Journey to the End of the Night (59 page)

"And how about her mother? She must have let out a squawk when she realized you were clearing out for good? ..."

"I'll say! All day long she went on about my rotten character and, mind you, just when I'd have needed to be treated kindly! ... You should have heard her! ... Anyway, on account of the mother too, it couldn't go on, so that's when I suggested to Madelon that I'd leave them in the crypt while I went off by myself for a while to travel around and see the country ..."

"'Then you'll take me with you,' she protested ... I'm your fiancée, aren't I? ... You'll take me with you or you won't go at all! ... And besides, you're not well enough yet' ..."

"I'm all well,' I said, 'and I'm going by myself.' It dragged on and on."

"'A wife always goes with her husband,' said the mother. 'Why don't you just get married?'

She backed her up just to bug me.

"Listening to that flapdoodle made me miserable. You know me! As if I needed a woman when I want to go to war! Or to run out on the war! Did I have women in Africa? Did I have a wife in America? ... Hearing them go on like that for hours gave me a pain in the gut! A bellyache! I know what women are good for! And so do you! For nothing! I've traveled and I know. So one evening when they'd been driving me up the wall, I couldn't stand it anymore and I told the mother what I thought of her! 'You're an old fool,' I told her ... 'You're even more dimwitted than Grandma Henrouille! ... If you'd traveled a little more and known a few more people like I have, you wouldn't be in such a hurry to give people advice, and it's not by picking up little pieces of tallow in the corner of your stinking church that you'll learn about life! You ought to get out of there yourself, it would do you good. Why don't you take a walk once in a while, you old bag? A little fresh air would do you good. You'd have less time for your prayers and you wouldn't smell so much like a cow ...'

"That's what I said to her mother! I can assure you, I'd been aching a long time to tell her off, and what's more she needed it bad ... But all in all, it's me that got the most out of it ... It sort of helped me out of the situation ... It looked as if the old battle-ax had just been waiting for me to fly off the handle so she could call me all the names for son-of-a-bitch she knew! So she let loose and said a lot more than she needed to. 'Thief! Lounge lizard!'

she yelled ... 'You haven't even got a trade! ... It's going on a year that I've been supporting you and my daughter! ... Pimp! ...' Get the idea? A regular family scene ... She seemed to be thinking it over for a while, and then she blurted out, she really put her heart in it: 'Murderer! Murderer!' That kind of gave me the shivers.

"When her daughter heard that, she was afraid I'd kill her mother on the spot. She flung herself between us and closed her mother's mouth with her own hand. Which was just as well. So the two of them are in cahoots, I said to myself. It was obvious , . , Well, I let it go ... The time for violence was past ... And anyway, what did I care if they were in cahoots? ... Maybe you think that after letting off all that steam they'd leave me alone ... Not at all! If that's what you think, you don't know them ... The daughter started up again. Her head was on fire and so was her cunt ... She started up worse than ever ...

"'I love you, Léon ... Can't you see that I love you?'

"That's all she knew, her 'I love you' jazz. As if that was the answer to everything.

"'What! You still love him?' her mother put in. 'Can't you see that he's nothing but a thug?

The lowest of the low! Now that he's got his eyesight back, thanks to our care, he'll bring you nothing but misery. Just take it from me, your mother! ...'

"To finish up the scene, we all cried, even me, because whatever happened I didn't want to get in too bad with those chippies, I didn't want us to be too much on the outs.

"So I went out for a walk. We'd said too much, and staying in the same room we couldn't have controlled ourselves for long. Even so we kept wrangling off and on for weeks, and keeping an eye on each other, especially at night.

"We couldn't make up our minds to break up, but our hearts weren't in it anymore. It was mostly fear that kept us together.

"'You must love somebody else!' Madelon would say now and then.

"I'd try to reassure her: 'Not at all! Of course not!' But it was obvious that she didn't believe me. The way she saw it, you had to love somebody, there was no getting around it.

"'Just tell me this,' I'd say. 'What would I do with another woman?' But she had love on the brain. There was nothing I could say to calm her. She dreamed up stuff I'd never heard before. I'd never have suspected she was hiding such rubbish in her head.

"'You took my heart, Léon!' she'd fire at me in all seriousness. 'You want to go?' she blustered. 'All right, go! But I warn you, Léon, I'll die of grief! ...' Die of grief on my account? Where's the sense in that, I ask you. 'No, no,' I'd say. 'You won't die. And in the first place I never took anything at all. I haven't even knocked you up! Think it over. I haven't given you any diseases either! Or have I? Well then! All I want is to go away, that's all! A kind of vacation ... What's wrong with that? ... Try to be reasonable ...' But the more I tried to make her understand my point of view, the less she thought of my point of view. In fact we didn't understand each other at all anymore ... It drove her crazy to think that I might really feel the way I said I did, that everything I said was true, simple, and sincere.

"Besides, she thought it was you who was trying to get me to beat it ... And seeing that she couldn't hold me by making me ashamed of my feelings, she tried a different way of holding me.

"'Don't go thinking I want you because of the crypt and the business,' she'd say. 'You know I don't really care about money ... What I want, Léon, is to stay with you ... And to be happy ... That's all ... It's perfectly natural ... I don't want you to leave me ... It's too cruel for people to separate when they've loved each other like we have ... Swear to me at least that you won't be gone for long ...'

"It went on like that for weeks. She was in love all right, a real pest ... Every evening she came back to her love jazz ... In the end she was willing to leave her mother in charge of the crypt, on condition that the two of us went to Paris together to look for work ... Always together! ... A screwball! She was willing to put up with anything you could think of except that we should go our separate ways ... On that subject the answer was strictly no ... So naturally the harder she dug in the sicker I got of the whole business!

