In a way she was dead right, but I couldn’t help being the way I was. I was afraid of hurting her. She was so easy to hurt.
“Believe me, Molly, I love you, I always will … as best I can … in my own way.”
My own way didn’t amount to much. And yet Molly had a perfect body, she was very tempting. But I had that lousy weakness for phantoms. Maybe I wasn’t entirely to blame. Life forces you to spend too much of your time with phantoms.
“You’re very affectionate, Ferdinand,” she reassured me. “Don’t worry about me … You’ve got this sickness … always wanting to know more and more … That’s all … Anyway, you have to live your own life … Out there, all alone … You’ll go further traveling alone … Will you be leaving soon?”
“Yes, I’ll finish medical school in France, and then I’ll come back,” I had the gall to assure her.
“No, Ferdinand, you won’t be back … And I won’t be here either …”
She was nobody’s fool.
It came time for me to go. One evening shortly before she’d have to start working, we went to the station. I’d said good-bye to Robinson during the day. He wasn’t happy either to see me go. I was always leaving people. On the station platform, while we were waiting for the train, some men passed, they pretended not to know her, but they exchanged whispers.
“You’re already far away, Ferdinand. You’re doing exactly what you want, aren’t you? That’s the main thing. It’s the only thing that counts …”
The train pulled in. I wasn’t so sure of my plans once I saw the engine. I kissed Molly with all the spirit I had left … I was sad for once, really sad, for everybody, for myself, for her, for everybody.
Maybe that’s what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.
Years have passed since I left her, years and more years … I wrote many times to Detroit and all the other addresses I remembered, where I thought she might be known. I never received an answer.
The house is closed now. That’s all I’ve been able to find out. Good, admirable Molly, if ever she reads these lines in some place I never heard of, I want her to know that my feelings for her haven’t changed, that I still love her and always will in my own way, that she can come here any time she pleases and share my bread and furtive destiny. If she’s no longer beautiful, hell, that’s all right too! We’ll manage. I’ve kept so much of her beauty in me, so living and so warm, that I’ve plenty for both of us, to last at least twenty years, the rest of our lives.
To leave her I certainly had to be mad, and in a cold, disgusting way. Still, I’ve kept my soul in one place up to now, and if death were to come and take me tomorrow, I’m sure I wouldn’t be quite as cold, as ugly, as heavy as other men, and it’s thanks to the kindness and the dream that Molly gave me during my few months in America.
Getting back from the Other World isn’t the half of it. You pick up the sticky, precarious thread of your days just as you left it dangling. It’s waiting for you.
For weeks and months I hung around the Place Clichy, where I’d started from, and environs, the Batignolles for instance, doing odd jobs. Ghastly! Under the rain, or in the heat of the cars when June came, that burns your throat and nose, almost like at Ford’s. For entertainment I’d watch them pass, people and more people, on their way to the theater or the Bois in the evening.
Always more or less alone in my free time, I’d mull over books and newspapers and all the things I’d seen. I resumed my studies, all the while working for a living, and finally managed to pass my examinations. Science, take it from me, is closely guarded, the Faculty of Medicine is a well-locked cupboard. Plenty of jars and very little jam. But after braving five or six years of academic tribulations I got my degree, a very high-sounding piece of paper. Then I put up my shingle in the suburbs, my sort of place, at La Garenne-Rancy,* right after the Porte Brancion* on your way out of Paris.
I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better. I put my name-plate over the door and waited.
The neighborhood people came and eyed my name-plate suspiciously. They even went to the police station to ask if I was a real doctor. Yes, they were told. He’s filed his diploma, he’s a doctor all right. The news spread all over Raney that a real doctor had set up shop in addition to all the others. “He’ll never make a living,” my concierge predicted. “There are too many doctors around here already!” She was perfectly right.
In the suburbs it’s mostly by streetcar that life turns up in the morning. Starting at dawn, whole strings of them would come clanking down the Boulevard Minotaure, carrying loads of dazed citizens to work.
The young ones actually seemed happy about it. They’d cheer the traffic on and cling to the running boards, laughing for all they were worth, the darlings! It’s hard to believe. But when you’ve known the telephone booth of the corner café for twenty years, so filthy you always mistake it for the crapper, you lose all desire to joke about serious things and about Raney in particular. Then you realize where they’ve put you. These houses are your prison, pissy within, flat façades, their heart belongs to the landlord. You never see him. He wouldn’t dare show his face. The bastard sends his agent. Yet the neighborhood people say he’s affable enough when you meet him. It doesn’t cost him a thing.
The sky in Raney is the same as in Detroit, a smoky soup that bathes the plain all the way to Levallois. Cast-off buildings bogged down in black muck. From a distance the chimneys, big ones and little ones, look like the fat stakes that rise out of the muck by the seaside. And inside it’s us.
