Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  He’s still clutching me, he drags me off towards the view… on the south side… From there, it’s perfectly true, you could see the whole of Paris!… The city was like an enormous animal, sprawled across the horizon… It’s black, it’s grey… it changes… it smokes… it makes a sad sound, a soft rumbling… it’s like a shell… notches, holes, spines catching at the sky… Des Pereires doesn’t give a hoot, he’s still talking… He harangues the scenery… He hoists himself up on the rail… He deepens his voice… It carries far away… It rolls over quarries and landslides…

  “Look, Ferdinand, look!…” I open my eyes as wide as they’ll go… I make a last effort… I’m really awfully tired… I wish he wouldn’t start again…

  “Farther, Ferdinand! Farther!… Do you see the city now? At the end! Do you see Paris? The capital?…”

  “Yes! Yes!… Yes!… That’s it all right!…”

  “They eat, don’t they?…”

  “Yes, Monsieur Courtial!…”

  “Every day, don’t they?…”

  “Yes! Yes!… Yes!…”

  “Good!… Then listen to me!…”

  Silence… He stirs up the air magnificently… He spreads his wings… He opens his cape a little… His gestures are really something… Is he going to fling challenges again?… He smiles in anticipation… He’s sardonic… He dispels a vision… a phantom… he brushes it aside… He taps his dome… Yes, indeed! Good Lord! What do you know! He’d been mistaken! He’d been deceiving himself all along! Ah! A big mistake!… He questions me… He calls me to witness!…

  “So then they eat, Ferdinand!… They eat! Yes indeed, they eat!… And I, poor fool! Where have I been?… Oh futile courage! But I’ve been punished! Cut to the quick!… I bleed! And it serves me right! Forget? Not I! Oh ho! I’m going to take them as they are!… And where they are! In their bellies! Customers by and for the belly!… I will address their bellies, Ferdinand!…”

  He addresses the city too… all of it! Rumbling over yonder in the mist…

  “Whistle! Whistle, you bitch! Mutter and roar! Grunt! I hear you!… Gluttons!… Bottomless pits!… All that’s going to change, Ferdinand!… Gluttons, I tell you!…”

  He calms down. Confidence returns! He smiles at me!… He smiles to himself…

  “Ah, that’s a thing of the past! I’ll lay to that!… You can trust me! You will be my witness! You can tell the old lady! Ah, the poor darling! Our troubles are over now! I’ve seen the light! It’s all settled! The spirit is victimized!… They scoff at the spirit! They persecute me! They spit at me! In the heart of Paris! Good! Very well! So be it! They can all go shit in their hats!… They can rot with leprosy! They can stew in a million kettles full of snot and cockroaches! I’ll stir them myself! Let them pickle! Let them whirl in gangrene! It’s too good for the stinkers! If they ask for me, I won’t be there!… I’m finished with the spirit! That’s dead and buried!… The bowels are the thing, Ferdinand!… The gastric ferments! Faugh! I’m going to wallow in their bowel movements! Phoo! It’s going to be an orgy! You challenge me? Here I stand! I’ll show them! I Courtial! Winner of the Popincourt Prize! The Nichan and all the rest! One thousand seven hundred and twenty-two balloon flights!… What do I fire my garden with? With radishes! That’s right! I’ll show you! You too will see me! O Zenith! O my Irène! O my jealous fury!… We haven’t a moment to lose!…” He pondered a while.

  “In this alluvial gravel?… This sandy soil? Never! Here? Bah! I’ve proved my point! Small-scale farming! I’ve had enough of it!… No time to waste on that!” He started chortling again at the mere thought!… It was just too funny!

