Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “We are in Bredonnes in Vendée… It’s tournament season…

  “The town is getting ready… Here come the courtiers in fine array… naked wrestlers… mountebanks… their coach rides by… ploughing through the crowd… Pancakes frying… three knights in damascened armour… they have come from far away… from the south… from the north… their bold challenges ring out…

  “Here comes Thibaud the Wicked, a troubadour, at daybreak he reaches the city gate along the towpath. He is weary… He has come to Bredonnes in quest of haven and shelter… and to seek out Joad the Dissembler, the sheriff’s son, to remind him of a sinister affair, the murder of an archer in Paris, near the Pont aux Change, in their student days…

  “Thibaud enters the city… At the Sainte-Geneviève ferry he flatly refuses to pay the fee… he comes to blows with the ferryman… The archers appear… they overpower him and drag him away… Here he is, bound hand and foot, foaming at the mouth, in tatters, dragged before the sheriff. He struggles furiously, and flings the ugly story in his face…”

  The tone appealed to Mireille, she wanted more. We hadn’t got along so well in a long time. Finally it was time to go home.

  There were only a few couples left on the paths of the Bagatelle park. Mireille was all cheered up. She wanted to catch them in the act… We abandoned my beautiful Legend for a furious discussion about whether what women really wanted was to shack up with each other… Mireille, for instance, wouldn’t she like to lay her girl friends a little?… Goose them maybe?… Especially the dainty little ones, the gazelles… what with those athletic haunches of hers… that arse…

  “What about dildos?” she remarked. “Sure, that’s why we watch. Why we look so hard when girls are having fun! To see if they won’t grow one!… So they can tear each other to pieces, the bitches! So they can rip each other’s guts out! And bleed all over the place! So all their rottenness can come pouring out of them!…”

  My sweet little Mireille was well informed! She followed my little show perfectly… I thought I’d better warn her: “If you repeat one word of this in Rancy… I’ll make you eat your shoes!…” And I grabbed hold of her under the gas lamp… I could already see the triumphant look on her face. I could feel it in my bones that she was going to tell the whole world that I had behaved like a beast… in the Bois de Boulogne! I began to see red… To think that she’d taken me for a ride again! I give her a good smack… She grins. Defiantly.

  From the thickets and copses, from all sides, people run out to watch us, by twos and fours, in droves. All brandishing their cocks. The ladies have their skirts hiked up front and back. The brazen, the loose and the cautious…

  “Attaboy, Ferdinand!” the whole lot of them shout. What a noise… It rose up out of the woods. “Give her the works. Clout her! Sock her!” Naturally all that encouragement made me rough.

  Mireille begins to shriek and run. I run after her. I knock myself out. I give her some wicked kicks in the rear end. They land with a dull thud. Hundreds of Ranelagh sex fiends come running up, they collect by the prickloads in front of us, they pull up from behind…

  The grass is full of them, thousands are pouring down the drive. More and more of them come stepping out of the darkness… The women’s dresses are in tatters… tits torn and dangling… little boys without pants… they knock each other down, trample each other, toss each other up in the air… some are left dangling from the trees… along with smashed-up chairs… An old bag, English, comes along in a little car and sticks her head out the window so far it almost falls off, she was beginning to get in my way… Never had I seen eyes so full of happiness. “Hurray! Hurray!” she shouts without even stopping her car… “Great stuff! You’ll crack her arse open! You’ll send her sky-high! You’ll knock the eternity out of her! Hurray for Christian Science!”

  I ran still faster. I ran faster than her car. I gave it everything I had, I was dripping with sweat. As I charged, I thought of my job… I’d be sure to lose it. That gave me the chills: “Mireille! Have pity! I adore you! Will you wait for me, you damn slut! Will you listen to me?”

  When we got to the Arc de Triomphe, the whole crowd began to whirl like a merry-go-round. The whole mob was chasing Mireille. The square was littered with corpses. The living were tearing off each other’s organs. The Englishwoman was toting her car over her head at arm’s length! Hurray, hurray! She knocks over a bus with it. The traffic is blocked by three files of mobile guards with shouldered rifles. All for our benefit. Mireille’s dress flies away. The Englishwoman flings herself on the kid, claws at her breasts, trickling, pouring, red all over. We fall, we writhe all together, we strangle each other. Pure bedlam.

  The flame under the Arc de Triomphe rises, rises higher, breaks, scatters through the sky… The whole place smells of smoked ham… Then Mireille whispering in my ear, speaking to me at last: “Ferdinand, my darling, I love you!… I admit it, you have wonderful ideas!” The flames rain down on us, everyone picks up a big chunk… We stuff them sizzling and whirling into our flies. The ladies put on bouquets of fire… We fall asleep inside each other.

