Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  To a foreigner the contrast was disconcerting. Such free-and-easy intimacy, such extraordinary intestinal familiarity, and up on the street such perfect restraint. It left me stunned.

  I returned to the light of day by the same stairway and went back to the same bench to rest. Sudden outburst of digestive vulgarity. Discovery of a joyous shitting communism. I ignored both these disconcerting aspects of the same adventure. I hadn’t the strength for analysis or synthesis. My pressing desire was to sleep. O rare, delicious frenzy!

  So I joined the line of pedestrians entering one of the neighboring streets. We progressed by fits and starts because of the shopwindows, which fragmented the crowd. At one point, the door of a hotel created a great eddy. People poured out on to the sidewalk through a big revolving door. I was caught up and poured the other way, into the big lobby inside.

  Instant amazement … You had to divine, to imagine the majesty of the edifice, the generous proportions, because the lights were so veiled that it took you some time to know what you were looking at.

  Lots of young women in the half-light, plunged in deep armchairs as in jewel cases. Around them attentive men, moving silently, with timid curiosity, to and fro, just offshore from the row of crossed legs and magnificent silk-encased thighs. Those miraculous beings seemed to be waiting for grave and costly events. Obviously they weren’t giving me a thought. So, ever so furtively, I in my turn passed that long and palpable temptation.

  Since at least a hundred of those divine leg owners were sitting in a single row of chairs, I reached the reception desk in so dreamy a condition, having absorbed a ration of beauty so much too strong for my constitution that I was reeling.

  At the desk, a pomaded clerk violently offered me a room. I asked for the smallest in the hotel. I can’t have had more than fifty dollars at the time. Also, I was pretty well out of ideas and self-assurance.

  I hoped the room the clerk was giving me was really the smallest, because his hotel, the Laugh Calvin,* was advertised as the most luxurious and sumptuously furnished on the whole North American continent!

  Over my head, what an infinity of furnished rooms! And all around me, in those chairs, what inducements to multiple rape! What abysses! What perils! Is the poor man’s aesthetic torment to have no end? Is it to be even more long-lasting than his hunger? But there was no time to succumb; before I knew it, the clerk had thrust a heavy key into my hand. I was afraid to move.

  A sharp youngster, dressed like a juvenile brigadier general, stepped, imperious and commanding, out of the gloom. The smooth reception clerk rang his metallic bell three times, and the little boy started whistling. That was my send-off. Time to go. And away we went.

  As black and resolute as a subway train, we raced down a corridor. The youngster in the lead. A twist, a turn, another. We didn’t dawdle. We veered a bit to the left. Here we go. The elevator. Stitch in my side. Is this it? No. Another corridor. Even darker. Ebony paneling, it looks like, all along the walls. No time to examine it. The kid’s whistling. He’s carrying my frail valise. I don’t dare ask him questions. My job was to keep walking, that was clear to me. In the darkness here and there, as we passed, a red-and-green light flashed a command. Long lines of gold marked the doors. We had passed the 1800s long ago and then the 3000s, and still we were on our way, drawn by our invincible destiny. As though driven by instinct, the little bellhop in his braid and stripes pursued the Nameless in the darkness. Nothing in this cavern seemed to take him unawares. His whistling modulated plaintively when we passed a black man and a black chambermaid. And that was all.

  Struggling to walk faster in those corridors, I lost what little self-assurance I had left when I escaped from quarantine. I was falling apart, just as I had seen my shack fall apart in the African wind and the floods of warm water. Here I was attacked by a torrent of unfamiliar sensations. There’s a moment between two brands of humanity when you find yourself thrashing around in a vacuum.

  Suddenly, without warning, the youngster pivoted. We had arrived. I bumped into a chair, it was my room, a big box with ebony walls. The only light was a faint ring surrounding the bashful greenish lamp on the table. The manager of the Laugh Calvin Hotel begged the visitor to look upon him as a friend and assured him that he, the manager, would make a special point of keeping him, the visitor, cheerful throughout his stay in New York. Reading this notice, which was displayed where no one could possibly miss it, added if possible to my depression.

  Once I was left alone, it deepened. All America had followed me to my room, and was asking me enormous questions, reviving awful forebodings.

