But Léon didn’t stir from his seat. He was screwed on tight.
“So you won’t come?” she said again. “You won’t come?”
She’d warned me that I’d better lie low. I’d had enough. “Are you coming?” she repeated. The cab was still going fast, the road was clear in front of us, and the jolting was worse than ever. We were bouncing around like crates in a truck.
“All right!” she concluded when he didn’t answer. “All right, that does it! You asked for it! Tomorrow! You hear, no later than tomorrow, I’m going to the police and telling them exactly how Madame Henrouille fell down the stairs! Do you hear me now, Léon? … You happy now? … Not playing deaf anymore? Either you come with me right away or I go to the police tomorrow morning! … So are you coming or aren’t you? Speak up!” She couldn’t have made her threat any plainer.
So then he decided to say something after all.
“You were involved in it yourself,” he said. “You can’t say a thing …”
That didn’t quiet her in the least, far from it. “I don’t care!” she said. “What if I was? You mean we’ll both go to jail? … That I was your accomplice? … Is that what you mean? … Well, that suits me fine! …”
And she started laughing hysterically, as if nothing could have been funnier …
“That would suit me to a T, I tell you! I’m crazy about jail, I tell you! … Don’t go expecting me to back down because of your jail talk! … I’ll go to jail any time you say! …… But you’ll go too, you bastard! … At least you won’t be able to give me the run-around any longer! … I belong to you, okay! But you belong to me too! You should just have stayed with me down there! I can only love once, Monsieur! I’m no tart!”
In saying that she was defying me and Sophie too. Making a point of fidelity and respectability.
In spite of it all the taxi was driving on, and he still made no move to stop the driver.
“Then you’re not coming? You’d rather go to the pen? Okay! … You don’t care if I turn you in? … You don’t care if I love you or not? … You don’t care about my future? You don’t care about anything, do you? …”
“No,” he says. “In a way you’re right … But it’s not just you … I don’t care about anyone else either … Christ, don’t take it as an insult! … I know you’re a sweet kid … But I don’t want to be loved anymore … It disgusts me! …”
She didn’t expect to have that kind of thing thrown in her face … She was so surprised that she didn’t know how to pick up the tirade she’d already begun. She’d been thrown off balance, but she recovered quick enough. “Oh! It disgusts you, does it? … What do you mean by that? … Tell me a little more, you ungrateful weasel!”
“No!” he said. “It’s not you that disgusts me, it’s everything. I don’t want anything … You can’t hold that against me …”
“What’s that you say? Say it again! Me … everything?” She was trying to understand. “Me, everything? Don’t talk Chinese! … Tell me in French, in front of these people. Why do I disgust you now? Don’t you get a hard-on like everybody else, you big pig, when you make love? Oh, so you don’t get a hard-on, is that it? … Out with it! … In front of these people … Tell us you don’t get a hard-on!”
In spite of her fury, her way of arguing her case made you want to laugh. But I didn’t have time to laugh very long, because she started up again. “And him there! I suppose he doesn’t squirt every time he catches me in a corner! The beast! The sex fiend! I dare him to say it’s not true! … You’re all looking for something new! … Admit it! … Variety, novelty! That’s what you want! A daisy chain! Why not a virgin! You degenerate pigs! Why look for pretexts? … You’re jaded, that’s all. You haven’t even got the courage of your vices! You’re scared of your vices!”
At that point Robinson took it on himself to answer. By that time he, too, had lost his temper, and he shouted as loud as she had.
