Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  In short, there was room in Topo, small as it was, for two systems of civilization, Grappa’s, which you might call Roman and which consisted of flogging your subjects for the sole purpose of extracting tribute, of which, if Alcide was to be believed, Grappa retained a disgraceful percentage for his own strictly personal use, and the more elaborate Alcide system bearing witness to a higher stage of civilization, in which every soldier becomes a customer. This military-commercial complex is much more modern and hypocritical; it is, indeed, the basis of our own system.

  Lieutenant Grappa was no great shakes at geography. For his knowledge of the vast territories committed to his charge, he relied on a few rudimentary maps that he had at the post. He was none too eager to know more about those territories. After all, we know what trees and the jungle are, we can see them very nicely from a distance.

  Tucked away in the fronds and hollows of that immense steam bath, a few thinly disseminated tribes stagnated amid their fleas and flies, stultified by their totems and unflaggingly gorging themselves with putrid manioc … Utterly naive, frankly cannibalistic, maddened by poverty, and ravaged by a thousand plagues. No earthly reason to go near them. Nothing to justify troublesome administrative incursions, which could yield no results whatsoever. When Grappa had finished meting out justice, he preferred to turn toward the sea and contemplate the horizon from which he had come one day and across which he would sail one day if all went well.

  Familiar and all in all agreeable as the place had become to me, the time came when I had to think of leaving Topo for the post that was to be my dwelling place and occupation after several days of fluvial navigation and sylvan peregrinations.

  Alcide and I were getting on fine together. We tried to fish for swordfish, a variety of shark that infested the waters in front of our hut. He was just as clumsy as I was. We never caught anything.

  The only furnishings in his hut were his folding bed, mine, and a few crates, some empty, some full. I had the impression that what with his little business he must be putting quite a lot of money aside.

  “Where do you keep it?” I asked him several times. “Where do you hide your filthy lucre?” Just to get his goat. “Planning a big spree when you get back?” I was only teasing him. Twenty times at least, as we dug into the inevitable canned tomatoes, I’d entertain him with amazing episodes of the heroic joyride from cathouse to cathouse that would celebrate his return to Bordeaux. He never said anything. He’d only laugh, as though my little stories amused him.

  Apart from the drill and the court sessions, nothing happened in Topo, nothing whatever, so naturally, for want of other subjects, I’d take up the same old joke as often as possible.

  Once toward the end of my stay, I thought of writing to Monsieur Puta to touch him for some money. Alcide promised to mail my letter the next time the Papaoutah called. Alcide kept his writing materials in a small biscuit tin, just like the one Branledore had had, exactly the same. All re-enlisted sergeants seemed to have them. When he saw me start opening the box, Alcide made a movement to stop me. I was surprised and embarrassed. I had no idea why he wouldn’t let me open it, but I put it down on the table. “Oh, all right, open it!” he said finally. “Hell, it doesn’t matter.” The photograph of a little girl was pasted to the inside of the lid. Just the head, a sweet little face with long curls, the way they wore them in those days. I took out pen and paper and quickly closed the lid. I was embarrassed at my indiscretion, but I also wondered why it had upset him so.

  First I figured that the child must be his and he hadn’t wanted to talk about her. I asked no questions, but then I heard him behind my back, trying to tell me something in a strange bumbling voice I’d never heard. I felt very uncomfortable. I knew I ought to help him tell me his story, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I knew it would be a painful story to listen to, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “It’s nothing!” I finally heard him say. “It’s my brother’s daughter … They’re both dead …”

  “Her parents?”

  “Yes, her parents …”

  “Then who’s bringing her up? Your mother?” I asked him that to show I was taking an interest.

  “My mother’s dead too.”

  “Who then?”

  “Well, me!”

