I smirked and smiled and waited for the manager to make me an offer. In other words, I applied for the job. Since it was late and they hadn’t time to go looking for another actor at the Porte Saint-Martin,* the manager was delighted to have me right on the spot. It saved him shoe leather. Me too. He barely looked at me. In fact he took me then and there. And put me to work. It might have bothered them if I’d limped, but even there I’m not so sure …
Penetrating the lovely warm padded basement of the Tarapout, I found a veritable hive of perfumed dressing rooms, where the English girls, while waiting for their number, passed the time romping suggestively and swearing. Overjoyed to have reconnected with my bread and butter, I hastened to make friends with my easy-going young colleagues. They welcomed me charmingly. Angels. Discreet angels. Besides, it’s pleasant to be neither confessed nor despised. That’s England for you.
The Tarapout was raking it in. Even backstage all was luxury, well-being, legs, lights, soaps, and sandwiches. I believe the sketch we appeared in was set in Turkestan. It was a pretext for choreographic monkeyshines, musical contortions, and violent drumming.
My part was slight but essential. Puffed up with gold and silver, I had some difficulty at first in finding a place to stand in among so many unstable lamps and doodads, but I got used to it, and thus displayed to my best advantage, I had nothing to do but daydream under the opalescent spotlights.
For a good fifteen minutes twenty cockney bayaderes knocked themselves out with song and bacchanalian dance, supposedly to convince me of the reality of their charms. I’d have been satisfied with less. It seemed to me that going through that routine five times a day was a lot to expect of a poor girl. Those girls never weakened, they waggled their bottoms implacably, with the slightly boring energy typical of their race, the unflagging persistence of an ocean liner, plowing its way through endless seas …
Why struggle, waiting is good enough, since everything is bound to end up in the street. Basically, only the street counts. Why deny it? It’s waiting for us. One of these days we’ll have to make up our minds and go down into the street, not one or two or three of us, but all. We stand on the brink, we simper and fuss, but never mind, the time will come.
Interiors are no good. As soon as a door closes on a man, he begins to smell and everything he has on him smells too. Body and soul, he deteriorates. He rots. It serves us right if people stink. We should have looked after them. We should have taken them out, evicted them, exposed them to the air. All things that stink are indoors, they preen themselves, but they stink all the same.
Speaking of families, I know a pharmacist on the Avenue de Saint-Ouen who had a marvelous sign in his window, a lovely advertisement: One bottle (price three francs) will purge the whole family. Isn’t that great! They all belch! … and shit together, familywise. They hate one another’s guts, the essence of home life, but no one complains because after all it’s cheaper than living in a hotel.
Which brings us to hotels. A hotel is more unsettled, less pretentious than an apartment, you don’t feel so guilty. The human race is never free from worry, and since the last judgment will take place in the street, it’s obvious that in a hotel you won’t have so far to go. Let the trumpeting angels come, we hotel dwellers will be the first to get there.
In a hotel you try not to attract too much notice. It doesn’t do a bit of good. As soon as you shout too loud or too often, they put their finger on you. Pretty soon, the way sound carries from room to room, you’ll almost be afraid to piss in the washbasin. So naturally you improve your manners, the way officers do in the navy. Heaven and earth can start quaking from one minute to the next, we’ll be prepared, it won’t faze us, for already, just colliding in the hotel corridors, we beg and obtain pardon ten times a day.
I’d advise you to familiarize yourself with the toilet smell of everyone on your floor; it comes in handy. It’s hard to harbor illusions at a rooms-by-the-month hotel. The guests don’t cut much of a figure. They journey discreetly through life from day to day, the hotel is a ship that’s rotting and full of holes, and they know it.
The one I moved to was patronized mostly by students from the provinces. As soon as you set foot on the stairs, it smelled of breakfast and old cigarette butts. At night you could recognize the place from a distance, because of the flame of gray light over the door and the gap-toothed gilt letters hanging from the balcony like an enormous dental plate. A monstrous lodging machine, distempered by sordid goings-on.