“Wrong!” he shouted. “I’ve got plenty of courage, as much as you! … Only, if you want the whole truth … everything, absolutely everything! disgusts me and turns my stomach! Not just you! … Everything! … And love most of all! … Yours as much as anyone else’s! … The sentimental tripe you dish out … Want me to tell you what I think of it? I think it’s like making love in the crapper! Do you get me now? … All the sentiment you trot out to make me stick with you hits me like an insult, if you want to know … And to make it worse, you don’t even realize it, you’re the one that’s rotten because you don’t understand! … You’re satisfied repeating the rubbish other people say … You think it makes sense … People have told you there’s nothing better than love, they’ve told you it’ll go down with everybody, everywhere and always, and that’s good enough for you … Well, I say fuck their love! … You hear? … Their putrid love doesn’t go down with me … not anymore! … You’ve missed the train! You’re too late! It won’t go down anymore, and that’s that! … What a stupid thing to get steamed up about! … Why do you have to make love, considering all the things that are happening? … All the things we see around us! … Or are you blind? … More likely you just don’t give a damn! You wallow in sentiment when you’re a worse brute than anybody … You want to eat rotten meat? … With love sauce? … Does that help it down? … Not with me! … If you don’t smell anything, it’s your hard luck! Maybe your nose is stuffed up! If it doesn’t disgust you, it’s because you’re stupid, the whole lot of you … You want to know what it is that comes between you and me? … All right, I’ll tell you! A whole life is what comes between you and me … Isn’t that enough for you?”
“My house is clean!” she comes back at him. “A person can be poor but clean, can’t they? When did you ever see that my house wasn’t clean? Is that what you’re insinuating with your nasty remarks? … My rear end is clean, Monsieur! … Maybe you can’t say as much for yourself! … Nor your feet neither!”
“I never said that, Madelon! I never said anything like that! … About your house not being clean! … You see that you don’t understand a thing!” That was all he could think of saying to calm her down.
“So now you say you haven’t said anything? You haven’t said anything, have you? Would you listen to him! He insults me worse than garbage and then he claims he hasn’t said anything! You’d have to kill him to make him stop lying! Jail isn’t bad enough for a skunk like him! A lousy rotten pimp! … It’s not enough! What he needs is the guillotine!”
Nothing could stop her. I couldn’t make anything of what they were saying in that taxi. All I could hear was curses and insults in with the roar of the motor and the sloshing of the wheels in the wind and rain that came beating against our door in ferocious gusts. The air between us was charged with threats. “It’s vile! …” she said several times. She couldn’t say anything else. “It’s vile!” And then she raised the stakes, double or quits. “You coming?” she said. “You coming, Léon? One … You coming? Two …” She waited. “Three? … So you’re not coming? …” “No,” he said, without moving an inch. He even added: “Do what you like!” That was an answer of sorts.
She must have moved back a little on the seat, as far as she could go. I guess she was holding the revolver in both hands, because when the shot went off it seemed to go straight into his belly. Then, almost at the same time, there were two more shots, one after the other … and then the car was full of acrid smoke.
But we kept right on going. Robinson slumped down on me, sideways, jerking and gasping: “Hep! Hep!” And more of the same: “Hep! Hep!” The driver must have heard.
First he slowed down a little to see what had happened. Then finally he stopped right under a gas lamp.
The moment he opened the door, Madelon gave him a violent push and jumped out. She scrambled down the embankment and beat it across the fields in the darkness, right through the mud. I tried to call her back, but she was already far away.
I didn’t quite know what to do with my wounded ma
n … In a way it might have been wisest to take him back to Paris … But by then we weren’t far from our place … The townspeople wouldn’t know what was going on … So Sophie and I bundled him up in overcoats and settled him in the corner where Madelon had fired her shots. “Take it easy!” I said to the driver. But he kept driving much too fast. He was in a hurry. The bumps made Robinson groan still worse.
When we pulled up in front of the rest home, the driver didn’t even want to give us his name, he was worried about trouble with the police, having to testify and all that … He also said there were sure to be bloodstains on the cushions. He wanted to beat it right away without waiting. But I’d taken his number.
Two bullets had gone into Robinson’s gut, maybe three, I wasn’t quite sure yet how many.
She had fired straight in front of her, I’d seen that. The wounds weren’t bleeding. Though Sophie and I were holding him up between us, he got a bad shaking and his head was wobbling. He spoke, but it was hard to understand him. He was already delirious. “Hep! Hep!” he kept chanting. He’d have time enough to die before we got there.
