Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  “And come to think of it, is there any need for us to weigh ourselves down with the least bit of logic? … Of course not! … Logic can only be an encumbrance to the infinitely subtle, truly progressive psychologists that our times are turning out … Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I look down on women, Ferdinand! Certainly not! You know that! But I don’t care for their ‘impressions’! I’m a testiculate animal, Ferdinand, and when I have a fact, I hang on to it for dear life … In that connection I had an interesting experience the other day … I was asked to admit a writer … He was cracked … You know what he’d been shouting for over a month? ‘They’re liquidating! … They’re liquidating! …’ That’s what he was shouting all over the house! He was a case all right. He had crossed over to the far side of the intelligence! … His trouble was that he simply couldn’t liquidate … An old stricture was poisoning him with urine, stopping up his bladder … I had to relieve him drop by drop with a catheter … it took hours … But the family insisted that the cause of it all was his genius … I tried my level best to convince them that their writer’s trouble was in his bladder, they clung to their idea … that he’d blown his top in a moment of excessive genius … In the end I had to fall in with their opinion … you know what families are like … You’ll never get a family to understand that a man, related to them or not, is nothing but suspended putrefaction … No family will pay bills for suspended putrefaction …”

  For twenty years Baryton had been wrestling with the quarrelsome vanity of families. They gave him a hard time. Patient and well balanced as I knew him to be, he nevertheless nursed a vestige of well-fermented hatred toward families … At the time when I was living close to him, he was exasperated and trying obstinately, though in secret, to free himself, to escape once and for all, one way or another, from the tyranny of those families … Everyone has his reasons for trying to escape his private unhappiness, and each of us, to that end, coaxes some ingenious method from the circumstances. Blessed are those who can content themselves with whorehouses!

  Parapine, for his part, seemed happy to have chosen the way of silence. Baryton, as I came to understand only later, doubted in his heart whether he would ever succeed in freeing himself from families, from their hold on him, from the thousand repulsive, servitudes involved in alimentary psychiatry, in short, from his condition. He so longed for something new and absolutely different that he was thoroughly ripe for flight and escape. This accounted no doubt for his critical tirades. … Routine was death to his ego. Sublimation was no longer possible, he just wanted to go away, to take his body somewhere else. There was nothing of the musician in Baryton, and in the end he had to upset everything like a bear.

  He, who thought himself so reasonable, set himself free by means of a scandalous and thoroughly regrettable action. Later on, at leisure, I shall try to tell what happened.

  For the moment the job of assistant to Baryton struck me as quite bearable. The therapeutic routine was far from strenuous, though now and then, as you’d expect, I’d feel pretty sick after talking too long with one of the patients, a kind of dizzy spell would come over me, as though the patients, from one commonplace little remark to another, had, without seeming to, led me away from my usual dwelling place to the heart and center of their dementia. For a short moment I wondered how I would ever get out of there and whether I hadn’t, unsuspecting, been locked up with them in their madness once and for all.

  Because I was always kind to the inmates, which was my nature, I lived on the dangerous rim of madness, on the brink, so to speak. I didn’t go under, but I felt in constant danger, as if they had lured me by stealth into their unknown city. A city whose streets became softer and softer as you penetrated further between its slobbery houses, with their melting, ill-closed windows and their dubious sounds. The doors and the ground are unstable, shifting … And yet something makes you want to go further, to see if you’ll have the strength to retrieve your reason from the wreckage. Reason can easily become an obsession, as good humor and sleep are for neurasthenics. All you can think of is your reason. Everything’s out of kilter. It’s no joke.

  So I was worrying along from doubt to doubt when the fourth of May came up. A big day. I was feeling wonderfully well that day. Pulse 78. Like after a good lunch. Then suddenly the world began to spin. I held tight. Everything turns to bile. People start looking weird. As if they’d gone sour like lemons and more malignant than ever before. From climbing too high, no doubt, to the very peak of health, I had fallen in front of the mirror and with passionate fascination was watching myself grow old.

  On rotten days like that, mountains of fatigue and disgust accumulate between your nose and your eyes, enough in that one spot to last several men for years. Much too much for one man.

  Just then, all in all, I’d have been glad to go back to the Tarapout. Especially as Parapine had also stopped talking to me. But I was in their bad books at the Tarapout. It’s hard to have no source of spiritual or material comfort but your boss, especially when he’s an alienist and you’re not so sure of your own head. All you can do is hold tight. And not say anything. We could still talk about women together. That was a benign subject, which gave me a chance to make him laugh now and then. In that field he gave me credit for a certain experience, for some slight and nasty competence.

  It had its advantages that on the whole Baryton should consider me with a certain contempt. A boss always finds the crumminess of his staff rather reassuring. A slave must at all costs be slightly, if not superlatively, contemptible. An assortment of chronic moral and physical defects justifies the horrible treatment he is getting. Then the earth turns more smoothly, for each man occupies the place he deserves.

