Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  The Linuty Foundation was across the way from the bronze balloon at the Porte Pereire. Almost every day when I’d finished with my patients, she’d come up to deliver my typescripts. A little temporary structure that’s been torn down since. I wasn’t happy there. The hours were too regular. Linuty, who had founded it, was a big millionaire, he wanted everybody to have medical treatment and feel better without money. Philanthropists are a pain in the arse. I’d have preferred some municipal dispensary… a little vaccinating on the side… a modest racket in health certificates… or even a public bath… in other words, a kind of retirement. Well, so be it. I’m not a Yid, or a foreigner, or a Freemason, or a graduate of the École Normale; I don’t know how to promote myself, I fuck around too much, my reputation’s bad. For fifteen years now they’ve seen me struggling along out here in the Zone;* the dregs of the dregs take liberties with me, show me every sign of contempt. I’m lucky they haven’t fired me. Writing picks me up. I’m not so badly off. Vitruve types my novels. She’s attached to me. “Listen,” I say, “listen, old girl, this is the last time I’m going to give you hell!… If you don’t find my Legend, it’s the parting of the ways, it’s the end of our friendship. No more intimate collaboration!… No more grub and bub, no more dough.”

  She bursts into lamentations. She’s a monster in every way, Vitruve, her looks are awful and her work is awful. She’s an obligation. I’ve had her on my neck since I was in England. She’s the fruit of a promise. We go way back. It was her daughter Angèle in London who made me swear to look after her for ever. I’ve looked after her all right. That was my vow to Angèle. It dates back to the war. Besides, come to think of it, she knows a lot of things. Okay. She’s tight-lipped in principle, but she remembers… Angèle, her daughter, was quite a number. It’s amazing how ugly a mother can get. Angèle came to a tragic end. I’ll explain all that if I’m forced to. Angèle had a sister, Sophie, a big tall screwball, settled in London. And Mireille, the little niece, is over here. She has the combined vices of the whole family, she’s a real bitch… a synthesis.

  When I moved from Rancy to Porte Pereire, they both tagged along. Rancy has changed, there’s hardly anything left of the walls or the Bastion. Big black scarred stones; they rip them out of the soft ground like decayed teeth. It will all go… the city swallows its old gums. The bus – the P.Q. bis they call it now – dashes through the ruins like a bat out of hell. Soon there won’t be anything but sawed-off dung-coloured skyscrapers. We’ll see. Vitruve and I used to argue about our troubles. She always claimed she’d been through more than I had. That’s not possible. Wrinkles, that’s for sure, she’s got a lot more than me! There’s no limit to the amount of wrinkles, the creases that the good years dig in their flesh. “Mireille must have put your papers away.”

  I leave with her and escort her out to the Quai des Minimes. They live together, near the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, it’s called the Hôtel Méridien.

  Their room is an inconceivable mess, a junk shop full of miscellaneous articles, mostly underwear, all flimsy and extremely cheap.

  Mme Vitruve and her niece both do it. They have three douche bags, as well as a fully equipped kitchen and a rubber bidet. They keep it all between the beds; there’s also an enormous atomizer that they’ve never succeeded in getting to squirt. I wouldn’t want to be too hard on Vitruve. Maybe she has had more trouble than I have. That’s what makes me control myself. Otherwise, if I were sure, I’d lick the hell out of her. She used to keep the Remington in the fireplace; she hadn’t finished paying for it… So she said. I don’t pay her too much for my typing, I’ve got to admit that… sixty-five centimes a page, but it mounts up in the end… especially with big fat books.

  When it comes to squinting, though, I never saw the like of Vitruve. It was painful to look at her.

  That ferocious squint gave her an air when she laid out her cards, that is to say her tarot cards. She sold the little ladies silk stockings… the future too, on credit. When she puzzled and pondered behind her glasses, she had the wandering gaze of a lobster.