  “My oh my! Take it away!…” He swept the poor cottage off the map…

  “To the country! That’s the ticket! The country, that’s for me! Open spaces? Forests?… Present!… Cattle? Udders? Hay? Poultry? If you will!… But above all, radishes!… Take my word for it!… And we’ll have all the waves!… Every last one, do you hear?… Real waves!… You’ll see, Ferdinand! You’ll see it all! The whole works!… Orgies of waves!…”

  The old girl was out on her feet. She had braced herself against the fence… She’d dozed off… I shook her so she’d come in too…

  “I’ll make you a cup of coffee!… I think there’s some left!…” That’s what she said… but there was no use looking… he’d drunk it all up, the stinker!… And eaten all the leftovers… There was nothing left in the cupboard… Not even a crumb of bread! Almost a whole Camembert!… While the rest of us were starving!… He’d even finished off the beans in the pot!… Balls! That really pissed me off!…

  We yelled at him to come in… “I’ve got to send a wire!” he answered from the distance… “I’ve got to send a wire!…” He was out on the road already… He wasn’t crazy.

  * * *

  We slept all day… We were supposed to leave the day after!… It was perfectly true that he’d sold the shack! With a part of the furniture thrown in… The contractor who’d bought it had even coughed up a small advance to make us clear out quicker… he was scared shitless we’d wreck the joint before leaving!…

  That same day while we were eating lunch, he started pacing up and down in front of our gate. We wouldn’t let him in. We’d kicked him out several times… He should let us finish, damn it! That bastard couldn’t keep still! He was a horrible sight… He was so frantic he’d rumpled up his hat and was eating the brim… tearing out pieces… He started roaming around again, clutching his hands behind his back… Humped over and scowling. He came and went like an animal in a cage! When he had the whole road to himself!… And every five minutes he’d yell in at us: “Don’t go smashing up my crapper! I’ve seen the bowl! It was in good condition! Watch out for my sink! A new one costs two hundred francs!…”

  Suddenly he couldn’t stand it any more!… He came into the garden after all. He took three steps up the path… We all went charging down… We put him out again… He had no right! Courtial was outraged at his unspeakable impudence!…

  “You will take possession at six this evening and not a minute sooner! At nightfall, my dear sir, at nightfall!… That was clearly specified in our deal…” It was enough to make you lose control!…

  The guy went back to his rounds. He got to grumbling more and more. It was so bad we had to close the window so we could discuss our own affairs in private… How were we going to get out of there?… What would be the best place to go? Better than somewhere else? How much money had we? Between us, Courtial’s and mine?…

  Des Pereires’s agricultural plans, his radio-terrestrial contraption were bound to cost us a pretty penny! He swore it wouldn’t be expensive… Anyway, it was a venture… We had to take his word for it… He’d already picked a place for his experiment… On the fringe of the Seine-et-Oise department… not too far from Beauvais… A splendid bargain. Still according to him… a farm they’d let us have for a song… Anyway, he’d just about settled with the agency… The rotter was wrapping us up! He’d conned us into this thing!… He’d wired… He showed us an ad out of some paper, The Echo of the Soil. He got a kick out of watching our faces as we listened to him… The old cutie and I weren’t looking very good… “Lot for several tenants, southern exposure. Market gardening preferred but not required. Buildings in perfect repair, etc…”

  “Chin up! Chin up, damn it! What did you expect me to find? A chalet in the Bois de Boulogne?… In Bagatelle?… You should have told me!… Why, this was a stroke of luck!” On the “Property for Sale” page… He was delighted at the prospect… He knew how to read between the lines… It was now or never!…

  In the course of our lunch the buyer of our cottage got noisier than ever, he clutched the gate… We really felt sorry for him with his eyes popping out of his head… slithering down over his cheeks. He’d hollered so much he couldn’t close his mouth… He was foaming at the mouth… He’d never hold out till six o’clock!… His gre
ed was something awful!… “Have pity! Have pity!” he begged…

  Courtial had to hurry through his cheese and run over to the telegraph office to confirm his “option”. We let our buyer in. The poor bastard was so grateful he licked the terrace steps!…

