Journey to the End of the Night (45 page)

Without waiting for me! ..."

Luckily I was able to retell the whole story, so to speak, in different words. Robinson was more than willing to see the same facts in a different light. All right by him. The priest in the hallway didn't dare come into the room. He was reeling with fright.

"Come in!" the daughter-in-law finally called out. "Come right in! You're very welcome, Monsieur l'Abbé! You've caught a poor, stricken family, that's all! ... The doctor and the priest! ... Always together in life's most painful moments! Isn't that right?" She was making phrases. Her new-found hope of extricating herself from the shit and the darkness was making the old bag lyrical in her repulsive way.

The bewildered priest lost all control and started sputtering with excitement at some distance from the sickbed. His excitement communicated itself to Robinson, who resumed his raving: "They're lying! They're all lying to me!" he yelled. Talk! Talk! And about what? Appearances! Emotional outpourings. Always the same. Still, it sparked me up, revived my nerve. I drew the daughter-in-law into a corner and put it to her plainly, because I saw that the only person capable of getting them out of this mess was yours truly. "A down payment!" I said to her. "And I want it now!" When there's no trust, as the saying goes, there's no reason to use kid gloves. She got the drift and deposited a thousand-franc note right in the middle of my palm. And then another to be on the safe side. I had thrown my weight. So while I was at it, I set to work, bringing Robinson around. He'd just have to go south, and that was that.

It's easy to speak of betrayal. But to betray somebody you need an opportunity, and once you have it you've got to take it. It's like opening a window in jail. Everybody would like to, but you don't often get the chance.

Once Robinson had left Rancy, I thought things would pick up, for instance that I'd have a few more patients than usual, but nothing of the kind. In the first place, there was a slump in those parts, a wave of unemployment, which is the worst thing that can happen. And then, in spite of the winter, the weather turned dry and mild, when what the medical profession needs is damp cold. No epidemics either, in short a bad season, a flop. I even saw some of my colleagues making their rounds on foot, which goes to show, smiling as if it amused them to walk, but actually very much put out, their only purpose being to save money by giving their cars a rest. All I had to wear outside was a raincoat. Was that what gave me my obstinate cold? Or could it have been the habit I'd got into of eating much too little. How do I know? Or had my fevers come back? Be that as it may, there was a cold snap just before spring, and after that I never stopped coughing, I was really sick. A disaster. One morning I simply couldn't get up. Bébert's aunt was just passing the house. I got someone to call her. She came up. I sent her to collect a small bill that was still owing to me in the neighborhood. The last and only. I collected half, and it did me for ten days, in bed.

Flat on your back for ten days you have time to think. As soon as I felt better, I'd get out of Rancy, that's what I decided. I hadn't paid my rent for six months ... So good-bye my four sticks of furniture! I'd slip quietly away, naturally without a word to anyone, and I'd never be seen again in La Garenne-Rancy. I'd leave without trace or address. When the hyenas of poverty are on your trail, why argue? If you're smart, you'll shut up and clear out. With my M.D., it was true, I could practice anywhere ... But anywhere else it would be neither better nor worse ... Yes, a little better at first, because it takes a while for people to find out about you, to get into the swing, and pick up the knack of doing you harm. While they're still looking for your most vulnerable spot, you have a little peace, but once they've found your funny bone it's the same all over. All things considered, the best time is the few weeks while you're still unknown in a new place. After that, the crumminess starts all over. It's their nature. The main thing is not to wait till they've spotted your weaknesses. Squash a bedbug before it can slip into its crack. Am I right?

As for sick people, patients, I had no illusions ... In another neighborhood they'd be no less grasping or jugheaded or weak-kneed than the ones here. The same wine, the same movies, the same sports talk, the same enthusiastic submission to the natural needs of the gullet and the ass would produce the same crude, filthy horde, staggering from lie to lie, bragging, scheming, vicious ... brutal between two fits of panic.

