The timing occupied him for quite a while. He explained what a difference a quarter of a degree could make. He was working on the carburetor, if I am not mistaken. I accepted this explanation, as I had the others, unquestionably. Meanwhile I was getting acquainted with the fly-wheel and some other more or less essential organs of the mysterious mechanism. Most everything about a car, I should say in passing, is more or less essential. All but the nuts underneath the chassis; they can get loose and fall out, like old teeth, without serious damage. I’m not speaking now of the universal—that’s another matter. But all those rusty nuts which you see dropping off when the car’s jacked up on the hoist—actually they mean very little. At worst the running board may drop off, but once you know your running board is off there’s no great harm done.
Apropos of something or other he suddenly asked me at what temperature the thermostat was set. I couldn’t tell him. I had heard a lot about thermostats, and I knew there was one in the car somewhere, but just where, and just what it looked like, I didn’t know. I evaded all references to the subject as skillfully as I could. Again I was ashamed not to know where and what this piece of apparatus was. Starting out from New York, after receiving a brief explanation about the functioning or non-functioning of the thermostat, I had expected the shutters of the hood to fly open automatically when the heat gauge read 180 or 190. To me thermostat meant something like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. My eye was constantly on the gauge, waiting for it to hit 180. Rattner, my then side-kick, used to get a bit irritated watching me watch the gauge. Several times we went off the road because of this obsession on my part. But I always expected that some time or other an invisible man would release the trap and the cuckoo would fly out and then bango! the shutters would open up, the air circulate between the legs, and the motor begin to purr like a musical cat. Of course the damned shutters never did fly open. And when the gauge did finally hit 190 the next thing I knew was that the radiator was boiling over and the nearest town was forty miles away.
Well, after the timing had been corrected, the points adjusted, the carburetor calibrated, the accelerator exhilarated, all the nuts, bolts and screws carefully restored to their proper positions, Dutter invited me to accompany him on a test flight. He decided to drive her up through Tijeras Canyon where there was a big grade. He set out at fifty miles an hour, which worried me a bit because the mechanic at the big service station had said to drive her slow for the next thousand miles until she loosened up a bit. The gauge moved slowly up to 180 and, once we were properly in the pass, it swung to 190 and kept on rising.
“I don’t think she’ll boil,” he said, lighting himself a cigarette with a parlor match. “Up here the principle is never to worry until she boils over. Cars act temperamental up here, just like people. It could be weather, it could be scales in the engine box . . . it could be a lot of things. And it mightn’t be anything more than altitude. The Buicks never did make big enough radiators for the size of the car.” I found this sort of talk rather cheering. More like a good French doctor. The American physician always says immediately—“Better have an X-ray taken; better pull out all your back teeth; better get an artificial leg.” He’s got you all cut up and bleeding before he’s even looked at your throat. If you’ve got a simple case of worms he finds that you’ve been suffering from hereditary constriction of the corneal phylactery since childhood. You get drunk and decide to keep the worms or whatever ails you.
Dutter went on to talk in his calm, matter of fact way about new and old Buicks, about too much compression and too little space, about buying whole parts instead of a part of a part, as with the Chevrolet or the Dodge. Not that the Buick wasn’t a good car—oh no, it was a damned good car, but like every car it had its weak points too. He talked about boiling over several times on his way from Espanola to Santa Fe. I had boiled over there myself, so I listened sympathetically. I remember getting near the top of the hill and then turning round to coast down in order to get a fresh start. And then suddenly it was dark and there were no clear crystal springs anywhere in sight. And then the lizards began whispering to one another and you could hear them whispering for miles around, so still it was and so utterly desolate.