  Twenty-five thousand policemen clear the Place de la Concorde. It was too much for us inside each other. It was too hot. There was smoke coming out. It was hell.

  * * *

  My mother and Vitruve in the next room were worried, they kept coming and going, waiting for my fever to go down. An ambulance had brought me home. I had collapsed on top of a sewer grating on the Avenue MacMahon. The bicycle cops had found me.

  Fever or not, I always have such a buzzing in both ears that it can’t get much worse. I’ve had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trail… no exaggeration… for twenty-two years. That’s quite a package. She’s tried a million different noises, a tremendous hullabaloo, but I raved faster than she could, I screwed her, I beat her to the tape. That’s how I do it! I shoot the shit, I charm her, I force her to forget me. My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots… It never stops scolding… It dazes me with blasts of the trombone, it keeps on day and night. I’ve got every noise in nature, from the flute to Niagara Falls… Wherever I go, I’ve got drums with me and an avalanche of trombones… for weeks on end I play the triangle… On the bugle I can’t be beat. I still have my own private birdhouse complete with 3,527 birds that will never calm down… I am the organs of the Universe… I provide everything, the ham, the spirit and the breath… Often I seem to be worn out. My thoughts stagger and sprawl. I’m not very good to them. I’m working up the opera of the deluge. As the curtain falls, the midnight train pulls into the station… The glass dome shatters and collapses… The steam escapes through two dozen valves… the couplings bounce sky-high… In wide-open carriages three hundred musicians soused to the gills rend the air, playing forty-five bars at once…

  For twenty-two years he’s been trying to carry me off… at exactly midnight… But I can fight back… with twelve pure symphonies of cymbals, two cataracts of nightingales… a whole troupe of seals being roasted over a slow fire… It’s bachelor’s work… that’s for sure. It’s my second life. Anyway it’s my business.

  If I mention it now, it’s to explain that I had a little attack in the Bois de Boulogne. I often make a lot of noise when I talk. I talk too loud. People make signs at me to lower my voice. I drool a little, I can’t help it… It’s very hard for me to take an interest in my friends. I tend to forget their existence. I’m preoccupied. Sometimes I puke in the street. Then it stops. It’s almost quiet. But the walls begin to shake again and the cars go into reverse. The whole earth trembles and me with it. I don’t speak… Life begins again. When I get to see God in his place, I’ll blast his ear, the inner ear, I’ve studied those things. I wonder how he’ll like that. I’m the Devil’s stationmaster. The day I go, wait and see how the train jumps the track. Monsieur Bizonde, the truss-maker, whom I do little jobs for, will find me paler than ever. He’ll get use
d to it.

  I was thinking about all that in my room while my mother and Vitruve were padding about next door.

  The gate of hell in your ear is a little atom of nothing. Move it a quarter of a hair’s breadth… a micron… and look through, you’re done for! That’s all! You’re damned for ever! You ready? No? Do you think you can make it? Kicking in isn’t free of charge! A beautiful shroud embroidered with tales – that’s what the Pale Lady wants. The last gasp is very demanding. It’s the last movie and nothing more to come! A lot of people don’t know! You’ve got to knock yourself out. I’ll be up to it soon… I’ll hear my ticker give its last slobbery pfutt… and then plop! It’ll wobble in its aorta… like an old broom handle… It’ll be all over. They’ll open it up to check… on that sloping table… They won’t see my beautiful Legend, nor my music either. The Pale Lady will have taken it all… Here I am, Madame, I’ll say to her, you’re the greatest connoisseur of all!…

  * * *

  I was dead to the world, but even so I couldn’t get Mireille off my mind…

  I had no doubt about her spilling the dirt all over the place.

  “My oh my!” they’d be saying at the clinic… “Ferdinand’s been overdoing it. He goes out to the Bois to get laid…” (The way they always exaggerate.) “With Mireille of all people!… Debauching all our young women!… We’ll put in a complaint!… He’s a disgrace to his profession! A rapist and an anarchist!…”

  No less! It made my blood boil in my bed to think about those fairy tales, I was oozing all over like a toad… I was suffocating… I wriggle and thrash… I throw off all the covers… Suddenly I feel strong as an ox. But it’s perfectly true that those devils were following us!… That charred smell all over! An enormous shadow shuts off my view… It’s Léonce’s hat… An agitator’s hat… with a brim as wide as a race track… He must have put out the fire… It’s Léonce Poitrat! I’m positive! He’s always been shadowing me… He’s out to get me! He hangs around the Préfecture a damn sight more than legitimate business warrants… After six o’clock… He’s all over the place, always active, organizing the apprentices, doing abortions… He doesn’t like me… I give him the creeps. He’s out to get me. He admits it…