  Her fortune-telling gave her a certain influence in the neighbourhood. She knew all the cuckolds. She pointed them out to me from the window, and even the three murderers – “I have proof.” I’d also given her an old blood-pressure contraption and taught her a little massage for varicose veins. That added to her income. Her ambition was to do abortions or to get involved in a bloody revolution, so everybody would talk about her and the newspapers would be full of it.

  I’ll never be able to say how she nauseated me as I watched her rummaging through that junk pile of hers. All over the world there are trucks that run over nice people at the rate of one a minute… Old Vitruve gave off a pungent smell. Redheads often do. It seems to me that there’s an animal quality in redheads; it’s their destiny: something brutal and tragic; they’ve got it in their skin. I could have laid her out cold when she went on about her memories in that loud voice of hers… Randy as she was, it was hard for her to find enough gratification. Unless a man was drunk and it was very dark, she didn’t have a chance. On that point I was sorry for her. I myself had done better in the way of amorous harmonies. That, too, struck her as unjust. When the time came, I’d have almost enough put by to settle my accounts with death… I had made my aesthetic savings. What marvellous arse I’d enjoyed… I’ve got to admit it, as luminous as light. I’d tucked into the Infinite.

  She had no savings – that could be sensed very easily, there was no need to go on about it. To earn her keep and get a little enjoyment on the side, she had to take a customer by surprise or wear him out. It was hell.

  By seven o’clock the good little workers have usually gone home. The women are doing the dishes, the males are tied up in radio waves. That’s when Vitruve abandons my beautiful novel and goes out in pursuit of her livelihood. She works her way from landing to landing with her slightly damaged stockings and her crummy lingerie. Before the crash she managed to get along, what with credit and the way she terrified her customers, but today the identical crap is given away at street fairs to stop the gripes of losers at the shell game. That’s unfair competition. I tried to tell her it was all the fault of the Japanese… She didn’t believe me. I accused her of doing away with my wonderful Legend on purpose, even of throwing it in the garbage…

  “It’s a masterpiece!” I added. “We’d better find it…”

  That made her chortle… We rummaged through the pile of junk.

  Finally her niece came in, very late. You should have seen her hips! That arse was a public scandal. Her skirt was all pleated… So that it could hold the note. A rounded accordion. The unemployed are desperate, sex-starved; no dough to take a girl out with… They kick up a fuss. “What about giving me some of that arse!” they’d shout at her. Square in her face. At the end of the hall, the result of always getting a hard-on for nothing. The youngsters with finer features than the rest feel entitled to it, they expect life to coddle them. It wasn’t until later that she began to go down and hustle… after no end of calamities… For the present she was just having fun.

  She didn’t find my beautiful Legend either. She didn’t give a damn about “King Krogold”… the only one who cared was myself. Her school of life was the Petit Panier, a dance hall near the Porte Brancion, just before the railway.

  They didn’t take their eyes off me when I got mad. In their opinion I was absolutely clueless! A stick-in-the-mud, jerk-off intellectual, and so on. But now, surprisingly enough, they were scared I’d clear out. If I had, I wonder what they’d have done. I have no doubt that the aunt thought about it plenty. Lord, the winning smiles they treated me to when I began to talk about a change of air…

  In addition to her amazing arse, Mireille had romantic eyes and a bewitching look, but a hefty nose, a beezer, that was her cross. When I wanted to humiliate her a bit, I’d say: “No kidding, Mireille, you’ve got a nose like a man…” But she was good
at telling yarns, she loved them like a sailor. She made up all sorts of things, at first to amuse me, later to make trouble for me. I like to hear a good story, that’s my weakness. She went too far, that’s all. We got violent in the end, but she certainly deserved the thrashings I gave her, and if I’d laid her out cold, she’d have deserved that too. She finally admitted it. The fact is I was pretty generous… I socked her for good reason… Everybody said so… at least the ones who were in the know.

  * * *

  I’m not being unfair to Gustin Sabayot when I say that he didn’t knock himself out with his diagnoses. He got his ideas from the clouds.