  Mme des Pereires and I began to pack up… to collect all the clothes, the pots and pans, the mattresses… all the stuff that hadn’t been sold!… Everything we were taking away with us on our venture!… In addition, under cover of darkness, I was to do a little reconnoitring around the Arcades Montpensier… to see if maybe there wasn’t something I could salvage… to try and rescue our brand-new mimeograph machine – our pride and joy! – really indispensable… And the little Mirmidor oil stove… and maybe three or four gross of old pamphlets… Especially the cosmogonies on Alfa paper that Courtial set so much store by… Maybe those brutes hadn’t had the time or chance to destroy everything, to wreck the whole place… Maybe a little something was left under the rubble… And the miniature altimeter?… A gift from South America!… Courtial would feel very badly if that couldn’t be saved!… Anyway, I’d give it a try!… It was all right with me!… The part I didn’t like was that she wanted to come along!… She didn’t quite trust me! She wanted to see for herself!… In case there was something to be saved, she thought I’d better not be alone!… “I’ll go too, Ferdinand! I’ll go with you!…” She hadn’t seen the disaster with her own eyes!… She still had some hope!… Maybe she thought we were pulling a fast one…

  Courtial came back from the post office. Me and Mme des Pereires went to the bedroom to empty the last cupboards… Now it was his turn to argue with that drip… who kept protesting that we were breaking the contract!… We almost had to fight to recover our clothes and a few extra towels… Taking possession had made him bumptious. We threw him out again to teach him good manners! Then the lug begins shaking the bars so hard that the whole gate fell down… He got wedged under it… He was caught like a rat!… I’d never seen a man in such awful convulsions! He was some buyer!… He was so fouled up he didn’t even notice when the old lady and I shoved off… We took a local…

  It was very late when we got to Paris… We made it fast… We didn’t see a soul in the arcades of the Palais… The neighbouring shops were all closed up tight… Ours was nothing but a hole… an enormous yawning chasm… a pit with big wobbly beams across it… Finally the old lady got it through her head that this was a real disaster!… That nothing was left of the Génitron! That we hadn’t been kidding!… All a rotten stinking mess… We bent down over the hole and took a good look at the wreckage… We even managed to recognize some big chunks of our Alcazar!… The investors’ corner!… Under the huge avalanche of cardboard and rubbish!… That terrible bell was there too! The catapult! It had sunk in sideways… between the scaffolding and the cellar… Actually it plugged up the whole crevice!… When old lady Courtial saw that, she still wanted to go down under and take a look… She was sure we’d find something worth saving… I warned her of the danger… one touch could bring down the whole mountain, she’d be squashed flat!… She insisted… She did a balancing act on a loose joist… I held her by the hand from up top… Watching her swaying over the void, my cock went limp… She’d hiked up her skirts and tied them around her waist. She saw a crack between the wall and the bell… She slipped in all by herself… She disappeared in the darkness… I heard her rummaging around at the bottom of the abyss… Then I sang out… I was too scared… My voice echoed like in a cave… She didn’t answer… Half an hour or so later she appeared in the opening… She called me to come and help her… Luckily I managed to grab her by the handles of her smock… I hoisted with all my might… She came up. She was tangled up in a pile of truck… all one enormous bundle… I hoisted the whole thing up on the edge… It was very hard going!… There was plenty of resistance… I saw she was pulling one more thing behind her… A big chunk of balloon, a whole slice of the Archimedes!… A big wide flap! The red strip I’d taken patches out of… I knew that rag well!… I’d hidden it myself between the gas meter and the transom. She had a wonderful memory!… She was as happy as a lark…

  “It’ll come in handy, you know!” she said briskly… “It’s real rubber, no cheap imitation!… you can’t imagine how strong it is…”

  “Sure!” I said. “Of course!…” I knew all right. I’d taken enough hunks out of it to patch up the other one with… In any case it was heavy and bulky… Even folded as small as it would go, it was quite a package… as tall and almost as heavy as a man… She refused to abandon it… We had to take it with us…

  “Well anyway, we’d better hurry…” I say… She was mighty strong, she hoisted it up on her back and carried it… I took her as far as the Rue Radziwill in a big hurry… When we got there, I said:

  “You go ahead, Madame, but don’t hurry any more! Take your time!… Stop on every corner. Watch out for the traffic! You’ve got plenty of time! I’ll join you on the Rue Lafayette! I’ve got to look in at the Insurrection!… It’s just as well they don’t see you… I left a key with the waiter!… the key to the attic!… I’d like to take another look up there…”

  This was only a pretext for going back awhile… I wanted to look around under the arcades… I thought maybe I’d run across Violette… Lately she’d been hanging out mostly over by the Galerie Coloniale… past the scales… She sights me from a distance!… “Yoo hoo,” she goes and comes running over… She’d seen me with the old lady… She’d been afraid to show herself… So then we had a good chance to talk and she told me all the dirt… everything that had been going on since we left… since the disaster… What a mess! Trouble trouble the whole time!… The cops had been asking thousands of questions… even of the whores!… The oddest stuff about our habits!… Did we sell junk? Did we get ourselves buggered?… Were we taking bets?… Did we sell dirty pictures? Did foreigners come around? Did we have any revolvers? Were we seeing anarchists?… The girls were scared pink… They were afraid to hang around near our wreckage!… They were doing the other Galeries now… They were scared of having their cards taken away!… That’s what it meant to them!… Everybody was complaining… All the shopkeepers in the neighbourhood were sore too… They really had it in for us… you can’t imagine… they were in a boiling lather! A petition had been sent to the prefect of the Seine department… to have the Palais-Royal cleaned up!… They were sick of living in a hotbed of debauchery! Their business was ruined already! They didn’t want to be corrupted by extra-bad eggs like us!… Violette liked me fine, she’d have liked me to stay on… But she was convinced that if we came back in the neighbourhood there’d be an awful stink and we’d be snagged in two seconds flat… that was definite and no use arguing!… The only thing we could do was clear out, make ourselves scarce!… Why ask for trouble?… That’s what I thought too!… We just had to clear out! But what about me, what was I going to do? What kind of work? She was kind of worried about that… I couldn’t tell her much!… I didn’t know myself… Except it would be in the country, that was sure… When she heard that, she said right away that she’d manage to come and see me… especially if she got sick again!… It happened now and then! Then she always had to go away for at least two or three weeks, not just on account of her sickness, but for her lungs too… She’d been spitting blood… In the country she stopped spitting… It was perfect… She gained a kilo a day… So that’s how we left it… that’s what we agreed between us… But I was to write to her first, poste restante… Circumstances prevented me… We had so much trouble… I didn’t keep my word… I always kept putting off my letter until the following week… I didn’t go back to the Palais until years later… That was during the war… I didn’t find her with the other girls… I asked them all… Even her name, Violette, didn’t register… Nobody remembered… They were all new…

  So that night I left her on the run. I had to make it fast, that’s a sure thing!… I wanted to drop by the Passage Bérésina
s to tell my folks I was leaving town with des Pereires… so they wouldn’t start acting up and put the bulls on my trail…

  When I got there, my mother was still in the shop straightening out her junk, she’d come home from peddling her selection around Les Ternes… My father came downstairs… He’d heard us talking… I hadn’t seen him in two years. Gaslight always makes people look green, but his pallor was something awful!… On account of the surprise maybe, he began to stammer so bad he had to stop talking… He couldn’t say a single word more!… He couldn’t understand either… what I was trying like mad to explain. That I was going away to the country… He wasn’t against it… Not in the least!… They didn’t care what happened! As long as I didn’t go broke on their hands!… As long as I made some kind of a living, here or somewhere else, it didn’t matter how! It was all one to them, in the Île-de-France or the Congo… It was no skin off their arse!

  My father looked lost in his old clothes! Especially his trousers had nothing to hold on by!… He’d got so thin, his head was so shrunk his big cap floated around on his bean… it slid down over his eyes… He looked at me from underneath… He couldn’t catch the meaning of what I was saying… I kept repeating that I thought there was a future for me in farming… “Ah! Ah!” he said… He wasn’t even surprised!…