In short, if I got the drift, Robinson’s only thought was to drop everything. At first his fiancee and her mother were angry, then they were stricken with grief. That’s what Abbé Protiste had come to tell me. All this was rather upsetting, and for my part I made up my mind to hold my tongue and steer clear of these people’s little family affairs at all costs … After an abortive interview we parted at the streetcar stop, rather coolly to tell the truth. Not at all easy in my mind, I went back to the rest home.
Only a short time after this visit, we had our first news of Baryton. From England. A few postcards. He wished us all “good health and good luck.” After that a few vapid lines from one place and another. A card with no message on it informed us that he had gone to Norway, and a few weeks later there was a somewhat reassuring telegram: “Good crossing!” From Copenhagen.
As we had foreseen, the chief’s absence provoked the most vicious comment in Vigny and environs. It seemed best for the future of the Institute that we should provide the patients and our colleagues round about with only the barest minimum of information regarding the reasons for this absence.
Months passed, months of extreme caution, dull and silent. Among ourselves we stopped mentioning Baryton altogether. To tell the truth, thinking about him made us feel rather ashamed.
And then it was summer again. We couldn’t spend all our time in the garden supervising the patients. To prove to ourselves that we had some freedom in spite of it all, we ventured as far as the banks of the Seine, just to get out.
After the embankment on the far shore, the great plain of Gennevilliers begins, a beautiful expanse of gray and white, with chimneys softly outlined in the dust and mist. Right beside the towpath you’ll see the bargemen’s bistrot. It guards the entrance to the canal. The yellow current comes pushing against the lock.
For hours on end we’d look down at all that, and off to the side at the long swamp, the insidious smell of which reaches as far as the motor road. You get used to it. That muck was so old, so worn out by the river floods that it had no color left. Sometimes on summer evenings when the sky went pink and sentimental the mud would take on a kind of gentle look. It was there on the bridge that we’d listen to the accordion music they’d play on the barges while waiting at the lock gates for the night to be over so they could pass through to the river. Especially the ones coming down from Belgium are musical, they have color all over, green and yellow, and clotheslines full of shirts and drawers and raspberry-colored slips, puffed up by the wind as it leaps and gusts into them.
I’d often go to the bargemen’s bar at the slack hour after lunch, when the owner’s cat is blissfully at peace within four walls, shut up in a little blue-enamel heaven that belongs to him alone.
There I too sat drowsing in the early afternoon, forgotten, I thought, by all the world, waiting for the time to pass.
I saw someone coming in the distance, coming up the road. I wasn’t long in doubt. He had hardly set foot on the bridge when I recognized him. It was Robinson, his very own self. No possible doubt. “He’s come looking for me,” I said to myself … “The priest must have given him my address! … I’ll have to get rid of him quick!”
At that particular moment I thought it was foul of him to come around bothering me just as I was starting to build up a cosy bit of self-indulgence. We’re always suspicious of things approaching on a road, and we’re right. By then he had almost reached the bistrot. I went outside. He seemed surprised to see me. “Where in hell have you come from?” I ask him, not at all friendly. “From La Garenne …” he says. “Okay. Have you eaten?” He didn’t look as if he’d eaten, but he didn’t want to seem to be starving the moment he got there. “So you’re on the loose again?” I ask him. Because, believe me, I wasn’t at all glad to be seeing him again. It didn’t suit me one bit.
Just then Parapine came up from the canal, looking for me. That was a good thing. Parapine was tired from being on duty so often at the asylum. It was true that I’d been taking, my responsibilities rather lightly. Be that as it may, we’d both have given a good deal to know exactly when Baryton would be coming back. We hoped he’d stop gadding about pretty soon so he could relieve us of the business and start looking after it himself. It was too much for us. Neither of us was ambitious, and we didn’t give a good goddamn about the prospects for the future. Which was wrong of us, I admit.
I have to give Parapine credit, he never asked questions about the financial management of the institution or my dealings with the clientele, but I filled him in just the same, in spite of him so to speak, and when that happened it was like talking to myself. About Robinson now, it was important to put him in the picture.
“I told you about Robinson, remember?” I asked him by way of introduction. “You know. My war buddy.”
He’d heard me tell my war stories and stories about Africa a hundred times and in a hundred different ways. That was my style.
“Well,” I went on, “This is Robinson in the flesh, come all the way from Toulouse to see us … We’re all having dinner together at the house.” To tell the truth, I felt kind of uneasy about inviting him in the name of the Institute. It was a sort of indiscretion. The situation called for a winning, ingratiating air of authority, something I didn’t have at all. Besides, Robinson wasn’t making things any easier for me. On our way back to the village he seemed curious and anxious, especially in regard to Parapine, whose long, pale face intrigued him. At first he thought Parapine was one of the lunatics. As soon as he found out where we were staying in Vigny, he began to see lunatics everywhere. I reassured him.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Have you found some sort of work at least, now that you’re back?”
“I’m going to start looking” was all the answer I got.
“How about your eyes? Cured? You can see now?”
