Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “Fees! …” as my colleagues persisted in saying. It didn’t stick in their craw. As if the word made it perfectly natural and there were no need to explain … “Shameful!” I couldn’t help thinking, you can’t get around it. Everything can be explained, I know that. But that doesn’t change the fact that the man who takes five francs from the poor and the wicked will be a louse to his dying day. Ever since then, in fact, I’ve been sure of being as slimy a customer as anyone else. It’s not that I’ve committed orgies and follies with their ten francs. Certainly not. The landlord took most of it, but that’s no excuse either. I wish it were, but it isn’t. The landlord is shittier than shit, but that’s another story.

  What with eating my heart out and navigating in the icy showers of the season, I was beginning to look tubercular myself. Naturally. That’s what happens when you have to forego practically every pleasure. Now and then I’d buy a few eggs, but my diet consisted mainly of beans and lentils. They take a long time to cook, I’d spend hours in the kitchen watching them boil after my visiting hours, and since I lived on the second floor I had a fine view of the back court. Back courts are the dungeons of row houses. I had plenty of time to look at my court, and especially to hear it.

  That’s where the shouts and yells of the twenty houses round about crash and rebound, even the cries of the concierges’ little birds, rotting away as they pipe for the spring they will never see in their cages beside the privies, which are all clustered together out at the dark end with their ill-fitting, banging doors. A hundred male and female drunks inhabit those bricks and feed the echoes with their boasting quarrels and muddled, eruptive oaths, especially after lunch on Saturday. That’s the intense moment in family life. Shouts of defiance as the drink pours down. Papa is brandishing a chair, a sight worth seeing, like an ax, and Mama a log like a saber! Heaven help the weak! It’s the kid who suffers. Anyone unable to defend himself or fight back, children, dogs, and cats, is flattened against the wall. After the third glass of wine, the black kind, the worst, it’s the dog’s turn, Papa stamps on his paw. That’ll teach him to be hungry at the same time as people. It’s good for a laugh when he crawls under the bed, whimpering for all he’s worth. That’s the signal. Nothing arouses a drunken woman so much as an animal in pain, and bulls aren’t always handy. The argument starts up again, vindictive, compulsive, delirious, the wife takes the lead, hurling shrill calls to battle at the male. Then comes the melee, the smash-up. The uproar descends on the court, the echo swirls through the half-darkness. The children yap with horror. They’ve found out what Mama and Papa have in them! Their yells draw down parental thunders.

  I spent whole days waiting for what sometimes happens after these family scenes to happen.

  It happened on the fourth floor, across from my window, in the house on the other side.

  I couldn’t see a thing, but I heard it clearly.

  There’s an end to everything. It’s not always death, it’s often something else and possibly worse, especially when there are children.

  That’s where those tenants lived, at the level where the shadow begins to pale. If the father and mother were alone on the days when this kind of thing happened, they’d first have a long argument and then there’d be a long silence. The situation was building up. They had a bone to pick with the little girl. They called her. She knew. She started whimpering right away. She knew what she was in for. To judge by her voice, she must have been about ten. It took me quite a few times before I understood what the two of them did to her.

  First they tied her up; it took a long time, like getting ready for an operation. That gave them a kick. “You little skunk!” cried the father. “The filthy slut!” went the mother. “We’ll teach you!” they’d shout together, and bawl hereout for all sorts of things that they probably made up. I think they tied her to the bed posts. Meanwhile the child was squeaking like a mouse in a trap. “That won’t help you, you little scum. You’ve got it coming! Oh yes! You’ve got it coming!” Then came a volley of oaths, you’d have thought she was cursing at a horse. All steamed up. “Stop talking, Mama,” said the little girl gently. “Stop talking, Mama! Hit me, but stop talking!” They gave her a terrible thrashing. I listened to the end to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, that this was really happening. I couldn’t have eaten my beans with that going on. I couldn’t close the window either. I was no good for anything. I was helpless. I just stayed there listening, same as everywhere and always. Still, I believed I gained strength listening to such things, the strength to go further, a strange sort of strength, next time I’d be able to go down even deeper and lower, and listen to other plaints that I hadn’t heard before or had had difficulty in understanding, because beyond the plaints we hear, there always seem to be others that we haven’t yet heard or understood.

  When they had beaten her so much she couldn’t howl anymore, a little sob continued to come out every time she breathed.

  And then I heard the man saying:

  “All right, old girl! Step lively! In there!” As happy as a lark.

  He said that to the mother, and then the door into the next room would slam behind them. Once she said to him, I heard her: “Oh, Julien, I love you so much, I could eat your shit, even if you made turds this big …”

  That was their way of making love, their concierge told me, they’d do it in the kitchen, leaning against the sink. They couldn’t do it any other way.

  I learned those things about them little by little in the street. When I met them, the three of them together, there was nothing to attract notice. They’d be out for a walk like a normal family. And now and then I’d see the father outside his shop on the corner of the Boulevard Poincaré, where they sold “shoes for sensitive feet.” He was the head salesman.

