Journey to the End of the Night (35 page)

"They didn't pay me," I replied. Which was true. Her prepared smile turned to a pout. She suspected me.

"It's really too bad, doctor, if you can't get people to pay you. How can you expect people to respect you? ... Nowadays people pay right away or not at all!" That, too, was true. I beat it. I had put my beans on to cook before leaving. Now was the time, at nightfall, to go and buy my milk. During the day people smiled to see me with my bottle. Naturally. No maid.

Winter dragged on, stretching out over months and months. We were always deep in rain and mist, they were at the bottom of everything.

There were plenty of patients, but not many who were willing and able to pay. Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can't afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they're at their last gasp. It's not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down.

When the quarterly rent came due in January, I first sold my sideboard, I told the neighborhood people I needed the space, because I was planning to give physical culture classes in my dining room. I wonder if anyone believed me. In February, to pay my taxes, I sold my bicycle and the phonograph Molly had given me as a going-away present. It played "No More Worries." The tune is still running through my head. It's all I've got left. As for the records, Bézin had them in his shop for a long time, and then in the end he sold them.

To make myself sound even richer, I told people I was going to buy a car as soon as the warm weather set in and in preparation I wanted to take in a little cash. I suppose I just didn't have the gall to practice medicine seriously. When I was being escorted to the door after giving the family plenty of advice and handing them my prescription, I'd start talking about everything under the sun just to postpone the moment of payment a little longer. I was no good at playing the prostitute. Most of my patients were so wretchedly poor and foul smelling, so disagreeable too, that I always wondered where they would ever find the twenty francs owing to me and whether they mightn't murder me to get them back. And yet I needed those twenty francs badly. Shameful! I still blush to think of it.

"Fees! ..." as my colleagues persisted in saying. It didn't stick in their craw. As if the word made it perfectly natural and there were no need to explain ... "Shameful!" I couldn't help thinking, you can't get around it. Everything can be explained, I know that. But that doesn't change the fact that the man who takes five francs from the poor and the wicked will be a louse to his dying day. Ever since then, in fact, I've been sure of being as slimy a customer as anyone else. It's not that I've committed orgies and follies with their ten francs. Certainly not. The landlord took most of it, but that's no excuse either. I wish it were, but it isn't. The landlord is shittier than shit, but that's another story.

What with eating my heart out and navigating in the icy showers of the season, I was beginning to look tubercular myself. Naturally. That's what happens when you have to forego practically every pleasure. Now and then I'd buy a few eggs, but my diet consisted mainly of beans and lentils. They take a long time to cook, I'd spend hours in the kitchen watching them boil after my visiting hours, and since I lived on the second floor I had a fine view of the back court. Back courts are the dungeons of row houses. I had plenty of time to look at my court, and especially to hear it.

That's where the shouts and yells of the twenty houses round about crash and rebound, even the cries of the concierges' little birds, rotting away as they pipe for the spring they will never see in their cages beside the privies, which are all clustered together out at the dark end with their ill-fitting, banging doors. A hundred male and female drunks inhabit those bricks and feed the echoes with their boasting quarrels and muddled, eruptive oaths, especially after lunch on Saturday. That's the intense moment in family life. Shouts of defiance as the drink pours down. Papa is brandishing a chair, a sight worth seeing, like an ax, and Mama a log like a saber! Heaven help the weak! It's the kid who suffers. Anyone unable to defend himself or fight back, children, dogs, and cats, is flattened against the wall. After the third glass of wine, the black kind, the worst, it's the dog's turn, Papa stamps on his paw. That'll teach him to be hungry at the same time as people. It's good for a laugh when he crawls under the bed, whimpering for all he's worth. That's the signal. Nothing arouses a drunken woman so much as an animal in pain, and bulls aren't always handy. The argument starts up again, vindictive, compulsive, delirious, the wife takes the lead, hurling shrill calls to battle at the male. Then comes the melee, the smash-up. The uproar descends on the court, the echo swirls through the half-darkness. The children yap with horror. They've found out what Mama and Papa have in them! Their yells draw down parental thunders.

I spent whole days waiting for what sometimes happens after these family scenes to happen.

It happened on the fourth floor, across from my window, in the house on the other side. I couldn't see a thing, but I heard it clearly.

There's an end to everything. It's not always death, it's often something else and possibly worse, especially when there are children.

That's where those tenants lived, at the level where the shadow begins to pale. If the father and mother were alone on the days when this kind of thing happened, they'd first have a long argument and then there'd be a long silence. The situation was building up. They had a bone to pick with the little girl. They called her. She knew. She started whimpering right away. She knew what she was in for. To judge by her voice, she must have been about ten. It took me quite a few times before I understood what the two of them did to her. First they tied her up; it took a long time, like getting ready for an operation. That gave them a kick. "You little skunk!" cried the father. "The filthy slut!" went the mother. "We'll teach you!" they'd shout together, and bawl her out for all sorts of things that they probably made up. I think they tied her to the bed posts. Meanwhile the child was squeaking like a mouse in a trap. "That won't help you, you little scum. You've got it coming! Oh yes! You've got it coming!" Then came a volley of oaths, you'd have thought she was cursing at a horse. All steamed up. "Stop talking, Mama," said the little girl gently. "Stop talking, Mama! Hit me, but stop talking!" They gave her a terrible thrashing. I listened to the end to make sure I wasn't mistaken, that this was really happening. I couldn't have eaten my beans with that going on. I couldn't close the window either. I was no good for anything. I was helpless. I just stayed there listening, same as everywhere and always. Still, I believed I gained strength listening to such things, the strength to go further, a strange sort of strength, next time I'd be able to go down even deeper and lower, and listen to other plaints that I hadn't heard before or had had difficulty in understanding, because beyond the plaints we hear, there always seem to be others that we haven't yet heard or understood. When they had beaten her so much she couldn't howl anymore, a little sob continued to come out every time she breathed.

