her stomach pinched
or her shoes gave out, little surface things of no account, nothing that ate
into her soul, nothing that created torment. Ennui! That was the worst
she ever felt. Days there were, no doubt, when she had a bellyful, as we say
-- but no more than that! Most of the time she enjoyed it -- or gave the
illusion of enjoying it. It made a difference of course, whom she went with
-- or came with. But the principal thing was a man. A man! That
was what she craved. A man with something between his legs that could tickle
her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy, make her grab that bushy twat of
hers with both hands and rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense
of connection, a sense of life. That was the only place where she experienced
any life -- down there where she clutched herself with both hands.
Germaine was a whore all the way through, even down to her good heart, her
whore's heart which is not really a good heart but a lazy one, an
indifferent, flaccid heart that can be touched for a moment, a heart without
reference to any fixed point within, a big, flaccid whore's heart that can
detach itself for a moment from its true center. However vile and
circumscribed was that world which she had created for herself, nevertheless
she functioned in it superbly. And that in itself is a tonic thing. When,
after we had become well acquainted, her companions would twit me, saying
that I was in love with Germaine (a situation almost inconceivable to them),
I would say: "Sure! Sure, I'm in love with her! And what's more, I'm going
to be faithful to her!" A lie, of course, because I could no more think of
loving Germaine than I could think of loving a spider; and if I was
faithful, it was not to Germaine but to that bushy thing she carried between
her legs. Whenever I looked at another woman I thought immediately of
Germaine, of that flaming bush which she had left in my mind and which
seemed imperishable. It gave me pleasure to sit on the terrasse of
the little tabac and observe her as she plied her trade, observe her
as she resorted to the same grimaces, the same tricks, with others as she
had with me. "She's doing her job!" -- that's how I felt about it, and it was
with approbation that I regarded her transactions. Later, when I had taken up
with Claude, and I saw her night after night sitting in her accustomed place,
her round little buttocks chubbily ensconced in the plush settee, I felt a
sort of inexpressible rebellion towards her; a whore, it seemed to me, had no
right to be sitting there like a lady, waiting timidly for some one to
approach and all the while abstemiously sipping her chocolat. Germaine
was a hustler. She didn't wait for you to come to her -- she went out and
grabbed you. I remember so well the holes in her stockings, and the torn
ragged shoes; I remember too how she stood at the bar and with blind,
courageous defiance threw a strong drink down her stomach and marched out
again. A hustler! Perhaps it wasn't so pleasant to smell that boozy breath of
hers, that breath compounded of weak coffee, cognac, aperitifs, pemods
and all the other stuff she guzzled between times, what to warm herself and
what to summon up strength and courage, but the fire of it penetrated her, it
glowed down there between her legs where women ought to glow, and there was
established that circuit which makes one feel the earth under his legs again.
When she lay there with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that
way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper show of feeling. She
didn't stare up at the ceiling with a vacant look or count the bedbugs on the
wallpaper; she kept her mind on her business, she talked about the things a
man wants to hear when he's climbing over a woman. Whereas Claude -- well, with
Claude there was always a certain delicacy, even when she got under the
sheets with you. And her delicacy offended me. Who wants a delicate
whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted
over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion,
wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make
water. And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind,
literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be
served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she
put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way
through -- and that was her virtue!
Easter came in like a frozen hare -- but it was fairly warm in bed. Today it
is lovely again and along the Champs-Elysees at twilight it is like an
outdoor seraglio choked with dark-eyed houris. The trees are in full
foliage and of a verdure so pure, so rich, that it seems as though they
were still wet and glistening with dew. From the Palais du Louvre to the
Etoile it is like a piece of music for the pianoforte. For five days I have
not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor have I had a single
idea in my head except to go to the American Express. At nine this morning
I was there, just as the doors were being opened, and again at one o'clock.
No news. At four-thirty I dash out of the hotel, resolved to make a last
minute stab at it. Just as I turn the corner I brush against Walter Pach.
Since he doesn't recognize me, and since I have nothing to say to him, I
make no attempt to arrest him. Later, when I am stretching my legs in the
Tuileries his figure reverts to mind. He was a little stooped, pensive, with
a sort of serene yet reserved smile on his face. I wonder, as I look up at
this softly enamelled sky, so faintly tinted, which does not bulge today
with heavy rain clouds but smiles like a piece of old china, I wonder what
goes on in the mind of this man who translated the four thick volumes of
the History of Art when he takes in this blissful cosmos with his
drooping eye.
Along the Champs-Elysees, ideas pouring from me like sweat. I ought to be
rich enough to have a secretary to whom I could dictate as I walk, because
my best thoughts always come when I am away from the machine.
Walking along the Champs-Elysees I keep thinking of my really superb health.
When I say "health" I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic!
Still have one foot in the 19th century. I'm a bit retarded, like most
Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. "I have only to talk
about a meal," he says, "and you're radiant!" It's a fact. The mere thought
of a meal -- another meal -- rejuvenates me. A meal! That means
something to go on -- a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I
don't deny it. I have health, good, solid, animal health. The only thing that
stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.
As for Carl, he's not himself these days. He's upset, his nerves are
jangled. He says he's ill, and I believe him, but I don't feel badly about
it.
I can't. In fact, it makes me laugh. And that offends him, of course.
Everything wounds him -- my laughter, my hunger, my persistence, my
insouciance, everything. One day he wants to blow his brains out
because he can't stand this lousy hole of a Europe any more; the next day he
talks of going to Arizona "where they look you square in the eye."
"Do it!" I say. "Do one thing or the other, you bastard, but don't try to
cloud my healthy eye with your melancholy breath!"
But that's just it! In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on
your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.
Fundamentally Carl is a snob, an aristocratic little prick who lives in a
dementia praecox kingdom all his own. "I hate Paris!" he whines. "All these
stupid people playing cards all day ... look at them! And this writing!
What's the use of putting words together? I can be a writer without
writing, can't I? What does it prove if I write a book? What do we want with
books anyway? There are too many books already ..."
My eye, but I've been all over that ground -- years and years ago. I've lived
out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck any more what's behind me, or
what's ahead Of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets.
No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le
bel aujourd'hui!
He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he's more miserable, if you
can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to
despise food, the
only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread.
Perhaps he does it for my benefit -- I don't know, and I don't ask. If he
chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him -- it's O. K. with me.
Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he
steers me to the D6me, the last place in the world I would seek on my day
off. But one not only gets acquiescent here -- one gets supine.
Standing at the D6me bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He's been on a
bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous
drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without
interruption, and finally a lay-off at the American Hospital. Marlowe's
bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets
in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with
sawdust -- he has just had a little snooze in the watercloset. In his coat
pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to
the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a
drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the
proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and
dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but
the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in
French, but the gerant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one
ambition is to talk a French which even the garcon will understand.
Of old French he is a master; of the Surrealists he has made excellent
translations; but to say a simple thing like "get the hell out of here, you
old prick!" -- that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe's French, not
even the whores. For that matter, it's difficult enough to understand his
English when he's under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed
stutterer ... no sequence to his phrases. "You pay!" that's one thing
he manages to get out clearly.
Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns
Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how
the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual
one is to pretend that he is going blind. Carl knows all his tricks by now,
and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his temples and begins to act
it out Carl gives him a boot in the ass and says: "Come out of it, you sap!
You don't have to do that with me!"
Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don't know, but at any
rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good coin. Leaning over us
confidentially he relates in a hoarse, croaking voice a piece of gossip
which he picked . up in the course of his peregrinations from bar to bar.
Carl looks up in amazement. He's pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the
story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. "But that's
impossible!" he finally blurts out. "No, it ain't!" croaks Marlowe. "You're
gonna lose your job ... I got it straight." Carl looks at me in despair.
"Is he shitting me, that bastard?" he murmurs in my ear. And then
aloud -- "What am I going to do now? I'll never find another job. It took me a
year to land this one."
This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to hear. At last he
has found someone worse off than himself. "They be hard times!" he croaks,
and his bony skull glows with a cold, electric fire.
