Journey to the End of the Night (32 page)

Molly had been right, I was beginning to understand her. Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you're in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That's not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can't content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn't very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you've got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic.

In the meantime I wasn't getting many patients. It takes time to get started, people said to comfort me. At the moment the patient was mostly me.

Nothing, it seemed to me, can be gloomier than La Garenne-Rancy when you've got no patients. No doubt about it. You shouldn't think in a place like that, and I'd come, from the other end of the earth what's more, precisely to think at my ease. Wasn't I in luck! Stuck-up simpleton! Black and heavy it came over me ... No joke, and it stayed with me. There's no tyrant like a brain.

Below me lived Bézin, the little junk dealer. Whenever I stopped outside his door he said to me: "You got to choose, doctor! Play the races or drink, it's one or the other! ... You can't have everything! ... I prefer my
apéritif!
I don't care for gambling ..." His favorite
apéritif
was
gentiane-cassis
. Not a bad-natured man ordinarily, but unpleasant after a few drinks ... When he went to the Flea Market to stock up, he'd stay away for three days, his "expedition" he called it. They'd bring him back. And then he'd prophesy:

"I can see what the future will be like ... An endless sex orgy ... With movies in between ... You can see how it is already ..."

On those occasions he could see even further: "I also see that people will stop drinking ... I'll be the last drinker in the future ... I've got to hurry ... I know my weakness ..." Everybody coughed in my street. It keeps you busy. To see the sun you have to climb up to Sacré-Coeur at least, because of the smoke.

From up there you get a beautiful view; then you realize that way down at the bottom of the plain it's us and the houses we live in. But if you try to pick out any particular place, everything you see is so ugly, so uniformly ugly, that you can't find it. Still further down it's always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.

When you live in Rancy you don't even realize how sad you've become. You simply stop feeling like doing anything much. What with scrimping and going without this and that, you stop wanting anything.

For months I borrowed money right and left. The people were so poor and so suspicious in my neighborhood that they couldn't make up their minds to send for me before dark, though I was the cheapest doctor imaginable. I spent nights and nights crossing little moonless courtyards in quest of ten or fifteen francs.

In the morning there was such a beating of carpets the whole street sounded like one big drum.

One morning I met Bébert on the sidewalk; his aunt, the concierge, was out shopping, and he was holding down the lodge for her. He was raising a cloud from the sidewalk with a broom.

Anybody who didn't raise dust at seven o'clock in the morning in those parts would get himself known all up and down the street, as an out-and-out pig. Carpet beating was a sign of cleanliness, good housekeeping. Nothing more was needed. Your breath could stink all it liked, no matter. Bebert swallowed all the dust he raised in addition to what was sent down from the upper floors. Still, a few spots of sunlight reached the street, but like inside a church, pale, muffled, mystic.

Bebert had seen me coming, I was the neighborhood doctor who lived near the bus stop. Bébert had the greenish look of an apple that would never get ripe. He was scratching himself, and watching him made me want to scratch too. The fact is I had fleas myself, I'd caught them from patients during the night. They like to jump up on your overcoat, because it's the warmest and dampest place available. You learn that in medical school. Bébert abandoned his carpet to come and say good morning. From every window they watched us talking.

If you've got to love something, you'll be taking less of a chance with children than with grownups, you'll at least have the excuse of hoping they won't turn out as crummy as the rest of us. How are you to know?

I've never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe.

Few people past twenty preserve any of that affection, the affection of animals. The world isn't what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake!

And turned Into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake.

"Hey, doctor," Bébert sings out. "Is it true that they picked up a guy on the Place des Fętes last night. Throat cut open with a razor. You were on duty, weren't you? Is it true?"

"No, Bébert. I wasn't on duty, it wasn't me, it was Dr. Frolichon[65] ..."

"That's too bad, 'cause my aunt said she wished you'd have been on duty and you'd have told her all about it ..."

