Journey to the End of the Night (11 page)

In my jittery despair, I had taken to waiting for Musyne in the butler's pantry as often as possible, a stupid thing to do. Sometimes I waited until morning, I was sleepy, but jealousy kept me awake, and so did the quantities of white wine the servants poured out for me. I seldom saw the Argentine masters of the house, I heard their songs and their blustering Spanish and the piano which never stopped but was usually being played by other hands than those of my Musyne. What, meanwhile, was she doing with her hands, the slut?

When she saw me at the door in the morning, she made a face. I was still as natural as an animal in those days. I was like a dog with a bone, I wouldn't let go. People waste a large part of their youth in stupid mistakes. It was obvious that my darling was going to leave me, flat and soon. I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people ... twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

So as I warmed myself in the pantry with the servants, I was unaware that the people dancing over my head were Argentine gods, they could have been German, French, or Chinese, that didn't mean a thing, the point was that they were gods, rich people, that's what I should have realized. Them upstairs with Musyne, me downstairs with nothing. Musyne was thinking seriously of her future, and naturally she preferred to do that kind of thinking with a god. I, too, was thinking of my future, but in a kind of delirium, because my constant companion was a muted fear of being killed in tbe war or of starving when peace came. I had a death sentence hanging over me, and I was in love. A nightmare, to put it mildly. Not far away, less than seventy miles, millions of brave, well-armed, well-trained men were waiting to settle my hash, and plenty of Frenchmen were waiting, too, to pump me full of lead if I declined to be cut into bleeding ribbons by the opposite side. A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war. When other people start thinking about you, it's to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they're not interested!

Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don't speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there's no other way of forgetting your body that's about to be skinned alive. Since Musyne was slipping away from me, I took myself for an idealist, which is the name we give to our little instincts clothed in high-sounding words. My leave was drawing to an end. The newspapers were summoning every conceivable combatant to the colors, first of all, it goes without saying, the ones without connections. An official order had gone out that no one should think of anything but winning the war.

Musyne, like Lola, was extremely eager to have me get back to the front on the double and stay there, and since I seemed to be dragging my feet, she decided to expedite matters, which was unusual for her.

One night when for a change we went home to Billancourt together, the fire brigade came by blowing bugles, and everybody in our house went scrambling down to the cellar in honor of some zeppelin.

Those petty panics, when a whole neighborhood in pajamas would pick up candles and vanish, cackling and clucking, into the bowels of the earth to escape a peril that was almost entirely imaginary, showed up the terrifying futility of those people, who behaved by turns like frightened hens and sheepish sheep. These preposterous inconsistencies ought to disgust the most patient, the most tenacious of sociophiles for good and all. At the first blast of the bugle, Musyne forgot every bit of the heroism for which she had been cited at the Theater of the Armies. She insisted on rushing into some hole and dragging me with her, into the Métro, the sewers, anywhere, as long as it was sheltered and deep enough under ground! After a while the sight of all those people, our fellow tenants, fat and thin, jovial and majestic, descending four by four, into the salutary pit, armed even me with indifference. Brave or cowardly? there's not much difference. A poltroon in one situation, a hero in another? it's the same man, and he doesn't think any more in one aspect than in the other. Everything unrelated to making money is infinitely beyond him. The question of life and death escapes him completely. Even on the subject of his own death his cogitations are feeble and ass-backward. He understands money and theatricals, nothing else.

Musyne whined when I resisted. Other tenants urged us to come along, and in the end I gave in. There were several cellar compartments to choose from, and various suggestions were made. The majority finally favored the butcher's storage cellar, it was deeper down, so they said, than any of the others. On the stairs I caught a whiff of an acrid odor that I knew only too well and which I absolutely couldn't bear.

"Musyne," I said, "are you really going down
there?
With all that meat hanging on hooks?" The question surprised her. "Why not?"

"Well," I said, "I have certain memories. I'd rather go back upstairs ..."

"You mean you're leaving me?"

"You'll join me as soon as it's over."

"But it may go on a long time ..."

"I'd rather wait for you upstairs," I said. "I don't like meat, and it'll be over soon." During the alert, sheltered in their dens, the tenants exchanged sprightly comments. Some ladies in kimonos, the last to arrive, swept with elegance and grace into that odoriferous chasm, where the butcher and his wife bade them welcome, at the same time apologizing for the artificial cold, indispensable for the conservation of their merchandise. Musyne vanished with the rest. I waited in our apartment, a night, a whole day, a year ... She never came back to me.

From that time on I became harder and harder to please. I had only two thoughts in my head: to save my skin and go to America. But getting away from the war was a first step which kept me busy and breathless for months and months.

The patriots kept clamoring: "Guns! Men! Ammunition!" They never seemed to get tired. It looked as if they wouldn't be able to sleep until poor Belgium and innocent little Alsace were wrested from the German yoke. It was an obsession which, so we were told, prevented the best of our fellow citizens from breathing, eating, or copulating. But it didn't seem to prevent the survivors from swinging business deals. Morale was doing all right on the home front.

There was every reason to ship us back to our regiments in a hurry. But when the medics looked me over, they still found me subnormal, barely good enough to be sent to another hospital, this one for the bones and nervous system. One morning six of us, three artillerymen and three dragoons, all of us sick and wounded, left the depot in quest of this institution where shattered courage, demolished reflexes, and broken arms were repaired. First, like all wounded soldiers at the time, we stopped for a checkup at the Val-de-Grâce,

[30] that noble pot-bellied citadel, with its beard of trees. The corridors smelled like a thirdclass railway carriage? a smell that's gone today, forever no doubt, compounded of feet, straw, and oil lamps. We didn't hang fire at the Val, they'd barely caught sight of us when two administrative, bedandruffed, and overworked officers chewed us out good and proper, threatened us with a court-martial, and projected us via other administrators into the street. They had no room for us, so they said, and directed us, very vaguely, to a bastion situated somewhere in the outskirts.

