Journey to the End of the Night (27 page)

I, too, dragged myself toward the lights, a movie house, and then another right next to it, and another, all along the street. We lost big chunks of crowd to each of them. I picked a movie house with posters of women in slips, and what legs! Boyohboy! Heavy! Ample!

Shapely! And pretty faces on top, as though drawn for the contrast, no need of retouching, not a blemish, not a flaw, perfect I tell you, delicate but firm and concise. Life can engender no greater peril than these incautious beauties, these indiscreet variations on perfect divine harmony.

It was warm and cozy in the movie house. An enormous organ, as mellow as in a cathedral, a heated cathedral I mean, organ pipes like thighs. They don't waste a moment. Before you know it, you're bathing in an all-forgiving warmth. Just let yourself go and you'll begin to think the world has been converted to loving-kindness. I almost was myself. Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul. I have to confess that I picked the sexy ones. No point in being proud; when it comes to miracles, take the ones that will stay with you. A blonde with unforgettable tits and shoulders saw fit to break the silence of the screen with a song about her loneliness. I'd have been glad to cry about it with her.

There's nothing like it! What a lift it gives you! After that, I knew I'd have courage enough in my guts to last me at least two days. I didn't even wait for the lights to go on. Once I'd absorbed a small dose of that admirable ecstasy, I knew Yd sleep, my mind was made up. When I got back to the Laugh Calvin, the night clerk, despite my greeting, neglected to say good evening the way they do at home. But his contempt didn't mean a thing to me anymore. An intense inner life suffices to itself, it can melt an icepack that has been building up for twenty years. That's a fact.

In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well ... I wasn't entirely alone ... It's not possible to sleep alone ... To eat cheaply in America, you can buy yourself a hot roll with a sausage in it, it's handy, they sell them on street corners in the poor neighborhoods, and they're not at all expensive. I didn't mind eating in poor neighborhoods, but never meeting those splendid creatures designed for the rich, that bothered me. Under those conditions it wasn't worth eating. True, at the Laugh Calvin, on those thick carpets, I could pretend to be looking for somebody among the too pretty women in the lobby. After a while I was able to face that sultry atmosphere without quailing. Thinking about it, I had to admit that the boys on the
Infanta Combitta
had been right; experience was teaching me that I didn't have sensible tastes for a poor slob. My shipmates on the galley had been right in giving me hell. Anyway, my morale was still low. More and more I dosed myself on movies, in this street or that street, but all they gave me was enough energy for a little stroll or two. No more. The loneliness in Africa had been pretty rough, but my isolation in this American anthill was even more crushing.

I'd always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, too different from the one where my petty habits were at home, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating.

On the point of dropping my last dollar in this adventure, I was still bored. So profoundly that I even refused to envisage the most urgent steps I should have been taking. We are so trivial by nature that only amusements can stop us from dying for real. I clung to the movies with desperate fervor.

Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets round about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulent advertisements. False promises. Driveling lies.

Along the river I explored other streets, more and more of them. Here the dimensions were more normal; for instance, from the sidewalk where I was standing I might have smashed every window in the house across the street.

Those neighborhoods were full of the smell of constant frying, the shops dispensed with sidewalk displays for fear of theft. Everything reminded me of the streets around my hospital in Villejuif, even the children with their crooked swollen knees all along the sidewalks, and the barrel organs. I'd have been glad to stay there with them, but poor people wouldn't have fed me any more than the rich; besides, I'd have had to look at them all, and their too much misery frightened me. So I finally went back to Richtown. "You nogood!" I said to myself. "Really, you have no virtue!" A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.

A streetcar was running beside the Hudson, heading for the midtown section, an ancient vehicle, trembling in every wheel and all its terrified carcass. It took a solid hour to get there. The passengers submitted without impatience to a complicated ritual, you paid by tossing coins into a kind of coffee mill stationed at the entrance. The conductor, dressed like ours, in the uniform of a Balkan prisoner of war, watched them doing it. At last we arrived. Returning exhausted from those populist excursions, I once again passed that inexhaustible double row of beauties in my Tantalian lobby. Again and again I passed, pensive and prodded by desire.

My poverty was such that I didn't dare rummage through my pockets to make sure. If only, I thought, Lola hasn't picked this particular moment to leave town ... But will she want to see me in the first place? Should I touch her for fifty or for a hundred dollars as a starter? ... I hesitated. I felt that I wouldn't have the nerve till I'd eaten and slept properly for once. And then, if this first touch was successful, I'd go looking for Robinson right away, that is, as soon as I got my strength back. Robinson was nothing like me. He was determined!

Courageous! Oh yes! I could bet he knew all about America by now, all the ins and outs!

Maybe he knew some way of acquiring the certainty, the peace of mind, in which I was so sadly lacking ...

If, as I supposed, he too had come on a galley and trodden these shores before me, he'd be well launched on his American career by now. These jumpy lunatics wouldn't faze him! I myself, come to think of it, might have looked for a job in one of those offices, whose dazzling signs I saw outside ... But at the thought of having to enter that sort of building I crumpled with fear. My hotel, that gigantic, loathsomely animated tomb, was enough for me.

Maybe those vast accretions of matter, those commercial honeycombs, those endless figments of brick and steel didn't affect the habitues the way they did me. To them perhaps that suspended deluge meant security, while to me it was simply an abominable system of constraints, of corridors, locks and wickets, a vast, inexpiable architectural crime. Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.

