To me her body was a joy without end. I never wearied of exploring that American body. I have to admit that I was a terrible lecher. I still am.
And I formed the pleasant and fortifying conviction that a country capable of producing bodies so daringly graceful, so tempting in their spiritual flights, must have countless other vital revelations to offer, of a biological nature, it goes without saying.
I made up my mind, while feeling and fondling Lola, that sooner or later I’d take a trip, or call it a pilgrimage, to the United States, the sooner the better. And the fact is that I knew neither peace nor rest (in an implacably adverse and harassed life) until I managed to go through with that profound and mystically anatomical adventure.
So it was in the immediate vicinity of Lola’s rear end that I received the message of a new world. Of course Lola wasn’t all body, she also had a wee little face that was adorable and just a bit cruel because of her gray-blue eyes that slanted slightly upward at the corners like a wildcat’s.
Just looking at her made my mouth water, like a sip of dry wine, that flinty taste. There was a hardness in her eyes, unrelieved by the amiably commercial orientalo-Fragonard vivacity you find in nearly all the eyes in these parts.
We usually met in a café nearby. There were more and more wounded men hobbling through the streets, many of them very bedraggled. Collections were taken for their benefit, “days” for this group and “days” for that group, especially for the organizers of the “days.” Lying, fucking, dying. A law had just been passed prohibiting all other activity. The lies that were being told surpassed the imagination, far exceeded the limits of the absurd and preposterous—in the newspapers, on posters, on foot, on horseback, on pleasure boats. Everybody was doing it. In competition, to see who could lie the most outrageously. Soon there wasn’t a bit of truth in the city.
The little that had been left in 1914, people were ashamed of now. Everything you touched was phony, the sugar, the aeroplanes, the shoes, the jam, the photographs … Everything you read, swallowed, sucked, admired, proclaimed, refuted, defended was made up of hate-ridden myths and grinning masquerades, phony to the hilt. The mania for telling lies and believing them is as contagious as the itch. Little Lola’s French consisted of only a few phrases, but they were all patriotic: “On les aura! … “Madelon, viens! …”* It was enough to make you cry.
Stubbornly, shamelessly she harped on the deaths of those doomed to die, actually all the women did, as soon as it became fashionable to be brave for other people.
Just as I was looking within and discovering such an extraordinary taste for everything that took me away from the war! I often asked Lola questions about America, but her answers were vague, pretentious, and manifestly unreliable, calculated to make a brilliant impression on me. But by that time I distrusted impressions. I’d been taken in once by an impression, and nobody was going to hoodwink me again. Nobody.
I believed in her body, I didn’t believe in her soul. I thought of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life.
She flitted across my nightmare with the mentality of the patriotic press: the poilus in the trenches, our own Lorraine, the cadets in their white gloves … In the meantime I made love to her more and more, I’d convinced her it was a good way to lose weight. But she set more store by our long walks. I hated long walks. But she insisted.
So we spent several hours every afternoon being athletic in the Bois de Boulogne, walking around the lakes and back.
Nature is a frightening thing … Even when it’s solidly domesticated as in the Bois, it gives real city dwellers an eerie, anxious feeling. And that puts them in a confiding mood. The Bois de Boulogne may be damp, fenced in, greasy, and trampled, but there’s nothing like it for sending memories rushing irresistibly to the minds of city dwellers strolling under the trees. Lola was not immune to that melancholy, confidential anxiety. As we walked along she told me, more or less truthfully, a thousand things about her life in New York and her little girlfriends over there.
I couldn’t quite make out how much of the potpourri of dollars, engagements, divorces, dresses, and jewelry that seemed to have made up her existence was worth trying to believe.
That day we headed for the race track. In those days and that neck of the woods you still saw lots of horse-drawn carriages, children on donkeys, other children kicking up dust, and cars full of soldiers on furlough, always in desperate haste, between two trains, to track down the women strolling on the side paths, raising more dust in their hurry to go to dinner and make love, jumpy, oily, peering this way and that, tormented by the implacable clock and the lust for life. They sweated with passion, but also with the heat.
The Bois wasn’t as well cared for as usual, it was neglected, in a state of administrative suspense.
“It must have been pretty here before the war,” Lola observed … “So chic! … Oh, tell me about it, Ferdinand! … Your races here … Were they like ours in New York?”
To tell the truth, I’d never been to the races before the war, but to amuse her I instantly made up dozens of colorful details, drawing on stories various people had told me. The toilettes … the ladies of fashion … The gleaming carriages … The start! … The joyous, imperious horns … The water jump … The President of the Republic … The undulant betting fever, etc.
My idealized account was so much to her liking that it brought us together. At that moment Lola seemed to discover that we had at least one taste in common, well concealed in my case, namely, a taste for social functions. She went so far as to kiss me in a burst of spontaneous emotion, something, I have to admit, that she seldom did. And then she was touched by the sadness of bygone fashions. Everyone has his own way of mourning the passage of time. It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the flight of the years.
