The way Gustin turns up his hands when he’s snoozing, it’s easy to read his future. A man’s whole life is in his palms. With Gustin it’s the life line that’s prominent. With me it’s luck, the fate line. My chances of long life don’t look too good… I wonder when it will be. I’ve got a furrow at the base of my thumb… Will it be an arteriole bursting in my encephalon? Or in the central gyrus?… Or in that little convolution of the third ventricle?… Metitpois often used to point out that spot in the morgue… A stroke is a tiny little thing… A little break in the grey mass, no bigger than a pinprick… But the soul has passed through, carbolic acid and all… Unfortunately it might turn out to be a neoplasm of the rectum… I’d give a lot for the arteriole… Your health!… Metitpois was a real master. We used to spend whole Sundays poking around in the grooves… investigating the different ways of dying… That fascinated the old man… He wanted to get an idea of how it would be. He personally hoped for a nice cosy flooding of both heart ventricles at once when his time came… He was laden with honours!…
“The most exquisite deaths, remember that, Ferdinand, are those that attack us in our most sensitive tissues…” He had a precious, elaborate, subtle way of talking, Metitpois, like the men of Charcot’s day. His prospecting of the Rolandic, the third ventricle, and the grey nucleus didn’t do him much good… in the end he died of a heart attack, under circumstances that were anything but cosy… an attack of angina pectoris that lasted twenty minutes. He held out for a hundred and twenty seconds with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar… But for eighteen minutes he screamed like a stuck pig… That his diaphragm was being ripped out, his living guts… That a thousand open razors had been plunged into his aorta… He tried to vomit them out at us… I’m not exaggerating. He crawled out into the living room… He damn near hammered his chest in… He bellowed into the carpet… in spite of the morphine… You could hear him all over the house and out in the street… He ended up under the piano. When the cardiac arterioles burst one by one, it’s quite a harp… it’s too bad nobody ever comes back from angina pectoris. There’d be wisdom and genius to spare.
We’d done enough meditating, it would soon be time for the venereal patients. That was at La Pourneuve, out past La Garenne. We worked together there. Just as I had foreseen, a tugboat whistle blew. It was time for us to be going. The venereal clinic was quite a place. While waiting for their injections, the clappers and syphilitics got acquainted. There was embarrassment at first, then they got to enjoy it. As soon as it was dark in the winter, they’d rush out to meet near the slaughterhouse down the street. Those people are always in a terrible hurry. They’re afraid that sweet little erection won’t come back. Mother Vitruve had figured it all out on her way to see me… The youngsters with their first dose, it makes them melancholy, it really gets them down… She used to wait for them at the exit… Motherly tenderness was her act… touching sympathy… “It burns pretty bad, doesn’t it, boy?… I know how it is… I’ve nursed them… I’ve got an amazing herbal tea… Why don’t you come home with me, I’ll make you some…” Two or three cups of coffee and the kid would come across. One night there was a terrible shambles down by the wall, an Algerian with a hard-on like a horse was buggering a little baker’s boy for the hell of it, right near the night watchman’s cabin. The watchman, who was an old hand at watching, took it all in… first the kid sighed, then he whimpered, and then he began to howl… He writhed and struggled, there were four of them holding him… Even so he got away and ran into the old man’s cabin for protection. And the watchman locked the door. “He got himself finished off. Believe it or not,” Vitruve assures me, by way of comment. “I could see the watchman through the blinds! The two of them were at it. Birds of a feather if you ask me!…”
She didn’t believe in sentiments. She took the lowest view and she was right. To get to La Pourneuve you had to take the bus. “You can spare five minutes,” Gustin said. He wasn’t in any hurry. We sat down in the bus shelter, the one before the bridge.
It was right there on the riverfront, at Number 18, that my parents went broke in the winter of ’92. That was a long time ago.
