Journey to the End of the Night (54 page)

He certainly gave us plenty of noodles and rasping Bordeaux. Somebody had left him a whole vineyard, so he told us. Which was our tough luck. A very inferior vintage, I assure you.

His asylum at Vigny-sur-Seine was always full. It was called a "Rest Home" in the prospectuses, because it was in the middle of a big garden, where the nuts went walking on nice days. They walked as if they had trouble keeping their heads balanced on their shoulders, they seemed in constant fear of stumbling and spilling the contents. All sorts of misshapen things, things they were dreadfully attached to, were bobbing and bumping about in there.

When the patients spoke of their mental treasures, it was always with anguished contortions or airs of protective condescension that made you think of powerful and ultrameticulous executives. Not for an empire would those lunatics have gone outside their minds. A madman's thoughts are just the usual ideas of a human being, except that they're hermetically sealed inside his head. The world never gets into his head, and that's the way he wants it. A sealed head is like a lake without an outlet, standing, stagnant. Baryton bought his noodles and vegetables wholesale in Paris. So naturally we weren't very popular with the shopkeepers of Vigny-sur-Seine. I'd go so far as to say that they detested us. Their animosity didn't spoil our appetites. At the beginning of my stay, Baryton, at the table, would distill philosophical conclusions from our disjointed remarks. But seeing that he had spent his life among lunatics and made his living by his association with them, sharing their meals, neutralizing their lunacies as best he could, nothing bored him so much as having to talk about their manias at table. "They have no place in the conversation of normal people!" he declared in peremptory self-defense. He himself observed that rule of mental hygiene strictly.

He was fond of conversation, and there was a kind of terror in the way he insisted on its being amusing, reassuring, and above all thoroughly sane. He just didn't want to think about the loonies. His feeling toward them was one of instinctive antipathy, and with that he contented himself once and for all. On the other hand, he loved hearing us talk about our travels. We couldn't tell him enough. My arrival liberated Parapine from the need to talk. For him it was providential, for now I could entertain the boss during meals. All my peregrinations were served up, related at length, doctored of course, made suitably literary, amusing. Baryton made an enormous amount of noise with his tongue and mouth in eating. His daughter Aimee always sat at his right. Though only ten, Aimee already seemed faded. Something lifeless, an incurable grayness blunted our image of Aimee, as though unhealthy little clouds were always passing over her face.

There were moments of friction between Parapine and Baryton. But Baryton never bore anyone a grudge, as long as they laid no claim to the profits of his establishment. For many years his accounts had been the only element of the sacred in his existence. Once, in the days when Parapine still spoke to him, he had told him bluntly at table that he was lacking in Ethics. At first that remark had nettled Baryton, but then the whole thing had been smoothed over. You don't quarrel about such trifles. Listening to the story of my travels, Baryton not only relished a surge of romantic emotion but rejoiced at the money he was saving. "You're such a fine storyteller, Ferdinand, that after listening to you T don't have to visit those countries anymore!" To him no prettier compliment was conceivable. Only easily managed lunatics were admitted to his institution, never vicious, out-and-out homicidal maniacs. The place wasn't absolutely sinister. Hardly any bars and only a few isolation cells. Maybe the most worrisome case was little Aimee, his own daughter. The child wasn't regarded as a patient, but the environment haunted her. A howl or two would sometimes reach us in the dining room, but the cause of those screams was always something quite insignificant. And they never lasted long. Then occasionally a group of inmates would suddenly, for no reason at all, be shaken by a prolonged wave of frenzy in the course of their interminable wanderings between the pump, the clumps of bushes, and the begonia beds. Those incidents would be handled without great alarums and excursions by means of tepid baths and buckets of opium extract.

Now and then the lunatics would stand at the few dining hall windows that opened out on the street and terrify the neighborhood with their bellowing, but mostly they kept their horror to themselves. They took good care of their horror, defending it against our therapeutic efforts. That resistance of theirs was the spice of their lives. When I think now of all the lunatics I knew at Baryton's, I can't help suspecting that the only true manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares.

Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd. It's the nightmare of having to represent the halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night.

