Funny Ha, Ha

by Paul Merton

  — But she was poor!

  — Poor is relative. She lived in a house, didn’t she?

  — Yes.

  — Then socio-economically speaking, she was not poor.

  — But none of the money was hers! The whole point of the story is that the wicked stepmother makes her wear old clothes and sleep in the fireplace—

  — Aha! They had a fireplace! With poor, let me tell you, there’s no fireplace. Come down to the park, come to the subway stations after dark, come down to where they sleep in cardboard boxes, and I’ll show you poor!

  — There was once a middle-class girl, as beautiful as she was good—

  — Stop right there. I think we can cut the beautiful, don’t you? Women these days have to deal with too many intimidating physical role models as it is, what with those bimbos in the ads. Can’t you make her, well, more average?

  — There was once a girl who was a little overweight and whose front teeth stuck out, who—

  — I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearances. Plus, you’re encouraging anorexia.

  — I wasn’t making fun! I was just describing—

  — Skip the description. Description oppresses. But you can say what colour she was.

  — What colour?

  — You know. Black, white, red, brown, yellow. Those are the choices. And I’m telling you right now, I’ve had enough of white. Dominant culture this, dominant culture that—

  — I don’t know what colour.

  — Well, it would probably be your colour, wouldn’t it?

  — But this isn’t about me! It’s about this girl—

  — Everything is about you.

  — Sounds to me like you don’t want to hear this story at all.

  — Oh well, go on. You could make her ethnic. That might help.

  — There was once a girl of indeterminate descent, as average-looking as she was good, who lived with her wicked—

  — Another thing. Good and wicked. Don’t you think you should transcend those puritanical judgemental moralistic epithets? I mean, so much of that is conditioning, isn’t it?

  — There was once a girl, as average-looking as she was well-adjusted, who lived with her stepmother, who was not a very open and loving person because she herself had been abused in childhood.

  — Better. But I am so tired of negative female images! And stepmothers – they always get it in the neck! Change it to stepfather, why don’t you? That would make more sense anyway, considering the bad behaviour you’re about to describe. And throw in some whips and chains. We all know what those twisted, repressed, middle-aged men are like—

  — Hey, just a minute! I’m a middle-aged—

  — Stuff it, Mister Nosy Parker. Nobody asked you to stick in your oar, or whatever you want to call that thing. This is between the two of us. Go on.

  — There was once a girl—

  — How old was she?

  — I don’t know. She was young.

  — This ends with a marriage, right?

  — Well, not to blow the plot, but – yes.

  — Then you can scratch the condescending paternalistic terminology. It’s woman, pal. Woman.

  — There was once—

  — What’s this was, once? Enough of the dead past. Tell me about now.

  — There—

  — So?

  — So, what?

  — So, why not here?

  THE MAN WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS

  Marcel Aymé

  Marcel Aymé (1902–1967) is considered one of the great French writers of the twentieth century. He first worked as a journalist, but following the huge success of his 1933 novel, The Green Mare, he increasingly concentrated on fiction. Aymé’s ironic, disillusioned perception of the state of affairs in France following the German occupation produced a body of work as distinctive as it is readable. The story below is one of his most famous, and there is a statue of the main character, Dutilleul, in the Montmartre district of Paris.

  In Montmartre, on the third floor of 75b Rue d’Orchampt, there lived an excellent gentleman called Dutilleul, who possessed the singular gift of passing through walls without any trouble at all. He wore pince-nez and a small black goatee, and was a lowly clerk in the Ministry of Records. In winter he would take the bus to work, and in fine weather he would make the journey on foot, in his bowler hat.

  Dutilleul had just entered his forty-third year when he discovered his power. One evening, a brief electricity cut caught him in the hallway of his small bachelor’s apartment. He groped for a while in the darkness and, when the lights came back on, found himself outside on the third-floor landing. Since his front door was locked from the inside, the incident gave him food for thought and, despite the objections of common sense, he decided to go back inside just as he had come out, by passing through the wall. This peculiar skill, apparently unrelated to any aspiration of his, rather disturbed him. So, the next day being Saturday, he took advantage of his English-style five-day week to visit a local doctor and explain his case. The doctor was soon persuaded that Dutilleul was telling the truth and, following a full examination, located the cause of the problem in a helicoid hardening of the strangulary wall in the thyroid gland. He prescribed sustained over-exertion and a twice-yearly dose of one powdered tetravalent pirette pill, a mixture of rice flour and centaur hormones.