  He grinned and blushed crimson, as if he’d done something absolutely indecent. Then he hastened to rectify:

  “All right, I’ll explain … I’m having her brought up in Bordeaux by the Sisters … But don’t get me wrong, they’re no Sisters of Charity … High-class Sisters … She’s my responsibility and you needn’t worry. She’ll want for nothing! Her name is Ginette … Sweet little girl … Like her mother … She writes to me, she’s making good progress, but you know, those schools are expensive … Especially now that she’s ten … I want her to have piano lessons at the same time … What do you think of the piano? … Well, in my opinion the piano is the right thing for girls … Don’t you agree? … And what about English? English can come in handy … Do you know English?”

  As Alcide confessed his failing—not being generous enough— I began to look at him more closely, with his little cosmetic mustache, his eccentric eyebrows, and his burnt-black skin. The delicacy of the man! And how he must have scrimped and saved on his meager wages … his pitiful allowances and tiny clandestine business … for months and years in this infernal Topo! … I didn’t know what to say, I had no experience, but his heart was so much superior to mine that I went red in the face … Next to Alcide I was an impotent slob, boorish and vain … No two ways … Plain as day …

  I didn’t dare speak to him anymore. Suddenly I felt unworthy to say a word to him. I, who only yesterday had kept him at a distance and even looked down on him a little.

  “I haven’t been lucky,” he went on, unaware that he was embarrassing me with his confidences. “Imagine, two years ago she had infantile paralysis … You know what infantile paralysis is?”

  He went on to explain that the child’s left leg was atrophied and that a specialist in Bordeaux was treating her with electricity.

  “You think she’ll get it back?” he asked me.

  I assured him that she would recover completely with time and electricity. He spoke very circumspectly of his dead mother and of the child’s infirmity. He was afraid, even at a distance, of harming her.

  “Have you been to see her since her illness?”

  “No, I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Will you go and see her soon?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to go for another three years … You see, I do a little business here … That’s a big help to her … If I went on leave now, my place here would be taken before I got back … Especially with that bastard …”

  So Alcide had asked to do a double hitch, to stay in Topo for six consecutive years instead of three, for the sake of his little niece, of whom he had nothing but a few letters and that little photograph.

  “What bothers me,” he said after we’d gone to bed, “is that she hasn’t anybody for the holidays … That’s hard on a little girl …”

  Obviously Alcide was perfectly at ease, at home so to speak, in the higher regions, on terms of familiarity with the angels. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him. With hardly a thought of what he was doing, he had consented to years of torture, to the crushing of his life in this torrid monotony for the sake of a little girl to whom he was vaguely related. Motivated by nothing but his good heart, he had set no conditions and asked nothing in return. To that little girl far away he was giving enough tenderness to make the whole world over, and he never showed it.

  Suddenly he fell asleep in the candlelight. After a while I got up to look at his face. He slept like everybody else. He looked quite ordinary. There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad.

  There are two ways of getting into the jungle. One is to cut a tunnel through it, the way rats do in a bale of hay. That�
�s the stifling way. I jibbed at that. Or you can endure the misery of sitting huddled in a hollow tree trunk, while they paddle you up the winding river from copse to snag, waiting for the endless days to pass and laying yourself open without defense to the deadly glare. And finally, dazed by the yapping of the black men, you reach your destination in some sort of condition.

  At first your paddlers always need time to catch the cadence. Arguments. A paddle strikes the water, two or three rhythmic howls, the jungle sends back an answer, eddies, she’s gliding, two paddles, three, still groping for the rhythm, waves, inarticulate burblings, a backward glance at the sea, flattening out as it recedes, and up ahead the long smooth expanse into which you’re toiling. And for a while yet, far away on his dock, almost swallowed up by the sea mists, Alcide under his enormous bell-shaped pith helmet, a chunk of head, the face a small cheese, and below it the rest of him, floating in his tunic, lost in a strange white-trousered memory.

  That’s all I have left of the place, of Topo.

  Have they managed to defend that scorching hamlet against the insidious scythe of the yellowish-brown river? Are its flea-bitten huts still standing? Are new Grappas and unknown Alcides still training new recruits in imaginary combat? Is the same plain-dealing brand of justice still being meted out? Is the drinking water still so rancid? So tepid? So bad that whenever you try to drink it, it leaves you disgusted for days on end … Is there still no refrigeration? And what of those acoustic battles between the flies and the everlasting hum of the quinine … Sulphate? Chloride? … in your ears? … But most of all: Are there still black people sweltering and pustulating in that caldron? Who knows? Maybe not.

