I tried to tell them I had friends who were expecting me. I spluttered and stammered.
“Friends?” they said. “Your friends couldn’t care less! Your friends forgot you long ago! …”
“But I want to see Americans,” I insisted. “And besides, they’ve got women like nowhere else in the world!”
“Wise guy!” they said. “Come on back with us. Believe us, it’s not worth it. You’ll make yourself sicker than you are. We’ll tell you what Americans are like! They’re either millionaires or skunks! There’s nothing in between! The shape you’re in you certainly won’t be seeing any millionaires! But don’t worry, you’ll get your fill of skunks, you can be sure of that! And it won’t be long, oh no!”
That’s the way they spoke to me. A bunch of jerks, cock-suckers, subhumans, they made me sick! “Beat it, the whole lot of you!” I told them. “You’re green with envy, that’s all! We’ll see if the Americans skin me alive! But one thing is sure, you’ve all got ladyfingers between your legs, and limp ones at that!”
I told them off, and after that I felt fine.
Night was coming on, and the galley was blowing the whistle for them. They all started rowing in cadence, all but one, me. I waited till I couldn’t hear them anymore, then I counted up to a hundred and ran to the village as fast as I could. That village was a pretty little place, well lit, wooden houses just waiting to be used, lined up to the right and left of a chapel, all perfectly silent. Unfortunately I was shivering with malaria and fear. Here and there I came across a sailor from the garrison—those people seemed to be taking it pretty easy—and even a few children and then a young girl with delightful muscles. That was America! I had arrived! It’s a pleasure to see that sort of thing after so many parched adventures. It’s as life-giving as fruit. I’d stumbled on the one useless village in the whole country. A small garrison of sailors and their families kept its installations in readiness for the conceivable day when a raging plague, imported by a boat like ours, would threaten the metropolis.
Those installations would be used for killing off as many for eigners as possible, so as to keep the city population from catching anything. They even had a cemetery ready, with flowers all over. They were waiting. For sixty years they’d been waiting. Waiting was all they did.
Finding an empty shack, I slipped in and fell asleep instantly. In the morning the streets were full of sailors in short pants, sturdy, well-built fellows, wielding brooms and sloshing water around my refuge and on all the streets and squares of that theoretical village. I tried to look unconcerned, but I was so hungry that in spite of my fears I headed for a place where there was a smell of cooking.
That’s where I was spotted and cornered between two squads of sailors, determined to identify me. Their first idea was to chuck me in the water. Taken straight to the Head Quarantine Officer, I was in a bad way. Though constant adversity had led me to develop a certain crust, I still felt too steeped in fever to risk any of my brilliant improvisations. My mind was wandering, and my heart wasn’t in it.
The best policy was to lose consciousness. Which I did. In the office where I later came to, some ladies in light-colored dresses had replaced the men around me. They put me through a vague and benevolent interrogation, which would have been plenty for me. But benevolence never lasts in this world, and the next day the men started talking prison to me again. I took the opportunity to bring up fleas, just in passing, so to speak … How I could catch them … and count them … my specialty … as well as classify these parasites and compile flawless statistics. I saw that my approach interested my guards, I had captured their attention. They were listening. But as for believing me, that was a different kettle of fish.
Finally, the commanding officer of the station turned up. He was called the “Surgeon General,” which would be a good name for a fish. He spoke roughly, but with more authority than the others. “What’s this you’re telling us, boy?” he said. “You say you can count fleas? Really now!” He thought that would shut me up, but not at all. One two three I reeled off the little spiel I had prepared. “I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It’s a civilizing factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! … A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season …”
“Come, come, young man! Enough of your hogwash!” the Surgeon General broke in. “You’re not the first! Other young scamps from Europe have been here before you, telling us the same kind of fairy tales, but in the end they turned out to be anarchists like the rest of them, only worse … They didn’t even believe in Anarchy any more! Enough of your boasting! … Tomorrow we’ll try you out on the immigrants over there on Ellis Island, in the shower room! Major Mischief, my assistant, will tell me if you’ve been lying. For two months now Major Mischief has been clamoring for an expert flea counter. We’ll assign you to him for a try! Dismissed! And if you’ve lied to us, we’ll chuck you in the drink! Dismissed! And watch your step!”
I withdrew from the presence of that American authority as I had withdrawn from so many authorities, by presenting first my pecker and then, by a deft about-face, my rear end, accompanying the whole with a military salute.