“Yes, I can see. Almost as good as before.”
“Then you must be happy,” I said.
No, he wasn’t happy. He had other things to do beside being happy. I was careful not to mention Madelon right away. That was still a ticklish subject between us. We spent quite some time over our apéritifs, and I took the opportunity to tell him a good deal about the rest home and various other things. I’ve never been able to stop shooting my mouth off right and left, pretty much like Baryton, come to think of it. Our dinner went off cordially. And when it was over I couldn’t very well put Robinson out in the street. I decided that for the present we’d set up a folding bed for him in the dining room. Parapine as usual expressed no opinion. “All right, Léon,” I said. “You can stay here until you find a job …” “Thanks,” he said simply. And every morning from then on he took the streetcar in to Paris, to look for a job as a salesman.
He was “sick of factories,” he said, he wanted to be a salesman. I’ve got to be fair, he may have knocked himself out looking for a salesman’s job, but he certainly didn’t find one.
One day he came back from Paris earlier than usual. I was still in the garden, supervising my charges near the big pond. He came out and joined me. There was something on his mind. “Listen!” he began.
“I’m listening.”
“Couldn’t you give me some little job right here? … I can’t find one anywhere else …”
“Have you really tried?”
“Yes, I’ve really tried …”
“You want a job here in the nuthouse? Doing what? Can’t you find some little thing in Paris? Would you like Parapine and me to ask some people we know?”
My offer to help him find a job wasn’t to his liking.
“It’s not that there’s absolutely no jobs to be had,” he said. “Maybe I’d find one … some little job … Sure … But don’t you see … I absolutely have to make it look like I’m off my rocker … It’s urgent, it’s indispensable! It’s gotta look like I’m off my rocker …”
“All right, ” I said. “Say no more!”
“Don’t try to shut me up, F
erdinand. I’ve got to say more,” he insisted, “because I want you to understand. And as I know you, it takes you a long time to understand anything and decide to do something about it.”
“In that case, shoot,” I said. “Tell me all about it.” I was resigned.
“If I don’t make it look like I’m nuts, I’ll be out of luck, I assure you … Big trouble! … She’s perfectly capable of having me arrested … Now do you get the drift?”
“Madelon, you mean?”
“Madelon! Who else?”
“That’s great!”
“You can say that again …”
“So you’re really on the outs?”
“As you see …”
“Come this way if you want to tell me more,” I interrupted and led him off to one side. “It’s safer because of the nuts … Mad as they are, they understand certain things that’ll sound even wilder when they repeat them …”
We went up to one of the isolation rooms, and once there it didn’t take him long to reconstitute the whole machination, especially as I already knew that he’d stop at nothing, and Abbé Protiste had hinted at the rest …
He hadn’t bungled his second try. No one could accuse him of goofing again. Not by a long shot!
“You see, the old bag was getting on my nerves more and more … Especially after my eyes got a little better and I could go out in the street by myself … After that I could see things … I could see the old bag too … I could see her all right, in fact I never saw anything else! … All day long I had her there in front of me! … She was poisoning my life! … I honestly think she hung around on purpose … to bug me … I can’t explain it any other way … And that house we were all living in, you know the house, it’s a hard place to keep from fighting in … You saw how small it is! … We were all on top of each other! … You can’t say different!
“And the cellar stairs weren’t very solid, were they?”
I myself had noticed how dangerous those stairs were, when I visited the crypt for the first time with Madelon. They’d been shaky even then.
“Yes, it was practically a setup,” he admitted very frankly. “And what about the people down there?” I asked him. “The neighbors, the priests, the reporters … Didn’t their tongues wag some when it happened? …”
“No, it seems they didn’t … Besides, they didn’t think I was up to it … They thought I was a washout … Blind … You understand …”
“Well, you can thank your stars for that, because otherwise … But what about Madelon? … Was she in it with you?” “Not exactly … But just a little, yes, of course, because we were supposed to inherit the whole crypt once the old bag passed on … Things had been settled that way … The two of us were going to take over …”
“So what went wrong between you?”
“Well, that’s hard to explain …”
“Was she sick of you?”
“Not at all, she was crazy about me and still dead set on getting married … Her mother was all for it too, more than ever. She wanted us to do it quick because we had come into the old bag’s mummies and there’d be enough for the three of us to live on and then some …”
“So what went wrong between you?”
“Well, I just wanted them to leave me in peace! It’s as simple as that! The mother, the daughter, both of them …”
“Look here, Léon!” I stopped him when I heard that. “Listen to me! … Your story doesn’t make sense! … Think of Madelon and her mother, put yourself in their place … How would you feel in their place? … I ask you … When you got there, you hardly had a pair of shoes to your name, no job, nothing, all day long you complained, about the old woman keeping all the money, and so forth and so on … She passes on, or rather, you pass her on … And right away you start making faces again and putting on airs … Put yourself in the place of those two women, stop and think … It’s unbearable! Boy, would. I have told you what you could do! … They should have sent you to jail, that’s what you really deserved, I don’t mind telling you!”
