ds
locked, and she is murmuring softly:
"Ah, my little rabbit, it is hard to leave you now. Come here, kiss me! What
are you going to do this evening? Tell me the truth, my little one ... I am
sorry that I have such an ugly temper." He kisses her timidly, just like a
little bunny with long pink ears; gives her a little peck on the lips as if
he were nibbling a cabbage leaf. And at the same time his bright round eyes
fall caressingly on her purse which is lying open beside her on the bench.
He is only waiting for the moment when he can graciously give her the slip;
he is itching to get away, to sit down in some quiet cafe on the Rue du
Faubourg-Montmartre.
I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round, frightened eyes of a
rabbit. And I know what a devil's street is the Faubourg Montmartre with its
brass plates and rubber goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex
running through the street like a sewer. To walk from the Rue Lafayette to
the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you
like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole,
implore, beseech, they try it out in German, English, Spanish, they show
you their torn hearts and their busted shoes, and long after you've chopped
the tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out, the
fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils -- it is the odor of
the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is guaranteed only for
a distance of twenty centimeters. One could piss away a whole lifetime in
that little stretch between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar
is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched like vultures
on their high stools and the money they handle has a human stink to it.
There is no equivalent in the Banque de France for the blood money that
passes currency here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that passes
like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves behind it a smoke and
stench. A man who can walk through the Faubourg Montmartre at night without
panting or sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his
lips, a man like that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be
castrated.
Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of an evening
while waiting for his Lucienne? Supposing he does get hungry and buy a
sandwich and a glass of beer, or stop and chat with somebody else's trollop?
You think he ought to be weary of that round night after night? You think it
ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death? You don't think that
a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too,
don't you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the
corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps
he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading
the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps
it isn't so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another
man's breath. Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a
pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised
lips. Bet you, when she squeezes him tight, when she begs for that little
package of love which only he knows how to deliver, bet you he fights like a
thousand devils to pump it up, to wipe out that regiment that has marched
between her legs. Maybe when he takes her body and practises a new tune,
maybe it isn't all passion and curiosity with him, but a fight in the dark,
a fight singlehanded against the army that rushed the gates, the army that
walked over her, trampled her, that left her with such a devouring hunger
that not even a Rudolph Valentine could appease her. When I listen to the
reproaches that are levelled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her
being denigrated or despised because she is cold and mercenary, because she
is too mechanical, or because she's in too great a hurry, or because this or
because that, I say to myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast! Remember
that you're far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corps
has laid siege to her, that she's been laid waste, plundered and pillaged. I
say to myself, listen, bozo, don't begrudge the fifty francs you hand her
because you know her pimp is pissing it away in the Faubourg Montmartre.
It's her money and her pimp. It's blood money. It's money
that'll never be taken out of circulation because there's nothing in the
Banque de Prance to redeem it with.
That's how I think about it often when I'm seated in my little niche
juggling the Havas reports or untangling the cables from Chicago, London,
and Montreal. In between the rubber and silk markets and the Winnipeg
grains there oozes a little of the fizz and sizzle of the Faubourg
Montmartre. When the bonds go weak and spongy and the pivotals balk and the
volatiles effervesce, when the grain market slips and slides and the bulls
commence to roar, when every fucking calamity, every ad, every sport item
and fashion article, every boat arrival, every travelogue, every tag of
gossip has been punctuated, checked, revised, pegged and wrung through the
silver bracelets, when I hear the front page being hammered into whack and
see the frogs dancing around like drunken squibs, I think of Lucienne
sailing down the boulevard with her wings outstretched, a huge silver condor
suspended over the sluggish tide of traffic, a strange bird from the tips
of the Andes with a rose-white belly and a tenacious little knob. Sometimes
I walk home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow her
through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts, through the arcade,
through the fents and slits, the somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the
grill of the Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, the snores and groans, the
green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars, the spangles,
the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings that she brushed with the
tips of her wings.
In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled;
along the beach at Montpamasse the waterlilies bend and break. When the tide
is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the
muck, the Dome looks like a shooting gallery that's been struck by a
cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For about an hour
there is a death-like calm during which the vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the
trees begin to screech. From one end of the boulevard to the other a
demented song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close of
the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The moment has come to
void the last bagful of usine. The day is sneaking in like a leper ...
One of the things to guard against when you work nights is not to break your
schedule; if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's
useless to go to bed at all. This morning, having nothing better to do, I
visited the Jardin des Plantes. Marvellous pelicans here from
Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at you with silly eyes.
Suddenly it began to rain.
Returning to Montpamasse in the bus I noticed a little French woman opposite
me who sat stiff and erect as if she were getting ready to preen herself.
She sat on the edge of the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail.
Marvellous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from her
derriere there sprung open a huge studded fan with long silken
plumes.
At the Cafe de l'Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman with a swollen
stomach tries to interest me in her condition. She would like me to go to a
room with her and while away an hour or two. It is the first time I have
ever been propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted to try it.
As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the authorities she will go
back to her trade, she says. She makes hats. Observing that my interest is
waning she takes my hand and puts it on her abdomen, I feel something
stirring inside. It takes my appetite away.
I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. As
soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the
loose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her
but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away
or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of a
female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded
appetites of the male.
I am speaking naturally of that world, which is peculiar to the big cities,
the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by
the machine -- the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and
collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.
It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery on
the Rue de Seze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn
back again to the proper precincts of the human world. On the threshold of
that big hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from
the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent
asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself
in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation of
being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from whatever place,
position or attitude I take my stance. Lost as when once I sank into the
quick of a budding grove and seated in the dining room of that enormous
world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those
interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight
and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created
I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to
so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are
sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the
negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of
art. Only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate
what is there in the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle
of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood,
flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold
outside the windows. On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a
fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf, fusing
into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her
shadow to the dream and harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain
rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the endless
vista of sea and sky. Two waxen hands lying lifelessly on the bedspread and
along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of
its birth.
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh
which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair
to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its
thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into
hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the
sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams
without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of the flying spray. He
stands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio, of time.
Into what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting gaze? Looking
down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything -- the
Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of the diaspora done
in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like
a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons squirming under
the book-press, seraglios expiring in oceans of dust, music issuing like fire
from the hidden chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the
earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish ... He is a bright sage,
a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to
which the body of a man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He
it is, if any man to-day possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the
human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to
detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been
refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the
minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern;
he announces his discoveries in the metaphysical pigment of space. No
searching for formulae, no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to
create. Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the
core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the
process of dissolution quickens.
More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is
moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows
down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse
sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the foetal
world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying
out and the river-beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a
metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow
ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis
there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the
veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light-waves bend and the sun
bleeds like a broken rectum.
At the very hub of this wheel which is falling apart, is Matisse. And he
will keep on rolling until everything that has gone to make up the wheel has
disintegrated. He has already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe,
over Persia and India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to
himself microscopic particles from Kurd, Beluchistan, Timbuctoo, Somaliland,
Angkor, Tierra del Fuego. The odalisques he has studded with malachite and
jasper, their flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in the
sperm of whales. Wherever a breeze stirs there are breasts as cool as jelly,
white pigeons come to flutter and rut in the ice-blue veins of the
Himalayas.
The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of
reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of
life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function
adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in
America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to
dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the
genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day
is permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged with strangled
embryos.
The world of Matisse is still beautiful in an old-fashioned bedroom way.
There is not a ball-bearing in evidence, nor a boiler-plate, nor a piston,
nor a monkey-wrench. It is the same old world that went gayly to the Bois in
the pastoral days of wine and fornication. I find it soothing and refreshing
to move amongst these creatures with live, breathing pores whose background
is stable and solid as light itself. I feel it poignantly when I walk along
the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the whores rustle beside me, when just to
glance at them causes me to tremble. Is it because they are exotic or
well-nourished? No, it is rare to find a beautiful woman along the Boulevard
de la Madeleine. But in Matisse, in the exploration of his brush, there is the
trembling glitter of a worid which
demands only the presence of the female to crystallize the most fugitive
aspirations. To come upon a woman offering herself outside a urinal, where
there are advertised cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse-races, where the
heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass of walls and roofs, is an
experience that begins where the boundaries of the known world leave off. In
the evening now and then, skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the
phantom odalisques of Matisse fastened to the trees, their tangled manes
drenched with sap. A few feet away, removed by incalculable aeons of time,
lies the prone and mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that
will belch no more. In the dusky corners of cafes are men and women with
hands locked, their loins slather-flecked; nearby stands the garcon with his
apron full of sous, waiting patiently for the entr'acte in order to fall
upon his wife and gouge her. Even as the worid falls apart the Paris that
belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is
steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like hair. On its wobbly
axle the wheel rolls steadily downhill; there are no brakes, no
ball-bearings, no balloon tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the
revolution is intact ...
