Guignol's Band

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “Ah! he says to himself… It’s the death of the horse!…

  “He stands there dreaming!… He starts hearing spirits!… Just stands there sniffling!… Ah! The phoney!… I act childish… I know the Yard all right!… Dopes, but double-crossers and stubborn!…

  “We talk for a while… He puts it another way…

  “‘Yes! It’s a terrible war!’

  “That makes him sigh.

  “‘Those Boches are real savages!… Did you see the Mirror this morning? Those photos? That atrocity? The way they cut off children’s hands?’

  “‘Ah! It’s true, Inspector… All too true!’

  “‘Got to kill those brutes, Cascade!’

  “‘That’s right, Inspector!’

  “‘I’d go myself if I were free!… Ah! How I wish I were free!… Like you!… If I hadn’t my job!… Ah! If I were free!’

  “And then a shitload of sighs… the louse!

  “‘I’m sick, Inspector! Haven’t you seen my certificate? Not strong! Delicate! Sensitive legs!’

  “‘Sick!’ he says. ‘But turbulent!’

  “Ah! I feel it coming… I see it’s getting fishy… I’ve annoyed him!

  “‘Me turbulent, Inspector?… Ah! I wouldn’t like to be that! Oh no!…’

  “Ah! I protest.

  “‘Quite well behaved I suppose?’

  “He’s sceptical.

  “‘Absolutely, Inspector!’

  “What’s coming next?

  “‘No violence? No breach of the law?’

  “‘Oh, not at all, Inspector!’

  “‘And what about your gang, Mr Cascade?’

  “Ah! Here it comes!

  “‘My gang? My gang?…’ I’m startled… The first news! What’s he insinuating?…

  “‘Oh! It’s going to get you into trouble! What an outfit! What riff-raff, Mr Cascade!… What a gang you’ve got!… What reckless people! Oh! I just don’t understand you… With such roughnecks!… Ah! I’m warning you, my dear Cascade, in all sympathy!’

  “I didn’t see what he was driving at.

  “Then he starts telling me things… in detail… the low-down tricks… the business of the hat… La Vaillance… your fight and everything… some stinker that cop!… Oh! Sister! What hot air!… I don’t say anything… I listen to him… I see what’s coming… He’s looking for trouble!… He’s been given orders, the rat!… They want to pin anarchism on me!… That way they can deport me!… Not a word of truth!… But that’s enough!… They invent, that’s all!… Anything goes when the cops are after you!… Just keep your mouth shut!… I stop dead!… I play dumb!… I plead guilty, not proud… If I make a wrong move, I’m a goner!… He’ll pull me in! I’m sure he’s got a warrant for me!… He’s warning me and means business!

  “‘I don’t want to see them at La Vaillance! Your friends!’

  “‘Very well, very well, Inspector!… They’re hoodlums! You’re right!… Mustn’t let ’em get away with anything!’

  “I agree with him.

  “‘Neither one of them!’

  “‘Of course not!’

  “‘Who’s the young one? With the arm like that?’

  “‘He’s one of the war casualties, Inspector! A boy who’s suffered a lot… A victim of the present horrors!’

  “‘Is Boro a victim of the present horrors too?’

  “He’s getting sarcastic.

  “‘That’s his tenth offence!… And I’m sure it’s not over! He still has bombs!… I’m sure he’s still making them!… You know something about it, don’t you, Mr Cascade? You associate with awful people! Gallows birds!… An abuser of freedom!… I’m ashamed for your sake, Mr Cascade!’

  “‘Oh! Inspector, if I may say so! The quietest man in the borough!… where there’re still some pretty bad eggs! Just between us, Inspector! Let’s admit, without any hard feelings!’

  “That’s a stone for his garden.

  “‘I don’t want to see them in the pubs any more!… Neither of them!… You get me?’

  “He doesn’t look as if he understands…

  “He’s obstinate!… A swine!…

  “All the same, goddamn it, I protest!…

  “‘Still and all, they’re not anarchists!’

  “‘Damn you, Cascade! What do you need?’

  “‘The young one’s not an anarchist!… He doesn’t know what it is!’

  “He disgusts me! What a stupid accusation!

  “‘We’ll see about that, Mr Cascade! We’ll see!’