Their business was “Notions, Flowers, Feathers”. There was, as I was often told, only one shop window and all they had in it was three hats. The Seine froze over that year. I was born in May. The springtime – that’s me. I suppose it’s our fate, but you get sick of growing old, of seeing everything around you change, the houses, the numbers, the trams, the hairdos. Short dresses, creased hats, the horseless carriage, the future belongs to aviation – it’s all the same! It’s all a drain on your attention. I don’t feel like changing any more. There are plenty of things I could complain about, but I’m stuck with them. I’m a pain, but I adore myself as much as the Seine stinks. The day they remove the hook-shaped lamp post from the corner by Number 12, I’ll be devastated. Man is temporary, I know that, but we’ve already temporized enough for my money.
Here come the barges… Nowadays each one has a heart of its own. It thuds loud and sullen in the echoing darkness of the arches. Enough of that. I’m falling apart. I’ll stop complaining. But don’t let them pile on any more. Things seem pretty crummy, but if they could carry us away with them, we’d die of poetry. In a way that wouldn’t be bad. Gustin agreed with me about all those endearing little things, except that he looked to the bottle for forgetfulness. Why not?… There was always a little booze and nostalgia in his Gallic moustache…
At the venereal clinic we used to mark vertical bars on a big sheet of paper as we went along… That was all there was to it. A red stroke: Salvarsan… Green: mercury!… And so on. The rest was routine… All we had to do was pump the juice into their buttocks or the bend of their arms… It was like larding a roast. Green!… Arm! Yellow… Arse!… Red!… Both buttocks… Another one in the arse!… Ditto! Bismuth! Bitch! Blue! Dripping vein! Swine! Get those pants on!… Swab that arm!… The rhythm was merciless. Batches and batches of them… Endless lines… Limp cocks! Pricks! Dripping peckers! Oozing! Festering! Starched sheets, as stiff as cardboard! Clap! Walking sideways! Queen of the world! The arse is its throne! Heated summer and winter!…
At first the poor bastards are worried! But after a while they start passing each other sucker’s remedies and screwing harder than ever! More!… As long as Julienne doesn’t notice… They’ll never come back… Lying to us!… Howling for joy… Urethra full of razor blades! Prick split in two! Cock in mouth. Get that crack ready!
Here’s case history Number 34, timid little white-collar worker with dark glasses, wise guy, every six months he goes to the Cour d’Amsterdam and gets a dose on purpose, so as to expiate by the rod… he pisses his razor blades into the little halfwits he meets through the ads… It’s his way of saying his prayers, as he puts it. Number 34 is nothing but one big parasite! Here’s what he wrote in our bogs: “I’m the terror of all cunts… I’ve buggered my big sister… Been engaged twelve times.” He’s a punctual customer, quiet, well behaved, and always glad to be back.
That’s our bread and butter. It’s not as bad as working on the railway.
When we got to La Pourneuve, Gustin said: “Say, Ferdinand, just now… while I was dozing, don’t try to tell me different… you read the lines of my hand… Well, what did you see?”
I knew what was worrying him: his liver. It had been sensitive around the edges for a long time, and lately he’d been having awful nightmares… He was building up to a cirrhosis…
In the morning I heard him throwing up in the sink… I told him it was nothing, why upset him? The damage was done. The main thing was that he should keep his jobs.
At La Jonction he’d landed his job in the welfare bureau soon after taking his degree. Thanks to a little abortion, that’s the long and the short of it… the girlfriend of a city councillor who was very conservative at the time… Gustin had just set himself up next door, he was poor as a church mouse. It had co
me off smoothly, his hand hadn’t begun to shake. The next time it was the mayor’s wife. Another triumph!… Out of gratitude they had appointed him charity doctor.