  He’s the bookkeeper at the clinic… He also wears a flowing bow tie. That hat blocks off part of my sleep… My temperature must be rising… I’m going to explode… At meetings he’s the life of the party, you should see him… He can shout for two hours on end at those trade-union blackmail sessions. No one can make Léonce shut up… if anybody tries to change a single word in one of his motions, he blows his top. He can shout louder than a colonel. He’s built like a brick shithouse. He can’t be beat for hot air and his cock has no equal either, comes up harder than thirty-six biceps. Cast iron. That’s him. He’s secretary of the Bricklayers and Roofers’ Union of Vanves La Révolte. Elected no less. His buddies are proud of Léonce, the lazy pugnacious bastard. For pimping on the labour movement he hasn’t his equal.

  With all that he wasn’t satisfied, he was jealous of me, my ideas, my spiritual treasures, my looks, the way people call me “Doctor”. There he was with the ladies, waiting… for me to make up my mind?… For me to kick in?… Nothing doing!… Just to burn him up… I’d stay right on the ground where I was!… It would be a miracle!… I’d even kiss him in the hope of killing him!… By contagion!…

  What’s that noise upstairs?… Various noises… it’s the pianist giving lessons… No, practising… He’s nervous… He must be alone… C!… C!… C!… Not so hot!… B!… B!… Come, come… Try again!… E!… E!… D! It’ll come out all right in the end!… And then an arpeggio with the left hand!… and now the right hand’s perking up… B-sharp!… Christ almighty!

  Through my window I can see Paris… spread out below me… And then it begins to climb… towards us… towards Montmartre… One roof pushes the next, sharp, cutting, bleeding in the light, streets blue, red and yellow… Lower down, the Seine, pale mists, a tugboat buffeting the current… with a tired wail… Still farther off, the hills… Everything looks alike… The night will take us in. Is that my concierge banging on the wall?

  I must be in pretty bad shape for her to come up… Mother Bérenge is too old for all those stairs… Where can she be coming from?… She crosses my room ever so softly… She doesn’t touch the floor. She doesn’t even look to right or left… She leaves by the window, out into the void… There she is, off in the darkness above the houses… there she is, over there…

  * * *

  D!… F!… G-sharp!… E!… Shit! Isn’t he ever going to stop? That must be his pupil starting in… When fever spreads through you, life gets as flabby as a barkeeper’s belly… You sink into a muddle of entrails. I hear my mother rubbing it in… She’s telling Mme Vitruve the story of her life… Over and over again, to make it clear what a time she’s had with me!… Extravagant!… Irresponsible!… Lazy!… Nothing like his father… he so conscientious… so hard-working… so deserving… so unlucky… who passed on last winter… Sure… she doesn’t tell her about the dishes he broke on her bean… Oh no! D, C, E! D-flat!… That’s his pupil, in trouble again… Skipping sixteenths… he’s tangled up in the teacher’s fingers… He’s skidding… he can’t straighten out… his nails are full of sharps… “Watch that beat!” I roar loudly.

  My mother doesn’t say a word about how he, Auguste, used to drag her through the back room by the hair. The place was really too small to argue in…

  Not one word about all that… nothing but poetry… Yes, we lived in cramped quarters, but we loved each other so. That’s what she was saying. Papa was fond of me, he was so sensitive about every little thing that my behaviour… so much to worry about… my alarming propensities, the terrible trouble I gave him hastened his death… all that grief and anguish affected his heart!… Plop! The fairy tales people tell each other… they make a certain amount of sense, but they’re a pack of filthy stinking lies… The stinking bitches get so het up filling each other full of bullshit that they drown out the piano… I can puke in peace.

  Vitruve is no slouch at telling whoppers either… she lists her sacrifices… Mireille is her whole life!… I can’t catch it all… I’d better go to the can to vomit… Probably a touch of malaria too… brought it back from the Congo… I’m pretty far gone in all directions…