"Maybe next time, Bébert."

"Do they often kill people around here?" Bebert asked.

I passed through the dust, but just then the municipal street sweeper whished past and, whirling up from the gutters, a howling typhoon filled the whole street with new clouds, more dense and stinging than the others. We couldn't see each other anymore. Bébert jumped up and down, sneezing and shouting for joy. His haggard face, his greasy hair, his emaciated monkey legs, the whole of him danced convulsively at the end of his broom. Bébert's aunt came home from shopping, she had already downed a glass or two. I have to add that she sniffed ether now and then, a habit contracted when she was working for a doctor and having such trouble with her wisdom teeth. The only teeth she had left were two in front, but she never failed to brush them. "When you've worked for a doctor like I have, you don't forget your hygiene." She gave medical consultations in the neighborhood, and as far away as Bezons.

I'd have been interested to know if Bébert's aunt ever thought of anything. No, she thought of nothing. She talked enormously without ever thinking. When we were alone with no one listening, she'd touch me for a free consultation. It was flattering in away.

"Bébert, doctor, I have to tell you because you're a doctor, he's a little pig! ... He 'touches'

himself! I noticed it two months ago, and I wonder who could have taught him such a filthy habit ... I've always brought him up right! ... I tell him to stop ... but he keeps right on ..."

I gave her the classic advice: "Tell him he'll go crazy." Bébert, who'd been listening, wasn't pleased.

"I don't touch myself, it's not true. It's the Gagat[66] kid who suggested ..."

"See?" said the aunt. "I suspected as much. The Gagats, you know, the people on the fifth floor ... They're all perverts. It seems the grandfather runs after female lion tamers ... Really, I ask you, lion tamers ... Look, doctor, while you're here, couldn't you prescribe a syrup to make him stop touching himself ..."

I followed her to her lodge to write out an antivice prescription for Bébert. I was too easy with everybody, I knew that. Nobody paid me. I treated them all free of charge, mostly out of curiosity. That's a mistake. People avenge themselves for the favors done them. Bébert's aunt took advantage of my lofty disinterestedness. In fact she imposed on me outrageously. I let things ride. I let them lie to me. I gave them what they wanted. My patients had me in their clutches. Every day they sniveled more, they had me at their mercy. And while they were at it they showed me all the ugliness they kept hidden behind the doors of their souls and exhibited to no one but me. The fee for witnessing such horrors can never be high enough. They slither through your fingers like slimy snakes.

I'll tell you the whole story some day if I live long enough.

"Listen, you scum! Let me do you favors for a few years more. Don't kill me yet. Looking so servile and defenseless; I'll tell the whole story. You'll fade away like the oozing caterpillars in Africa that came into my shack to shit ... I'll make you into subtler cowards and skunks than you are, and maybe it'll kill you in the end."

"Is it sweet?" Bébert asked about the medicine.

"Don't make it sweet whatever you do," said the aunt. "For that little creep ... He don't deserve to have it sweet, he steals enough sugar from me already. He has every vice, he'll stop at nothing. He'll end up murdering his mother!"

"I haven't got a mother," said Bébert peremptorily. He had his wits about him.

"Damn you!" cried the aunt. "None of your back talk, or I'll give you the cat o'nine tails!" Then and there she takes it down off the hook, but he'd already beat it out into the street.

"Cock-sucker!" he shouted back at her from the corridor. The aunt went red in the face and came back to me. Silence. We changed the subject.

"Maybe, doctor, you ought to go and see the lady on the mezzanine at 4 Rue des Mineures ... He used to be a notary's clerk ... She's heard about you ... I told her what a wonderful doctor you are, so nice to the patients."

