Journey to the End of the Night (42 page)

I had almost stopped waiting when a little girl appeared at my door, trying to read the names on the bells. As it turned out, she was looking for me. Madame Henrouille had sent her.

"Who's sick?" I asked.

"A gentleman. He's hurt himself ..."

"A gentleman?" I thought of Henrouille himself,

"The husband? ... Monsieur Henrouille?"

"No ... A friend, but he's in their house ..."

"Somebody you know?"

No, she'd never seen this friend.

It was cold out, the child ran, I walked fast.

"How did it happen?"

"I don't know."

We skirted a small park, the remains of an old forest, where at night the long, slow winter mists would catch between the trees. One little street after another. We soon came to the house. The child didn't say good-bye to me, she was afraid to go nearer. Madame Henrouille, the daughter-in-law, was standing on the front steps under the awning, waiting for me. Her oil lamp was flickering in the wind.

"This way, doctor ... This way ..." she called out.

"Has your husband hurt himself?" I asked her.

"Go right in!" she said rather brusquely, without even giving me time to think. I ran smack into the old woman, who began to yap and light into me while I was still in the hallway. A broadside.

"Oh, the monsters! The bandits! Doctor! They tried to kill me!" So they'd come a cropper.

"Kill you?" I said with an air of surprise. "Why would they want to do that?"

"Because I was taking too long to die! Use your brains, dammit! Naturally I don't want to die!"

"Mother! Mother!" the daughter-in-law broke in. "You've taken leave of your wits! How can you say such awful things to the doctor!"

"Awful things, is it? Well, you slut, you've got an all-fired nerve! Taken leave of my wits, have I? I've got wits enough to see the whole lot of you hanged! Believe you me!"

"But who's hurt? Where is he?"

"You'll see who!" the old woman puts in. "The murderer! He's upstairs on their bed! A fine mess he's made of your bed, you hussy! Got his no-good blood all over your mattress! His blood, not mine! What filthy rotten blood that must be! You won't wash that out in a hurry!

Take it from me, that murderer's blood will stink for a long time to come! Some people go to the theater for excitement! Not us, we've got a theater right here! It's upstairs, doctor!

Real theater, no make-believe. Don't miss it! Hurry hurry! Maybe the dirty dog will be dead before you get there! And then you won't see a thing!"

The daughter-in-law tried to hush her up, for fear she'd be heard on the street. In spite of the situation, the daughter-in-law didn't seem terribly upset, only put out that their scheme had misfired, but her opinions were unchanged. In fact she was dead sure she'd been right.

"Oh doctor, listen to her! Isn't it shameful! When I've always tried so hard to make her life pleasant! You know that! Didn't I keep urging her to go and stay with the Sisters ..." Hearing about the Sisters again was too much for the old woman.

"To Paradise! Yes, you slut, that's where you all wanted to send me! Oh, you bandits! That devil upstairs! That's why you and your husband brought him here! To kill me, that's right, not to send me to any Sisters! He botched it, the man's all thumbs if you ask me! Go on, doctor, go and see what that bastard upstairs has done to himself, oh yes, him and nobody else! ... I hope he croaks! Go on, doctor! Go see him before it's too late!" If the daughter-in-law didn't seem dejected, the old woman was even less so. The plot had almost wiped her out, but she wasn't as indignant as she put on. It was all an act. Actually that bungled murder had revived her, raised her up from the creeping tomb she'd been shut up in all those years at the back of the moldering garden. Late in life an indestructible vitality had come back and was running through her veins. She was indecently relishing not only her victory but also the prospect of having something to torment her mean-hearted daughter-in-law with for the rest of her life. She had her where she wanted her now. She was bent on my knowing every detail of the miscarried plot and how it had all happened.

