the collar of my camelhair overcoat. I caught cold so easily. All my life I've been cold. Except when my father took me in his arms and let me stroke his prickly bearded face. August, all those leaves, the insects clinging to my hair, buzzing, and boulevard Ossements itself, in its greenish melancholy. There was a strange, miserable silence. You wanted to spin round, spin, spin, until you fall, an airplane in flames, like when you were small. And those grassy smells coming from who knows where, gardens, over there, probably, beyond the lime trees, in the splendor of the hollyhock. A young woman in a summer dress was weeping in the middle of the street, silently. She was pulling up, in vain, a dirty underskirt, which kept falling back down. The ivy, on the cemetery walls, had dark tints to it. The wire fencing that protected it from the living was painted purple. Yet if you wanted to, you could walk against the grayish stones, as I was, it was a question of habit. I was gazing at a chicken gizzard, from which some coarse-ground grains were spilling out, some tiny pebbles. Life had never seemed to me so slow and atrocious. Terrifying. The sky was taking on an ugly color of spoiled calf's liver. It would rain, that night. With a storm, perhaps, and a very strong wind.
Madame C. crossed the street and took me by the hand.
The strangeness of our sexual relations had put me off a bit in the beginning, of course, but then I ended up taking some pleasure in them. You get used to anything. I would wash myself for a long time after lovemaking. After all, it wasn't so unpleasant as all that to be a phallus-man, the w y there used to be cannon-men in the circuses. Madame C. was often very melancholic. She was only inexhaustible when it came to her childhood. Outside of that, and the question of the toilet, she was silent most of the time. She never spoke to me of her husband. I only knew that I looked like him. One evening, she confided to me that she was bored absolutely shitless on this earth, bored beyond all belief. Once she had extirpated me from her vagina, she knocked back about ten Calvados and fell asleep, curled up like a monstrous fetus. I quietly slipped out and returned to my little apartment. Sometimes, Madame C. made me think of an exiled queen, or an Oriental princess whom seclusion had made obese. She had perhaps been very beautiful in a former life. One evening, I brought her an old Frehel record. "You know, Madame, it's the song that she was listening to in Pepe le Moko." I never managed to call her anything other than "Madame," because she intimidated me. "It's beautiful, my little Adolphe, it's so beautiful!" She wept.
Madame C. was very fond of reading. She often opened up the mail of the building's residents ("all bastards," she confided to me, "you wouldn't believe the filth I read. If I don't like the letters, I don't let them have them. The others I seal up again, they don't notice a thing. Anyway, screw them. Humanity, Bastards Incorporated, my little blue cat"). She was sentimental: Max Du Veuzit, Guy des Cars, Gilbert Cesbron, Didier Decoin. For her birthday, I gave her Pnin. She asked me if this Nabokov was a Communist. I reassured her. "You'll see, it's very beautiful. It's the story of a bachelor. It's everyman's story. It's heartbreaking." She stopped at the tenth page. "Your thing's stupid," she told me simply. Same failure with Pierre- Jean Jouve and The Desert World. "What's with these fags? You going all village priest on me?" I had no luck with my books. I would have probably done better to let her read what she liked. But no. I was stubborn. I couldn't stand that she didn't like the same things I did. Svevo's As a Man Grows Older was the final straw. She thought I was making fun of her. "I'm forty-eight, my little Adolphe, I'm not an old woman yet, remember that!" She was an offended woman. She had probably suffered too much in the past, Madame C. had grown ill tempered. I was discouraged. I didn't have much to say to her. Our relations were beginning to disgust me. Moreover, I had been feeling a terrible sense of guilt since my romance began: my father's grave was a bit neglected. I didn't take the same care as before in hunting down its polluters.
