Max has called me to the bathroom to ask if he can use my hairbrush. Sure, use it! (Tomorrow I’ll get a new one!) And then I look at the bath tub, the last bit of water gurgling through the drain. The sight of those filthy cruds floating at the bottom of the tub almost makes me puke. Max is bending over the tub to clean the mess. He’s got the dirt off his hide at last; he feels good, even if he must mop up his own dirt. I know the feeling. I remember the public baths in Vienna, the stench that knocks you down . . .
Max is stepping into his clean linen. He’s smiling now—a different sort of smile than I ever saw him give. He’s standing in his clean underwear and browsing through my book. He’s reading that passage about Boris, about Boris being lousy and me shaving his armpits, about the flag being at half-mast and everybody dead, including myself. That was something to go through—and come out singing. Luck! Well, call it that if you like. Call it luck if it makes you feel any better. Only I happen to know differently. Happens it happened to me—and I know. It isn’t that I don’t believe in luck. No, but it isn’t what I mean. Say I was born innocent—that comes nearer to hitting the mark. When I think back to what I was as a kid, a kid of five or six, I realize that I haven’t altered a bit. I’m just as pure and innocent as ever. I remember my first impression of the world—that it was good, but terrifying. It still looks that way to me—good but terrifying. It was easy to frighten me, but I never spoiled inside. You can frighten me today, but you can’t make me sour. It’s settled. It’s in the blood.
I’m sitting down now to write a letter for Max. I’m writing to a woman in New York, a woman connected with a Jewish newspaper. I’m asking her to try to locate Max’s sister in Coney Island. The last address was 156th Street near Broadway. “And the name, Max?” She had two names, his sister. Sometimes she called herself Mrs. Fischer, sometimes it was Mrs. Goldberg. “And you can’t remember the house—whether it was on a corner or in the middle of the block?” No, he can’t. He’s lying now and I know it, but what the hell. Supposing there was no sister, what of it? There’s something fishy about his story, but that’s his affair, not mine.
It’s even fishier, what he’s doing now. He’s pulling out a photograph taken when he was seven or eight—a photograph of mother and son. The photograph almost knocks the pins from under me. His mother is a beautiful woman—in the photograph. Max is standing stiffly by her side, a little frightened, the eyes wide open, his hair carefully parted, his little jacket buttoned up to the neck. They’re standing somewhere near Lemberg, near the big fortress. The whole tragedy of the race is in the mother’s face. A few years and Max too will have the same expression. Each new infant begins with a bright, innocent expression, the strong purity of the race moistening the large, dark eyes. They stand like that for several years and then suddenly, around puberty often, the expression changes. Suddenly they get up on their hind legs and they walk the treadmill. The hair falls out, the teeth rot, the spine twists. Corns, bunions, calluses. The hand always sweating, the lips twitching. The head down, almost in the plate, and the food sucked in with big, swishing gulps. To think that they all started clean, with fresh diapers every day . . .
We’re putting the photograph in the letter, as an identification. I’m asking Max to add a few words, in Yiddish, in that broomstick scrawl. He reads back to me what he has written and somehow I don’t believe a word of it. We make a bundle of the suit and the dirty linen. Max is worried about the bundle—it’s wrapped in newspaper and there’s no string around it. He says he doesn’t want to be seen going back to the hotel with that awkward-looking bundle. He wants to look respectable. All the while he’s fussing with the bundle he’s thanking me profusely. He makes me feel as if I hadn’t given him enough. Suddenly it occurs to me that there was a hat left here, a better one than the thing he’s got on. I get it out and try it on. I show him how the hat should be worn. “You’ve got to turn the brim down and pull it well over your eye, see? And crush it in a bit—like that!” Max says it looks fine on me. I’m sorry I’m giving it away. Now Max tries it on, and as he puts it on I notice that he doesn’t seem enthusiastic about it. He seems to be debating whether it’s worth the trouble to take along. That settles it for me. I take him to the bathroom and I set it rakishly over his right eye. I crush the crown in even more rakishly. I know that makes him feel like a pimp or a gambler. Now I try the other hat on him—his own hat with the stiffly curled brim. I can see that he prefers that, silly as it looks. So I begin to praise the shit out of it. I tell him it becomes him more than the other. I talk him out of the other hat. And while he’s admiring himself in the mirror I open the bundle and I extract a shirt and a couple of handkerchiefs and stuff them back in the drawer. Then I take him to the grocer at the corner and I have the woman wrap the bundle properly. He doesn’t even thank the woman for her pains. He says she can afford to do me a service since I buy all my groceries from her.
We get off at the Place St. Michel. We walk towards his hotel in the Rue de la Harpe. It’s the hour before dark when the walls glow with a soft, milky whiteness. I feel at peace with the world. It’s the hour when Paris produces almost the effect of music upon one. Each stop brings to the eye a new and surprising architectural order. The houses actually seem to arrange themselves in musical notation: they suggest quaint minuets, waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes. We are going into the oldest of the old, towards St. Severin and the narrow, twisting streets familiar to Dante and da Vinci. I’m trying to tell Max what a wonderful neighborhood he inhabits, what venerable associations are here stored away. I’m telling him about his predecessors, Dante and da Vinci.
