Journey to the End of the Night (31 page)

"Ferdinand! Hey, Ferdinand!" Naturally it sounded outrageous in that dim light, I didn't like it. Above the rooftops the sky was coming back in cold little patches, cut out by the eaves. Sure enough, someone was calling me. I turned around and instantly recognized Leon. He came over to me, speaking in a whisper, and we filled each other in. He'd been cleaning an office like the rest of them. That was as much of a gimmick as he'd managed to find. He walked heavily, with a certain true majesty, as if he had been doing dangerous and in a way sacred things in the city. Actually I'd noticed that all those night cleaners had that look. In fatigue and solitude men emanate the divine. His eyes were also full of it when, in the bluish half-light where we were standing, he opened them wider than eyes usually open. He, too, had cleaned endless rows of toilets and made whole mountains of silent offices sparkle.

"Ferdinand," he said. "I recognized you right away. By the way you got into the car ... By the sad look on your face when you saw there were no women on board. Am I right? Isn't that your style?" He was right, it was my style. Unquestionably, my soul was as obscene as an open fly. So his observation was apt and nothing to be surprised at. What I hadn't expected was that he too was a failure in America. That came as a surprise. I told him about the galley at San Tapeta. But he didn't know what I was talking about.

"You're delirious!" he said simply. He'd come over on a freighter. He'd have tried for a job at Ford's, but his papers were just too phony, he wouldn't have dared show them. "They're barely good enough to keep in my pocket," he said. For cleaning offices they didn't much care who you were. They didn't pay much either, but they looked the other way ... This night work was a kind of Foreign Legion,

"What about you?" he asked me then. "What are you doing? You still cracked? Still chasing rainbows? Still got the travel bug?"

"I want to go back to France," I said. "I've seen enough, you're right ..."

"Best thing you can do," he said. "For us the jig is up ... We've aged without noticing it, I know ... I'd like to go home too, but there's still this trouble with my papers ... I'll wait a while and try and get hold of some good ones ... I can't complain about the work I'm doing ... There's worse. But I'm not learning English ... Some of the guys have been at it for thirty years and all they've learned is 'Exit,' because it's written on the doors they polish, and 'Lavatory.' You get the drift?"

I got the drift. If Molly should ever fail me, I'd have to go into night work myself. No reason why that should ever stop.

The fact is that when you're at war you say peace will be better, you bite into that hope as if it were a chocolate bar, but it's only shit after all. You don't dare say so at first for fear of making people mad. You try to be nice. When you're good and sick of wallowing in muck you speak up. Then everybody thinks you were raised in a barn. And there you have it. I met Robinson two or three times after that. He wasn't looking at all well. A French deserter, who made bootleg liquor for the gangsters of Detroit, let him occupy a corner of his shop. The business tempted Robinson. "I'd make a little rotgut for those bastards to pour down their throats," he confided, "but you know, I've lost my nerve ... The first going-over a cop gave me, I know I'd fold up ... I've been through too much ... Besides, I'm sleepy all the time ... Not to mention the dust in those offices, my lungs are full of it ... See what I mean? It wears you down ..."

We arranged to meet another night. I went back to Molly and told her the whole story. She tried not to show how bad I was making her feel, but it wasn't hard to see she was miserable. I kissed her more often now, but her unhappiness was deep, more real than in other people, because most of us tend to talk as if things were worse than they are. American women are different. We're afraid to understand, to admit it. It's rather humiliating, but this is real unhappiness, not pride, not jealousy, there are no scenes, it's genuine heartbreak. We may as well admit that we haven't got it in us and that when it comes to the pleasure of being really unhappy we're bone dry. We're ashamed of not being richer in heart and everything else, and also of having judged humanity worse than it really is.

Now and then Molly would let go and say something mildly reproachful, but it was always said gently and kindly.