  By the time I get back to bed, my mother is in the middle of her courtship… in Colombes… The days when Auguste rode a bike… Not to be outdone, the other one goes on shamelessly… about her desperate efforts to save my reputation… at Linuty’s… Oh no! I can’t stand it! I sit up… I’m at the end of my rope… I can’t move… I just lean over and vomit on the other side of the doss… If I’ve got to be delirious, I’d rather wallow in stories of my own… I see Thibaud the Troubadour… He’s always in need of money… He’s going to kill Joad’s father… Well, at least that will be one father less in the world… I see splendid tournaments on the ceiling… I see lancers impaling each other… I see King Krogold himself… He has come from the north… He had been invited to Bredonnes with his whole court… I see his daughter Wanda, the blonde, the radiant… I wouldn’t mind jerking off, but I’m too sticky… Joad is horny in love… Oh well, why not!… I’ve got to get back… A sudden surge of bile… The effort makes me bellow… This time my old bitches can’t help hearing… They come in and patch me up. I throw them out again… in the hallway they start shooting the shit again. After the way they’d been running me down, the tide changes… They discover my good points… They’re dependent on me for a good many things… Better be realistic… They’d been overdoing it… After all, who brings home the bacon?… My mother wasn’t making much, working for Monsieur Bizonde, the famous truss-maker… Not enough to get by on… It’s hard at her age to make ends meet on a commission basis… And who keeps Mme Vitruve and her niece going with his clever ideas?… Suddenly a new wave of suspicion. They begin to hedge…

>   “He’s a scatterbrained brute!… But good-hearted…” You’ve got to admit that. Yes, of course. There’s the rent and groceries to think about… Mustn’t exaggerate. They hasten to put each other’s minds at rest. My mother is no working woman… She says that over and over again, it’s her litany… She’s a small-business woman… Our family ran itself ragged for the glory of small business… We’re no drunken workers, up to our ears in debt… Oh no! Certainly not!… There’s a big difference and don’t forget it!… Three lives, mine, hers, and most of all my father’s, were ground down by sacrifice… Nobody even knows what became of them… They paid our debts…

  And now my mother knocks herself out trying to recapture those lives of ours… She’s reduced to her imagination… They’ve disappeared, our lives… our pasts as well… Whenever she has a free moment, she tries to put things back on their feet… but inevitably they collapse again!…

  She flies into terrible rages if I even begin to cough, because my father had a chest like a bull, good strong lungs… I can’t stand the sight of her any more, she gives me the creeps! She wants me to share in her fantasies… I’m not in the mood! One of these days I’m going to do something bad! I want to have my own fantasies… C! E! A! The pupil is gone. The pianist is relaxing… Doing a berceuse… I wish Émilie would come up… She comes every evening to straighten out… She hardly says anything… I forget she’s there! Ah, here she is! She wants me to take some rum… The drunks next door are bawling again…

  “He has a high fever you know!… I’m terribly worried!” my mother repeats for the hundredth time.

  “He’s so kind to his patients,” yacks Vitruve in turn…

  At that point I was so hot I dragged myself to the window.

  “On a long tack across the Étoile my gallant ship glides through the dusk… under full sail… she is heading straight for the Hôtel-Dieu… The whole town is on deck, still and calm. All those dead – I know them all… I even know the helmsman… He’s my buddy… The pianist has caught on… He’s playing the tune we need… ‘Black Joe’… for a cruise… to catch the wind and weather… and the lies… If I open the window, it will be cold… Tomorrow I’m going to kill Monsieur Bizonde, who keeps us going… the truss-maker, in his shop… I want him to travel… he never goes out… My vessel groans and pitches over the Parc Monceau… She’s slower than last night… She’s going to hit the statues… Two ghosts go ashore at the Comédie Française… Three enormous waves carry off the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. The siren screams against my window panes… I close my door… A roar of wind… My mother appears with her eyes popping out… She scolds me… Misbehaving as usual!… Vitruve comes running!… More good advice… I rebel… I give them hell… My fair ship is limping. Those females can wreck the infinite… She’s off course, it’s shameful!… Nevertheless she heels over to port… there’s no more graceful craft afloat… My heart follows her… Those bitches would do better to run after the rats that are fouling the rigging… She’ll never make that tack with her ropes so taut!… Got to slacken them… let out three turns before the Samaritaine! I shout all that out over the rooftops… My room is going to sink!… I’ve paid for it, haven’t I? Every last cent! With my lousy rotten existence!… I shit in my pyjamas! What a mess… Things are terribly bad! I’m going to founder at the Bastille. “Ah, if only your father were here!”… I hear those words… I explode! It’s her again! I turn round. My father, I say, was a skunk!… I yell my lungs out!… “There was no lousier bastard in the whole universe! From Dufayel to Capricorne!…” At first she’s stupefied! She freezes! Transfixed… Then she gets hold of herself. She calls me the lowest of the low. I don’t know which way to look. She bursts into tears. She rolls on the carpet in anguish. She rises to her knees. She stands up. She comes at me with the umbrella.