But that’s enough daydreaming. Let’s go looking for Robinson and his church of Sainte-Eponime, and that crypt where he and the old woman are taking care of mummies. That’s what I’d come for, so I’d better get going.
I took a carriage, and we meandered this way and that at a leisurely sort of trot, through the dark sunken streets of the old town, where the light catches between the roofs. Over cobbles and bridges we drove with a great clatter of wheels, behind a horse that was all shoes. They haven’t burned any cities in the South for a long time. They’ve never been so old. Wars don’t pass that way anymore.
We pulled up in front of Sainte-Eponime* on the stroke of noon. The crypt was a little further on, under a calvary. It was pointed out to me, in the middle of a small, parched garden. You entered the crypt through a sort of barricaded hole. From a distance I saw the caretaker, a young girl, and asked for news of my friend Robinson. She was just closing the door. She answered with a friendly smile, and the news she gave me was good.
From where we were standing in that noonday light everything around us turned pink, and the worm-eaten stones of the church rose skyward, as though ready to melt into the air.
Robinson’s little friend must have been about twenty, with firm, wiry legs, a small, perfectly charming bust, and surmounting it a delicate, precisely etched face. Just the eyes may have been a little too black and attentive for my taste. Not at all the dreamy type. It was she who wrote Robinson’s letters, the ones I had received. She went ahead of me to the vault with her precise gait, her shapely feet and ankles. She had the build of a good lay, and must have spread her legs very nicely when circumstances demanded. Short, hard hands with a strong grip, the hands of an ambitious working girl. A brisk little movement to turn the key. Shimmering heat all around us. Once she had the door open, she decided, in spite of the lunch hour, to show me through the vault. I was beginning to feel a little more relaxed. Behind her lantern we descended into increasing coolness. It was real nice. I pretended to stumble between two steps as an excuse for grabbing her by the arm. That made us laugh, and when we reached the clay floor at the bottom I kissed her a little on the neck. She protested at first, but not very much.
After a brief moment of affection, I wriggled round her belly like a love worm. Lecherously we moistened and remoistened our lips for our soul conversation. With one hand I crept slowly up her tensed thighs, it’s fun with the lantern on the floor, because at the same time you can watch the muscles rippling over her legs. It’s a position I can recommend. Ah! Such moments are not to be missed. They put your eyes out of joint, but it’s worth it. What gusto! What sudden good humor! The conversation resumed in a new tone of confidence and simplicity. Now we were friends. Asses first. We had just saved ten years.
“Do you often show people around?” I asked, puffing and putting my foot in it. But I quickly covered up: “Doesn’t your mother sell candles at the church next door? … Father Protiste has told me about her.”
“I only take Madame Henrouille’s place during lunch hour,” she answered. “In the afternoon I work for a dressmaker … On the Rue du Theatre … Did you pass the theater on your way here?”
Again she reassured me about Robinson. He was much better, in fact the specialist thought he’d soon see well enough to go out by himself. All that was most encouraging. As for Grandma Henrouille, she seemed delighted with the vault. She was doing good business and saving money. Only one difficulty, in the house where they were living, the bedbugs kept everybody awake, especially on stormy nights. So they burned sulfur. It seemed that Robinson often spoke of me, pleasantly what’s more. One thing leading to another, we came around to the projected marriage, the circumstances and all.
I have to admit that with all that talk I still hadn’t asked her name. Her name was Madelon.* She’d been born during the war. Their marriage plans, after all, suited me fine. Madelon was an easy name to remember. I figured she must know what she was doing in marrying Robinson … Even if he was getting better, he’d always be an invalid … And besides, she thought only his eyes were affected … But his nerves were shot, and so was his morale and everything else! I was almost going to tell her so, to warn her … I’ve never known how to steer conversations about marriage, or extricate myself from them.
To change the subject, I expressed a keen and sudden interest in the cellar and its occupants. People came a long way to see it, so as long as I was there why not take a look?