Leaving the Dome Marlowe explains between hiccups that he's got to return to
San Francisco. He seems genuinely touched now by Carl's helplessness. He
proposes that Carl and I take over the review during his absence. "I can
trust you, Carl," he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a real one
this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We haul him to a
bistrot at the Boulevard Edgar Quinet and sit him down. This time
he's really got It -- a blinding headache that makes him squeal and grunt and
rock himself to and fro like a dumb brute that's been struck by a
sledge hammer. We spill a couple of Femet-Brancas down his throat, lay him
out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies there
groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring.
"What about his proposition?" says Carl. "Should we take it up? He says
he'll give me a thousand francs when he comes back. I know he won't, but
what about it?" He looks at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the
muffler from his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous grin
lights up his face. "Listen, Joe," he says, beckoning me to move closer,
"we'll take him up on
it. We'll take his lousy review over and we'll fuck him good and proper."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Why we'll throw out all the other contributors and we'll fill it with our
own shit -- that's what!"
"Yeah, but what kind of shit?"
"Any kind ... he won't be able to do anything about it. We'll fuck him good
and proper. One good number and after that the magazine'll be finished. Are
you game, Joe?"
Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl's
room. When we turn on the lights there's a woman in the bed waiting for
Carl. "I forgot all about her," says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove
Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there's a knock at the door. It's Van
Norden. He's all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth -- at the Bal Negre, he
thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked
fish.
In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth.
Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth.
* * *
It is my last dinner at the dramatist's home. They have just rented a new
piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist's with a
rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he
goes for the cigars. One by one I've fucked myself out of all these free
meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against
me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think
of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was
sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had
tried to pawn off on a garcon at the Dome. He had offered me six
francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the
upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was
so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one
of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half
once, may be more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and
then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a
jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was staffed with wedding
rings. When I got to the pier Mona Was not to be seen. I waited for the last
passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown
the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my
pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got
it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was
sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when
suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a
few francs besides. And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one
would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went
immediately to a cafe and wrote a dozen letters. "Would you let me have
dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you." It
worked like a charm. I was not only fed ... I was feasted. Every night I went
home drunk. They couldn't do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls.
What happened to me between times was none of their affair. Now and then the
thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money. They
were all obviously relieved when they realized that they would see me only
once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said -- "it won't be
necessary any more." They never asked why. They congratulated me, and that
was all. Often the reason was I had found a better host; I could afford to
scratch off the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never
occurred to them. Finally I had a steady, solid program -- a fixed schedule.
On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a meal and on Fridays that kind.
Cronstadt, I knew, would have champagne for me and homemade apple pie. And
Carl would invite me out, take me to a different restaurant each time, order
rare wines, invite me to the theatre afterwards or take me to the Cirque
Medrano. They were curious about one another, my hosts. Would ask me which
place I liked best, who was the best cook, etc. I think I liked Cronstadt's
joint best of all, perhaps because he chalked the meal up on the wall each
time. Not that it eased my conscience to see what I owed him, because I had
no intention of paying him back nor had he any illusions about being
requited. No, it was the odd numbers which intrigued me. He used to figure it
out to the last centime. If I was to pay in full I would have had to break a
sou. His wife was a marvellous cook and she didn't give a fuck about those
centimes Cronstadt added up. She took it out of me in carbon copies. A fact!
If I hadn't any fresh carbons for her when I showed up, she was crestfallen.
And for that I would have to take the little girl to the Luxembourg next day,
play with her for two or three hours, a task which drove me wild because she
spoke nothing but Hungarian and French. They were a queer lot on the whole,
my hosts ... At Tania's I look down on the spread from the balcony. Moldorf
is there, sitting beside his idol. He is warming his feet at the hearth, a
monstrous look of gratitude in his watery eyes. Tania is running over the
adagio. The adagio says very distinctly: no more words of love! I am at the
fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk. Sylvester has just
come back from Broadway with a heart full of love. All night I was lying on a
bench outside the mall while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and
the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever
touching the ground. All night long I smell the lilacs in the little dark
room where she is taking down her hair, the lilacs that I bought for her as
she went to meet Sylvester. He came back with a heart full of love, she said,
and the lilacs are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits. The
room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm lilacs and the horses are
galloping like mad. In the morning dirty teeth and scum on the
window-panes; the little gate that leads to the mall is locked. People
are going to work and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail. In the
bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Tchad, the silent
lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints. All the letters I wrote her, drunken
ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with bits of charcoal, little pieces from
bench to bench, firecrackers, doilies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over
them now, together, and he will compliment me one day. He will say, as he
flicks his cigar ash: "Really, you write quite well. Let's see, you're a
Surrealist, aren't you?" Dry, brittle voice, teeth full of dandruff, solo for
solar plexus, g for gaga.
Up on the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio going on down below.
The keys are black and white, then black, then white, then white and black.
And you want to know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something
with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that's the only
god-damned thing you know. Play it, and then cut off your big thumbs.
That adagio! I don't know why she insists on playing it all the time. The old
piano wasn't good enough for her; she had to rent a concert grand -- for the
adagio! When I see her big thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber
plant beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw his clothes
away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs, threw nuts down into the
herring-frozen sea. There is something exasperating about this movement,
something abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in lava,
as if it had the color of lead and milk mixed. And Sylvester, with his head
cocked to one side like an auctioneer, Sylvester says: "Play that other one
you were practising today." It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good
cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the
acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air. Yes, her fingers are
very supple, extraordinarily supple. She does batik work too. Would you like
to try a Bulgarian cigarette? I say, pigeon-breast, what's that other
movement I like so well? The scherzo! Ah, yes, the scherzo! Excellent, the
scherzo! Count Waldemar von Schwisseneinzug speaking. Cool, dandruff eyes.
Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And crotons in the pea soup, if you please. We always
have pea soup Friday nights. Won't you try a little red wine? The red wine
goes with the meat, you know. A dry, crisp voice. Have a cigar, won't you?
Yes, I like my work, but I don't attach any importance to it. My next play
will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with
calcium lights. O'Neill is dead. I think, dear, you should lift your foot
from the pedal more frequently. Yes, that part is very nice ... very
nice, don't you think? Yes, the characters go around with microphones in
their trousers. The locale is in Asia, because the atmospheric conditions are
more conducive. Would you like to try a little Anjou? We bought it especially
for you ...
All through the meal this patter continues. It feels exactly as if he had
taken out that circumcised dick of his and was peeing on us. Tania is
bursting with the strain. Ever since he came back with a heart full of love
this monologue has been going on. He talks while he's undressing, she tells
me -- a steady stream of warm piss, as though his bladder had been punctured.
When I think of Tania crawling into bed with this busted bladder I get
enraged. To think that a poor, withered bastard with those cheap Broadway
plays up his sleeve should be pissing on the woman I love. Calling for red
wine and revolving drums and crotons in his pea soup! The cheek of him! To
think that he can lie beside that furnace I stoked for him and do nothing but
make water! My God, man, you ought to get down on your knees and thank me.
Don't you see that you have a woman in your house now? Can't you see
she's bursting? You telling me with those strangulated adenoids of yours --
"well now, I'll tell you ... there's .two ways of looking at that ..." Fuck
your two ways of looking at things! Fuck your pluralistic universe, and your
Asiatic acoustics! Don't hand me your red wine or your Anjou ... hand
her over ... she belongs to me! You ,go sit by the fountain, and let
me smell the lilacs! Pick the dandruff from out of your eyes ... and
take that damned adagio and wrap it in a pair of flannel pants! And the other
little movement too ... all the little movements that you make with your weak
bladder. You smile at me so confidently, so calculatingly. I'm flattering the
ass off you, can't you tell? While I listen to your crap she's got her hand
on me -- but you don't see that. You think I like to suffer -- that's my
role, you say. O.K. Ask her about it! She'll tell you how I suffer. "You're
cancer and delirium," she said over the phone the other day. She's got it
now, the cancer and delirium, and soon you'll have to pick the scabs. Her
veins are bursting, I tell you, and your talk is all sawdust. No matter how
much you piss away you'll never plug up the holes. What did Mr. Wren say?
Words are loneliness, I left a couple of words for you on the
tablecloth last night -- you covered them with your elbows.