  Having taken the first pill, Dutilleul put the medicine away in a drawer and forgot about it. As for the intensive over-exertion, as a civil servant his rate of work was governed by practices that permitted no excess, nor did his leisure time, divided between reading the newspapers and tending his stamp collection, involve him in any excessive expenditure of energy either. A year later, therefore, his ability to walk through walls remained intact, but he never used it, apart from inadvertently, being uninterested in adventure and resistant towards the seductions of his imagination. He never even thought of entering his home by any route other than the front door and then only after having opened it by means of key and lock. Perhaps he would have grown old in the comfort of his habits, never tempted to put his gift to the test, had an extraordinary event not suddenly turned his life upside down. Being called to other duties, his deputy chief clerk Monsieur Mouron was replaced by a certain Monsieur Lécuyer, a man of abrupt speech who wore a nailbrush moustache. From his first day, the new deputy chief clerk looked unfavourably on Dutilleul’s wearing of pince-nez with a chain and a black goatee, and made a show of treating him like an irritating, shabby old thing. But the worst of it was that he intended to introduce reforms of considerable scope into his department—just the thing to disturb his subordinate’s peace. For twenty years now, Dutilleul had commenced his official letters with the following formula: “With reference to your esteemed communication of the nth of this month and, for the record, to all previous exchange of letters, I have the honour to inform you that…” A formula for which Monsieur Lécuyer intended to substitute another, much more American in tone: “In reply to your letter of n, I inform you that…” Dutilleul could not get used to these new epistolary fashions. In spite of himself, he would go back to his traditional ways, with a machine-like obstinacy that earned him the deputy clerk’s growing hostility. The atmosphere inside the Ministry of Records became almost oppressive. In the morning he would come in to work full of apprehension, and in bed in the evenings, it often happened that he stayed awake thinking for a whole fifteen minutes before falling asleep.

  Disgusted by this backward thinking that was threatening the success of his reforms, Monsieur Lécuyer had banished Dutilleul to a badly lit cubbyhole that led off his own office. It was reached by a low and narrow door in the corridor and still displayed in capital letters the inscription: BROOM CUPBOARD. Dutilleul resigned himself to accepting this unprecedented humiliation, but at home, reading a news item on some bloodthirsty crime, he found himself picturing Monsieur Lécuyer as the victim.

  One day, the deputy clerk burst into Dutilleul’s cubbyhole brandis
hing a letter and began to bellow:

  “Rewrite this tripe! Rewrite this piece of unspeakable dross that brings shame on my department!”

  Dutilleul tried to protest, but Monsieur Lécuyer raged on, calling him a procedure-addicted cockroach and, before storming out, crumpled the letter in his hand and threw it in Dutilleul’s face. Dutilleul was modest but proud. Sitting alone in his cubbyhole, he grew rather hot under the collar and suddenly felt a flash of inspiration. Leaving his seat, he stepped into the wall that divided his office from that of the deputy clerk—but stepped carefully, in such a way that only his head emerged on the other side. Sitting at his desk, his hand still shaking, Monsieur Lécuyer was shifting a comma in an underling’s draft that had been submitted for his approbation, when he heard a cough inside his office. Looking up, with an unspeakable fright, he found Dutilleul’s head mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy. But the head was still alive. Through its pince-nez, the head flashed a look of hatred at him. Even better, the head began to speak.

  “Sir,” it said, “you are a ruffian, a boor and a scoundrel.”

  Gaping in horror, Monsieur Lécuyer was unable to tear his eyes from this apparition. At last, hefting himself out of his armchair, he leapt into the corridor and ran round to the cubbyhole. Dutilleul, pen in hand, was sitting in his usual place, in a peaceful, hard-working attitude. The deputy clerk gave him a long stare and then, after stammering a few words, went back to his office. Hardly had he sat down when the head reappeared on the wall.

  “Sir, you are a ruffian, a boor and a scoundrel.”