With her little lantern Madelon and I made the shadows of the corpses emerge from the wall one by one. They must have given the tourists food for thought! Those ancient stiffs were lined up against the wall as if a firing squad had worked them over … They weren’t exactly skin and bone anymore, or clothing either … Just a little of all that … In a very grimy state, and full of holes. Time had been gnawing at their skin for centuries and was still at it … Here and there it was still tearing away bits of their faces … enlarging all the holes and even finding long strips of epidermis that death had left clinging to their cartilage. Their bellies had emptied of everything, and now there were little cradles of shadow where their navels had been.
Madelon explained that to get into this condition the bodies had had to spend more than five hundred years in a quicklime cemetery. You wouldn’t have taken them for corpses. Their corpse days were far behind them. By easy stages they had come closer and closer to dust.
In that cellar there were big ones and little ones, six and twenty in all, who asked for nothing better than to enter into Eternity. They weren’t being admitted yet. Two women with bonnets perched on top of their skeletons, a hunchback, a giant, and even a complete baby, with a kind of bib, lace if you please, around his tiny dried-out neck, and some bits and pieces of swaddling clothes.
Grandma Henrouille was making a lot of money out of these scrapings of the centuries. To think that when I last saw her she herself had looked very much like these spooks … So then Madelon and I went slowly back, passing them by again. One by one their so-called heads stood silent in the harsh circle of lamp light. It’s not exactly night they have in their eye sockets, it’s almost a gaze, but gentler, like the gaze of those who know. More disturbing is their smell of dust, it catches in your nose.
Whenever a party of tourists showed up, Grandma Henrouille was on the spot. She made those stiffs work like circus performers. At the height of the summer season, they brought her in a hundred francs a day.
“Don’t they look sad?” Madelon asked me. A ritual question.
Death didn’t mean a thing to that cutie. She had been born during the war, when death came easy. But I knew well how people die. Something I had learned. It’s very painful. It’s all right to tell the tourists that these dead are happy. They can’t speak for themselves. Grandma Henrouille even clouted them on the belly when there was enough parchment left on it, and it went “boom boom.” But even that’s no proof of good cheer.
Finally Madelon and I got back to our own affairs. So it was true that Robinson was better. That was good enough for me. Our little friend seemed bent on this marriage. She must have been bored to death in Toulouse. You didn’t often meet a man who had traveled as much as Robinson. What stories he had to tell! True ones and not so true. He’d already spoken to them at length of America and the Tropics. Lovely!
I’d been in America and the Tropics too. I knew stories about them too and proposed to tell her some. Come to think of it, I had traveled with Robinson, and that’s how we’d got to be friends. The lantern went out. We lit it ten times while arranging the past and the future. She wouldn’t let me touch her breasts, said they were much too sensitive.
But seeing that Grandma Henrouille would be coming back from her lunch any minute, we had to climb back to the daylight over the steep, rickety staircase, which was as difficult to negotiate as a ladder. I made a note of those stairs.
Because of the treacherous narrow stairs Robinson didn’t often go down to the mummy cellar. Most of the time he stood at t
he door, giving the tourists a bit of sales talk and getting used to taking in a few specks of light here and there.
Meanwhile in the depths, Grandma Henrouille managed very well. She knocked herself out with the mummies, enlivening the tourists’ visit with a little speech about her parchment stiffs. “They’re not at all repulsive, ladies and gentlemen, because, as you see, they were preserved in quicklime … for more than five centuries … Our collection is the only one of its kind in the whole world … The flesh is gone, of course … Only the skin is left, but it’s tanned … They’re naked, but not indecent … You will observe that a baby was buried at the same time as its mother … The baby is also extremely well preserved … And that tall man with the lace shirt that he still has on … He’s got every one of his teeth … You will observe …” At the end of the tour she clouted them all on the chest—it sounded like a drum. “Observe, ladies and gentlemen, that this one has only one eye left … all dried out … and the tongue too … it’s like leather!” She gave it a pull. “He’s sticking his tongue out, but he’s not nasty … You can give what you like as you leave, ladies and gentlemen, but the usual is two francs each and half price for children … You can touch them before you go … convince yourself … but please, ladies and gentlemen, don’t pull too hard … they’re extremely fragile …”
Grandma Henrouille had wanted to raise the prices as soon as she got there, she applied to the Diocese. But it wasn’t so simple, because of the priest at Sainte-Eponime, who demanded a third of the take all for himself, and also because of Robinson, who kept griping, because in his opinion she wasn’t giving him a big enough rake-off.