Coming back Dutter got talking about parts and parts of parts, rather intricate for me, especially when he began comparing Pontiac parts with parts of parts belonging to the Plymouth or the Dodge. The Dodge was a fine car, he thought, but speaking for himself he preferred the old Studebaker. “Why don’t you get yourself a nice old Studebaker?” I asked. He looked at me peculiarly. I gathered that the Studebaker must have been taken off the market years ago. And then, almost immediately afterwards, I began talking about Lancias and Pierce Arrows. I wasn’t sure whether they made them any more either, but I knew they had always enjoyed a good reputation. I wanted to show him that I was willing to talk cars, if that was the game. He glossed over these remarks however in order to launch into a technical explanation of how cores were casted and molded, how you tested them with an ice pick to see if they were too thick or too thin. This over he went into an excursus about the transmission and the differential, a subject so abstruse that I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was getting at. The gauge, I observed, was climbing down towards 170. I thought to myself how pleasant it would be to hire a man like Dutter to accompany me the rest of the way. Even if the car broke down utterly it would be instructive and entertaining to hear him talk about the parts. I could understand how people became attached to their cars, knowing all the parts intimately, as they undoubtedly do.
When we got back to the laboratory he went inside for a thermometer. Then he took the cap off the radiator and stuck the thermometer in the boiling radiator. At intervals he made a reading—comparative readings such as a theologian might do with the Bible. There was a seventeen degree difference, it developed, between the reading of the gauge and the thermometer reading. The difference was in my favor, he said. I didn’t understand precisely what he meant by this remark, but I made a mental note of it. The car looked pathetically human with the thermometer sticking out of its throat. It looked like it had quinsy or the mumps.
I heard him mumbling to himself about scales and what a delicate operation that was. The word hydrochloric acid popped up. “Never do that till the very last,” he said solemnly.
“Do what?” I asked, but he didn’t hear me, I guess.
“Can’t tell what will happen to her when the acid hits her,” he mumbled between his teeth.
“Now I tell you,” he went on, when he had satisfied himself that there was nothing seriously wrong. “I’m going to block that thermostat open a little more with a piece of wood—and put in a new fan belt. We’ll give her an eight pound pull to begin with and after she’s gone about four hundred miles you can test her yourself and see if she’s slipping.” He scratched his head and ruminated a bit. “If I were you,” he continued, “I’d go back to that service station and ask them to loosen the tappets a little. It says .0010 thousandth on the engine but up here you can ride her at .0008 thousandth—until you hear that funny little noise, that clickety-click-click, you know—like little bracelets. I tried to catch that noise before when she was cold but I couldn’t get it. I always like to listen for that little noise—then I know she’s not too tight. You see, you’ve got a hot blue flame in there and when your valves are screwed down too tight that flame just burns them up in no time. That can heat a car up too! Just remember—the tappets!”
We had a friendly little chat about the slaughter going on in Europe, to wind up the transaction, and then I shook hands with him. “I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble,” he said. “But just to make sure why you come back here after they loosen the tappets and I’ll see how she sounds. Got a nice little car there. She ought to last you another twenty thousand miles—at least.”
I went back to the big service station and had the tappets attended to. They were most gracious about it, I must say. No charge for their services this time. Rather strange
, I thought. Just as I was pulling out the floorwalker in the butcher’s smock informed me with diabolical suavity that, no matter what any one may have told me, the pretty little noise I was looking for had nothing to do with the tightness or looseness of the valves. It was something else which caused that. “We don’t believe in loosening them too much,” he said. “But you wanted it that way, so we obliged you.”
I couldn’t pretend to contradict him, not having the knowledge of Hugh Dutter to fortify my argument, so I decided to have the car washed and greased and find out in a roundabout way what the devil he meant.
When I came back for the car the manager came over and politely informed me that there was one other very important thing I ought to have done before leaving. “What’s that?” I said.
“Grease the clutch.”
How much would that be, I wanted to know. He said it was a thirty minute job—not over a dollar.
“O.K.,” I said. “Grease the clutch. Grease everything you can lay hands on.”
I took a thirty minute stroll around the block, stopping at a tavern, and when I got back the boy informed me that the clutch didn’t need greasing.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “What did he tell me to have it greased for?”