We’d pay one another visits from room to room. After years of crummy undertakings in the world of practical affairs, of so-called adventures, I was back again with students.
Their desires were still the same, intense and putrid, neither more nor less insipid than in the old days when I’d left them. The people had changed, but the ideas were the same. They still went at more or less regular hours to the other end of the neighborhood to nibble bits of medicine, odds and ends of chemistry, a pill or two of law, and heaps of zoology. The war, in passing over their age group, hadn’t changed a thing, and if out of sympathy you took an interest in their dreams, they led you straight to their fortieth birthday. These young men gave themselves twenty years, two hundred and forty months of dogged thrift, in which to achieve happiness.
Their notions of happiness and success were conventional images, but carefully drawn. They saw themselves at the last square, surrounded by a small but incomparably precious family. Yet they would seldom have looked at this family. What for? One thing a family isn’t meant for is to be looked at. And a father’s distinction and happiness consist in kissing his family—his poetry—without ever looking at it.
By way of novelty, they’d have motored to Nice with their dowered bride and possibly have adopted the use of checks for making payments. As for the shameful reaches of the soul, they would no doubt have taken their wife to a whorehouse one evening. No more. The rest of their world would be shut up in their daily papers and guarded by the police.
Staying at that flea-bitten hotel made my friends a trifle shameful and irritable for the moment. The young bourgeois student feels that he’s being punished, and since it’s taken for granted that he can’t start saving yet, he drowns his sorrow in Bohemia and more Bohemia, in coffee-house despair.
At the beginning of each month we went through a short but acute fit of eroticism, the whole hotel shook with it. We washed our feet. An erotic expedition was arranged. Money orders arrived from the provinces, and that is what made up our minds. I might have obtained just as good coituses from my English chorus girls at the Tarapout, and free of charge at that, but thinking it over, I rejected the easy way because of the complications and the rotten jealous little pimps who were always hanging around backstage, waiting for the girls.
Since we read several pornographic magazines at our hotel, we knew the ropes and addresses needed for getting fucked in Paris. You have to admit that addresses are fun. You let yourself be tempted … even I, who had known the Passage des Bérésinas and traveled and experienced no end of complications in the pornographic line, never seem to have exhausted the hope of intimate revelations. Where the ass is concerned, there’s always a residue of curiosity. You say to yourself that the ass has nothing more to tell you, that you haven’t one more minute to waste on it, and then you start in again just to make absolutely sure that the subject is exhausted, you learn something new about it after all, and that suffices to launch you on a wave of optimism.
You pull yourself together, you think more clearly than before, you start hoping again even if you’d given up hope altogether, and inevitably you revert once more to the ass, the same old story. Indeed, there are always, at all ages, discoveries to be made in the vagina. So one afternoon three of us from the hotel set out in search of an inexpensive piece. It was quick work, thanks to the connections of Pomone,* who operated an agency in the Batignolles quarter for every kind of erotic arrangement or combination that anyone could desire. His books were fu
ll of offers at all prices. This providential man officiated without ostentation of any kind at the back of a court; his exiguous premises were so poorly lit that you needed as much tactile sense and gift of dead reckoning to find your way as in an unfamiliar urinal. Your nerves would be unsettled by the layers of curtain you had to part before reaching the procurer, who was always to be found seated in an artificial confessional twilight.
Because of that dim light, to tell the truth, I never really managed to get a good look at Pomone, and though we had long conversations and even worked together for a time, though he made me all sorts of propositions and confided any number of sensitive secrets, I should be quite incapable of recognizing him today if I met him in hell.
I remember only that the furtive enthusiasts in the sitting room, waiting their turn for an interview, always behaved correctly, never any familiarity between them, in fact they were as reserved as if they’d been waiting for some eccentric dentist who disliked noise and didn’t care much for light either.
