“But you tell him,” I advised her. It was ticklish saying a thing like that to someone in his condition.
“No! No! It would be better coming from you,” she insisted. “Coming from me it would upset him to know I knew …”
“Really?” I asked in amazement. “Why?”
“He’s been wearing it for thirty years and never said a word about it to me …”
“In that case,” I suggested, “why not let him keep it? As long as he’s used to breathing with it in …”
“Oh no, I’d never forgive myself,” she replied with a kind of quaver in her voice …
I went quietly back into the room. He heard me approaching. He was glad I’d come back. Between fits of suffocation he spoke to me. He made an effort to be friendly, asked how I was getting along, if I had built up a new clientele … “Oh, yes!” I said in reply to all his questions. It would have been much too long and complicated to go into detail. Not the right time. Hidden behind the door, his wife made signs at me, meaning I should ask him to remove his plate. I went close to his ear and whispered, advising him to remove it. Mistake! “I threw it down the toilet!” he said, his eyes more frightened than ever. Vanity, that’s what it was. After that he let out a long rale.
An artist makes do with what happens to be at hand. All his life Henrouille had taken aesthetic pains with his dental plate.
That was a good time for confessions. I’d have liked him to take advantage and give me his opinion about his mother and what had been done to her. But he couldn’t. His mind was wandering. He began to drool copiously. The end. Impossible to get another sentence out of him. I wiped his lips and went back downstairs. His wife in the corridor wasn’t at all pleased, she almost lit into me about the plate, as if it were my fault.
“It was gold, doctor! … I know! I know how much he paid for it! … They don’t make them like that anymore!” … She went on and on! She made me so nervous I offered to go up and try again. But only if she went with me.
That time the husband hardly recognized us. Just a little. The rales weren’t as loud when we were both with him; it was as if he wanted to hear everything his wife and I said to each other.
I didn’t go to the funeral. The autopsy that I had kind of feared never came off. It was all done on the quiet. But after that the widow Henrouille and I were on the outs for good because of the dental plate.
Young people are always in such a hurry to go and make love, in such a rush to grab hold of anything that’s been advertised as a pleasure. When it comes to sensation they never think twice. It’s a little like those travelers who go and eat anything that’s given them at the station buffet while waiting for the whistle to blow. As long as you provide young people with the two or three phrases likely to steer a conversation in the direction of fucking, that’s all they need, they’ll be as happy as larks. Happiness comes easy to the young, why wouldn’t it when they come as often as they please?
Youth is a glorious beach at the edge of the water, where women seem at last to be freely available, where they’re so beautiful they don’t need the falsehood of our dreams.
So naturally when winter comes it’s hard for us to go home, to tell ourselves that it’s all over, to admit it. We’d be glad to stay on, even in the cold of age … we go on hoping. That’s not hard to understand. We’re contemptible. No one’s to blame. Pleasure and happiness come first. I think so too. When you start hiding from people, it’s a sign that you’re afraid to play with them. That in itself is a disease. We should try to find out why we refuse to get cured of loneliness. A character I met in the hospital during the war, a corporal, spoke to me about that kind of feeling. Too bad I never saw him again! “The earth is dead,” he said to me. “We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons … Nothing can help us, we were born rotten … There you have it!”
True, they hauled this thinker off to the fortress one night, proof that he was still good enough to be shot. I even remember that it took two M.P.’s to hold him, a tall one and a short one. At the court-martial they said he was an anarchist.
Sometimes, when you think about it years later, you wish you could retrieve the words certain people said and the people themselves, so as to ask them what they were trying to tell you … But they’re as gone as gone can be! … We weren’t educated enough to understand them … We’d like to know if maybe they’ve changed their minds … But it’s much too late … It’s over and done! … Nobody knows anything about them anymore. So we just have to go on alone in the night. We’ve lost our true companions, and we didn’t even ask them the right question, the real one, when there was still time. When we were with them, we didn’t know. Lost men. Anyway, we’re always late. Vain regrets won’t make the kettle boil.
Well, luckily at least Abbé Protiste came to see me one fine morning to split the commission we’d made on Grandma Hen-rouille’s crypt. Actually I’d given up expecting that priest. He dropped like a gift from heaven … We each had fifteen hundred francs coming to us. At the same time he brought me good news of Robinson. It seems his eyes were a good deal better. The lids had even stopped suppurating. And they were all asking for me down there. True enough, I’d promised to go and see them. Even Protiste insisted.
From what he told me I also gathered that Robinson was going to be married soon to the daughter of the woman who sold candles in the church next to the burial vault, the one that had jurisdiction over Grandma Henrouille’s mummies. The thing was as good as done.