He's put a fence around her as if she were a dirty, stinking bone of a
saint. If he only had the courage to say 'Take her!" perhaps a miracle would
occur. Just that. Take her! and I swear everything would come out all
right. Besides, maybe I wouldn't take her -- did that ever occur to him, I
wonder? Or I might take her for a while and hand her back, improved.
But putting up a fence around her, that won't work. You can't put a fence
around a human being. It ain't done any more ... You think, you poor,
withered bastard, that I'm no good for her, that I might pollute her,
desecrate her. You don't know how palatable is a polluted woman, how a
change of semen can make a woman bloom! You think a heart full of love
is enough, and perhaps it is, for the right woman, but you haven't got a
heart any more ... you are nothing but a big, empty bladder. You are
sharpening your teeth and cultivating your growl. You run at her heels like
a watchdog and you piddle everywhere. She didn't take you for a watchdog
... she took you for a poet. You were a poet once, she said. And now what
are you? Courage, Sylvester, courage! Take the microphone out of your pants.
Put your hind leg down and stop making water everywhere. Courage, I say,
because she's ditched you already. She's contaminated, I tell you, and you
might as well take down the fence. No use asking me politely if the coffee
doesn't taste like carbolic acid: that won't scare me away. Put rat poison
in the coffee, and a little ground glass. Make some boiling hot urine and
drop a few nutmegs in it ...
It is a communal life I have been living for the last few weeks. I have had
to share myself with others, principally with some crazy Russians, a drunken
Dutchman, and a big Bulgarian woman named Olga. Of the Russians there are
chiefly Eugene and Anatole.
It was just a few days ago that Olga got out of the hospital where she had
her tubes burned out and lost a little excess weight. However she doesn't
look as if she had gone through much suffering. She weighs almost as much as
a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and
still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior. She has two big
warts on her chin from which there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is
growing a moustache.
The day after Olga was released from the hospital she commenced making shoes
again. At six in the morning she is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs
of shoes a day. Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is
that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two pairs of shoes a
day. If Olga doesn't work there is no food. So everyone endeavours to pull
Olga to bed on time, to give her enough food to keep going, etc.
Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup, tomato soup,
vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always tastes the same. Mostly it
tastes as if a dish rag had been stewed in it -- slightly sour, mildewed,
scummy. I see Eugene hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays
there, rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden away in
the commode; after three days it tastes like the big toe of a cadaver.
The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing,
especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the
slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill.
But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and
pulls back the bed-sheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the
sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of
furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water
still in it, and he says: "I am a slave!" Every day he says it, not once,
but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.
But about the smell of rancid butter ... There are good associations too.
When I think of this rancid butter, I see myself standing in a little,
old-world courtyard, a very Smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the
cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me ... old women with
shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes, bearded idiots. They
totter out into the courtyard to draw water or to rinse the slop pails. One
day Eugene asked me if I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the
corner of the yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper lying
around the hole. The little well was slimy with excrement, which in English
is shit. I tipped the pail and there was a foul, gurgling spash
followed by another and unexpected splash. When I returned the soup was
dished out. All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush -- it is getting
old and the bristles get caught in my teeth.
When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window. I am afraid to sit on
the other side of the table -- it is too Close to the bed and the bed is
crawling. I can see bloodstains on the gray sheets if I look that way, but
I try not to look that way. I look out on the courtyard where they are
rinsing the slop pails.
The meal is never complete without music. As soon as the cheese is passed
around Eugene jumps up and reaches for the guitar which hangs over the bed.
It is always the same song. He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his
repertoire, but I have never heard more than three. His favorite is
Channant poeme d'amour. It is full of angoisse and
tristesse.
In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark. Eugene sits at
the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front. The house is empty,
but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe.
The garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and the rain
blends with Eugene's angoisse and tristesse. At midnight,
after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul
breath, I return to sleep on a bench. The exit light, swimming in a halo of
tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos
curtain; I close my eyes every night on an artificial eye ...
Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world intelligible.
The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door
bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with
bat-dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is
an enamelled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: "Be sure to close
the door." Why close the door? I can't make it out. I look again at the sign
but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out
my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is
sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her
neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in
colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before
the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossus and Carthage, of Carthage
before and after the salting. In a corner of the room I see an iron bedstead
and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse
from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the
huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the
room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only
the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window
and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers
and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are
nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.
I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge. A deep fog has settled
down, the earth is smeared with frozen grease. I can feel the city
palpitating, as if it were a heart just removed from a warm body. The
windows of my hotel are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of
chemicals burning. Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation, street
lamps drowning, men and women choking to death, the bridges covered with
houses, slaughter-houses of love. A man is standing against a wall with an
accordion strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but
the accordion writhes between his stamps like a sack of snakes. The universe
has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no
rivers. The people who live here are dead; they make chairs which other
people sit on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and in
the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already dead are trying
frantically to mount the gallows, but the wheel is turning too fast ...
Something was needed to put me right with myself. Last night I discovered
it: Papini. It doesn't matter to me whether he's a chauvinist, a
little Christer, or a nearsighted pedant. As a failure he's marvellous ...
The books he read -- at eighteen! Not only Homer, Dante, Goethe, not only
Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only
Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de
Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley
-- not only these but all the small fry in between. This on page 18.
Alors, on page 232 he breaks down and confesses. I know nothing, he
admits. I know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have written
critical essays, I have maligned and defamed ... I can talk for five minutes
or for five days, but then I give out, I am squeezed dry.
Follows this: "Everybody wants to see me. Everybody insists on talking to
me. People pester me and they pester others with inquiries about what I am
doing. How am I? Am I quite well again? Do I still go for my walks in the
country? Am I working? Have I finished my book? Will I begin another soon?
"A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his works. A wildeyed
Russian girl wants me to write an account of my life for her. An American
lady wants the very latest news about me. An American gentleman will
send his carriage to take me to dinner -- just an intimate, confidential talk,
you know. An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten years ago, wants me to
read him all that I write as fast as I write it. A painter friend I know
expects me to pose for him by the hour. A newspaper man wants my present
address. An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my soul;
another, more practical, about the state of my pocketbook. The president of
my club wonders if I will make a speech for the boys! A lady, spiritually
inclined, hopes I will come to her house for tea as often as possible. She
wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and -- what do I think of that new
medium? ...
"Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter
up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for
your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for?
Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an
intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid
for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all
that I do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon
to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man
in a tailored suit who comes along?
"I am a man who would live an heroic life and make the world more endurable
in his own sight: If, in some moment of weakness, of relaxation, of need, I
blow off steam -- a bit of red-hot rage cooled off in words -- a passionate
dream, wrapped and tied in imagery -- well, take it or leave it ... but
don't bother me!
"I am a free man -- and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to
ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the
paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face
to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. What do you
want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have
something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your
compliments humiliate me! Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to any one. I
would be responsible to God alone -- if He existed!"
It seems to me Papini misses something by a hair's breadth when he talks of
the need to be alone. It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a
failure. An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the
artist needs is loneliness.
The artist, I call myself. So be it. A beautiful nap this afternoon that put
velvet between my vertebrae. Generated enough ideas to last me three days.
Chock full of energy and nothing to do about it. Decide to go for a walk.
In the street I change my mind. Decide to go to the movies. Can't go to the
movies -- short a few sous. A walk then. At every movie house I stop and look
at the billboards, then at the price list. Cheap enough, these opium
joints, but I'm short just a few sous. If it weren't so late I might go back
and cash an empty bottle.
By the time I get to the Rue Amelie I've forgotten all about the movies. The
Rue Amelie is one of my favorite streets. It is one of those streets which
by good fortune the municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones
spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other. Only one block
long and narrow. The Hotel Pretty is on this street. There is a little
church, too, on the Rue Amelie. It looks as though it were made especially
for the President of the Republic and his private family. It's good
occasionally to see a modest little church. Paris is full of pompous
cathedrals.
Pont Alexandre III. A great wind-swept space approaching the bridge. Gaunt
bare trees mathematically fixed in their iron grates; the gloom of the
Invalides welling out of the dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent
to the Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they want him now,
the great warrior, the last big man of Europe. He sleeps soundly in his
granite bed. No fear of him turning over in his grave. The doors are well
bolted, the lid is on tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they
wanted, it was only your corpse!
