Journey to the End of the Night (55 page)

Under the guidance of Parapine, Baryton did his best to modernize his establishment, as cheaply as possible to be sure, buying electrical, pneumatic, hydraulic devices, second hand, at a discount, at clearance sales, but indefatigably, so as to seem at all times better equipped than before and so appeal to the manias of his captious, well-to-do inmates. Many a moan was wrung from him by the necessity of acquiring useless equipment ... of currying favor with the very lunatics.

"I opened my institution," he confided in me one day in an outpouring of sorrow, "just before the Exposition,[91] the big one, Ferdinand ... we alienists in those days were, or, if you will, constituted a very small group, much less curious, I can assure you, and less depraved than today! ... None of us in those days tried to be as crazy as his patients ... It was not yet the fashion for the healer to go off his rocker on the pretext that it furthered the cure, an obscene fashion, mind you, like almost everything that comes to us from foreign countries ...

"You see, Ferdinand, in the days of my beginnings, French medical men still had selfrespect. They didn't feel obliged to rave along with their patients ... In the interest of harmony? ... Don't ask me! To make them happy? Where will it lead us? ... If we persist in being more ingenious, more morbid, more perverse than the most persecuted lunatic in our asylums, in wallowing with some sort of obscene pride in every form of dementia paraded before our eyes, what will become of us? ... Do you feel able, Ferdinand, to reassure me about the future of human reason? Or even of plain common sense? ... At this rate what will be left of plain common sense in a few years? Nothing. I foresee it. Absolutely nothing! I can predict it ... It's obvious ...

"For one thing, Ferdinand, from the standpoint of a truly modern intelligence, haven't all differences and distinctions been effaced? No more white! No more black! Everything dissolves. That's the new approach! The fashion! If that's the case, why not go mad ourselves? ... Right this minute! As a starter! And brag about it! Proclaim total psychic chaos! And advertise it with our own madness! Who's going to stop us? I ask you, Ferdinand! ... What last superfluous human scruples? ... What flabby misgivings?

Well? ... Sometimes, Ferdinand, when I listen to certain of our colleagues, and, mind you, among the most esteemed, the most sought-after by the clientele and the academies alike, I wonder where they're leading us! It's infernal! Those madmen disconcert, terrify, diabolize, and above all disgust me! Just hearing them at one of their modern congresses report on the results of their habitual researches, I'm seized with livid panic, Ferdinand! I listen and my reason deserts me! Diabolical, prurient, captious, and dishonest, these minions of modern psychiatry are hurling us into the abyss with their superconscious analyses ... I say it again, into the abyss. One fine morning, Ferdinand, unless you younger men do something about it, that's where we'll end up! What with stretching ourselves thin, with sublimating ourselves and torturing our minds, we'll end up on the far side of intelligence, the infernal side, that there's no coming back from! ... And the fact is, what with masturbating their intelligence day and night, those ultrasuper wise men seem even now to have shut themselves up in the dungeons of the damned!

"I say day and night, because you know, Ferdinand, they fornicate themselves all night in their dreams ... Need I say more! ... They dig at their minds! They dilate them! They tyrannize them! ... All around them there's nothing left but a foul slumgullion of organic debris, a marmalade of madness and symptoms that drip and ooze from every part of them ... The remains of the mind are all over our hands, and there we are, sticky, grotesque, contemptuous, fetid. Everything's going to collapse, Ferdinand, everything is collapsing, I, old man Baryton, am telling you, and it won't be long now! ... You'll see the end, Ferdinand, the great debacle! Because you're still young! You'll see it! Oh, you'll enjoy it, I can promise you! ... You'll all end up in the nuthouse!
Zoom!
Just one more outburst of madness! One too many! And
wham!
off you go to the loony bin! At last! You'll be liberated, as you put it. It has tempted you too much and too long! That will be the act of daring you've been clamoring for! But once you're in the nuthouse, my little friends ... take it from me, you'll stay there!

"Make a note of this, Ferdinand, the beginning and end of all things is the lack of moderation! Want me to tell you how the big débâcle started? ... It started when men played fast and loose with their sense of proportion! With foreign exaggerations! When moderation's gone, power goes with it! It was inevitable! Is then everyone doomed? Why not? All of us? Definitely! Going to the dogs? No, running! A mad stampede!