  Reclining anxiously on the bed, I tried to adjust to the darkness of my cubbyhole. At regular intervals the walls on the window side trembled. An Elevated Railway train was passing. It bounded between two streets like a cannonball filled with quivering flesh, jolting from section to section of this lunatic city. You could see it far away, its carcass trembling as it passed over a torrent of steel girders, which went on echoing from rampart to rampart long after the train had roared by at seventy miles an hour. Dinnertime passed as I lay thus prostrate, and bedtime as well.

  What had horrified me most of all was that Elevated Railway. On the other side of the court, which was more like a well shaft, the wall began to light up, first one, then two rooms, then dozens. I could see what was going on in some of them. Couples going to bed. These Americans seemed as worn out as our own people after their vertical hours. The women had very full, very pale thighs, at least the ones I was able to get a good look at. Before going to bed, most of the men shaved without taking the cigars out of their mouths.

  In bed they first took off their glasses, then put their false teeth in a glass of water, which they left in evidence. Same as in the street, the sexes didn’t seem to talk to each other. They impressed me as fat, docile animals, used to being bored. In all, I only saw two couples engaging, with the light on, in the kind of thing I’d expected, and not at all violently. The other women ate chocolates in bed, while waiting for their husbands to finish shaving. And then they all put their lights out.

  There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.

  I’d seen too many puzzling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how much I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.

  The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow, to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.

  And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

  I’d better go out into the street, a partial suicide. Everyone has his little knacks, his ways of getting sleep and food. I’d need to sleep if I wanted to recover the strength I’d need to go to work next day. Get back the
zip it would take to find a job in the morning, and in the meantime force my way into the unknown realm of sleep. Don’t go thinking it’s easy to fall asleep when you’ve started doubting everything, mostly because of the awful fears people have given you.

  I dressed and somehow found my way to the elevator, but feeling kind of foggy. I still had to cross the lobby, to pass more rows of ravishing enigmas with legs so tempting, faces so delicate and severe. Goddesses, in short, hustling goddesses. We might have tried to make an arrangement. But I was afraid of being arrested. Complications. Nearly all a poor bastard’s desires are punishable by jail. So there I was on the street again. It wasn’t the same crowd as before. This one billowed over the sidewalks and showed a little more life, as if it had landed in a country less arid, the land of entertainment, of night life.

  The people surged in the direction of lights suspended far off in the darkness, writhing multicolored snakes. They flowed in from all the neighboring streets. A crowd like that, I said to myself, adds up to a lot of dollars in handkerchiefs alone or silk stockings! Or just in cigarettes for that matter! And to think that you can go out among all that money, and nobody’ll give you a single penny, not even to go and eat with! It’s heartbreaking to think how people shut themselves off from one another, like houses.

  I, too, dragged myself toward the lights, a movie house, and then another right next to it, and another, all along the street. We lost big chunks of crowd to each of them. I picked a movie house with posters of women in slips, and what legs! Boyohboy! Heavy! Ample! Shapely! And pretty faces on top, as though drawn for the contrast, no need of retouching, not a blemish, not a flaw, perfect I tell you, delicate but firm and concise. Life can engender no greater peril than these incautious beauties, these indiscreet variations on perfect divine harmony.

  It was warm and cozy in the movie house. An enormous organ, as mellow as in a cathedral, a heated cathedral I mean, organ pipes like thighs. They don’t waste a moment. Before you know it, you’re bathing in an all-forgiving warmth. Just let yourself go and you’ll begin to think the world has been converted to loving-kindness. I almost was myself.

  Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn’t quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that’s waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul. I have to confess that I picked the sexy ones. No point in being proud; when it comes to miracles, take the ones that will stay with you. A blonde with unforgettable tits and shoulders saw fit to break the silence of the screen with a song about her loneliness. I’d have been glad to cry about it with her.

  There’s nothing like it! What a lift it gives you! After that, I knew I’d have courage enough in my guts to last me at least two days. I didn’t even wait for the lights to go on. Once I’d absorbed a small dose of that admirable ecstasy, I knew I’d sleep, my mind was made up.

  When I got back to the Laugh Calvin, the night clerk, despite my greeting, neglected to say good evening the way they do at home. But his contempt didn’t mean a thing to me anymore. An intense inner life suffices to itself, it can melt an icepack that has been building up for twenty years. That’s a fact.

  In my room I’d barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well … I wasn’t entirely alone … It’s not possible to sleep alone …

  To eat cheaply in America, you can buy yourself a hot roll with a sausage in it, it’s handy, they sell them on street corners in the poor neighborhoods, and they’re not at all expensive. I didn’t mind eating in poor neighborhoods, but never meeting those splendid creatures designed for the rich, that bothered me. Under those conditions it wasn’t worth eating.

