When you’re not used to the comfort and luxuries of the table, they go to your head in no time. Truth is always glad to leave you. With next to no encouragement it will set you free. And we manage very nicely without it. Amid this sudden plethora of comforts a fine megalomaniacal delirium finds no difficulty in overwhelming you. I started telling tall ones in my turn, intermittently discussing hives with the young cousin. You extricate yourself from your daily humiliations by trying, like Robinson, to put yourself on a level with the rich by means of lies, the currency of the poor. We’re all ashamed of our ungainly flesh, our inadequate carcasses. I couldn’t make up my mind to show them my truth; it was as unworthy of them as my rear end. I had to make a good impression at all costs.
I started answering their questions with fantasies, same as Robinson had done in his confab with the old gentleman. I, too, was invaded by pride! … My enormous clientele! … The dreadful overwork! … My friend Robinson … the agronomist who had offered me the hospitality of his chalet … on the outskirts of Toulouse …
And besides, when your table companion has eaten well and had plenty to drink, he’s easily convinced. Luckily! Anything goes! Robinson had preceded me in the furtive delights of impromptu cock-and-bull; it cost me very little effort to follow in his footsteps.
Because of the smoked glasses he was wearing, the people couldn’t see exactly what was wrong with Robinson’s eyes. We generously attributed his misfortune to the war. From then on we were sitting pretty, raised first socially, then patriotically, to the level of the other guests, who had been rather taken aback at first by the whimsy of the painter husband, though to be sure his status as a fashionable artist obliged him now and then to do something weird and unexpected … The guests began to find all three of us ever so charming and inconceivably interesting.
Maybe Madelon didn’t play her role of fiancee as modestly as she should have; she got everybody including the women so hot and bothered I was afraid the party would end in an orgy. It didn’t. Gradually the sentences became undone, defeated by slobbering attempts to go beyond words. Nothing happened.
Tangled in phrases and cushions, fuddled by our collective effort to make one another happy, more deeply, more warmly happier by the spirit alone since our bodies were replete, we did everything possible to suffuse the present moment with all the pleasure in the world, with every marvel known to us in and outside of ourselves, so that our neighbor might at last get the full advantage of it and confess to us that this was the very miracle he was looking for, that this gift from us was just what had been lacking for so and so many years to his eternal happiness! That we at last had revealed to him the reason of his own being! And he was going to tell all and sundry that he had found the reason of his being. So we’d down another bumper together to celebrate our joy! May our joy endure forever! And may this charm never be broken! May we, above all, never never relapse into those abominable days when there were no miracles, the days before we met and miraculously found one another! … All of us together from this moment on! At last! And for ever!
The skipper couldn’t restrain himself from breaking the charm.
He had this mania for talking about his painting, it was really too much on his mind, about his pictures, come what may and a propos of anything or nothing. Thanks to his obstinate idiocy, crushing banality returned, drunk as we were, to our midst. Defeated, I went over to the skipper and delivered myself of a few heartfelt and high-flown compliments, the sweet words in which artists delight. Just what he needed. My compliments hit him like an orgasm. He slumped down on one of the overblown sofas and fell asleep almost instantly, as sweetly as you please, palpably happy. The others meanwhile studied the contours of one another’s faces with a leaden gaze of mutual fascination, torn between almost irresistible somnolence and the delights of heaven-sent digestion.
As for me, I suspended my desire to doze, saving it up for the night. Only too often the day’s lingering fears banish sleep, so when you’re lucky enough to build up a small stock of beatitude, you have to be a born fool to squander it in futile preliminary catnaps. Keep it for the night, that’s my motto! Always be thinking of the night. Besides, we’d been invited to dinner, so it was time to be working up a fresh appetite …
We took advantage of the prevailing stupor to slip away. The three of us managed a discreet exit, dodging the slumbering guests dispersed around the hostess’s accordion. Softened by music, the hostess’s eyes blinked in search of darkness. “See you later,” she said as we passed. Her smile ended in a dream.