  The first thing he did when he stepped out of his house in the morning was to look up at the sky. “Ferdinand,” he’d say, “today it’s going to be rheumatism, one case after another. You want to bet?” He read that in the heavens. He was never very far off, because he had a thorough knowledge of the climate and the human temperament.

  “Aha! A bit of hot weather after a cold spell! That calls for calomel, take my word for it! There’s jaundice in the air. The wind has changed… From north to west. From cold to rain… That means two weeks of bronchitis… There’s no point in them even getting up. If I were in charge, I’d make out my prescriptions in bed… After all, Ferdinand, when they come to see us, all they do is gab… For doctors who get paid by the call there’s some point in it… but for us?… on a monthly salary… what’s the use?… I could treat them without stepping out of the house. Damn pests. I don’t have to see them. They wouldn’t wheeze any more or less. They wouldn’t vomit any more, they wouldn’t be any yellower or redder, or paler, or less idiotic… That’s the way it is and nobody’s going to change it!” That’s how Gustin felt about it, and he was damn right.

  “Do you think they’re sick?… They moan… they belch… they stagger… they fester… You want to clear them out of your waiting room? On the double? Even the ones who damn near suffocate every time they cough?… Offer them a free pass to the movies… or a free drink across the street… you’ll see how many you’ve got left… If they come around and bother you, it’s mostly because they’re bored. On the day before a holiday you never see a soul… Mark my words, the trouble with those poor bastards isn’t their health, what they need is something to do with themselves… they want you to entertain them, cheer them up, fascinate them with their belches… their farts… their aches and pains… they want you to find explanations… fevers… rumblings… new and intriguing ailments… They want you to get interested, to expatiate… that’s what you’ve got your diplomas for… Ah, getting a kick out of his death while he’s busy manufacturing it: that’s mankind for you, Ferdinand! They cling to their clap, their syphilis, their TB. They need them. And their oozing bladders, the fire in their rectums. They don’t give a damn. But if you knock yourself out, if you know how to keep them interested, they won’t die until you get there. That’s your reward. They’ll come around to the bitter end.” When the rain slanted down between the chimneys of the power plant, he’d say: “Ferdinand, this is sciatica day… If I don’t get ten cases today I’ll send my parchment back to the dean!” But when the soot came back at us from the east, which is the driest quarter, over the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, he’d crush a smudge against his nose and say: “I’ll be buggered if the lungers don’t start bringing up clots before the night is out. Damn it all, they’ll wake me up a dozen times…”

  Sometimes in the late afternoon he’d make things easier for himself. He’d climb up the ladder to the enormous cabinet where the samples were kept. And he’d start distributing medicines directly, free of charge, and absolutely without formality. “Hey you, Stringbean, you got palpitations?” he’d say to some sloven. “No.” “Haven’t you got a sour stomach?… A discharge?… Sure you have. Just a little? Well then, take some of this, you know where, in two quarts of water… it’ll do you a world of good!… How about your joints? Don’t they ache?… No haemorrhoids? And how about your bowels?… Here are some Pepet suppositories. Worms too? You think so? Well, here are some wonder drops… Take them before you go to bed.”

  He suggested something from every shelf… There was something for every disorder, every symptom, every obsession… Patients are amazingly greedy. As long as they’ve got some slop to put in their mouths, they’re satisfied, they’re glad to get out. They’re afraid you might call them back.

  With his gift-giving I’ve seen Gustin reduce to ten minutes a consultation that would have taken hours if handled conscientiously. But I myself had nothing to learn in that line. I had my own system.

  I wanted to talk to him about my Legend. We’d found the first part under Mireille’s bed. I was badly disappointed when I reread it. The passage of time hadn’t helped my romance any. After years of oblivion a child of fancy can look pretty tawdry… Well, with Gustin I could always count on a frank, sincere opinion. I tried to put him in the right frame of mind.

