Monsieur Baruch prolonged his wanderings more than usual, convincing himself that it was time to give up his newspaper habit. Besides the help wanted ads, he never finished reading it, and he didn’t understand what was being talked about anyway: What did the Vietnamese want? Who was that Carlos Lacerda person anyway? What was an electronic computer? Where was Karachi? And while he was wandering, and as night was falling, he again heard that tiny noise inside his head, which did not come, as he had discovered, from Madame Pichot’s television set or from Mr. Belmonte’s water heater or from the typewriter Mr. Ribeyro wrote on in the attic. It was a sound reminiscent of a wagon uncoupling from a standing train and taking off on its own unforeseen journey.
In the now dark apartment, he stood for a moment next to the light switch, wondering. What if he did go out for a walk? He barely knew the neighborhood. Since he had arrived he had studied the shortest route to the bakery, the Metro station, and the grocery store, and had restricted himself scrupulously to it. Only one time did he dare to diverge from his regular route, and he ended up in a horrible square, which he soon found out was called Reunion Square: a mound of dirt with dirty trees, broken benches, stray dogs, crippled old men, groups of unemployed Algerians, and houses, for god’s sake, chancrous houses, without joy or mercy, that glared at each other in terror, as if they were suddenly going to shout and disappear in an outburst of shame.
The walk now also ruled out, Monsieur Baruch turned on the light in the room where he had left the letter, checked to make sure that it was still in its place and, crossing through the other darkened room, entered the kitchen. He shaved carefully in five minutes, put on a clean three-piece suit, and returned to examine his face in the bathroom mirror. There was nothing out of the ordinary. His long diet of coffee and toast had sunken his cheeks, it’s true, and his nose, for which he always had a certain amount of commiseration due to its tendency over the years to curve downward, hung now between his cheeks like a flag lowered in a gesture of surrender. But his eyes had the same expression as always, the one that reflected his fear of traffic, air drafts, movie theaters, beautiful women, nursing homes, hoofed animals, and unaccompanied nights, and that made him startle and protect his heart with his hand whenever a stranger stopped him in the street to ask him the time.
It must have been time for the after-dinner movie, for a male voice was heard from the neighbor’s television set, a voice that could have belonged to Jean Gabin at the police station speaking in slang with a cigarette hanging off his lips, but Monsieur Baruch, indifferent to the emotions surely flooding Madame Pichot, did nothing but rinse his razor, remove the blade, and turn off the light. Fully dressed, he climbed into the shower—a metal stall in a corner of the kitchen—and opened the cold-water tap to wet his head, his neck, and his three-piece suit. Holding the razor blade firmly between his thumb and index finger of his right hand, he lifted his jaw and made a short but deep incision in his throat.
The pain he felt was less sharp than he had expected, and he was tempted to repeat the operation. But, in the end, he decided to sit down in the shower with his legs crossed, and there he began to wait. His already wet clothes made him shiver, so he lifted his arm to turn off the tap. When the last drops stopped falling on his head he experienced in his chest a sensation of warmth and almost well-being, which made him remember sunny mornings in Marseille, when he would go from bar to bar in the port offering ties to sailors, without much luck, or those other mornings in Genoa, when he would help Simón in his fabric store. Then there were his plans to travel to Lithuania, where they told him he had been born, and to Israel, where he had close relatives, whom he imagined to be numerous, sketching his own features over their blank faces.
Far away, another fire truck went by with its siren blasting, and then he told himself it was absurd to be inside that dark wet stall, like someone purging a sin or hiding from a bad deed (but hadn’t his whole life been one bad deed?), and that it would be better to stretch out on the sofa in either of the rooms and thereby establish a new room in his home, the mortuary chapel, a room he had known potentially existed ever since he arrived, stalking him through that symmetrical space.