In our nuthouse we had patients at all prices, the most opulent living in heavily padded Louis XV rooms. Baryton paid these a daily, highly priced visit. They'd be expecting him. Now and then he'd be welcomed with a titanic, truly magnificent, and long-premeditated sock in the jaw. which he'd enter on the bill under "special treatment." At table Parapine maintained an attitude of reserve. Not that he was the least bit put out by my oratorical triumphs; quite the contrary, he seemed less preoccupied than in times past, in his microbe days, and all in all, almost happy. Don't forget that he'd had a bad scare over his business with the minor maidens. It had left him rather disconcerted in his dealings with the sex. In his free time, he'd wander around the grounds of our institution just like a patient. He'd smile at me when I passed, but his smiles were so vague, so pale, you'd have thought he was bidding me good-bye.

By taking us on as technical aides, Baryton had made a good bargain, for in addition to our unflagging devotion, we brought him entertainment and the echoes of adventure, for which deprivation had left him with such a craving. And indeed, he often took pleasure in expressing his satisfaction with us. Yet on Parapine's score he had certain reservations. He had never felt entirely comfortable with Parapine. "Parapine, you see, Ferdinand," he confided in me one day, "Parapine is a Russian." To Baryton the fact of his being Russian was as descriptive, morphological, and irreparable as "diabetic" or "nigger." Launched on a topic that had been tormenting him for months, he set his brain to working enormously in my presence and for my special benefit ... You wouldn't have recognized the old Baryton. We were on our way to the local tobacco store for cigarettes.

"Parapine, you see, Ferdinand, of course he's intelligent ... but really, you know, there's something dreadfully arbitrary about his intelligence! Don't you agree, Ferdinand? In the first place, he simply refuses to adapt ... You can see that at a glance ... And he's not at ease in his work ... For that matter, he's not at ease in the world ... Admit it! ... And there he's making a mistake! A big mistake! ... Because it makes him unhappy! ... That proves it. Take me, Ferdinand, think how adaptable I am! ..." (He thumped his sternum.)

"Suppose, for instance, the earth starts turning the wrong way tomorrow. What will I do?

Well, Ferdinand, I'll adapt! Instantly! And do you know how, Ferdinand? I'll just sleep twelve hours more, that'll turn the trick! One two three! It's as simple as that! I'll have adapted! Whereas your Parapine, you know what he'd do in such a situation? He'd ruminate projects and grudges for another hundred years! ... I'm certain! ... I assure you! ... Don't you agree? ... If the earth starts going backward, he won't be able to sleep! ... He'll see some sort of special injustice in it! ... Injustice, injustice! That's his bug! ... He was always talking about injustice in the days when he still deigned to speak to me ... And do you think he'll content himself with sniveling? Which wouldn't be so bad! ... Oh no! Before you know it he'll start looking for a way to blow up the planet! To get even, Ferdinand! And the worst of it, I'll tell you the worst of it, Ferdinand! ... But just between you and me ... Well, the worst of it is that he will find a way! That's right! Look here, Ferdinand, I'm going to tell you something. Try to imprint it on your mind! ... There are simple lunatics and there are others, tortured by an obsession with civilization ... It grieves me to think that Parapine belongs to the latter class! ... Do you know what he said to me the other day? ..."

"No, sir ..."

"Well, here's what he said: 'Between the penis and mathematics, Monsieur Baryton, there's nothing! A vacuum!' And another thing! ... Do you know what he's waiting for before starting to speak to me again?"

"No, Monsieur Baryton, I have no idea ..."

"He hasn't told you?"

"No, not yet ..."

"Well, he has told me ... He's waiting for the dawn of the mathematical age! Neither more nor less! His mind is made up! What do you think of such impertinence? To me! His senior! His chief!"

Of course I had to laugh a little, to join him in laughing off this extravagant fancy. But Baryton was no longer dwelling on such trifles. He had bigger and better things to get indignant about.