I saw the human mind, Ferdinand, losing its balance little by little and dissolving in the vast maelstrom of apocalyptic ambitions! It began about 1900 ... mark that date! From then on, the world in general and psychiatry in particular have been one frantic race to see who could become more perverse, more salacious, more outlandish, more revolting, more creative as they call it, than his neighbor ... A pretty mess! ... Who would be first to throw himself into the arms of the monster, the beast without heart and without restraint! ... The beast will devour us all, Ferdinand, it's a certainty and a good thing too! ... What is this beast? ... A big head that goes where it pleases! ... Even now its wars and its flaming slobber are pouring in on us from all sides! ... Here and now we are in the midst of a deluge! Neither more nor less! Apparently we were bored with consciousness! Well, we won't be bored any longer! We've started buggering each other for variety's sake ... And we've been going in for 'impressions' and 'intuitions' ever since ... like women ...

"And come to think of it, is there any need for us to weigh ourselves down with the least bit of logic? ... Of course not! ... Logic can only be an encumbrance to the infinitely subtle, truly progressive psychologists that our times are turning out ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I look down on women, Ferdinand! Certainly not! You know that! But I don't care for their 'impressions'! I'm a testiculate animal, Ferdinand, and when I have a fact, I hang on to it for dear life ... In that connection I had an interesting experience the other day ... I was asked to admit a writer ... He was cracked ... You know what he'd been shouting for over a month? They're liquidating! ... They're liquidating! ...' That's what he was shouting all over the house! He was a case all right. He had crossed over to the far side of the intelligence! ... His trouble was that he simply couldn't liquidate ... An old stricture was poisoning him with urine, stopping up his bladder ... I had to relieve him drop by drop with a catheter ... it took hours ... But the family insisted that the cause of it all was his genius ... I tried my level best to convince them that their writer's trouble was in his bladder, they clung to their idea ... that he'd blown his top in a moment of excessive genius ... In the end I had to fall in with their opinion ... you know what families are like ... You'll never get a family to understand that a man, related to them or not, is nothing but suspended putrefaction ... No family will pay bills for suspended putrefaction ..." For twenty years Baryton had been wrestling with the quarrelsome vanity of families. They gave him a hard time. Patient and well balanced as I knew him to be, he nevertheless nursed a vestige of well-fermented hatred toward families ... At the time when I was living close to him, he was exasperated and trying obstinately, though in secret, to free himself, to escape once and for all, one way or another, from the tyranny of those families ... Everyone has his reasons for trying to escape his private unhappiness, and each of us, to that end, coaxes some ingenious method from the circumstances. Blessed are those who can content themselves with whorehouses!

Parapine, for his part, seemed happy to have chosen the way of silence. Baryton, as I came to understand only later, doubted in his heart whether he would ever succeed in freeing himself from families, from their hold on him, from the thousand repulsive servitudes involved in alimentary psychiatry, in short, from his condition. He so longed for something new and absolutely different that he was thoroughly ripe for flight and escape. This accounted no doubt for his critical tirades... . Routine was death to his ego. Sublimation was no longer possible, he just wanted to go away, to take his body somewhere else. There was nothing of the musician in Baryton, and in the end he had to upset everything like a bear.

He, who thought himself so reasonable, set himself free by means of a scandalous and thoroughly regrettable action. Later on, at leisure, I shall try to tell what happened. For the moment the job of assistant to Baryton struck me as quite bearable. The therapeutic routine was far from strenuous, though now and then, as you'd expect, I'd feel pretty sick after talking too long with one of the patients, a kind of dizzy spell would come over me, as though the patients, from one commonplace little remark to another, had, without seeming to, led me away from my usual dwelling place to the heart and center of their dementia. For a short moment I wondered how I would ever get out of there and whether I hadn't, unsuspecting, been locked up with them in their madness once and for all. Because I was always kind to the inmates, which was my nature, I lived on the dangerous rim of madness, on the brink, so to speak. I didn't go under, but I felt in constant danger, as if they had lured me by stealth into their unknown city. A city whose streets became softer and softer as you penetrated further between its slobbery houses, with their melting, illclosed windows and their dubious sounds. The doors and the ground are unstable, shifting ... And yet something makes you want to go further, to see if you'll have the strength to retrieve your reason from the wreckage. Reason can easily become an obsession, as good humor and sleep are for neurasthenics. All you can think of is your reason. Everything's out of kilter. It's no joke.