  Most of the time our court had only unrelieved horrors to offer. Especially in the summer, it thundered with threats and echoes and blows, with falling objects and people, and unintelligible insults. The sun never reached the bottom. The walls seemed to be painted with dense blue shadows, especially in the corners. The concierges had their own little privies, clustered like so many beehives. At night when they went out to pee they’d bump into the garbage cans, which would boom like thunder.

  Washing, strung from window to window, would be trying to dry.

  After dinner, when there were no brutalities under way, what you heard was mostly arguments about the races. But those sporting polemics also ended badly as often as not, with assorted swats and wallops, and behind one of the windows, for one reason or another, someone was always knocked cold in the end.

  In the summer everything smelled strong. There was no air left in the court, only smells. The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they’re overflowing. It’s a known fact. The ones on the third floor were always overflowing. Madame Cezanne, the concierge at No. 8, would come up with her rattan unplugger. I’d watch her working away, and in the end we got to talking. “If I were you,” she advised me, “I’d take care of the pregnant women on the quiet … Some of the women in this neighborhood really live it up … You’d hardly believe it! … They’d like nothing better than to use your services … Take it from me … It’s better than treating cheap clerks for varicose veins … Besides, they pay cash.”

  Madame Cézanne had an enormous aristocratic contempt, I don’t know where she got it, for anybody who worked …

  “The tenants here are never satisfied, you’d think they were in jail, they’ve got to make trouble for everybody! … One day their toilets are plugged up … Another day their gas leaks … Or their letters are being opened! … Always making nuisances of themselves … Pests! The other day one of them spat in his rent envelope … Did you ever hear the like?”

  Sometimes she’d have to give up trying to unplug a toilet, it was too hard. “I don’t know what they put in there, but at least they shouldn’t let it dry! … I know them … They always send for me too late … If you ask me
, they do it on purpose! … In the place where I used to work, it was so hard they had to melt the pipe! … I can’t imagine what those people eat … It’s double strength …”

  You’d have a hard time talking me out of the idea that Robinson wasn’t mostly to blame for my trouble starting up again. At first I didn’t pay much attention to my spells. I somehow kept dragging myself from one patient to the next, but I’d become even uneasier than before, more and more so, like in New York, and I was beginning to sleep even worse than usual.

  In short, meeting Robinson again had given me a shock, and I seemed to be falling sick again.

  With the misery painted all over his face, I felt he was bringing back a bad dream that I’d been unable to get rid of all those years. It was driving me nuts.

  All of a sudden he turned up. I’d never see the last of him. He must have been looking for me in the neighborhood, I certainly wasn’t looking for him … He was bound to come back again and make me think about his rotten life. Actually everything conspired to make me think of his repulsive substance. Even those people I saw out the window, who didn’t look like anything much, just walking in the street, chewing the fat in doorways, rubbing shoulders, made me think of him. I knew what they were after and what they were hiding behind their innocent look. To kill and get killed, that’s what they wanted, not all at once of course, but little by little like Robinson, with all the old sorrows they could summon up, all the new miseries and still nameless hatreds, except when they do it with out-and-out war, and then it’s quicker.

  I didn’t even dare go out, for fear of meeting him.

  My patients would have to send for me two or three times in a row before I’d make up my mind to visit them. Usually they had called in someone else by the time I got there. My head was a shambles like life itself. I was called to 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, fourth floor, where I’d been only once before. Actually, they came to get me in a car. I recognized the grandfather right away, he wiped his feet elaborately on my doormat. A furtive type, gray and stooped, his grandson was sick and he wanted me to hurry.

  I remembered his daughter too, another strapping wench, a little faded, but strong and silent, she always came home to her parents for her abortions. They never scolded her, but all the same they wished she’d finally get married, all the more so since she already had a little boy of two staying with the grandparents.

  For no reason at all this child was always getting sick, and when he was sick, the grandfather, the grandmother, and the mother wept together. What made them weep all the more was that he had no legitimate father. It’s at times like that that families are most afflicted by irregular situations. The grandparents were convinced, without quite admitting it to themselves, that illegitimate children are more delicate and prone to illness than others.

  The father, at any rate the putative father, had cleared out for good. They had talked marriage to him so much that he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d beat it so fast that if he was still running he must have been far away by then. Nobody could understand why he had run out on her like that, least of all the girl herself, because he had really enjoyed fucking her.

  Now that the fickle lover had gone, all three of them contemplated the child and blubbered. She had given herself to that man “body and soul,” as they say. In her opinion that explained everything, it was bound to happen. The baby had come out of her body and left her thighs all wrinkled. The mind is satisfied with phrases, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that’s why it’s usually depressing and disgusting to look at. It’s true that I’ve rarely known a single childbirth to demolish so much youth. All that mother had left, in a manner of speaking, was feelings and a soul. No one wanted her anymore.

  Before that clandestine birth, the family had lived in the Filles du Calvaire quarter, they had lived there for years. If they exiled themselves to Raney, it wasn’t for the pleasure of it, it was to hide, to get themselves forgotten, to disappear.