  “Stubborn, the louse! He was getting nasty!… Better not insist!… Soon as you cross him he gets vicious… All his whisky goes to his nose!… Couldn’t touch him then with kid gloves!… And yet he’s got dough!… I know what he’s been costing me for fourteen years!… He was able to build himself a house, I’m telling you, and a nice one! With my handouts!… It’s a hell of a long time I’ve been greasing him!… In exchange he’s nabbed me only twice!… And for two jail terms where I was perfectly innocent!… Just plain unjust! A clean alibi! A shame! It was Tatave’s women who’d given the guy a shakedown!… Not mine! Ah! Not at all! He knew all about it, the louse! Only I owed him for a dozen matters! That squared him!… He’d never been able to pin anything on me!… Had to get me!… For honour’s sake!… I think he’d have lost his job!… They all kidded him at the Yard! That was in Pretty-Eye’s time! Ah! there were out-of-town jobs in those days!… Boys, things were moving then!… They did a cottage a week!… In cahoots with the maids!… They’d bring back three or four hundred pounds!… That was youth for you!… They’d jump from one town to another!… Those maids were the death of their bosses!… Pretty-Eye, some good-looking kid!… Only the swellest homes!… Practically invited guests!… You realize?… Matthew was boiling in his pants!… All pissed up!… I had to take the rap for Tatave!… It couldn’t last for ever!… He even warned me!… Got to get you, Cascade! Got to get you! Put in eleven months for Tatave!… Seven and four… That was my share!… I saved Matthew’s honour for him! I lost thirty-five pounds!… So I know the guy a little!… We’ll settle accounts later on… There’s nothing lost I’m telling you! For the time being I was nice! Didn’t want to sour things!… I shifted the conversation!… I said to him, ‘Inspector, I see you’re putting something on Chatterton… It’s a good horse!… I’m not denying it!… But… after all!…’

  “‘Have you got something better, Mr Cascade?’

  “‘I sure have!… It seems to me!’… Never come straight out with it in England… they think you’re scatterbrained!… ‘If I may say so, I’d put something on Micky instead, Inspector! After all, there’s a better jockey up, isn’t there?… I’m not giving you any advice, Inspector!… Bear that in mind!… I wouldn’t allow myself!… Look, I’m putting six down for you!… But on Micky to win! All or nothing!…’

  “He looks as if he doesn’t understand me!… I lay down my six pounds!… Bim! Bam! He sweeps up all the tokens! Like that, no gabbling! And bye-bye!… I see that he catches on without a word! Total loss six pounds!… Because of you, you big fatheads!… You! For your damned extravagances! Otherwise he’d have taken me away!… Just an act! Hot air! Just a song and dance in his pocket! Blackmail pure and simple!… That’s the crap I’ve got to take! And you’re the cause of it!… I can tell it to you straight to your face! Isn’t it a damned pity? Isn’t it a perfect shame that at my age I’m still knocking around for arseholes like you?… My gang?… My gang?… So it seems! Ah! Hello, my gang!… Pianists who raise hell in Mile End at four in the afternoon!… Swell! My gang!… Yours!… Goddamn it! In a jam for stinkers like that! Ah! It’s awful! I’m telling you!… Justice is dead! I saw the cop in a stew!… He was saying to himself, ‘I’m waiting for you, Cascade! If you don’t cough up, you’ll get it in the neck!… I’ll yank you in and whoops!… Love!…’ He wa
s picking on me!”

  “You’re too good-natured, Cascade!… You’re too good-natured!”… Angèle was at it again!… A downpour… big sobs!… Hearing such stories, all the troubles of her poor man!… She can’t resist!… She leaps to his neck again! She hugs and kisses him wildly!… She gets another smack. She plops down on the couch again…

  “I lose out every time!… That’s my affair!… I always get it in the neck!… But I want you to stop giving me a pain in the arse!”

  That’s Cascade for you!… He lets it out! And now right away it’s poetry!…

  For don’t you see that every day

  I love you more and more?

  Today more than yesterday

  And less than tomorrow!

  He reels it straight off.

  “I learnt it, you know, in Rio!”… And oops! He flies off the handle again.

  “I’ve been getting the dirty end of it, guys! I don’t dare stick my nose outside! Things are bad, boys!… Things are bad!… Cascade here!… Cascade there!… They want me!… They’re looking for me!… Maybe I stink?… All the dicks sniffing at me!… And her, always yowling!… At manille I lose like fifty!… At the races my nags dash backwards… Only girls keep coming in!… There I’ve got all I want!… I’ve got to admit!…”

  Berthe and Mimi were enjoying it, sprawled in the cushions choking with laughter… Berthe, the skinny green-looking one, and peg-leg Mimi were beneath the lamp splitting with giggles…

  “Either they’re yowling or nagging, they can’t keep quiet!”