You need the courage of a crab at Raney, especially when you’re not as young as you used to be and you know you’ll never get away. There at the end of the streetcar line a grimy bridge spans the Seine, that enormous sewer which displays everything that’s in it. Along the banks, on Sunday and at night, men climb up on the piles of garbage to take a leak. Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors. Women never meditate. Seine or no Seine. In the morning the streetcar carries away its crowds to get themselves compressed in the Métro. Seeing them all fleeing in that direction you’d think there must have been some catastrophe at Argen-teuil, that the town was on fire. Every day in the gray of dawn it comes over them, whole clusters cling to the doors and handrails. One enormous rout! Yet all they’re going to Paris for is a boss, the man who saves you from starvation. The cowards, they’re scared to death of losing him, though he makes them sweat for their pittance. For ten years you stink of it, for twenty years and more. It’s no bargain.
Plenty of bitching and beefing in the streetcar, just to get into practice. The women gripe even worse than the kids. If they caught somebody without a ticket, they’d stop the whole line. It’s true that some of those women are already stinko, especially the ones headed for the market at Saint-Ouen, the semibourgeoises. “How much are the carrots?” they ask long before they get there, to show they’ve got money to spend.
Compressed like garbage in this tin box, they cross Raney, stinking good and proper especially in the summer. Passing the fortifications,* they threaten one another, they let out one last shout, and then they scatter, the Métro swallows them up, limp suits, discouraged dresses, silk stockings, sour stomachs, dirty feet, dirty socks. Wear-ever collars as stiff as boundary posts, pending abortions, war heroes, all scramble down the coal-tar and carbolic-acid stairs into the black pit, holding their return ticket which all by itself costs as much as two breakfast rolls.
The nagging dread of being fired without ceremony, something (accompanied by a tight-lipped reference) that can happen to a tardy worker any time the boss decides to cut down on expenses. Never-dormant recollections of the “Slump,” of the last time they were unemployed, of all the newspapers they had to buy for the want ads, five sous a piece … the waiting in line at employment offices … Such memories can strangle a man,
however well protected he may seem in his “all-weather” coat.
The city does a good job of hiding its crowds of dirty feet in those long electric sewers. They won’t rise to the surface again until Sunday. You’d better stay indoors when they emerge. Just one Sunday watching their attempts to amuse themselves will permanently spoil your taste for pleasure. Around the Métro entrance, near the bastions, you catch the endemic, stagnant smell of long drawn-out wars, of spoiled, half-burned villages, aborted revolutions, and bankrupt businesses. For years the ragpickers of the “Fortified Zone”* have been burning the same damp little piles of rubbish in ditches sheltered from the wind. Half-assed barbarians, undone by red wine and fatigue. They take their ruined lungs to the local dispensary instead of pushing the streetcars off the embankment and emptying their bladders in the tollhouse.* No blood left in their veins. When the next war comes, they’ll get rich again selling rat skins, cocaine, and corrugated-iron masks.
For my practice I had found a small apartment at the edge of the “Zone,” from which I had a good view of the embankment and the workman who’s always standing up top, looking at nothing, with his arm in a big white bandage, the victim of a work accident, who doesn’t know what to do or what to think and hasn’t enough money to buy himself a drink and fill his mind.
Molly had been right, I was beginning to understand her. Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you’re in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That’s not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can’t content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn’t very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you’ve got to hurry, and while you’re looking you’ve got to eat, and keep away from wars. That’s a lot of things to do. It’s no picnic.
In the meantime I wasn’t getting many patients. It takes time to get started, people said to comfort me. At the moment the patient was mostly me.
Nothing, it seemed to me, can be gloomier than La Garenne-Rancy when you’ve got no patients. No doubt about it. You shouldn’t think in a place like that, and I’d come, from the other end of the earth what’s more, precisely to think at my ease. Wasn’t I inluck! Stuck-up simpleton! Black and heavy it came over me … No joke, and it stayed with me. There’s no tyrant like a brain.
Below me lived Bézin, the little junk dealer. Whenever I stopped outside his door he said to me: “You got to choose, doctor! Play the races or drink, it’s one or the other! … You can’t have everything! … I prefer my apéritif! I don’t care for gambling …”
His favorite apéritif was gentiane-cassis. Not a bad-natured man ordinarily, but unpleasant after a few drinks … When he went to the Flea Market to stock up, he’d stay away for three days, his “expedition” he called it. They’d bring him back. And then he’d prophesy:
“I can see what the future will be like … An endless sex orgy … With movies in between … You can see how it is already …”
On those occasions he could see even further: “I also see that people will stop drinking … I’ll be the last drinker in the future … I’ve got to hurry … I know my weakness …”
Everybody coughed in my street. It keeps you busy. To see the sun you have to climb up to Sacre-Coeur at least, because of the smoke.
From up there you get a beautiful view; then you realize that way down at the bottom of the plain it’s us and the houses we live in. But if you try to pick out any particular place, everything you see is so ugly, so uniformly ugly, that you can’t find it.
Still further down it’s always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.
When you live in Raney you don’t even realize how sad you’ve become. You simply stop feeling like doing anything much. What with scrimping and going without this and that, you stop wanting anything.