“He tells everybody that,” said the boy, grinning.
As I was backing out he asked me slyly if she het up much on me.
“A little,” I said.
“Well, don’t pay any attention to it,” he said. “Just wait till she boils. It’s a mighty smooth running car, that Buick. Prettiest little ole car I ever did see. See us again sometime.”
Well, there it is. If you’ve ever served in the coast artillery you know what it’s like to take the azimuth. First you take a course in higher trigonometry, including differential calculus and all the logarithms. When you put the shell in the breech be sure to remove all your fingers before locking the breech. A car is the same way. It’s like a horse, in short. What brings on the heat is fuss and bother. Feed him properly, water him well, coax him along when he’s weary and he’ll die for you. The automobile was invented in order for us to learn how to be patient and gentle with one another. It doesn’t matter about the parts, or even about the parts of parts, nor what model or what year it is, so long as you treat her right. What a car appreciates is responsiveness. A loose differential may or may not cause friction and no car, not even a Rolls Royce, will run without a universal, but everything else being equal it’s not the pressure or lack of pressure in the exhaust pipe which matters—it’s the way you handle her, the pleasant little word now and then, the spirit of forbearance and forgiveness. Do unto others as you would have them do by you is the basic principle of automotive engineering. Henry Ford understood these things from the very beginning. That’s why he paid universal wages. He was calibrating the exchequer in order to make the steep grades. There’s just one thing to remember about driving any automotive apparatus and that is this: when the car begins to act as though it had the blind staggers it’s time to get out and put a bullet through its head. We American people have always been kind to animals and other creatures of the earth. It’s in our blood. Be kind to your Buick or your Studebaker. God gave us these blessings in order to enrich the automobile manufacturers. He did not mean for us to lose our tempers easily. If that’s clear we can go on to Gallup and trade her in for a spavined mule. . . .
BERTHE
(INÉDIT)
This text is a rewrite from the original draft called “Mara-Marignan,” which I think I wrote shortly before leaving Paris, though I may have written it in New York shortly after coming back from Europe. The point about it is that I tried to recapture the story as I told it originally—to a friend in Paris—almost immediately after the incident occurred. I must have written it five or six times. Then the manuscript got lost and didn’t turn up until about fifteen years later. On recovering it I decided to incorporate it into the book called Quiet Days in Clichy, but in doing so I was obliged to alter it somewhat. It might be regarded as a companion piece to “Mademoiselle Claude”—another of several tributes to the prostitutes of Paris. It is a true story, needless to say, and quite “unvarnished.”
This is a page from the life of a whore whom I met on the Champs Elysées one evening long ago. The filles de joie who work these Elysian fields are not the sort who work on an empty stomach. Berthe was different. That’s why I write about her.
It was just before I reached the Café Marignan that I stumbled on her. She wore a shiny black dress and around her neck was slung a thin, mouse-eaten fur piece. It was rather chilly, though I was only partly aware of the fact, having just put away a wonderful meal and a skinful of wine. I was strolling leisurely along in search of a quiet place to flop and have a strong black coffee.
Berthe, who seemed to sense that some one was studying her—she was only a few feet ahead of me—had just turned her head when I quickened my pace and drew up alongside her. My shoes had been shined that afternoon—an event!—and I looked, so I supposed, like a million dollars. The very way my hat was cocked must have told her at once that I was an American. In other words, a sucker. I didn’t mind being taken for a sucker; I had more money on me than usual and, as I was saying, all I cared about at the moment was to find a nice quiet place to flop and sip some thick, bitter coffee. So, when she said, “Hello, where are you strolling?” it was the most natural thing in the world to take her arm and say, “Nowhere. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”
It was only a few steps to the Marignan whose terrace was dotted with tables all shaded with striped parasols, though there was no need for shade at that hour. I was immediately intrigued by her insistence on talking English. It was an English she had picked up in Panama or Costa Rica, where she had once run a night club. She had been all over Central America, apparently, and not as a whore.