But just as a sick man changes sides in bed and in life, so we too are entitled to move from side to side, it's the only thing we can do, the only defense that's ever been found against Fate. No good hoping to drop off your misery somewhere on the way. Misery is like some horrible woman you've married. Maybe it's better to end up loving her a little than to knock yourself out beating her all your life. Since obviously you won't be able to bump her off. Anyway, I slipped away from my mezzanine pad in Rancy very quietly. At my concierge's they were all sitting around the table over wine and chestnuts when I passed the lodge for the last time. They didn't see a thing. She was scratching herself, and he, bent over the stove, befuddled by the heat, was so far gone in drink that he couldn't keep his eyes open. As far as those people were concerned, I was slipping into the unknown, a kind of endless tunnel. It feels good to have three less people knowing you, that is, spying on you and doing you dirt, three people without the faintest idea what's become of you. It's great. Three, because I'm counting their daughter, their little girl Thérèse, who scratched her fleas and bedbug bites so hard that she was all broken out and festering with boils. It's true that you got so badly bitten at my concierge's that going into their lodge was like crawling into a scrubbing brush.

Falling on the people who passed in the street, the long, naked, whistling finger of gas in the entrance turned them instantly into ghosts, gaunt or stout, framed in the black doorway. The same passers-by would then go and find themselves a bit of color here and there, in the light of windows or street lamps, and finally lose themselves, as black and shapeless as myself, in the night.

I was no longer under any obligation to recognize these passers-by. Still, I'd have liked to stop them for just one second in their aimless roaming, just long enough to tell them once and for all that I was clearing out, getting lost far far away, so far that I didn't give a shit for any of them and they had no way of hurting me now, it was no use trying ... When I got to the Boulevard de la Liberté, the vegetable wagons were bumping along the road to Paris. I went the same way. I was almost out of Rancy. It was kind of chilly, so to warm myself I made for Bébert's aunt's lodge, which was a little out of my way. Her lamp was a spot in the darkness at the end of the corridor. "I really have to say good-bye to his aunt," I said to myself. "Then it'll really be over." She was sitting as usual in her chair, among the smells of her lodge. A small stove warmed the room, and there was her old old face that always seemed about to burst into tears now that Bébert was gone. On the wall, over her sewing box, hung a big school photo of Bébert in his school smock, with his beret and his cross. It was an enlargement, she'd paid for it with coffee coupons. I woke her.

She started up. "Good morning, doctor." I still remember her exact words. "You look sick," she said first thing. "Sit down ... I'm not very well myself ..."

"I was taking a little walk," I said, feeling silly to be turning up like that.

"It's late for a little walk, especially being you're headed for Place Clichy ... There's a cold wind on the avenue at this time of night ..."

She stood up and, stumbling this way and that way, started making us a hot grog, at the same time talking about everything under the sun, but mostly the Henrouilles and Bébert. There was nothing I could do to make her stop talking about Bébert, though it made her miserable and was bad for her and she knew it. I listened without interrupting, I was in a torpor. She wanted to remind me of all Bébert's endearing qualities, she set them out in a kind of display, taking a great deal of trouble because she was determined not to forget a single one of Bébert's qualities. She kept starting over, and when she had them all in order and had told me everything that could possibly be told about bottle feeding him as a baby, she'd remember some little quality that would have to be lined up beside the others. She'd start once again from the beginning, and even so she'd forget something, and when that happened she had no recourse but to burst into tears of frustration. She was so tired her mind wandered. She sobbed herself to sleep. She hadn't strength enough to retrieve her little memories of little Bébert, whom she had loved so dearly, from the darkness for very long. Nothingness was always close to her now and to some extent upon her. A bit of grog and fatigue and there it was, she fell asleep and snored like a distant airplane being carried away by the clouds. She had no one left on earth.

While she sat crumpled among the smells, I thought I'd go away and probably never see Bébert's aunt again. After all, Bébert had slipped away, quietly and for good, and his old aunt would be following him before long. Her heart was sick and very old. It pumped blood into her arteries as best it could, but then the blood had a hard time climbing back into the veins. She'd be going to the big cemetery nearby, where the crowds of dead are waiting. That's where she took Bébert to play before his illness. And then it would really be over. They'd come and repaint her lodge, and then it would seem as if we had all retrieved ourselves like Japanese billiard balls on the brink of the hole, shilly-shallying before they end it all.