  In the course of that day alone, the frightful head appeared on the wall twenty-three times and kept up the same frequency in the days that followed. Dutilleul, who had acquired a degree of skill in this game, was no longer satisfied with simply insulting the deputy clerk. He uttered obscure threats, exclaiming for example in a sepulchral voice, punctuated by truly demonic laughter:

  “Werewolf! Werewolf! Hair of a beast!” (laughter) “A horror is lurking the owls have unleashed!” (laughter)

  On hearing which, the poor deputy clerk grew even paler and even more choked, and his hair stood up quite straight on his head while down his back dribbled horrid cold sweat. On the first day he lost a pound in weight. In the following week, apart from melting away almost visibly, he began to eat his soup with a fork and to give passing policemen full military salutes. At the beginning of the second week, an ambulance came to collect him at home and took him to a mental asylum.

  Delivered from Monsieur Lecuyer’s tyranny, Dutilleul was free to return to his cherished formalities: “With reference to your esteemed communication of the nth of this month…” And yet, he was not satisfied. There was a craving inside him, a new, imperious urge—it was nothing less than the urge to walk through walls. Of course this was easily satisfied, for example at home, and there indeed he went ahead. But a man in possession of brilliant gifts cannot long be content to exercise them in pursuit of mediocre goals. Besides, walking through walls cannot constitute an end in itself. It is the beginning of an adventure, which calls for a sequel, for elaboration and, in the end, for some reward. Dutilleul quite understood this. He felt within him a need for expansion, a growing desire to fulfil and surpass himself, and a stab of longing, which was something like the call of what lay through the wall. Unfortunately, he lacked an objective. He looked for inspiration in the newspaper, particularly in the politics and sports sections, since he felt these were honourable activities, but finally realising that they offered no outlets for people who walk through walls, he made do with the most promising of the ‘in brief’ news items.

  The first break-in that Dutilleul carried out was at a large credit institution on the right bank of the river. After walking through a dozen walls and partitions, he forced a number of safes, filled his pockets with banknotes and, before leaving, autographed the scene of his theft in red chalk with the pseudonym The Werewolf, with a very elegant flourish that was reproduced the next day in all the newspapers. By the end of the week, The Werewolf’s name had become spectacularly famous. Public sympathy was unreservedly on the side of this superior burglar who was so cleverly mocking the police. He distinguished himself each succeeding night with the accomplishment of a new exploit, whether at the expense of a bank or a jeweller or some wealthy individual. There was not one among the dreamy type of Parisienne or country miss who did not passionately wish they belonged body and soul to the terrible Werewolf. After the theft of the famous Burdigala diamond and the burglary at the state pawnbroker’s, which took place in the same week, the fervour of the masses reached the point of delirium. The Minister for the Interior was forced to resign, bringing the Minister for Records down with him. In spite of this, Dutilleul became one of the richest men in Paris, always came to work on time and was talked of as a strong candidate for the palmes académiques, for his contribution to French culture. In the mornings at the Ministry of Records, he enjoyed listening to colleagues discussing his exploits of the night before. “This Werewolf,” they said, “is amazing, a superman, a genius.” Hearing such praise, Dutilleul blushed pink with embarrassment and, behind his pince-nez and chain, his eyes shone with warmth and gratitude.

  One day, this sympathetic atmosphere won him over so completely that he felt he could not keep his secret for much longer. With some residual shyness, he considered his colleagues, gathered around a newspaper that announced his theft at the Bank of France, and declared in modest tones: “You know, I am The Werewolf.” Hearty laughter greeted Dutilleul’s confession and won him the mocking nickname “Werewolf”. That evening, as they were leaving the Ministry, his colleagues made him the butt of endless jokes, and his life seemed less sweet.

  A few days later, The Werewolf was caught by a night patrol in a jeweller’s shop on the Rue de la Paix. He had added his signature to the counter and had begun to sing a drinking song while smashing various display cases with the help of a solid gold chalice. It would have been easy for him to sink into a wall and so escape the night patrol, but all the evidence suggests that he wanted to be arrested—probably solely in order to disconcert his colleagues, whose incredulity had mortified him. Indeed they were very surprised when the next day’s papers ran a photograph of Dutilleul on their front pages. They bitterly regretted having misjudged their brilliant comrade and paid homage to him by all growing small goatees. Carried away by remorse and admiration, some were even tempted to try their hand at their friends’ and acquaintances’ wallets and heirloom watches.