"And do you know where I met that murderer?" she went on in the same exalted register, especially for my benefit. "In your waiting room! ... That's right, doctor, and I didn't trust him! ... I didn't trust him this far! ... Do you know what he first suggested to me? He wanted to bump you off, you bitch! That's right, you slut! And cheap too! I assure you! He has the same propositions for everybody! It's common knowledge! ... So you see, you hussy, I know how he makes his living! I know all about him! His name is Robinson! ... Deny it if you dare! ... Tell me that's not his name! ... As soon as I saw him whispering in corners with you two, I had my suspicions ... And a good thing too! ... If I hadn't been suspicious, where'd I be now?"

Over and over again the old woman told me how it had all happened. The rabbit had moved while he was fastening the fireworks to the door of the hutch. Meanwhile she had been watching him from her shack, she'd had a "ringside seat," as she put it. The contraption was loaded with buckshot ... it had gone off in his face while he was connecting it up, right in his eyes. "A man's not easy in his mind when he's plotting murder," she concluded. "What would you expect?"

Anyway, for butter-fingered incompetence, it took the cake.

"That's what they've done to men lately," the old woman went on. "That's right! Matter of habit! They have to kill to eat!

They're not satisfied anymore to steal their daily bread! ... Or kill their grandmothers! ... Nobody's ever seen anything like it! ... Never! ... It's the end of the world! ... Wickedness is all they're good for! And you now! Up to your necks in it! ... And him gone blind! You'll have him on your hands for the rest of your days! ...What do you think of that? ... Him and his slimy tricks! ..."

The daughter-in-law didn't say a word, but she must have worked out her plan. She was a really concentrated villain. While we were busy with our reflections, the old woman went looking through the rooms for her son.

"And you know, doctor, I have a son! Where's he got to? What's he up to now?" She staggered down the corridor, shaken by nonstop laughter.

Old people don't usually laugh so hard except in the bughouse. When you hear a thing like that, you wonder what the world's coming to. She was bent on finding her son. He'd escaped into the street. "All right, let him hide! He can live forever for all I care! Now he'll have to live with that scum upstairs, serves him right, live with the two of them, including our friend who'll never see again! And support him! Hee hee! Square in the face! I saw it! I saw it from start to finish! Boom boom! I saw it all right! And it wasn't a rabbit, I assure you! Damn it all, doctor, where's my son? Haven't you seen him? There's another dirty dog, always been even deeper than her, but now finally the viciousness of his crummy character has come out, oh yes, it's come out all right. It takes a long time for a low character like his to come out! But when it does, it's rotten to the core! You can't deny it, doctor! Something worth seeing!" She was having a fine time. She wanted to impress me with her superiority to the situation and to confound us all, to humiliate us, so to speak. She had hit on a good role and was working it for all it was worth. An emotional binge. Which is always a pleasure. There's no limit to our happiness as long as we're capable of playing a part. She was sick of old folks' jeremiads, the only part she'd been given in the last twenty years. She'd never let go of this new, virulent, unhoped-for role that had come her way. Old age means not having a passionate role to play anymore, seeing your theater fold up on you, so there's nothing but death to look forward to! All of a sudden the old woman's zest had come back to her with her new and ardent role: the avenger. She didn't want to die anymore, not in the least. She radiated the desire to live, the affirmation of life. In melodrama she had found new fires, real fire.

She was wanning herself, she had no desire to leave the new fire, to leave us. For a long while she had almost ceased to be-lieve there was any fire. She hadn't known what to do to stop herself from dying at the back of her dim-witted garden. And then suddenly this tempest of hard hot reality had hit her.

"My death!" Grandma Henrouille was shrieking now. "That's something I want to see! Do you hear! I've still got my two eyes! I want to get a good look at it!" She never wanted to die! Never! That was definite! She had stopped believing in her death. Everybody knows that such situations are hard to manage and that managing them is always very expensive. In the first place we didn't even know where to put Robinson. In the hospital? Obviously that would make for loose tongues, all sorts of gossip ... Send him back to his pad? ... Unthinkable, with his face in that condition. Like it or not, the Henrouilles had to keep him.

