Age had covered her, like a sturdy old tree, with smiling branches.
Grandma Henrouille was merry; discontented and filthy, but merry. The destitution in which she had lived for more than twenty years had not marked her soul. Her dread, on the contrary, was the outside world, as though cold, horror, and death could come to her only from that direction and not from within. She evidently feared nothing from within, she seemed absolutely sure of her mind, as of something undeniable, acknowledged, and certified, once and for all.
And to think that I had been chasing mine halfway around the world.
They called the old woman “mad”; that’s easy to say. She hadn’t set foot outside her den more than three times in the last twelve years, and that’s all there was to it. She may have had her reasons … She was afraid of losing something … She wasn’t going to tell them to people like us, people who were no longer inspired by life.
Her daughter-in-law brought up her commitment project again. “What do you say, doctor? Don’t you think she’s mad? … We can’t get her to go out anymore! … It would do her good to get out now and then! … Oh yes, grandmother, it would do you good! … Don’t say it wouldn’t! … It would do you good … I assure you!” The old woman shook her head. She shut herself in, stubborn and savage, when that kind of pressure was put on her …
“She won’t let us take care of her … She’d rather relieve herself in the corners … It’s cold in her shack, and there’s no fire … We really can’t let her go on like this … Don’t you agree, doctor, that we can’t …?”
I pretended not to understand. Henrouille had stayed home beside the stove, he preferred not to know exactly what his wife and mother and I were cooking up …
The old woman flew off the handle again.
“Give me back everything that’s mine and I’ll go away … I have money to live on. … And that’s the last you’ll ever hear of me! …”
“Money to live on! But grandmother! You can’t expect to live on your three thousand a year! … The cost of living has gone up since the last time you went out! … You tell her, doctor, wouldn’t it be better for her to go and live with the Sisters like we told her … The Sisters are good and kind …”
But the thought of the Sisters gave her the creeps.
“The Sisters! The Sisters!” she rebelled. “I’ve never stayed with any Sisters … Why not send me to live with the priest while you’re at it! … If I haven’t got enough money, as you say, I’ll go to work!”
“Work, grandmother? Where? Oh, doctor, would you listen to her! Work at her age! She’ll soon be eighty! It’s madness, doctor. Who’d want her? Why, you’re insane, grandmother! …” “Insane! Nobody! Nowhere! … Aren’t you somewhere? … You lump of shit, you!”
“Listen to her, doctor! She’s raving and insulting me! How can you expect us to keep her here?”
The old woman turned to confront me, the new peril.
“How does he know if I’m crazy or not? Is he inside my head? Is he inside yours? He’d have to be to know! … Beat it, both of you! … Get out of my home! … The way you keep at me you’re meaner than six months of winter! … Go and examine my son instead of standing there jabbering in the henbane! He needs a doctor a sight more than I do! Not a tooth left in his head, and they were perfect when I was taking care of him! Go on, beat it, get out, the both of you!” And she slammed the door in our faces.
From behind her lamp she watched us retreating across the yard. When we’d reached the other side, when we were far enough away, she started snickering again. She’d given a good account of herself.
When we got back from that disagreeable incursion, Henrouille was still standing by the stove, with his back to us. His wife went on pestering me with questions, all aimed in the same direction … She had a dark, sly little face. Her elbows hugged her body when she spoke. She never gestured. She was determined that this medical consultation shouldn’t be wasted, she wanted it to serve some purpose … The cost of living was going up all the time … Her mother-in-law’s pension wasn’t enough anymore … They were getting old themselves after all … They couldn’t go on forever living in fear that the old woman would die without proper care … that she’d set the house on fire … in her fleas and filth … instead of going to a perfectly good institution, where she’d be taken care of …
Since I put on an air of agreeing with them, they were both as affable as could be … they promised to sing my praises in the neighborhood … if only I’d help them … take pity on them … rid them of the old woman … who was miserable herself, living in the conditions she brought on herself with her obstinacy …
“We could even rent her little house,” suggested the husband, who had suddenly woken up … He’d put his foot in it, saying that in front of me. His wife stepped on his foot under the table. He didn’t understand why.
While they were wrangling, I thought about the thousand francs I could pocket just by making out a certificate of commitment. They seemed to want it badly … Bébert’s aunt had probably told them all about me and assured them that I was the down-at-heelest doctor in all Raney … and would do anything they asked … They’d never have expected Frolichon to do a thing like that! He was virtuous!
I was deep in these reflections when the old woman burst into the room where we were plotting. She must have suspected something. What a spectacle! She had bunched her ragged skirts over her belly, and there she was, all tucked up, screaming at us and at me in particular. She’d come in from the far end of the garden for that express purpose!
“Blackguard!” she yelled at me point blank. “You can go home! Didn’t I tell you to beat it! You won’t gain anything by hanging around! … I’m not going to the nuthouse! … Nor to the Sisters either! … Do your damnedest, lie your head off! … You won’t get me, you bought and paid-for pimp! … They’ll go before I do, the thieves, robbing an old woman! … And you, too, you rotter, you’ll end up in jail, I’m telling you, and it won’t be long!”