He had no difficulty standing up and walking out of the shower, but just as he was about to leave the kitchen, he felt a retching that doubled him over, and he began to vomit so violently that he lost his balance. Before he could lean against the wall, he found himself lying on the ground under the lintel of the doorway, his legs in the kitchen and his trunk in the adjoining room. In the next room, a light had been left on, and from his prone position Monsieur Baruch could see the table, and on the edge of the table, the spine of the folder that held the writing paper.
He mentally scrutinized his body, hunting for a pain, a crack, a serious impairment that would reveal that his human mechanism was definitively out of order. But he felt no discomfort. The only thing he knew was that it was impossible for him to stand up, and that if something had finally happened, it was that from then on he would have to give up living a vertical life and make do with the slow existence of worms and their flat chores, their lack of prominence, their penitence skimming the ground, the dust from which they had arisen.
He then took off on a long journey across the floor strewn with circulars and old newspapers. His arms were heavy and in his effort to move forward, he began to use his jaw, his shoulders, to bend at the waist, at his knees, to scrape along the floor with the tips of his shoes. He stopped for a bit while trying to remember where he might have left that long bandage he wrapped around his waist in winter to fight his sciatica. If he had left it in the wardrobe in the first room, he would only have to advance four meters to get to it. Otherwise, his journey would become as improbable as his return to Lithuania or his voyage to the Kingdom of Zion.
While he was summoning his memory, and while he was fighting the sensation that the air had turned into something bitter and unbreathable, and while he recalled his actions of the last few weeks and the objects he kept in all the drawers in the house, Monsieur Baruch once again heard the sirens of the fire trucks, but this time they were accompanied by the clattering of the wagon uncoupling and increasing its acceleration as it struck out into the open field, without schedule or destination, obliviously passing provincial stations, beautiful sites marked by a cross on tourist maps, disconnected, intoxicated, with no consciousness other than its own speed and its condition of being something broken, separate, condemned to finish up on a forgotten track, where nothing but rust and oblivion awaited it.
Perhaps his eyelids fell or his exposed eyeballs were flooded with an opaque substance, because he ceased to see his home, his wardrobes, and his tables, and instead he saw clearly, this time, indeed, and unexpectedly, by the light of an internal projector, a magic spell, the beds he had slept in for the last twenty years, including the last double bed in the shop in Le Marais, where Renée would curl up on one side and not allow him to cross the imaginary and geometric line that divided the bed in half. Beds in hotels, boardinghouses, hostels, always narrow, impersonal, rough, and hard, and each one came punctually in its own time, not a single one was skipped, and they gathered in the space shaping up into a nocturnal and infernal train, onto which he had crawled, like now, to spend long nights, alone, seeking refuge from his fear. But what he couldn’t make out were the songs, other than a disharmonious clatter, as if dozens of radio stations were playing all at the same time, fighting to drown each other out, and managing only to articulate single words, perhaps from the titles of pop tunes, words like betrayal, infidelity, treachery, solitude, anyone, anguish, revenge, summer, words without melody, words that fell hollow on his ear like tokens, and gathered there, proposing, perhaps, a charade or constituting a concise account, in chapters, of a passion that was mediocre but nonetheless catastrophic, like those in the crime section of the newspapers.
The humming stopped abruptly, and Monsieur Baruch realized that once again he could see, that he could see the lamp that was out of rea
ch in the next room and under the lamp the inaccessible folder of writing paper. And the silence in which familiar objects now floated was worse than blindness. If it would at least start to rain on the corrugated iron or if Madame Pichot would turn up the volume on her television set or if Mr. Belmonte would decide to take a late bath, some sound, no matter how soft or loud, would rescue him from that world of silent and present things, which seemed hollow when deprived of sound, deceptive, meted out with artifice by some clever stage designer to make him believe that he was still in the realm of the living.