We didn’t go very far, only to the place where I’d noticed a bend in the river, between two rows of tall, pointed poplars. From there you can see the whole valley, and in the distance a village in its hollow, huddled round a church tower planted like a nail in the reddening sky.
Madelon was anxious. “What time is there a train back?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” we assured her. “They’ll take us by car. It’s all arranged. The skipper said so … They’ve got one …”
That was enough for Madelon. She was dreamy with happiness. It had really been a splendid day.
“Léon,” she asked him. “How do your eyes feel now?”
“Much better. I didn’t want to tell you before because I wasn’t sure, but I think, especially with the left eye, it’s getting so I can count the bottles on the table … I drank quite a lot, did you notice? Good stuff too!”
“The left is the heart side!” said Madelon joyfully. Naturally she was happy about his eyes being better.
“Come,” she suggested, “you kiss me and I’ll kiss you.” Their effusions were making me feel in the way. But it was hard for me to leave because I didn’t know where to go. I made as if to do my business behind a nearby tree and stayed there, waiting for their seizure to pass. They said things full of tenderness. I heard them. The dullest love dialogues are kind of amusing when you know the people. And I’d never heard them talk like that before.
“Do you really love me?” she asked.
“I love you as much as I love my eyes!” was his answer.
“Oh Léon, that’s a beautiful thing to say! … But you haven’t seen me yet, Léon … Maybe when you see me with your own eyes and not just through other people’s, you won’t love me so much … When that time comes, you’ll see other women, and maybe you’ll love them all … The way your friends do …”
That remark, made in an undertone, was a dig at me … I hadn’t the slightest doubt. She thought I was far away and couldn’t hear her … So she let loose … She lost no time … Robinson started protesting. “Hey there!” Slander, malicious gossip, he assured her.
“Me! Certainly not! Oh no, Madelon!” he defended himself, “That’s not my way at all! What makes you think I’m like him? … When you’ve been so good to me! … I’m the faithful sort! I’m no skirt chaser! When I give my word it’s for always! You’re beautiful, I know that already, but you’ll be even more beautiful when I see you … There! Are you happy now? Not crying any more? What more can I tell you?”
“Oh Léon! You’re so sweet!” she said, cuddling up to him. Then they were swearing to love each other forever and ever and nothing could stop them, the heavens weren’t big enough.
“I want you to always be happy with me! …” he said very gently. “With nothing to do and everything you need all the same …”
“Oh, how good you are, my sweet Léon! You’re even better than I thought … So tender! … So faithful! … So everything!”
“It’s because I adore you, my pussycat …”
And they worked each other up even further by necking. And then, as if to shut me out of their intense happiness, they gave me a kidney punch …
She started off: “Your friend the doctor! Isn’t he a nice one!” And then she repeated, as if the thought of me stuck in her craw. “He’s a nice one all right! … I wouldn’t want to say anything against him, because he’s a friend of yours … But I have a
feeling that he’s a brute with women … I don’t like to say anything bad about him, because I think he’s really fond of you … But, you know, he’s not my type … I’ll tell you something … You’re sure it won’t make you mad?” No, nothing would make Léon mad. “Well, I’d say the doctor is too hot on women … Kind of like a dog, see what I mean? … What do you think? … I get the feeling that he’s ready to jump every last one of them! He does his nasty business, and then he makes himself scarce … Don’t you think so? Don’t you think he’s like that?”
The bastard thought everything she wanted him to think, in fact he agreed that in addition to being right everything she said was screamingly funny. So funny he could die laughing. He encouraged her to go on and almost split a gut.
“Yes, Madelon, what you say is perfectly true! Ferdinand isn’t a bad sort, but delicacy isn’t his strong point, I don’t mind telling you, nor fidelity either! … Take my word for it! …” “Has he had lots of mistresses? You must know, Léon.”
The bitch. She was fishing for information.