The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I don't know what
it is rushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swift-moving current, but a
great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in my never to
leave this land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to
the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me,
no check, no cable, nothing, nothing. A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette
was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking
through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold
fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river towards
Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to
himself: "Ah, spring is coming!" And God knows, when spring comes to Paris
the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But it was
not only this -- it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene.
It was his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen,
to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people -- the proudest
and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me. And
yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes
the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.
When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes
even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign.
The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity
going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A
constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a testtube.
Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous.
Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely
uncoordinated.
When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that
Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white
prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the bread lines, the opium
joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers,
the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets,
legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole
city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely
meaningless. And Forty-Second Street! The top of the world, they call it.
Where's the bottom then? You can walk along with your hand out and they'll
put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back
and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white
prisons. They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray their
empty faces with flecks of ecstasy.
* * *
"Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that
be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about
food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don't ask to go back to America, to be put in double harness again, to
work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am
poor enough; it only remains to be a man. Last week I thought the problem of
living was about to be solved, thought I was on the way to becoming
self-supporting. It happened that I ran across another Russian -- Serge is
his name. He lives in Suresnes where there is a little colony of
emigres and rundown artists. Before the revolution Serge was a captain
in the Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged feet and
drinks vodka like a fish. His father was an admiral, or something like that,
on the battleship Potemkin.
I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances. Sniffing about for food I
found myself towards noon the other day in the neighborhood of the Folies
Bergere -- the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow little lane with
an iron gate at one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping
vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck
pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing there with my hands in my
pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand
unloading the iron barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I'm
broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high and low for an
English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside
and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings. The
incident takes on strange proportions to me -- the empty house, the sawdust
dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship
Potemkin -- above all. Serge's gentleness. He is big and tender, a man every
inch of him, but with a woman's heart.
In the cafe nearby -- Cafe des Artistes -- he proposes immediately to put me
up; says he will put a mattress on the floor in the hallway. For the lessons
he says he will give me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any
reason the meal is lacking then five francs. It sounds wonderful to me --
wonderful. The only question is, how will I get from Suresnes to the
American Express every day.
Serge insists that we begin at once -- he gives me the car fare to get out to
Suresnes in the evening. I arrive a little before dinner, with my knapsack,
in order to give Serge a lesson. There are some guests on hand already --
seems as though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in.
There are eight of us at the table -- and three dogs. The dogs eat first. They
eat oatmeal. Then we commence. We eat oatmeal too -- as an hors-d'oeuvre.
"Chez nous," says Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, "c'est pour
les chiens, les Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ca va." After the
oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon omelette, fruit, red
wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes. Not bad, the Russian meal. Everyone talks
with his mouth fall. Toward the end of the meal Serge's wife who is a lazy
slut of an Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons. She
fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a tiny piece to see
if there is any juice inside, and then throws it on the floor for the dogs.
The meal over, the guests rush away. They rush away precipitously, as if
they feared a plague. Serge and I are left with the dogs -- his wife has
fallen asleep on the couch. Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the
garbage together for the dogs. "Dogs like very much," be says. "Very good
for dogs. Little dog he has worms ... he too young yet." He bends down to
examine some white worms lying on the carpet between the dog's paws. Tries
to explain about the worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking.
Finally he consults the dictionary.
"Ah," he says, looking at me exultantly, "tape-worms!" My response is
evidently not very intelligent. Serge is confused. He gets down on his hands
and knees to examine them better. He picks one up and lays it on the table
beside the fruit. "Huh, him not very beeg," he grunts. "Next lesson you
learn me worms, no? You are gude teacher. I make progress with you ..."
Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A
pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body. The food
begins to repeat on me -- the quaker oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried
apples. I see the little tape-worm lying beside the fruit and all the
varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth to explain what was the
matter with the dog. I see the empty pit of the Folies Bergere and in every
crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching
themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes. I
see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring
everything in sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze
tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit
throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys.
I try to quiet myself. After all, this is a home I've found, and there's a
meal waiting for me every day. And Serge is a brick, there's no doubt about
that. But I can't sleep. It's like going to sleep in a morgue. The mattress
is saturated with embalming fluid. It's a morgue for lice, bedbugs,
cockroaches, tape-worms. I can't stand it. I won't stand it. After
all I'm a man, not a louse.
In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck. I ask him to take me in
to Paris. I haven't the heart to tell him I'm leaving. I leave the knapsack
behind, with the few things that were left me. When we get to the Place
Pereire I jump out. No particular reason for getting off here. No particular
reason for anything. I'm free -- that's the main thing ...
Light as a bird I flit about from one quarter to another. It's as though I
had been released from prison. I look at the world with new eyes. Everything
interests me profoundly. Even trifles. On the Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere
I stop before the window of a physical culture establishment. There are
photographs showing specimens of manhood "before and after." All frogs. Some
of them are nude, except for a pince-nez or a beard. Can't understand how
these birds fall for parallel bars and dumbbells. A frog should have just a
wee bit of a paunch, like the Baron de Charlus. He should wear a beard and a
pince-nez, but he should never be photographed in the nude. He should wear
twinkling patent-leather boots and in the breast pocket of his sack coat
there should be a white handkerchief protruding about three-quarters of an
inch above the vent. If possible, he should have a red ribbon in his lapel,
through the buttonhole. He should wear pajamas on going to bed.
Approaching the Place Clichy toward evening I pass the little whore with the
wooden stump who stands opposite the Gaumont Palace day in and day out. She
doesn't look a day over eighteen. Has her regular customers, I suppose.
After midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the spot. Back of
her is the little alleyway that blazes like an inferno. Passing her now with
a light heart she reminds me somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose
with a diseased liver, so that the world may have its pate de foie
gras. Must be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you. One
imagines all sorts of things -- splinters, etc. However, every man to his
taste!
Going down the Rue des Dames I bump into Peckover, another poor devil who
works on the paper. He complains of getting only three or four hours' sleep
a night -- has to get up at eight in the morning to work at a dentist's
office. It isn't for the money he's doing it, so he explains -- it's for to
buy himself a set of false teeth. "It's hard to read proof when you're
dropping with sleep," he says. "The wife, she thinks I've got a cinch of it.
What would we do if you lost your job? she says." But Peckover doesn't give
a damn about the job; it doesn't even allow him spending money. He has to
save his cigarette butts and use them for pipe tobacco. His coat is held
together with pins. He has halitosis and his hands sweat. And only three
hours' sleep a night. "It's no way to treat a man," he says. "And that boss
of mine, he bawls the piss out of me if I miss a semicolon." Speaking of
his wife he adds:
"That woman of mine, she's got no fucking gratitude, I tell you!"
In parting I manage to worm a franc fifty out of him. I try to squeeze
another fifty centimes out of him but it's impossible. Anyway I've got
enough for a coffee and croissants. Near the Gare St. Lazare there's
a bar with reduced prices.
As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert.
Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau. The usher looks
ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip. Every time he passes
me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.
It's so long since I've sat in the company of well dressed people that I
feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell the formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge
makes deliveries here too. But nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A
faint odor of perfume ... very faint. Even before the music begins there is
that bored look on people's faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture,
the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand,
there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a
general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady,
uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is curiously alert; it's
as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut,
vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water.
I've never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes
me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It's as though I had no clothes on and
every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light
flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my
ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations.
How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place.
After what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of
semiconsciousness balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me,
a lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake, rising in
great swooping spirals, there emerge great flocks of birds, huge birds of
passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock after flock surge up
from the cool, still surface of the lake and, passing under my clavicles,
lose themselves in the white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as
if an old woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body, slowly the
windows are closed and my organs drop back into place. Suddenly the lights
flare up and the man in the white box whom I had taken for a Turkish officer
turns out to be a woman with a flower-pot on her head.
