The Man Who Walked through Walls

by Marcel Ayme

  In the meantime, Lady Burbury was growing fat on the pastor’s ministrations. We should hasten to say that there was nothing in the conduct of either that could be construed as damaging to their honour but, by folding herself back into her sister’s body, Judith had brought back with her the fruit, still only potential, of her union with the Reverend. Not without some mild moral repugnance, Lady Burbury gave birth to a well-proportioned boy whom the pastor baptised with complete indifference. The child was named Antony and there is nothing more to say about him. At around the same time, the Begum of Gorissapur brought a pair of twins into the world for whom nobody but the Maharajah himself was responsible. There was great rejoicing and, as was the habit in those parts, the people presented the newborns with their weight in pure gold. For their parts, Barbe Cazzarini and Rosalie Valdez y Samaniego also became mothers, one of a boy, the other of a girl. There was rejoicing over these births too.

  Mrs Smithson, the millionaire’s wife, did not follow her sisters’ example but fell rather seriously ill. During her convalescence in California, she took to reading those dangerous novels that show in too rosy a light dishonourable couples engulfed in sin, novels whose authors are not even ashamed to describe—with despicable complacency but also, alas! in such appealing terms, with such artistry veiling the horrible truth, making disgraceful situations enticing, as to transfigure and glamorise their principal actors, all the while devilishly inducing us to forget, if not to approve (it is not unheard of!) the true nature of these odious practices—are not, as I say, even ashamed to describe the pleasures of love and the pursuit of sensual pleasure. There is nothing wickeder than that kind of book. Mrs Smithson allowed herself to be taken in by them. She began by sighing and went on to justify herself. She reasoned: “I have five husbands and have had as many as six at once. I have had only one lover but he gave me more joy in six months than I have had in a year from all my spouses together. Even though he was unworthy of my love. I abandoned him out of a qualm of conscience.” (Here Mrs Smithson would sigh and allow the pages of her novel to run on beneath her thumb.) “The lovers in Love Awakens Me have no idea how it is to have such qualms. And they are as happy as hogs” (she meant to say as gods). “My own scruples are unfounded, for what is the sin of adultery exactly? Honouring others with what is meant for one man alone. But nothing prevents me from taking a lover and keeping myself exclusively for Smithson.”

  These reflections could not be long in bearing fruit. The worst of it was that Mrs Smithson was not alone in having them, rather the poison made its way simultaneously, according to the laws of ubiquity that governed them, into the minds of her sisters. One evening during the last few days of her convalescence on the Californian beaches of Dorado, Mrs Smithson went to a concert. The programme included a jazz version of the Moonlight Sonata. The charm of Beethoven and his wild music worked upon her mind to such effect that she fell in love with the drummer, who, in two days’ time, was setting sail for the Philippines. Two weeks later, she was rushing a double to Manila, plucking up the musician upon his arrival and becoming his lover. In the same period, Lady Burbury was falling for a panther-hunter at the mere sight of him in a magazine photograph and therefore delegating a double to Java. On leaving Stockholm, the tenor’s wife left a double behind so she could make the acquaintance of a young chorister whom she had noticed at the opera, while Rosalie Valdez y Samaniego, whose husband had just been eaten by a Papuan tribe on the occasion of a religious holiday, multiplied herself into four for the love of as many handsome youths encountered in different Oceanian ports.

