Parapine was slowly getting ready to leave. I helped him put a scarf around his neck and a sort of mantilla over his eternal dandruff. Then he remembered that I’d come to see him about something precise and urgent. “My word!” he said. “Here I’ve been boring you with my own little problems and forgetting your patient. Forgive me, colleague, and let’s get back to our subject. But after all, what can I tell you that you don’t already know? Among so many shaky theories and questionable experiments, reason, in the last analysis, forbids us to choose. Just do your best, colleague! Since you have to do something, do your best! Personally, I must tell you in confidence that typhoidal infections have come to disgust me beyond all measure! Beyond all imagination! When I came to typhoid as a young man, there were only a few of us prospecting the field, we were able to help one another … to advance one another’s reputations … While now, what can can I say? They pour in from Lapland, my friend! from Peru! More and more every day! Specialists are turning up from all over the world! In Japan they roll off the assembly line! In less than a few years I’ve seen the world become a hotbed of universal and preposterous publications on this same hackneyed subject. To maintain and more or less defend my position I’ve resigned myself to writing and rewriting my same little article from congress to congress, from journal to journal, throwing in a few subtle, innocuous, and quite tangential modifications toward the end of each season … Believe me, colleague, typhoid in our time is as botched and bungled as the mandolin or banjo. It’s maddening. Everyone wants to play some little tune in his own way. I may as well admit it, I haven’t the strength to drive myself anymore, what I’m looking for, to see me through to the end of my days, is some quiet little backwater of research that will bring me neither enemies nor disciples, but only the mediocre celebrity without jealousy, which I sorely need and with which I shall gladly content myself. Among other absurdities, I have considered studying the comparative influence of central heating on hemorrhoids in northern and southern countries. What do you think of it? The role of hygiene? Of diet? That kind of thing is fashionable nowadays. Such a study, properly handled and ingeniously dragged out, is sure to be favorably received by the Academy, since the majority of its members are old men to whom these problems of heating and hemorrhoids can hardly be indifferent. Look what they’ve done for cancer, which concerns them so closely … Don’t you think the Academy might vote me one of its hygiene awards? Why not? Ten thousand francs? Not bad … Enough for a trip to Venice … Yes, my young friend, I was in Venice once as a young man … Oh yes! You can starve there just as well as anywhere else … But you breathe a sumptuous aroma of death that’s not easy to forget …”
By then we were out on the street, but had to hurry back for his galoshes, which he’d forgotten. That delayed us. Then we rushed through the streets, but he didn’t tell me where we were going.
Making our way down the long Rue de Vaugirard* strewn with vegetables and other encumbrances, we approached a square surrounded by chestnut trees and policemen, and we slipped into the back room of a small café, where Parapine sat down at a curtained window.
“Too late!” he moaned. “They’ve gone.”
“Who?”
“The little girls from the Lycee … Some of them are charming … I know their legs by heart. I ask for nothing more at the end of my day … Let’s get out of here! I’ll see them another day …”
I’d have been glad if I’d never have had to go back to Raney. Since the morning when I’d left it, I had almost forgotten my daily cares; they were so deeply incrusted in Raney that they didn’t follow me. Perhaps they’d have died of neglect like Bébert if I hadn’t gone back. They were suburban cares. Even so, on the Rue Bonaparte, reflection came back to me, the gloomy kind, though it’s a street that would normally be pleasing to a passer-by. Few streets are so smiling and so gracious. But on approaching the Seine, I began to worry. I strolled aimlessly about. I couldn’t make up my mind to cross the river. Everybody can’t be Caesar! Across the bridge, on the opposite bank, my troubles would begin. I reserved the right to wait on the left bank until nightfall. At least, I said to myself, I’d be saving a few hours of sunlight.
The water lapped against the bank where the fishermen were, and I sat down to watch them. I really was in no hurry at all, no more than they were. I’d pretty well come to the point, the age, you might say, when a man knows what he’s losing with every hour that passes. But he hasn’t yet built up the wisdom to pull up sharp on the road of time, and anyway, even if you did stop you wouldn’t know what to do without the frenzy for going forward that has possessed you and won your admiration ever since you were young. Even now you’re not as pleased with your youth as you used to be, but you don’t yet dare admit in public that youth may be nothing more than a hurry to grow old.
In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that’s absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.
The fishermen on the bank weren’t catching anything. They didn’t even seem to care very much whether they caught any fish or not. The fish must have known them. They were all just pretending. A fine last glow of sunshine maintained a little warmth around us and sent reflections sprinkled with blue and gold leaping over the water. A cool wind came over to us through the big trees on the far side, a smiling wind blowing through thousands of leaves in gentle gusts. A nice place to be. For two whole hours we stayed there, catching nothing, doing nothing. Then the Seine darkened and the corner of the bridge turned red with the sunset. The people on the quai above had forgotten us as we sat there between the embankment and the water.