There is a buzz now and all those who want to cough cough to their heart's
content. There is the noise of feet shuffling and seats slamming, the
steady, frittering noise of people moving about aimlessly, of people
fluttering their programs and pretending to read and then dropping their
programs and scuffling under their seats, thankful for even the slightest
accident which will prevent them from asking themselves what they were
thinking about because if they knew they were thinking about nothing they
would go mad. In the harsh glare of the lights they look at each other
vacuously and there is a strange tenseness with which they stare at one
another. And the moment the conductor raps again they fall back into a
cataleptic state -- they scratch themselves unconsciously or they remember
suddenly a show-window in which there was displayed a scarf or a hat; they
remember every detail of that window with amazing clarity, but where it was
exactly, that they can't recall; and that bothers them, keeps them wide
awake, restless, and they listen now with redoubled attention because they
are wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they will not lose
consciousness of that show-window and that scarf that was hanging there, or
the hat.
And this fierce attentiveness communicates itself; even the orchestra seems
galvanized into an extraordinary alertness. The second number goes off like
a top -- so fast indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights go
up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws working
convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their ear Brahms, Beethoven,
Mendeleieff, Herzegovina, they would answer without thinking -- 4, 967,
289.
By the time we get to the Debussy number the atmosphere is completely
poisoned. I find myself wondering what it feels like, during intercourse, to
be a woman -- whether the pleasure is keener, etc. Try to imagine something
penetrating my groin, but have only a vague sensation of pain. I try
to focus, but the music is too slippery. I can think of nothing but a vase
slowly turning and the figures dropping off into space. Finally there is
only light turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself. The man next to
me is sleeping soundly. He looks like a broker, with his big paunch and his
waxed moustache. I like him thus. I like especially that big paunch and all
that went into the making of it. Why shouldn't he sleep soundly? If he wants
to listen he can always rustle up the price of a ticket. I notice that the
better dressed they are the more soundly they sleep. They have an easy
conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes off, even for a few seconds, he
feels mortified; he imagines that he has committed a crime against the
composer.
In the Spanish number the house was electrified. Everybody sat on the edge
of his seat -- the drums woke them up. I thought when the drums started it
would keep up forever. I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or
throw their hats away. There was something heroic about it and he could have
driven us stark mad. Ravel, if he had wanted to. But that's not Ravel.
Suddenly it all died down. It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his
antics, that he had on a cut-away suit. He arrested himself. A great
mistake, in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If
you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. Ravel
sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest
before going to bed.
My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away from me, now that the
drums have ceased. People everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit
light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his
eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard
with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as if he were posing for the Balzac of
Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite
me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she
looks as though she had lock-jaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated.
The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail -- marvellous if she
were to have a hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those
stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the
concert with blood on their dickies!
Sleep is the keynote. No one is listening any more. Impossible to think and
listen. Impossible to dream even when the music itself is nothing but a
dream. A woman with white gloves holds a swan in her lap. The legend is that
when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins. Everybody is giving birth
to something -- everybody but the Lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is
uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the
shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing
her ears. Little phrases from California, whales with big fins, Zanzibar,
the Alcazar. When along the Guadalquivir there were a thousand mosques
a-shimmer. Deep in the icebergs and the days all lilac. The Money Street
with two white hitching-posts. The gargoyles ... the man with the Jaworski
nonsense ... the river lights ... the ...
* * *
In America I had a number of Hindu friends, some good, some bad, some
indifferent. Circumstances had placed me in a position where fortunately I
could be of aid to them; I secured jobs for them, I harbored them, and I fed
them when necessary. They were very grateful, I must say, so much so, in
fact, that they made my life miserable with their attentions. Two of them
were saints, if I know what a saint is; particularly Gupte who was found one
morning with his throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in
Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out stark naked on the
bed, his flute beside him, and his throat gashed, as I say, from ear to ear.
It was never discovered whether he had been murdered or whether he had
committed suicide. But that's neither here nor there ...
I'm thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has brought me finally
to Nanantatee's place. Thinking how strange it is that I should have
forgotten all about Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby
hotel room on the Rue Cels. I'm lying there on the iron bed thinking what a
zero I have become, what a cipher, what a nullity, when, bango! out pops the
word: NONENTITY! That's what we called him in New York -- Nonentity.
Mister Nonentity.
I'm lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms he boasted of when
he was in New York. Nanantatee is playing the good Samaritan; he has given me
a pair of itchy blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the
dusty floor. There are little jobs to do every hour of the day -- that is, if
I am foolish enough to remain indoors. In the morning he wakes me rudely in
order to have me prepare the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans,
etc. His friend. Kepi, warns me not to eat the food -- he says it's bad. Bad
or good what difference? Food! That's all that matters. For a little
food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a broken broom, to wash his
clothes and to scrape the crumbs off the floor as soon as he has finished
eating. He's become absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to
be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way, the clock must
ring, the toilet must flush properly ... A crazy Hindu if ever there was
one! And parsimonious as a string bean. I'll have a great laugh over it when
I get out of his clutches, but just now I'm a prisoner, a man without caste,
an untouchable...
If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse blankets he says
to me on arriving: "Oh, so you didn't die then? I thought you had died."
And though he knows I'm absolutely penniless he tells me every day about
some cheap room he has just discovered in the neighborhood. "But I can't
take a room yet, you know that," I say. And then, blinking his eyes like a
Chink, he answers smoothly: "Oh, yes, I forgot that you had no money. I am
always forgetting, Endree ... But when the cable comes ... when Miss Mona
sends you the money, then you will come with me to look for a room, eh?" And
in the next breath he urges me to stay as long as I wish -- "six months ...
seven months, Endree ... you are very good for me here."
Nanantatee is one of the Hindus I never did anything for in America. He
represented himself to me as a wealthy merchant, a pearl merchant, with a
luxurious suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette, Paris, a villa in Bombay, a
bungalow in Darjeeling. I could see from the first glance that he was a
half-wit, but then half-wits sometimes have the genius to amass a fortune. I
didn't know that he paid his hotel bill in New York by leaving a couple of
fat pearls in the proprietor's hands. It seems amusing to me now that this
little duck once swaggered about the lobby of that hotel in New York with an
ebony Cane, bossing the bell-hops around, ordering luncheons for his guests,
calling up the porter for theatre tickets, Denting a taxi by the day, etc.,
etc., all without a sou in his pocket. Just a string of fat pearls around his
neck which he cashed one by one as time wore on. And the fatuous way he used
to pat me on the back, thank me for being so good to the Hindu boys -- "they
are all very intelligent boys, Endree ... very intelligent!" Telling me that
the good lord so-and-so would repay me for my kindness. That explains now why
they used to giggle so, these intelligent Hindu boys, when I suggested that
they touch Nanantatee for a five-spot.
Curious now how the good lord so-and-so is requiting me for my benevolence.
I'm nothing but a slave to this fat little duck. I'm at his beck and call
continually. He needs me here -- he tells me so to my face. When he goes to
the crap-can he shouts: "Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please. I must
wipe myself." He wouldn't think of using toilet paper, Nanantatee. Must be
against his religion. No, he calls for a pitcher of water and a rag. He's
delicate, the fat little duck. Sometimes when I'm drinking a cup of
pale tea in which he has dropped a rose-leaf he comes alongside of me and
lets a loud fart, right in my face. He never says "Excuse me!" The word must
be missing from his Gujurati dictionary.
The day I arrived at Nanantatee's apartment he was in the act of performing
his ablutions, that is to say, he was standing over a dirty bowl trying to
work his crooked arm around toward the back of his neck. Beside the bowl was
a brass goblet which he used to change the water. He requested me to be
silent during the ceremony. I sat there silently, as I was bidden, and
watched him as he sang and prayed and spat now and then into the wash-bowl.
So this is the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York! The Rue
Lafayette! It sounded like an important street to me back there in New York.
I thought only millionaires and pearl merchants inhabited the street. It
sounds wonderful, the Rue Lafayette, when you're on the other side of the
water. So does Fifth Avenue, when you're over here. One can't imagine what
dumps there are on these swell streets. Anyway, here I am at last, sitting
in the gorgeous suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette. And this crazy duck
with his crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself. The
chair on which I'm sitting is broken, the bedstead is falling apart, the
wall-paper is in tatters, there is an open valise under the bed crammed with
dirty wash. From where I sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down
below where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke their clay
pipes. I wonder now, as he chants the doxology, what that bungalow in
Darjeeling looks like. It's interminable, his chanting and praying.