The street had been freshly paved. As soon as we came to our gate, I sent the concierge to get Parapine from his room in a hurry. He came down right away, and he and a male nurse helped us carry Robinson to his bed. Once we’d undressed him we were able to examine him and palpate the wall of his abdomen. It was already distended, and soft in places. I found two holes practically on top of each other, but no third; one of the bullets must have gone astray.
If I had been in Léon’s place, I’d have preferred an internal hemorrhage, it floods the abdomen and doesn’t take long. The peritoneum fills up, and that’s the end. With peritonitis on the other hand an infection sets in, and it takes forever.
It was still too soon to tell how he’d go about dying. His belly was swelling up, he was staring at us, his eyes were already set, he was groaning, but not very much. He was having a sort of calm spell. I’d already seen him very sick in a lot of different places, but this time everything was different, his moans and his eyes and everything. It looked as if we couldn’t hold him much longer, he was slipping away from minute to minute. He was sweating big drops that made it look as if his whole face were crying. At times like that you’re sorry you’ve become as poor and as hard as you have. We’re short of practically everything we’d need to help someone die. All we have left inside is the things that are useful in our everyday life, a life of comfort, a life all for ourselves, a life of viciousness. We’ve lost our confidence along the way. We’ve harried and goaded what pity we had left, driven it to the bottom of our body like some nasty pill. We’ve pushed pity to the bottom of our bowels along with our shit. That’s a good place for it, we say to ourselves.
I stayed with Léon to commiserate, I had never felt so embarrassed. I couldn’t manage it … He couldn’t find me … it was driving him wild … He must have been looking for another Ferdinand, somebody much bigger than me, to help him die more easily. He was straining to figure out if there’d been any progress in the world … Poor fellow … Drawing up an inventory in his mind … Wondering if people hadn’t changed just a little for the better during his lifetime, if maybe he had been unfair to them without meaning to … But there was only me, just me, me all alone, beside him, the genuine Ferdinand, who was short of everything that would make a man bigger than his own bare life, short of love for other people’s lives. Of that I had none, or so little there was no use showing it. I wasn’t as big as death. I was a lot smaller. I had no great opinion of humanity. I think I’d have found it easier to grieve for a dying dog than for Robinson, because a dog isn’t tricky, and Robinson, in spite of everything, was tricky in a way. I was tricky myself, we were all tricksters. … Our other qualities had left us along the way, I’d even lost the grimaces that can come in handy over deathbeds, I’d lost everything along the way, I couldn’t find any of what we need to help a man die, all I could find was cunning. My feelings were like a house where you only go on holidays. Scarcely inhabitable. Besides, a dying man is demanding. Dying isn’t enough for him. He has to get a kick out of it … At the very bottom of life, with his arteries already full of urea, he has to get a kick out of his last gasps.
And the dying snivel, because they’re not having as much fun as before … They make demands … they protest. The dramatics of misery wants to carry over from life into death.
He came partly to his senses when Parapine gave him his injection of morphine. He even talked a little about what had happened. “It’s best to have it end like this,” he said. And later: “It doesn’t hurt as much as I’d have thought.” When Parapine asked him exactly where the pain was, you could see he wasn’t all there anymore, but even so there were still things he wanted to tell us … He hadn’t the strength, his head wasn’t clear enough … He wept, he gagged, and a moment later he laughed. He wasn’t like the usual sick man, we didn’t know how to act in front of him.
It looked as if he were trying to help us live. As if he’d been trying to find us pleasures to go on living for. He held us by the hands. One hand each. I kissed him. That’s all you can do in a case like that without going wrong. We waited. He didn’t say anything more after that. A little later, maybe an hour, the hemorrhage came, internal and profuse. It carried him off.
His heart started beating faster and faster, and then very very fast. His heart was running after his exhausted, diminished blood, chasing it to the ends of his blood vessels, throbbing in his fingertips. The pallor rose up from his neck and took hold of his whole face. He died in a choking fit. He went as if he had taken a running start, squeezing the two of us in his arms.
Then, almost immediately, he was back again in front of us, already taking on the weight of a dead man.