* * *
Out of a clear sky there comes one day a letter from Boris whom I have not
seen for months and months. It is a strange document and I don't pretend to
understand it all clearly. "What happened between us -- at any rate, as far
as I go -- is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the one point
where I am still alive: my death. By the emotional flow I went through
another immersion. I lived again, alive. No longer by reminiscence, as I do
with others, but alive."
That's how it began. Not a word of greeting, no date, no address. Written in
a thin, pompous scrawl on ruled paper torn out of a blank book. "That is
why, whether you like me or not -- deep down I rather think you hate me -- you
are very close to me. By you I know how I died: I see myself dying again: I
am dying. That is something. More than to be dead simply. That may
be the reason why I am so afraid to see you: you may have played the trick
on me, and died. Things happen so fast nowadays."
I'm reading it over, line by line, standing by the stones. It sounds nutty to
me, all this palaver about life and death and things happening so fast.
Nothing is happening that I can see, except the usual calamities on the front
page. He's been living all by himself for the last six months, tucked away in
a cheap little room -- probably holding telepathic communication with
Cronstadt. He talks about the line falling back, the sector evacuated, and so
on and so forth, as though he were dug into a trench and writing a report to
headquarters. He probably had his frock coat on when he sat down to pen his
missive, and he probably rubbed his hands a few times as he used to do when a
customer was calling to rent the apartment.
"The reason I wanted you to commimt suicide ..." he begins again. At tnat I
burst out laughing. He used to walk up and down with one hand stuck in the
tail-flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borghese, or at Cronstadt's --
wherever there was deck space, as it were -- and reel off this nonsense about
living and dying to his heart's content. I never understood a word of it, I
must confess, but it was a good show and, being a Gentile, I was naturally
interested in what went on in that menagerie of a brain-pan. Sometimes he
would lie on his couch full length, exhausted by the surge of ideas that
swept through his noodle. His feet just grazed the book rack where he kept
his Plato and Spinoza -- he couldn't understand why I had no use for them. I
must say he made them sound interesting, though what it was all about I
hadn't the least idea. Sometimes I would glance at a volume furtively, to
check up on these wild ideas which he imputed to them -- but the connection
was frail, tenuous. He had a language all his own, Boris, that is, when I had
him alone; but when I listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had
plagiarized his wonderful ideas. They talked a sort of higher mathematics,
these two. Nothing of flesh and blood ever crept in; it was weird, ghostly,
ghoulishly abstract. When they got on to the dying business it sounded a
little more concrete: after all, a cleaver or a meat-axe has to have a
handle. I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was the first time in my life
that death had ever seemed fascinating to me -- all these abstract deaths
which involved a bloodless sort of agony. Now and then they would compliment
me on being alive, but in such a way that I felt embarrassed. They made me
feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a sort of atavistic remnant,
a romantic shred, a soulful pithecanthropus erectus. Boris especially
seemed to get a great kick out of touching me: he wanted me to be alive so
that he could die to his heart's content. You would think that all those
millions in the street were nothing but dead cows the way he looked at me and
touched me. But the letter ... I'm forgetting the letter ...
"The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the
Cronstadts', when Moldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then.
Perhaps closer than I shall ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that
some day you'd go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left high and
dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to sustain it. I should never
forgive you for that."
Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that! Myself it's not
clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate, it's clear that I was just
pure idea, an idea that kept itself alive without food. He never attached
much importance, Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with
ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his heart set on
renting the apartment, he wouldn't forget to put a new washer in the toilet.
Anyway, he didn't want me to die on his hands. "You must be life for me to
the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which you can sustain
my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something
so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to.
I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I
speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's
self so intimately."
* * *
You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would
like to know what I was doing -- but no, not a line about the concrete or the
personal, except in this living-dying language, nothing but this little
message from the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and
sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself how it happens that
I attract nothing but crack-brained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics,
psychopaths -- and Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy
Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread.
There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, according to
Boris and Cronstadt. He positively hated me, the little viper -- yet he
couldn't stay away from me. He came round regularly for his little dose of
insults -- it was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it's true, I was
lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to him. And though I
never displayed much sympathy I knew how to be silent when it involved a
meal and a little pin money. After a while, however, seeing what a masochist
he was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then; that was like a
whip for him, it made the grief and agony gush forth with renewed vigor. And
perhaps everything would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it
his duty to protect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that brought up a moral
question. He wanted me to stick to Mlle. Claude for whom, I must admit, I had
a genuine affection. He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her.
Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.
I mention Tania now because she's just got back from Russia -- just a few
days ago. Sylvester remained behind to worm his way into a job. He's given up
literature entirely. He's dedicated himself to the new Utopia. Tania wants me
to go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a new life. We
had a fine drinking bout up in Carl's room the other day, discussing the
possibilities. I wanted to know what I could do for a living back there -- if
I could be a proof-reader, for example. She said I didn't need to worry about
what I would do -- they would find a job for me as long as I was earnest and
sincere. I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.
They don't want to see sad faces, in Russia; they want you to be cheerful,
enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to
me. I wasn't born with this kind of enthusiasm. I didn't let on to her, of
course, but secretly I was praying to be left alone, to go back to my little
niche, and to stay there until the war breaks out. All this hocus-pocus about
Russia disturbed me a little. She got so excited about it, Tania, that we
finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire. Carl was
jumping about like a cockroach. He has just enough Jew in him to lose his
head over an idea like Russia. Nothing would do but to many us off --
immediately. "Hitch up!" he says, "you have nothing to lose!" And then he
pretends to run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one. And while
she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business had gotten so
solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the interval away chewing my ear
off, which made me somewhat grumpy and ill at ease. Anyway, we had to think
about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi on the
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone's throw away from the cemetery, and off
we whizzed. It was just a nice hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and
the wine rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely than
usual. Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin, his face as
red as a beet. He was happy, the poor bastard, thinking what a glorious new
life he would lead on the other side of Europe. And at the same time he felt
a bit wistful, too -- I could see that. He didn't really want to leave Paris,
any more than I did. Paris hadn't been good to him, any more than it had to
me, or to anybody, for that matter, but when you've suffered and endured
things here it's then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls,
you might say, like some lovesick bitch who'd die rather than let you get out
of her hands. That's how it looked to him, I could see that. Rolling over the
Seine he had a big foolish grin on his face and he looked around at the
buildings and the statues as though he were seeing them in a dream. To me it
was like a dream too: I had my hand in Tania's bosom and I was squeezing her
titties with all my might and I noticed the water under the bridge and the
barges and Notre Dame down below, just like the post-cards show it, and I was
thinking drunkenly to myself that's how one gets fucked, but I was sly about
it too and I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for
Russia or heaven or anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon, I was
thinking to myself, and soon we'd be pushing a feed down our bellies and what
could we order as a special treat, some good heavy wine that would drown out
all this Russia business. With a woman like Tania, full of sap and
everything, they don't give a damn what happens to you once they get an idea
in their heads. Let them go far enough and they'll pull the pants off you,
right in the taxi. It was grand though, milling through the traffic, our
faces all smudged with rouge and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us,
especially when we swung into the Rue Laffitte which is just wide enough to
frame the little temple at the end of the street and above it the
Sacre-Coeur, a kind of exotic jumble of architecture, a lucid French idea
that gouges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly
in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn't jar
your nerves.
x x x
With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken talk about Russia,
the walks home at night, and Paris in full summer, life seems to lift its
head a little higher. That's why perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me
seems absolutely cock-eyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o'clock,
to have a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to places I've
never seen before, the swell bars around the Champs-Elysees where the sound
of jazz and baby voices crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany
woodwork. Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy, sappy strains
pursue you, come floating into the cabinet through the ventilators and make
life all soft soap and iridescent bubbles. And whether it's because
Sylvester is away and she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly
tries to behave like an angel. "You treated me lousy just before I went
away," she says to me one day. "Why did you want to act that way? I never
did anything to hurt you, did I?" We were getting sentimental, what with the
soft lights and that creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place. It
was getting near time to go to work and we hadn't eaten yet. The stubs were
lying there in front of us -- six francs, four-fifty, seven francs,
two-fifty -- I was counting them up mechanically and wondering too at the same
time if I would like it better being a bartender. Often like that, when she
was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love, and all that
crap, I'd get to thinking about the most irrelevant things, about shining
shoes or being a lavatory attendant, particularly I suppose because it was
so cosy in these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to me
that I'd be stone sober and perhaps old and bent ... no, I imagined always
that the future, however modest, would be in just this sort of ambiance,
with the same tunes playing through my head and the glasses clinking and
behind every shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take the
stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.