But he heard nothing and could not even manage to remember in which corner of the house he might have left the bandage for his sciatica, and all he could do was continue on his journey, though without much faith, for the newspapers crumpled under his effort, creating undulations and obstacles that he felt incapable of overcoming. By squinting he could read the headline, Sheila’s Accusations, and underneath, in smaller type, Lord Chalfont guarantees the strength of the pound sterling, and next to it a box announcing, “A typhoon sweeps through the north of the Philippines,” and then, with almost imperceptible lettering—and how tenaciously he worked to make it out—“Monsieur and Madame Lescène are pleased to announce the birth of their grandson Luc-Emmanuel.” And then he felt warmth, an agreeable breeze in his chest, and immediately he heard Bernard’s voice telling Renée that if they didn’t raise his salary he would leave the shop in Le Marais, and Renée’s that said that the young man deserved a raise, and his own voice recommending that they wait a while and the creaking of the stairs the first time he climbed down on tiptoe to spy on how they talked and joked behind the counter, between purses and umbrellas and gloves and that ripping sound that could be none other than the message Renée wrote on notebook paper before she left and that he tore to pieces after reading several times, thinking idiotically that by destroying the proof he would destroy what it proved.
The voices and sounds grew distant or Monsieur Baruch gave up tuning them in, for as he turned his eyeballs he corroborated a circumstance that forced him to immediately change his plans: the front door was closer to him than the wardrobes in both rooms and his improbable bandage. Through the crack underneath he could see the light in the stairwell. He then began to turn onto his belly—with extreme difficulty for he needed to change the entire orientation of his initial itinerary and while he was trying to do so the light on the stairway turned on and off several times, accompanied by footsteps on the stairs though probably ones that moved in circles or on the lower floors or in the basement because they never ended up approaching.
After the effort he had made to change direction, his head ceased to be supported by his jaw and fell heavily to one side, where it remained, resting on one ear. The walls and ceiling were now spinning, the fireplace passed several times in front of his eyes, followed by the wardrobe, the sofa, and the other pieces of furniture, and in the background a lamp and all those objects were chasing one another in an ever more boundless circle. Monsieur Baruch then summoned a final resource, which he had until that moment held in reserve, and tried to shout, but in all that chaos, who could assure him where to find his mouth, his tongue, his throat? Everything was scattered, and the relationship he retained with his body had become so vague that he didn’t really know its shape, how big it was, how many extremities it had. By now the whirlwind had stopped, however, and what he saw in front of his eyes was a piece of newspaper on which he read, “Monsieur and Madame Lescène are pleased to announce the birth of their grandson Luc-Emmanuel.”
Then he gave up all his efforts and surrendered on top of the dusty newspapers. He could just barely feel the presence of his body floating in an aqueous space or submerged in the depths of a tank. He was now swimming skillfully in a sea of vinegar. No, it was not a sea of vinegar, it was a becalmed lake. A bird was trilling in the crown of a snow-covered tree. Water flowed down a green ravine. The moon appeared in a diaphanous sky. Cattle grazed in a fertile meadow. By some odd route he had reached the pleasant landscape of the classics, where everything was music, order, light, reason, and harmony. Everything could now be explained. Now he understood, without any rationale, apodictically, that he should have had his bedroom in the place where he had left the bandage and he should have left the bandage in the place that would be his bedroom and he should have thrown Bernard out of the shop and turned Renée in for having run off with the money and chased her down in Lyon begging on his knees for her to return and he should have told Renée to leave without Bernard knowing and he should have killed himself the night she left so as not to suffer an entire year and then paid a murderer to stab Bernard or Renée or both of them or himself on the steps of a synagogue and he should have gone alone to Lithuania and left Renée in poverty and when he was young he should have married the employee of the boardinghouse in Marseille who had only one breast and he should have kept his money in the bank instead of in the house and made where he was lying the bedroom and not have gone on the first date Renée asked him for at the Café des Sports and he should have shipped out on that merchant marine ship on its way to Buenos Aries and at some point he should have sported a thick mustache and kept the bandage in the wardrobe that was closest so that now that he was dying, now so far away from that pleasant corner, having fallen to the bottom of a filthy ravine, he could have attempted an emergency rescue, given himself a stretch of time, carried on, torn up the letter, written it the next morning or the following year and continued to wander around that house, in his sixties, tired, without skill or art or ability, without either Renée or the business, watching the enigmatic factory or the roof of the garage or listening to how the water flowed through the pipes from the attic or how Madame Pichot turned on her television set.