“Plenty,” he replied with assurance, “but you know … he’s not hard to please …”
Some conclusion had to be drawn from this exchange, and Madelon proceeded to draw one.
“Doctors are mostly all pigs, everybody knows that … But if you ask me, he’s a champion!”
“You’ve never said truer words,” my good and faithful friend approved her. And he went on: “It’s so bad, he’s such a sex fiend, I’ve often thought he took drugs … And say, the man’s equipment! If you could see it! Huge! Monstrous! It’s not natural! …”
“Really?” said Madelon, perplexed, trying to remember my equipment. “You think he’s got some disease?” She was worried, suddenly dismayed by those intimate revelations.
“I don’t know about that,” he was regretfully obliged tc admit. “I can’t tell for sure … But it wouldn’t surprise me with the life he leads.”
“Yes, you’re right … he must take drugs … That must be why he’s so strange sometimes …”
Madelon’s little head was working hard, and she added: “We’d better be careful from now on …”
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You afraid of him? He isn’t anything to you, I hope? … He hasn’t ever made you any advances, has he?”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t have let him. But you never know what he might take it into his head … Suppose he threw a fit, for instance … Those dope fiends have fits, you know! … But one thing is sure, I’d never go to him if I were sick!”
“Neither would I, now you bring it up!” Robinson approved. After which there was more mushing and petting …
“Honey lamb!” she cooed.
“Kitten … Kitten!” he replied. And silences in between, punctuated by barrages of kisses.
“See how many times you can tell me you love me while I kiss you as far as your shoulder …”
That little game began at the top of the neck.
“I’m as red as a beet!” she cried, panting. “I’m suffocating! Air! Air!” But he didn’t let her breathe. He started all over again. Sitting in the grass nearby, I tried to see what would happen. He took her nipples between his lips and toyed with them. Innocent pastimes. I was all red in the face myself for a variety of reasons and in addition amazed at my own indiscretion.
“We’ll be very happy, won’t we, Léon? Tell me you’re sure we’ll be happy.”
Then came an intermission. And then endless plans for the future, enough plans to make a whole new world, but a world only for the two of them. I, most especially, wasn’t in it at all. It looked as if they’d never finish getting rid of me, sweeping my nasty image out of their life.
“Have you been friends with Ferdinand a long time?”
The question was nagging at her …
“Oh yes, for years … in different places …” he answered. “First we just happened to meet, on our travels … He likes going to strange places … So do I in a way, and for a long time we traveled together … See?” He reduced our life together to the flattest banality.
“Well,” she said with crisp determination. “You’re not going to be such good friends anymore … From now on! … It’s going to stop! It is going to stop, isn’t it, pussycat? … From now on I’ll be your only companion … Understand? … How about it, sweetie?”
“What’s wrong? You jealous of him?” In spite of himself he was rather disconcerted, the dope.
“No, I’m not jealous of him, but you see, Léon, I love you too much, I want you all to myself … I don’t want to share you with anybody … And he’s not the kind of person you should associate with now that I love you, Léon … He’s too immoral … Understand? Tell me you adore me, Léon! Tell me you understand!”
“I adore you …”
“That’s good.”
We got back to Toulouse that same night.
The accident happened two days later. It was time for me to be leaving after all, and I was just packing my suitcase before starting for the station when I heard someone shouting outside the house. I listened … They wanted me to come quick and hurry down to the crypt … I couldn’t see the person who was shouting that way. But to judge by the tone of voice, it must have been terribly urgent … They wanted me to go there right away!
“Just a minute,” I say. “Where’s the fire!” I didn’t feel like hurrying. It must have been about seven o’clock, just before dinnertime. We were supposed to say good-bye at the station, we’d arranged it that way … That was convenient for everybody, because the old woman would be coming home a little later than usual. She was expecting a whole crowd of pilgrims at the crypt that evening.
“Come quick, doctor!” The voice in the street shouted again. “Madame Henrouille has had an accident!”