For months I borrowed money right and left. The people were so poor and so suspicious in my neighborhood that they couldn’t make up their minds to send for me before dark, though I was the cheapest doctor imaginable. I spent nights and nights crossing little moonless courtyards in quest of ten or fifteen francs.
In the morning there was such a beating of carpets the whole street sounded like one big drum.
One morning I met Bébert on the sidewalk; his aunt, the concierge, was out shopping, and he was holding down the lodge for her. He was raising a cloud from the sidewalk with a broom.
Anybody who didn’t raise dust at seven o’clock in the morning in those parts would get himself known all up and down the street, as an out-and-out pig. Carpet beating was a sign of cleanliness, good housekeeping. Nothing more was needed. Your breath could stink all it liked, no matter. Bébert swallowed all the dust he raised in addition to what was sent down from the upper floors. Still, a few spots of sunlight reached the street, but like inside a church, pale, muffled, mystic.
Bébert had seen me coming, I was the neighborhood doctor who lived near the bus stop. Bébert had the greenish look of an apple that would never get ripe. He was scratching himself, and watching him made me want to scratch too. The fact is I had fleas myself, I’d caught them from patients during the night. They like to jump up on your overcoat, because it’s the warmest and dampest place available. You learn that in medical school.
Bébert abandoned his carpet to come and say good morning. From every window they watched us talking.
If you’ve got to love something, you’ll be taking less of a chance with children than with grownups, you’ll at least have the excuse of hoping they won’t turn out as crummy as the rest of us. How are you to know?
I’ve never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe.
Few people past twenty preserve any of that affection, the affection of animals. The world isn’t what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake! And turned into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake.
“Hey, doctor,” Bébert sings out. “Is it true that they picked up a guy on the Place des Fetes last night. Throat cut open with a razor. You were on duty, weren’t you? Is it true?”
“No, Bébert. I wasn’t on duty, it wasn’t me, it was Dr. Frolichon* …”
“That’s too bad, ’cause my aunt said she wished you’d have been on duty and you’d have told her all about it …”
“Maybe next time, Bébert.”
“Do they often kill people around here?” Bébert asked.
I passed through the dust, but just then the municipal street sweeper whished past and, whirling up from the gutters, a howling typhoon filled the whole street with new clouds, more dense and stinging than the others. We couldn’t see each other anymore. Bébert jumped up and down, sneezing and shouting for joy. His haggard face, his greasy hair, his emaciated monkey legs, the whole of him danced convulsively at the end of his broom.
Bébert’s aunt came home from shopping, she had already downed a glass or two. I have to add that she sniffed ether now and then, a habit contracted when she was working for a doctor and having such trouble with her wisdom teeth. The only teeth she had left were two in front, but she never failed to brush them. “When you’ve worked for a doctor like I have, you don’t forget your hygiene.” She gave medical consultations in the neighborhood, and as far away as Bezons.
I’d have been interested to know if Bébert’s aunt ever thought of anything. No, she thought of nothing. She talked enormously without ever thinking. When we were alone with no one listening, she’d touch me for a free consultation. It was flattering in a way.
“Bébert, doctor, I have to tell you because you’re a doctor, he’s a little pig!
… He ‘touches’ himself! I noticed it two months ago, and I wonder who could have taught him such a filthy habit … I’ve always brought him up right! … I tell him to stop … but he keeps right on …”
I gave her the classic advice: “Tell him he’ll go crazy.” Bébert, who’d been listening, wasn’t pleased.
“I don’t touch myself, it’s not true. It’s the Gagat* kid who suggested …”
“See?” said the aunt. “I suspected as much. The Gagats, you know, the people on the fifth floor … They’re all perverts. It seems the grandfather runs after female lion tamers … Really, I ask you, lion tamers … Look, doctor, while you’re here, couldn’t you prescribe a syrup to make him stop touching himself …”
I followed her to her lodge to write out an antivice prescription for Bébert. I was too easy with everybody, I knew that. Nobody paid me. I treated them all free of charge, mostly out of curiosity. That’s a mistake. People avenge themselves for the favors done them. Bébert’s aunt took advantage of my lofty disinterestedness. In fact she imposed on me outrageously. I let things ride. I let them lie to me. I gave them what they wanted. My patients had me in their clutches. Every day they sniveled more, they had me at their mercy. And while they were at it they showed me all the ugliness they kept hidden behind the doors of their souls and exhibited to no one but me. The fee for witnessing such horrors can never be high enough. They slither through your fingers like slimy snakes.
I’ll tell you the whole story some day if I live long enough.
“Listen, you scum! Let me do you favors for a few years more. Don’t kill me yet. Looking so servile and defenseless; I’ll tell the whole story. You’ll fade away like the oozing caterpillars in Africa that came into my shack to shit … I’ll make you into subtler cowards and skunks than you are, and maybe it’ll kill you in the end.”
“Is it sweet?” Bébert asked about the medicine.
“Don’t make it sweet whatever you do,” said the aunt. “For that little creep … He don’t deserve to have it sweet, he steals enough sugar from me already. He has every vice, he’ll stop at nothing. He’ll end up murdering his mother!”
Journey to the End of the Night Page 25