It was toward the end of August that the drama broke out. I say drama, but that isn't the right word. There's no drama with us, messieurs, nor tragedy: there is only burlesque and obscenity. We may not be happy, but we get a good laugh. A hollow one, of course, but still. And then, let's admit it, sorrow is funny. It's hypocrites who claim the opposite (besides, those great humanists of ours secretly chuckle when they admire the disorder of the world). One evening Madame C. wanted us to go out together to the movies. I wasn't that keen on being seen with her, but as she insisted, I ended up giving in. It was a porno that someone had recommended to her, Barbara Broadcast, which they were playing at the "Maine," just behind the lodge. I personally don't have anything against pornos—quite the contrary—and I obediently followed Madame C. After all, a bad porno is better than a good film by Lelouche, or racking your brains over whether Romy Schneider is going to lave an abortion or not in Sautet's latest film. Pornography isn't always where you think it is. The film was far from crap. Two or three scenes were even beautiful, provocative. The main actress was rather moving. Madame C. held her breath. There weren't many audience members in the theater, luckily, her six and a half feet weren't in anyone's way. Poor audience, sparse, timid, touching. When the lights came up, Madame C. stood upwithout a word. She didn't seem her usual self. She didn't utter a peep the whole way to the lodge. She held me by the hand and squeezed me very tightly. I could tell she was aroused. Once we got to the lodge, she undressed feverishly. Then she sat down on a stool and looked at me solemnly: "You know what I found most moving in that film, my little blue cat, is when the cook fucked the baroness up the ass in the middle of all those simmering dishes ... What do you say we try it'? ..." Without waiting for me to answer, she grabbed me, tore off my clothes, and tried to insert me between her enormous buttocks. This time the idea of such a journey drove me crazy. I managed to slip away from her, the horror of the situation increased my strength, it was too much, the runt revolted, he yelled, he hopped from stool to stool, and finally, he knocked Madame C. out with an enormous pot. Then he ran back to his place, naked as a worm, and he locked himself in.
I didn't leave my apartment for two weeks. I phoned my boss to tell him that I was seriously ill. Terrible asthma attacks laid me up in bed. I was living in a state of perpetual terror. The slightest sound made me jump. At any moment, especially at night, I thought I heard the elephantine step of Madame C. in the stairwell. My door was securely bolted, but I knew very well that, with a simple flick of her wrist, she was capable of smashing it to bits. I had nightmares where King Kong was chasing me so he could sodomize me. Giant women disguised as little girls surrounded me, clapping their hands. I was sinking into quicksand, I was sinking straight to the bottom, unable even to cry out. Sometimes, Madame C.'s vagina was endowed with teeth, and she threatened to cut me in two if I wasn't nice to her. In the morning, I was so depressed, so agonized, that I didn't even have the courage to keep an eye on my father's grave. I spent the whole day flopped on my bed. I closed the shutters so as not to see the cemeter
y crushed by the heat. And, sometimes, I missed Madame C., and I wondered why she wasn't coming to see me and I burst into tears. I was terribly cold.
I began to recover, slowly. I was no longer afraid to leave my place. I was ready to apologize to Madame C. for having knocked her out. So I stopped by the lodge. She was no longer there. A little old woman, all shriveled, had taken her place. "What, you don't know what happened? Don't you read the paper? Madame C. tried to kill herself, she threw herself under the train, at Gaite station. Funny, isn't it? The poor woman must not have been in possession of all her faculties anymore. And then, hold on, monsieur, would you believe it, the old biddy didn't even manage to get squashed. It was the train that went off the rails. Six people had minor injuries, yes monsieur. I myself say that women like that are a public menace, that's all there is to it. First off, the woman was just too fat. It was abrr,rmal. Where is she? At Sainte-Anne, I think. Yes, with the crazies." The little old woman seemed beside herself with joy, telling me the misfortunes of the woman she had replaced. I left, shrugging. All that no longer concerned me.
Monsieur Rameau greeted me coolly at the shop. He didn't even ask me if I was feeling better. He himself wasn't in good health just then. He confided to me that he was afraid he had cancer. He sat in the shop, in front of his plastic flowers, hands on his knees, for hours at a time. He would just stare into space at who knows what. Good breeding no longer told. Good breeding wasn't good for anything anymore, not even for humiliating me.