“Okay! Okay! Okay! … I’ll be right down.”
But in less than a moment I’d thought it over. “You go ahead,” I said. “Tell them I’m coming right away … Soon as I put my pants on …”
“But it’s terribly urgent!” the voice cried … “She’s unconscious, I tell you! … She seems to have broken a bone in her head! … She fell down the stairs! … down to the bottom of her vault!”
“That’ll do!” I said to myself when I heard that lovely story. No need to think any longer. I beat it straight to the station. I knew all I wanted to know.
I caught my train at seven-fifteen, but only by the skin of my teeth.
We never did say good-bye.
The first thing Parapine said when he saw me was that I wasn’t looking well.
“You must have worn yourself to a frazzle in Toulouse,” he said, suspicious as usual.
It’s true that I’d had a scare down there in Toulouse, but nothing to complain about, since I’d managed to keep clear of serious trouble, or so I thought, by slipping away at the critical moment.
I told Parapine the story in detail and aired my suspicions as well. He wasn’t convinced that I’d been very bright, but we didn’t have time to go into it very thoroughly, because by then the question of a job for me had become so urgent that I had to do something about it. There was no time to be lost in discussion … I had only a hundred and fifty francs left to my name and no idea where to turn … The Tarapout? … They weren’t hiring anymore … the Depression. Back to La Garenne-Rancy? Try and retrieve my practice? I considered it for a while in spite of everything, but only as a last resource and very reluctantly. Nothing is quenched so easily as the sacred fire.
It was Parapine who finally came to the rescue. He found me a small job at the institution where he himself had been working for some months.
Their business was still pretty good. In addition to taking cretins to the movies, Parapine was in charge of the sparks. Twice a week, at scheduled hours, he unleashed magnetic storms over the heads of the melancholics assembled for that purpose in a hermetically sealed and pitch-black room. Mental gymnastics in sum, a brilli
ant idea emanating from Dr. Baryton, his boss. A skinflint, incidentally, this colleague of ours. He took me on at a very low salary but with a contract a mile long, full of clauses entirely to his advantage. In short, a boss.
We were hardly paid at all at that rest home, but the food wasn’t at all bad and the lodging was excellent, with facilities for laying the nurses, which was tolerated and tacitly permitted. Baryton, the boss, had no objection whatever, in fact he had noticed that erotic tolerance attached the staff to the house. A wise man looks the other way.
And besides, in the first place, it was no time to ask questions or make demands when he was offering me a nice little chunk of wherewithal in the nick of time. Thinking it over, I couldn’t quite see why Parapine was suddenly taking such an active interest in me. His attitude weighed on my mind. To give him credit for brotherly love … would really be gilding his character … It had to be something more complicated. But you never can tell …
We all ate lunch together, that was the custom, gathered around Baryton, our boss, the esteemed alienist, with his pointed beard and short beefy thighs, a nice man except for his thrift, but on that point he could be utterly revolting, all he needed was a pretext or opportunity …
He certainly gave us plenty of noodles and rasping Bordeaux. Somebody had left him a whole vineyard, so he told us. Which was our tough luck. A very inferior vintage, I assure you.
His asylum at Vigny-sur-Seine was always full. It was called a “Rest Home” in the prospectuses, because it was in the middle of a big garden, where the nuts went walking on nice days. They walked as if they had trouble keeping their heads balanced on their shoulders, they seemed in constant fear of stumbling and spilling the contents. All sorts of misshapen things, things they were dreadfully attached to, were bobbing and bumping about in there.
When the patients spoke of their mental treasures, it was always with anguished contortions or airs of protective condescension that made you think of powerful and ultrameticulous executives. Not for-an empire would those lunatics have gone outside their minds. A madman’s thoughts are just the usual ideas of a human being, except that they’re hermetically sealed inside his head. The world never gets into his head, and that’s the way he wants it. A sealed head is like a lake without an outlet, standing, stagnant.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 42