“Ferdinand,” she asked, “do you think there will be races here again?”
“When the war is over, Lola, I should think …”
“We can’t be sure, can we?”
“No, we can’t be sure.”
The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.
“Suppose, Ferdinand, suppose the war goes on a long time, maybe for years … Then it’ll be too late for me … to come back here … Do you understand, Ferdinand? … You know how I love beautiful places like this … so grand, so chic … It’ll be too late … Forever too late … Maybe … Maybe I’ll be old, Ferdinand … When the races start up again … I’ll be old … You’ll see, Ferdinand, it will be too late … I can feel it will be too late …”
She was as desolate as if she’d put on two more pounds. I said everything I could think of to comfort her and give her hope … She was only twenty-three after all … The war would be over soon, oh very soon … Good times would come again … as good as before, even better … For her at least … being so adorable … the lost years … she’d catch up with no harm done … She wouldn’t run short of admirers … so soon … To please me she pretended she wasn’t sad anymore.
“Do we have to keep walking?” she asked.
“Your weight! …”
“Oh, that’s right, I’d forgotten …”
We left Longchamp, the children had gone. Nothing left but dust. The furlough boys were still chasing Happiness, but no longer in the copses, the pursuit of Happiness had moved to the café terraces around the Porte Maillot.
We headed for Saint-Cloud along the riverbank, shrouded in a dancing halo of autumn mists. As we approached the bridge, some barges loaded to the gunwales with coal and lying low in the water were thrusting their noses under the arches …
Above the fences the park deployed a great fan of greenery. Those trees are as vast and gentle and strong as dreams. But trees were something else I distrusted, ever since I’d been ambushed. Behind every tree a dead man. Between two
lines of roses the avenue, rising gently, led to the fountains. Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt. Further on, along the side paths, great cubes and rectangles of dark-colored canvas were flapping, carnival booths, which the war had taken by surprise and suddenly filled with silence.
“It’s been a whole year since they went away!” the soda-water lady told us. “You won’t see two people here in a whole day now … I come out of habit … There used to be so many people! …”
That was all the old lady knew, the rest of what had happened was a blank to her. Lola wanted to go and look at the empty tents, one of those funny sad impulses.
We counted about twenty of them, a long one full of mirrors and a lot of small ones, candy stands, lotteries, even a small theater traversed with drafts. There was a tent in every space between the trees; one of them, near the Grand Avenue, had lost its flaps, it was as well ventilated as a punctured mystery.
These tents were leaning close to the mud and fallen leaves. We stopped near the last, the one that was bent lowest, it was pitching on its poles like a ship in the wind, with wildly flapping sails ready to snap the last of its cables. It swayed in the rising wind, a sheet of canvas flew up above the roof and flapped and flapped. The old name of the stand was written on the front in green and red letters; it had been a shooting gallery, the Gallery of the Nations. There was no one to take care of it now. Maybe the owner had gone shooting with the rest of them, with his customers.
What a lot of bullets the little targets in the stand had taken! All of them riddled with little white dots! A wedding, that always got a laugh out of them: tin figures in the first row, the bride with her flowers, the cousin, the soldier, the groom with a big red face, and in the second row the guests, who must have been killed a good many times when the carnival was still operating.
“I bet you’re a good shot, aren’t you, Ferdinand? If the carnival were still running, I’d challenge you … You are a good shot, aren’t you, Ferdinand?”
“No, I’m not a very good shot …”
In the last row behind the wedding, another row was daubed in, the town hall with its flag. People must have shot at the town hall, too, when the gallery was working, at the windows, they’d open and a bell would clang, and they even shot at the little tin flag. And they’d shot at the regiment marching on an incline nearby, like mine on the Place Clichy, this one was between the pipes and the little balloons. People had shot at those things for all they were worth, and now they were shooting at me, yesterday and tomorrow.
“They’re shooting at me, too, Lola!” I cried. It slipped out of me.
“Let’s be going,” she said … “You’re talking nonsense, Ferdinand, and we’ll catch cold.”
We descended the main avenue, the Avenue Royale, toward Saint-Cloud, avoiding the mud. She held me by the hand, hers was tiny, but I couldn’t think of anything but the tin wedding at the shooting gallery up there, which we had left behind us in the shadow of the trees. I even forgot to kiss Lola, something had come over me, I felt very funny. I think it was then that my head became so agitated, with all the ideas going around in it.
It was dark when we got to the Pont de Saint-Cloud.
“Ferdinand, would you like to have dinner at Duval’s? You like Duval’s, don’t you … It would cheer you up … There’s always such a big crowd … Unless you’s rather eat in my room …” She was being very considerate that evening.
We finally decided on Duval’s. But we’d hardly sat down when the place struck me as monstrous. I got the idea that these people sitting in rows around us were waiting for bullets to be fired at them from all sides while they were eating.