He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain prescribed
way -- his religion demands it. But on Sundays he takes a bath in the tin
tub -- the Great I AM will wink at that, he says. When he's dressed he goes to
the cupboard, kneels before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats
the mumbojumbo. If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will
happen to you. The good lord what's his name never forgets an obedient
servant. And then he shows me the crooked arm which he got in a taxi
accident on a day doubtless when he had neglected to rehearse the complete
song and dance. His arm looks like a broken compass; it's not an arm any
more, but a knuckle-bone with a shank attached. Since the arm has been
repaired he has developed a pair of swollen glands in the armpit -- fat little
glands, exactly like a dog's testicles. While bemoaning his plight he
remembers suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal diet. He
begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu with plenty of fish and meat.
"And what about oysters, Endree -- for le petit frere?" But all this is
only to make an impression on me. He hasn't the slightest intention of
buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish. Not as long as I am there, at
least. For the time being we are going to nourish ourselves on lentils and
rice and all the dry foods he has stored away, in the attic. And the butter
he bought last week, that won't go to waste either. When he commences to
cure the butter the smell is unbearable. I used to run out at first, when he
started frying the butter, but now I stick it out. He'd be only too
delighted if he could make me vomit up my meal -- that would be something else
to put away in the cupboard along with the dry bread and the mouldy cheese
and the little grease cakes that he makes himself out of the stale milk and
the rancid butter.
For the last five years, so it seems, he hasn't done a stroke of work,
hasn't turned over a penny. Business has gone to smash. He talks to me about
pearls in the Indian ocean -- big fat ones on which you can live for a
lifetime. The Arabs are ruining the business, he says. But meanwhile he prays
to the lord so-and-so every day, and that sustains him. He's on a marvellous
footing with the deity: knows just how to cajole him, how to wheedle a few
sous out of him. It's a pure commercial relationship. In exchange for that
flummery before the cabinet every day he gets his ration of beans and garlic,
to say nothing of the swollen testicles under his arm. He is confident that
everything will turn out well in the end. The pearls will sell again some
day, maybe five years hence, maybe twenty -- when the Lord Boomaroom wishes
it. "And when the business goes, Endree, you will get ten per cent -- for
writing the letters. But first, Endree, you must write the letter to find out
if we can get credit from India. It will take about six months for an answer,
maybe seven months ... the boats are not fast in India." He has no conception
of time at all, the little duck. When I ask him if he has slept well he will
say: "Ah, yes, Endree, I sleep very well ... I sleep sometimes ninety-two
hours in three days."
Mornings he is usually too weak to do any work. His arm! That poor broken
crutch of an arm! I wonder sometimes when I see him twisting it around the
back of his neck how he will ever get it into place again. If it weren't for
that little paunch he carries he'd remind me of one of those contortionists
at the Cirque Medrano. All he needs is to break a leg. When he sees me
sweeping the carpet, when he sees what a cloud of dust I raise, he begins to
cluck like a pygmy. "Good! Very good, Endree. And now I will pick up the
knots." That means that there are a few crumbs of dust which I have
overlooked; it is a polite way he has of being sarcastic.
Afternoons there are always a few cronies from the pearl market dropping in
to pay him a visit. They're all very suave, butter-tongued bastards with
soft, doelike eyes; they sit around the table drinking the perfumed tea with
a loud, hissing noise while Nanantatee jumps up and down like a
jack-in-the-box or points to a crumb on the floor and says in his smooth
slippery voice -- "Will you please to pick that up, Endree." When the guests
arrive he goes unctuously to the cupboard and gets out the dry crusts of
bread which he toasted maybe a week ago and which taste strongly now of the
mouldy wood. Not a crumb is thrown away. If the bread gets too sour he takes
it downstairs to the concierge who, so he says, has been very kind to him.
According to him, the concierge is delighted to get the stale bread -- she
makes bread pudding with it.
One day my friend Anatole came to see me. Nanantatee was delighted.
Insisted that Anatole stay for tea. Insisted that he try little grease
cakes and the stale bread. "You must come every day," he says, "and teach me
Russian. Fine language, Russian ... I want to speak it. How do you say that
again, Endree -- borscht? You will write that down for me, please,
Endree ..." And I must write it on the typewriter, no less, so that he can
observe my technique. He bought the typewriter, after he had collected on
the bad arm, because the doctor recommended it as a good exercise. But he
got tired of the typewriter shortly -- it was an English typewriter.
When he learned that Anatole played the mandolin he said: "Very good! You
must come every day and teach me the music. I will buy a mandolin as soon as
business is better. It is good for my arm." The next day he borrows a
phonograph from the concierge. "You will please teach me to dance, Endree.
My stomach is too big." I am hoping that he will buy a porterhouse steak
some day so that I can say to him: "You will please bite it for me.
Mister Nonentity. My teeth are not strong!"
As I said a moment ago, ever since my arrival he has become extraordinarily
meticulous. "Yesterday," he says, "you made three mistakes, Endree. First,
you forgot to close the toilet door and so all night it makes boom-boom;
second, you left the kitchen window open and so the window is cracked this
morning. And you forgot to put out the milk bottle! Always you will put out
the milk bottle please, before you go to bed, and in the morning you will
please bring in the bread."
Every day his friend Kepi drops in to see if any visitors have arrived from
India. He waits for Nanantatee to go out and then he scurries to the cupboard
and devours the sticks of bread that are hidden away in a glass jar. The food
is no good, he insists, but he puts it away like a rat. Kepi is a scrounger,
a sort of human tick who fastens himself to the hide of even the poorest
compatriot. From Kepi's standpoint they are all nabobs. For a Manila cheroot
and the price of a drink he will suck any Hindu's ass. A Hindu's mind you,
but not an Englishman's. He has the address of every whore-house in Paris,
and the rates. Even from the ten-franc points he gets his little commission.
And he knows the shortest way to any place you want to go. He will ask you
first if you want to go by taxi; if you say no, he will suggest the bus, and
if that is too high then the tramway or the metro. Or he will offer to walk
you there and save a franc or two, knowing very well that it will be
necessary to pass a tabac on the way and that you will please be so
good as to buy me a little cheroot.
Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no ambition except
to get a fuck every night. Every penny he makes, and they are damned few, he
squanders in the dance-halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay,
but that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any little femme
de chambre who is stupid and credulous enough to be taken in by him. He
has a little room on the Rue Condorcet for which he pays sixty francs a
month. He papered it all himself. Very proud of it, too. He uses
violet-colored ink in his fountain-pen because it lasts longer. He shines
his own shoes, presses his own pants, does his own laundry. For a little
cigar, a cheroot, if you please, he will escort you all over Paris. If you
stop to look at a shirt or a collar-button his eyes flash. "Don't buy it
here," he will say. "They ask too much. I will show you a cheaper place."
And before you have time to think about it he will whisk you away and
deposit you before another shop-window where there are the same des and
shirts and collar-buttons -- maybe it's the very same store! but you don't
know the difference. When Kepi hears that you want to buy something his soul
becomes animated. He will ask you so many questions and drag you to so many
places that you are bound to get thirsty and ask him to have a drink,
whereupon you will discover to your amazement that you are again standing
in a tabac -- maybe the same tabac! -- and Kepi is saying
again in that small unctuous voice: "Will you please be so good as to buy me
a little cheroot?" No matter what you propose doing, even if it's only to
walk around the corner. Kepi will economize for you. Kepi will show you the
shortest way, the cheapest place, the biggest dish, because whatever you
have to do you must pass a tabac, and whether there is a
revolution or a lock-out or a quarantine Kepi must be at the Moulin Rouge
or the Olympia or the Ange Rouge when the music strikes up.
The other day he brought a book for me to read. It was about a famous suit
between a holy man and the editor of an Indian paper. The editor, it seems,
had openly accused the holy man of leading a scandalous life; he went
further, and accused the holy man of being diseased. Kepi says it must have
been the great French pox, but Nanantatee avers that it was the Japanese
clap. For Nanantatee everything has to be a little exaggerated. At any rate,
says Nanantatee cheerily: "You will please tell me what it says, Endree. I
can't read the book -- it hurts my arm." Then, by way of encouraging me -- "it
is a fine book about the fucking, Endree. Kepi has brought it for you. He
thinks about nothing but the girls. So many girls he fucks -- just like
Krishna. We don't believe in that business, Endree ..."