  They were getting on his nerves.

  “Go get the Calva! You hear me, Mimi?”

  He was sending Mimi downstairs… The two of them bounce down… Angèle was sobbing with her head in her hands from the clout she’d just got, she made the whole table shake… Cascade didn’t want to look at her… He turned his back on her on purpose, sitting astride his chair, that’s the way he grouses… He was rocking. He was burning up inside…

  At bottom, he’s proud, no doubt about it, that Matthew let him have it as if he were a big shot… it puts him up there with the real moguls!… Even so, for his six pounds!… He doesn’t give much of a damn about the six pounds!… Doesn’t come to much these days! Us, his gang! And some gang!… Gives him real class!… Not just an ordinary guy!… Arranging things was a little weakness of his… He’d have gladly forked over a hundred pounds to take on that kind of weight!… With his stable?… A hundred pounds more or less!… And ten and twelve and a hundred and fifty? What the hell was that?… Matthew had taken him!… Especially with the reinforcements!… We sure were living in style!… Open house!… Fat of the land at the Leicester… piles and piles of food!… Phoneys, spongers and tramps!… A real perpetual parade!… A real boarding school… You didn’t know who or why… Someone always dropping in!… Bringing others along… pals travelling through… girls arriving… no more chalking it up in twenty-five pubs!… Always just because he was a big-timer… he didn’t know from where or how… he always settled right off!… Man’s reputation! And then the races and the Derby where he bet damned high… and poker with the sky the limit and the cost of medicines… That came to something! Beauty care, hairdressers, settings, all the little whatnots for women who didn’t deny themselves a thing, fancy-priced massages, Houbigant perfume! And heavier expenses, hush money for the cops who were snotty and blackmailers and devoured his money, one after the other, six, seven pounds at a clip! Weekly! Monthly! Just in so-called small fines! In the theatres up to a dozen pounds! Weekend dough for the big jobs! And it was never enough! In short, a whale of an outlay!… It kept dribbling the hell out in all directions! Especially since the year 1914–15 when it had become a real massacre, a gold rush, a parade of profits, since the suckers were just handing it out all over the place! Cascade was positive… Dough had to keep rolling in or he’d fold!

  “The war! The war!… It’s driving ’em wild! Just take a look at ’em!… They don’t know what they’re crapping about!… They want all the dough!… Then they don’t want anything! They all want to leave! They can’t see straight! Their pants are on fire! Their dough’s on fire! Just take a look at my pimps! They did the damnedest things, committed crimes to bring their girls to London… If you’d said to them a year ago, ‘Pal, got to beat it! Be heroic! Go back to the Bastille! Business is dead! London’s finished!’… they’d’ve called you King of the Loonies!… Today trumpets and tata!… You tell ’em, ‘Get going, soldier boy! Bullets a penny a dozen! Up and at ’em!’ Off they fly! They’re all raving bughouse! They can’t stop running! Just tearing off like mad! Does it make sense?… You tell me!… They leave their women and kids behind!… They won’t have ’em for all the money in the world! Completely nuts!… Making dough hand over fist!… And a couple of sure-fire rackets, besides!… Gold galore right now! It’s being spoilt that’s killing ’em!… Pity the poor pimp! He can’t stand being stuffed with dough!… Take my word for it!… I’m not scratching!… ‘Tatave, you make me sick! your woman’s bringing in twelve pounds a day!… It’s a crime to kill the golden goose!’

  “‘You!’ he says. ‘Look who’s talking!… You got it easy!… You got your albumin!…’

