I'll Never Be Young Again (23 page)

‘Give me the money,’ I said.

They gave the two notes into my hands, and then they gathered up the sheet of paper, and they all crowded together, their eyes searching it, their lips moving, pressing hard, eager to see the words once more, fearful lest I should have missed anything.

‘It is all there?’

‘Yes - it’s all there.’

They moved away, and across the street to the Rotonde, not bothering about me any more, and I lost their backs in the crowd, and I did not bother about them either. I folded the two notes carefully, and put them with the five-franc note that had hitherto stood between me and starvation. I went back to my own table in the corner. A hundred and fifty francs. That was not so bad. A hundred and fifty francs for three poems. Dirty, fusty little moles. My mind was clearer now, and I did not want it to be clear. I called the
garçon
to bring me another cognac.

Still the figures passed up and down in front of the Dôme, and the lights flickered opposite at the Rotonde.The taxis rattled and screeched over the cobbled stones of the Boulevard Montparnasse.

I looked at my watch, the hands pointed to half-past one. I had done well, very well indeed. I had sold three pornographic poems for a hundred and fifty francs, and I had not thought about Jake for three-quarters of an hour.

Paris was a grand place, and I was a grand fellow.

I went on drinking and sitting at the café.

S
eventy-five francs I spent on drink. At that time it did not seem to me that there was any point in saving money. I had left the Rue Vaugirard, of course. It was not humble enough for me now. I found an attic at the top of a gaunt bare-faced building in the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. There was a laundry beneath me, and a dirty
épicerie
where they put stale slabs of chocolate in the window, bottles of congealed sweets, and sticks of thin spaghetti. Flies used to fasten on to these, and drowse sleepily in the sun against the hot dusty pane.

My room was at the back of the building; it looked down upon a square court where all the dogs of the neighbourhood, poor, restless, flea-bitten mongrels, used to come regularly to make love. It was almost impossible to sleep, the heat was terrific, and no air seemed to find its way into the tiny room from the high window. I would wake up in the middle of the afternoon - I used to try to sleep during the day and spend the nights outside at a café - and there would float up to me from the court the boiled hot smell of dirty linen in soft soapy water; this was the work of the
blanchisseuse
, and the irritating scream of her voice ‘Marcelle! Marcelle!’ and then another smell of rubbish left in the corner of the yard, not cleared away, and used as a lavatory by people who did not mind, and the monotonous murmur of voices arguing in the room beneath me, a baby fretful and the smell of wet blankets and milk in a bottle, and then, sharp and sudden, the squeal of a bitch in pain, and a panting yelping dog, and somebody laughing, and somebody leaning out of his window with a fat belly and a white shirt, yawning horribly, and the rasping sound of a throaty, high-pitched gramophone playing the same tune over and over again.

And away down the boulevard the groan of a tram, the tinkle of its bell, and the heavy wheels of a cart lumbering over cobbled stones, the silly rise and fall of a taxi’s hooter, and again ‘Marcelle! Marcelle!’ screamed the
blanchisseuse
.

I could not sleep, so I lay on my back and read the torn page of an old newspaper printed on green paper. I read the account of an assault in a wood near Rennes, and a thief battering a woman’s head in Tours, and then the day’s racing at Maisons-Laffitte, a cycling course at St Denis, and so on to the advertisements of ‘
masseuses
’ at Montmartre, and pills for
impuissance
, and how to cure ‘
l’action brève
’ by a special treatment guaranteed ‘
dans trois jours
’.Then getting up from bed, not bothering to wash or to shave, and yawning a little, and lighting a cigarette, and so down the grimy flight of stairs to the dusty street, and crossing the boulevard, and walking about to stretch my legs, and then sitting down at a café and watching the people, and drinking too much.

So, as I have said, I drank away seventy-five francs, and got myself a head like a closed-in barrel and a tongue like a lump of suet, and then I had enough, so I went to bed for two days, and slept as though I had never slept before, and I did not eat a thing and all I drank was the water out of a jug that stood in the corner of my room, tepid water with refuse at the bottom like brown sand.

So now I was sober, and conscious only that I was hungry and unwashed, and that there remained to me seventy francs or so, and something had got to be done with it, and I was without question the weakest damned fool that had ever gone under because he was alone.

Thank God I was alive, anyhow, and could feel as good as this, in spite of starving, in spite of having filled myself with drink, and thank God the blasted heat had broken at last, for there was a grey sky and a cool wind blowing, and a sting in the air like autumn.

I went out to a place and had a bath and a shave, and a hair-cut and my clothes brushed, and ate a grand meal, and I knew now that I was free again, although I should always remember, I knew I could come and go as I wanted, and my thoughts were my own, and I did not have to be haunted, but would keep it beside me as a thing of beauty set in a place apart; I could start with a clear mind and an untroubled spirit, and never again would I be tortured by the memory of Jake, nor the silent beach and the staring cliffs of the Baie des Trépassés. I crossed over from the Rive Gauche to the Paris that I did not know, the shops and the theatres, the jewellers’ windows, the American voices, the Cook’s tours. . . . And that gave me an idea for a job, for what could be more right and obvious than I standing, megaphone in hand, beside the driver of an open char-à-banc, with a sea of tired faces gazing up at me, horn-rimmed faces and Panama hats, white-haired old ladies, schoolgirls sucking sweets, and pointing to the right and to the left, waving my free arm: ‘We are now coming to the Place de l’Opéra; on the right you see the famous Rue de la Paix leading to the Place Vendôme and’ (the wretched attempt at jocularity) ‘I dare say you ladies would like to take a peep into some of the shops if it wasn’t for the impatience of the gentlemen.’

Ha! ha! the titter, the pathetic rustle of amusement, and a stout, red-faced old Englishman leaning forward in his seat, nudging his friend, straining to catch the eye of a scarlet-lipped, full-breasted little prostitute who crosses in the stream of traffic, slowly hesitating, hobbling in her high-heeled stumpy shoes.

‘We’re seeing Paris all right,’ they say: ‘Casino de Paris, Folies-Bergère, Montmartre after dark, and the things fellows tell you about that go on in the Bois.’

I watched them from the pavement, and it seemed to me ridiculous and a little wearisome that everyone must be incessantly occupied with the same subject, those Englishmen in the char-à-banc, that girl who glances away self-consciously, those two mouth against mouth in a closed taxi, that man pretending to read a paper at a kiosk, that fat priest into whose hand a passing advertiser thrusts a warning against syphilis - they were every one of them obsessed and aware of themselves, they were fusty and mole-like as my olive-green-faced man who had bought the pornographic poems to sign them with his own initials.

And I was one of them, I thought about it too, and we were all alike, whispering, nodding, smiling behind our fingers.

This is filthy, I thought, this is bloody filthy, and then I looked at a girl with long legs and a mouth, and it did not seem so bad after all, so that I laughed at myself, wondering why I should bother, anyway, and I sniffed at the air that was light and full of a good Paris smell, and the day had turned out fine, and I felt well, and things were fun, so I went to Cook’s to find out about a job.

There was nothing doing there, of course; I was sent off to another office in another branch, and at the next place I had to sit in a waiting-room for an hour and a half while a little clerk with inky fingers and bad breath wrote my name in a book, was called to the telephone, asked me a question, and then telephoned again, finally disappearing for ever and then coming back and saying he was sorry, but he had not anything for me, and perhaps would I call in during the week. I felt like a drink, but that was no good because I had a new thing about not drinking, so I went soft in a café and had a struggle with something called a
café Liégeois
, and then out again in a search for work, wondering whether some sinister hotel would take me on as a night-porter, or if I should haunt the newspaper offices, poems in hand, and tell them in lofty tones that I was my father’s son.

That was too easy, though, that was giving way, so I put the little idea away back in my mind, and I tramped around poking my nose into bureaux and offices, with a smile on my face that did not mean a thing, and I ended up the day in a totally unexpected position, selling shirts behind the counter of a sports shop in the Rue Auber.

 

It is not fair to myself to say I did not try. I did try, for three solid blasted months. I sold shirts during three weeks and then I got the sack because I had a drink I did not want on a Sunday night, and when I woke up it was eight o’clock on the Monday evening. So I crawled along to the Rue Auber like a whipped puppy on the Tuesday morning, but they did not think much of me, judging by the reception they gave me, so I went out with a wave of my hand, saying to myself that it had been worth it, anyway, on Sunday night, and the next thing I knew was that I was on a stool behind another counter; this time it was a Travel Bureau in the Avenue George Cinq, and I had to talk intimately about the comforts of a wagon-lit between Paris and Biarritz to spoilt young women who did not care to go. I became amazingly familiar with train services; I warmly praised the fittings of the third-class carriages that were attached to the non-stop running from Calais to Trieste; I suggested that it was simpler to reach the Oberland by the Engadine Express and not the Simplon-Orient, thus avoiding a change at Lausanne; I ran my fingers over maps with an air of intelligence; I extolled the advantages of a tour in the Massif Central from Carcassonne to the Gorges Basses du Tarn, a tour in six stages with one day’s rest at Millau and everything included except wine.

Then, when my fluency had reached an astounding pitch, when I had quoted without a tremor the interesting fact that

‘Sables-d’Or has all the amenities of a modern seaside resort, the absence of currents and the high temperature of the water allowing aquatic sports at any hour of the day, and little wonder that it has been named, and justly so, the Plage Fleurie’, when I was called up to the manager in his private office, and was told that I wasted the time and patience of every client who spoke to me; anyhow, this Bureau was run for the purpose of reserving seats in trains, and not as an advertising firm for the hotels of the Côtes du Nord.

So once more I lost my job; that was after a fortnight, and now five weeks had gone by, and during the next five I became in turn assistant to a dealer in old furniture, period Louis Quinze, little gold chairs with cane seats, and stiff cabinets with straight legs; then I pressed clothes at a dry-cleaner’s, straining away perspiration with camphor-balls, and then a lift-man at a
boîte-de-nuit
in the Rue Fontaine, where I left rather hurriedly in the middle of one night because I was expected to go to bed without any warning, some elderly lady rather long in the tooth having expressed ‘
une envie
’, which I felt I could not satisfy even if I had followed the advice of every advertisement in the green paper; then I interviewed faith-healers who wanted their names put in the back page of the
Christian Science Monitor
.

Finally I opened the door of a dingy apartment off the Boulevard Clichy and showed nervous young men into one room, furnished with a table and a pot of ferns, where they waited restlessly until the adjoining-room - furnished with a sofa and a looking-glass - was left free for them by other young men, cured of their restlessness, for the payment of forty francs and the enjoyment of a quarter of an hour’s interview, and sometimes less, with ‘Madame’, a charming, generous woman who sucked
menthe
, and told them to be sure and come and see her again, presenting them with her card. After this I felt that it was impossible to sink any lower; there was no greater degradation now that life could bring to me. I had reached the limit, and yet there was some solace in the fact that I was able to laugh at myself. That was the only thing that remained, the ability to laugh. The rest had gone - pride, ambition, self-respect, dreams, and thinking about Jake. The last little experience
chez
‘Madame’, the pot of ferns, and the
menthe
, had broken these right up; it seemed to me that there could not be any mortal thing left by the sort of life she stood for, the sameness, the inevitability, the sheer appalling boredom of it. I knew that if I stayed much longer in her atmosphere of
menthe
I should lose even the quality of laughter. It had started as a joke, and now it was not a joke any longer; it had passed from a stage of disgust and loathing to a dangerous placidity and indifference. If I stayed there I should never be free, I should get warped and distorted like an insect in a spider’s web. I had to get out of it, and get out of it quickly. I remember leaving the place suddenly one afternoon about four o’clock in a kind of horror that had never come to me before, a surge of revolt rising up in me like a wave of nausea, and I walked dazed and blindly along the Boulevard Clichy; then up the narrow streets - up - up - and climbed the back-breaking steps, and then out on to the space below the Sacré-Cœur, and sat with my chin in my hands beside a group of tourists and a lot of screaming little boys. I did not hear them, but I just sat there looking over Paris, shivering in the cold air, watching the dark sun set away in the distance beyond the hills of Meudon, and a chill mist rise from the Seine and settle upon the towers and the spires, and it was grey, it was winter.