The day before yesterday I finally decided to go and see Gustin at home. The suburb where he lives is a twenty-minute walk from my place once you’ve crossed the Seine. The weather wasn’t so good but I started out just the same. I thought I’d take the bus. I hurry through my consultation. I’m slipping out past the accident ward when an old bag spots me and latches on to me. She drags out her words, like me. That comes of fatigue. She has a voice like a grater. That’s from liquor. She starts whining and whimpering, she wants me to go home with her. “Oh, Doctor, please come, I beg of you! … My little girl, my Alice! … it’s on the rue Rancienne, just around the corner …” I didn’t have to go. My office hours were over, supposedly. She insists … By that time we’re outside … I’m fed up with sick people; I’ve been patching up those pests all day, thirty of them … I was all in. Let them cough. Let them spit. Let their bones fall apart … Let them bugger each other. Let them fly away with forty different gases in their guts … To hell with them … But this sniveling bitch holds me tight, falls on my neck, and blows her despair in my face. Her despair reeks of red wine … I haven’t the strength to resist. Anyway, nothing would have made her let go. I thought maybe when we got to the rue des Casses, which is a long street without a single lamp, I’d give her a good kick in the ass … So for the hundredth time I weaken … And the record starts up again. “My little girl! … Please, Doctor, please! My little Alice … You know her?” The rue Rancienne wasn’t around the corner … It was completely out of my way … I knew exactly where it was. It’s after the cable factory … She’s still talking, and I listen through my private haze … “Eighty-two francs a week … that’s all we’ve got to live on … with two children. And my husband is such a brute. It’s shameful, Doctor.”
I knew it was all a lot of hokum. Her whole story stank of booze and sour stomach.
By that time we’d got to their hangout. I climb the stairs. At last I could sit down … The kid wore glasses. I sit down beside her bed. She’s sick all right, but even so she was playing with her doll, kind of. I thought I’d cheer her up. I’m always good for a laugh when I put my mind to it … She’s not dying, but she does have trouble breathing … She’s certainly got an inflammation … I make her laugh. She gags. I tell her mother there’s nothing to worry about. The bitch! Now she’s got me cornered, she decides she can use a doctor too. It’s her legs, all covered with black-and-blue marks where she’s been beaten. She hikes up her skirts. Enormous bruises and deep burns. Her unemployed husband did that with the poker. That’s the way he is. I tell her what she can put on them … I take a piece of string and make a kind of swing for the miserable doll. Up and down she goes, from the bed to the doorknob and back. It was very funny … that was better than talking.
I apply the stethoscope. She’s wheezing pretty bad, but it’s nothing dangerous. I tell the mother there’s nothing to worry about … exactly the same words as before. That’s what gets you down. The kid begins to laugh. She gags again. I have to stop. Her face is all blue … Mightn’t she have a little diphtheria? I’ll have to see … Take a specimen? … Tomorrow.
The father comes in. With his eighty-two francs they can’t afford wine, all they’ve got to drink is cider. “I drink it out of a bowl,” he says right off the bat. “It makes you piss.” And he takes a swig from the bottle to show me… . We all say how lucky it is that the little angel isn’t too sick. What interested me most was the doll … I was too tired to bother about grown-ups and diagnoses. Grown-ups are a pain in the ass. I was determined not to treat a single one until next day.
I guess they think I don’t take my work seriously. To hell with what they think. I drink their health again. The consultation is absolutely free, gratis, for nothing. The mother brings up her legs again. I give her a last piece of advice. Then I go down the stairs. On the sidewalk there’s a little dog with a limp. He follows me without a moment’s hesitation. Everything attaches itself to me today. It’s a little fox terrier, black and white. Seems to be lost. Those unemployed punks upstairs, what ingratitude! They don’t even see me to the door. I bet they’re fighting again. I can hear them yelling. He can stick the whole poker up her ass for all I care. That’ll teach her to waylay me at closing time.