“And when was all this?” he asks.
“Oh, around the fourteenth century,” I answer.
“That’s it,” says Max, “before that it was no good and after that it has been no good. It was good in the fourteenth century and that’s all.” If I like it so well he’d be glad to change places with me.
We climb the stairs to his little room on the top floor. The stairs are carpeted to the third floor and above that they are waxed and slippery. On each floor is an enamel sign warning the tenants that cooking and washing are not permitted in the rooms. On each floor is a sign pointing to the water closet. Climbing the stairs you can look into the windows of the hotel adjoining; the walls are so close that if you stuck your mitt out the window you could shake hands with the tenants next door.
The room is small but clean. There’s running water and a little commode in the corner. On the wall a few clothes hooks have been nailed up. Over the bed a yellow bulb. Thirty-seven francs a week. Not bad. He could have another for twenty-eight francs, but no running water. While he’s complaining about the size of the room I step to the window and look out. There, almost touching me, is a young woman leaning out of the window. She’s staring blankly at the wall opposite where the windows end. She seems to be in a trance. At her elbow are some tiny flowerpots; below the window, on an iron hook, hangs a dishrag. She seems oblivious of the fact that I’m standing at her side watching her. Her room, probably no larger than the one we’re standing in, seems nevertheless to have brought her peace. She’s waiting for it to get dark in order to slip down into the street. She probably doesn’t know anything about her distinguished predecessors either, but the past is in her blood and she connects more easily with the lugubrious present. With the darkness coming on and my blood astir I get an almost holy feeling about this room I’m standing in. Perhaps tonight when I leave him Max will spread my book on the pillow and pore over it with heavy eyes. On the flyleaf it is written: “To my friend Max, the only man in Paris who really knows what suffering is.” I had the feeling, as I inscribed these words, that my book was embarking on a strange adventure. I was thinking not so much of Max as of others unknown to me who would read these lines and wonder. I saw the book lying by the Seine, the pages torn and thumb-marked, passages underlined here and there, figures in the margin, coffee stains, a man with a big overcoat shoving it in his pocket, a voyage, a strange l
and, a man under the Equator writing me a letter: I saw it lying under a glass and the auctioneer’s hammer coming down with a bang. Centuries passing and the face of the world changing, changing. And then again two men standing in a little room just like this, perhaps this very room, and next door a young woman leaning out of the window, the flowerpots at her elbow, the dishrag hanging from the iron hook. And just as now one of the men is worn to death; his little room is a prison and the night gives him no comfort, no hope of relief. Weary and disheartened he holds the book which the other has given him. But he can take no courage from the book. He will toss on his bed in anguish and the nights will roll over him like the plague. He will have to die first in order to see the dawn . . . Standing in this room by the side of the man who is beyond all help my knowledge of the world and of men and women speaks cruelly and silently. Nothing but death will assuage this man’s grief. There is nothing to do, as Boris says. It is all useless.
As we step into the hall again the lights go out. It seems to me as if Max were swallowed up in everlasting darkness.
It’s not quite so dark outdoors though the lights are on everywhere. The Rue de la Harpe is thrumming. At the corner they are putting up an awning; there is a ladder standing in the middle of the street and a workman in big baggy trousers is sitting on top of it waiting for his side-kick to hand him a monkey wrench or something. Across the street from the hotel is a little Greek restaurant with big terra cotta vases in the window. The whole street is theatrical. Everybody is poor and diseased and beneath our feet are catacombs choked with human bones. We take a turn around the block. Max is trying to pick out a suitable restaurant; he wants to eat in a prix fixe at five and a half francs. When I make a face he points to a de luxe restaurant at eighteen francs the meal. Clearly he’s bewildered. He’s lost all sense of values.
We go back to the Greek restaurant and study the menu pasted on the window. Max is afraid it’s too high. I take a look inside and I see that it’s crowded with whores and workmen. The men have their hats on, the floor is covered with sawdust, the lights are dingy. It’s the sort of place where you might really have a good meal. I take Max by the arm and start dragging him in. A whore is just sailing out with a toothpick in her mouth. At the curb her companion is waiting for her; they walk down the street towards St. Severin, perhaps to drop in at the bal musette opposite the church. Dante must have dropped in there too once in a while—for a drink, what I mean. The whole Middle Ages is hanging there outside the door of the restaurant; I’ve got one foot in and one foot out. Max has already seated himself and is studying the menu. His bald head glistens under the yellow light. In the fourteenth century he would have been a mason or a joiner: I can see him standing on a scaffold with a trowel in his hand.
The place is filled with Greeks: the waiters are Greek, the proprietors are Greek, the food is Greek and the language is Greek. I want eggplant wrapped in vine leaves, a nice patty of eggplant swimming in lamb sauce, as only the Greeks know how to make it. Max doesn’t care what he eats. He’s afraid it’s going to be too expensive for me. My idea is to duck Max as soon as the meal is over and take a stroll through the neighborhood. I’ll tell him I have work to do—that always impresses him.
It’s in the midst of the meal that Max suddenly opens up. I don’t know what’s brought it on. But suddenly he’s talking a blue streak. As near as I can recall now he was visiting a French lady when suddenly, for no reason at all, he burst out crying. Such crying! He couldn’t stop. He put his head down on the table and wept and wept, just like a broken-hearted child. The French lady was so disturbed that she wanted to send for a doctor. He was ashamed of himself. Ah yes, he remembers now what brought it about. He was visiting her and he was very hungry. It was near dinner time and suddenly he couldn’t hold back any longer—he just up and asked her for a few francs. To his amazement she gave him the money immediately. A French lady! Then suddenly he felt miserable. To think that a strong, healthy fellow like himself should be begging a poor French lady for a few sous. Where was his pride? What would become of him if he had to beg from a woman?
That was how it began. Thinking about it the tears came to his eyes. The next moment he was sobbing, then, just as with the French lady, he put his head on the table and he wept. It was horrible.
“You could stick a dagger into me,” he said, when he had calmed himself, “you could do anything to me, but you could never make me cry. Now I cry for no reason at all—it comes over me, like that, all of a sudden, and I can’t stop it.”
He asks me if I think he’s a neurasthenic. He was told it was just a crise de nerfs. That’s a breakdown, isn’t it? He remembers the dentist again, his saying right away it’s nothing, just nervousness. How could the dentist tell that? He’s afraid it’s the beginning of something worse. Is he going mad perhaps? He wants to know the truth.
What the hell can I tell him? I tell him it’s nothing—just nerves.
“That doesn’t mean you’re going buggy,” I add. “It’ll pass soon as you get on your feet . . .”
“But I shouldn’t be alone so much, Miller!”
Ah, that makes me wary. I know what’s coming now. I ought to drop in on him oftener. Not money! No, he underlines that continually. But that he shouldn’t be alone so much!
“Don’t worry, Max. We’re coming down often, Boris and I. We’re going to show you some good times.”
He doesn’t seem to be listening.
“Sometimes, Miller, when I go back to my room, the sweat begins to run down my face. I don’t know what it is . . . it’s like I had a mask on.”
“That’s because you’re worried, Max. It’s nothing . . . You drink a lot of water too, don’t you?”
He nods his head instantly, and then looks at me rather terrified.
“How did you know that?” he asks. “How is it I’m so thirsty all the time? All day long I’m running to the hydrant. I don’t know what’s the matter with me . . . Miller, I want to ask you something: is it true what they say, that if you’re taken sick here they do you in? I was told that if you’re a foreigner and you have no money they do away with you. I’m thinking about it all day long. What if I should be taken sick? I hope to God I shouldn’t lose my mind. I’m afraid, Miller . . . I’ve heard such terrible stories about the French. You know how they are . . . you know they’ll let you die before their eyes. They have no heart! It’s always money, money, money. God help me, Miller, if I should ever fall so low as to beg them for mercy! Now at least I have my carte d’identité. A tourist they made me! Such bastards! How do they expect a man to live? Sometimes I sit and I look at the people passing by. Everyone seems to have something to do, except me. I ask myself sometimes—Max, what is wrong with you? Why should I be obliged to sit all day and do nothing? It’s eating me up. In the busy season, when there’s a little work, I’m the first man they send for. They know that Max is a good presser. The French! what do they know about pressing? Max had to show them how to press. Two francs an hour they give me, because I have no right to work. That’s how they take advantage of a white man in this lousy country. They make out of him a bum!”
He pauses a minute. “You were saying, Miller, about South America, that maybe I could start all over again and bring myself to my feet again. I’m not an old man yet—only morally I’m defeated. Twenty years now I’ve been pressing. Soon I’ll be too old . . . my career is finished. Yes, if I could do some light work, something where I shouldn’t have to use my hands . . . That’s why I wanted to become an interprète. After you hold an iron for twenty years your fingers aren’t so nimble any more. I feel disgusted with myself when I think of it. All day standing over a hot iron . . . the smell of it! Sometimes when I think on it I feel I must vomit. Is it right that a man should stand all day over a hot iron? Why then did God give us the grass and the trees? Hasn’t Max a right to enjoy that too? Must we be slaves all our lives—just to make money, money, money . . . ?”
On the terrasse of a café, after we’ve had o
ur coffee, I manage to break away from him. Nothing is settled, except that I’ve promised to keep in touch with him. I walk along the Boulevard St. Michel past the Jardin du Luxembourg. I suppose he’s sitting there where I left him. I told him to stay there awhile instead of going back to the room. I know he won’t sit there very long. Probably he’s up already and doing the rounds. It’s better that way too—better to go round bumming a few sous than to sit doing nothing. It’s summer now and there are some Americans in town. The trouble is they haven’t much money to spend. It’s not like ’27 and ’28 when they were lousy with dough. Now they expect to have a good time on fifty francs.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 18