I know she's lying. Her favorite doctor is Frolichon. She always recommends him when she can and runs me down at every opportunity. As far as she's concerned, my humanitarianism has earned me an animal hatred. Because, don't forget, she's an animal. Except that this Frolichon she admires makes her pay cash, so she consults me on the run. If she recommends me, this must be a strictly nonpaying patient, or there's something very shady somewhere. As I'm leaving, I remember Bébert,

"You ought to take him out," I said. "The child doesn't get out enough."

"Where do you want us to go? I can't go very far on account of my lodge ..."

"Take him to the park at least on Sunday ..."

"But there are even more people and more dust in the park than here ... It's so crowded." There's some sense in what she says. I try to think of another place to suggest. Diffidently I propose the cemetery.

The cemetery of La Garenne-Rancy is the only open space of any size in the neighborhood with a few trees in it.

"Say, that's a fact, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe we'll go." Bébert had just come in.

"How about it, Bébert? Would you like to go for a walk in the cemetery? I have to ask him, doctor, because I don't mind telling you, he's as stubborn as a mule about taking a
walk
..." Actually, Bébert has no opinion. But the idea appeals to his aunt, and that's enough. She has a weakness for cemeteries, like all Parisians. It looks as if she were about to start thinking. She examines the pros and cons. The fortifications are too low class ... The park is definitely too dusty ... While the cemetery, sure enough, isn't bad ... The people who go there on Sunday are mostly respectable folk who know how to behave ... And another thing that makes it really convenient is that on the way back you can shop on the Boulevard de la Liberté, where some of the stores keep open on Sunday.

And she concluded. "Bébert, take the doctor to see Madame Henrouille on the Rue des Mineures ... You know where Madame Henrouille lives, don't you, Bébert?" Bébert knew where everything was, if only it gave him a chance to roam around. Between the Rue Ventru and the Place Lénine it's all apartment houses. The contractors have taken over practically all the fields that were left around there, at Les Garennes, as the area was called. There was just a tiny bit of country at the end, a few empty lots after the last gas lamp.

Wedged in between apartment buildings, a few private houses are still holding out, four rooms with a big coal stove in the downstairs hallway; true, for reasons of thrift, the stove is seldom lit. The dampness makes it smoke. These remaining private houses belong to people who have retired on small incomes ... The moment you go in, the smoke makes you cough. The people who've stayed in the neighborhood haven't got big incomes, especially these Henrouilles I was being sent to. They had a little something though. In addition to the smoke, as you stepped in, the Henrouilles' house smelled of the toilet and stew. They'd just finished paying for the place, it represented the savings of at least fifty years. The first time you saw them, you noticed something was wrong and wondered what it was. Well, the unnatural side of the Henrouilles was that for fifty years they had never spent one sou without regretting it. They'd put their flesh and spirit into that house of theirs, like a snail. But the snail doesn't know what he's doing.

The Henrouilles had spent a lifetime acquiring a house, and once it was theirs they couldn't get over it. Like people who've just been dug out of an earthquake, they were flabbergasted. Folks who've just been let out of a dungeon must get a funny look on their faces. The Henrouilles had thought about buying a house even before they were married. First separately, then together. For half a century they had refused to think about anything else, and when life had forced them to think about something else, the war for instance and especially their son, it made them very unhappy.

When as newlyweds they had moved into their house, each with the savings of ten years, it wasn't quite finished and it was still in the middle of the fields. To reach it in winter, they had to put on sabots; they'd leave them at the grocery store on the corner of the Rue de la Révolte in the morning when they set out for work in Paris, three kilometers distant, by horse car, two sous a ticket.

You need a sturdy constitution to get through a whole lifetime on such a schedule. There was a picture of them over the bed on the upper floor, taken on their wedding day. Their bedroom furniture had all been paid for, ages ago in fact. All the receipted bills that had accumulated in the last ten, twenty, forty years, He pinned together in the top bureau drawer, and the account book, fully up to date, is downstairs in the dining room where they never eat. Henrouille will show you all that if you ask him. On Saturdays he balances the accounts in the dining room. They've always eaten in the kitchen.