I turned off to the left, toward Colombes. The little dog was still following me … After Asnières comes La Jonction, and then it’s not far to my cousin’s. I couldn’t stand seeing him drag along like that. Maybe I’d better go home after all. We turned back by way of the Pont Bineau. skirting the row of factories. The dispensary was shut up tight when we got there … “We’ll feed the little mutt,” I said to Madame Hortense. “Somebody’ll have to get some meat … We’ll call up first thing in the morning. The S.P.C.A. will send a car for him. We’d better lock him up for tonight.” Then I went out again, easy in my mind. But that dog was too scared. He’d been beaten too much. Life is hard on the streets. When we opened the window next day, he wouldn’t wait, he jumped out, he was even afraid of us. He thought we’d locked him up to punish him. He couldn’t understand. He didn’t trust anybody anymore. It’s bad when that happens.
Gustin knows me well. When he’s sober, he has good ideas. He has a sense of style. His judgments are reliable. There’s no jealousy in him. He doesn’t ask much of this world. He’s got an old sorrow … disappointment in love. He doesn’t want to forget it. He seldom talks about it. She was a floozie. Gustin is good as gold. He’ll never change till his dying day.
Meanwhile he drinks, kind of.
My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line.
“You could talk about something pleasant now and then.” That was Gustin’s opinion. “Life isn’t always disgusting.” In a way he’s right. With me it’s kind of a mania, a bias. The fact is that in the days when I had that buzzing in both ears, even worse than now, and attacks of fever all day long, I wasn’t half so gloomy … I had lovely dreams … Madame Vitruve, my secretary, was talking about it only the other day. She knew how I tormented myself. When a man’s so generous, he squanders his treasures, loses sight of them. I said to myself: “That damn Vitruve, she’s hidden them some place …” Real marvels they were … bits of Legend, pure delight … That’s the kind of stuff I’m going to write from now on … To make sure they’re as good as I think, I rummage through my papers. I can’t find a thing … I call Delumelle, my agent; I want to make him hate me … to make him groan under my insults. But he’s not so easily fazed. It’s all one to him, he’s loaded. All he says is that I need a vacation … Finally Vitruve comes in. I don’t trust her. I have my reasons. I light into her, point blank: where did you put my masterpiece? I had several hundred reasons for suspecting her …
The Linuty Foundation was across the way from the bronze balloon at the Porte Péreire. Almost every day when I’d finished with my patients, she’d come up to deliver my typescripts. A little temporary structure that’s been torn down since. I wasn’t happy there. The hours were too regular. Linuty, who had founded it, was a big millionaire, he wanted everybody to have medical treatment and feel better without money. Philanthropists are a pain in the ass. I’d have preferred some municipal dispensary … a little vaccinating on the side … a modest racket in certificates of good or bad health … . or maybe I could have supervised a public bath … in other words, something soft. Well, so be it. I’m not a Yid* or a foreigner or a Freemason, or a graduate of the École Normale; I don’t know how to make friends and influence people, I fuck around too much, my reputation’s bad. For fifteen years now they’ve seen me struggling along out here in the Zone;* the dregs of the dregs take liberties with me, show me every sign of contempt. I’m lucky they haven’t fired me. Writing picks me up. I’m not so badly off. Vitruve types my manuscripts. She’s attached to me. “Listen,” I say, “listen, old girl, this is the last time I’m going to give you hell … If you don’t find my Legend, it’s the parting of the ways, it’s the end of our friendship. No more intimate collabor
ation . . No more grub and bub, no more dough.”
She bursts into lamentations. She’s a monster in every way, her looks are awful and her work is awful. She’s an obligation. I’ve had her on my neck since I was in England. She’s the fruit of a promise. Our acquaintance goes way back. It was her daughter Angèle in London who made me swear to look after her forever. I’ve looked after her all right. That was my vow to Angèle. It dates back to the war. Besides, come to think of it, she knows what she knows. Okay. Supposedly she’s tight-lipped, but she remembers … Angèle, her daughter, was quite a number. It’s amazing how ugly a mother can get. Angèle came to a bad end. I’ll explain if I’m forced to. Angele had a sister, Sophie, a big tall screwball, she’s settled in London. And Mireille, the little niece, is over here. She has the combined vices of the whole family, she’s a real bitch … a synthesis.