“Get out!” I warned them. “Beat it! They’re going to shoot! They’re going to kill you! The whole lot of you!”
I was hurried back to Lola’s hotel! Everywhere I saw the same thing … The people in the hallways of the Paritz all seemed to be on their way to be shot and so did the clerks behind the big desk, all of them just ripe for it, and the character down at the door with his uniform as blue as the sky and as golden as the sun, the doorman, and the officers and generals walking this way and that not nearly so gorgeous of course, but in uniform all the same, all ripe to be shot, there’d be shooting from every side, no one would escape, not this one, not that or the other. The time for joking was past …
“They’re going to shoot!” I yelled at the top of my lungs in the middle of the lobby. “They’re going to shoot! Beat it, all of you! …” I went to the window and shouted some more. What a disturbance! “Poor soldier boy!” the people said. The concierge led me gently to the bar, by suasion. He gave me something to drink and I drank quite a lot, and then the M.P.’s came and took me away, not so gently. There’d been M.P.’s at the Gallery of the Nations, too. I’d seen them. Lola kissed me and helped them to take me away with their handcuffs.
Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you’re in this world, don’t you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.
There was quite a commotion. Some people said: “That young fellow’s an anarchist, they’ll shoot him, the sooner the better … Can’t let the grass grow under our feet with a war on! … But there were others, more patient, who thought I was just syphilitic and sincerely insane, they consequently wanted me to be locked up until the war was over or at least for several months, because they, who claimed to be sane and in their right minds, wanted to take care of me while they carried on the war all by themselves. Which proves that if you want people to think you’re normal there’s nothing like having an all-fired nerve. If you’ve got plenty of nerve, you’re all set, because then you’re entitled to do practically anything at all, you’ve got the majority on your side, and it’s the majority who decide what’s crazy and what isn’t.
Even so my diagnosis was very doubtful. So the authorities decided to put me under observation for a while. My little friend Lola had permission to visit me now and then, and so did my mother. That was all.
We, the befogged wounded, were lodged in a secondary school at Issy-les-Moulineaux, especially rigged to take in soldiers like me, whose patriotism was either impaired or dangerously sick, and get us by cajolery or force to confess. The treatment wasn’t really bad, but we felt we were being watched every minute of the day by the staff of silent male nurses endowed with enormous ears.
After a varying period of observation, we’d be quietly sent away and assigned to an insane asylum, the front, or, not infrequently, the firing squad.
Among the comrades assembled in that suspect institution, I always wondered while listening to them talking in whispers in the mess hall, which ones might be on the point of becoming ghosts.
In her little cottage near the gate dwelt the concierge, who sold us barley sugar and oranges as well as the wherewithal for sewing on buttons. She also sold us pleasure. For noncoms the price of pleasure was ten francs. Everybody could have it. But watch your step, because men tend to get too confiding on such occasions. An expansive moment could cost you dearly. Whatever was confided to her she repeated in detail to the Chief Medical Officer, and it went into your court-martial record. It seemed reliably established that she’d had a corporal of Spahis, a youngster still in his teens, shot for his confidences, as well as a reservist in the corps of engineers, who had swallowed nails to put his stomach out of commission, and a hysteric, who had described his method of staging a paralytic seizure at the front. One evening, to sound me out, she offered me the identification papers of a father of six, who was dead, so she told me, saying they might help me to a rear echelon assignment … In short, she was a snake. In bed, though, she was superb, we came back again and again, and the pleasure she purveyed was real. She may have been a slut, but at least she was a real one. To give royal pleasure they’ve got to be. In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sa
uce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.
The school buildings opened out on a big terrace, golden in summer, surrounded by trees, with a magnificent panoramic view of Paris. It was there that our visitors waited for us on Thursdays, including Lola, as regular as clockwork, bringing cakes, advice, and cigarettes.
We saw our doctors every morning. They questioned us amiably enough, but we never knew exactly what they were thinking. Under their affable smiles as they walked among us, they carried our death sentences.
The mealy-mouthed atmosphere reduced some of the patients under observation, more emotional than the rest, to such a state of exasperation that at night, instead of sleeping, they paced the ward from end to end, loudly protesting against their own anguish, convulsed between hope and despair, as on a dangerous mountain spur. For days and days they suffered, and then suddenly one night they’d go to pieces, run to the Chief Medical Officer, and confess everything. They’d never be seen again. I wasn’t easy in my mind myself. But when you’re weak, the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them as they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.
That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.
Beside me, in the next bed, there was a corporal, a volunteer like me. Up until August he had been a teacher at a secondary school in Touraine, teaching history and geography, so he told me. After a few months in the front lines this teacher had turned out to be a champion thief. Nothing could stop him from stealing canned goods from the regimental supply train, the quartermaster trucks, the company stores, and anywhere else he could find them.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 6