She had begun a long narrative about a man named Winchell who belonged to some “athletic club” in New York. A gentleman, he was, and he had treated her swell. In fact, he had presented her to his wife and in no time they were off, the three of them, to Deauville as well as other places. So she said. I think there was truth in her words because there are crazy Americans like Mr. Winchell floating around in the world and now and then they do take an interest in a whore. Sometimes they even try to make a lady of her. (Not such a difficult thing as most people imagine.) When, as in this case, the little whore really behaves like a lady, the wife invariably gets jealous. But as Berthe was saying, this man Winchell really was a prince—and his wife wasn’t a bad skate either. She got sore, of course, when it was proposed to sleep three a-bed, but that was only natural. Berthe had no trouble excusing her for that.
However, Winchell was gone now and the money he had left Berthe had been eaten up. It went fast because, as things turned out, no sooner had Winchell disappeared than Ramon turned up. Ramon had been in Madrid, trying to get a cabaret started for Berthe, and then the revolution had broken out and Ramon had to flee. He was a good comrade, Ramon, and Berthe trusted him implicitly. Now he was gone too; she had no idea where he was at the moment but she was sure he would send for her when things were right. “I’m certain of it,” she repeated.
All this while we sipped our coffee. All in that English which, as I remarked, she had picked up in Panama or Costa Rica, or maybe it was San Salvador. Finally, after a brief pause, she asked what I was doing in Paris and whether I was hungry or not. I told her I wasn’t the least bit hungry, that I had just partaken of an excellent repast. Before answering her other question I asked if she would care to have a brandy or a liqueur. I noticed, in suggesting this, that she was regarding me rather strangely, too intently. For a moment I felt uncomfortable. I suspected that she was thinking of Mr. Winchell again, of what a prince he had been, et cetera. I therefore remarked parenthetically, and as casually as I could, that Mr. Winchell and I hailed from different worlds. I elaborated on it a bit to make sure that she got the drift. I then told her frankly how much I had in my
pocket, which wasn’t a colossal sum after all, and added nonchalantly that I was in the mood to spend it.
At this point Berthe leaned over and confessed that she was hungry, very hungry. I was astonished. I had expected anything but this. At the same time I was rather pleased. “Why not go inside?” I suggested. “We can eat right here.” Most women, if hungry, very hungry, would have said yes. Not Berthe. No, she wouldn’t dream of eating at the Marignan—it was too expensive. Why couldn’t we go to some ordinary restaurant—she didn’t care where—there were plenty of them nearby, she said. I pointed out that it was past closing time for most restaurants, but she insisted that we try.
Suddenly she seemed to have lost the gnawing pains of hunger and, bending forward as if to confide something delicate, she began telling me what a swell guy she thought I was, and with it, all mixed up with Mr. Winchell, Ramon, the revolution and what not, came the story of her life in Central America. Finally it boiled down to this—she wasn’t cut out to be a whore, never would get accustomed to it, and was already god-damned sick of it. I was the first man, she averred, who had treated her like a human being. The first man in a long, long time. It was a pleasure, she added, just to sit and talk like this. Then came a twinge of hunger and, shivering a bit, she wrapped the crazy, skinny fur tighter about her neck. Her arms were covered with goose pimples. It was incongruous the way she tried to smile and appear nonchalant: hungry, but not too hungry, eager, but not too eager. Her talk was incongruous too. Almost hysterical, I thought. She had just said that the man who got her got pure gold. Whereupon she laid her hands on the table, palms up. “Look at me,” she begged, “je ne suis plus belle.” “You are too,” I said. “But I’m not!” she exclaimed. “Once I was beautiful, but not any longer. I’m tired, that’s what. Tired of it all. I’m not the type for this racket. Always I worked for a living . . .” She showed me her hands again.
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