I made the acquaintance of Pomone through a medical student. The student cultivated him as a means of making a bit of extra money out of his cock, because, you see, the lucky bastard was gifted with a monumental penis. He and his amazing equipment would be hired to bring animation into little intimate gatherings in the suburbs. The ladies made a great fuss over him. especially those who wouldn’t have believed that anyone could have “such a big one.” Overwhelmed young girls would dream and rave. In the police records our student figured under the alarming pseudonym of Belshazzar!*
The waiting customers seldom strike up a conversation. Suffering exhibits itself; pleasure and the needs of the flesh hang their heads in shame.
Say what you please, it’s a sin to be a lecher and poor. When Pomone heard about my situation and my medical past, nothing could stop him from telling me about his suffering. A vice was wearing him out. It consisted in “touching” himself continuously under his desk, while conversing with his customers, hunters afflicted with an itching perineum. “It’s my work, you see! How do you expect me to control myself … with all the horrors they tell me, the swine! …” In short, his customers tempted him to vice, like those obese butchers who can’t help gorging themselves on meat. In addition, I believe his bowels were constantly inflamed as a result of a malignant fever originating in his lungs. And the fact is that he was carried off by tuberculosis a few years later. He was also exhausted in a different sense by the chatter of his pretentious lady customers, always cheating, always making up ridiculous stories about nothing or about their sexual apparatus, the like of which, to hear them talk, you wouldn’t find if you ransacked all four corners of the earth.
What the men wanted most and what had to be found for them was mostly consenting and admiring partners for their erotic wrinkles. Incredible the quantities of love those men had to share, as much as Madame Herote’s customers. A single morning’s mail would bring the Pomone Agency enough unsatisfied love to extinguish all the wars in the world forever. But these deluges of sentiment never went beyond the ass. The more’s the pity.
His desk disappeared beneath that mass of passionate banalities. In my desire to know more, I decided to help him for a while in classifying that vast epistolary ragout. Just as with neckties or diseases, he explained, you grouped them according to types, the lunatics on one side, the masochists and sadists on another, the flagellants over here, the ones looking for a “governess” on a different page, and so on. It’s not long before your amusement becomes a chore. We’ve been expelled from Paradise all right! No doubt about that! Pomone was of the same opinion with his moist hands and his everlasting vice, which gave him pleasure and remorse at the same time. After a few months I knew enough about his business and himself. My visits became less frequent.
At the Tarapout they continued to regard me as quite acceptable, a quiet, punctual super, but after a few weeks of calm, my customary ill luck sought me out from an unusual quarter, and I was obliged to abandon my work as a super and resume my miserable journey.
Seen in perspective, those days at the Tarapout were only a sort of forbidden and insidious port of call. Admittedly, I was always well dressed during those four months, once as a prince, twice as a centurion, one day as an aviator, and well and regularly paid. At the Tarapout I ate enough to last me for years. I led the life of a coupon clipper without the coupons. Treachery! Disaster! One night, I don’t know why, they changed our number. The scene of the new sketch was the London Embankment. My misgivings were immediate, our little English girls were expected to sing, off key and ostensibly on the banks of the Thames at night, while I played the part of a policeman. A totally silent role, walking up and down in front of the parapet. Suddenly, when I’d stopped thinking about it, their singing grew louder than life itself and steered fate in the direction of calamity. While they were singing, I couldn’t think of anything but all the poor world’s misery and my own, those tarts with their singing made my heart burn like tuna fish. I thought I’d digested it, forgotten the worst! But this was the worst of all, a song that couldn’t make it … And as they sang, they wiggle-waggled, to try and bring it off. A fine mess, all of a sudden we were knee deep in misery … No mistake! Mooning about in the fog! Their lament was dripping with misery, it made me grow older from minute to minute. Panic oozed from the very stage set. And nothing could stop them. They didn’t seem to understand all the harm their song was doing us all … They laughed and flung out their legs in perfect time, while lamenting their whole life … When it comes to you from so far, with such sureness of aim, you can’t mistake it and you can’t resist.