  A person you make use of should be dull and abject, a born failure. It comes as a relief to the boss, especially since Baryton paid us very badly. An employer with his degree of acute avarice tends to be suspicious and uneasy. Failure, debauchee, black sheep, loyal! … Now there’s a perfect combination that will justify anything. Baryton wouldn’t have been displeased if I had been kind of wanted by the police. Those are the things that guarantee an employee’s loyalty.

  I had cast off all self-respect long ago. That sentiment had always struck me as far above my station, much too costly for my resources. I’d made that sacrifice once and for all and had no regrets whatever.

  By then I was quite content if I could keep myself in a tolerable state of alimentary and physical balance. I had stopped worrying my head about anything else. Nevertheless, I found it hard to get through certain nights, especially when the memory of what had happened in Toulouse prevented me from sleeping.

  At such times I couldn’t help it, I imagined all sorts of dramatic sequels to Grandma Henrouille’s fall into the mummy crypt. Fear rose up from my bowels, seized hold of my heart, and made it pound so hard that I’d jump out of bed and pace the floor, this way and that way into the depths of darkness and into the dawning light. During those attacks I despaired of ever recapturing enough peace of mind to fall asleep again. If someone tells you he’s unhappy, don’t take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep … If he can, then all’s well. That’s good enough.

  I would never again succeed in sleeping fully. I had lost, so to speak, the habit of trust, the enormous trust you need to sleep soundly among human beings. I’d have needed at least an illness, a fever, a specific catastrophe to retrieve some small part of my old indifference, neutralize my anxiety, and recapture the divine stupidity of an easy mind. The only bearable days I remember over a period of many years were a few days of heavy feverish flu.

  Baryton never asked me about my health. For that matter he chose to disregard his own. “Science and life form disastrous mixtures, Ferdinand! Always avoid taking care of your health, believe me! … Every question asked of. your body becomes a breach … through which anxiety, obsession, will enter …” Such were his simplist biological principles … He thought he was clever. “The known is good enough fo
r me” was another of his frequent sayings. He was trying to impress me.

  He never mentioned money to me, but in his secret heart he thought of it all the time.

  Though I didn’t exactly understand them at the time, Robinson’s dealings with the Henrouille family were on my conscience, and from time to time I tried to tell Baryton bits and pieces of the story. But it didn’t interest him in the least. He preferred my stories about Africa, especially the ones relating to colleagues of ours whom I’d run across here and there and to the strange and questionable medical practices of those very freakish colleagues.

  At the rest home we had an alarm now and then in connection with his little girl Aimee. Suddenly at dinner time she was nowhere to be found, neither in the garden nor in her room. I fully expected to find her dismembered body in a clump of bushes one evening. She roamed all over the place with our lunatics, so there was reason to fear the worst. And indeed she had narrowly escaped being raped quite a number of times. When that happened, there’d be no end of screams and shower baths and warnings. Time and again she’d been told to avoid certain hidden paths, but the child was irresistibly attracted to nooks and crannies. On those occasions her father never failed to give her a memorable spanking. All in vain. I think she enjoyed the excitement.

  We of the staff always had to be on our guard when passing the lunatics in the corridors. Madmen are more prone to murder than ordinary people. We got into the habit of turning our backs to the wall when they passed, prepared to give them a good kick in the groin at the slightest suspicious move. Watching you out of the corners of their eyes, they pass on. Madness apart, we understood each other perfectly.

  Baryton deplored the fact that none of us played chess. Just to please him, I had to take it up.

  During the day he distinguished himself by an active petty chicanery that made life in his entourage extremely fatiguing. Every morning some new and abysmally practical idea would spring from his brain. One day he decided to replace our rolls of toilet paper with folded folios, and we were obliged to ponder and waste a whole week with contradictory resolutions. Finally we decided to wait for the sales at the department stores. The next futile bother had to do with flannel vests: should they be worn over or under the shirt? … And what was the proper way to administer Epsom salts? … Parapine evaded these subintellectual controversies by stubborn silence.

  In the end, inspired by boredom, I told Baryton about many more adventures than my travels had ever provided. My stock was exhausted. From then on it was up to him to fill in the conversational vacuum with his niggling pros and cons. Of which there was no end. He had defeated me by exhaustion. And I had no such defense as Parapine’s total indifference. In spite of myself I had to answer him. I couldn’t hold myself back from bickering with him for hours on end about the relative merits of cocoa and coffee … He was bewitching me with foolishness.

  We’d start in again about something or other, about elastic stockings for varicose veins, about optimum faradic currents, or the treatment of cellulitis in the region of the elbow … It got so that I’d jabber about anything under the sun in line with his tastes or recommendations, like a human talking machine … He would keep abreast or just ahead of me in those infinitely idiotic meanderings. He saturated me with conversation for all eternity. When Parapine heard us embark on quibbles as long as the noodles we were eating, he’d guffaw to himself and sputter the boss’s Bordeaux all over the tablecloth.