The night came out from under the arches and climbed along the château,* taking the façade and, one by one, the sunset-flaming windows.
Again there was nothing I could do but go away.
The booksellers on the quai were shutting up their boxes. “Are you coming?” a woman shouted over the parapet to her fisherman husband beside me, who was putting away his tackle, camp chair, and worms. He grumbled and the other fishermen grumbled after him, and up we went, all of us grumbling, to the quai. I spoke to his wife, just to be saying something pleasant before night took everything away. Then and there she wanted to sell me a book. She had forgotten, so she said, to put it away in her box. “I’ll let you have it at half price, for next to nothing.” A little old Montaigne, absolutely authentic, for one franc. For that little money I was glad to give her pleasure. I took her Montaigne.
Under the bridge the water looked dark and heavy. I had lost all desire to go anywhere. On the boulevards I drank a café crème and opened the book she had sold me. I just chanced to open it at a letter Montaigne once wrote to his wife after a son of theirs had died. That passage caught my interest at once, probably because it made me think of Bébert. Roughly, this is what Montaigne says to his wife: “Ah, my dear wife, don’t eat your heart out! Cheer up! … Everything will turn out all right! … It always does … And by the way, rummaging through some old papers belonging to a friend of mine, I’ve just found a letter that Plutarch wrote to his wife under circumstances very similar to ours … That letter, dear wife, struck me as so apt, so much to the point, that I’m sending it on to you! … A splendid letter! Well, I won’t keep you waiting any longer, just let me know if it doesn’t do a good job of healing your sorrow! … Dear wife! I’m sending you Plutarch’s fine letter! It’s really something! I’m sure you’ll like it! … Pay close attention, dear wife! Read it carefully! Show it to your friends! And read it over! Now my mind is at rest … I’m sure it will set you up! Your devoted husband, Michel.” Now that, I said to myself
, is a good job. How happy his wife must have been to have a husband like her Michel, who never let anything get him down. Well, it’s their business. Maybe we go wrong when we try to judge other people’s hearts. Maybe they felt real grief. Period grief?
But as far as Bébert was concerned, my day hadn’t been so good. I had no luck with Bébert, dead or alive. It seemed to me that there was nothing for him on earth, not even in Montaigne. Maybe, come to think of it, it’s the same for everybody, nothingness. No getting around it, I’d left Raney that morning, and now I had to go back, empty-handed. I had absolutely nothing to offer him, or his aunt either.
A short stroll around the Place Blanche before going back.
I see people all up and down the Rue Lepic, even more than usual. So I go up too, to see what’s going on. The crowd was outside a butcher shop. You had to squeeze into the circle to see what was going on. It was a pig, an enormous pig. He was groaning in the middle of the circle, like a man who’s being pestered, but louder. The people were tormenting him, they never stopped. They’d twist his ears just to hear him squeal. He’d tug at his rope and try to escape and squirm and wriggle his feet in the air. Other people would poke him and prod him, and he’d bellow even louder with the pain. Everybody was laughing more and more.
The pig couldn’t manage to hide in the little straw he had, it would fly away when he grunted and puffed into it. He couldn’t escape from those people, and he knew it. He kept urinating the whole time, but that didn’t help him either. Any more than his grunting and bellowing. No hope. Everybody was laughing. The butcher back in his shop was exchanging signs and jokes with his customers and gesticulating with a big knife.
He was happy too. He had bought the pig and tied it up as an advertisement. He couldn’t have had a better time at his daughter’s wedding…”
More people kept arriving outside the shop to watch the pig crumpling in big pink folds after every attempt to escape. But that wasn’t enough yet. They put a vicious little dog on the pig’s back and incited it to jump and snap at the fat dilated flesh. They were having such a wonderful time that they blocked off the street completely. The police had to come and disperse the crowd.
When you get to the top of the Caulaincourt Bridge* at about that hour, you see the first lights of Raney beyond the great lake of night that covers the cemetery. To get there you have to go all the way around. It’s a long way. You need so much time and so many steps to get around the cemetery to the fortifications, you get the feeling you’re going around the night itself.
When you get to the Porte and the toll station, you pass the stinking old office where the little green official is rotting away. The dogs of the Zone are at their barking posts. In spite of everything you see some flowers in the light of a gas lamp, they belong to the flower woman who is always there, waiting for the dead who pass from day to day, from hour to hour. The cemetery, another cemetery next to it, and then the Boulevard de la Revolte with all its street lamps, heading straight into the night. You just turn left and follow it. That was my street. There was really no fear of meeting anyone. Even so, I’d have liked to be somewhere else and far away. I’d also have liked to be wearing slippers so no one would hear me going in. Yet I was in no way to blame if Bébert wasn’t getting better. I had done all I could. I had nothing to reproach myself with. It wasn’t my fault if such cases are hopeless. I passed his door—without being noticed, I thought. Upstairs I didn’t open the blinds, I looked through the slits to see if there were still people talking outside Bébert’s. Some visitors were still coming out of the house, but they didn’t look the same as yesterday’s visitors. A neighborhood cleaning woman I knew was crying as she left. “It looks bad,” I said to myself. “He’s certainly no better … Maybe he’s dead … if one of them is in tears already.” The day was over.