The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to the swell bars
with her like that. It was hard to leave her, certainly. I used to lead her
around to the porch of a church near the office and standing there in the
dark we'd take a last embrace, she whispering to me "Jesus, what am I going
to do now?" She wanted me to quit the job so as I could make love night and
day; she didn't even care about Russia any more, just so long as we were
together. But the moment I left her my head cleared. It was another kind of
music, not so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears when I
pushed through the swinging door. And another kind of perfume, not just a
yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of sweat and patchouli that seemed to come
from the machines. Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was like
dropping suddenly to a low altitude. Generally I made a beeline for the
toilet -- that braced me up rather. It was a little cooler there, or else the
sound of water running made it seem so. It was always a cold douche, the
toilet. It was real. Before you got inside you had to pass a line of
Frenchmen peeling off their clothes. Ugh! but they stank, those devils! And
they were well paid for it, too. But there they were, stripped down, some in
long underwear, some with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in
their veins. Inside the toilet you could take an inventory of their idle
thoughts. The walls were crowded with sketches and epithets, all of them
jocosely obscene, easy to understand, and on the whole rather jolly and
sympathetic. It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I
suppose it was worth while doing it even looking at it from just the
psychological viewpoint. Sometimes, as I stood there taking a leak, I
wondered what an impression it would make on those swell dames whom I
observed passing in and out of the beautiful lavatories on the
Champs-Elysees. I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they
could see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no doubt,
everything was gauze and velvet -- or they made you think so with the fine
scents they gave out, swishing past you. Some of them hadn't always been such
fine ladies either; some of them swished up and down like that just to
advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone with themselves,
when they talked out loud in the privacy of their boudoirs, maybe some
strange things fell out of their mouths too; because in that world, just as
in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth,
sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put
covers over the can.
As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me.
Once in a while I'd get too much of a skinful and I'd have to stick my
finger down my throat -- because it's hard to read proof when you're not all
there. It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to
epitomize Nietzche's philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're
drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proof-reading department.
Dates, fractions, semi-colons -- these are the things that count. And these
are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all
ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders, and if it weren't that I had
learned how to kiss the boss's ass, I would have been fired, that's certain.
I even got a letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never even
met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic phrases about my more
than ordinary intelligence, he hinted pretty plainly that I'd better learn
my place and toe the mark or there'd be what's what to pay. Frankly, that
scared the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic word in
conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap all night. I played the
high-grade moron, which is what they wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of
flatter the boss, I'd go up to him and ask him politely what such and such a
word might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and time-table,
that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break -- and he made
his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running the show -- you could
never trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job. My only
regret was that I knew too much. It leaked out now and then, despite all the
precautions I took. If I happened to come to work with a book under my arm
this boss of ours would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him
venomous. But I never did anything intentionally to displease him; I liked
the job too well to put a noose around my neck. Just the same it's hard to
talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself,
even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew god-damn well, the boss,
that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yams; and yet,
explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams
and fill me full of dates and historical events. It was his way of taking
revenge, I suppose.
The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis. As soon as I hit the
air I became extravagant. It wouldn't matter what the subject of
conversation happened to be, as we started back to Montparnasse in the early
morning, I'd soon turn the fire-hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out
my perverted dreams. I liked best talking about those things which none of
us knew anything about. I had cultivated a mild sort of insanity, echolalia,
I think it's called. All the tag-ends of a night's proofing danced on the
tip of my tongue. Dalmatia -- I had held copy of an ad for that
beautiful jewelled resort. All right, Dalmatia. You take a train and
in the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are bursting their
skins. I could reel it off about Dalmatia from the grand boulevard to
Cardinal Mazarin's palace, further, if I chose to. I don't even know where
it is on the map, and I don't want to know ever, but at three in the morning
with all that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with sweat and
patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing through the wringer and those
beer yams that I was braced for, little things like geography, costume,
speech, architecture don't mean a god-damn thing. Dalmatia belongs to a
certain hour of the night when those high goings are snuffed out and the
court of the Louvre seems so wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like
weeping for no reason at all, just because it's so beautifully silent, so
empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs rolling the
dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on my throbbing nerves like
a cold knife-blade I could experience the most wonderful sensations of
voyage. And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the
globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than
a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious
attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing, nothing at all. Now and
then, it's true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura
of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into
a great cloud-like form that blotted out the past. I couldn't allow myself
to think about her very
long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had
become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about
her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my
contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my
wretched past.
For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my
mind -- her. Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to
her we would all be Jesus Christs to-day. Day and night I thought of her,
even when I was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of
things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all,
suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a
few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where
we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted
spot, like the Place de l'Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mournful
streets off the Mosque or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil
which at ten o'clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes
one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of
human drama. When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great
void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep,
black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or
sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing
back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
How many thousand times, in walking through the streets at night, have I
wondered if the day would ever come again when she would be at my side: all
those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked
at them so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must have
become a part of the very buildings and statues, they must be saturated with
my anguish. I could not help but reflect also that when we had walked side
by side through these mournful, dingy streets now so saturated with my dream
and longing, she had observed nothing, felt nothing: they were like any
other streets to her, a little more sordid perhaps, and that is all. She
wouldn't remember that at a certain corner I had
stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces,
I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain
there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole
Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.
Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of unusual anguish and
desolation, certain things were revealed to me with poignant clarity.
Whether it was that I had so often walked this street in bitterness and
despair or whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had dropped
one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do not know. "Why don't you
show me that Paris," she said, "that you have written about?" One thing I
know, that at the recollection of these words I suddenly realized the
impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had gotten to
know, the Paris whose arrondissements are undefined, a Paris that has
never existed except by virtue of my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a
huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to
which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best
of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be
experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that
grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away
by it.
Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these reflections stirring in my
brain, I recalled another strange item out of the past, out of that
guide-book whose leaves she had asked me to turn but which, because the
covers were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open. For no reason at
all -- because at the moment my thoughts were occupied with Salavin in whose
sacred precincts I was now meandering -- for no reason at all, I say, there
came to mind the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which I
passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and
asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied. Up to that time nothing very
terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly
possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in
fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris, a
circumstance which was not so much depressing as bewildering, for
wherever I have roamed in this world the easiest thing for me to discover
has been a friend. But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to me
yet. One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even
without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris -- I
discovered that! --on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment -- perhaps
the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the
end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and sentiment
enough to spare to peep into other people's lives, to dally with the dead
stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between
the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. As I was
leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips,
as though I were saying to myself "Not yet, the Pension Orfila!
Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman in Paris discovers
sooner or later -- that there are no ready-made infernos for the tormented.
It seems to me I understand a little better now why she took such huge
delight in reading Strindberg. I can see her looking up from her book after
reading a delicious passage and, with tears of laughter in her eyes,
saying to me: "You're just as mad as he was ... you want to be
punished!" What a delight that must be to the sadist when she discovers her
own proper masochist! When she bites herself, as it were, to test the
sharpness of her teeth. In those days, when I first knew her, she was
saturated with Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he revelled
in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had
endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had
brought us together. We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was
I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could
not recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the
carnival was over and I had been picked clean ...