In the beginning everybody had liked him in his new job. And then all of a sudden they didn’t like him… They were sick of his mug and everything about him… They couldn’t stand him any more. So they did everything in their power to make life miserable for him. They ran him down, accusing him of everything imaginable, of having dirty hands, of getting his doses wrong, of not knowing which drugs were poisonous… Of bad breath… Of wearing buttoned shoes… When they’d tormented him so much he was ashamed to be seen in the street and after threatening a thousand times to fire him like a fart, they changed their minds and began to tolerate him for no good reason, except that they were sick of finding him so nasty and spineless…
All the filth, the envy, the vexation of the district had put its mark on his mug. He’d suffered all the gall and rancour of the pen-pushers in his clinic. The hangovers of the 14,000 alcoholics of the district, the gastric catarrhs, the excruciating stoppages of the 6,422 cases of clap that he wasn’t able to cure, the ovarian pangs of the 4,376 menopause cases, the querulous anxiety of 2,266 sufferers from high blood pressure, the irreconcilable contempt of 722 bilious headaches, the persecution mania of 47 tapeworm owners, plus the 352 mothers of children with worms, and the nondescript mob, the vast horde of masochists with manias of every kind, the eczema patients, the albuminous, the diabetic, the fetid, the palsied, the vaginous, the useless, the “too muches”, the “not enoughs”, the constipated, the repentant queers, whole shipments of murderers had been flowing over his face, cascading under his glasses morning and afternoon for thirty years.
At La Jonction he lived right in the middle of the shithouse, directly over the X-ray room. He had his three-room apartment, and it was a good solid stone building, not a plywood box like nowadays. But to hold your own against life you need dykes ten times higher than in Panama and little invisible sluices. He’d been living there since the Exhibition, the big one, since the happy days of Argenteuil.
Now there were big “buildings” all around the place.
Occasionally Gustin would still attempt a little distraction… He’d bring in a little cutie, but that didn’t happen too often. His great sorrow came back to him as soon as any sentiment started up. After the third meeting… He preferred to drink… There was a bistro across the street with a green front and a banjo player on Sundays. It was handy for the French fries, the girl really knew how to make them. The rotgut burned Gustin’s innards, for my part, I haven’t even tried to drink since I’ve had that buzzing in my ears day and night. It knocks me out, it makes me look like I’ve had cholera. Gustin auscultates me now and then. He doesn’t tell me what he thinks either. That’s the one thing we’re discreet about. I’ve got my troubles too, I have to admit it. He knows my case, he tries to cheer me up: “Go on, Ferdinand, go ahead and read, I’ll listen to the damn thing! Not too fast, though! And cut out the gestures. It wears you out and it makes me dizzy…”
“After the battle, King Krogold, his knights, his pages, his brother the archbishop, the clerics of his camp, the whole court, went to the great tent in the middle of the bivouac and dropped with weariness. The heavy gold crescent, a gift from the caliph, was nowhere to be found… Ordinarily it surmounted the royal dais. The captain entrusted with its safekeeping was beaten to a pulp. The King lies down, tries to sleep… He is still suffering from his wounds. He wakes. Sleep refuses to come… He reviles the snorers. He rises. He steps over sleepers, crushing a hand here and there, leaves the tent… Outside he is transfixed with the cold. He limps, but still he makes his way. A long file of wagons rings the camp. The sentries have fallen asleep. Krogold moves along the deep trenches that defend the camp… He talks to himself, he stumbles, recovers his balance just in time. Something is glistening at the bottom of the ditch, an enormous blade. It trembles… A man is there, holding the glittering object in his arms. Krogold leaps, overturns him, pins him down, it’s a common soldier, and slits his throat like a pig with his short sword… ‘Glug, glug!’ the thief gurgles through the hole. He drops everything. It’s all over. The King bends down, picks up the caliph’s crescent. He climbs out of the ditch. He falls asleep in the mist… The thief has had his just deserts.”
* * *
About that time the crash came and I almost got fired from the clinic. Because of gossip again.
I heard about it from Lucie Keriben, who had a dress shop on Boulevard Moncontour. Lots of people came to her shop and they gossiped a good deal. She let me in on some pretty rotten rumours. So vicious in fact that it couldn’t have been anybody but Mireille… I wasn’t mistaken… Pure calumny of course. She was spreading it around that I had been organizing orgies with some of my female patients in the neighbourhood. Really lousy stuff… Secretly Lucie Keriben was kind of glad to see me having a little trouble… She was jealous.
So I wait for Mireille to come home, I hide in the Impasse Viviane, where I knew she’d have to come by. I wasn’t making enough dough yet to go off and write full time… I was still good for another hitch of bad luck. I was in a foul humour. I see her coming… she passes in front of me. I give her a kick in the seat that sends her sailing off the pavement. She gets my meaning immediately, but she won’t talk. She wanted to see her aunt first. The little bitch wouldn’t come clean. Not a word.