  As soon as it became impossible to conceal the pregnancy from the neighbors, they decided to leave their Paris neighborhood to avoid all comments. A removal for honor’s sake.

  In Raney they didn’t need the respect of their neighbors. In the first place no one knew them in Raney, and in the second place the municipal government was known all over France for its abominable politics; not to mince words, they were anarchists, thugs. In that kind of community public opinion is of no account.

  The family had punished themselves voluntarily, cutting themselves off from all their old relations and old friends. Their tragedy was complete. Nothing more to lose, so they said. Declassed. When you’re determined to lose your name, you go among the common people.

  They found no fault with anyone. They merely tried to discover by feeble little acts of rebellion what Destiny could have had in mind the day it had played them such a dirty trick.

  Living in Raney gave the daughter only one consolation, but that was a big one. Now she could talk freely to all and sundry about “her new responsibilities.” In deserting her, her lover had awakened a passion for heroism and singularity that had lain dormant in her nature. As soon as she felt sure that she would never for the rest of her days lead the same sort of life as most women of her class and background, and that she would always be in a position to invoke the tragedy of a life ruined by her very first love, she adjusted with alacrity to the great disaster that had befallen her and, all things considered, the ravages of fate became tragically welcome. She glorified in her unmarried-mother act.

  In the dining room, as her father and I went in, the economy lighting stopped at half-tints and faces appeared only as pale spots, blobs of flesh mumbling words that hung suspended in a penumbra heavy with the smell of old pepper that all heirloom furniture exudes.

  The child, lying swaddled on his back in the middle of the table, let me palpate him. To begin with, I pressed the wall of his abdomen, ever so carefully and slowly, from the navel to the testicles, and then still very gravely I auscultated him.

  His heartbeat was like a kitten’s, sharp and nervous. Then the child had enough of my exploring fingers and began to yell as children can do at that age, incredibly. That was too much. Since Robinson’s return I’d been feeling very funny in body and mind, and the little innocent’s screams made an abominable impression on me. What screams! Heavens above, what screams! I was at the end of my rope.

  Another idea must have helped to provoke my idiotic behavior. In my exasperation, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out all the rancor and disgust I had been holding in for too long.

  “Hey,” I said to that little bellower, “don’t be in such a hurry, you little fool, you’ll have plenty of time for bellowing! Never fear, you little idiot, there’ll be time to spare. Save your strength. There’ll be enough misery to melt your eyes and your head and everything else if you don’t watch out!”

  The grandmother gave a start:

  “What are you saying, doctor?” I repeated simply:

  “There will be plenty!”

  “What?” she asked in horror. “Plenty of what?”

  “You have to understand!” I said. “You have to understand. You’re always having things explained to you! That’s the whole trouble! Try to understand! Make an effort!”

  “What will be left … What’s he saying?” they all three asked one another. The daughter “with the responsibilities” made a strange face and started emitting prodigiously long screams. Here was a marvelous occasion for a fit, and she wasn’t going to miss it. She meant business. She kicked! She choked! She squinted horribly! I’d done it all right! You should have seen her! “Mama, he’s mad!” She bellowed so hard she almost choked. “The doctor’s gone mad! Mama, take my baby away from him!” She was saving her child.

  I shall never know why, she began in her agitation to take on a Basque accent. “He’s saying such awful things! Mameng! … He’s insane! …”

  Th
ey snatched the baby out of my hands as if they were rescuing him from the flames. The grandfather, who had been so deferential only a short while ago, unhooked an enormous mahogany thermometer from the wall, it was as big as a club … And he pursued me at a distance to the door, which he slammed violently behind me with a big kick.

  Naturally they took advantage of the incident not to pay for my call …

  When I found myself back on the street, I wasn’t exactly pleased with what had happened. Not so much because of my reputation, which couldn’t have been worse in the neighborhood than people had already made it with no help from me, as because of Robinson, from whom I had hoped to deliver myself with my outburst of frankness, to find the strength never to see him again by deliberately creating a scandal, by stirring up this hideous scene with myself.

  Here’s what I figured: by my little experiment I’d see how much of a stink it’s possible to kick up at one throw. The trouble with scenes and tantrums is that you’re never finished, you never know how far you’ll be forced to go in your frankness … What people are still hiding from you … And what they’ll show you some day … if you live long enough … if you go far enough into the heart of their cock-and-bull stories … The whole business would have to be started all over again.

  I, too, just then, was in a hurry to hide. I started for home by way of the Impasse Gibet, then I took the Rue Valentines. It was quite a distance. Time to change my mind. I headed for the lights. On the Place Transitoire I met Peridon the lamp lighter. We exchanged a few innocent remarks. “On your way to the movies, doctor?” he asked me. That gave me the idea. A good one, I thought.

  The bus gets you there quicker than the Métro. After that shameful incident I’d have been glad to leave Raney for good if I’d been able to.

  When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.