“I’ve been took!” he concluded. “Took for a sucker! … Again! … I never have any luck! … The old bag’s cellar, you know … it brings in a fortune! … Believe you me, she’s raking it in!”
“But you didn’t put any money into the business,” I argued to calm him down and put some sense into him … “And you’re well fed! Well taken care of!”
But Robinson was as stubborn as a mule, he felt persecuted and that was that. He refused to understand, to. resign himself.
“All in all,” I said, “you’ve come out of a nasty business pretty well! So don’t complain! You’d have gone straight to Cayenne* if they’d nabbed you … Here nobody’s bothering you! … And you’ve found little Madelon who’s a sweet kid and willing to put up with you … despite the state of your health … So what have you got to complain about? … Especially now that your eyes are getting better …”
“You seem to be saying I don’t know what I’m complaining, about,” he said then. “But I feel I’ve got to complain … that’s the way it is … it’s all I’ve got left … that’s right … It’s the only thing they let me do … Nobody’s forced to listen.”
True enough, he did nothing but complain whenever we were alone. I had come to dread those confidential moments. I looked at him with his blinking eyes which still oozed a little in the sunlight, and I said to myself that all things considered Robinson was not endearing. There are animals like that, they can be innocent, unhappy, anything you please, you know it, and still you don’t like them. There’s something wrong with them.
“You could have died in jail …” I tried again, determined to make him think.
“I’ve been in jail … It’s no worse than where I am now! … You’re out of date …”
He hadn’t told me he’d been in jail. That must have been before we met, before the war. He pressed his point and concluded: “Take it from me. There’s only one kind of freedom, only one, to see properly and have your pockets full of money. The rest is bullshit! …”
“So what, exactly, do you want?” I asked him. When he was challenged like that to make up his mind, to speak up, he deflated. And that’s just when it might have been interesting …
During the day, while Madelon was working for the dressmaker and Grandma Henrouille was exhibiting her mummies, we went to a café under the trees. Robinson was crazy about that café under the trees, probably because of the noise the birds made up above us. Millions of them! Especially about five o’clock when they came home to their nests, all keyed up by the summer. They swooped down on the square like a storm. There was a story about a barber who had his shop across from the park and had gone crazy just from hearing them cheep for years and years. It’s true we couldn’t hear each other talk. Robinson thought it was cheerful.
“If only she’d give me twenty centimes per visitor and be regular about it, I’d be satisfied.”
About every fifteen minutes he’d get back to his preoccupation. In between, the colors of times past seemed to come back to him, incidents too, stories, among others, about the Compagnie Pordurière in Africa, which both of us had known well after all, and some hairy tales that he’d never told me before. Maybe he hadn’t dared. He was kind of reticent in a way, I’d even say secretive.
Speaking of the past, what I remembered best when I was in good spirits was Molly, like the echo of a clock striking in the distance. When something pleasant popped into my mind, I always thought of her.
After all, when our egoism lets us go for a while, when it comes time to throw it off, the only women whose memory you cherish in your hearts are the ones who really loved men a little, not just one man, even if it was you, but the whole lot.
When we left the café that evening, we hadn’t done a thing, we could have been retired noncoms.
During the season, there was a steady flow of tourists. They hung around the crypt and Grandma Henrouille always got them to laugh. Her jokes weren’t exactly to the priest’s taste, but, since he was collecting more than his share, he didn’t say boo, and besides smutty jokes were over his head. Be that as it may, Grandma Henrouille was worth seeing and hearing in the midst of her corpses. She looked you straight in the eye, she wasn’t in the least afraid of death; wrinkled and shriveled as she was, you’d have thought she was one of them, coming along with her lantern to shoot the shit right in what passed for their faces.