Billiard balls also start out with vigor and brio, but they never get anywhere in the end. Neither do we, and the whole earth is good for nothing else than to help us all get together. Bébert's aunt no longer had far to go; there was practically no vigor left in her. We can't get together while we're alive. There are too many colors to distract us and too many people moving around us. We can only get together in silence, when it's too late, like the dead. I knew all that, but it didn't help. I too had to move and go somewhere else. ... I couldn't stay there with her.

My diploma in my pocket made a big bulge, much bigger than my money and my papers. Outside the police station the patrolman was on duty, waiting to be relieved at midnight. He kept spitting. We bade each other good evening.

After the on-and-off light over the gas pump on the corner of the boulevard came the toll station with its clerks, verdant in their glass cage. The streetcars had stopped running. This was a good time to drop in on the toll clerks and talk about life, which is getting harder and harder, more and more expensive. There were two of them, a young one and an old one, both with dandruff, bent over enormous ledgers. Through their window you could see the fortifications, enormous shadowy piers jutting far out into the night as they waited for ships from so far away, ships so noble that you'll never see such ships. That's for sure. But we can hope for them.

I chewed the fat for quite a while with those clerks, we even drank a bit of coffee that was warming on the cast-iron stove. They asked me as a joke if I was going on vacation, at night like that with my little bundle. "That's right," I said. No use talking to those clerks about anything too peculiar. They couldn't have helped me to understand. Still, I was miffed at their little joke and felt the need of saying something striking, of impressing them sort of, so I started talking off the cuff, about the campaign of 1816,[75] the one that had brought the Cossacks to the exact spot where we were then, to the Barrier, on the heels of the great Napoleon.

All this, of course, as nonchalantly as you please. Having convinced those lugs of my superior culture and sprightly erudition, I felt reassured and started down the avenue to the Place Clichy.

You've doubtless noticed the two prostitutes waiting at the corner of the Rue des Dames. They fill in the few weary hours separating deep night and early dawn. Thanks to them, life perseveres through the darkness. With their handbags chock-full of prescriptions, allpurpose handkerchiefs, and photos of children in the country, they are the connecting fink. Be careful when approaching them in the darkness, for those women are so specialized?

barely alive enough to respond to the two or three sentences which sum up everything one can do with them ?that they barely exist. They are insect ghosts in buttoned boots. Don't speak to them, don't go too near them. They're dangerous. I had plenty of room. I started running between the car tracks. The avenue is long.

At the end of it you'll see the statue of Marshal Moncey. He has been defending the Place Clichy since 1816 against memories and oblivion, against everything and nothing, with a wreath of not very expensive beads. I came running down the deserted avenue and got there one hundred and twelve years too late. No more Russians, no more battles, no more Cossacks, no more soldiers, nothing except a ledge of the pedestal that you could sit down on, just under the wreath. And the little brazier with three shivering derelicts around it, squinting into the acrid smoke. Not a very good place to be.

A few cars now and then raced desperately for the exits.

In times of crisis you remember the Grands Boulevards as a place that's not as cold as other places. What with my fever, it cost me an effort of the will to make my brain function. Under the influence of Bébert's aunt's grog, I descended the slope in flight from the wind, which isn't quite so cold when it comes at you from behind. Near the Saint-Georges Métro station an old woman in a little round hat was wailing about her granddaughter in the hospital, stricken with meningitis, so she said. With that as an excuse, she was taking up a collection. With me she was out of luck.

All I could give her was words. I told her about little Bébert and also about a little girl I'd taken care of in Paris, who had died of meningitis while I was in medical school. It had taken her three weeks to die, and her mother in the bed next to hers was so unhappy she couldn't sleep, so she masturbated the whole three weeks, and even when it was all over there was no way of stopping her.