I was certainly out of luck. For once I’d had a chance of making a thousand francs at one stroke! I took to my heels.
When I was out in the street, she leaned over the little peristyle to shout after me in the darkness. “Scoundrel! … Scoundrel!” she shrieked. And the echo came back. The rain was coming down. I ran from lamppost to lamppost as far as the urinal on the Place des Fetes. The first available shelter.
In that aedicula at hip height, I found Bébert. He too had gone there for shelter. He had seen me running out of the Henrouille house. “So that’s where you’ve been …” he said. “Now you’ll have to go up and see the people on the fifth floor of our house, it’s their daughter …” The girl he was referring to, I knew her well … wide hips, beautiful thighs, long and silky … There was something tender yet willful about her, and in her movements the precise grace that you often find in women who are sexually fit. She had consulted me several times about her pains in the abdomen. At twenty-five, after her third abortion, she was having complications. Her family called it anemia.
You should have seen her, so solidly built and with a taste for coitus unusual in females. Discreet in her ways, modest in dress and speech. Not the least bit hysterical. But well endowed, well fed, well balanced, a champion in her line. An athlete of pleasure. No harm in that. She only went with married men. And only with connoisseurs, men capable of recognizing and appreciating nature’s triumphs, who won’t settle for some vicious little slut. No, her soft skin, her sweet smile, her way of walking, and the nobly mobile fullness of her hips earned her the heartfelt, well-merited enthusiasm of certain office managers who knew their stuff.
Unfortunately these office managers couldn’t divorce their wives on her account. On the contrary, she helped them to stay happily married. So every time she found herself three months gone, it never failed, she went to the midwife. When you’re a hot number and you haven’t got a sucker handy, life is no bed of roses.
Her mot
her opened the door by a crack, as cautiously as if she’d been expecting a murderer. She spoke in whispers, but they were so loud, so intense, she might just as well have been cursing.
“Oh, doctor, what have I done to deserve such a daughter! Oh, doctor, you won’t breathe a word to anyone in the neighborhood, will you? … I trust you …” She went on and on, airing her fears and spluttering about what the neighbors might think … She was having an attack of knuckleheaded anxiety. Those attacks last a long time.
She gave me time to get used to the dim light in the hallway, the smell of leeks in the soup, the wallpaper with its idiotic leaves and flowers, and her strangled voice. Finally, amid bumblings and exclamations, we reached her daughter’s bedside. She lay prostrate, her mind wandering. I’d have liked to examine her, but she was losing so much blood, there was such a gooey mess I couldn’t see anything in her vagina. Blood clots. A glug-glug between her legs like in the decapitated colonel’s neck in the war. All I could do was put back the big wad of cotton and pull up the blanket.
The mother was looking at nothing and listening to nothing but herself. “It’ll kill me, doctor! I’ll die of shame!” I made no attempt to dissuade her. I didn’t know what to do. We could see the father pacing back and forth in the little dining room next door. Apparently he hadn’t finished composing his attitude for the occasion. Maybe he was waiting for things to come to a head before selecting a posture. He was in a kind of limbo. People live from one play to the next. In between, before the curtain goes up, they don’t quite know what the plot will be or what part will be right for them, they stand there at a loss, waiting to see what will happen, their instincts folded up like an umbrella, squirming, incoherent, reduced to themselves, that is, to nothing. Cows without a train.
But the mother had the leading part as intermediary between her daughter and me. The stage could cave in, she didn’t give a damn, she was happy and convinced of her goodness and beauty.
I couldn’t count on anyone but myself to break this sickening spell.
I risked suggesting that the girl should be sent straight to the hospital for an emergency operation.
A big mistake! I’d given her the cue for her finest speech, the one she’d been waiting for.
“Oh God, the disgrace! The hospital! Oh, doctor! The disgrace of it! All we needed! The last straw!”
There was nothing I could say. I sat down and listened to the mother thrashing about more tumultuously than ever, entangled in her tragic absurdities. Too much humiliation, too much misery culminate in total inertia. The world is too much for you to bear. You give up. While she invoked and provoked Heaven and Hell, thundering disaster, I looked down in defeat and, looking, saw a small puddle of blood forming under the girl’s bed, from which a thin trickle oozed slowly along the wall toward the door. A drop fell regularly from the bed springs. Drip drip. The towels between her legs were soaked red. I managed to ask, very timidly, whether the whole placenta had been ejected. The girl’s hands, pale and bluish at the tips, hung down on either side of the bed. It was the mother again who answered my question with a flood of disgusting jeremiads. I should have reacted, but I hadn’t the strength.
I myself had been so obsessed by my bad luck for so long, I was sleeping so badly that I was just drifting, I didn’t care whether one thing happened rather than another. My only thought was that if I had to listen to this screeching mother I was better off sitting than standing. It doesn’t take much to please you once you’re thoroughly resigned. And anyway, where would I have found the fortitude to interrupt this wild woman who “didn’t know how she was going to save the family’s honor.” What a part! And how she ranted! After every abortion, I knew from experience, she let loose in the same way, trying, it goes without saying, to outdo herself each time! How long it went on she alone could decide! Today she seemed determined to decuple the effect!
