Everything that was so complicated a moment before would suddenly become so simple, so divinely simple … Everything would be changed, the forbiddingly hostile world would turn into a playful, docile, velvety ball, rolling at your feet. Then and there, perhaps, you’d throw off the exhausting habit of dreaming about successful people and enormous fortunes, because then you’d be able to put your hands on all that. The life of people without resources is nothing but one long rebuff and one long frenzy of desire, and a man can truly know, truly deliver himself only from what he possesses. As for me, I’d picked up and dropped so many dreams, my mind was cracked and fissured, full of drafts and disgustingly out of order.
In the meantime I was afraid to attempt even the most inoffensive conversation with these young things in the restaurant. I went ahead with my tray in well-behaved silence. When it came my turn to pass the earthenware hollows filled with sausages and beans, I took what was given me. That restaurant was so clean and well lighted that, skimming its mosaic floor, I felt like a fly on milk.
Waitresses dressed like nurses stood behind the noodles, rice, and stewed fruit. Each had her specialty. I took what the most attractive ones were dishing out. To my regret, they didn’t smile at the customers at all. As soon as you were served, you had to leave your place in line and find yourself a table. You balance your tray and take little mincing steps as if it were an operating room. It was a change from the Laugh Calvin and my gold-bordered ebony cubbyhole.
But if they showered the customers with so much light, if they lifted us for a moment from the habitual darkness of our condition, there was method in their madness. The owner was up to something. I had my suspicions. After days of darkness it feels very strange to be suddenly bathed in torrents of light. It made me a little giddier than usual. Which wasn’t difficult, I admit.
I couldn’t manage to hide my feet under the immaculate little enamel-topped table I had landed at; they stuck out in all directions. I’d have liked my feet to be somewhere else, because we were being watched through the window by the line of people we had just left in the street. They were waiting for us to finish eating so they could come and take our tables. Actually that was the reason, to keep up their appetite, why we were so well lighted and displayed so prominently; we were living advertisements, so to speak. The strawberries on my cake shimmered and sparkled so brightly that I couldn’t bring myself to eat them.
You can’t get away from American business enterprise.
Yet despite the dazzling glare and my cramped posture I perceived the comings and goings in my immediate vicinity of a very nice waitress and decided not to miss a single one of her delightful movements.
When my turn came to have her clear my table, I took careful note of the unusual shape of her eyes, the outer ends of which tilted upwards more sharply than is common among French women. The eyelids also inclined slightly toward the eyebrows on the temple side. A sign of cruelty, but just enough, the kind of cruelty you can kiss, an insidious tartness like the Rhine wines one can’t help liking.
When she came close to me, I made little gestures of complicity, as if I knew her. She looked me over as if I’d been an animal, without indulgence but with a certain curiosity. “This,” I said to myself, “is the first American woman who has been forced to look at me.”
Once I’d finished my luminous cake, there was no help for it, I had to give up my place to someone else. Reeling slightly, instead of taking the obvious way to the exit, I braced myself and circled round the man at the cash desk who was waiting for all of us and our money. Sticking out like a sore thumb in the bright, disciplined light, I headed for the blonde.
The twenty-five waitresses at their posts behind the simmering dishes all signaled to me in unison that I was mistaken, headed the wrong way. In the plate-glass window I saw a great stir among the people waiting, and the people behind me, who were supposed to start eating, hesitated to sit down. I had broken the foreordained order of things. All the people around me cried out in consternation: “It must be a foreigner!”
But I had my idea for what it was worth, I wasn’t going to lose the beauty who had waited on me. The sweet thing had asked for it, she had looked at me. I was sick of being alone. I was sick of dreams. I wanted sympathy! Human contact! “Miss,” I said, “you hardly know me. But I already love you. Shall we get married? …” That’s how I addressed her, most respectfully.
Her answer never reached me, for a giant guard, he too dressed all in white, stepped up at that exact moment and simply shoved me out into the night, without insults or brutality, like a dog that has misbehaved.
The whole thing went off like clockwork, there was nothing I could say.
I went back to the Laugh Calvin.
In my room the same thunders were still shattering their echoes, first the roar of the “El,” which seemed to hurl itself at us from far away, smashing the city every time it passed by carrying away the aqueducts; and, in between, incoherent, mechanical sounds from far below, coming up from the street, plus the soft murmur of the eddying crowd, hesitant, monotonous, always starting up again, then hesitating again and starting up again. The great stewpot of people in a city.
From up high where I was, you could shout anything you liked at them. I tried. They made me sick, the whole lot of them. I hadn’t the nerve to tell them so in the daytime, to their face, but up there it was safe. “Help! Help!” I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect on them. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn’t care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I’ve tried. It’s a waste of time.
I have to admit it was only for need of money, but how very pressing, how imperious a need! that I started looking for Lola. If it hadn’t been for that pitiful need, man! would I have let that little bitch of a girlfriend grow old and die without ever setting eyes on her again! All in all—and when I thought about it I had no doubt whatsoever—her behavior to me had been most crummily ruthless.