  Soon the unhappy ubiquitist was gripped by a frenzy of lust and had lovers all around the globe. Their numbers increased exponentially with common ratio 2.7. This dispersed army included men of all kinds: sailors, plantation-owners, Chinese pirates, army officers, cowboys, a chess champion, Scandinavian athletes, pearl-divers, a Soviet ‘people’s commissar’, schoolboys, cattle-drovers, a matador, a butcher boy, fourteen film directors, a porcelain restorer, sixty-seven doctors, some marquises, four Russian princes, two railway workers, a geometry teacher, a saddler, eleven lawyers, and we shall have to leave some to the imagination. However, we shall highlight one member of the Académie Française on a conference tour in the Balkans with a full, bushy beard. The people seeming particularly handsome on a single one of the Marquesas Islands, the insatiable seductress there multiplied herself into thirty-nine. In the space of three months, she had spread nine hundred and fifty copies of herself around the world. Six months on again, the total was approaching the regions of eighteen thousand, a sizeable number. They almost changed the face of the world. Eighteen thousand lovers came under the influence of the same woman and, without knowing it, developed a kind of similarity in their ways of desiring, feeling and appreciating. Moreover, shaped by her advice and by the same wish to please her, they grew to resemble each other in their bearing, their stride, the kind of waistcoat they wore and the colours of their ties, even in their facial expressions. Thus it was that the geometry teacher grew to look like a Chinese pirate and the academician, despite his beard, like the matador. The growing likeness between so many men defied scientific analysis. Sabine had developed the habit of humming a song that began like this: Among the Guards of France, I had a lover once. This melody floated on the lips of her innumerable lovers, and those of their friends and acquaintances, and became an international leitmotif. Al Pacone’s gangsters were singing it while they raided the main bank in Chicago, as were the pirates of Wou-Naï-Na as they pillaged junks along the Yangtze, and likewise the academicians as they redrafted their great dictionary. In the end, it seemed that Sabine’s silhouette, her profile, the shape of her eyes, the turn of her legs must soon impose new ideals of feminine beauty. Great travellers, especially reporters, were amazed to discover everywhere the same woman, so perfectly like herself. The newspapers were stirred to comment; the world of science proposed several explanations for the phenomenon, which led to great quarrels that are still unresolved. The semi-finalist theory of the levelling of races by genetic mutation and infra-conscious species choice prevailed among the general public. Lord Burbury, who followed these debates closely, began to look at his wife with a rather odd expression.

  At Rue de l’Abreuvoir, in apparent calm, Sabine Lemurier continued to live as an attentive wife and good housekeeper, going to the market, cooking roasts, sewing on buttons, making her husband’s underwear last, exchanging visits with his colleagues’ wives and writing punctually to his old uncle in Clermont-Ferrand. Unlike her four sisters, she seemed not to have heeded the treacherous enticements of Mrs Smithson’s novels and had forbidden herself to multiply in order to go chasing lovers. This precaution may be judged specious, deceitful and hypocritical, since Sabine and her numberless sinful sisters were one and the same person. But the worst of sinners is never entirely abandoned by God, who sustains a glimmer in the darkness of every poor soul. It was doubtless that very glimmer that must thus have re-emerged in an eighteen-thousandth of our countless seductresses. In fact, she meant first of all to pay her dues to the primacy of Antoine Lemurier, her legal spouse. Her conduct towards him was ongoing proof of this admirable concern. Lemurier having fallen ill at the very point of making some ill-judged investments and heavily indebting himself, it happened that the household was now in grave trouble, only one step ahead of poverty. Often they would run short of money for the chemist, for food and for the landlord all at once. Sabine now had some distressing times but, even with the bailiff knocking at the door and Antoine calling for the priest, she was able to resist the temptation to call on Lady Burbury’s or Mrs Smithson’s millions. Yet, even while sitting at the invalid’s side and deploring his laboured breathing, she remained attentive to her sisters’ cavorting (there were now forty-seven thousand of them), aware of their every gesture and listening to their immense lubricious murmuring, and now and then a sigh would escape her lips. Her teeth clenched, cheeks flushed and pupils slightly dilated, she seemed, sometimes,
like a telephone operator surveying a vast switchboard with passionate dedication.