She, it occurred to me, must have been beautiful herself, as luscious as you please in her day; but more verbose, I’m pretty sure, more wasteful of energy, more demonstrative than her daughter, whose concentrated intimacy had been one of nature’s truly admirable achievements. Those things haven’t been studied as closely as they deserve. The mother sensed her daughter’s animal superiority and instinctively condemned it out of hand, the unforgettable depth of her fucking, her way of coming like a continent!
In any case she was delighted with the theatrical aspect of the disaster. Her mournful tremolos monopolized the attention of our little group, as thanks to her we floundered in chorus. And there was no hope of getting her out of there. I ought to have tried, though. To do something. It was my duty, as they say. But I was too comfortable sitting and too uncomfortable standing.
Their place was a bit more cheerful than the Henrouilles’, just as ugly but more comfortable. Cosy. Not sinister like the Henrouilles’. Just plain ugly.
Dazed with fatigue, I glanced around the room. Little things without value that had always been in the family, especially the mantelpiece cover with its little pink velvet bells that you can’t buy anymore, and the porcelain Neapolitan, and the sewing table with the beveled mirror, a present no doubt from an aunt in the provinces who had had two of them. I said nothing to the mother about the puddle of blood I saw forming under the bed or the drops that kept falling punctually, she’d have screeched even louder and wouldn’t have listened to me anymore. She was never going to stop complaining and venting her indignation. She was dedicated.
Just as well to keep still and look out of the window as the gray velvet of evening took hold of the avenue, house by house, first the smallest, then the others; in the end the big ones are taken, too, and the people moving about in between, more and more faint, vague and blurred, hesitating as they pass from sidewalk to sidewalk before vanishing into the darkness.
Further away, far beyond the fortifications, strings and rows of lights scattered through the night like tacks to hang forgetfulness over the city, and other little lights, red and green, boats and more boats, a whole flotilla come from all directions, tremulously waiting for the great gates of night to open behind the Tower.*
If that mother had taken a moment to breathe, or better still, if there had been a long moment of silence, I might have dropped everything and tried to forget that it was necessary to live. But she kept at me.
“Couldn’t I give her an enema, doctor? What do you think?” I didn’t say yes or no, but once again, since she gave me a chance to speak, I advised immediate removal to the hospital. The only response was more yelping, sharper, more resolute, more strident than ever. There was nothing to be done.
I made slowly and quietly for the door.
The shadows now lay between us and the bed.
I could scarcely see the girl’s hands resting on the sheet, because the two pallors were so much alike.
I went back and felt her pulse, which was weaker, more furtive than before. Her breath came in gasps. I could still hear her blood dripping on the floor like a watch ticking more and more slowly, more and more faintly. I couldn’t do a thing. The mother went ahead of me to the door.
“Especially, doctor,” she said in a paroxysm of terror, “promise you won’t say a word to anyone!” She implored me. “Give me your word!”
I promised anything she wanted. I held out my hand. She gave me twenty francs. She closed the door behind me, little by little.
Downstairs Bébert’s aunt was waiting for me with her most solemn expression. “Is it bad?” she inquired. I realized that she’d been waiting for half an hour to collect her usual commission of two francs. To make sure I wouldn’t get away. “And how about the Henrouilles? Everything all right?” she asked. She was hoping to collect a tip for them too. “They didn’t pay me,” I replied. Which was true. Her prepared smile turned to a pout. She suspected me.
“It’s really too bad, doctor, if you can’t get people to pay you. How can you expect people to respect you? … Nowadays people pay right away or not at all!” Th
at, too, was true. I beat it. I had put my beans on to cook before leaving. Now was the time, at nightfall, to go and buy my milk. During the day people smiled to see me with my bottle. Naturally. No maid.
Winter dragged on, stretching out over months and months. We were always deep in rain and mist, they were at the bottom of everything.
There were plenty of patients, but not many who were willing and able to pay. Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can’t afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they’re at their last gasp. It’s not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down.
When the quarterly rent came due in January, I first sold my sideboard, I told the neighborhood people I needed the space, because I was planning to give physical culture classes in my dining room. I wonder if anyone believed me. In February, to pay my taxes, I sold my bicycle and the phonograph Molly had given me as a going-away present. It played “No More Worries.” The tune is still running through my head. It’s all I’ve got left. As for the records, Bézin had them in his shop for a long time, and then in the end he sold them.
To make myself sound even richer, I told people I was going to buy a car as soon as the warm weather set in and in preparation I wanted to take in a little cash. I suppose I just didn’t have the gall to practice medicine seriously. When I was being escorted to the door after giving the family plenty of advice and handing them my prescription, I’d start talking about everything under the sun just to postpone the moment of payment a little longer. I was no good at playing the prostitute. Most of my patients were so wretchedly poor and foul smelling, so disagreeable too, that I always wondered where they would ever find the twenty francs owing to me and whether they mightn’t murder me to get them back. And yet I needed those twenty francs badly. Shameful! I still blush to think of it.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 27