Every evening, as usual, I left the shop at seven o'clock. Now it was my job to close the metal shutter. The August light was relentless, still, at that hour. Not a shadow in the street. And yet, I was shivering. My overcoat offered poor protection. My ears rang. The ivy was motionless. Not a breath of air. Sometimes I went to sit down in front of the statue of Ludovic Trarieux, 1840-1904, among the old men who, like me, no longer wanted anything and weren't taking off for vacation. I hadn't the slightest desire to leave rue Froidevaux. Traveling terrifies me. Anyway, where would I go? The world is a prison. My cell was enough for me. Sometimes a hot wind stirred up the dust on square Georges-Lamarque. The acrid smell of dog urine brought tears to your eyes. I often thought of that Japanese movie director, Ozu, who had this simple word carved onto his grave: "Nothingness." I too walked about with such an epitaph, but while alive. I was falling into the void of time, and nothing, no one, could hold me back. The world, to my ears, was just funeral music. Around eight o'clock, I went back to my apartment. My summer evenings were very full since the rifle with telescopic sight had been delivered. Admirable object. Sometimes, at night, I got up to caress it. Sometimes I even took it into my bed. It was a wonderful mistress, so chaste, so cold. In the morning, I opened the window wide, and I aimed the gun at my father's grave. Yesterday, I shot a dog that got a little too close. The first bullet only wounded its paw, it tried to run away, but I put a bullet through its head. As an example to others. Word to the wise. The world is strange through a telescopic sight. Geometrical. Clean. Snow crystal. A circle, a cross: absolute concision. Void. Sometimes, I amused myself by shooting butterflies, like that, just for the fun of it. They vanished in a puff of dust in the summer light I felt a sense of power I'd never felt before. And to think that I had so long thought of myself as a runt! I'd had no idea there was such strength in me! Henceforth I would be hard and cold, as is proper when entrusted with a mission. Every now and then I amused myself by aiming my rifle at passersby. With just one gesture, I would have been able to send them to the nothingness from which they came. But I spared them. I took pity on them. I had practically stopped thinking of Madame C. I barely suffered anymore, or rather, my suffering was of another order, it was the solitude of kings, of Gods, of great conquerors, the tender sadness that swept over me when I saw my subjects, those poor worms, crawling under my window. I had mastered nature: the trees, in my telescopic sight, bowed before me, they begged my forgiveness, and the birds in the sky, and the seasons, and the clouds, all guilty. But was it their fault? I would have probably done better not to create them in the first place.
Every morning, I greeted my people, the dead, my only friends, with a big wave of my hand. I watched over them the way God watches over the living. I no longer even knew who Madame C. was. Or M. Rameau. I had stopped going to work. The day before, three cats had been sent to the firing squad, three scrawny white cats that had gotten into the bad habit of sleeping on my father's grave. And why would I have spared them? Rene Marlaud, 1902— 1953, had called for their heads, I had to give them to him, for his anger would have been terrible. More and more often I felt the urge to shoot at passersby, at random. This morning, in my telescopic sight, appeared the nasty girl who had called me a slug at the shop. I spared her, this time, but don't let me see her pass by in the street again! She was no longer in mourning, of course. I followed her as far as I could with my telescopic sight, and when I lost sight of her I was so excited that I couldn't keep still. Yes, how long would I be sparing my subjects? At night, often, I suffocated. I seemed to hear my father breathing near me. His breath was fetid. I thought with horror what Strindberg said in Inferno: "For the dead have bad breath, like debauchees after a sleepless night." I usually only fell asleep early in the morning, when the birds began to taunt me.
At the beginning of September, there was a letter from Madame C. She was still at Sainte-Anne. She complained about the food, which wasn't good, and the overcrowded conditions. She was still calling me her "little blue cat." She missed me. She asked me if I could send her the photo of Luis Mariano in Violettes Imperiales, the one that was above the dresser. She told me it would give her a bit of company. She made some incoherent remarks about the Spanish border, and spoke to me of Hondarribia right across from Hendaye, where the light was so beautiful. Might I be able to dig up a color postcard for her of Biarritz in the spring? The Casino, if possible. If not, the Rocher de la Vierge. She would also very much like a box of marrons glaces, and some big shiny lollipops, the "Marquise de Sevigne" brand. But did they still make those? She asked me for some news about her little Persian cat, Missia, which had died in 1938. I was put in charge of kissing and cuddling it for her. She wasn't too unhappy, here, they were pretty nice to her, but she knew that when she left, she would be a very old woman, with white hair, and that attracting a man would then no longer be possible. That worried her sometimes, and she didn't sleep as well. But in the end she was dealing with it. She thanked me in advance, she kissed my hands, and wished me a merry Christmas, and my dad, and my mom, and all my brothers, and all my sisters, and also the humble captain, and also all my pets, all my toys, my teddy bear, and, of course, the farmyard turkeys, her cousins. I really wondered how I'd been able to read such a pack of nonsense all the way to the end. And yet, I was crying, Adolphe Marlaud was crying. He swallowed his tears, silently. He found that they tasted strange, not even salty. Suppose his father had caught him? Oh no, he mustn't be caught red-handed. He was like his father, a real man, not a whimperer. What the hell did it matter to him, Jewish children herded into a stadium? He obeyed orders. He had to guard the grave.
He rolled up Madame C.'s letter into a ball and threw it in the trashcan; then he went to carefully wash his hands, because he had read somewhere about madness, that it could be contagious.
The High-Life Page 3