So I was worrying along from doubt to doubt when the fourth of May came up. A big day. I was feeling wonderfully well that day. Pulse 78. Like after a good lunch. Then suddenly the world began to spin. I held tight. Everything turns to bile. People start looking weird. As if they'd gone sour like lemons and more malignant than ever before. From climbing too high, no doubt, to the very peak of health, I had fallen in front of the mirror and with passionate fascination was watching myself grow old.

On rotten days like that, mountains of fatigue and disgust accumulate between your nose and your eyes, enough in that one spot to last several men for years. Much too much for one man.

Just then, all in all, I'd have been glad to go back to the Tarapout. Especially as Parapine had also stopped talking to me. But I was in their bad books at the Tarapout. It's hard to have no source of spiritual or material comfort but your boss, especially when he's an alienist and you're not so sure of your own head. All you can do is hold tight. And not say anything. We could still talk about women together. That was a benign subject, which gave me a chance to make him laugh now and then. In that field he gave me credit for a certain experience, for some slight and nasty competence.

It had its advantages that on the whole Baryton should consider me with a certain contempt. A boss always finds the crumminess of his staff rather reassuring. A slave must at all costs be slightly, if not superlatively, contemptible. An assortment of chronic moral and physical defects justifies the horrible treatment he is getting. Then the earth turns more smoothly, for each man occupies the place he deserves.

A person you make use of should be dull and abject, a born failure. It comes as a relief to the boss, especially since Baryton paid us very badly. An employer with his degree of acute avarice tends to be suspicious and uneasy. Failure, debauchee, black sheep, loyal! ... Now there's a perfect combination that will justify anything. Baryton wouldn't have been displeased if I had been kind of wanted by the police. Those are the things that guarantee an employee's loyalty.

I had cast off all self-respect long ago. That sentiment had always struck me as far above my station, much too costly for my resources. I'd made that sacrifice once and for all and had no regrets whatever.

By then I was quite content if I could keep myself in a tolerable state of alimentary and physical balance. I had stopped worrying my head about anything else. Nevertheless, I found it hard to get through certain nights, especially when the memory of what had happened in Toulouse prevented me from sleeping.

At such times I couldn't help it, I imagined all sorts of dramatic sequels to Grandma Henrouille's fall into the mummy crypt. Fear rose up from my bowels, seized hold of my heart, and made it pound so hard that I'd jump out of bed and pace the floor, this way and that way into the depths of darkness and into the dawning light. During those attacks I despaired of ever recapturing enough peace of mind to fall asleep again. If someone tells you he's unhappy, don't take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep ... If he can, then all's well. That's good enough.

I would never again succeed in sleeping fully. I had lost, so to speak, the habit of trust, the enormous trust you need to sleep soundly among human beings. I'd have needed at least an illness, a fever, a specific catastrophe to retrieve some small part of my old indifference, neutralize my anxiety, and recapture the divine stupidity of an easy mind. The only bearable days I remember over a period of many years were a few days of heavy feverish flu. Baryton never asked me about my health. For that matter he chose to disregard his own.

"Science and life form disastrous mixtures, Ferdinand! Always avoid taking care of your health, believe me! ... Every question asked of your body becomes a breach ... through which anxiety, obsession, will enter ..." Such were his simplist biological principles ... He thought he was clever. "The known is good enough for me" was another of his frequent sayings. He was trying to impress me.

He never mentioned money to me, but in his secret heart he thought of it all the time. Though I didn't exactly understand them at the time, Robinson's dealings with the Henrouille family were on my conscience, and from time to time I tried to tell Baryton bits and pieces of the story. But it didn't interest him in the least. He preferred my stories about Africa, especially the ones relating to colleagues of ours whom I'd run across here and there and to the strange and questionable medical practices of those very freakish colleagues. At the rest home we had an alarm now and then in connection with his little girl Aimée. Suddenly at dinner time she was nowhere to be found, neither in the garden nor in her room. I fully expected to find her dismembered body in a clump of bushes one evening. She roamed all over the place with our lunatics, so there was reason to fear the worst. And indeed she had narrowly escaped being raped quite a number of times. When that happened, there'd be no end of screams and shower baths and warnings. Time and again she'd been told to avoid certain hidden paths, but the child was irresistibly attracted to nooks and crannies. On those occasions her father never failed to give her a memorable spanking. All in vain. I think she enjoyed the excitement.