A little later he takes me upstairs to the attic which is loaded down with
tin cans and crap from India wrapped in burlap and firecracker paper. "Here
is where I bring the girls," he says. And then rather wistfully: "I am not a
very good fucker, Endree. I don't screw the girls any more. I hold them in
my arms and I say the words. I like only to say the words now." It isn't
necessary to listen any further: I know that he is going to tell me about
his arm. I can see him lying there with that broken hinge dangling from the
side of the bed. But to my surprise he adds: "I am no good for the fucking,
Endree. I never was a very good fucker. My brother, he is good! Three times
a day, every day! And Kepi, he is good -- just like Krishna."
His mind is fixed now on the "fucking business." Downstairs, in the little
room where he kneels before the open cabinet, he explains to me how it was
when he was rich and his wife and children were here. On holidays he would
take his wife to the House of All Nations and hire a room for the night.
Every room was appointed in a different style. His wife liked it there very
much. "A wonderful place for the fucking, Endree. I know all the rooms ..."
The walls of the little room in which we are sitting are crammed with
photographs. Every branch of the family is represented, it is like a
cross-section of the Indian empire. For the most part the members of this
genealogical tree look like withered leaves: the women are frail and they
have a startled, frightened look in their eyes: the men have a keen,
intelligent look, like educated chimpanzees. They are all there, about
ninety of them, with their white bullocks, their dung-cakes, their skinny
legs, their old-fashioned spectacles; in the background, now and then, one
catches a glimpse of the parched soil, of a crumbling pediment, of an idol
with crooked arms, a sort of human centipede. There is something so
fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery that one is reminded
inevitably of the great spawn of temples which stretch from the Himalayas
to the tip of Ceylon, a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty
and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous because the fecundity
which seethes and ferments in the myriad ramifications of design seems to
have exhausted the very soil of India itself. Looking at the seething hive
of figures which swarm the facades of the temples one is overwhelmed by the
potency of these dark, handsome people who mingled their mysterious streams
in a sexual embrace that has lasted thirty centuries or more. These frail
men and women with piercing eyes who stare out of the photographs seem like
the emaciated shadows of those virile, massive figures who incarnated
themselves in stone and fresco from one end of India to the other in order
that the heroic myths of the races who here intermingled should remain
forever entwined in the hearts of their countrymen. When I look at only a
fragment of these spacious dreams of stone, these toppling, sluggish
edifices studded with gems, coagulated with human sperm, I am overwhelmed by
the dazzling splendor of those imaginative flights which enabled half
a billion people of diverse origins to thus incarnate the most fugitive
expressions of their longing.
It is a strange, inexplicable medley of feelings which assails me now as
Nanantatee prattles on about the sister who died in child-birth. There she
is on the wall, a frail, timid thing of twelve or thirteen clinging to the
arm of a dotard. At ten years of age she was given in wedlock to this old
roue who had already buried five wives. She had seven children, only one of
whom survived her. She was given to the aged gorilla in order to keep the
pearls in the family. As she was passing away, so Nanantatee puts it, she
whispered to the doctor: "I am tired of this fucking ... I don't want to
fuck any more, doctor." As he relates this to me he scratches his head
solemnly with his withered arm. "The fucking business is bad, Endree," he
says. "But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must
say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it. It is the
best word there is, Endree ... say it now ... OOMAHARUMOOMA!"
"OOMARABOO ..."
"No, Endree ... like this ... OOMAHARUMOOMA!"
"OOMAMABOOMBA ..."
"No, Endree ... like this ...
"... but what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover,
the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the
lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his
throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind,
the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his
conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire in
his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo
and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was
hardset to memorize more than a word a week."
I suppose I would never have gotten out of Nanantatee's clutches if fate
hadn't intervened. One night, as luck would have it. Kepi asked me if I
wouldn't take one of his clients to a whore-house near by. The young man had
just come from India and he had not very much money to spend. He was one of
Gandhi's men, one of that little band who made the historic march to the sea
during the salt trouble. A very gay disciple of Gandhi's I must say, despite
the vows of abstinence he had taken. Evidently he hadn't looked at a woman
for ages. It was all I could do to get him as far as the Rue Lafemere; he was
like a dog with his tongue hanging out. And a pompous, vain little devil to
boot! He had decked himself out in a corduroy suit, a beret, a cane, a
Windsor tie; he had bought himself two fountain-pens, a kodak, and some fancy
underwear. The money he was spending was a gift from the merchants of Bombay;
they were sending him to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi.
Once inside Miss Hamilton's joint he began to lose his sang-froid.
When suddenly he found himself surrounded by a bevy of naked women he looked
at me in consternation. "Pick one out," I said. "You can have your choice."
He had become so rattled that he could scarcely look at them. "You do it for
me," he murmured, blushing violently. I looked them over coolly and picked
out a plump young wench who seemed full of feathers. We sat down in the
reception room and waited for the drinks. The madame wanted to know why I
didn't take a girl also. "Yes, you take one too," said the young Hindu. "I
don't want to be alone with her." So the girls were brought in again and I
chose one for myself, a rather tall, thin one with melancholy eyes. We were
left alone, the four of us, in the reception room. After a few moments my
young Gandhi leans over and whispers something in my ear. "Sure, if you like
her better, take her," I said, and so, rather awkwardly and considerably
embarrassed, I explained to the girls that we would like to switch. I saw at
once that we had made a faux pas, but by now my young friend had
become gay and lecherous and nothing would do but to get upstairs quickly
and have it over with.
We took adjoining rooms with a connecting door between. I think my companion
had in mind to make another switch once he had satisfied his sharp, gnawing
hunger. At any rate, no sooner had the girls left the room to prepare
themselves than I hear him knocking on the door. "Where is the toilet,
please?" he asks. Not thinking that it was anything serious I urge him to do
in the bidet. The girls return with towels in their hands. I hear him
giggling in the next room. As I'm putting on my pants suddenly I hear a
commotion in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a pig, a
dirty little pig. I can't imagine what he has done to warrant such an
outburst. I'm standing there with one foot in my trousers listening
attentively. He's trying to explain to her in English, raising his voice
louder and louder until it becomes a shriek.
I hear a door slam and in another moment the madame bursts into my room, her
face as red as a beet, her arms gesticulating wildly. "You ought to be
ashamed of yourself," she screams, "bringing a man like that to my place!
He's a barbarian ... he's a pig ... he's a ... !" My companion is standing
behind her, in the doorway, a look of utmost discomfiture on his face. "What
did you do?" I ask.
"What did he do?" yells the madame. "I'll show you ... Come here!" And
grabbing me by the arm she drags me into the next room. "There! There!" she
screams, pointing to the bidet.
"Come on, let's get out," says the Hindu boy.
"Wait a minute, you can't get out as easily as all that."
The madame is standing by the bidet, fuming and spitting. The girls
are standing there too, with towels in their hands. The five of us are
standing there looking at the bidet. There are two enormous turds
floating in the water. The madame bends down and puts a towel over it.
"Frightful! Frightful!" she wails. "Never have I seen anything like this! A
pig! A dirty little pig!"
The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. "You should have told me!" he says.
"I didn't know it wouldn't go down. I asked you where to go and you told me
to use that." He is almost in tears.
Finally the madame takes me to one side. She has become a little more
reasonable now. After all, it was a mistake. Perhaps the gentlemen would like
to come downstairs and order another drink -- for the girls. It was a great
shock to the girls. They are not used to such things. And if the good
gentlemen will be so kind as to remember the femme de chambre ... It
is not so pretty for me femme de chambre -- that mess, that ugly mess.
She shrugs her shoulders and winks her eye. A lamentable incident. But an
accident. If the gentlemen will wait here a few moments the maid will bring
the drinks. Would the gentlemen like to have some champagne? Yes?
"I'd like to get out of here," says the Hindu boy weakly.