Naturally all this started us talking about the death of Monsieur Henrouille, but we didn’t go into it very deeply. More pleasantly, the conversation came back to Robinson’s future, and then to the city of Toulouse, that I didn’t know at all and that Grappa had talked about in the old days, and then to the weird business the two of them were engaged in down there, and finally to the young girl who was due to marry Robinson. In other words, we talked about everything under the sun, a little of this and a little of that … Fifteen hundred francs! That made me indulgent, and optimistic, so to speak. Everything he told me about Robinson’s plans struck me as wise, sensible, judicious, and well suited to the circumstances … Everything would be all right. So at least I thought. And then the priest and I started talking about age. We had both spent more than thirty years on inhospitable and little regretted shores. There was no point in even turning around to look back on those shores. We hadn’t lost much by growing older. “A man, after all, must be very degraded,” I concluded, “to regret one year more than another! … You and I, Mr. Priest, can grow old with gusto! And enthusiasm! Was yesterday such a bargain? Or last year? … What did you think of it? … Regret what? … I ask you! … Youth? … You and I never had any youth!
“The poor, it’s true, get younger inside as they go along, and toward the end, provided that on the way they’ve made some attempt to jettison all the lies and fear and contemptible eagerness to obey they were given at birth, they’re less revolting than at the start. The rest of what exists on earth isn’t for them! It doesn’t concern them. Their job, their only job, is to get rid of their obedience, to vomit it up. If they manage that before kicking in, then they can boast that they haven’t lived for nothing.”
I was definitely in good form … Those fifteen hundred francs had sparked me off. I went on: “The only real youth, Mr. Priest, is loving everyone without distinction, that alone is true, that alone is young and new. Well, Mr. Priest, do you know many young people who are like that? … I don’t! … All I see is crusty old stupidities fermenting in more or less recent bodies, and the more these sordid absurdities ferment the more they stimulate the young and the more they boast how fantastically young they are! But it’s not true, it’s bullshit … They’re young the way a boil is young, no more, because of the pus inside that hurts and makes them swell up.”
My talking to him like that upset Protiste, and not wanting to irritate him anymore, I c
hanged the subject … For one thing, he’d been very kind to me, providentially so in fact … It’s hard to stop yourself from going back to a subject that’s as much on your mind as that was on mine. It scrambles your brains. To get free, you try to unload some part of it on everybody who comes to see you, and that exasperates them. Being alone is to train for death. “A man,” I went on, “should die more abundantly than a dog and take a thousand minutes to do it. Each minute will be new all the same and laced with enough fear and trembling to make him forget all the pleasure he may have had in making love during the preceding thousand years … Happiness on earth would be to die with and while having pleasure … The rest is nothing at all, a fear that we don’t dare avow, art.”
Hearing me rave that way, Protiste thought I must have fallen sick again. Maybe he was right and maybe I was wrong about everything. In my isolation, searching for a way to punish man’s universal egoism, it’s true that I was jerking off my imagination, looking for punishment everywhere, even in death. You amuse yourself as best you can when you’re short of friends and don’t often get a chance to go out, much less to emerge from yourself and fuck.
I admit it wasn’t exactly sensible to needle Protiste with philosophical ideas contrary to his religious convictions. But the fact is his whole person exuded a nasty little smell of superiority that must have got on quite a few people’s nerves. As he saw it, all we humans on earth were in a kind of waiting-for-eternity room, each with a number. His number, I don’t have to tell you, was first class, good for Paradise. He didn’t give a shit about anything else.
Such convictions are unbearable. On the other hand, when he offered that same afternoon to advance me the price of the trip to Toulouse, I stopped needling and contradicting him. My dread of having to face Tania and her ghost again at the Tarapout made me accept his invitation without a word of argument. A week or two of the easy life, if nothing else, that’s what I said to myself. When it comes to tempting you, the Devil has millions of tricks. We’ll never know them all. If we lived long enough, we wouldn’t know where to go to start a new happiness. We’d have strewn aborted happinesses all over, the whole earth would stink of them, unbreathably. The ones in the museums, the real abortions, turn some people’s stomachs, the mere sight of the things makes them want to vomit. And our loathsome attempts to be happy are miscarried enough to sicken you long before you die for real.
If we didn’t forget them, we’d simply waste away. Not to mention the trouble we’ve taken to get where we are, to make our hopes, our degenerate joys, our passions and lies interesting … Want some? Help yourself. And what of our money? And our little affectations that go with it … And the things we get other people to swear to and that we ourselves swear to, things we thought no one had ever said or sworn to before, before they filled our minds and mouths, and perfumes and caresses and mimicries, in short, everything it takes to hide all that as much as possible, so we’ll never have to speak of it again, for fear it will come back at us like vomit. Our trouble isn’t lack of perseverance, it’s that we’re not on the right road that leads to an easy death.
Going to Toulouse was another piece of damn foolishness. Thinking it over, I suspected as much. So I had no excuse. But following Robinson in his adventures, I had developed a taste for shady undertakings. Already in New York when I couldn’t sleep, I racked my brains wondering if it mightn’t be possible to go further and still further with Robinson. You sink, at first you’re afraid in the darkness, but all the same you want to understand, and after that you never leave the depths. But there’s too much. You can’t understand so many things at once. Life is too short. You don’t want to be unjust to anyone. You have scruples, you hesitate to make snap judgments, and worst of all, you’re afraid to die while you’re hesitating, because then you’d have been on earth for nothing whatsoever. And that’s the worst of all.