She’d spread all that gossip to get me worried… then I’d hurry up and give them what they were after. Violence was no use. Especially with Mireille, it only made her more spiteful than ever. She wanted to get married. To me or somebody else. She was fed up with factories. At sixteen she’d already worked in seven of them in the western suburbs.
“No more job,” she’d announce. At the “Happy Suck” English sweet factory she’d caught the director getting sucked off by an apprentice. What a place! For six months she tossed dead rats into the big sugar vat. At Saint-Ouen she’d been snagged by a forelady, who’d taken to swatting her in the washroom. They had walked off the job together.
Mireille knew all about capitalism… before she even began to menstruate. At the free camp in Marty-sur-Oise there had been finger play, fresh air and rousing speeches. She had developed nicely. On Federates’ Day,* she was an honour to the settlement house, it was she who brandished Lenin on a pole from La Courtine to Père-Lachaise. The way she came swaggering down the street… the cops were flabbergasted. And with those luscious legs she had the whole boulevard horning out the ‘Internationale’.
The little pimps at the dance hall where she hung out didn’t realize what a number they had on their hands. She was still a minor and scared of the vice squad. For a while she tagged along with Robert, Gégène and Gaston. But they were building up to a mess of trouble… She would be their downfall.
I could expect just about anything from Vitruve and her niece, especially Vitruve; she knew too much about me not to make use of it some day.
I appeased them with money, but the kid wanted more, she wanted the whole works. When I tried to get around her with affection, it looked mighty suspicious to her. I’ll take her out to the Bois, I said to myself. She’s got a grudge against me. I’ve got to do something to catch her interest. I had my plans for the Bois, I’d tell her a nice story, I’d flatter her vanity.
“Ask your aunt,” I say. “You’ll be home before midnight… Wait for me at the Café Byzance.”
So off we went, the two of us.
After the Porte Dauphine she was already in a better humour. She liked the swanky neighbourhoods. At the Hôtel Méridien it was the bedbugs that got her down. When she picked up a little boyfriend and had to take her slip off, the marks made her feel ashamed. They all knew it was bedbug bites… They were all familiar with the liquids and the stuff you burn… Mireille’s dream was a room without bugs… If she had cleared out then, her aunt would have had her brought back. She reli
ed on her for the dough she brought in, but there was also a little pimp, Bébert from Val-du-Grâce, who had the same ideas. He ended up on snow. He’d been reading the Journey…
As we were approaching the waterfall, I began to get confidential…
“I know you’ve got a boyfriend in the post office who gets a kick out of letting you whip him…”
She was too happy to put on airs or beat about the bush. She told me all about it. But when we got to the Pré Catelan, she was afraid to go on, the darkness frightened her. She thought I was taking her into the woods to beat her up. She felt in my pockets to see if I had a rod. I didn’t have a thing. She felt my pecker. On account of the passing cars, I suggested we go over to the island where we could talk more at our ease. She was a slut, she had a hard time coming and danger appealed to her. The youngsters rowing on the lake lost control, got tangled in the branches, cursed, tipped, and ruined their little lanterns.
“Listen to the ducks gagging in the diluted urine!”
“Mireille!” I say, once we were settled. “I know you’re a champion liar… one thing you don’t trouble your head about is the truth…”
“Go on,” she says. “If I were to repeat a tenth of what I heard!…”
“Okay,” I stop her, “I’m full of indulgence for you… I’d even call it weakness… Not on account of your body… or your face or your nose… What attracts me is your imagination… I’m a voyeur! You tell me dirty stories… And I’ll tell you a beautiful legend… Is it a bargain?… Fifty-fifty? You’ll be getting the best of it!…”
That appealed to her, talking business… I filled her in… I guaranteed there’d be plenty of princesses, yards and yards of genuine velvet… brocade to the very linings… furs and jewels… beyond imagining… We were in perfect agreement about the setting and even the costumes. And then at last our story started with:
Death on Credit Page 4