  “Gustin,” I said. “You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes… Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?… Are your heart and cock still capable of leaping to the words of an epic, sad to be sure, but noble… resplendent?… You feel up to it?…”

  Gustin, he stayed where he was, half-dozing on his stepladder, in front of his samples and the wide-open medicine cabinet… Not a word out of him… he didn’t want to interrupt me…

  “It’s the story,” I informed him, “of Gwendor the Magnificent, Prince of Christiania… Here we are… He is breathing his last… as I stand here talking to you… his blood is pouring from a dozen wounds… Gwendor’s army has just suffered a terrible defeat… King Krogold himself caught sight of him in the thick of the fray… and clove him in twain… Krogold is no do-nothing king… He metes out his own justice… Gwendor had betrayed him… Death comes to Gwendor and is about to finish his job… Get a load of this:

  “The tumult of battle dies down with the last glow of daylight… The last of King Krogold’s guards vanish in the distance… The death rattles of a vast army rise up in the shadows… Victors and vanquished give up their souls as best they can… The silence stifles their cries and moans, which become gradually weaker and less frequent…

  “Crushed beneath a heap of his followers, Gwendor the Magnificent is still losing blood… At dawn Death stands before him.

  “‘Hast thou understood, Gwendor?’

  “‘I have understood, O Death. I have understood since the beginning of this day… I have felt in my heart, in my arm as well, in my friends’ eyes, even in the step of my charger, a slow, sad spell akin to sleep… My star was failing in thine icy grip… Everything began to leave me! O Death! Great is my remorse! Endless my shame… Behold these poor corpses!… An eternity of silence will not soften my lot…’

  “‘There is no softness or gentleness in this world, Gwendor, but only myth! All kingdoms end in a dream!…’

  “‘O Death, give me a little time… a day or two! I must find out who betrayed me…’

  “‘Everything betrays, Gwendor… The passions belong to no one, even love is only the flower of life in the garden of youth.’

  “And very gently Death gathers up the prince… He has ceased to resist… His weight has left him… And then a beautiful dream takes possession of his soul… The dream that often came to him when he was little, in his fur cradle, in the Chamber of the Heirs, close to his Moravian nurse in the castle of King René…”

  Gustin’s arms dangled between his legs…

  “Well, how do you like it?” I ask him.

  He was on his guard. He wasn’t too eager to be rejuvenated. He resisted. He wanted me to explain the whole thing to him… the whys… the wherefores… That’s not so easy… Such things are as frail as butterflies. A touch and they fall to pieces in your hands and you get soiled. What’s the use? I didn’t press the matter
.

  * * *

  In going on with my Legend I might have consulted some sensitive soul… well-versed in fine feelings… in all the innumerable shadings of love…

  I prefer to manage on my own.

  Sensitive souls are often impotent. They need to be whipped. There’s no getting away from it. Anyway, let me describe King Krogold’s castle:

  “…A great monster cowering in the heart of the forest, vast crushing hulk, hewn out of the rock… kneaded from bilging foulness, credences edged with friezes and redans… dungeons upon dungeons… from the distant seashore over there… the crests of the forest ride in to break like waves against the outer walls…

  “The lookout, wide-eyed for fear of being hanged… Higher… still higher… On the summit of Morehande, on the tower of the Treasure House, the banner flaps in the gale… It bears the royal arms. A snake beheaded, bleeding at the neck! Traitors, beware! Gwendor has paid for his crime!…”

  Gustin was done in. He was dozing. In fact, he was sound asleep. I locked up his medicine cabinet. “Let’s get out of here!” I said to him. “We’ll take a walk by the Seine!… It’ll do you good…” He didn’t want to move… I kept at him and he finally agreed. I suggested a little café on the other side of the Île aux Chiens… When we got there, he fell asleep again in spite of the coffee. Not a bad idea, I admit. It feels pretty good in those bistros around four o’clock… Three artificial flowers in a tin vase. The riverfront is deserted. Even the old soak at the bar is beginning to accept the idea that the landlady won’t listen to him any more. I leave Gustin alone. The next tugboat is sure to wake him. The cat jumps off the old bag’s lap and comes over to sharpen his claws.