This statistics racket, it seemed to me, was as good a way as any other of getting me to New York. The very next day, Mischief, the major in question, told me in a few words what my work would be. He was a fat, jaundiced-looking man, as nearsighted as it’s possible to be, with enormous smoked glasses. He must have recognized me the way wild animals recognize their victims, by the general outline, because with those glasses he was wearing he couldn’t possibly have distinguished any features.
On the job we got along fine. I even think that by the end of my stay Mischief had taken quite a liking to me. In the first place, not seeing a person is an excellent reason for taking a liking to him, and besides he was delighted at my brilliant flea-catching technique. Nobody else in the whole station could hold a candle to me when it came to catching and boxing the most restive, keratosed, and impatient of fleas. I was able to classify them by sex before they had even been removed from the immigrant. I don’t mind telling you, my work was amazing … In the end Mischief trusted my skill implicitly.
By late afternoon the nails of my thumb and forefinger were bruised from crushing fleas, but my day’s work wasn’t over, I still had to line up the columns of my daily statistical table: So-and-so many Polish … Yugoslavian … Spanish fleas … Crimean crabs … Peruvian chiggers … every furtive, biting thing that travels on human derelicts ended under my fingernails. As you see, my work was both monumental and meticulous. Our calculations were completed in New York in a special office equipped with electrical flea-counting machines. Every day the little quarantine tug crossed the whole harbor, carrying our figures to be processed or checked.
Days and days passed, my health picked up, but, as my fever and delirium abated in those comfortable surroundings, my craving for adventure and daring exploits revived and became imperious. At ninety-eight point six everything is boring.
Yet I could have stayed there, with not a thing to worry about, well fed at the station mess. Best of all, it seems worth adding, Major Mischief’s daughter, a stunning young lady of fifteen, used to turn up in extremely short skirts after five o’clock and play tennis directly under the window of our office. I’ve seldom seen finer legs, still slightly on the mannish side perhaps, yet on their way to becoming more delicate, a splendid specimen of burgeoning flesh. A challenge to happiness, a promise to make a man shout for joy. Some of the young ensigns of the detachment followed her everywhere.
Those young scamps had no need to justify themselves by doing useful work like me! I didn’t miss the slightest detail of their caperings around my little idol. Just watching them, I found myself blanching several times a day. After a while, I began to think that maybe at night I could pass for a sailor myself. I was still fondling that hope when, one Saturday in t
he twenty-third week of my stay, the situation ripened. The man in charge of shuttling the statistics back and forth, an Armenian, was suddenly promoted to the post of executive flea counter in Alaska, where he’d be dealing with the prospectors’ dogs.
A fine promotion if ever there was one, and true enough, the man was delighted. The Alaskan dog teams are invaluable. Since they are always needed, they are well cared for. Whereas nobody gives a damn about immigrants, of whom there are always too many.
That left no one to take our figures to New York, and in a twinkling I was assigned to the task. Before I shoved off, Mischief, my boss, shook hands with me and urged me to be good and behave myself in town. That was the last bit of advice that estimable man ever gave me, and just as he had never seen me up to that time, he never saw me again. As soon as we went ashore, the rain came down in buckets, penetrated my thin jacket, and soaked the statistics, which gradually melted away in my hand. Nevertheless, I made a big wad with some of them and let it stick out of my pocket to make me look more or less like a businessman when I hit town. Thereupon, trembling with fear and emotion, I hurried off in quest of new adventures.
Raising my eyes to the ramparts, I felt a kind of reverse vertigo, because there were really too many windows and so much alike whichever way you looked that it turned my stomach.
Flimsily clad, chilled to the bone, I made for the darkest crevice I could find in that giant façade, hoping that the people would hardly notice me in their midst. My embarrassment was quite superfluous. I had nothing to fear. In the street I had chosen, really the narrowest of all, no wider than a good-sized brook in our part of the world and extraordinarily dirty, damp and dark at the bottom, there were so many other people, big and little, thin and fat, that they carried me along with them like a shadow. They were going to town like me, on their way to work no doubt. Poor people like everywhere else.
As if I knew where I was going, I put on an air of choosing and changed my direction, taking a different street on my right, one that was better lit. “Broadway” it was called. I read the name on a sign. High up, far above the uppermost stories, there was still a bit of daylight, with sea gulls and patches of sky. We moved in the lower light, a sick sort of jungle light, so gray that the street seemed to be full of grimy cotton waste.
That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the bottom of it, filling it from side to side, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the end of all the streets in the world.
There were no cars or carriages, only people and more people.
This was the priceless district, I was told later, the gold district: Manhattan. You can enter it only on foot, like a church. It’s the banking heart and center of the present-day world. Yet some of those people spit on the sidewalk as they pass. You’ve got to have your nerve with you.