"Don't you feel so badly about it," says the madame. "It is all over now.
Mistakes will happen sometimes. Next time you will ask for the toilet." She
goes on about the toilet -- one on every floor, it seems. And a bathroom too.
"I have lots of English clients," she says. "They are all gentlemen. The
gentleman is a Hindu? Charming people, the Hindus. So intelligent. So
handsome."
When we get into the street the charming young gentleman is almost weeping.
He is sorry now that he bought a corduroy suit and the cane and the
fountain-pens. He talks about the eight vows that he took, the control of
the palate, etc. On the march to Dandi even a plate of ice cream it was
forbidden to take. He tells me about the spinning wheel -- how the little band
of Satyagrahists imitated the devotion of their master. He relates with
pride how he walked beside the master and conversed with him. I have the
illusion of being in the presence of one of the twelve disciples.
During the next few days we see a good deal of each other; there are
interviews to be arranged with the newspaper men and lectures to be given
to the Hindus of Paris. It is amazing to see how these spineless devils
order one another about; amazing also to see how ineffectual they are in all
that concerns practical affairs. And the jealousy and the intrigues, the
petty, sordid rivalries. Wherever there are ten Hindus together there is
India with her sects and schisms, her racial, lingual, religious, political
antagonisms. In the person of Gandhi they are experiencing for a brief
moment the miracle of unity, but when he goes there will be a crash, an
utter relapse into that strife and chaos so characteristic of the Indian
people.
The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has
been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by
the ubiquitous bath-tub, the five and ten cent store bric-a-brac, the
bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries,
etc., etc. His ideal would be to americanize India. He is not at all pleased
with Gandhi's retrogressive mania. Forward, he says, just like a Y. M.
C. A. man. As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to
expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny.
India's enemy is not England, but America. India's enemy is the time spirit,
the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus
which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom.
She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.
He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people. He tells me about the
credulous souls who succored him there -- the Quakers, the Unitarians, the
Theosophists, the New Thoughters, the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. He knew
where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew how to make the tears
come to his eyes at the right moment; he knew how to take up a collection,
how to appeal to the minister's wife, how to make love to the mother and
daughter at the same time. To look at him you would think him a saint. And
he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a contaminated saint who talks in one
breath of love, brotherhood, bath-tubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.
The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking
business." He has had a full program all day -- conferences, cablegrams,
interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice
to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside his
troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the
garcon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he
is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now
that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very
cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the
Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his
pocket-book. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately
we've got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes he's dancing with a
naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass
reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room -- and those dark,
bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer
glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are
unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches, scratching themselves
peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued
pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited
explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something
microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that
sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet
remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but
insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the
frost which gathers on the window-pane. And like those frost patterns which
seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are
nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which
commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to
ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an
ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call
myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale,
customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations
of the nerve ends.
And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more
delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I
was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in
the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of
tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign
particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered
everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter
clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I
lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama
simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of
hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely
justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and
wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in
blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with
pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty
handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there
is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and
drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute
that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine
freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of
this dung-heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want
roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish
it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will
reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close
his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured, disgrace,
humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui --in the belief that overnight
something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all
the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in
there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and
drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the
cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host
touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless
torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of
relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by
slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the
carcass is ripped open.
And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends
eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds
which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last
moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should
appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even
the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two
enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than
anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it
would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest
dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever
has, and probably nobody ever again will.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary
effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had
been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would
alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved felt as though a great burden had been lifted
from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after
touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse
I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance
to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had
happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been
destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact.
Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there
might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid,
for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested
itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made
up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that
henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.
Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet
and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the
day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the
quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had
one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally
altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part
of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of
his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds
God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow
into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the
soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If
to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a
cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to
preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I
have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat
no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I
shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am
only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world
which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a
jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena
I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.
* * *
At one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement. He had warned me that
if he didn't answer it would mean that he was sleeping with some one,
probably his Georgia cunt.
Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with an air of weariness
as usual. He wakes up, cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.
He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did
not die overnight.
I sit down by the window and give him what encouragement I can. It is
tedious work. One has to actually coax him out of bed. Mornings -- he means by
mornings anywhere between one and five p.m. -- mornings, as I say, he gives
himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past he dreams. About his
"cunts." He endeavors to recall how they felt, what they said to him at
certain critical moments, where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies
there, grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that curious,
bored way of his, as though to convey the impression that his disgust is too
great for words. Over the bedstead hangs a douche-bag which he keeps for
emergencies -- for the virgins whom he tracks down like a sleuth. Even
after he has slept with one of these mythical creatures he will still refer
to her as a virgin, and almost never by name. "My virgin," he will say, just
as he says "my Georgia cunt." When he goes to the toilet he says:
"If my Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait. Say I said so. And listen, you
can have her if you like. I'm tired of her."
He takes a squint at the weather and heaves a deep sigh. If it's rainy he
says: "God damn this fucking climate, it makes one morbid." And if the sun
is shining brightly he says: "God damn that fucking sun, it makes
you blind." As he starts to shave he suddenly remembers that there is no
clean towel. "God damn this fucking hotel, they're too stingy to give you a
clean towel every day!" No matter what he does or where he goes things are
out of joint. Either it's the fucking country or the fucking job, or else
it's some fucking cunt who's put him on the blink.
"My teeth are all rotten," he says, gargling his throat. "It's the fucking
bread they give you to eat here." He opens his mouth wide and pulls his lower
lip down. "See that? Pulled out six teeth yesterday. Soon I'll have to get
another plate. That's what you get working for a living. When I was on the
bum I had all my teeth, my eyes were bright and clear. Look at me now! It's a
wonder I can make a cunt any more. Jesus, what I'd like is to find some rich
cunt -- like that cute little prick, Carl. Did he ever show you the letters
she sends him? Who is she, do you know? He wouldn't tell me her name, the
bastard ... he's afraid I might take her away from him." He gargles his
throat again and then he takes a long look at the cavities. "You're lucky,"
he says ruefully. "You've got friends, at least. I haven't anybody, except
that cute little prick who drives me bats about his rich cunt."
"Listen," he says, "do you happen to know a cunt by the name of Norma? She
hangs around the Dome all day. I think she's queer. I had her up here
yesterday, tickling her ass. She wouldn't let me do a thing. I had her on the
bed ... I even had her drawers off ... and then I got disgusted. Jesus, I
can't bother struggling that way any more. It isn't worth it. Either they do
or they don't -- it's foolish to waste time wrestling with them. While you're
struggling with a little bitch like that there may be a dozen cunts on the
terrasse just dying to be laid. It's a fact. They all come over here
to get laid. They think it's sinful here ... the poor boobs! Some of
these school-teachers from out West, they're honestly virgins ... I mean it!
They sit around on their can all day thinking about it. You don't have to
work over them very much. They're dying for it. I had a married woman the
other day who told me she hadn't had a lay for six months. Can you imagine
that? Jesus, she was hot! I thought she'd tear the cock off me. And groaning
all the time. 'Do you? Do you?' She kept saying that all the time,
like she was nuts. And you know what that bitch wanted to do? She wanted to
move in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I didn't even know her
name. I never know their names ... I don't want to. The married ones! Christ,
if you saw all the married cunts I bring up here you'd never have any more
illusions. They're worse than the virgins, the married ones. They don't wait
for you to start things -- they fish it out for you themselves. And then they
talk about love afterwards. It's disgusting. I tell you, I'm actually
beginning to hate cunt!"
He looks out the window again. It's drizzling. It's been drizzling this way
for the last five days.
"Are we going to the Dome, Joe?" I call him Joe because he calls me Joe.
When Carl is with us he is Joe too. Everybody is Joe because it's easier
that way. It's also a pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.
Anyway, Joe doesn't want to go to the Dome -- he owes too much money there.
He wants to go to the Coupole. Wants to take a little walk first around the
block.
"But it's raining, Joe."
"I know, but what the hell! I've got to have my constitutional. I've got to
wash the dirt out of my belly." When he says this I have the impression that
the whole world is wrapped up ther