  True, at the Laugh Calvin, on those thick carpets, I could pretend to be looking for somebody among the too pretty women in the lobby. After a while I was able to face that sultry atmosphere without quailing. Thinking about it, I had to admit that the boys on the Infanta Combitta had been right; experience was teaching me that I didn’t have sensible tastes for a poor slob. My shipmates on the galley had been right in giving me hell. Anyway, my morale was still low. More and more I dosed myself on movies, in this street or that street, but all they gave me was enough energy for a little stroll or two. No more. The loneliness in Africa had been pretty rough, but my isolation in this American anthill was even more crushing.

  I’d always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, too different from the one where my petty habits were at home, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating.

  On the point of dropping my last dollar in this adventure, I was still bored. So profoundly that I even refused to envisage the most urgent steps I should have been taking. We are so trivial by nature that only amusements can stop us from dying for real. I clung to the movies with desperate fervor.

  Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets round about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulent advertisements. False promises. Driveling lies.

  Along the river I explored other streets, more and more of them. Here the dimensions were more normal; for instance, from the sidewalk where I was standing I might have smashed every window in the house across the street.

  Those neighborhoods were full of the smell of constant frying, the shops dispensed with sidewalk displays for fear of theft. Everything reminded me of the streets around my hospital in Villejuif, even the children with their crooked swollen knees all along the sidewalks, and the barrel organs. I’d have been glad to stay there with them, but poor people wouldn’t have fed me any more than the rich; besides, I’d have had to look at them all, and their too much misery frightened me. So I finally went back to Richtown. “You no-good!” I said to myself. “Really, you have no virtue!” A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn’t got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.

  A streetcar was running beside the Hudson, heading for the midtown section, an ancient vehicle, trembling in every wheel and all its terrified carcass. It took a solid hour to get there. The passengers submitted without impatience to a complicated ritual, you paid by tossing coins into a kind of coffee mill stationed at the entrance. The conductor, dressed like ours, in the uniform of a Balkan prisoner of war, watched them doing it.

  At last we arrived. Returning exhausted from those populist excursions, I once again passed that inexhaustible double row of beauties in my Tantalian lobby. Again and again I passed, pensive and prodded by desire.

  My poverty was such that I didn’t dare rummage through my pockets to make sure. If only, I thought, Lola hasn’t picked this particular moment to leave town … But will she want to see me in the first place? Should I touch her for fifty or for a hundred dollars as a starter? … I hesitated. I felt that I wouldn’t have the nerve till I’d eaten and slept properly for once. And then, if this first touch was successful, I’d go looking for Robinson right away, that is, as soon as I got my strength back. Robinson was nothing like me. He was determined! Courageous! Oh yes! I could bet he knew all about America by now, all the ins and outs! Maybe he knew some way of acquiring the certainty, the peace of mind, in which I was so sadly lacking �
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  If, as I supposed, he too had come on a galley and trodden these shores before me, he’d be well launched on his American career by now. These jumpy lunatics wouldn’t faze him! I myself, come to think of it, might have looked for a job in one of those offices, whose dazzling signs I saw outside … But at the thought of having to enter that sort of building I crumpled with fear. My hotel, that gigantic, loathsomely animated tomb, was enough for me.

  Maybe those vast accretions of matter, those commercial honeycombs, those endless figments of brick and steel didn’t affect the habitues the way they did me. To them perhaps that suspended deluge meant security, while to me it was simply an abominable system of constraints, of corridors, locks and wickets, a vast, inexpiable architectural crime.

  Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.

  I went out and watched my last three dollars wriggling in the palm of my hand under the electric signs on Times Square, that amazing intersection where the crowds engaged in picking their movie show are bathed in floods of advertising. In search of a cheap restaurant, I went into one of those rationalized public refectories, where the service is reduced to a minimum and the alimentary rite is cut down to the exact measure of nature’s requirements.

  They hand you a tray at the entrance, and you take your place in a line. You wait. The girls around me, delightful candidates for dinner, didn’t say a word to me … It must feel really funny, I thought, to be able to go right up to one of those young ladies with the tidy, prettily shaped noses, and say: “Miss, I’m rich, very rich … just tell me what it might please you to accept …”