"Ah, Ferdinand! I see this kind of thing strikes you as innocuous. Innocent words ... just one more case of idle foolishness ... That's what you seem to think ... Just that! Am I right? Oh, thoughtless Ferdinand! Let me take pains to put you on your guard against such aberrations, which only appear to be trivial! You are absolutely mistaken! Absolutely! ... A thousand times mistaken! ... You will believe me, I trust, when I tell you that in the course of my career I have heard, here and elsewhere, just about everything that can be heard in the way of hot and cold delirium! Nothing has been lacking ... You'll give me credit for that, won't you Ferdinand? And you have surely observed, Ferdinand, that I am not given to anxiety ... to exaggeration ... Not at all ... A word or group of words carries very little weight with me! And the same goes for sentences and whole speeches! ... Though a simple man by birth and nature, I am, and no one will deny it, one of those amply inhibited persons who are not frightened by words! ... Well, Ferdinand, conscientious analysis has obliged me to conclude that I must be on my guard against Parapine! And formulate the most express reservations ... His variety of extravagance resembles none of the common, inoffensive varieties ... It is, I believe, one of the few dangerous forms of eccentricity, a highly contagious mania, to be precise, of the rampant social variety! In your friend's case, we may not yet be dealing with out-and-out insanity ... No ... Maybe his trouble is only exaggerated conviction ... But the contagious manias are well known to me! ... I've known a good many sufferers from conviction mania ... Of many different types ... And in the last analysis, those who talk about justice seem to be the maddest of the lot! ... At first, I must confess, I took a certain interest in justice fanatics ... Today those particular maniacs annoy and exasperate me more than I can tell , . , Don't you feel the same way? ... Human beings show a strange aptitude for transmitting this mania. It terrifies me, and we find it, mind you, in all human beings! Bear that in mind, Ferdinand, in all of them! Same as with liquor and sex ... The same predisposition ... The same fatality ... Infinitely widespread ... Are you laughing, Ferdinand? If so, you frighten me! Fragile! Vulnerable!

Thoughtless! Dangerous Ferdinand! When I think that I took you for a serious-minded man! Don't forget that I'm old, Ferdinand, I could afford the luxury of thumbing my nose at the future! I'd have every right to! But you?!"

As a matter of principle, in all things and for all time, I agreed with the boss. I haven't made much practical headway in the course of my harassed existence, but I had learned the essential principles of servile etiquette. Consequently, we had become good friends. I never opposed him, and I didn't eat much at the table. A pleasant sort of assistant, in sum, economical, not the least ambitious, no threat to anyone.

Vigny-sur-Seine is situated between two sluice gates, between two hillsides stripped of vegetation, a village turning suburb. Paris will swallow it up.

It loses a garden a month. On the approaches, billboards splash it with all the colors of the Russian ballet. The town clerk's daughter has learned to make cocktails. Only the streetcar seems intent on becoming historical; nothing short of a revolution will make it give up. The people are anxious, the children no longer have the same accent as their parents. It embarrasses the inhabitants to think that they're still attached to the Seine-et-Oise[90]

Department. Miracles are under way. The last garden globe vanished when Laval became premier, the local cleaning women have just raised their prices by twenty centimes an hour. A bookmaker has been sighted. The postmistress buys pederastic novels and imagines others that are even more realistic. The priest says "shit" at the drop of a hat and gives stock market tips to his parishioners when they are very very good. The Seine has killed its fish and is becoming Americanized between files of pusher-puller-selfloading barges that look like ghastly sets of rotten tin false teeth along both banks. Three developers have just gone to jail. Progress sweeps on!

The real-estate situation has not escaped Baryton. He bitterly regrets not having had the foresight to buy up lots in the next valley twenty years ago, when the owners were begging you to take them away, like rotten fruit, at twenty centimes a square meter. The good old days. Luckily his Psychotherapeutic Institute was holding its own very nicely. Nevertheless there were problems. Those insatiable families were always demanding, always insisting on newer and newer methods of treatment, more electrical, more mysterious, more everything... . The most recent, most impressive machines and contraptions. And he had to submit, on pain of being outdone by his competitors ... those similar institutions tucked away in the neighboring groves of Asnières, Passy, Montretout, lying in wait for the deluxe class of nuts.