When, grown older, we look back on the selfishness of the people who’ve been mixed up with our lives, we see it undeniably for what it was, as hard as steel or platinum and a lot more durable than time itself.
As long as we’re young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together.
I finally, with a good deal of trouble, found my little bitch on the twenty-third floor of a building on 77th Street. It’s incredible how revolting people seem when you’re about to ask a favor of them. Her place was posh, pretty much what I’d imagined.
Having steeped myself in large doses of cinema, I was mentally in pretty good shape, almost out of the depression that had weighed on me ever since I landed in New York, so our first contact wasn’t as unpleasant as I’d expected. Lola didn’t even seem terribly surprised at seeing me, it was only when she recognized me that she seemed rather put out.
By way of preamble, I tried to strike up an inoffensive sort of conversation, drawing on our common past. I kept it as discreet as possible and mentioned the war just in passing, without any particular emphasis. There I was putting my foot in it. She didn’t want to hear about the war, not one word. It aged her, and she didn’t like that. She lost no time in getting back at me; age, she said, had so wrinkled, bloated, and caricatured me that she wouldn’t have known me in
the street. In short, we exchanged compliments. If the little tart thought she could get me down with such foolishness! I didn’t even deign to react to her sleazy impertinence.
Her furnishings didn’t bowl me over with their elegance, but the place was cheerful enough, or at least I thought so after the Laugh Calvin.
There always seems to be a certain magic about getting rich quickly. Since the rise of Musyne and Madame Herote, I knew that a poor woman’s ass is her gold mine. Those sudden female metamorphoses fascinated, me, and I’d have given Lola’s concierge my last dollar to make her talk.
But there was no concierge in the house. There were no concierges in the whole city. A city without concierges has no history, no savor, it’s as insipid as a soup without pepper and salt, nondescript slop. O luscious scrapings! O garbage, O muck oozing from bedrooms, kitchens, and attics, cascading down to the concierge’s den, the center of life—what luscious, tasty hell-fire! Some of our concierges are victims of their profession, laconic, throat-clearing, delectable, struck dumb with amazement, martyrs, stupefied and consumed by the Truth.
To counter the abomination of being poor, why deny it, we are in duty bound to try everything, to get drunk on anything we can, cheap wine, masturbation, movies. No sense in being difficult, “particular” as they say in America. Year in year out, we may as well admit, our concierges in France provide anyone who knows how to take it and coddle it close to his heart with a free-gratis supply of all-purpose hatred, enough to blow up the world. In New York, they’re cruelly lacking in this vital spice, so sordid and irrefutably alive, without which the spirit is stifled, condemned to vague slanders and pallid bumbled calumnies. Without a concierge you get nothing that stings, wounds, lacerates, torments, obsesses, and adds without fail to the world’s stock of hatred, illumining it with thousands of undeniable details.
What made this lack all the more deplorable was that Lola, surprised in her native environment, inspired me with a new sort of disgust. I longed to pour out my revulsion at the vulgarity of her success, at her trivial, loathsome pride, but how could I? In that same moment, by the workings of an instant contagion, the memory of Musyne became equally hostile and repugnant to me. An intense hatred for those two women arose in me, it’s still with me, it has become part and parcel of my being. I’d have needed a whole panoply of evidence to rid myself on time and for good of all present and future indulgence for Lola. We can’t live our lives over again.
Courage doesn’t consist in forgiveness, we always forgive too much. And it does no good, that’s a known fact. Why was “the Housemaid” put in the last row, after all other human beings? Not for nothing, we can be sure of that. One night while they’re asleep, all happy people, believe me, ought to be put to sleep for real, that’ll be the end of them and their happiness once and for all. The next day they’ll all be forgotten, and we’ll be free to be as unhappy as we please, along with the Housemaid. But what’s all this I’m telling you? Lola was pacing the floor without many clothes on, and in spite of everything her body still struck me as very desirable. Where there’s a luxurious body there’s always a possibility of rape, of a direct, violent breaking and entering into the heart of wealth and luxury, with no fear of having to return the loot.
Maybe she was just waiting for me to make a move, and then she’d have shown me the door. Anyway, I was careful, mostly because I was so abominably hungry. Eat first! Besides, she was going on and on about the vulgar trivia of her daily life. The world would certainly have to be shut down for at least two or three generations if there were no more lies to tell. People would have practically nothing to say to one another. She finally got around to asking me what I thought of her America. I owned that I’d become so weakened, so terror-stricken, that almost everyone and almost everything frightened me, and that her country as such terrified me more than all the direct, occult, and unforeseeable menaces I found in it, chiefly because of the enormous indifference toward me which to my way of thinking was its very essence.