  It will doubtless be supposed that letting oneself get caught by the police simply in order to surprise a few colleagues shows a great deal of frivolity, unworthy of an exceptional man, but the obvious motivations count for very little with this kind of resolution. In giving up his liberty, Dutilleul believed he was giving in to an arrogant desire for revenge, while in truth he was simply slipping down the slope of his destiny. For a man who walks through walls, there can be no dazzling career if he hasn’t at least once seen the inside of a prison.

  When Dutilleul entered the premises of La Santé Prison, he felt that fate was spoiling him. The thickness of the walls was a veritable feast. Only a day after his incarceration, the astonished guards found that the prisoner had hammered a nail into his cell wall on which now hung a gold watch belonging to the warden. He either could not or would not reveal how this item had come into his possession. The watch was returned to its owner and, the following day, found once more at The Werewolf’s bedside, along with the first volume of The Three Musketeers borrowed from the warden’s personal library. The staff at La Santé grew very tense. Furthermore, the guards were complaining of kicks in their backsides of inexplicable provenance. It seemed that the walls no longer had ears but feet. The Werewolf’s detention had lasted a week when, on entering his office one morning, the warden found the following letter on his desk:

  Dear Warden, With reference to our interview of the seventeenth of this month and, for the record, to your general instruct
ions dating from fifteenth of May of the previous year, I have the honour to inform you that I have just finished reading the second volume of The Three Musketeers and that I intend to escape tonight between eleven twenty-five and eleven thirty-five. I remain, dear Warden, yours respectfully, The Werewolf.

  In spite of the close surveillance to which he was subjected that night, Dutilleul escaped at half-past eleven. Broadcast to the public the following morning, the news stirred deep admiration up and down the country. Nevertheless, after this latest feat, which had brought his popularity to even greater heights, Dutilleul hardly seemed concerned about secrecy and moved around Montmartre without any precautions. Three days after his escape, a little before noon, he was arrested on Rue Caulaincourt at the Café du Rêve, where he was enjoying a glass of white wine with lemon among friends.

  Marched back to La Santé and triple-locked into a murky cell, The Werewolf escaped that very evening and went to sleep in the warden’s own apartment, in the guest bedroom. The next morning at about nine o’clock, he called the maid for his breakfast and allowed himself to be plucked from his bed, without resisting, by belatedly alerted guards. Outraged, the warden set a guard at the door of Dutilleul’s cell and put him on dry bread. Around noon, the prisoner went to lunch in a nearby restaurant and then, after his coffee, called the warden.

  “Hello! Warden, sir, I’m a little embarrassed but a moment ago, as I was leaving, I forgot to take your wallet with me, so here I am stuck for cash in this restaurant. Would you be so good as to send someone to pay the bill?”

  The warden rushed over himself, so furious that he overflowed with threats and oaths. Personally offended, Dutilleul escaped the next night, this time never to return. He took the precaution of shaving off his black goatee and replacing his lorgnette and chain with tortoiseshell spectacles. A sports cap and a loud checked suit with plus fours completed his transformation. He set himself up in a small apartment on Avenue Junot to which, since his first arrest, he had sent a selection of furnishings and his most prized objects. He was getting tired of the fuss over his fame and, since his stay in La Santé, he had become rather blasé about the pleasure of walking through walls. The thickest, the proudest of them now seemed to him mere Japanese screens, and he dreamt of plunging into the heart of some immense pyramid. While planning a journey to Egypt, he continued to live a very peaceful life, dividing his time between his stamp collection, the cinema and long strolls around Montmartre. His metamorphosis was so complete that, beardless and bespectacled, he could walk right past his best friends without being recognised by any of them. Only the painter Gen Paul, who picked up the least physiological change in the old denizens of the neighbourhood, at last managed to discover Dutilleul’s true identity. One morning, finding himself face to face with Dutilleul at the corner of the Rue de l’Abreuvoir, he could not stop himself from saying, in his rough way: