Journey to the End of the Night (13 page)

What efforts are made to keep the truth away from these places, but it comes back again and again, to grieve for everybody. Drinking is no help, red wine as thick as ink, nothing helps, the sky in those places never changes, it's a vast lake of suburban smoke, shutting them in. Under foot the mud drags you down with fatigue, and the sides of existence are also closed, shut off by hotels and more factories. Even the walls in that section are coffins. With Lola gone for good and Musyne too, I had nobody left. That's why I finally wrote to my mother, just to see somebody. I was only twenty, and all I had was a past. The two of us together, my mother and I, walked through dozens of Sunday streets. She told me little things about her business, what the people around her were saying about the war, that it was sad, "horrible" in fact, but that with plenty of courage we'd all come through in the end, the ones that got killed were an accident, like in the races, if you kept your seat properly you wouldn't fall. To her the war was just one more affliction, she tried not to think about it too much, because it frightened her in a way, it was full of terrifying things she didn't understand. She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth, and that if things had been going so badly of late, the cumulative faults of the poor must have a good deal to do with it ... They must have been very naughty, of course they hadn't meant to be, but they were guilty all the same, and giving them a chance to expiate their transgressions by suffering was a great kindness ... My mother was an "untouchable."

That resigned, tragic optimism was her only faith and the foundation of her character. The two of us, in the rain, went down streets of vacant lots. The sidewalks in that part of the world sink and evade your step, in winter the branches of the little ash trees at the edge hold the raindrops a long time, a tenuous fairyland trembling in the breeze. Our way back to the hospital led past a number of newly built hotels, some had names, others hadn't even gone to that much trouble. "Rooms by the week" was all they had to say for themselves. The war had suddenly emptied them of all the workers and wage slaves who had lived there. They wouldn't even come back to die. Dying is work, too, but they'd do it somewhere else.

My mother was tearful as she took me back to the hospital. She accepted the accident of my death, and not content to acquiesce, she wondered if I was as resigned to it as she was. She believed in fate as implicitly as she did in the beautiful standard meter at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, which she had always spoken of with respect, because she had learned in her youth that the one she used in her notions shop was a scrupulous copy of that superb official original.

Between the housing lots in that degraded countryside there were still a few fields and gardens here and there and, attached to those scraps of land, a few aged peasants wedged in between the new buildings. When there was time left before I had to be back, my mother and I went to watch them, those comical peasants obstinately poking iron into the earth, that soft grainy substance, where the dead are laid to rot but which gives us our bread all the same. "The ground must be terribly hard," my mother said every time she saw them. She was puzzled. You see, she only understood miseries that resembled her own, city miseries, and she tried to figure out what the country kind could be like. That was the only curiosity I ever saw in my mother. It was all the diversion she needed for a Sunday, and she took it back to the city with her.

I never heard from Lola, or from Musyne either. Those sluts were on the good side of the situation, from which we, the flesh earmarked for sacrifice, were barred by smiling but implacable orders. Twice I'd been sent back to the places where the hostages were coralled. My future was all settled.

As I've told you, Branledore, my neighbor at the hospital, enjoyed permanent popularity with the nurses. He was swathed in bandages and dripping with optimism. All the other patients envied him and copied his manner. Once we'd become presentable and ceased to be moral lepers, we all began to get visits from socialites and political bigwigs. People started telling each other in the drawing rooms that Professor Bestombes' Neuro-Medical Center had become a temple and home, as it were, of the most intense patriotic fervor. Our visiting days came to be patronized not only by bishops, but also by an Italian duchess, a big munitions magnate, and before long by the personnel of the Opera and the Comedie Franchise. A beautiful young actress from the Comedie, who recited poetry like nobody's business, came to my personal bedside and declaimed some superlatively heroic lines for my special benefit. As she spoke, her perverse red hair (she had the complexion that went with it) was tossed by extraordinary waves that sent vibrations straight to my perineum. When this divine creature questioned me about my feats of arms, I gave her so many poignant details that she began to devour me with her eyes. Deeply moved, she asked leave to have the most intense passages in my narrative framed in verse by a poet who happened to be one of her admirers. I consented without hesitation. Informed of this project, Professor Bestombes expressed his special approval. He even granted an interview on the subject to an "illustrated national weekly," whose photographer took our picture all together on the hospital steps with the beautiful actress beside us. "In these tragic days," cried Professor Bestombes, who never missed a trick, "it is the poet's highest duty to revive our taste for the epic! This is no time for trivial artifice! Down with emasculated literature! A new soul has been born to us in the great and noble tumult of battle! The great patriotic renewal ... The lofty summits to which our glory is destined! ... We demand the sustaining grandeur of the epic! ... For my part, I find it admirable that this sublime, creative, and never to be forgotten collaboration between a poet and one of our heroes should have taken place under our very eyes in this hospital which I direct!" Branledore, my roommate, whose imagination had been rather outdistanced by mine and who didn't figure in the photograph, was seized with a keen, tenacious jealousy. He became my embittered rival for the palms of heroism. He made up new stories, he surpassed himself, no one could stop him, his exploits verged on delirium.

It was difficult for me to get the jump on him, to improve on his extravagances, yet none of us at the hospital resigned himself to defeat; in a fever of emulation we all vied with one another in composing brilliant pages of military "history" in which to figure sublimely. In those heroic romances we wore the skins of phantasmagoric characters, but deep within them our ludicrous selves trembled body and soul! I'd like to have seen people's faces if they had found out what we were really like. The war had been going on too long. Our great friend Bestombes received the visits of innumerable foreign celebrities, neutrals, skeptics, and scientists of all persuasions. Spruce, besabered inspectors from the War Ministry passed through our wards, their military careers had been extended, they had been rejuvenated and revitalized with pay increases. So naturally they were generous with praise and citations. Everything was perfect. Bestombes and his wounded heroes were the pride of the medical profession.

My fair admirer from the Comédie came back and paid me a private visit, while her pet poet was completing the rhymed narrative of my exploits. One day I finally ran into this pale, anxious young man in one of the corridors. The doctors, he told me, had assured him that the fragility of his heart strings was well-nigh miraculous. Consequently these same doctors, always concerned with the protection of the frail, had kept him out of the army. To make up for which our young bard had undertaken, at the risk of his health and last spiritual energies, to forge "The Moral Cannon of Our Victory." A magnificent? and it goes without saying?unforgettable weapon. Practically everything was unforgettable in those days.

I wasn't going to complain, since he had picked me from among so many undeniably brave men as his hero! And, I have to admit, they honored me royally. It was magnificent. The recitation was given at the Comédie Française itself, as part of a so-called poetic afternoon. The whole hospital was invited. When my vibrant redhead appeared on the stage, striding grandly, her figure draped in the for once voluptuous folds of the tricolor, the whole audience, flushed with desire, rose to its feet and gave her one of those ovations that never seem to end. Naturally I had known what to expect, but my amazement was real all the same. I could not conceal my stupefaction from my neighbors at hearing her, my magnificent friend, thrill and throb and sigh in such a way as to make the dramatic effect of the episode I had dreamed up for her more vivid and more moving. Her poet was miles beyond me for fantasy, he had monstrously magnified mine, enhanced it with flamboyant rhymes and high-sounding adjectives, which fell with a solemn reverberation on the breathless, admiring silence. Coming to the climax of a period, the most impassioned of the lot, the actress turned toward the box where Branledore and I and a few other wounded men were sitting, and held out her two magnificent arms as though offering herself to the most heroic among us. At that particular moment the poet was faithfully rendering a deed of awe-inspiring bravery that I had attributed to myself. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm sure it was something pretty good. Luckily, when it comes to heroism, people are willing to believe anything. The audience caught the meaning of her symbolic offering, turned in our direction, ecstatic, stamping, bellowing with joy, and clamored for the hero. Branledore took up the whole front row of the box and blotted out the rest of us. He hid us almost completely with his bandages. He did it on purpose, the bastard. But two of our comrades climbed up on chairs behind him so the crowd could admire them over his head and shoulders. They brought the house down.

I came close to crying out: "But it's all about me! Me and nobody else!" I knew my Branledore, we'd have exchanged insults in front of all those people, we might even have used our fists. So in the end he was the winner, he triumphed. Just as he'd planned, he had the whole storm of applause to himself. Defeated, we took refuge backstage, where fortunately we were feted again. That was some comfort. But our actress and inspiration wasn't alone in her dressing room. The poet, her poet, our poet was with her. He had the same weakness for young soldier boys as she did. They made it clear to me very artistically. A handsome offer. They repeated it, but I ignored their kind suggestions. I was the loser, because they had influence and things might have worked out very well. I left them abruptly, I was nettled. Silly of me, I was young.

To recapitulate: the aviators had snatched Lola away from me, the Argentines had taken Musyne, and now this harmonious invert had filched my magnificent actress. Sadly I left the Comédie as the last torches were being extinguished in the corridors and returned alone, without recourse to the streetcar, to our hospital, that mantrap plunked down in the tenacious mud of the rebellious suburbs.

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head. But just then such fits of dizziness would come over me for no reason at all that I could easily have been run over. The war had given me the staggers. When it came to pocket money, all I could count on during my stay at the hospital was the few francs my mother managed to scrape up for me each week. So as soon as I could I went looking for little extras here and there, wherever I could find them. One of my old bosses looked like a likely prospect, and I went right over to see him.

I remembered opportunely that in a certain obscure period of my life shortly before the war I had worked as a helper for this Roger Puta[36] who owned a jewelry shop near the Madeleine. My work for that loathsome jeweler consisted of menial jobs, such as polishing the silverware in the shop. There was lots of it, every shape and size, and it was hard to take care of in the gift-giving holiday season because it was always being handled. As soon as my classes were out at medical school where I was engaged in exacting and (because I kept flunking the exams) interminable studies, I hightailed it to the backroom of Monsieur Puta's shop, where I labored for two or three hours, until dinnertime, applying whiting to his chocolatières.

In return for my work, I was fed, copiously I have to admit, in the kitchen. Then in the morning before school, I had to take the watchdogs out for a piss. All that for forty francs a month. Puta's jewelry shop on the corner of the Rue Vignon sparkled with thousands of diamonds, each one of which cost several decades of my salary. They're still sparkling in the exact same place, by the way. When everybody was mobilized, this Puta got himself assigned to the auxiliaries and put under the special orders of a certain cabinet minister, whose car he drove from time to time. But he also made himself useful, unofficially of course, by supplying the ministry with jewels. The higher officials speculated, with gratifying results, on present and future transactions, and the longer the war went on, the more jewels were needed. Monsieur Puta got so many orders that he sometimes had trouble filling them.

When he was overworked, Monsieur Puta managed to look slightly intelligent because of the fatigue that tormented him, but only then. When rested, his face, in spite of his undeniably fine features, became so harmonious in its idiotic placidity that it would be hard not to carry a despairing memory of it with one to the grave.

His wife, Madame Puta, seldom left the cashier's desk, in a manner of speaking she and the desk were one. She had been brought up to be a jeweler's wife. That had been her parents'

ambition. She knew her duty inside and out. The prosperity of the cash drawer brought happiness to husband and wife. Not that Madame Puta was bad looking, not at all, she could even, like so many others, have been rather pretty, but she was so careful, so distrustful that she stopped short of beauty just as she stopped short of life?her hair was a little too well dressed, her smile a little too facile and sudden, and her gestures a bit too abrupt or too furtive. You racked your brains trying to figure out what was too calculated about her and why, you always felt uneasy when she came near you. This instinctive revulsion that shopkeepers inspire in anyone who goes near them and who knows what's what is one of the few consolations for being as down at heel as people who don't sell anything to anybody tend to be.