  But peace to the memory of Monsieur Baryton, the bastard. In the end I got rid of him. But what genius it took!

  The frothier of the female patients entrusted to my care gave me a hell of a time … When it wasn’t cold showers, it was catheters … Their little vices and perversions, their big apertures that always had to be kept clean … One of our young inmates regularly earned me a reprimand from the boss … She’d wreck the garden by pulling up flowers, that was her mania, and I didn’t care for the boss’s observations …

  “The betrothed,” they called her, she was an Argentine, physically not bad at all, but as for her head, she had only one idea, she wanted to marry her father. One by one she picked all the flowers in the garden and stuck them in the big white veil that she wore day and night, wherever she went. Her family, who were religious fanatics, were dreadfully ashamed. They hid their daughter from the world and her idea with her. According to Baryton, she had succumbed to the absurdity of too strict and rigid an upbringing. The unbending morality of her parents had exploded in her head, so to speak.

  At dusk we’d read the roll call at great length and send the boarders to their quarters. Then we’d make the rounds of the rooms, mostly to stop the more agitated ones from masturbating too frantically before falling asleep. You have to watch closely and keep them in check on Saturday night, because the families come visiting on Sunday and it’s bad for the reputation of the establishment if they find the patients masturbated white.

  All that reminded me of Bébert and the antimasturbation syrup. I administered quantities of that syrup in Vigny. I had kept the formula and ended by believing in it.

  The concierge at the rest home kept a little candy shop with her husband, a big bruiser who was called in now and then when an inmate got violent.

  And so life and the months went by, pleasantly enough all in all, and we’d have had nothing to complain about if Baryton hadn’t suddenly conceived another of his big ideas.

  He had no doubt been wondering for quite some time if it mightn’t be possible to make more and better use of me for the same money. And he finally found the answer.

  One day after lunch he came out with his idea. First he had them dish up a whole salad bowl full of my favorite dessert, strawberries and cream. Already my suspicions were aroused. And true enough, I had no sooner downed the last strawberry than he attacked.

  “Ferdinand,” he says. “I’ve been wondering if you mightn’t consent to give my little girl Aimee a few English lessons … What do you say? … I know you have an excellent accent … And in English a good accent is what counts, don’t you think? … You see, Ferdinand, without wishing to flatter you, I know how obliging you are …”

  He had caught me off balance. “Why, certainly, Monsieur Baryton,” I said.

  It was agreed then and there that I’d give Aimee her first English lesson the very next morning. And others followed, one after another, for weeks …

  Those English lessons marked the beginning of a thoroughly murky, dubious period, during which event followed event at a rhythm quite different from that of ordinary life.

  Baryton insisted on attending the lessons I gave his daughter, every one of them. In spite of my conscientious efforts, poor little Aimee made no headway in English, none at all. She had no interest whatever in discovering what all these new words might mean. In fact she wondered what we nasty men wanted of her that made us insist so on her remembering their meanings. She didn’t cry, but she was very close to it. She’d have been a lot happier if we had left her alone to manage what little French she already knew, the difficulties and facilities of which were quite sufficient to keep her busy all her life.

  But her father didn’t see it that way, not at all.

  “You must grow up to be a modern young woman, my dear,” he kept insisting. That was supposed to comfort her. “I, your father, have lost a good deal by not knowing enough English to handle my foreign patients … Come come, don’t cry, my darling! … You’d do better to listen to Monsieur Bardamu, who’s so patient, so kind, and when you’re able to say ‘the’ with your tongue the way he has shown you, I’ll buy you a beautiful nickel-plated bicycle …”

  But Aimee had no desire to say “the” or “enough,” none whatever … It was the boss who said “the” and “rough” in her place, and that wasn’t all he learned in spite of his Bordeaux accent and his mania for logic, which is really no help in English. This went on for a month, two months. As the father’s passion for learning English developed, Aimee had less
and less need to struggle with the vowels. Baryton monopolized me. In fact he took up all my time, he never let me go, pumped all my English out of me. Since his room was next to mine, I could hear him first thing in the morning, converting his whole private life into English as he dressed. ‘ ‘The coffee is black … My shirt is white … The garden is green … How are you today, Bardamu?” he would shout through the partition. He soon acquired a taste for the most elliptical forms of the language.

  With that perversion he took us a long way … Once he had made contact with great literature, there was no stopping him … After eight months of such abnormal progress, he had refashioned himself almost completely along Anglo-Saxon lines. In this way he managed to get me completely disgusted with him. Twice in a row.

  Little by little we had come to leave little Aimee out of the conversation almost entirely, in other words, in peace. She was quite content to go back to her clouds. She’d never learn English, and that was that. Baryton would learn it all.

  Winter returned, and with it Christmas. The travel agencies were advertising return trips to England at bargain prices … While walking on the boulevards, accompanying Parapine to the movies, I’d notice those advertisements … I even went in and asked about the prices.