  “‘Albumin or not! You’re just plain dumb!’ It drives me haywire listening to ’em!… I can’t take any more of it!… It’s not Verdun, it’s the Somme! And so on and so on!… And citations, look, like him!… You’d think they were kids!… In school! That they’d swallowed cannon!… And they claim to be smart Frenchmen! Ah! Damn my balls! I’m going to explain to you!… They read the papers too much!… Oh, I eat up all the articles! And quack quack! And parrots!… Do I read them? Shitzoff! The magazines and their crap!… That’s what sends ’em off their nut! The jabber! The jabber!… Do you read the sheets, you, huh?… Admit, Boro! Admit, you dirty yegg!… In the first place, I’ve seen you!… You start drooling!… Here’s my penny! The Mirror!… The Sketch!… The Star! If you please!… What crap… Look, you can look around here, you’ll never see a single one of ’em around!… Even in the toilet I won’t have ’em!… I tell the girls, ‘Just let me see one of ’em here and I’ll clout you!’… You can look all around! You’ve got a mug like a client! I want you to be less idiotic! All the same it gets you! No stopping you… War here!… War there!… Keeps eating you!… Indeed, Madame!… Victory here!… Victory there!… Offensives!… Cannon fodder!… They need it!… Send back the bones! The goo! The mug! All for nothing!… What’s there to write about?… I see just one thing in war!… It means raising hell and making dough! Just have to lie down to get it!… It’s women’s work!… I’m not victory!… I’m not defeat! I don’t disembark!… I’m no offensive!… I’m no retreat!… I have a good time, that’s all!… What’s the difference! Not just a laughing matter!… They pay for being dumb!… The proof is that they run away! The faster the better!… They get scared, in my opinion!… Just that!… Blind fear, that’s all!… You halfwit! I’m not scared, damn it!… I don’t need a travel permit! I get along by myself!… The hell with Matthew! And the rest of them!… And Marshal Haig! And the Tsar! And Poincaré!* And the Lord Mayor too! All in the same bag! I want to cash in, me too! Ah! Timid! They’re having a good time! Let’s us too! All right with me!… They’re bloodsuckers! All right! I’ve always said so! I’m known! I’ve got my card! You go look me up in the records! I’m just a poor fish! Not a general!… I don’t want to bother anyone! Here’s mud in your eye!… I could cash in more! My girls are enough for me. I could make munitions! I got an offer!… Bigger dopes than me are rolling in dough!… Or draughty condoms!… Or fake cardboard shoes!… “Victory Pumps”! It’s not hard… but me, my business is tail! All right, good! I’m staying in it!… Yes, Majesty!… So what’re they handing me?… I had three girls, all I needed… plus Angèle of course… now they slap a dozen on me!… What kind of business is that?… Will you tell me?… I don’t read the papers! I’m not bats!… Even Little-Arm
Pierrot realizes!… Now he’s in jail!… He knows I talk straight!… No beating about the bush!… It’s straight stuff or they get your hide! I’ll let him have his Clémence back!… But it sure gives me a pain in the arse! I didn’t ask for anything!… It’s not an ordinary traffic!… I’ve got a dozen on my neck!… I’ve got to arrange for a house like Pépé the Hump! Where should I go?… Tell me, you grafters!… You all read the papers!… And I see you like cognac!… I’m so glad!… So I see!… And you smoke my cigars, don’t you! Cuban tobacco, bear in mind!… Ah, you’re not letting yourselves get depressed!… Ah! That’s delightful… Everything to keep up the morale, gentlemen!… It’s a mug’s game! Quite right! You’ll get out of it!… So!… Boom! Morale’s everything!… My old man, who was in the war of 1870, who was a cabinet-maker in Bezons, always used to say to me, ‘Sonny, watch out for the omnibuses…’ He was the one who got run over by one!… You see what use it is to be careful!… Catastrophe!… The poor world’s full of syph! Luckily there’re some free men!”

  We’d had three drinks, we were beginning to feel pretty warm.

  “Mimi!… Mimi!… Bring up the Burgundy! I don’t want these gentlemen to leave on an empty stomach!… And the sausage!… And the brawn!… I want the gentlemen to have a bite!… I can’t ever do enough for them!… Kidders!… Wise guys!… Real characters!… Matthew kept telling me that!… They’re genuine artists! And he knows about those things!… The kind of men you don’t meet often!…

  “‘Artists! Mr Cascade!’ Boro! Boro! Sing me my song!… So I can really see if you’re an artist!… Or I won’t talk to you any more!… For ten years!… That’s how I am!… Come on, the Dark Waltz… and all the girls in the chorus!… To the victory of the little guys and the bathhouse boys!… Ah! Ah! Need some imagination! Wilhelm’s listening to us.”

  There was a small Gaveau in the corner, with some notes missing… Boro obliges… he starts off!… They get going in chorus! They’re ripping along!… “The Knight of the Moo… oo… oon!” They’re so off-key that we’re all splitting!… The yowling doubles!… Makes the windows creak!… And what feeling!… Big Angèle’s bellowing the loudest… There’s pain in her voice… She’s sobbing, she’s so unhappy!… Because she’s upset that her man’s so nervous…