And then I heard the man saying:

"All right, old girl! Step lively! In there!" As happy as a lark. He said that to the mother, and then the door into the next room would slam behind them. Once she said to him, I heard her: "Oh, Julien, I love you so much, I could eat your shit, even if you made turds this big ..."

That was their way of making love, their concierge told me, they'd do it in the kitchen, leaning against the sink. They couldn't do it any other way.

I learned those things about them little by little in the street. When I met them, the three of them together, there was nothing to attract notice. They'd be out for a walk like a normal family. And now and then I'd see the father outside his shop on the corner of the Boulevard Poincaré, where they sold "shoes for sensitive feet." He was the head salesman. Most of the time our court had only unrelieved horrors to offer. Especially in the summer, it thundered with threats and echoes and blows, with falling objects and people, and unintelligible insults. The sun never reached the bottom. The walls seemed to be painted with dense blue shadows, especially in the corners. The concierges had their own little privies, clustered like so many beehives. At night when they went out to pee they'd bump into the garbage cans, which would boom like thunder.

Washing, strung from window to window, would be trying to dry.

After dinner, when there were no brutalities under way, what you heard was mostly arguments about the races. But those sporting polemics also ended badly as often as not, with assorted swats and wallops, and behind one of the windows, for one reason or another, someone was always knocked cold in the end.

In the summer everything smelled strong. There was no air left in the court, only smells. The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they're overflowing. It's a known fact. The ones on the third floor were always overflowing. Madame Cézanne, the concierge at No. 8, would come up with her rattan unplugger. I'd watch her working away, and in the end we got to talking. "If I were you," she advised me,

"I'd take care of the pregnant women on the quiet ... Some of the women in this neighborhood really live it up ... You'd hardly believe it! ... They'd like nothing better than to use your services ... Take it from me ... It's better than treating cheap clerks for varicose veins ... Besides, they pay cash."

Madame Cézanne had an enormous aristocratic contempt, I don't know where she got it, for anybody who worked ...

"The tenants here are never satisfied, you'd think they were in jail, they've got to make trouble for everybody! ... One day their toilets are plugged up ... Another day their gas leaks ... Or their letters are being opened! ... Always making nuisances of themselves ... Pests! The other day one of them spat in his rent envelope ... Did you ever hear the like?" Sometimes she'd have to give up trying to unplug a toilet, it was too hard. "I don't know what they put in there, but at least they shouldn't let it dry! ... I know them ... They always send for me too late ... If you ask me, they do it on purpose! ... In the place where I used to work, it was so hard they had to melt the pipe! ... I can't imagine what those people eat ... It's double strength ..."

You'd have a hard time talking me out of the idea that Robinson wasn't mostly to blame for my trouble starting up again. At first I didn't pay much attention to my spells. I somehow kept dragging myself from one patient to the next, but I'd become even uneasier than before, more and more so, like in New York, and I was beginning to sleep even worse than usual.

In short, meeting Robinson again had given me a shock, and I seemed to be falling sick again.

With the misery painted all over his face, I felt he was bringing back a bad dream that I'd been unable to get rid of all those years. It was driving me nuts.

All of a sudden he turned up. I'd never see the last of him. He must have been looking for me in the neighborhood, I certainly wasn't looking for him ... He was bound to come back again and make me think about his rotten life. Actually everything conspired to make me think of his repulsive substance. Even those people I saw out the window, who didn't look like anything much, just walking in the street, chewing the fat in doorways, rubbing shoulders, made me think of him. I knew what they were after and what they were hiding behind their innocent look. To kill and get killed, that's what they wanted, not all at once of course, but little by little like Robinson, with all the old sorrows they could summon up, all the new miseries and still nameless hatreds, except when they do it with out-and-out war, and then it's quicker.

I didn't even dare go out, for fear of meeting him.

My patients would have to send for me two or three times in a row before I'd make up my mind to visit them. Usually they had called in someone else by the time I got there. My head was a shambles like life itself. I was called to 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, fourth floor, where I'd been only once before. Actually, they came to get me in a car. I recognized the grandfather right away, he wiped his feet elaborately on my doormat. A furtive type, gray and stooped, his grandson was sick and he wanted me to hurry.

I remembered his daughter too, another strapping wench, a little faded, but strong and silent, she always came home to her parents for her abortions. They never scolded her, but all the same they wished she'd finally get married, all the more so since she already had a little boy of two staying with the grandparents.

For no reason at all this child was always getting sick, and when he was sick, the grandfather, the grandmother, and the mother wept together. What made them weep all the more was that he had no legitimate father. It's at times like that that families are most afflicted by irregular situations. The grandparents were convinced, without quite admitting it to themselves, that illegitimate children are more delicate and prone to illness than others. The father, at any rate the putative father, had cleared out for good. They had talked marriage to him so much that he couldn't take it anymore. He'd beat it so fast that if he was still running he must have been far away by then. Nobody could understand why he had run out on her like that, least of all the girl herself, because he had really enjoyed fucking her.

Now that the fickle lover had gone, all three of them contemplated the child and blubbered. She had given herself to that man "body and soul," as they say. In her opinion that explained everything, it was bound to happen. The baby had come out of her body and left her thighs all wrinkled. The mind is satisfied with phrases, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at. It's true that I've rarely known a single childbirth to demolish so much youth. All that mother had left, in a manner of speaking, was feelings and a soul. No one wanted her anymore.