I had my living to make, I told her, so I’d soon have to cure myself of my excessive sensibility. In that respect, I admitted, I was very backward, and I assured her that I’d be exceedingly grateful if she could recommend me to some possible employer among her acquaintances … But please, as soon as possible … I’d be quite satisfied with a modest salary … And considerably more of this insipid hogwash … She took my modest but nevertheless indiscreet suggestion pretty badly. Her replies were discouraging from the start. She couldn’t think of anyone at all who might give me a job or help me. Naturally that drove us back to talking about life in general and hers in particular.
We were still sizing each other up morally and physically when the bell rang. And then, with practically no pause or interval, four women swept into the room, painted, corpulent, middle-aged, muscular, bejeweled, and very free and easy. Lola introduced us very summarily, she was visibly embarrassed and tried to drag them away somewhere, but, thwarting all her efforts, they competed for my attention, telling me everything they knew about Europe. Europe was an old-fashioned garden, full of old-fashioned, erotic, grasping lunatics. They knew all there was to know about the Chabanais* and the Invalides.*
Personally, I hadn’t been to either of those places, the first being too expensive, the second too out of the way. In replying, I was overcome by a blast of automatic patriotism that made me even sillier than usual on such occasions. I told them their city gave me the creeps. An unsuccessful carnival, a nauseating flop, though the people in charge were knocking themselves out to put it over …
While perorating thus artificially and conventionally, I couldn’t help realizing that there were other reasons than malaria for my physical prostration and moral depression. There was also the change in habits; once again I was having to get used to new faces in new surroundings and to learn new ways of talking and lying. Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you’re having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again. That’s what exile, a foreign country is, inexorable perception of existence as it really is, during those long lucid hours, exceptional in the flux of human time, when the ways of the old country abandon you, but the new ways haven’t sufficiently stupefied you as yet.
At such moments everything adds to your loathsome distress, forcing you in your weakened state to see things, people, and the future as they are, that is, as skeletons, as nothings, which you will nevertheless have to love, cherish, and defend as if they existed.
A different country, different people carrying on rather strangely, the loss of a few little vanities, of a certain pride that has lost its justification, the lie it’s based on, its familiar echo— no more is needed, your head swims, doubt takes hold of you, the infinite opens up just for you, a ridiculously small infinite, and you fall into it …
Travel is the search for this nothing, this bit of intoxication for numbskulls …
Lola’s four visitors had a good laugh listening to my wild confessions, my little Jean-Jacques act. They called me all sorts of names that I hardly understood because of their American mispronunciation and oily, indecent way of speaking. Loudmouthed cats.
When the Negro servant came in with tea, we all fell silent.
One of the visitors must have had more discernment than the others, for she announced in a loud voice that I was shaking with fever and must be frightfully thirsty. In spite of my shakes, I loved the food that was served. Those sandwiches, I can say without exaggeration, saved my life.
The conversation turned to the relative merits of the Paris brothels, but I didn’t bother to join in. The ladies dabbled in various complicated drinks and then, flushed, warmed, and communicative, started talking about “marriages.” Busy as I was with the food, I couldn’t help realizing in one corner of my mind that these were marriages of a very special kind, matings, I was pretty sure, between juveniles, and that the ladies collected a commission on them.
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br /> Lola saw that this talk caught my attention and aroused my curiosity. She gave me a pretty mean look. She had stopped drinking. The American men Lola knew weren’t like me, they never showed curiosity. Under her watchful eye I controlled myself with some difficulty. I’d have liked to ask those ladies a hundred questions.
Finally the guests left us, moving heavily, enlivened by drink, sexually stimulated. Bouncing and wriggling, they held forth with a curiously elegant and cynical eroticism. I sensed an Elizabethan something deep down, and I’d have liked to feel its undoubtedly choice and concentrated vibrations at the end of my organ. But much to my regret and increased sadness, I got no more than a presentiment of that biological communion, that vital message so essential for a traveler. Incurable melancholy!
As soon as they had left, Lola made no secret of her exasperation. That intermezzo had really annoyed her. I didn’t say a word.
“Those hags!” she cried a few minutes later.
“How did you get to know them?” I asked her.
“I’ve always known them …”
No inclination to tell me more at the moment.
Judging by their rather arrogant manner toward her, I had the impression that in a certain society these women must have enjoyed greater prestige than Lola, a considerable authority, in fact. I never found out any more about it.
Lola said something about going downtown, but told me I could stay and wait for her and have some more to eat if I was still hungry. Seeing that I’d left the Laugh Calvin without paying my bill and had no intention of going back—for good reason—I was delighted with her suggestion—a few more moments of warmth before going out and facing the street, and oh my aching back! what a street!
As soon as I was alone, I made for the hallway leading to the place the Negro servant had emerged from. We met halfway to the pantry, and I shook hands with him. He trusted me right off and led me to the kitchen, a fine, well-arranged place, much more logical and attractive than the living room.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 22