It’s a district filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood.
I found time to go and see them, I even went in and spoke to the employees who guard the cash. They’re sad and underpaid.
When the faithful enter their bank, don’t go thinking they can help themselves as they please. Far from it. In speaking to Dollar, they mumble words through a little grill; that’s their confessional. Not much sound, dim light, a tiny wicket between high arches, that’s all. They don’t swallow the Host, they put it on their hearts. I couldn’t stay there long admiring them. I had to follow the crowd in the street, between those walls of smooth shadow.
Suddenly our street widened, like a crevasse opening out into a bright clearing. Up ahead of us we saw a great pool of sea-green light, wedged between hordes of monstrous buildings. And in the middle of the clearing stood a rather countrified-looking house, surrounded by woebegone lawns.
I asked several people in the crowd what this edifice was, but most of them pretended not to hear me. They couldn’t spare the time. But one young fellow right next to me was kind enough to tell me it was City Hall, adding that it was an ancient monument dating back to colonial times, ever so historical … so they’d left it there … The fringes of this oasis formed a kind of park with benches, where you could sit comfortably enough and look at the building. When I got there, there was hardly anything else to see.
I waited more than an hour in the same place, and then toward noon, from the half-light, from the shuffling, discontinuous, dismal crowd, there erupted a sudden avalanche of absolutely and undeniably beautiful women.
What a discovery! What an America! What ecstasy! I thought of Lola … Her promises had not deceived me! It was true.
I had come to the heart of my pilgrimage. And if my appetite hadn’t kept calling itself to my attention, that would have struck me as one of those moments of supernatural aesthetic revelation. If I’d been a little more comfortable and confident, the incessant beauties I was discovering might have ravished me from my base human condition. In short, all I needed was a sandwich to make me believe in miracles. But how I needed that sandwich!
And yet, what supple grace! What incredible delicacy of form and feature! What inspired harmonies! What perilous nuances! Triumphant where the danger is greatest! Every conceivable promise of face and figure fulfilled! Those blondes! Those brunettes! Those Titian redheads! And more and more kept coming! Maybe, I thought, this is Greece starting all over again. Looks like I got here just in time.
What made those apparitions all the more divine in my eyes was that they seemed totally unaware of my existence as I sat on a bench close by, slap-happy, drooling with erotico-mystical admiration and quinine, but also, I have to admit, with hunger. If it were possible for a man to jump out of his skin, I’d have done it then, once and for all. There was nothing to hold me back.
Those unlikely midinettes could have wafted me away, sublimated me; a gesture, a word would have sufficed, and in that moment I’d have been transported, all of me, into the world of dreams. But I suppose they had other fish to fry.
I sat there for an hour, two hours, in that state of stupefaction. I had nothing more in the world to hope for.
You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he’s fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there’s a dream.
I had to look at the practical side of things and not dip into my small supply of money right away. I didn’t have much. I was even afraid to count it. I couldn’t have anyway, because I was seeing double. I could only feel those thin, bashful banknotes through the material of my pocket, side by side with my phony statistics.
Men were passing, too, mostly young ones with faces that seemed to be made of pink wood, with a dry, monotonous expression, and jowls so wide and coarse they were hard to get used to … Well, maybe that was the kind of jowls their womenfolk wanted. The sexes seemed to stay on different sides of the street. The women looked only at the shopwindows, their whole attention was taken by the handbags, scarves, and little silk doodads, displayed very little at a time, but with precision and authority. You didn’t see many old people in that crowd. Not many couples either. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I should sit on that bench for hours all by myself, watching the people pass. But all at once the policeman standing like an inkwell in the middle of the street seemed to suspect me of sinister intentions. I could tell.
Wherever you may be, the moment you draw the attention of the-authorities, the best thing you can do is disappear in a hurry. Don’t try to explain. Sink into the earth! I said to myself.
It so happened that just to one side of my bench there was a big hole in the sidewalk, something like the Métro at home. That hole seemed propitious, so vast, with a stairway all of pink marble inside it. I’d seen quite a few people from the street disappear into it and come out again. It was in that unde
rground vault that they answered the call of nature. I caught on right away. The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.
Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was to take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.
In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.
The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equaled only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.
The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.
When a gush of water announced a vacancy, the clamor around the free compartment redoubled, and as often as not a coin would be tossed for its possession. No sooner read, newspapers, though as thick as pillows, were dismembered by the horde of rectal toilers. The smoke made it hard to distinguish faces, and the smells deterred me from going too close.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 20