"You're sweet, Ferdinand," she'd say. "I know you try hard not to be as beastly as other people, but sometimes I wonder if you really know what you want. Think it over. You'll have to find a way of earning your living when you get back there, Ferdinand ... You won't be able to roam around all night dreaming the way you do here ... the way you enjoy so much ... while I'm working ... Have you thought of that, Ferdinand?" In a way she was dead right, but I couldn't help being the way I was. I was afraid of hurting her. She was so easy to hurt.

"Believe me, Molly, I love you, I always will ... as best I can ... in my own way." My own way didn't amount to much. And yet Molly had a perfect body, she was very tempting. But I had that lousy weakness for phantoms. Maybe I wasn't entirely to blame. Life forces you to spend too much of your time with phantoms.

"You're very affectionate, Ferdinand," she reassured me. "Don't worry about me ... You've got this sickness ... always wanting to know more and more ... That's all ... Anyway, you have to live your own life ... Out there, all alone ... You'll go further traveling alone ... Will you be leaving soon?"

"Yes, I'll finish medical school in France, and then I'll come back," I had the gall to assure her.

"No, Ferdinand, you won't be back ... And I won't be here either ..." She was nobody's fool.

It came time for me to go. One evening shortly before she'd have to start working, we went to the station. I'd said good-bye to Robinson during the day. He wasn't happy either to see me go. I was always leaving people. On the station platform, while we were waiting for the train, some men passed, they pretended not to know her, but they exchanged whispers.

"You're already far away, Ferdinand. You're doing exactly what you want, aren't you?

That's the main thing. It's the only thing that counts ..."

The train pulled in. I wasn't so sure of my plans once I saw the engine. I kissed Molly with all the spirit I had left ... I was sad for once, really sad, for everybody, for myself, for her, for everybody.

Maybe that's what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.

Years have passed since I left her, years and more years ... I wrote many times to Detroit and all the other addresses I remembered, where I thought she might be known. I never received an answer.

The house is closed now. That's all I've been able to find out. Good, admirable Molly, if ever she reads these lines in some place I never heard of, I want her to know that my feelings for her haven't changed, that I still love her and always will in my own way, that she can come here any time she pleases and share my bread and furtive destiny. If she's no longer beautiful, hell, that's all right too! We'll manage. I've kept so much of her beauty in me, so living and so warm, that I've plenty for both of us, to last at least twenty years, the rest of our lives.

To leave her I certainly had to be mad, and in a cold, disgusting way. Still, I've kept my soul in one place up to now, and if death were to come and take me tomorrow, I'm sure I wouldn't be quite as cold, as ugly, as heavy as other men, and it's thanks to the kindness and the dream that Molly gave me during my few months in America.

Getting back from the Other World isn't the half of it. You pick up the sticky, precarious thread of your days just as you left it dangling. It's waiting for you. For weeks and months I hung around the Place Clichy, where I'd started from, and environs, the Batignolles for instance, doing odd jobs. Ghastly! Under the rain, or in the heat of the cars when June came, that burns your throat and nose, almost like at Ford's. For entertainment I'd watch them pass, people and more people, on their way to the theater or the Bois in the evening.

Always more or less alone in my free time, I'd mull over books and newspapers and all the things I'd seen. I resumed my studies, all the while working for a living, and finally managed to pass my examinations. Science, take it from me, is closely guarded, the Faculty of Medicine is a well-locked cupboard. Plenty of jars and very little jam. But after braving five or six years of academic tribulations I got my degree, a very high-sounding piece of paper. Then I put up my shingle in the suburbs, my sort of place, at La Garenne-Rancy,[60]

right after the Porte Brancion[61] on your way out of Paris.

I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better. I put my name-plate over the door and waited. The neighborhood people came and eyed my name-plate suspiciously. They even went to the police station to ask if I was a real doctor. Yes, they were told. He's filed his diploma, he's a doctor all right. The news spread all over Rancy that a real doctor had set up shop in addition to all the others. "He'll never make a living," my concierge predicted. "There are too many doctors around here already!" She was perfectly right. In the suburbs it's mostly by streetcar that life turns up in the morning. Starting at dawn, whole strings of them would come clanking down the Boulevard Minotaure, carrying loads of dazed citizens to work.