Hurry, hurry, don’t be late for your death. Sickness, the poverty that disperses your hours and years, the insomnia that paints whole days and weeks gray, the cancer that may even now, meticulous and blood-spotted, be climbing up from your rectum.
You’ll never have time, you tell yourself. Not to speak of war, which is also, what with the criminal boredom of men, ready to rise up from the cellar that poor people shut themselves up in … you can never be sure … It’s a moot point … Maybe all those who don’t understand should have their throats cut … And perhaps other, new poor people should be born, and so forth and so on, until we get a crowd who understand the joke, the whole joke … Just as you mow a lawn until the grass is really right, really soft.
On leaving the train at Toulouse I was in doubt what to do. But a bottle of beer at the station buffet set me strolling through the streets. An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That’s the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It’s dream time. And because you’re in a dream you can afford to waste a little time in the park. Still, after a certain age, unless you have gilt-edged reasons, people will think you’ve gone to the park to chase little girls like Parapine. So better not. You’ll be safer in the pastry shop just before the park gate, the beautiful shop on the corner, as fancy as a brothel stage set, beveled mirrors studded with little birds. Deep in thought, you catch yourself eating burnt almonds ad infinitum. A place for seraphim. The young ladies who work there babble furtively about their private affairs as follows:
“So I told him he could call for me on Sunday … My aunt heard him and made a terrible stick because of my father …”
“But hasn’t your father remarried?” her friend breaks in.
“What has that got to do with it? … Even if he’s remarried, he still has a right to know who his daughter’s going out with …”
The other young lady in the shop was of the same opinion. The consequence was an impassioned controversy involving all three. Not wanting to disturb them, I sat quietly in my corner, stuffing myself uninterruptedly with tarts and cream puffs, which were excellent by the way, hoping that my discretion would help them solve their delicate problem of family priorities more quickly, but they made no progress. Nothing came of their discussion. Their speculative incompetence restricted them to an imprecise sort of hatred. Those shopgirls were bursting with illogicality, vanity, and ignorance. Drooling with rage, they whispered insults by the dozen.
I couldn’t help it, I was fascinated by their nasty passion. I attacked the rum babas. I stopped counting the babas. So did they. I was hoping they’d come to some conclusion before I had to leave … But passion made them deaf and soon dumb.
Tense, their venon spent, they rested in the shelter of the pastry counter, each one invincible, shut up in her shell, pinched, ruminating plans for a still more embittered comeback. At the first opportunity, she would—promptly this time— spew out all the angry, cutting absurdities she happened to know about her little friend. And the occasion wouldn’t be long in coming, she’d see to that … Scrapings of arguments aimed at nothing at all. In the end I sat down, the better for them to befuddle me with the unceasing sound of their words, intentions, thoughts, as on a shore where the ripples of unceasing passions never manage to get organized …
You listen, you wait, you hope, here, there, in the train, at the café, in the street, in drawing rooms, at the coincierge’s, you listen and wait for evil to get organized as in wartime, but there’s only waste motion, nothing is ever done, either by those unfortunate young ladies or by anyone else. No one comes to help us. An enormous babble, gray and monotonous, spread over life like an enormously discouraging mirage. Two ladies came in, and the muddle-headed charm of the ineffectual conversation spread out between the counter girls and myself was broken. The girls gave the new arrivals their eager and undivided attention, anticipating their requests and their least desires. They chose here and there and nibbled at the tarts and petits fours. When it came time to pay, they gushed polite phrases, and each insisted on offering the others little pastries to nibble that very minute.<
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One declined most graciously, explaining at length and in confidence to the other ladies present, who took a keen interest, that her doctor had forbidden her all sweets, that her doctor was a genius, that he had done wonders in combating constipation in Toulouse and elsewhere, that he was well on his way to curing her of a retention of “number two,” from which she had been suffering for more than ten years, thanks to a very special diet and a miraculous medicine known to him alone. The other ladies were not going to let themselves be outdone so easily in matters of constipation. Their own constipation defied comparison. They were up in arms. They demanded proofs. In response to their doubts, the lady observed simply that when moving her bowels she now broke wind, that it sounded like fireworks … that because of her new-style bowel movements, all well molded, solid, and substantial, she was obliged to take extra precautions … Sometimes these marvelous new feces of hers were so hard they gave her excruciating pain in the rectum … a tearing sensation! … So now she had to use vaseline before moving her bowels. Irrefutable.
Thus convinced, the voluble ladies left the Petits Oiseaux pastry shop, accompanied to the threshold by the smiles of the entire staff.
The park across the way was a good place in which to rest, meditate briefly, and put my thoughts in order before going to look for my friend Robinson.
In provincial parks the benches, offering a view of flowerbeds overstuffed with cannas and daisies, are almost always empty on weekday mornings. Near the rock garden, on strictly captive waters, a small tin boat, encircled by floating ashes, was moored to the shore by a moldy rope. A sign announced that the skiff operated on Sunday and that a tour of the lake cost two francs.
How many years? … students? … phantoms?
In the corners of all parks there lie forgotten any number of little coffins engarlanded with dreams, thickets charged with promises, handkerchiefs full of everything. All a big joke.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 39