That’s what I said to Robinson.
“Maybe so,” Robinson answered back. “But even if you’re a doctor and educated and all that, you’ll never understand my nature …”
“You shut up,” I finally told him. “You poor jerk, don’t talk to me about your nature. You talk like a nut. I’m sorry Baryton has gone away God knows where, or he’d have taken you in! Best thing that could happen to you! Lock you up! See what I mean? Baryton would have known how to handle your nature!”
“If you’d had what I had and been through what I’ve been through,” he came back at me, “you’d have been nuts yourself, I assure you! Maybe worse than me! … A softie like you!” And he began to bawl me out as windily as if he’d had a right to.
I watched him closely while he was gassing. I’d often been abused that way by the patients. It didn’t bother me any more.
He’d got a good deal thinner since Toulouse, and something had happened to his face, something I’d never seen before, a kind of portrait had settled on his features, with forgetfulness and silence all around it.
In all this Toulouse business there was something else that bothered him, it was only a minor part of the story, but it had gone against his grain, and when he thought about it now it came back at him like bile. It was having to grease the palms of a whole bunch of operators for nothing. When they’d taken over the crypt, he’d had to dish out commissions right and left, to the priest, the chair woman, the town hall, the vicars, and God knows who else, all to no end, and that had stuck in his craw … Just talking about it threw him into a fit. Thieving he called it.
“And now tell me, did you finally get married?” I asked him.
“I’ve told you already, no! I didn’t want to anymore.”
“But your little Madelon wasn’t bad? You can’t tell me different …”
“That’s not the question …”
“Oh yes it is. You said you were free, didn’t you? If you were dead set on leaving Toulouse, you could have left her mother in charge of the crypt for a while … you’d have come back later …”
“Physically yes, you’re right,” he went on. “I admit it, she was first class. You told me the truth. Especially because it so happened that when I got my sight back, the first thing I saw was her, in a mirror … Can you imagine? … In the light! … About two months after the old woman fell … I was trying to look at Madelon’s face, and then suddenly my sight came back … Like a flash of light … You get the picture?”
“Wasn’t it nice?”
“Sure, it was nice … But that’s not everything.”
“And you cleared out all the same? …”
“Yes, but let me explain, seeing you want to understand … She started it … she started thinking I was acting funny … that I’d lost my zip … that I wasn’t nice to her anymore … that kind of crap …”
“Maybe your conscience was troubling you …” “Conscience?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Call it anything you want, I was feeling rotten, that’s all … But I don’t think it was conscience …”
“Were you sick?”
“Yeah, sick, that’s what it probably was. For the last hour I’ve been trying to make you say I’m sick … Admit you’re pretty slow …”
“Okay, okay,” I tell him. “Let’s say you’re sick if you think it’s the safest way …”
“It would make sense,” he assured me. “Because I wouldn’t put anything past her … She could start singing to the cops any day now.”
He sounded like he was giving me advice, and I didn’t want his advice. That kind of thing didn’t appeal to me at all, because of the complications it would lead to.
“Do you really think she’d talk?” I asked him, just to make sure … “After all, she was your accomplice in a way … That ought to make her think twice before shooting her mouth off …”
“Think twi
ce!” Those words made him jump sky-high. “I can see you don’t know her …” I handed him a laugh. “Hell, she wouldn’t hesitate for one second … Like I’m telling you! If you knew her as well as I do, you wouldn’t doubt it! She’s in love, I tell you! Haven’t you ever known a woman in love? When she’s in love, she’s crazy. Crazy, I tell you! And it’s me she’s in love with and crazy about! … Do you know what that means? It means that anything crazy is just her meat! Craziness won’t stop her! Hell no!”
I couldn’t tell him it rather surprised me to hear that Madelon had reached such a pitch of frenzy in a few months, because after all I’d known her slightly myself … I had my own ideas on the subject, but I couldn’t tell him that.
From the way she had handled herself in Toulouse and the things I’d heard her say when I was hidden behind the poplar tree on the day of the houseboat, it was hard for me to imagine that she could have changed so completely in so short a time … She had struck me as more shrewd than tragic, a smooth article, only too glad to get what attention she could with her fantasies and pretensions, wherever they seemed to wash … But in that particular situation there was nothing I could say, I had to let it ride. “All right! All right!” I said. “And how about her mother? She must have let out a squawk when she realized you were clearing out for good? …”
“I’ll say! All day long she went on about my rotten character and, mind you, just when I’d have needed to be treated kindly! … You should have heard her! … Anyway, on account of the mother too, it couldn’t go on, so that’s when I suggested to Madelon that I’d leave them in the crypt while I went off by myself for a while to travel around and see the country …”
“ ‘Then you’ll take me with you,’ she protested … ‘I’m your fiancee, aren’t I? … You’ll take me with you or you won’t go at all! … And besides, you’re not well enough yet’ …”
“ ‘I’m all well,’ I said, ‘and I’m going by myself.’ It dragged on and on.”
Journey to the End of the Night Page 46