And everything, moreover, was possible. Monsieur Baruch stood up, but in reality he continued lying down. He shouted, but he only bared his teeth. He lifted one arm, but he managed only to open his hand. That’s why three days later, when the policemen knocked down the door, we found him stretched out, looking at us, and if not for the black puddle and the flies we would have thought that he was performing a pantomime, waiting for us there on the floor, his arm outstretched, anticipating our greeting.
Paris, 1967
THE FIRST SNOWFALL
THE ITEMS Torroba left were easily assimilated into the disorderly panorama of my room. Altogether, they consisted of a few pieces of dirty clothes wrapped in a shirt and a cardboard box containing some papers. At first I didn’t want to store these odds and ends because Torroba had a well-earned reputation as a pickpocket, and everyone knew that the police couldn’t wait to dump him on the other side of the border as an undesirable alien. But Torroba asked me in such a way, bringing his myopic and mustachioed face right up to mine, that I had no choice but to agree.
“My friend, it’s just for one night! Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll come get my things.”
Needless to say, he didn’t. His things remained there for several days. Out of sheer boredom I examined his dirty clothes and amused myself looking through his papers. There were poems, drawings, pages of a personal diary. The truth was, there were rumors in the Latin Quarter that Torroba had a lot of talent, a tentative and exploratory talent that could be applied to a range of materials, but above all to the art of living. (Some of his verses were moving: Soldier in winter’s stubble, hands and nails blue from cold.) This may be why I developed a certain amount of interest in this vagabond bard.
A week after his initial visit, he showed up again. This time, he was carrying a suitcase held together with a rope.
“Sorry, but I still haven’t found a room. You’re going to have to keep my suitcase. Do you possibly have a razor I can use?”
Before I could answer, he had deposited his suitcase in a corner, gone over to the sink, and picked up my personal items. He stood in front of the mirror and whistled while he shaved, not taking the trouble to remove his sweater, his muffler, or his beret. When he finished, he dried himself off with my tow
el, told me some neighborhood gossip, and left, saying that he would return the next day to pick up his belongings.
The next day he did, in fact, return, but not to pick them up. On the contrary, he left me a dozen books and two teaspoons, probably stolen from a student restaurant. This time he didn’t shave, but he had the nerve to eat a large chunk of my cheese and ask me to lend him a silk tie. I don’t know why, because he never wore button-down shirts. Similar visits continued throughout the fall. My hotel room turned into something like a compulsory stop in his Parisian vagrancy. There he found everything he needed: a good chunk of bread, cigarettes, a clean towel, writing paper. I never gave him any money, but he made up for that in kind. I put up with him but not without a certain apprehension, and I waited eagerly for him to find a garret, where he could take refuge along with all his junk.
The inevitable finally occurred: one day Torroba arrived at my room fairly late and asked if he could spend the night.
“Right here, on the rug,” he said, pointing to the rug with holes through which the hexagonal brick floor could be seen.
Although my bed was fairly wide, I agreed that he could sleep on the floor. I did so with the intention of making him uncomfortable and thereby preventing him from adopting bad habits. Apparently, however, he was used to that kind of hardship, because while I lay awake, I heard him snoring the whole night long, as if he were sleeping on a bed of roses.
And there he lay, stretched out, until almost noon. I had to jump over him to prepare breakfast. He finally rose, placed his ear to the door, then ran to the table and gulped down a cup of coffee.
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