  Maybe none of all that is there anymore, maybe a tornado broke loose one night, maybe the Little Congo, just in passing, gave Topo one good lick with its muddy tongue and it was all over. Maybe the whole place is dead and gone, the very name wiped off the maps, and nobody left to remember Alcide … Maybe his little niece has forgotten him too. Maybe Lieutenant Grappa never saw his Toulouse again … Maybe the jungle, which has always, year after year when the rainy season sets in, had designs on the dune, has recaptured the whole settlement, crushed it beneath the shade of its giant mahogany trees, even those unexpected little sand flowers that Alcide didn’t want me to water … Maybe it’s all gone …

  I’ll long remember those ten days going up the river … Huddled in the bottom of the canoe, watching out for muddy whirlpools, picking furtive passages between enormous drifting branches, nimbly avoided. A labor for convicts on the lam.

  After every sundown we’d camp on a rocky promontory. Finally one morning we left that filthy native canoe and slipped into the forest by a hidden path that twined through the moist green gloom, lit only here and there by a ray of sunlight falling from the roof of that vast cathedral of leaves. Monstrous felled trees forced us to make frequent detours. Whole Métro trains could have maneuvered with ease in the hollows left by their roots.

  Suddenly the full light was on us again, we had come to a clearing and had to climb, an additional effort. The rise we had come to overlooked the endless forest, rolling over red, yellow, and green peaks, modeling and smoothing hill and dale, as monstrously spacious as the sea and the sky. I was given to understand by signs that the man whose habitation we were looking for lived just a little further on … in another valley. And there he was waiting for us.

  He had built a sort of hut between two big boulders, sheltered, as he informed me, from the eastern tornadoes, which were the worst, the most furious. That, I was willing to admit, was an advantage, but the hut itself definitely belonged to the lowest, most ramshackle category, an almost theoretical edifice, coming apart at every seam. I had foreseen something of the sort, but this surpassed all my expectations.

  The man must have thought I looked downcast, because he addressed me rather brusquely, to shake me out of my thoughts. “Come off it, you’ll be better off here than in the trenches! Here at least you can worry along. The food is rotten, I can’t deny it, and there’s nothing to drink but pure mud, but you can sleep as much as you like … There’s no big guns here and no bullets! All in all, it’s a bargain!” He talked something like the Director General, but he had pale eyes like Alcide’s.

  He must have been close to thirty, with a beard … I hadn’t taken a good look at him on arriving, because on arriving I’d been thrown off by the dilapidation of the setup he was supposed to bequeath me and which might possibly be my home for years … But observing him later on, I found a distinctly adventurous face with sharply accentuated angles, one of those rebellious faces that plunge into life head-on instead of rolling with the waves, with a big round nose, and cheeks like coal barges, plashing against destiny with a soft babbling sound. That was an unhappy man.

  “It’s true,” I said. “There’s nothing worse than war.”

  I thought we’d said enough for the moment. I had no desire to say any more. It was he who went on:

  “Especially now that they make them so long. Well anyway, friend, you’ll see that it’s no joke here! There’s nothing to do … It’s a sort of vacation … Except who’d want to spend a vacation in a place like this? Well, maybe it’s a matter of temperament. I wouldn’t know …”

  “How about the water?” I asked. The water I saw in the cup I had poured myself had me worried, it was yellowish. I drank some, it was sickening and as warm as in Topo. A three-day sediment of mud.

  “Is this the water?” The water torture was starting all over again.

  “Yes, that’s all there is, except rain water … But when it starts raining, the shack won’t last long. You see the condition it’s in?”—I saw.