From bistrot to bastion, from absinthe to café crème, the six of us wandered about, at the mercy of every misdirector, in search of this new refuge which seemed to specialize in the treatment of incompetent heroes like us.

Only one of us had even the most rudimentary personal property, and that fitted nicely into a little tin box marked "Pernot Biscuits," a well-known brand at the time, though I never hear it mentioned anymore. In that box our comrade kept a few cigarettes and a toothbrush. Come to think of it, we used to kid him about the care he took of his teeth, which was most unusual at the time. "Homosexual" we used to call him'.

Finally, in the middle of the night, we approached the outworks, swollen with darkness of the Bicętre bastion. No. 43 it was called. That was the place.

It had just been renovated to serve as a home for elderly cripples. They hadn't even finished laying out the garden.

When we got there, there wasn't a living soul in the military section, only the concierge. The rain was coming down in buckets. The concierge was terrified when she heard us, but we made her laugh by touching her in the right place. "I thought it was the Germans," she said.

"They're miles away," we told her. "Where are you wounded?" she asked with concern. "All over, but not in the cock!" said one of the artillerymen. That, I don't mind telling you, was real wit, just the kind the concierge liked.

Later on some old men on welfare were lodged in that bastion with us. New buildings with miles and miles of window glass had been thrown up for them in a hurry, and there they were kept like insects until the end of the war. On the surrounding hills a rash of skimpy housing lots vied for possession of the seas of mud inadequately contained by rows of precarious shacks, in the shadow of which one would occasionally see a head of lettuce and three radishes, of which, it is hard to say why, the nauseated slugs were making the houseowner a present.

Our hospital was clean. You have to hurry to see that kind of thing, move in at the beginning, the first few weeks, because maintenance isn't a French virtue, we have no taste for it, in fact, we're downright disgusting in that respect. We flopped on six metal beds, at random and by moonlight, the building was so new the electricity hadn't been put in yet. Early next morning the doctor came and introduced himself, he seemed delighted to see us and exuded cordiality. He had reasons for being pleased, he'd just been promoted to major, and in addition he had the most beautiful eyes you ever saw, supernatural velvet, he made use of them to flutter the hearts of several volunteer nurses, who surrounded him with attentions and sympathetic mimicry and feasted on every word and move of their dear doctor. At the very first meeting he took our morale in hand and told us as much. Taking one of us by the shoulders and shaking him with paternal familiarity, he explained the regulations in a comforting tone and indicated the quickest and surest way of getting ourselves sent back to the front to be lambasted some more.

Wherever they came from, no two ways about it, that was their only thought. It seemed to give them a kick. It was the new vice. "France, my friends," he proclaimed, "has put her trust in you. France is a woman. She is counting on your heroism! She has been a victim of the most cowardly, the most abominable aggression. She has a right to expect her sons to avenge her to the hilt! To restore, even at the cost of the extreme sacrifice, every square inch of her territory! All of us here in the hospital, my friends, will do our duty, and we expect you to do yours! Our science is at your disposal! It is yours! All its resources will be devoted to curing you! Help us with your good will! I know we can count on your good will! We hope, we trust, that each one of you will soon resume his place side by side with his dear comrades in the trenches! Your sacred place! Defending your beloved soil! Vive la France! Forward to battle!" He knew how to talk to soldiers.

We were all standing at attention at the foot of our beds. Behind him a brunette, one of his group of pretty nurses, was having a hard time controlling her feelings, which were made visible by three or four tears. The other nurses, her friends, tried to comfort her: "Don't worry, sweetie, he'll be back ... I'm sure he will!"

Her cousin, a plumpish blonde, was consoling her the most. As she passed us, holding her up with both arms, the plump one told me this weakness had overcome her pretty cousin because her fiance had just gone off to the navy. Our impassioned medical authority tried to soothe the tragic and beautiful emotion aroused by his short, vibrant speech. He was embarrassed and grieved. The apprehension he had awakened in this profound and noble heart, all sensibility and tenderness, was too painful. "If we had only known, Doctor," the blonde cousin whispered, "we'd have warned you ... They love each other so dearly, you can't imagine!" The group of nurses and the Master went their way. Chattering and swishing they receded down the corridor. They had finished with us.

I tried to recollect, and to fathom the meaning of, the speech the man with the beautiful eyes had just made, but far from depressing me, when I thought it over, his words struck me as just what was needed to disgust me with the whole idea of dying. My comrades were of the same opinion, but they did not, like me, see a kind of challenge or insult in them. They made no attempt to understand what was going on around us; all they saw, and that unclearly, was that the usual delirium of the world had so increased in the last few months that there was nothing stable left for a man to build his existence on. Here in the hospital, just as in the Flanders night, death stalked us. Here, to be sure, it threatened from a distance, but just as implacably, once the Administration set it in pursuit of your trembling carcass.

Here, it was true, they didn't bawl us out, in fact they spoke gently, and they never talked about death, but our death sentence showed up distinctly in the corner of every paper they asked us to sign and in all the precautions they surrounded us with ... those tags around our necks and wrists ... whenever they let us out for a few hours. And all the advice they gave us! ... We felt counted, watched, serial-numbered, enrolled in the vast multitude that would soon be leaving for the front. So naturally all the civilian and medical personnel around us seemed more cheerful than we were. The nurses, the bitches, weren't in the same boat, their only thought was to go on living, to live longer and longer, to live and love, to stroll in the park and to copulate thousands and thousands of times. Every one of those angelic creatures had a plan all worked out in her perineum, like a convict, a little plan for love later on, when all of us soldier boys should have perished in God knows what mud and God knows how!