When I moved from Rancy to Porte Péreire, they both tagged along. Rancy has changed, there’s hardly anything left of the walls or the Bastion. Big black scarred stones; they rip them out of the soft ground like decayed teeth. It will all go … the city swallows its old gums. The bus —the P.O. bis they call it now—dashes through the ruins like a bat out of hell. Soon there won’t be anything but sawed-off dung-colored skyscrapers. We’ll see. Vitruve and I used to argue about our troubles. She always claimed she’d been through more than I had. That isn’t possible. Wrinkles, yes, she’s got more. There’s no limit to the amount of wrinkles people can get: the loathsome traces that the good years dig in their flesh. “Mireille must have put your papers away.”
I leave with her and escort her out to the rue des Minimes. They live together, near the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, in a joint that calls itself the Hôtel Méridien.
Their room is an inconceivable mess, a junk shop full of miscellaneous articles, mostly underwear, all very flimsy and cheap.
Madame Vitruve and her niece both do it. They have three douche bags fully equipped and a rubber bidet. They keep it all between the beds; there’s also an enormous atomizer that they’ve never succeeded in getting to work. I wouldn’t want to be too hard on Vitruve. Maybe she has had more trouble than I have. That’s what makes me control myself. Otherwise, if I were sure, I’d lick the hell out of her. She used to keep the Remington in the fireplace; she hadn’t finished paying for it. So she said. I don’t pay her too much for my typing, I’ve got to admit that … sixty-five centimes a page, but it mounts up in the end … especially with big fat books.
When it comes to squinting, though, I never saw the like of Vitruve. It was painful to look at her.
That ferocious squint gave her an air when she laid out the cards … tarots. She sold the little ladies silk stockings … and the future too, on credit. When she puzzled and pondered behind her glasses, she had the wandering gaze of a lobster.
Her fortune-telling gave her a certain influence in the neighborhood. She knew all the cuckolds. She pointed them out to me from the window, and even the three murderers—”I have proof.” I’d also given her an old blood-pressure contraption and taught her a little massage for varicose veins. That added to her income. Her ambition was to do abortions or to get involved in a bloody revolution, so everybody would talk about her and the newspapers would be full of it.
I’ll never be able to say how she nauseated me as I watched her rummaging through that junk pile of hers. All over the world there are trucks that run over nice people at the rate of one a minute … Vitruve gave off a pungent smell. Redheads often do. It seems to me that there’s an animal quality in redheads; it’s their destiny: something brutal and tragic; they’ve got it in their skin. I could have laid her out cold when she went on about her memories in that loud voice of hers … She had hot pants, and it was hard for her to do much about it. Unless a man was drunk and it was very dark, she didn’t have a chance. On that point I was sorry for her. I myself had done better in the way of amorous harmonies. That, too, struck her as unjust. When the time came, I’d have almost enough put by to settle my accounts with death … I had my esthetic savings. What marvelous ass I’d enjoyed, I’ve got to admit it, as luminous as light. I had tasted of the Infinite.
She had no savings, that goes without saying. To earn her keep and get a little enjoyment on the side, she had to take a customer by surprise or corner him when he was too tired to resist. It was hell.
By seven o’clock the good little workers have gone home. The women are doing the dishes, the males are tied up in radio waves. That’s when Vitruve abandons my beautiful book and goes out in pursuit of her livelihood. She pads from landing to landing with her slightly damaged stockings and her crummy lingerie. Before the crash she managed to get along, what with credit and the way she terrified her customers, but today the identical crap is given away at street fairs to stop the gripes of losers at the shell game.
That’s unfair competition. I tried to tell her it was all the fault of the Japanese. She didn’t believe me. I accused her of doing away with my wonderful Legend on purpose, even of throwing it in the garbage …
“It’s a masterpiece,” I added. “We’ve got to find it.”
That handed her a laugh. We rummaged through the pile of merchandise.
Finally her niece came in. She was very late. Christ Almighty, what a rear end. That ass of hers was a public scandal. Her pleated skirt helped to bring it out … A rounded accordion. The unemployed are desperate, sex-starved; no dough to take a girl out with … They were good and mad. “What about giving me some of that ass!” they’d shout at her. Square in her face as she comes through the hall. It’s rough always getting a hard-on for nothing. The youngsters with finer features than the rest feel entitled to it, they expect life to coddle them. It wasn’t until later that she began to go down and hustle … after no end of calamities … For the present she was just having fun.