After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to the library and
there, after bathing in the Ganges and pondering over the signs of the
zodiac, I began to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg
had so mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to
grow clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which the poet
makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to
re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth,
the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle
to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun-god
cast up on an alien shore. It was no mystery to me any longer why he and
others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to
Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the
hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here,
at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most
impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here
that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new
meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he
is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold,
indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade
away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughter-house that it is.
The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down
tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing. The air is chill
and stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue
save death. A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold.
An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more splendorous than
Nineveh. The very navel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering
idiot, one crawls back on hands and knees. And like a cork that has drifted
finally to the dead center of the ocean, one floats here in the scum and
wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a passing Columbus.
The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the
charnel-house to which the stinking wombs confide their bloody packages of
flesh and bone.
The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamor of the
streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become a
straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that blows. One passes
along a street on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for sale, one is moved to
tears. While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery, stands a miserable hut
that calls itself "Hotel du Tombeau des Lapins." That makes one laugh, laugh
fit to die. Until one notices that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits,
dogs, lice, emperors, cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse-knackers, and so
on. And almost every other one is an "Hotel de l'Avenir." Which makes one
more hysterical still. So many hotels of the future! No hotels in the past
participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis. Everything is hoary,
grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen with the future, like a gumboil.
Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place
Violet, the colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only dwarfs
and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are
belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears
to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat
by the roadside.
Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyples? Because that day a
woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the
slaughter-house, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut
of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More even than the sight of
those whimpering curs that were being sold on the Rue Brancion, because it
was not the dogs which filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing,
those rusty spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful life. In
the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir
Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des Perichaux, I had noticed here
and there signs of blood. Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized
omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I
wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments
of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes,
taunting me with the direst forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled,
the muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the
very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world like a dirty little
mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be
so. Each one is travelling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with
good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles
toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to
escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their
cries are unheard.
My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and
for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad,
bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure,
wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night
after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly
recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street,
terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me
and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave
her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on
the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the
train that was bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just as
she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was
that same, sad, incrustable smile on her face, the last-minute look which is
intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a
vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and
then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and
of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again
with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural,
which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow
of the viaduct, who reach out for her, who cling to her desperately and
there is that same inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have
clamped down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no
matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is
an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk
from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.
It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets, it is
that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly
we respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a
sickening panic. It is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish
twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to
their strangling grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear
like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty
sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written
into the human physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead
I suddenly see inscribed "Impasse Satan." That which makes me shudder when
at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays
and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis."
In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with
"Defendez-vous centre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there
are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No
matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis.
It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has
eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.
* * *
I think it was the fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass
again. Not a word of warning. One of the big mucky-mucks from the other side
of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders
and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his
trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz.
After paying what little debts I had accumulated among the linotype
operators and a good-will token at the bistrot across the way, in
order to preserve my credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my
final pay. I had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be
leaving; I didn't tell him why because he'd have been worried about his
measly two hundred francs.
"What'll you do if you lose your job?" That was the phrase that rung in my
ears continually. Ca y est maintenant! Ausgespielt! Nothing to
do but get down into the street again, walk, hang around, sit on benches,
kill time. By now, of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a
while I could pretend that I was still working on the paper. That would make
it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner. It was Summer time and
the tourists were pouring in. I had schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them.
"What'll you do ... ?" Well, I wouldn't starve, that's one thing. If I
should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from
falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul's and
have a square meal every evening; he wouldn't know whether I was working or
not. The main thing is to eat. Trust to Providence for the rest!
Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded like a little
dough. And I cultivated a whole new set of acquaintances -- bores whom I had
sedulously
avoided heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little money,
Guggenheim prize men, etc. It's not hard to make friends when you squat on a
terrasse twelve hours a day. You get to know every sot in
Montparnasse. They cling to you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer
them but your ears.
Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a new phrase for me:
"What if your wife should arrive now?" Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed,
instead of one. I'd have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn't lost her
good looks, I'd probably do better in double harness than alone: the world
never permits a good-looking woman to starve. Tania I couldn't depend on to
do much for me; she was sending money to Sylvester. I had thought at first
that she might let me share her room, but she was afraid of compromising
herself; besides, she had to be nice to her boss.
The first people to turn to when you're down and out are the Jews. I had
three of them on my hands almost at once. Sympathetic souls. One of them was
a retired fur merchant who had an itch to see his name in the papers;
he proposed that I write a series of articles under his name for a Jewish
daily in New York. I had to scout around the Dome and the Coupole searching
for prominent Jews. The first man I picked on was a celebrated
mathematician; he couldn't speak a word of English. I had to write about the
theory of shock from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to
describe the movements of the astral bodies and demolish the Einsteinian
conception at the same time. All for twenty-five francs. When I saw my
articles in the newspaper I couldn't read them; but they looked impressive,
just the same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant attached.
I did a lot of pseudonymous writing during this period. When the big new
whorehouse opened up on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, I got a little
rake-off, for writing the pamphlets. That is to say, a bottle of champagne
and a free fuck in one of the Egyptian rooms. If I succeeded in bringing a
client I was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in the old days.
One night I brought Van Norden; he was going to let me earn a little money
by enjoying himself upstairs. But when the Madame learned
that he was a newspaper man she wouldn't hear of taking money from him; it
was a bottle of champagne again and a free fuck. I got nothing out of it. As
a matter of fact, I had to write the story for him because he couldn't think
how to get round the subject without mentioning the kind of place it was.
One thing after another like that. I was getting fucked good and proper.
The worst job of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a deaf and dumb
psychologist. A treatise on the care of crippled children. My head was full
of diseases and braces and work-benches and fresh air theories; it took
about six weeks off and on, and then, to rub it in, I had to
proof-read the god-damned thing. It was in French, such a French as I've
never in my life seen or heard. But it brought me in a good breakfast every
day, an American breakfast, with orange juice, oatmeal, cream, coffee, now
and then, ham and eggs for a change. It was the only period of my Paris
days that I ever indulged in a decent breakfast, thanks to the crippled
children of Rockaway Beach, the East Side, and all the coves and inlets
bordering on these sore points.
Then one day I fell in with a photographer; he was making a collection of
the slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate in Munich. He wanted to know
if I would pose for him with my pants down, and in other ways. I thought of
those skinny little runts, who look like bell-hops and messenger boys, that
one sees on pornographic post-cards in little book-shop windows
occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit the Rue de la Lune and
other malodorous quarters of the city. I didn't like very much the idea of
advertising my physog in the company of these elite. But, since I was
assured that the photographs were for a strictly private collection, and
since it was destined for Munich, I gave my consent. When you're not in your
home town you can permit yourself little liberties, particularly for such a
worthy motive as earning your daily bread. After all, I hadn't been so
squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There were nights when I
was so damned desperate, back there, that I had to go out right in my own
neighborhood and panhandle.
We didn't go to the show places familiar to the tourists,
but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more congenial, where we
could play a game of cards in the afternoon before getting down to work. He
was a good companion, the photographer. He knew the city inside out, the
walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often, and the days of the
Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the Jews during the reign of the Black
Death. Interesting subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the
things he was doing. He had ideas for scenarios too, astounding ideas, but
nobody had the courage to execute them. The sight of a horse split-open like
a saloon door, would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or
Rembrandt; from the slaughter-house at Villette he would jump into a cab and
rush me to the Trocadero Museum, in order to point out a skull or a mummy
that had fascinated him. We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the
20th arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places were
lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale, Place des Peupliers,
Place Contrescarpe, Place Paul-Verlaine. Many of these places were already
familiar to me, but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the
rare flavor of his conversation. If today I should happen to stroll down
the Rue du Chateau-des-Renders, for example, inhaling the fetid stench of
the hospital beds with which the 13th arrondissement reeks, my
nostrils would undoubtedly expand with pleasure, because, compounded with
that odor of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odors of our
imaginative voyages through the charnel house of Europe which the Black
Death had created.
Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual named Kruger, who was
a sculptor and painter. Kruger took a shine to me for some reason or other;
it was impossible to get away from him once he discovered that I was willing
to listen to his "esoteric" ideas. There are people in this world for whom
the word "esoteric" seems to act as a divine ichor. Like "settled" for Herr
Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain. Kruger was one of those saints who
have gone wrong, a masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness,
rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would knock a man's teeth
down his throat without a qualm. He seemed to think I was ripe to move on to
another plane, "a higher plane," as he put it. I was ready to move on
to any plane he designated, provided that one didn't eat less or drink less.
He chewed my head off about the "threadsoul," the "causal body," "ablation,"
the Upanishads, Plodnus, Krishnamurti, "the Karmic vestiture of the soul,"
"the nirvanic consciousness," all that flapdoodle which blows out of the East
like a breath from the plague. Sometimes he would go into a trance and talk
about his previous incarnations, how he imagined them to be, at least. Or he
would relate his dreams which, so far as I could see, were thoroughly
insipid, prosaic, hardly worth even the attention of a Freudian, but, for
him, there were vast esoteric marvels hidden in their depths which I had to
aid him to decipher. He had turned himself inside out, like a coat whose nap
is worn off.
Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my way into his heart.
I had him at such a point that he would come running after me, in the street,
to inquire if he could lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me together in
order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like a pear that
is ripening on the tree. Now and then I had relapses and I would confess my
need for more earthly nourishment -- a visit to the Sphinx or the Rue St.
Apolline where I knew he repaired in weak moments when the demands of the
flesh had become too vehement.
As a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil. He was a good
housekeeper, that I'll say for him. And an economical one to boot. Nothing
went to waste, not even the paper that meat was wrapped in. Friday nights he
threw open his studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to
drink and good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything left over I
would come round the next day to polish it off.
Back of the Bal Bullier was another studio I got into the habit of
frequenting -- the studio of Mark Swift. If he was not a genius he was
certainly an eccentric, this caustic Irishman. He had for a model a Jewess
whom he had been living with for years; he was now tired of her and was
searching for a pretext to get rid of her. But as he had eaten up me dowry
which she had originally brought with her, he was puzzled as to how to
disembarrass himself of her without making restitution. The simplest thing
was to so antagonize her that she would choose starvation rather than support
his cruelties.
She was rather a fine person, his mistress; the worst that one could say
against her was that she had lost her shape, and her ability to
support him any longer. She was a painter herself and, among those who
professed to know, it was said that she had far more talent than he. But no
matter how miserable he made life for her she was just; she would never allow
anyone to say that he was not a great painter. It was because he really has
genius, she said, that he was such a rotten individual. One never saw her
canvases on the wall -- only his. Her things were stuck away in the kitchen.
Once it happened, in my presence, that someone insisted on seeing her work.
The result was painful. "You see this figure," said Swift, pointing to one of
her canvases with his big foot. "The man standing in the doorway there is
just about to go out for a leak. He won't be able to find his way back
because his head is on wrong ... Now take that nude over there ... It was all
right until she started to paint the cunt. I don't know what she was thinking
about, but she made it so big that her brush slipped and she couldn't get it
out again."
By way of showing us what a nude ought to be like he hauls out a huge canvas
which he had recently completed. It was a picture of her, a splendid
piece of vengeance inspired by a guilty conscience. The work of a madman --
vicious, petty, malign, brilliant. You had the feeling that he had spied on
her through the keyhole, that he had caught her in an off moment, when she
was picking her nose absent-mindedly, or scratching her ass. She sat there
on the horsehair sofa, in a room without ventilation, an enormous room
without a window; it might as well have been the anterior lobe of the
pineal gland. Back of her ran the zigzag stairs leading to the balcony; they
were covered with a bilious-green carpet, such a green as could only emanate
from a universe that had been pooped out. The most prominent thing was her
buttocks, which were lop-sided and full of scabs; she seemed to have slightly
raised her ass from the sofa, as if to let a loud fart. Her face he had
idealized: it looked sweet and virginal, pure as a cough-drop. But her bosom
was distended, swollen with sewer-gas; she seemed
to be swimming in a menstrual sea, an enlarged foetus with the dull, syrupy
look of an angel.
Nevertheless one couldn't help but like him. He was an indefatigable worker,
a man who hadn't a single thought in his head but paint. And cunning as a
lynx withal. It was he who put it into my head to cultivate the friendship
of Fillmore, a young man in the diplomatic service who had found his way
into the little group that surrounded Kruger and Swift. "Let him help you,"
he said. "He doesn't know what to do with his money."
When one spends what he has on himself, when one has a thoroughly good time
with his own money, people are apt to say "he doesn't know what to do with
his money." For my part, I don't see any better use to which one can put
money. About such individuals one can't say that they're generous or stingy.
They put money into circulation -- that's the principal thing. Fillmore knew
that his days in France were limited; he was determined to enjoy them. And
as one always enjoys himself better in the company of a friend it was only
natural that he should turn to one like myself, who had plenty of time on
his hands, for that companionship which he needed. People said he was a
bore, and so he was, I suppose, but when you're in need of your food you can
put up with worse things than being bored. After all, despite the fact that
he talked incessantly, and usually about himself or the authors whom he
admired slavishly -- such birds as Anatole France and Joseph Conrad -- he
nevertheless made my nights interesting in other ways. He liked to dance, he
liked good wines, and he liked women. That he liked Byron also, and Victor
Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few years out of college and he had
plenty of time ahead of him to be cured of such tastes. What he had that I
liked was a sense of adventure.
We got even better acquainted, more intimate, I might say, due to a peculiar
incident that occurred during my brief sojourn with Kruger. It happened just
after the arrival of Collins, a sailor whom Fillmore had got to know on the
way over from America. The three of us used to meet regularly on the
terrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner. It was always
Pernod, a drink which put Collins in good humor and provided a base, as it
were,
for the wine and beer and fines, etc., which had to be guzzled
afterwards. All during Collins's stay in Paris I lived like a duke; nothing
but fowl and good vintages and desserts that I hadn't even heard of before.
A month of this regimen and I should have been obliged to go to Baden-Baden
or Vichy or Aix-les-Bains. Meanwhile Kruger was putting me up at his studio.
I was getting to be a nuisance because I never showed up before three a.m.
and it was difficult to rout me out of bed before noon. Overtly Kruger never
uttered a word of reproach but his manner indicated plainly enough that I
was becoming a bum.
One day I was taken ill. The rich diet was taking effect upon me. I don't
know what ailed me, but I couldn't get out of bed. I had lost all my
stamina, and with it whatever courage I possessed. Kruger had to look after
me, had to make broths for me, and so on. It was a trying period for him,
more particularly because he was just on the verge of giving an important
exhibition at his studio, a private showing to some wealthy connoisseurs
from whom he was expecting aid. The cot on which I lay was in the studio;
there was no other room to put me in.
The morning of the day he was to give his exhibition, Kruger awoke
thoroughly disgruntled. If I had been able to stand on my feet I know he
would have given me a clout in the jaw and kicked me out. But I was
prostrate, and weak as a cat. He tried to coax me out of bed, with the idea
of locking me up in the kitchen upon the arrival of his visitors. I realized
that I was making a mess of it for him. People can't look at pictures and
statues with enthusiasm when a man is dying before their eyes. Kruger
honestly thought I was dying. So did I. That's why, despite my feeling of
guilt, I couldn't muster any enthusiasm when he proposed calling for the
ambulance and having me shipped to the American Hospital. I wanted to die
there, comfortably, right in the studio; I didn't want to be urged to get up
and find a better place to die in. I didn't care where I died, really, so
long as it wasn't necessary to get up.
When he heard me talk this way Kruger became alarmed. Worse than having a
sick man in his studio should the visitors arrive, was to have a dead man.
That would completely ruin his prospects, slim as they were. He didn't
put it that way to me, of course, but I could see from his agitation that
that was what worried him. And that made me stubborn. I refused to let him
call the hospital. I refused to let him call a doctor. I refused everything.
He got so angry with me finally that, despite my protestations, he began to
dress me. I was too weak to resist. All I could do was to murmur
weakly -- "you bastard, you!" Though it was warm outdoors I was shivering like
a dog. -- After he had completely dressed me he flung an overcoat over me and
slipped outside to telephone. "I won't go! I won't go!" I kept saying but he
simply slammed the door on me. He came back in a few minutes and, without
addressing a word to me, busied himself about the studio. Last minute
preparations. In a little while there was a knock on the door. It was
Fillmore. Collins was waiting downstairs, he informed me.
The two of them, Fillmore and Kruger, slipped their arms under me and
hoisted me to my feet. As they dragged me to the elevator Kruger softened
up. "It's for your own good," he said. "And besides, it wouldn't be fair to
me. You know what a struggle I've had all these years. You ought to think
about me too." He was actually on the point of tears.
Wretched and miserable as I felt, his words almost made me smile. He was
considerably older than I, and even though he was a rotten painter, a rotten
artist all the way through, he deserved a break -- at least once in a
lifetime.
"I don't hold it against you," I muttered. "I understand how it is."
"You know I always liked you," he responded. "When you get better you can
come back here again ... you can stay as long as you like."
"Sure, I know ... I'm not going to croak yet," I managed to get out.
Somehow, when I saw Collins down below my spirits revived. If ever any one
seemed to be thoroughly alive, healthy, joyous, magnanimous, it was he. He
picked me up as if I were a doll and laid me out on the seat of the cab --
gently too, which I appreciated after the way Kruger had manhandled me.
When we drove up to the hotel -- the hotel that Collins was stopping at --
there was a bit of a discussion with the proprietor, during which I lay
stretched out on the sofa in the bureau. I could hear Collins saying to the
patron that it was nothing ... just a little breakdown ... be all
right in a few days. I saw him put a crisp bill in the man's hands and then,
turning swiftly and lithely, he came back to where I was and said: "Come on,
buck up! Don't let him think you're croaking." And with that, he yanked me to
my feet and, bracing me with one arm, escorted me to the elevator.
Don't let him think you're croaking! Obviously it was bad taste to
die on people's hands. One should die in the bosom of his family, in
private, as it were. His words were encouraging. I began to see it all as a
bad joke. Upstairs, with the door closed, they undressed me and put me
between the sheets. "You can't die now, god-damn it!" said Collins warmly.
"You'll put me in a hole ... Besides, what the hell's the matter with you?
Can't stand good living? Keep your chin up! You'll be eating a porterhouse
steak in a day or two. You think you're ill! Wait, by Jesus until you get a
dose of syphilis! That's something to make you worry ..." And he began to
relate, in a humorous way, his trip down the Yangtsze-Kaing, with hair
falling out and teeth rotting away. In the feeble state that I was in, the
yam that he spun had an extraordinarily soothing effect upon me. It took me
completely out of myself. He had guts, this guy. Perhaps he put it on a bit
thick, for my benefit, but I wasn't listening to him critically at the
moment. I was all ears and eyes. I saw the dirty yellow mouth of the river,
the lights going up at Hankow, the sea of yellow faces, the sampans shooting
down through the gorges and the rapids flaming with the sulphurous breath of
the dragon. What a story! The coolies swarming around the boat each day,
dredging for the garbage that was flung overboard, Tom Slattery rising up on
his death-bed to take a last look at the lights of Hankow, the beautiful
Eurasian who lay in a dark room and filled his veins with poison, the
monotony of blue jackets and yellow faces, millions and millions of them
hollowed out by famine, ravaged by disease, subsisting on rats and dogs and
roots, chewing the grass off the earth, devouring their own children. It was
hard to imagine that this man's body had once been a mass of sores, that he
had been shunned like a leper; his voice was so quiet and gentle, it was as
though his spirit had been cleansed by all the suffering he had endured. As
he reached for his drink his face grew more and more soft and his words
actually seemed to caress me. And all the while China hanging over us like
Fate itself. A China rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur,
yet preserving to the very end the glamor, the enchantment, the mystery, the
cruelty of her hoary legends.
I could no longer follow his story; my mind had slipped back to a Fourth of
July when I bought my first package of firecrackers and with it the long
pieces of punk which break so easily, the punk that you blow on to get a
good red glow, the punk whose smell sticks to your fingers for days and
makes you dream of strange things. The Fourth of July the streets are
littered with bright red paper stamped with black and gold figures and
everywhere there are tiny firecrackers which have the most curious
intestines; packages and packages of them, all strung together by their
thin, flat, little gutstrings, the color of human brains. All day long there
is the smell of powder and punk and the gold dust from the bright red
wrappers sticks to your fingers. One never thinks of China, but it is there
all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and
long afterwards, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells
like, you wake up one day with gold-leaf choking you and the broken pieces
of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a
nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your
blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a
fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old,
which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in
everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it
with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick
to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.
A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation from Collins who had
returned to Le Havre, Fillmore and I boarded the train one morning, prepared
to spend the week-end with him. It was the first time I had been outside of
Paris since my arrival here. We were in fine fettle, drinking Anjou all the
way to the coast. Collins had given us the address of a bar where we were to
meet; it was a place called Jimmie's Bar, which everyone in Le Havre was
supposed to know.
We got into an open barouche at the station and started on a brisk trot for
the rendez-vous; there was still a half bottle of Anjou left which we
polished off as we rode along. Le Havre looked gay, sunny; the air was
bracing, with that strong salty tang which almost made me homesick for New
York. There were masts and hulls cropping up everywhere, bright bits of
bunting, big open squares and high-ceilinged cafes such as one only sees in
the provinces. A fine impression immediately; the city was welcoming us with
open arms.
Before we ever reached the bar we saw Collins coming down the street on a
trot, heading for the station, no doubt, and a little late as usual.
Fillmore immediately suggested a Pernod; we were all slapping each other on
the back, laughing and spitting, drunk already from the sunshine and the
salt sea air. Collins seemed undecided about the Pernod at first. He had a
little dose of clap, he informed us. Nothing very serious -- "a strain" most
likely. He showed us a bottle he had in his pocket -- "Venetienne" it was
called, if I remember rightly. The sailors' remedy for clap.
We stopped off at a restaurant to have a little snack before repairing to
Jimmie's place. It was a huge tavern with big, smoky rafters and tables
creaking with food. We drank copiously of the wines that Collins
recommended. Then we sat down on a terrasse and had coffee and
liqueurs. Collins was talking about the Baron de Charlus, a man after his
own heart, he said. For almost a year now he had been staying at Le Havre,
going through the money that he had accumulated during his bootlegging days.
His tastes were simple -- food, drink, women and books. And a private bath!
That he insisted on.
We were still talking about the Baron de Charlus when we arrived at Jimmie's
Bar. It was late in the afternoon and the place was just beginning to fill
up. Jimmie was there, his face red as a beet, and beside him was his
spouse, a fine, buxom Frenchwoman with glittering eyes. We were given a
marvellous reception all around. There were Pernods in front of us again,
the gramophone was shrieking, people were jabbering away in English and
French and Dutch and Norwegian and Spanish, and Jimmie and his wife, both of
them looking very brisk and dapper, were slapping and kissing each other
heartily and raising their glasses and clinking them -- altogether such a
bubble and blabber of merriment that you felt like pulling off your clothes
and doing a war dance. The women at the bar had gathered around like flies.
If we were friends of Collins that meant we were rich. It didn't matter that
we had come in our old clothes; all Anglais dressed like that. I
hadn't a sou in my pocket, which didn't matter, of course, since I was the
guest of honor. Nevertheless I felt somewhat embarrassed with two
stunning-looking whores hanging on my arms waiting for me to order
something. I decided to take the bull by the horns. You couldn't tell any
more which drinks were on the house and which were to be paid for. I had to
be a gentleman, even if I didn't have a sou in my pocket.
Yvette -- that was Jimmie's wife -- was extraordinarily gracious and friendly
with us. She was preparing a little spread in our honor. It would take a
little while yet. We were not to get too drunk -- she wanted us to
enjoy the meal. The gramophone was going like wild and Fillmore had begun to
dance with a beautiful mulatto who had on a tight velvet dress that revealed
all her charms. Collins slipped over to my side and whispered a few words
about the girl at my side. "The madame will invite her to dinner,"
he said, "if you'd like to have her." She was an ex-whore who owned a
beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. The mistress of a sea captain
now. He was away and there was nothing to fear. "If she likes you she'll
invite you to stay with her," he added.
That was enough for me. I turned at once to Marcelle and began to flatter the
ass off her. We stood at the corner of the bar, pretending to dance, and
mauled each other ferociously. Jimmie gave me a big horse-wink and nodded his
head approvingly. She was a lascivious bitch, this Marcelle, and pleasant at
the same time. She soon got rid of the other girl, I noticed, and then we
settled down for a long and intimate conversation which was interrupted
unfortunately by the announcement that dinner was ready.
There were about twenty of us at the table, and Marcelle and I were placed
at one end opposite Jimmie and his wife. It began with the popping of
champagne corks and was quickly followed by drunken speeches, during the
course of which Marcelle and I played with each other under the table. When
it came my turn to stand up and deliver a few words I had to hold the napkin
in front of me. It was painful and exhilarating at the same time. I had to
cut the speech very short because Marcelle was tickling me in the crotch all
the while.
The dinner lasted until almost midnight. I was looking forward to spending
the night with Marcelle in that beautiful home up on the cliff. But it was
not to be. Collins had planned to show us about and I couldn't very well
refuse. "Don't worry about her," he said. "You'll have a bellyful of it
before you leave. Tell her to wait here for you until we get back."
She was a bit peeved at this, Marcelle, but when we informed her that we
had several days ahead of us she brightened up. When we got outdoors
Fillmore very solemnly took us by the arm and said he had a little
confession to make. He looked pale and worried.
"Well, what is it?" said Collins cheerfully. "Spit it out!"
Fillmore couldn't spit it out like that, all at once. He hemmed and hawed
and finally he blurted out -- "Well, when I went to the closet just a minute
ago I noticed something ..."
"Then you've got it!" said Collins triumphantly, and with that he flourishes
the bottle of "Venetienne."
"Don't go to a doctor," he added venomously.
"They'll bleed you to death, the greedy bastards. And don't stop drinking
either. That's all hooey. Take this twice a day ... shake it well before
using. And nothing's worse than worry, do you understand? Come on now. I'll
give you a syringe and some permanganate when we get back."
And so we started out into the night, down towards the waterfront where there
was the sound of music and shouts and drunken oaths, Collins talking quietly
all the while about this and that, about a boy he had fallen in love with,
and the devil's time he had to get out of the scrape when the parents got
wise to it. From that he switched back to the Baron de Charlus and then to
Kurtz who had gone up the river and got lost. His favorite theme. I liked the
way Collins moved against this background of literature continuously; it was
like a millionaire who never stepped out of his Rolls Royce. There was no
intermediate realm for him between reality and ideas. When we entered the
whorehouse on the Quai Voltaire, after he had flung himself on the divan and
rung for girls and for drinks, he was still paddling up the river with Kurtz,
and only when the girls had flopped on the bed beside him and stuffed his
mouth with kisses did he cease his divagations. Then, as if he had suddenly
realized where he was, he turned to the old mother who ran the place and gave
her an eloquent spiel about his two friends who had come down from Paris
expressly to see the joint. There were about half a dozen girls in the room,
all naked and all beautiful to look at, I must say. They hopped about like
birds while the three of us tried to maintain a conversation with the
grandmother. Finally the latter excused herself and told us to make ourselves
at home. I was altogether taken in by her, so sweet and amiable she was, so
thoroughly gentle and maternal. And what manners! If she had been a little
younger I would have made overtures to her. Certainly you would not have
thought that we were in a "den of vice," as it is called.
Anyway we stayed there an hour or so, and as I was the only one in condition
to enjoy the privileges of the house, Collins and Fillmore remained
downstairs chattering with the girls. When I returned I found the two of
them stretched out on the bed; the girls had formed a semi-circle about the
bed and were singing with the most angelic voices the chorus of Roses in
Picardy. We were sentimentally depressed when we left the house --
Fillmore particularly. Collins swiftly steered us to a rough joint which was
packed with drunken sailors on shore leave and there we sat awhile enjoying
the homosexual rout that was in full swing. When we sallied out we had to
pass through the red-light district where there were more grandmothers with
shawls about their necks sitting
on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding pleasantly to the
passersby. All such good-looking, kindly souls, as if they were keeping
guard over a nursery. Little groups of sailors came swinging along and
pushed their way noisily inside the gaudy joints. Sex everywhere: it was
slopping over, a neap-tide that swept the props from under the city. We
piddled along at the edge of the basin where everything was jumbled and
tangled; you had the impression that all these ships, these trawls and
yachts and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a violent storm.
In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had happened that it seemed
as if we had been in Le Havre a month or more. We were planning to leave
early Monday morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job. We spent Sunday
drinking and carousing, clap or no clap. That afternoon Collins confided to
us that he was thinking of returning to his ranch in Idaho; he hadn't been
home for eight years and he wanted to have a look at the mountains again
before making another voyage East. We were sitting in a whorehouse at the
time, waiting for a girl to appear; he had promised to slip her some
cocaine. He was fed up with Le Havre, he told us. Too many vultures hanging
around his neck. Besides, Jimmie's wife had fallen in love with him and she
was making things hot for him with her jealous fits. There was a scene
almost every night. She had been on her good behavior since we arrived, but
it wouldn't last, he promised us. She was particularly jealous of a Russian
girl who came to the bar now and then when she got tight. A troublemaker. On
top of it all he was desperately in love with this boy whom he had told us
about the first day. "A boy can break your heart," he said. "He's so damned
beautiful! And so cruel!" We had to laugh at this. It sounded preposterous.
But Collins was in earnest.
Around midnight Sunday Fillmore and I retired; we had been given a room
upstairs over the bar. It was sultry as the devil, not a breath of air
stirring. Through the open windows we could hear them shouting downstairs and
the gramophone going continually. All of a sudden a storm broke -- a regular
cloudburst. And between the thunderclaps and the squalls that lashed the
window-panes there came to our ears the sound of another storm raging
downstairs at the bar. It sounded frightfully close and sinister; the women
were shrieking at the tops of their lungs, bottles were crashing, tables were
upset and there was that familiar, nauseating thud that the human body makes
when it crashes to the floor.
About six o'clock Collins stuck his head in the door. His face was all
plastered and one arm was stuck in a sling. He had a big grin on his face.
"Just as I told you," he said. "She broke loose last night. Suppose you
heard the racket?"
We got dressed quickly and went downstairs to say good-bye to Jimmie. The
place was completely demolished, not a bottle left standing, not a chair
that wasn't broken. The mirror and the show-window were smashed to bits.
Jimmie was making himself an egg-nog.
On the way to the station we pieced the story together. The Russian girl had
dropped in after we toddled off to bed and Yvette had insulted her promptly,
without even waiting for an excuse. They had commenced to pull each other's
hair and in the midst of it a big Swede had stepped in and given the Russian
girl a sound slap in the jaw -- to bring her to her senses. That started the
fireworks. Collins wanted to know what right this big stiff had to interfere
in a private quarrel. He got a poke in the jaw for an answer, a good one that
sent him flying to the other end of the bar. "Serves you right!" screamed
Yvette, taking advantage of the occasion to swing a bottle at the Russian
girl's head. And at that moment the thunderstorm broke loose. For a while
there was a regular pandemonium, the women all hysterical and hungry to seize
the opportunity to pay off private grudges. Nothing like a nice bar-room
brawl ... so easy to stick a knife in a man's back or club him with a bottle
when he's lying under a table. The poor Swede had found himself in a hornet's
nest; everyone in the place hated him, particularly his shipmates. They
wanted to see him done in. And so they locked the door and pushing the tables
aside they made a little space in front of the bar where the two of them
could have it out. And they had it out! They had to carry the poor devil to
the hospital when it was over. Collins had come off rather lucky -- nothing
more than a sprained wrist and a couple of fingers out of joint, a bloody
nose and a black eye. Just a few scratches, as he put it. But if he ever
signed up with that Swede he was going to murder him. It wasn't finished yet.
He promised us that.
And that wasn't the end of the fracas either. After that Yvette had to go
out and get liquored up at another bar. She had been insulted and she was
going to put an end to things. And so she hires a taxi and orders the driver
to ride out to the edge of the cliff overlooking the water. She was going to
kill herself, that's what she was going to do. But then she was so drunk
that when she tumbled out of the cab she began to weep and before any one
could stop her she had begun to peel her clothes off. The driver brought her
home that way, half-naked, and when Jimmie saw the condition she was in he
was so furious with her that he took his razorstrop and he belted the piss
out of her, and she liked it, the bitch that she was. "Do it some more!" she
begged, down on her knees as she was and clutching him around the legs with
her two arms. But Jimmie had enough of it. "You're a dirty old sow!" he said
and with his foot he gave her a shove in the guts that took the wind out of
her and -- a bit of her sexy nonsense too.