We stood up. We disengaged ourselves from his hands. They stopped in mid-air, stiff, yellow, and blue in the light of the lamp.
Then Robinson was like a stranger in the room, someone who had come from a horrible country and you wouldn’t have dared speak to.
Parapine kept his wits about him. He managed to send someone to the police station for a cop. The cop just happened to be Gustave, our Gustave, who was on stand-by after his traffic duty.
“OhmyGod!” said Gustave when he entered the room and saw Robinson.
Then he sat down at the nurses’ table that hadn’t been cleared yet to get his breath and take a little drink. “Seeing it’s a crime,” he said, “we’d better take him to headquarters.” Then he remarked: “Robinson was all right, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. I wonder why she killed him …” Then he drank some more. He shouldn’t have. Drink didn’t agree with him. But he liked the bottle. It was his weakness.
We went up to the storeroom to get a stretcher. By then it was too late to disturb the staff, so we decided to carry the body to the police station ourselves. It was far away, at the other end of town, after the grade crossing, the last house.
We started out. Parapine held the front of the stretcher, Gustave Mandamour the other end. But neither of them walked very straight. Going down the little stairway, Sophie had to steady them a bit. It was then I noticed that, she didn’t seem terribly upset. Yet it had happened right beside her, so close that one of that madwoman’s bullets could have gone right into her. But Sophie, as I’d noticed on other occasions, needed time to get her emotions started. Not that she was cold. When it hit her, it was like a ton of bricks, but she needed time.
I wanted to follow the body a little way to make sure it was really over. But instead of actually following as I should have, I veered from side to side of the road and finally, after passing the big school building near the grade crossing, I slipped into a side street that leads down to the Seine, first sloping gently between hedges and then taking a steep plunge.
Over the fences I saw them moving off with their stretcher. They looked as if they’d suffocate in the sheets of mist that slowly closed behind them. Along the riverbank the current was driving
hard against the barges, which had been wedged tight as a precaution against the flood water. More cold came from the Gennevilliers plain, in puffs of mist that spread over the swirling river and made the water glisten under the arches.
Down there in the distance lay the sea. But there was no more room in me for imaginings about the sea. I had other things to do. I had tried to lose myself, I hadn’t wanted to be face to face with my own life anymore, but everywhere I kept finding it. I was always coming back to myself. My wanderings were over. No more knocking about for me … The world had closed in … We had come to the end! Like at the carnival! It’s not enough to be sad; there ought to be some way to start the music up again and go looking for more sadness … But not for me … We may not admit it, but what we really want is to have our youth back again … We ought to be ashamed … Anyway, I wasn’t prepared to endure any more! … Yet I hadn’t gone as far in life as Robinson! … All in all, I hadn’t succeeded … I hadn’t conceived even one good, sound idea, like his idea of getting himself bumped off … That idea was bigger than my big head, bigger than all the fear that was in it, a fine, a magnificent idea to die with … How many lives would I need to make myself an idea more powerful than anything in the world? No saying. A flop! My ideas went rattling around in my head with lots of space between them. They were like faint, flickering little candles, trembling throughout a lifetime in the middle of a ghostly, abominable universe.
Maybe things were a little better than twenty years ago, nobody could say that I hadn’t made a wee beginning of progress, but there seemed no possibility of my ever managing, like Robinson, to fill my head with one single idea, but that one superb, a thought far stronger than death, and of my succeeding, just with my idea, of exuding joy, carefreeness, and courage wherever I went. A scrumptious hero!
I’d be brimful of courage then. I’d be dripping with courage, and life itself would be just one big idea of courage, that would be the driving force behind everything, behind all men and things from earth to heaven. And by the same token there would be so much love that Death would be shut up inside it with tenderness, and Death would be so cosy-comfortable in there, the bitch, that she’d finally start enjoying herself, she’d get pleasure out of love along with everyone else. How wonderful that would be! What a production! I was laughing to myself all alone on the riverbank, when I thought of all the things I’d have to do if I wanted to inflate myself like that with infinite resolutions … An idealistic toad! Fever, you know.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 51