  “The food,” he went on, “is all canned. That’s what I’ve been eating for a whole year … It hasn’t killed me. Convenient in a way, but it doesn’t stick to the ribs … The natives eat putrid manioc, that’s their business, they like it … For the last three months it’s been running through me … Diarrhea … Maybe it’s fever too, I’ve got both … Around five o’clock I’m more lucid … That’s how I know I’ve got fever, because it’s hard to feel hotter than you do already in this climate! … Actually, it’s probably the chills that tell you you’ve got a fever … And not being quite so bored, maybe that’s another sign … but that’s a matter of temperament too … maybe a few drinks would cheer us up … but I don’t go for drink … it doesn’t agree with me …”

  He seemed to think very highly of what he called “temperament.”

  Then while he was at it, he gave me a little more of his delightful information: “By day it’s the heat, at night it’s the noise that’s hard to bear … It’s unbelievable … The animals go chasing round and round, to fuck or to kill each other, how do I know? … Either way, you never heard such a hullabaloo! … The loudest are the hyenas … They come up close to the shack … You’ll hear them! … You won’t have any doubts … It’s nothing like the quinine music … Sometimes you can mistake birds or big flies for quinine … It’s conceivable … But hyenas, the enormous way they laugh … They’re smelling your flesh … That’s what makes them laugh … They’re in a hurry to see you pass on! … You can even see their eyes shining, so I’m told … They feed on dead bodies … I’ve never looked into their eyes … I’m sorry in a way …”

  “Sounds delightful!” I said.

  But he hadn’t finished with the night life.

  “Then there’s the village,” he went on … “There aren’t a hundred niggers in it, but they make enough rumpus for ten thousand. You’ll tell me what you think of it! And man! If it’s tom-toms you’re after, you’ve come to the right place! … If they’re not beating them because the moon is out, they’re beating them because the moon has gone by … There’s always some reason! … The sons-of-bitches seem to be in cahoots with the animals to drive us crazy! So help me, I’d shoot the whole lot of them if I weren’t so tired … As it is, I put cotton in my ears … That’s even better … As long as I had vas
eline in my medicine chest, I greased the cotton with it, now I use banana oil … Banana oil does the trick … That way they can gargle with thunderstorms if it makes them happy! It’s no skin off my ass with my ears full of greased cotton! I don’t hear a damned thing! These niggers are sick, they’re perverts! You’ll see! … All day long they squat on the ground, you wouldn’t think them capable of moving as far as the nearest tree to piss against, but the minute it’s dark, surprise! Vice! Nerves! Hysteria! Chunks of the night gone hysterical! That’s niggers for you, take it from me! Degenerate scum! …”

  “Do they often come and buy from you?”

  “Buy? You’re out of your mind! The trick is to rob them before they rob you! That’s business! At night of course they do as they please … with greased cotton in both ears! … they’d be fools to stand on ceremony! … Besides, as you see, my shack has no door … so naturally they help themselves … for them it’s the good life …”

  “But what about your inventory?” I asked, utterly dismayed at what he had told me. “The Director General told me … he made himself very clear … to draw up a meticulous inventory the moment I got here …”

  “I have the honor,” he replied with perfect calm, “of telling you that the Director can kiss my ass …”

  “But won’t you have to see him on your way through Fort-Gono?”

  “I will never see either Fort-Gono or the Director again … It’s a big forest, my young friend …”

  “But where will you go?”

  “If anyone asks you, tell them you don’t know. But since you seem eager to learn, let me give you some very good advice before it’s too late! Don’t worry about the company any more than the Company worries about you! If you can run as fast as the Company screws its employees, I can tell you right now that you’re due to win the Grand Prix! … So be thankful that I’m leaving you a little cash and ask no more! … As for the stock, if it’s true that the Director told you to take charge of it … tell him there isn’t any left, and that’s that! … If he won’t believe you, who cares? … They take us all for thieves anyway! So it won’t make any difference to public opinion if for once we get a little something out of it … And besides, don’t worry, the Director knows more about financial monkey-shines than anybody, so why contradict him? That’s my opinion! What’s yours? Everybody knows that for a man to come here he has to be prepared to kill his father and mother! Am I right?”