I went out and watched my last three dollars wriggling in the palm of my hand under the electric signs on Times Square, that amazing intersection where the crowds engaged in picking their movie show are bathed in floods of advertising. In search of a cheap restaurant, I went into one of those rationalized public refectories, where the service is reduced to a minimum and the alimentary rite is cut down to the exact measure of nature's requirements.

They hand you a tray at the entrance, and you take your place in a line. You wait. The girls around me, delightful candidates for dinner, didn't say a word to me ... It must feel really funny, I thought, to be able to go right up to one of those young ladies with the tidy, prettily shaped noses, and say: "Miss, I'm rich, very rich ... just tell me what it might please you to accept ..."

Everything that was so complicated a moment before would suddenly become so simple, so divinely simple ... Everything would be changed, the forbiddingly hostile world would turn into a playful, docile, velvety ball, rolling at your feet. Then and there, perhaps, you'd throw off the exhausting habit of dreaming about successful people and enormous fortunes, because then you'd be able to put your hands on all that. The life of people without resources is nothing but one long rebuff and one long frenzy of desire, and a man can truly know, truly deliver himself only from what he possesses. As for me, I'd picked up and dropped so many dreams, my mind was cracked and fissured, full of drafts and disgustingly out of order.

In the meantime I was afraid to attempt even the most inoffensive conversation with these young things in the restaurant. I went ahead with my tray in well-behaved silence. When it came my turn to pass the earthenware hollows filled with sausages and beans, I took what was given me. That restaurant was so clean and well lighted that, skimming its mosaic floor, I felt like a fly on milk.

Waitresses dressed like nurses stood behind the noodles, rice, and stewed fruit. Each had her specialty. I took what the most attractive ones were dishing out. To my regret, they didn't smile at the customers at all. As soon as you were served, you had to leave your place in line and find yourself a table. You balance your tray and take little mincing steps as if it were an operating room. It was a change from the Laugh Calvin and my gold-bordered ebony cubbyhole.

But if they showered the customers with so much light, if they lifted us for a moment from the habitual darkness of our condition, there was method in their madness. The owner was up to something. I had my suspicions. After days of darkness it feels very strange to be suddenly bathed in torrents of light. It made me a little giddier than usual. Which wasn't difficult, I admit.

I couldn't manage to hide my feet under the immaculate little enamel-topped table I had landed at; they stuck out in all directions. I'd have liked my feet to be somewhere else, because we were being watched through the window by the line of people we had just left in the street. They were waiting for us to finish eating so they could come and take our tables. Actually that was the reason, to keep up their appetite, why we were so well lighted and displayed so prominently; we were living advertisements, so to speak. The strawberries on my cake shimmered and sparkled so brightly that I couldn't bring myself to eat them. You can't get away from American business enterprise.

Yet despite the dazzling glare and my cramped posture I perceived the comings and goings in my immediate vicinity of a very nice waitress and decided not to miss a single one of her delightful movements.

When my turn came to have her clear my table, I took careful note of the unusual shape of her eyes, the outer ends of which tilted upwards more sharply than is common among French women. The eyelids also inclined slightly toward the eyebrows on the temple side. A sign of cruelty, but just enough, the kind of cruelty you can kiss, an insidious tartness like the Rhine wines one can't help liking.

When she came close to me, I made little gestures of complicity, as if I knew her. She looked me over as if I'd been an animal, without indulgence but with a certain curiosity.

"This," I said to myself, "is the first American woman who has been forced to look at me." Once I'd finished my luminous cake, there was no help for it, I had to give up my place to someone else. Reeling slightly, instead of taking the obvious way to the exit, I braced myself and circled round the man at the cash desk who was waiting for all of us and our money. Sticking out like a sore thumb in the bright, disciplined light, I headed for the blonde.

The twenty-five waitresses at their posts behind the simmering dishes all signaled to me in unison that I was mistaken, headed the wrong way. In the plate-glass window I saw a great stir among the people waiting, and the people behind me, who were supposed to start eating, hesitated to sit down. I had broken the foreordained order of things. All the people around me cried out in consternation: "It must be a foreigner!" But I had my idea for what it was worth, I wasn't going to lose the beauty who had waited on me. The sweet thing had asked for it, she had looked at me. I was sick of being alone. I was sick of dreams. I wanted sympathy! Human contact! "Miss," I said, "you hardly know me. But I already love you. Shall we get married? ..." That's how I addressed her, most respectfully.

Her answer never reached me, for a giant guard, he too dressed all in white, stepped up at that exact moment and simply shoved me out into the night, without insults or brutality, like a dog that has misbehaved.

The whole thing went off like clockwork, there was nothing I could say. I went back to the Laugh Calvin.

In my room the same thunders were still shattering their echoes, first the roar of the "El," which seemed to hurl itself at us from far away, smashing the city every time it passed by carrying away the aqueducts; and, in between, incoherent, mechanical sounds from far below, coming up from the street, plus the soft murmur of the eddying crowd, hesitant, monotonous, always starting up again, then hesitating again and starting up again. The great stewpot of people in a city.

From up high where I was, you could shout anything you liked at them. I tried. They made me sick, the whole lot of them. I hadn't the nerve to tell them so in the daytime, to their face, but up there it was safe. "Help! Help!" I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect on them. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time.