Misery was everywhere, in spite of the luxurious hall; it was on us, on the set, it overflowed, it drenched the whole earth. Those girls were real artists … Abject misery poured out of them, and they made no attempt to stop it or even understand it. Only their eyes were sad. The eyes aren’t enough. They sang the calamity of existence, and they didn’t understand. They mistook it for love, nothing but love, the poor little things had never been taught anything else. Supposedly, they were singing about some little setback in love. That’s what they thought! When you’re young and you don’t know, you mistake everything for love trouble …
Where I go … where I look …
It’s only for you … ou …
Only for you … ou …
That’s what they sang.
It’s a mania with the young to put all humanity into one ass, just one, the dream of dreams, mad love. Maybe later they would find out where all that ended, when their rosiness had fled, when the no-nonsense misery of their lousy country had engulfed them, all sixteen of them, with their hefty mare’s thighs and their bobbing tits … The truth is that misery already had the darlings by the neck, by the waist, they couldn’t escape. By the belly, by the breath, by every cord of their thin, off-key voices.
Misery was inside them. No costume, no spangles, no lights, no smile could fool her, delude her about her own, misery finds her own wherever they may hide; it just amuses her to let them sing silly songs of hope while waiting their turn … Those things awaken misery, caress and arouse her …
That’s what our unhappiness, our terrible unhappiness comes to, an amusement.
So to hell with people who sing love songs! Love itself is misery and nothing else, misery lying out of our mouths, the bitch, and nothing else. She’s everywhere, don’t wake her, not even in pretense. She never pretends. And yet those English girls went through their routine three times a day, with their backdrop and accordion tunes. It was bound to end badly.
I didn’t interfere, but don’t worry, I saw the catastrophe coming.
First one of the girls fell sick. Death to cuties who stir up calamity! Let ’em croak, we’ll all be better off! And while we’re at it, don’t hang around street corners near accordion players, as often as not that’s where you’ll catch it, where the truth will strike. A Polish girl was hired to take the place of the sick one in their act. The Pol
ish chick coughed too, when she wasn’t doing anything else. She was tall and pale, powerfully built. We made friends right away. In two hours I knew all about her soul, as far as her body was concerned, I had to wait a while. This girl’s mania was mutilating her nervous system with impossible crushes. Naturally, what with her own unhappiness, she slid into the English girls’ lousy song like a knife into butter. Their song began very nicely, like all popular songs it didn’t seem to mean a thing, and then your heart began to droop, it made you so sad that listening to it you lost all desire to live, because it’s true that everything, youth and all that, comes to nothing, and then you started harking to the words, even after the song was over and the tune had gone home to sleep in its own bed, its honest-to-goodness bed, the tomb where everything ends. Two choruses, and you felt a kind of longing for the sweet land of death, the land of everlasting tenderness and immediate foggy forgetfulness. As a matter of fact their voices were foggy too.
All of us in chorus repeated their plaint, reproachful of everybody who was still around, still dragging their living carcasses from place to place, waiting along the riverbanks, on all the riverbanks of the world, for life to finish passing, and in the meantime doing one thing and another, selling things to other ghosts, oranges and racing tips and counterfeit coins … policemen, sex fiends, sorrows, telling each other things in this patient fog that will never end …
Tania was the name of my new pal from Poland. Her life at the moment, I gathered, was one compact frenzy, because of a little forty-year-old bank clerk, whom she had known since Berlin. She wanted to go back to Berlin and love him in spite of everything and at all costs. She’d have done anything to get back to him.
She pursued theatrical agents, those promisers of engagements, to the ends of their pissy stairways. While waiting for answers that never came, those rotters pinched her buttocks. But she was so totally enthralled by her faraway love that she hardly noticed their manipulations. This state of affairs hadn’t prevailed for a week when disaster struck. For months she had been loading Destiny with temptations, like a cannon.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 37