I racked my brains: was I really not at all to blame? It was cold and still in my place. Like a little night just for me, in a corner of the big one.
Now and then the sound of steps rose up to me and the echo came in louder and louder, droning, then dying away … Silence. I looked out again to see if anything was happening across the way. Nothing was happening except inside me, still asking myself the same questions.
I was so tired from walking and finding nothing that I finally fell asleep in my coffin, my private night.
Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn’t work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. “You’re pretty, Mademoiselle,” they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. “You’re very pretty, Mademoiselle …”
And in between they boast that they’ve succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it’s not true and they’ve simply kept it all to themselves. Since at that little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can’t hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thirty years or more to climb from your belly to your face. That’s all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn’t always succeed in completing it.
Just then I was busy improving my soul with bills I couldn’t pay, insignificant as they were, my impossible rent, my overcoat that was much too light for the season, and the grocer who laughed up his sleeve every time he saw me counting my pennies, hesitating to buy a piece of Brie and blushing when the price of grapes started going up. And then my patients, who were never satisfied. Bébert’s death hadn’t done me any good in the neighborhood. His aunt didn’t hold it against me, though. No, I can’t say she behaved badly under the circumstances. It was more from the Henrouilles in their private house that trouble and worry suddenly began raining down on me.
One day Grandma Henrouille walked out of her shack without so much as a by-your-leave, ignoring her son and daughter-in-law, and decided entirely on her own to come and see me. She had a head on her shoulders. After that she came many times and asked me if I really thought she was insane. Questioning me like that gave the old woman something to do. She’d wait in my so-called waiting room. Three chairs and a little three-legged table.
When I got back that evening, I found her in the waiting room, comforting Bébert’s aunt by telling her all about the relatives she herself had lost along the way before arriving at her age, nieces by the dozen, an uncle here and there, a father way back in the middle of the last century, any number of aunts, and her daughters, who had passed on here and there, she couldn’t quite remember where or how. Her own daughters had become so vague in her mind that she had to imagine them more or less, but still with deep sorrow when she spoke of them to someone else. By that time her own children were even less than memories. Around her aged loins she gathered a whole nation of humble ancient deaths, shades long silent, imperceptible sorrows, which, when I arrived, she was trying with considerable difficulty to rouse to a little life for the consolation of Bébert’s aunt.
And then Robinson dropped in to see me. Introductions all around. Friends.
In fact it was then, as I later recollected, that Robinson got into the habit of meeting Grandma Henrouille in my waiting room. They’d sit and talk. Bébert was to be buried the next day. “Are you coming?” the aunt asked everyone she met. “I’d appreciate it if you came.”
“Of course I’ll come,” said the old woman. “It’s nice to have people around one at such times.” There was no keeping her in her hovel. She’d turned into a gadabout.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re coming,” the aunt thanked her. “And you, Monsieur, will you come too?” sh
e asked Robinson.
“Oh, I’m afraid of funerals, Madame, you mustn’t take it amiss,” he said to get out of it.
And then each of them talked a lot, all about his own affairs, almost violently, even Grandma Henrouille joined in. They all talked much too loudly, like in a nuthouse.
So I went in and took the old woman to my consulting room next door.
I didn’t have much to say to her. But she had questions for me. I promised not to go through with the commitment proceedings. We went back to the waiting room and sat down with Robinson and the aunt. We all talked for a good hour about the sad case of Bébert. Everyone in the neighborhood agreed that I had knocked myself out trying to save him, that you can’t fight fate, and that all in all, to everybody’s surprise, I had behaved pretty well. When Grandma Henrouille heard the child’s age, seven, she seemed to feel better, that relieved her in a way. The death of so young a child was just an accident in her opinion, not the same as a normal death, which might have given her food for thought.
Robinson started in again telling us about the acids that burned his stomach and lungs, suffocated him, and made him spit black phlegm. But Grandma Henrouille didn’t spit anything at all, and she didn’t work with acids, so what Robinson had to say on the subject was of no interest to her. She had only come to size me up. She looked at me out of the corner of her lively bluish eyes as I spoke, and none of the latent tension between us escaped Robinson. It was dark in my waiting room, the big building on the other side of the street was paling before giving in to the night. After that there were only our voices between us, and all that voices seem on the point of saying but never say.
Once alone with Robinson, I tried to make it plain that I had no desire whatever to see him anymore, but that didn’t stop him from coming back toward the end of the month, and almost every evening after that. It’s true that his lungs were in bad shape.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 30