"It was no use trying to put any sense into her. I knew I was wasting my time and only getting her more stirred up. So I had to start thinking up ways to get rid of her love as she called it ... That was what made me think of telling her that I kind of went out of my mind now and then ... That fits would come on ... without warning ... She gave me a funny look ... She didn't rightly know if this was another fish story or not. But anyway, considering the adventures I'd told her about and what the war had done to me and my latest exploit with Grandma Henrouille and the funny way I was acting with her, it gave her food for thought ...

"She thought for more than a week and didn't bother me all that time ... She must have said a word or two to her mother about my fits ... Anyway, they didn't seem so eager to hang on to me anymore ... 'Good deal!' I said to myself. 'It's going to be all right! Free at last! ...' I could already see myself slipping quietly away in the direction of Paris without any breakage ... But not so fast! ... I started overdoing it ... Frills! ... I thought I'd hit on a smart way of proving to her once and for all that I'd been telling the truth ... That I really went nuts when the spirit moved me ... 'Feel!' I said to Madelon one evening. 'Feel the bump on the back of my head! And the scar on top of it! Some bump, eh?'

"When she'd had a good feel of the bump on the back of my head, it really started her off, I can tell you ... But imagine, it didn't disgust her at all, far from it, it gave her hotter pants than ever ... 'That's where I was wounded in Flanders,'I said. That's where I was trepanned ...'

"'Oh, Léon!' she cried out, still feeling the bump. 'Can you ever forgive me, Léon? ... I doubted you up to now, but now I beg your forgiveness with all my heart! I see it all now!

I've been beastly to you! Oh yes, I have! I've been awful! ... I'll never be mean to you again! I swear it! I want to make it up to you, Léon. Right away! You'll let me make it up to you, won't you? ... I'll make you happy again ... Oh, how I'll take care of you! Starting today! I'd be ever so patient with you! So gentle! You'll see, Léon! I'll be so good to you you won't be able to get along without me! I'll give you back all my heart, I belong to you! ... Every bit of me! I'll give you my whole life, Léon! Only tell me you forgive me, tell me, Léon!'

"I hadn't said any of that, she'd said it all herself, so naturally she had no trouble answering herself ... How in God's name was I to stop her?

"It looked like feeling my scar and my bump had made her drunk with love all of a sudden!

She wanted to take my head in both hands and never let it go and make me happy from then to Eternity, whether I liked it or not! After that scene her mother wasn't allowed to bawl me out anymore. Madelon didn't even let her mother talk. You wouldn't have known her, she wanted to protect me to the bitter end!

"It couldn't go on. Naturally I'd rather we parted friends ... But it was no use ... She was bursting with love, and she was stubborn. One morning when she and her mother were out shopping, I did the same as you, I made up a little bundle and beat it on the quiet ... After all I've told you, you won't try to tell me I wasn't patient enough ... Believe me, there was nothing I hadn't tried ... Now you know the whole story ... When I tell you that girl would stop at nothing and that she's likely to come here looking for me any minute, don't try and tell me I'm seeing things ... I know what I'm talking about! I know her! And we'd be a lot safer in my opinion if she found me locked up with the nuts ... That way I could pretend not to understand ... With her that's the only way ... Just let on that you don't know what she's talking about ..."

Two or three months before, I'd have been interested in what Robinson was telling me, but I seem to have aged all of a sudden.

I guess I'd been getting more and more like Baryton, I didn't give a damn. What Robinson had been telling me about his adventure in Toulouse didn't strike me as a very real danger anymore. I tried in vain to get excited about his situation, but his situation had a musty smell about it. Maybe we like to think different, but the world leaves us long before we leave it ... for good.

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort ... You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk ... you abridge ... You give up ... For thirty years you've been talking ... You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life ... You're fed up ... From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others ... But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore.

If you've got to be unhappy, you may as well keep regular habits. I insisted on everybody in the house being in bed by ten o'clock. I was the one who turned out the lights. The business took care of itself.

We didn't overtax our imaginations. The Baryton system of taking cretins to the movies kept us busy enough. Under our management the institution wasn't run as economically as it had been. Wanton waste, we figured, might bring the chief back, since it gave him such nightmares.

We had bought an accordion, so Robinson could play music for the patients to dance to in the garden during the summer months. It was hard to keep the inmates busy day and night. We couldn't send them to church all the time, they got too bored.

We received no further reports from Toulouse. Abbé Protiste never came back to see us. The asylum settled down to a life of furtive monotony. We weren't easy in our minds. Too many ghosts around.

Months passed. Robinson was looking better. At Easter time our patients became rather agitated, women in light-colored dresses had taken to strolling back and forth outside the garden. Harbingers of spring. I gave them bromides.

At the Tarapout the cast had been changed several times since the days when I'd worked there. The little English girls were far away, I was told. In Australia. We'd never see them again ...

I wasn't allowed backstage since the business with Tania. I didn't press the point. We started writing letters all over the place, especially to the consulates of the northern countries, to try and get some news of Baryton's movements. There were no answers of any interest.

Meanwhile Parapine performed his technical duties in dignified silence. I doubt if in twenty-four months he had uttered more than twenty sentences in all. I was obliged to attend to the daily material and administrative details practically unaided. I made a few mistakes. Parapine never held them up to me. We got along fine together by dint of sheer indifference. An adequate turnover of patients kept the institution going nicely. After paying for supplies and rent, we still had more than enough to live on, and it goes without saying that Aimee's aunt was paid regularly for the child's board.