  Despite taking part in (and being part of) this voluptuous free-for-all, this shameless, fornicating, perspiring, moaning multiplicity, and enjoying it (necessarily, out of necessity, and necessary and complete conformity of conformation), despite this, then, Sabine remained unsatisfied, her soul still full of yearning. The problem was that she had gone back to loving Theorem although she was determined that he would never know. Perhaps her forty-seven thousand lovers were only a product of that one hopeless passion. That is one answer. On the other hand, you might imagine that she was simply, irresistibly sucked in by a funnel-shaped fate (cf. the philosopher Charles Fourier’s observation, there for all to read around the base of his statue, where Boulevard de Clichy meets Place de Clichy: The passions are proportional to destinies). Sabine had learnt of Theorem’s success, first from her cheesemonger, then from the newspapers. She had gone to an exhibition and, with heart racing and eyes misty, there admired his Woman with Nine Heads, so loving, so tragically unreal and, for her, so suggestive. Her former lover seemed purified, rehabilitated, redeemed, restored, shiny brand new. For him alone, she dared to pray, to pray that he might have a good bed, good food, a pure spirit in every season, and also that his painting might grow ever more beautiful.

  Theorem still had his black eyes, but his madness had left him, even though he had only the same arguments as before by which to prove it. Wisely, he decided that there are excellent reasons for almost everything you can think of, that there must surely be some that would invalidate the proof of his madness, only he hadn’t taken sufficient trouble to find them. In any case, his life remained about the same, hardworking and mostly solitary. As Sabine had hoped, his paintings’ beauty increased and art critics said fine things about the spirituality of his canvases. He was hardly to be seen in the cafés and, even among his own friends, he spoke rarely, his sorrowful expression and bearing those of a man burdened with some terrible pain. For he had carried out a thorough examination of his soul and trial of his past conduct towards Sabine. Aware of his base behaviour, he blushed over it twenty times a day, upbraiding himself aloud as a boor, a lout, a splay-footed, venomous toad, as a puffed-up hog. He would have liked to denounce himself in Sabine’s presence, to implore her pardon, but he felt too unworthy. Having made a pilgrimage to their Breton beach, he returned with two excellent canvases that would have a lesser man weeping, as well as a sharper recollection of his boorishness. So much humility flooded his passion for Sabine that he now regretted ever being loved by her.

  Happily, having escaped death, Antoine Lemurier recovered, returned to his work at the office and, as best he could, staunched his financial losses. During his ordeal, his neighbours had been thrilled, thinking that the husband would snuff it, the house would be sold and the wife in the gutter. They were all, moreover, excellent people, hearts of gold like any neighbours, and had nothing personal against the Lemurier household, but seeing the unfolding just next door of a grim tragedy with ramifications, incidents, hollering landlord, bailiff and mounting fever, they were keenly awaiting some denouement that would be worthy of the drama. They resented Lemurier for not dying. He had spoilt it all. In revenge, they set about pitying and praising his wife. They would say: “Madame Lemurier, you’ve been so brave, we’ve thought of you often, I wanted to come up and see you, Frédéric told me no, you’ll disturb her, but I saw how you were doing, and I often said it, only yesterday with Monsieur Brevet—Madame Lemurier has been extraordinary; impeccable, she really has.” These kinds of things were said as much as possible right in front of Lemurier, or else they were repeated by the concierge or by the couple from the fifth floor or else by the people opposite on the third floor, so often that the poor man came to believe his own expressions of gratitude inadequate. One evening, Sabine seemed weary to him, in the lamplight. She was at her fifty-six thousandth lover, a police captain and attractive man who was unbuckling his belt in a Casablanca hotel and telling her that after a good meal and a fine cigar, making love is a heavenly thing. Watching his wife reverently, Antoine Lemurier took up her hand and pressed it to his lips.

  “My darling,” he said, “you are a saint. You are the sweetest of saints, the most beautiful. A saint, really a saint.”

  The unintended hollowness of this homage and his adoring gaze was too much for Sabine. She pulled her hand away, burst into tears and, blaming her nerves, went up to her bedroom. As she was putting in her curlers, the white-bearded academician died from a ruptured aneurism in an Athenian restaurant, where he was dining with Sabine, who was known there as Cunégonde and passed as his niece. (Cunégonde might appear a rather unusual, even pretentious name, but kindly consider a little longer—there aren’t fifty-six thousand saints in the calendar and each of their names had already been honoured.) Assured that the great man’s mortal remains would be well looked-after, Cunégonde reverted to Sabine, who the next morning dispatched her to a shack in the slums in expiation of the substantial injury done to Antoine Lemurier.