He lay in bed upstairs, in a pitiful state. He was terrified of being thrown out and prosecuted. Not hard to see why. It was one of those things that you really can't tell anyone about. We kept the blinds in his room carefully drawn, but people, the neighbors, started passing through that street more often than usual, just to look up at the shutters and ask for news of the injured man. We gave them news all right, we told them fairy stories. But how were we to stop them from smelling a rat? From gossiping? Besides, they embroidered on what we told them. How could we stop them from speculating? Luckily nobody had gone to the law. That was something. As far as his face was concerned, I was doing all right. The wound was very jagged and a lot of dirt had got into it, but no infection had set in. As for his eyes, I foresaw scars in the corneas, through which light would pass with difficulty, if at all.

We'd manage to patch up some sort of eyesight if there was anything left to patch. For the moment we'd concentrate on what was most urgent, above all we'd have to prevent the old woman from getting us all into trouble with her horrible yapping in front of the neighbors. True, most of them thought she was mad, but that doesn't always account for everything. If the police really started prying, God knew where it would lead us. Preventing the old woman from making a spectacle of herself in her little yard had become a ticklish business. We all took turns trying to calm her down. It was no good if she thought we were browbeating her, but gentleness didn't always work very well either. In a frenzy of vindictiveness, she was blackmailing us, neither more nor less.

I went to see Robinson at least twice a day. He groaned under his bandages as soon as he heard me climbing the stairs. He was really in pain, but not as much as he wanted me to think. He'd have cause, I foresaw, for much worse distress when he realized exactly what had happened to his eyes ... I was evasive about the future. He complained of stinging in his eyelids. He thought that was what prevented him from seeing anything. The Henrouilles were taking good care of him, in accordance with my instructions. No trouble on that score.

Nobody mentioned the plot anymore. We didn't speak of the future either. As I was leaving them in the evening, we all took turns looking at one another, so intensely I always had a feeling that we were about to do away with one another once and for all. When I thought it over, that culmination struck me as logical and expedient. I could scarcely imagine the nights in that house. But there they would be in the morning, and together we'd face the world together just where we left it together the night before. Madame Henrouille would help me renew the dressing with permanganate, and we'd open the blinds a bit as a test. The result was always the same. Robinson didn't even notice that we had just opened the blinds ...

So the earth makes its way through the vastly menacing, silent night. Every morning the son would welcome me with a little peasant phrase: "Well, well, doctor ... Looks like another late frost!" he would observe, glancing up at the sky from under the little peristyle. As if the weather mattered. His wife would go out and try again to parley with her mother-in-law, but only succeed in redoubling her fury. While we kept Robinson's eyes bandaged, he told me about his beginnings in life. When he was eleven, his parents had apprenticed him to a high-class shoemaker. One day he delivered a pair of shoes to a lady customer, and she invited him to share a pleasure which up until then he had known only in his imagination. He was so horrified by what he had done that he never went back to his boss. In those days fucking a customer was still an unforgivable crime. Especially the lady's chemise, all of chiffon, had had a phenomenal effect on him. Thirty years later he remembered that chemise in every detail. The lady swishing through her apartment full of cushions and fringed portieres, her pink and perfumed flesh, had given young Robinson food for interminable and despairing comparisons to last him the rest of his life.

Yet a good many things had happened since. He'd seen continents and been through whole wars, but he'd never recovered from that revelation. It gave him pleasure to think about it, to tell me about the minute of youth he had enjoyed with the lady customer. "Having my eyes closed like this makes me think," he observed. "It's like a parade ... Like having a movie show in my bean ..." 1 didn't dare tell him that he'd have time to get awfully sick of his little movie show. Since all thought leads to death, a day would come when he'd see nothing else in his movie show.

Not far from the Henrouilles' house there was a little factory with a big engine in it. It shook their house from morning to night. And there were other factories a little further away that thumped and pounded the whole time, even at night. "We'll be gone when the roof caves in," Henrouille would joke, but he was kind of worried all the same. "It'll happen sooner or later!" It was true that bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling. An architect tried to reassure them, but whenever you stopped in that house to listen to what was going on, you felt as if you were on a ship, sailing from one fear to another. Passengers, shut up between decks, making plans even sadder than life, economizing and dreading the darkness as well as the light.