When we got back to the house and foregathered for dinner, we discussed the day’s take, and Grandma Henrouille called me her “little old Dr. Jackal” because of the dealings we’d had in Raney. All in a bantering tone, of course. Madelon bustled about in the kitchen. That joint where we were staying got only the measliest light, it was an annex of the sacristy, very cramped, all cluttered with joists and struts and dusty crannies. “Yes,” said the old woman, “it’s practically always night in here, so to speak, but you can still find your bed, your pockets, and your mouth. That’s good enough for me.”
She hadn’t grieved for long after her son’s death. “He was always very delicate,” she said to me one evening. “Look, I’m seventy-six and I’ve never complained! … He complained all the time, it was his way, exactly like your Robinson … just to give you an example. Take the stairs to the crypt, for instance … They’re tough, you’ll agree … You’ve been down there … They knock me out, of course they do, but some days they’re worth as much as two francs a step to me … I’ve figured it out … Well, for that price I’d climb up to heaven if anyone asked me to!”
Madelon put lots of spices in our food, and tomatoes as well. It was great. And we drank rose. Even Robinson had taken to wine now that he was living in the South. He had already told me everything that had happened since his arrival in Toulouse, so I had stopped listening. To tell the truth, I was kind of disappointed in him, and disgusted. “You’re a bourgeois!” I told him finally (at that time I could think of no worse insult). “All you ever think of is money … Once you recover your eyesight, you’ll be the worst of the whole bunch.”
Hard words couldn’t get him down. They seemed on the contrary to give him a lift. Besides, he knew it was true. The man’s all set, I said to myself, no need to trouble my head about him … You can’t get around it, a little woman like that, slightly on the violent, depraved side, will change a man beyond recognition … For a long time, I said t
o myself, I thought this Robinson was made for adventures, but cuckold or not, blind or not, he’s only a cheap punk … Neither more nor less.
In addition, Grandma Henrouille had contaminated him with her mania for saving, and so had Madelon with her desire to be married. That settled it. He was washed up. Especially as he’d got to like the girl more and more. I knew something about that. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little jealous, it wouldn’t be true. Madelon and I got together for short moments now and then, before dinner in her room. But those interviews were hard to arrange. We never spoke of them. We were as discreet as could be.
Don’t go thinking on that account that she didn’t love her Robinson. There’s no connection. It was just that he was playing at being engaged, so naturally she played at being faithful. That’s how it was between them. As long as they saw eye to eye, that was the main thing. As he told me, he wasn’t going to touch her until they were married. It was his idea. So he’d have eternity, and I’d have the here and now. He was also planning, so he told me, to set himself up in a small restaurant with Madelon, and run out on Grandma Henrouille. He really meant business. “She’s nice, the customers will like her,” he foresaw in his more cheerful moments. “And say, you’ve tasted her cooking … When it comes to the eats, she hasn’t her equal.”
He even thought he could touch Grandma Henrouille for a bit of capital to start with. All right with me, but I suspected that he’d have a hard time persuading her. “You see everything through rose-colored glasses,” I said, just to calm him down and make him think a little. At that he began to cry and call me a heartless bastard. To tell the truth, you should never discourage anybody. I admitted that I was wrong, that my trouble was my black thoughts, and that all things considered, they were what had wrecked my life. Robinson’s gimmick before the war had been copperplate engraving, but he wouldn’t have anything more to do with it, not at any price. That was his business. “With my lungs I need fresh air, and anyway my eyes will never be the same.” In a way he was right. What could I say? When we walked through busy streets together, people turned around to pity the blind man. People have plenty of pity in them for the infirm and the blind, they really have love in reserve. I’d often sensed that love they have in reserve. There’s an enormous lot of it, and no one can say different. But it’s a shame that people should go on being so crummy with so much love in reserve. It just doesn’t come out, that’s all. It’s caught inside and there it stays, it doesn’t do them a bit of good. They die of love—inside.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 40