  Taking the name Louise Mégnin, Cunégonde took up residence in one of the poorest shacks in the Saint-Ouen slum, in one of those that cluster at the heart of that squalid region, among its great heaps of detritus packed down in crumbly earth that smelt grimly of ashes and humanity. Built out of old wood from demolitions and tarpaulin, her shack comprised two rooms divided by a partition made of planks, one of which sheltered a weak, bronchitic old man, cared for by an idiot child whom he insulted night and day in his dying man’s voice. It took Louise Mégnin a long time to grow used to this new neighbourhood, likewise to its vermin, the rats, the smells, the sound of brawls, the vulgarity of the slum’s inhabitants and all the sordid inconveniences imposed by life in this last circle of hell on earth. Lady Burbury and her married sisters, the fifty-six thousand seductresses too (whose number did not cease to grow), all lost their appetite for several days over it. Lord Burbury was shocked when now and then he would see his wife go white, shake from head to toe and her eyes roll upwards. “Something is being kept from me,” he decided. It was, quite simply, that inside her shack, Louise Mégnin was squaring up to a stocky rat or vying with bedbugs for her mattress, but he couldn’t know this. You might imagine that this expiatory descent into the abode of the ragged and the hell-bent, into stink, among vermin, sores, pustules, hunger, knives, living wrecks, sour wine and drunken insults, might have set the multi-corporal sinner an appreciable way along the path of virtue. But no, on the contrary. Louise Mégnin, her fifty-six thousand sisters (now become sixty thousand) and the tetra-carnate wife did their best to ignore the slums of Saint-Ouen. Instead of appreciating her sufferings, as would have been right and improving, Louise strove to see nothing and hear nothing and scattered herself across five continents to be dazzled by vain frivolity. It was easy. When one has sixty thousand pairs of eyes, one can easily distract oneself with the spectacle offered by one or other of them. The same for one’s ears.

  Luckily, Providence was watching. One evening, at dusk, the air was very soft; the effluvia of shacks, caravans and the disgusting heaps mingled with the deep scent of carrion; above the slum a light smog was floating, blurring the outlines of the rickety constructions and the clinker alleys; housewives were calling each other whores, filth, thieves, and in a café built of wooden planks the radio was blasting out an interview with the great racing cyclist Émile Idée. Louise Mégnin was filling her watering can at the public fountain when she saw a monstrous man emerge from a caravan and come towards her. Built like a gorilla, of similar stature, features and arm-length, his own hanging down to his knees, he was wearing slippers and unmatched breeches. He flexed his shoulders as he advanced and stopped beside Louise without a word, small eyes shining in his hairy face. Other men had already approached her at the fountain, a few had even come to prowl around her shack, but even the coarsest of them still observed a few rules of convention. This one was clearly unconcerned about convention and as calm in h
is determination as if he were going to catch a bus. Louise did not dare look up but stared in fright at his enormous, dangling hands that were covered in straight, black hair, here and there stuck together in wild, grimy tangles. Her watering can filled, she took the path for home and the gorilla went with her, still in silence. He walked beside her, taking small steps due to his legs—disproportionately short and crooked for his breadth—and occasionally spat gobs from the wad he was chewing. “So, why are you following me?” asked Louise. “My wound is weeping again,” said the gorilla, and, without pausing, he pulled at the fabric of his breeches where they were sticking to his thigh. They reached the shack. Numb with fear, Louise stepped ahead, ran inside and shut the door in his face. But before she could lock it, he had pushed it in with one hand and was filling the door frame. Unembarrassed by her presence, he allowed his fingers warily to travel over his thigh, feeling through the fabric for the contours of the suppurating wound. This little game went on for some time. In the room next door, the old man spouted blasphemies and with his moribund voice complained that the boy was trying to murder him. Horrified, Louise stood frozen in the middle of the room, her eyes riveted on the gorilla. Looking up, he saw her gaze, gestured with his hand that she should wait and, after closing the door behind him, he laid his plug of tobacco on a chair.