The young ones actually seemed happy about it. They'd cheer the traffic on and cling to the running boards, laughing for all they were worth, the darlings! It's hard to believe. But when you've known the telephone booth of the corner cafe for twenty years, so filthy you always mistake it for the crapper, you lose all desire to joke about serious things and about Rancy in particular. Then you realize where they've put you. These houses are your prison, pissy within, flat facades, their heart belongs to the landlord. You never see him. He wouldn't dare show his face. The bastard sends his agent. Yet the neighborhood people say he's affable enough when you meet him. It doesn't cost him a thing.

The sky in Rancy is the same as in Detroit, a smoky soup that bathes the plain all the way to Levallois. Cast-off buildings bogged down in black muck. From a distance the chimneys, big ones and little ones, look like the fat stakes that rise out of the muck by the seaside. And inside it's us.

You need the courage of a crab at Rancy, especially when you're not as young as you used to be and you know you'll never get away. There at the end of the streetcar line a grimy bridge spans the Seine, that enormous sewer which displays everything that's in it. Along the banks, on Sunday and at night, men climb up on the piles of garbage to take a leak. Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors. Women never meditate. Seine or no Seine. In the morning the streetcar carries away its crowds to get themselves compressed in the Metro. Seeing them all fleeing in that direction you'd think there must have been some catastrophe at Argenteuil, that the town was on fire. Every day in the gray of dawn it comes over them, whole clusters cling to the doors and handrails. One enormous rout! Yet all they're going to Paris for is a boss, the man who saves you from starvation. The cowards, they're scared to death of losing him, though he makes them sweat for their pittance. For ten years you stink of it, for twenty years and more. It's no bargain.

Plenty of bitching and beefing in the streetcar, just to get into practice. The women gripe even worse than the kids. If they caught somebody without a ticket, they'd stop the whole line. It's true that some of those women are already stinko, especially the ones headed for the market at Saint-Ouen, the semibour-geoises. "How much are the carrots?" they ask long before they get there, to show they've got money to spend.

Compressed like garbage in this tin box, they cross Rancy, stinking good and proper especially in the summer. Passing the fortifications,[62] they threaten one another, they let out one last shout, and then they scatter, the Métro swallows them up, limp suits, discouraged dresses, silk stockings, sour stomachs, dirty feet, dirty socks. Wear-ever collars as stiff as boundary posts, pending abortions, war heroes, all scramble down the coal-tar and carbolic-acid stairs into the black pit, holding their return ticket which all by itself costs as much as two breakfast rolls.

The nagging dread of being fired without ceremony, something (accompanied by a tightlipped reference) that can happen to a tardy worker any time the boss decides to cut down on expenses. Never-dormant recollections of the "Slump," of the last time they were unemployed, of all the newspapers they had to buy for the want ads, five sous a piece ... the waiting in line at employment offices ... Such memories can strangle a man, however well protected he may seem in his "all-weather" coat.

The city does a good job of hiding its crowds of dirty feet in those long electric sewers. They won't rise to the surface again until Sunday. You'd better stay indoors when they emerge. Just one Sunday watching their attempts to amuse themselves will permanently spoil your taste for pleasure. Around the Métro entrance, near the bastions, you catch the endemic, stagnant smell of long drawn-out wars, of spoiled, half-burned villages, aborted revolutions, and bankrupt businesses. For years the ragpickers of the "Fortified Zone"[63]

have been burning the same damp little piles of rubbish in ditches sheltered from the wind. Half-assed barbarians, undone by red wine and fatigue. They take their ruined lungs to the local dispensary instead of pushing the streetcars off the embankment and emptying their bladders in the tollhouse.[64] No blood left in their veins. When the next war comes, they'll get rich again selling rat skins, cocaine, and corrugated-iron masks. For my practice I had found a small apartment at the edge of the "Zone," from which I had a good view of the embankment and the workman who's always standing up top, looking at nothing, with his arm in a big white bandage, the victim of a work accident, who doesn't know what to do or what to think and hasn't enough money to buy himself a drink and fill his mind.