It was high time we were leaving. The city looked different in me early
morning light. The last thing we talked about, as we stood there waiting for
the train to pull out, was Idaho. The three of us were Americans. We came
from different places, each of us, but we had something in common -- a whole
lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes
time to part. We were getting quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the
big open spaces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had swung
along instead of the train we'd have hopped aboard and said good-bye to it
all. But Collins was never to see America again, as I learned later; and
Fillmore ... well, Fillmore had to take his punishment too, in a way that
none of us could have suspected then. It's best to keep America just like
that, always in the background, a sort of picture post-card which you look
at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for
you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and
tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast.
It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea ...
x x x
Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait
until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty,
disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.
I returned to Paris with money in my pocket -- a few hundred francs, which
Collins had shoved in my pocket just as I was boarding the train. It was
enough to pay for a room and at least a week's good rations. It was more
than I had had in my hands at one time for several years. I felt elated, as
though perhaps a new life was opening before me. I wanted to conserve it
too, so I looked up a cheap hotel over a bakery on the Rue du Chateau, just
off the Rue de Vanves, a place that Eugene had pointed out to me once. A few
yards away was the bridge that spans the Montparnasse tracks. A familiar
quarter.
I could have had a room here for a hundred francs a month, a room without
any conveniences to be sure -- without even a window -- and perhaps I would
have taken it, just to be sure of a place to flop for a while, had it not
been for the fact that in order to reach this room I would have been obliged
to first pass through the room of a blind man. The thought of passing his
bed every night had a most depressing effect upon me. I decided to look
elsewhere. I went over to the Rue Cels, just behind the cemetery, and I
looked at a sort of rat-trap there with balconies, running around the
court-yard. There were bird-cages suspended from the balcony too, all along
the lower tier. A cheerful sight perhaps, but to me it seemed like the
public ward in a hospital. The proprietor didn't seem to have all his wits
either. I decided to wait for the night, to have a good look around, and
then choose some attractive little joint in a quiet side street.
At dinner time I spent fifteen francs for a meal, just about twice the
amount I had planned to allot myself. That made me so wretched that I
wouldn't allow myself to sit down for a coffee, even despite the fact that
it had begun to drizzle. No, I would walk about a bit and then go quietly to
bed, at a reasonable hour. I was already miserable, trying to husband my
resources this way. I had never in my life done it; it wasn't in my nature.
Finally it began to come down in bucketsful. I was glad. That would give me
the excuse I needed to duck somewhere and stretch my legs out. It was still
too early to go to bed. I began to quicken my pace, heading back towards the
Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly a woman comes up to me and stops me, right in
the pouring rain. She wants to know what time it is. I told her I didn't
have a watch. And then she bursts out, just like this: "Oh, my good sir, do
you speak English by chance?" I nod my head. It's coming down in torrents
now. "Perhaps, my dear good man, you would be so kind as to take me to a
cafe. It is raining so and I haven't the money to sit down anywhere. You
will excuse me, my dear sir, but you have such a kind face ... I knew you
were English right away." And with this she smiles at me, a strange,
half-demented smile. "Perhaps you could give me a little advice, dear sir.
I am all alone in the world ... my God, it is terrible to have no money ..."
This "dear sir" and "kind sir" and "my good man," etc., had me on the verge
of hysteria. I felt sorry for her and yet I had to laugh. I did laugh. I
laughed right in her face. And then she laughed too, a weird, high-pitched
laugh, off-key, an altogether unexpected piece of cachinnation. I caught her
by the arm and we made a bolt for it to the nearest cafe. She was still
giggling when we entered the bistrot. "My dear good sir," she began
again, "perhaps you think I am not telling you the truth. I am a good girl
... I come of a good family. Only" -- and here she gave me that wan, broken
smile again -- "only I am so misfortunate as not to have a place to sit down."
At this I began to laugh again. I couldn't help it -- the phrases she used,
the strange accent, the crazy hat she had on, that demented smile ...
"Listen," I interrupted, "what nationality are you?"
"I'm English," she replied. "That is, I was born in Poland, but my father
is Irish."
"So that makes you English?"
"Yes," she said, and she began to giggle again, sheepishly, and with a
pretense of being coy.
"I suppose you know a nice little hotel where you could take me?" I said
this, not because I had any intention of going with her, but just to spare
her the usual preliminaries.
"Oh, my dear sir," she said, as though I had made the most grievous error,
"I'm sure you don't mean that! I'm not that kind of a girl. You were joking
with me, I see that. You're so good ... you have such a kind face. I would
not dare to speak to a Frenchman as I did to you. They insult you right away
..."
She went on in this vein for some time. I wanted to break away from her. But
she didn't want to be left alone. She was afraid -- her papers were not in
order. Wouldn't I be good enough to walk her to her hotel? Perhaps I could
"lend" her fifteen or twenty francs, to quiet the patron? I walked
her to the hotel where she said she was stopping and I put a fifty francs
bill in her hand. Either she was very clever, or very innocent -- it's hard to
tell sometimes -- but, at any rate, she wanted me to wait until she ran to
the bistrot for change. I told her not to bother. And with that she
seized my hand impulsively and raised it to her lips. I was flabbergasted. I
felt like giving her every damned thing I had. That touched me, that crazy
little gesture. I thought to myself, it's good to be rich once in a while,
just to get a new thrill like that. Just the same, I didn't lose my head.
Fifty francs! That was quite enough to squander on a rainy night. As I
walked off she waved to me with that crazy little bonnet which she didn't
know how to wear. It was as though we were old playmates. I felt foolish and
giddy. "My dear kind sir ... you have such a gentle face ... you are so
good, etc." I felt like a saint.
When you feel all puffed up inside it isn't so easy to go to bed right away.
You feel as though you ought to atone for such unexpected bursts of
goodness. Passing the "Jungle" I caught a glimpse of the dance floor; women
with bare backs and ropes of pearls choking them -- or so it looked -- were
wiggling their beautiful bottoms at me. Walked right up to the bar and
ordered a coupe of champagne. When the music stopped, a beautiful
blonde -- she looked like a Norwegian -- took a seat right beside me. The place
wasn't as crowded or as gay as it had appeared from outside. There were only
a half dozen couples in the place -- they must have all been dancing at once. I
ordered another coupe of champagne in order not to let my courage
dribble away.
When I got up to dance with the blonde there was no one on the floor but us.
Any other time I would have been self-conscious, but the champagne and the
way she clung to me, the dimmed lights and the solid feeling of security
which the few hundred francs gave me, well ... We had another dance
together, a sort of private exhibition, and then we fell into conversation.
She had begun to weep -- that was how it started. I thought possibly she had
had too much to drink, so I pretended not to be concerned. And meanwhile I
was looking around to see if there was any other timber available. But the
place was thoroughly deserted.
The thing to do when you're trapped is to breeze -- at once. If you don't,
you're lost. What retained me, oddly enough, was the thought of paying for a
hat check a second time. One always lets himself in for it because of a
trifle.
The reason she was weeping, I discovered soon enough, was because she had
just buried her child. She wasn't Norwegian either, but French, and a
midwife to boot. A chic midwife, I must say, even with the tears running
down her face. I asked her if a little drink would help to console her,
whereupon she very promptly ordered a whisky and tossed it off in the wink
of an eye. "Would you like another?" I suggested gently. She thought she
would, she felt so rotten, so terribly dejected. She thought she would like
a package of Camels too. "No, wait a minute," she said, "I think I'd rather
have les Pall Mall." Have what you like, I thought, but stop weeping,
for Christ's sake, it gives me the willies. I jerked her to her feet for
another dance. On her feet she seemed to be another person. Maybe grief makes
one more lecherous, I don't know. I murmured something about breaking away.
"Where to?" she said eagerly. "Oh, anywhere. Some quiet place where we can
talk."
I went to the toilet and counted the money over again. I hid the hundred
franc notes in my fob pocket and kept a fifty franc note and the loose
change in my trousers pocket. I went back to the bar determined to talk
turkey.
She made it easier for me because she herself introduced the subject. She
was in difficulties. It was not only that she had just