She didn’t find my beautiful Legend either. She didn’t give a damn about “King Krogold” … the only one who cared was myself. Her school of life was the Petit Panier, a dance hall near the Porte Brandon, just before the railroad.
They didn’t take their eyes off me when I got mad. In their opinion I was a champion creep. A stickin-the-mud, jerkoff intellectual, and so on. But now, surprisingly enough, they were scared I’d clear out. If I had, I wonder what they’d have done. I have no doubt that the aunt thought about it plenty. Lord, the winning smiles they treated me to when I began to talk about a change of air …
In addition to her amazing ass, Mireille had romantic eyes and a bewitching look, but a hefty nose … a beezer. That was her cross. When I wanted to humiliate her a bit, I’d say: “No kidding, Mireille, you’ve got a nose like a man …” But she was good at telling yarns, like a sailor. She made up all sorts of things, at first to amuse me, later to make trouble for me. I like to hear a good story. That’s my weakness. She went too far, that’s all. I got violent in the end, but she certainly deserved the thrashings I gave her, and if I’d killed her, she’d have deserved that too. She finally admitted it. The fact is I was pretty generous … I socked her for good reason. Everybody said so … at least the ones who were in the know.
I’m not being unfair to Gustin Sabayot when I say that he didn’t knock himself out with his diagnoses. He got his ideas from the clouds.
The first thing he did when he stepped out of his house in the morning was to look up at the sky. “Ferdinand,” he’d say, “today it’s going to be rheumatism, one case after another. You want to bet?” He read that in the heavens. He was never very far off, because he had a thorough knowledge of the climate and the human temperament.
“Aha! a bit of hot weather after a cold spell. That calls for calomel, take my word for it. There’s jaundice in the air. The wind has changed … From north to west. From cold to rain … That means two weeks of bronchitis … There’s no point in their even getting up. If I were in charge, I’d make out my prescriptions in bed … After all, Ferdinand, when they come to see us, all they do is gab … For doctors who get paid by the
call there’s some point in it … but for us? … on a monthly salary … what’s the use? … I could treat them without stepping out of the house. Damn pests. I don’t have to see them. They wouldn’t wheeze any more or less. They wouldn’t vomit any more, they wouldn’t be any yellower or redder, or paler, or less idiotic … That’s the way it is and nobody’s going to change it!” That’s how Gustin felt about it, and he was damn right.
“Do you think they’re sick? … They moan … they belch … they stagger … they fester … You want to clear them out of your waiting room? On the double? Even the ones who damn near suffocate every time they cough? … Offer them a free pass to the movies … or a free drink across the street … you’ll see how many you’ve got left … If they come around and bother you, it’s mostly because they’re bored. On the day before a holiday you never see a soul … Mark my words, the trouble with those poor bastards isn’t their health, what they need is something to do with themselves … they want you to entertain them, cheer them up, fascinate them with their belches … their farts … their aches and pains … they want you to find explanations … fevers … rumblings … new and intriguing ailments … They want you to get interested, to expatiate … that’s what you’ve got your diplomas for … Ah, getting a kick out of his death while he’s busy manufacturing it: that’s Man for you, Ferdinand! They cling to their clap, their syphilis, their T.B. They need them. And their oozing bladders, the fire in their rectums. They don’t give a damn. But if you knock yourself out, if you know how to keep them interested, they won’t die until you get there. That’s your reward. They’ll come around to the bitter end.” When the rain slanted down between the chimneys of the power plant, he’d say: “Ferdinand, this is sciatica day … If I don’t get ten cases today I’ll send my parchment back to the dean!” But when the soot came back at us from the east, which is the driest quarter, over the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, he’d crush a smudge against his nose and say: “I’ll be buggered if the lungers don’t start bringing up clots before the night is out. Damn it all, they’ll wake me up a dozen times …”
Death on the Installment Plan Page 2
